Chaos Is Tyranny

On his show today, Andrew Klavan mentioned that Plato told us: “What erupts out of chaos is tyranny.” I looked for the quote and concluded he was paraphrasing. But I found this quote, and I’m highlighting what I think Klavan was referencing: 

By degrees the anarchy finds a way into private houses…The son is on a level with his father, he having no respect or reverence for either of his parents; and this is his freedom… Citizens…chafe impatiently at the least touch of authority… they will have no one over them… Such…is the fair and glorious beginning out of which springs tyranny… Liberty overmasters democracy…the excessive increase of anything often causes a reaction in the opposite direction… The excess of liberty, whether in States or individuals, seems only to pass into excess of slavery… And so tyranny naturally arises out of democracy, and the most aggravated form of tyranny and slavery out of the most extreme form of liberty.

By “the most extreme form of liberty,” Plato means anarchy, or chaos, not actual freedom.

The Spherical Model gives us a perspective when we’re dealing with ideas in the political sphere, and how they interrelate with the economic and social spheres.

I thought this might be a good time to review the idea of the Spherical Model and show some ideas on it.

The Political Sphere of the Spherical Model

Instead of right and left, we have three dimensions, so we use a sphere. North on the sphere is the freedom zone—the good direction—where we enjoy our God-given rights, and governments are limited to only protecting those rights.

South on the sphere is the tyranny zone—the bad direction—where we suffer oppression, and our rights are not respected.

That very farthest south area, the polar area, we might call totalitarian, because it would attempt total control over every aspect of life—actions, beliefs, associations, ways of doing business, use of money and property.

On the website, we use this description:

Totalitarianism means that the state has all the power—the police, the military. The state can do what it wants, and the mere citizen is without any rights except what the state decides to grant. Anarchy, on the other hand, means that power belongs to whoever is stronger and meaner than the next guy. If you threaten to beat people up (or kill them) if they don’t give you all their belongings, and you’re strong enough to mean it, then you have power. If someone else is stronger or better armed than you are, then you have to yield power to them. In other words, anarchy, while less organized, is power in the hands of the strongest and best armed—just as in totalitarianism.

A large part of world history has been the creation of chaos for the purpose of accumulating power over people. Stalin and Lenin stated that as their purpose. People like Obama’s advisor Rahm Emmanuel put it as, “Never let a crisis go to waste.” Use the chaos to build your power.

It doesn’t really matter what you call that southern tyranny: fascism, socialism, communism, or some other -ism or -archy. They’re still tyranny.

The horizontal direction on the sphere indicates level of interest, from individuals and families on up to states, nations, and world levels. At any of these levels, tyranny can be a statist tyranny—coercion run by the government. Or it can be anarchic tyranny—run by non-governmental individuals or groups that assert dominance by physical force. To the person being oppressed, it doesn’t make much difference who’s doing the oppressing.

Anarchy might mean lack of government, but there’s never a lack of people trying to exert power over others.

On the sphere, anarchic tyranny would always be to the west of statist tyranny. But when you look at the southern pole of the sphere, you can see that, whatever type of tyranny, at whatever level, they are very close to each other.

south pole view of the Spherical Model
with Anarchy adjacent to Statist Tyranny 

Communism, Socialism, and Fascism are close
and overlapping as varieties of statist tyranny.

The value of using the Spherical Model, rather than the typical left-right model, is that we can see just how close the “extreme left” (statist tyranny) is to the “extreme right” (also statist tyranny). And calling the “right” fascist, as though that were diametrically opposed to “socialist” or “communist” is misleading at best. They’re overlapping ideas.

Up there we have our Constitutional Republic. When we always abide by the Constitution, we remain up there in the freedom zone, with accompanying prosperity and civilization.

We can’t, as a people, compromise with southern hemisphere tyranny and expect to remain in the freedom zone. One compromise pulls us southward. The next compromise pulls us further southward. And so on, until the Constitution looks like a distant memory.

You can’t trust a party. You can choose a party that gets you closer to what you want—south to tyranny, poverty, and savagery; or north to freedom, prosperity, and civilization. And you can participate to move the ideas of that party toward your preferred ends.

In recent years, the Democrat Party has sunk further southward. It has people in it that think they value freedom, prosperity, and civilization. But their party—it’s ideas, platform, and thought leaders—do not want those things. However, they use language to relabel things to convince people that they can bring about good results, while claiming the conservatives—their enemy—want all things bad, which they tend to describe in terms of tribalist biases: racism, bigotry, homophobia, sexism, etc.

They talk about a utopia, but not a real world. They think they should get credit for simply wanting some good outcome—even when everything they do can only lead southward, because it takes away individual rights and grants power to government far beyond government’s proper role. With the help of a willing, biased media, they get away with the relabeling, despite their own pitiful track record of bad outcomes—particularly for the minorities they claim to be compassionate about.

