Q & A time on Civil Disobedience

Q: What costs city governments millions of dollars, and has been associated with fatal drug abuse, riots, looting, confrontation with police, socialism, communism, suicide, murder and just plain old poor sanitation?

A: The Occupy Wall Street movement.

I'm not so sure that's the message they intended to send.

Civil disobedience is a valid protest mechanism, but it works best as a last resort. That means you use it after you've tried electing officials who share your views, have tried taking issues to the courts, and have spent time writing and speaking in public to share your point of view. Unfortunately these preliminary methods all appear to be too slow for those with limited patience or intellect.

Civil disobedience also doesn't cover anarchy, looting or riots. People who do that are just thugs, ruffians and thieves.

Don't leave your brain home

At a recent presidential Q&A session, President Obama was asked the question "Would you please raise my taxes?"

Apparently, Doug Edwards (an ex-Google executive) forgot his brain when he asked that question. What he wanted was improved job training, better education and new infrastructure. What he asked for was for a horribly inefficient organization to take his money by legislation, run it through a wasteful bureaucratic process, then eventually spend it on three areas, two of which he could spend money on himself with zero overhead.

Yeah, infrastructure such as roads are government controlled and are easier to deal with through taxation. But if Doug wants better schools, donate time and money to schools. He's got enough money to sponsor chairs or scholarships at universities, or buy crayons for every elementary student in the country. If he wants better job training, then hire or train some people. He's been an executive at a big company before. He should know how those sorts of things work. Why not organize a job training program, or volunteer to help or donate to one that already exists?

It just boggles the mind how people (even very successful people who understand finance and business) assume government involvement will improve things more than large scale personal involvement will improve things. Get involved! Make a difference! Stop whining about what other people (or government) aren't doing, and make yourself useful.

We don't need more taxes. We need more people taking ownership and making a difference so the need for taxation goes down.

Sin Tax

Tax what you don't want people to do and you get less of it. Stop taxing what you want people to do and you get more of it. People sometimes call those Sin Taxes. Now, I'm just confused by this plan from the deficit reduction Gang of Six.

Rather than taxing vices, they're going straight after the smart folks who have been doing all the right things to provide both for themselves and for others. Wonder of wonders, that seems to be where the money is.

The home mortgage interest deduction? Charitable giving? Retirement savings? I guess the new plan is for us to be uncharitable greed-mongers who are forced into government housing and a tiny Social Security check when we're too old to work, rather than having a home and a retirement fund. A concrete studio apartment in the projects is good enough for retirement, ain't it?

Still, the answer is not to go regressive and just tax booze, smoking, sleaze and gambling either. I figure it's going to take painfully deep cuts across just about everything (particularly entitlements) to get out of the hole Congress has dug for us, and I doubt many of our esteemed Senators and Representatives have the nerve to cut deep enough to solve the problem.

That's what you get for bickering over deficit reduction until the last minute. You get a poor job slapped together in a hurry by people more interested in posturing than production, which will need to be fixed again next year if it lasts that long.

Unfortunately, there is a tipping point waiting out there somewhere. A point of no return where we just can't recover without major international disaster. Even worse, we may not even know when we've crossed that threshold. Let's hope common sense can actually be common, just this once, so we can move on in a more sensible manner as a country.

White House says stimulus is working

I saw an article in the paper today about the stimulus package, and how it appears to be on track to create or save as many as 3.5 million jobs at a cost of $862 billion, as promised by Congress. Now, that may sound like success to a lot of people, and I'll even ignore the whole "on track" bit and assume it's true. But let's do a little bit of math and see what that means.

Doing some simple division, you get $246285 per job, give or take a few cents. Now, we need to quantify what "a job" is just a bit, so I went out to the Bureau of Labor and Statistics and found a 2010 jobs report. In the report, you find this quote:

The average person born in the latter years of the baby boom held 11 jobs
from age 18 to age 44

So it's time to break out the calculator again. The study says men were employed on average 85% of that span of years, That gives a span of 21.84 working years, (26 years times 84%), and eleven jobs. One more divide tells me that the average job lasted 1.98 years based on the info provided by the BLS. That's somewhat below my own average job duration, but I'm in high tech which pushes average job lengths up a bit.

Now the magic begins. Taking our dollar amount, and the average job length, (and dividing once again. Am I being too divisive?) we get an annual wage of $124386 per year. There are several professions with high education requirements and detailed skill sets where that is a reasonable annual salary.

