The Taxman Cometh

by John Young

April 15th has come and gone. Every year, I spend money on proper tax software and file a tax return somewhere between twenty-five and thirty pages long. It’s usually a pretty depressing exercise because I get to add up just how much of my hard-earned money goes to a government that hates me.

Fundamentally, I don’t have an issue with paying taxes in order to keep my borders safe and keep criminals in check. Certainly, I dislike a number of details of the income tax that I’ll be discussing in a moment; but I believe that as a citizen I’m obligated to pay for the men and women who stand ready to do violence on my behalf so I can sleep safely in my bed at night.

The trouble is, I’m obviously paying a lot more than should reasonably be required; and I’m furthermore paying it through a set of tax regulations that is so ridiculously complex that I sometimes experience doubt as to their meaning.

And that doubt can be quite fatal because our IRS has the charitable impulses of Genghis Kahn combined with the sense of humor of an atomic bomb and the sensitivity of Torquemada. So whenever in doubt, I make the decision that yields the highest tax payment. If you call the IRS for help, you usually get someone who is barely literate and whose advice, if you follow it, cannot be used in their own special court system to establish that you were acting in good faith.

A few years back, Money Magazine had 50 CPAs independently do the taxes for a hypothetical family of four. Although all 50 CPAs had the same data, they came back with 49 different answers as to the total tax due. Only one of these trained professionals who had years of training plus objective testing under their belt achieved what the IRS considered to be the “correct” answer.

If 49 out of 50 trained professionals can’t get the right answer — what are the odds that an ordinary person will? For all practical purposes, the odds of getting it right are pretty close to zero; no matter how hard you try. That’s why I use professional software and buy audit defense every year. Sometimes, if something out of the ordinary has occurred, I pay a professional. Even at that, odds are that there are probably a few errors in the software or the professional is one of the 49 out of 50 who will mess up, though I have no way of knowing whether those errors affect my particular circumstances or not.

And this is my single largest indictment of the income tax: it turns every taxpayer into a “not yet charged” criminal. Every taxpayer in the United States, at some point, has a fear in the back of his mind regarding the income tax; because pretty much every taxpayer has no choice but to get something wrong on his income tax forms. The IRS has its own courts for trying cases, and on top of that all of the wages of the entire judicial branch of government depend on the income tax so the conflict of interest is quite intense, and always stacked against the taxpayer unless he has special pull or connections. (A certain Secretary of the Treasury comes to mind.) So at any moment in time, any taxpayer’s name can be pulled out of a hat as the subject of an audit or other extraordinary treatment.

And this “extraordinary treatment” to which I refer is my second indictment of the income tax. The IRS is one of the most casually evil branches of our government in that it is staffed with people who have almost unlimited power to make a taxpayer’s life miserable. While not all IRS employees take delight in the torture they are permitted to inflict; far too many gain a thrill from the absolute corruption they embrace as a result of their absolute power. The IRS has the power to do things that no other branch of government is allowed to do. They can seize your paycheck and your bank accounts with minimal notice and without a warrant or even due process in a court of law. If you owe them $3,000 and can’t pay it immediately, within just a few months they will add penalties and interest that turn the original debt into $15,000 or more. If your house gets foreclosed or your business is destroyed and (like too many) you commit suicide just to escape them — they can seize the proceeds of your life insurance and leave your widow penniless. And, in fact, they routinely do ALL of these things, and more. Their harassment extends even beyond the grave. Even worse, if an IRS agent with a conscience decides to blow the whistle on this outrageous activity, his career will be destroyed. In essence, for owing a few hundred dollars in taxes a taxpayer can receive treatment at the hands of the IRS that would make even a death row inmate blanch.

These two factors, in and of themselves, would be sufficient cause to repeal the income tax and abolish the IRS in its entirety even if the amount of taxes we owed was only $1/year. But, of course, we owe much more.

