Craving Class

Some weeks ago we had a princess party for our granddaughter (Political Sphere’s child, so we'll call her Little PS 1). She made a beautiful princess. Her little girl friends came dressed as princesses too. The boys came dressed as knights. (One came as a cowboy—I think he was Woody from Toy Story, which is tangentially related to Disney princesses.) Except for the 100-degree glaring sunshine, the whole day was a delight.

I was a princess for Halloween at that same age. I remember feeling so beautiful and special. I love the idea of feeling like a princess—special, treasured. I want that for every little girl, and an equivalent sense of value for every little boy. But feeling special and treasured does not need to mean feeling more important than others.

Princess PS1 and Princess Spherical Model (me)

The main problem with wanting to be a princess is, you dream of ending up in a stratified class system—which, by definition, is below the equator of the Spherical Model.

There are movies that gloss over the point. The Princess Diaries movies take an awkward, unnoticed teenager growing up in San Francisco and turn her into a princess of a small European principality. She sees the opportunity of political position to do good for people; that’s not a bad thing. But getting that opportunity for power simply because of her bio-Dad’s genealogy seems a less that certain method for society to choose its leaders.

There’s another one, The Prince and Me, from 2004, in which a farm girl gone to college meets a Danish prince who is slumming it incognito as a foreign exchange student. They fall in love, and she moves to his European monarchy to transform into a princess.

I understand the idea of true love in a story. But the loss of “all men are created equal” is not as inconsequential as the fairytales make it seem.

So I’ve been wondering if we can identify, in ourselves, a class system craving that we ought to resist.

Here are some examples:

·        Belief that heritage isn’t just valuable to you personally, but makes you superior to those with lesser family lines: ex.: descended from the Mayflower, descended from the founding fathers, descended from the Mormon pioneers, descended from Texas original 300.

·        Belief that physical looks make you superior to those with less natural attractiveness.

·        Belief that money makes you superior to those with less—and even worse, belief that older, inherited money makes you superior to those who have more recently earned wealth.

·        Belief that educational accomplishments are not only valuable to you personally, and to society as you share what you know, but that your degrees and credentials make you superior to people without as impressive a collection of honors.

·        Belief that celebrity makes you superior to the unknown masses.

·        Belief that positions of civic responsibility or political power, elected or appointed, make you superior to regular citizens.

·        Belief that rank within an organization, such as in a corporation, church, or even a volunteer organization, makes you superior to those in lower ranks.

·        Belief that misfortune and suffering make you superior to those who have suffered less, and therefore you feel entitled to the results of other people’s work.

The common phrase is “belief that you are superior.” You can be a better runner than your competitors without being a superior human being in other areas of your life. You can be a successful entrepreneur without being a superior human being in other areas of your life. It’s not a bad thing to strive for a goal, attempt to reach it, and pass other participants along the way. That is how we get improvement, innovation, and varieties of progress in particular areas.

But there’s a difference between doing superior things and being superior people. The things we do may reveal our character, and they might identify ways we can benefit society—but they do not define the worth of our souls. Blind justice means that every citizen, in every walk of life, has equal standing before the law, by virtue of being a human being.

I have a dream—that instead of looking at ephemeral, outward, arbitrary measures, we find better ways to identify and honor good character. Let’s stop stratifying ourselves according to outward standards and strive to be true-hearted and virtuous.

Greed vs. Self-Interest

I’m still reading Poverty of Nations. (I wrote about it Monday and Wednesday.) I hadn’t intended to write multiple posts on it, but some basic concepts keep coming up worth thinking about. No promises that there won’t be more posts on this book. There’s still a lot of book to finish reading.

The other day I read a section on self-interest that helpfully identifies the difference between greed and self-interest. This is helpful because the detractors of free enterprise often talk about greedy capitalists, out only for their own interests. So we could use some clarity.

Self-interest is seeing that you take care of yourself and your needs. Greed is wanting more than your just deserts. We need self-interest. We try to root out greed within ourselves, because it is harmful to our own souls, and tends to harm others as well.

