Natural Feeding and Teaching

This post is about education. But I’m going to start with an analogy, about food, in hopes of helping you see the current paradigm with new eyes.

Imagine a conversation between a couple of moms at a park on a pleasant afternoon, while the kids play. This is a slightly different time and place than our current nation. Mom 1 is about to call the kids to head home for dinner; it’s time to start the cooking process if they’re going to have dinner on the table when Dad gets home. Mom 2 is surprised.

Mom 2: You cook for your own family? Really? I could never do that.

Mom 1: Yeah, I always have, and the kids are growing just fine.

Mom 2: I’d be afraid I’d do something wrong. I mean, what if I made my kids fat? How would I ever forgive myself?

Mom 1: Well, I mostly make just enough. And it’s not junk food. And we don’t have sweet snacks and desserts all the time, just as an occasional treat.

Mom 2: Yeah, I could never say no if my Emma whined and wanted more.

Mom 1: It takes being the grown up, I guess.

Mom 2: I’m just glad I don’t have to do that. I mean, it’s enough that I have to get them dressed and out the door in the morning. I’m so glad the school feeds them breakfast and lunch. And now that they send dinner home too—what a lifesaver! I’m just so glad the government cares enough about our children to make sure they get fed.

Mom 1: I figure I can do that. And I’m the one who knows what my kids will eat.

Mom 2: But, seriously, do you know what they should eat? Do you have a degree in nutrition? Are you certified?

Mom 1: No, I just use common sense and make things mostly from scratch. It’s not rocket science.

Mom 2: But all those studies—you should get them to eat more broccoli, or less, or use soy or don’t use soy. Is peanut butter really too dangerous? I mean, I’d never feed them something if I didn’t already know they didn’t have an allergy.

Mom 1: Usually you don’t find out they have an allergy if they haven’t eaten it at least once.

Mom 2: Well, still, I’m sure the government data puts the odds in our favor.

Mom 1: One of my kids does have food allergies, to dairy. So I just adjust what I’m cooking for him. You can’t even get one of the school meals without milk, can you?

Mom 2: Well, no, but you can just throw out what they don’t eat.

Mom 1: Yeah. I don’t do that. Like, if I know a kid’s never going to eat peas, I can make sure he gets some food he will eat that provides the same nutrition. I’m the one closest to the situation, so I can easily adjust.

Mom 2: Maybe so, but it’s so much easier to just let the government food specialists make those decisions. Plus, it’s no cost to me. Not only do I have time free that I don’t have to cook, we don’t have to spend that huge chunk of our budget just to feed out kids. I mean, it’s free! What could be better than free?

Mom 1: I guess we just value personal choice, personal responsibility, being able to adjust to our child’s personal needs without having to go through a government bureaucracy that doesn’t care about our child’s individual needs; we like time talking together while we eat, learning together about foods, how to cook, how to make things taste better, getting variety when we want it…

Mom 2: Yeah, strange. Whatever. Hey, gotta get going… (runs off, sits down on another bench by someone less crazy).

daughter Social Sphere dissecting a squid
during a group science day in 2009

This conversation is eerily similar to conversations I’ve actually had about our choice to homeschool. Up until a century plus a couple of decades ago, most parents saw to the education of their own children. Sometimes the mom and dad did lessons at home, taught reading and basic math, and gave assigned readings. Sometimes they joined together with some other families to hire a teacher or two in a neighborhood school. Sometimes—especially for kids who showed promise as they got older—they got to learn more as apprentices or in higher education. What we see taught in college now was frequently taught in secondary schools (calculus was aimed at 8^th grade), and undergraduate universities taught the specialized knowledge now reserved for graduate programs.

I grew up thinking public schools were the norm, and we sent our kids to them. Early on we got lucky.Our very smart kids (never sent to preschools) got funneled into a gifted program that was quite good, despite the bus ride across town. Then we moved, and spent two years coming to realize our needs could not be met in the local schools. Private schools, which we couldn’t afford for three kids anyway, were not going to solve our issues, because we needed some individual attention. So we dove into homeschooling and never looked back.

It was a difficult decision, and kind of scary. But it turned out that it wasn’t so very different from cooking every day for your own kids. You look at what they need; you know enough to either provide the instruction or figure out where to get what they need. So you facilitate their learning one way or another—just like you did when they were learning how to sit up, how to walk, how to talk, how to brush their own teeth. Those are things you have down yourself pretty well, so you just show the way.