When I say “we” I am making a big assumption. I’m assuming that you, the reader, pay taxes too. Not too long ago, that was a fairly safe assumption; but today it is pretty much an even bet. By the time the latest Obama outrage has passed through Congress and taken effect, fully 50% of wage earners will effectively owe NO income tax whatsoever, leaving the remaining 50% of us to shoulder the burden not just for ourselves, but for the non-taxpaying wage earners along with the usual free-riders in government hack jobs, non-governmental agencies and the welfare industry. In essence, this means that over 50% of the adults in this country will have no direct stake in the cost of government since someone else will be paying the freight. I’m betting that if you are reading this, odds are that you’ll be joining me in paying the freight for everyone else.

And what amazing freight it is! Adding up my property tax, state income tax, federal income tax, FICA and Medicare alone — the lovely government has taken roughly 40% of my income. When you add the gas and sales taxes (I drive a lot), it comes to 43% of my income. And that’s not counting all of the hidden taxes. Amazing, though, isn’t it, that I have to pay so much of my income?

If the numb-skulls in Washington want the most impressive stimulus package ever seen; all they have to do is shut themselves down and leave my paycheck alone. Because by doing that, they would nearly double my disposable income overnight – and not just mine; but the income of millions of Americans as well. But, I digress.

What am I getting in exchange for all of this money? Well, let’s see.

1. I am getting borders that are so completely unsecured that as many as 5,000 illegal aliens a day pass over the border into Arizona alone. I also get, as head of homeland security, the woman who oversaw the security disaster in Arizona: Janet Napolitano. Now, it seems, due to our lax border security with Mexico, my fellow Americans may experience death from swine flue.

2. While I have to scrimp and save in order to afford payments for dental bills; I get the pleasure of providing unlimited free medical care to our own native crop of welfare layabouts (and this includes most of the bureaucrats in Washington) but also for illegal aliens and every dusky featherless biped who happens to have the good fortune of not speaking English.

3. After paying $650/year in gas taxes, $190/year in vehicle registrations and $800/year in tolls for my tiny 40mpg car; I get the privilege of driving on roads that are so poorly maintained that I have to ALSO pay for a new four-wheel alignment twice a year.

4. I get to pay for “Fusion Centers” and the Department of Homeland Security to label me a “likely terrorist” because I have an honorable DD-214.

5. I get to pay for multi billionaires to jet all over the world on my dime because their global Ponzi schemes are “too big to fail.”

6. And more, and more, and more — virtually NONE of it pertaining to the actual functions government is empowered to provide under Article I Section 8 of the Constitution, and virtually all of it misdirected to assist a globalist oligarchy or harm America’s founding peoples.

Don’t get me wrong — I have disagreements with “our” government all year long. But right around tax time, when I see how much they are shaking me down, those disagreements take on a special tinge of disgust.

How Much is a Quadrillion, and Why Should You Care?

by John Young

As a scientist and engineer, I’m one of a relatively small percentage of the population that regularly works with numbers of this magnitude. When I heard that the Obama administration’s latest budgets could leave us indebted to the tune of 1.25 QUADRILLION dollars, I knew two things. First, I knew this was very very very bad news. Second, I knew that the number was so incomprehensible as to be practically unreal to most folks.

I’d like to make this number somewhat comprehensible in concrete terms.

Across the country, given the so-called “housing crisis,” the average price of a single family home is $204,000. Obviously, it is more in some places and less in others; but that’s the average. There are currently 6.7 billion people on the planet if you count even newborn babies.  1.25 quadrillion dollars is enough to give every single person, including the infants, their own America-style single-family home.

In the United States, there are 53 million students enrolled in public schools from grades K-12.  With 1.25 quadrillion dollars, we could write each of them a check for $23,000,000. With that much money, deposited and earning only 5% interest, each of these students could individually employ 10 teachers each earning $100,000/year in perpetuity. When they are done their K-12 schooling, they could all go to Harvard, stay at the Ritz while attending, buy a brand-new Mercedes every month and still have plenty of spending money without ever touching their principle.

