The perpetual motion legislative machine

Has it ever occurred to you that elected officials must be insane?
Have you wondered why so many kooky ideas are introduced as legislation?

Here are just 3 reason why legislators get caught up with legislation that seems inane or just wrong.

1. the need to be doing SOMETHING

As any libertarian will tell you, most of what legislators do is simply unconstitutional... actions that the legislature has no business messing with in the first place... but there is literally NO control over that, and the actions of legislatures pay no attention whatever to constitutionality.

All that aside, most people who run for public office are looking to stay for a long time, so they need to have "accomplishments" to tout for their reelection campaigns. They introduce legislation because it is virtually "required", lest they be accused of doing nothing. In that environment, doing anything is better than doing nothing. Legislation about state symbols is a good example:

Minnesota has a state Bird (Loon), Butterfly (Monarch), Drink (Milk), Fish (Walleye), Flower (Pink and White Snowy Lady's Slipper), Fruit (Honeycrisp Apple), Grain (Wild Rice), Gemstone (Lake Superior Agate), Mushroom (Morel), Tree (Norway Pine), and Muffin (Blueberry). Oh, mustn't forget the state Photograph. Who could vote against an old man in prayer?



Not that legislating state symbols is easy... we still don't have a state Animal or Mammal, despite at least 8 times trying to name the White-Tailed Deer, 6 times the Eastern Timber Wolf, and a couple of shots with the 13-Lined Ground Squirrel. Many others have been proposed, such as naming the leech as the state Parasite.

In the category of "Are we really paying you to do this stuff?"... a bill that would require retailers to post notices that cocoa bean mulch can be dangerous to pets.

Because global warming is making fish spawn earlier, the legislature will consider a proposal to open the fishing season a week earlier. No, fishermen don't think so, records don't show it, and the DNR didn't ask for it, but somebody thought it must be true.

And... in the category of "We can do this since we don't have to live with the results"... some legislators want beer sold throughout the new Gophers football stadium -- from the cheap seats to the luxury boxes. No, the U doesn't want it.

On a more serious note, this year the DFL (that's Democrats to you foreigners) rammed through a massive tax bill... well, it maybe wasn't massive, because all the numbers were left BLANK.


2. the need to please supporters and contributors

Many pieces of legislation are actually written and pushed by non-legislators... lobbyists for one or more industries or organizations. Here's a good example:

Some of Minnesota's biggest unions and construction companies are pushing a plan to use state loan guarantees and tax breaks to kick-start a building industry that has been staggered by the recession. But... the list of projects involved is a secret, and may not EVER be released to the public.

3. the need to mend what one has already screwed up

Speed limit change will protect suburban kids. Seems that, in their omniscience, legislators restricted speed limits statewide in a way that has kept suburban areas from limiting speeds in new residential areas, so they'll fix it (maybe) with new legislation.

There are all kinds of problems created by the "short-term offender law", which has, for the past 6 years, required counties to house felons who have 180 days or less remaining to serve on their sentences. Hopefully, that will be fixed by still more legislation.

One of the primary reasons for governments being defined by constitutions is to LIMIT what government can stick their noses into... to protect the people from overweening officials who pad their resumes with silly, nuisance, and downright bad legislation. Clearly, having a constitution, and swearing to uphold it, does not even begin to keep legislators from doing any goofy thing they want. But WHY do they do such things? I think it's the same answer given by Gordon Gekko in the movie Wall Street... "Because I CAN".

Our minority President socks it to minorities

We all heard this new populist President claim that he wouldn't increase taxes on anyone earning under $200,000. That means that anyone even close to being considered poor should have been able to look forward to no higher taxes. Obama has, from the beginning, declared that he will help the "poor" and "hard-working" Americans. He has been idolized because he's clearly a "minority" President, which might have caused one to expect him to respect the rights of minority groups. If that's what you expected, dream on, fool.

