Tuesday, September 30, 2014

What I Would Have Said at the Candidate Forum, Question 5

 Some of you may know that I filed for Lt. Governor as an independent in an effort to advance a lawsuit by Neighbors of Arkansas against the unjust changes made in the law in 2013. These changes make it harder to get on the ballot as an independent. I will not be on the ballot as part of the remedy, but I remain confident that the law will soon be thrown out as unconstitutional. Similar laws have in the past, and there is no way there can be “equal protection” under the law when one's access to the ballot can be made harder every time one attempts to access the ballot outside of the two parties whose misrule has so harmed our nation.

During that process, before it was clear that our (three of us sued as candidates, the other two for local offices) being placed on the ballot was not going to be a part of the remedy, I held myself out as a candidate. I even got invited to a forum. One co-hosted by the El Dorado Chamber of Commerce and the Union County NAACP. This forum is to occur on September the 30th. Since I went to the trouble to answer the questions (in case access to the ballot this cycle was still an option) I thought I might as well share my answers with you. With that set up, here are the questions which will be asked at the forum tonight and how I would have answered them. If you don't think the system is broken, compare how I would answer them by how they are being answered by the candidates that the system is offering you.....

Question 5...

Incarcerated persons are often released with few life skills in place, do you think a retraining program would benefit this state and decrease the rate of return to the overwhelmed prison system.


That depends on how you do it. I believe we need to re-think our penal system. The first step is to distinguish between those who are really bad people and who are just screw-ups. Some people are in prison right now because they need to be. Others are in prison because they were not as lucky as me when I was young and stupid.

The wrong way to do it is to further fatten the prison-industrial complex with a vast, expensive, and centrally planned prison job training program. If this group was the type to thrive in an institutionalized educational setting then they would be honors graduates, not convicts. We have to meet them where they are, not throw more money into methods that are not reaching them.

The right way to do it is to open the Bible, and note that they did not even have prison as we know it even for some very serious crimes, much less for the screw ups. What they had were “cities of refuge” where the criminal could go and stay until their time was up. They had to live in one of a few cities, away from their old influences. Not nice places, but at least they could interact with some people who were decent role models and keep some toe-hold in the private economy.

Vera.org says is costs Arkansas $24,300 per inmate. And add a few thousand of job training on there and you are pushing $30K. Meanwhile our small towns are dying while our prisons are stuffed. Why not take that same money and make some towns who volunteer for it “cities of refuge” for certain offenders? Housing two of them to a cheap motel or apartment would be maybe $3,000 a year each. Give another $6,000 to the city for the trouble of having them and then another $6,000 tax credit to any employer in town who hires them. Their food and bills are on them and their family, but with a tax credit available even if they are nearly worthless to an employer at first, someone should hire them for up to the amount of the credit. That is saving about a third of your money and they keep getting life skills and growing up so you don't have to “re-train” them. The whole experience is training, and not in being a gangster, like they would get in prison. The screw-ups win, society wins, the small towns win, the employer's win, the taxpayers win, the prison-industrial complex loses and I can live with that.

So what if a screw-up has a little kid they are taking care of and a job and what have you? Here is where you have to see beyond the superficial to understand how tough justice is actually more merciful. Proverbs says that a fool when struck may become wise. For the right person a caning would be the fastest job-retraining program in the world. It would be better in that situation to offer them an alternative sentence of a caning than sending them off to either prison or a city of refuge. They can take a beating and consider their debt paid, and two weeks later they are back at work and loving their kid.

You don't offer that choice to the real bad guys, they belong in prison. But you offer the option to the rest and let them decide if it is better for them than prison. Don't deny them that choice out of a false sense of being too kind to let them make their own decisions.

We don't have the money to pay for a new statist program and they don't work anyway, especially in an economy destroyed by the fiscal mismanagement of these two DC based parties.

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Mark Moore is a proponent of a philosophy of government known as "Localism".  In the end, it is either going to be globalism or localism, because no other view of government can protect its population from globalism.   To learn more, check out Mark's book "Localism, a Philosophy of Government."



What I Would Have Said at the Candidate Forum, Question 8

 Some of you may know that I filed for Lt. Governor as an independent in an effort to advance a lawsuit by Neighbors of Arkansas against the unjust changes made in the law in 2013. These changes make it harder to get on the ballot as an independent. I will not be on the ballot as part of the remedy, but I remain confident that the law will soon be thrown out as unconstitutional. Similar laws have in the past, and there is no way there can be “equal protection” under the law when one's access to the ballot can be made harder every time one attempts to access the ballot outside of the two parties whose misrule has so harmed our nation.