I haven't mentioned yet is that this would be the cost if they were paid TO DO NOTHING, as if they were a little monetary black hole, sucking in government funds. The government can, of course, employ them with government labor and get some value from them on things like road construction or hiring new IRS agents to handle foreclosure paperwork, but those are by definition not private sector jobs. We need jobs in the private sector.

Even assuming the government pays 3.5 million people to pick their noses, they can do better with minimal effort. The average personal income in the US is about $43000. By applying this wage to the amount being spent, and assuming the same average job duration, you can employ 10.1 million nose pickers. I assume it would be a simple matter to triple that to 30 million if people were hired to do actual work with value near their pay.

Then there's the trickle down effect of jobs, um, created or saved by the majority of that money going back into the economy as rent, house payments, groceries, and so on. This should make jobs per dollar go up.

I know this is counter to the way government is designed to work, but isn't it about time for the government to spend efficiently? They could have done better by randomly mailing out stimulus checks. Oh, wait. They did that already. My bad. If I remember right, members of Congress complained about how too many people paid off debt or invested their stimulus check, rather than buying stuff. People did things which take longer to show an impact, and that irritated those who wanted immediate gratification.

We as citizens can fix this problem, and we are fixing it gradually. It takes time, hard work, and thinking as much about your neighbor's job as you do your own. Small businesses are the engine of the economy. As a group, we provide the goods, services and jobs which will bring us back to a stable economy which is capable of sustaining a lower and healthier unemployment rate. If we wait for the government to bail us out on this one, it will be a long wait and a burden to be shouldered by our children and grandchildren.

Jobs Created or Saved?

We've been hearing since 2008 how large numbers of jobs have been created or saved via government intervention. Hooray for us! All those folks are employed now! Everything is just great! But wait. Recently, they announced that some education stimulus funding was going to have to be continued in the last half of 2010, or we would suffer massive teacher layoffs, and children would have to deal with gargantuan class sizes.

This got me thinking that the stimulus-related jobs aren't described in enough categories, so I'm going to define my own. Each category defines a particular group of jobs which exist now because of the stimulus.

Jobs Created

• These jobs are self-sustaining long-term jobs created through a bootstrap process which was funded by government intervention. This means government jobs don't get counted here, which I think is a good thing. This could include things like spin-off companies from universities which receive federal funds.

Jobs Saved

• These jobs return to being self-sustaining long-term jobs after suffering a short period where the job would have been lost without government intervention. Still, don't put goverment jobs here. Some small businesses are saved through loans, or through tapping into house equity. Too bad most lenders seem to be in lock-down.

Temps Created

• These are short-term jobs which result in the temp workers filling jobs with known end dates. There are actually two sub categories here, since there are those temp jobs where the employee earns more than the government spent to create the job, and there are those where the government pays at least equal to their wages. For this category, think new construction projects like roads, or things like census takers. The majority of the paychecks come either directly or indirectly from the government.

Temps Saved

• These are short-term jobs which would have been eliminated (as all temp jobs are) if it had not been for government intervention putting off the ending date. Most of these would be employees of small businesses who found some sort of windfall through the stimulus which allowed them to keep employees longer than they had planned. Meh.

Government Jobs Eliminated

• Woudn't it be cool if they would report this as a positive number? I'd want it to be a net value so it would be an actual reduction in the number of government employees rather than the elimination of X jobs while the government is off creating Y new ones elsewhere.

Jobs Subsidized

• These are long-term jobs which require ongoing funding to avoid collapse. This is where you count government jobs (both created and saved) as well as any others which would go away without continued government efforts to prop them up. Granted, some jobs such as teachers could be on their way to being self-sustaining at existing taxation levels, so it's a matter of deciding how long we're willing to pay and pray.

So, which do think we have the most of now that we've been stimulating the economy for nearly two years to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars? It should be blindingly obvious if you follow the news. Now for the tough question. Since the government can't and shouldn't take care of everything, what do we as citizens do about it?

The Berlin Wall...the moral to the story

I was born during the early part of the Vietnam War. This war was part of a larger "East verses West", "Communist /Socialist verses Capitalist" cold war. For me and my generation, this is how it had always been. By the time I was old enough to know much of anything the USSR, The Iron Curtain, Cold War, nuclear missles, Eastern Bloc Countries, and the Berlin Wall were household terms.

