Civilization Values, Part III: Property Ownership

This is part III of a series about the values necessary for civilization. Part I was about  life, and Part II was about truth. The values of honoring God, life, family, truth, and property are a brief summary of the Ten Commandments, but also followed by any other culture that could be called civilization. Respecting property ownership comes up in “Thou shalt not steal” and “Thou shalt not covet.”

Much of the material in this series comes from the Spherical Model website, written mostly between 2008 and 2010, in the Civilized vs. Savage section. In the earlier posts I’ve also added a few current comments, before, after, or within.

image from here

For today, I’ll just point out that there’s a strong connection between valuing property rights and civilization. A type of government that takes away property rights, or devalues them, deciding how or whether a worker will be allowed to spend her earnings, taking away her property if the rulers decide they know better who deserves that money—such a government is not a path to civilization. Socialism, then, is de-civilizing. It leads southward on the sphere, toward tyranny, poverty, and savagery, rather than toward the goals of freedom, prosperity, and civilization.

Here’s what I wrote about respecting property ownership back in 2010.

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Value Property Rights

“Thou shalt not steal” is another necessity of civilization. An economy can’t thrive without respect for individual property ownership. In a lecture I once heard by University of Houston economist Bart Smith, the surprising thing he said was, “the economy is successful where the people are good.”  He showed a number of examples. It’s one of those commonsense ideas that aren’t really so common.

The culture in Mexico, for example, periodically goes through a retrenchment where they say they are going to root out corruption. But the same people live in the culture; often the same people who took graft before hold similar positions of authority, so the same corruption quickly reappears.

People actually have to believe in being good, in choosing not to be corrupt because it is a matter of personal honor. And those who cannot acquiesce to the desire for honesty need to be removed from the civilized portion of society (the more widespread, the more difficult to isolate). Religion, caring about God’s will more than selfish will, gives a rationale for honesty that allows society to prosper, and is a basis for making the change that imposing written laws cannot do.

image from here

A few years ago my husband had a computer stolen from his car. He had a lunch meeting in a restaurant and didn’t want to deal with the computer backpack at his table, so he left it on the floor, under the back seat, unfortunately only partially hidden, and locked the door. Someone with a crowbar bashed the window, grabbed the computer, and took off. It was never recovered. That computer was the only place we had photos from the previous month, not yet printed out, including our first meeting with our future daughter-in-law and also a two-day teen camp for our homeschooling group. The pictures more than anything were a painful loss. We lost some business files, but fortunately our financial files weren’t on that computer, and many other things were either not a great loss or were replaceable. The window and the computer were insured, but not until after a $1000 deductible, at a time when we were attempting a small business and had very little income. It was financially very painful, and it was hurtful to feel that, even in a locked car, in a public parking lot, someone was savage enough to consider he had more right to our possessions than we did. When you’re going through life trying to think of society as civilized, it shocks the senses. You feel betrayed.

I’m sure our experience is so common that everyone reading this has either experienced similar theft or knows someone personally who has.

When our kids were younger, we lived in a semi-rural neighborhood near a relatively small metropolitan area (about 160,000). The kids came and went throughout the day. We locked the door when we left home, because we had grown up in bigger cities. But seldom would it have been necessary to lock the door to prevent theft. In the neighborhood where we live now, in a city of several million, we keep the front door locked, usually with a deadbolt and another key lock, even when we’re home. We have an alarm system, connected to a service that has more than once sent police officers to check out whether we were safe when the alarm went off accidentally. We carry the house key if we so much as leave for the park or the mailbox.

I should add that this is a relatively safe suburban family neighborhood. But the freedom we enjoyed in the safer rural place doesn’t exist here. We spend resources and effort on our safety that we wouldn’t have to spend if the place were so civilized that no one would dishonor themselves by taking what didn’t belong to them.

[Aside: It may be worth noting that, the more urban the area, the more crime you can expect. Urban settings in today’s world are nearly always less civilized than non-urban settings. Coincidentally, if you look at the political beliefs of the basic urban dweller, you can see that they prefer socialism and governmental control to freedom, possibly out of fear caused by the constant threat of chaos.]

It takes a truly uncivilized (savage) mind to assume you have a right to the belongings of someone else when you have neither worked for nor earned the belongings. That’s why “Thou shalt not covet” is also important. Wanting what your neighbor has is a big step downward from wanting something like your neighbor has, while rejoicing that he can enjoy it, and then setting as a goal earning something similar for yourself.

[Another aside: The lottery, and other forms of gambling, reinforce the idea that it’s a good thing to get something for nothing. The most likely to fall for this lie are the poor, who can least afford to lose the money they do get from their labors. It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that gambling costs society about $2 in social programs (welfare, crime) for every dollar it brings in as supposed income for the state. The solution shouldn’t be “let’s have our own gambling so those dollars don’t leave the state”; it should be “let’s educate the people about gambling so their hard-earned dollars are put to good use in our society instead of draining out in wasted gambling elsewhere.”]