The book quotes from Jay W. Richards’ book Money Greed, and God,[1] which lists a number of things you do out of self-interest:

·         Breathing

·         Washing your hands

·         Eating more fiber

·         Taking your vitamins

·         Clocking in at work

·         Looking both ways before crossing the street

·         Going to bed

·         Taking a shower

·         Paying bills

·         Going to the doctor

·         Hunting for bargains

·         Reading a book

·         Praying for God’s forgiveness

I’m sure there’s more: getting a good education, putting on a sweater, going to the gym, teaching good manners to children, celebrating your birthday, taking a vacation, doing a raise-worthy job at work, learning to play a musical instrument. The list will go on much longer if we include things that we do for others because the giving makes us feel good: donating used clothes, coaching a youth sports team, reading bedtime stories to your children, teaching Sunday School, shoveling your elderly neighbor’s driveway, helping a friend fix his car, donate to a favorite charity, volunteer time at a charity.

learning early to make some good
self-interested purchases

Do any of these things get done out of greed? If you didn’t take enough interest in yourself to do them, would your life be better off or worse? If you gave up taking a shower because you thought you would be a better person by denying yourself that bit of self-interest, neither you nor the people who have to be around you would be better off.

If you give up eating enough fiber, taking your vitamins, going to the gym, and brushing your teeth, simply because you believed it was selfish to take care of yourself, and then your resulting bad health leads you to need a doctor, do you deny yourself that too, because it would be selfish? Truly all the people in your world appreciate your taking care of yourself as well as you can. Think of them.

But what about in a sales transaction? Is a merchant greedy for asking his price? The book quotes Adam Smith, from The Wealth of Nations: “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.”[2]

Just for amusement, let’s take a look at such a transaction, with a butcher who lacks self-interest. First of all, the butcher probably wouldn’t have sought a means of making a living if he had no self-interest. So he probably wouldn’t have invested the time and capital necessary to open a butcher shop. But say that was placed into his hands and he ran the business as a favor to someone. He would have to buy the livestock to butcher. Without self-interest, he wouldn’t be interested in getting the best livestock for the best price; he would be thinking it less self-interested to take an inferior animal off the rancher’s hands and pay a premium price for it. The next step for him is to offer inferior meat to you, the buyer. Then he can either charge you a high enough price that he can make a bad deal for another inferior animal another day to sell to you (quickly losing you as a repeat customer), or he can ask only enough that he can afford only an even lesser animal. In other words, he quickly goes out of business and offers you nothing to buy. Do you really want to be dealing with a butcher with no self-interest?

Suppose you’re selling a house. Do you look for the most deserving buyer, who may not be able to afford your price, and then drop your price to, say,25% below what he can offer? If you do, what is the likelihood you can then go ahead and buy your next home? (Wouldn’t the buyer be greedy if he accepted such an offer?) Do you benefit from feeling guilty of greed if you stick to your asking price so that you can buy your next home? I think both you and the buyer are better satisfied with the deal if you both believe you benefit from the exchange. Satisfaction for both, regret and resentment for neither.

Now we get to the even more interesting thing about actual greed in a free market: the free market still works. Here is what Grudem says in Poverty of Nations:

Greed cannot be prevented by human laws, since it is an internal attitude. It can be reduced only with a change of heart coming from inside a person.

When greed manifests itself through violations of the rights of others, a free-market system is most likely to limit its harmful effects through the reactions of consumers (who will soon refuse to buy from a merchant they perceive to be greedy) and through the protections provided by the rule of law and legal protections of others’ rights.

Has any economic system ever eliminated greed from every person in a society? No. So what shall we do? Why not favor a system that utilizes people’s healthy self-interest and even their sinful greed in a socially beneficial way by rewarding those who best serve the needs of others? That is what a free-market system does” [Kindle location 4065-4080].

One of the basic characteristics of a free market is that two people make a trade that makes both of them better off. If either of them isn’t satisfied with the deal, they don’t have to make it; they can keep their money or their commodity and wait for a more agreeable arrangement. Both take care of their own self-interest and trust in the self-interest of the other. And that’s a good thing.

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[1] Richards, Jay W., Money, Greed, and God: Why Capitalism Is the Solution and Not the Problem (New York: HarperOne, 2009), p. 121.

[2] Smith, Adam, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. Edwin Cannan (1776; repr., New York: Modern Library, 1994), p. 15.

Prices

I’m still reading Poverty of Nations, as I mentioned in the last post. So I’m tuned in to some basic economic concepts right now. A couple of times this week I came upon the concept of prices as a shortcut to a lot of truthful information.

For background, let’s take from the Spherical Model definition of money, and a few other terms. (I also wrote about basic money terms here and here.)

Wealth

Wealth is the accumulation of the results of work above what is needed for subsistence. Let’s quickly review the Robinson Crusoe (simple world) example:

Robinson Crusoe illustration
from the first edition of
Daniel Dafoe's book

At first, whatever Crusoe has, it’s a matter of what he is able to obtain for himself. He fishes. He gathers. He hunts. He plants, irrigates, and harvests. And barring a catastrophic hurricane or some such disaster, he is free to enjoy the fruits of his labor. This is his wealth—the results of his capacity to recover from the shelterless, foodless situation he finds himself in right after a shipwreck.

