Individual Liberty — Individual Responsibility 

Every now and then

Every now and then the things I see just really start to grate on me. And every now and then the innumeracy of people does as well.

Friday afternoon, as I was heading to my car from the office I noticed several dozen people standing around holding signs and chanting near the federal courthouse. They held signs saying that “Corporations aren’t people”,  “Veterans didn’t fight for profits”, and “Money isn’t speech”, among others. One sign, and I’m sorry I didn’t take pictures and my photographic memory ran out of film a long time ago, said something to the effect of “don’t outbid my vote”.

OK. I’m willing to admit that corporatism may not be the best thing for society, but I’m still tempted to ask a couple of questions.

What is a corporation? I suppose people will say that it’s a legal fiction designed to exploit the poor, or some such nonsense. Corporations have been around in one form or another since the Roman Empire. It’s an association of people working together toward a common goal.

Naturally there’s more to it than that. Corporations generally have a structure or hierarchy. They generally are formed to provide legal protection to the people that formed them. And, of course there’s that common goal thing.

In the end though, the corporation consists of people, whether those people be the partners that formed the corporation or its shareholders. And those people have a common, agreed upon, formalized purpose for banding together.

Now then, the people holding the signs presumably are grouped together for a common purpose as well. Based on what I saw they’re after two things – a reversal of the recent supreme court ruling holding that corporations have as much right to give money to political campaigns or disseminate a message as the individuals that make up those corporations do, and an end to the “unfair” profits that corporations make.

Apparently the idea is that if a corporation can spend massive amounts of money on a political campaign then it will drown out the speech of others. I beg to differ. It that were the case then how is it that recently in the “Golden State” we saw referendums pass despite their supporters being outspent by large margins?

And have these same people forgotten the aphorism “money talks, bullshit walks”? Yes… money is speech. Just as surely as pornography is speech.

No, the real problem with our political system has little to do with how much money people spend getting their message across. The real problem is that the message is pretty universally the same, or at least one of the problems anyway.

John McCain (thank the Lord above he’s not running for President this time) hinted at a real problem in our political system back when he championed McCain-Feingold, although his “solution” for it addressed the wrong problem. The problem with our political system is corruption. Perhaps that’s why people want to see big corporations prohibited from spending money on campaigns?

But that’s the wrong medicine for the ailment. I ask you, if a politician is corrupt, what’s the solution to the problem? Is it really to stop allowing people and corporations to spend money on political campaigns and advertising? Or is it to punish the politician. Do we punish the electorate or the corrupt electee?

As for the matter of bribery – who is more corrupt, the person that offers the bribe or the politician that takes it? Aren’t they both equally culpable?

What then constitutes a bribe? Surely there must be some sort of exchange of value – “do this for me and I’ll give you this”… How are we to distinguish between a group campaigning for a particular politician in order to gain something (preferential treatment) and another group campaigning for a particular politician in order to gain something (the election of a politician whose policies they favor)?

You just can’t fit the answers to those questions on a poster board or into a catch chant – can you?

So, the sign said “Veterans didn’t fight for profit”. That’s nice and catchy. What did they fight for? Let’s see… ostensibly in Afghanistan they fought to strike back at the murderous barbarians that attacked our nation on September 11, 2001. There the United States deposed the Taliban and allowed the Afghani people to establish their own government in its place – a Democracy. Do we get oil from Afghanistan? I don’t think so.

In Iraq, we went in to remove Saddam Hussein – after he had attacked Iran and even his own people with weapons of mass destruction. And yes, that’s exactly what he did. He was known to have possessed and used weapons of mass destruction. That was one of many reasons. We went in after he had shot at our own servicemen who were enforcing the terms of the surrender agreement that he was in continual violation of. And, we went to root out terrorists that went there after we invaded Afghanistan. Do we get oil from Iraq? I don’t think so.

Were these wars about profit? Hardly. They were both fought to expand the foothold of Democracy in the world and to strike blows against terrorist barbarians that use suicidal maniacs to spread fear. They were fought to spread Liberty!

What else does our military fight for? Well, I have to admit we really have misused it. Joining the blue helmets to act as the world’s police force is not something that I normally associate with defending our own liberties after all. And, what do we get when we do that? We get accused of imperialism – of course we get that even more when we hope to spread democracy and republican forms of government throughout the world.

I ask you… if you honestly believe in something to the point that you think other people should at least have the opportunity to be exposed to it (as say, the Jihadi’s do with Sharia) don’t you have an obligation to share it? And if you believe that people benefit from Liberty, Freedom, and the right to hold private property, is it imperialism to fight to give other people the ability to take up and assert those very rights?