There are roughly 306 million people in the United States if you count illegal aliens and their offspring. With 1.25 quadrillion dollars, we could write every person a check for over 4 million dollars. Since everyone would be a multi-millionaire; there would no longer be issues related to poverty, education, welfare or most forms of criminality.

The thickness of a $100 Federal Reserve Note .0043″.  1.25 quadrillion dollars composed of compressed and stacked $100 bills  would be 848,327 miles high. To put that in perspective, the moon’s average distance from the earth is only 250,000 miles. The circumference of the earth is roughtly 24,000 miles, so that’s enough $100 bills to circle the earth 10 times. And, remember — that’s not laid end-to-end, but tightly stacked one on top of the other.

If we were to use ordinary $1 bills, the stack would reach from here to Venus three times.

On an astronomical scale, 1.25 quadrillion miles is approximately how far light from a star would travel in 212 years.  To put that into perspective, it only takes light about 4.5 years to reach our nearest stellar neighbor, alpha centuri.

In other words, 1.25 quadrillion dollars is a truly staggering amount of money.

Unfortunately, while I’ve been describing what one could do with that much money as an asset — all of that money is going to be a DEBT. And as a debt, it will take away from our future generations — with interest — everything and more that it could have provided as an asset.

So instead of giving America’s people a check for $4 million; it will be $4 million plus interest extracted from them during their working lifetimes.

A little bit more math should let you see how untenable this is.

The average person works at a primary occupation for 40 years. Usually, wages start low, rise slowly for 10 years, stay at a plateau for about 20 years (called the peak earning years) and then slowly fall  for the last 10 years until retirement.

The Median Wage for Nuclear Engineers in the United States, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, is $90,000/year. Assuming that a miraculous engineer earned this much money for all 40 years of his work history, his total lifetime income would be $3.6 million dollars; though, in reality, it would likely be closer to $2.5 million.

Well — if you subtract the $4 million that he owed in taxes from his $3.6 million in earnings; that would leave him having to pay more than he earned. He’d have nothing left over from which he could pay rent, get back and forth to work, put clothes on his back and food on his table. In other words, for all practical purposes he would be unable to survive.

So it is impossible to collect enough taxes to repay that debt; even if every person in America earned $90,000/year.

This is the legacy that Obamunism and the “buy now/pay later” nitwits in Congress are leaving for our children.

But YOU have the power to change that. The only question is whether or not you have the WILL. If you don’t, a $1.25 quadrillion national debt will destroy our civilization. And that is why you should care about what a number that large means.

AIG Reaction Provides a Teachable Moment

by John Young

The surreal situation surrounding the AIG bonuses provides an opportunity to discuss the importance of principles and ideas, as well as an opportunity to discuss an important aspect of ethics.

For those who haven’t been following the news, let’s set the stage.

AIG is a huge multinational insurance company that provides various types of insurance throughout the world. One aspect of its business is the provision of insurance to banks so that they are made whole in the event that a debtor defaults on a loan. Like practically all insurance companies, AIG works on two principles. First, it wants to collect more in premiums than it pays out in claims; and second it invests available funds in order to grow them against the day when a large number of claims may come due.

It turns out that AIG made a number of bad decisions in insuring certain loan packages for banks, combined with bad decisions regarding where to invest their own money. This put AIG in eminent danger of going out of business. Because of the pivotal role that AIG plays in the banking industry, if AIG went out of business, the effects would have been devastating. Therefore, the Federal government opted to provide AIG with taxpayer funds sufficient to take an 80% ownership stake in the company and keep it from going under.

Meanwhile, now that AIG is solvent from the cash infusions, AIG management opted to fulfill its pre-existing contractual obligations to its employees by providing them with fairly substantion bonuses amounting to, on average, $1M apiece within the very division largely responsible for AIG finding itself en extremis.

Democrats in Congress have responded by putting forth a tax law intended to deprive these employees of fully 90% of their bonuses

The brokers at AIG make poor sympathetic figures. After all, they are involved in a pretty sleazy industry to start with, and intimately intertwined with an upside-down system in which people who place bets on stocks make factors more income than the people whose hard work actually gives those stocks their value. In short, to the average person, it appears as though the brokers at AIG probably haven’t done an honest day of real productive work in their lives.

