Clarification

The hunting club story wasn't about Social Security, it was about the fairness of the whole political and economic system that we currently have. I guess I didn't make that clear. What I was trying to say is that the system benefits the rich more than the poor because the rich people contribute more to the system. The more you put in, the more you get out, sounds fair to me. I'm not saying that it's the poor people's fault. Obviously, if you ain't got nothing, you can't pay nothing. The guys in the hunting club solved this dilemma by providing two other ways that the members could fulfill their obligation if they couldn't easily come up with a hundred dollars.

Maybe that's what they need to do with our system, provide some way that the poor people can make a contribution. In my previous post, I said something about how the ancient hunter-gatherers found ways that people who were not so good at hunting and gathering could contribute to their system, thus justifying their membership in the tribe. This not only benefited those individuals, it benefitted the whole tribe by making use of diverse skills and abilities that the average hunter-gatherer might not have time to develop. This diversification of labor was the beginning of civilization. Without it, we would still be chucking rocks at wild animals for a living.

I haven't figured out yet exactly what kind of contribution our poor people could make. The first impulse is to put them to work on some kind of government project, but what caused the problem in the first place is that there aren't a lot of useful low skilled jobs to be had these days. If the poor could find some kind of well paying jobs that they were qualified to perform, they wouldn't be poor in the first place. Everybody says that the answer is education, but you have said that the poor can't get a decent education in the crummy schools that we provide for them. Truth be known, a lot of well educated people are unemployed or underemployed as it is. I have believed for a long time that what we need is some alternate way for people to make a living, since there doesn't seem to any future in working anymore, but I still don't know what that is.

Social Security: I've got nothing against Social Security, now that I've gotten my share out of it. All the years I was working and paying in, I never expected to get a dime of that money back. This was probably due to my association with paranoid conservative types who predicted that S.S. would be bankrupt by the time I was old enough to retire. Since then, I have learned not to believe everything that people tell me.

Public Health Care: I honestly do not remember the single payer plan ever being proposed while Obamacare was being debated, but you follow the news a lot more closely than I do, so I will take your word for it. I do remember looking up some of the systems in other countries, particularly the U.K and Canada, and concluding that Obamacare was none of the above. The Canadian system was my favorite, and I don't know why something like that wasn't proposed here. If that's what you call "single payer", I would vote for it.

Labor reforms: My experience with the 40 hour week was that it was largely a myth. Those guys at the paper mill were always trying to get me to work overtime, and not just management either. Most of my hourly colleagues seemed to think that there as something wrong with me because I refused voluntary overtime and repeatedly tried to get my union brothers and sisters to try to negotiate mandatory overtime out of our contract. Nowadays, I understand that a lot of employers want their people to work less than 40 hours a week, and a guy needs to have two or three of those part time jobs if he wants to get his 40 hours in. The other labor reforms you mentioned are good things, even if they were passed by liberals. Of course, none of it means anything if you don't have a job, but that's a whole nother story.

You seem to be saying that it's fair for people to get something for nothing. I would prefer to work for a living myself, and I think that many of the poor people would too. Like I said, though, there doesn't seem to be any future in that.

Got to go, a storm is rolling in and the lights are blinking. See you when you come back.

meanwhile the rich keep getting richer and the poor keep getting poore

I’m having a hard time relating your hunting club story to anything. Are you saying some people should pay their social security by mending fences or selling tickets to social security dinners?

If we are talking about social security, I think that it does pretty well with the idea that everybody contributes to it. Even the lowliest part time worker at McDonalds gets fica taken out of his paycheck, and people who don’t pay anything into it never get to collect it.

Of course nobody gets exactly what they put into it, many people die before they ever collect a penny, but it’s basically an insurance policy. Some people never get sick and never collect on their health insurance policy and that money goes to pay for people who get sick a lot.

I just don’t see what you have against social security, or even if you have anything against it.

And where do you stand on single payer? I know that you hate the way the that insurance companies get such a big cut, and so do I, but I don’t think you would be for a single payer, so what do you expect? As for the democrats not getting it when they had both houses, well they had some blue dogs, and that combined with the republican party voting en masse against it, and waging a strident campaign against it, I think the onus for killing the single payer lays much more heavily on the republicans. And basically the reps were against Obamacare no matter what. They used to like the payer mandate until it became part of Obamacare and then they hated it. They agreed that the current system doesn’t work well, but they never had any plan of their own. So the hell with them.

Is any of this really fair? Is life itself fair? Who knows? It is what it is, and it's all we've got to work with for now.

I think that is what the conservatives were saying during the gilded age when people had sixty hour work weeks and monopolies ruled the economy, but the progressives and the socialists fought that and among other things got the forty hour work week which you enjoyed working at the mill. And things were better for awhile, but now we are back at the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer at an alarming rate, and that seems to be just fine with you.

Going down to Missouri this weekend, so I might be a day or two later getting back to the fray.

The Beagle and Bass Model

Not to be confused with the modern Freehold of Beaglesonia, the Beagle and Bass Hunting and Fishing Club was an organization of which my father was a member back in the day. At one point it was decided to assess each member an additional $100 above and beyond the annual dues that they were already paying. Now a hundred dollars was a lot of money in those days, and some of the members would have been hard pressed to come up with it. It was a popular proposal nevertheless, because everybody wanted the club to do more of what it had already been doing.

The club held an annual fund raising dinner-dance to which the tickets cost one dollar, so it was decided that, for each ticket a member sold, one dollar would be credited towards his $100 extra assessment. They had also agreed to do some fencing work for a certain farmer in exchange for hunting privileges on his land. It so happened that the minimum wage at the time was exactly one dollar, so it was decided that, for each hour a member worked on Oren's fences, the club would credit him with one dollar towards his assessment. So there were three ways that a member could pay his assessment, in any combination he chose. Some members would rather sell tickets than build fences, some members chose to do a little of both, making up the difference with cash, and some members would rather just pay the hundred dollars and get it over with.

This is not hypothetical, it's a true story taken from real life. I chose it as an example because the math was easy, even for me, but I suppose you could plug in any numbers that you wanted to, as long as the various methods of payment were of equivalent value. The point being that, if you want to get something out of an organization, you first have to put something in. Ideally, every member should make an equal contribution but, if you limit the contributions to cash only, it puts an unreasonable burden on the poorer members. Some people have more time than money, some people have more money than time, and everybody is not equally gifted with the same skills. Nevertheless, everybody should contribute something before they are allowed to draw anything out. Otherwise, the pot will eventually be empty and no good to anybody.

Social Security was supposed to be self funding, and it was until just recently. If present trends continue, however, there will soon be more people drawing out than putting in, and the system will go bankrupt. Taking money from another program is not the answer, at least not for the people who are currently benefitting from the other program. If Social Security is to be "saved" in its present form, they will have to increase the inflow and/or decrease the outflow, either of which is likely to make the system a lot less popular than it has been up to now. I have already drawn out more than I ever put in, so it's no skin off my nose. They could discontinue the program entirely and I would be money ahead. It's not my fault, I never voted for the thing but, if people want to throw their money away, I'll take it.

I don't remember hearing that the single payer medical plan was ever officially proposed. They might have talked about it, but I don't think that it ever came up for a vote. Furthermore, the Republicans didn't "let" Obama do anything, since they were the minority in both houses at the time. They stalled Obamacare as long as they could, but they didn't have the votes to kill it.

Is any of this really fair? Is life itself fair? Who knows? It is what it is, and it's all we've got to work with for now.

the income inequality distribution graph

In the early days of Republicanism it was they that supported public works while the Democrats opposed them. Well if you go back far enough in the history of the political parties you find it hard to figure which was the party of the left and which was the party of the right.

The smartest thing we could do with social security, considering how much longer we are all living is extend the age at which we get it. Of course that will never happen because whoever suggests that is going down in flames. The other problem is that congress refuses to fund it the way they should, but then they are that way with everything.

This is an unfair charge that Obamacare was implemented to help the insurance companies make even more money. Obama pushed hard for the single payer but the reps wouldn’t let him have it, so he had to take what he could get.