During that process, before it was clear that our (three of us sued as candidates, the other two for local offices) being placed on the ballot was not going to be a part of the remedy, I held myself out as a candidate. I even got invited to a forum. One co-hosted by the El Dorado Chamber of Commerce and the Union County NAACP. This forum is to occur on September the 30th. Since I went to the trouble to answer the questions (in case access to the ballot this cycle was still an option) I thought I might as well share my answers with you. With that set up, here are the questions which will be asked at the forum tonight and how I would have answered them. If you don't think the system is broken, compare how I would answer them by how they are being answered by the candidates that the system is offering you.....

Question 8...

Violent crimes are increasing, is there a proactive measure that can be initiated during your term in office?


NICIC.Gov says: The crime rate in Arkansas (2011) is about 34% higher than the national average rate. It is higher than any state except South Carolina. Property crimes account for around 89% of the crime rate in Arkansas which is about 33% higher than the national rate. The remaining 11% are violent crimes and are about 39% higher than other states.

As I studied and researched in order to give your question a proper answer I tried to find a common thread. What did Arkansas and South Carolina, the two states where apparently there is less respect for private property and person, have in common? What is the common thread? Then I remembered the GOP presidential debate in 2012. Ron Paul was booed by an audience of people who claimed to be Christians. His offense was that he cited the Golden Rule. There was a lot of hypocrisy in that room that night, and there is nothing more corrosive to moral character than hypocrisy. We will never have enough cops and guns and prisons to restrain a population which is without moral inspiration.

This ties into everything else I have been saying about the way things have been done in Arkansas. The people running the show have set a very poor moral example for everyone else. When people see the powerful getting whatever they can get no matter how they get it, it makes them want to do the same. They may not be powerful enough to enlist the government to help them loot like the insiders do, so they use the tools that they have. If you want them to act better, you need the people running the show to act better.

When people are in Little Rock trying to form coalitions to loot everyone else, how can you complain when people on the street form a coalition to loot everyone else? The upper crust of one town puts on their suits and ties and goes to Little Rock and tries to talk the legislature into using government force to take money from other towns and give it to them. They don't call it robbery. They call it “economic development.” Street crime merely cuts out the government middle man. When thugs pin you against the wall and take your wallet, its not robbery. For them and their family, its “economic development.” The answer is not in any of these idiotic program proposals, the answer lies in the human heart. It's a question of moral inspiration and it starts at the top.


If you elected Mark ( a spokesman could have stood in for me) I guarantee you that he would help you set the moral example that we need. Need I say. Because you can't build enough prisons or hire enough cops to control a population without moral inspiration.


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Mark Moore is a proponent of a philosophy of government known as "Localism".  In the end, it is either going to be globalism or localism, because no other view of government can protect its population from globalism.   To learn more, check out Mark's book "Localism, a Philosophy of Government."

What I Would have said at the Candidate Forum, Question 2

 Some of you may know that I filed for Lt. Governor as an independent in an effort to advance a lawsuit by Neighbors of Arkansas against the unjust changes made in the law in 2013.  These changes make it harder to get on the ballot as an independent. I will not be on the ballot as part of the remedy, but I remain confident that the law will soon be thrown out as unconstitutional. Similar laws have in the past, and there is no way there can be “equal protection” under the law when one's access to the ballot can be made harder every time one attempts to access the ballot outside of the two parties whose misrule has so harmed our nation.

During that process, before it was clear that our (three of us sued as candidates, the other two for local offices) being placed on the ballot was not going to be a part of the remedy, I held myself out as a candidate. I even got invited to a forum. One co-hosted by the El Dorado Chamber of Commerce and the Union County NAACP. This forum is to occur on September the 30th. Since I went to the trouble to answer the questions (in case access to the ballot this cycle was still an option) I thought I might as well share my answers with you. With that set up, here are the questions which will be asked at the forum tonight and how I would have answered them. If you don't think the system is broken, compare how I would answer them by how they are being answered by the candidates that the system is offering you.....

Question #2
As Governor how would you promote new business utilizing Arkansas residents and resources?”

By getting myself and my ego and my administration out of the middle of it. By replacing the fear of government meddling with the expectation of fair play and justice.