On April 1st, our federal government BLASTED one small, poor minority group almost beyond belief. Most of you are not in that minority group, so you'll have a tendency to either stop reading or to hem and haw, thinking up excuses for the liar that has taxed beyond even a dictator's imagination.

A 2000% increase in tax! Precisely, it was an increase of 2,252.7%. Yes, take the old tax and make it 22 and a half times larger. That's not an increase... it's a nuclear tax bomb!. Nothing else comes close. That increase means that this product is now taxed at OVER FIFTY PERCENT! The Federal tax is higher than the retail cost of the product itself, including product, packaging, marketing, distribution, etc. Everything that goes into putting the product out there for sale costs less than the Federal tax.

Have you guessed what the product is? What minority group could a "minority", "poor-favoring" President attack so viciously? Oh yes, the group is cigarette smokers, who were already paying grievous taxes, but this incredible tax increase REALLY targeted what is probably the poorest segment of cigarette smokers; those who buy loose tobacco and make their own cigarettes.

Those of us who have been making our own cigarettes (I've been doing it for most of the past 10 years) go to that trouble for one reason only; to save money. Making cigarettes is laborious and time-consuming. Nobody would do it if it weren't cheaper than buying ready-made cigarettes. So naturally, the poorest smokers are the the most likely to be buying loose tobacco. Based on 2006 figures, more than 36.5 percent of adult smokers had incomes of less than $25,000 annually, and I'll guarantee you that if you included only those who make their own, the poor percentage would be much higher.

Since 1998, federal, state and local governments have collected more than $284 BILLION in cigarette taxes and payments. That $284 BILLION came out of pockets of only 19.7% of our citizens. The U.S. population is about 304 million. Subtract out the kids who don't yet pay taxes, and you're left with, at most, about 240 million adults. 20% of that group is 48 million. That means that the average smoker paid aboutt $6,000 in taxes and payment since 1998.

Most of that $284 BILLION was spent, after all the normal government waste in handling it, for programs that had absolutely nothing to do with smoking, cigarettes, or the smokers who paid the taxes. Such obscene taxation is nothing other than ripping off a minority because the majority doesn't give a damn. In fact, we have a lot of people here in Minnesota who, at the same time they claim to fight for the rights of minorities, APPLAUD the soaking that smokers have taken. I have news for those so-called liberals... a high percentage of smokers are also RACIAL MINORITY FOLKS, so you're really blasting them. Another large segment of the population of smokers is VETERANS... you know, those of us who "served our country" and "put our lives on the line"? Unfortunately, my experience with liberals is that they don't in fact give a damn about minorities... they just want to APPEAR TO CARE about them... no more than politically-correct pompous, pretentious posturing.

The American Revolution was begun because of taxes, but the tax on tea and those of the Stamp Act were miniscule compared to the taxes on smokers. Another huge irony is that, without the introduction of tobacco as a crop, the American Colonies would have failed, and none of what we know as American History would have occurred. While our President and Congress are granting mammoth bailouts to large corporations, they are ripping off poor and hard-working Americans. These are the people you voted for? Is this the sort of "CHANGE" you thought they meant?

Iowa justices vote for justice!

  

The justices of the Iowa Supreme Court voted unanimously that gay marriage is constitutional. Having been born and raised in Iowa, I am surprised and delighted... surprised because I suspect that decision is not the choice of the people of Iowa, and delighted because it is a victory of human rights over majority opinion. Perhaps I underestimate the sense of justice of Iowa citizens, but the issue of gay marriage should not be a matter of opinion, but must be, and has been, decided on the basis of equality of human rights.

Majority opinion must never be allowed to take precedence over constitutionally sound and equal rights for all citizens. For many years, I have, as have most libertarians, pressed the position that gay citizens deserve, without question, EQUAL rights... not special rights as gays have sometimes pushed for, but absolutely equal rights under the law. Conservatives who on one hand claim to be constitutionalists while pushing to exclude equality to gays with the other hand, are simply wrong; constituionally wrong, and morally wrong.