Wait… did I say “the right to hold private property”? – And what exactly is that anyway… is it anything less that the right and ability to profit from your own labors?

Hm.. maybe our veterans did fight for profit after all – just not quite the way the poster declared.

A friend of mine “shared” a “photo” on Facebook recently (OK, the sharing part I get… the photo part not so much). The photo was more of a poster that quoted Bernie Sanders in 2011…

“This country does in fact have a serious deficit problem. But the reality is that the deficit was caused by two wars – unpaid for. It was caused by huge tax breaks for the wealthiest people in this country. It was caused by a recession as a result of the greed, recklessness and illegal behavior on Wall Street. And if those are the causes of the deficit, I will be damned if we’re going to balance the budget on the backs of the elderly, the sick, the children, and the poor. That’s wrong”.

Let’s analyze this screed for a moment.

First of all, what is a deficit? Isn’t it really the difference between the amount we spend as compared to the amount we take in annually – when the one exceeds the other? In other words, if there’s a deficit it’s something that happens from year to year. The deficit isn’t the debt. It’s the amount we overspend every year.

OK, so the Afghanistan and Iraq war aren’t paid for. That’s debt, not deficit. In any case, the annual deficit is over ten times the annualized cost of those two wars combined if I recall correctly (See the table below).

For that matter, this nation has been running a deficit every year for a long time before those “uses of force” were even “authorized” by Congress. Even during the so called surplus years of the Clinton presidency we never stopped running a deficit. We just took money from social programs and moved it around to give the illusion that we were taking in more than we were spending. But that’s all it was, an illusion.

“Huge tax breaks” for the wealthiest? Excuse me  Mr. Sanders – but those tax breaks were largely responsible for reducing the total amount of our deficit. They kick started the economy after Wall Street was hit by barbarians and allowed the President during those times to see unemployment reduced after the attack until it was back in the four percent range – less than half of the “new normal” under the current administration and congress.

As for the “greed, recklessness and illegal behavior” on Wall Street? How about your own recklessness in denying that there was any problem in the two government sponsored entities you were touting before the economy tanked, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac? How about the recklessness of the programs that YOU sponsored that not only encouraged, but practically demanded that Banks lend money to people regardless of their ability to pay? When you’re forced to lend money to people who won’t pay, what do you do to make sure you don’t get left holding the bag when they finally default?

Our deficit was caused more by cronyism than anything else. We didn’t really need to revisit and re-implement the failed Keynesian economic policies of the past. Taking money from the productive in society to give it to a chosen few – to guarantee the success of political cronys that have otherwise failed is the cause of our deficit. Spending TRILLIONS of dollars with little or no benefit is the cause of our deficit. Here are a few numbers to look at.

Amount		Description
$125,000		Annual income threshold for being held as “wealthy”.
$1,000,000		A million dollars
$1,000,000,000		A billion dollars
$129,000,000,000		Annual Cost of two wars
$1,560,000,000,000		ANNUAL deficit.

Lord, I hate innumeracy! Here’s another thing that bothers me. While it’s true that our politicians earn lots of money it seems that people have been sucked into the whole class warfare thing for so long that it has become normal to be angered by what other people earn. Another friend of mine “shared a photo” recently… This one compared the salaries of politicians to the salaries of our military and the social security benefits of retirees… then it tried to make a point that completely ignored another facet of reality…

Salary of retired US President		$450,000	for LIFE
Salary of House/Senate members		$174,000	for LIFE
Salary of Speaker of the House		$223,500	for LIFE
Salary of Majority/Minority Leader		$193,400	for LIFE
Average Salary of soldier deployed in Afghanistan		$38,000	per YEAR
Average Income of seniors on Social Security		$12,000	per YEAR

The “photo” then stated “I think we found where the cuts should be made!”

While it might seem outrageous to some that our politicians are paid so highly (some would think they’re paid poorly), especially in relationship to the salary of our military and retirees, this isn’t a great jumping off point for budget cuts.

How many living Presidents and former Presidents are there in this country? How many living congressmen or senators? How many of those were ever Speaker of the House or the Majority or Minority leaders? Even if you added up their total compensation for life it would be a drop in the bucket compared to the total outlays for Social Security or for soldiers earning combat pay. There are tens of millions of retirees after all, so our total outlays just on them are likely a thousand times that that we could save even if we totally eliminated the salaries and retirement benefits of all of those federal politicians…

If we really want to get things under control we’ve got to stop this petty class warfare BULLSHIT which is based on nothing less than covetousness and start looking at where our REAL budget problems come from.