Let Freedom Ring

In Praise of Price Gouging

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 08:30:00 +0000

by Ron Paul

As the northeastern United States continues to recover from Hurricane Sandy, we hear the usual outcry against individuals and companies who dare to charge market prices for goods such as gasoline. The normal market response of rising prices in the wake of a natural disaster and resulting supply disruptions is redefined as “price gouging.” The government claims that price gouging is the charging of ruinous or exploitative prices for goods in short supply in the wake of a disaster and is a heinous crime But does this reflect economic reality, or merely political posturing to capitalize on raw emotions?

In the wake of Hurricane Sandy, the supply of gasoline was greatly disrupted. Many gas stations were unable to pump gas due to a lack of electricity, thus greatly reducing the supply. At the same time demand for gasoline spiked due to the widespread use of generators. Because gas stations were forbidden from raising their prices to meet the increased demand, miles-long lines developed and stations were forced to start limiting the amount of gasoline that individuals could purchase. New Jersey gas stations began to look like Soviet grocery stores.

Had gas stations been allowed to raise their prices to reflect the increased demand for gasoline, only those most in need of gasoline would have purchased gas, while everyone would have economized on their existing supply. But because prices remained lower than they should have been, no one sought to conserve gas. Low prices signaled that gas was in abundant supply, while reality was exactly the opposite, and only those fortunate enough to be at the front of gas lines were able to purchase gas before it sold out. Not surprisingly, a thriving black market developed, with gas offered for up to $20 per gallon.

With price controls in effect, supply shortages were exacerbated. If prices had been allowed to increase to market levels, the profit opportunity would have brought in new supplies from outside the region. As supplies increased, prices gradually would have decreased as supply and demand returned to equilibrium. But with price controls in effect, what company would want to deal with the hassle of shipping gas to a disaster-stricken area with downed power lines and flooded highways when the same profit could be made elsewhere? So instead of gas shipments flooding into the disaster zones, what little gas supply is left is rapidly sold and consumed.

Governments fail to understand that prices are not just random numbers. Prices perform an important role in providing information, coordinating supply and demand, and enabling economic calculation. When government interferes with the price mechanism, economic calamity ensues. Price controls on gasoline led to the infamous gas lines of the 1970s, yet politicians today repeat those same failed mistakes. Instituting price caps at a below-market price will always lead to shortages. No act of any legislature can reverse the laws of supply and demand.

History shows us that the quickest path to economic recovery is to abolish all price controls. If governments really want to aid recovery, they would abolish their “price-gouging” legislation and allow the free market to function.

De-worshipping Public Education

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 12 Nov 2012 08:30:00 +0000

by Karen De Coster

Hard as it is to believe, the world is still chock-full of professional educators who worship the ideals of a state-sponsored, indoctrinating public school system. This system is wrought with funding boondoggles, and has proven to be an arrant failure overall, damaging millions of children in the process.

Public education is based on the idea that government is the "parent" best equipped to provide children with the values and wisdom required to grow into an intelligent, functional adult. To reiterate what former first lady Hillary Clinton professed, these public school champions believe "it takes a village…."

It doesn't take a village to raise and educate children. It takes a family, a church, interested third parties such as friends and neighbors, or quality private educational institutions that flourish under a capitalistic system and respond to the paying parent-consumers.

As Hebrew University historian Martin van Crevald points out in his book, The Rise and Decline of the State, the archetype for state-directed education was popularized by nineteenth-century state worshippers who wanted to impose a love of big government ideals upon the youth. There was also the move toward secularization, and an overall appetite for "discipline" of the unruly (meaning independent) masses that buttressed the campaign to take education out of the hands of family and church.

After all, unruly, independently educated masses might resist government's objectives, and this kind of disarray would be unacceptable in the move toward building a powerful, controlling state apparatus. Prussia's Frederick William I and France's Napoleon discerned this, as did a legion of other despotic rulers throughout the 18^th and 19^th centuries.

Modern-day education has built on the foundation set forth by these tyrants. What is most disquieting about the public education mindset is that those who believe most strongly in it are convinced that there are no other noble alternatives, and that the alternatives that do exist are merely a hindrance to the only real education, that which is provided via the public domain. The egalitarian core belief of these educators is that society is responsible for obtaining, maintaining, and paying for the process of equally developing young minds.

But since the laws of the modern state that control the educational system lean toward equality, that means a bias against the smart and hardworking. This takes education to the level of heavy egalitarian leanings, sustaining the philosophy that schools have the obligation to treat all students as pure equals — equal in intelligence, work ethic, performance, and desire. Such nonsense is refuted by H. George Resch in "Human Variety and Individuality" on the Separation of School and State website.

Mr. Resch contends that compulsory, government-controlled education is trying to achieve ends that are not possible due to the fact that general equality is not only impossible to define, but that biological, environmental, and cultural differences among us are so vast that a compulsory, standardized public education poses difficulties that cannot be overcome, and certainly not by a public school system.

It's obvious that public schooling is neither beneficial to most students, nor is it efficient. Education is an acquired good, a good that has to meet the needs of the consumers, or else face rejection in the free market. Hence, the necessity for individually tailored private educational institutions that cater to the urgencies of the marketplace, or home schools that provide a quality environment for each student's direct needs.

In school districts throughout the land, public school teachers and administrators, along with closely allied PTA's, battle a threatening voucher system — extolled by conservatives as the "great solution" to education. The voucher system, to the public school proponent, means the likely scenario of competition — a little bit of the free market invading their government-protected world of free-form indoctrination.

Vouchers may — according to these public educators — open up the possibility that parents would seek higher standards in the public school curriculum, educational materials, and teacher-administrator qualities, or else these parents could easily cash in on their vouchers and move on to an alternative institution that is more likely to listen to their wishes, and modify its overall teaching program accordingly. This means that all those educators using "Heather has Two Mommies" to brainwash children on the "virtues" of homosexuality might have to trade in such liberal balderdash for truly educational literature. How ridiculous that the education system should dare have to fall into the snare of having to concede to the free market!

The voucher threat may also pressure schools to drop their ineffectual, equality-minded goals in favor of programs that would champion the forgotten merit of competition, and focus more intensely on those students who are destined for achievement above and beyond the norm.

Of course, one should stand strongly opposed to any flagitious voucher system, though for reasons opposite of those propounded by the pro-public schooling hawks. Vouchers are anti-free market in general, and are just another way for government to control young minds, and a way to further dig itself more deeply into the mostly unregulated sphere of private education. Vouchers allow for no freedom whatsoever from the clutches of the state-mandated regulatory circus. However, there is certain joy in seeing public school proponents backed into a corner with their claws out and having to do battle with something moderately competitive.

Then, of course, there is the greatest threat of all, which comes from the home schooling crowd. Public educators shrivel at the mere mention of home-schooled students out-performing their public school peers.

For example, the National Education Association has recently attacked the legitimacy of home schooling in spite of home-schoolers' recent successes in terms of placing students first, second, and third in a national spelling bee, and claiming the overall winner in a national geography bee. A huge success for home schooling, and private education in general, these accomplishments raised the ire of those who insist on the public education way.

Just recently, a spokesperson for the NEA stated that public schooling is far superior to all forms of private education — because of its advanced academic opportunities and convenience of socialization. This statement ignores the fact that the home schooling environment has developed voluntary communal learning environments that allows for direct community involvement for the students, and draws upon the expertise of numerous individuals to obtain the greatest excellence in resource use for teaching.

Let me state that the public education field is not composed entirely of incompetents and ne'er-do-wells. There are a lot of ethical, hard-working and concerned people in the public school systems that desire to do their best to bring sense and order to an unworkable system. The bigger problem remains this: the system was built on authoritarian intentions, the premises for why we need public education are incorrect, and maintaining funding for such a monstrous system becomes impossible in the long run without plundering an entire population to support it.

Simple common sense dictates that my paying $1,200 in annual school taxes with no children in the local public school system, while a neighbor with four children taking advantage of the free schooling in our district pays the same $1,200 in school taxes, is indeed a theft of colossal proportions.

This constant depredation of an entire community to pay for the education of the children of some of the members of that community violates the core philosophy of self-sustaining, voluntary market coordination. This is truly a form of legalized gangstering, where every property-owning taxpayer is robbed via legal government mandate to help support the goals of the state in maintaining a vicious system of educational welfare for my richer, as well as poorer neighbors.

It's high time that the public resist the inherent dangers of continuing on a path toward a more socialized, bureaucratic, and just plain immoral taxpayer-funded public school system. Taxpayers need to reject the public education nipple and look toward the same market they covet for their goods and services — the free market.

What Freedom Means to Me

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 09 Nov 2012 08:30:00 +0000

by Fran Tully

Freedom is one of those words that is thrown around by everyone--even those who spend most of their lives trying to restrict yours. Freedom means different things to different people.

The men who started this country were willing to risk their lives over an unfair tax of 2%. Maybe they realized that 2% was just the proverbial camel's nose under the tent. But the Founders demanded liberty, and were willing to fight to preserve their right to be free . . . to be left alone . . . not to be forced to pay for something that they didn't want or weren't getting.

So when I think about about freedom, I think about the outright LIE that we keep being told . . . that "we live in the freest nation on earth." It makes me angry, and sick to my stomach. We do NOT live in the freest nation on earth. We live in what USED TO BE a country that offered the greatest opportunities on earth.

What bothers me more than anything else, is that government believes that it is entitled to deny me my most basic rights. In my quest for freedom, I think I have finally figured out what freedom means to me. Freedom is self-sufficiency, self-governance. The freedom to exercise all of my basic human rights, without interference.

I dream of converting depleted soil back into black, healthy, productive, mineral-rich topsoil . . . of raising my own livestock to provide me with eggs, meat, manure, and seed-ready soil . . . . Of a root cellar full of potatoes, onions, garlic, corn, apples, squash, canned vegetables, cured ham, and pumpkins. A pond and a creek teaming with fish, frogs, and birds. A fence with a sign warning unwanted guests that once they cross that line, they will be treated as a threat just like any other trespasser with criminal intent. Trees with fruit, nuts, shade, and stored energy. A power system that is completely independent of the grid. A view of nature where I can watch the sunrise, the wildlife in their natural habitat, and a sky free of power lines and buildings. My self-governance would make me supreme ruler of all of my land. I would NOT ask permission for anything that I believed was my basic natural right. I would decide how much to smoke, drink, eat, burn, and irrigate--based on what I believed would best serve the continuation of a healthy body and property. I would decide if, when and how an animal should be slaughtered, butchered and preserved. I would decide if some of the water from the creek should be put into a cistern or used to generate electricity. I would determine if my children should be able to drive a car or a motorized vehicle. I would decide who could enter my property. I would decide if and how much I should pay some government parasite in taxes. I would decide if people I invite onto the property should have guns, and if they should be allowed to carry them. It would not be a government-free zone . . . I would govern it--and ONLY me. I would be free in my mind, and in my actions. I would be free from stress, because I wouldn't have to worry about if my food was designed to be a slow kill weapon, if my water was treated to cause weak bones, dementia, and slow learning. I wouldn't be worried about some goon with a gun groping my wife or kids, or asking them to walk into an X-ray chamber with no protection. I wouldn't be worried that forced vaccinations are just another name for chemical warfare, I wouldn't be concerned about grocery stores with a three-day supply of food running out because of a power outage, an act of war, a riot, or a collapse of the financial system. I wouldn't be concerned about my neighbors killing my family for their next meal--or an agent of the law killing me because I refuse to give up my gun and go peacefully into their controlled housing. My freedom would be from the inside out.

As a teenager, freedom came when I left the supervision of my parents and took responsibility for feeding myself, educating myself, protecting myself, and housing myself. Over time, the government has tried to enslave me against my will. They have violated my privacy, contaminated my air and water, destroyed the value of my savings and investments, and turned my food into poison. They have orchestrated a plan to sterilize the population, and created a tax and school system designed to break apart the family unit. They believe that they have won, that they have us right where they want us. But I believe that some will simply wake up, and walk out. Just as we walked out of our parents' homes as teens, we need to once again decide to do for ourselves.

In my vision of Freedom, we build our own energy efficient home--don't live in the bank's house. Repair the soil and grow our own food--don't poison the earth with Monsanto chemicals and GMO seeds. Create a natural balance, where the cows, sheep, chickens, and pigs naturally work the ground, maintain the plants, and control disease. Develop our own mini-power plants with wind, water, and solar. Plan our power consumption with the idea that the more efficiently we use it, the less we will need to produce or store. Enjoy reading, writing, and conversation. Practice horseshoes, cross-country skiing, and walking instead of watching TV or going to the gym. Plant flowers, clover, and hang a bird feeder to add beauty and attract nature. Put up bat houses to control mosquitoes. Make fishing poles and raise worms to improve soil, feed the birds, and enjoy fresh fish. Grow barley and hops so we can brew our own beer. Grow grapes, plums, and berries to provide our own wine. Grow tobacco and comfrey to have something to smoke and trade. Grow an orchard of apples for fruit, juice, cider, and vinegar. To me, this is as free as one can hope to get. Some people might believe that such a life would be too hard. But to me, nothing could be as hard as watching this country spiral toward socialism and total destruction of all that was once good. To me, that is more than I can bear. Freedom isn't free, and it isn't easy, but none of the best things in life are. Freedom is worth fighting for . . . and worth leaving for.

Election 2012: How The Winner Will Destroy America

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 08 Nov 2012 08:30:00 +0000

by Brandon Smith

After all the hollow and uninspired elections that this country has suffered through over the past several decades, one might think that at some point long ago the American public would have finally struck a plateau of disenfranchisement; that we could sink no further into despondency, that there is a saturation limit to the corruption of our voting process. Unfortunately, there has been no such luck. I have to say that in all honesty I have never seen more people gut jumbled and disgusted with our electoral system than I have in 2012. Sure, there is still a hyper-gullible segment of the populous that continues to play the game, but even those idiots are beginning to admit that the choices offered are dismal at best, catastrophic at worst. The fog of the false Left/Right paradigm is starting to lift, and all that lay in its wake is a hoard of lost wide-eyed flabbergasted followers without a coattail or a talking point to cling to. Sudanese refugees have a better chance of survival than these people do…

Even in the more obvious of fraudulent past elections there was at least an attempt by the establishment to present a pageant of conflicting ideologies (George W. Bush vs. John Kerry comes to mind). There has always been the Democrat who pretends to be anti-war, or the Republican who pretends to be small government, or the Democrat who pretends to defend our right to privacy, and the Republican who pretends to be pro-2nd Amendment. But in 2012, even the theater of rhetoric has disappeared. Both primary party candidates seem to be sharing the same intestinal tract and the same teleprompter, and now, the average American is asking a new set of questions. They do not wonder how these men will change things for the better. Not at all. Instead, they wonder which one will do LESS DAMAGE while in office. This is the terrible reality we have come to understand in our society today. It is a sad awakening, but a necessary one.

As you read this now, the new President of the United States is being “chosen” or has been chosen. Whoever the “winner” happens to be is ultimately irrelevant. They do not count. They are mascots. Middle management cronies running through the motions to distract the masses while enacting the policies of their superiors. They are fry cooks serving greasy overpriced democracy with no real sustenance. What does matter, though, is what comes next. I’m sorry to say that the idea that one man will do less damage than the other is a naïve sentiment. Democrat? Republican? Obama? Romney? The crimes and calamities wrought will be exactly the same. Take a look into my crystal ball and see the future. Here is how the winner will destroy America…

1) He Will Continue The Policy Of Dollar Devaluation

Neither candidate has expressed any interest through the election or even before it to protect the value of our currency, and both candidates have supported steps towards quantitative easing and fiat printing in order to delay an inevitable national debt crisis. Both Romney and Obama have sung the praises of Ben Bernanke (Romney changed his tune just in time for his campaign, but who's buying that?) and the private Federal Reserve despite the consistent failures of that despotic institution to produce any tangible economic results with their Keynesian methods.

The dollar will see a vast devaluation during the term of this candidate and a loss of world reserve status, leading to stagflation (a combination of the worst elements of deflationary and inflationary crises in the same event). Skyrocketing prices and crumbling unemployment will be the highlights of his presidency, because he will never take measures to reign in or dismantle the primary root cause of the problem; the Federal Reserve itself.

2) He Will Continue Extreme Government Debt Spending

Neither candidate has offered a practical or operable solution to the $16 trillion official national debt problem we now face, let alone the tens of trillions of dollars in entitlement obligations that the Treasury Department never talks about. A nation can only live off food stamps and credit for so long before it implodes like a wet paper sack. And this is exactly what we have become; an entire culture of debt addicts and money hounds searching for our next fix of foreign or central bank cash. The fact is, both Obama and Romney would INCREASE spending while using fiat injections to buttress an ever weakening economy in the name of “stability”. The new president will claim that if spending cuts are initiated, it will send the U.S. financial system into a tailspin and a “return” to recession conditions. This will of course be a lie. We have not left recession/depression conditions since 2008.

3) He Will Support And Expand On Wars In The Middle East

There is no such thing as a mainstream “anti-war candidate” in 2012. Not even a fake one. Obama’s measures of state violence and complete lack of respect for the sovereign internal matters of foreign nations surpass the madness of George Bush Jr. He has even gone so far as to assert that his office has the right to assassinate American citizens without trial, evidence, or due process of the law. Not only has he asserted the right to this power, he has used it! Romney’s position, hilariously, is that Obama has not gone far enough! Either way, the winner in 2012 is going to leap like a vile locust into new countries and unleash a plague of laser guided death. The next president WILL be a war hungry president.

4) He Will Lock Down The Web And Limit Internet Speech

Both Romney and Obama have expressed a desire to establish cybersecurity measures which include vast new governmental authority over the functions and operations of the internet. The ultimate goal? To gain legal precedence for the right to dictate web content, up to and including the ability to label any website a subversive threat to national security or a recruitment tool for “extremists”.

With the establishment spreading completely baseless accusation of cyberthreats coming from every corner of the globe (but mostly from Iran) it would seem that they are conditioning the public for a future encounter with a cyber event, and telling them who to blame when it occurs. The problem is, the most prominent cyber security threats to the internet in the past few years have come not from the Middle East, or Russia, or China, but the U.S. and Israel (Stuxnet anyone?). Keep this in mind when our new president blames the next cyber attack on a convenient political target and then uses the event as an excuse to regulate the web.

5) He Will Erase American Civil Liberties

This president will find a reason, or he will create a reason to diminish Constitutional protections including our right to trial and due process. Both candidates have offered unflinching support for the National Defense Authorization Act and its provisions for indefinite detainment. Neither man has ventured any sincere concerns over the broad nature of the language involved in the labeling of “terrorists” and “extremists”. Literally anyone can now be categorized as an enemy combatant and a threat to national security for almost any reason, and this appears to be the way Obama and Romney like it. That is to say, they both want totalitarian powers, or at the very least, they have made no effort to turn them down.

It is important to note that there has never been a government in history that sought out such powers and did not actually use them. Only a fool would assume his favorite elitist candidate in 2012 will not utilize the extreme authorities now amassed for the executive branch over the past decade.

6) He Will Embrace A Globalist Dynamic And Abandon American Sovereignty

Both Barack Obama and Mitt Romney are surrounded by “advisers” who are also members of the Council On Foreign Relations, an institution which openly calls for the dissolution of American sovereignty on a regular basis and the creation of a centralized global system dominating the financial, social, and political life of every nation in the world. With the economic stability of the U.S. on the verge of oblivion, it is very likely that a historic crisis will ensue during the first term of the next president, and that he will in response suggest a new global system as the solution.

This system has already been created, in part, by the IMF and World Bank in concert with member governments and revolves around the issuance of a new world reserve currency (Special Drawing Rights) as the centerpiece. I can guarantee with absolute certainty that the next president, regardless of who he happens to be, will promote an IMF rescue package coupling the dollar to the SDR and turning over full economic control of America to an international body. He will make it sound rational, reasonable, and even advantageous, but in the end, he will be selling the globalist snakeoil he was conscripted to sell before his election campaign ever started.

In 2012, it will not be about voting. It will not be about “winning”. It will not even be about getting to the next election. It will be about survival. As big a joke as the 2012 elections have become even to the generally unaware, I am not laughing. I do not need to look at the promises of either candidate. I do not need to weigh their incompetent quick fix policies. All I have to do is look at the current downward trend and understand that the president, whoever he may be, will continue it. If anything is to truly change, it will be because we as Americans finally walk away from the game, enacting our own solutions and our own opposition instead of handing over our power to sniveling errand boys wrapped in flags and expensive suits and self-rightousness every four years. 2012 is going to be the beginning of upheaval and renewal, for better or for worse, and it is certain that the guy in the White House into 2013, Republican or Democrat, is going to be a part of the problem, nothing more…

The Economics of Disaster

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 07 Nov 2012 08:30:00 +0000

by Ron Paul

Hurricane Sandy was one of the worst natural disasters the east coast has ever seen. Clean-up and recovery will take months, if not years and estimates run in the tens of billions of dollars. Parts of New York and New Jersey will never be the same. Entire seashore communities have been wiped out, but the determination to rebuild has been lauded as courageous and admirable. Yet as with all natural disasters, Sandy raises uncomfortable questions about the extent to which taxpayers should fund the cleanup and the extent to which government programs create moral hazards.

For example, FEMA and the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) are expected to pick up the tab for much of the flood damage caused by the hurricane. Of course this will mean more federal debt and inflation for the rest of us, since the program only has about $4 billion to work with and is already $18 billion in debt from hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Many think there is a need for the government to provide flood insurance of this kind. After all, the market would never provide insurance in flood prone areas at an affordable price. But shouldn't that tell us something?

Shouldn't that tell us that it is a losing proposition to insure homes in coastal areas and flood plains often threatened by severe and destructive weather patterns? And if it’s a losing proposition, should taxpayers subsidize the inevitable losses arising from federal flood insurance?

The NFIP disguises the real cost of flood insurance in flood prone areas, which influences homebuilding and sales in such areas. Recklessly taking unwise risks when risk is underpriced is known as moral hazard. When politicians decide that private insurance premiums are too high, as with houses built in flood plains, the solution is to under price the risk through federal subsidies. The obvious and expected outcome is more danger to life and limb when disaster strikes.

Even NFIP has been forced to raise rates significantly in coastal areas, and is now dropping second homes from coverage altogether,

Many assume it is compassionate to entrust government central planners with disaster recovery. However, the greatest compassion brings results, not just good intentions. And we’ve seen how bureaucratic organizations like FEMA mismanaged recovery and relief in the wake of hurricanes Katrina and Ike. Organizations such as the Red Cross and private companies like Home Depot and Duracell have already stepped in admirably to help those in need, and we can only hope FEMA has learned this time not to impede and frustrate private efforts as they have in the past.

Above all, my thoughts and prayers are with the victims of Hurricane Sandy in this tremendously difficult time and hope they can get their lives put back together as quickly and seamlessly as possible.

Vote Choice

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 06 Nov 2012 09:00:00 +0000

"Always vote for principle, though you may vote alone, and you may cherish the sweetest reflection that your vote is never lost."

-John Quincy Adams

"Constantly choosing the lesser of two evils is still choosing evil."

- Jerry Garcia

The Crisis in American Public Schools

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 05 Nov 2012 08:30:00 +0000

by Josh Krab

There is an inordinate problem that has been growing in the United States. Students in our public schools are showing a lack of interest in modern methods of education and high school graduates are starting our in life with a weak foundation in knowledge and skills that will move them forward in life. Most students in the U.S. are manufactured through the factory line of public schools. These schools teach students to obey orders and to respond to the school bell like animals. Students are assigned loads of homework which gives them no time to bond with the family or pursue an interest that they enjoy. All they have learned is to memorize facts in history that really have no meaning to them, use formulas that they will probably never use in life again, and study subjects that they have absolutely no interest in pursuing farther. We must take a new approach to teaching our children by teaching them the skills they are interested in pursuing and that will bring them success in life.

Government officials have tried solving these problems by dumping more money into public education but have failed. The problems have only gotten worse. In 2008, public schools in Washington D.C. spent about $24, 600 per child. Comparatively, total spending per pupil in the D.C. private schools – among the most upscale in the nation – averages around $10,000 less per child (Coulson). Lack of money isn’t the issue in our public schools. We need a change in education policy that allows for students to pursue topics of interest to them.

There are many things that will help solve the problems in our schools and one of the greatest solutions is for schools to help students to pursue their interests in life rather than to force them to learn standardized textbook materials. Students want to feel that they are learning something worth-while in the classroom and letting them pursue a topic of their interest is the best way to allow that to happen.

Take education in Sweden for example. Sweden is a country known for its quality of life and a nation that beats American school performance in every academic category. Children in Sweden don’t enter school until age seven and the total length of schooling is nine years. When students enroll in Swedish schools, the authorities ask three questions: (1) Why do you want to go to this school? (2) What do you want to gain from the experience? (3) What are you interested in? They listen to the answers (Gatto).

These are the types of questions we need to ask here in the U.S. schools. We need to get a greater understanding of what our students really want to learn, and help them achieve the education they desire. Education in the United States should not be about conforming to the standards of the government but rather about pursuing your own interests starting at a young age.