I’ll admit to flaws in the restaurant example. There are always flaws in setting up these little examples because they inherently misrepresent something. I did say they all paid five bucks so we know they all contributed equally. Whether or not that reflects real life is irrelevant, that’s why it is an example. I just wanted to know that if the situation was as described, would that seem unfair to you. Yes or no, like the lawyer to the witness. Of course this is bogus too, not all questions can be answered that way, it is just a trick of the interviewer to make the interviewee look like he is dodging the question. Of course we never use deceptive questioning in the halls of Beaglesonia.

But here’s an example that is widely used: the level playing field. We are all of us
Americans playing on a level playing field, and we all have an equal chance to get rich, and if for some reason the playing field becomes unlevel why we should do whatever is in our means to relevel it. I believe if we asked any politician that unfair choice of yes or no, they would all say yes. They might differ in what is to be done to relevel it, but they would think it should be made level.

Of course in reality it can never be really level. We want to give our kids advantages. Should we not be able to pay for the kid to go to a better school, even if our neighbor can’t afford that and his kid has go to a crappier school where his kid will learn less and rub shoulders with poorer kids who won’t have the connections that our kid going to Snooty High will have? Our kid doesn’t have any greater moral right to the road to riches than the neighbor kid has, but there it is.

So this is all I am saying, but big deal, so what? Everybody knows that. I have wasted all that time the legions of Beaglesonia followers have spent reading this just to say that? Hardly seems fair.

Arrgh, you know, it seems like I spend a good part of the morning driving towards my point, and by the time I get there I see the day is slipping away and I have to get out and about before I can finish my journey, and so it has happened again today.

The point I want to make is that isn’t there some point on the income equality distribution graph, where it just doesn’t seem right, where something should be done to change it, just for the sake of fairness? There. Yes or no.

Nothing Comes From Nothing

What I said was that all governments, by their very nature, are socialist to some degree, but some are more socialist than others. In saying that governments confiscate and redistribute wealth, I left out an important part. They don't necessarily redistribute the confiscated wealth directly to individuals, some of it is used for public works projects like roads and bridges. In a manner of speaking, it's the same only different. They take our money and build a road that everybody can use, no matter how much tax they paid into the system. A pure libertarian would say that they shouldn't even do that, but I disagree. Private property is worthless if the owner can't access it, and  public roads are the most efficient means to provide that access. If all roads were private, people would have to pay tolls to use them, and the cost of the tolls would be added to every product that is transported on them, which is not all that different from the taxes we pay now, except that the government cannot arbitrarily deny access to public roads like a private road owner could. So not all socialism is a bad thing but, of course, not everybody agrees about how much is too much.

Social Security is certainly an expression of socialism, but it has worked surprisingly well, up till now. People have been predicting that the fund would go bankrupt for a long time, and it hasn't happened yet. I think there is general agreement, however, that, if present trends continue, the system will run out of money sooner or later. When that happens, they are going to have to do something, either modify the system or scrap it altogether and start all over again with something different. Maybe they will come up with something like Obamacare, where everybody is required to invest part of their earnings in some kind of private pension plan. If they do, it will likely be the Democrats who push for it, even though, like Obamacare, it will be a sweetheart deal for the big investment companies. So much for the Republicans being the party of big business.

Your restaurant analogy has one thing wrong with it: In real life, we don't all contribute equally to the system. If everybody in the restaurant paid a different amount of money for their meal, and they all got the same meal, would that be fair? Of course, in real life, everybody does not have the ability to contribute equally to the system, so it would be unreasonable to expect them to. An idea about that just now popped into my head, but it could be kind of a long story, so I'll save it for tomorrow.

Wealth is not created out of nothing. Money is created out of nothing, but money is not wealth, it just represents wealth. If they create more money than there is wealth for it to represent, the money is  devalued, which is commonly called "inflation". Transfer is not the same thing as creation. If you take a dollar from one guy and give it to another guy, they still only have one dollar between the two of them.

When you talk about fair distribution of wealth, it implies that it is somebody's job to distribute it. In a hypothetical state of nature, there is no distribution. All the stuff is out there and it's everybody's job to go get it for himself. Unfortunately, some people try to get more than their fair share by taking it away from somebody who has already went out and gotten it for himself. To remedy that, "governments were instituted among men". On the other hand, if everybody goes out and gets what they want for themselves, what do you do about the people who lack the skill or opportunity to do so? If you just let them starve to death, you are depriving the system of people who, although they are lousy hunter-gatherers, might be good craftsmen, inventors, or nurturers of your children. Although it is unreasonable to expect everybody to contribute the same amount of meat to the communal cooking pot, there might be some way to assign equivalent value to the contributions of the people who made the pot, and the people who stir the pot and keep the fire going while the rest of us are out hunting and gathering more food.

bowls of soup and a benjamin

Well then in short every economic system is capitalist. And every government is socialist. So that when you call Obama a socialist you are saying he is just like everybody else. And how can you speak of creeping socialism if our country was always socialist anyway. Maybe you mean to say every economic system has elements of capitalism, and every government has elements of socialism. And I suppose you could say that every ideology has elements of libertarianism. So I guess that allows you to call yourself a libertarian when you choose to, though you eschew many of the tenets. I suppose I could call myself a libertarian too because I like the isolationist legal dope part.

So then I take it you approve of social security. Good for you. Here is an example of the government making you do what’s good for you. As Bohemians, you and I, can only rue the free spending, no saving, ways of most Americans. So that at least now that they are forced to save via social security, they are not so much a drain on their kids, or a sad-eyed pathetic mob, that you and I would have to support because you can’t just let a person die for Chrissake, though some tea party types cheer the thought. I take the last example from, I don’t remember the exact occasion but it was at one of those fire eating confabs of conservatives, oh here it is:http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2011/09/tea-party-debate-audience-cheered-idea-of-letting-uninsured-patients-die/

My rich getting richer, poor getting poorer thing was not about the means to do something about it, but whether in and of itself we felt there was something wrong about it, something unfair. What if a bunch of people sat down at a restaurant and we all paid the same amount of money, but some of us got a lot of food, and others not so much? Would we think this is unfair? We might argue about what to do about it. Some might argue that we should take the food off the plates of the fatties, and give it to the skinnies, some might say it’s better not to cause a fuss because we will all get kicked out of the restaurant, but I think, and I may be wrong here, that most people, including Beagles would think that the situation was unfair.

But you know, examples are always misleading. What if after we shared our food, or got kicked out of the restaurant, we hit the streets and one of us came across a hundred dollar bill, would we think that was unfair? Well I don’t, except in the general sense that life is unfair. I don’t think the guy should have to share that hundred bucks with anybody else, I don’t think anything needs to be done about this.

So what is going on here? Maybe there is a difference in the way that hundred dollar bill just appears out of nowhere, it doesn’t seem to have belonged to anybody before. Maybe there is a difference between conservatives and liberals. Most liberals are in favor of redistribution of wealth and conservatives view the very phrase with horror. Conservatives think wealth can be created out of nothing, and liberals think it is created by taking something from somebody else. The zero sum game vs the non zero sum game. I don’t want to argue which is better just yet, but I wonder if this is a good model for what we have been talking about.

But I have veered away from fairness as applied to the distribution of wealth, but then we have all winter, now that summer is almost gone.

A Rose by Any Other Name Still Has Thorns

A long time ago, during an internet argument, I coined the phrase "state capitalism" to describe what they are currently doing in Red China. My argument was that all economic systems are capitalist, the only difference being who controls the capital. Capital is defined as money or goods that are used to generate more money or goods instead of being used for immediate consumption. I argued that even a hunter-gatherer economy is capitalistic, with Mother Nature being the capitalist. That's because, if our hunter gatherers consumed all the resources at their disposal instead of leaving some for seed, they would have to move around a lot, which I guess they did. If they return to the same territory someday, they will likely find that the resources have recovered in their absence, unless another band of greedy consumers has gotten there first and used everything up again.