As a result, it is very easy for the Obamunists to seize upon these brokers as poster children for the application of outright communistic interference. This is no different than when Ted Kennedy points to the one out a million legal gun owners who kills an innocent person as justification for draconian restrictions on our right of self-defense while completely ignoring the millions of times every year that legally owned guns are successfully used for self-defense without ever harming anyone. (In fact, legally armed citizens with carry permits kill fewer innocent people by accident than police.)

The technique used by the Obamunists of the world is to capitalize on the revulsion we may feel for a particularly unsympathetic example in order to create laws and set precedents that apply to an entire group of people, the overwhelming preponderance of whom should be left alone.

It is here that it is important for us to separate, in our minds, the actual people involved in a situation from the underlying principles at issue.

The underlying principles at issue are the terms of employment between an employee and an employer. While there are reasonable rules applied to these agreements; particularly when it comes to compensation beyond the minimum legal wage and payment for overtime, government has very little to say.

There are a wide array of fields in which objective performance of an employee is so important to an employer’s bottom line that performance and compensation are intimately tied together. One example is food service in a restaurant. In this case, a waitress works for a minimal hourly wage, counting on her performance in that task to provide her with additional compensation in the form of tips.

The same applies to a sales-woman. Usually, sales professionals are provided with a minimal “base” salary, but receive additional compensation based upon a formula that gives them a percentage of the money they made for their employer. This works to the benefit of both the employer and the employee. For the employer, it minimizes the risk of shelling out money for an unproductive employee. For the employee, it means that the more effectively she works, the more money she takes home. When a sales-woman enters into an employment contract of this type, she is counting upon her commissions and bonuses to make up the difference of a salary that would otherwise be insufficient.

This same principle applies to traders on Wall Street or working in the derivatives department at AIG. Employees take a calculated risk that through sheer performance, they will make up the difference in an otherwise insufficient salary. Their performance bonuses are usually based upon measurable and objective criteria that are spelled out in a contract.

If the AIG personnel had known, in advance, that they would not be receiving performance bonuses they would have either gone to work for another company or they would have demanded higher salaries.

For Chuckie Schumer to come in after the fact and impose a special tax that effectively renders the terms of their compensation agreement null and void is manifestly unfair because it changes the rules in the middle of the game. It is no different, in principle, from taxing a waitress 90% on her tips because Congress deems them somehow “excessive” or taxing a sales-woman 90% on her commissions. The fact that this tactic is being applied — at the moment — to unsympathetic figures doesn’t make it right. It will have established a principle that will allow the Obamunists to run amock and eventually tax to death anyone whose business even remotely touches government and whose performance-based compensation is deemed somehow “excessive.”

Naturally, this is terribly disingenuous. If you really want an eye-opener just take a look at the MILLIONS OF DOLLARS A YEAR that former members of Congress usually earn after they leave Congress and join forces with the VERY INDUSTRIES THEY WERE ENTRUSTED TO REGULATE while in Congress. But I digress.

So the first problem is that effectively nullifying the terms of the AIG employment contract after the fact provides an open avenue to implement seriously destructive tax policies in the future that will destroy incentives for achievement. This is not acceptable.

The second problem lies in the effective nullification itself. While such nullification doesn’t violate the letter of the Cosntitution, it certainly nullifies the spirit. Article I, Section 10 of the Constitution states:

” No State shall … pass any … Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts …”

In fact, using a strict constructionist view of the Constitution as would be applied by James Madison, Article I Section 8 — which enumerates the powers of Congress and in so-doing limits them — gives Congress no power to pass such laws either.

Of course, the Congress-critters know this; so they are doing an end-run by using their powers under the 16th Amendment (income tax) to effectively render a private agreement null and void without declaring it to be so.

This is akin to a car-jacker arguing that he committed no crime because the victim of his behavior was driving a tractor-trailer rather than a car.