One of the bedrock functions of government is to protect minorities against persecution by a majority. As libertarians often remind, the United States is not a democracy, but a constitutional republic. A democracy means majority rule and minorities be damned... i.e. mob rule. The Founders of this nation despised democracy. Most of our immigrant ancestors came here to avoid persecution for their minority views. All too often, our vote-hungry major political parties cater to majority viewpoints at the expense of minorities and the Constitution.

Congressional representatives often claim that their votes reflect the wishes of their constituents, the voters of their state. They seem to be ignorant of the fact that their first duty, as sworn in their oath of office, is to first determine the consitutionality of an issue, before ever considering the wishes of the public.

I favor referendum as a way for the people to press their positions, but the fact remains that a majority of the people can be wrong, and can, out of ignorance or emotion, oppress those minorities they disagree with. It is the job of the courts to correct when and if that occurs, but it is also the job of our elected officials... each and every one of them.

I cannot fail to add that if government did not convey special privileges on "married couples", gay marriage would not be an issue to begin with. As an unmarried person, I, like gays, resent the inequality of government interference in a social activity that is none of their business in the first place.

That the Iowa Supreme Court justices, without exception, voted to equalize a set of rights, is a pure delight, and I sincerely commend them.

A government agency that works?

A couple of years ago, I got myself enrolled for VA medical care, but never bothered to make an appointment. I was determined to make myself more healthy through diet and exercise, thus eliminating any need for more medical care. My plan worked great for 2 years, then I had another mild mini-stroke, spent most of a day in an emergency ward, and suddenly had numerous doctor and test appointments. To add to the confusion, I had another attack before all the tests were done for the first one.

It all sort of "hit the fan" when a neurologist prescribed Plavix to thin my blood, and I discovered that the prescription would cost me $150/month out of pocket. There is no way I could afford that, so I decided to see what I might be able to quickly accomplish at the VA hospital, and so made a phone call. I was told that I was in their system, but I needed to first update my means test. I asked if I could do that in person and was told I could, so I set out to approach the huge VA hospital.

I expected a typical governmental organization, with lots of sitting around waiting, reams of paperwork, and delayed results. The huge parking lot, full to the far reaches, was right in line with what I expected. I played musical parking places for about 10 minutes, then got lucky.

From the time I finally entered the big revolving doors, my experience changed, and it deserves description. First, a guy at the Information desk gave me precise directions to the Means Testing office. I asked a woman at a desk, and she told me to put my name on a clipboard and wait in the waiting room. Within 5 minutes, a woman called me, sat me down, helped me fill out a short income form, entered the info on the computer, and told me what my co-pays would be for the next year. I asked if I could make a doctor's appointment right away. She gave me a phone number and told I could call from a nearby lounge, which I did, and made an appointment for 11 days later.

Encouraged by such progress, I asked if there was any way I could get a prescription to replace the one for Plavix. With little explanation, I was told to go to the Urgent Care and see a pharmacist. A helpful woman at Urgent Care had me sign a clipboard outside the pharmacist's office, and wait. A few minutes later, the pharmacist came for me, listened to my explanation, questioned me, made some inquiries, made computer entries, and then she took me to a nurse who took my blood pressure and asked a few more questions... then back to the pharmacist, who said she had ordered a prescription for me to last until my doctor's appointment. She directed me to the pharmacy pickup.

Upon arriving at the pharmacy pickup, I noticed my name already on a video screen of prescriptions ready for pickup, got in line, waited a couple of minutes, and got the prescription... at no cost.

The reason I got so much accomplished so quickly was that every time I asked a question I got a good response, so I kept asking. Not at all what I expected. I found that VA employees "hold your hand" and know how to take whatever next step you ask about. They honestly seemed competent and eager to help at each step. I listened as the Urgent Care receptionist handled an elderly veteran in a wheelchair who was visiting from Chicago and needed help here. After gathering a bit of information, she called for a triage nurse, who quickly arrived and pushed the patient away.