Another improvement we can make in our schools is to teach lessons that are relevant to the students’ lives. Learning that the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7^th 1941 has absolutely no meaning or relevancy to a student in 7^th grade. Yes, the lessons of history are important, but their importance lies in how those events that happened years ago are affecting us today. The dates in history are not important to learn. It is the lessons that we learn from the events in history that are important. We must teach the lessons of history rather than the dates of history in order to provide relevancy to our students.

The public school machine may turn out many graduates but these graduates are hardly equipped for a flourishing start in life. Students are taught many things that they will never use in their lifetime. Knowledge on how a plant transports nutrients from the ground to the different parts of a tree may be useful to a student who wants to pursue horticulture, yet this information will be of no help to the student who wants to pursue music.

Ironically, those topics that all students will use in their lifetimes are hardly ever mentioned in school. Instead of teaching about the geological differences between the Sierra Mountains and the Sahara dessert we should teach our students how to successfully manage finances. Managing finances is something that every student will encounter in their lifetime and the skills associated will prepare a student for success in the world ahead of them.

Life skills are also very important things to learn and should be emphasized in our schools. Teaching life skills is another way to provide relevancy to students. Maintaining a school vegetable garden is a fun and exciting way for children not only to learn the skills associated with working a garden but also the science involved. This allows students to be a part of science rather than just read about it in a text book.

The solutions discussed so far have to do with public school reform but there are steps that parents can take themselves to give their children an education that will be worthwhile and relevant to their children’s lives.

Taking your children out of public school and putting them into an alternative is certainly the best way to give children a quality education. Private schooling, charter schooling, or home schooling are great alternatives to public education. Tax credits and school vouchers are available in many states for people who want to remove their children from government-run public schools and place them in alternative institution.

Home schooling is one of the greatest ways for children to get a good, solid education that will give them skills they can immediately use in life. It allows for children to pursue their dreams without having standard education getting in their way. Many students who are home schooled look forward to learning and are very eager about pursuing topics of their choice further than even the high school level. Home schooling allows students to learn at their own pace, not forcing them to memorize things that they will only forget as soon as they graduate. It gives children more time with their family, and enables them to keep a close relationship with their siblings.

There are nearly two million students in the United States who are home schooled. (Stats & Facts) On average, these students out perform public school students in every aspect of schooling. A 1997 study by Dr. Brian Ray of the National Home Education Research Institute found that home schooled students excelled on nationally-normed standardized achievement tests. On average, home schoolers outperformed the public school peers by 30 to 37 percentile points across all subjects.(HSLDA)

According to research conducted by NHERI, a parent’s education level did not appear to affect the performance of children in home school settings. Students taught at home by mothers who never finished high school scored a full 55 percentile points higher than public students from families of comparable educational backgrounds. In his 1999 study, Dr. Lawrence M. Rudner found no difference in achievement according to whether or not a parent was certified to teach. For those who would argue that only certified teachers should be permitted to home school, this study suggests that such a requirement would not significantly affect student achievement. (Ray)

Home schooling your children will enable your children to pursue their interests, supply them with the skills necessary for success in life, and also prepare them for a great start in college. Home-educated students typically score above average on the SAT and ACT tests that colleges consider for admissions.(Ray)

The problem with public schools in the U.S. is becoming increasingly revealed and more and more parents are responding by pulling their children out of public schools and home schooling them. It appears the home school population is continuing to grow (at an estimated 2% to 8% per annum over the past few years) (Fast Facts). This is a step in the right direction and it should be continued. Students don’t need anymore facts crammed into their brains but rather need to learn skills that will bring them success in life. Although school reform is a great solution to the problem in America’s schools, home schooling is even a better answer to this great crisis.

WORKS CITED

Coulson, Andrew J. "The Real Cost Of Public Schools - Washingtonpost.com." The Washington Post: National, World & D.C. Area News and Headlines - The Washington Post. The Washington Post, 6 Apr. 2008. Web. 27 Apr. 2011. .

"Fast Facts." National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) Home Page, a Part of the U.S. Department of Education. U.S. Department of Education, 2009. Web. 27 Apr. 2011. .

Gatto, John Taylor. "Confederacy of Dunces." A Different Kind of Teacher: Solving the Crisis of American Schooling. Berkeley, CA: Berkeley Hills, 2001. 64-65. Print.

"HSLDA | Home Schooling Achievement." Homeschool: HSLDA-Home School Legal Defense Association. Web. 18 May 2011. .

Ray, Brian D. "Research Facts on Homeschooling." National Home Education Research Institute. 11 Jan. 2011. Web. 17 May 2011. .

"Stats & Facts." Alliance for the Separation of School and State. 26 Mar. 2010. Web. 27 Apr. 2011. .

Why Vote Third Party?

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 04 Nov 2012 07:30:00 +0000

(from http://www.nysthirdparty.com/index.html)

First, let me point out that in no other industrialized, democratic country, are there only two strong political parties. In each and every one of these countries, there are at least three political parties that are on an equal footing. I find it incomprehensible that in a country such as ours, which demands choices in every other aspect of life (i. e. - 150 station cable/satellite TV systems), we still limit ourselves to only two options when it comes to politics.

It should be further noted that there is nothing in the Constitution that specifies a two party system. There are even clues in this document that suggest the Founding Fathers assumed that there would always be more than two strong candidates. In fact, if you look at the first several Presidential elections in this country, you would see that there were always at least three Presidential candidates who received electoral votes.

We have been deluded in this country into thinking that a Third Party won't work. How? Well, first we're told that if we vote for a third party, we'd be wasting our vote. This is, of course, looking at it from their perspective. In their view, any time you don't vote for their candidate, the vote is wasted. If that doesn't work, we're told that our vote won't count. Translated, this means that your vote will count, just not for their party. Next, we're told that we are splitting the vote, helping the other candidate win. I have two comments on that. The first is that this is certainly an egotistical viewpoint. After all, why should you drop your candidate in order to help get their candidate elected? My second comment is that this argument is nothing more than the "voting for the lesser of two evils" logic. We people who vote third party, however, have our own logic. And that is, why should we vote for the lesser of two evils when the lesser evil is still evil? Finally, we're told that we are being presented with two clear choices, so we don't need to clog up the field with any more. In reality, this makes no sense. Even if it were true that we are always being presented with two candidates who are at opposite ends of the political spectrum, where does that leave the voters who are in the middle? As an example, how about a voter who has liberal social ideas but conservative fiscal views? Why should these types of voters have to give up fifty percent of their values in order to choose between the conservative and liberal candidates? This is another example, and there are many more, where the two party system is a failure in delivering representational elections. But there are two more important reasons why we support the minor parties.

The first is we believe that the present two party system has led to gridlock in the country, which has extended into the general population as well. Essentially, we have become an "us" versus "them" society. There is no middle ground. If you are not with "us", then you are with "them", and that makes you the enemy. Moderates who try to compromise with opposing moderates, and who go against the party's wishes, are branded as traitors. As a result, the serious problems that we are facing in this country are not being addressed. A strong third party could blunt this attitude, and therefore open up a dialogue, since people might realize that it's no longer just "them" anymore with their diametrically opposing viewpoints.

The second reason we support minor parties is that we believe that the two party system has led to an overall decline in morality in the country. We try to live an honest life ourselves, and try to teach our children to be honest and moral citizens. But in looking over the last 30 or so years, we find that many of our Presidents were not so moral themselves. I'm not going to get into who did what since reprehensible behavior existed on both sides of the aisle. But we are so locked in to the philosophy of "us" versus "them", that we overlook their errors simply because we can't bring ourselves to vote for the other party's candidate. Yeah, we may not like the guy, we may even despise him, but we can't let the other guy win. So we hold our nose and vote for him. Politics is probably one of the few areas where we essentially reward a person for doing something that we teach our children not to do. Of course, our children see this. And what do you suppose they learn from this? That immorality pays? No wonder our moral standards have declined over the years. A strong third party would give voters someone else to vote for in case they find that they cannot support one candidate because of his views, and the other candidate because of his immoral actions.

Now, I'm not naive enough to believe that if a current minor party was suddenly elevated to being one of the two major parties, that it wouldn't revert to the same tactics being used today. After all, human nature is human nature. But the point is, that by having three or more solid choices to chose from, there is less of a chance that the electorate will fall into the "us" versus "them" trap. So, the next time somebody encourages you to perpetuate the two party system by telling you that you're wasting your vote, tell them that you're sorry that they prefer to watch only two TV stations. And that they prefer only to have two changes of clothes. And that they prefer only to eat two kinds of food. Then tell them how the two party system has led to gridlock and a lessening of moral standards. My guess is that whether or not they understand the connotations and points you are trying to make, they will go away and bother somebody else. And in the end, isn't that all we really want from them?

Values Clarification

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 02 Nov 2012 07:30:00 +0000

By Richard Maybury

Reprint from the Nov-Dec 2011 EWR

I write often about the economic experiments governments have been doing on us for a century or more. Politicians also use us as guinea pigs in educational experiments.

A new such experiment was sweeping the public schools when my wife and I were doing stints as teachers in the 1970s — me for four years and her for eight. The experiment is one of the things that prompted me to write my Uncle Eric book Whatever Happened To Justice?

The experiment was, and in some places still is, called Values Clarification.

I remember in my school, the teacher assigned to teach Values Clarification to mid-teens had been raised Jewish, and she was troubled by her new assignment.

She had been taught to believe there are certain boundaries that are knowable and true, and should never be crossed: don't steal, don't murder, and don't break your agreements, among others.

Values Clarification, which has now been taught to millions, leads children to believe truth is just a matter of opinion, which means right and wrong are just matters of opinion.

Please read the last 17 words again.

That's the philosophical premise of fascism. In politics it leads to the conclusion that power holders should do whatever appears necessary, no exceptions, no limits. Every Jew is raised to know where this leads, which is why the mere mention of the word fascism makes some Jews go ballistic.

The young Jewish teacher was highly intelligent and could see through the jargon of tolerance in the Values Clarification course. She was torn. Should she follow orders, thereby helping to erase the children's ethics, or should she go renegade and quietly teach the children that right and wrong are knowable?

She never told me what she decided to do, and I'm glad, because if she disobeyed orders, our teaching contract would have required me to turn her in. I knew her well, though, and I'm sure she decided to violate orders and teach against fascism. (Shortly thereafter, my wife and I resigned.)

Other teachers went along with the experiment. The reason I can say this with certainty is the new book Lost In Transition by Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith. I have not read the book, but I've read articles about its findings.

Essentially, what Smith and his team learned from studying a cross section of American youth, ages 18 to 23, can be summarized by the comment of one young person: "I mean, I guess what makes something right is how I feel about it. But different people feel different ways, so I couldn't speak on behalf of anyone else as to what's right and wrong."

Notice the phrasing and choice of words in that sentence. This person is not stupid. Yet he does not know how to tell the difference between right and wrong.

That is what Smith and his team found across America. Here are two more representative comments:

• Right and wrong are "up to the individual. Who am I to say?"

• "I would do what I thought made me happy or how I felt. I have no other way of knowing what to do but how I internally feel."¹

In short, a substantial part of the population has been trained to have no real ethics.

Smith's team found that young people not only do not know right from wrong, they don't even know how to think about the question, even in regard to such behaviors as drunk driving or cheating on a spouse. Moral codes are outside their experience.

This was easy to predict in the 1970s when the Values Clarification experiment was on the rise. Some of the more skeptical teachers 35 years ago secretly referred to it as Values Obfuscation.

But I never heard any teacher tell the parents what was being done to their kids.

Today, some of those kids have grown up to be teachers.

I have a huge 1969 Webster's unabridged dictionary of 2,662 pages, and a copy of the original 1828 Webster's. Neither says values are related to right and wrong. The definitions are about worth, in the sense that economists speak of price. The value of an apple is one dollar. The artistic value of the Mona Lisa is amazing.

Then things change. I have a teacher's manual from a 1973 Values Clarification course. The introduction begins: "Values are nebulous concepts, formed in the cradle and modified by experience, felt differently by every person," and "We cannot truly teach values."²

Along with traditional concepts of right and wrong such as honesty and responsibility, the course teaches about creativity, humor, leadership, cooperation, wonder, admiration and serenity. All these are values, too, says the course, just like honesty and responsibility.

Confused? Imagine how a child feels.

Then my 1988 Webster's contains a new meaning for values: "social principles, goals or standards." Another recent Webster's adds "a person's principles or standards of behavior; one's judgment of what is important in life."

It's amazing what a little linguistic sleight of hand can accomplish. "Values" has supplanted "ethics" and "morals," and right and wrong are determined by "one's judgment of what is important in life."

Smith found that when young people were asked to describe a moral dilemma they had faced, two-thirds either did not understand the question or described problems that are not moral, such as whether they could afford to rent a certain apartment. Smith said the two-thirds do not appear to know how to think about right and wrong.

In short, Values Clarification did indeed turn out to be values obfuscation. Millions are without a moral compass. They aren't immoral, they're amoral.

If your occupation requires you to interview job applicants, you might ask them if they were taught Values Clarification in school. If the answer is yes, look out.

Note that under withering criticism of Values Clarification, some schools may have changed the name.

This brings us to the court system

Humans, being human, do not always agree. When serious disputes occur, they have found only two ways to resolve them. One is to try to beat the opponent into submission or kill him. The other is go to court.

If government has any legitimate purpose, it must be to prevent violence, by operating an efficient police and court system based on logic and ethics. Think about it.

And, statists long ago learned that the way to force the public to cave in to higher taxes is to cut back these most essential services until everyone is terrified.

The Economist magazine reports that courts "all over the country" are now being cut back.³ A county in Georgia has stopped civil suits altogether, and in California, where a "fair and speedy" civil trial already takes two years to get to court, parties who are at each other's throats may soon find they will wait five. One judge understandably warns this would bring about "the unraveling of society."⁴

I believe it is a near certainty now that…

…a perfect storm of violence is near

We've already seen the flash mobs and riots of August, and now we're seeing members of the Occupy Wall Street crowd calling for the same.

I'm sure no small percentage of the people who have been looting and burning were taught Values Clarification. They are doing what feels right to them.

The scariest thing I've heard in a long time…

…happened October 11th. A column of Occupy Wall Street protestors, reportedly numbering 2,000, sought out and marched to homes of persons they believed were wealthy. A spokesman said the column of irate protestors was "visiting" the homes of the well off "who hoard wealth at the expense of the 99 percent."⁵

Imagine looking out your window one afternoon to find hundreds of furious people who hate you, who want your money, and believe they have a right to it.

The Occupy Wall Street protests have spread to an estimated 150 cities.⁶

Summarizing: it's here

Along with a completely dysfunctional and corrupt government, a crumbling court system, wobbly economy, high unemployment, and what appears to be the beginning of widespread riots, we have millions in two generations who have been made incapable of knowing right from wrong.

Notice that this is not a forecast, it's real. It's here now.

A lot of the people at the top levels of government were likely taught Values Clarification. When they give a hate-the-rich speech, I'm sure they are doing what feels right to them.

See to your safety — do it now

For at least 20 years I've been saying the economic experiment the government launched in 1971 would eventually lead to worldwide violence in the streets, and it is a good idea for everyone to be ready to defend themselves and ride out a period of shortages of food and other necessities.

Then the January 2009 EWR announced, "I think the December riots in Greece were the beginning of global mayhem."

Two months later I wrote, "Clearly, America now has a banana republic government and economy. This means, in my opinion, it will soon have banana republic social trouble, including severe joblessness, homelessness, crime and shortages. I can't see how this mess won't lead to riots. Continue building your emergency preparations."

In August this year, the riots arrived.

Two things you should do now

The Values Clarification chickens are coming home to roost. I'm afraid we are headed for a global Kristallnacht⁷ in which the targets will be not only Jews but anyone a crowd might regard as well off.

If you have not made your emergency preparations, the first thing I suggest is that you get started immediately. Not tomorrow, now.

The hayseed maneuver

My wife keeps an old beat-up truck and a supply of cast-off clothes including straw hats. These enable us to travel around looking like a couple of hayseeds instead of members of the well off.

Here's another idea. It is admittedly self-serving, but I hope you will consider it.

Values Clarification had a lot to do with my decision to write Whatever Happened To Justice? Numerous comments from people who own the book have convinced me it is extremely helpful to the young. For a person who does not have a moral compass, it creates one, and for those who have one but could use some help standing against the crowd in school, it provides some of this much needed additional strength. A school is, after all, a peer pressure cooker, and there is a limit to how much ridicule a child can take.

This is not puffery. Lots of readers have told me their children find Whatever Happened To Justice? a godsend. It teaches about right and wrong by using rules common to all religions, which is what the old British Common Law was all about.

So, if you have children or grandchildren, please help them. Give them copies of Whatever Happened To Justice? as holiday gifts.

I waited 35 years to write about Values Clarification, because I knew how crazy it would sound. Could a government experiment using our children as guinea pigs erase the population's sense of right and wrong?

Now we have Smith's study as real scientific evidence that this is exactly what has been happening. ♦

¹ "If It Feels Right…," by David Brooks, NEW YORK TIMES website, 12 Sep 11.

² LEARNING ABOUT VALUES, David L. Cook Publishing Co., 1973, p.3.

³ "The feeblest branch," THE ECONOMIST, 1 Oct 11, p.31.

⁴ Ibid., "The feeblest…"

⁵ "Hedge Fund Manager John Paulson to…," ABC News website, 11 Oct 11.

⁶ Ibid., "Hedge Fund…"

⁷ Kristallnacht ("Crystal Night"): In Nov. 1938, attacks against Jews throughout Nazi Germany.

Herbert Hoover's Depression (Part 2)

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 07:30:00 +0000

By Murray Rothbard

This article is excerpted from chapter 7 of America's Great Depression.

The Development of Hoover's Interventionism: Labor Relations

We cannot fully understand Hoover's disastrous interference in the labor market during the depression without tracing the development of his views and actions on the labor front during the 1920s. We have seen that his Reconstruction Program and his Economic Conference of 1920 praised collective bargaining and unionism. In 1920, Hoover arranged a meeting of leading industrialists with "advanced views" on labor relations to try (unsuccessfully) to persuade them to "establish liaison" with the American Federation of Labor.[30] From 1919 through 1923, Hoover tried to persuade private corporations to insure the uninsurable by adopting unemployment insurance, and in 1925 he praised the American Federation of Labor as having "exercised a powerful influence in stabilizing industry." He also favored the compulsory unemployment of a child labor amendment, which would have lowered the national product, and raised labor costs as well as the wages of competing adult workers.

Most important of Hoover's activities in the labor field was his successful war against United States Steel and its chairman, Judge Elbert H. Gary, a war conducted as a "skillful publicity campaign" (in the words of a Hoover admirer) against "barbaric" hours of work in the steel industry.[31] The success of this battle made it much easier later on to persuade businessmen to go along with his labor policies during the 1929 depression. Hoover had decided that the 12-hour day in the steel industry must be eradicated and replaced by the 8-hour day. He persuaded Harding, lapsing from his usual laissez-faire instincts, to hold a conference of steel manufacturers in May 1922, at which Harding and Hoover called on the magnates to eliminate the 12-hour day. An admiring biographer notes with satisfaction that Hoover made the steel leaders "squirm."[32] It was of course easy for Harding and Hoover, far removed from the necessity of meeting a payroll or organizing production, to tell other people how long and under what conditions they should work. Hoover was supported by such "enlightened" steelmen as Alexander Legge and Charles R. Hook, but bitterly opposed by other leaders like Charles M. Schwab, and of course by Judge Gary, chairman of the board of US Steel and president of the American Iron and Steel Institute. The war was on.

The steel agitation, it should be pointed out, had not been begun by Hoover. It originated back in September 1919, when Gary refused to engage in collective bargaining with a workers' union. The workers struck on that issue, and the strike was led by Communist leader William Z. Foster. By the time the strike had failed, in January 1920, public opinion, properly regarding the strike as Bolshevik inspired, was squarely on the side of US Steel. By this time, however, the Interchurch World Movement had appointed a Commission of Inquiry into the strike; the commission issued a report favorable to the strikers in July 1920, and thereby initiated the 8-hour day agitation.[33] The report started a propaganda war, with the nation's leftists attempting to change the whole temper of public opinion. The Reverend A.J. Muste, the Socialist New York Call, Labor, and The Nation backed the report, while business associations strongly attacked the inquiry. The latter included the National Association of Manufacturers, the National Civic Federation, the Wall Street Journal, and others. Many religious papers, however, were persuaded by the prestige of the committee (a prestige in religion that somehow carried over to secular matters) to change their previous views and to line up on the antisteel side.

It was at this critical point in the battle that Hoover entered the fray and persuaded President Harding to join him. Hoover "deliberately broke the story" of the unsuccessful private meeting with Gary, Schwab, and the others to the press. He told the press that President Harding was "attempting to persuade industry to adopt a reasonable working day."[34] Thus did the government mobilize public opinion on the side of the union. Hoover managed to have the national Engineering Societies – effectively dominated by Hoover – issue a report (again outside of their competence) endorsing the 8-hour day in November 1922. Hoover eulogized the report, wrote the introduction, and persuaded Harding to sign it.

Under the presidential pressure, Judge Gary appointed a committee of the steel industry, headed by himself, to study the question. The committee reported on May 25, 1923, unanimously rejecting the 8-hour day demands. US Steel also issued a reply to the Interchurch Report, written by Mr. Marshall Olds, and endorsed by the prominent economist, Professor Jeremiah W. Jenks. Abuse rained down on the steel industry from all sides. Forgotten were the arguments used by US Steel, e.g., that the steel workers preferred the longer 12-hour day because of the increased income, and that production would suffer under an 8-hour schedule.[35]

This and other arguments were swept away by the wave of emotionalism whipped up over the issue. The forces of the Social Gospel hurled anathemas. "Social Justice" and "Social Action" committees of Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish organizations set up a clamor on issues about which they knew virtually nothing. Attaching a quantitative codicil to the qualitative moral codes of the Bible, they did not hesitate to declare that the 12-hour day was "morally indefensible." They did not elaborate whether it had suddenly become "morally indefensible" or whether it, and even longer work days, had also been morally wicked throughout earlier centuries. If the latter, it was certainly strange that countless preceding generations of churchmen had overlooked the alleged sin; if the former, then a curious historical relativism was now being mingled with the presumably eternal truths of the Bible.

The American Association for Labor Legislation of course entered the fray, and threatened federal maximum-hour legislation if the steel industry did not succumb to its imperious demands. But the most effective blow was a stern public letter of rebuke sent to Gary by President Harding on June 18, written for the president by Hoover. Faced by Harding's public requests and demands, Gary finally surrendered in July, permitting Hoover to write the notice of triumph into Harding's Independence Day address.

The Hoover-Harding victory over US Steel effectively tamed industry, which, faced by this lesson, no longer had the fight to withstand a potent combination of public and governmental pressures.[36]

Nor did this exhaust Hoover's labor interventionism during the 1920s. Hoover played a major role in fostering railway unions, and in foisting upon the railroad industry the Railway Labor Act – America's first permanent incursion of the federal government into labor-management relations. The railroad problem had begun in World War I, when the federal government seized control of the nation's rails. Run by Secretary of the Treasury McAdoo, the government's policy was to encourage unionization. After the war was over, the railway unions tried their best to perpetuate this bastion of socialism, and advocated the Plumb Plan, which called for joint operation of the railroads by employers, unions, and the government.

The railroads were returned to private owners in 1920, but Congress gave a dangerous sop to the unions by setting up a Railroad Labor Board, with tripartite representation, to settle all labor disputes. The board's decisions did not have the force of law, but they could exert an undue pressure on public opinion. The unions were happy with this arrangement, until the government representatives saw the light of economic truth during the depression of 1921, and recommended reductions in wage rates. The nonoperating railway unions conducted a nationwide strike in defiance of the proposed reduction in the summer of 1922. While Attorney General Daugherty acted ably in support of person and property by obtaining a federal injunction against union violence, the "horrified" Mr. Hoover, winning Secretary of State Hughes to his side, persuaded Harding to force Daugherty to remove the injunction. Hoover also intervened privately but insistently to try to wring pro-union concessions from the railroads.