Coveting is placing your wants above the rights of your neighbor. Stealing doesn’t happen if you don’t covet first. Coveting is the thought, convincing yourself you are deserving and the neighbor isn’t; stealing is the act of taking because you have rationalized that you deserved it. In a civilized society, the urge to covet and steal are corrected at around age 2-3, and continue to be monitored by parents until a person reaches adulthood; only the uncivilized keep coveting and stealing into adulthood. If these relative few are held accountable—are removed from civilized society until and if their behavior is corrected—then society is safe from the decay. But if they’re not held accountable, if they are accepted and even sometimes considered clever, then the happy sense of living in civilization declines.

Civilization Values, Part II: Truth

This is part II in a series on the things a society needs to value in order to have civilization. In the Spherical Model, civilization is the positive northern hemisphere of the sphere, with its opposite, savagery, down south.

The 5 values, which show up in the Ten Commandments, are God, life, family, truth, and property ownership. I’m doing them in whatever order works for me. Part I was on life. Part III will be on property ownership. Honoring God and family are so big, I’m saving them.

The quote is from the John Keats poem "Ode on a Grecian Urn."
I took the photo of the urn in the British Museum in 2016

So, here is the section on truth from the Spherical Model website article on Civilization.

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Value Truth

“Thou shalt not lie” is a commandment with many ramifications in Civilization. Observe, for example, taking an oath to tell the truth in a court of law. The oath means that, because God is your witness, and He knows the truth, and you will be judged by Him in this life and the life to come, therefore you feel the requirement to tell the truth under oath. God is bigger than yourself, a mere human, and He is bigger than your human peers; so it is to God you obligate yourself in the oath, not just to society. If you don’t believe in God, what does your oath mean? You might be telling the truth; there are honest people who don’t believe in God. But, without any belief greater than your personal self, you (your own god) could declare that it is acceptable for you to lie if it fits your personal needs to do so. You accept no higher authority to insist otherwise. Society feels no obligation from you, because you admit to nothing greater than yourself and your personal moral code, however self-serving.

[Side note: I am not saying that we isolate ourselves from non-religious people, and not give them the freedoms the rest of us enjoy. I am saying, societally it ought to be up to the non-religious to present evidence that they are being truthful. Maybe that would be submitting to a lie-detector; maybe it would be supplying character witnesses. I’m not sure of a solution, and it may look no different from now. Affirming, rather than taking an oath, is already allowed in the Constitution, and there are already laws against perjury. But I would like to see some initiative on the part of the non-religious to compensate the Civilized society for the fact that their belief system gives society less guarantee of their truthfulness.]

While we must not have a state religion (more on freedom of religion later), there is a religious morality that enables laws and freedom to exist and encourage civilization that atheism (or secularism) fails to do. And it shouldn’t be surprising that many of the tyrannies in the world in the past century have been atheistic (the alternative to atheistic tyranny is religious tyranny—that is, a single forced religion; societies with freedom of religion don’t become tyrannies). In Soviet countries during communist rule, Christian grandmothers persisted in teaching religious values to their children and grandchildren. The Soviets controlled productions. But developers of the European Union have conspired that they will not make the same mistake; they will also control reproduction and education. When you control education of children, you control the destiny of mankind.

In addition to that original section, it turns out I’ve written often enough about truth to make a collection. Here they are in chronological order: 

·         Stand for Truth, March 2, 2012

·         The Truth Is Is That, July 16, 2012

·         Truth, Beauty, Goodness, January 6, 2014

·         Wisdom and Learning, May 11, 2015

·         Truth and Perception, April 17, 2017

·         Truth Be Told, November 6, 2017

·         Speak the Truth and Play Fair, February 12, 2018

·         Telling the Truth, May 24, 2018

·         Red Pills, Walking Away, and Truth Seeking, July 16, 2018

·         Tribalism vs. Truth, August 27, 2018

·         Who Is Telling the Truth, September 27, 2018

·         Truth Before It’s Too Late, October 4, 2018

·        Perceiving What Is Real, July 8 2019 

I’ve referred to this before (in “Truth Before It’s Too Late”), but in Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life, rule number 8 is “Tell the truth, or at least don’t lie.” As he’s talked about this concept, he suggests never saying anything that makes you feel weak. He’s not talking about wielding power over others, or making them think you do so you don’t somehow appear weak. He’s talking about an internal guide. If you’re saying something untrue, pay attention and you’ll notice a weak feeling inside. People use the word conscience possibly to mean the same thing. Unless you train yourself to ignore it, there’s an internal guide to know whether you’re telling the truth.

When asked about whether a person should tell the truth even when there’s a Nazi at the door to collect the Jew you’re hiding in a closet, he doesn’t actually answer that question. Instead, he points out that there were a lot of lies—giving in to the weakness, saying the convenient, mollifying little lies—building up to the situation where Nazis were in power and could arrive at your door asking that question. Telling the truth each and every one of those times, let the consequences follow as they may, is your guide to the best possible future. Lying, for convenience, self-protection, or manipulation of others is walking away from the best civilized life you could live.