Normally, when I've been in a medical facility for a couple of hours, I'm more than eager to escape, but this whole process went so smoothly and quickly that I wandered around the hospital for a while, checking out the cafeteria, snack shop, and store. I even stopped at the ER desk to ask if I could get emergency care even before I had seen a doctor. A man working at the ER desk offered help before I could ask, and told me that I certainly could check into the ER, even before my first doctor's appointment.

Like you, I had heard some negative reports about VA medical facilities. Frankly, one reason I didn't proceed two years earlier was that I supposed that they were pressed to handle Iraqi war injuries, and thought that I need not add to their problems. I underestimated them. In my defense, my experience with government facilities has always been negative, and anything military has usually been equally poor.

For my future treatment at the VA, I will have no co-pay for doctor visits, and a $5 co-pay for prescriptions. That's very close to free, and far better than Medicare. I've been paying $96/month for Medicare, without prescription coverage, and paying for a significant part of each medical treatment.

There is, of course, a downside. VA medical programs will cost $41.7 billion this year. Only about 6% of that cost will be paid by the patients, an average of $427 for each of 5.7 million patients. What patients pay is based on their income. The remaining 94% will, of course, be borne by taxpayers, most of whom are also paying far more for their own medical care. One more enormous expense of having a gigantic military force.

Nevertheless, my kudos to the award-winning Twin Cities Veterans Administration medical center. From my limited experience, it appears that they provide excellent service, and probably at a reasonable cost to the taxpayers.

Meanwhile, over in the BIG house...

reprinted from 8/17/03

Continuing from yesterday's "Welfare - adding psychological insult to injury"... our nouveaux riche middle class saw no limits. Expectations grew as fast as ones imagination could work. Add in easy credit and a certain amount of justified guilt from the vets, and you develop a giant new ME generation that quickly assumed that the world was created for them. A sheltered suburban lifestyle, lots of gifts, attending college, buying a house after marriage... then 2 cars, 2 good jobs, etc.

Within one generation, people who used to live, work, and play side-by-side became the Haves righteously doling out favors to the Have-Nots, with a hug, while patting themselves on the back... and they're still doing it... with renewed righteousness... while trying to blame the problems on someone else.

The poor were staying poor, despite welfare, so benefits were raised, and raised... to the point where welfare became a "living wage", equivalent to, or greater than, the wages of many working people. It no longer made any sense for the poor to even attempt to become productive. Get a job and earn LESS?

For the hard-core welfare recipient, the value of the full range of welfare benefits substantially exceeded the amount the recipient could earn in an entry-level job. As a result, recipients were likely to choose welfare over work, thus increasing long-term dependence.

Offer a society only one practical way to survive, and they're likely to get good at it. That naturally evolved a culture of welfare expertise... how to get all you can (it's a "right" after all)... and that expertise transferred to the next generation... and the next. We produced the spectacle of multi-generational families where nobody could remember not relying on welfare. Because government is so pathetic at administration (even though 70% of welfare funds are spent on it) we also had a caste of people on welfare who were not even poor, while most poor people did not receive benefits.

The financial impact of WWII and the catastrophic aftermath of government growth and destruction can be seen in 3 numbers... the National Debt in 3 years:

1935 - 28.7 billion dollars
1945 - 258.7 billion dollars (9 times as high in 10 years)
2003 - 6.75 trillion dollars (26 times as high since the end of WWII)

… and that was while taxes were skyrocketing.

Was welfare necessary at all?

The Economic Report of the President in 1989 concluded that economic growth alone naturally raises more and more people out of poverty. Without welfare, economic growth would have produced a poverty rate about the same as, or a little lower than, the one we have today. If the value of volunteer labor is included, private sector contributions to charitable causes are approximately the same as the poverty budgets of federal, state and local governments combined.

