We'll Sing and We'll Shout

The phrase in the title comes from a hymn called “The Spirit of God Like a Fire Is Burning.” It is historic and well-loved in my Church. The chorus says,

We’ll sing and we’ll shout

                With the armies of heaven,

Hosanna, hosanna to God and the Lamb!

Unlike many hymns, this one is loud, even boisterous. I like that.

I’m not a person who loves demonstrations, or huge gatherings, or big symbolic gestures generally. But sometimes those have been worth doing. Like 4th of July fireworks. Or Thanksgiving Day parades.

There was a big gathering downtown Houston a year or two after 9/11, once the anti-America crowd dared speak up in the media after a time of only quiet muttering in deference to the dead. So in reaction to that we had a big patriotic gathering to support our troops and America in general.

I’ve been to the state capitol a time or two with rather large groups for specific purposes. But I tend to prefer quiet solitude.

But I saw a video of a singing and dancing demonstration—a nicely choreographed flash mob—that I’m glad happened, earlier this month. It was in Peru[i], possibly the most pro-life people in the world, celebrating their annual March for Life.

Young people sing and dance “por la vida”—for life. Briefly translated, “we take to the streets, together, in the march for life.” And then a lot of singing and dancing ensues. It’s just three minutes, worth watching.

They dance for life, with exuberance; they don’t mention being against abortion. I like the positive power of that message.

And I’m thinking that kind of positive would be helpful in the effort to defend civilization on a number of issues.

For example, yesterday’s Houston Chronicle had a front-page story about the bill in the Texas legislature that—as the Chronicle put it, “Texas Senate Oks measure limiting transgender rights.” The byline is Andrea Zelinski; I’m noting that because it isn’t a news story; it’s so slanted that disguising itself as a news story can only be called propaganda. So now I know Zelinski is an editorial writer masquerading as a reporter.

What does the bill have the audacity to do? Require people to use the public bathroom that correlates with the gender they are born with. It has to do with privacy and safety, rather than, as implied, discrimination and trampling someone’s rights.

Up until a couple of years ago, when Houston’s then-mayor Anise Parker went out of her way to force through a “transgenders have more rights than you” rule, and she illegally ignored the people’s will to repeal it, and she tried to oppress churches and pastors who might not agree with her—up until then, transgenders used whatever bathroom they wanted. If a male looked like a woman, he could go in a women’s restroom and use a stall like anyone else. But if he looked like a man, and/or he did something that made females uncomfortable, they could let their discomfort be known.

The new city law was to silence them. If they worried such a person might not be a harmless transgender, but might be a sexual predator, they would be breaking the law to say so. Their rights of privacy and security were overridden for the sake of transgenders who insist that reasonable accommodations aren’t good enough. Only total capitulation by all of society will do.

Houston’s mayor got overridden. The people spoke up about reasonable safety issues. The issue came up a few other places. And then suddenly president Obama made an executive order that every state and every school had to shut up about their discomfort with predator facilitation and kowtow to the LGBT juggernaut. He had no right as president to make such an edict, so states have an obligation to defy it. And Texas is codifying that with SB6.

So what I’m suggesting, for some creative person out there, is a joyous, exuberant, singing dancing flashmob to deliver the positive message, “Women are women, and men are men, and we’re really glad we have our own bathrooms and locker rooms. Hurray for differences! Hurray for common sense! Hurray that we can speak up for safety and privacy!” So, somebody out there, go for it.

There are probably some other things we ought to sing and shout about, instead of eggshell-walking so media doesn’t slam us.

·         We love a free market with government out of the way!

·         Our brilliant Constitution works every time it’s tried!

·         We celebrate our religious freedom by living it in our everyday lives!

·         How about that great right to assemble and talk about what we want—even things we disagree about!

·         We know how to rise above poverty in America—and we want you to know how too!

·         The person who earns the money decides how to spend it—and that’s great for everyone!

·      You get the picture. We conservatives aren’t a negative lot; it’s the other side who actually fits that description.

But we could use some practice at saying how great it is to be for freedom, prosperity, andcivilization. Those are things we ought to sing and shout about.

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[i] On March 15, Peru suffered severe rains and flooding. My prayers go out to them.

A World Too Savage

There’s a series of somewhat related items I came across the past few days. Some of them heartbreaking for a lover of civilization.

This first is from December, but it came to my awareness this week. The piece begins, “Nearly 400 children have been rescued and 348 adults arrested following an “extraordinary” international child pornography investigation in Canada.” This was the result of a three-year undercover project. It wasn’t limited to Canada:

What they eventually found was a full blown child porn production and distribution company in Toronto that was distributing their content online. The site was run by 42-year old Brian Way and sold and distributed images of child exploitation to people across the world.

The head of Toronto’s Sex Crimes Unit said they enlisted the help of the United States Postal Inspection Service since many of the videos were being exported to the U.S. and began a joint investigation. After a seven-month long investigation, officers executed search warrants across the city of Toronto including at the business of Brian Way.

It is hard for a civilized person to understand the demand—the market—for obscene violence to children. There are actual people, among us, who choose this evil.

This next story is about a man, a hero, named Tim Ballard, who has dedicated his life to rescuing children enslaved in sex trafficking. After 12 years working for the government as a special agent, he used his skills to create a private organization, Operation Underground Railroad. They recently had a successful sting operation surrounding a Super Bowl party. On February 5 O.U.R. led to the arrest of 9 traffickers and rescued 29 girls.  Since its founding four years ago, O.U.R. “has successfully completed 73 operations, rescued 643 victims, and aided in 273 arrests.”

Tim Ballard, screen shot from here

I’ve seen Tim Ballard talk about his operations on the Glenn Beck show. It is eye-opening to realize how much slavery—and much of it sex slavery—exists. Estimates are that there is far more slavery in the world today than there ever was during legal slavery.

Much of Ballard’s work is in Haiti, which the 3^rd highest rate of sex trafficking in the world, mainly because of severe poverty there. He says, “If you just painted orphanage on the side of the wall, people would bring children to you, and then the kids would go out the backdoor in a deal."

But he adds that the US is the highest producer and consumer of child pornography in the world. His operation is successful by posing as American buyers, because they seem plausible to the dealers.

Again, it is beyond shocking that there are people among us who would purchase sex with children, or purchase child slaves for the purpose of using them for sex. This seems beyond the imagination of a dystopian novel.

Closer to home, I came across a third piece, about a woman named Tracie Mann, who spoke to a women’s group in Montgomery County, just north of the Greater Houston Area. Mann is the founder of Phoenix Charity, in which

Tracie Mann
photo from here

she oversees every aspect of the rescue and recovery operations and with a team of at least 30. Her team increases to about 100 with partners on the streets and from various levels of local and state law enforcement agencies in Montgomery and Harris counties, as well as federal agencies such as the FBI, DPS, and ICE.

She is working to provide hope and positively reprogram the mindset of the recovering children who on average are raped in excess of 100 times within 24 hours, beaten, drugged, and branded. As the owner of Body Restore Med Spa and Laser Center, which funds her recovery operations, her work allows her to remove the brand marks, tattoos, burns, and scars the children carry once rescued.

She has been involved in this work, on her own, since 2004. She is trying to raise awareness. She says it happens in front of us, and we don’t notice—at doctors’ offices, at fast food restaurants, through social media and phone apps.

She said, "We watched the sale and purchase outside a McDonald's in Montgomery County. It happens. It happens in plain site because we all live in our own little bubbles."

I admit that I am in something of a bubble. This is a hard thing to think about. Especially close to home. I wrote about a sting operation, in Waco, a couple of years ago. There were 29 arrests, 9 of them for human trafficking. The shock there was that one was a Ft. Hood sergeant. Another was a law school acquaintance of son Political Sphere, who reports that the guy had seemed normal.

That’s what I’m finding puzzling. People among us, enjoying the benefits of civilization that come from a preponderance of people living basically decent lives, yet who willingly engage in heinous acts against fellow human beings—often the young and most vulnerable.

In the Spherical Model I offer a chart of behavior relative to family, showing the ideal on down to the savage, marking where civilization has decayed and the culture sinks. Since we’re talking about the savage behavior, we’ll travel that chart from the bottom up, in hopes of gaining understanding.

Starting at the bottom, my experience is close to nil. I might not have ever met someone who would engage in any aspect of human trafficking. OK—I just thought of an exception, because I grew up on the same street as the kidnapper of Elizabeth Smart. But I’m unaware of ever meeting anyone who would buy or sell people.

Moving up the scale, I can’t imagine anyone I know engaging in child porn (although the less violent versions of porn have affected people I know). I have never met anyone who would admit to participating in prostitution, as either the prostitute or the buyer. But Mr. Spherical Model has come across both in regular business-related circumstances. So it may be shockingly common for people on business trips to pay for that degradation.

Going further up, I have known a very few people I would consider promiscuous, but none that expected approval from me, although in the celebrity world that appears common. And I’ve known a few more who were adulterous; most were ashamed, and recognized it as a causal factor in their divorce.

Further up still, I’ve known quite a number of people who consider sex outside of marriage a normal part of a relationship, and many live together before marriage as if that is an expected step in a relationship. This is where much of our culture is today.

I attended a women’s interfaith event where we discussed various belief questions at our tables. At mine, out of about eight religious people, only two of us clearly believed that sex outside of marriage is sinful and goes against our religions. The other was a Christian immigrant from Iran. Since the scriptures are clear, I wondered why the other Christians were so vague on the subject.

Going up further, we find people who believe as I do, that sex outside of marriage is unwise and wrong, but fail to live true to that belief, but then turn their lives around and work in their future toward a strong family. This is the minimum level for civilization. If we don’t get back up to this level, and work to sustain this belief and behavior, we sink further.

There are a couple of other things I came across this week. One is a quote from the Prophet and leader of my Church, President Thomas S. Monson. He said, “Today, we are encamped against the greatest array of sin, vice, and evil ever assembled before our eyes.” The thing is, he said it 50 years ago. There has been some serious sinking since then.

But not all of society sinks, and many individuals rise. And that is reason to be hopeful.

The other thing I came across was a piece in my local section of the Houston Chronicle last week, by Rick Brown. He was talking about the history of cultures that believe, as ours does today, that sex is “to be enjoyed recreationally and that best happens outside of marriage.”

He made the comparison to the apostle Paul’s Greco-Roman culture. As he put it,

There was a lot of sex in the city of Thessalonica. Many—if not most—of the Christians that Paul is writing to came out of a pagan background where sexual promiscuity was the norm and widely tolerated. They had to learn a new way to walk.

The interesting thing is that they did find the new way—the way that had been taught by God from Adam and Eve onward, but was new to the Christian converts. That recovered truth eventually became the accepted and understood way in most of the Western world for the next 1900 years.

It can be done. People can change. People can go against the common culture and toward civilization.

The way—the only way—to civilization is a righteous people honoring God, family, life, truth, and property. We know this. I guess we need to do some Paul-style spreading the word.

Emphasizing Civiization

I fill up my quote file randomly, with what happens to come across my path on a given day. But recent additions have leaned toward the Social Sphere—Civilization and how to get there. Or maybe it's that, as we've known all along, the political, economic, and social spheres are interrelated, and you don't get freedom and prosperity if you sink from civilization into savagery. So it's wise to emphasize civilization.

The Social Sphere--or Civilization Sphere

So here are some of my recent additions to the file:

There always has been, and is now more than ever, only one hope for rescue. If we abide in God’s truth revealed in his Son, then we shall know the truth and the truth will set us free. That is why I say again and again that we must dispense with our verbal arsenal that speaks only in terms of right and left. We have forgotten there is an up and a down. May God help us! We need His transforming power to change our thinking and to give us a hunger for what is true. True freedom is not in doing whatever we wish but in doing what we ought. That has been buried in America. And only one who knows the way out of the grave can give us a second chance to live: Jesus, the way, the truth, and the life that sets us free from within first, before we learn to deal with the lies around us.—Ravi Zacharias, “The Soul of America,” 7-2-2016

The rights of man come not from the generosity of the state, but from the hand of God.

—John F Kennedy

The propitious smiles of Heaven can never be expected on a nation that disregards the eternal rules of order and right, which Heaven itself has ordained.—George Washington, First Inaugural Address, April 30 1789

"I have been driven many times upon my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I had nowhere else to go. My own wisdom and that of all about me seemed insufficient for that day." Lincoln Observed: The Civil War Dispatches of Noah Brooks edited by Michael Burlingame (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), p. 210.

I feel a strong desire to tell you—and I expect you feel a strong desire to tell me—which of these two errors is the worse. That is the devil getting at us. He always sends errors into the world in pairs—pairs of opposites. And he always encourages us to spend a lot of time thinking about which is the worse. You see why of course? He relies on your extra dislike of the one error to draw you gradually into the opposite one. But do not let us be fooled. We have to keep our eyes on the goal and go straight through between both errors. We have no other concern than that with either of them.—C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

The First Amendment of the Constitution was not written to protect the people of this country from religious values; it was written to protect religious values from government tyranny.—Ronald Reagan

Happiness, whether in despotism or democracy, whether in slavery or liberty, can never be found without virtue.—John Adams

All the principles of science are of divine origin. Man cannot make or invent or contrive principles. He can only discover them, and he ought to look through the discovery to the Author.—Thomas Paine

Without God, there could be no American form of government, nor an American way of life.—Dwight D. Eisenhower

"[N]o wall of words, [and] no mound of parchment can be so formed as to stand against the sweeping torrent of boundless ambition on the one side, aided by the sapping current of corrupted morals on the other."—George Washington (1789)

Evil may so shape events that Caesar will occupy a palace and Christ a cross, but that same Christ will rise up and split history into A.D. and B.C., so that even the life of Caesar must be dated by his name. Yes, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”—Martin Luther King, Jr. (quoting 19^th Century abolitionist Theodore Parker)

This is still God’s world. The forces of evil, working through some mortals, have made a mess of a good part of it. But it is still God’s world. In due time, when each of us has had a chance to prove ourselves—including whether or not we are going to stand up for freedom—God will interject himself, and the final and eternal victory shall be for free agency.

And then shall those complacent people on the sidelines, and those who took the wrong but temporarily popular course, lament their decisions.

To the patriots I say this: Take that long eternal look.

Stand up for freedom, no matter what the cost. Stand up and be counted. It can help to save your soul—and maybe your country.—Ezra Taft Benson

“No people will tamely surrender their Liberties, nor can any be easily subdued, when knowledge is diffused and Virtue is preserved. On the Contrary, when People are universally ignorant, and debauched in their Manners, they will sink under their own weight without the Aid of foreign Invaders.”—Samuel Adams

"This is our vision. This is our mission.

But we can only get there together.

We are one people, with one destiny.

We all bleed the same blood.

We all salute the same great American flag.

And we are all made by the same God.

And when we fulfill this vision; when we celebrate our 250 years of glorious freedom, we will look back on tonight as when this new chapter of American Greatness began."—President Donald Trump (first speech to Congress 2-28-2017)

What Is a Right?

I’ve covered the definition of a right here and there. I think it’s essential knowledge if you’re going to achieve freedom, prosperity, and civilization, which is the goal here at the Spherical Model.

Bill of Rights in the US Constitution
image from the National Archives

In 2013 I wrote,

What is a right? Something you are entitled to just by virtue of being born a human. God has granted it to you. Others are required to respect your rights, but not to provide them out of thin air.

In the Economic Sphere section of the Spherical Model website, in the section called “How to Tell What Is a Right,” I offer this:

Let’s be clear on what a right is: it is not a privilege, something you might be granted under certain circumstances. It is something that you deserve simply for being human. You do not have to earn a right; you can’t rightfully be deprived of it (with possible forfeitures such as committing capital crimes). If it is a right, it does not come from government; it comes from God. Government may use its power to either guarantee a person’s rights, or to deprive a person of his rights. Restraint from depriving a person of his rights is not equivalent to granting rights. Rights simply do not come from government.

So, if something is a right, it is a person’s natural right whether there is a government entity guaranteeing it or not.

We’re born 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.

I came across an additional good source this weekend, reading Dr. Larry Arnn’s book The Founders' Key. He does a good—and fair—job of laying out both the definition of natural rights and the “progressive” definition of “positive rights,” as defined by FDR. And then explains why we should prefer the way natural rights are understood. He says,

The Founders thought that all our rights are connected. Our right to property is based on the same facts as our freedom of speech. Our right to the material things that we earn is founded in the same nature as our freedom to worship and pray as we please. Our civil and political rights depend on our ability to hold the means of our well-being in our own hands. We can have no rights of any kind that do not leave “to everyone else the like advantage.” This means that nothing properly called a right takes anything from anyone else. [p. 62]

The highlight is mine. I thought that was a main idea worth exploring.

Let’s look again at FDR’s list of “positive rights”:

In our day certain economic proofs have become accepted as self-evident: a second bill of rights, under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all, regardless of station or race or creed. Among these are:

·         the right to a useful and remunerative job, the right to earn enough to provide food and clothing and recreation;

·         the right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return that will give him and his family a decent living;

·         the right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom—freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;

·         the right of every family to a decent home; the right to adequate medical care, and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;

·         the right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age—sickness, medicine, and unemployment;

·         the right to a good education.

All of these rights spell security. And after this war is won, we must be prepared to move forward in the implementation of these rights to new goals of happiness and well being. For unless there is security here and home, there cannot be lasting peace in the world.

So, if you have the right to a “useful and remunerative job,” then you have the right to an employer to provide it. If there’s a free-market agreement between you and the employer, you both benefit. But if the employer is coerced to provide for you, regardless of your skill or success in bringing profit to the employer, the government must enslave the employer in order to provide you with that “right.”

If you have the right, as a farmer, to raise and grow whatever you want, regardless of market supply and demand, and receive a particular government-set rate of return—even in a season when crops fail and the farmer provides nothing of value to society—then someone is going to be coerced into giving that farmer his “rightful” share, regardless of whether the farmer provides value.

The right to trade in a free market is a good idea; a monopoly is not a free-market idea. There are sensible laws to prevent monopolies from keeping supply and demand from working. However, if a company innovates and creates something new, they aren’t required to also create a competitor. They simply put their product out there and compete when/if a competitor shows up. So that one depends on whether government does its policing role to protect free trade, or steps in to pick winners and losers, which ends up actually interfering with free trade.

If every family has a “right” to a “decent” home, who buys it for the family that can’t afford it? And who decides what “decent” means? If everyone has the “right” to adequate medical care, who is coerced to provide it or pay for it? And who decides what “adequate” means? And while it sounds nice to allow everyone the “opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health,” who decides what the opportunity consists of? If illness or disabilities are preventing that person from enjoying good health, who is required to intervene and see to it that the person doesn’t have to suffer? And how, if a solution is unknown?

If someone has the “right” to be free from financial worry in old age—whether or not they work and save, or have higher than normal health care costs because of inadequate self-care or just circumstances beyond their control—who must be coerced to provide for that person?