After the unions lost their strike, they determined to rewrite the law so that they could become established with the help of federal coercion. From 1923 on, the unions fought for a compulsory arbitration law. They achieved this goal with the Railway Labor Act of 1926, which, in effect, guaranteed collective bargaining to the railway unions. The bill was drafted by union lawyers Donald Richberg and David E. Lilienthal, and also by Herbert Hoover, who originated the idea of the Railway Labor Mediation Board. Seeing the growing support for such a law and lured by the promised elimination of strikes, the bulk of the railroad industry surrendered and went along with the bill. The Railway Labor Act – the first giant step toward the collectivization of labor relations – was opposed by only a few far-sighted railroads, and by the National Association of Manufacturers.[37]

Even more mischievous than Hoover's pro-union attitude was his adoption of the new theory that high wage rates are an important cause of prosperity. The notion grew during the 1920s that America was more prosperous than other countries because her employers generously paid higher wage rates, thus insuring that workers had the requisite purchasing power to buy industry's products. While high real wage rates are actually the consequence of greater productivity and capital investment, this theory put the cart before the horse by claiming that high wage rates were the cause of high productivity and living standards. It followed, of course, that wage rates should be maintained, or even raised, to stave off any threatening depression. Hoover began championing this theory during the Unemployment Conference of 1921. Employers on the manufacturing committee wanted to urge lowering wage rates as a cure for unemployment, but Hoover successfully insisted on killing this recommendation.[38] By the mid-1920s, Hoover was trumpeting the "new economics" and attacking the "old economics" that resisted the new dispensation. In a speech on May 12, 1926, Secretary Hoover spread the gospel of high wage rates that was to prove so disastrous a few years later:

not so many years ago – the employer considered it was in his interest to use the opportunities of unemployment and immigration to lower wages irrespective of other considerations. The lowest wages and longest hours were then conceived as the means to obtain lowest production costs and largest profits .... But we are a long way on the road to new conceptions. The very essence of great production is high wages and low prices, because it depends upon a widening ... consumption, only to be obtained from the purchasing-power of high real wages and increased standards of living.[39]

Hoover was not alone in celebrating the "new economics." The National Industrial Conference Board reported that, while during the 1920–1921 depression, wage rates fell by 19 percent in one year, the high-wage theory had taken hold from then on. More and more people adopted the theory that wage-cutting would dry up purchasing power and thus prolong the depression, while wage rates held high would quickly cure business doldrums. This doctrine, allied with the theory that high wage rates cause prosperity, was preached by many industrialists, economists, and labor leaders throughout the 1920s.[40] The Conference Board reported that "Much was heard of the dawn of a new era in which major business depressions could have no place." And Professor Leo Wolman has stated that the prevailing theory during the 1920s was that "high and rising wages were necessary to a full flow of purchasing power and, therefore, to good business."[41]

As the final outgrowth of the famous conference of 1921, Hoover's Committee on Recent Economic Changes issued a general multivolume report on the American economy in 1929. Once again, the basic investigations were made by the National Bureau. The committee did not at all foresee the Great Depression. Instead, it hailed the price stability of the 1920s and the higher wages. It celebrated the boom, little realizing that this was instead its swan song: "with rising wages and relatively stable prices we have become consumers of what we produce to an extent never before realized." In the early postwar period, the committee opined, there were reactionary calls for the "liquidation" of labor back to prewar standards. But, soon, the "leaders of industrial thought" came to see that high wages sustained purchasing power, which in turn sustained prosperity.

They began consciously to propound the principle of high wages and low costs as a policy of enlightened industrial practice. This principle has since attracted the attention of economists all over the world – its application on a broad scale is so novel.[42]

This change in the industrial climate, according to the committee, came about in a few short years, largely due to the influence of the Conference on Unemployment. By the fall of 1926, steel magnate Eugene Grace was already heralding the new dispensation in the Saturday Evening Post.[43]

The conclusions of the Hoover-appointed economic committee were ominous in their own right. "To maintain the dynamic equilibrium" of the 1920s, it declared, leadership must be at hand to provide more and more "deliberate public attention and control." In fact, "research and study, the orderly classification of knowledge ... well may make complete control of the economic system a possibility." To maintain the equilibrium, "We ... [must] develop a technique of balance," the technique to be supplied by economists, statisticians, and engineers, all "working in harmony together."

And so, President Herbert Hoover, on the eve of the Great Depression, stood ready to meet any storm warnings on the business horizon.[44] Hoover, the "great engineer," stood now armed on many fronts with the mighty weapons and blueprints of a "new economic science." Unfettered by outworn laissez-faire creeds, he would use his "scientific" weapons boldly, if need be, to bring the business cycle under governmental control.

Hoover did not fail to employ promptly and vigorously his "modern" political principles, or the new "tools" provided him by "modern" economists. And, as a direct consequence, America was brought to her knees as never before. Yet, by an ironic twist of fate, the shambles that Hoover abandoned when he left office was attributed, by Democratic critics, to his devotion to the outworn tenets of laissez-faire.

Notes

[30] Irving Bernstein, The Lean Years: A History of the American Worker, 1920–1933 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960), p. 147. As early as 1909, Hoover had called unions "proper antidotes for unlimited capitalistic organizations," ibid., p. 250.
[31] Warren, Herbert Hoover and the Great Depression, p. 28.
[32] Lyons, Our Unknown Ex-President, p. 231.
[33] See Marshall Olds, Analysis of the Interchurch World Movement Report on the Steel Strike (New York: G.P. Putnam and Sons, 1922), pp. 417ff.
[34] Lyons, Our Unknown Ex-President, p. 231.
[35] Also forgotten was the fact that wages were involved in the struggle, as well as hours. The workers wanted shorter hours with a "living wage," or as the Inquiry Report put it, "a minimum comfort wage" – in short, they wanted higher hourly wage rates. See Samuel Yellen, American Labor Struggles (New York: S.A. Russell, 1956), pp. 255ff.
[36] On the 12-hour day episode, see Frederick W. MacKenzie, "Steel Abandons the 12-Hour Day," American Labor Legislation Review (September, 1923): 179ff.; Hoover, Memoirs, vol. 2, pp. 103–04; and Robert M. Miller, "American Protestantism and the Twelve-Hour Day," Southwestern Social Science Quarterly (September, 1956): 137–48. In the same year, Governor Pinchot of Pennsylvania forced the anthracite coal mines of that state to adopt the eight-hour day.
[37] For a pro-union account of the affair, see Donald R. Richberg, Labor Union Monopoly (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1957), pp. 3–28; also see Hoover, Memoirs, vol. 2.
[38] See McMullen, "The President's Unemployment Conference of 1921 and its Results," p. 17.
[39] Hoover, Memoirs, vol. 2, p. 108.
[40] One of these industrialists was the same Charles M. Schwab, head of Bethlehem Steel, who had bitterly fought Hoover in the 8-hour day dispute. Thus, in early 1929, Schwab opined that the way to keep prosperity permanent was to "pay labor the highest possible wages." Commercial and Financial Chronicle 128 (January 5, 1929): 23.
[41] National Industrial Conference Board, Salary and Wage Policy in the Depression (New York: Conference Board, 1932), p. 3; Leo Wolman, Wages in Relation to Economic Recovery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1931), p. 1.
[42] Committee on Recent Economic Changes, Recent Economic Changes in the United States (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1929), vol. 1, p. xi.
[43] Committee on Recent Economic Changes, Recent Economic Changes in the United States, (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1929), vol. 2; Henry Dennison, "Management," p. 523.
[44] Another important foretaste of the later National Recovery Act (NRA) was Hoover's use of the Department of Commerce during the 1920s to help trade associations form "codes," endorsed by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), to curtail competition in the name of eliminating "unfair" trade practices.

Herbert Hoover's Depression (Part 1)

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 07:30:00 +0000

by Murray Rothbard
This article is excerpted from chapter 7 of America's Great Depression.

If government wishes to alleviate, rather than aggravate, a depression, its only valid course is laissez-faire – to leave the economy alone. Only if there is no interference, direct or threatened, with prices, wage rates, and business liquidation will the necessary adjustment proceed with smooth dispatch.

Any propping up of shaky positions postpones liquidation and aggravates unsound conditions. Propping up wage rates creates mass unemployment, and bolstering prices perpetuates and creates unsold surpluses.

Moreover, a drastic cut in the government budget – both in taxes and expenditures – will of itself speed adjustment by changing social choice toward more saving and investment relative to consumption. For government spending, whatever the label attached to it, is solely consumption; any cut in the budget therefore raises the investment-consumption ratio in the economy and allows more rapid validation of originally wasteful and loss-yielding projects.

Hence, the proper injunction to government in a depression is cut the budget and leave the economy strictly alone. Currently fashionable economic thought considers such a dictum hopelessly outdated; instead, it has more substantial backing now in economic law than it did during the 19th century.

Laissez-faire was, roughly, the traditional policy in American depressions before 1929. The laissez-faire precedent was set in America's first great depression, 1819, when the federal government's only act was to ease terms of payment for its own land debtors. President Van Buren also set a staunch laissez-faire course, in the Panic of 1837. Subsequent federal governments followed a similar path, the chief sinners being state governments, which periodically permitted insolvent banks to continue in operation without paying their obligations.[1] In the 1920–1921 depression, government intervened to a greater extent, but wage rates were permitted to fall, and government expenditures and taxes were reduced. And this depression was over in one year – in what Dr. Benjamin M. Anderson has called "our last natural recovery to full employment."

Laissez-faire, then, was the policy dictated both by sound theory and by historical precedent. But in 1929, the sound course was rudely brushed aside. Led by President Hoover, the government embarked on what Anderson has accurately called the "Hoover New Deal." For if we define "New Deal" as an antidepression program marked by extensive governmental economic planning and intervention – including bolstering of wage rates and prices, expansion of credit, propping up of weak firms, and increased government spending (e.g., subsidies to unemployment and public works) – Herbert Clark Hoover must be considered the founder of the New Deal in America. Hoover, from the very start of the depression, set his course unerringly toward the violation of all the laissez-faire canons. As a consequence, he left office with the economy at the depths of an unprecedented depression, with no recovery in sight after three and a half years, and with unemployment at the terrible and unprecedented rate of 25 percent of the labor force.

Hoover's role as founder of a revolutionary program of government planning to combat depression has been unjustly neglected by historians. Franklin D. Roosevelt, in large part, merely elaborated the policies laid down by his predecessor. To scoff at Hoover's tragic failure to cure the depression as a typical example of laissez-faire is drastically to misread the historical record. The Hoover rout must be set down as a failure of government planning and not of the free market. To portray the interventionist efforts of the Hoover administration to cure the depression, we may quote Hoover's own summary of his program, during his presidential campaign in the fall of 1932:

We might have done nothing. That would have been utter ruin. Instead we met the situation with proposals to private business and to Congress of the most gigantic program of economic defense and counterattack ever evolved in the history of the Republic. We put it into action.... No government in Washington has hitherto considered that it held so broad a responsibility for leadership in such times.... For the first time in the history of depression, dividends, profits, and the cost of living, have been reduced before wages have suffered.... They were maintained until the cost of living had decreased and the profits had practically vanished. They are now the highest real wages in the world.

Creating new jobs and giving to the whole system a new breath of life; nothing has ever been devised in our history which has done more for ... "the common run of men and women." Some of the reactionary economists urged that we should allow the liquidation to take its course until we had found bottom.... We determined that we would not follow the advice of the bitter-end liquidationists and see the whole body of debtors of the United States brought to bankruptcy and the savings of our people brought to destruction.[2]

The Development of Hoover's Interventionism: Unemployment

Hoover, of course, did not come upon his interventionist ideas suddenly. It is instructive to trace their development and the similar development in the country as a whole, if we are to understand clearly how Hoover could so easily, and with such nationwide support, reverse the policies that had ruled in all previous depressions.

Herbert Clark Hoover was very much the "forward-looking" politician. We have seen that Hoover pioneered in attempts to intimidate investment bankers in placing foreign loans. Characteristic of all Hoover's interventions was the velvet glove on the mailed fist: i.e., the businessmen would be exhorted to adopt "voluntary" measures that the government desired, but implicit was the threat that if business did not "volunteer" properly, compulsory controls would soon follow.

When Hoover returned to the United States after the war and a long stay abroad, he came armed with a suggested "Reconstruction Program." Such programs are familiar to the present generation, but they were new to the United States in that more innocent age. Like all such programs, it was heavy on government planning, which was envisaged as "voluntary" cooperative action under "central direction."[3] The government was supposed to correct "our marginal faults" – including undeveloped health and education, industrial "waste," the failure to conserve resources, the nasty habit of resisting unionization, and seasonal unemployment.

Featured in Hoover's plan were increased inheritance taxes, public dams, and, significantly, government regulation of the stock market to eliminate "vicious speculation." Here was an early display of Hoover's hostility toward the stock market, a hostility that was to form one of the leitmotifs of his administration.[4] Hoover, who to his credit has never pretended to be the stalwart of laissez-faire that most people now consider him, notes that some denounced his program as "radical" – as well they might have.

So "forward-looking" was Hoover and his program that Louis Brandeis, Herbert Croly of the New Republic, Colonel Edward M. House, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and other prominent Democrats for a while boomed Hoover for the presidency.[5]

Hoover continued to expound interventionism in many areas during 1920. Most relevant to our concerns was the conference on labor-management relations that Hoover directed from 1919 to 1920, on appointment by President Wilson and in association with Secretary of Labor William B. Wilson, a former official of the United Mine Workers of America. The conference – which included "forward-looking" industrialists like Julius Rosenwald, Oscar Straus, and Owen D. Young, labor leaders, and economists like Frank W. Taussig – recommended wider collective bargaining, criticized "company unions," urged the abolition of child labor, and called for national old-age insurance, fewer working hours, "better housing," health insurance, and government arbitration boards for labor disputes. These recommendations reflected Hoover's views.[6]

Hoover was appointed Secretary of Commerce by President Harding in March 1921, under pressure from the left wing of the Republican Party, led by William Allen White and Judge Nathan Miller of New York. (Hoover was one of the first of the modern breed of politician, who can find a home in either party.) We have seen that the government pursued a largely laissez-faire policy in the depression of 1920–1921, but this was not the doing of Herbert Hoover. On the contrary, he "set out to reconstruct America."[7] He only accepted the appointment on the condition that he would be consulted on all economic policies of the federal government. He was determined to transform the Department of Commerce into "the economic interpreter to the American people (and they badly need one)."[8]

Hardly had Hoover assumed office when he began to organize an economic conference and a committee on unemployment. The committee established a branch in every state having substantial unemployment, along with subbranches in local communities and mayors' emergency committees in 31 cities.[9] The committee contributed relief to the unemployed, and also organized collaboration between the local and federal governments.

As Hoover recalls:

We developed cooperation between the federal, state, and municipal governments to increase public works. We persuaded employers to "divide" time among their employees so that as many as possible would have some incomes. We organized the industries to undertake renovation, repair, and, where possible, expand construction.[10]

Standard Oil of New Jersey announced a policy of laying off its older employees last, and it increased its repairs and production for inventory; US Steel also invested $10 million in repairs immediately upon conclusion of the conference.[11] In short, the biggest businesses were the first to agree.

Happily, the depression was about over by the time these measures could take effect, but an ominous shadow had been cast over any future depression, a shadow that would grimly materialize when the 1929 crash arrived. Once again, these measures bore the characteristic Hoover stamp; the government compulsion and planning were larded with the rhetoric of "voluntary cooperation." He spoke of these and other suggested measures as "mobilization of cooperative action of our manufacturers and employers, of our public bodies and local authorities." And there came into use the now all too familiar war analogy: "An infinite amount of misery could be saved if we have the same spirit of spontaneous cooperation in every community for reconstruction that we had in war."

While the government did not greatly intervene in the 1920–1921 recession, there were enough ominous seeds of the later New Deal. In December 1920, the War Finance Corporation was revived as an aid to farm exports, and a $100 million Foreign Trade Financial Corporation was established. Farm agitation against short-selling led to the Capper Grain Futures Act, in August 1921, regulating trading on the grain exchanges. Furthermore, on the state level, New York passed rent laws, restricting the eviction rights of landlords; Kansas created an Industrial Court regulating all key industries as "public utilities"; and the Non-Partisan League conducted socialistic experiments in North Dakota.[12]

Perhaps the most important development of all, however, was the President's Conference on Unemployment, called by Harding at the instigation of the indefatigable Herbert Hoover. This was probably the most fateful omen of antidepression policies to come. About 300 eminent men in industry, banking, and labor were called together in September 1921 to discuss the problem of unemployment. President Harding's address to the conference was filled with great good sense and was almost the swan song of the Old Order's way of dealing with depressions. Harding declared that liquidation was inevitable and attacked governmental planning and any suggestion of Treasury relief. He said, "The excess stimulation from that source is to be reckoned a cause of trouble rather than a source of cure."[13]

To the conference members, it was clear that Harding's words were mere stumbling blocks to the wheels of progress, and they were quickly disregarded. The conferees obviously preferred Hoover's opening speech, to the effect that the era of passivity was now over; in contrast to previous depressions, Hoover was convinced, the government must "do something."[14] The conference's aim was to promulgate the idea that government should be responsible for curing depressions, even if the sponsors had no clear idea of the specific things that government should do. The important steps, in the view of the dominant leaders, were to urge the necessity of government planning to combat depressions and to bolster the idea of public works as a depression remedy.[15] The conference very strongly and repeatedly praised the expansion of public works in a depression and urged coordinated plans by all levels of government.[16] Not to be outdone by the new administration, former President Wilson, in December, added his call for a federal public-works-stabilization program.

The extreme public-works agitators were disappointed that the conference did not go far enough. For example, the economist William Leiserson had thought that a Federal Labor Reserve Board "would do for the labor market what the Federal Reserve Board did for the banking interests." But the wiser heads saw that they had made a great gain. As a direct result of Hoover's conference, twice as many municipal bonds for public works were floated in 1921 and 1922 as in any previous year; federal highway grants-in-aid to the states totaled $75 million in the autumn of 1921, and American opinion was aroused on the entire subject.

It was no accident that the conference had arrived at its interventionist conclusions. As usually happens in conferences of this type, a small group of staff men, along with Herbert Hoover, actually prepared the recommendations that the illustrious front men duly ratified.[17] Secretary of the crucial Public Works Committee of the conference was Otto Tod Mallery, for a long time the nation's leading advocate of public-works programs in depressions. Mallery was a member and guiding spirit of the Pennsylvania State Industrial Board and Secretary of the Pennsylvania Emergency Public Works Commission, which had pioneered in public-works planning, and Mallery's resolutions thoughtfully pointed to the examples of Pennsylvania and California as beacon lights for the federal government to follow.[18]

Mallery was one of the leading spirits in the American Association for Labor Legislation (AALL) an organization of eminent citizens and economists devoted to the promotion of government intervention in the fields of labor, unemployment, and welfare. The Association had held the first national unemployment conference in early 1914. Now, its executive director, John B. Andrews, boasted that the presidential conference's recommendations followed the standard recommendations formulated by the AALL in 1915. These standard recommendations featured public works and emergency public relief, at the usual hours and wage rates – the wage rates of the boom period were supposed to be maintained.[19] Neither was the conference's following of the AALL line a coincidence. Aside from Mallery's critical role, the conference also employed the expert knowledge of the following economists, all of whom were officials of the AALL: John B. Andrews, Henry S. Dennison, Edwin F. Gay, Samuel A. Lewisohn, Samuel McCune Lindsay, Wesley C. Mitchell, Ida M. Tarbell, Mary Van Kleeck, and Leo Wolman.[20]

It seems clear that the businessmen at the conference were not supposed to mold policy; their function was to be indoctrinated with the Hoover-AALL line and then to spread the interventionist gospel to other business leaders. Andrews singled out for particular praise in this regard Joseph H. Defrees, of the United States Chamber of Commerce, who appealed to many business organizations to cooperate with the mayors' emergency committees, and generally to accept "business responsibility" to solve the unemployment problem. President Samuel Gompers of the American Federation of Labor (AF of L) also hailed the widespread acceptance by industry of its "responsibility" for unemployment, as an outcome of this conference.

Hoover did his best to intervene in the recession, attempting also to stimulate home construction and urging banks to finance more exports. Fortunately, however, Harding and the rest of the cabinet were not convinced of the virtues of governmental depression "remedies." But eight years later, Hoover was finally to have his chance. As Lyons concludes, "A precedent for federal intervention in economic depression was set, rather to the horror of conservatives."[21]

It is, of course, a sociological law that a government bureau, once launched, never dies, and the conference was true to this law. The conference resolved itself into three research committees, run by a staff of experts, with Hoover in overall command. One project bore fruit in Leo Wolman's Planning and Control of Public Works, a pro–public works study published in 1930. A second committee published a study on Seasonal Operation in the Construction Industry, in 1924, in cooperation with the Division of Building and Housing of the Department of Commerce. This work urged seasonal stabilization of construction, and was in part the result of a period of propaganda activity by the American Construction Council, a trade association headed by Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Its foreword was written by Herbert Hoover.[22] The most important project was a study of Business Cycles and Unemployment, published in 1923.

Hoover invited the National Bureau of Economic Research (headed by Wesley C. Mitchell) to make a "fact-finding" study of the problems of forecasting and control of business cycles, and then appointed a Committee on Business Cycles to draft policy recommendations for the report. Chairman of the committee was Owen D. Young, and other members included Edward Eyre Hunt, who had been secretary of the President's Conference, Joseph Defrees, Mary Van Kleeck, Clarence Woolley, and Matthew Woll of the AF of L. Funds for the project were considerately supplied by the Carnegie Corporation. Wesley C. Mitchell, of the National Bureau and AALL, planned and directed the report, which included interventionist chapters by Mallery and Andrews on public works and unemployment benefits, and by Wolman on unemployment insurance. While the National Bureau was supposed to do only fact-finding, Mitchell, in discussing his report, advocated "social experimentation."[23]

Meanwhile, Hoover had not been idle on the more direct legislative front. Senator W.S. Kenyon of Iowa, in late 1921, introduced a bill supported by Hoover, embodying recommendations of the conference and specifically requiring a public-works-stabilization program. In the December 1921 hearings, the Kenyon Bill was supported by numerous leading economists, as well as by the American Federation of Labor, the American Engineering Council (of which Hoover had just been named president), and the United States Chamber of Commerce. One of the supporters was Wesley C. Mitchell. The bill never came to a vote, however, largely due to healthy senatorial skepticism based on laissez-faire ideas.

The next public-works-stabilization bill before Congress was the Zihlman Bill in the House. This was promoted by the National Unemployment League, formed in 1922 for that purpose. Hearings were held in the House Labor Committee in February 1923. Hoover backed the proposal, but it failed of adoption.

Finally, Hoover presented the report on business cycles and unemployment to the Congress, and strongly urged a public-works program in depressions. Later, in 1929, Hoover's Committee on Recent Economic Changes would also support a public-works program.