The future?

Since the 70's, a variety of attempts have been made to move welfare recipients to employment, but welfare has become a way of life, and recipients severely handicapped in relation to the working world, so the problem is monumental. Again... it's similar to the problems slaves faced upon release, but at least the freed slaves were used to work and a poor lifestyle.

Some church organizations, working on a volunteer and local level, have had success in bringing such people into the workforce, but it requires a fierce desire from the former welfare recipient, and a lot of patient help from the volunteers. Experience should tell us that it's the only sort of solution that can actually work.

Is it so difficult to see the destructiveness of government programs... the economic manipulation of people through legislation... through FORCE? How long will do-gooders continue to believe that government programs are the solution, when in fact they are the source of the problems? More government programs won't help... more tax money won't help. Will our nation be brought to its knees before we all come to that simple realization?

If you resent hearing this from a libertarian, take it from a liberal's hero who, despite his early and correct definition of the problem, continued on to immensely compound the problems.

The lessons of history, confirmed by the evidence immediately before me, show conclusively that continued dependence upon relief induces a spiritual disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fiber. To dole our relief in this way is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit. The Federal Government must and shall quit this business of relief.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, State of the Union 1935

This is the conclusion to a 4-part series:
1. Being poor ain't what it used to be

2. Government and the godawful greatest generation

3. Welfare - adding psychological damage to injury

4. Meanwhile, over in the BIG house...

Welfare - adding psychological damage to injury

reprinted from 8/16/2003

In "Government and the godawful greatest generation", I described the effects of the seemingly innocuous post-WWII veterans benefits... the massive suburban home building boom, which then drained cities of jobs and housing, trapping a large, mostly black, population of Americans. Many of us think of that boom period as the realization of the "American Dream", and for the privileged veterans, it certainly was.

It also created a chasm between the nouveau middle class and the stranded inner-city poor. For those not part of the boom, it removed any hope of working their way up, and it divided our nation racially and psychologically. While the new middle class could envision nothing but future prosperity, the poor lost hope.

The 50's were a time of "can do", of limitless growth... as long as you didn't look beneath the surface. Prior to WWII, Americans of all colors labored and lived together in cities. The effects of the privileged race to the suburbs effectively split black and white into cities vs. suburbs, and psychologically into "them" vs. "us". The inner-city black population was now an embarrassment, shameful by contrast.

The new America responded. Unfortunately, it responded from its new divided, paternalistic viewpoint. Those who had would help those who had not. Naturally, they would do it through government.

So, government welfare programs got a massive new dose of support. AFDC - Aid to Families with Dependent Children - was part of the original Social Security legislation of 1935. Here's a short summary of what happened:

• By the end of 1940, 360,000 families were receiving AFDC.
• In the 50's, AFDC grows by only 110,000 families.
• In the 60's, AFDC grows by a much larger amount of 800,000 families as President Johnson's "War on Poverty" attempts to assist the poor.

AFDC was a major disaster. The "cure" was even worse than the "disease". In the AFDC program the requirements for eligibility essentially amount to:

1. low income,
2. very few assets,
3. dependent children and
4. no man in the household.

Anyone satisfying these requirements was entitled to benefits. And the word entitlement means "right" -- benefits cannot be withdrawn simply because recipients refuse to modify their behavior.

Direct Results?

1. Huge increases in out-of-wedlock births, especially by teenage girls.
2. Huge increases in single-mother "families"

People will do what you pay them to do, especially if they're desperate. It was exactly what should have been expected from AFDC. Naturally, these new families were virtually incapable of taking care of themselves. Young mothers, with little education, qualified for very few jobs, had the additional burden of children to care for, by themselves.

