Perri Nelson's Website

Views from Western Washington

2009-07-11T18:31:08Z

If there’s one thing I love about living in Western Washington, it’s the spectacular scenery. Every Monday night, my wife and I drive out to Enumclaw on our way to dance practice. On the way we pass by Krain Corner, a location with a fabulous view of farmland, rolling hills, and Mt. Rainier. On more than one occasion I’ve driven through the area and wished I had brought my camera with me.

Today, I was taking Lucas to Black Diamond Miner’s Days, a local event where he and other members of the Merle E. Luther chapter of the Order of DeMolay were working. Since it’s a nice, relatively cloudless day I decided I’d take the camera with me and head on down the road a bit after I dropped him off. Here are some of the pictures I took.

I also took some pictures from the Green River bridge. This bridge had been closed for repairs for nearly nine months, causing us to have to take a long detour on our trips to dance practice. Since it was once again open, I decided to take a few pictures while I was there.

The Green River also happens to flow through Flaming Geyser State Park. The flaming geyser itself isn’t really a natural geyser, despite the name. It’s actually a test hole bored by Eugene Lawson on October 4, 1911, prospecting for coal in the area. At about 900 feet down, the drill encountered a layer containing methane gas. This gas has been slowly seeping up ever since. In 1922 Mr. Lawson, the discoverer of the gas layer noticed it was bubbling up from the ground and lit it. For many years it burned continuously, with the flame reaching heights of eight to ten feet. Today the flame is much smaller, only about eight to ten inches high. The flame is fed by a natural layer of methane gas that is about 89% methane.

All in all, it wasn’t a bad way to spend about an hour or so, and I think I got some nice pictures out of the trip as well.

What makes America great?

2009-07-10T22:42:18Z

That’s the question I’d like to consider for a while. Of course the question itself may be suspect to some people. In asking this particular question I’m assuming that America is great, and I’m well aware that there are some people in America today that just don’t accept that premise. To those people, I’d like to offer up a suggestion – do like so many other people do and vote with your feet.

I’m not saying “America, love it or leave it.” here, and I’m not simply hoping to get rid of dissenters. Instead, I’m saying that one of the measures of a country’s greatness might be found in the flow of emigrants and immigrants. If more people are emigrating from a country than are immigrating into it, that says something about conditions in that country don’t you think? And if the opposite is true, doesn’t that say something about it as well?

So, let’s consider the “problem” of immigration as evidence that something about America must be great. I use the scare quotes because I don’t really see immigration itself as a problem, and I don’t believe that most conservatives do either. What I do see as a problem is illegal immigration, and that’s distinct from immigration as a whole. If we look at this problem, we can see that both sides of the political spectrum view America as a desirable place to be. One side wants more controls on immigration so that we can keep “undesirable” people out of the country – leaving the definition of “undesirable” open to interpretation depending on which side of the aisle you want representing you. The other side wants fewer or no controls on immigration – whether it’s to create a larger constituency or out of a desire to be more “humane.” Neither side of this debate believes that people are rushing to leave the country – rather they both seem to believe that people are struggling to get in.

So, if people are struggling to enter our country, why are they doing it? What is it that attracts people to America? What makes America great? I have my own answers to that question, but rather than engage in speculation alone I suppose that the ideal way to answer this would be to poll everyone that comes in, and analyze their answers. I don’t have the resources to do that unfortunately, and I don’t really think that anyone does. How do you poll illegal immigrants for example – people that are trying to avoid questioning about how they arrived? Without the resources to conduct such a poll myself, I turned to that fabulous invention of the late twentieth century, the Internet search engine.

In the first thirty results of a query using the keywords “poll of immigrants to United States” (“of” and “to” are treated as noise words by the search engines sadly), thirty of the results had to do with polls about how Americans or people from other countries feel about immigration. Not one had anything to do with how immigrants feel about it. So I tried again. A search with the query “why do people immigrate to the United States” turned up better results, although several of the first available answers are again nothing more than speculation. This paper might shed some light on the subject though. One of the first things that can be found in the abstract are these statements…

A popular cause of immigration among people coming from poor and undeveloped countries is the condition of the immigrant's homeland… The people that immigrate basically just want to live a better life… Immigrants see the United States as a land of opportunity and prosperity and they want to be a part of that.

Another statement from the abstract also touches on the greatness of the United States…

The United States itself is one of the major reasons that so many immigrants come here;…

Now this particular paper is only available to paid subscribers to the OP Papers web site, and I'm not one of them so I can't vouch for the research that went into the paper. Still, these initial conclusions match pretty well with my own expectations. That doesn't, of course, make them correct but as it's quite literally the first result that I encountered (other than from other bloggers) during my search leads me to believe that there's some validity to it. That many other articles reflect the same conclusions does as well.

From this, I draw up a simple, short list of things that appear to make America great…

Conditions here are better than in other nations.
America is a land of opportunity.
America is a land of prosperity.
The American way of life is better in a subjective fashion than other ways of life.
America is unique, offering more freedom, and happiness than other nations.

That first one seems to me to be fairly interesting. Our founders recognized that people will put up with a great deal of hardship before they’ll change the circumstances under which they live. In the Declaration of Independence Thomas Jefferson wrote…

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.

We've got still more evidence from the things people have had to say about our political processes. The more active conservatives among you will surely remember the many celebrities that promised to leave the country, to emigrate if you will, if George W. Bush won a second term of office. That not one of them actually fulfilled this promise when George W. Bush was reelected in 2004 supports the notion that “mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves.” Conditions here must indeed be much better than in some other nations if people are willing to abandon at some considerable expense their established way of life to come here.

America offers its residents economic freedom that may not be attainable in some other nations. Yes, we have our poor, but even our poor are better off than those of other nations. Here, there is no guarantee that a person will find work, but the opportunity is there, and it’s one of the reasons people cite for coming here. In fact, our friends on the other side of the political aisle were fond of reminding us as recently as two summers ago that we have a glut of jobs that Americans just aren’t willing to do. If a person truly wants to find work and money, it’s possible here, even in times of relative economic depression.

It’s not just economic freedom that makes America great either. There’s also political freedom. We don’t generally criminalize dissent here as they do in some countries. Our country never had a Joseph Stalin that would erase all record of his political enemies from the public memory, even going so far as to remove former friends like Nikolai Yezhov from published photographs in the days before tools like PhotoShop even existed…

The American way of life is superior to other ways of life because we have these economic and political freedoms. The founders recognized that the rights of individuals were superior to the rights of society. This is one of the things that made the American revolution distinct from the French revolution. Rather than “Liberty and Equality” which were the central tenets of the French revolution, it was “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” that were central to the American revolution.