The way this state has been doing things is that they have a generally unfriendly business climate with lots of taxes, regulations, and a high cost of government overhead, but if you are one of the favored few who has sucked up to the political class then you get subsidies and special deals. They have a board and a commission for everything and half the time they get captured by the insiders in the industry and just raise barriers to entry for other Arkansans. It is past time we dialed that back and let the markets and the customers determine who the winners are, not base business success on being connected to the system. Good honest businesses want to focus on pleasing customers, not lobbying the legislature or obtaining permits from the government.

Look, if someone wants to start a hair-braiding and nail painting shop out on Rock Island Row they should not need to jump through a bunch of government hoops and licensing and stuff to do that. And if someone wants to build a multimillion dollar business, say a chain of hardware stores, they should be free to focus on pleasing their customers instead of having to run to Little Rock all the time to beg the Governor and the legislature not to take their tax money and give it to a competitor from some national chain in order to bribe them to come to this state.

That is the dishonest accounting by which our current political system says that they “create jobs” in Arkansas. They take money from all over the state and then spend it subsidizing a business. Then they look only at that business and say “look at the jobs we created”, but they don't count how many jobs were lost over the rest of the state because they sucked money out of the other communities. It is no wonder many national chains stop short of coming to Arkansas. Those who are good at what they do want to transact business, not suck up to politicians.

I keep hearing talk about lowering income taxes, but if you really want to help our business climate, lower sales taxes. They are too high both relative to surrounding states and the internet. Border communities like this one risk losing sales of big ticket items especially. Really, if something is manufactured in this state, its sales should not even be taxed here. We got the taxes on the profits of the company.


One last point- we are missing out on the boom in natural gas in large part because Governor Beebe raised taxes on the extraction of natural gas by 1,600%. Revenues from the tax the next year DROPPED 10%. Can you imagine how many companies must have reduced operations for that to happen? How many jobs were lost? People need to feel confident that when they invest in this state that we won't immediately try to loot them once they start making money. Right now, I don't think they have that confidence.

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Mark Moore is a proponent of a philosophy of government known as "Localism".  In the end, it is either going to be globalism or localism, because no other view of government can protect its population from globalism.   To learn more, check out Mark's book "Localism, a Philosophy of Government."

What I Would Have Said at the Candidate Forum, Question 6

 Some of you may know that I filed for Lt. Governor as an independent in an effort to advance a lawsuit by Neighbors of Arkansas against the unjust changes made in the law in 2013.   These changes make it harder to get on the ballot as an independent. I will not be on the ballot as part of the remedy, but I remain confident that the law will soon be thrown out as unconstitutional. Similar laws have in the past, and there is no way there can be “equal protection” under the law when one's access to the ballot can be made harder every time one attempts to access the ballot outside of the two parties whose misrule has so harmed our nation.

During that process, before it was clear that our (three of us sued as candidates, the other two for local offices) being placed on the ballot was not going to be a part of the remedy, I held myself out as a candidate. I even got invited to a forum. One co-hosted by the El Dorado Chamber of Commerce and the Union County NAACP. This forum is to occur on September the 30th. Since I went to the trouble to answer the questions (in case access to the ballot this cycle was still an option) I thought I might as well share my answers with you. With that set up, here are the questions which will be asked at the forum tonight and how I would have answered them. If you don't think the system is broken, compare how I would answer them by how they are being answered by the candidates that the system is offering you.....

Question #6

The issue of minimum wage has been in the forefront for many weeks, are you pleased with the current ruling, if so why, if not why not.

I am neither pleased nor displeased with the court ruling, as I consider the whole issue to be a distraction or even a gimmick that has nothing to do with bringing back good jobs with good wages.

You have to address the root causes- such as the corporate tax code which rewards American corporations for becoming global corporations and outsourcing our manufacturing base. If they leave their profits at home they get taxed at one of the highest rates in the world, but if they make money off shore then they never have to pay U.S. Taxes on it, unless they bring it back home! You could not think of a tax policy more suited to offshoring American jobs.

Then they both tell us we can have “free trade” with unfree people. That the Chinese are now a “most favored nation” in trade status. That we should not put tariffs on Chinese goods even though they have a captive labor force of one billion human souls. They are like a gigantic 21st century plantation, but somehow our workers are supposed to compete against people that have virtual slaves. Well, let me tell you something, trading on the labor of unfree people was the wrong way to get cheap cotton in 1850 and its the wrong way to get cheap junk from China now.

And the money. Don't look at the wages, look at the money and what they have done to it- both parties. When I was born the dollar could be exchanged for gold by any nation on earth, 35 dollars to the ounce. And our coins were made of silver, just common quarters and dimes were 90% silver. Today the melt value of each of those quarters from the year I was born is $3.35 per quarter. So four quarters from the year I was born have a melt value of $13.00 now. So a wage of $7.00 an hour in 1961 money would be like a wage of $91 an hour today!

What happened to our money? Our gold is gone and our silver is gone. It has been replaced by DEBT. Debt they now say that we owe to them. Instead of real money that naturally buys more as we get more productive they give us fake money that they can drain the value from. We now have to scramble for wage hikes just to stay even. They steal value from the dollar by over-printing. Then they give us a few government peanuts with some of what they stole. We see that and we think they are giving us free stuff. What they have really been doing is stealing from us in ways hard to detect and giving a little back with grand announcements and brass bands. The result is that people connected to government, to the political system, and to the global banks have gotten richer and the rest of us have gotten poorer. Both parties are hip deep in it. They are both all about going global, not looking out for America.


So voting for or against this gimmick is not going to change anything for the better. You want change for the better, here is where it starts. Here it is: Quit voting for the people whose policies have been robbing you blind. That's the first step. And until you take it, its not gonna get better. Thank you.

What I Would Have Said at the Candidate Forum, Question 4

 Some of you may know that I filed for Lt. Governor as an independent in an effort to advance a lawsuit by Neighbors of Arkansas against the unjust changes made in the law in 2013 which have the effect of making it much harder to get on the ballot as an independent. I will not be on the ballot as part of the remedy, but I remain confident that the law will soon be thrown out as unconstitutional. Similar laws have in the past, and there is no way there can be “equal protection” under the law when one's access to the ballot can be made harder every time one attempts to access the ballot outside of the two parties whose misrule has so harmed our nation.

During that process, before it was clear that our (three of us sued as candidates, the other two for local offices) being placed on the ballot was not going to be a part of the remedy, I held myself out as a candidate. I even got invited to a forum. One co-hosted by the El Dorado Chamber of Commerce and the Union County NAACP. This forum is to occur on September the 30th. Since I went to the trouble to answer the questions (in case access to the ballot this cycle was still an option) I thought I might as well share my answers with you. With that set up, here are the questions which will be asked at the forum tonight and how I would have answered them. If you don't think the system is broken, compare how I would answer them by how they are being answered by the candidates that the system is offering you.....

Question 4...
There are many health issues facing the residents of Arkansas. With the implementation of Arkansas’ unique approach to the Affordable Healthcare Act what impact do you feel it has had on Arkansas? AR currently has the lowest % of uninsured residents in the country, what do you see as the future of healthcare?

I have a reputation among those who know me of being able to see things coming. That reputation is very well deserved. I have made many predictions, documented on my blog, where I said the conventional wisdom was way wrong and time after time events later proved the conventional wisdom to be as wrong as I said it would be. I say this as a statement of fact, not as bragging, because I don't consider that it takes any special genius to see these things. Not when it comes to public policy. All it takes is looking at things honestly and thinking independently instead of getting locked into some group-think.

What is the impact of this program? It is easy to know the impact this act has had and will have on Arkansas, even before the data is in. It will have the same impact as every other centrally controlled, top down government transfer program in five thousand years of human history. It won't be different this time. No matter how good it sounds, it never is. Here is what it will do, and what they all do, every time without exception: It will misallocate resources.

Because our people have been so productive, we have until recently been able to endure expanding government misallocating our resources. That is because we were able to create wealth faster than they were misallocating it. But friends we are at the end of that rope now, and that is true whether we accept that fact, or refuse to face it.

Now in the middle of misallocating resources some good is going to be done- you can't throw that much money around without some good being done somewhere. But to get an honest accounting you also have to ask yourself what harm might be done too. And at this point the harm we risk is very great. Catastrophic even.

The first problem is the program is not being paid for. It is being financed by debt laid on the backs of our children. I don't have much of platform, but if I have one plank I would say it is this: stop stealing from children. A controversial idea I know. I cannot think of a more immoral way to pay for government benefits for ourselves than to send the bills to the next generation by means of government debt. But since this program is financed by debt, and our debt is unsustainable, then it stands to reason that this program is also unsustainable. Ergo, it will not be sustained. It will collapse, just when people have become most dependent on it.

This is my prediction for what will happen.  We will get into this thing and in a few years realize that the money needed to pay for all of these promises does not exist.  The money to pay for it never existed, they only said it did in order to gain control over your family's health care.  We will have dismantled our existing health care structure for the poor only to see the single federal system the state's leaders pinned all of our hopes on fall apart.  

We can save the most lives if we back out of it now. I don't expect that will happen, but I do want you to remember. Remember who did it to you (republicrats), and remember that I tried to warn you.

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Mark Moore is a proponent of a philosophy of government known as "Localism".  In the end, it is either going to be globalism or localism, because no other view of government can protect its population from globalism.   To learn more, check out Mark's book "Localism, a Philosophy of Government."

What I Would Have Said at the Candidate Forum, Question 3

 Some of you may know that I filed for Lt. Governor as an independent in an effort to advance a lawsuit by Neighbors of Arkansas against the unjust changes made in the law in 2013 which have the effect of making it much harder to get on the ballot as an independent. I will not be on the ballot as part of the remedy, but I remain confident that the law will soon be thrown out as unconstitutional. Similar laws have in the past, and there is no way there can be “equal protection” under the law when one's access to the ballot can be made harder every time one attempts to access the ballot outside of the two parties whose misrule has so harmed our nation.

During that process, before it was clear that our (three of us sued as candidates, the other two for local offices) being placed on the ballot was not going to be a part of the remedy, I held myself out as a candidate. I even got invited to a forum. One co-hosted by the El Dorado Chamber of Commerce and the Union County NAACP. This forum is to occur on September the 30th. Since I went to the trouble to answer the questions (in case access to the ballot this cycle was still an option) I thought I might as well share my answers with you. With that set up, here are the questions which will be asked at the forum tonight and how I would have answered them. If you don't think the system is broken, compare how I would answer them by how they are being answered by the candidates that the system is offering you.....

Question 3....
We cannot overlook the need for new jobs and new industry, knowing that, what is a probable first step?

At some point this evening, probably with this question but possibly the preceding one, the other guys are going to start talking about workforce education and job training programs. They will make the kinds of claims we have all heard so often before about how this government program is going to “create jobs”. But they don't really, they just steal economic activity from some places and redeposit it on other places, minus a friction cost or overhead. And of course, it steals economic activity from those of us less connected to this government program and redeposits it to the benefit of those more connected to the government. That starts that whole cycle I mentioned before where businesses spend less and less effort taking care of customers and more and more lobbying government for favors. This sort of government intervention in the economy, when costs are fully accounted, results in a negative feedback cycle.

Look, workforce education is nothing more than an attempt to have a planned economy with respect to labor inputs. Planned economies don't work. Central planning only works for the central planners and those connected to them, not the economy as a whole. Honestly when I first read their plans for “workforce education” you know what my first thought was? “What Warsaw Pact country's FIVE YEAR PLAN did they steal that from?” It sounds like maybe Bulgaria 1975. Am I close?

This represents an attempt by the corporate big boys to shift their job training costs onto the backs of taxpayers. Who do you think is going to sit on these planning boards where it is decided how many welders and phlebotomists and mechanics are needed in a region? Representatives for the big players in that business. And if you are paying the bill, why, they will have the steak and lobster. They will push for the most elaborate training facilities around. And if they think they will need 80 workers in the next five years do you think they will say “let's build it to train 80 workers in five years”? Oh no. They will say “build it to train 380 workers”. They will give a high number because it is in their interests to have a lot of trained workers to choose from so they can cherry pick the best. The rest can go flip burgers even after the taxpayers footed the bill for their training.

Central planning does not work. It never has, and this bunch is not the first group in human history smart enough to make it work. It only works for the connected, and like the late great George Carlin said, “its a big club, and you and I ain't in it.”

We would be better taking half of the money we are spending on workforce education and using it for tax credits for companies who want to have apprenticeships. That way the apprentices can be paid from the tax credit while they are learning. The company will invest a more reasonable amount for training facilities, and they would not train more workers than they need. In other words, this apprentice approach would waste a lot less money. The political parties hate it because there is no program for them to control. Some companies may hate it because they were so looking forward to you picking up all the tab. But a lot of employers would love it, especially the small ones who are not interested in sucking up to politicians and getting on Workforce Education boards, but would not mind taking on an apprentice. The other half of the money can be returned to Arkansas taxpayers who will use it to buy things and thus increase jobs and help the economy in a free-market way.