So this very dangerous tactic by our Congress puts the income of all Americans at risk (or, at least, the 50% of us who pay taxes), opens the gateway to communist policies that will suppress achievement and violates the Constitution.

On these basis alone, Congress shouldn’t even dream of passing a 90% tax on the bomuses of AIG executives, no matter how lowly we may regard them.

But now let me get to the real meat of the issue — the combination of Constitutionalism and Ethics.

At the time of our nation’s founding, it was thought that the greatest threat to the loyalty of our representatives would come from foreign states. Thus, Article I Section 9 states in part:

“No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.”

From the above, it is abundantly clear to anyone with an IQ above room temperature that it was the intention of our founding fathers to prevent the corruption of our legislators and other public servants. Naturally, the partisans of foreign states (such as China and Israel) who are also citizens of the United States get around this restriction and adversely affect the loyalty of our legislators; but the issue of corruption by large corporate entities is far more pervasive and insidious.

At the time of our nation’s founding almost any concentration of wealth of any consequence was in the hands of either governments or the aristocracy composing those governments, and nobody dreamt of the existence of behemoth corporations with greater monetary throughput than entire states. Some of the corporations in this country are financially larger than some first-world nations. But this outcome — and its next consequence — were not foreseen.

With great wealth comes the ability to share some of that wealth with others. And if the wealthy entity shares strategically with legislators, it can secure special privileges that allow it to quash competition and grow to a size beyond all sense and reason — to the point that it becomes so big that if it fails our entire economy will collapse. That’s exactly what happened with AIG.

A quick perusal of financial contributions by AIG yields stunning information not provided on the daily news. In all honesty, I don’t personally find it stunning at all, because I’ve been talking about this for a long time. Either way, it turns out that AIG contributed gargantuan gobs of money to political campaigns for decades under a wide variety of names. I count 23 obvious ones, ranging all the way from AIG Global Investment Corporation through AIG SunAmerica. Just since 1990, AIG has dumped nearly $10 million into Congress. This is just money for campaigns, and doesn’t count the bribes that come in the form of special so-called “consulting assignments” that members of Congress receive after leaving.

Certainly, AIG got their money’s worth. But let me cut to the chase.

The only reason that AIG became “too big to fail” in the first place is simple corruption. Because it became so big, when it reached the point of failure, our Congress violated our Constitution wholesale by giving them hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayer money and even taking an ownership stake in what was supposed to be a private enterprise. Then, when the company sought to provide employee retention bonuses, all hell broke loose in Congress with Chuckie Schumer and the other Obamunists vowing to levy a 90% tax on the recipients.

There is an important ethical principle here. Notice that when you do the wrong thing, it leads to crisis after crisis in which you must either undo what you previously did or commit further immoral acts. This is the way of the world, and there is no escaping this.

When our Congress was faced with a faltering AIG, it had three choices. It could allow it to fail — thus throwing us into an immediate global depression; it could bail it out — thus breaking the U.S. Constitution and guaranteeing our children a dismal future; or it could have undone the wrong it committed by allowing AIG special privileges that allowed it to grow so big by breaking it up into its 23 or so constituent parts so that the strong parts could be saved and just the weaker divisions would fail.

By failing to put right their initial mistake, Congress created yet another debacle — the image of a bunch of slimy derivatives traders receiving nearly $200M in bonuses where the money for paying those bonuses came from taxes being paid by people who can barely afford to put food on the table. Rather than taking the opportunity to right that wrong, they instead jumped to yet another outrage: a wholesale jump to embrace communist principles by taxing those whom they deem to make “too much money.”

This is no different, ethically, than the woman who has an affair on her husband only to discover that the one circumstance necessitates other wrongs just to sustain the first one until she discovers that she has wrapped herself in a cocoon of lies and deceptions that necessitate her destroying her children’s stability even though that was never her intention in the first place.

Many of our members of Congress are very bright individuals. But they have become so impressed with themselves that they believe they can evade the natural consequences of their behavior forever, when they cannot. The further they go without righting their multitude of wrongs, the more difficult making the right and honest choices will become until they have painted themselves into a corner and wrapped themselves in a straightjacket whose material is spun from their own deceptions.