Truth matters. Civilization depends on it.

Civilization Values, Part I: Life

I’m planning to spend several posts on Civilization. Specifically, civilization requires that we value the following: God, life, family, truth, and property ownership. These ideas come from the Ten Commandments, but they are universally necessary for civilization.

The first several of the Ten Commandments talk about honoring God—no other gods, not taking His name in vain, etc. We’ll handle belief in God another day, but we do need to keep in mind that any rights we have naturally, simply for being human beings, come from God. The alternative would be that they are granted—and taken away—by some imperfect human being(s). There’s no guarantee in that. So even those who don’t believe in God depend on those who do to recognize those rights.

On life, there’s “Thou shalt not kill,” or take innocent life, murder.

On family, there’s “Honor they father and they mother” and “Thou shalt not commit adultery,” or anything like unto it—so no sex outside the covenant of marriage.

On truth, there’s “Thou shalt not bear false witness,” or lie.

On property, there’s “Thou shalt not steal” and “Thou shalt not covet” whatever belongs to someone else.

Civilization Sphere
from the Spherical Model

I will be mostly quoting from the Spherical Model website, the article “Civilized vs. Savage,” which I originally wrote mostly in 2008 and published online in 2010. I reserve the right to insert comments and recent examples.

I had planned today’s post, on valuing innocent human life, several days ago, before the mass murders this weekend. I’d like to point out that the Spherical Model[i] helps us get a clearer picture of what happened, both in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio.

The news the last couple of days has been putting forth a right-left narrative. The evil murderer in El Paso seems to have an online presence saying he condemns immigration, particularly of Hispanics, whether legal or not; he’s a white nationalist, which the media call the extreme right. This crazy evil person was also a climatist (believes humans need to radically curtail activity to save the planet) and believes there are too many humans—a Malthusian.

Conservatives—who are about conserving the Constitution, along with the idea that all people are created equal before the law—have nothing to do with any race, or any other tribal group, being superior to the rest of the human race. Racism is a southern hemisphere idea, down in the tyranny zone.

Conservatives are about conservation—wise use of resources. Climatism, which is some combination of a pagan religion and a power grab against human technological progress by those who believe only they should benefit from such technology while they rule over the rest of us—that’s a southern hemisphere tyrannical idea. Malthusianism—in which humans should feel guilty for existing and should work to prevent the perpetuation of the species—are not only long debunked, but are part of the southern hemisphere savagery zone, not a northern hemisphere part of civilization.

screenshot from Monday news conference

The Dayton shooter was supposedly a socialist, Democrat voter. That puts him clearly in the southern hemisphere, where you find tyranny, poverty, and savagery. It doesn’t of course mean all people who have fallen for the socialist philosophy believe in mass murder.

But what we do see is that, as exemplified by these two mass murderers, their beliefs put them far away from freedom, prosperity, and civilization—the things we’re trying to conserve and restore.

Calling either of them left or right is at best a confusing misnomer, at worst a despicable lie.

In addition to these two massacres, there were three separate shootings, killing or injuring another two dozen people, in Chicago, in a single area in a single day. This included the deaths of two mothers who were dedicated to ending gun violence—shot and killed while they held up signs, if I heard the story right. I think this was black-on-black violence, which doesn’t fit the narrative of “rampant racism in America,” and is commonplace in that city. So these killings went almost unmentioned.

It was a tragically bloody weekend.

We have a long way to go to get to the northern hemisphere, where life is valued. But we won’t get there by blaming anything but the evil that is inherent in tyranny and savagery and also inexplicably rooted in certain individual hearts.

In hopes of better understanding, here’s a look at the value of life.

embryo image from here

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Value Innocent Human Life

There’s “Thou shalt not kill”—with kill better translated as “murder” or “take innocent human life.” It is a savage culture that does not value human life, specifically innocent human life. Baby killing is savage, yet as abortion becomes a settled fact of society, child abandonment at birth (children left in restrooms and dumpsters) is heard of more and more. In spring 2008, while I was researching for this article, a young mother put her newborn in the restroom trash in a Houston, Texas, hospital and covered it with bloody paper towels. Complaints about the mess are what brought a cleaning crew to discover the child, miraculously still alive (survived for several days). Texas is a state where unwed mothers can abandon babies with no questions asked, at hospitals, fire stations and other facilities. All any young mother had to do was come in and say, “I don’t want the baby,” and she would be treated without question, and the child would be put up for adoption. She had nothing to fear. She was already at a care facility. Yet she put a live baby in the garbage. Insanity? Yes. But savage insanity. She covered the baby so he wouldn’t quickly be seen. She went back to the hospital waiting room for treatment because of bleeding. She was carrying out relatively logical life tasks but didn’t know a baby shouldn’t go in the garbage covered by bloody paper towels? That she needs mental treatment is obvious. But that her variety of “insanity” is growing more common, spreading almost like an epidemic, is also apparent. There were two more examples in the news that April, one in a restroom on a plane, one at a Houston high school, both 14-year-old girls, and no one apparently knew they were pregnant.