"On May 8, 1945, the unconditional surrender of the German armed forces (Wehrmacht) was signed by Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel in Berlin, ending World War II for Germany. The German people were suddenly confronted by a situation never before experienced in their history: the entire German territory was occupied by foreign armies, cities and infrastructure were largely reduced to rubble, the country was flooded with millions of refugees from the east, and large portions of the population were suffering from hunger and the loss of their homes. The nation-state founded by Otto von Bismarck in 1871 lay in ruins."germanculture.com

"As Germany surrendered to the Allied Powers, the war in Europe officially ended. The land lay in devastation from the invasion and cities were turned into rubble from the bombing of Germany from the Allies. England, the Soviet Union, France, and the United States tried their hand in saving the destructed Germany. They decided the best way to rebuilt would be to divide Germany into four militarized zones, each one controlled by one of the Allied powers. Berlin was divided similarly. The government of Germany was also divided and each divided section was given the power to set the government they wanted on a ballot for election. Each country did this excluding the Soviet Union, which immediately set up their own communist government."Think Quest

The three divisions of Germany held by Great Britain, France and the United States united those sections to form one "West" Germany while the division occupied by the Soviet Union (USSR) was kept under Soviet control.

By 1961 it was evident that the economy of the west was vastly superior and robust compared to that of the east or Soviet section of Germany (East Germany). Since the entire city (east and west) of Berlin was inside the borders of East Germany many people from East Germany began to migrate to the western part of Berlin.

So many people had migrated or fled to the other part of Berlin that the Soviet government felt they had to do something to curtail this movement. This was done by erecting a wall that surrounded the western section of Berlin cutting it off from the rest of East Germany.

"The Berlin Wall always was a symbol of the superiority of freedom over oppression and of the free market over a controlled economy. Those two aspects — politics and economics — were as much a part of it as the gray paint on its east side and the colorful and taunting graffiti on its west side." Deseret News, November 9, 2009

I remember as a child hearing about people risking their lives in attempts to escape from the oppression of the east over that wall. Many people were successful while many others never made it. The wall was heavily guarded and anyone attempting to pass over the wall were shot, no questions asked.

The Berlin Wall and the "Iron Curtain" it represented were as normal to me as rock n roll, apple pie and lemonade. I am sure I was not alone in this thinking. We never imagined that things could change."

I saw life in the East just as the commentor to the Deseret News opinion piece, "My childhood was filled with watching footage of people daring to run for their lives hoping to reach freedom before guards in the towers would notice - rapid fire bullets took their lives again and again as they risked all rather than live under Soviet oppression! Americans how soon we forget - and propaganda covers the horror to modern youth unaware of the past. The dead do not repeat the truth from their history!"

The 1981 movie "Night Crossing" told the story of two families who attempted to cross the barbed wire-walled East German border where automated machine guns, armed guards, and deadly land mines dotted this "death strip". On September 15, 1979 tired of the Cold War rules that restricted their lives, these two families built their own balloon as an escape vehicle to the West.

I saw that movie not long after its debut. It is a story that has stuck with me ever since.

The Berlin Wall and the "Iron Curtain" it represented were as normal to me as rock n roll, apple pie and lemonade (cliches intended). I am sure I was not alone in this thinking. We never imagined that things could change.

Today marks the 20th anniversary of the fall of that wall. I had been married just a few short months when an undercurrent that had been brewing for years exploded to enable a cascade of events to unfold right before our eyes.

• June 1987: Ronald Regan becomes the second US president to make an historic speech in Berlin, this time in front of the Brandenburg Gate. He echoes Kennedy’s devotion to preserving democracy. His exhortation – “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall” – would become a catchphrase.


• August 1989: The Eastern Bloc shows signs of weakening, with Hungary removing its border bloc with Austria. Thousands of East Germans escape to the West via Austria.


• September 1989: East Germans begin organizing peaceful “Monday demonstrations” weekly in protest against the GDR government.


• September-November 1989: Protests agitating for loosened border controls increase in number in the GDR.


• October 18, 1989: Erich Honecker, who had ruled since 1971, resigns. His departure leaves open the possibility for looser border controls.


• November 9: The GDR politburo, seeing the impossibility of maintaining a firm hand, agrees to a minor concession allowing limited travel across the border.
  
  At a press conference announcing the decision, a politburo member who had just learned of the policy mistakenly says that is immediately effective. In fact, it was to take effect the next day, in order to inform the border guards ahead of time.
  
  Thousands of East Berliners flock to the checkpoints and attempt to cross the border, overwhelming the guards by their numbers.
  
  People begin picking away at the wall by hand.

"France 24 News

Almost over night the world I had grown up in had changed.

"It was a day in which the entire world seemed to exhale after decades of a tense Cold War many felt would last forever. It was, for many, the beginning of the real end to World War II, defined for them by years of war, followed by more than 40 years of oppression and occupation. And it was the beginning of a more chaotic world, defined by ideologies and terrorist threats rather than a superpower standoff."Deseret News

Yet 20 years later as we observed the anniversary of this incredible day we must remember the lessons of the past. "Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it." George Santayana

Today our own government seems bent on moving toward greater control over the economy, quite ostensibly in the name of "saving" it.

But if we look to the lessons that can be learned from the history of oppression that was symbolized by that Wall we will remember. We will remember that it was the successes of capitalism that those behind that Iron Curtain risked their lives to reach. It was the oppression of governmental economic control that they were fleeing.

If we remember these lessons and learn from them we will avert a repeat of the past.

Geese and Ganders in Budgeting

President Obama announced new initiatives today to help citizens save more money for retirement, making it easier to contribute to IRAs and 401(k) programs. I applaud his administration's efforts. An administration official (not named in the Reuters article I read) was speaking about the personal savings rate which has risen to 5% today from as low as 0.8% in April of 2008, and has even been negative in recent history. He said, "Right now the situation in national savings is unsustainable." He also called the negative savings rate, spending more than we make, of past years a "major macroeconomic challenge."

It's so amazingly refreshing for someone in government to say that it's not okay to continually spend more than you bring in, and that it's unsustainable to do so. Overspending increases your debt load, and increases interest payments to loans rather than paying for goods and services. When expenses exceed income it is called deficit spending.

Having a positive savings rate as individuals is absolutely critical as we make our personal budgets, and a positive savings rate is the result of having, of all things, a balanced budget. But wait. To go from zero to a positive savings rate, you also need to have something left over and unspent. That leftover is what you use to either pay down the debt you've built up in the past, or to build up savings. That unspent amount is the 5% mentioned above.

The really slick part is that once you've paid off your debt, your cash available to spend on goods and services goes up by whatever you used to be paying in interest. Then if you build up a nest egg of investments, the interest from those investments can either accelerate your savings or become additional spending money. So eventually, you can get to the point where you have everything you did while spending yourself into ever-increasing debt, but without actually going into debt to do it. Neat trick, isn't it?

It's the difference between sacrificing for the future, and sacrificing the future. To make this work, those who are overly fond of deficit spending (on a personal level or otherwise) need to trade in their audacious chutzpah for a backbone, sort of like a Cash for Clunkers program.

The Tryanny of Control

Milton Friedman PBS Free to Choose 1980 Vol 2 of 10 The Tyranny of Control

In this video that I stumbled upon Milton Friedman expounds on the benefits and the history of the free market. It is well worth the time to watch.

To find other videos by this same presenter see: http://miltonfriedman.blogspot.com/



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Wall Street Journal gets it right

Finally, a realistic view of what conservatives see. This also goes for anyone else who is sick of the government run-away spending and corporate financial irresponsibility.

According to the April 30, 2009 article in the WSJ:

"There is a major cultural schism developing in America. But it's not over abortion, same-sex marriage or home schooling, as important as these issues are. The new divide centers on free enterprise -- the principle at the core of American culture." Read more...

Some points brought out in the article:

• The [Tea party] protesters are homeowners who didn't walk away from their mortgages
• They are small business owners who don't want corporate welfare and bankers who kept their heads during the frenzy and don't need bailouts
• According to a Pew Research Center poll we are better off in a free market economy even though there may be severe ups and downs from time to time
• For the moment, free enterprise is culturally mainstream
• We need to offer specific, market-based reform solutions rather than merely ranting about the alternative

It is well worth the time to read the entire article.

The significance of Atlas Shrugged

Having read Ayn Rand's Anthem, the following book was brought to my attention.