It was the notion that “All men are created equal” rather than “All men must have equal outcomes” that carried our revolution forward. The first notion, that all men are created equal, leaves the responsibility for the outcome on the shoulders of the individual – and makes it desirable to preserve individual rights and to allow the people to pursue happiness. The second notion, that equality means equality of circumstance and outcome, denies individual rights and restricts the peoples ability to pursue happiness for themselves. Ultimately, the French revolution was a failure. It resulted in a bloodbath that captured the innocent and the guilty alike, and ended not in liberty for the French people, but in a totalitarian dictatorship. The American revolution on the other hand has survived for over 233 years, not a long period of time in the history of the world perhaps, but longer than any other form of “democracy” (It’s really a Republic, not a Democracy.) the world has seen.

This is the principal thing that makes America great in my mind. Our founders believed that all men were created equal, and that their individual unalienable rights were granted to them by God and not by the government. Thus the role of government is to protect individual rights, not to define them. And America’s government – though fallen far from the ideal envisioned by its founders – does this far better than any other government in the history of mankind.

America IS great – and cultural relativism be damned. There is objective evidence to that fact. As such we, as Americans, have a right to be proud of our country. We don’t need our President to go on “apologia” tours or to apologize for leading the world to liberty. We’ve got it right. Those immigrants flocking to our shores can’t all be wrong – Can they?

Absolutely correct

2009-07-06T22:27:57Z

I’m a conservative or a “right wing extremist” as characterized by some in our government. I’m not quite as “right wing” as the John Birch society, but in this instance, I agree with them one hundred percent…

This IS a republic and not a democracy, regardless of the propaganda you may have been fed in school or by the major media. And we really should keep it that way, or at least return it to that ideal.

Tiger Mountain State Forest

2009-07-06T18:16:07Z

There are occasions when a man just has to get away for one reason or another. Such an occasion occurred for me yesterday, and so I returned to a place I wandered about a few years ago under similar circumstances. Last time I went there, I had a cell phone with a camera in it, but the pictures I took while hiking along the trail were fuzzy and small. This time, I determined to take my real camera with me and took a hike up the old timber trails in Tiger Mountain State Forest.

One of the things along the trail that I remembered quite well from my previous trip, and one of the reasons I chose this particular location for this trip was a huge (about 8 to 9 feet in diameter) boulder on the opposite side of a small stream that caught my eye. When I took it’s picture last time, I was hoping for a better result, but upon downloading it from my cell phone I was truly disappointed. This is all I got out of my camera that time…

This time, I managed a much better picture…

It was easily the biggest rock I saw on the trail. Of course, this was a trail in a state forest so you’d expect to see a lot more than just big rocks. Next to the trail somewhat further into the forest there was the stump of an old dead tree, with this rather huge root sticking out of the ground. The root was old and weathered smooth, and had some rather interesting grain patterns, so I snapped another picture…

Not everything in the forest was dead either. I didn’t see too many animals, but there were lots of birds singing in the trees. Unfortunately every time I tried to capture one digitally, it flew off before I quite finished aiming the camera. The flora though was fairly interesting, for example this foxglove…

There were a lot of weathered rocks and stones along the trail. It was running up the side of a mountain after all, so it shouldn't be too surprising. Some of the rocks had some interesting color patterns, especially with the lichens and moss growing on them… something like this…

Being in a mountain forest, it shouldn’t be too surprising to find shelf fungus growing on the trees either. I didn’t see much of it, but this one caught my eye. It looks a bit like a duck bill or something to me…

The trail through the forest was full of switchbacks, moving back and forth as it climed the mountain. Every now and then the trail would cross a small stream, and when it did, there would be a small bridge to cross. And of course, everywhere there were trees…

I'm not quite as young as I used to be and my wife was somewhat concerned about my health. I wanted to follow the trail to its end, but after an hour of climbing, I decided to turn back so I could head home rather than keep her worrying about me. I had a nice, pleasant time on the trail, away from people, and away from the noise of civilization. The trip wasn't a waste of time by any means.

One thing that was markedly different about this trip up the mountain from my last one was the quality of the litter I encountered. Last time I ended up carrying out other hiker's garbage. This time I carried out their money. Last time someone dropped their Starbucks cup along side the trail along with some other trash. This time someone dropped twenty dollars. I'd say the quality of litter has improved.

Where it all began

2009-07-03T16:55:11Z

As you know, from time to time I get some interesting tidbits in email and share them here. Here's yet another, with some minor reformatting…

(But Only To A Few)

Where It All Began

A little girl wrote to Sarah Palin and asked; 'How did the human race start?'

Sarah Palin answered, 'God made Adam and Eve, they had children, and so was all mankind made.'

Two days later the girl wrote to Michelle Obama and asked the same question.

Michelle Obama answered, 'Many years ago there were monkeys from which the human race evolved.'

The confused girl went to her father and said, 'Dad, how is it possible that Sarah Palin told me the Human race was created by God, and Michelle Obama said they evolved from monkeys.'

The father answered, 'Well, Dear, it is very simple, Sarah Palin told you about her ancestors and Michelle Obama told you about hers.'

Admit it! There IS a striking resemblance!

Now remember… this is only humor. We don't need any Democrats going all Danish Muslim on me… Besides, if it was acceptable for the Democrats to compare President Bush to a chimp, then this should be as well. Unless the Democrats are hypocrites… ‘Nuff said.

Two years ago.

2009-06-29T07:39:57Z

It was my granddaughter's second birthday on Sunday. Here are a few pictures from the party.

A first step?

2009-06-27T19:19:29Z

The U.S. House of Representatives passed legislation to drive up the cost of energy on Friday. There’s really no other way that this should be said, unless you believe in or are invested in the propaganda regarding anthropogenic climate change.

The legislation, which passed despite deep divisions among Democrats, could lead to profound changes in many sectors of the economy, including electric power generation, agriculture, manufacturing and construction.

The bill passed 219 to 212. It still has to go through the Senate, but there too there’s a majority of Democrats and we know that the President would happily sign anything that cripples the economy.

President Obama hailed the House passage of the bill as “a bold and necessary step.” He said in a statement that he looked forward to Senate action that would send a bill to his desk “so that we can say, at long last, that this was the moment when we decided to confront America’s energy challenge and reclaim America’s future.”