I wanted to talk about this today, because of the calls for defunding the police, in the wake of the protests—and then riots—in Minneapolis, and then around the country.

Black Lives Matter is claiming the high ground. They’re the protesters, not the rioters. They want the protests to remain peaceful; they just want to call for the elimination of racism among police. They want things to get better in society. It’s those rioters who are trying to tear down everything, to create chaos.

But who, then, is calling for the defunding of the police?

It turns out that Black Lives Matter has that on their website.

Maybe we need to know more about them. On their “What We Believe” page, they say they started out as a response to state-sponsored racism. They use Trayvon Martin as an example [he was killed while attacking citizen George Zimmerman, not by racist police, however]. They add Ferguson, Missouri, which, if you’ll recall, brought about the lie “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot,” when a black thief, Michael Brown, attacked a police officer, who killed him in self-defense, according to multiple eye witnesses, including black ones. Despite their lie about Brown being gunned down with his hands up in surrender, this is the case that “galvanized” their movement, which they claim is not only national but worldwide.

What a treasure this George Floyd case must be, a black man actually killed by police! And possibly even because of race. They leave out that everyone the whole country over is appalled by the killing, regardless of any guilt of the victim. This was not justice, and Americans everywhere want to see justice done.

Let’s go on. This is further down the page: 

We are guided by the fact that all Black lives matter, regardless of actual or perceived sexual identity, gender identity, gender expression, economic status, ability, disability, religious beliefs or disbeliefs, immigration status, or location….

We are self-reflexive and do the work required to dismantle cisgender privilege and uplift Black trans folk….

We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and “villages” that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable.

We foster a queer‐affirming network. When we gather, we do so with the intention of freeing ourselves from the tight grip of heteronormative thinking….

So, this complaint about blacks needing to be treated fairly is something of a “social justice” whatchagot stew.

They want to toss out the idea of gender. They want to get rid of the traditional family, remove the responsibility of rearing children from parents and place it on the collective, so that mothers are free to go protest.

On another page, they proudly claim they are working tirelessly to dismantle ICE and concentrate especially on freeing black illegal immigrants, of which they say there are 600,000.

If you’ve been sympathizing with them because George Floyd was black, consider whether the rest of their agenda is relevant to your George Floyd sympathy.

Consider also that one of their three founders (all three are self-styled Marxist-Leninists), Assata Shakur, whom they revere at every meeting, fled to Cuba after being convicted of shooting a police officer during a routine traffic stop, and, finding him wounded on the ground, executed him . BLM uses the final line of the Communist Manifesto as a battle cry, apparently condoning the millions of deaths that manifesto has led to.

Back in 2014 and 2015, at their inception, they declared war on law enforcement. As David Horowitz has written,

The Black Lives Matter activists fomented riots, burned and looted cities, and incited their followers with chants that ranged from “What do we want? Dead Cops! When do we want them? Now!” to “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot.”[i]

Oh, and the hashtag #Defund the Police—that’s theirs. They say explicitly, “We call for a national defunding of police.” They’ve been putting forth that idea for years. It isn't a sudden response to the incident in Minneapolis. But now they are getting actual policymakers to go along with them.

The nine-member Minneapolis City Council voted over the weekend to dismantle and defund the city’s police department. They have a vague plan to cover public safety needs with social workers and counselors of some sort.

CNN host Alysin Camerota talked with Council President Lisa Bender, asking what most of us would think is the logical first question:

Camerota: What if, in the middle of the night, my home is broken into? Who do I call?

Bender: Yes, I mean, I hear that loud and clear from a lot of my neighbors, and myself, too, and I know that that comes from a place of privilege. Because for those of us for whom the system is working, I think we need to step back and imagine what it would feel like to already live in that reality where calling the police may mean more harm is done.

In other words, you only think you deserve police protection from a home invasion because of your white privilege. Blacks, I guess she’s claiming, couldn’t call the police to protect them from a home invasion, because George Floyd was killed? But she isn’t asking you to imagine what it feels like to live in a system without protective police; she is forcing the people of her city to experience it.

Not to be outdone, New York City Mayor Bill DeBlasio committed to diverting funding from police to “youth services” and “social services.” It's unclear how much money, and how many police jobs will be cut.

In our nation’s capital, Washington DC’s mayor had the street painted with “Black Lives Matter,” and renamed the place Black Lives Matter Plaza. Further down, the street was painted with “Defund the Police.”  

"Black Lives Matter" painted on street in DC
screenshot from here

Meanwhile, when protesters refused to obey the law and blocked a bridge, the black Dallas Police Chief Renee Hall had 674 arrested. "We warned them.... If you break the law, we will arrest you,” she said. 

As a regular law-abiding citizen, I much prefer the Texas way.