But his wealth is limited by his personal time, talents, and energies. It might be that, once he discovers another person on the island, Friday, they commiserate about their limitations. And somewhere along the way they discover differences in abilities. Crusoe is pretty good at farming, but fishing is tedious and frustrating, so he often goes without that protein source. Friday, on the other hand, finds fishing easy, but he’d sure like his garden to yield more veggies and rice to go with it.

Specialization and Exchange

An idea finally dawns on them. How would it be if Crusoe gave up fishing altogether and spent more of his time farming, expanding his garden to provide for the entire population of the two of them? And at the same time, instead of struggling to farm without success, Friday would spend even more hours fishing. Then he would trade his surplus fish for Crusoe’s surplus harvest. They try this, and it works so well, they both have more to eat than they had before, and they both have more spare time for climbing coconut palms or hunting—necessary tasks which neither one is particularly good at.

But this trade thing is working out so well that, when they meet a native who has no trouble at all shinnying up those palm trees, they make exchanges with him. And another native is very handy with a spear and can easily take down a wild boar, which is much too big to use up by himself before it spoils, so he’s glad for the exchange, and the others are very glad not to have to face those wild boars any more.

They specialize. They all work mostly at what they are best at. The result of their total labor is now considerably greater than the total would be without specialization. This leaves them all more actual wealth (results of labor) and even more time to enjoy the wealth.

Money

Money is a more convenient means of exchange than bartering goods; a unit of money represents a particular value, equivalent to a standard unit of work. Money is used for convenience,

When it becomes convenient for the laborers making the exchanges. It’s up to the society. If Crusoe wants more coconuts, but the palm tree climber doesn’t happen to want more veggies right now, but he would like more fish—and it turns out Friday wants more veggies, not coconuts, but he already checked with Crusoe, who didn’t need more fish. They can make a three-way deal. Bring in more if you want. But it gets more complicated to barter without some standard of exchange. Money, to symbolize that standard value, can be useful.

It’s also up to the society to decide what the symbol of exchange (money) will be. On this island, they might use clam shells, as some primitive societies have (bringing us the slang term “clams” for money). Some societies have used salt, which has some intrinsic value to everyone; that’s where the term salary came from. Early Central American societies used cacao beans, which were easy to carry, measure, and trade, and also useful for their own properties. These people also had incremental units based on a measure of grain; their units of gold and silver could always be exchanged for a measure of barley, so they had a standard value. More societies have used gold than any other single commodity as money. It’s usable as a decoration, because of its luster, and it’s easily malleable, making it easy to form into coins. It’s relatively rare, beautiful, and fairly heavy, which makes it natural as a representative of wealth. Silver, with many similar qualities, is next to gold in common use as money, most often used for smaller monetary units….

If Crusoe saved himself enough rice to last through a famine, he could safely exchange the rest of his surplus into clam shells, or gold. And that would even preserve his work, since his produce other than the rice is quickly perishable. In an ideal economy wealth would be represented by something that always exactly equals a standard amount of accumulated work-value. 

Price

Price is an agreement from the seller to the buyer regarding how much money (representing effort put into obtaining the good being sold) he is willing to exchange for the item/service being sold.

Do Robinson Crusoe and friends need a government bureaucrat stepping into their little island world and passing edicts about what would be a fair exchange? No. The price is set by the worker willing to exchange his labor. If it isn’t worth it to Crusoe to exchange a basket of veggies for a mended net, he is free not to make the exchange. But if Friday, who needs nets for fishing, prefers to spend his time fishing without having to stop and mend his own nets, he can figure out what a fair exchange is and offer it to the net mender. If his offer of fish is too low, the net mender is free not to make the exchange with him, until a bargain can be reached with a number of fish that will satisfy him. The price is set, then, by the experts on what they value—those willing to make the exchange.

 

OK, that’s enough background to help you appreciate these quotes on price that I came across this week.

This first is from Poverty of Nations:

Nothing conveys information faster than prices.

Prices convey objective information on the subjective attitudes and feelings of buyers and sellers. As relative prices change, options are altered and decisions are made. Perceived benefits and costs are continuously affected by changing circumstances, including many important variables that are never constant. In other words, not a person in the world knows how to make a market work or how to make even a simple thing like a pencil. But it still happens, because enormous complications are simplified when decentralization and prices take charge. In these ways, prices serve as an amazing, worldwide source of instant economic information [Kindle location 3495-3500].