If a person has a “right” to a “good” education, shouldn’t teachers be providing that for free? Shouldn’t builders be building the necessary buildings for free? If so, who works for free to provide housing and food for the teachers and builders? And who gets to decide what qualifies as “good”?

While it sounds nice to “give” security to every citizen, a government isn’t God; and a government isn’t a wealth source. Government is power, and a cost. Everything government does is a cost to society. So anything it “provides” that costs money must be taken from someone who earned that money.

So let’s be clear: if government is “giving” us rights that we weren’t born with, government is coercing someone to work to provide for someone else it deems worthy. Government deprives Person A of his natural rights to life, liberty, and/or property in order to give the illusion it is providing the extra, “positive rights” for Person B. Whatever Person B feels, Person A rightly feels oppressed by that arrangement.

image found here

If we want people to have some basic shelter, food, health care, and education, there’s a way a free people can do that: charitable giving. Local charities and philanthropies are a lot better at identifying the best way to provide those things than governments can ever be. Then, a person decides when he can afford to offer from his surplus, and he can decide what conditions apply when he makes his donation.

We can do that with anything that is not a natural, God-given right, but is nice to have. We can accumulate enough to offer it freely to those who can’t manage to work their way out of their naked, impoverished, and inexperienced state. We can care about, and for, one another.

Government has no feelings. It is only coercion. That power should be limited to necessary protections of our life, liberty, and property.

Anniversary Celebrations

Some of our group at the 2016
Texas Indepence Day celebration
at Washington-on-the-Brazos

Today is the 181^st anniversary since Texas declared independence from Mexico, where dictator Santa Ana had thrown out the constitution and trampled the rights of the people. The siege at the Alamo was underway at that moment, holding off forces from February 26 to March 6. Estimates range from 182-257 Texians and Tejanos dead and 600 Mexican soldiers. The length of time the few martyrs held off the entire Mexican army allowed for the declaration of independence to be signed, and for troops to be gathered and inspired to win independence just a month and a half later at the Battle of San Jacinto.

I’ll be celebrating this Saturday at Washington-at-the-Brazos, where the declaration was signed, by playing old-time music with some friends, in pioneer dress. I joined in this event last year, and it was great fun. There are re-enactors and plenty of hands-on activities for families.

a blacksmith at the 2016 celebration
at Washington-on-the-Brazos

The other anniversary is actually Saturday, but I’m celebrating today. The first Spherical Model blog post was March 4, 2011, so I’ve been doing this for six years now.

In case you’re new here, the Spherical Model is an alternative to the right/left model for political ideas. It has the advantage of showing how economic and social ideas interrelate, so we can see what leads to freedom, prosperity, and civilization.

The full story can be found at the website: SphericalModel.com.

I’ve done several shorter versions. A good place to start is The Political World Is Round, from December 29, 2014.

And if you prefer a video version—which is helpful, since the Spherical Model is three-dimensional—that’s available here: https://youtu.be/IGoh5X-CPGA

I once wrote about the behind the scenes of this smallest of all think tanks. I’m repeating that today, with some updating, since more than three years have gone by.

_____________________________________

The Spherical Model is mainly just me, plus those I talk things over with—which happen to include my three adult children, whose interests align neatly with the three spheres, so I refer to my children in the blog as oldest son Political Sphere, second son Economic Sphere, and daughter Social Sphere. All three are married and pursuing lives we can be proud of.

Political Sphere finished law school almost two years ago and has been working as an assistant DA in a smaller county a couple of hours from here. He and Mrs. Political Sphere have two children—Little PS1 and Little PS2, my brilliant and adorable grandchildren. Political Sphere probably has the most influence on the blog, because he calls regularly to talk through ideas with me. He has guest posted a couple of times, and I keep wishing he would do that more often, but life does have a way of getting over-full.

That's me, with Little PS1&2, among the bluebonnets
last spring at Stephen F. Austin State Park

Economic Sphere graduated with a degree in economics, and is nearing the end of his time in the US Army. He has returned from two long deployments to Korea. He and Mrs. Economic Sphere live at an Army base not too far from here. He plans on yet more college afterward, and economics still come up just about every time we talk.

Social Sphere finished college a couple of years ago, and then took their newborn to South America for an internship to help undernourished children. She and Mr. Social Sphere been working in creative pursuits. Little Social Sphere is now two and getting more verbal. He is a delight. She is both an idea generator and a person who makes others feel good—so she has influenced this blog more directly than can be evident to anyone but me.

I refer to myself as Spherical Model. (My actual name shows up on the website, where I own the copyright, if you’re interested enough to search that out.) Sometimes I say “we here at the Spherical Model,” but that’s mainly just me. Here’s a brief bio of me.