In the US we’re a federation; states and local jurisdictions can do some experimenting. My guess is that, in a city with no police, you will get a lot of crime—what we've always called crime. Bad guys come in with weapons, take what they want by force—what can you do? Defend yourself with your own gun—if you’re in a place that hasn’t already taken that right away from you.

We could watch and see.

But since we know that chaos leads to tyranny, we aren’t really guessing about how that experiment will turn out.

I suggest those cities fence themselves in first. Or, maybe, allow refugees to escape before the worst happens. Because, when people are given a clear choice, they don’t choose to live oppressed, poverty-stricken lives in a savage society. They’d rather enjoy their God-given rights, in a society that is much more likely to be prosperous for all, and where civilized people actually treat each other with respect and caring, regardless of race. People choose north.

---

[i] Video here. 

Don’t Mistake Rioters for Protesters, Part II

Yesterday, there was this news: “This is the greatest 50-day rally in the history of the S&P 500.” You didn’t hear that? Hmm. 

It was good news. When there’s a sudden drop, you can expect a sudden recovery—unless interference keeps the bounce back from happening.

Some people don’t want a bounce back.

That’s why you’re not hearing about it. And maybe that’s why you are hearing about what is in the news.

In Part I we started talking about the difference between the protesters and the rioters. Let’s cover three related things today.

·       Your house is not on fire (unless the rioters have gotten to you).

·       Riots are not a reaction to racism; they are a reaction against freedom, free markets, and civilization.

·       Chaos, like other forms of tyranny, brings oppression, poverty, and savagery.

Your House Is Not on Fire

cartoon frame, by chainsawsuit.com
found on Facebook

There was a cartoon meme going around, attempting to describe what people mean when they say “black lives matter” and won’t accept “all lives matter” as a response. There are two people, each with a house behind them. The first one’s house is burning down. The second guy is holding a hose, spraying his own house, because “all houses matter.” He seems unaware of how useless that statement is when clearly his neighbor’s house is on fire and could use the hose.

The metaphor works only if there’s a house on fire. In this case the fire is purported to be “systemic racism.” Not just an occasional isolated incident among 325 million people, but a problem so pervasive that the house is burning down.

What is wrong with the metaphor? The house isn’t really on fire. There’s as much “fire” as you might have from lighting the occasional birthday candle in the house; you can easily blow it out and get along with living in the house in complete safety and comfort.

The counter to the metaphor is two people in front of two houses. One is screaming that his house is on fire, and the other one, who has looked, examined, checked inside, and verified that the house is not actually on fire, tries to calm the neighbor. Yes, all of our houses matter; we would not want a fire in anyone’s house.

To which the first screams again, in agony and frustration, “You don’t understand. My house is on fire!”

But it isn’t.

The narrative—the house-on-fire story—is that blacks, particularly black men, are in danger of being killed by racist police every time they leave their homes. Their mothers worry for them. Some people even call it a genocide happening right before our eyes.

If this were happening, we would all be alarmed—the way we would be if our neighbor’s house actually were burning. We’d call for the fire department and use our water hoses to help in the meantime.

But where do you spray if there’s no fire?

Yesterday, Tucker Carlson on Fox News, went through the entire list of deaths of unarmed blacks in the US in 2019—data maintained since 2015 by The Washington Post. In 2019 there were ten: nine men and one woman. By Carlson’s count, in five of those cases, the suspect attacked an officer just before the shooting. In one, the discharge of the black police officer’s weapon was accidental during grappling with the suspect, and the officer was not charged.

That leaves four. In two of these cases, officers were not charged, because circumstances showed they had reason to believe they were being threatened. In two cases the officers were charged. One was of the female black woman. One was a case in which the officer claimed he had seen a gun pointed at him during a car chase; a gun was later found in the car. The officer was nevertheless charged.

By my count, that is one killing of an “unarmed” black man—who had a gun—and the police officer was charged. The case of the woman was a clear fatal error by the police officer, who was charged.

The black population in the US is 13%, roughly 42,250,000. Of these, 6% are male: 2,535,000. Even if you counted all nine of the unarmed black males killed in 2019, that’s 0.000355%. Not a genocide by any definition of that word. It is certainly not evidence that police are “hunting” black men, as Joy Reid recently claimed on MSNBC.

In fact, police officers of any race are less likely to shoot a black suspect than a white suspect, even though blacks are more likely to be committing crimes. Why? Most likely because of fear of being called racist. That fear is great enough to discourage officers from being willing to patrol predominantly black neighborhoods.

Killings by police continue on a downward trend for all races.

As for police officers, Carlson said,

At the same time, this country remains a dangerous place for police officers; 48 of them were murdered in 2019, according to FBI data. That’s more than the number of unarmed suspects killed of all races.