In 1924, the AALL continued its agitation. It participated in a national conference proposing public-works planning. The conference was called by the Federated American Engineering Societies in January. In 1923, Wisconsin and Massachusetts were persuaded to adopt a stabilizing public-works program. Massachusetts was directly swayed by testimony from the ubiquitous Andrews and Mallery. These state programs were never translated into effective action, but they did indicate the developing climate. In January 1925, Hoover had the satisfaction of seeing President Coolidge adopt his position. Addressing the Associated General Contractors of America (a group that stood to gain by a government building program), Coolidge called for public-works planning to stabilize depressions. Senators George H. Pepper and James Couzens tried to pass public-works-planning legislation in 1925 and 1926, but they failed, along with later attempts by Senator Wesley Jones, who submitted bills that had been drafted in Hoover's Department of Commerce. The Republican Senate was the most recalcitrant, and one Pepper Bill was filibustered to death there. Even favorable reports by its Commerce Committee could not sway the Senate. By this time, not only Hoover and Coolidge, but also Secretary Mellon, the Democratic Party in 1924, and later Governor Alfred E. Smith of New York, had endorsed the public-works program. In May 1928, Senator Robert F. Wagner (D, NY) introduced three bills for comprehensive public-works planning, including the creation of an employment stabilization board, but the plan was not considered by Congress.[24]

After Hoover was elected president, he became more circumspect in presenting his views, but he carried on the fight with renewed vigor. His technique was to "leak" the "Hoover Plan" to trusted associates, who would obviously be presenting Hoover's views. He chose as his vehicle Governor Ralph Owen Brewster of Maine. Brewster presented a public-works plan to the Conference of Governors in late 1928, and waxed eloquent about the plan as designed to "prevent depressions."[25]

His use of the term "Road to Plenty" was hardly a coincidence, for Hoover had adopted the plan of Messrs. Foster and Catchings, which had recently been outlined in their famous book, The Road to Plenty (1928). The authors had submitted the plan to Brewster, and, after Hoover's endorsement, Brewster brought Professor William T. Foster along to the Governors' Conference as his technical advisor. Foster and Catchings, bellwethers of inflation and the bull market and leading underconsumptionists, had been closely involved in the public-works agitation. Foster was director of the Pollak Foundation for Economic Research, founded by investment banker Waddill Catchings. The pair had published a series of very popular books during the 1920s, agitating for such panaceas as public works and monetary inflation.[26]

Although seven or eight governors were enthusiastic about the Hoover-Foster-Catchings Plan, the conference tabled the idea. A large part of the press hailed the plan in extravagant terms, as "prosperity insurance," a "prosperity reserve," or as a "pact to outlaw depression"; while more conservative organs properly ridiculed it as a chimerical and socialistic effort to outlaw the law of supply and demand. It was not surprising that William Green of the AF of L hailed the plan as the most important announcement on wages and employment in a decade, or that the AF of L's John P. Frey announced that Hoover had now accepted the old AF of L theory that depressions are caused by underconsumption and low wages.[27] The press reported that "labor is jubilant, because leaders believe that the next President has found ... a remedy for unemployment which, at least in its philosophy and its groundwork, is identical with that of labor."[28]

The closeness of Foster and Catchings to Hoover is again demonstrated by the detailed account of their own plan that they published in April 1929. In an article entitled "Mr. Hoover's Plan: What It Is and What It Is Not – A New Attack on Poverty," they wrote authoritatively that Hoover should wield a stabilization public-works reserve, not of $150 million, as had often been mentioned in previous years, but of the gigantic sum of $3 billion. This plan would iron out prices and the business cycle, and stabilize business. At last, scientific economics was to be wielded as a weapon by an American president: "The Plan ... is business guided by measurements instead of hunches. It is economics for an age of science – economics worthy of the new President."[29]

Notes

[1] For an appreciation of the importance of this fact for American monetary history, see Vera C. Smith, The Rationale of Central Banking (London: P.S. King and Son, 1936).
[2] From his acceptance speech on August 11, and his campaign speech at Des Moines on October 4. For a full account of the Hoover speeches and antidepression program, see William Starr Myers and Walter H. Newton, The Hoover Administration (New York: Scholarly Press, 1936), part 1; William Starr Myers, ed., The State Papers of Herbert Hoover, (New York. 1934), vols. 1 and 2. Also see Herbert Hoover, Memoirs of Herbert Hoover (New York: Macmillan, 1937), vol. 3.
[3] See Joseph Dorfman, The Economic Mind in American Civilization (New York: Viking Press, 1959), vol. 14, p. 27.
[4] Hoover, Memoirs, vol. 2, p. 29. Hoover's evasive rhetoric is typical: "I insisted that these improvements could be effected without government control, but the government should cooperate by research, intellectual leadership [sic], and prohibitions upon the abuse of power."
[5] Cf. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Crisis of the Old Order, 1919–1933 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957), pp. 81ff.; Harris Gaylord Warren, Herbert Hoover and the Great Depression (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), pp. 24ff.
[6] Hoover records that the "extreme right" was hostile to these proposals – and understandably so – and notably the Boston Chamber of Commerce. Also see Eugene Lyons, Our Unknown Ex-President (New York: Doubleday, 1948), pp. 213–14.
[7] Hoover to Wesley C. Mitchell, July 29, 1921. Lucy Sprague Mitchell, Two Lives (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1953), p. 364.
[8] Warren, Herbert Hoover and the Great Depression, p. 26.
[9] See Hoover, Memoirs, vol. 2; Warren, Herbert Hoover and the Great Depression; and Lloyd M. Graves, The Great Depression and Beyond (New York: Brookmire Economic Service, 1932), p. 84.
[10] Hoover, Memoirs, vol. 2, pp. 41–42.
[11] See Joseph H. McMullen, "The President's Unemployment Conference of 1921 and its Results" (unpublished M.A. thesis, Columbia University, 1922), p. 33.
[12] See Graves, The Great Depression and Beyond.
[13] See E. Jay Howenstine, Jr., "Public Works Policy in the Twenties," Social Research (December, 1946): 479–500.
[14] See Lyons, Our Unknown Ex-President, p. 230.
[15] In reality, public works only prolong the depression, aggravate the malinvestment problem, and intensify the shortage of savings by wasting more capital. They also prolong unemployment by bolstering wage rates. See Mises, Human Action (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1949), pp. 792–94.
[16] The payment of charity wages as high as market rates began in the depression of 1893; public works as a depression remedy started on a municipal scale in the recession of 1914–1915. The secretary of Mayor John Purroy Mitchell's New York Committee on Unemployment urged public works in 1916, and Nathan J. Stone, chief statistician of the US Tariff Board, urged a national public works and employment reserve in 1915. Immediately after the war, Governor Alfred E. Smith of New York and Governor Frank O. Lowden of Illinois urged a national public-works-stabilization program. See Raphael Margolin, "Public Works as a Remedy for Unemployment in the United States" (unpublished M.A. thesis, Columbia University, 1928).
[17] McMullen, "The President's Unemployment Conference of 1921 and its Results," p. 16.
[18] Pennsylvania had established the first public-works-stabilization program in 1917, largely inspired by Mallery; it was later repealed. Mallery had also been made head of a new Division of Development of Public Works by States and Cities During the Transition Period, in the Wilson administration. See Dorfman, The Economic Mind in American Civilization," vol. 4, p. 7.
[19] See John B. Andrews, "The President's Unemployment Conference – Success or Failure?" American Labor Legislation Review (December, 1921): 307–10. Also see "Unemployment Survey," in ibid, pp. 211–12.
[20] American Labor Legislation Review (March, 1922): 79. Other officials of the AALL included: Jane Addams, Thomas L. Chadbourne, Professor John R. Commons, Professor Irving Fisher, Adolph Lewisohn, Lillian Wald, Felix M. Warburg, Woodrow Wilson, and Rabbi Stephen S. Wise.
[21] Lyons, Our Unknown Ex-President, p. 230.
[22] The American Construction Council was formed in response to the hounding of the New York construction industry by state and federal authorities during the depression of 1920–1921. The governments charged the industry with "price-fixing" and "excessive profits." Hoover and Roosevelt together formed the council in the summer of 1922, to stabilize and organize the industry. The aim was to cartelize construction, impose various codes of operation and "ethics," and to plan the entire industry. Franklin Roosevelt, as president of the council, took repeated opportunity to denounce profit seeking and rugged individualism. The "codes of fair practice" were Hoover's idea. See Daniel R. Fusfeld, The Economic Thought of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Origins of the New Deal (New York: Columbia University Press, 1956), pp. 102ff.
[23] Wesley C. Mitchell, "Unemployment and Business Fluctuations," American Labor Legislation Review (March, 1923): 15–22.
[24] The following economists, businessmen, and other leaders had by now served as officers of the American Association for Labor Legislation, in addition to those named above: Ray Stannard Baker, Bernard M. Baruch, Mrs. Mary Beard, Joseph P. Chamberlain, Morris Llewellyn Cooke, Fred C. Croxton, Paul H. Douglas, Morris L. Ernst, Herbert Feis, S. Fels, Walton H. Hamilton, William Hard, Ernest M. Hopkins, Royal W. Meeker, Broadus Mitchell, William F. Ogburn, Thomas I. Parkinson, Mrs. George D. Pratt, Roscoe Pound, Mrs. Raymond Robins, Julius Rosenwald, John A. Ryan, Nahum I. Stone, Gerard Swope, Mrs. Frank A. Vanderlip, Joseph H. Willits, and John G. Winant.
[25] Ralph Owen Brewster, "Footprints on the Road to Plenty – A Three Billion Dollar Fund to Stabilize Business," Commercial and Financial Chronicle (November 28, 1928): 25–27.
[26] The Foster-Catchings Plan called for an organized public-works program of $3 billion to iron out the business cycle and stabilize the price level. Individual initiative, the authors decided, may be well and good, but in a situation of this sort "we must have collective leadership." William T. Foster and Waddill Catchings, The Road to Plenty (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1928), p. 187. For a brilliant critique of the underconsumptionist theories of Foster and Catchings, see F.A. Hayek, "The 'Paradox' of Savings," in Profit, Interest, and Investment (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1939), pp. 199–263.
[27] See Dorfman, The Economic Mind in American Civilization, vol. 4, pp. 349–50.
[28] "Hoover's Plan to Keep the Dinner-Pail Full," Literary Digest (December 8, 1928): 5–7.
[29] William T. Foster and Waddill Catchings, "Mr. Hoover's Plan – What It Is and What It Is Not – The New Attack on Poverty," Review of Reviews (April, 1929): 77–78. For a laudatory survey of Hoover's pro–public works views in the 1920s, by an official of the AALL, see George H. Trafton, "Hoover and Unemployment," American Labor Legislation Review (September, 1929): 267ff.; and idem, "Hoover's Unemployment Policy," American Labor Legislation Review (December, 1929): 373ff.

Let the Markets Clear!

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 30 Oct 2012 07:30:00 +0000

by Ron Paul

French businessman and economist Jean-Baptiste Say is credited with identifying the fundamental economic principle that aggregate demand for goods in an economy will equal the aggregate supply of goods when markets are permitted to operate. Or in Say’s words, “products are paid for with products.”

English classical economist David Ricardo, among others, more fully developed this principle into what has become known as “Say’s Law.” Say’s Law, according to Ricardo, leads us to understand that market equilibrium for goods is constant. This simply means that markets, when left alone by government planners or other fraudulent actors, inexorably tend toward an “equilibrium price” which eventually balances supply and demand for any particular good. Thus markets will clear themselves of any surpluses or shortages in the form of excess supply and demand.

This important corollary of Say’s Law-- that markets clear-- is critical to understanding the moribund US housing market. In housing, perhaps more than any other good, we see the terrible consequences of government and central bank interference with market forces.

First, the Federal Reserve Bank relentlessly increased the money supply over the last few decades. Much of this newly created money and credit flowed from Fed member banks into the residential and commercial real estate markets, causing prices to rise dramatically prior to the housing bust of 2007.

At the same time, the Fed systematically suppressed interest rates for decades. This led to tremendous malinvestment both by homebuilders and individuals, and encouraged a seedy subprime mortgage industry to make nonviable loans that would not make economic sense under market interest rates.

Congressional meddling in the mortgage market also added tremendously to the problem. Inane legislation like The Community Reinvestment Act literally forced banks to make thousands of loans to bad credit risks. Similarly, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac put taxpayers on the hook for millions of mortgages that never would meet market underwriting criteria. And of course the real estate and homebuilder lobbies made sure mortgage interest debt (unlike most personal debt) remains tax-deductible.

The ultimate result of these interventions by our caring friends in Congress and the Fed has been the biggest housing bubble and crash in US history, leaving millions of Americans underwater on their mortgages if they have not already lost their houses altogether. Congress and the Fed are directly responsible for millions of shattered lives, and almost unknowable economic damage in the form of trillions of dollars in mortgage backed securities.

The only solution to this mess is to allow the US housing market to clear. All of the bad mortgage debt must be liquidated, whether via foreclosure or bankruptcy. Banks holding substantial mortgages or mortgage backed assets must face the music and adjust their balance sheets to reflect today’s reality. Undoubtedly this will force many banks into immediate insolvency, but such banks must be allowed to fail without receiving another nickel of taxpayer money. Banks took the risks and made money during the bubble years; those who exercised bad judgment must now accept the consequences of their actions.

Never in American history have we needed to adopt a policy of laissez faire more desperately; never has government seemed more determined to artificially prop up an industry. But only by allowing the housing market to clear can we hope to rebuild our shattered economy from a stable foundation. Clearly there will be pain in the short term, but we owe it to younger Americans and future generations to allow the reemergence of a rational housing market.

Pearl Harbor: An Attack Unprovoked?

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 29 Oct 2012 07:30:00 +0000

By Josh Krab

Many school teachers teach history as if it is just a collection of events that we must remember in order to be intelligent. History is a series of events that we can and must learn from in order to be successful in the future. Dates and significant events are important in history but many people forget that the events leading up to that moment are even more important. The attack on Pearl Harbor is an event that is familiar to everyone. Many people know what happened on December 7^th 1941, but what many people don’t know is what happened before that tragic event. Why did the Japanese decide to attack the most powerful nation on earth? The fact is that the attack on Pearl Harbor was no accident. It was not a failure of American intelligence. It was not permissible because of some brilliant Japanese intelligence. It was a deliberately provoked event by the highest levels of the U.S. government.

In 1941, polls conducted in the United States showed that over 80% of the citizens opposed getting involved in World War II. However, Franklin Roosevelt was using warships to escort cargo ships across the Atlantic to supply England with war goods. This use of war ships triggered a series of events that led to the attack on Pearl Harbor and our involvement in the war. On October 16, 1941, a German torpedo hit the U.S. destroyer Kearny. Fifteen days later, the destroyer Rueben James was torpedoed and 100 American sailors died, being the first U.S. warship that was sunk in the war.[1] These events took place in the Atlantic but yet our entrance into the war came from an attack in the Pacific.

In 1937, a group of U.S. Navy ships led by the gunboat Panay was escorting merchant ships through a war zone on the Yangtze River in China. On December 12, 1937, Japanese planes attacked the group, sinking the Panay and three oil supply vessels, and killing three people. Earlier that year, Japanese planes had attacked the British ambassador’s car.[2] The message in these attacks was clear to the West: get out and stay out of our business. This event was America’s entry into the World War II. It happened two years after the Neutrality Act in which Congress had forbidden the President to use the U.S. armed forces to protect people who had taken the risk of entering a war zone. FDR’s violation of this act set a precedent for future actions in the Orient.

On the morning of December 7, 1941, at 7:55 a.m., the Japanese navy attacked the U.S. forces in the Pacific. The base was attacked by 353 Japanese fighters, bombers and torpedo planes in two waves, launched from six aircraft carriers. The main attack occurred in Pearl Harbor but there were also secondary attacks which occurred in the Philippines, Wake Island, Midway Island, and elsewhere. Five battleships, three cruisers, and three destroyers were sunk and other ships damaged; 188 aircraft were destroyed on the ground; 2,403 American soldiers, sailors and civilians were killed, and 1,178 wounded.[3] The next day, President Roosevelt addressed Congress asking for a declaration of war and stated that the attack was “unprovoked”. But was the attack really unprovoked?

One of the U.S. government’s top experts on Japan was Lieutenant Commander Arthur H. McCollum. In early 1940, McCollum was placed in control of all intelligence information about Japan that was routed to President Roosevelt. McCollum believed that the U.S. should get involved in the war to help Britain defeat Germany.[4] But he faced a problem: a recent Gallop poll showed that 88% of the American people opposed U.S. involvement in the war.[5] McCollum began to devise a way to change the minds of the American people and believed the best way would be to lure the Japanese into attacking the U.S.

Although we don’t have a lot of information on how much McCollum talked with Roosevelt, we do know that in October of 1940 McCollum circulated a memo containing an eight-point plan[6]:

1. Make an arrangement with Britain for the use of British bases in the Pacific, particularly Singapore.

2. Make an arrangement with Holland for the use of base facilities and acquisition of supplies in the Dutch East Indies.

3. Give all possible aid to the Chinese government of Chiang Kai-shek.

4. Send a division of long-range heavy cruisers to the Orient, Philippines, or Singapore

5. Send two divisions of submarines to the Orient

6. Keep the main strength of the US fleet, now in the Pacific, in the vicinity of the Hawaiian Islands.

7. Insisted that the Dutch refuse to grant Japanese demands for undue economic concessions, particularly oil.

8. Completely embargo all trade with Japan, in collaboration with a similar embargo imposed by the British Empire.

McCollum’s 1940 memo ends with his hope that by these eight steps “Japan could be led to commit an overt act of war.”[7]

Although we cannot find very solid evidence that President Roosevelt was intentionally following McCollum’s eight-point plan we do know the steps that Roosevelt took to provoke the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor did fall in line with many of McCollum’s ideas. We also know that Secretary of War Stimson wrote in his diary that he favored the plan.[8]

By spring of 1940 events began unfolding and actions were being taken by President Roosevelt to begin provocations for a Japanese attack. In April of 1940, Roosevelt began moving the Pacific fleet from San Diego to Pearl Harbor. The fleet’s commander, Admiral Richardson, protested the move because he believed that moving the fleet to Pearl Harbor left them too exposed to an attack. He immediately began a nine-month campaign to persuade the President to move them back to the safety of San Diego.[9] In October of 1940 Richardson flew back to Washington D.C. and told FDR that he strongly disagrees with sacrificing navy ships to get into a war with Japan. By February of 1941, FDR will no longer tolerate Richardson’s protests. He fires Richardson and replaces him with Admiral Kimmel. [10]

Roosevelt began reducing the supply of oil and metals to Japan in July of 1940 and by September of that year he had cut off the supply of iron to Japan. [11]

On October 4^th 1940, Winston Churchill, the prime minister of Britain, gave permission to put U.S. warships in Singapore, which is near the oil fields of the Dutch East Indies. Under pressure from FDR, the Dutch reduce their supply of oil to Japan and give permission to base U.S. warships in the Dutch East Indies.[12] A succession of trade restrictions put in place on December 31^st 1940 begins halting U.S. shipments of aviation fuel, metals, machinery, and machine tools to Japan.[13]

On January 1, 1941, twenty-four U.S. submarines were sent to the Orient. This was step five in McCollum’s eight-point plan. Roosevelt begins sending cruisers and destroyers into Japanese home waters on March 15 1941. His orders are kept in secret from the public but the Japanese are fully aware that U.S. warships are in their territory.[14]

Congress passed FDR’s “Lend-Lease Act” on March 11 1941. This act gives funding to the governments of Britain and China to help fight the Germans and Japanese. Within three months, U.S. aid is sent to Stalin to help in the fight.

By May of 1941, the Japanese economy is becoming shaken by FDR’s embargoes and Admiral Kimmel starts to become nervous. He warns FDR that U.S. Pacific forces are under-gunned, vulnerable to Japanese attack, and spread too thin to protect troops at widely scattered bases.[15] On July 26, 1941 FDR freezes all Japanese assets and reduces Japanese oil supply by 90%, which further shakes the Japanese economy.[16]

On September 11, 1941, FDR told the nation that the destroyer Greer had been attacked by a German submarine, and henceforth U.S. warships now had the standing order to “shoot on sight” at any German vessel west of Iceland. He did not reveal to the public that the Greer had stalked the submarine for three hours in cooperation with a British patrol plane before the German turned and fired. In response, Germany accused President Roosevelt of “endeavoring with all means at his disposal to provoke incidents for the purpose of baiting the American people into war.”[17]

In October 9, 1941 the U.S. government intercepted a Japanese “bomb plot” message indicating Pearl Harbor as a target for attack by carrier-based planes.[18] FDR met with his war council on November 251941 and Secretary of War Stimson noted in his diary that he believes that U.S. forces will “likely be attacked perhaps as soon as Monday.” Roosevelt becomes concerned over the problem of “how we should maneuver them into the position of firing the first shot.[19] On December 6 1941 General Hap Arnold landed in Sacramento, California, to warn the air base that war with Japan is imminent. Roosevelt reads an intercepted message and tells his assistant Harry Hopkins, “This means war.”[20]

The next day, the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor. The U.S. has terrible losses. The main Japanese goal was to steal oil and other natural resources in the Dutch East Indies. To do this they had to chase the U.S. armed forces from the Pacific.

The events discussed above are events that are hardly talked about in history class, if mentioned at all. Each one of these events played a significant role in provoking a Japanese attack on U.S. armed forces and from what evidence we have, President Roosevelt and his advisors knew full well that this would happen and were indeed desiring an attack in order to change the public’s mind about getting involved in World War II.

Captain Russel Grenfell, of the British navy, wrote in his 1952 book Main Fleet To Singapore that,

No reasonably informed person can now believe that Japan made a villainous, unexpected attack on the United States. An attack was not only fully expected but was actually desired. It is beyond doubt that President Roosevelt wanted to get his country into the war, but for political reasons was most anxious to insure that the first act of hostility came from the other side; for which reason he caused increasing pressure to be put on the Japanese, to a point that no self-respecting nation could endure without resort to arms. Japan was meant by the American President to attack the United States. As Mr. Oliver Lyttelton, then British Minister of Production, said in 1944, “Japan was provoked into attacking America at Pearl Harbor. It is a travesty of history to say that America was forced into war.”[21]

This point could not be truer. It is a shame that President Roosevelt said in his speech that the attack was “unprovoked”. President knew full well that he had provoked the attack. Instead, he lied, and used this opportunity to get involved in the war. It was a great crime that should have been punished but FDR got away with it.

Thanks to the Freedom of Information Act of 1966 this information has come out in the open and historians can see the true story of why the Japanese attack us.

[1] Richard Maybury, World War II: the Rest of the Story and How It Affects You Today (Placerville: Bluestocking Press, 2003), 117.

[2] Ibid., 117.

[3] Ibid., 108.

[4] Robert Stinnett, Day of Deceit (New York: The Free Press, 2000), 261-267.

[5] Ibid., 17.

[6] Ibid., 8.

[7] Robert Stinnett., 8.

[8] Robert Stinnett., 9.

[9] Edwin Layton, And I Was There (New York: William Morrow, 1985), 52-55.

[10] Robert Stinnett., 10-11.

[11] Richard Maybury., 133.

[12] Robert Stinnett., 10.

[13] Robert A. Theobald, The Final Secret of Pearl Harbor (New York: Devin-Adair, 1954), 12.

[14] Richard Maybury.,134-136.

[15] Edwin Layton., 112.

[16] Richard Maybury., 138.

[17] Thomas Fleming, The New Dealers’ War (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 89.

[18] Edwin Layton., 158-163.

[19] Edwin Layton., 195.

[20] Robert Theobald., 28.

[21] Richard Maybury., 142.

Against the Federal Constitution

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 26 Oct 2012 07:00:00 +0000

Mr. HENRY. Mr. Chairman, I am much obliged to the {44} very worthy gentleman for his encomium. I wish I was possessed with talents, or possessed of any thing that might enable me to elucidate this great subject. I am not free from suspicion: I am apt to entertain doubts. I rose yesterday to ask a question which arose in my own mind. When I asked that question, I thought the meaning of my interrogation was obvious. The fate of this question and of America may depend on this. Have they said, We, the states? Have they made a proposal of a compact between states? If they had, this would be a confederation. It is otherwise most clearly a consolidated government. The question turns, sir, on that poor little thing — the expression, We, the people, instead of the states, of America. I need not take much pains to show that the principles of this system are extremely pernicious, impolitic, and dangerous. Is this a monarchy, like England — a compact between prince and people, with checks on the former to secure the liberty of the latter? Is this a confederacy, like Holland — an association of a number of independent states, each of which retains its individual sovereignty? It is not a democracy, wherein the people retain all their rights securely. Had these principles been adhered to, we should not have been brought to this alarming transition, from a confederacy to a consolidated government. We have no detail of these great considerations, which, in my opinion, ought to have abounded before we should recur to a government of this kind. Here is a revolution as radical as that which separated us from Great Britain. It is radical in this transition; our rights and privileges are endangered, and the sovereignty of the states will be relinquished: and cannot we plainly see that this is actually the case? The rights of conscience, trial by jury, liberty of the press, all your immunities and franchises, all pretensions to human rights and privileges, are rendered insecure, if not lost, by this change, so loudly talked of by some, and inconsiderately by others. Is this tame relinquishment of rights worthy of freemen? Is it worthy of that manly fortitude that ought to characterize republicans? It is said eight states have adopted this plan. I declare that if twelve states and a half had adopted it, I would, with manly firmness, and in spite of an erring world, reject it. You are not to inquire how your trade may be increased, nor how you are to become a great and powerful {45} people, but how your liberties can be secured; for liberty ought to be the direct end of your government.

Having premised these things, I shall, with the aid of my judgment and information, which, I confess, are not extensive, go into the discussion of this system more minutely. Is it necessary for your liberty that you should abandon those great rights by the adoption of this system? Is the relinquishment of the trial by jury and the liberty of the press necessary for your liberty? Will the abandonment of your most sacred rights tend to the security of your liberty? Liberty, the greatest of all earthly blessing — give us that precious jewel, and you may take every thing else! But I am fearful I have lived long enough to become an old-fashioned fellow. Perhaps an invincible attachment to the dearest rights of man may, in these refined, enlightened days, be deemed old-fashioned; if so, I am contented to be so. I say, the time has been when every pulse of my heart beat for American liberty, and which, I believe, had a counterpart in the breast of every true American; but suspicions have gone forth — suspicions of my integrity — publicly reported that my professions are not real. Twenty-three years ago was I supposed a traitor to my country? I was then said to be the bane of sedition, because I supported the rights of my country. I may be thought suspicious when I say our privileges and rights are in danger. But, sir, a number of the people of this country are weak enough to think these things are too true. I am happy to find that the gentleman on the other side declares they are groundless. But, sir, suspicion is a virtue as long as its object is the preservation of the public good, and as long as it stays within proper bounds: should it fall on me, I am contented: conscious rectitude is a powerful consolation. I trust there are many who think my professions for the public good to be real. Let your suspicion look to both sides. There are many on the other side, who possibly may have been persuaded to the necessity of these measures, which I conceive to be dangerous to your liberty. Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect every one who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but downright force. Whenever you give up that force, you are inevitably ruined. I am answered by gentlemen, that, though I might speak of terrors, yet the fact was, that we were surrounded by none of the {46} dangers I apprehended. I conceive this new government to be one of those dangers: it has produced those horrors which distress many of our best citizens. We are come hither to preserve the poor commonwealth of Virginia, if it can be possibly done: something must be done to preserve your liberty and mine. The Confederation, this same despised government, merits, in my opinion, the highest encomium: it carried us through a long and dangerous war; it rendered us victorious in that bloody conflict with a powerful nation; it has secured us a territory greater than any European monarch possesses: and shall a government which has been thus strong and vigorous, be accused of imbecility, and abandoned for want of energy? Consider what you are about to do before you part with the government. Take longer time in reckoning things; revolutions like this have happened in almost every country in Europe; similar examples are to be found in ancient Greece and ancient Rome — instances of the people losing their liberty by their own carelessness and the ambition of a few. We are cautioned by the honorable gentleman, who presides, against faction and turbulence. I acknowledge that licentiousness is dangerous, and that it ought to be provided against: I acknowledge, also, the new form of government may effectually prevent it: yet there is another thing it will as effectually do — it will oppress and ruin the people.

There are sufficient guards placed against sedition and licentiousness; for, when power is given to this government to suppress these, or for any other purpose, the language it assumes is clear, express, and unequivocal; but when this Constitution speaks of privileges, there is an ambiguity, sir, a fatal ambiguity — an ambiguity which is very astonishing. In the clause under consideration, there is the strangest language that I can conceive. I mean, when it says that there shall not be more representatives than one for every thirty thousand. Now, sir, how easy is it to evade this privilege! "The number shall not exceed one for every thirty thousand." This may be satisfied by one representative from each state. Let our numbers be ever so great, this immense continent may, by this artful expression, be reduced to have but thirteen representatives. I confess this construction is not natural; but the ambiguity of the expression lays a good ground for a quarrel. Why was it not clearly and unequivocally {47} expressed, that they should be entitled to have one for every thirty thousand? This would have obviated all disputes; and was this difficult to be done? What is the inference? When population increases, and a state shall send representatives in this proportion, Congress may remand them, because the right of having one for every thirty thousand is not clearly expressed. This possibility of reducing the number to one for each state approximates to probability by that other expression — "but each state shall at least have one representative." Now, is it not clear that, from the first expression, the number might be reduced so much that some states should have no representatives at all, were it not for the insertion of this last expression? And as this is the only restriction upon them, we may fairly conclude that they may restrain the number to one from each state. Perhaps the same horrors may hang over my mind again. I shall be told I am continually afraid: but, sir, I have strong cause of apprehension. In some parts of the plan before you, the great rights of freemen are endangered; in other parts, absolutely taken away. How does your trial by jury stand? In civil cases gone — not sufficiently secured in criminal — this best privilege is gone. But we are told that we need not fear; because those in power, being our representatives, will not abuse the powers we put in their hands. I am not well versed in history, but I will submit to your recollection, whether liberty has been destroyed most often by the licentiousness of the people, or by the tyranny of rulers. I imagine, sir, you will find the balance on the side of tyranny. Happy will you be if you miss the fate of those nations, who, omitting to resist their oppressors, or negligently suffering their liberty to be wrested from them, have groaned under intolerable despotism! Most of the human race are now in this deplorable condition; and those nations who have gone in search of grandeur, power, and splendor, have also fallen a sacrifice, and been the victims of their own folly. While they acquired those visionary blessings, they lost their freedom. My great objection to this government is, that it does not leave us the means of defending our rights, or of waging war against tyrants. It is urged by some gentlemen, that this new plan will bring us an acquisition of strength — an army, and the militia of the states. This is an idea extremely ridiculous: gentlemen cannot be earnest. This acquisition {48} will trample on our fallen liberty. Let my beloved Americans guard against that fatal lethargy that has pervaded the universe. Have we the means of resisting disciplined armies, when our only defence, the militia, is put into the hands of Congress? The honorable gentleman said that great danger would ensue if the Convention rose without adopting this system. I ask, Where is that danger? I see none. Other gentlemen have told us, within these walls, that the union is gone, or that the union will be gone. Is not this trifling with the judgment of their fellow-citizens? Till they tell us the grounds of their fears, I will consider them as imaginary. I rose to make inquiry where those dangers were; they could make no answer: I believe I never shall have that answer. Is there a disposition in the people of this country to revolt against the dominion of laws? Has there been a single tumult in Virginia? Have not the people of Virginia, when laboring under the severest pressure of accumulated distresses, manifested the most cordial acquiescence in the execution of the laws? What could be more awful than their unanimous acquiescence under general distresses? Is there any revolution in Virginia? Whither is the spirit of America gone? Whither is the genius of America fled? It was but yesterday, when our enemies marched in triumph through our country. Yet the people of this country could not be appalled by their pompous armaments: they stopped their carer, and victoriously captured them. Where is the peril, now, compared to that? Some minds are agitated by foreign alarms. Happily for us, there is no real danger from Europe; that country is engaged in more arduous business: from that quarter there is no cause of fear: you may sleep in safety forever for them.

Where is the danger? If, sir, there was any, I would recur to the American spirit to defend us; that spirit which has enabled us to surmount the greatest difficulties: to that illustrious spirit I address my most fervent prayer to prevent our adopting a system destructive to liberty. Let not gentlemen be told that it is not safe to reject this government. Wherefore is it not safe? We are told there are dangers, but those dangers are ideal; they cannot be demonstrated. To encourage us to adopt it, they tell us that there is a plain, easy way of getting amendments. When I come to contemplate this part, I suppose that I am mad, or that my {49} countrymen are so. The way to amendment is, in my conception, shut. Let us consider this plain, easy way. "The Congress, whenever two thirds of both houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose amendments to this Constitution, or, on the application of the legislatures of two thirds of the several states, shall call a Convention for proposing amendments, which, in either case, shall be valid to all intents and purposes, as part of this Constitution, when ratified by the legislatures of three fourths of the several states, or by the Conventions in three fourths thereof, as the one or the other mode of ratification may be proposed by the Congress. Provided, that no amendment which may be made prior to the year 1808, shall in any manner affect the 1st and 4th clauses in the 9th section of the 1st article; and that no state, without its consent, shall be deprived of its equal suffrage in the Senate."

Hence it appears that three fourths of the states must ultimately agree to any amendments that may be necessary. Let us consider the consequence of this. However uncharitable it may appear, yet I must tell my opinion — that the most unworthy characters may get into power, and prevent the introduction of amendments. Let us suppose — for the case is supposable, possible, and probable — that you happen to deal those powers to unworthy hands; will they relinquish powers already in their possession, or agree to amendments? Two thirds of the Congress, or of the state legislatures, are necessary even to propose amendments. If one third of these be unworthy men, they may prevent the application for amendments; but what is destructive and mischievous, is, that three fourths of the state legislatures, or of the state conventions, must concur in the amendments when proposed! In such numerous bodies, there must necessarily be some designing, bad men. To suppose that so large a number as three fourths of the states will concur, is to suppose that they will possess genius, intelligence, and integrity, approaching to miraculous. It would indeed be miraculous that they should concur in the same amendments, or even in such as would bear some likeness to one another; for four of the smallest states, that do not collectively contain one tenth part of the population of the United States, may obstruct the most salutary and necessary amendments. Nay, in these four states, six tenths of the people may reject {50} these amendments; and suppose that amendments shall be opposed to amendments, which is highly probable, — is it possible that three fourths can ever agree to the same amendments? A bare majority in these four small states may hinder the adoption of amendments; so that we may fairly and justly conclude that one twentieth part of the American people may prevent the removal of the most grievous inconveniences and oppression, by refusing to accede to amendments. A trifling minority may reject the most salutary amendments. Is this an easy mode of securing the public liberty It is, sir, a most fearful situation, when the most contemptible minority can prevent the alteration of the most oppressive government; for it may, in many respects, prove to be such. Is this the spirit of republicanism?

What, sir, is the genius of democracy? Let me read that clause of the bill of rights of Virginia which relates to this: 3d clause: — that government is, or ought to be, instituted for the common benefit, protection, and security of the people, nation, or community. Of all the various modes and forms of government, that is best, which is capable of producing the greatest degree of happiness and safety, and is most effectually secured against the danger of mal-administration; and that whenever any government shall be found inadequate, or contrary to those purposes, a majority of the community hath an indubitable, unalienable, and indefeasible right to reform, alter, or abolish it, in such manner as shall be judged most conducive to the public weal.

This, sir, is the language of democracy — that a majority of the community have a right to alter government when found to be oppressive. But how different is the genius of your new Constitution from this! How different from the sentiments of freemen, that a contemptible minority can prevent the good of the majority! If, then, gentlemen, standing on this ground, are come to that point, that they are willing to bind themselves and their posterity to be oppressed, I am amazed and inexpressibly astonished. If this be the opinion of the majority, I must submit; but to me, sir, it appears perilous and destructive. I cannot help thinking so. Perhaps it may be the result of my age. These may be feelings natural to a man of my years, when the American spirit has left him, and his mental powers, like the members of the body, are decayed. If, sir, amendments {51} are left to the twentieth, or tenth part of the people of America, your liberty is gone forever. We have heard that there is a great deal of bribery practised in the House of Commons, in England, and that many of the members raise themselves to preferments by selling the rights of the whole of the people. But, sir, the tenth part of that body cannot continue oppression on the rest of the people. English liberty is, in this case, on a firmer foundation than American liberty. It will be easily contrived to procure the opposition of one tenth of the people to any alteration, however judicious. The honorable gentleman who presides told us that, to prevent abuses in our government, we will assemble in Convention, recall our delegated powers, and punish our servants for abusing the trust reposed in them. O sir, we should have fine times, indeed, if, to punish tyrants, it were only sufficient to assemble the people! Your arms, wherewith you could defend yourselves, are gone; and you have no longer an aristocratical, no longer a democratical spirit. Did you ever read of any revolution in a nation, brought about by the punishment of those in power, inflicted by those who had no power at all? You read of a riot act in a country which is called one of the freest in the world, where a few neighbors cannot assemble without the risk of being shot by a hired soldiery, the engines of despotism. We may see such an act in America.

A standing army we shall have, also, to execute the execrable commands of tyranny; and how are you to punish them? Will you order them to be punished? Who shall obey these orders? Will your mace-bearer be a match for a disciplined regiment? In what situation are we to be? The clause before you gives a power of direct taxation, unbounded and unlimited, exclusive power of legislation, in all cases whatsoever, for ten miles square, and over all places purchased for the erection of forts, magazines, arsenals, dockyards, &c. What resistance could be made? The attempt would be madness. You will find all the strength of this country in the hands of your enemies; their garrisons will naturally be the strongest places in the country. Your militia is given up to Congress, also, in another part of this plan: they will therefore act as they think proper: all power will be in their own possession. You cannot force them to receive their punishment: of what service would militia be to you, {52} when, most probably, you will not have a single musket in the state? for, as arms are to be provided by Congress, they may or may not furnish them.

Let me here call your attention to that part which gives the Congress power "to provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining the militia, and for governing such part of them as may be employed in the service of the United States — reserving to the states, respectively, the appointment of the officers, and the authority of training the militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress." By this, sir, you see that their control over our last and best defence is unlimited. If they neglect or refuse to discipline or arm our militia, they will be useless: the states can do neither — this power being exclusively given to Congress. The power of appointing officers over men not disciplined or armed is ridiculous; so that this pretended little remains of power left to the states may, at the pleasure of Congress, be rendered nugatory. Our situation will be deplorable indeed: nor can we ever expect to get this government amended, since I have already shown that a very small minority may prevent it, and that small minority interested in the continuance of the oppression. Will the oppressor let go the oppressed? Was there ever an instance? Can the annals of mankind exhibit one single example where rulers overcharged with power willingly let go the oppressed, though solicited and requested most earnestly? The application for amendments will therefore be fruitless. Sometimes, the oppressed have got loose by one of those bloody struggles that desolate a country; but a willing relinquishment of power is one of those things which human nature never was, nor ever will be, capable of.

The honorable gentleman's observations, respecting the people's right of being the agents in the formation of this government, are not accurate, in my humble conception. The distinction between a national government and a confederacy is not sufficiently discerned. Had the delegates, who were sent to Philadelphia, a power to propose a consolidated government instead of a confederacy? Were they not deputed by states, and not by the people? The assent of the people, in their collective capacity, is not necessary to the formation of a federal government. The people have no right to enter into leagues, alliances, or confederations; {53} they are not the proper agents for this purpose. States and foreign powers are the only proper agents for this kind of government. Show me an instance where the people have exercised this business. Has it not always gone through the legislatures? I refer you to the treaties with France, Holland, and other nations. How were they made? Were they not made by the states? Are the people, therefore, in their aggregate capacity, the proper persons to form a confederacy? This, therefore, ought to depend on the consent of the legislatures, the people having never sent delegates to make any proposition for changing the government. Yet I must say, at the same time, that it was made on grounds the most pure; and perhaps I might have been brought to consent to it so far as to the change of government. But there is one thing in it which I never would acquiesce in. I mean, the changing it into a consolidated government, which is so abhorrent to my mind. [The honorable gentleman then went on to the figure we make with foreign nations; the contemptible one we make in France and Holland; which, according to the substance of the notes, he attributes to the present feeble government.] An opinion has gone forth, we find, that we are contemptible people: the time has been when we were thought otherwise. Under the same despised government, we commanded the respect of all Europe: wherefore are we now reckoned otherwise? The American spirit has fled from hence: it has gone to regions where it has never been expected; it has gone to the people of France, in search of a splendid government — a strong, energetic government. Shall we imitate the example of those nations who have gone from a simple to a splendid government? Are those nations more worthy of our imitation? What can make an adequate satisfaction to them for the loss they have suffered in attaining such a government — for the loss of their liberty? If we admit this consolidated government, it will be because we like a great, splendid one. Some way or other we must be a great and mighty empire; we must have an army, and a navy, and a number of things. When the American spirit was in its youth, the language of America was different: liberty, sir, was then the primary object. We are descended from a people whose government was founded on liberty: our glorious forefathers of Great Britain made liberty the foundation {54} of every thing. That country is become a great, mighty, and splendid nation; not because their government is strong and energetic, but, sir, because liberty is its direct end and foundation. We drew the spirit of liberty from our British ancestors: by that spirit we have triumphed over every difficulty. But now, sir, the American spirit, assisted by the ropes and chains of consolidation, is about to convert this country into a powerful and mighty empire. If you make the citizens of this country agree to become the subjects of one great consolidated empire of America, your government will not have sufficient energy to keep them together. Such a government is incompatible with the genius of republicanism. There will be no checks, no real balances, in this government. What can avail your specious, imaginary balances, your rope-dancing, chain-rattling, ridiculous ideal checks and contrivances? But, sir, we are not feared by foreigners; we do not make nations tremble. Would this constitute happiness, or secure liberty? I trust, sir, our political hemisphere will ever direct their operations to the security of those objects.

Consider our situation, sir: go to the poor man, and ask him what he does. He will inform you that he enjoys the fruits of his labor, under his own fig-tree, with his wife and children around him, in peace and security. Go to every other member of society, — you will find the same tranquil ease and content; you will find no alarms or disturbances. Why, then, tell us of danger, to terrify us into an adoption of this new form of government? And yet who knows the dangers that this new system may produce? They are out of the sight of the common people: they cannot foresee latent consequences. I dread the operation of it on the middling and lower classes of people: it is for them I fear the adoption of this system. I fear I tire the patience of the committee; but I beg to be indulged with a few more observations. When I thus profess myself an advocate for the liberty of the people, I shall be told I am a designing man, that I am to be a great man, that I am to be a demagogue; and many similar illiberal insinuations will be thrown out: but, sir, conscious rectitude outweighs those things with me. I see great jeopardy in this new government. I see none from our present one. I hope some gentleman or other will bring forth, in full array, those {55} dangers, if there be any, that we may see and touch them. I have said that I thought this a consolidated government: I will now prove it. Will the great rights of the people be secured by this government? Suppose it should prove oppressive, how can it be altered? Our bill of rights declares, "that a majority of the community hath an indubitable, unalienable, and indefeasible right to reform, alter, or abolish it, in such manner as shall be judged most conducive to the public weal."

I have just proved that one tenth, or less, of the people of America — a most despicable minority — may prevent this reform or alteration. Suppose the people of Virginia should wish to alter their government; can a majority of them do it? No; because they are connected with other men, or, in other words, consolidated with other states. When the people of Virginia, at a future day, shall wish to alter their government, though they should be unanimous in this desire, yet they may be prevented therefrom by a despicable minority at the extremity of the United States. The founders of your own Constitution made your government changeable: but the power of changing it is gone from you. Whither is it gone? It is placed in the same hands that hold the rights of twelve other states; and those who hold those rights have right and power to keep them. It is not the particular government of Virginia: one of the leading features of that government is, that a majority can alter it, when necessary for the public good. This government is not a Virginian, but an American government. Is it not, therefore, a consolidated government? The sixth clause of your bill of rights tells you, "that elections of members to serve as representatives of the people in Assembly ought to be free, and that all men having sufficient evidence of permanent common interest with, and attachment to, the community, have the right of suffrage, and cannot be taxed, or deprived of their property for public uses, without their own consent, or that of their representatives so elected, nor bound by any law to which they have not in like manner assented for the public good." But what does this Constitution say? The clause under consideration gives an unlimited and unbounded power of taxation. Suppose every delegate from Virginia opposes a law laying a tax; what will it avail? They are opposed by a majority; eleven members can destroy their efforts: {56} those feeble ten cannot prevent the passing the most oppressive tax law; so that, in direct opposition to the spirit and express language of your declaration of rights, you are taxed, not by your own consent, but by people who have no connection with you.

The next clause of the bill of rights tells you, "that all power of suspending law, or the execution of laws, by any authority, without the consent of the representatives of the people, is injurious to their rights, and ought not to be exercised." This tells us that there can be no suspension of government or laws without our own consent; yet this Constitution can counteract and suspend any of our laws that contravene its oppressive operation; for they have the power of direct taxation, which suspends our bill of rights; and it is expressly provided that they can make all laws necessary for carrying their powers into execution; and it is declared paramount to the laws and constitutions of the states. Consider how the only remaining defence we have left is destroyed in this manner. Besides the expenses of maintaining the Senate and other house in as much splendor as they please, there is to be a great and mighty President, with very extensive powers — the powers of a king. He is to be supported in extravagant magnificence; so that the whole of our property may be taken by this American government, by laying what taxes they please, giving themselves what salaries they please, and suspending our laws at their pleasure. I might be thought too inquisitive, but I believe I should take up very little of your time in enumerating the little power that is left to the government of Virginia; for this power is reduced to little or nothing: their garrisons, magazines, arsenals, and forts, which will be situated in the strongest places within the states; their ten miles square, with all the fine ornaments of human life, added to their powers, and taken from the states, will reduce the power of the latter to nothing.

The voice of tradition, I trust, will inform posterity of our struggles for freedom. If our descendants be worthy the name of Americans, they will preserve, and hand down to their latest posterity, the transactions of the present times; and, though I confess my exclamations are not worthy the hearing, they will see that I have done my utmost to preserve their liberty; for I never will give up the power of direct taxation but for a scourge. I am willing to give it conditionally; {57} that is, after non-compliance with requisitions. I will do more, sir, and what I hope will convince the most skeptical man that I am a lover of the American Union — that, in case Virginia shall not make punctual payment, the control of our custom-houses, and the whole regulation of trade, shall be given to Congress, and that Virginia shall depend on Congress even for passports, till Virginia shall have paid the last farthing, and furnished the last soldier. Nay, sir, there is another alternative to which I would consent; — even that they should strike us out of the Union, and take away from us all federal privileges, till we comply with federal requisitions: but let it depend upon our own pleasure to pay our money in the most easy manner for our people. Were all the states, more terrible than the mother country, to join against us, I hope Virginia could defend herself; but, sir, the dissolution of the Union is most abhorrent to my mind. The first thing I have at heart is American liberty: the second thing is American union; and I hope the people of Virginia will endeavor to preserve that union. The increasing population of the Southern States is far greater than that of New England; consequently, in a short time, they will be far more numerous than the people of that country. Consider this, and you will find this state more particularly interested to support American liberty, and not bind our posterity by an improvident relinquishment of our rights. I would give the best security for a punctual compliance with requisitions; but I beseech gentlemen, at all hazards, not to give up this unlimited power of taxation. The honorable gentleman has told us that these powers, given to Congress, are accompanied by a judiciary which will correct all. On examination, you will find this very judiciary oppressively constructed; your jury trial destroyed, and the judges dependent on Congress.

In this scheme of energetic government, the people will find two sets of tax-gatherers — the state and the federal sheriffs. This, it seems to me, will produce such dreadful oppression as the people cannot possibly bear. The federal sheriff may commit what oppression, make what distresses, he pleases, and ruin you with impunity; for how are you to tie his hands? Have you any sufficiently decided means of preventing him from sucking your blood by speculations, commissions, and fees? Thus thousands of your people will be most shamefully robbed: our state sheriffs, those unfeeling blood-suckers {58} have, under the watchful eye of our legislature, committed the most horrid and barbarous ravages on our people. It has required the most constant vigilance of the legislature to keep them from totally ruining the people; a repeated succession of laws has been made to suppress their iniquitous speculations and cruel extortions; and as often has their nefarious ingenuity devised methods of evading the force of those laws: in the struggle they have generally triumphed over the legislature.

It is a fact that lands have been sold for five shillings, which were worth one hundred pounds: if sheriffs, thus immediately under the eye of our state legislature and judiciary, have dared to commit these outrages, what would they not have done if their masters had been at Philadelphia or New York? If they perpetrate the most unwarrantable outrage on your person or property, you cannot get redress on this side of Philadelphia or New York; and how can you get it there? If your domestic avocations could permit you to go thither, there you must appeal to judges sworn to support this Constitution, in opposition to that of any state, and who may also be inclined to favor their own officers. When these harpies are aided by excisemen, who may search, at any time, your houses, and most secret recesses, will the people bear it? If you think so, you differ from me. Where I thought there was a possibility of such mischiefs, I would grant power with a niggardly hand; and here there is a strong probability that these oppressions shall actually happen. I may be told that it is safe to err on that side, because such regulations may be made by Congress as shall restrain these officers, and because laws are made by our representatives, and judged by righteous judges: but, sir, as these regulations may be made, so they may not; and many reasons there are to induce a belief that they will not. I shall therefore be an infidel on that point till the day of my death.

This Constitution is said to have beautiful features; but when I come to examine these features, sir, they appear to me horribly frightful. Among other deformities, it has an awful squinting; it squints towards monarchy; and does not this raise indignation in the breast of every true American?

Your President may easily become king. Your Senate is so imperfectly constructed that your dearest rights may be sacrificed by what may be a small minority; and a very small minority may continue forever unchangeably this government, {59} although horridly defective. Where are your checks in this government? Your strongholds will be in the hands of your enemies. It is on a supposition that your American governors shall be honest, that all the good qualities of this government are founded; but its defective and imperfect construction puts it in their power to perpetrate the worst of mischiefs, should they be bad men; and, sir, would not all the world, from the eastern to the western hemisphere, blame our distracted folly in resting our rights upon the contingency of our rulers being good or bad? Show me that age and country where the rights and liberties of the people were placed on the sole chance of their rulers being good men, without a consequent loss of liberty! I say that the loss of that dearest privilege has ever followed, with absolute certainty, every such mad attempt.

If your American chief be a man of ambition and abilities, how easy is it for him to render himself absolute! The army is in his hands, and if he be a man of address, it will be attached to him, and it will be the subject of long meditation with him to seize the first auspicious moment to accomplish his design; and, sir, will the American spirit solely relieve you when this happens? I would rather infinitely — and I am sure most of this Convention are of the same opinion — have a king, lords, and commons, than a government so replete with such insupportable evils. If we make a king, we may prescribe the rules by which he shall rule his people, and interpose such checks as shall prevent him from infringing them; but the President, in the field, at the head of his army, can prescribe the terms on which he shall reign master, so far that it will puzzle any American ever to get his neck from under the galling yoke. I cannot with patience think of this idea. If ever he violates the laws, one of two things will happen: he will come at the head of his army, to carry every thing before him; or he will give bail, or do what Mr. Chief Justice will order him. If he be guilty, will not the recollection of his crimes teach him to make one bold push for the American throne? Will not the immense difference between being master of every thing, and being ignominiously tried and punished, powerfully excite him to make this bold push? But, sir, where is the existing force to punish him? Can he not, at the head of his army, beat down every opposition? Away with your {60} President! we shall have a king: the army will salute him monarch: your militia will leave you, and assist in making him king, and fight against you: and what have you to oppose this force? What will then become of you and your rights? Will not absolute despotism ensue?

[Here Mr. HENRY strongly and pathetically expatiated on the probability of the President's enslaving America, and the horrid consequences that must result.]

What can be more defective than the clause concerning the elections? The control given to Congress over the time, place, and manner of holding elections, will totally destroy the end of suffrage. The elections may be held at one place, and the most inconvenient in the state; or they may be at remote distances from those who have a right of suffrage: hence nine out of ten must either not vote at all, or vote for strangers; for the most influential characters will be applied to, to know who are the most proper to be chosen. I repeat, that the control of Congress over the manner, &c., of electing, well warrants this idea. The natural consequence will be, that this democratic branch will possess none of the public confidence; the people will be prejudiced against representatives chosen in such an injudicious manner. The proceedings in the northern conclave will be hidden from the yeomanry of this country. We are told that the yeas and nays shall be taken, and entered on the journals. This, sir, will avail nothing: it may be locked up in their chests, and concealed forever from the people; for they are not to publish what parts they think require secrecy: they may think, and will think, the whole requires it. Another beautiful feature of this Constitution is, the publication from time to time of the receipts and expenditures of the public money.

This expression, from time to time, is very indefinite and indeterminate: it may extend to a century. Grant that any of them are wicked; they may squander the public money so as to ruin you, and yet this expression will give you no redress. I say they may ruin you; for where, sir, is the responsibility? The yeas and nays will show you nothing, unless they be fools as well as knaves; for, after having wickedly trampled on the rights of the people, they would act like fools indeed, were they to public and divulge {61} their iniquity, when they have it equally in their power to suppress and conceal it. Where is the responsibility — that leading principle in the British government? In that government, a punishment certain and inevitable is provided; but in this, there is no real, actual punishment for the grossest mal-administration. They may go without punishment, though they commit the most outrageous violation on our immunities. That paper may tell me they will be punished. I ask, By what law? They must make the law, for there is no existing law to do it. What! will they make a law to punish themselves?

This, sir, is my great objection to the Constitution, that there is no true responsibility — and that the preservation of our liberty depends on the single chance of men being virtuous enough to make laws to punish themselves.

In the country from which we are descended, they have real and not imaginary responsibility; for their mal-administration has cost their heads to some of the most saucy geniuses that ever were. The Senate, by making treaties, may destroy your liberty and laws for want of responsibility. Two thirds of those that shall happen to be present, can, with the President, make treaties that shall be the supreme law of the land; they may make the most ruinous treaties; and yet there is no punishment for them. Whoever shows me a punishment provided for them will oblige me. So, sir, notwithstanding there are eight pillars, they want another. Where will they make another? I trust, sir, the exclusion of the evils wherewith this system is replete in its present form, will be made a condition precedent to its adoption by this or any other state. The transition, from a general unqualified admission to offices, to a consolidation of government, seems easy; for, though the American states are dissimilar in their structure, this will assimilate them. This, sir, is itself a strong consolidating feature, and is not one of the least dangerous in that system. Nine states are sufficient to establish this government over those nine. Imagine that nine have come into it. Virginia has certain scruples. Suppose she will, consequently, refuse to join with those states; may not she still continue in friendship and union with them? If she sends her annual requisitions in dollars, do you think their stomachs will be so squeamish as to refuse her dollars? Will they not accept her regiments? {62} They would intimidate you into an inconsiderate adoption, and frighten you with ideal evils, and that the Union shall be dissolved. 'Tis a bugbear, sir: the fact is, sir, that the eight adopting states can hardly stand on their own legs. Public fame tells us that the adopting states have already heart-burnings and animosity, and repent their precipitate hurry: this, sir, may occasion exceeding great mischief. When I reflect on these and many other circumstances, I must think those states will be found to be in confederacy with us. If we pay our quota of money annually, and furnish our ratable number of men, when necessary, I can see no danger from a rejection.

The history of Switzerland clearly proves that we might be in amicable alliance with those states without adopting this Constitution. Switzerland is a confederacy, consisting of dissimilar governments. This is an example which proves that governments of dissimilar structures may be confederated. That confederate republic has stood upwards of four hundred years; and, although several of the individual republics are democratic, and the rest aristocratic, no evil has resulted from this dissimilarity; for they have braved all the power of France and Germany during that long period. The Swiss spirit, sir, has kept them together; they have encountered and overcome immense difficulties with patience and fortitude. In the vicinity of powerful and ambitious monarchs, they have retained their independence, republican simplicity, and valor. [Here he makes a comparison of the people of that country and those of France, and makes a quotation from Addison illustrating the subject.] Look at the peasants of that country and of France; and mark the difference. You will find the condition of the former far more desirable and comfortable. No matter whether the people be great, splendid, and powerful, if they enjoy freedom. The Turkish Grand Signior, alongside of our President, would put us to disgrace; but we should be as abundantly consoled for this disgrace, when our citizens have been put in contrast with the Turkish slave. The most valuable end of government is the liberty of the inhabitants. No possible advantages can compensate for the loss of this privilege. Show me the reason why the American Union is to be dissolved. Who are those eight adopting states? Are they averse to give us a little time to consider, before we {63} conclude? Would such a disposition render a junction with them eligible; or is it the genius of that kind of government to precipitate people hastily into measures of the utmost importance, and grant no indulgence? If it be, sir, is it for us to accede to such a government? We have a right to have time to consider; we shall therefore insist upon it. Unless the government be amended, we can never accept it. The adopting states will doubtless accept our money and our regiments; and what is to be the consequence, if we are disunited? I believe it is yet doubtful, whether it is not proper to stand by a while, and see the effect of its adoption in other states. In forming a government, the utmost care should be taken to prevent its becoming oppressive; and this government is of such an intricate and complicated nature, that no man on this earth can know its real operation. The other states have no reason to think, from the antecedent conduct of Virginia, that she has any intention of seceding from the Union, or of being less active to support the general welfare. Would they not, therefore, acquiesce in our taking time to deliberate — deliberate whether the measure be not perilous, not only for us, but the adopting states?

Permit me, sir, to say, that a great majority of the people, even in the adopting states, are averse to this government. I believe I would be right to say, that they have been egregiously misled. Pennsylvania has, perhaps, been tricked into it. If the other states who have adopted it have not been tricked, still they were too much hurried into its adoption. There were very respectable minorities in several of them; and if reports be true, a clear majority of the people are averse to it. If we also accede, and it should prove grievous, the peace and prosperity of our country, which we all love, will be destroyed. This government has not the affection of the people at present. Should it be oppressive, their affections will be totally estranged from it; and, sir, you know that a government, without their affections, can neither be durable nor happy. I speak as one poor individual; but when I speak, I speak the language of thousands. But, sir, I mean not to breathe the spirit, nor utter the language, of secession.

I have trespassed so long on your patience, I am really concerned that I have something yet to say. The honorable {64} member has said, we shall be properly represented. Remember, sir, that the number of our representatives is but ten, whereof six is a majority. Will those men be possessed of sufficient information? A particular knowledge of particular districts will not suffice. They must be well acquainted with agriculture, commerce, and a great variety of other matters throughout the continent; they must know not only the actual state of nations in Europe and America, the situations of their farmers, cottagers, and mechanics, but also the relative situations and intercourse of those nations. Virginia is as large as England. Our proportion of representatives is but ten men. In England they have five hundred and fifty-eight. The House of Commons, in England, numerous as they are, we are told, are bribed, and have bartered away the rights of their constituents: what, then, shall become of us? Will these few protect our rights? Will they be incorruptible? You say they will be better men than the English commoners. I say they will be infinitely worse men, because they are to be chosen blindfolded: their election (the term, as applied to their appointment, is inaccurate) will be an involuntary nomination, and not a choice.

I have, I fear, fatigued the committee; yet I have not said the one hundred thousandth part of what I have on my mind, and wish to impart. On this occasion, I conceived myself bound to attend strictly to the interest of the state, and I thought her dearest rights at stake. Having lived so long — been so much honored — my efforts, though small, are due to my country. I have found my mind hurried on, from subject to subject, on this very great occasion. We have been all out of order, from the gentleman who opened to-day to myself. I did not come prepared to speak, on so multifarious a subject, in so general a manner. I trust you will indulge me another time. Before you abandon the present system, I hope you will consider not only its defects, most maturely, but likewise those of that which you are to substitute for it. May you be fully apprized of the dangers of the latter, not by fatal experience, but by some abler advocate than I!

Why Schools Don't Educate

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 25 Oct 2012 17:30:00 +0000

by John Taylor Gatto

I accept this award on behalf of all the fine teachers I've known over the years who've struggled to make their transactions with children honorable ones, men and women who are never complacent, always questioning, always wrestling to define and redefine endlessly what the word "education" should mean. A Teacher of the Year is not the best teacher around, those people are too quiet to be easily uncovered, but he is a standard-bearer, symbolic of these private people who spend their lives gladly in the service of children. This is their award as well as mine.

We live in a time of great school crisis. Our children rank at the bottom of nineteen industrial nations in reading, writing and arithmetic. At the very bottom. The world's narcotic economy is based upon our own consumption of the commodity, if we didn't buy so many powdered dreams the business would collapse - and schools are an important sales outlet. Our teenage suicide rate is the highest in the world and suicidal kids are rich kids for the most part, not the poor. In Manhattan fifty per cent of all new marriages last less than five years. So something is wrong for sure.

Our school crisis is a reflection of this greater social crisis. We seem to have lost our identity. Children and old people are penned up and locked away from the business of the world to a degree without precedent - nobody talks to them anymore and without children and old people mixing in daily life a community has no future and no past, only a continuous present. In fact, the name "community" hardly applies to the way we interact with each other. We live in networks, not communities, and everyone I know is lonely because of that. In some strange way school is a major actor in this tragedy just as it is a major actor in the widening guilt among social classes. Using school as a sorting mechanism we appear to be on the way to creating a caste system, complete with untouchables who wander through subway trains begging and sleep on the streets.

I've noticed a fascinating phenomenon in my twenty-five years of teaching - that schools and schooling are increasingly irrelevant to the great enterprises of the planet. No one believes anymore that scientists are trained in science classes or politicians in civics classes or poets in English classes. The truth is that schools don't really teach anything except how to obey orders. This is a great mystery to me because thousands of humane, caring people work in schools as teachers and aides and administrators but the abstract logic of the institution overwhelms their individual contributions. Although teachers do care and do work very hard, the institution is psychopathic - it has no conscience. It rings a bell and the young man in the middle of writing a poem must close his notebook and move to different cell where he must memorize that man and monkeys derive from a common ancestor.

Our form of compulsory schooling is an invention of the state of Massachusetts around 1850. It was resisted - sometimes with guns - by an estimated eighty per cent of the Massachusetts population, the last outpost in Barnstable on Cape Cod not surrendering its children until the 1880's when the area was seized by militia and children marched to school under guard.

Now here is a curious idea to ponder. Senator Ted Kennedy's office released a paper not too long ago claiming that prior to compulsory education the state literacy rate was 98% and after it the figure never again reached above 91% where it stands in 1990. I hope that interests you.

Here is another curiosity to think about. The homeschooling movement has quietly grown to a size where one and a half million young people are being educated entirely by their own parents. Last month the education press reported the amazing news that children schooled at home seem to be five or even ten years ahead of their formally trained peers in their ability to think.

I don't think we'll get rid of schools anytime soon, certainly not in my lifetime, but if we're going to change what is rapidly becoming a disaster of ignorance, we need to realize that the school institution "schools" very well, but it does not "educate" - that's inherent in the design of the thing. It's not the fault of bad teachers or too little money spent, it's just impossible for education and schooling ever to be the same thing.
Schools were designed by Horace Mann and Barnard Sears and Harper of the University of Chicago and Thorndyke of Columbia Teachers College and some other men to be instruments of the scientific management of a mass population. Schools are intended to produce through the application of formulae, formulaic human beings whose behavior can be predicted and controlled.

To a very great extent, schools succeed in doing this. But our society is disintegrating, and in such a society, the only successful people are self-reliant, confident, and individualistic - because the community life which protects the dependent and the weak is dead. The products of schooling are, as I've said, irrelevant. Well-schooled people are irrelevant. They can sell film and razor blades, push paper and talk on the telephones, or sit mindlessly before a flickering computer terminal but as human beings they are useless. Useless to others and useless to themselves.

The daily misery around us is, I think, in large measure caused by the fact that - as Paul Goodman put it thirty years ago - we force children to grow up absurd. Any reform in schooling has to deal with its absurdities.
It is absurd and anti-life to be part of a system that compels you to sit in confinement with people of exactly the same age and social class. That system effectively cuts you off from the immense diversity of life and the synergy of variety, indeed it cuts you off from your own part and future, scaling you to a continuous present much the same way television does.

It is absurd and anti-life to be part of a system that compels you to listen to a stranger reading poetry when you want to learn to construct buildings, or to sit with a stranger discussing the construction of buildings when you want to read poetry.

It is absurd and anti-life to move from cell to cell at the sound of a gong for every day of your natural youth in an institution that allows you no privacy and even follows you into the sanctuary of your home demanding that you do its "homework".

"How will they learn to read?" you say and my answer is "Remember the lessons of Massachusetts." When children are given whole lives instead of age-graded ones in cellblocks they learn to read, write, and do arithmetic with ease if those things make sense in the kind of life that unfolds around them.

But keep in mind that in the United States almost nobody who reads, writes or does arithmetic gets much respect. We are a land of talkers, we pay talkers the most and admire talkers the most, and so our children talk constantly, following the public models of television and schoolteachers. It is very difficult to teach the "basics" anymore because they really aren't basic to the society we've made.

Two institutions at present control our children's lives - television and schooling, in that order. Both of these reduce the real world of wisdom, fortitude, temperance, and justice to a never-ending, non-stopping abstraction. In centuries past the time of a child and adolescent would be occupied in real work, real charity, real adventures, and the realistic search for mentors who might teach what you really wanted to learn. A great deal of time was spent in community pursuits, practicing affection, meeting and studying every level of the community, learning how to make a home, and dozens of other tasks necessary to become a whole man or woman.

But here is the calculus of time the children I teach must deal with:

Out of the 168 hours in each week, my children sleep 56. That leaves them 112 hours a week out of which to fashion a self.

My children watch 55 hours of television a week according to recent reports. That leaves them 57 hours a week in which to grow up.

My children attend school 30 hours a week, use about 6 hours getting ready, going and coming home, and spend an average of 7 hours a week in homework - a total of 45 hours. During that time, they are under constant surveillance, have no private time or private space, and are disciplined if they try to assert individuality in the use of time or space. That leaves 12 hours a week out of which to create a unique consciousness. Of course, my kids eat, and that takes some time - not much, because they've lost the tradition of family dining, but if we allot 3 hours a week to evening meals, we arrive at a net amount of private time for each child of 9 hours.

It's not enough. It's not enough, is it? The richer the kid, or course, the less television he watches but the rich kid's time is just as narrowly proscribed by a somewhat broader catalog of commercial entertainments and his inevitable assignment to a series of private lessons in areas seldom of his actual choice.

And these things are oddly enough just a more cosmetic way to create dependent human beings, unable to fill their own hours, unable to initiate lines of meaning to give substance and pleasure to their existence. It's a national disease, this dependency and aimlessness, and I think schooling and television and lessons - the entire Chautauqua idea - has a lot to do with it.

Think of the things that are killing us as a nation - narcotic drugs, brainless competition, recreational sex, the pornography of violence, gambling, alcohol, and the worst pornography of all - lives devoted to buying things, accumulation as a philosophy - all of them are addictions of dependent personalities, and that is what our brand of schooling must inevitably produce.

I want to tell you what the effect is on children of taking all their time from them - time they need to grow up - and forcing them to spend it on abstractions. You need to hear this, because no reform that doesn't attack these specific pathologies will be anything more than a facade.

The children I teach are indifferent to the adult world. This defies the experience of thousands of years. A close study of what big people were up to was always the most exciting occupation of youth, but nobody wants to grow up these days and who can blame them? Toys are us.
The children I teach have almost no curiosity and what they do have is transitory; they cannot concentrate for very long, even on things they choose to do. Can you see a connection between the bells ringing again and again to change classes and this phenomenon of evanescent attention?
The children I teach have a poor sense of the future, of how tomorrow is inextricably linked to today. As I said before, they have a continuous present, the exact moment they are at is the boundary of their consciousness.
The children I teach are ahistorical, they have no sense of how past has predestined their own present, limiting their choices, shaping their values and lives.
The children I teach are cruel to each other, they lack compassion for misfortune, they laugh at weakness, and they have contempt for people whose need for help shows too plainly.
The children I teach are uneasy with intimacy or candor. My guess is that they are like many adopted people I've known in this respect - they cannot deal with genuine intimacy because of a lifelong habit of preserving a secret inner self inside a larger outer personality made up of artificial bits and pieces of behavior borrowed from television or acquired to manipulate teachers. Because they are not who they represent themselves to be the disguise wears thin in the presence of intimacy so intimate relationships have to be avoided.
The children I teach are materialistic, following the lead of schoolteachers who materialistically "grade" everything - and television mentors who offer everything in the world for free.
The children I teach are dependent, passive, and timid in the presence of new challenges. This is frequently masked by surface bravado, or by anger or aggressiveness but underneath is a vacuum without fortitude.

I could name a few other conditions that school reform would have to tackle if our national decline is to be arrested, but by now you will have grasped my thesis, whether you agree with it or not. Either schools have caused these pathologies, or television, or both. It's a simple matter [of] arithmetic, between schooling and television all the time the children have is eaten away. That's what has destroyed the American family, it is no longer a factor in the education of its own children. Television and schooling, in those things the fault must lie.

What can be done? First we need a ferocious national debate that doesn't quit, day after day, year after year. We need to scream and argue about this school thing until it is fixed or broken beyond repair, one or the other. If we can fix it, fine; if we cannot, then the success of homeschooling shows a different road to take that has great promise. Pouring the money we now pour into family education might kill two birds with one stone, repairing families as it repairs children.

Genuine reform is possible but it shouldn't cost anything. We need to rethink the fundamental premises of schooling and decide what it is we want all children to learn and why. For 140 years this nation has tried to impose objectives downward from the lofty command center made up of "experts", a central elite of social engineers. It hasn't worked. It won't work. And it is a gross betrayal of the democratic promise that once made this nation a noble experiment. The Russian attempt to create Plato's republic in Eastern Europe has exploded before [our] eyes, our own attempt to impose the same sort of central orthodoxy using the schools as an instrument is also coming apart at the seams, albeit more slowly and painfully. It doesn't work because its fundamental premises are mechanical, anti-human, and hostile to family life. Lives can be controlled by machine education but they will always fight back with weapons of social pathology - drugs, violence, self-destruction, indifference, and the symptoms I see in the children I teach.

It's high time we looked backwards to regain an educational philosophy that works. One I like particularly well has been a favorite of the ruling classes of Europe for thousands of years. I use as much of it as I can manage in my own teaching, as much, that is, as I can get away with given the present institution of compulsory schooling. I think it works just as well for poor children as for rich ones.

At the core of this elite system of education is the belief that self-knowledge is the only basis of true knowledge. Everywhere in this system, at every age, you will find arrangements to place the child alone in an unguided setting with a problem to solve. Sometimes the problem is fraught with great risks, such as the problem of galloping a horse or making it jump, but that, of course, is a problem successfully solved by thousands of elite children before the age of ten. Can you imagine anyone who had mastered such a challenge ever lacking confidence in his ability to do anything? Sometimes the problem is the problem of mastering solitude, as Thoreau did at Walden Pond, or Einstein did in the Swiss customs house.

One of my former students, Roland Legiardi-Lura, though both his parents were dead and he had no inheritance, took a bicycle across the United States alone when he was hardly out of boyhood. Is it any wonder then that in manhood when he decided to make a film about Nicaragua, although he had no money and no prior experience with film-making, that it was an international award-winner - even though his regular work was as a carpenter.

Right now we are taking all the time from our children that they need to develop self-knowledge. That has to stop. We have to invent school experiences that give a lot of that time back, we need to trust children from a very early age with independent study, perhaps arranged in school but which takes place away from the institutional setting. We need to invent curriculum where each kid has a chance to develop private uniqueness and self-reliance.

A short time ago I took seventy dollars and sent a twelve-year-old girl from my class with her non-English speaking mother on a bus down the New Jersey coast to take the police chief of Sea Bright to lunch and apologize for polluting [his] beach with a discarded Gatorade bottle. In exchange for this public apology I had arranged with the police chief for the girl to have a one-day apprenticeship in a small town police procedures. A few days later, two more of my twelve-year-old kids traveled alone to West First Street from Harlem where they began an apprenticeship with a newspaper editor, next week three of my kids will find themselves in the middle of the Jersey swamps at 6 A.M., studying the mind of a trucking company president as he dispatches 18-wheelers to Dallas, Chicago, and Los Angeles.

Are these "special" children in a "special" program? Well, in one sense, yes, but nobody knows about this program but the kids and myself. They're just nice kids from Central Harlem, bright and alert, but so badly schooled when they came to me that most of them can't add or subtract with any fluency. And not a single one knew the population of New York City or how far it is from New York to California.

Does that worry me? Of course, but I am confident that as they gain self-knowledge they'll also become self-teachers - and only self-teaching has any lasting value.

We've got to give kids independent time right away because that is the key to self-knowledge, and we must re-involve them with the real world as fast as possible so that the independent time can be spent on something other than more abstraction. This is an emergency, it requires drastic action to correct - our children are dying like flies in schooling, good schooling or bad schooling, it's all the same. Irrelevant.

What else does a restructured school system need? It needs to stop being a parasite on the working community. Of all the pages in the human ledger, only our tortured entry has warehoused children and asked nothing of them in service to the general good. For a while I think we need to make community service a required part of schooling. Besides the experience in acting unselfishly that will teach, it is the quickest way to give young children real responsibility in the mainstream of life.

For five years I ran a guerilla program where I had every kid, rich and poor, smart and dipsy, give 320 hours a year of hard community service. Dozens of those kids came back to me years later, grown up, and told me that one experience of helping someone else changed their lives. It taught them to see in new ways, to rethink goals and values. It happened when they were thirteen, in my Lab School program - only made possible because my rich school district was in chaos. When "stability" returned the Lab was closed. It was too successful with a wildly mixed group of kids, at too small of a cost, to be allowed to continue. We made the expensive elite programs look bad.

There is no shortage of real problems in the city. Kids can be asked to help solve them in exchange for the respect and attention of the total adult world. Good for kids, good for all the rest of us. That's curriculum that teaches Justice, one of the four cardinal virtues in every system of elite education. What's sauce for the rich and powerful is surely sauce for the rest of us - what is more, the idea is absolutely free as are all other genuine reform ideas in education. Extra money and extra people put into this sick institution will only make it sicker.

Independent study, community service, adventures in experience, large doses of privacy and solitude, a thousand different apprenticeships, the one day variety or longer - these are all powerful, cheap and effective ways to start a real reform of schooling. But no large-scale reform is ever going to work to repair our damaged children and our damaged society until we force the idea of "school" open - to include family as the main engine of education. The Swedes realized that in 1976 when they effectively abandoned the system of adopting unwanted children and instead spent national time and treasure on reinforcing the original family so that children born to Swedes were wanted. They didn't succeed completely but they did succeed in reducing the number of unwanted Swedish children from 6000 in l976 to 15 in 1986. So it can be done. The Swedes just got tired of paying for the social wreckage caused by children not raised by their natural parents so they did something about it. We can, too.

Family is the main engine of education. If we use schooling to break children away from parents - and make no mistake, that has been the central function of schools since John Cotton announced it as the purpose of the Bay Colony schools in 1650 and Horace Mann announced it as the purpose of Massachusetts schools in 1850 - we're going to continue to have the horror show we have right now. The curriculum of family is at the heart of any good life, we've gotten away from that curriculum, time to return to it. The way to sanity in education is for our schools to take the lead in releasing the stranglehold of institutions on family life, to promote during school time confluences of parent and child that will strengthen family bonds. That was my real purpose in sending the girl and her mother down the Jersey coast to meet the police chief. I have many ideas to make a family curriculum and my guess is that a lot of you will have many ideas, too, once you begin to think about it. Our greatest problem in getting the kind of grass-roots thinking going that could reform schooling is that we have large vested interests pre-emptying all the air time and profiting from schooling just exactly as it is despite rhetoric to the contrary. We have to demand that new voices and new ideas get a hearing, my ideas and yours. We've all had a bellyful of authorized voices mediated by television and the press - a decade long free-for-all debate is what is called for now, not any more "expert" opinions. Experts in education have never been right, their "solutions" are expensive, self-serving, and always involve further centralization. Enough. Time for a return to democracy, individuality, and family. I've said my piece. Thank you.

The Internet Revolution is a Liberty Revolution

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 24 Oct 2012 17:53:00 +0000

by Ron Paul

Until the late 1990s, individuals interested in Austrian economics, U.S. constitutional history, and libertarian philosophy had few sources of information. They had to spend hours scouring used book stores or the back pages of obscure libertarian periodicals to find the great works of Mises, Rothbard, Hayek, and other giants of liberty. Local library and university collections ignored libertarian politics and economics.

Today, however, the greatest classics of libertarian thought, libertarian philosophy, and libertarian economics are available instantly to anyone with internet access. Thanks to the internet, it is easier than ever before for liberty activists to spread news and other information regarding the evils of government power and the benefits of freedom. For the first time in human history, supporters of liberty around the world can share information across borders quickly and cheaply. Without the filter of government censors, this information emboldens millions to question governments and promote liberty.

This is why liberty-minded Americans must do everything possible to oppose-- and stop-- government attempts to censor or limit the free flow of information online.

One such attempt is known as “CISPA”, or the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act. This bill will create a monstrous coalition of big business and big government to rob Americans of their protections under the 4^th Amendment of the Constitution.

CISPA permits both the federal government and private companies to view your private online communications with no judicial oversight, provided they merely do so in the name of “cybersecurity.” But America is a constitutional republic, not a surveillance state-- and the wildly overhyped need for security does not trump the Constitution.

“Cybersecurity” is the responsibility of companies that operate and make money in cyberspace, not taxpayers. Those companies should develop market-based private solutions to secure their networks, servers, cloud data centers, and user/customer information. The role of the US intelligence community is to protect the United States from military threats, not to provide corporate welfare to the private sector. Much like the TSA at the airport, CISPA would socialize security costs and remove market incentives for private firms to protect their own investments.

Imagine security-cleared agents embedded at private companies to serve as conduits for intelligence information about their customers back to the US intelligence community-- while enjoying immunity from any existing civil or criminal laws. Imagine Google or Facebook reporting directly to the National Security Agency about the online activity of US citizens. Imagine US government resources being wasted on a grand scale to “assist” private companies in the global market. All of this would become reality under CISPA.

As of this writing, it appears that the House and Senate will not agree on a final version of CISPA this year. However, the Obama administration seems ready to impose provisions of this bill by executive order if Congress does not act soon.

The past five years have seen an explosion in the liberty movement, fueled in large part by the internet. Preserving that freedom is crucial if the liberty movement is to continue its progress. Therefore, all activists in the liberty movement have a stake in the battle for internet freedom. We must be ready to come together to fight any attempt to increase government’s power over the internet, regardless of the supposed justifications. We must resist voices from both the political right and left which alternatively seek to legislate morality or enforce political correctness with force. Copyright protection, pornography, cyberterrorism, gambling, and “hate speech” are merely excuses for doing what all governments have done throughout human history: increase their size, scope, and power.

Once we understand this, we understand the critical link between internet freedom and human freedom.

Saudi Arms Deal is About Iran

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 18:20:00 +0000

by Ron Paul

This month the US Administration notified Congress that it intends to complete one of the largest arms sales in US history to one of the most repressive regimes on earth. Saudi Arabia has been given the green light by the administration to spend $60 billion on some 84 new F-15 aircraft, dozens of the latest helicopters, and other missiles, bombs, and high-tech military products from the US weapons industry.

Saudi Arabia, from where 15 of the 19 September 11 hijackers came, is a family-run dictatorship, where there are no political parties, no independent press, and where any form of political dissent is met with the most severe punishment. We are told that we must occupy Afghanistan to encourage more rights for women, an issue on which the Saudi regime makes the Taliban look rather liberal by comparison. We are told that our increasingly aggressive policies toward Iran are justified by that country’s rigid Islamic laws and human-rights violations, while the even more repressive Islamic rule in Saudi Arabia is never mentioned.

So why would the US government, which spends hundreds of billions of dollars yearly and maintains hundreds of bases overseas to push global democracy, approve a deal like this with such a regime? As Stockholm Institute scholar Pieter Wezeman told the Washington Post, "Of course it's against Iran. Of course it's against Yemen. You can read between the lines ... but there are not any official statements about it." Although the deal must be approved by Congress, there is little chance of any significant Congressional opposition for the above reason.

Imagine if China had armed an aggressive, anti-American Mexico to the teeth. How would we feel? Threatened? That is likely how Iran feels with this massive arms sale to Saudi Arabia. To underscore this message, the US quietly announced early this month that it was selling 20 F-35 Stealth fighters to Israel. As Israeli military purchases are paid for with US foreign aid, we must realize that the weapons pointed at Iran in the Middle East are American made and largely paid for with American tax dollars. Certainly Iran understands this. Will such a provocative move, arming two anti-Iranian powers in the region to the teeth, lead to a trigger event to bring about a full invasion of Iran? The economic tsunami that would result from such a horrific turn of events would only be eclipsed by the death and destruction in the region -- and likely beyond.

Some will argue that these arms deals are international trade which we should encourage and applaud. Sadly, the United States does not build much that we can export these days. But the fact is that the US weapons industry is underwritten by the American taxpayer. From research and development to acquisition by the US military, the costs of the US arms industry are borne by American citizens. But, as so-called “private” companies, the enormous profits they make selling weapons to countries like Saudi Arabia are of course privatized. So the costs are socialized and the profits are privatized. There is a word for this arrangement and it is not “capitalism.”

Election Time Again - Vote Choice!

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 21:05:00 +0000

Well election time is here again and I am now writing to make my suggestions on who and what to vote for. I highly reccommend you do your own research and vote for the person who would best REPRESENT you... not some one who is best likely to win. Vote choice not chance. These candidates/propositions are all for California.

For Governor: Chelene Nightingale http://www.nightingaleforgovernor.com/

For Lieutenant Governor: Jim King http://vote4king.blogspot.com/

For Secretary of State: Merton D. Short

For Controller: Lawrence G. Beliz

For Treasurer: Robert Lauten http://www.robertlauten.com/

For Attorney General: Diane Beall Templin http://www.templin4attorneygeneral.blogspot.com/

For Insurance Commissioner: Clay Pedersen

United States Senator: Carly Fiorina (my real choice candidate dropped out due to illness)www.carlyforca.com/

United States Representative District 4: Tom McClintock http://www.tommcclintock.com/

State Senator District 4: Doug La Malfa

State Assembly District 4: Ted Gaines

Proposition 19: No

Proposition 20: Yes

Proposition 21: No

Proposition 22: Yes

Proposition 23: Yes

Proposition 24: No

Proposition 25: No

Proposition 26: Yes

Proposition 27: No

The Trouble With Unconstitutional Wars

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 17:35:00 +0000

By Ron Paul

Our foreign policy was in the spotlight last week, which is exactly where it should be. Almost two years ago many voters elected someone they thought would lead us to a more peaceful, rational co-existence with other countries. However, while attention has been focused on the administration’s disastrous economic policies, its equally disastrous foreign policies have exacerbated our problems overseas. Especially in times of economic crisis, we cannot afford to ignore costly foreign policy mistakes. That’s why it is important that U.S. foreign policy receive some much needed attention in the media, as it did last week with the leaked documents scandal.

Many are saying that the Wikileaks documents tell us nothing new. In some ways this is true. Most Americans knew that we have been fighting losing battles. These documents show just how bad it really is. The revelation that Pakistani intelligence is assisting the people we are bombing in Afghanistan shows the quality of friends we are making with our foreign policy. This kind of thing supports points that Rep. Dennis Kucinich and I tried to make on the House floor last week with a privileged resolution that would have directed the administration to remove troops from Pakistan pursuant to the War Powers Resolution.

We are not at war with Pakistan. Congress has made no declaration of war. (Actually, we made no declaration of war on Iraq or Afghanistan either, but that is another matter.) Yet we have troops in Pakistan engaging in hostile activities, conducting drone attacks and killing people. We sometimes manage to kill someone who has been identified as an enemy, yet we also kill about 10 civilians for every 1 of those. Pakistani civilians are angered by this, yet their leadership is mollified by our billions in bribe money. We just passed an appropriations bill that will send another $7.5 billion to Pakistan. One wonders how much of this money will end up helping the Taliban. This whole operation is clearly counterproductive, inappropriate, immoral and every American who values the rule of law should be outraged. Yet these activities are being done so quietly that most Americans, as well as most members of the House, don’t even know about them.

We should follow constitutional protocol when going to war. It is there for a reason. If we are legitimately attacked, it is the job of Congress to declare war. We then fight the war, win it and come home. War should be efficient, decisive and rare. However, when Congress shirks its duty and just gives the administration whatever it wants with no real oversight or meaningful debate, wars are never-ending, wasteful, and political. Our so-called wars have become a perpetual drain on our economy and liberty.

The founders knew that heads of state are far too eager to engage in military conflicts. That is why they entrusted the power to go to war with the deliberative body closest to the people – the Congress. Decisions to go to war need to be supported by the people. War should not be covert or casual. We absolutely should not be paying off leaders of a country while killing their civilians without expecting to create a lot of new problems. This is not what America is supposed to be about.

Why Not Another World War?

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 24 Jul 2010 15:50:00 +0000

by Peter Schiff

There is overwhelming agreement among economists that the Second World War was responsible for decisively ending the Great Depression. When asked why the wars in Iran and Afghanistan are failing to make the same impact today, they often claim that the current conflicts are simply too small to be economically significant.

There is, of course, much irony here. No one argues that World War II, with its genocide, tens of millions of combatant casualties, and wholesale destruction of cities and regions, was good for humanity. But the improved American economy of the late 1940s seems to illustrate the benefits of large-scale government stimulus. This conundrum may be causing some to wonder how we could capture the good without the bad.

If one believes that government spending can create economic growth, then the answer should be simple: let's have a huge pretend war that rivals the Second World War in size. However, this time, let's not kill anyone.

Most economists believe that massive federal government spending on tanks, uniforms, bullets, and battleships used in World War II, as well the jobs created to actually wage the War, finally put to an end the paralyzing "deflationary trap" that had existed since the Crash of 1929. Many further argue that war spending succeeded where the much smaller New Deal programs of the 1930s had fallen short.

The numbers were indeed staggering. From 1940 to 1944, federal spending shot up more than six times from just $9.5 billion to $72 billion. This increase led to a corresponding $75 billion expansion of US nominal GDP, from $101 billion in 1940 to $175 billion by 1944. In other words, the war effort caused US GDP to increase close to 75% in just four years!

The War also wiped out the country's chronic unemployment problems. In 1940, eleven years after the Crash, unemployment was still at a stubbornly high 8.1%. By 1944, the figure had dropped to less than 1%. The fresh influx of government spending and deployment of working-age men overseas drew women into the workforce in unprecedented numbers, thereby greatly expanding economic output. In addition, government spending on wartime technology produced a great many breakthroughs that impacted consumer goods production for decades.

So, why not have the United States declare a fake war on Russia (a grudge match that is, after all, long overdue)? Both countries could immediately order full employment and revitalize their respective manufacturing sectors. Instead of live munitions, we could build all varieties of paint guns, water balloons, and stink bombs.

Once new armies have been drafted and properly outfitted with harmless weaponry, our two countries could stage exciting war games. Perhaps the US could mount an amphibious invasion of Kamchatka (just like in Risk!). As far as the destruction goes, let's just bring in Pixar and James Cameron. With limitless funds from Washington, these Hollywood magicians could surely produce simulated mayhem more spectacular than Pearl Harbor or D-Day. The spectacle could be televised — with advertising revenue going straight to the government.

The competition could be extended so that the winner of the pseudo-conflict could challenge another country to an all-out fake war. I'm sure France or Italy wouldn't mind putting a few notches in the 'win' column. The stimulus could be never-ending.

If the US can't find any willing international partners, we could always re-create the Civil War. Missed the Monitor vs. the Merrimack the first time? No worries, we'll do it again!

But to repeat the impact of World War II today would require a truly massive effort. Replicating the six-fold increase in the federal budget that was seen in the early 1940s would result in a nearly $20 trillion budget today. That equates to $67,000 for every man, woman, and child in the country. Surely, the tremendous GDP growth created by such spending would make short work of the so-called Great Recession.

The big question is how to pay for it. To a degree that will surprise many, the US funded its World War II effort largely by raising taxes and tapping into Americans' personal savings. Both of those avenues are nowhere near as promising today as they were in 1941.

Current tax burdens are now much higher than they were before the War, so raising taxes today would be much more difficult. The "Victory Tax" of 1942 sharply raised income tax rates and allowed, for the first time in our nation's history, taxes to be withheld directly from paychecks. The hikes were originally intended to be temporary but have, of course, far outlasted their purpose. It would be unlikely that Americans would accept higher taxes today to fund a real war, let alone a pretend one.

That leaves savings, which was the War's primary source of funding. During the War, Americans purchased approximately $186 billion worth of war bonds, accounting for nearly three quarters of total federal spending from 1941—1945. Today, we don't have the savings to pay for our current spending, let alone any significant expansions. Even if we could convince the Chinese to loan us a large chunk of the $20 trillion (on top of the $1 trillion we already owe them), how could we ever pay them back?

If all of this seems absurd, that's because it is. War is a great way to destroy things, but it's a terrible way to grow an economy.

What is often overlooked is that war creates hardship, and not just for those who endure the violence. Yes, US production increased during the Second World War, but very little of that was of use to anyone but soldiers. Consumers can't use a bomber to take a family vacation.

The goal of an economy is to raise living standards. During the War, as productive output was diverted to the front, consumer goods were rationed back home and living standards fell. While it's easy to see the numerical results of wartime spending, it is much harder to see the civilian cutbacks that enabled it.

The truth is that we cannot spend our way out of our current crisis, no matter how great a spectacle we create. Even if we spent on infrastructure rather than war, we would still have no means to fund it, and there would still be no guarantee that the economy would grow as a result.

What we need is more savings, more free enterprise, more production, and a return of American competitiveness in the global economy. Yes, we need Rosie the Riveter — but this time she has to work in the private sector making things that don't explode. To do this, we need less government spending, not more.

The Public School Nightmare

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 17:41:00 +0000

by John Taylor Gatto

I want you to consider the frightening possibility that we are spending far too much money on schooling, not too little. I want you to consider that we have too many people employed in interfering with the way children grow up – and that all this money and all these people, all the time we take out of children's lives and away from their homes and families and neighborhoods and private explorations – gets in the way of education.

That seems radical, I know. Surely in modern technological society it is the quantity of schooling and the amount of money you spend on it that buys value. And yet last year in St. Louis, I heard a vice-president of IBM tell an audience of people assembled to redesign the process of teacher certification that in his opinion this country became computer-literate by self-teaching, not through any action of schools. He said 45 million people were comfortable with computers who had learned through dozens of non-systematic strategies, none of them very formal; if schools had pre-empted the right to teach computer use we would be in a horrible mess right now instead of leading the world in this literacy. Now think about Sweden, a beautiful, healthy, prosperous and up-to-date country with a spectacular reputation for quality in everything it produces. It makes sense to think their schools must have something to do with that.

Then what do you make of the fact that you can't go to school in Sweden until you are 7 years old? The reason the unsentimental Swedes have wiped out what would be first and seconds grades here is that they don't want to pay the large social bill that quickly comes due when boys and girls are ripped away from their best teachers at home too early.

It just isn't worth the price, say the Swedes, to provide jobs for teachers and therapists if the result is sick, incomplete kids who can't be put back together again very easily. The entire Swedish school sequence isn't 12 years, either – it's nine. Less schooling, not more. The direct savings of such a step in the US would be $75–100 billion, a lot of unforeclosed home mortgages, a lot of time freed up with which to seek an education.

Who was it that decided to force your attention onto Japan instead of Sweden? Japan with its long school year and state compulsion, instead of Sweden with its short school year, short school sequence, and free choice where your kid is schooled? Who decided you should know about Japan and not Hong Kong, an Asian neighbor with a short school year that outperforms Japan across the board in math and science? Whose interests are served by hiding that from you?

One of the principal reasons we got into the mess we're in is that we allowed schooling to become a very profitable monopoly, guaranteed its customers by the police power of the state. Systematic schooling attracts increased investment only when it does poorly, and since there are no penalties at all for such performance, the temptation not to do well is overwhelming. That's because school staffs, both line and management, are involved in a guild system; in that ancient form of association no single member is allowed to outperform any other member, is allowed to advertise or is allowed to introduce new technology or improvise without the advance consent of the guild. Violation of these precepts is severely sanctioned – as Marva Collins, Jaime Escalante and a large number of once-brilliant teachers found out.

The guild reality cannot be broken without returning primary decision-making to parents, letting them buy what they want to buy in schooling, and encouraging the entrepreneurial reality that existed until 1852. That is why I urge any business to think twice before entering a cooperative relationship with the schools we currently have. Cooperating with these places will only make them worse.

The structure of American schooling, 20th-century style, began in 1806 when Napoleon's amateur soldiers beat the professional soldiers of Prussia at the battle of Jena. When your business is selling soldiers, losing a battle like that is serious. Almost immediately afterwards a German philosopher named Fichte delivered his famous "Address to the German Nation" which became one of the most influential documents in modern history. In effect he told the Prussian people that the party was over, that the nation would have to shape up through a new Utopian institution of forced schooling in which everyone would learn to take orders.

So the world got compulsion schooling at the end of a state bayonet for the first time in human history; modern forced schooling started in Prussia in 1819 with a clear vision of what centralized schools could deliver:

Obedient soldiers to the army; Obedient workers to the mines; Well subordinated civil servants to government; Well subordinated clerks to industry; Citizens who thought alike about major issues.

Schools should create an artificial national consensus on matters that had been worked out in advance by leading German families and the head of institutions. Schools should create unity among all the German states, eventually unifying them into Greater Prussia.

Prussian industry boomed from the beginning. She was successful in warfare and her reputation in international affairs was very high. Twenty-six years after this form of schooling began, the King of Prussia was invited to North America to determine the boundary between the United States and Canada. Thirty-three years after that fateful invention of the central school institution, at the behest of Horace Mann and many other leading citizens, we borrowed the style of Prussian schooling as our own.

You need to know this because over the first 50 years of our school institution Prussian purpose – which was to create a form of state socialism – gradually forced out traditional American purpose, which in most minds was to prepare the individual to be self-reliant.

In Prussia the purpose of the Volksschule, which educated 92 percent of the children, was not intellectual development at all, but socialization in obedience and subordination. Thinking was left to the Real Schulen, in which 8 percent of the kids participated. But for the great mass, intellectual development was regarded with managerial horror, as something that caused armies to lose battles.

Prussia concocted a method based on complex fragmentations to ensure that its school products would fit the grand social design. Some of this method involved dividing whole ideas into school subjects, each further divisible, some of it involved short periods punctuated by a horn so that self-motivation in study would be muted by ceaseless interruptions.

There were many more techniques of training, but all were built around the premise that isolation from first-hand information, and fragmentation of the abstract information presented by teachers, would result in obedient and subordinate graduates, properly respectful of arbitrary orders. "Lesser" men would be unable to interfere with policy makers because, while they could still complain, they could not manage sustained or comprehensive thought. Well-schooled children cannot think critically, cannot argue effectively.

One of the most interesting by-products of Prussian schooling turned out to be the two most devastating wars of modern history. Erich Maria Ramarque, in his classic "All Quiet on the Western Front" tells us that the First World War was caused by the tricks of schoolmasters, and the famous Protestant theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer said that the Second World War was the inevitable product of good schooling.

It's important to underline that Bonhoeffer meant that literally, not metaphorically – schooling after the Prussian fashion removes the ability of the mind to think for itself. It teaches people to wait for a teacher to tell them what to do and if what they have done is good or bad. Prussian teaching paralyses the moral will as well as the intellect. It's true that sometimes well-schooled students sound smart, because they memorize many opinions of great thinkers, but they actually are badly damaged because their own ability to think is left rudimentary and undeveloped. We got from the United States to Prussia and back because a small number of very passionate ideological leaders visited Prussia in the first half of the 19th century, and fell in love with the order, obedience and efficiency of its system and relentlessly proselytized for a translation of Prussian vision onto these shores.

If Prussia's ultimate goal was the unification of Germany, our major goal, so these men thought, was the unification of hordes of immigrant Catholics into a national consensus based on a northern European cultural model. To do that children would have to be removed from their parents and from inappropriate cultural influence. In this fashion, compulsion schooling, a bad idea that had been around at least since Plato's "Republic," a bad idea that New England had tried to enforce in 1650 without any success, was finally rammed through the Massachusetts legislature in 1852. It was, of course, the famous "Know-Nothing" legislature that passed this law, a legislature that was the leading edge of a famous secret society which flourished at that time known as "The Order of the Star Spangled Banner," whose password was the simple sentence, "I know nothing" – hence the popular label attached to the secret society's political arm, "The American Party." Over the next 50 years state after state followed suit, ending schools of choice and ceding the field to a new government monopoly.

There was one powerful exception to this – the children who could afford to be privately educated. It's important to note that the underlying premise of Prussian schooling is that the government is the true parent of children – the State is sovereign over the family. At the most extreme pole of this notion is the idea that biological parents are really the enemies of their own children, not to be trusted. How did a Prussian system of dumbing children down take hold in American schools?

Thousands and thousands of young men from prominent American families journeyed to Prussia and other parts of Germany during the 19th century and brought home the Ph.D. degree to a nation in which such a credential was unknown. These men pre-empted the top positions in the academic world, in corporate research, and in government, to the point where opportunity was almost closed to those who had not studied in Germany, or who were not the direct disciples of a German Ph.D., as John Dewey was the disciple of G. Stanley Hall at Johns Hopkins. Virtually every single one of the founders of American schooling had made the pilgrimage to Germany, and many of these men wrote widely circulated reports praising the Teutonic methods. Horace Mann's famous "7th Report" of 1844, still available in large libraries, was perhaps the most important of these.

By 1889, a little more than 100 years ago, the crop was ready for harvest. It that year the US Commissioner of Education, William Torrey Harris, assured a railroad magnate, Collis Huntington, that American schools were "scientifically designed" to prevent "over-education" from happening. The average American would be content with his humble role in life, said the commissioner, because he would not be tempted to think about any other role. My guess is that Harris meant he would not be able to think about any other role. In 1896 the famous John Dewey, then at the University of Chicago, said that independent, self-reliant people were a counter-productive anachronism in the collective society of the future. In modern society, said Dewey, people would be defined by their associations – not by their own individual accomplishments.

It such a world people who read too well or too early are dangerous because they become privately empowered, they know too much, and know how to find out what they don't know by themselves, without consulting experts. Dewey said the great mistake of traditional pedagogy was to make reading and writing constitute the bulk of early schoolwork. He advocated that the phonics method of teaching reading be abandoned and replaced by the whole word method, not because the latter was more efficient (he admitted that it was less efficient) but because independent thinkers were produced by hard books, thinkers who cannot be socialized very easily. By socialization Dewey meant a program of social objectives administered by the best social thinkers in government.

This was a giant step on the road to state socialism, the form pioneered in Prussia, and it is a vision radically disconnected with the American past, its historic hopes and dreams. Dewey's former professor and close friend, G. Stanley Hall, said this at about the same time, "Reading should no longer be a fetish. Little attention should be paid to reading." Hall was one of the three men most responsible for building a gigantic administrative infrastructure over the classroom. How enormous that structure really became can only be understood by comparisons: New York State, for instance, employs more school administrators than all of the European Economic Community nations combined.

Once you think that the control of conduct is what schools are about, the word "reform" takes on a very particular meaning. It means making adjustments to the machine so that young subjects will not twist and turn so, while their minds and bodies are being scientifically controlled. Helping kids to use their minds better is beside the point. Bertrand Russell once observed that American schooling was among the most radical experiments in human history, that America was deliberately denying its children the tools of critical thinking. When you want to teach children to think, you begin by treating them seriously when they are little, giving them responsibilities, talking to them candidly, providing privacy and solitude for them, and making them readers and thinkers of significant thoughts from the beginning. That's if you want to teach them to think.

There is no evidence that this has been a State purpose since the start of compulsion schooling. When Frederich Fröbel, the inventor of kindergarten in 19th-century Germany, fashioned his idea he did not have a "garden for children" in mind, but a metaphor of teachers as gardeners and children as the vegetables. Kindergarten was created to be a way to break the influence of mothers on their children. I note with interest the growth of daycare in the US and the repeated urgings to extend school downward to include 4-year-olds.

The movement toward state socialism is not some historical curiosity but a powerful dynamic force in the world around us. It is fighting for its life against those forces which would, through vouchers or tax credits, deprive it of financial lifeblood, and it has countered this thrust with a demand for even more control over children's lives, and even more money to pay for the extended school day and year that this control requires.

A movement as visibly destructive to individuality, family and community as government-system schooling has been might be expected to collapse in the face of its dismal record, coupled with an increasingly aggressive shake down of the taxpayer, but this has not happened. The explanation is largely found in the transformation of schooling from a simple service to families and towns to an enormous, centralized corporate enterprise.

While this development has had a markedly adverse effect on people and on our democratic traditions, it has made schooling the single largest employer in the United States, and the largest grantor of contracts next to the Defense Department. Both of these low-visibility phenomena provide monopoly schooling with powerful political friends, publicists, advocates and other useful allies. This is a large part of the explanation why no amount of failure ever changes things in schools, or changes them for very long. School people are in a position to outlast any storm and to keep short-attention-span public scrutiny thoroughly confused.

An overview of the short history of this institution reveals a pattern marked by intervals of public outrage, followed by enlargement of the monopoly in every case.

After nearly 30 years spent inside a number of public schools, some considered good, some bad, I feel certain that management cannot clean its own house. It relentlessly marginalizes all significant change. There are no incentives for the "owners" of the structure to reform it, nor can there be without outside competition.

What is needed for several decades is the kind of wildly-swinging free market we had at the beginning of our national history. It cannot be overemphasized that no body of theory exists to accurately define the way children learn, or which learning is of most worth. By pretending the existence of such we have cut ourselves off from the information and innovation that only a real market can provide. Fortunately our national situation has been so favorable, so dominant through most of our history, that the margin of error afforded has been vast.

But the future is not so clear. Violence, narcotic addictions, divorce, alcoholism, loneliness...all these are but tangible measures of a poverty in education. Surely schools, as the institutions monopolizing the daytimes of childhood, can be called to account for this. In a democracy the final judges cannot be experts, but only the people.

Trust the people, give them choices, and the school nightmare will vanish in a generation.

Why I Do Not Pledge Allegiance to the Flag

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 21:32:00 +0000

written by Connor Boyack

I do not pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America.

This pledge—a mechanically-repeated affirmation of loyalty inculcated in children by rote—is the legacy of the socialist progressive movement in the late 1800s. Its author, Francis Bellamy, was a self-avowed “Christian socialist” (who loved to preach that “Jesus was a Socialist”) whose primary intention in creating the pledge was to encourage children to worship the State and revere centralized authority. Francis’ cousin and co-conspirator, Edward Bellamy, was an author whose utopian novel Looking Backward trailed in popularity at the time only to Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Ben Hur. A decade later he published Equalityas a sequel, which expanded upon the ideas he has promoted in the first novel.

Looking Backward told of a future America where socialism reigned supreme; eventually surpassing one million copies, the book was translated into 20 languages. The protagonist of the book goes to sleep one night in 1887 and wakes up in the year 2000, where American industries have been nationalized and everybody earns the same income. The theories and policies promoted in this book—which were essentially Marxist in ideology—were termed “Nationalism” by Edward and his cousin Francis, who were both key spokesmen for the movement.

The Bellamy cousins were not obscure figures spouting ideas into an echo chamber, but influential advocates of centralized government whose Nationalist movement saw the rise of 167 clubs across the country. John Dewey, father of the current government school system and a socialist himself, once referred to Edward Bellamy as a “Great American Prophet” and wrote:

"What Uncle Tom’s Cabin was to the anti-slavery movement Bellamy’s book may well be to the shaping of popular opinion for a new social order. … It accords with American psychology in breathing the atmosphere of hope."