I graduated with a degree in English, specializing in writing and editing. I spent my early career years as a writer and editor, mainly in the field of education, but partly in computer documentation—way back when we used Wordperfect 2.0. (I go back far enough to have learned WordStar, in case you’re a word processor historian.) One of those jobs was at a language translation company, where I did Spanish and Portuguese quality assurance—and also Arabic, although all I needed to test there was whether the words showed up in Arabic script or got left in English. Among the education jobs were college level teacher development and support, and high-low curriculum writing (that means for higher grades, for middle school and high school, with low reading ability). I wrote textbooks and workbooks on government and biology.

I spent a lot of years, starting before the birth of Economic Sphere, as a stay-at-home mom. The most intense decade of that was 2000-2010, when we homeschooled, an adventure not to be missed. The Spherical Model idea came out of a homeschool effort to explain political ideas to my children—back in 2004. So my kids were the first to be taught the Spherical Model.

Mr. Spherical Model and I have been married for 35 years and counting. We both graduated from Brigham Young University. That does, in our case, mean that we are Mormons (members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints). Both of us come from families that go back to early pioneer days. His graduate school was in Indiana; we went back and wandered around the campus during a trip last fall—first time back there. We’ve since lived in northern California, Washington State, and now Texas, where we’ve been homesteading since 1998.

I have other interests as well: music, art, photography, health, cooking, sports, and probably other things that would make for a pleasant grandma-blog, if I didn’t feel compelled to continue what I’m writing here. I’m active in a local tea party, which comes up occasionally in this blog. I’m a precinct chair. I’ve been a district and state delegate a few times. And I frequently write to my representatives. I’ve worked at the polls and have been a poll watcher several times. In other words, while I don’t consider myself a political activist, I do try to get involved to do good where I can.

When I started writing on Defense of Marriage issues, back around 2003, I was talking with Richard Wilkins, who had come to speak to us. I’m a good note taker, and I believe I can take a number of ideas and arrange them in understandable language, so I asked him about writing, even though I had no credentials. He said it was valuable to have the viewpoint of a mother, and I should never be apologetic for that. So I’m acting on faith that what I have to say can be valuable to readers. I hope it is.

I love the Constitution. I love this country and pray for its preservation. And I love civilization. I wish the whole world would choose to live in the way that leads to freedom, prosperity, and thriving civilization.

Now, on to another hopeful year.

Market Solutions to Health Care Costs

Some of us have been hopeful for a long time (since March 2010 when it was enacted) for the repeal of Obamacare. We don’t even like the idea of “repeal and replace,” because any replacement should not be a different government program; it should be free market solutions. All government needs to do is get the heck out of the way.

But, for those who fall into the pit built by the big government control types, and fear what would happen if you take away the boondoggle that has been foisted upon you, please remember: people had health care before the inaccurately named Affordable Care Act.

As Ted Cruz put it in 2013, in an interview with Mark Levin,

Imagine three years ago, when this was being debated, if President Obama said, “I’ve got a great plan. I’m going to take away the healthcare of 5 million Americans in order to cover 100,000. And while I’m at it, I’m going to jeopardize the healthcare of 100 million Americans who have employer-provided plans…. And while I’m at it, I’m going to cost millions of jobs and force millions of people into part-time work, working 29 hours a week.” Is that a good deal for America? People would have laughed at it. If he’d simply been honest, he would have been laughed out of the room…. Because the only way to sell this law was to mislead the American people.

At this point, we also ought to be honest about what the ACA has really cost us. I’ll leave the data to others for now. But here’s a summary from Casey Mulligan, a University of Chicago economics professor, from a couple of years ago:

In summary, the ACA has three major taxes in it. Two are taxes on full-time employment and the other is a tax on income. They may be implicit, they may be hidden, politicians may not call them taxes, but that’s what they are. Their economic impact on workers varies widely, affecting low-skill workers the most. They create all kinds of productivity problems and will have visible and permanent effects on the economy. I have estimated that employment will be three percent less over the long term because of the ACA, and that national income—or GDP, if you like to think of it that way—will be two percent less. If you look at the productivity costs alone—forgetting the fact that there will be a number of people not working anymore—they come to $6,000 per person who gets health insurance because of the law. And I’m not beginning to count the payments needed for health care providers.

In conclusion, I can make you this promise: If you like your weak economy, you can keep your weak economy.

Doing anything but completely repealing Obamacare is to burden people who ought to have the burden relieved.

There are free market options—options people would be more likely to turn to as government stops forcing a bloated, ugly, expensive, coercive plan on them.

To remind us of one of the free market alternatives, libertarian Tom Woods linked to a previous podcast discussing concierge care, or direct primary care. The guest was Dr. Josh Umbehr. I wrote about his practice in 2013, after an interview he did with Mark Levin.

image from Atlas MD blog

Just to remind us that free market options work, and are already possible, I’d like to share some of the interview with Tom Woods. 

Dr. Umbehr is a primary care physician in Kansas. At the time of the interview, his direct primary care practice was five years old. As he described it, the bulk of what most people need is family medicine. At his practice they pay a flat rate per month based on age, like a gym membership.

I looked up his practice, and it’s $10 per child, $50 per adult age 20-44, $75 a month for age 45-64, and $100 for age 65+. He says,

For that membership you get unlimited home visits, work visits, office visits, technology visits. Not limited by what insurance will pay for. No copay at our office visits. Any procedure we can do in the office is included free of charge, because that is what the membership is covering—just like any equipment at the gym is included in the base membership price. So, stitches, biopsies, joint injections, ultrasounds, bone scans, lung scans, urine testing, strep throat testing, minor surgical procedures—all included for free.

He's talking about a lot of savings, because of wholesale medications, labs, imaging, and pathology, that physicians have access to. Here’s an example:

We ordered some blood work. We have our negotiated cash discounts of usually 95%. And a patient’s blood work was accidentally billed through the insurance rate, because of a computer mistake at the lab, and the price that they were quoted was $1028. We ran that back through our system; it cost $39—a 97% savings by just cutting out the middleman.

He describes how they save enough money just on medications to cover the cost of the membership:

We can dispense medications in Kansas, just like a pharmacist. Forty-four states allow physicians to function like this. And so, I can order the medications wholesale from the same places the pharmacies do. But I can get 1000 blood pressure pills for $8.34. Even after my 10% markup, they’re under a penny a pill. Walmart would literally have to give them away to out-compete us. And if they did, great, we still win. It’s not a value that is a revenue generator for us; we’re adding to the value of the membership.

He makes the comparison to Costco membership, or to Walmart or Amazon, who focus on value for the customer.

These savings have been available for at least a couple of decades. It just takes a doctor to look at a new business model and be willing to try it. He said that in medical school they actually taught that dealing with business was beneath them, something they shouldn’t dirty themselves with. But, if they take an oath to “do no harm,” that ought to include no financial harm. If he can save a patient money while providing better health care, that’s giving more and better life. That’s what doctors should be doing.

Some doctors say it’s hard to get patients just to pay a $20 copay; how would they get their patients to pay $50? Dr. Umbehr lays it out like this:

Netflix to Blockbuster. Netflix figured out how to give me 10,000 videos for $7,  when Blockbuster could only give me 1 for $7. So, if we apply that same innovation to health care, it only stands to reason that we can drastically reduce the cost curve.

The Silicon Valley formula is, you have to be 10x better before the barrier to change is overcome. We’re 20x better.

What about the system as a whole? Is this just helping the few individuals who use it but don’t need much beyond basics? He says no, it helps everyone. For example,

The total cost, if you go back to the last year I have data for—I think it was 2011—the cost for all prescription medications in the US was $263 billion. The cost for all cancer care [prescriptions] was $157 billion. So, if we could, with our wholesale changes, and we can get cancer medicines cheaper. Not all of it. Not everything’s cheap. Some of it is just expensive. But if you get that lower…

We had an example where we had a breast cancer chemotherapy pill that was $600 for every two weeks at the pharmacy and $6 or $7 with us—a literal 99% savings. We gave it to her for free just so that we could say now we provided chemotherapy.

So, if we took, let’s just be minimal and say we only save $157 billion out of that $263 billion of prescription for all the things that are expensive—then we pay for all cancer care.

Besides savings through insurance, administrative costs are also much lower:

The average physician would have 7 employees per doctor to run a practice. We have half of a full-time equivalent per physician—because of less regulation, less red tape, less bureaucracy. That would drive down the cost of care.

More savings examples, for the health care system overall:

One of my favorite examples is Imitrex, a migraine medicine, that at the pharmacy, for the name brand, as I pull it up now $565 cash price, anywhere from $447 to $486 with a coupon; the generic is $260 cash price, as well as $101 that I get for $5—my patient gets for $5, because I don’t need to make revenue off the medication.

I’m trying to make them healthier; I’m trying to save them money; I’m trying to show the value of my membership. So, every month they refill that medicine I’m saving them at least $100. Their membership’s $50; their medicine’s $5. I’m giving them $45 of their life back. That’s life—that’s time, that’s energy.

So, when someone says, well this only works well for the rich or the healthy, that’s ridiculous. This works out best for the sick and the poor. Just like any market, I’m reaching the people most likely to benefit from a food service, or a phone service, or a car service. So, people who want to save money on their medicines and are sick enough to need medicines benefit the most from this system.

So, the government is paying $101 for that medicine, instead of the $5 that it should be.

Dr. Umbehr’s practice, in Kansas, is Atlas MD. They also have a blog, and offer free help to other physicians wanting to try this business model.

I looked online for something nearby. Searching “direct primary care” I didn’t get anything closer than Austin. But “concierge care Houston” came up with at least one possibility not too far away with four physicians.

I’m also interested in health savings accounts. In fact, Dr. Umbehr recommends using health savings accounts and a catastrophic high deductible insurance policy in addition to his practice for full coverage at the lowest cost.

If we want everyone to be provided good quality health care at affordable costs, we need to do exactly opposite of the Affordable Care Act: repeal government interference, and replace it with the free market.

Black Family History Research

In celebration of Black History Month, I’d like to share some family history news, related to efforts to help freedmen—freed slaves, back in the years following the Civil War.

This first story isn't exactly new news; it goes back to around 2000.

The Freedman’s Bank was a savings and trust company chartered by the US Congress in 1865 to benefit former slaves. It turned out to be a disaster. After more than $57 million were deposited in the bank, it collapsed because of mismanagement and outright fraud.

But there is a silver lining to the disaster. In an effort to establish bank patron’s identities, bank workers at the time recorded the names and family relationships of account holders, sometimes taking brief oral histories. This practice created the largest single repository of lineage-linked African-American records known to exist. It’s estimated that 8-10 million African Americans living today have ancestors who deposited money in the Freedman’s Bank. 

So, if this information was available for over 100 years, why wasn’t it used? The problem was that the data lacked effective indexes. The only way to use it was to pore over seemingly random records.

In 2000 an 11-year project was completed to index the records, to make them digitally searchable. Back in the early 2000s, the records were available, at cost, on a CD you could use on your computer. As online technology improved, they became available, at no cost, at FamilySearch.org. 

Freedman's Bank Records CD-ROM cover

The indexing project started In 1989. Marie Taylor, an employee of the Family and Church History Department of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, set out to unlock the information trapped in the Freedman’s Bank records. 

It was going to be a big project. It would require a lengthy, consistent volunteer crew to extract and link the 480,000 names contained in the records. Taylor and project co-director Darius Gray, enlisted the voluntary help of inmates at the Utah State Prison. The Church had previously established a family history center at the prison, where inmates voluntarily donate their time to family history projects. The unique facility occupied three rooms filled with microfilm readers, microfiche readers, and 30 computer stations. The entire process involved approximately 550 inmates who vied for the opportunity to contribute their free time to the project. Theirs was a freewill gift–not a prison work assignment.

The names on these records were real people–men and women who had little education, little money, and little anticipation of what the future would ultimately yield. Today they can be found, once again linking those families so long and tragically separated.

I attended a presentation about these records at a Black History Month event in 2002. A Prairie View A&M history professor said, “Genealogy could help in solving some of the social problems today.  Once you realize who these people were, that you have an obligation to them, that you can’t let them down, it changes what you’ll do.”

In short, connecting to ancestors—connecting family—civilizes people. Civilized people become more prosperous and thriving.

That was a big project. But, as technology improves, things are getting even better.

This past week I learned about some more recent indexing work, on records from the Freedmen’s Bureau. This is yet another project of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and Family Search, the Church’s free-for-everyone online genealogy site.

According to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture website,

Commonly known as the Freedmen’s Bureau, the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands was created by Congress at the end of the Civil War to assist in the reconstruction of Southern society and the transition of formerly enslaved individuals to freedom and citizenship. Administered by the War Department, the Bureau followed the record-keeping system inspired by the war effort and the expansion of the Federal Government it required. These handwritten records include letters, labor contracts, lists of food rations issued, indentures of apprenticeship, marriage and hospital registers, and census lists. They provide a unique view into the social conditions of the South at the end of the war, especially the lives of newly freed individuals.

Here's the story I heard this week: On June 19, 2015, the Freedmen’s Bureau Project of Family Search was challenged to index 1.5 million Civil War records, which identified more than 4 million people. One year and one day later—they completed indexing all those records.

A School provided by the Freedmen's Bureau
photo from the National Museum of African American History and Culture

The searchable records were presented to the Smithsonian African American Museum—in time for its recent opening. There’s a kiosk in the museum where you can search records. You can also do that search online through FamilySearch.org.

But that’s not the end of the story. In the next phase of the Freedmen’s Bureau Project, Family Search is collaborating with the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture to transcribe word-for-word every document in the collection, and make them searchable.

You can volunteer to help with the Freedmen’s Bureau Transcription Project.

The website says, “To date, volunteers have transcribed over 200,000 pages from 16 Smithsonian units. With almost 2 million individual records in the collection, the Freedmen’s Bureau Transcription Project will be the largest crowdsourcing project ever sponsored by the Smithsonian.”

To get involved, all you need is a computer, an ability to read cursive, and a little spare time here and there. Here is the Transcription Center’s project page, where you can “start contributing today”: https://transcription.si.edu/browse?filter=owner:16

The last verse of the Old Testament, Malachi 4:6, says God “shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers.” That seems to be happening—for all of God’s children. Wherever that turning of hearts happens, the decay of savagery is healed by the powers of civilization.