When the house-is-on-fire crowd are asked to give evidence, it’s usually anecdotal. Typically they refer to a traffic stop in which the person claims they were targeted because of their race—even though traffic stops mostly happen before the police officer knows the race of the driver. In other words, in our analogy, the smoke detector was set too sensitive and went off when the toast got slightly brown. We do not help by buying in to something that simply isn't true; we do better service by helping the panicked person see that there's no fire.

However, in 2018, the last year of complete data, killings of blacks by someone else happened about 7400 times more often than killing of blacks by a police officer. Most often this is black-on-black crime. If this were the house-on-fire, maybe we could talk. Maybe it’s a foundation problem—maybe it’s fatherless homes.

Riots Are Not a Reaction to Racism

Shop owners have been hurt and confused as they put up signs that say, “Black Store Owner,” or “We’re on your side,” to try to persuade the destroying rioters to pass them by. The rioters go right ahead and attack. It might even be that most of the looted businesses have had minority owners. These are people who were struggling to stay afloat during the coronavirus shutdown, and then this happens. Five minutes of rioting may have destroyed their entire life’s work and investment. Why would protesters do that? 

Trevon Ellis, barbershop owner in Minneapolis, lost all when rioters burned
down his shop. Image by Laylah Amatullah Barrayn for NPR, found here.

Because they’re not protesters getting carried away in the anger over the unjust killing of George Floyd. They are domestic terrorists using that moment as an opportunity for their own purposes. Those purposes are to destroy civil society. That is not an exaggeration; that is essentially what they say is their mission. They want to create so much chaos that business can’t be conducted—because they want to stop business exchanges of any sort.

You store owners—you are their enemy. They don’t care what color you are; they hate that you are making money in a free-market economy.

A Washington Examiner editorial put it this way: 

The senseless and callous police killing of George Floyd inspired peaceful protests at first, but now, it has become an excuse for a troupe of professional revolutionaries and marauders. They use these incidents in order to flex their muscle and test how far their impressionable recruits are willing to go in breaking the law.

An Antifa rally in Manhattan last year.
Image by J.C. Rice, found here

I doubt you could say these revolting terrorists are deep thinkers. Have they thought through to the logical end how tearing down civil society will mess up their lives as well as ours?

It might be that they have in mind some imaginary fantasy utopia that they can create from scratch—once everyone is reduced to eking out their survival in some post-apocalyptic wasteland. Picture New York City as imagined in the movie Escape from New York. Or maybe like in Mad Max. Or possibly a more widespread 9/11. It doesn’t look like people comfortably housed and fed and enjoying the internet and their cell phones.

How do societies really look after their demise? Do they rise, Phoenix-like from the burning cinders? No. Archaeologists look for them where they rotted and got overgrown by trees, if they were in that kind of climate. Or beneath blowing dust or sand, if they were in that kind of climate.

The closest you might see, historically, is Europe following the Black Plague. Such a large percentage of the population was wiped out that many areas were faced with starting over—without the brainpower or resources that they’d recently had. It took centuries to build back up to the Renaissance. But even they didn’t have to start completely from scratch. There were still governments and property ownership, and people buying and selling their goods.

The bad guys always assume all will go better with them in charge? Why? Because they’re prideful enough to believe they’re so much more brilliant and advanced than any others who have tried it. And what is the evidence of this brilliance and goodness?

They’re delusional, and they’re power hungry. They’re not attempting to wipe out civilization so that a brilliant Thomas Jefferson can combine with a golden-hearted George Washington. They’re not even going to be looking for such minds and hearts. Nor would they submit to them if they arose. These are power mongers.

Someone is organizing them. I think we’ll be learning more about that in coming days—if there are any news media that do their job, but I wouldn’t expect to learn anything from the New York Times (a former newpaper[i]), CNN, or MSNBC, none of which have been seen seeking truth for a very long time.

There are likely to be multiple shadowy figures, George Soros types (possibly including him personally). It looks like a James Bond story. There’s a big bad guy, who plans to destroy the world for reasons that have meaning only to himself, but will, he thinks, result in his ultimate control of everyone and everything. And he’s surrounded by minions. So many minions that it keeps all the Hollywood wannabes employed for the filming of the climactic scene.

Did you ever think, “Why would somebody choose that life? Out on some obscure island, away from family and comforts of home, to work for this madman, who has no regard for them? They get paid, we assume. But enough for that? Do they all buy into the madman’s mission, thinking, “Once he’s in charge, he’ll put people like me in an important position”?

Those real life minions are out on the streets throwing bricks at Mom and Pop stores, and anything else with a window—playing their role in some evil villain’s master plan that includes destroying everything you value: your beliefs, life, liberty, property, family, and truth.

In the movies, James Bond or some other hero comes to the rescue and foils the plans. But, without a scriptwriter, we need that hero to be the rest of us: police officers, national guard troops, civic leaders, and ordinary everyday truth-telling citizens.