"Atlas Shrugged continues to gain popularity during this financial crisis, recently selling more copies than ever since its publication in 1957. Atlas Shrugged provides a vivid depiction of an America similar to today's and provides the ideological causes of today's failing policies." Ayn Rand Institute

How to Fix the Economy

Let's start with the obvious. Throwing a trillion dollars at big companies and Senator's pet projects isn't going to get us where we need to go. Yes, some small portion of it will really help, and some of the psychological shock and awe may help get things going. Other than that, meh.

Fixing the economy is a bit complicated, since it's hard to agree on exactly what's broken. For example, for years we had economists up in arms at our dwindling personal saving rate. In 2005 the average American spent more than he made. It was an outrage, bankrupting the next generation by leaving them no inheritance.

Fast forward four years to 2009. People are changing their spending habits, and have begun once again to save money. The economists (one would hope not really the same ones) are up in arms about how we need to spend money to stimulate the economy, and are outraged that people would be so thoughtless as to save their money in these dire times.

Now, about defining the term "fix." Do we really want to put the economy back where it was in 2006 and 2007? That's like rebuilding a car that flew off a cliff, but putting it back on the top of the cliff with the accelerator held to the floor. No, we don't want to put things back the way they were, or we will end up right back where we are.

The government is currently trying to keep companies from collapsing by subsidising, supporting, and in some cases buying them. Is this necessary? Sime of that help could very well be necessary to get the economy going quickly because of the large part some of those companies play. But the big question is whether it is sufficient. There we get a resounding "no."

Let's take a look at the environment that these companies need to survive. Unemployment is up. Pay is down. Spending is down, with part of that loss in spending going to savings.

Now, just like following puppet strings back to the puppet master, you can follow the money to see what's really going to happen here if we don't jump in.

Is saved money being taken out of the economy? Um, no. Not unless it's going under the mattress. Okay then, where does it go by and large? It goes to banks, credit unions, and brokerage accounts.

What do banks and credit unions do with their money? I mean under normal circumstances. They loan it back out to people and businesses, which is a way of them investing it. Currently they are too scared to loan money like they did in the past. This is good. The government is pumping billions of dollars in, and it's not really helping much. Why? Because they only want to invest where there's a chance of getting their money back! Duh!

They're looking at billions of dollars of losses due to loans they were encouraged to make so everyone could have their own roof over their head. Guess what? Some people are incapable of paying for their own roof, and some of them were speculators that got suckered into buying at a bad time. Not giving them loans is an improvement. So what happens if you stop giving loans to those incapable of making their payments in the long run? More money becomes available to those who have managed their finances properly. I bet those with credit scores over 750 have a lot less problem getting loans, so long as they continue their trend of only buying what they know they can actually pay for. That's how they got the score in the first place.

So now we have lots of people who are losing their houses. Everyone's sad about that. What do we do to "save the children" and feel good about ourselves? Do we put them right back into another mortgage and set them up to fail again like last time? NO! Wrong answer! How about this. Let them rent a place from the guy with the 750+ credit score, who has been out buying up foreclosed properties at discount prices, pulling bad debt from the banks.

Let's summarize so far. We have the foreclosed properties being bought up at a reasonable price by financially responsible people. We have the folks who got foreclosed being housed in rentals or mom's basement until they can get back on their feet. We have banks and credit unions slowly building up their cash reserves. The savings that isn't going into low interest accounts goes into the stock market or other investments where it will have a stablizing effect.

Unfortunately the car companies are in for a hard stretch. The've become used to selling luxury, such as the third or fourth car in a two-driver family, or selling the Hummer when a Civic will do. Americans have tightened the belt and been forced to face reality on personal budgets. That means people will make due with what they're driving for a lot longer, and consider buying from the glut of used cars rather than going for something new as a first choice. But you know what happens when people make their cars last longer without upgrading, and don't have a 2nd or 3rd spare? Maintenance and repairs go up as the cars age. It's not a cure-all, but I'd think seriously about investing in that service department.

Jobs are still missing from my list, so I'll pontificate on that subject next. Did you know that India has begun pricing themselves out of the outsourcing market? It turns out that they caught the entrepreneureal bug in a big way, saw a huge opportunity, bid really low, then discovered they were in competition with each other. Prices increased due to competition, pay increased as they fought for the most qualified employees, and we're now to a point where it's not as economical to hire foreigners to answer your phones or write your software.

So with foreign labor costs higher, there's more incentive to hire locally. Unemployment will go back down. Still, those jobs won't pay as much since labor costs go down whenever unemployment has gone up. Still, since we're going to be paying less for rent and mortgages, and other prices have held reasonably steady (other than gasoline and its whipsaw ride), people can get by on a little less. As they gain experience and seniority, pay goes up gradually over time.

So there are several of the major facets of our current economic crisis. The goal here is that when we put the rebuilt economic car back on the mountain, we point it along the road that goes up the hill and set it up to start out in first gear, rather than perching on the cliff zooming along at full speed.

So, allow me to summarize on how to fix the economy in five easy steps.

1. Continue to save money and increase your savings rate wherever possible by reducing unnecessary expenses. Trimming the fat goes for both companies and people.
2. Invest savings in good deals, such as discounted real estate or let the bank invest it for you.
3. Borrow only when it is responsible to do so.
4. Accept reduced-cost labor as a part of the cycle.
5. Wait and watch as we rebuild based on good principles rather than unrealistic expectations.

I'll even throw in another item, although it won't apply to most. It's another one of those 750+ credit score kinds of things. If you're able, now is the best time in recent history to start a business because that will make you the one that is doing the lending, hiring the reduced cost labor, and building up to reap the long term rewards of success through responsibility.

Sorry for such a simple answer. I feel like the doctor telling the fat guy that the answer to all his problems is diet and exercise. It's always easy to say, but hard to do.

Being Fiscally Conservative

There's a lot of talk about liberal vs. conservative ideals and attitudes these days, but it seems that nearly all of our representatives in the US House and Senate have forgotten the meaning of being fiscally conservative. There's plenty of blame to go around.

President Obama stated in his address to Congress tonight (2/23/09) that one of his goals is to cut the budget deficit in half. That's a wonderful goal, but it's like saying he wants to sink half as fast as we are currently sinking. Bill Clinton and George W Bush and their associated congressional delegations both saw a budget surplus, so it's been possible in the past irrespective of political party. World circumstances are partly to blame for that surplus window being very small, so I'll grant that it's not just greed and corruption driving the deficit. Still, Old Hickory managed to pay off the entire national debt once so it's been possible in the past.

Given that we want to move toward a balanced budget, I like to compare small scale and large scale to identify principles. For instance, what happens if I as a consumer try to spend my way out of my financial problems? Assuming I can get infinite loans, it doesn't look so bad at first. I get my necessities taken care of, along with whatever I can convince myself looks like a necessity, along with a few things that are just too cool to pass up.

But what happens if my source of money shuts off and begins to come due? Not only do I have to suddenly balance my budget, but part of that budget n0w has to go to pay off both principle and interest to cover my spending spree. The national equivalent of this thought experiment is that in 2008 8% of our taxes went to interest payments. The deficit goes toward increasing the principle each year. I think it would be a bit high if 8% of my income went to interest payments, but some people are well above that percentage on their personal budgets.

Every time we run a deficit, that percentage goes up. Guess what happens if we keep running deficits every year? Pretty soon, we end up with so much of the budget going to debt that we can't pay for anything else. Could you survive with 25% of your budget going to interest? How about 75%? What's the drop dead value where you can't meet requirements for survival? What's our national drop dead point where we can't defend and support ourselves as a country?

If it helps, think of this Saturday Night Live skit, and apply it to governmental spending.

We have lots of options to choose from.

1. Balance budgets now voluntarily. It hurts for a while, but it's like being vaccinated against stupidity.
2. Gradually cut back on expenses as the percentage of debt service goes up, and put off the choice.
3. Pay off debt later when we are forced to do so by an overwhelming burden of debt.
4. Ignore it until we have uncontrolled inflation, and can use $100 bills as kindling.
5. Call it quits and see what form of government comes out from the far side of the chaos.

Well, it turns out to not be much of a choice after all.

Wind of Change

It has been nearly 20 years since the fall of Communism/socialism in the United Soviet Socialist Republics and the other Eastern bloc countries, yet socialism in our own country is sung as the way of the future.

In doing a search on socialism in Google I found the following written just over a week ago.

“I was standing on the Washington Mall on Inauguration Day, alongside nearly two million other people, and proudly watched the first African American take the oath of office in our nation’s history. That alone made the day deeply memorable, joyful, and historic. But I couldn’t help but think – and I’m sure that millions of others had the same thought – that the transfer of power from Bush to President Obama not only tore down a barrier that once was thought near impenetrable, but also signified the fading away of one era and the beginning of another.” A New Era Begins, Sam Webb, National Chair of the Communist Party of the United States of America 02/06/2009 http://cpusa.org/article/view/1015/

My question to you is why would the chair of the Communist Party here in America be so proud about our current President of the United States?