Fathers of children born as tickets to cash in on welfare were absent from parenting... by FORCE, and that gradually transformed young men who would have ordinarily been responsible fathers into absent sperm donors. Soon, as seen from the distant suburbs, we had a black underclass that appeared to have no morals. Not only were they not working and on the dole, they were breeding fast, and men were abandoning their families.

We had divided the nation with veteran's benefits, psychologically crushed the left-behinds with destructive welfare, and then insisted that they had a RIGHT to be "kept". Think about how similar that is to the treatment of slaves... except that the new slaves didn't have to work.

Tomorrow… Meanwhile, over in the big house...

Government and the godawful greatest generation

reprinted from 8/15/2003

In "Being poor ain't what it used to be" I described a "caste of far-from-destitute but psychologically poor people" in America, and promised to examine why and how this mostly inner-city caste has developed.

Warning: For those of you who believe that government
programs are solutions, you may as well go read
something else. You're not going to like this.

In looking back over my lifetime, I can't see anything more tragic than what has happened to much of the American black population, and I'm going to lay that tragedy right on the doorstep of liberals... modern socialistic liberals who, working from their own usual comfy position, have very nearly destroyed the very people they thought they were helping.

Let me make it clear that this isn't about race except that it has happened primarily to American blacks. I suspect, but can't prove, that if the same conditions had existed when the Irish, Italian, or other immigrations occurred, we would have a different underclass with the same characteristics. Blacks happened to be the resident poor when this disaster began.

A quick overflight of U.S. history since World War II:

After WWII, our government's propaganda machine had been running hard out for years, and switched from "support the war" to "support our returning heroes". It was indeed a mania. In retrospect, it was not only unfair to all those who remained at home working long hours and doing without, it was unfair to veterans of all other wars, before and since.

"Greatest generation" indeed... "privileged generation", in fact. Returning vets were adored, and benefits heaped upon them. Within a short time, being elected to any political office was almost impossible for anyone but a veteran. Almost 60 years later, there are, incredibly, still a handful of WWII veterans in Congress.

Veteran's benefits, especially VA-guaranteed home loans with no down payment, and veteran's educational benefits, began the great population shift from the cities to the suburbs. With the prime workforce building new houses in the suburbs, businesses began moving there as well, and giving veterans job preference. Cities became poor, neglected, and naturally crime-ridden, causing even more people to move still further away, and we saw the gradual development of yet another ring of suburbs, the development of suburban shopping malls, and an explosion of auto transportation.

WWII and veteran's benefits reconfigured our landscape from top to bottom. The 50's was characterized by our new suburban middle class and "the American dream"... home ownership, a car in every garage, and a barbeque in the back yard. By the 60's, cities were desperate, so government came to the rescue. Veterans in office had seen their lives changed by government programs, so they did more of them. Between "urban renewal programs" and new highway construction, whole communities of remaining working poor were destroyed.

Veterans, in control now, had little use for their working class "roots"... they tried their damndest to "tidy up" America, virtually eliminating what was good about working class communities. That was the beginning of the "nanny state"... eliminating eyesores and embarrassing slums. Meanwhile, the veterans were out in the suburbs, creating a newly-privileged (read spoiled) baby-boom generation with a whole new set of expectations. Suddenly, being poor as I described it in "Being poor ain't what it used to be" was no longer fun... it wasn't even tolerable.

Those left in the cities were the poorest of the poor, and getting poorer. Factories had moved, and working-class jobs became scarce. Lots of inexpensive housing was bulldozed, and "standards" of construction were raised, eliminating future construction of low-cost housing through wonderful government measures such as building codes. We couldn't expect people to live in unsafe or unsanitary conditions, could we? The question never asked was, and still isn't... "what happens to those people who can't afford improved, more expensive lifestyles?" Blank out. That was when homelessness became a new problem.

Why wouldn't the baby-boomers believe in government programs? It created the good life for them, and they naturally wanted to "spread the wealth".

Tomorrow - Welfare, adding psychological insult to injury