Chaos, Like Other Forms of Tyranny, Brings Oppression, Poverty, and Savagery

If you’ve got a civic leader saying, “We need to give them our sympathy, because their anger is justified,” that’s not a leader willing to use government for its proper role: protecting life, liberty, and property. They're telling you they don’t want you to enjoy freedom, prosperity, and civilization.

They're telling you they think violent damage to people and property is OK, if the perpetrator just claims to be angry about the accepted narrative. And that accepted narrative is that America is racist—and always has been; America is irredeemable.   

Ben Shapiro asked (and answered) the question on his show yesterday: What is the logical next step of someone with the belief that America is irredeemably racist and evil? That America must be torn down, totally destroyed. You can’t have something that you claim is rotten to the core and always has been, and then say, “But it will all be better if we just elect a Democrat as president again.” You can’t claim that systemic evil will be cured by a bit of tweaking.

You either have to be in favor of conserving, preserving, restoring our Constitution and the civilization it has nurtured; or you are in favor of overthrowing America and oppressing its people with some form of tyranny, with its attendant poverty and savagery.

What did Barack Obama mean by “fundamentally changing America”? He meant that the constitutional republic should be destroyed—and something else, something Marxist, should be put in its place.

What did Maxine Waters mean recently when she said, “I don’t want to see these establishments opened back up”? Why not? 

The Political Sphere of the Spherical Model

We know what it takes to move up north, on the Spherical Model, to Freedom, Prosperity, and Civilization. 

Killing, looting, pillaging, destroying, hating, taking, controlling—those are all behaviors of tyrants, who bring oppression, poverty, and savagery, located far down south on the sphere.

These people are telling you what they intend. They want to take away your freedom, your earnings, and your civilization, and replace these with oppressive tyranny, enslavement and poverty, and the savagery left to humans without civilization.

Maybe it’s time to stop believing the false house-is-burning narrative and start believing those who say they are determined to burn down all our houses.

---

[i] Andrew Klavan has made it his personal policy, every time he refers to the New York Times, to add “a former newspaper.” I agree with him that that is appropriate.

Batting a Thousand

This is a celebration day—the 1000^th post on the Spherical Model blog. 

I want to thank you for coming here and reading what I have to say. Today we’ll cover a little personal history, highlights, and future planning.

Back in 2004 I was homeschooling my kids—a few years into that adventure. I don’t remember the exact context in which it came up, something related to our history lessons. But I was thinking through the idea of political directions. The usual right-left orientation assumes left is communist and the right is fascist. That leaves a balance somewhere in the middle as a desirable goal. People talk about America as center-right.

There are problems with that model. For one, the right and left designations are arbitrary, and refer originally to the seating arrangement of European parliaments. The left—or liberal—side was in favor of more voice of the people, while the right—or conservative—side was in favor of maintaining the monarchy.

I don’t know any conservatives who favor a monarchy in America. And “liberal,” which has etymological roots in freedom, has nothing to do with either communism or fascism—both totalitarian extremes.

And, while we’re at it, can we just say, there’s very little difference between one flavor of totalitarian statist regime and another. Communism uses the power of the state to take away everyone’s freedom; fascism uses the power of the state to take away everyone’s freedom.

I had a short piece by W. Cleon Skousen (author of The 5000-Year Leap) that changed the ends to tyranny as the far left extreme, and anarchy as the far right extreme, with freedom being balanced around the middle.

That makes more sense to me that the other left-right model. But I still had problems with it. It seemed to me that, if you have a society trying to escape anarchy, they would pass through the balanced freedom center long before they would reach the other tyrannical extreme. And they’d look around and say, “This is great! Let’s stay here.” But that isn’t actually very common. What happens more often is that people turn from anarchy to tyranny, directly. Trotsky and others even used that as a plan: create chaos and promise relief, thus talking people into granting more power to the tyrants.

So, as I was mulling this over. And the idea came to me that tyranny and anarchy aren’t the extremes. 

They aren’t even very different. Back in 2014, I wrote a summary description. At this point in the explanation I said this:

Total government control means the state has all the power—the police, the military. The state can do what it wants, and the mere citizen is without any rights except what the state decides to grant.

Anarchy, on the other hand, means that power belongs to whoever is stronger and meaner than the next guy. If you threaten to beat people up (or kill them) if they don’t give you all their belongings, and you’re strong enough to mean it, then you have power. If someone else is stronger or better armed than you are, then you have to yield power to them.

In other words, anarchy, while less organized, is power in the hands of the strongest and best armed—just like a tyrannical government.

So maybe government tyranny and anarchic tyranny are pretty close to the same thing.

All right. So, then what is the actual opposite of tyranny? Freedom. You could use the word liberty. It means there’s just enough government—combined with a great deal of personal responsibility—to allow people to enjoy opportunities, and choices, in the use of their lives.