Tuesday, September 23, 2014

Ballot Issue #1 an Attempt to Restore Balance of Power

The establishment is not a fan of separation of powers. This is because it creates friction which slows down the looting machine that government has become.   This is especially true when some of that power is possessed by the Legislature,   These days, most of us dislike the legislature and feel like it does not represent us anymore.  And that is true, it doesn't.  That is what happens when voters just go by a party label- the legislators serve the groups which fund the national party and not the people.

The party system has also destroyed much of the legislature's power, and rendered it generally unable to function as intended by the Founders.   This is because almost half of every legislature will stick by an executive of their party almost regardless of what they do. No wonder Executive Branch has grown in power while the Legislative Branch, the People's Branch, has grown impotent and almost irrelevant.

Today Barack Obama ordered the U.S. military to bomb targets in Syria, an act of war.  He did not even bother to ask for Congressional approval despite the clear Constitutional provision that it is Congress, not the Executive, which is to declare war.   He has also on numerous occasions decided that he will not enforce provisions of Obamacare that could prove problematic for him.  He has even threatening to grant mass amnesty to illegal aliens by Executive Order.   If Congress does not pass the laws he wants, he simply makes them up himself.   And he is not the only executive to dominate a legislature.  It's par for the course now.

The establishment, left and right, have a distaste for the Rule of Law and the Legislative Branch.  It is the only branch that is still within reach of a determined grassroots effort.   They want a strong Executive so that they can "get things done" that most citizens have no interest in seeing done, or even downright oppose.  The Big Boys want the legislature to be a rubber stamp, almost irrelevant, and for the most part they are getting their way.

In Arkansas do we have a good legislature which should be trusted with more power? Don't get me wrong, I don't think we have a good legislature at this point, but its fixable.  We get what we pay for in legislative salaries.  We need better legislators that work for us and to get them we are going to have to pay them better, just like any other boss would have to do to get better help.  Still, it is not the legislators themselves I trust, it is that the legislators are still within reach of the People.  They know their offices can be wrested from them if they don't at least pretend to be responsive to constituents.   They are still in the influence of the People.  I have no confidence that this is the case for Governors and Presidents.

That brings us to Ballot Issue #1.   What is says is that the appropriate legislative committee would have to approve any rule change by state agencies.  The state (establishment) press is of course against it.  The Arktimes crazies are screeching that it would lead to "one branch" government.     Given how the position of the legislature has eroded, these claims are somewhere between false and ridiculous.

The articles take the tone that state bureaucracies are supposed to be their own equal branch of government.   They are not.   They are the executors for the Executive Branch, which is supposed to be "faithfully" executing the laws. What are the supposed to be "faithful" to?  The constitution and legislative intent.   That is, the executive branch should be executing the laws according to what the legislature intended when they passed them.   Right now they take whatever laws the legislature passes and then carry them out however they want to with no real oversight from the legislature.

I have seen personnel from state agencies spin, mislead, and even lie to legislators in an effort to scare them into or out of doing something.  The power between the agencies and the legislators is all out of whack because they hold most of the information and can stay at their jobs for decades.  The news article attributes the desire to pass the measure to a state legislature which is of the opposite party of the Governor.    They were tired of getting outflanked by the Governor and his minions.   There is a lot of truth to that, but besides all that the power of the legislative branch has diminished. This initiative is an attempt to restore balance between the branches of government, not eliminate the other branches.

This measure is not going to completely fix the problem, because it will never be fixed as long as citizens elect their legislators from the same political parties which elect their executive branch members.   This practice end-runs the Founder's intent with regard to separation of powers.   Still, it is a start to returning to the proper balance between the branches, where the People's Branch is a first among equals.




Saturday, September 20, 2014

Resolving Carter Paradox Requires Courage and Honesty, Not Intelligence

Former "The Arkansas Project" blogger extraordinaire Nick Horton marvelled at the lack of Republican Party reaction when State Representative Davy Carter, also the Speaker of the State House by the way, endorsed a Democrat over members of what is supposed to be his own party in the November elections.   He wrote:
Simply amazing. If you criticize Republicans for betraying GOP principles, you're "helping Democrats." But if the "GOP" Speaker endorses a Democrat, those same people are absolutely silent.
Since then Carter has endorsed another Democrat, again without comment or objection by all of those Republican Party insiders who fuss at Nick Horton for telling people the truth about what Republican office holders have done.    How do we make sense of this apparent contradiction?

The paradox is easily resolved if one has the courage and honesty to accept the overwhelming evidence that America is controlled by one party with two faces.   The One Party's interest is described by the following three goals:

1) Keep the looting machine for the interests which fund it going.  This explains why there is one party which says it wants to grow government and does it and another which sometimes says it doesn't but does anyway.

2) Centralize power in Washington.  This greases the skids so that the looting machine referenced in number one can operate with less friction, and also takes more decision making power from those pesky local officials who have not caught on to the realpolitik of the situation- that the two-party thing is an elaborate fraud to prevent people from taking their country back.

3) Pursue global answers to all issues, be it monetary policy that bails out even foreign banks, open borders that globalizes the labor pool, interventionist foreign policies that have us sending our troops to every mud hole on earth instead of protecting our own borders, trade and tax polices which outsource our manufacturing base, and education polices which internationalize local school curriculums.  It makes sense that the One Party with Two Faces is a global party, offering voters no meaningful choice on any issue related to global vs. national sovereignty issues, because this monstrosity is largely funded at the highest levels by global, rather than national, interests.

Once you have the courage and the honesty (again, it does not take much intelligence because the strength of the evidence is so overwhelming that one has to fight harder to not see it than to see it) to accept that America is run by One Party with Two Faces then what was before inexplicable makes perfect sense.   Those who hold to principles of limited government and honoring the limits of the Constitution may in some technical sense be in one-half of the One Party with Two Faces, but the realpolitik of the thing is that they are not in the club.  The real party apparatus knows that these people are not of them, and they will marginalize and weed them out every chance they get.  It is the grassroots and some sincere elected officials who are not in the party.  They may be in some technical sense members, but when the chips are down the insiders of both parties get along with each other much better than they do with the outsiders of their own party.  Consider these facts:

Vice President Joe Biden told Senator Lindsey Graham that he would do anything he could to make sure that Graham was re-elected, whether that meant coming to South Carolina to praise him or coming to attack him.

In Arkansas in 2011, every Republican state senator, with the exception of Jason Rappert, put their name on a fundraiser for Democrat State Senator Larry Teague.  Two of them were even listed as co-sponsors including former state chairman of the Republican Party of Arkansas Gilbert Baker.

Karl Rove is now revealed as one of the main figures trying to destroy the Tea Party.   His people were among those running ads in Mississippi painting Senate Candidate McDaniel as a racist in order to prop up establishment incumbent Thad Cochran.  He has been doing similar stuff across the nation with his "American Crossroads" and deceptively named "Conservative Victory Project."

Rove did resign under a cloud, but he need not fear prosecution for his voter suppression schemes, because once you reach a certain level, the members of the One Party with Two Faces do not prosecute one another regardless of the severity of their crimes.  Attorney General Eric Holder for example, funneled guns to murderous Mexican drug cartels.  These guns were later used in hundreds of shootings, including the death of U.S. Border Patrol personnel.  I explained long ago that Holder would never be prosecuted for this crime because none of them at that level are ever prosecuted.  They are in the same party, even if they are wearing the other face of it.

State Senators have not reached the stage where they are above prosecution, so when Senator Paul Bookout of Jonesboro used $50,000 of campaign contributions for personal purchases he had to resign and face prosecution.  Still, Republican Senate Leader Michael Lamoureux took up for Bookout early on when it seemed the fallout could be contained.   Lamoureux did not bother to do the same when Gov. Mike Beebe slanderously accused Secretary of State Mark Martin of being like convicted felon former state Treasurer Martha Shoffner for doing something that was perfectly legal for him to do.  

The Governor piled on Martin, the Democrat Party piled on Martin. Lamoureux said nothing to support Martin, the state Republican party would not even put out a press release defending him even though it was obvious he was acting within the law.   A felonious Democrat Senator got more support from the Republican club than the highest elected Republican state official.  Martin you see, is not really in the party.  He only thinks he is because he has a piece of paper somewhere that says he is a Republican.  But to be in the party, the insiders have to know that when the chips are down you will do the wrong thing for the right people.  They are not sure about that in Martin's case, so he gets no help from "his" party.  It won't matter how loyal he has been to them, how many of their operatives he hires, or what he does for them.   They don't trust him.  They don't trust him to be dishonest.

The insiders know there is really only one party.  They have known for a long time.  Back in the 1990s, I was a newly minted Vice Chairman of a Republican County Committee.   The chairman called and said he could not make an important meeting where candidate selection would be discussed and asked me to represent the committee for him.  