If this insanity is spreading, then the disease is communicable because of the decay in value for innocent human life. Even insane behavior must occur to the insane person; if it’s inconceivable and never seen in society, it is much less likely to be conceived of in the mind of the mentally unstable.

That is why the insanity of campus shootings has become much more common since Columbine in 1999, when such an atrocity became “conceivable.” In 2007 a shooting rampage happened at Virginia Tech. It happened at Northern Illinois State in February 2008. The previously inconceivable insanity still horrifies, but it no longer surprises. And there’s a certain level of rational thinking among the insane attackers, who choose a place like a school, where they are likely to have free rein to kill multiple victims before being taken down in their own death. They have a savage goal, and they logically think through the ways to accomplish it. Insanity to the civilized mind, but logical to the savage mind.

Killing of the elderly, euphemistically called euthanasia or “dying with dignity,” is another way of saying society can’t be bothered to care for the no-longer productive. This idea flouts both honoring our parents and honoring life. And it is savage. Every civilized culture has valued innocent life, and every society that has then lost that value for life has decayed into more and more savagery.

Everywhere that euthanasia has been legalized, stories abound of people who, in more civilized countries, could have received care to live longer productive lives, but who in these countries are euthanized—against their will and the will of their families[ii]. They are disposed of. This is always the result of supposedly allowing people to have the “dignified” choice of naming the time, location, and circumstances of their demise, something civilized people don’t actually expect because that decision belongs to God.

Loss of value for life leads to looming demographic disasters. Worldwide reproductive rates have been falling for decades—not because of greater infertility, but because of self-imposed infertility. Replacement rates for society are 2.1 children per female, producing one replacement for herself and one for the male (the .1 compensates for the live births that do not then grow to adulthood). Most industrialized countries, as well as many third world countries, are well below these rates[iii]. Some people falsely believe this is a good thing for the planet, so we don’t overuse our resources. But they fail to take into account some basic math.

There are roughly three segments of society: those too young to be producers yet, the producers (adults in their working years), and those too old to still be producers. In part, the elderly can provide for themselves with pre-retirement savings, if they’ve planned well and lived providently. But if their needs exceed their ability to provide, it is incumbent on the producers (their adult children) to see to their care. Meanwhile, the producers are also caring for the upcoming generation. When this is seen as a burden, then producers have fewer children, which means that when the smaller generation moves into the producer role, there are fewer of them providing for larger groups of elderly plus young. And since the producers will be spending more of their earnings on elderly and child care, they will have less ability to save for their own retirement, so the next smaller generation of producers will be even more greatly burdened.

The only way out of the servitude toward the non-producers is to increase the offspring generation so that the next generation of producers will be bigger, thus spreading out the burden. (For example, an elderly couple with six adult children sharing the burden of their care is less of a burden per person than an elderly couple with only one or two adult children.) But the savage solution is to encourage the demise of the elderly once they become a burden. Socialized medicine, where a cold bureaucrat rather than loving adult children makes the decisions about an elderly patient’s care, tends to decrease care options “for the sake of society as a whole,” essentially causing premature death of the elderly. That’s savage.

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[i] For a quick review of what north and south mean in the Spherical Model, see The Political Sphere Is Round.

[ii] According to ScienceDirect, whenever physician assisted suicide is legalized, euthanasia without consent follows. This LifeSiteNews story show the expansion of definitions to include everyone. 

[iii] I wrote about the danger of what is called Demographic Winter here and added to that here. Recent research shows that, while it’s a complicated question, the US fertility rate has joined Europe and other developed countries that have dropped below replacement levels. 

Vote Counts, Part II

We’re talking about counting votes, and how votes are counted. In Part I we talked about why the Electoral College is still a good idea and why the National Popular Vote (NPV) compact is a bad idea.

Just one of the significant reasons this is a bad idea is that we can’t get an accurate vote total. It’s just not possible in our current reality. Today, in Part II, we'll cover some of the details of why accurately counting all votes is an unattainable wish.

Harris County, Texas, where Houston is located (and where I live), has been an epicenter working toward voter integrity for a long time[i]. Alan Vera has been working for ballot security as his main battle for the past decade—and has trained people around the country on these issues. (He trained me as a poll watcher.) He spoke at our local Tea Party meeting a couple of weeks ago, reporting on the legislative session, and generally about ballot security issues.

Hart e-Slate machine
image from here

We have, in this county, what Vera believes is the gold standard for electronic voting machines, the Hart e-Slate. It has passed every test for every election, without fail. But, as of the last election, all countywide offices were won by Democrats, and the new County Clerk isn’t about voter integrity; she’s about getting particular results.