But what about the difference between statist tyranny and anarchy? That’s real. But it doesn’t seem to be a polar opposite difference. It’s more about who is exerting power. We could look at that side-to-side movement as a difference in interest. Is it local? Is it state (or province, depending on where you live)? Maybe a region? A nation? A group of nations? The entire globe?

That’s basically a neutral difference—unless someone tries to assert control that would be more appropriate for a more local level.

I was thinking this over, and it occurred to me that, with three dimensions, you can describe the polar opposites of tyranny and freedom while also looking at the lateral difference between one level of localization and another. You can see it on a sphere.

Freedom is north, tyranny is south
on the Political Sphere
screenshot from video

The first time I tried drawing this, I used a plastic Easter egg. I even wondered if that was appropriate, because so much of history ends up in the southern, tyranny zone, maybe that should be a larger end of the egg.

Eventually, though, I wanted something larger to show this on, so I painted an old globe all white, and made a way to attach lines on it to delineate an equator and some longitudinal lines. This is what I used when I finally made a video of the explanation.

I think the concept is easiest to see and understand in the political sphere, which I’ve just described. But the same spherical idea can work for economics—with polar opposites of poverty in the south and prosperity in the north. For a while I called these poles controlled economy and free market economy, which accurately describes the differences, but I now prefer describing the different outcomes rather than the rules for getting those outcomes.

Additionally, there’s a social sphere, with polar opposites of savagery in the south and civilization in the north.

The neutral side-to-side movement from local to larger interest works for all three spheres. And, on many issues, you can see how the political, economic, and social spheres interrelate. The Spherical Model makes it easier to show that. A person might believe they can be a fiscal conservative while being a social liberal; but, if they do, they’re really ignoring some basic truths.

This three-dimensional model is slightly more complex than a simple left-right model. But it’s a lot more accurate, and solves so many confusions—particularly related to associating conservatism (as in conserving the US Constitution) with fascism, or anarchic resistance to any government. When you look at the sphere, you can see that fascism and anarchy are both very south, just with different levels of control: anarchy is likely to be local, while fascism is likely to involve a national government. Those are both very far away from the freedom ideas of the Constitution, which are brilliantly designed to protect life, liberty, and property with a very limited government.

I wrote the first description of the Spherical Model in 2004, just for my kids, and eventually some other homeschool teens. In 2010, my daughter started classes at the community college, shortly before she turned 16, and a parent was required to be on campus with her. So I carried my computer along and set up a writing station in the library while she was in class. And that’s where I wrote much of the material that shows up on the website. I got the website up in November of that year, and the following March started this blog.

As with many important ideas, the person who thinks it up feels more like it came through them than from them. The Aha! moment I had when I got this idea still strikes me as a gift from God, providing me understanding that I appreciate, and that I feel obligated to share.

I have a long-term intention of writing a book. Certainly a thousand posts, on top of the website, would indicate there’s enough material. But it’s a matter of choosing what to say, in what order, in the best way to share these ideas for the audience most likely to benefit.

I haven’t yet figured out how to finish a book. After that I’ll need to look at how to get it published, and marketed, so it gets into the hands of people that can use it. I’m slower than I would like. I’m amazed at people with very busy jobs who nevertheless regularly put out books. But, if God gave this to me, He knows my limitations. So I’ll trust Him to get me to a finish line in His own due time.

For readers, if you want to understand the Spherical Model concept enough to use it for organizing your own thoughts, and to share it, I suggest (again) the following:

This is me, Linda Nuttall

·         The Spherical Model website. There’s an intro, then a section for each sphere: political, economic, and social; the social sphere divides Civilization into two sections.

·         The video.

·         Summaries similar to today’s:

o   The Political World Is Round  December 29, 2014

o   Year Two Begins   March 5, 2013 

o   The Basic Principles   January 2, 2017  

·         About the author:

o   Behind the Sphere   October 21, 2013  

o   Anniversary Celebrations   March 2, 2017 

o   About Me   April 2, 2018  

·         Various Best-of Collections:

o   Best of Spherical Model, Part I, Part II, Part III  June 2013

o   Defense of Marriage Collection  July 1, 2013

o   Education Collection  July 24, 2013 

o   More of the Best, Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV  March 2015

o   Sampling the Spherical Model 2018   December 27, 2018  

·        

Socialism on the Sphere

Earlier today I was listening to the STA Money Hour on radio (it comes on at noon weekdays on KPRC 950 AM), and one of the hosts mentioned he’d had a conversation with his young adult son about socialism, what it means, what’s being taught in schools and elsewhere, what the young man’s friends thought. And the answer was kind of scary. There’s so little knowledge among young people, who are being taught that socialism is about “fairness” and “sharing the wealth” so that these young people get free education, free healthcare, and other free “stuff.” So the host said it was his plan to post the video of Milton Friedman on the Phil Donohue Show, from decades ago, that so clearly explains the economics of it. I’ve shared that video before, but I’m including it again at the end of today’s post.