That’s not what this bill will do. Instead it will take an already struggling economy and cripple it. Rather than confronting the energy challenge, it will exacerbate it. Rather than reclaiming America’s future, it will smother it under a blanket of bureaucratic regulation.

Considerably more than half of the energy that we use in this country comes from the burning of carbon based fuels. We all saw what precipitated our current economic “crisis” last summer. As the price of petroleum (a carbon based fuel used by the “working” class to get to and from work, as well as by the transportation industry to move groceries from the farm to store shelves) rose to record levels we watched as first there was a slowdown in the economy and then a virtual collapse of other sectors of our government’s “carefully managed” plans for our “free market” economy (it’s much closer to a “state run” economy when you look at it).

Taxing the use of carbon based fuels through cap-and-trade policies will bring back those prices. We’ll shut down entire industries in our zeal to avert a .25° rise in “average” global temperature…

The final bill has a goal of reducing greenhouse gases in the United States to 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020, and 83 percent by midcentury.

Good luck with that. 17 percent of 2005 levels isn’t likely to bring that much of a change, especially when you consider that returning to pre-1990 levels won’t bring much measurable change either.

We know about alternative energy sources, but they make up a miniscule portion of our energy economy, and they’re not cheap. Nor are they exactly “environmentally friendly.” Take solar power for example. If we’re talking about the use of semiconductors to directly convert solar energy into electricity, they’re not very efficient, they require a large amount of surface area exposed to the sun, don’t work well on cloudy or rainy days, and their production involves the use of massive amounts of toxic chemicals. If we’re talking about using solar energy to heat water, it requires a large surface area again, and much of the captured “warming” is re-radiated back into the environment.

What about wind power? Well, I suppose the return to 16th century technologies might not be such a bad thing. The Dutch managed to reclaim a lot of land from the sea using windmills. And who can forget The Man from La Mancha? And if sails were good enough for the navies of the world all those centuries, surely we can use them to propel our cars to and from work – unless we live in an area that doesn’t happen to be favored by high winds. Oh wait… we can’t use wind power either. It requires vast tracts of land in order to work. And those huge propellers are so unsightly – just ask Ted Kennedy.

How about nuclear energy? Oh wait… that’s just so incredibly dangerous – just ask Jane Fonda. Why, we can’t even find a place to dispose of the waste products that people will agree on.

Biofuels? Not very efficient in the end. Ethanol for example, produces less energy per gallon than gasoline. Racing engines make more power on ethanol than on gasoline, but that’s because they consume nearly four times as much ethanol as a similarly sized gasoline engine would gasoline.

Biofuels aren’t exactly environmentally friendly either. After all, it takes a lot of energy to grow the plant material in the first place. And consider how much land must be dedicated to the production of that plant material. Oh, I suppose we could convert our farms to growing feedstock for biofuels, but then what would we eat? Check out this quote from the Washington Post…

“Anybody that knows anything about the marketing of corn knows that when you raise the price of corn you are going to create problems in all of the markets that use corn,” said Ronald W. Cotterill, director of the Food Marketing Policy Center at the University of Connecticut.

How about waste oil from cooking? Sorry Charlie, there’s just not enough of it.

Now don’t get me wrong. I think that it’s a good idea to pursue alternative energy sources. It’s not even an exclusively “Democratic” idea either. Remember, it was George W. Bush (you know the “selected, not elected” President) that called for a fourfold increase in alternative energy supplies. And he took a lot of heat for that from the “objective, non-partisan” media…

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Ever since President Bush proposed a four-fold increase in “alternative fuels” during this year's State of the Union address, the media has been abuzz with doomsday reports…

“Fossil” fuels won’t be around forever – not if they’re truly “fossil” fuels. Finding environmentally friendly energy sources is a good thing. After all, we all live in the environment. We’ve yet to create a closed system that separates us from it for a significant period of time, despite the best work of space researchers.

But, our economy is already suffering from a “prolonged recession.” Leave it to our Congress to pass legislation that “could lead to sweeping changes in the economy,” all in the name of “climate change.”

Protect your wallets folks, the government’s coming after them again. This legislation is indeed a first step. A first step back to the stone age – when life was nasty, brutish, and short.

Three quarters of us are idiots

2009-06-25T20:08:36Z

That’s right. Three quarters of us are apparently idiots, duped by politicians and an alarmist media into believing that by reducing our so-called “greenhouse gas” emissions we can do something about “climate change.” That’s according to a Washington Post – ABC poll of 1,001 American adults.

One of the sharpest dividing lines in attitudes toward climate legislation was age, with younger adults more receptive to cap and trade and federal regulation of greenhouse gases. Nearly two-thirds of those younger than 30 said they support cap and trade, and eight in 10 support federal limits on emissions. Among seniors, about four in 10 said they back a cap-and-trade proposal, and half favor federal intervention on emissions.

What this really means is that younger adults are more gullible about the environment than older adults. This is most likely due to propagandized “education” about anthropogenic global warming, or the more politically correct term these days “climate change,” which can even cover the possibility of global cooling.

Have we really forgotten that even if we somehow managed to cut back our emissions of so-called “greenhouse gasses” back to the level of emissions in 1990 that there would only be a marginal effect? Are we really alarmed by graphs that show exaggerated rises in the concentration of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere, when the real rate of increase is so small as to practically be insignificant? We’re still only talking about a few hundred parts per million after all. Does no one pay attention to the fact that recent evidence shows that there is no correlation whatsoever between global “average” temperatures and carbon dioxide emissions? Or that there is a much closer correlation between global “average” temperatures and solar magnetic activity? Or that “average” global temperature measurements are incredibly tricky to obtain when we only sample a miniscule portion of the world – mostly the part near our cities? Or even that “average” global temperatures have fallen in the twenty-first century compared to the last decade of the twentieth?

Oh wait… that last is most likely the reason why it’s called “climate change” instead of “global warming” now.

When three quarters of us are so alarmed by propaganda about the so-called “settled science” of “climate change” (Think about it, how settled can the science be when we have to change the terminology to distract from the fact that “global warming” isn’t a steadily increasing phenomenon?) that we think the government must eliminate our choices and reduce the energy available to drive our economy we’re really in trouble. Abdicating our freedom to the government seems inevitable when so many of us can’t even think for ourselves.

David and Santayana are right. Sorry about that Mr. Jacob. We just aren’t ready for direct democracy yet.

Common Sense

2009-06-18T16:55:07Z

I think that today's Founders Quote Daily from the Patriot Post should stand as an indictment to our generation…

“As parents, we can have no joy, knowing that this government is not sufficiently lasting to ensure any thing which we may bequeath to posterity: And by a plain method of argument, as we are running the next generation into debt, we ought to do the work of it, otherwise we use them meanly and pitifully. In order to discover the line of our duty rightly, we should take our children in our hand, and fix our station a few years farther into life; that eminence will present a prospect, which a few present fears and prejudices conceal from our sight.”
-- Thomas Paine, Common Sense, 1776

Trillion dollar deficits? Our founders knew that saddling the next generation with debt was a bad thing. We've not only saddled the next generation with debt, but the generation following that one. The left has tried to make the founders irrelevant. They’ve all but excised them from our history, instead teaching multiculturalism and the evils of our nation, all the while ignoring this truly great evil.

The national debt now averages out to a million dollars for a family of four. According to the National Association of Realtors, the median family income in the United States currently stands at about $58,500 per year. Assuming an average working lifetime from 20 year of age to 65 years of age, that amounts to a bit more than a third of the lifetime income per family. With the nation running trillion dollar deficits for the foreseeable future, the national debt will only rise. With unemployment on the rise in our shrinking economy, the family income will only fall.

I have to ask. At the rate we’re going, how long will it be before the national debt (averaged out per family) exceeds the total lifetime income of the average American family? And what do you think the consequences of that will be? Our governors (i.e. our elected representatives and their masters the federal bureaucracy) have abandoned common sense. When will the American people pick it up?

Will the U.S. end up supporting al Qaeda?

2009-06-17T21:04:19Z

That’s what might happen if we continue to pursue the “two state” solution to the Palestinian – Israeli conflict. It turns out that al Qaeda has an active cell in Gaza. Strangely, these “Palestinians” don’t seem to even recognize one of their staunchest allies – Jimmy Carter.

Perhaps one of the few things that work in our favor in the current war on terrorism (I am still allowed to use that term, even if it has fallen out of official favor) is the fact that many of these terrorist groups don’t seem to understand the old maxim “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” Perhaps they’ve been instructed by some of the imbeciles on the left that don’t understand it either. You know the ones – they complained about our supporting dictators and the like during Reagan’s presidency – when we were opposing the expansion of Soviet style communism.

As long as the “Palestinians” are fighting each other though, they’ve got less energy and resources to fight us. Now if only we’d stop funding them.

In the last two years, the US has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in building and training a 1,500-strong PA special force…

That’s money well spent isn’t it? That 1,500-strong special force couldn’t even provide security for Mr. Peanut (apologies to Planters).

Two states?

2009-06-16T17:41:25Z

Israel and Palestine? That’s really a non-starter. They tried that solution in the beginning. Israel got her state. The Palestinians refused, unwilling to live in their own state alongside a Jewish nation. The result has been a long “peace process” punctuated by the occasional cease-fire.

Not that it will do much good, but I propose at least a three-state solution. Israel, Hamas, and Fatah. Perhaps actually, a four-state solution would be even better. Israel, Hamas, Fatah, and reasonable non-terrorist Palestinians.

Ultimately though, even if either of these last two were to be implemented, we’d still be hearing about the “two-state” solution for the middle east. Hamas and Fatah would simply demand that Israel and the “reasonable non-terrorist” states be eliminated.

Maybe that’s what the left means by a “two state” solution in the first place. The state of Hamas and the state of Fatah. It’s a sure bet though that they don’t want to include our strongest ally in the middle east.

Who lives in a pineapple under the sea?

2009-06-13T06:13:39Z

I think this explains last November quite well…

I was just watching a commercial for a new program starring Jay Leno. He was doing one of those “man on the street” type of bits and he asked a woman “Who lives at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue?”

“I have no idea” was her reply.

Jay then asked her “Who lives in a pineapple under the sea?”

“Spongebob” she shot back almost instantly.

When people who are (presumably) of voting age can recognize a cartoon character on a children’s program faster than they can recognize the address of our Commander In Chief, I think we’re in trouble. But then, the last eleven weeks have pretty much confirmed that fear anyway.

Then and Now – again.

2009-06-09T06:10:36Z

About a year ago, I wrote the following posting. Nothing in it has really changed since, and it was one of my more popular postings, so I present it here again.

After a few years of serious thought on the subject, I've come to an inescapable conclusion: The United States of America today is nothing like the country that our founders envisioned. The form of our government pays lip service to the form of government that the founders established, but it's very different in fundamental ways. Even so, I still find it preferable to the governments of any other nation on Earth. I think I'd prefer the government our founders envisioned, but the changes would be a shock for us all.

One of the first things that distinguishes our country from that envisioned by the founders is how we think of it. Today we say that “The United States of America is” great. (Well, I say that. There are some that would say otherwise.) In the past, I imagine that we might have said that “The United States of America are” great. It's a subtle distinction, but the founders envisioned the federal government as tying together individual states to present a common face to the world. That vision changed sometime in the mid nineteenth century. The government of the United States was not originally a government “of the people, by the people, for the people” as stated in President Lincoln's Gettysburg address. Rather it was a government “of the states, by the states, for the states”.

The government of the United States of America is not, and never has been a democracy. In fact, as far as I can tell, the government of no nation on Earth is a democracy. In a democracy, the people vote on every decision of the government. Imagine how unwieldy that would be with a population of over three hundred million people. We have a hard enough time as it is determining who is eligible to vote in national elections and counting ballots accurately even when we have months to prepare for the election. Is it any wonder that even today's proponents of direct democracy don't really argue for a “true” democracy?

Instead of a democracy, our federal government is a representative republic. We (the people) elect representatives to enact our laws. Under the original system, as envisioned by our founders and hammered out with much compromise, the people elected representatives to “the people's House”, the House of Representatives, and the state legislatures elected two representatives to serve in the Senate. That changed in April of 1913 when the seventeenth amendment to the Constitution was ratified. Now the only real distinctions between the House of Representatives and the Senate have to do with which house can initiate legislation for appropriations and which house gets to ratify treaties, the appointment of ambassadors, judges, and cabinet officials. That, and the length of their respective members terms of office.

As I said earlier, I'd prefer the government our founders envisioned. That includes the way our Senators are chosen. I'd personally like to see the seventeenth amendment repealed and return the selection of our Senators to the state legislatures. It's a fair bet that that's not going to happen in my lifetime though, if ever. Besides, it might make little difference anyway. My wife is fond of reminding me that our elected representatives don't listen to the people who elected them anyway. For the most part, she's right about that, and I don't think that Senators are or would be any different. As it stands now, our Senators pander to the people at election time and then do what they damned well please once they're in office. Returning the power of selection to the state legislatures isn't likely to change that at all, especially when state legislators act the same way themselves.

For that matter, repealing the seventeenth amendment would probably have little effect for another reason. Part of the reason why the seventeenth amendment was even proposed in the first place has to do with the fact that state legislatures couldn't be bothered to live up to their responsibilities under the federal Constitution in the first place. As I understand it, some states went without representation in the Senate because their legislatures couldn't select Senators. Other state legislatures simply passed on the responsibility for the selection of Senators to the people, holding popular elections and then selecting the winners of the popular elections to be their senators. It was a freshman senator (Joseph Little Bristow, a Republican from Kansas) that proposed the seventeenth amendment, although he was elected by the Kansas legislature. Interestingly enough, Sen. Bristow was defeated in his re-election bid in 1914.

The seventeenth amendment wasn't the only change in the structure of our federal government though. There have been a total of twenty-seven amendments to our Constitution over the centuries since it was ratified. Quite possibly the most disastrous of all of them is the fourteenth amendment. I say this even though the authors of the fourteenth amendment quite possibly had the most noble of intentions, and despite the fact that I am almost certain that my liberal friends will excoriate me for it.

First of all, the fourteenth amendment was for the most part unnecessary. The fourteenth amendment didn't abolish slavery in the United States, that was done by the thirteenth amendment. The fourteenth amendment didn't grant the right to vote to black people or former slaves, that was done by the fifteenth amendment. Among the amendments to the Constitution that I like, these two, the thirteenth and fifteenth are near the top of the list of positive changes to our government's structure. While the fourteenth amendment also included some positive changes, I think that the law of unintended consequences has resulted in some negative changes. Some of the negative consequences of the fourteenth amendment (in my opinion) include:

Anchor babies —
The fourteenth amendment begins with the statement “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” At first read this seems like a good idea, and the intention was obviously to remove any doubt about the citizenship of people who were born slaves and freed by the thirteenth amendment. This was wholly unnecessary though, since Congress could have enacted a law that granted citizenship to those people since Article 1 section 8 of the Constitution explicitly grants the Congress the power to “establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization”. The unintended consequence of the Constitutional amendment as it is worded is that we now have people deliberately violating our immigration laws with the express intent of having a child in the United States so that that child can be a United States citizen and serve as a buffer to prevent their deportation.
The effective rewriting of the first amendment —
The fourteenth amendment states in part “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” Our federal courts, (particularly our Supreme court) have, in my opinion interpreted this badly. Explicit prohibitions against certain federal actions have been extended to the states, to our counties, to our cities, and even to our public schools as a result. Where the first amendment begins with the words “Congress shall make no law”, court interpretations of the fourteenth amendment have changed the intent to “no governmental body or agency shall make any regulation”. Some people see this as a good thing, but to me it has resulted in a perversion of the first amendment. Where once, Congress could enact no law that prohibited the free expression of religion our courts do so with impunity, in the name of prohibiting the “endorsement” of religion by government at any level.

Even liberal Democrats should have reason to dislike this part of the fourteenth amendment. After all, they love to repeat the mantra that President Bush was “selected, not elected”. It was the equal protection clause of the fourteenth amendment that was invoked by the Supreme Court when they decided Bush v. Gore in 2000, effectively ending the recounts in Florida, resulting in President Bush's electoral victory. Ironically, if the full recount using uniform standards that was mandated by the Supreme Court had been undertaken in the first place, Al Gore might have been President. It was his decision to try counting only heavily Democratic counties in the first place that resulted in his election loss.

For a while, I labored under the misapprehension that the fourteenth amendment also placed undue restrictions on the state legislatures' right to determine the means by which presidential Electors are chosen as granted by Article II of the Constitution.

Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress: but no Senator or Representative, or Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States, shall be appointed an Elector.

My thoughts were that to a certain degree the fourteenth amendment overrules that, without explicitly modifying it. The second paragraph of the fourteenth amendment says in part “But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice-President of the United States … is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State.”

A more careful reading tells me that the fourteenth amendment does not affect the rights of state legislatures to determine the means of selection of Electors. After all, it says “at any election for the choice of electors”. State legislatures are still free to choose electors without holding an election. It's just that when they choose to hold an election as the means for selecting electors that they have to allow everyone eligible to vote to vote or the state loses some of its representation. The elided portion of this amendment (in my quote above) was actually worthwhile and probably necessary.

The third and fourth sections of the fourteenth amendment should probably have stood alone. Of the entire amendment, these sections seems to be the most justifiable to me. So really, my primary objections to the fourteenth amendment only apply to the first section — the one most likely to get me in trouble with liberals today. The first section of the fourteenth amendment truly needs amending. Even there, the equal protection clause is, on the whole, a good thing. Sadly, nothing in the first section seems to apply to the federal government.

Of course, just as with the seventeenth amendment, I doubt that we'll ever see changes to the fourteenth amendment during my lifetime, or even my children's lifetime. These two amendments have served to make our federal government work the way that it does today, and they are a part of what our government is today. Wishing for a return to the better part of the past isn't going to accomplish much. We have to live with the government we have today. That means that we must accept Senators that pander to the people rather than look after the interests of their state governments and we have to accept anchor babies and, sadly, the perversion of the original intent of the first amendment as a limitation on the federal government.

Probably the two largest changes between the government envisioned by the founders and the government of the United States today has to do with the expansion of the powers of the federal government, and the unchecked, unbridled power of the federal courts.

To illustrate my point about the greatly expanded powers of the federal government, consider this quote from James Madison (kindly provided by the Patriot Post)…

[T]he government of the United States is a definite government, confined to specified objects. It is not like the state governments, whose powers are more general. Charity is no part of the legislative duty of the government.
— James Madison (speech in the House of Representatives, 10 January 1794)

From this and a careful reading of the Constitution itself, it is clear that the founders intended the state governments to retain their governance over the people and that the federal government was intended to govern and protect the states. The founders wanted a limited federal government with only those powers necessary to treat with foreign nations as an equal and to unify and protect the states.