The politicians are using this relatively small issue of a few bonuses at AIG to distract us from the big-picture issue of why our money had to go to AIG in the first place.

Very few of them, if any, have asked themselves what they are going to do about the wave of inflation that is bearing down upon the shore of our economy caused by the meteoric Deep Impact of incessant money printing to fund the stimulus. For smart people, they really are pretty stupid. But, then again, for anyone who has watched Congress for a while, this isn’t exactly shocking.

Global Warming as a Proxy for Peak Oil

by John Young

I don’t envy President Obama. As much as I disagree with so much of his philosophy and so many of his initiatives, I can only imagine that his first weeks inhabiting the Oval Office have been sobering in the extreme. We have a quagmire in Southwest Asia from which a graceful exit is all but precluded by the special interests that helped him get elected, so he’s stymied there. We have an economic meltdown on our hands where his advisors give only bad solutions and his hands are tied from implementing workable ones by a powerful finance sector.

In essence, President Obama is caught by the classic “Hammer and Anvil” tactic.

In military terms, the Hammer and Anvil involves catching an enemy force either between two strong units, or between a strong unit and an impassable barrier. In practice, either the Hammer or Anvil is usually concealed from the enemy so the enemy is unaware of his predicament so it cannot be evaded. Peak Oil and structural limits to debt and taxation are the Anvil and entrenched special interests are the Hammer; with President Obama caught in between.

The Hammer of special interests surrounds President Obama, assuring that he does nothing contrary to their best interests — the American people be damned. Whether we are talking about Rahm Emmanuel, Robert Reich, Tim Geithner or Christina Romer, the President is surrounded by people who put him in a box from which escape is impossible, forcing his back against the concealed Anvil of looming energy shortages, impossible entitlement obligations and spiraling national debt.

President Obama is caught in the middle of the road with the Hammer on one side, the Anvil on the other side, and an 18-wheeler coming around the bend.

So, my considerable disagreements with the President notwithstanding, I can’t help feeling some sympathy for his position.

But not TOO much sympathy. After all, he wasn’t drafted. He went out of his way to make all sorts of unholy alliances with myriad special interests in order to secure his current position; and he is plenty smart enough to know that such alliances come at considerable cost in terms of freedom of action. So he willingly agreed to walk right in between the Hammer and Anvil.

Lately, President Obama — in concert with other world leaders — seems to have found a way out of the Peak Oil dilemma. The Peak Oil dilemma, simply stated, is that it is real, unavoidable, and will profoundly affect life on this planet. Meanwhile, our politicians are completely silent about the issue even though we are right on top of it. When it comes — if it hasn’t already — there are going to be serious challenges to civilization itself and certainly the legitimacy of the current political order. The dilemma is how to maintain legitimacy (and rulership) in the face of what could be catastrophic upheavals.

When I speak of legitimacy and rulership, I’m not really speaking about politicians. Politicians, even the President, are just proxies for the special interests that pay for their campaigns. What I am speaking of, instead, is those very special interests who tend to rule from behind the scenes. They are extremely worried about maintaining their grip and control through the Long Emergency described by Kunstler.

For some time I have struggled with understanding why the globalist cabal has been pushing the Global Warming scare so hard. I already suspected it was largely false or manufactured, and the near unanimous acceptance of the phenomenon by political leaders and media outlets made it clear that, like the lies about race, the promotion of Global Warming served the interests of the global cabal in some form or fashion. But I couldn’t figure out why. Thankfully, President Obama tipped his hand.

It turns out the President Obama has plans to reduce the United States’ “carbon footprint” by a whopping 80% by 2050.

Most people don’t really have any conception of what that means, so let me give you a comparison.

Pretend you got rid of your car, and took only public transportation wherever you went, doubled the insulation of your home, switched to compact fluorescent lighting, and turned down your thermostat to 58 degrees. Pretend that, in addition, you used all Energy Star rated appliances and you recycled anything that came into your life that could be recycled. Do you know how much you’d reduce your carbon footprint? By only 20%. That’s all. A mere 20%.