There’s really not much necessary learning from elementary school that a functional adult doesn’t have a good grasp of. When things get tougher, at the high school level, finding specialized help, the way people do for music lessons, is easy enough. And getting easier with so many online resources.

And you learn as you go. Just as I’m a much better cook now than I was years ago. And I make it better tasting under more limited conditions (food allergies) than I ever used to know how to do. But it isn’t rocket science. And when they get to the level of rocket science (we actually studied some of that), you can get help, which we did.

Were there holes and gaps in our children’s educations? Undoubtedly. But I guarantee there were not as many holes in things important to me as the public schools would have caused. Anything they may have missed is easily compensated for with a book or an online search. Because they know how to learn on their own now.

I’m often in awe of how well all of my children do that as young adults. What a delight it is to talk over with them what they’ve recently discovered!

There’s more to say about education, but I want to end with a point and a quote. You, as a parent, have the right and responsibility to bring up your children as you see fit. Among parents earnestly striving to care for their children, any interference with that process is wrong. Outcomes for the children will be worse under government control. And our lives and freedoms will be threatened by the government control, no matter how convincing the authorities are about their good intentions.

Here’s the quote for the day, from Ezra Taft Benson, former US Secretary of Agriculture, and author of The Proper Role of Government (as well as former President and Prophet of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints 1985-1994):

The best way to prevent a political faction or any small group of people from capturing control of the nation's educational system is to keep it decentralized into small local units, each with its own board of education and superintendent. This may not be as efficient as one giant super educational system (although bigness is not necessarily efficient, either) but it is far more safe. There are other factors, too, in favor of local and independent school systems. First, they are more responsive to the needs and wishes of the parents and the community. The door to the school superintendent's office is usually open to any parent who wishes to make his views known. But the average citizen would be hard pressed to obtain more than a form letter reply from the national Commissioner of Education in Washington, D.C.

Glass Breaking Fun

This past week economist Greg Mankiw’s blog posted a couple of cartoons relating to the broken glass fallacy. I summarized the fallacy last July this way:

A vandal comes and breaks a baker’s window. The baker then employs a glazier to replace the window, so the glazier has more income, which he spends to by a suit. And so on, implying that the economy is better off because of the broken window. But this looks only at what is seen, not what is unseen. The baker was building up capital to buy a larger oven and hire more workers. But he had to use the capital on the window, which he wouldn’t have had to do without the breakage. So there was a loss in the economy to the baker, to his possible employees that didn’t get hired, and to the manufacturer of the new oven that didn’t get purchased. Those losses are unseen. The economy is actually worse off because of the unnecessary glass breakage.

First there was this cartoon:

From Greg Mankiw's blog

 Then there was this follow-up:

My son Political Sphere was visiting for spring break this past weekend, and we were laughing about these cartoons (I know, our forms of entertainment are admittedly a little arcane), and he asked if I’d heard about the real life example. This happened in Arizona while he was living there, so he was familiar with it; I had to look it up. Here’s a portion of the story from January 2009:

A Maricopa County grand jury returned the Jan. 22 indictment against Troy Jason Vollberg, 34, who was arrested Friday by Scottsdale police.

The indictment contains 12 felony counts including fraudulent schemes, aggravated criminal damage and burglary in the first degree….

Those documents accuse Vollberg, owner of Tri-State Glass, of being the mastermind behind an effort nearly two years ago to bilk the Scottsdale Unified School District out of hundreds of thousands of dollars to replace broken bus windshields.

Investigators claim Vollberg paid Scott Sloan $5,000 to find a person to knock out the glass, and then paid Mike Olivares $15,000 in April 2007 to break out the front windshields of 70 school buses in a Scottsdale bus yard.

Vollberg, whose company was a subcontractor for the school district, charged the district $134,000 to repair the windshields.

Police documents say Vollberg pocketed the money and used it for a "trip to Las Vegas and new tires for his truck."

This is a real-life example of literally broken glass. Clearly the prosecution shows there is a belief by society that Vollberg’s “contribution” to the economy was not a net positive. Yes his glass repair company (or mainly himself) got a temporary net increase of $134,000, pretty significant business. He “invested” $20,000 to a couple of thugs to do the actual glass breakage, so subtract that amount from his profit, but include it as being spent elsewhere in the economy. And then he spent a chunk of the profits on a trip to Las Vegas, contributing to the tourism industry, and also purchasing new truck tires, with some trickle-down economic benefit there. All positives so far, right? Then why the prosecution?