Remember Joe the plumber’s chat with then candidate Barack Obama? Obama responded to the questions from “Joe” that he intended to “spread the wealth around”—in other words…a redistribution of wealth or socialism.

“We Communists believe that socialism is the very best replacement for a capitalist system that has served its purpose, but no longer meets the needs and requirements of the great majority of our people.” Gus Hall (1910-2000), former National Chair of the Communist Party of the United States of America 01/01/1996 http://cpusa.org/article/static/13/

The New Testament even talks of sharing with the poor. Acts 2: 44, 45:

And all that believed were together, and had all things common;

And sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all men, as every man had
need.

“Americans have always been committed to taking care of the poor, aged, and unemployed. We have done this on the basis of Judaic-Christian beliefs and humanitarian principles. It has been fundamental to our way of life that charity must be voluntary if it is to be charity. Compulsory benevolence is not charity. Today's socialists--who call themselves egalitarians--are using the federal government to redistribute wealth in our society, not as a matter of voluntary charity, but as a so-called matter of right. One HEW official said recently, ‘In this country, welfare is no longer charity, it is a right. More and more Americans feel that their government owes them something."’ (U.S. News and World Report, April 21, 1975, p. 49). Ezra Taft Benson A Vision and a Hope for the Youth of Zion, 12 April 1977 http://speeches.byu.edu/reader/reader.php?id=6162


The idea of helping the poor is a noble endeavor. Indeed, we ought to help the poor where we can. However, mandatory redistribution of wealth or socialism will never bring this about.

Edmund Burke, the great British political philosopher, warned of the threat of economic equality. He said,

“A perfect equality will indeed be produced--that is to say, equal wretchedness, equal beggary, and on the part of the petitioners, a woeful, helpless, and desperate disappointment. Such is the event of all compulsory equalizations. They pull down what is above; they never raise what is below; and they depress high and low together beneath the level of what was originally the lowest.” http://speeches.byu.edu/reader/reader.php?id=6162

In my early 20s I noticed the results of socialism and communism in Eastern Europe. The stories come out of the east were less than stellar. History has shown those results.

“Instead of growing, the capital stock of socialist countries has been declining. They've been consuming it. Most of the textile mills in eastern Czechoslovakia were built before the First World War. They still operate with the original machinery. In East Germany, many of the buildings seem not to have been painted since 1945. In some cases, no one even painted over the old and faded Nazi slogans on the walls. In the Soviet Union, there are chemical factories built 110 years ago that are still producing the same chemicals in the same way. It is a general principle that under socialism no factory is ever closed.

The capital stock inherited from previous generations has been largely worn out, and there are real declines in the standards of living of many East European countries. Those declines would have taken place sooner had it not been for the enormous amount of Western capital that was pumped in by the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and other international lending institutions and used largely to finance current consumption.” Why Socialism Collapsed in Eastern Europe by Tom Palmer director of Cato University, Fall 1990. http://www.cato.org/special/berlinwall/palmer1990.html


It has only been 20 years since that time. Many have not forgotten. The following is comment on a post at humanevents.com from someone named Chris in Romania:

“For everybody that praise socialism,

I am from my experience: I lived under communism and I know what socialism is. I would rather die than go back in that time (before 1989 when we drop the communism in Romania). Socialism looks fine on the paper, but it was applied to people and it didn't work. And to make it work, hundred of millions of people were killed in the name of this ideology and it's still not working. If you want to correct the future, learn from the mistakes that were done in the past. And socialism is one of those mistakes.

It is sad to see people from WestEurope or US preaching how good the socialism is, when they haven't lived A DAYin a socialist society. They didn't stay in line to buy milk (the ratio was 1liter per day for 2 people), to buy bread (1/2 of bread per person), 2 liters ofoil per month, 2 kilograms of sugar per month, 20 liters of gas per month. Also,Sunday we had driving restrictions "to save gas".

I am glad that Romaniajoined NATO but I am not that happy that Romania joined UE in 2007. Millions ofRomanians had to leave the country and work in Western Europe because the wholeindustry and agriculture in Romania was ruined by the socialist ideology. Andthey work there like slaves, underpaid, with no benefits, while the westernpoliticians preach to their people, who are staying home on unemployment, how
good the socialism is.” Chris, from Romania Sep 28, 2008 http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=28723&page=6

"The lyrics [below] celebrate the political changes in Eastern Europe at that time – such as the Polish Round Table Agreement and fall of the Berlin Wall, the increasing freedom in the communist bloc (which would soon lead to the fall of the USSR), and the clearly imminent end of the Cold War.


The Scorpions were inspired to write this song on a visit to Moscow in 1989, and therefore included references to the aforementioned landmarks.

In 2005 the viewers of the German television network ZDF chose this song as the song of the century. It is the highest ever selling song in Germany, reputedly selling over 6 million copies in that country alone, and is frequently played on television shows presenting video footage of the fall of the Berlin Wall. It is widely known in Germany as the song of German reunification (and fall of communism in Eastern Europe generally), even though it only rose to popularity two years later. " http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_of_Change_(song)

The euphoria felt as these people were finally able to leave the oppression that had held their countries down was pronounced.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taVW8Kv2HcQ

Wind of Change by The Scorpions

I follow the Moskva
Down to Gorky Park
Listening to the wind of change
An August summer night
Soldiers passing by
Listening to the wind of change

The world closing in
Did you ever think
That we could be so close, like brothers
The future's in the air
I can feel it everywhere
Blowing with the wind of change

Chorus:
Take me to the magic of the moment
On a glory night
Where the children of tomorrow dream away
In the wind of change

Walking down the street
Distant memories
Are buried in the past forever

I follow the Moskva
Down to Gorky Park
Listening to the wind of change

Take me to the magic of the moment
On a glory night
Where the children of tomorrow share their dreams
With you and me

Take me to the magic of the moment
On a glory night
Where the children of tomorrow dream away
In the wind of change

The wind of change blows straight
Into the face of time
Like a storm wind that will ring
The freedom bell for peace of mind
Let your balalaika sing
What my guitar wants to say

Take me to the magic of the moment
On a glory night
Where the children of tomorrow share their dreams
With you and me

Take me to the magic of the moment
On a glory night
Where the children of tomorrow dream away
In the wind of change

Even now there are countries in Europe who are experimenting with socialism.

Barack Obama talks about change and hope. But these people looked to a different kind of change—a change in the opposite direction from that which our nation’s leaders want to take us.

What I ask you now, is who will finance our socialist experiment? There will be no other nation on earth that will be able to pick us up when we fall.

Our Best and Brightest Hope

We have the obvious problem that the economy has hit a bump in the road. For some, it's a really big bump. We have foreclosures, layoffs, businesses and people going bankrupt. So we have weeping and wailing all around, right?

No, not even close. We have a shining beacon out there, able to turn the economy around, give finance a kick in the pants, and get society out of this "woe is me" attitude. Who is this paragon of goodness? The nearly trillion dollar government-built taxpayer money shotgun? Once again, no, not even close. The refunds, bailouts and handouts are likely to have an emotional impact which could possibly shorten the downturn, and some borderline-viable businesses will be saved, but that's not what recoveries are made of.

Let's make the reasonable assumption that some of those who have been in a layoff recently have been fiscally responsible and have spent the time and effort to build a nest egg. Yes, there are those who didn't get into loans beyond their means and who are able to hold a $20 bill for more than 10 minutes without spending it. The exact percentage doesn't make any difference. Now let's trim it down some more and assume that some percentage of those responsible types also have some entrepreneurial spirit. This results in new small businesses popping up all over the place.

If you assumed 5% savers and 5% of those as entrepreneurs, you have 2500 businesses formed per million layoffs. Of course my numbers are guaranteed to be incorrect, but the principle remains despite the numbers you would prefer to choose.

Those new small businesses will hire people, so the old-school companies don't need to hire everyone back to reduce unemployment. Some of the fledgling companies will fail as they always do, but some will thrive and move on to become the movers and shakers of the economic recovery, and will become household words in their states, countries, and even in the world.

To widen the scope, many of those small businesses will thrive because they meet the needs of you and me, the common citizen. Our part in the recovery if we're not forming these engines of industry, is to patronize them because they help us with what we need and want.

So whose vest is big enough to hold the shiny pin given for saving the world from economic disaster? Yours and mine, if we're up to the challenge.