One of her “innovations” is countywide voting. This has been allowed in certain counties of Texas—mainly small, rural counties, where it makes some sense, where poll workers are likely to recognize their neighbors who come to vote. But she initiated it here without state approval for our May special election (a day for school boards, city councils, and other smaller things that don’t happen at the usual November election time—an issue for another day).

During early voting—the two weeks prior to voting day—we have citywide voting. You can vote at any designated voting location in the county. A computer system is set up to get the voter data and update it online supposedly immediately. People like the flexibility. But there’s a limited number of polling places, about three dozen. They’re spread out across the county, an area roughly the size of the state of New Jersey, so it takes a good twenty minutes to drive from one to another. It would be hard for a nefarious voter to vote at one place and get to another one before the system updated to prevent him from voting at another location.

But on election day we typically have as many as 800 polling places in the county. When they’re set up by precinct, you can more or less guarantee that you won’t overcrowd a place too badly. But when people choose their own voting location based on convenience to their work or whatever, you don’t know what kind of bottlenecks you’re going to cause. That’s just one problem.

But, back to the updates. My polling place is located in a middle school. The elementary school next door is a voting place for the adjacent precinct. It’s a two-minute walk.

Alan Vera
image from here

How long does it take for the “immediate” updates? Alan Vera and team did experiments to find out.

What needs to happen is that electronic poll books (a handy little tablet we now use, that works pretty well, I think) needs to register that a voter was given a code, and then relay that information to all the other voting locations to indicate that particular voter has voted and cannot vote again. During early voting, locations are set up to have good internet and quick updates. Training tells polling judges that they are instantaneous, so they shouldn’t worry. But in the many locations on a regular election day, they could be in schools, where internet access may be blocked, or there may be interference. It took as short as around 20 minutes for a machine to update to as long as 17 hours. The team even found that it took a half hour for the e-pollbook to update to the adjacent machine at the very same voting location, which should be instantaneous. Vera has the data now to prove that the county cannot qualify for countywide voting.

There’s also a push toward throwing out the secure and accurate e-Slate machine and spending billions of dollars on a combination of electronic and paper system. You print out your vote, and then the machine has no other record. What could go wrong?

There’s a requirement to use electronic systems that meet a minimum standard, enacted eventually following the 2000 debacle in Florida. Paper ballots have always been subject to fraud.

Back in 2004, in the Washington State governor’s race, Christine Gregoire won against Dino Rossi, on a third recount, after Rossi had won by 261 votes, when all of a sudden, well after the close of the election, someone says, “Oh, my, I almost forgot. I have these boxes of ballots sitting out back in my shed. We have to count those.” And, lo and behold, they counted and counted until the total changed the outcome.

Look now at California. The governor has declared that they will give driver’s licenses to illegal aliens, and a driver’s license is the only requirement to vote. In other words, they are declaring that the vote total in California will include as many illegals as they can get to vote.

That means that, if the NPV compact were to be in effect, the vote outcome in any state in the compact would depend on the votes of illegal voters in California. And the outcome of the entire US presidential vote would depend on votes that should not count.

The reality is that we do not count all votes. We count enough to determine the outcome. All votes available and certified on election day get counted. Provisional votes take more time and depend on case-by-case circumstances. Mail-in votes—a larger portion and a growing fraud problem—get counted if received on time, but there may be leeway based on postmark date (different rules in different jurisdictions). Military votes that arrive this way tend to be left out of the count, unless there’s a recount that requires a more accurate count of all votes. If they’re deemed mathematically unlikely to change the outcome, they get left uncounted.

Then there are the disputed votes. Overvotes, for example, where more than one candidate is marked on a ballot (not possible on a certified e-Slate machine, but common on any kind of paper ballot and some other systems). This is the kind of detail that makes recounts slow and tedious and makes the outcome uncertain for long periods of time.

And there are issues of fraud that come up. If, for example, a particular voting place was found to contain an extra several hundred votes that all have the same signature—that means a poll worker, probably in cahoots with the presiding judge, found names from the precinct that hadn’t voted and they input votes for those names, signing each person’s name without even trying to disguise the signature. Yes, that has been done, in Harris County. And that was when each precinct was separate. With countywide voting, there could be such fraudulent voters who put in every name in the entire county at every voting place and truly mess up the accuracy of the count.

With NPV, there would be incentive for such fraud to take place—at any and every voting location that wasn’t run by honest Americans and watched over by other honest Americans from the opposing party.

Imagine how much discord there would be if states used this combination of fraud and NPV to prevent a win to a Republican president. Constitution-loving Americans would not stand for being subjugated under a corrupt, illegitimate ruler. It would end the centuries-long peaceful turnover of power that our founders designed.

The national vote total is not how we elect a president. It isn’t even possible for us to count an accurate national vote. The Electoral College isn’t antiquated and outdated; it is more necessary than ever.

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[i] I’ve written about election integrity here, here, here, and here. 

Vote Counts, Part I

image found here

Should every vote count? Yes.

Should every vote be counted? Yes, in an ideal world.