Later today I heard Larry Elder mention on his show, that there’s a recent poll showing that large numbers of young people in their 20s and 30s favor socialism—this in the face of Venezuela. They don’t seem to make the connection.

Last week economist Thomas Sowell was asked about the growing approval of socialism in America; would we resist it? He said he hoped so, but he wouldn’t bet on it.

Socialism, in red, overlaps with other -isms,
but they're all down into tyranny.

So today I’m doing my little part of educating the world on socialism, using what we know from the Spherical Model.

How do we know where socialism is on the sphere?

The same way you know about any government type or -ism: you see how it answers the questions for reaching north on the political, economic, and social spheres.

So let’s try it. We’ll try this one sphere at a time, but be warned that the spheres interrelate.

Political Sphere

Question 1: Is socialism something that an individual has the right to do, and therefore has a right to delegate to his/her government?

Answer: Depending on how we’re defining socialism, there’s some range here. Socialism could mean that government takes over various sectors of the economy, or maybe the entire means of production for a country. It’s a matter of degree, but socialism implies that government has the right to take private property without due compensation.

Socialism defines property “rights” as “whatever the government allows you to control as if you own it,” but government is ultimately the actual owner of whatever it decides to take ownership of.

But in real life—what we call natural law—we don’t have the right to take someone else’s property, which essentially means taking the fruits of labor from someone’s life, thus enslaving them; therefore we don’t have the right to delegate that right to our government.

This means socialism doesn’t pass the freedom test on this question. Socialism is southern hemisphere. The more power that government takes that the people do not have the right to grant to government, the more tyrannical the government.

Question 2: Does socialism infringe in any way on the rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights?

Answer: Let’s remind ourselves of those God-given rights—just the ones listed in the Bill of Rights. (There are, of course, others.)

·         Freedom of religion, speech, press, peaceable assembly, petition government for redress of grievances.

·         Right to bear arms.

·         Right to security in our homes and papers, and from illegal searches and seizures.

·         Right to a fair and speedy trial, by jury.

·         Freedom from excessive bail, excessive fines, or cruel and unusual punishments.

The final two amendments of the original Bill of Rights add that government is limited to the enumerated powers granted in the Constitution, and that any rights not enumerated are retained by the States or the individual people.

In theory, socialism wouldn’t have to infringe on all these rights; it would only need to infringe on property rights. However, in practice, in order to enforce the coercive taking of property, in all the countries that have tried it, we’ve seen many more rights infringed. The right to bear arms gets lost early on. So do free speech rights—and all the rest of the First Amendment. The judicial system gets corrupted, and “fairness” becomes whatever the government says it is, no matter how unjust.

So, socialism falls into the southern hemisphere on this question.

Question 3: Is socialism within the proper role of government, some aspect of protecting life, liberty and property? These include national defense, protection from interstate crime, enabling (not controlling) international and interstate commerce, standardized weights and measures and currency, and the judiciary that guarantees the protective laws?

Answer: Socialism isn’t about protecting life, liberty, or property. It purports to be about fairness, and “protecting” people from poverty. But, as we know, whenever government interferes in a way that is beyond the proper role of government, there will be unintended consequences, which are usually the exact opposite of the stated goal. So, if socialism intends to get people out of poverty, you can expect the unintended consequences to include putting people into poverty.

That’s what we’ve seen happening in Venezuela. The richest nation in South America fell into abject poverty in about a decade. In some countries the fall has taken longer, 30 to 50 years. But it has happened every time. China, Soviet Union, Cuba, North Korea, Cambodia. Everywhere it’s been tried. As it forces the people into deprivations while taking away their ability to rebel, tyranny reigns
.

screenshot from Stuart Varney report on Venezuela August 2018

Socialism is designed to fall into tyranny.

Economic Sphere

Question: Who decides what will be done with the fruits of your labors?

Answer: There’s only that single question for the Economic Sphere. Does the person who produced something through his labors get to decide how the fruits of his labors are used? Or should someone else decide? In socialism, it’s someone else. Government. Probably a distant bureaucrat, who decides that, if someone produces quite a lot—far more than the person needs for subsistence, so that the producer accumulates wealth—then government should take a portion of that wealth and distribute to someone who was not as successful at producing surplus fruits of labor.

Socialism ignores how hard a person works, how valuable a person’s work is to society, or how careful a person is to accumulate his wealth rather than quickly spend it. Socialism is only concerned that the outcomes should be equalized.

Socialism fails to take into account that, if a person doesn’t get to keep the fruits of his labors, and the government promises to give enough to everyone regardless of effort, socialism has taken away the incentive to work. And the result, before long, is that those who would have produced more will no longer bother to do so.

Socialism, therefore, not only takes what has been produced from the producers, but it leads the producers to produce less in the future—which means there’s less to take, to redistribute. That’s how poverty results.