Socialism is harder to define because, as you say, it seems to mean different things to different people. Generally, I would say that it's a system where the government confiscates and redistributes wealth. By that definition, all governments are socialistic by their very nature, varying only in degree. Canada is probably more socialistic than the U.S., and I understand that Sweden is even more that way. Russia used to be even more socialist than Sweden, but I don't think they are anymore. China is currently one of the most socialistic countries in the world, but they may be drifting away from that position. It's hard to tell with those guys because they, like most Orientals, are inscrutable. The movement towards socialism in the Western democracies has been evolutionary, not revolutionary, which is why some people call it "creeping socialism". It has mostly been achieved by democratic means, which is why some people call it "democratic socialism".

Comparing communism or socialism to democracy is indeed like comparing apples to oranges.
Democracy is not a system of economics, it has to do with how the political leadership is chosen. It's not even a form of government, because you can have a democratic monarchy or a democratic republic. It just means that whatever form of leadership you have is chosen by popular vote. Universal suffrage is a fairly new concept, and has not yet been fully implemented anywhere that I know of.  No democracy in history has allowed all their people to vote. We currently allow a greater percentage of our population to vote than we ever have, which is why I said that we are more democratic than we've ever been.

I'm not sure how all this applies to the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. If you attempt to close that gap by confiscation and redistribution of wealth, you are just reducing everybody to the lowest common denominator. That might seem fair to the guys on the bottom, but the guys on the top are certain to resist it. A better plan would be to let the rich people keep their money and provide a means for the poor people to get some of their own. It's not a zero sum game because the Federal Reserve is cranking out new money all the time. Just find a way for some of that new money to get into the hands of the poor people and leave the old money alone.

is socialism a purple cow?

Remember those high school essays that began with “Webster’s dictionary defines suchandsuch and soandso.” I think that was mostly because some kid saw it in some other kid’s essay, and said hey, here’s a way I can pad my word count. Communism has a pretty clear definition in that the state owns all the means of production. What that means in China where government big shots and their cronies seem to own most of the businesses, or in America where the businesses control a lot of the government, I don’t know what to call it, you pick a name.

But socialism, who the hell knows what that means? I suppose there is an entry in the dictionary for the subject, but I don’t think anybody looks that up before they use the word because it means so many different things (like small L libertarian), that a single definition would be useless. To you and your ilk, the lone loony wolves howling at the moon, it basically means anything you don’t like (Honey, does this hat look socialist?), or more specifically anything the democrats want to do, or even more specifically anything Obama wants to do, or any hat or tie he chooses to wear. It’s just like an insult, you call somebody that because it sounds bad, and it’s easier than do any kind of analysis about it.

How long have I been hearing this? All my life, because I was born while FDR was still alive. The United States, on the other hand, has been drifting towards socialism since the days of FDR. What the hell does it mean? We’ve been creeping towards it for seventy years, and we are still not there? What the hell kind of a revolution is that? And how are we so socialist (whatever you happen to mean by that)? Since you mention FDR, I assume you mean social security. Surely you aren’t against that.

Democracy has a pretty good definition going back to Plato, pretty much means everybody gets to vote, well not really that because early on the United States only allowed rich white men to vote, and we still call that democracy. But that’s a whole other story, so let’s just call it a democracy because a lot of people got to vote. Let’s leave out some of those countries where there is only one candidate and where the government backs its own candidate and persecutes the opponents, which I guess would leave out Russia, though most likely the Russkies would choose Putin even if he didn’t cheat on elections. Anyway that leaves the rest of Europe (which you claim is socialist whatever you mean by that) as democracies. 

 I guess I just take issue with your description of democratic socialism, as if that was something odd. It reminds me of the cold war when folks used to speak of democracy vs communism, like the two were opposites and it was like comparing apples and oranges. You could have a communism which was democratic, and you could have a non-communist country that was not democratic.

I see I have gotten past my allotment of words without getting into the subject of fairness. Mostly I am speaking of income distribution. If the current system of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer, continues, is there any point where you would think this has gone too far and something needs to be done about it? And of course we are assuming that the rich got richer fair and square and legal and by working hard.

"Ardently Capitalist Communists"

Government and politics

Main articles: Politics of Vietnam and Military of Vietnam

The Presidential Palace in Hanoi, formerly the Palace of The Governor-General of French Indochina.

The Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum in Hanoi.

The Socialist Republic of Vietnam, along with China, Cuba, and Laos, is one of the world's four remaining single-party socialist states officially espousing communism. Its current state constitution, which replaced the 1975 constitution in April 1992, asserts the central role of the Communist Party of Vietnam in all organs of government, politics and society. The General Secretary of the Communist Party performs numerous key administrative and executive functions, controlling the party's national organization and state appointments, as well as setting policy. Only political organizations affiliated with or endorsed by the Communist Party are permitted to contest elections in Vietnam. These include the Vietnamese Fatherland Front and worker and trade unionist parties. Although the state remains officially committed to socialism as its defining creed, its economic policies have grown increasingly capitalist,^[91] with The Economist characterizing its leadership as "ardently capitalist communists".

The pictures aren't important, they somehow hitched a ride on my "copy and paste" from Wikipedia. It appears that Vietnam has gone the same way as Red China, they still have a communist or socialist government, but their economic system has been drifting towards capitalism for some time. I know a guy (American) who has made a few business trips to Red China with the Japanese owned company for which he works. He told me that the deal in China is you can start a business there, but the Chinese government holds the controlling interest, that is, more than 50% of the stock. I'm not sure what the current status of private property ownership is there. There have been proposals made in the past to allow it, but I haven't heard that any of them have been actually implemented. I remember reading some years go that a Chinese politician, in defending one of those proposals, said that they needed to allow private property in order to "preserve socialism". I'm not sure what he meant by that, but he was a politician after all, so maybe it wasn't supposed to make sense.

The United States, on the other hand, has been drifting towards socialism since the days of FDR. Some European countries, and possibly Canada, may be ahead of us in the respect, but we're all going down the same road. Our politics, however, are probably more democratic than they have ever been, so I guess you could call what we have "democratic socialism". Back when we were kids, some people referred to it as "creeping socialism", but they were just paranoid.

We like to think that we own our real estate but, in a manner of speaking, we're just renting it from the state. If you don't pay your property taxes, the state will confiscate your property and sell it to the highest bidder. If nobody wants to buy it, they'll likely convert it to some public purpose, like a park or museum. This is not so different than it was in the Middle Ages. The Duke of Earl might think that he owned his dukedom, but that land was granted to the duke or one of his ancestors by the king, who could reclaim it if the duke failed to pay his taxes or otherwise pissed off the king. The duke could also be dispossessed by another nobleman in combat, but the king may or may not have had something to say about that too. All things considered, I think we've got a better deal now.

Whether or not our current system is fair depends on how you define "fair". Is it fair to take something away from somebody who has worked for it and give it to somebody who has not? Well maybe, under some circumstances but, if you carry that to the extreme, people might just stop working. Of course you could force them to work, but wouldn't that be slavery? I suppose you're right that we could "level the playing field" a bit more, but there has been a lot of that leveling going on in our lifetimes, and yet they say that the gap between rich and poor is getting wider all the time.

 In the communist countries, the government controls the money and, in the capitalist countries, the money controls the government. There must be a better way to run things, but I don't know what it is.

who keeps our brother?

I thought that Vietnam had one of those quasi commie governments like China does. I don’t think anybody has a real commie government anymore, maybe the Cubans, but they are awfully stubborn. A lot of people think that China is our enemy. I think you have referred to it that way once or twice.

I just meant that thing about some big corporation taking over Beaglesonia, as an example of how you can never be sure of your property, not as a practical thing. Just part of my ploy to prove that life isn’t fair. Big deal, doesn’t everybody know that anyway? Well it’s just that idea that THEY push that anybody can work hard and accomplish their dreams, which fails to mention that some folks will have to work really really hard, and some will just have to dip their silver ladle into the money river that flows by the estate.

The fight over the condo thing was a reflection on your Irish and English guy, where the only options are you can fight the guy and if you win you get the condo, and if you lose you don’t or, you can just not have the condo. Which option seems fairer to you, which would you prefer?

But all those laws and regulations which generally favor the rich have a place, at least there are rules that you can live peaceably by. I guess I appreciate the fact that I have the deed to my condo and if that angry Irish man comes knocking on my door all fisticuffs to get my condo, I can ring up the constabulary and have him locked away somewhere. I guess as a good liberal, I will feel a bit guilty, because except for some quirk of fate, it own this condo and he does not.

This is all over whether or not life is fair, but I think we all knew going in that it isn’t. In a narrower sense, we can talk about whether the current system is fair or not, and I think we can all agree that it is not. But then we get to is it so unfair that something should be done about it? I think here we have a difference of opinion. But despite all my talk of fighting I don’t want to overthrow it, I just want to make it more fair, through milquetoast things like more graduated income taxes and better healthcare and education for the poor, blah, blah, blah.

But in a broader sense, should we be doing anything at all? Christianity is mixed sometimes saying we should all aid the poor, and sometimes saying we will all get our reward or punishment in the next life, so why worry about what happens in this one? The commies are all for making things fair, but they have rather a checkered past. Ayn Rand says fuck the poor, they are all lazy and undeserving (or else they wouldn’t be poor), and the natural system rewards the best and so it should be.

Well how about that then, should we try to make the country more fair? What about the world? Do we owe anything to our fellow man?  

Since When?

Vietnam is not Communist anymore? Red China is our enemy? Maybe you're right, I should pay more attention to the news. I suppose I'll have to look that up this weekend before I start spouting off about it but, as of now, I've never heard of such a thing.

Cheboygan kids must be different than Chicago kids because my experience with them is that they are amoral, devious, and manipulative. I don't know how they relate to puppets, but that's the way they interact with adults and each other. Okay, I've been off that job for 10 years now, so maybe they've changed, but I doubt it.

One reason I bought swamp land is that it's unlikely that anybody will ever try to kick me off of it. It costs about twice as much to build on land like this, and government regulations would make it difficult to site any kind of large scale commercial project on it. When they first passed those wetland laws, back in the 70s, you couldn't even build a house on land like this, but my friend Reagan saw to it that those laws were relaxed just enough for my purposes, but not enough for the fat cats to build condos and shopping malls. Of course there are ways around that, but the legal expenses, added to the construction costs, would discourage most developers. Commercial and industrial development in Cheboygan County has been stagnated for some time anyway and, if it ever picks up again, there is enough good building land still vacant in the area to make my little swamp unattractive by comparison.

In the unlikely event that the government ever wanted my land for some public purpose, they would have to pay me fair market value for it, which my tax assessment says is about a hundred thousand dollars. I doubt that I could sell it for half that price in today's market but, if the government says that's what it's worth then, by God, that's what they would have to pay for it if they wanted it. I told them so too, when they raised my assessment shortly after I bought the place. Michigan passed a law by ballot initiative some time ago that says the government can only exercise eminent domain for purely public purposes. For awhile they were forcing people to sell to the government, and than turning around and selling the land to private developers, but we put a stop to that.

Come on Uncle Ken! Are you telling me that you would rather have gained your condo by combat than by purchase, and that you would rather defend it yourself than trust the legal system to do it for you? Isn't this inconsistent with your anti-war and anti-gun positions? Be that as it may, "the system" has always been rigged to favor one group of people over another. In the Stone Age, it was rigged in favor of the guys who could throw the biggest stones. Later, as weapons and social organizations became more sophisticated, the advantage went to the guy who could command the loyalty of the biggest army. Nowadays, it's money that calls the shots. At any time in history, there has always been a class of people who had very little chance to advance themselves economically. In your Socialist People's Paradise of the future, it will be the commissars or the bureaucrats who tell you where you can live and what you can do there. I prefer the current system myself. It may not be as fair as it could be, but it's certainly more humane than a bunch of people hacking on each other with swords for a living.

Have a nice weekend.

it's not fair

Vietnam, Vietnam, Vietnam, this will never end will it? We never gave a shit about South Vietnam, we didn’t own it before the war, so when we gave it up, we weren’t giving up anything that was ours. We just didn’t want the commies to have it, and now they do, except they aren’t really commies anymore, but they are kind of a buffer against the Chinese who are sort of our enemies. Not much of a buffer, but they have fought one or two wars against them and held them to a draw.

I’m going to differ with you on fairness. From my experience with little kids I think we are all born with some kind of perception of it. Little kids knew right away when something wasn’t fair and they were upset when something unfair happened, even if it wasn’t to them directly. Also there are experiments where kids are shown puppet shows where one puppet mistreats another and the kids dislike the bad puppet.

But as we get older our powers of rationalization increase so that we are able to look at any situation and analyze it so that the outcome that just happens to benefit us is also the fairest outcome. Myself, if I, say, get drunk and don’t show up for work, I know I’ve done the wrong thing. I’ve done wrong things before, and I will do them in the future, but I recognize that I shouldn’t have done what I did. But some people, the rationalizers, are all like, my wife said something nasty to me and I was hurt so that’s why I hit the bottle, and my boss is a big asshole, so it’s really their faults, not mine.

I picked this up in this great book I never miss a chance to plug, The Lost City by Alan Ehrenhalt, in which he examines the southwest side in the 50’s. It’s a little conservative to my tastes, so I think you might like it. Basically he is comparing the 50’s to the 90’s, and the 90’s lose. The example he gave was sin. He was talking about some church by Marquette Park, and how some of the parishioners would go to the tavern before or after church, and they knew they were sinning, but they did it anyway, but at least they knew they were sinning, whereas people of today go on Dr Phil and it turns out they were abused as children or something and then this and that and then they are hustled out to some fancy spa/sanitarium, and none of it was really their fault. I’m not so sure that there is more rationalizing going on here than then, but I think it is better to own up to your sins. Maybe you want to read more about this book: http://www.amazon.com/The-Lost-City-Forgotten-Community/dp/0465041930

I don’t think there was any one point where everybody registered their deeds and had their property. I expect it was fought over even after that and the folks aligned with the winning side got property and the ones on the other side lost their property. I don’t see any fair in this other than might makes right. Even in the present day when things are all legal-like and nice, I suspect that if some big corporation set its eyes on Beaglesonia and all these high powered lawyers began showing up in the courthouse riffling through records it would make you nervous.

I think if I am a landless peasant, I much prefer the option that if I fight and win I can get a piece of land, which I will have to continue to fight for to keep, to the option of this land belongs to this other guy and tough shit. I don’t really think fighting is fair, some of us are just bigger than others through no virtue or fault of our own, but I think it is fairer to have a chance to fight over something than to have no say in the situation.

If we redistributed the land, maybe some would squander it, but some would work hard and keep it, isn’t that more fair than everybody keeps what they have and those that have nothing continue to have nothing, and the system is rigged so that the rich keep getting richer and the poor, poorer?

Well there is a ringing call to revolution isn’t it? Hippie Ken would be proud. But fat old retiree Ken would have to add, that he is not sure how one would bring this about, and after the violent upheaval we may well end up worse for everybody than we were before.

In this book about slavery the guy talks about how slaveholders were in a bit of a pickle because slavery does not fit in with liberty and the equality of man, but they were all like this and that, economics, inferiority of the Negro, blah, blah, blah, so really they weren’t doing anything wrong. I am no fan of that blowhard Thomas Jefferson, who owned slaves all his life, and only freed a few at his demise, but at least he admitted that it was wrong. At least he knew he was sinning.

I’m just saying it is not fair.

Fairness is a Human Concept

Nixon surrendered South Vietnam to North Vietnam, so North Vietnam got exactly what it wanted out of the war. One can argue that South Vietnam wasn't worth saving. If so, what were our guys doing there in the first place? I believed at the time that the whole thing was deliberately contrived to make the United States look weak and ineffective so as to advance the cause of global government, and I'm still not sure that wasn't the case. Meanwhile, while we were being paranoid about the prospect of global government, they snuck the global economy in right under our noses.

I don't know enough about the Tea Party to defend them, and I'm not sure that I even want to. The best I can do is to point out that their purpose seems to be to advance their particular political agenda, an agenda with which I generally agree. I'm not aware that they have ever used violent or illegal means in this effort, which is more than you can say about some of the radical groups that were active in the 60s.

Fairness is indeed a human concept, and not all humans have the same idea of what it means. When I was driving school buses, I often heard kids complain that something wasn't fair. After awhile, it dawned on me that they weren't using the same definition of "fair" that I was. One day I asked one of them if, as it appeared to me, that by "not fair" they meant something wasn't going exactly the way they wanted it to. He said "Of course, what did you think it meant?" Apparently these kids had learned that, by crying "No fair!", the could get adults to reconsider their position on an issue. The thought that the kids themselves might want to reconsider their own position never seemed to occur to them.

In my story about the Englishman and the Irishman, the Englishman thought that his ownership of the property was fair because his father had given it to him. As he thought further about it, he realized that, at some point, one of his ancestors had obtained the property by fighting for it, and that also seemed fair to him. It must have seemed fair to the Irishman that he could obtain the property the same way that the Englishman's ancestor had, but I doubt that the Englishman felt the same way about it. That's because, what was considered fair in the Feudal Era, is not the same as what is considered fair today.

The story doesn't go into the details of the fight by which the property came into the possession of the Englishman's ancestor. Our knowledge of history tends to lead us to the assumption that the Englishman's ancestor took the land away from the Irishman's ancestor, but we don't know that for a fact. He may have taken the land away from another Englishman, or even a Roman citizen who may have himself taken it from whatever indigenous tribe occupied the region at the time. That tribe may have taken it from another tribe, and so on. Determining who "rightfully" owns the land might be a daunting task indeed, which is probably why they do it differently nowadays.

At some point, the British government must have decided that whoever was currently in possession of the land should draw up a legal document to that effect and register it at the court house. From that point on, it was no longer considered fair to obtain real estate by force of arms. You want this land, you can buy it fair and square. If the owner doesn't want to sell, that is his right. If he wants to pass it down to one of his kids when he dies, that is also his right. While this system might not seem fair to the landless peasants, it was certainly more fair than the old system where you had to fight to obtain land and then periodically fight to defend it. The peasants never would have gotten any land under that system anyway, so they are no worse off now than they were before. Indeed, if a peasant wants to learn a marketable skill, get a job, and save his money, he has at least some chance of eventually buying some land. When his ancestors lost the land, if indeed they ever owned it, they lost it because they weren't as good at fighting as someone else was. Was that fair?

One alternative is for the state to confiscate all the land and redistribute it so that everybody has the same size parcel. Of course, not everybody wants the responsibilities of land ownership, so some of them would sell their land and squander the money on wine, women, and song. Then they would be right back where they started from. One way to prevent that would be to prohibit people from selling their land and forcing them to live on it whether they wanted to or not. Can you see where this is going? Do you really want to go there?

maybe not theft, but surely not fair and square

Some presidents were smart, some were stupid. Look how smart we are, and yet neither of us has ever been president, so far. It’s better to be smart, but better still to be lucky and have smart people around you. They all learn to talk down to stupid people, because the undecideds, or as they prefer to call themselves, independents, are generally pretty stupid. They are the guys who want to go to war in Ukraine, but can’t find it on a map.

Nixon didn’t surrender to Vietnam, I believe the popular term of the time was bug out. He bugged out. He pretended the ARVN was a real army and snuck out. We didn’t give them anything, though I can think of some states we might be better off without.

The Tea Party may have ‘independent’ chapters, but they are in the thrall of the big money folks to fund their crackpot candidates, and they never publicly disagree with each other over anything. If Rushbo took off his clothes (shudder) none of them would say that he was naked.

As for property is theft. I wasn’t a deep thinker, like I am now, in my hippie days. I suppose I meant something like we all come into the world naked, but after the slap some of us land on silken pillows and some of us on dirty diddies. So how come some of us have more rights to property than others? Aren’t we all equal? Shouldn’t we all start out with the same amount of stuff?

Well actually that sounds pretty good. How to achieve this equality is a whole other problem, but shouldn’t this be something we should be aiming at? I suppose the true capitalist/Randian/libertarian would say no because if we don’t let some people pile up lots of property they will have no incentive to do all the wonderful things they have done to advance civilization. But that’s just my guess. It’s not nice to put words in the mouths of others.

Way back when if one guy was fighting another for land, I suppose if they were both about the same size and both had the same kind of club, it would be fair and square. But in this modern day, if one rich kid is raised in a nice environment and goes to a really good school, and has all kinds of family connections and gets all rich, that would be all perfectly legal, but compared to the poor kid who misses meals in his youth and goes to a crappy school and has no connections and lives hand to mouth, that is not fair and square.

But life is not fair, and I agree with that. I don’t know if you were ever a fan of Kurt Vonnegut, but in I think it’s his first book, Welcome to the Monkey House, he has a story where strong people have to walk around with weights attached so that they are not any stronger than the average guy, and smart people, I don’t remember, something like have to have a shot of whiskey every hour so that they are not any smarter than the average guy, etc. That clearly does not make any sense.

Your Irish story makes a lot of sense. This book I’m reading about early Christianity, has this thing where the early Christians were the downtrodden and the poor, but then rich guys wanted to join the church, and the more pure among the Christians, clung to that thing about it’s easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than a rich man to enter the Kingdom. And the rich people were all like, hey we were born rich, that’s the way God meant us to be, and the pure poor were all like, it wasn’t because God meant you to be that way it is because somewhere up your lineage your ancestors ripped that money and land off the people. I guess you can guess who won that contest.

But still what to do, what to do? I guess we modern day liberals push for things like graduated income taxes and making things like good education and good health care available for all.

There is this thing lately where the rich are richer and the poor are poorer and it’s getting more so all the time. Is this something we should try to reverse, or should we just notice it and pass on? Is it something that is just like a natural phenomenon like the polar vortex, and there is nothing to be done about it even if we wanted to?

Property Does Not Steal, People Steal

I guess I was naïve in those days, but I had the notion that a person doesn't get to be President of the United States by being stupid. Cunning, manipulative, or even evil, but certainly not stupid. Looking back on it now, maybe I was wrong about that. If the majority of the people are stupid, why wouldn't they elect one of their own to be president? Or maybe there is something about being president that makes people stupid once they're in office. I wonder if the water pipes and the heating ducts in the White House have ever been checked for stupid germs.

Also looking back at it now, maybe the Cold War was a sham to begin with. Maybe the leaders of both countries got together and cooked up the whole thing to help them both keep their people in line. If so, it's a wonder that some hot headed kid like Blanton, of my story "The War That Never Was", didn't make an honest war out of it by accident.

Sure Nixon ended the Vietnam War, by surrendering, but anybody could have done that. I wonder why he ended up with the job.

I don't know whether or not the Tea Party people "cling together seamlessly". I do know that there are numerous independent Tea Party chapters with no central leadership so, if they're all so clingy with each other, there must be a reason.

Now when you say "Property is theft", what exactly do you mean by that? It doesn't seem likely that property itself is a thief, so I think you mean that the people who own property are thieves. That is certainly true about some property owners, as it is for the general population, but I think that most property owners today came by their holdings fair and square. Of course, if you trace it back far enough, most property was originally stolen from someone because, before the invention of money, that was about the only way you could transfer property from one owner to another. Well, I mean real estate, because personal property can more easily be bartered or given as a gift. I suppose you could do the same thing with real estate, but I don't think it happens as often as it does with personal property.

I understand that John Locke believed that the most important job of government is to protect property rights. I think the reason for that was, if people do not feel secure about their property, they might not work so hard to acquire it. If you can steal my stuff, then I can steal your stuff, so where's it going to end? Before you know it, we're right back in the Middle Ages, which is also called the Feudal Era. Edward Gibbon said that famine and disease commonly follow a war because everybody is too busy fighting to cultivate crops, and starving people generally get sick a lot. In modern times, the same result can come about if all the supermarkets get bombed. And who is likely to invest in building a new supermarket if they expect that it also will get bombed some day?

This reminds me of a story. Stop me if you've heard this one: An Irishman, who was fishing on a riverbank, was approached by an Englishman who told him that he was not allowed to fish there because it was private property. The Irishman said, "Now who might be the owner of this private property?" The Englishman said, "I am the owner." The Irishman said, " And how exactly did you come to be the owner of this private property?" The Englishman said "Well, I got it from my father, and he got it from his father, who got it from his father before him. Now that I think of it, I suppose that, if you trace it back far enough, one of my ancestors must have originally gotten it by fighting for it." The Irishman replied, "Fine, I'll fight you for it then."

is property theft?

Speaking of the John Birch Society, maybe as a legacy of that, or maybe the reason it attracted you in the first place is your tendency to see a sort of conspiracy when the simpler answer would be ineptness. I think you have blamed, I don’t remember who, maybe They, or more likely the congress, or more likely the democrats of purposely handling international things in a way that gives our enemies the advantage.

I remember that the Birchers were considered subversive, but now that I think of it how would that work, surely they wouldn’t conspire with other countries, and how could anybody think that that bunch of nuts could overtake the US?

I’m thinking back to that Goldwater/Johnson election and how it made a democrat out of me. Goldwater was certainly seen as a warmonger, and Curtis LeMay wanting to drop the bomb didn’t help. One thing I think both we and the Russkies can pat ourselves on the back for is that in fifty years of cold war neither of us ever dropped the bomb.

But I remember too the joke that went around as we dug ourselves deeper into Vietnam, where it was a good thing we didn’t elect Goldwater because then we would have been involved in an Asian war. A lot of presidents had their fingerprints on that war, but none had so many as LBJ. And there was Nixon pretending a little bit like he had a piece of peacenik him in, I think he had the peace symbol in one of his commercials. But of course nobody believed a word he said.

So in one sense it made sense to kick up a fuss at the Democratic convention. But thinking about it, it wasn’t so much that it was because we hated LBJ, but that we thought it was a party we might sway, probably because they had some peace candidates, McCarthy and Bobbie, before Humphrey won the nomination. I don’t think we ever thought the republicans would end the war. Kind of ironic in that you now see Nixon apologists claiming that he ended the war, and in a way he did, but that is a story for another day.

So kind of like the tea party claims to be beyond political parties but clings to the reps in their death grip, so did we hippies cling to the dems, and you could give us some credit for bringing in McGovern and a radical platform to the dems in 72 and sinking them like a stone.

I agree that the right is the party of the individual and the left of the collective. But I don’t see any lone wolf activity in the tea party. They cling to each other seamlessly, and it is very rare that one will criticize another one.

I’m reading a book on racism in the early US, The White Man’s Burden, and one thing the author has just mentioned is how closely property was linked to liberty in the early US. I think Locke and Paine were always talking about private property. On the one hand, all men should have liberty, but on the other hand how dare you fuck with the property (slaves) of another man?

One of my favorite phrases in my hippie days was that property is theft. Well it had a good ring, and in a way it has something to it in the way property is arbitrarily distributed. Well more on that tomorrow.

A Pack of Lone Wolves

The Libertarian Party was formed in the 1970s by a bunch of guys who were disillusioned with Nixon, but couldn't bring themselves to vote Democrat.

The John Birch Society was formed in the 50s, and named after a Christian Missionary who was murdered by the Red Chinese. I think that our government was trying to kiss up to the Red Chinese in those days because they knew about the incident and covered it up. It wasn't till years later that the story was brought out by Chinese refugees. The Birchers appealed to me because they were notoriously anti-communist. When I got in there, however, I learned that the real enemy wasn't the Russian or Chinese Communists, they were just pawns of the "Insider Conspiracy", as was our own government. Looking back on it now, it seems kind of silly, but it made a lot of sense to me at the time. How else could you explain the way people in high places always seem to be screwing up? Maybe they're not really screwing up, maybe they're doing it on purpose with the intent of subverting everything that real Americans hold dear. Well maybe not, but it does seem to look that way at times, or at least it did to me in those days.

The Birchers themselves were accused of being subversive, but no government agency ever filed charges against them. The Birchers even requested that a congressional committee investigate them so that they could clear their name, but it never happened. Finally, a state legislative committee, I believe it was California, conducted an investigation and gave the Birchers a clean bill of health.

I looked the JBS up on the internet a few years ago. They are still around and don't seem to have changed much, only now nobody pays any attention to them. They never were a political party, calling themselves an "educational organization" from the beginning. Their intent was to make people aware of the clear and present danger so that they could oppose it by "all legal, moral, and ethical means".

I certainly would  have voted for Goldwater if I had been old enough to vote at the time. What I liked about him was that he said we shouldn't take any shit from the Russians. If he were alive today, he would probably be saying the same thing about the Islamics, and he would still have my vote. People said that he was a war monger but, even though he was never elected, there has certainly been no shortage of war in our lifetimes. I doubt that Goldwater would have made it any worse in that respect but, of course, there's no way to know that now.

The principle philosophical difference between the Left and the Right is individualism versus collectivism. We, of course, are the individualists and you guys are the collectivists. Being a bunch of individualists, it's hard to keep us organized for very long. We may temporarily rally round the flag for a common cause, but it won't last forever. We are like pack of lone wolves, banding together when necessary, but preferring to go our separate ways whenever possible. That may be our primary weakness, but it also means that you will never know if you've gotten us all. Some day, when you least expect it, a lone survivor may come out of the swamp and start the whole thing all over again. All it takes is one.

yellow dog libertarians

By capital L I assume you mean the actual official Libertarian party that runs somebody for president every year and gets less than one percent of the vote. The only candidate whose name I can remember is some guy named Barr from the south who was a regular politician before that. I imagine they have been around for awhile, maybe since Goldwater days?

I had a Texas friend who was a right winger, a big fan of Buchanan when he was running in the Republican primary and I was surprised that he thought the Wacko Whackos got the short end of the stick. That whole thing where the right supports these fringe groups like the posse comitatus, and those guys who think they don’t have to pay taxes because of some loophole, or that nut job rancher guy. They seem to love anybody who takes up arms against law enforcement, as long as they are fellow white right wingers.

But I think small L libertarians are where it is at these days, that is the type that I seem to come across more often than I would suspect these days. They are like those cafeteria catholics the anti abortion people used to decry, in that they pick and choose among the doctrines of the church, taking what they like and rejecting what they don’t. But then I wonder why do they choose the term libertarians since there are also issues in the democratic and republican and probably even the communist party that they like and dislike. Small L libertarian is one way to make that designation, but a little awkward because most people are unaware of the official Libertarian party. I like yellow dog libertarian.

But the confusing part of yellow dog libertarians is some choose this doctrine and reject that doctrine and some do vice versa, so if a guy introduces himself as a small L, yellow dog, libertarian, that alone doesn’t tell you what he believes.

I remember the John Birch Society. It seems like it was big in Eisenhower’s day, and was thought of as being subversive, like the communist party. Which was maybe ironic because their main claim to fame of the Birchers was calling everybody else a communist. I think they were effectively nobodies by the time of Goldwater. By the way you don’t mention Goldwater. You know he was the guy who turned me from Republican to Democrat, although I have to admit becoming a hippie would have turned me that way anyway, even if he hadn’t been around.

The American Independent party, I have a hard time believing was anything other than a racist organization holding up states rights as a fig leaf.

The tea party is like the small L libertarians in that it includes a lot of people with varying views. It is a big tent for the right. They have this unity in the face of the enemy, which is basically anybody that isn’t with them, but if they ever got to ruling and passing legislation their differences would tear them apart.

Well I am just running down right wing organizations aren’t I? A tragic thing in modern politics, well actually politics since Adam if you think about it, it’s always easier to run down the other side than it is to build up your side.

From Libertarian Party to Tea Party

I think you already know that there are Libertarians with a capital "L" and libertarians with a small "l". I used to be a card carrying member of the Libertarian Party until the aftermath of the 9-11 attacks, when I thought that they were too soft on Islamic terrorism. I actually had a previous difference with them over the Waco whacko incident when they sided with the Waco whackos. I let that one slide, but their position on 9-11 was a deal breaker for me. I think that I'm still a small "l" libertarian, although sometimes I think of myself as a reactionary, depending on the issue.

Before I joined the Libertarians, I was a card carrying member of the American Independent Party and the John Birch Society. I came back to the Republicans for Reagan, but I jumped ship when the first Bush came along. I had already decided that the libertarian philosophy was closer to my own beliefs than the American Independent Party. By that time, the AIP had pretty well died out anyway, but I understand that many of the survivors were assimilated into Ross Perot's Reform Party. Perot didn't appeal to me. I saw one of his 30 minute infomercials where he spoke with pride of his boyhood business where he had managed to sell newspapers to a bunch of poor people who couldn't even read, and it made me wonder what else he was trying to sell.

I think that most libertarians consider Ayn Rand to be one of their patron saints although, if she were alive today, I'm not sure that she would call herself one. I suppose you could say the same thing about Marx, Lenin, Mao, Buddha, or Jesus Christ. I think that if any of these guys could see what their followers have done in their names, they would be turning over in their graves. Most libertarians are highly individualistic people anyway, and not prone to hero worship.

What the libertarians and the tea party types have in common is their dislike for big government. It's not just about taxes, it's about reducing the size and scope of government. While I agree with them in principle, I'm not so sure that just reducing government will solve all our problems. I mean, the reason government got so big in the first place was that there were various problems that weren't being effectively addressed by anyone else and, in frustration, people called on government to "do something". Governments, after all, are run by people, and we all know what people are like.What we need is for people to just shape up and do the right things of their own free will, thus rendering governments unnecessary. Lots of luck with that one!

libertarians, who are these guys

I dropped into the Ten Cat last Friday and none of my usual buds were there, but the Cubs were on the tube so I watched that. There was some irregular guy (not that there was anything wrong with him, but he wasn’t a regular.) He was fiddling with his phone of course (What is with that, people fiddling endlessly with their stupid phones when they could be using their time more productively by staring blankly into space?). Anyway he roused himself presently from the tiny screen, and said something about the game, and then I answered, and then within five minutes it was apparent that he was a libertarian. Of course I announced immediately that I was a liberal democrat, and then there was an awkward moment when we could have both returned to our beers and the ballgame and not spoken another word to each other, or we could argue about it.

So we argued about it. We first laid the ground rules, no getting personal, no getting pissed, no name calling. And I even got to make my little speech about how we have to assume that the other guy is neither stupid nor evil, and we have to be logical about all this. And furthermore since it’s a logical world and we are both logical people it should be possible for us to get together and discover the true path (my path). Of course that is only theoretical, and probably never works in the real world. I think after three, four years the only truths we have hammered out is that Obama is not a muslim, and that gun nuts consider any move to limit firearms anywhere in the US is one step closer to their Old Betsy being taken away from them.

We argued until I had my limit of beers and the Cubs were well on their way to defeat, and I believe we both had a good time, and parted on good terms. He of course had his smart phone so instead of saying we would look something up on wiki overnight, he could look it up right then and there. I won once and he won a couple times, though my point was much more important than his two minor points.

Well what is it about you libertarians? Well maybe not all of you because you guys are not organized, but five minutes into a conversation even about baseball, they are announcing that they are libertarians. I have previously said that libertarians are just guys (not many women I think, though I don’t have any data on that) who don’t want to pay their taxes and want to appear to be principled intellectuals, but I think I have to add to that, people who like to argue. Not that there is anything wrong with that.

I imagine the idea has been around since revolutionary times. A quick trip to wiki reveals that libertarianism, like tartar sauce, has French roots. And over time the word has meant different things to different people. I’m not sure if Ayn Rand ever used the term, but I think we can trace it back to her. Most libertarians of today embrace her fondly, though not too close a hug because atheism was at the core of her philosophy and she sneered at Christianity, and most of these new libertarians are pretty religious. The guy at Ten Cat announced his Christianity a few times but we didn’t go there, because that area is such a quagmire, and boring to boot.

Alright then Ayn Rand, and Goldwater, who, though, a Christian, didn’t brag on it too much, and then after that the term fell in popularity. There were a few around, but they were considered odd, and you never ran into any in the local bar or anywhere else.

And now there are scads, well the tea party loves the term, though they mostly just like the low taxes, small government part, they are not crazy about the individual liberties and isolationist foreign policy.

Well we have done this before. I know I have told my part about how I went from a high school fan of Tricky Dick to a liberal democrat, and probably you have told how you went from Southwest side Methodist to libertarian. But nobody remembers what the other guy said as well as what they said themselves, so can we get the story of how Beagles came to Libertarianism?

The More They Get, the More They Want

You're right that free trade works better in theory than it does in the real world, but a lot of things are like that. I remember that Fred Sears, back at old Gage Park high, was all excited about free trade when the idea was first getting started. He predicted that there would be some disruptions in the beginning, but that it would all level out eventually, and maybe it will. People who have nothing generally don't aspire to much but, when they get a little taste of something, they soon want more and more of it. Fred Sears called it "The Revolution of Rising Expectations". Like I said yesterday, the Japanese wage scale is already approaching parity with ours, and I understand that the German wage scale has already surpassed ours. I have heard on the news a couple of times that the Chinese wage scale, while it still has a long way to go, has been creeping upward for some time. All these wage scales wouldn't have to match ours, they would just need to close the gap enough so that it no longer made up for the cost of transportation. The rising cost of energy can only help bring this about sooner.

Buying American is more easily said than done. In some product lines, like electronics, you just can't find anything made in American anymore. Toyota has been advertising lately that some of their models are the most American made cars on the market. I assume that they mean that they have more American made parts in them than Fords, Chevys, and Chryslers. The other day I saw on the news that Toyota had yet another recall. They said that these particular cars were made in South Korea by General Motors, although they were sold in the U.S. as Toyotas. All things considered, I think the ship has already sailed on this global economy thing, and it's unlikely to return to port anytime soon. We're stuck with it, for better or for worse, so we might as well learn how to live with it.

Nobody is going to pay a living wage out of the goodness of their heart. They will pay what is necessary to attract and retain whatever quality of employees that they need to conduct their business profitably, and not a penny more. You can pass minimum wage laws, which I, unlike many of my conservative colleagues, think is not such a bad idea. To make these laws really effective, however, they would have to be global rather than national. That would require a global government, which I am not yet willing to accept. What we really need is a global labor union, but I don't see that happening anytime soon.

The European Common Market was probably a good idea, but the present European Union goes way beyond that. People have been dreaming about a United States of Europe for a long time, and they've almost got it now. Whether or not they can hold it together remains to be seen. Some Europeans swear by it, and others swear at it. Watch this space for further developments.

The super rich are unlikely to voluntarily contribute money to reduce the national debt, because a substantial part of that debt is owed to them. Why should they give their money to Uncle Sam when they can loan it to him and collect the interest?

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that your ideas are without merit, it's just that they are unlikely to be implemented anytime soon. That's okay, though, at least it shows that you're thinking. Have a nice weekend.

a couple great ideas

I have always thought free trade was the way to go. In theory everybody wins. Well not exactly. Workers in industries that are underpriced by industries in other countries, lose their jobs. Theoretically they can simply get jobs in industries that their country is better at doing. Theoretically. Consumers certainly win in that they can now buy cheaper goods. I guess that should be a spur to the economy because now they have more money to spend and will buy more goods. But now my head is in the dizzying heights of economics and I am dizzy.

It’s been good for the US. If all our states had tariffs against each other that would be a mess. That was the idea behind the common market which was doing very well until it ran into trouble with freeloaders like Greece, and now it seems to be rocked by this Russian thing though they would have been equally rocked if there were no common market at all.

The idea with China was that they would be buying all these goods from us, but that hasn’t happened, partly because they are penny pinchers to our American spendthrifts, and then there is all this talk about how they are cheating on the deal.

Which all gets me to thinking. What if, out of sheer love of country and their fellow man, Americans tried to buy American goods even though it would cost more? And what if employers got together to pay a living wage, just because it was the right thing to do? And customers, many of them now being paid a living wage, would go to the living wage stores and not mind that it would cost them extra because now they are making more?

Oh I suppose the price of our exports would soar and we wouldn’t be selling much abroad and we would become a nation of folks taking in each others laundry, and I am told that never works.

Speaking of things that never work, those one percenters have plenty of dough, but it has to worry them the country is shambling under this huge national debt. What if they contributed their money bags to bringing down the national debt? I’m not sure how the math would come out, but surely they could put a big dent in it without having to mortgage any of their mansions or yachts, and then since the government would no longer have to pay that onerous interest the economy would soar and they would make most of it all back. Wouldn’t that be great? But maybe not. Most of their money is not in mansions and yachts, but in stocks and bonds, and if they sold them wouldn’t the stock market sink like a stone?

I think it turned out that the Yazidis weren’t so bad off and the Kurds were able to evacuate, so I think, as of this morning, we have no boots on the ground. But now this is at least the second time it has been contemplated and there has been no uproar, so I think it is just a matter of time.

Those daffy Scotsmen. I have long maintained that people would rather be oppressed by their own people than by some other country, and it now appears that people would rather not be oppressed by their own people than to not be oppressed by some other country.

From Readers Digest to Ketchup

We used to subscribe to Readers Digest back in the 70s, so that must have been when I read that stuff about language. After several years, however, the articles in Readers Digest seemed to be saying the same things over and over again, so we let our subscription expire. We still have several reference books that we bought from them, and we do use them now and then. Today, while sitting in the doctor's waiting room waiting for my hypothetical wife to come out, I thumbed through a current copy of their large print edition, so it must still be around. From what I could tell, most of it seemed to be written by teenagers. Maybe it always was, but I notice it more now because I am no spring chicken myself.

The main reason for the improvement in the Red Chinese economy is all the manufactured goods that our guys buy from them. Before Nixon traded Taiwan for two teddy bears, they used to buy a lot of that stuff from Taiwan and Japan. I can't remember when was the last time I saw something from those two countries, it's pretty much all from Red China now. As far as I know, Taiwan and Japan are getting along just fine without our business. Of course a lot of our cars come from Japanese owned companies, but more and more, those cars are actually being made in the U.S. I heard or read in the news once that the wage scale of Japanese auto makers is now comparable to the wage scale of U.S. auto makers and, if the Japanese companies build their cars here, they save on the shipping costs.

I heard something about those Yazidis on that mountain top, but I thought they were evacuating them with helicopters. This was a few days ago and, of course, the situation could have changed by now, or maybe I didn't get it right in the first place. You know how that goes.

A few years ago, when I was still on Multiply, one of my contacts was a Scotsman, and he wrote several blogs about their secessionist movement. He was against it himself, believing that Scotland could ill afford to maintain their own transportation system, postal service, and military. I hadn't heard about it for awhile but, just a few days ago there was something on the TV news about them wanting to still use the Pound Sterling as currency if the secession referendum passed. The Englishman I currently follow on Ipernity says that his country uses both the Pound and the Euro and, when  he tells us about something he has recently purchased, he gives the price in both. I don't know why some Scots want to secede, but I have heard that a lot of the people in the U.K. are tired of subsidizing the poorer countries in the European Union. Also, the headquarters for the EU is in Brussels, Belgium, and they figure it should be in London.

Any looking up that I do will have to wait for the weekend, but Tartar sauce and ketchup are at the top of  my list.

phonetic spelling, boots on the ground, and ketchop

What you’ve read in the Readers Digest (Is that still around? Back when I was a kid my grandmother used to read it so I thought she was an intellectual because nobody else I knew ever read anything), is substantially what I have read. One book I read lately tried to make the case that all languages come from one original root language, but I don’t know if they ever made their case. The thing is we are just wired for language, and if two babies are separated at birth from adults they will develop their own language, much like twins do. I should do some research on that twins thing. I’ve heard about it anecdotally, but I don’t think I’ve ever read anything on the subject.

I think the reason English is the world language has more to do with conquest than anything else. I can’t imagine how horrified a person learning English must become when he learns that every word is spelled every which way. I, of course, have long been a proponent of phonetic spelling, and never tire of talking about its benefits. Unfortunately other people never tire of not listening to me.

The Chinese guy said he was forty, though he looked twenty, you know how that is. How do they do that? I think most Chinese are happy with their government. They have always had authoritarian governments, and a booming economy is all most people care about. I don’t know how Uncle Sugar boosted the Chinese economy, but if he did, it’s a good thing, because who else would loan us the piles of money that they are so willing to do?

This boots on the ground thing is kind of slippery. I remember maybe a month ago Obama made a speech about throwing some ‘advisors’ (How much advising do these guys need?) into Iraq, but I think that hinged on changing the government (Malaki) in Iraq, and I don’t think that ever happened. The latest I heard was we were going to put some guys in to help those Yazidis get off the mountain or something. But I’m not sure if that ever happened either, so I don’t know.

Was just now listening to an interview with some general on NPR, and he thinks we need to send in weapons and advisors to defend the homeland from ISIS. I agree these are bad guys and a force in mideast, but I don’t see where homeland comes in, and I just hate the expression homeland. Why don’t we just call it the fatherland and be done with it? How come none of these other armies can stand up to ISIS? One of the things is they have those nifty weapons that they took from the armies that we gave them too. Aren’t they going to take them from them again?

Still there are those Yazidis sitting on those mountain tops, and the penchant of ISIS of killing prisoners and civilians. In principle I was against the war with Serbia, because it really had nothing to do with us, but then I saw those photos of the guys in the concentration camps. Shouldn’t we do something?

I have heard about the Scots seceding, but I have never read to any depth on it. Why do they want to secede, what horrible things have the English done to them lately? Aren’t they still allowed to speak that burry language of theirs, can’t they wear kilts if they want to, and eat all the haggis they can stomach? I suspect they have just watched Braveheart too many times while drinking Scotch whiskey.

During my research on tartar sauce I learned that there are different groups of tartars all over southwestern Russia, and they are Turkish people, who to my eye have always seemed half Caucasian and half Asian. Try looking up catsup some time. it has an interesting story, what with the two spellings, and I believe it started out as fish oil.

Language, Politics, and Tartar Sauce

I have read some of the same stuff as you have about language, I think it was decades ago in Reader's Digest. Another thing I remember from that article is that almost every language in the world has the same word for "mama". The author figured that was because it's one of the first sounds that babies typically make, probably in the presence of their mother, who reinforces it with a smile because she thinks the kid actually understands what he is saying. Truth be known, the kid is just trying sounds at random, and this one gets a positive reaction, so he puts it in his repertoire. Another time, from a different source, I heard that English has more words in it than any other language. This should not be surprising, since most of the words in the English language were originally borrowed from some other language. This might be why English has become so popular as an international language, you can say more things with it.

If the Chinese guy you met in the park was any younger than we are, it's not surprising that he likes his government, since it's the only one he has ever known. Also depending on his age, he might not remember all the upheaval that accompanied the evolution of Chinese socialism into what it has become today. The Red Guards operated in the 70s, and I think that Tiannamin Square incident happened in the 80s so, if this guy was any younger than 30, he might not remember either one of them. I don't think they've had any serious uprisings since then. One reason may be that they finally killed off everybody who disagreed with them. Another reason is that their economic conditions have vastly improved in the last few decades, thanks to Uncle Sucker.

We have boots on the ground in Iraq? I just heard on the news tonight that they were conducting air strikes and weren't planning on going any farther than that. Man, if you can't believe what you see on television anymore, what the hell can you believe?

I understand that the U.K. has a vote coming up to withdraw from the European Union. This came from a fairly reliable source, an internet blog by a real Englishman, so it must be true. Also, Scotland has a vote coming up to secede from the U.K. They have been talking about it for years, and now it looks like they're really going to do it. I mean that they're really going to vote on it, not necessarily that it will pass. Last I heard, the Scots were divided on the issue.

The French invented Tartar Sauce? So then maybe the "Tartar" spelling is what the French call them. No, that can't be right because the raw hamburger dish is called "Steak Tartare", and I'm pretty sure that's French. I'll have to look that up one of these days, now that you've gotten me all curious about those Tartars. Now that I think of it, the Tartars I saw at the opera house a few years ago didn't look at all Oriental, so maybe they didn't come from Mongolia after all. I'll have to look that up as well.