While Edward was the writer, Francis might be termed the “doer”. While Vice President in charge of education for the Society for Christian Socialists, Francis made a connection with one Daniel Ford, editor of a religious publication named The Youth’s Companion. Networking with other advocates of socialism and nationalization, including the then-president of the National Education Association (NEA), William Harris, who himself strongly advocated for the Prussian system of education and a centralized authority requiring the subservience and allegiance of the individual, Francis worked on a program to teach American youth the importance of loyalty to the government.

In 1892, under Harris’ leadership, the NEA supported a National Public School Celebration which promoted loyalty to both the government and its schools. The core agenda was offered up by The Youth’s Companion, and Francis Bellamy was asked to be the chairman of the celebration. Speaking during the event, Bellamy stated that “the training of citizens in the common knowledge and the common duties of citizenship belongs irrevocably to the State.” As part of the program he organized, Bellamy drafted a pledge to be recited by the youth in attendance as a way of encouraging loyalty to the government.

Though it has changed in minor ways since its creation, Bellamy’s pledge is largely what is today called the Pledge of Allegiance. After its introduction at this conference, Bellamy had it published in The Youth’s Companion. The following months and years found the pledge, with Bellamy’s persistent promotion, gaining increasingly widespread adoption through the school system, and later through adult organizations, eventually gaining the blessing of Congress. (Interestingly, during WWII Congress voted to change the hand gesture while saying the pledge from the “Bellamy Salute” to the gesture we now recognize, with hand placed over heart.)

Bellamy had to show some restraint in developing the pledge, as his desires to use language more closely associated with the nationalist and socialist movements would, he feared, meet with resistance. In describing some of his thoughts in creating the pledge, Bellamy stated:

"It began as an intensive communing with salient points of our national history, from the Declaration of Independence onwards; with the makings of the Constitution…with the meaning of the Civil War; with the aspiration of the people…

The true reason for allegiance to the Flag is the ‘republic for which it stands.’ …And what does that vast thing, the Republic mean? It is the concise political word for the Nation – the One Nation which the Civil War was fought to prove. To make that One Nation idea clear, we must specify that it is indivisible, as Webster and Lincoln used to repeat in their great speeches. And its future?

Just here arose the temptation of the historic slogan of the French Revolution which meant so much to Jefferson and his friends, ‘Liberty, equality, fraternity.’ No, that would be too fanciful, too many thousands of years off in realization. But we as a nation do stand square on the doctrine of liberty and justice for all…"

What Edward Bellamy wrote about in his socialist utopian novels, his cousin Francis was determined to implement. As was understood by Marx, Dewey, and by all dictators and despots throughout human history, the best way to implement an agenda is to pursue a generational campaign through influencing and/or controlling the education of children to indoctrinate them with a slow, and at first fairly innocuous, stream of ideas.

To be sure, most school-age children do not even understand the implications of the pledge they are habitually repeating, let alone realize the history and meaning behind what they are doing when reciting it. However, the daily process of making such a pledge surely ingrains in the mind of the growing child an attitude and paradigm that solidifies over time and grooms an individual to offer their allegiance to the government as an adult.

So, history aside, why all the fuss? Let’s contrast the pledge of allegiance with the oath of office mandated by the Constitution as noted in Article VI, clause 3:

"The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the members of the several state legislatures, and all executive and judicial officers, both of the United States and of the several states, shall be bound by oath or affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States."

That oath reads as follows:

"I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God."

This oath has substance, and the Constitution to which the individuals’ loyalty is required is the codification of key principles worthy of our absolute support. The oath inherently has meaning, and the allegiance being affirmed by offering such an oath denotes clear responsibilities. (That so few do indeed fulfill their oath of office says more about them and their constituents than it does about the oath or the Constitution itself.)

In stark contrast we see the monotonous and largely superficial pledge of allegiance, with children throughout the country pointing their gaze to a piece of cloth—a symbol that few understand. Ask the average child (or adult, for that matter) what it means to pledge allegiance to the flag, and you’re likely to get responses that demonstrate a complete lack of understanding. Where no understanding exists, correct action cannot follow. Little wonder that the political landscape is what it is today.

If people wish to cast aside the pledge’s history and instead praise the wording and its meaning—pledging allegiance to the flag and to the Republic, affirming that we are one nation, indivisible, and that liberty and justice exist for all—then children should be taught to learn what a Republic is, what principles led us to become one nation, and why liberty and justice are inherent and God-given rights to be secured—and not provided—by government. But these types of teachings do not generally exist in public schools, and so reduced to its core and repeated on a daily basis, the pledge serves its (and Bellamy’s) purpose; children are indoctrinated with a steady dose of subservience to the State and are, over time, taught the importance of fealty to the federal government.

If a pledge is required or insisted upon by parents, then their children should be taught to pledge their allegiance to the Constitution, modeling their pledge after the oath of office the Constitution itself requires of federal officials. In so doing, children would be pointed towards the source of the Republic, and not a diversion. Symbols can be powerful tools for teaching, but they should not demand our attention and allegiance themselves. Jesus Christ instituted the sacrament with his apostles not to suggest that their minds should focus on the bread and water He gave them, but to make clear that these symbols were to be used to encourage the individual to remember His body and sacrifice; we worship Jesus Christ, and not the symbols that represent him. Similarly, we should not pledge our allegiance to the flag—a symbol of this Republic—but to the object it represents, namely, the written Constitution and the principle of liberty it exists to protect.

The idea for Bellamy’s pledge came from the “loyalty oaths” imposed on Southerners after Lincoln’s bloody war between the states. Southerners were forced upon penalty of death to affirm their allegiance to the federal government as a condition for receiving a presidential pardon. This action hardly seems like one we should be inculcating into our children, especially given the abusive, corrupt, and outright tyrannical actions being adopted by many within our federal government in recent decades.

When I am in a meeting where the pledge is being recited, so as not to ruffle too many feathers and immediately have others call into question my patriotism, I simply say a modified version of the Pledge of Allegiance which satisfies my problems with Bellamy’s version:

"I pledge allegiance to the Constitution of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, with liberty and justice for all."

Where appropriate, I simply abstain from making any such pledge (or wearing any lapel pins or buttons or any other outward, superficial demonstration of one’s patriotism), preferring to let my words and actions speak for themselves in showing to whom and to what my allegiance is given.

The Bellamy cousins had in mind a project to teach American youth loyalty to the government, realizing that the then-predominant strain of individualism and passionate love of liberty inspired by the founding fathers of this country ran afoul of the socialist utopia envisioned inLooking Backward. The fact that hundreds of millions of Americans have embraced the pledge as a token of Americanism and patriotic duty, while ignoring its origins, context, and original intent, and in light of the worship of and trust in government that has permeated our society, indicates that the Bellamys were at least in some significant amount successful.

My children will be taught not to affirm their allegiance to the government, to a symbol such as the flag, or to anything but the underlying and enduring principles that created this nation to begin with. Those principles are enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and our allegiance to these documents (and, more importantly, the principles and ideas themselves) is the correct action that should be taken by every concerned citizen, ardent patriot, and free-thinking individual.

On Patriotism

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 31 May 2010 17:32:00 +0000

Ron Paul before the U.S. House of Representatives, May 22, 2007

Madam Speaker, for some, patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel. For others, it means dissent against a government's abuse of the people's rights.

I have never met a politician in Washington or any American, for that matter, who chose to be called unpatriotic. Nor have I met anyone who did not believe he wholeheartedly supported our troops, wherever they may be.

What I have heard all too frequently from various individuals are sharp accusations that, because their political opponents disagree with them on the need for foreign military entanglements, they were unpatriotic, un-American evildoers deserving contempt.

The original American patriots were those individuals brave enough to resist with force the oppressive power of King George. I accept the definition of patriotism as that effort to resist oppressive state power.

The true patriot is motivated by a sense of responsibility and out of self-interest for himself, his family, and the future of his country to resist government abuse of power. He rejects the notion that patriotism means obedience to the state. Resistance need not be violent, but the civil disobedience that might be required involves confrontation with the state and invites possible imprisonment.

Peaceful, nonviolent revolutions against tyranny have been every bit as successful as those involving military confrontation. Mahatma Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., achieved great political successes by practicing nonviolence, and yet they suffered physically at the hands of the state. But whether the resistance against government tyrants is nonviolent or physically violent, the effort to overthrow state oppression qualifies as true patriotism.

True patriotism today has gotten a bad name, at least from the government and the press. Those who now challenge the unconstitutional methods of imposing an income tax on us, or force us to use a monetary system designed to serve the rich at the expense of the poor are routinely condemned. These American patriots are sadly looked down upon by many. They are never praised as champions of liberty as Gandhi and Martin Luther King have been.

Liberals, who withhold their taxes as a protest against war, are vilified as well, especially by conservatives. Unquestioned loyalty to the state is especially demanded in times of war. Lack of support for a war policy is said to be unpatriotic. Arguments against a particular policy that endorses a war, once it is started, are always said to be endangering the troops in the field. This, they blatantly claim, is unpatriotic, and all dissent must stop. Yet, it is dissent from government policies that defines the true patriot and champion of liberty.

It is conveniently ignored that the only authentic way to best support the troops is to keep them out of dangerous undeclared no-win wars that are politically inspired. Sending troops off to war for reasons that are not truly related to national security and, for that matter, may even damage our security, is hardly a way to patriotically support the troops.

Who are the true patriots, those who conform or those who protest against wars without purpose? How can it be said that blind support for a war, no matter how misdirected the policy, is the duty of a patriot?

Randolph Bourne said that, "War is the health of the state.'' With war, he argued, the state thrives. Those who believe in the powerful state see war as an opportunity. Those who mistrust the people and the market for solving problems have no trouble promoting a "war psychology'' to justify the expansive role of the state. This includes the role the Federal Government plays in our lives, as well as in our economic transactions.

Certainly, the neoconservative belief that we have a moral obligation to spread American values worldwide through force justifies the conditions of war in order to rally support at home for the heavy hand of government. It is through this policy, it should surprise no one, that our liberties are undermined. The economy becomes overextended, and our involvement worldwide becomes prohibited. Out of fear of being labeled unpatriotic, most of the citizens become compliant and accept the argument that some loss of liberty is required to fight the war in order to remain safe.

This is a bad trade-off, in my estimation, especially when done in the name of patriotism. Loyalty to the state and to autocratic leaders is substituted for true patriotism; that is, a willingness to challenge the state and defend the country, the people and the culture. The more difficult the times, the stronger the admonition comes that the leaders be not criticized.

Because the crisis atmosphere of war supports the growth of the state, any problem invites an answer by declaring war, even on social and economic issues. This elicits patriotism in support of various government solutions, while enhancing the power of the state. Faith in government coercion and a lack of understanding of how free societies operate encourages big-government liberals and big-government conservatives to manufacture a war psychology to demand political loyalty for domestic policy just as is required in foreign affairs.

The long-term cost in dollars spent and liberties lost is neglected as immediate needs are emphasized. It is for this reason that we have multiple perpetual wars going on simultaneously. Thus, the war on drugs, the war against gun ownership, the war against poverty, the war against illiteracy, the war against terrorism, as well as our foreign military entanglements are endless.

All this effort promotes the growth of statism at the expense of liberty. A government designed for a free society should do the opposite, prevent the growth of statism and preserve liberty.

Once a war of any sort is declared, the message is sent out not to object or you will be declared unpatriotic. Yet, we must not forget that the true patriot is the one who protests in spite of the consequences. Condemnation or ostracism or even imprisonment may result.

Nonviolent protesters of the Tax Code are frequently imprisoned, whether they are protesting the code's unconstitutionality or the war that the tax revenues are funding. Resisters to the military draft or even to Selective Service registration are threatened and imprisoned for challenging this threat to liberty.

Statism depends on the idea that the government owns us and citizens must obey. Confiscating the fruits of our labor through the income tax is crucial to the health of the state. The draft, or even the mere existence of the Selective Service, emphasizes that we will march off to war at the state's pleasure.

A free society rejects all notions of involuntary servitude, whether by draft or the confiscation of the fruits of our labor through the personal income tax. A more sophisticated and less well-known technique for enhancing the state is the manipulation and transfer of wealth through the fiat monetary system operated by the secretive Federal Reserve.

Protesters against this unconstitutional system of paper money are considered unpatriotic criminals and at times are imprisoned for their beliefs. The fact that, according to the Constitution, only gold and silver are legal tender and paper money outlawed matters little. The principle of patriotism is turned on its head. Whether it's with regard to the defense of welfare spending at home, confiscatory income tax, or an immoral monetary system or support for a war fought under false pretense without a legal declaration, the defenders of liberty and the Constitution are portrayed as unpatriotic, while those who support these programs are seen as the patriots.

If there is a war going on, supporting the state's effort to win the war is expected at all costs, no dissent. The real problem is that those who love the state too often advocate policies that lead to military action. At home, they are quite willing to produce a crisis atmosphere and claim a war is needed to solve the problem. Under these conditions, the people are more willing to bear the burden of paying for the war and to carelessly sacrifice liberties, which they are told is necessary.

The last 6 years have been quite beneficial to the health of the state, which comes at the expense of personal liberty. Every enhanced unconstitutional power of the state can only be achieved at the expense of individual liberty. Even though in every war in which we have been engaged civil liberties have suffered, some have been restored after the war ended, but never completely. That has resulted in a steady erosion of our liberties over the past 200 years. Our government was originally designed to protect our liberties, but it has now, instead, become the usurper of those liberties.

We currently live in the most difficult of times for guarding against an expanding central government with a steady erosion of our freedoms. We are continually being reminded that 9/11 has changed everything.

Unfortunately, the policy that needed most to be changed, that is, our policy of foreign interventionism, has only been expanded. There is no pretense any longer that a policy of humility in foreign affairs, without being the world's policemen and engaging in nation building, is worthy of consideration.

We now live in a post-9/11 America where our government is going to make us safe no matter what it takes. We are expected to grin and bear it and adjust to every loss of our liberties in the name of patriotism and security.

Though the majority of Americans initially welcomed the declared effort to make us safe, and we are willing to sacrifice for the cause, more and more Americans are now becoming concerned about civil liberties being needlessly and dangerously sacrificed.

The problem is that the Iraq war continues to drag on, and a real danger of it spreading exists. There is no evidence that a truce will soon be signed in Iraq or in the war on terror or the war on drugs. Victory is not even definable. If Congress is incapable of declaring an official war, it is impossible to know when it will end. We have been fully forewarned that the world conflict in which we are now engaged will last a long, long time.

The war mentality and the pervasive fear of an unidentified enemy allows for a steady erosion of our liberties, and, with this, our respect for self-reliance and confidence is lost. Just think of the self-sacrifice and the humiliation we go through at the airport screening process on a routine basis. Though there is no scientific evidence of any likelihood of liquids and gels being mixed on an airplane to make a bomb, billions of dollars are wasted throwing away toothpaste and hair spray, and searching old women in wheelchairs.

Our enemies say boo, and we jump, we panic, and then we punish ourselves. We are worse than a child being afraid of the dark. But in a way, the fear of indefinable terrorism is based on our inability to admit the truth about why there is a desire by a small number of angry radical Islamists to kill Americans. It is certainly not because they are jealous of our wealth and freedoms.

We fail to realize that the extremists, willing to sacrifice their own lives to kill their enemies, do so out of a sense of weakness and desperation over real and perceived attacks on their way of life, their religion, their country, and their natural resources. Without the conventional diplomatic or military means to retaliate against these attacks, and an unwillingness of their own government to address the issue, they resort to the desperation tactic of suicide terrorism. Their anger toward their own governments, which they believe are coconspirators with the American Government, is equal to or greater than that directed toward us.

These errors in judgment in understanding the motive of the enemy and the constant fear that is generated have brought us to this crisis where our civil liberties and privacy are being steadily eroded in the name of preserving national security.

We may be the economic and the military giant of the world, but the effort to stop this war on our liberties here at home in the name of patriotism is being lost.

The erosion of our personal liberties started long before 9/11, but 9/11 accelerated the process. There are many things that motivate those who pursue this course, both well-intentioned and malevolent, but it would not happen if the people remained vigilant, understood the importance of individual rights, and were unpersuaded that a need for security justifies the sacrifice for liberty, even if it is just now and then.

The true patriot challenges the state when the state embarks on enhancing its power at the expense of the individual. Without a better understanding and a greater determination to rein in the state, the rights of Americans that resulted from the revolutionary break from the British and the writing of the Constitution will disappear.

The record since September 11th is dismal. Respect for liberty has rapidly deteriorated. Many of the new laws passed after 9/11 had, in fact, been proposed long before that attack. The political atmosphere after that attack simply made it more possible to pass such legislation. The fear generated by 9/11 became an opportunity for those seeking to promote the power of the state domestically, just as it served to falsely justify the long-planned invasion of Iraq.

The war mentality was generated by the Iraq war in combination with the constant drumbeat of fear at home. Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, who is now likely residing in Pakistan, our supposed ally, are ignored, as our troops fight and die in Iraq and are made easier targets for the terrorists in their backyard. While our leaders constantly use the mess we created to further justify the erosion of our constitutional rights here at home, we forget about our own borders and support the inexorable move toward global government, hardly a good plan for America.

The accelerated attacks on liberty started quickly after 9/11. Within weeks, the PATRIOT Act was overwhelmingly passed by Congress. Though the final version was unavailable up to a few hours before the vote, no Member had sufficient time to study it. Political fear of not doing something, even something harmful, drove the Members of Congress to not question the contents, and just voted for it. A little less freedom for a little more perceived safety was considered a fair trade-off, and the majority of Americans applauded.

The PATRIOT Act, though, severely eroded the system of checks and balances by giving the government the power to spy on law-abiding citizens without judicial supervision. The several provisions that undermine the liberties of all Americans include sneak-and-peek searches, a broadened and more vague definition of domestic terrorism, allowing the FBI access to library and bookstore records without search warrants or probable cause, easier FBI initiation of wiretaps and searches, as well as roving wiretaps, easier access to information on American citizens' use of the Internet, and easier access to e-mail and financial records of all American citizens.

The attack on privacy has not relented over the past 6 years. The Military Commissions Act is a particularly egregious piece of legislation and, if not repealed, will change America for the worse as the powers unconstitutionally granted to the executive branch are used and abused. This act grants excessive authority to use secretive military commissions outside of places where active hostilities are going on. The Military Commissions Act permits torture, arbitrary detention of American citizens as unlawful enemy combatants at the full discretion of the President and without the right of habeas corpus, and warrantless searches by the NSA. It also gives to the President the power to imprison individuals based on secret testimony.

Since 9/11, Presidential signing statements designating portions of legislation that the President does not intend to follow, though not legal under the Constitution, have enormously multiplied. Unconstitutional Executive Orders are numerous and mischievous and need to be curtailed.

Extraordinary rendition to secret prisons around the world have been widely engaged in, though obviously extralegal.

A growing concern in the post-9/11 environment is the Federal Government's list of potential terrorists based on secret evidence. Mistakes are made, and sometimes it is virtually impossible to get one's name removed even though the accused is totally innocent of any wrongdoing.

A national ID card is now in the process of being implemented. It is called the REAL ID card, and it is tied to our Social Security numbers and our State driver's license. If REAL ID is not stopped, it will become a national driver's license ID for all Americans. We will be required to carry our papers.

Some of the least-noticed and least-discussed changes in the law were the changes made to the Insurrection Act of 1807 and to posse comitatus by the Defense Authorization Act of 2007. These changes pose a threat to the survival of our Republic by giving the President the power to declare martial law for as little reason as to restore public order. The 1807 act severely restricted the President in his use of the military within the United States borders, and the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 strengthened these restrictions with strict oversight by Congress. The new law allows the President to circumvent the restrictions of both laws. The Insurrection Act has now become the "Enforcement of the Laws to Restore Public Order Act.'' This is hardly a title that suggests that the authors cared about or understood the nature of a constitutional Republic.

Now, martial law can be declared not just for insurrection, but also for natural disasters, public health reasons, terrorist attacks or incidents, or for the vague reason called "other conditions.'' The President can call up the National Guard without congressional approval or the Governors' approval, and even send these State Guard troops into other States.

The American Republic is in remnant status. The stage is set for our country eventually devolving into a military dictatorship, and few seem to care. These precedent-setting changes in the law are extremely dangerous and will change American jurisprudence forever if not revised. The beneficial results of our revolt against the King's abuses are about to be eliminated, and few Members of Congress and few Americans are aware of the seriousness of the situation. Complacency and fear drive our legislation without any serious objection by our elected leaders. Sadly, though, those few who do object to this self-evident trend away from personal liberty and empire-building overseas are portrayed as unpatriotic and uncaring.

Though welfare and socialism always fails, opponents of them are said to lack compassion. Though opposition to totally unnecessary war should be the only moral position, the rhetoric is twisted to claim that patriots who oppose the war are not supporting the troops. The cliché "Support the Troops'' is incessantly used as a substitute for the unacceptable notion of supporting the policy, no matter how flawed it may be.

Unsound policy can never help the troops. Keeping the troops out of harm's way and out of wars unrelated to our national security is the only real way of protecting the troops. With this understanding, just who can claim the title of "patriot''?

Before the war in the Middle East spreads and becomes a world conflict for which we will be held responsible, or the liberties of all Americans become so suppressed we can no longer resist, much has to be done. Time is short, but our course of action should be clear. Resistance to illegal and unconstitutional usurpation of our rights is required. Each of us must choose which course of action we should take: education, conventional political action, or even peaceful civil disobedience to bring about necessary changes.

But let it not be said that we did nothing. Let not those who love the power of the welfare/warfare state label the dissenters of authoritarianism as unpatriotic or uncaring. Patriotism is more closely linked to dissent than it is to conformity and a blind desire for safety and security. Understanding the magnificent rewards of a free society makes us unbashful in its promotion, fully realizing that maximum wealth is created and the greatest chance for peace comes from a society respectful of individual liberty.

A Win in Kentucky and Oregon!

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 19 May 2010 17:34:00 +0000

Well Ron Paul's son Rand Paul won the primaries in Kentucky last night. This is a great win for the Revolution. Although my recommendation for Jaynee Germond in Oregon's 4th district lost, Oregon's 3rd district saw a great constitutional candidate win, Delia Lopez. Hopefully we will see these great liberty-fighting candidates make a complete victory in November and we'll have them working for us - We the people- by next year.

We need to have a win here in CA also. I strongly urge you to support the and vote for the candidates I listed in an earlier post. Out of all the candidates listed, I believe Senate Candidate Chuck Devore has great potential. Although he is still far from winning the primary, his support has been surging. www.chuckdevore.com

Also we are looking foward to a win in CA's 10th district. Gary Clift is the constitutionalist running for Represenatative. Please support him at: www.cliftforcongress.com

Also in CA's 8th district we have John Dennis that is looking good in the polls. Please if you live in the San Francisco area vote John Dennis: www.johndennis2010.com This would be a critical win as if he wins the primaries, he will be facing Nacy Pelosi in November.

2010 California Elections

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 15 May 2010 19:03:00 +0000

The California primary elections are upon us. I decided to post candidates and their websites that I believe would be the best able to serve. These candidates are the ones that are mostly aligned to the constitution and are for limited government and individual freedom. Many of these have a slim chance of winning but remember that every vote counts so don't put off voting this election. This is a very important election. All the candidates listed below are Republican.

My choice for Governor: Lawrence Naritelli
website: http://www.larrynaritelli.com/default.html

My choice for Lieutenant governor: Sam Aanestad
website: http://www.voteforsam.com/

My choice for Secretary of State: Orly Taitz
website: http://www.runorlyrun.com/homepage.html

My choice for Controller: David Evans
website: http://www.electevanscontroller.com/

Only choice for Treasurer (better than the democrat): Mimi Walters
website: http://www.mimiwalters.com/home/

My choice for Attorney General: John Eastman
website: http://www.eastmanforag.com/

My choice for Insurance Commissioner: Mike Villines
website: http://www.mikevillines.com/

My choice for Board of Equalization, 2nd District: Alan Nakanishi
website: http://www.alannakanishi.com/

My choice for United States Senator: Chuck Devore
website: http://www.chuckdevore.com/index.asp

And for CA's 4th district I support the following candidates:

My choice for U.S. Representative (4th District): Tom McClintock
website: http://www.tommcclintock.com/

My choice for State Senator (4th District): Rick Keene
website: http://rickkeene.com/site/

My choice for State Assembly (4th District): Ted Gaines
website: http://www.tedgaines.com/

My positions on the propositions:

Yes on Prop 13
No on Prop 14
No on Prop 15
Yes on Prop 16
Yes on Prop 17

For CA district 3 here are the candidates I recommend:

For Representative (District 3): Jerry Liedecker (Constitution party) or Dan Lungren (Republican party), I prefer Jerry Liedecker
websites:
Jerry Liedecker: http://vote4jerry.blogspot.com/
Dan Lungren: http://www.danlungren.com/

Also I wanted to metion that Ron Paul's son Rand Paul, who is running for United States Senate, is doing very well in the polls. We are hoping he will win in the primaries on May 18th in Kentucky. Rand Paul's campaign site: http://www.randpaul2010.com/

On May 18th there is a primary election in Oregon also. I recommend voting for Jaynee Germond (for Congress) if you live in Oregon's 4th district. She's a great constitutional congressional candidate: http://www.germond2010.com/

I also have some good news. BJ Lawson, running for Congress in North Carolina's 4th district won in the Republican primaries a few weeks ago. We are hoping this freedom fighter will win in the November general election and be representing us next year! Check out his website: http://www.lawsonforcongress.com/