So, price is what gives us accurate truth as buyers and sellers.

This next is from a Mises introduction of a new book by global investor and blogger Hunter Lewis, called Free Prices Now! I think the words are from the press release about the book:

The most reliable barometer of economic honesty is to be found in prices. Honest prices, neither manipulated nor controlled, provide both investors and consumers with reliable economic signals. They are the foundation for a successful economy.

A corrupt economic system does not want honest prices, honest information, or honest results. The truth may be unprofitable for powerful government leaders, private interests allied with them, or economic “experts” whose careers have been devoted to price manipulations and controls….

Can it really be this simple, that economic prosperity and job growth depend on allowing economic prices to tell the truth, free from the self-dealing and self-interested theories of powerful special interests?

Yes.

What do prices do? Tell the truth, in the most efficient way, about the value of a commodity to both the seller and the buyer—the experts involved in the exchange. No interference in price (particularly including manipulating the value of the monetary unit) can help convey that truth. Truth surrounding these exchanges helps economies prosper.

Labor

Labor Day, the day we don’t work. Hmm. The history (Wikipedia and Department of Labor) shows the intent to be honoring workers and tradesmen, and their valuable contributions to society, which seems worthy enough, even though we don’t have corollary doctors’ days, politicians’ days, or musicians’ days. Labor Day is a product of the labor movement; i.e., labor unions, which makes me less enthusiastic about it.

Instead of a day to bring attention to workers through parades and civic events, it is now a day for shopping, family barbecues, and marking the end of summer—and in fashion the end of wearing white shoes until Easter. We don’t actually learn much about workers on this day. Nor do we give a holiday to many lower skilled workers—food service, retail, theme parks, movie theaters, etc. So, as a holiday, it lacks meaning. But we enjoy the day off.

When I was growing up, we never started school until after Labor Day. That’s still true some places. (Daughter Social Sphere starts her college semester tomorrow.) But here in Texas, many public schools started last week. So this is a chance to regroup, gather supplies, and breathe one more time before diving in to daily routine unbroken from now until Thanksgiving. (The year we moved to Texas, school started August 11^th, which was particularly painful because we’d left a district that hadn’t ended until two weeks into June. It took until just a few years ago to push Texas schools later into August, long past the years we were using them.)

I thought, in the spirit of the day, it might be worth looking at the concept of labor, which is a positive thing.

I’m about halfway through a book called Poverty of Nations: A Sustainable Solution, by theologian Wayne Grudem and economist Barry Asmus. It’s an economics book, for general readers, with an emphasis on what systems and policies can get a nation from poverty toward prosperity. (Hint: natural resources and receipt of nation-to-nation aid don’t bring people out of poverty.) And it uses a Biblical approach; it looks at particular ideas and their known outcomes, and compares them to what the Bible says. It turns out, a free market is the most moral, and the most likely to both require and encourage moral behavior in citizens. Property rights (thou shalt not steal), honesty and keeping contracts (thou shalt not lie/bear false witness), and respect for life and liberty all directly contribute to prosperity.

I first heard of this book when the author was being interviewed on the Hugh Hewitt show (August 19, but you might need a membership to listen to the archive. Hewitt plans a week-by-week look at each chapter of the book starting, I think, this week). The connection between freedom, free enterprise, and civilization sounded very much in line with Spherical Model concepts.

They talked about the idea of “earned success.” I hadn’t heard that exact phrase before, but it struck me as true. I found the phrase in the book (on my Kindle, so no page numbers, but at location 3790), where he quotes Albert Brooks: “The secret to human flourishing is not money but earned success in life.”[1]

Brooks studies what makes people happy, or satisfied with life. There are other life factors as well, relating mostly to living the laws of civilization, emphasizing family and religion, but the economic factor contributing best to human happiness is earned success, which Brooks defines as “the ability to create value honestly—not by winning the lottery, not by inheriting a fortune, not by picking up a welfare check. It doesn’t even mean making money itself. Earned success is the creation of value in our lives or in the lives of others.”[2] I’d like to add that stay-at-home mothers earn success without a paycheck.  

On a national scale, rather than promoting redistribution of wealth, governments would do their people a financial favor if they encouraged earned success. One policy Grudem talks about is micro-capitalization. I’ve been intrigued by this concept for a few years. LDS Humanitarian Services started using this practice after the Christmas tsunami in Indonesia in 2004, which was the first I’d heard of it. They would interview the survivors about what they needed. Beyond the immediate offerings of food, clothing and shelter Humanitarian Services was known for supplying in the wake of disasters around the world, the survivors needed a way to replace some of what they’d lost, to get back on their feet and self-sustaining. Sometimes the aid provided a sewing machine or two, plus enough for a few starting supplies of fabric and thread. Sometimes it was a fishing boat, or even just a new sail.

The book Influencer (by Patterson, Grenny, Maxfield, McMillan, and Switzler of VitalSmarts) talks about the process of combining microloans with a small group council, to improve the success of fledgling businesses. They use as an example a small village in central India, where a group of housewives meet to discuss ways they can individual develop very small businesses, such as starting an egg business.[3]

Grudem suggests that organizations, or perhaps wealthy individuals looking to invest capital, make the microloans, rather than governments. And he encourages slightly larger investments as well:

While many organizations have promoted microloans (typically under $250) to start one-person businesses, we are also aware of encouraging cases in which Christians have decided to invest in for-profit businesses in the “small and medium enterprise” (SME) range, where $25,000 to $1 million is required to start a business. Such businesses are crucial for larger economic growth in poor nations, but they are more difficult to launch due to high start-up and due-diligence costs, and the challenge of providing a reasonable risk/return model for investors.

Foreign aid, or government aid, that does not encourage independence, or earned success, binds people in poverty.

Sometimes there’s an immediate need to give a man a fish. But that is never a long-term solution to his hunger. You teach a man to fish, and he has the skill to take care of himself. But maybe he also needs the means to make or otherwise get hold of a fishing pole or net or boat.

Following up each concept, Grudem gives a follow-up of the concept in scripture. One detail he brought out, that I guess I needed reminding of, because I hadn’t really noticed it, was that Adam and Eve were commanded to work in the Garden of Eden, to till and tend it, to be stewards over the earth. After the fall, out in the cold cruel world, work started having more challenges—heat, drought, insects. So work came to require more sweat to get from subsistence to creative, innovative earned success. But doing work is important to human beings, no matter how many basic needs are met.

Human creativity—our work— is part of our purpose and happiness on earth. Labor on, and be good at what you do. It pleases God, and will please your soul as well. We want that for everyone.

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[1] Arthur C. Brooks, The Battle: How the Fight between Free Enterprise and Big Government Will Shape America’s Future (New York: Basic Books, 2010), 71.

[2] Ibid., 75.

[3] Patterson, Kerry, Joseph Grenny, David Maxfield, Ron McMillan, Al Switzler, Influencer: The Power to Change Anything, (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2008), 168.

A Small Reprieve

August 14th I wrote about a challenge in our (very large) county, trying to prevent a Common Core-type infiltration through daycares. The week after that post, I attended the Harris County Department of Education meeting, and spoke, among several others, who addressed the HCDE board on this issue.

There’s a good summary of the meeting, if you’re interested, at Big Jolly Politics. I am the one referred to in the article this way: “I missed the name of one of the citizens, I apologize for that.” I’m apparently easy to miss, with a name that’s hard to hear. Nevertheless, I felt good about my short speech, and got approval from those near me after I sat down.

Earlier in the day was a workshop in which proponents of the program, called Early to Rise, were able to present more details about their program, and answer direct questions from the trustees. But there was no community input at the workshop. Big Jolly also summarized the workshop.

There’s good news. This past Monday, August 26, was the deadline for deciding what would appear on the November ballot. County Judge Ed Emmett decided not to accept the proposition for the ballot. HCDE didn’t have to make the decision, at least at this time, after all. Whew! Thank you, Judge Emmett.

It was not an easy position for Judge Emmett. He expected to be sued either way. He didn’t get an answer from the Attorney General on the legitimacy of an additional tax to be filtered through a more-or-less government entity to private entities. County Judge Vince Ryan had been in favor of putting the measure on the ballot and dealing with lawsuits from objectors. Emmett didn’t like that answer and hired a private attorney, whose advice he followed. I believe keeping it off the ballot was a better decision than putting it on possibly illegally, leaving the public at the mercy of someone willing to fight through the legal system after tax money is already spent. The proponents can always (and certainly will) look at alternative ways to seek what they want.

But it was never right to take tax money intended for improving school districts and give it, without oversight, to a private entity, for the purpose of training daycare providers (who have access to training in community colleges and many other places), entering homes and directing parents, and doing something indefinite about healthcare for very young children. Particularly disturbing—and the point over which the proposition was turned down—was making this an additional tax through HCDE. To review, HCDE gets 2/3 cent per $100 property value, and by law can never assess more than 1 cent. This new tax, a full additional 1 cent assessment, over and above everything HCDE already gets, would be a 150% increase, with all of the increase going only to a private entity for this one project. One would think that a public school entity such as HCDE would need more for actual public school child education than for something that isn’t even under the purview of public schools.

I wanted to share a couple of things from the meeting, mainly related to Rep. Debbie Riddle. She gave an analogy about the proposal, so we could see it in a new light. First she reminded us of how the money would be spent, which was not on actually doing childcare improvement: $400,000 on grant writing, $500,000 on evaluation services, $800,000 on best practices research, $12.6 Million for professional development and outdoor resources (I don’t know what that means, but that’s about half the annual amount), $750,000 for PR, $250,000 for tech support.

Now here’s her comparison (from my notes, so not an exact quote): “Suppose you come to me and say, ‘If you pay me $100, I’ll go out and find someone to mow your yard. And I’ll even consider letting you mow your own lawn, and I’ll pay you $25 to do it.’ That’s what this deal looks like.”

If there was a need for early childhood intervention (assuming, which I don’t, that HCDE should have its public school fingers in that arena), then why would HCDE need some outside entity to do it, rather than do their duty and find the solution themselves? This Early to Rise program was brought to them, placed on their agenda, and then attempted to be placed on the ballot, all prior to HCDE researching whether early childhood intervention needed any additional attention, let alone this huge influx of additional tax.

The trustees responded to the citizen testimony (particularly mine) by attempting to make it clear things were not settled, which seemed puzzling, because why would we have been encouraging them to turn down the proposal if we’d thought it was too late for public input? The chairman pointed out that she only learned of a proposed contract the Saturday morning previous to the meeting. The contract, which specified that if the voters approved the ballot proposition, all the money would be turned over to HCSRC, for ten years or more, indeed was made public that Saturday. But there have been discussions of the issue at least since June, so that was disingenuous. Also on the agenda was a private meeting with the lawyer the trustees hired specifically to deal with finding a way to work with the HCSRC, the nonprofit intending to manage the Early to Rise program. [The contract with the legal team was in evidence on page 453 of the full public agenda, dated August 2, 2013, well ahead of the Saturday of the public announcement of the proposal from HCSRC. It begins that the law firm in the contract “will represent Harris County Department of Education…in connection with the negotiation of an Early Childhood Services Agreement between the Department and the Harris County School Readiness Corporation.”]

So it is my suspicion that if there hadn’t been so much outcry against the program, the HCDE trustees might have moved ahead as though the taxpayers opinion mattered not at all. And we are relieved that Judge Emmett took it out of their hands, just in case.

I wanted to share this photo of Rep. Riddle, from the hallway outside the meeting. She was teaching this 9-year-old boy how to give a firm handshake. She also spent time telling us stories, and giving encouragement. I think she does that everywhere she goes. Rep. Riddle is the one who put forth the bill to get rid of the two remaining redundant county boards of education. It didn’t get out of committee this legislative session, but we can try again in a year and a half.

In the meantime, the moral or the story is: constant vigilance.

Money and Ideology

A couple of weeks ago I was driving home from a conference and had the radio on the Houston public radio station. I know… but I’d had it on earlier for Prairie Home Companion and hadn’t thought to change it. Plus, there aren’t many better options on a Saturday evening. The show was called Living on Earth; I hadn’t heard of it before. My expectation, naturally, was that there would be a liberal perspective, and probably “green” thinking—pro-government intervention to limit use of fossil fuel energy technologies. No surprises there, but there was a segment that got me arguing back to the radio, even though I knew not to take it seriously.

Logo from here

There were a couple of things that were interesting in this segment, called “Secret Cash for Climate Denial.” One is that the interviewer, Steve Curwood, whom I would assume would have an agenda or he wouldn’t do this job, asked questions that helped us see the truth and kept his tone unbiased. The other is that the interviewee, Suzanne Goldenberg, was honest in ways liberals are only when they assume everyone listening agrees with them.

It was a bit like a Dilbert cartoon, where everyone actually says what they think. Her complaint was that there are nonprofit organizations that send money to organizations seeking to argue against “climate change” legislation—“climate denial” is the phrase used, as a comparison to holocaust denial.

Goldenberg admitted that what these organizations do is lawful. She also admitted that there is a corollary on the left—the Tides Foundation.

So, she knows it’s legal, and she approves of whatever the Tides Foundation does. But the reason it’s wrong for the conservative organizations is because she disagrees with them. Yes, she was that clear about it. A little background, and then I’ll quote her.

Her complaint is that organizations called Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund give exclusively to conservative causes. (They are apparently closely aligned and can be considered essentially a single entity; their mission statements, here and here, are nearly identical.)

According to the story, the amount has been $400 Million over the past decade, with a quarter of that, $100 Million, going, as she puts it, “to about 100 different organizations that have worked to undermine the science behind climate change, or have worked to block action on climate change.” Personally, I wouldn’t use the term “undermine the science,” but simply presenting the opposing scientific view, because, despite her belief, proof that humans are causing catastrophic climate change is anything but settled. So I would see this use of money as a positive. If I had oodles of cash to hand out to chosen nonprofit projects, I might look into these.

To clarify, looking at the decade as a whole looks bigger, so let’s simplify to annual numbers: total annual intake by these two or more groups: $40 Million; total going toward discussion over climate science: $10 Million. I know to most of us $10 Million is a lot of money. But it could probably support only about a dozen or so employees plus capital expenses such as office space, technology, and some travel.

For comparison, I went to the one liberal organization she mentioned, which gives almost exclusively to liberal causes, the Tides Foundation. A simple Google search took me to a summary from a couple of years ago. The Tides Foundation intake in 2009 was $115,887,921. There’s also an additional Tides group called the Tides Center, which took in $60,111,511 that year. Putting the two together, Tides takes in about $176 Million, about 4 ½ times Donor funds.

This source shows a hint of disapproval toward the liberal agenda, but the information seems to be accurate. They say the Tides Center specializes in helping new organizations, so that, under their umbrella, new organizations can put off getting their own tax-exempt status right away, and also receive help with running a business, applying for grants, and running PR campaigns. In addition, the Tides Center serves as a firewall protecting the Tides Foundation from lawsuits from people harmed by Foundation-funded projects.

The Tides Center’s board chairman is Wade Rathke, who is also a member of the Tides Foundation board, as well as a leader in SEIU and what was ACORN. A year or so ago, Glenn Beck went into detail about these organizations and the incestuous connections with myriad socialist organizations, and close ties to George Soros. I’ll let his research suffice. But Tides undeniably promotes a surprisingly large number of leftist agenda projects. From 1996-2010, the Center (in addition to whatever the even larger Foundation did) supported 677 separate projects (200 just in 2010), with a total of $522.4 Million—for an average of $34.8 Million per year (counting 1996 and 2010 inclusively, making 15 years). Am I making it clear that just the Tides organizations dwarf in size the Donor funds?

A particular favorite Tides project type is radical environmentalism, but I don’t have a specific amount going for that, so we can’t do a direct comparison. Other favorite causes are anti-war, anti-free trade, anti-firearms ownership, anti-death penalty, pro-government-funded abortion on demand, and LBGT promotion. It would be difficult to come up with a project I did not strongly oppose, based on what I know to be true, and what I believe is right. I don't believe they promote anything that leads to political freedom, economic prosperity, and thriving civilization (maybe the occasional classical music program, perhaps).

So that puts me in an opposite but parallel position to Suzanne Goldenberg. Here is the exchange where she discloses her actual complaint:

CURWOOD: Conservatives aren’t the only ones that use anonymous donor mechanisms; liberals do as well. What's, what's the problem here?

GOLDENBERG: To me that the main difference is the causes they’re supporting. When you're talking about science—when you're talking about the facts of climate science—the two sides aren't equivalent. And I don't think that it's legitimate to say putting out information about science is one thing and putting out information that is factually wrong is just as valid. Because they clearly aren’t. I think as a society we’d be concerned if organizations were taking secret money to go out and say, hey, smoke as many cigarettes as you like, it won't hurt you; hey, be afraid when you use a public washroom, you can get HIV aids from toilet seats. I think it's a very different thing when you're talking about putting out information that is factually incorrect, and you're doing that in a secretive fashion.

I am amused when she says she disagrees that “putting out information about science is one thing and putting out information that is factually wrong is just as valid,” because I agree with her. I do think it’s wrong to take in secretive money with the specific purpose of putting out information that is factually incorrect. It’s just that she believes things to be facts that are not, and I am skeptical of what she calls “consensus,” which is anathema to scientific discovery.

If I were like Suzanne Goldenberg, I would say that we should keep the laws for conservative organizations, because I agree with them, but I think we should refer to the liberal ones as nefarious secret cash being laundered into harmful causes, and should therefore be outlawed. That’s what I would say if I didn’t believe in free speech and I trusted the government to scrutinize the beliefs of any organization so it could ban what it disagreed with.