Another option for producers is escape. Those who want to keep more of what they’ve produced will leave a place where a government takes their earnings. Even if government were to confiscate all their wealth, those producers who escape would still have their human capital, which they would take with them to produce more wealth in a less hostile environment. That’s one reason socialist countries have historically prevented their people from leaving. And you’re hearing complaints from New York's governor about the wealth producers leaving, just when they had so many uses for the exorbitant taxes they were charging.

Socialism doesn’t lift people out of poverty; it sinks entire societies (except for a few ruling elite) into poverty.

Social Sphere

Question 1: Does socialism allow for and encourage the flourishing of religion?

Answer: There’s an essential reason for this question. Rights come, logically, from either a greater than human source or a human-given source. If rights are God-given, then a person is entitled to them simply by virtue of being human. No human can rightfully deprive you of them. But if rights are not God-given, then there is no guarantee the human giver will not take them away.

Say, as in so-called “Democratic Socialism,” a majority votes that you should be deprived of your property simply because you have more than the majority (or its appointed bureaucrat) deems that you need or qualify for. You’re deprived of your property rights because you worked harder or smarter than someone else. Put another way, the majority has enslaved you to work for the majority’s benefit, rather than your own. The majority is a human tyrant.

And since the actions of a socialist government are tyrannical—i.e., go against your God-given rights—coercion will be necessary to do the enslaving, so you’ll lose additional rights.

But here is the crux of the matter: socialism claims to be a way to alleviate the unfairness of unequal outcomes, those terrible inequalities, or disparities. Without socialism, how do you deal with the fact that some people are starving or homeless while others enjoy mansions and private jets? Socialism claims to be moral and charitable.

But is it? Is it charitable for you to go on your neighbor’s property, steal the apples he has grown and was going to pick and sell at a market, and instead take those apples and distribute them to some hungry people down the road?

If your neighbor finds out and decides—voluntarily chooses—to allow for this theft for the sake of the hungry people, that says something about the charitable (and also merciful) feelings of your neighbor. But it says nothing about you except that you disrespect your neighbor’s property. You didn’t give anything of your own to feed the hungry. So you should stop smugly calling yourself charitable.

We can’t delegate our ability to give charity to government to do for us, because we don’t have the power to give someone else’s property charitably. We only have power to give our own property.

But isn’t that what we do when we pay our tax money to government to distribute to the poor?

The simple answer is no. You give tax money to government to carry out government responsibilities, of which charity is not one. When you vote (or have your representatives vote) to take tax money for charitable purposes, you’re giving your money and your neighbors’ to government bureaucrats to make decisions about who deserves what, which opens up all kinds of possibilities for favoritism and corruption.

If you donate your charity directly, not only is that actual charitable giving, rather than coerced “giving,” there’s no portion of it going to a government bureaucrat, so more money goes to the charitable cause. If you give to an organization, you can do your research to know who they serve, how they decide who’s deserving, and how much of your donation goes directly to charitable purposes rather than overhead.

So there’s a free choice way to take care of the poor, and socialism isn’t it.

But that real way does require a righteous people—a religious people, most likely—who feel the personal obligation to help out their fellow human beings.

Earlier today, the Heritage Foundation linked a piece well worth reading by historian Lee Edwards, “What Americans Must Know about Socialism.” The piece ends with this:

This is the reality of socialism—a pseudo-religion grounded in pseudo-science and enforced by political tyranny. This is the case against socialism—a god that failed, a science that never was, a political system headed for the ash heap of history

Socialism is a religious perspective, but it places government in the role of God. And instead of seeing theft and coveting as sins, it exalts them as basic principles.

Question 2: Does socialism promote the family as the basic unit of civilization?

Answer: No. Socialism tries to replace the family. It tries to be the source of rights, provider of needs, educator and inculcator of ideology, controller of messages, controller of behaviors. It assumes that people would not do what government calls “good,” left to their own devices. So it steps in, where the family used to be, to provide and teach its ways, and to coerce and punish any disagreement or disobedience. And it punishes much more severely than a loving parent would. Violence against dissent isn’t a mistake in how it has been implemented; it is an inherent practice.

Socialism is not intended to grow civilized adults, as a family is intended to do; rather, it is intended to grow submissive minions to allow the ruling elite unlimited power.

Ahead of a story on Venezuela posted on Facebook on March 8, the Heritage Foundation summarizes with this:

Socialism always promises progress, but it inevitably delivers scarcity, corruption and decay.

Rather than empower the common man, socialists believe in empowering bureaucracy. In their minds, bureaucrats will always make decisions based on science and dispassionate reason—and make sure those decisions are implemented and enforced efficiently.

It’s an elitist, intellectually arrogant belief, and it’s dangerous.

Capitalism is the economic engine of freedom, prosperity, and civilization. Socialism sinks us into tyranny, poverty, and savagery.

Here is the Milton Friedman video again: