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.

Another Nail

On February 16, the Washington State Supreme Court ruled on the case of State of Washington v. Arlene’s Flowers and Ingersoll v. Arlene’s Flowers.

Baronelle Stutzman of Arlene's Flowers
photo from Alliance Defending Freedom

Here’s a review of what happened. Baronelle Stutzman, the owner of Arlene’s Flowers in Richland, WA, had been happily serving her friend, a gay man, for several years. But in 2012(just three months after the state invented same-sex “marriage” in a close vote) he asked her to be the florist for his same-sex “wedding.” She kindly declined. Her Christian belief that marriage is the union of one man and one woman prevented “her from using her artistic talents to promote contrary ideas about marriage.” But, while she couldn’t do the work, she gave him the names of three other florists she thought would be glad to do the event.

In a normal world, the gay man, who had been a friend and had clearly not been discriminated against because of his sexual orientation, would have simply gone to one of the other florists on the list. But this is not a normal world.

He sued her for discrimination. And then the State of Washington joined in its own suit, claiming she violated its anti-discrimination law. In 2015 the trial court ruled against her. The ruling this week was the appeal to the state’s supreme court; they ruled unanimously against her.

Her defense had two prongs: freedom of religion and freedom of speech. The court was unsympathetic to both.

A person has a right to practice their religion, says the state, but only within the limits that the state sets. If the state decides it has a compelling interest, it is free to trample religious freedom at will. The state calls it punishing an “independent social evil.” What was the evil that the kind florist did? Disagree with the state’s current opinion about sex. So they say they have a “broader societal purpose: eradicating barriers to equal treatment of all citizens in the commercial marketplace.”

A person does not have a right, the state says, to refuse to perform an event that a homosexual—or some other protected class—requests. A person is obligated to provide the service so as not to “disrespect and subordinate” someone in that class. The state believes it has the right and power to coerce specific work; the state believes it owns slaves.

It was clear in the facts of the case that Stutzman did not deprive anyone of a service; she accommodated reasonably by recommending other florists. That was a win/win solution; the customer would receive the service he wanted, and she would preserve her right to live her religion according to her conscience.

But the court disregarded the facts of the case, as well as the clear wording of the law. The court has no sympathy for this particular religious belief, so they punish for it.

But the test for them will be when a white supremacist goes to an orthodox Jewish-owned business and insists that they print the advertising for their anti-Semitic event. Or when they require a Muslim business to cater a pig farmers’ banquet. Or require a Jewish photographer to photograph the third polygamous “marriage” of a Muslim client.

It appears the law will only rule against Christians, or anyone who has the temerity to go against their preferred religious position on sexuality.

Beyond the religious freedom argument, there is the freedom of speech—or expression. When I look at a court case, I often turn to the Volokh Conspiracy (a legal blog). Eugene Volokh gives this summary:

[T]he court concluded that flower arranging isn’t sufficiently expressive to qualify. (I think the analysis should be different for people who produce material that has been traditionally viewed as expressive, such as photographers, calligraphers, printers, singers, artists and the like, though it’s not clear how Washington state’s Supreme Court would decide on that.)

It appears that courts also get to define, at their whim, what is “sufficiently expressive to qualify.” A printer has a stronger case, possibly, because actual words are involved. If a cake decorator is asked to write words on the cake, that makes a stronger case. And, if a court decides that a singer, photographer, calligrapher, or other artist is using his/her talent as a form of expression, the court might be more sympathetic about coercing use of that expression. But floral design, they have arbitrarily decided, is not really a talent, or an expression, or anything but a commercial service.

While Alliance Defending Freedom, which has been representing Stutzman, plans to appeal to the US Supreme Court, Volokh is not encouraging. He says,

I doubt the U.S. Supreme Court will review the case further: It could only review the First Amendment issue (since the state supreme court is the final decision-maker on the state constitutional issue), and the compelled speech case here is weaker than in the New Mexico wedding photographer case, which the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear.

Even if SCOTUS were to take on the case, their decision would still hinge on Justice Kennedy’s ruling. He’s the one who heard all the evidence in Obergefell, heard the warning about religious freedom being affected, and then ruled broadly that same-sex couples have always had a right to marry—six thousand years of multi-cultural world history to the contrary.

What is particularly disturbing about this case was the extent to which the Washington court was willing to go. They punish to excess—and, again, beyond the law. A business owner is generally protected from having personal property affected by a lawsuit against the business, unless there are certain overriding factors. As David French wrote,

[I]f you doubt the court’s malice, look only to its last ruling—that Stutzman can be held personally liable for her allegedly discriminatory act. In other words, the court is willing to pierce the corporate veil to impose individual liability even in the absence of the traditional justifications for that drastic step. Stutzman didn’t commit fraud. She didn’t commingle her personal and corporate funds. She kept her private and professional affairs separate. But she still faces personal financial ruin.

Arlene's Flowers
photo from here

Remember, Baronelle Stutzman was 70 years old in 2012, at the time of the original incident—after spending 40 years as a florist. The fine was only about $1000, but she was also required to pay the legal fees of the ACLU—about $1 million—in addition to never operating her business again. Her small business never had that many assets. Add in all of her belongings, savings, preparation for retirement, and she is placed in penury with no chance of recovery. If you have any sense of justice, this seems way out of line for the crime of slightly inconveniencing a longtime customer/friend.

As I wrote in 2015:

When you’re taking the life, livelihood, home and savings of a 70-year-old woman who has always served you sweetly and cheerfully, you really need to re-think who is the intolerant one.

Anthropomorphizing Government

If you were to create an extremely powerful android, including feelings and inclinations, what would that look like? And would you subject yourself to such a creation?

We want our android creation to “care” about people. An android can’t actually care; it doesn’t, by definition, have feelings. But it can appear to have them.

For example, if people are starving, our android must be programmed to give food, or money for food. If people are homeless, our android must be programmed to build and/or otherwise provide housing to those in need. If people need medical care that is beyond their ability to pay for, our android must be programmed to pay their medical bills.

There might be other “feelings” we’d like our android to seem to feel. Maybe it should be free from bigotry. We tell it to ignore skin color, gender, age, and other human attributes when making decisions. It should instead give preferences based on character, perhaps, or sometimes need. There could be an algorithm.

We might program our android to “care” about the next generation with a passion about educating children.

If our android creation now has the inclination to provide food, shelter, medical care, and education to anyone in need, it must either suffer the “sadness” or “frustration” of failing to meet its programmed goal (which would mean blowing its circuits or some technical breakdown), or it must have resources with which to do those things.

We will need to program our android to obtain those resources. Will we make it super talented, so it can do some job that people are willing to pay a lot of money for? Maybe be a superstar performer? Maybe a great entrepreneur that happens to succeed in many business ventures? Maybe it will do physical labor to earn a nest egg to then invest and earn a surprising return on investment?

It needs to be something that keeps resources coming in while the android spends proceeds on those charitable things we assigned it to care about.

And here’s another detail: we can’t program it to do something we aren’t capable of doing. It won’t sing or act better than the programmer. It won’t invent and take entrepreneurial risks better than the programmer. It won’t make better investments than the programmer.

Maybe we could program the android to come up with its own means of finding resources. “Just find a way,” we could say. What could go wrong? Well, if you’re into sci-fi, the rule is that androids always turn on the people. Always. (This has come up in recent story lines on Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., in which very human-like androids have been popping up--with feelings, like anger, jealousy, and vengeance. And Mack says something like, "Don't you ever watch the movies? The robots always turn on the humans.")

Android Aida starts doing damage to humans
on Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.
image from here

Let’s say this android creation of ours is our government. People talk as if it actually has feelings. A “caring” government must provide free health care. A “caring” government must get rid of bigotry. A “caring” government must “feel” guilty of its success compared to other countries and give away its wealth to other countries to even the playing field. A “caring” government must give everyone the same opportunities for education—more than K-12 and all the way through college.

This creation we call government doesn’t actually earn a living, let alone a living plus proceeds to pay for all of this largesse. So we’ve programmed it to “just find a way,” including the permission to take resources from the creators, who actually do work for a living.

Since government has been programmed to do so many specific things to show that it “cares,” it finds a way. It seizes our resources, usually through taxes, fees, tariffs, licenses, and sometimes outright theft—because somewhere in the algorithm it prioritizes who it decides is deserving, regardless of who earned or built up the property.

The android, supposedly programmed to “care” for people, turns on them—at least on some of them—and asserts its power. It takes and gives as it chooses. And we, the creator of it, find ourselves at its mercy. Because, as sci-fi lit tells us, the more human-like you make the android, the more likely it will turn on humans—with super-human power. 

Then, when the creature is out of control and on a rampage, what must be done? Die or take it down.

It would be preferable to avoid the problem. Instead of saying, “This time it will be different,” say, “This time I will limit the powers of the creation to specific purposes."

With government, the limits of its power should be where it can do what we can do ourselves, but better; that's a very few things. The creators of our government—the writers of the US Constitution—spelled out the limited purposes in the Preamble:

·        Establish Justice (law enforcement and adjudication).

·        Insure domestic Tranquility (avoid civil wars, settle interstate or regional disputes).

·        Provide for the common defence (protect sovereignty from attacks).

·        Promote the general Welfare (handle things that affect everyone, such as coining money, standardizing measurements,providing some infrastructure, and encouraging interstate commerce).

·        Secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity (the blessings of protecting life, liberty, and property lead to general economic prosperity and civilization).

The rest of the Constitution, including the Bill of Rights, enumerates the specific things the federal government can do—the limited programming.

The creation is, indeed, power, which, like fire is good when contained and used for its specific purposes, but is dangerous outside those boundaries. There’s nothing in there about “caring.” Any attempt to program in “caring” goes beyond the bounds of its proper purpose.

We can’t enforce caring in our neighbor; we can only persuade. And we can model the behavior by doing it ourselves. So we cannot program caring into government. We cannot take our neighbor’s property and give it to government to redistribute to someone it deems more deserving—because we do not have the right to take our neighbor’s property in the first place. When you attempt to imbue government with that power, you are creating a monster.

If we want government to be our servant, rather than our tyrannical oppressor, we’d better remove any of the dangerous programming—anything beyond the limited purpose of government.

Nonequivalents

Some things have been spun as equivalent that are not. Here are a few:

·        Defunding NPR ≠ killing Big Bird, or closing down that communications company; it simply means funding would need to come from someplace other than taxpayer money.

·        Medical insurance ≠ medical care. In fact, medical insurance—especially once mandated as an employee benefit, interfered with the market and raised prices so that medical care became harder for the patient to pay for.

·        Repealing Obamacare ≠ eliminating health care. It means that we would eliminate the expensive mandates and other coercions that have made it harder for people to pay for the insurance they want or the care they need.

·        Being against illegal immigration ≠ racism; it is not even equivalent to being anti-immigration. It is likely equivalent to favoring law-abiding immigrants.

·        Being against a higher minimum wage ≠ keeping families in poverty. It is, rather, being in favor of a free market in which entry-level workers get opportunities to earn entry-level wages while gaining valuable experience that will help them become more valuable employees in the future. Conversely favoring a higher minimum wage = outlawing jobs for many entry-level workers.

This list could do on. But I’ll add one more, that I’d like to spend time on today:

·        Favoring school choice ≠ being against educating all children. Just the opposite, in fact. And I’ll add, eliminating the US Department of Education ≠ eliminating public schools. After all my entire public education happened before that political entity was established, so I know it can be done.

In the December issue of Imprimis, Hillsdale College President Larry Arnn speaks about “A More American Conservatism.” The overall piece looks at the question of whether the new president can be identified as a conservative (answer: we’ll see what he does, but there are some reasons to be hopeful). But a large section talks about education, which is a specialty of his, as president of an influential liberal arts college. And I’d like to share some of that.

Dr. Arnn mentions that he approves of the appointment of Betsy DeVos. He says, “Trump has nominated the splendid Betsy DeVos to be secretary of the Department, and she is a fighter for every kind of school choice.” These words are comforting. She has now been sworn in, after a tie-breaking vote from Vice-President Pence.

Dr. Arnn says this about the Department of Education:

The federal government spends seven or eight percent of its money on education, and its method is typical of the federal intrusion into local matters: it gives money from the federal treasury to state and localities on condition. The conditions are myriad, confusing, and usually ugly when they can be understood. Title IV of the Higher Education Act governs federal student aid, and it numbers around 500 pages. A lawyer for our college told me once that I would be unable to read it, because he himself cannot read it, for which reason his firm keeps a specialist who is the only person he knows who understands what it says. For this reason alone, it would be a grand thing to get rid of the Department of Education.

Someone quipped that, if you really hate DeVos in charge of the Department of Education, support the bill to eliminate that department—and she’s gone.

Here’s another nonequivalence:

·       The Department of Education ≠ better education outcomes for students. In fact, there have been no appreciable increases in education outcomes since this bureaucracy was established, but costs per student have skyrocketed.

Dr. Arnn shares a basic principle about education:

The first thing to understand is that human beings are made to learn, and they desire to do it naturally. This means the job of teachers, like the job of parents, is to help children learn, not to make them or cause them to learn. Good schools are built around this fact.

One of the arguments for a national bureaucracy over education is that every student, in every state, ought to have the opportunity for education as some minimum standard, and so national standards and testing are necessary. But testing ≠ meeting a standard. In fact, setting a minimum standard ≠ better education outcomes.

Dr. Arnn talks about a kind of standard that would be useful:

The chairman of our education program at Hillsdale College has written a series of standards that states might adopt for K-12 education. For each grade, they take up about half a page. But if a child can do the things on that half a page, the child has earned a lot. Here is a way for higher levels of government to be sure that any money they give to lower levels is well spent in education. It involves hardly any management of details. That is the constitution model, the model that comes from our Founding.

To follow this practice would liberalize the system. It would mean that there would be plenty of bad charter schools, just as there are plenty of bad schools now. But it would also mean that there would be a proliferation of good ones.

Charter schools are just one type of school choice. At this point there are not enough of them. 

Here are some of the numbers in Texas. There are 5.2 million K-12 students (10% of all kids in US). Of that 5.2 million, 250,000 attend private schools, 300,000 are homeschooled, and 250,000 attend charter school. There’s a wait list of an additional 130,000 for charter schools. That’s why there must be lotteries to settle who attends a charter school (which is a public-school-funded entity that operates on different principles with different, often innovative practices).

Of those 87% attending public schools, 900,000 (20% of public-schooled students) are stuck in 1,032 failing schools—schools that have failed to show progress for three years in a row. There are considerably more students stuck in hopelessly failing schools than there are students being taught by parents, private schools, and charter schools added together.

That is what bureaucracy has wrought. To want that status quo = not caring about the education of the next generation. There ought to be a better choice for every family with a student they care about.

Dr. Arnn talks about what the 16 successful charter schools Hillsdale College operates look like:

Everybody wears a uniform and signs an honor code. Everybody studies mathematics at least through pre-calculus. Everybody learns Latin, history, literature, philosophy, physics, biology, and chemistry. Everybody is admitted by a lottery system. For the inner-city schools, care is take to advertise only in the immediate area, to make the opportunity available to the children who live in poor areas. The students in these schools make on the average excellent scores on the ubiquitous state standardized tests, and they do this without class time or curriculum set aside to pare for those tests. They do very well even in relation to the legions of public schools that now take months to cram only for those tests.

While these schools work well, he does not recommend making every school like this. It is the choice that makes the difference. Standards are high. Everyone is there voluntarily. The same is true at Hillsdale College. He says,

At Hillsdale College the curriculum is rigorous and the standards of behavior are high. But they are not imperative. The ultimate penalty is simply this question: are you sure you want to be here, when there are so many other options, options generally not quite so difficult or strict? The student who responds yes to that question is self-governing, which is the aim. That is why we at Hillsdale would not support a national law that everyone had to do what we do. We know too much about human beings to think that would work.

Knowing about individual human beings is something distant bureaucracies are particularly not good at.

Dr. Arnn ends his education portion with these hopeful words about a reformed Department of Education:

[I]t would be teaching the governments below not to give people orders all the time. It would be teaching them that parents do after all love their children in the great majority of cases, and that the strongest institutions are built on love. It would be teaching them that schools can do better without a national engineering project to take over their work, to set their tests, to prescribe their behavior.

He admits that such reforms would indeed “lay the ground for the Department’s abolition.” But, again, that ≠ less education; it actually can mean better education at lower costs—which are outcomes that market choices among good, free people, almost always bring.