Should the winner be the one who gets more votes than the other(s)? Not necessarily.

There’s a Tom Woods Show podcast, from November 18, 2016, just after President Trump was elected, in which Woods was talking about the Electoral College with Kevin Gutzman[i] and Brion McClanahan[ii]. Woods shares a baseball metaphor that might help here. Suppose you’ve got two teams in the baseball World Series. Team A wins three games 8-1, 8-1, 8-1, and Team B wins three games 2-1, 2-1, 2-1, and then in the final game Team B wins again 2-1. Team B wins the series.

image from here

If Team A starts complaining, “Hey, but we earned a bigger total number of absolute points: a total of 28 points. And those guys only earned a total of 11 points. We’re the real winners”—everybody rolls their eyes and calls them sore losers. Total points don’t matter. The thing that matters is games won.

The strategy would be completely different if a team were playing for most runs scored over several games. For example, as Kevin Gutzman adds,

If you think about the strategy involved in managing the World Series, your analogy is illuminating. For example, in game 1 the team that’s down 6-1 in the 8^th inning isn’t going to put in it’s best relief pitcher, because it doesn’t care what the final margin is at that point. They know they’ve lost. They want to save their best pitchers for the remaining games, and so they don’t throw their number 1 guy out there in the 9^th inning.

On the other hand, if it mattered what the margin was in game 1, if that had anything to do with who was eventually going to win the series, then you might see the ace closer come on in the 9^th inning with the score 7-1, to try to ensure that there weren’t anymore runs scored….

So that’s like Trump not spending much time campaigning in California. There’s just no reason for him to go waste money and his own time, or Pence’s time, or some Trump offspring’s time, or anyone’s time trying to get more votes in California when they know they’ve lost. So, again, you get to the 9^th inning of game 1, you’re down 6-1, you’re going to put the scrub middle reliever out there to get batted around a little bit, because you really don’t care. You just want to get the game over with, and let’s move on to game 2.

Strategy would change in a presidential campaign, because, similarly, total votes is not the way the American presidential vote is won.

Think about this. What is united in the United States? The states. We’re not the “United Individuals of America.” Our states are not provinces, or districts, or boroughs segmenting a singular larger entity, as is common in other nations. According to the online dictionary, a state is:

a nation or territory considered as an organized political community under one government

While we have democratic (rule by the majority of the people) aspects, we are not simply ruled by the changing whims of the majority of Americans. We safeguard against that kind of tyranny by having a republic—a representative form of government. We have representatives at the state level, and at the congressional district level. And within states we have similar levels down to very local.

The way the election of our president was set up, the states—which are independently governed entities—hold elections to decide on electors, who will represent that state’s choice for president.

Anyone who wins the presidency has to win not only a preponderance of states, but a wide variety of little societies that have their own interests and needs. Gulf states have different needs from Eastern Seaboard states. Southwestern states have different needs from Midwest states. Mountainous areas have different needs from coasts or deserts or plains. Big urban centers have different needs from smaller cities, suburbs, and rural areas.

The rules of the game are to make belonging to the United States valuable to people in all these different littler societies. This is on purpose, and by design. It was never about getting the highest number of voters, any more than winning the World Series is about getting the most total points. In fact, the first several elections didn’t even record the total number of votes.

On that Woods podcast they point out that no one tries to determine the Senate majority by seeing which party got the highest vote total. The “game” isn’t played that way.

So the strategy is different.

The biggest difference is that we don’t have candidates simply go to the biggest urban centers, where they can accumulate the most votes, and ignore the rest of the country. Every location has at least some small strategic significance. And a candidate decides where to spend time and resources based on the effort to win the most electoral college votes.

That idea that the total votes is irrelevant is important. It’s especially something to look at as there’s greater pressure to do an end-run (switching sports metaphors) around the Constitution and its amendment process by states doing a National Popular Vote (NPV) compact, in which these participating states determine their respective electors based on—not their individual state’s voters, but on the national vote total.

There are plenty of reasons this is a bad idea. And you can tell they’re not serious if you picture what they will do if/when Trump or any other Republican wins the popular vote. Will they declare their electors for that Republican winner? Or will they demur and say, “Well, the courts haven’t decided on whether we can actually do this yet”? It’s a one-way strategy only. They’re not about fairness; they’re corrupt.

One of the main reasons this is a bad idea is that we can’t get an accurate vote total. In theory it ought to be possible, but in reality it isn’t.

In Part II we'll cover some of the details of why an accurate national vote count isn't even attainable.

Apollo 11 50th Anniversary

son Political Sphere at NASA
November 1986
on our first visit to Houston

Saturday is a big, historic celebration day for all mankind. But we’re in Houston, and it’s especially meaningful here. Johnson Space Center, or NASA, is where out-of-town guests most want to visit. We went there frequently during our homeschooling years. We’re hoping to take a grandson this coming week.

I remember July 20, 1969. I had just turned 11. It was a Sunday. The afternoon meeting at church usually lasted an hour and a half, but that day it was abbreviated to about twenty minutes, at which point we were sent home to experience history with our families.

Our black and white TV was on the rest of the day. We watched the occasional simulation, but waited what seemed endlessly for the historic moment. After long hours, past summertime bedtime, we watched what looked sort of like a fuzzy white ghost moving down a ladder to step onto the moon—where no human had ever stepped before.

And Neil Armstrong spoke his historic words:

One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.

There’s a description in the Spherical Model of what a thriving civilization looks like. One part of that description is:

Creativity abounds; enlightening arts and literature exceed expectations. Architecture and infrastructure improve; innovation and invention are the rule.

Putting a human being on the moon was a remarkable human accomplishment. So many things went right—which included a supportive public in a free world where creativity and innovation could thrive. It was a close race with the competitive communist Soviets. But it seems to me symbolically fitting that we, the free people, actual won the space race.

I’ve been celebrating the 50^th anniversary in little ways all month. Reading things in the newspaper and online, making plans to do another tour. But this week has been especially fun watching a documentary series presented by Bill Whittle, entitled Apollo 11: What We Saw. So far there have been three parts, which can be either viewed or listened to as a podcast. But I recommend watching. The fourth one will be shown on Saturday, the actual 50^th anniversary day.

Each is about an hour long, and well worth the time. The first is here, below, followed by links to the next two. If you hunt for them on your own, you can find them on YouTube and on The Daily Wire (whose studio was used for the production), as well as The Daily Wire’s Facebook page.

Among the rich delight of details are a couple of observations. One is that, while it seems miraculous in the days of slide rules that we could send men to the moon, each step along the way was only the next increment beyond the previous accomplishment, which the whole population (Bill Whittle even more than most) were paying attention to. Another is that the astronauts were an extraordinary bunch, who really did have "the right stuff." Success beat out failure more than once because of Neil Armstrong's beyond-normal-human ability to think and act calmly while under more stress than most of us will ever face.

It's a story worth retelling, and forever remembering.

Apollo 11: What We Saw

Part 1: Find it here

As the astronauts landed on the moon
screenshot from What We Saw, Part I

 

Part 2: Find it here.

Apollo 11 Lunar Module
screenshot from What We Saw Part II

Part 3: Find it here. 

Buzz Aldrin, in perhaps the most famous photo in world history
screenshot from What We Saw Part III

Economics on the Sphere

The Spherical Model gives us a way to look at government economic policies and know whether they’ll work or not—or even whether they should be tried.

The Economic Zone

There’s this basic principle:

Whenever government attempts something beyond the proper role of government (protection of life, liberty, and property), it causes unintended consequences—usually exactly opposite to the stated goals of the interference.

While this is a statement related to the Political Sphere, the principle is probably easiest to see on the economic sphere. For that, we’re going to review a couple of segments of the Spherical Model website on the Economic Sphere. If you’re not yet familiar with the Spherical Model concepts, you can get a quick refresher by reading “The Political World Is Round” or by watching the (very low-budget) video, here. Below, the indented parts are quoted from the website, interspersed with my comments today.

Just as with the political Freedom Zone, there’s a 45th parallel to stay above for optimum economic prosperity. In this zone, government is limited to its proper economic role: protect property rights, safeguard society from attack, and, if called upon, mint the monetary units while safeguarding the wealth. The US Constitution does limit the federal government. When government attempts to interfere, for whatever well-intentioned purpose, to stimulate the economy, manage unemployment, control interest rates, redistribute wealth, or tax for any purpose outside the proper role of government—it will always cause damage to the economy.

All that government needs to do is follow the Constitution, and we would have the most prosperous economy in world history in perpetuity. But following the Constitution has always been the challenge.

Davy Crockett
by William Henry Huddle, 1989
image from Wikipedia

There’s a Davy Crockett story[i] I’ve used at this point. You can re-read it on the website. It tells how Davy Crockett learned from a constituent that government had no business using tax money on charity. He was able to persuade Congress, but only on that one piece of legislation.

Let’s add to that a story of James Madison—the principal writer of the Constitution, who ought to know, who was against a 1792 Congressional appropriation of $15,000 for French refugees. Madison said, “I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution, which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents.”[ii]

Here’s what happens:

It is a pattern of people in power to exert more power than they have been granted, ostensibly to do good, thus usurping power they had not been granted but setting precedence for future exertion of that power. The founders knew this, had seen it and experienced it, and read and studied so that they would word the Constitution in a way that would purposely restrict government from usurping this power. But it takes constant vigilance in order to prevent the usurpation. And after decades, even centuries now, of lawmakers overstepping “for the general welfare,” we are far distant from the Freedom Zone.

We know what the Free-Enterprise [Prosperity] Zone would look like: healthy, prosperous economy, with each worker benefiting from his own labors, and having the opportunities to meet his financial needs and build up wealth. There would be no guarantees of the success of every single person, but there would be better opportunities than in any other system in any country at any time in history.