Because he caused the school district to spend $134,000 of its budget on bus window repairs. Now, I’m often critical of the way public schools prioritize their spending, but I can’t imagine any district preferring to spend their budget on vandalism repair, for the sake of the economy, at the expense of educating children.

Later on, Vollberg “invested” $8,000 to hire a thug to break windows at a trucking company, where he got a return of $45,000 for repairs, and additionally spent a mere $10,000 for smashed bus windows—again—this time charging $270,000. It was the inflated price for repairs this time that set off the investigation that finally uncovered his window-breaking scheme. So, this one man has given us plenty of real life case studies.

If it’s not clear to you that damaging other people’s property in order to profit yourself is (and should be) against the law, you may be a Keynesian. If you believe in respect for private property, and believe the use of capital for positive ends is better than for unnecessary damage repair, you may be a free marketer (AKA classical economist).

More pertinent (and more in accord with the cartoons), Keynesians believe government ought to "stimulate the economy" by spending money somewhere, even if it means "breaking some glass" to spend it on, while free marketers believe government interference is much more likely to harm than help the economy.

Citizen Participation

The other evening I came across a recording of Larry Arne, president of Hillsdale College, giving a speech, a few weeks after the November election. I always like hearing Larry Arne; he is a combination of calm, folksy, and incidentally extremely well educated. And he has a brilliant way of expressing love for the Constitution. I’m sorry I don’t have a link to the speech; I realized afterward I would have liked to save it. But one of his quotes was from, I think, one of the ancient Greeks: “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.” And then he added, “Politics is like that too.”

That’s how I feel about it. I am not particularly interested in the game of politics, but because those who are interested and involved in politics are the ones who make policy that affects my life, I feel obligated to pay enough attention to prevent as much damage as possible.

The question is, how much is enough? I don’t know the answer, but I continue to do what I’m willing to do and feel may have a positive effect.

Cypress Texas Tea Party visit to Rep. Bill Callegari's office

This past Friday a few friends from our local Tea Party group went with me to visit the office of one of our state representatives. We did this during the last Texas legislative session two years ago and found it valuable. This is just one of many ways we regular citizens are trying to have an impact. We have made a list of bills to follow during the legislative session, on subjects we care about: education, voter integrity, taxes, protection against federal encroachment. And we have included a list of basic principles as well. There are literally thousands of bills presented each session. Some are so obscure that it’s pretty near impossible for a regular citizen living a non-political life to become aware of them and judge them. That’s why we have representatives instead of direct democracy. But where we are aware of bill and issues, we do want to let our representatives know where we stand.

Back two years ago I offered to share, at a Tea Party meeting, some information I had on how a bill goes through the legislative process. I got the information from Texas Home School Coalition. They have a monthly day at the legislature where students learn to lobby on issues related to homeschooling and parental rights. Then the students (with parents in the background) divide up for the afternoon and deliver the information to every legislative office. We used to go as homeschoolers—hands down one of the best field trip opportunities ever!

So I was one of the few to have visited legislative offices in Austin, or even locally. After that information day, people in the group said, couldn’t we go visit local offices? And can you arrange that? So that’s how it happened. And I got the assignment again this time.

We have input from various sources for the bills we’re following, but I still feel less informed than I would like. That’s why I added the principles list. This was just written by me without, so far, direct feedback from the entire group, but it’s my impression of what we agree on in our discussions. And, in case you’re not aware, a local Tea Party is just a local group that gets together under that name. We receive no monies from any source. We don’t collect dues, and we don’t owe allegiance or money to any national organization. We use free internet communications, and we meet at a local restaurant that allows us the use of the space without a fee, on the assumption that many of us will buy food while we’re there (a good assumption).

So, again, the list is local, and it is unofficial:

·         We support the US Constitution and conservative principles in the Texas Constitution.

·         We support low taxes and limited government spending and oppose ever having a state income tax.

·         We support handling each issue at the most local authority possible—with individual and family decisions as the default authority.

·         We support asserting 10^th Amendment states’ rights against usurpation by federal government.

o   We particularly oppose imposing national health care on the people of Texas.

·         We support parental rights in the education and upbringing of their children, including local control over spending and curriculum in public schools.

·         We do not as a group endorse candidates, but we provide a platform for sharing information so our members can make informed decisions; individual members may endorse, work for, or become candidates. 

We aim for Fridays, near the lunch hour, to make the opportunity open to as many as possible. A representative group of five of us went last Friday. The local off ice staffer, Gracie, was very welcoming, let us take our photo with her. She not only took the materials we brought with us, she took notes of all we said. And I know it is her job to pass along that information to the representative.

Not that many people go to the effort of coming in person. Not everyone even goes so far as to make a phonecall or send an email expressing their opinion. So there’s a way to measure constituent opinion based on who makes these contacts. When I got this information, it was before the anthrax scare, and before email became as standardized as it is now. So email is now the preferred quick opinion expression to representatives (national and state). The offices have programs to sort and store the opinions. It’s assumed that for every email expressing an opinion, probably 10 people have that opinion but haven’t made the contact. So it’s a little like voting for ten people when you are the one to send your opinion. There’s a similar assumption for phonecalls; your opinion for or against will be recorded and considered, even though a phonecall leaves no written record of your reasoning.

It used to be assumed a personally written letter (as opposed to a letter copied word-for-word from multiple members of some organization) was worth about 25 constituent opinions. I’m not sure how that’s measured now, but I do know that letters are troublesome because of the need to scan each delivered item for dangerous substances. So in general mail is not preferred.

As for numbers, an in-person visit is worth about 100 constituent opinions. It may be that visiting the local office when the legislature is meeting in Austin is less powerful than traveling to the capitol, but it’s still important. Driving to Austin would mean even more. Usually citizen lobbyists aren’t the ones to go; special interest groups go, unions and organizations, or their paid lobbyists. It’s their job, and they press for influence. When an individual citizen goes to the effort, the representative is likely to take notice.

I don’t know how much difference we’re making in the long run, but I do believe that, even if we don’t have an interest in politics, politics is interested in us, and we’d better do what we can to be watchful. This is just one of the ways.

Recognizing Savagery When We See It

This is the fourth in the anniversary review of the Spherical Model basics. Part I covers the introduction and the Political Sphere. Part II covers the Economic Sphere. Part III covers the basics of Civilization. In all three the emphasis has been on the principles that get us up in the northern freedom thriving zone. I’m adding this additional segment about what savagery looks like, in case we’re missing the evidence of savagery around us.

Sometimes we think only of worst-case scenarios as savagery: the holocaust, genocide, cannibalism, mafia killings, child abuse, imposed euthanasia, raping and pillaging. But there’s also a lot that happens on the way down. So, here’s a general description of what you might find in a savage world:

·         Families break up or fail to form. Children are unwanted, avoided, and even abandoned by one or both parents. Promiscuity is commonplace and accepted as normal, even honored as a preferred lifestyle.

·         People fail to worship God, ranging from indifference, simply not attending religious services, to not choosing a religion, to declaring antipathy and disdain toward religious people.

·         People fail to live in peace with one another. Nations fight other nations or threaten war. Factions separate from other factions and refuse to tolerate differences in belief. Tribes separate from other tribes and put loyalty to ethnic connection above loyalty to God or righteous behaviors.

·         Poverty increases and becomes more difficult to rise above; society is more permanently stratified. Corrupt business practices abound, with neither workers nor hirers keeping their part of agreements. Producing wealth and preserving it both become increasingly difficult. Takers willingly confiscate from producers, discouraging production—which decreases innovation and invention, curtailing technological progress. People seek to get what they can for themselves and leave helping the poor to others.

·         Art, literature, and music deteriorate, with lack of form along with dissonance and ugliness being praised in place of truth, beauty, form, and function.

·         Pressure against civilizing principles grows stronger. Religion is removed from public discourse. Parental rights are diminished. Controlling entities take over choices about raising and educating children. Choices about food, health care, media, work, use of income, and other basic freedoms are also usurped by controlling entities.

·         Trust fails. Children are encouraged to distrust parents and report on them. And neighbors are encouraged to distrust and report on their neighbors. People will have reason to distrust law enforcement, which will be inadequate for their protection. And people will be deprived of means to protect themselves.

·         Laws become arbitrary, favoring cronies, ignoring basic justice and fairness. Eventually this includes arbitrary violations of life, liberty, and property based on the interests of the controlling entities.

This last was made relevant Tuesday by our current Attorney General Eric Holder, chief of the Department of Justice, in a response to a request for clarification from Senator Rand Paul; Holder claimed the idea was only hypothetical and not part of the administration’s plans, but he could conceive of a scenario in which the president could, in theory, assassinate a US citizen on US soil without due process based on the government’s opinion that the person could be planning terrorism. Combine that hypothetical with the government’s definition of grassroots patriots, including Tea Partiers, as possible terrorist threats, and it’s not a huge leap to worst case scenarios. It took Senator Paul’s extraordinary near-13-hour old-fashioned filibuster Wednesday to nudge the AG into sending the senator a letter declaring that the Constitution does indeed limit the administration in this specific way.

So, for now, we can rest assured that assassination for our opinions is not imminent (if the administration can be believed). But that hardly means all is rosy.

We may not be aware of how far into savagery we have sunk, because many of us can still go about our daily lives as usual. But we have a president who disdains regular American citizens, anyone who doesn’t go along with his socialist intentions, saying they “get bitter, they cling to guns or religion,” and then accuses them of “antipathy toward people who aren't like them.” He refuses to enforce the DOMA legislation he made an oath to uphold, sues states that attempt to enforce US border protection, and increasingly rules by edict (“executive order”) when Congress doesn’t cave to his pressure for higher taxes and higher entitlement spending. In a petulant fit, he insists any budget cuts (in the rate of increase, caused by the sequester he suggested) be as painful as possible. That is our leadership, chosen by the people in what we assume was a free and relatively fair election.

When you go through the list above, you can see plenty of symptoms of savagery already all around us. Those of us who love civilization already recognize the decay. We mourn what we’ve already lost. And we tenaciously adhere (rather than bitterly cling) to the principles required for civilization, in hopes that in our own homes and perhaps also in our own communities we can yet enjoy some of the beauty of civilization.

Basics of the Civilization Sphere

 

This is the third in an anniversary series reviewing the basics of the Spherical Model. The March 1st post was on the Political Sphere. The March 4^th post (the actual 2-year anniversary of the start of this blog) was on the Economic Sphere. Today’s post is on the Social Sphere, or Civilization Sphere. I have varied on the terminology for this sphere, since the three legs of the conservative stool are political, economic, and social. But my emphasis is on the goal of civilization, so I often use that word rather than the more general word social. The northern hemisphere is Civilization; the southern hemisphere is Savagery. The goal is not just to be barely at or above the equator line; it is to be far enough north to reside above the 45^th parallel, in the Civilization Zone, where there can be true, sustained, thriving civilization.

Since the November election, I have spent more time on civilization than on political and economic freedom. Of the three, it is the most essential. You can’t have self-governance is you don’t have people who can and do govern themselves. Nor can you have a thriving economy without people who have a strong work ethic and honesty about earnings in exchange for labor (replacing the uncivilized desire to get something for nothing). And that starts with individual families, regardless of what sort of regime the family is subject to, to pass along the behavior required of civilized people.

A critical mass of healthy, civilized families leads to strong communities, then outward to cities, then states, then nations. Going north on all three overlapping spheres starts with going north on the Civilization Sphere.

Here are the two basic premises for the Civilization Sphere (covered in detail in two parts at Spherical Model, here and here):

1.      Not all religious societies are civilized (according to my definition, which differs from the archaeological definition—see below in “What does civilization look like”), but every civilized society is a religious society. This absolutely does not mean state-sponsored religion or lack of religious freedom; in fact, the opposite is true. Freedom of religion is essential, and the flourishing of religion in general must be encouraged.

2.      The family is the basic unit of civilized society. Whatever threatens the family threatens civilization. So preserving and protecting the family is paramount in laws and social expectations in a civilized society.

Sometimes people claim to be conservative on economic issues, but not on social issues. They are misguided; it isn’t possible to successfully follow free market principles and get economic prosperity in a decaying civilization. It likewise isn’t possible to talk about the rights guaranteed us in the US Constitution, and the philosophical concept of ultimate good the Constitution is based on, without acknowledging the giver of those inalienable rights: God.

I just finished reading Hugh Hewitt’s latest book, Talking with Pagans, a collection of debates, mostly from his radio show, collected over the past several years. One section was with Christopher Hitchens, who believed he had deflected the pro-religious argument by insisting that he did believe in ultimate good and ultimate standards of right and wrong. He simply believed the sense of ultimate good we have, in anyone choosing to be ethical and good, is the result of Darwinian natural selection. I’m glad that worked for him; being around people who are good and ethical is always better than being around the savage opposite. But it is capricious, since the ultimate arbiter of right is the person himself, with no higher authority (other than just civil law) to contradict his opinion.

Hitchens, along with some of the others on the atheist side, claimed that there’s a lot of disagreement among religious people on the code of living righteously. Almost without fail these debaters take as evidence the relatively rare fanatics, a few of whom in history have been violent, claiming to act in the name of their god(s). They choose to cherry pick, however, leaving out the savage atrocities of anti-religious tyrants such as Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, just to cover the past century.

In fact, over the centuries there has been a great deal of consensus about how to live a basically moral life. The primary list is the Ten Commandments, which outline our requirements to honor God, the giver of life, liberty, and free will, along with limitations that show respect for those very rights in those around us. No community ever progressed to civilization while simultaneously allowing murder, theft, and promiscuity. In fact, you will find life, family, and property rights valued in any community that can be construed to be truly civilized.

In addition, there are refinements, positive behaviors to develop, many listed in the New Testament. (See The Beatitudes in Matthew 5:3-12, plus the definition of charity in I Corinthians 13, and Paul’s admonition on seeking virtue in Philippians 4:8. I keep returning to the BoyScout Oath and Law as well.)

What does civilization look like? This description is from the Spherical Model:

In the northern circle that is the goal—Civilization—families typically remain intact, and children are raised in loving homes, with caring parents who guide their education and training, dedicating somewhere between 18 and 25 years for that child to reach adulthood, and who then remain interested in their children’s success for the rest of their lives.

Civilized people live peaceably among their neighbors, helping rather than taking advantage of one another, abiding by laws enacted to protect property and safety—with honesty and honor. Civilized people live in peace with other civilized people; countries and cultures coexist in appreciation, without fear.

There is a thriving free-enterprise economy. Poverty is meaningless; even though there will always be a lowest earning 10% defined as poor, in a civilized society these lowest earners have comfortable shelter and adequate food and clothing—and there’s the possibility of rising, or at least for future generations to rise.

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

People feel free to choose their work, their home, their family practices, their friendships and associations. And they generally self-restrain before they infringe on the rights and freedoms of others. Where there are questions about those limits, laws are in place to help clarify boundaries of civilized behavior. When someone willingly infringes on the rights or safety of another, the law functions to protect that victim as well as society from further uncivilized behavior from the offender.

I haven’t spent a lot of time writing about what savagery looks like; I prefer looking at the positive goal. However, I’m concerned that we may be missing the signs of the savagery we’re suffering. It’s like the problem abuse victims have with their thinking: “I’m surviving this; it’s not that bad. I’m just glad it’s not worse.” Only when they get out and get some perspective can they recognize how wrong it was for them to submit themselves to so much abuse.

So I’d like to continue this series with one more post, on Friday, to look at where we are—not so we can feel miserable about it, but so that we can take that first step of recognition that must come before doing something about it.

Economic Sphere Basics

Today is the second anniversary of the beginning of the Spherical Model blog, and we’re doing a recap of the basics of what the Spherical Model is. Friday’s summary covered the principles that lead to the northern freedom zone on the Political Sphere. Today’s summary covers the basic principles leading to the thriving free enterprise zone on the Economic Sphere. (I hope you'll read the full version of each.)

The principles themselves are simple. The preliminary discussion is basic economics, which doesn’t get taught nearly enough in schools. Here are some of the main points:

·        Wealth represents the accumulation of the results of labor.

·        Money is a representative, or symbol, of wealth, to make it easier to exchange.  

·        Problems of the economy as a whole always result from interference in the exchange of labor, or value of money.

·        There has never been a national recession or depression that wasn’t caused by interference with the money supply, or in other words dishonesty about the value of money.

·        Capitalism is a system of increasing productivity, and thereby increasing wealth.

o   Capital is extra time/work/wealth that is invested to make it possible to produce more wealth.

o   Capital in and of itself is simply never evil. Capital might be considered always good. It represents work above and beyond what is essential followed by careful use of it toward a good idea, resulting in even more surplus.

·        Government cannot create wealth; government can only spend it. Government can, however, regulate (that is, make standard) monetary units by coining money, or printing money, each unit of which represents a result of labor that can be exchanged for the results of someone else’s labor.

o   Government can cause harm by printing “money” that does not represent actual wealth.

With these things in mind, how do we identify ways to guarantee thriving free enterprise? Limit government to its proper role: protecting people and their property (wealth), and guaranteeing the value of the money. Maybe add to that some infrastructure to help facilitate commerce, and that’s about it. Every intervention by government to redistribute from those who have to those who have not causes unintended consequences that make things worse both for those being taken from and those being given to.

Capital is taken that could have been used for productive purposes, possibly that could have provided employment for those in need. Incentive is taken from those who would have freely given to the needy, taking their surplus so that they can’t decide to give, and making them resentful that they had no choice about the confiscation. And the receivers of government largesse feel entitled to the redistribution, since the faceless government, rather than a neighbor who did the earning of the wealth, has decided they deserve it. They are therefore ungrateful. If there had been a personal connection between willing giver and reluctant but grateful receiver, both could have benefitted and moved forward in a positive relationship.

The way to limit government is to recognize God-given rights and never allow government to usurp power over those things. That requires political freedom instead of tyranny, so you can see how free-enterprise overlays freedom in the north and controlled economy overlays tyranny in the southern hemisphere.

So freedom and economic thriving both require knowing what a right is. The Constitution, again, is handy for that. The first Ten Amendments were not an afterthought; they were understood clearly by the founders, so much so that they went without saying. But then some of the wiser ones wondered what would happen if these rights didn’t remain self-evident. So they were included before the Constitution was ratified.

They are in a way “negative rights”: God has given these to all men, and government shall not infringe upon them. Government, in other words, is limited, while the individual, in regard to rights, is not.

Then along come the “progressives,” who start talking about “positive rights,” things they think every person ought to have, and therefore government should have the ability to bestow upon them, things like a right to a job (regardless of skills), a right to food, a right to shelter. Are these things rights?

If it is a right, God has given it. But we all come into the world naked, impoverished, and inexperienced. It is by growth, hard work, and gaining in expertise that we try to overcome this condition throughout our life. We are born with the right to life, the right to live free (not enslaved), and the right to pursue our own path to overcome the naked impoverished state.

Do we have a right to clothing? Well, it’s sure nice to have the appropriate clothing when you live through a northern winter. But is it your neighbor’s obligation to work to provide your clothing? Or is that your own obligation? Would it be good of your neighbor to give you his surplus clothing if he saw you were in need? Yes. But his giving it to you is charity, or philanthropy, not an obligation to meet your right. If he had no surplus, but just enough clothing to keep himself from freezing, would it be his obligation to give up a coat to you? No. If he were heroic, he might work out a way to share with you and perhaps keep you both alive. But he is not obligated to do so. So, your clothing is not his obligation. Providing clothing for someone other than self is a charitable act.

At the basic level, the relationship of parent to child is charitable. The parent can clearly see that the child cannot provide his own clothing, so the parent, showing his care for the child, provides that clothing. Same with food. You might even say that the parent has an obligation to feed, clothe, shelter, and nurture the child, because the parent brought the helpless child into the world and therefore has an obligation to that child. But the obligation isn’t without limit. The parent nurtures the child to be capable of feeding, clothing, and sheltering himself. And then, at that point, the parent no longer has the obligation to provide. If the grown child has lost a job, and has a temporary need for economic help, it might be that the parent could step in and offer food, clothing, and shelter from his surplus (charity). But the parent would have no such obligation to a grown and capable child who lacked means simply because of unwillingness to work for them. And that parent would have absolutely no obligation to provide from his hard-earned supply to a lazy child of the neighbor down the road.

So, even though we need them, we do not have a right to food, clothing, and shelter. Ditto for a furnished apartment, a television, telephone, medical care, air conditioning, or a car. Nice to have. Important to have. Maybe even necessary to have in order to fulfill one’s purposes in life. But it is a capable person’s own obligation to work to provide these necessities for himself.

In a civilized society, there will be a desire to somehow provide these necessities to those who are not capable of taking care of themselves: the impoverished because of illness, accident, injury, or lowered mental capacity. But it is philanthropy that fills the need—not government taking from a producer by force to give to a non-producer.

Economic thriving, then, requires limited government, adherence to laws protecting property, and then a charitable people to care for the truly needy.

What Is the Spherical Model

We’re approaching an anniversary here at the Spherical Model. While the website has been up somewhat longer, the blog began March 4,2011, which is Monday. That first post was a Friday, so I think I’ll start the celebration today.

The Spherical Model is a way of looking at ideas and how they interrelate. It begins as an alternative to the left/right paradigm of politics, because that view is inadequate. Using a three-dimensional model allows for a full range of ideas, along with an understanding of how they compare to each other and whether they lead to freedom or tyranny. In addition, the model shows similar three-dimensional positions for economic and social ideas. These aren’t three separate models; they are three layers of the same model.

For the full explanation, I hope you’ll read the website. A year ago, at the one-year anniversary, I offered a shorter version, to get you started with the basics.

The Spherical Model idea is my own. It began in 2004, during our homeschooling decade, when I was looking for a way to explain the political spectrum during our history lessons, including a pretty long unit on the Constitution and government. I expanded the spherical idea beyond politics to include economic and social ideas sometime later and started writing those segments in 2008. I got the website up in 2010, when we finally graduated Social Sphere from our homeschool.  

I consider Spherical Model to be a think tank, but as think tanks go this is about as small as one can get. It consists of me and my personal research and opinions, along with input from my grown children, who happen to have personalities and interests that coincide with the three portions of the model: Political Sphere, Economic Sphere, and Social Sphere. The oldest, Political Sphere, who is a law student now, tends to offer the most input, which I appreciate. A time or two he has written a guest post. Economic Sphere has a degree in economics, and when I had more access to him daily, I often had him school me in how to explain economic principles. He’s now in the Army, studying at the Defense Language Institute. My daughter, Social Sphere, got married this past year, and is studying Family Consumer Science, which fits well into what we cover in the ingredients needed for civilization. Mr. Spherical Model, my husband of 31 years, also offers occasional general input.

For this anniversary review, I’d like to do a series on the three overlaying spheres. The goal, in all three spheres, is to follow the principles that will lead us to and help us remain in the northern hemisphere—the further north the better. So we’ll cover the principles over the next few days.

Political Sphere

The northern hemisphere is freedom; the southern hemisphere is tyranny. The longitudinal lines relate to the perspective—who has the interest. The western hemisphere is most local/individual, and moving toward the eastern hemisphere is moving toward larger interests, with national, regional, and global interests. In the south the two quadrants divide, then, into chaos tyranny in the southwest and statist tyranny in the southeast—both bad, and both the most common versions of governance throughout history. Too many people see the whole political struggle as consisting of the opposition between chaos and control; power seekers often use chaos as an opportunity to gain power by offering relief from the chaos.

These people are blind to the entire northern hemisphere, where people are more peaceful, more productive, more thriving. America, as created in the US Constitution, is probably the best example we have of northern hemisphere freedom at the national level, possibly in all of world history.

What are the principles that get us to the northern freedom zone? The following questions let us know whether the principles are being met.

• Is the policy being debated something that an individual has the right to do, and therefore has the right to delegate to his/her government? For example, a person has the right to protect his own life and property. He can, therefore, combine resources with his neighbors and hire a government entity, such as a sheriff, to do that job for him. Similarly, the several states can combine to delegate the power of defending the nation to a national government entity. Conversely, a person does not have the right to take his neighbor’s excess grain production, for example, and bestow it on himself, because his neighbor was more prosperous in a particular season. He can, of course, ask his neighbor for charity, but he cannot coerce the neighbor to give. That would rightfully be considered theft. Therefore the person cannot delegate the redistribution of wealth to the government to do for him without moving too far south on the sphere.
• Does the policy infringe in any way on the rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights? Does the policy infringe on the free exercise of religion or try to establish a particular sect as a state religion? Is political speech hindered? Does the policy infringe on the right of citizens to bear arms? Does the policy constitute an illegal search or seizure? Does the policy deprive a person of life, liberty, or property when the person has not committed a crime for which that deprivation is the just sentence? Does the policy try to claim for government a power that was not specifically granted in the Constitution? etc. If the policy infringes on the God-given rights, then government cannot take that power without usurping power from the people and is too far south on the sphere.
• Is the idea being debated a proper role of government, some aspect of protection (including national defense, protection from interstate crime, enabling international and interstate commerce, standardized weights and measures and currency to protect the value of wealth, the judiciary that guarantees the protective laws), as enumerated in the Constitution? If not, then accepting the idea is outside the Constitution and is too far south on the sphere.
• Is the perspective appropriately local? It is important that any issue be handled at the most local level possible. Parents should decide the means, methods, and curriculum for educating their children, for example. An issue that affects a state should be handled at the state level, not the national level. National decisions should not be ceded to some international body. As listed in the above question, some interests are national, but ceding power to a larger entity than the actual interest leads to tyranny, which means too far south on the sphere.