But, then, free speech is one of those “outré” concepts of us “extremists” who believe in that old Constitution. Not something the liberals take seriously. There are a lot of things liberals claim are true, and they believe they can make it true by saying it loudly, over and over and over, and attacking any source of opposing views. What we need is better awareness, better questioning. And more truth telling is also good. What we definitely don’t need is a government stepping in to police our beliefs and ban dissent.

Regulatory Tyranny

There’s a book on my to-read list called Individual Rights and Government Wrongs that puts forth the idea that all government regulation should be done away. I’m not new to this concept; son Political Sphere has been honing this argument on me for a while, so I don’t have the automatic response that the very idea is crazy. I’m willing to hear this debate.

The book’s author, Brian Phillips, is local and spoke at our last Tea Party meeting. He points out that, regardless of regulations, it is never in the interest of businesses to sell inferior or dangerous products. And there are plenty of private information sources where we can learn about the safety and quality of products. Think about it; when we want to buy a major appliance, we probably look at Consumer Reports. When we want to buy a used car, we might also use Kelly Blue Book. When we want to hire a contractor, we’ll probably consult the Better Business Bureau or Angie’s List. If reliable information is the commodity consumers demand, private enterprise can provide that commodity. Government simply is not the most reliable source of consumer information.

 Phillips said that most people bring up the Food and Drug Administration and say surely we need that. Again, if we used information sources and made informed decisions, we might be better off than waiting for government imprimatur. The FDA, as a regulatory agency, produces no food, develops no new medicines; it only prevents or allows actions of free citizens.

Phillips included a real example about the FDA, the Abigail Burroughs story. Abigail had a rare form of cancer as a young woman. Her doctor knew of a drug that could help, but it was not yet approved by the FDA. She sought permission from the FDA to use experimentally. They refused. She died eight months later, at the age of 21, in 2001. In 2004 the FDA approved the drug that might have saved her life, too late for her. If Abigail had been allowed to depend on her own doctor that she trusted, and the research she had done before making an informed decision to risk using the experimental drug, she might not have lost her life in her youth. The FDA was not protecting her; it was preventing her from acting on her own behalf.

Phillips said, “According to the FDA, Abigail did not have the right to act, except by permission. That’s the principle underlying all government regulation.”  I think that is the key point. When government acts as the decision maker and permission giver, government has usurped our freedom to act according to our own minds.

He says some people argue that government can regulate, because the majority has voted them that power, so it’s the will of the people. But the US is not a democracy. In a democracy, the majority can do anything it pleases. He gives the example of democratic Athens, where the majority voted to put Socrates to death for his ideas. The US is a representative republic; the Constitution spells out safeguards of our rights, purposely limiting government. It protects us from the tyranny of the majority.

Another way our current regulatory bureaucracy is anti-Constitutional is that, as I mentioned in my last post, law must be knowable by those who are subject to it. Ignorance of the law is not an excuse, so if an entrepreneur/business owner is required to hire someone (or possibly an entire department) whose entire job is to study compliance to bureaucratic regulation, because knowing the law without the intense study (and possibly even with it) is impossible, then do we actually have free enterprise? We have business by permission—and are always at risk of missing a detail for which we can be fined or prosecuted. “Whatever the ruler says” is tyranny.

So, if we agree we’re in a bad place in this regulatory nightmare, what do we do? I don’t know the eventual answer. I am at the information sharing point. Phillips said something I found hopeful: “The real revolution occurred in the fifteen years before a shot was fired—in the hearts and minds of the people.” And I remember my US history enough to know that’s true. People like Samuel Adams were speaking out, loudly, the decade before the Revolutionary War, spreading the message of freedom, helping people understand the principles at stake. I remember one amusing story about Samuel Adams’s very large dog, a Newfoundland I think; the dog had a thing against the bright red coats worn by the British military being quartered in the city to rule over the people. The dog and was known to take the occasional piece off a red tailcoat to carry in his teeth. Samuel Adams was the kind to give the dog a congratulatory pat on the head while insincerely apologizing or apparently failing to notice. Adams was a bit ahead of his time, outspoken—and right. We need some Sam Adamses in our time. Phillips said, “Those of us who want to return America to its purpose need to be sure of the value of our cause.”

Phillips rightly pointed out, “Our founding fathers also lived in gloomy times.” They went from a ragtag army to take on the world’s greatest military power—and they won.” They had to, because they were fighting for our God-given rights. He reminded us that they lost lives, and fortunes, but never lost their sacred honor.

It might seem easier to just give in and try to get along, but we may have already done that too long. We may need to stand up and speak up, more and more. We already have a brilliant Constitution; we just need to abide by it. Changing minds and hearts could be the most peaceful path to return to freedom.