We haven’t spent nearly enough time actually following the Constitution, and thereby staying in the Freedom Zone of the Political Sphere or the Prosperity Zone of the Economic Sphere.

We seriously lowered ourselves on the sphere shortly after the turn of the last century. Income taxes were instituted, and the Federal Reserve Bank was formed. Woodrow Wilson set the standard for Italian and German fascism in his efforts at government control. He interfered in the economy and encouraged his followers to do so. It was the interfering policies put in place early in the century that led to the Great Depression; these policies followed by Hoover and then Roosevelt lengthened and deepened the Depression.

Remember, any government act meant to do other than to protect the people’s wealth is economically unsound—it will cause harm, either in the short term or eventually.

We ought to know better. Out country has had enough experiences with extra-constitutional experimentation: Woodrow Wilson, FDR, LBJ, Nixon, Carter, Obama—for example. This piece, from the website, was written in 2010, when we’d suffered just about a year and a half of Obama interference, which malaise continued through his entire presidency:

Friedrich Hayek, in The Road to Serfdom and others of his writings, details why central planning (another term for government interference) in decision making wreaks havoc. He wrote in the 1940s, with the clarity of having been there and observing as things happened, how and why Wilson, Hoover, and Roosevelt policies failed—and continued to fail and will always fail.

There is such a stark difference between the failure of the controlled economy and free enterprise that even a relatively mild step from control toward freedom leads to remarkable increases in prosperity. The Ronald Reagan era is such an example. The years from Lyndon Johnson and Jimmy Carter showed a continual rise in the misery index (unemployment rate added to the rate of inflation), until an average high of 20.27 during Carter’s administration. In relatively short time, Reagan was able to drop the rate down to 11.19—not low enough, but a huge improvement. He lowered taxes and deregulated previously controlled business sectors. Even without the liberal Congress lowering spending as much as Reagan had intended, there was marked improvement. The index continued to go down through George W. Bush’s presidency, and only headed back up when the liberal Congress (during Bush’s last two years) started imposing economic controls. Obama, during his first year, imposed more controls than any president since FDR, socializing industries, controlling banks, redistributing wealth, attempting to socialize the health care system—and the misery index responded, rising from an average 8.1% under Bush to 12.33% after a single year.

And note that the misery could be higher if unemployment were more accurately calculated; those unemployed more than six months, or those no longer seeking employment or who have taken low-pay temporary jobs, are not included. This means that, if unemployment is really closer to 17%, then Obama in a single year has “controlled” the economy into depression-feeling Carteresque misery. Right now the inflation rate is being held artificially low with far below market interest rates, which will at some point need correction. So by some objective measures, Obama’s economic errors have already exceeded Carter’s.

Reagan didn’t get us all the way up to the Free-Enterprise Zone; he got us generally above the equator with an upward direction—more remarkable because it was reached without the assistance of a like-minded legislature. And the result was huge. Unemployment and interest rates dropped, and GDP started a growth spurt lasting two decades.

We look now, a couple of years into the Trump presidency, and there’s been an effect on the economy very similar to Reagan’s improvement over Carter’s malaise. That ought to tell us something:

If we could make that much progress by going upward just above the equator on the Spherical Model, how much more prosperous would we be as a country if we followed the Constitution and moved up to the Free-Enterprise Zone [Prosperity Zone] and stayed there?

Here’s another really radical idea: If America could make that much upward, perpetual progress by abiding by the Constitution, wouldn’t that work for any other country that tried it? Yes. Yes, it would. They would have to adopt a constitution essentially like ours—one that protects life, liberty, and property while limiting government to just its essential role—like the list in the Preamble of our Constitution:

 in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity

And then, of course, people doing well would need to voluntarily fill the philanthropic role that is needed to help those who cannot help themselves. These countries could keep their culture: their language, their history, their clothing, their music, their art and architecture.

Would we worry if competing countries started doing as phenomenally well as we were doing? No need. Because we’d be plenty prosperous. It isn’t a zero-sum game. When more wealth is created, there’s more wealth to go around.

If only we could make use of our founders’ ideas, and then export those ideas.

But they can’t be imposed on an unwilling people; people have to choose freedom, prosperity, and civilization. Lack of choosing them is the trouble we mainly have here in America. We need people to come to appreciate what actually leads to the blessed outcomes that are our potential, and then choose those ultimate good outcomes.

I’m willing to give it a try. Who’s with me?

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[i] I first heard this Davy Crockett story from Nina Hendee, who told Texas history stories to school groups at the family restaurant Taste of Texas. I later found the full story: “Not Yours to Give,” originally published in The Life of Colonel David Crockett, by Edward Sylvester Ellis, republished at http://juntosociety.com, © 2002 The Junto Society.

[ii] This incident and quote came to my attention in “Healthcare—If Government Doesn’t Do It, Who Will?” by Larry Elder, online column August 27, 2009, on Townhall.com.