It's very clear to me that the founders did not envision a massive entitlement system woven into the very fabric of our federal government. [Update 6/8/2009: They’d be truly appalled at the massive redistribution of wealth and government takeover of private industry of today.] And yet today we have our social security system — a government mandated Ponzi scheme if there ever was one, extracting by force of law moneys from today's workers to provide retirement benefits and death and disability benefits to yesterday's workforce. The founders would never have approved of our social security system. As Madison said, “Charity is no part of the legislative duty of the government.”

As it is, the social security system is unsustainable. We've known that for decades. I cannot remember a time in my adult life when politicians and economists weren't warning of the time in the future when social security would be bankrupt. The sad thing is, they've been warning about it for decades, and people seem to have become convinced that it just isn't so. After all, we've all heard the stories about Chicken Little and the boy who cried wolf. Just because they've been warning us for so long doesn't mean it's not true though.

The myth of the social security “lockbox” is just that, a myth. Today's social security recipients are not being paid using moneys they put into the system, they're being paid with moneys that today's workers are paying into the system through payroll taxes. One modern trend is to reduce the size of your family by having fewer children. Fortunately, thanks to the big expansion in our population during the “baby boom” the birth rate hasn't been going down. It's nearly twice what it was in 1940, and has essentially held steady since 1955, fluctuating a bit up and down, but pretty close to four million births per year over the last six decades. As long as the birth rate holds steady, we can probably be assured of a steady inflow of funds into the social security system. The problem is the outflow keeps increasing.

As more and more “baby boomers” begin to retire and draw social security, the system must pay out more and more benefits. Adding to the problem, the average life expectancy in the U.S. keeps going up. Where it once was “common knowledge” that the average life expectancy was about 70 years, it is now 78.1 years, or nearly a decade more that people will be receiving social security benefits. For women it's now 80.7 years. Paying out those benefits for an extra decade means more money is going out of the system than before.

I cannot remember the time when politicians weren't promising to “fix” social security. [Update 6/8/2009: and now they’re promising to “fix” our health care system – even though it’s not really broken.] Usually the fixes involve higher payroll taxes, or raising the cap on income for payroll taxes (that's the plan of the Democratic party's candidate for the next Presidential Election), cutting the level of benefits, or raising the retirement age. “Privatizing” social security has been touted as a “fix” for the problem, because private investments tend to do better in general than the “"fixed”" rate of return in the social security system. [Update 6/8/2009: Well, they did until our government decided to “fix” Wall Street by precipitating the housing “crisis”, and the “bail out”of the banking system.] Of course, politicians object to that plan because the moneys going into the system are being used to pay current benefits. Privatizing them for future benefits simply won't work because less funds will be available to pay current benefits — or for the government to raid for the general fund. Worse still, “privatizing” social security “accounts” might actually require the government to apply real accounting principles to the system. People might actually begin to expect that the money they put into the system will be used to pay their benefits.

The real fix for the mess that the social security system is in is even less likely to be accepted than privatizing it. The plain fact of the matter is that the federal government has no business being in the retirement account business in the first place. Our founders didn't want government to be running entitlement programs. Our founders didn't provide any authorization for such a program in the Constitution. Oh, I'm sure that the words “general Welfare of the United States” in the first paragraph of Article 1 Section 8 might be interpreted to provide such an authorization, but it's clear from the words of Madison and others that that's not what the founders meant by that.

If Congress can do whatever in their discretion can be done by money, and will promote the General Welfare, the Government is no longer a limited one, possessing enumerated powers, but an indefinite one, subject to particular exceptions.
— James Madison (Letter to Edmund Pendleton - 1792)

No, the real fix for the mess that our social security system is in is to abolish it entirely. It's unconstitutional, it's a violation of the founders intent, and it infringes upon states' rights. States' rights? “What the hell are you talking about?” I hear you asking. Well, how about the tenth amendment to the Constitution. You know the one I'm talking about surely…

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

That plainly says, at least to me, that since there is no authorization in the federal Constitution for the Congress to implement a social security system of the type we currently have, and there is no prohibition in the federal Constitution on the states implementing such a plan that only the states have the authority to implement such a “social safety net.” The states after all were intended to govern the people, not the federal government.

“The state governments have a full superintendence and control over the immense mass of local interests of their respective states, which connect themselves with the feelings, the affections, the municipal institutions, and the internal arrangements of the whole population. They possess, too, the immediate administration of justice in all cases, civil and criminal, which concern the property, personal rights, and peaceful pursuits of their own citizens.”
— Joseph Story (Commentaries on the Constitution, 1833)

It's plain that a great many people in our nation are dependent upon social security. No politician in his (or her) right mind is going to suggest abolishing the program now. It's a reality and a fact of American life. It's also broken and prevents our government from spending its money on its real obligations. Not to mention the fact that it's only one example of many ways our federal government has usurped powers that belong to the states, done so poorly and polluted the vision of our founders. The Medicare system comes to mind as another example of such a program, as does the federal government's meddling in education — possibly the one example of federal overreaching that is even acknowledged by a federal entity (the National Archives).

Q. Where, in the Constitution, is there mention of education?
A. There is none; education is a matter reserved for the States.

All of this comes from a deliberate misinterpretation of the words “and general Welfare of the United States” in Article I, section 8, paragraph 1. No Democrat and no Republican politician today would dream of changing these things — of returning our federal government to the form envisioned by our founders, or of returning it to compliance with the plain meaning of the Constitution. The people wouldn't allow it. Too many of them are dependent upon the federal government in one way or another, or hope someday to be so. And that's truly sad.

As our federal government grows in power, exceeding its authority and assuming ever more control over the lives of the citizens of the many United States of America it is aided and abetted by the first of the three branches of government envisioned by the founders to exceed its constitutionally defined role — the courts. This is largely because of a flaw in the Constitution that was recognized early on by the Anti-Federalists and dismissed by the Federalists.

During the drafting of the Constitution, much vigorous debate centered around the powers that the government should have. The debate focused initially upon the powers of the executive and upon the makeup of the legislature. The system as it was ultimately established limited the powers of the President, giving Congress the ultimate power over his election, and the ability to vet his decisions. The President was given the power to appoint ambassadors and cabinet officers, but Congress (via the Senate) was given the power of refusal. The President was given the power to veto legislation, but Congress was given the ability to override that veto. The Legislature was divided into two houses, a “peoples” house (the House of Representatives) and a states house (the Senate). This compromise thwarted the will of some of the founders to have the legislature solely represent the people and thus grant more power to the larger states, and thwarted the will of others to ensure that each state had equal representation regardless of population. Congress was granted the power of impeachment to remove any and all officers of the United States federal government, and each house was given the ability to discipline its own members. Congress was also granted the power to determine the makeup of the federal courts, the hierarchy of the federal courts, and even to limit their jurisdiction. This is the system of “checks and balances” that was designed to prevent any branch of the government from assuming a role that did not belong to it.

Much has been said about the system of checks and balances. There is a general perception that we have three co-equal branches of government, and some of the founders even stated that it was so. A reading of the Constitution though doesn't give me that impression. It's plain to me that the founders (at least the ones that prevailed) intended for Congress to be the premier branch of the federal government. As the direct elected representatives of the people and the states it is natural and just that Congress ought to by right be the premier branch of the government. The presidency is in many ways subordinate to the Congress, charged with executing the laws that the Congress enacts, and subject in many ways to Congressional oversight. Not being directly chosen by the people or the states, the president can't truly speak for them. The courts ultimately were intended by a plain reading of the Constitution, and by the words of the founders themselves to have an even more limited role.

Far less is said in the Constitution about the federal courts than about either the Presidency or the Legislature. Nothing whatsoever is said in the Constitution about a check on the decisions of the courts. Their jurisdiction may be limited by Congress, but if they exceed that jurisdiction there is no remedy described. Justices of the Supreme Court are appointed to indefinite terms and hold their offices “during good Behaviour,” a nebulous term that in practice means until they choose to step down. This is where the founders failed in my estimation, and ultimately paved the way for the most profound change in the federal government of all.

To begin with, the founders recognized, and the federalists asserted that it was fundamentally important that the power of judgement had to be separate from the executive power. After all, it's not good for someone to be “judge, jury, and executioner” together with being the arresting officer. That may have worked in the movies for Judge Dredd, but it's really a system of injustice, not of justice. The federalists also asserted that the power of judgement had to be separate from the legislative branch. It simply wouldn't do to make law on the fly while trying a case (as our courts appear to do these days).

“there is no liberty, if the power of judging be not separated from the legislative and executive powers.”
— Federalist No. 78.

Unfortunately, as I described earlier, the Constitution didn't say enough about the Judiciary. The failure of the founders to establish sufficient checks on the Judiciary resulted in judicial oligarchy. Today our courts make law from the bench, substituting the policy preferences of judges and “justices” for the laws enacted by the legislature. They have usurped the power of the legislature by claiming for themselves the power to “construe the laws according to the spirit of the Constitution.” The anti-federalists warned of this.

…The supreme court under this constitution would be exalted above all other power in the government, and subject to no control…
…The judges are supreme and no law, explanatory of the constitution, will be binding on them.
— Antifederalist No. 78 - 79

Sadly, the anti-federalists were right but the federalists dismissed their arguments. The Constitution doesn't grant the courts the power to legislate and it doesn't grant the courts the power to invalidate legislation. Perhaps tiredness after the long struggle to hammer out the many compromises necessary to craft our Constitution had crept in, but the federalists were wrong. They asserted…

In the first place, there is not a syllable in the plan under consideration which directly empowers the national courts to construe the laws according to the spirit of the Constitution, or which gives them any greater latitude in this respect than may be claimed by the courts of every State.
— Federalist No. 81

The problem with that of course is that there was not a syllable in the plan under consideration that directly prohibited the national courts from doing that very thing. The founders were very careful to limit the powers of Congress. They were very careful to limit the powers of the President. They were not so careful to limit the powers of the judiciary. It didn't take long for the judiciary to assume powers that weren't “directly” authorized to them under the Constitution.

“It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is. Those who apply the rule to particular cases, must of necessity expound and interpret that rule. If two laws conflict with each other, the courts must decide on the operation of each.”
— Chief Justice John Marshall

This was a plain usurpation of the legislative power. Under our Constitution it is emphatically the province and duty of the Congress to say what the law is. After all, it's the Congress that is empowered to “make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof.” Article I Section 8 of the constitution does NOT say that “The Courts shall have the power to make all laws.”

The anti-federalists were right, there is no check upon the power of the courts. But what about Congress' power to limit the court's jurisdiction? The courts routinely ignore it and other matters of jurisdiction.

…the Court's intervention in this military matter is entirely ultra vires.
— Justice Antonin Scalia (Dissenting in Boumediene v. United States)

Ultra Vires? That's Latin and translates as “Beyond the powers.” The term is from corporate law, but the essential idea is that the court is acting beyond its authority and its intervention in the matter is illegal.

What about Congress' other, ultimate power over the courts? The power of impeachment? I have to ask the question “what good is it?”. As some of my liberal readers were fond of telling me when I took note of Nancy Pelosi's blatant disregard of the Logan Act, “a law that isn't enforced might as well not be a law at all” (they didn't comment with those statements, but they did speak to me about it, some via email). In this case, a power that isn't used might as well not be a power at all.

Seldom is a judge impeached, at the federal level or even at the state level. It takes something truly egregious to result in the impeachment of a judge. [Update: Even then, it doesn’t appear to disqualify the impeached from serving in the Congress.] In the state of Washington, even a DUI isn't enough to result in the impeachment of a judge. It's so rare that the last time it happened was in 1989, when Alcee Hastings was impeached and removed from office, and he was only the sixth judge to be removed from office by the United States Senate in this way. It has been nearly twenty years since a judge was successfully impeached. Who knows? Perhaps the judiciary isn't completely immune. The House is considering another impeachment even as I write this.

Today's federal government has far exceeded the visions of our founders. In part it has done so through politicians simply ignoring those visions and pandering to the weaknesses of the people. In part it has done so by slowly evolving toward a mobocracy rather than a limited federal republic. In part it has done so with the willing acquiescence of the states, giving up their power and authority because of internal strife and faction. In part it has done so through the power play between the various branches, with the courts seeking supremacy over all as Justice Scalia said in Boumediene… “What drives today's decision is neither the meaning of the Suspension Clause, nor the principles of our precedents, but rather an inflated notion of judicial supremacy.”

Of course, this too is unlikely to change. Our politicians and special interests love to use the courts to enact laws that simply wouldn't get past the political branches of the government. Where the people have expressed their will and it goes contrary to the interests of a particular group lawsuits seem to be the way to enact policy preferences that are otherwise unacceptable to the people. This doesn't just happen at the federal level, although it may ultimately reach that level. The California supreme court recently overturned the will of 61% of the people of California, in a move that may eventually substitute the will of four judges for the will of the entire American people. If you can't get the majority of the people to agree with you, it seems that a lawsuit is the way to go. [Update: It took a constitutional amendment to reign in the California supreme court, and even that was nearly not enough.]