I was confused, because I thought that was what the committee was for, but I went.   Turns out the state Executive Director was there.   A big donor to the party was there.  Even the campaign manager for the current state representative for that city was there.  The thing was, that state representative was a Democrat.  Yet here was his campaign manager in a meeting where the state party Executive Director was there to select candidates.   I was in the meeting by accident, and I later figured out that I was the only pro-life person in that room.  By the way, the State Representative who succeeded that one was also a Democrat- but he was also a former chairman of the Republican County Committee.

It is a big club, and you and I are not in it.  Once one accepts this everything I have discussed above and a thousand other apparent contradictions becomes at once clear.  Each person can either choose to face the facts, painful though it might be at first, or go on pretending.  Which do you choose?





Tuesday, September 09, 2014

Is This What Our Children's Money Is Supposed to Save?

During the debate over the so-called "Private" Option version of Obamacare advocates for expansion said that rural hospitals in the state would close down without the potential massive infusion of taxpayer dollars that the program provided.   Since the feds were not paying for their spending at the time, all of these news dollars would have to come from additional borrowing.

I find it grossly immoral and cowardly for politicians to buy themselves support by suggesting we borrow money against the credit of the next generation.   The just born and the unborn have no vote with which to defend themselves from plundering from despicable political predators who, like genuine amoral psychopaths, have the chilling ability to pass off stealing from children as some kind of moral duty with a deep synthetic earnestness.

I am displeased that rural hospitals might have to shut down, but the answer to that is for our government to reverse the deliberate policies which have led to subsidizing large cities at the expense of rural areas.This is preferable to laying increasing debt loads on our children forever in order to shield hospital administrators from having to adjust to painful market realities.

Not that it is even working.  The hospital in Crittenden County for example still had to shut down.   Not even the infusion of borrowed money which came from implementing Obamacare via the "Private" Option was able to shield them from market realities and their own incompetence.   So now my children are to be hitched to the government debt grist mill not to save certain rural hospitals, but in a failed effort to save them which nevertheless does not stop the program which was purportedly enacted to save them.

But it gets worse.  It turns out that the administrators who were running the hospital were committing insurance fraud against their own employees.   They were "self-insured" and collected premiums all year, but never paid any claims.   The employees thought they were covered, they were told they were covered, but the hospital was keeping their premiums and not paying any claims.   Nor does it appear now that they will pay them- the employees may be on the hook even though they paid their premiums.

I am not surprised to discover that some hospital administrators who supported the "Private" Option are thieves, because they were thieves beforehand.  They were thieves from the moment they decided to push for the government to start an expensive new program which would be paid for by debt laid on the backs of the next generation.  

Nor am I surprised by the disconnect from reality displayed by these hospital administrators who thought they could keep the illusion of solvency going with such seedy tactics.  Essentially every politician who wants to expand government when we are so unable to pay for the government we have is acting in a way that is just as disconnected from reality.   So are the voters who are backing them.   They don't want to face the reality that you can't just keep ordering up more government goodies and programs on the national credit card.  It's unsustainable and those who support such measures are out of touch with reality, just like the administrators of the Crittenden County Hospital.

Those of us who believe government should live within its means and not steal from children are often called insulting names by those who want a cut of the loot which government is stealing from those children.  Names like "nut", "extremist", "whack job", "crazy" and what have you all tend to imply that our position is just not realistic or rational.   The implication is that we are somehow "out of touch with reality."  The truth is exactly the reverse.   It is our opponents who aggressively and short-sightedly demand unsustainable government looting that are truly out of touch with reality.  That applies to both fiscal reality and moral reality.

The only calculus by which those of us who believe we should live within our means is "out of touch with reality" is that of the politics of Hell.   By that reckoning, if children's credit is there for the looting, why then, start looting before some other parasite gets there first.   By this hellish reasoning, we are "fools" to refrain from looting while loot is available and "crazy" to put our sense of justice above our immediate appetites and felt needs.  The wisdom in our foolishness is that the fruit of the calculus of Hell is a society very much more hellish.  A society where all seek to loot, and where none bother to produce since what is produced is looted.  A society where every belly is therefore empty despite an intense focus on immediate appetites.

The so-called "Private" Option was always immoral.  It was always irrational by any calculus other than that of Hell,  It was always seedy even.  And sometimes, with events like those which are now occurring in Crittenden County, the truth of that is exposed to open daylight.