Author Chris Brady's Leadership Blog

"In Charge of the Game"

In today's political environment there seems to be two sides: 1) those who think the government can and should be in charge of solving our problems, and 2) those who think the government is evil and should be restrained. These are oversimplifications, to be sure, but I believe they at least come close to making a little sense of where people stand. 

Each of these viewpoints can easily run to extremes. Those of the first viewpoint can readily get caught up in theories of government that, in the past, have led to totalitarian states, oppression, and state-sponsored genocide. Those of the second viewpoint tend to take the form of "founding father worship," a condition whereby we deify the men who gave us America's founding documents as though they were infallible.

It is with this second viewpoint I wish to take momentary umbrage. For, although I believe America's founding to be a spectacularly singular event in the history of freedom, I do believe the founders were fallible, fallen human beings like the rest of us.

I also believe they made at least one huge error.

Lemmesplain.

Yesterday evening I was out with my family. Somehow, the topic of the game of Monopoly came up. Recently, my two youngest children, six and eight years old, have been completely enamored with this game. And boy, are they good at it! In one knock-down-drag-out-winner-take-all match, my six year old son cleaned my clock and left me destitute, all the while subsidizing his sister, who was not in much better shape than myself. I marvelled at their mathematical skills, their grasping of the concept of mortgages, and the agility with which they would quickly become real-estate tycoons. In yesterday's discussion, it came up that in a game between just the two of them things had progressed so far that they actually broke the bank.

"What do you mean?" I asked, smelling a rat.

"We made sooooo much money the bank ran out," answered the six-year-old with pride.

"Yeah, so we made more," chimed the eight-year-old with a freckled grin. 

"You did what?" I asked.

"We made more money."

"Just like that?"

"Yup. It was easy, actually."

Now I knew I was onto something, so I pressed further, asking, "Who gave you the authority to do it?"

They both shrugged their shoulders and answered, "We did."

"And why did you think it was ok to do?" I asked, going for the jugular.

"Because we were in charge of the game, silly!"

Out of the mouth of babes! You see, what my two cherubs had done was nothing more than the obvious - nothing more than governments have been prone to do any time and every time they find themselves in a similar jam, and, "being in charge of the game," who's to stop them?

The founding fathers put into documentary form many principles from the greatest minds of statehood from throughout history. They sought to chain the monster of government and make it subservient to the dictate of the people. Balances of powers, states' rights, a Bill of Rights, and the rule of law were enshrined in founding documents that began a great experiment in freedom unmatched in world history. However, they overlooked at least one enormous point: whoever controls the money controls the game. By assigning exclusive control of the money supply to the government alone, they dangled a carrot of irresistable size in front of the noses of power mongers and opportunists. It was only a matter of time before such a towering source of power would be abused. Without competition, due oversight, or powers of restraint provided to the people, the exclusive authority to control the money supply could eventually be the Achilles heel of the entire government.

Which brings us to today. Both sides of the political divide (the two viewpoints stated above) have found that once in office, the magic machine of money creation is easily at hand to enact their policies (no matter what their campaign rhetoric had been). The benefit is that the populace does not have to be asked, and no new taxes need be imposed. One political side promises more big government as the answer, and funds it with trillions of dollars created out of thin air. The other side yells and screams about the socialism of such programs, and then, once in office, reaches for the same easy-money spigot. The bottom line is this: when something as powerful as controlling the money supply is governed only by the false notion of self-restraint, there will be no restraint. 

"What happened next?" I asked my young Federal Reserve Chairmen.

"We made more, why?"

"Oh, just wondering," I said.

"But Dad," interrupted the eight-year-old, sharp enough to see where I was heading, "It didn't cause prices to go up!"

I was so proud of her, for she remembered the lesson of inflation I had tried to teach them a couple years ago. But she was also missing another aspect of the game.

"That's because the rents are fixed," I answered. "They are printed on each card and cannot change. If they weren't fixed, they would go up every time you expand the money supply." (Don't even get me started on the evils of price-fixing! That's another monster altogether!)

"I know, I know, Dad," she said with a coy smile, "But it's just a game!"

She was right, of course, and Dad didn't feel like infringing any further upon childhood joy with real life economics. But when it comes to real life, it is not just a game.

So what could the founders have done differently?

The concept is called "privatized money," which involves allowing the people themselves to come up with, distribute, and regulate their own money supply based upon open competition. There would be several at a time, all vying for our usage based upon merit alone. No authoritative government would be handing us one single choice and forcing us to accept it as "legal tender," all the while affecting its value with its hands on the levers behind the curtain. Privatization would be like choosing amongst Visa, MasterCard, and American Express based upon who we thought had the most stable, reliable, well-known, and dependable money. Perhaps each would offer a backing and redemption in gold. It is not such a crazy idea. Deregulation and free markets have vastly improved such things as airlines, telephones, and even postal service (Federal Express, Airborne, and others have carved a nice niche in the space around the government's strange monopoly on mail). Privatized money has been done many times in spotty moments throughout history, at points where governments hadn't yet confiscated control. It worked. Usually it went from chaos to consolidation among a handful of worthy competitors, just like most industries.

We don't need to debate the details, however, because it's unlikely to ever happen. Those in charge of the game will never give it up. Instead, they've got to work to keep us playing along.

"Hey, you just passed 'GO', collect your $200 and pay your rent." 

 

Art, History, and Michael Jackson

Below is another excerpt from my upcoming ITALY book (chapter 19). 

            One of the ways I’d sold this whole month of Italy concept to Terri was by emphasizing its educational aspects.  Partly due to our regular travel schedule, and also the fact that we insisted on living in two states at once, we had thus far entirely home schooled our children.  This had many benefits and effects on our family life, one of which was to turn us into opportunists always on the lookout for ways to teach.  So my sales pitch was an easy lob across the plate: What could be more educational than to go and see in person many of the things one normally only gets to read about in books? It was a strong argument, of course. 

 While in Siena, as we were touring the magnificent town hall called the Palazzo Pubblico, a project to restore some of the building's many fabulous frescoes was underway.  Christine stopped cold in her tracks when she noticed a college-aged woman lying on her side on the floor, carefully applying freshening color to a border originally painted over six hundred years prior.  This gave us the spontaneous opportunity to explain to our children the process of painting en fresco,wherein the artist applies the paint to the wall as its freshly laid plaster is still drying.  In this way, the art is applied into the wall and not merely onto it.  For this reason, the art is much more durable throughout the centuries.  Fortunately for us, and the world, the Renaissance painters from Michelangelo to Raphael painted almost entirely en fresco.  This was a moment of art history at its best. 

 This one little lesson inspired a search for art supplies and resulted in several afternoons of drawings and sketches.  Nathaniel and Christine each drew and colored fabulous renderings of the temples from Poseidonia, complete with fluted columns and admiring tourists.  J.R. drew a colorful rendition of his own, and Casey took a little table and chair out into the yard and made a near perfect sketch of La Contea.

            On another occasion, right around bedtime, Casey sat on the small love seat adjoining the desk I’d set up as my temporary office.  “Dad,” he inquired, “how come my allowance is worth so much less in Euros than it is in Dollars?”  I was glad he was seated, because my answer would take a bit of explaining.  As I launched into one of my favorite topics, Nathaniel heard what was going on and joined us.  Soon Christine and J.R. were there, too, and now I had eight brown eyes looking at me intently as I explained international monetary policy and the effects of inflation, balance of trade, and currency exchange rates.  I couldn’t believe their concentration level, their uninterrupted attention spans, the incredible teachable moment.  Their questions were pointed, informed, and insightful.  We chatted back and forth for almost two hours when finally Christine said, “Thanks for teaching us about inflation, Daddy.” 

            “How was that for some home schooling?” I asked pridefully of Terri after the kids were in bed.

            “It was fantastic,” she agreed.

            “I couldn’t believe how attuned they were to everything I was saying.  Even little J.R..  I think this trip has awakened in our children the hunger to learn,” I said, never one to miss a chance to reinforce a sale I’d made.

            “Yes, I’d agree.  But there was also another factor at work,” she said.

            “And what was that?”

            “It was bedtime and they were stretching it out.”

            Fast-forward six months after our month in Italy.  We were settling into our new surroundings in North Carolina, having recently sold our home in Michigan.  Terri had taken the kids to an event at a local museum in downtown Raleigh.  As a guide led the group around a corner and into a section of Italian art and history, my kids apparently came alive.  There was a painting of Mt. Vesuvius they recognized immediately.  They were even able to name some of the artists and their works.  As Terri recounted this story to me afterwards, I couldn’t help thinking how satisfying it is for a salesman to hear of his customer’s satisfaction.

            I have long believed that history is critical to a proper understanding of our human existence.  Billions of people have inhabited this place before us, and they’ve left fascinating clues and hints about the lives they lived.  They aren’t just names and places and dates, they were real people just like us.  They felt deeply, suffered terribly, laughed merrily, loved, ate, traveled, thought, raised children, worshipped, wrote, expressed themselves through art, built wonderful buildings, and wrote penetrating thoughts.  I get lost in wonder just pondering the depth and width of human history.  It is mysterious because so much of it is irrecoverable.  Tiny proofs of it are scattered across the globe, leaving often agonizingly incomplete records of what transpired before us.

            History is also one of the most difficult subjects to impart to children.  It takes patience and a deep appreciation of it on the part of the teacher to have any hope of transferring its wonder to the next generation.  Many times as I relate stories from history in my speeches or writings, I run across adults who say they’ve never really understood history before.  “It was always so boring,” they say.  But it is not boring.  History is magnificent and as full of mystery as life itself.  It’s a story without full answers, an unfinished work of art still being crafted each minute of every day.  It was this depth of appreciation I hoped a slow and easy trip through Italy would impart to my children.  But I wasn’t leaving it to chance.

            In my opinion, perspective is the key to appreciating history appropriately.  This must occur through the agency of two other things: geography and a timeline.  I love maps.  In another life I probably could have been a cartographer, holding up in a dusty office in Florence or Genoa, working with parchments and ink, reproducing the territories being discovered by the brave mariners of the late fifteenth century.  Timelines too have been a fascination, the way they provide insights into concurrent events, or the proximity of one event to another.  When looking at timelines I have often been hit with “aha” moments, realizing for the first time, for instance, that the conquests of Alexander the Great were a great connector between the civilization of the ancient Greeks and the Roman republic and empire to follow.  So in the interest of maximizing the impact of our historical touring through Italy, I had decided to use both maps and timelines with the children.

            One day we assembled at the wooden picnic table on the veranda.  With a long, blank piece of paper we together wrote out a crude timeline, showing first the ancient mysterious peoples populating the Italian peninsula, then the Etruscans, next the Romans, followed by the Dark Ages and the rise of the official church, then the Renaissance, and onward up to the present day.  In one sweep, portrayed with colored pencils in the Tuscan sunshine, my kids were treated to the perspective only obtainable through simplification.

            “Now,” I asked, “Where do the frescoes we saw being redone in Siena fit on this timeline?”

            A little finger came forward and rested on a spot.

            “Almost,” I answered, then was able to give some explanation.

            “How about the ruins we saw in Poseidonia? Where do they fit on here?”

            This time the point was accurate.  I continued with these kinds of questions until I noticed boredom creeping in.

            Next I flipped over the crude timeline and drew an even cruder map of Italy.  It was at this point I was thankful we weren’t taking a month in Hungary, or Poland, boots being so much easier to draw than livers or spleens.

            “Who can point to where we are in Tuscany right now?” I asked.

            Again, out shot a little finger.

            “Good.  And how about where we are on the Amalfi Coast.  Where’s that?”

            Another nearly perfect point.

            I was feeling so good.  This teaching stuff was a piece of cake.  Then I caught myself and realized it wasn’t my teaching ability, and it certainly wasn’t my map or timeline making ability, rather it was the power of being here and seeing it all firsthand.  It was the power of place all over again.

            Next I asked, “And who painted the Sistine Chapel Ceiling?” I was certain they’d get this one easily.  We’d been talking a lot about art history, and one of my favorites of all time is Michelangelo.  Besides, we were planning to go to Rome soon and had been discussing seeing the Sistine Chapel.

            “I know!” yelled Christine full of excitement.

            “Okay, sweetheart, who?” I asked, waiting like every proud teacher to hear a demonstration of the growing knowledge of his pupil.

            “Michael Jackson!” she answered with all the sincerity in the world.

 

 

Rising Above the Stage Show

'Get out and vote,' we are told; 'Be informed and get active,' and so we who value our freedom and love our country run like a pack of lemmings to a stage show draped in red, white, and blue. 'Hooray for our side,' they yell, 'All of our problems can be neatly packaged in a ten second soundbite and blamed on the other side,' we are repeatedly led to believe.

The inherent problem with our partisan political process is that the very essence of its structure imbibes a false assumption. We are invited to participate, but in order to do so we have to 'choose a side.' Then, having chosen, we are fed the long list of proper beliefs to substantiate why our side is so right and the other is so wrong.

But what if both sides are complicit in the problem, or perhaps less, what if they are both benign in their abilities to do anything about the real problems? What if neither side is totally right or wrong? What if the real problem lies above the stage show?

Freedom is the parent of some strange children, two of which are

1. blaming others, and

2. feeling guilty.

Whenever a problem gets bantered about in our national public discourse, it is usually one or both of these reactions that ensues. This is fueled by the structure of an 'our side against yours' national mindset.

For example, when gasoline prices skyrocketed a few years ago we heard from one side of the red-white-and-blue stage show that it was because Americans were wasteful and driving gas-guzzling SUVs. From the other side of the stage show we heard that those big, bad Chinese people were consuming more and more of OUR oil. There you have it, blame and guilt all wrapped up in the debate. So those feeling guilty run out and buy hybrid vehicles to assuage their pangs while others fight the urge to 'hate' an ethnic group that gets labelled as hyper-productive and stealing our jobs by being willing to work for peanuts (or, um, rice).

Closer scrutiny, however, reveals a different story. While China's growing economy (as well as those of other emergent nations) has increased the demand for oil, it is at best only one of the three main factors in the increase in oil prices, and it might be the least significant. What really occurred was a financial commodities bubble caused by a complicated set of games-playing in the commodities markets by banks operating with secret and unfair federal exemptions to bring investment money into a place it was never supposed to be. 

Picture the commodities trading floor as a closed system in which producers of commodities (oil, wheat, corn, etc. the 'stuff' that everyday people need and can't do without) meet purchasers of commodities (like cereal companies, etc) to buy and sell with each other. A small amount of 'speculators' is allowed in so a 'ready market' is available at all times for both buyers and sellers (who therefore don't have to wait for each other to make a sale or purchase). This small amount of speculators is closely regulated by a federal law established in 1936. But over time six or seven very powerful investment banks obtain secret letters of exemption which allow them government-granted monopoly status to allow 'their investment customers' special access to those markets through their trading desks. This is exactly what happened, and as a result the money invested in commodity indices rose from just $13 billion in 2003 to over $317 billion in 2008 (twenty five times growth in less than five years). This amount of money pumped into a market that can only be 'played long' (meaning, money is made by the investors ONLY when prices go up, unlike securities where money can be made on 'both sides' of the market - going up OR down) had the effect of massively increasing the prices of commodities. Of course, these prices quickly find their way to the end customer, the little guy, who is paying more for everything and can't figure out why. What's really happening is the government has allowed a small number of granted monopoly banks to fleece him without his knowledge or consent.

That's just one of the scams being run.

Another (and thankfully it's getting much more coverage these days) is the willful, intentional, deliberate devaluation of the American dollar. While the government (through the workings of its private partner the FED) pumps trillions of worthless dollars into circulation (through the hands of many of the same banking interests given such special treatment in the commodities scam above) the dollars held by average Americans become worth less and less. So while the 'little guy' is getting creamed in the commodities market and the price of everything he buys is going higher and higher, the dollars he holds to buy those things is capable of purchasing less and less.

We could also dive into the housing bubble that has left millions of Americans 'upside down' in their home mortgages while bankrupting millions of others. That would represent scam #3, and again, it was perpetrated by many of the same characters from scam #1 and scam #2 above, but I won't go into the whole vicious circle of greed and government bailouts to fat-cat bankers with taxpayer money that makes this one so sickening, because this isn't a direct factor in the oil price scandal. 

Only now, after these three revolving cons, can we even begin to discuss the growing Chinese market and its impact on oil prices. And only now can we even begin to consider the car we drive as having an effect on all this.

What has happened is the American public has been hi-jacked by a glitzy distraction called partisan politics in which blame and guilt are manipulated by the media to keep us split in a neat fifty-fifty feud. It doesn't hurt that moral issues are thrown in so that our convictions force us to lump everything together in what appear to be neat packages of "Donkey" or "Elephant." Meanwhile, the whole time we bicker and fight amongst ourselves, a bunch of cronies are robbing us blind.

I wonder what would happen if we rose above the partisan stage-show and united? What if we found common ground on all the things we could agree upon, such as freedom and justice for all, and turned our well-meaining but mis-guided furor upon the real thieves of the American dream? 

 

 

The Empire of Debt

We are taught that the United States is a Democracy, when it was actually founded as a Republic. We are told that we have free enterprise, when actually we are in the grips of a totalitarian debt empire. We are told that we are free, when we are actually locked into a pyramid scheme. Though we still live in one of the greatest places in the world, we owe it to our children to reverse what has happened. Watch the video below. 

Poison in the Pantry

I receive many emails covering a broad range of topics almost every day. Many deserve no more than a few second glance or a quick chuckle. Every now and then, however, I'll come across something that stops me in my tracks. This happened recently. Someone had sent me a video clip to watch and I got caught up looking through the viewer comments. Something someone had written there was so stupid, so uninformed, and ultimately, so dangerous, that I have not been able to stop thinking about it.

What was the topic?

A "movement" to create a "more fair system" utilizing "proper resource management." At least, those are some of the words this person used to advertise, with excitement, I might add, the concept of Communism by a different name. What bothered me almost as much as this person's naive passion was the almost fearful way people responded to her. It is as if we are not allowed to be candid about things any more. When a snake crawls into our living room we are not allowed to yell "snake"and throw it back outside. Instead, we have to tip-toe around issues, giving everyone ridiculous respect for every idea because our world has become so saturated with "tolerance." As long as you are sincere about your idea it doesn't matter if it is utterly ridiculous, dangerous, and just plain stupid.

Finally, some of the commenters apparently got as sick of the nonsense as I did. One in particular had lived under a Communist regime himself for decades and brought some actual first-hand experience with a "more fair system" to the discussion, detailing the oppression of the many by the few that Communism always brings. In my Rascal book, I review many stories of people who risked their lives to escape from these types of "more fair" regimes rather than stay behind barbed wire fences to enjoy the benefits of "proper resource management." But idealists are not friends with facts, they prefer fantasies. The young lady continued to babble about her movement and how it was assured to make the world better.

I am not going to link to the specific article because it is only a representation of a larger issue and can be found in a thousand different places. The question I'd like to pose is this: Why is freedom so hard to appreciate? Why do people who live in a free environment hatch themes and schemes that will ruin their freedom and lead to suffering, oppression, and injustice? Why do they ignore the lessons of history which clearly show what every single one of these "more fair systems" of "better resource management" lead to?

Here is a second group of questions to consider: Why do people who cling to murderous philosophies think they are the most informed, enlightened, intelligent and compassionate? Why does blind ignorance pass for being visionary? Why is "oppressive" marketed as "progressive?"

Treat people with respect. Keep an open mind and consider their opinions and thoughts. But in the end, poison should not be allowed to sit in the food pantry as though it is as nourishing as the other items on the shelves. Label it for what it is: Dangerous. Think critically about everything you hear and read. Allow no philosophies to pass into normalcy without a fight in the arena of logic, reason, and the lessons of history. And through it all, remain a Rascal. Freedom has only ever been won, defended, and preserved by people too strong to be fooled by dogma, led by charlatans, and duped by movements.  

 

Politics: A Bounce House

Politics are like a children's bounce house.

Everyone inside appears to be having fun, but upon further inspection we realize that this is precisely because they are children.

Pandemonium is somehow the source of the entertainment.  Without it, the inhabitants would lose interest and exit. 

Anyone with any sense would not seek to enter it in order to improve it, but would instead busy himself with the finding of a sharp object. For only in its deflation can a bounce house be reduced to its core liners and exposed as the bag of hot air that it is.  Only by being deflated will the noise and fights emanating from within cease.

Of course, this would be a cruel course of action to follow if the house were filled with happy children. Not so for blood-sucking politicians. In this latter case it would be downright merciful. I can almost imagine one of them looking out from its deflating crush to whisper, "finally."

Freedom for Leg Jigglers

He was jiggling his leg like crazy, he was. Up and down, up and down, and the result of his mindless entertainment was that my seat-back tray was bouncing around like a dog in the back of a pickup truck coming home from church on a dirt road. It was one of those commuter flights between some big town and a smaller one not yet large enough to warrant a real plane. For this reason space was at even more of a premium than usual, and in such tight quarters leg jiggling was extra annoying.

"Er, uh, excuse me, sir. Could you please refrain from shaking the entire plane with your habitual childish habits? I am afraid the rivets on the wings are going to work themselves loose."

It was these types of phrases I rehearsed in my mind while pretending to myself that I was reading my book. There were more polite ways to say it, of course, but there were also some funnier ones, too. However, out of respect for his personal freedom to be a goof-ball, and my suspicion that I was a tad bit on the irritable side and just might be on the verge of losing my Christian testimony, I kept quiet (until now. Oh, the power of blogging)!

It was not until later, in the shower, of course, when I had a thought (they don't come often, but when they do, it's worth writing about). It occurred to me that, just as with me and that man on the plane, we humans have an innate desire to control the behavior of others. I arrived at this not-so-profound insight by starting with the innocent little question:

"How can any idiot think that a bigger government is good?"

Then I remembered that jiggly leg fellow. Here I was wanting to control HIS behavior. Maybe, just maybe, all these people clamoring for "a law for this" and "a bureau for that" aren't really proponents of bigger government, per se, but rather they just want to control the behavior of others.

I really think that's it.

Control the behavior of someone else? 

What kind of monster would aspire to such arrogance, such haughty holier-than-though (or should I say atheister-than-thou?) demagoguery? And exactly WHICH behavior should be controlled? To what standard? And how? And who says?

See how this gets so sticky so fast?

Oh, and I almost forgot to mention. The very blokes who want to do all this controlling of the rest of us (what we drive, what we buy, what we say, who we get for our doctor, how we can or cannot defend ourselves against people nobody can control, etc., etc.) also conveniently don't believe in any moral absolutes. Nope. They make it up as they go! 

So there you have it.

A bunch of control freaks want to MAKE you behave according to THEIR arbitrary value system. And, by the way, they don't allow themselves to be held to any higher standard beyond themselves, because they have convinced themselves, conveniently, that there is no God. 

So you see? They become the highest authority and dare to command you according to their own self-made set of principles. Comforting, isn't it?

By instinct, I guess, being a freedom-loving liberty defender and all, I allowed Mr.Leg Jiggler to have his jollies. But, I must admit, when he stopped jiggling and started swaying them back and forth, back and forth, opening and closing them incessantly, I almost reached the limit.

And then there was the whole, "What would Jesus do?" thing, and that really stopped me in my tracks. Yup. He'd have walked.

So I think the moral of the story is thus: It's better to suffer a few leg jigglers along the way than to lose our personal freedom to be just as annoying to someone else.

And to those of you out there whom I have ever similarly and unknowingly annoyed, I have this to say: "Hey, it's still a free country!"    

Green Police

 

Cheap Trick was my favorite band when I was a kid. It all started with the "I Want You to Want Me" song that I first heard blaring at a gas station in South Carolina while on vacation. Maybe it had to do with all the pretty girls around. Maybe it was Robin Zander's voice. At any rate, they quickly became a favorite, and I stayed with them through the 8-track (I was young, VERY young, diapers, practically), vinyl, cassette, and CD years. For this reason, when the "Green Police" commercial came on during the Super Bowl, I was at first distracted with a blast from my past. As the commercial wore on, however, I awoke.

It seems the commercial is an attempt at humor from Audi, which can be taken one of two ways.

Way #1: Audi is as fed up as most of us with the legalistic approach of government-worshippers who want to enforce responsible behavior through the power of the state. In a good stab at such misguided beliefs, Audi basically tried to sell an awesome car to people fed up with getting in trouble with the viciously politically correct. I am okay with this view, though the imagery was still very scary.

Way #2: Audi agreed with the stance that would require governmentally enforced global eco-wacko-ism and thought it was funny to poke fun at people who don't share the extreme "granola" viewpoint. 

Perhaps there is a third interpretation, one that would indicate that the advertising gurus over at Audi are geniuses because they managed to inflame a controversial subject to the point where a blogger would waste some of his precious time writing to his 3 loyal readers about a commercial! 

Obviously, the commercial was so controversial because, like good humor, it rang close to the truth. Many of us share the viewpoint that ecological hysteria is being used to increase statist's power at the expense of individual freedom. Just like wars, if a government can get people freaked out enough (i.e. the world is coming to an end, we will be nuked in five minutes, the earth is going to overheat, the polar ice-caps are melting, global warming, and now, the ever-flexible "climate change"-allowing people to freak out when temperatures trend in either direction) then they can justify taking emergency, draconian measures to enforce their "protection." It used to be that this protection was from enemies in war. Now the protection is against ourselves and neighbors who dare to flush their toilets a bit too often.

This is tragic. 

Why?

Because the loss of individual freedom will kill everything else. The parasite in totalitarian government always ends up killing its host (usually millions at a time). 

But there is another tragedy, too. It is the tragedy that will certainly befall our environment if the extremists succeed in giving something like the Green Police the power the commercial showed us. What some don't seem to understand is that totalitarian, tyrannical, communistic, socialistic governments have a very consistent track record of being the worst polluters.

For those of us who truly enjoy nature and care about passing a clean, well-cared-for planet on to our grandchildren, and who also realize that the private sector is more effective at administering nearly anything when compared to pervasive governments, the issue is a hot one (no pun intended). There is no way a statist power of even the most invasive kind can effectively control the behavior of 6 billion people. It is up to individual responsibility and stewardship. This has always been accomplished best through community activism, social norms, private enterprise, proper incentives aligned to reinforce the correct behavior, and the like. None of these are perfect, and we have a long way to go, (if only all the effort toward empowering government toward this end were being used to empower the private sector) but, rest assured, they will far surpass the efforts of any government to make a difference, and, they come with the additional benefit of individual freedom instead of its opposite.

Government is like a sledge hammer. It is only good at one thing, and the use of a sledgehammer is obvious. However, when you are a sledgehammer, every problem tends to look like a cinder block in need of smashing. A sledgehammer can be used to cut a board in half, but it will do a messy and destructive job of it. (Don't even get me started on how the sledgehammer works on the economy!) The board may eventually be pulverized into two pieces, but not as effectively as it would have had the correct tool been used.

The question isn't whether or not we should be responsible stewards of planet earth. Of course we should. The question is rather which tool is most appropriate to bring about the most effective results. History is clear that individual initiative and the private sector properly incentivized are consistently far superior to the government sledgehammer. The people who don't believe this don't read history, I guess, or haven't traveled enough to third world countries. Or maybe, just maybe, they simply want the power and prestige governmental decree in service to a worthy political correctness can bring.

In the words of Cheap Trick in their opening song from the At Budakon album: "Ain't That a Shame."

Twitter Highlights

In our increasingly fast-paced digital world, it seems more and more thought is compressed into short little sound-bites. Lengthy, well-developed tracts are hardly read by a busy public. It is becoming more and more true that, if you want someone to read something, keep it short.

In that spirit, I guess, Twitter has taken off as a social networking device. I have personally enjoyed its interactivity and 140 character limit. If you would like to follow me on twitter, click here.

Someone recommended that I list some of my recent Tweets here as a summary. I hope you enjoy them! (And don't worry, I'll keep this list short!)

Government: the only place someone could get away with saying they're going to spend their way out of their spending problem.

Politician's prayer: Give me this day someone else's daily bread.

We are human beings, however, most of us only look like human doings.

You can tell a lot about a person by what it takes to make him/her mad.

Excellence is unwrapped by the hands of courage.

The annual US budget ought to say: "As much as we want." It would save paper, at least.

Never mistake gentility for character.

Most people don't really know what they want until they see someone else with it.

Life has no rewind, but it is being recorded.

They call it the human race, however, many people aren't even jogging in it.

Many people appear to be tip-toeing through life trying to get to death safely.

A Bloody Mess!

Conventional wisdom has a way of looking barbaric once proven wrong. 

Take, for example, the bleeding of patients a little over a century ago. Here's how it went. Someone would be sick with either the common cold or colon cancer or anything in between, and the prescription would almost always involve removing quantities of the patient's blood (in which the Bible tells us resides the very life of the person, hence the phrase "life's blood.") The "knowledge" said that "bad humors" had found their way into the blood and needed to be removed before they killed the patient.

After such a genius approach, when the patient weakened even further, the only appropriate thing to do was what? You got it: drain more blood. And what if the patient didn't revive at that point? Yup! Drain away even more. This would be done either with incisions and/or leeches, believe it or not! Sometimes, amazingly, a patient fortunate enough to receive this kind of "care" would actually recover, heaping thanks and praise upon the knowledgeable physician.

Which brings me to our government and the economy. 

Unable to see beyond their barbaric "knowledge" of how an economy works, the physicians at the FED and throughout Washington know darn well what the patient needs. Blind to the debilitating affect of their "care," these all-knowing physicians of prosperity do the exact wrong thing to the patient at the exact wrong time. Bleeding it through borrowing and spending, they await the expected recovery. When the patient seems to get even worse, what do they conclude? Of course! Even more treatment is required! So they bleed it some more with more borrowing and spending! Surely the patient will revive soon!

Just how much blood has been sucked out of our economy at the hands of these government leeches (I crack myself up) and from the cuts of their stimulus package knives? Consider the budget for this year:

$3.8 TRILLION!!!!

I said $3.8 TRILLION!!!  For ONE YEAR'S worth of spending!

Just a handful of years ago that was the sum-total of all accumulated US debt from its entire existence! Now we spend that kind of money in ONE YEAR!!!

But don't worry, $2.4 Trillion of that comes in from tax revenue, so they only have to borrow $1.4 Trillion of it!! (really quickly, calculate your share of that debt: just divide $1.4 Trillion by 300 million people. Oh, and, uh, that's just for 1 year. That doesn't include the national debt, and it doesn't include the interest that kind of borrowing is going to require. But, then again, I was never THAT good at math!)

This has gone beyond bleeding the patient. I mean, come on, we've got bucketfuls of blood all over the doctor's office: blood in the sink, blood on the floor, blood all over the walls. We've bled the economy so drastically with this "treatment" that it's become too gory for even the worst of Hollywood's B movie producers. It is a fact in special effects: too much blood and nobody will believe it. That MUST be where we are as a nation! It's so ridiculous people can't even believe it! It doesn't even look real! It's UNREAL! These geniuses aren't merely bleeding the patient now, they're chopping off limbs!

Even worse, at least the physicians of old were trying to cure patients of ailments they had nothing to do with causing. In the case of our economy, the very "physicians" who so arrogantly drain more and more blood out of the economy were actually responsible for causing the ailment in the first place!

Oh, if only our policymakers and quacks in Washington would just DO NOTHING!! Our patient is amazing! It has survived 20+ years at the hands of economic barbarians! Maybe, just maybe, it is made of robust enough stuff to still come back from the brink of death. But this can only happen if we can keep the "doctors" away from the patient.

So here's my idea: Let's get them out there campaigning, right now, all the time, without ceasing. I know, I know, it will be hard for us to stomach, but it will still be better than letting them anywhere near our patient!

And with that I've got to stop. 

My eyes are bloodshot.