You'd think that with opinions like this I might simply give up hope. Not so. Despite the fact that our government has evolved in ways that it was never intended to, and despite the fact that no politician will do anything serious to reverse the trend (who wants to give up power once attained after all), our nation is STILL the land of the free and the home of the brave. Our nation is still the BEST place to live on God's green Earth. Our liberties are still ensured by our Constitution and there are still people bent on preserving them. Returning to the founders vision might be a bit of a shock, but someday it just might happen. Unsustainable bloat in the federal bureaucracy will eventually see to that when the entitlement programs we've burdened ourselves with collapse under their own weight — just as all Ponzi schemes eventually do.

[Update 6/8/2009: Things really haven't changed since last year except as a matter of degree. As I said a few days ago, much of what we think is true about our country no longer is. Our republic has been replaced by a Judicial Oligarchy and an unaccountable bureaucracy. Meanwhile the media tries to distract us by telling us how “like a god” our current socialist President is.

A former co-worker of mine once asked me “how does it affect you personally.” I was at a loss to explain it then. It should be much more obvious how it affects us all now. If you hold stock in G.M. or Chrysler, wait a couple of months. When that paper becomes less than worthless you too will see how it affects us all personally.

I used to worry about sounding like an alarmist. The story of the boy who cried wolf was stuck too well in my head. Sadly, we let the wolf in the front door long ago, and now very few believe it.

Our national debt will continue to rise. We've gone from a recession to what very well could be a depression, and liberals will say that it's all “Bush's fault.” We throw good money stolen from the productive among us after bad, and as G.M. has so aptly demonstrated, it does nothing to fix the real problems in our economy.

No, conservatives haven’t been “crying wolf.” We’ve been warning about the coming disaster for decades. The fact that we haven’t completely collapsed isn’t because of those warnings though. Rather it’s because the gift that we inherited was so robust in the first place that what looks like a concerted effort to tear it down has only slowly been able to erode our liberties and our bounty. The way things are going though, it will eventually be destroyed, unless we do something to turn it around soon.

The eventual collapse isn’t something I want to see. And I don’t want my children to see it either. But it will come… unless we do something to change it.]

Pay to park and get towed anyway.

2009-06-08T21:56:11Z

That’s the way it works in Seattle according to the Seattle Times…

…tourists or those simply unfamiliar with downtown streets are being hit the hardest by the tows, thanks in part to pay stations that allow drivers to purchase parking through 6 p.m., despite signs that say otherwise.

That’s right. The pay stations (you know, those places where you pay for your parking) accept money from patrons in exchange for the right to park until 6 p.m. But, and here’s the kicker, if you park in the locations you’re paying to park in between 3 p.m. and 6 p.m., your car will be ticketed and towed.

Yes, there are signs warning you that if your car is parked there from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. it will be towed, but the city is still collecting money from parkers during those hours. Normally, when you pay to park, you are purchasing a license to park. Here, if you pay to park, you may not be – unless you park somewhere else using your receipt.

Pay stations have lowered maintenance costs, break down less often and allow drivers to use several forms of payment, said Rick Sheridan, spokesman for the Department of Transportation.
Along with street signs, an electronic message says "See signs for restricted hours" when a pay station is "awakened" for a transaction.
Sheridan said pay stations theoretically could be reprogrammed to stop accepting payment at a certain time, depending on when tow-away zones are enforced on different streets.
But, he added, "that would make them lose their convenience factor."

So, considering that the pay station is automated, and issues you a receipt that a reasonable person from out of town might assume is a license to park, shouldn’t it only accept money for times when you can legally park? Programming the automated pay station to avoid that sort of confusion is the morally right thing to do… unless you’re working for the city. Then it causes the pay station to lose it’s “convenience factor.”

Convenient for the city. A nightmare for the tourist. No wonder I’ve grown to loath Seattle (and no, this hasn’t happened to me).

What Republic?

2009-06-04T18:23:58Z

I’ve made the comparison here and in other places on several occasions that our federal government is looking more and more like the communist ideal. I’ve said that what we are living under is less a constitutional republic than a socialist state.

After all, our judges no longer honor the plain words and meaning of the Constitution, written for plain men to understand. They’ve so twisted it that in some areas it now means the opposite of what it actually says. Congress hasn’t abided by the Constitution in over 150 years, and the Presidency for even longer. While on paper we live in a constitutional republic uniting the several states, in actuality the states have little or no power, and the people are ruled by unelected, unappointed bureaucrats – most of whom live thousands of miles away from the people whose lives they manage.

I’ve complained endlessly about the unfair taxation scheme that we live under. That the “progressive” tax we have is nothing less than a socialist wealth redistribution program. I’ve railed about the “welfare” program built into our tax code that gives people money for fornicating – have a baby you can’t afford to raise and the federal government gives you money from other peoples taxes as a reward. I’ve complained that the federal government has no business in the social welfare business.

I’ve illustrated in great detail how our federal government programs parallel the Marxists plans for overthrowing democracies and replacing them with first socialist then truly communist states. And yet I’ve been told that none of this is happening. I’ve been told that this isn’t the rise of socialism. I’ve been told that it “cannot” be socialism because the government doesn’t control the means of production.

Well, that argument isn’t true anymore, at least in the case of General Motors. Now that the federal government holds a 60% stake in General Motors, as the majority shareholder they do control the means of production for our largest domestic auto maker. It’s almost as if this was the plan all along for our industries.

The government already controls the banking industry. “Bail out” money came with strings. Some banks didn’t even want it, and now they can’t give it back! They (the federal government) have controlled auto makers through bureaucratic “standards” for decades. Now they control one directly as majority stockholder.

There is no industry, no business in our nation that the federal government doesn’t have its regulatory hooks in. Auto manufacturing is just the latest example. Even the creative industries like software engineering are regulated and controlled by bureaucrats in the federal government. We’ve even ceded creative control over software packaging and licensing to foreign governments in some cases.

The majority of our people have come to expect the government to be in everything. Once, long ago we were free to run our own lives with minimal government interference. That was what our founders wanted for us.

Liberty, once surrendered, cannot be recovered without paying the price in blood. Our liberty is gone. What little liberty we have is but an illusion. The ancient Greek democracies lasted only a couple of hundred years. The illusion of American democracy may last a little longer, but the substance is long gone.

Welcome to the “Brave New World” of the socialist bureaucracy. The “revolution” is complete. Now it’s just a matter of refinement.