A logical question might be “where is the other 80% of my energy consumption?” It is in the food you eat, the clothes you wear, and in providing everything that goes into the house where you live.

Think about it this way. Pretend you make $1,000/month (after taxes) and you currently spend $400 on debt service, leaving you $600 from which you buy food, transportation, electricity, home heating, clothes, entertainment and whatnot. Is there a single thing that you will buy with your $600 that does NOT use energy in its production and in bringing it to you? No.

So this should start to answer that question about what is involved in cutting the country’s carbon footprint by 80%. Less food. Less clothing. Less electricity. Less entertainment. In fact, less of EVERYTHING. And not just a little bit less, but enough less that suburbs essentially disappear, people are living in cubicles, food is crap and practically every scrap of clothing is recycled. The good news is that our obesity problems will be solved.

That picture looks awfully bleak. But imagine, for a moment, the difference between Americans moving to such conditions gradually, in a controlled manner, in the interests of “saving the world from global warming” as opposed to dropping into them suddenly, without warning or control, and with a globalist cabal eating filet mignon in front of us laughing in our faces. Which approach is more likely to keep control of the globe within existing hands?

So now you know the true secret of Global Warming. Global Warming is one attempt by our ruling cabal to manage the resource scarcity that we will be seeing with Peak Oil in such a way as to preserve their own undeserved positions of dominance while consolidating their control. I say “one attempt” because they are undoubtedly working on other angles as well, such as reduction of population in areas where energy consumption is greatest per-capita. This might take place through wars or any number of means.

But the whole point is to have their cake and eat it too.

And they’ll have that IF we do not head them off at the pass, and we CAN head them off at the pass.

We are entering a time when the corrupt and unworthy globalist cabal that is running things is going to be as vulnerable as they have ever been and throwing off their yoke will be easier than at any point in the recent past or than it will be twenty years from now.

Secessionist and sovereignty movements are gaining ground and building a head of steam. The global cabal maintains control through leverage and consolidation, and any form of break-up threatens their ability to maintain control. As long as the Federal government is pre-eminent, they only need to corrupt maybe 1,000 people to rule the whole country. But how many would they have to corrupt in order to deal with 26 different sovereign states within this land mass?

Resource scarcity almost always creates resource competition, and in multiethnic regions, it leads to ethnic conflict. This means that separatist organizations ranging from the New Black Panthers to the Lakota Sioux will have a realistic bid to create autonomous break-away entities, as well as people like US.

Let me put it to you this way: you can be an ant on the global ant farm, or you can take control of your own destiny for yourself and future generations. The choice is yours.

Obama, Keynes and Bailout II

The thoughts I have on Barack Obama are extensive. I could write books on the various aspects of this topic, but won’t. Instead, each aspect will be explored individually over time as the new president’s actions illustrate the necessary points. In the meantime, I’d like to share a bit of my stream of consciousness regarding his new bailout package.

Nobody in America outside of academia admits to being a socialist. Yet politicians put forth proposals, policies and legislation that are textbook examples of socialism constantly. The new bail-out package is socialism and has therefore been proposed by socialists — whether they dare to name themselves honestly or not. All of these proposals for national health care are nothing but socialism as well. The ridiculous controlled media paints the picture of an amazing world in which effects (socialist programs) come into being without their causes (socialists).

The media can certainly mediate people’s perceptions; especially given the large number of voters in this country who can’t find the United States on a map and are therefore easily manipulated by the barrage of non-facts and simplistic logic they receive via their 5-hour daily dose of brainwash-tube.

But media can only manipulate perception, it cannot change reality. A person’s perception of reality can be changed through the ingestion of LSD. But no matter what that person perceives or believes while under the influence, if he jumps off the Empire State Building believing in his ability to fly, he will wind up just as dead. Perceptual manipulation has its limits — both for hallucinogenic substances and for our controlled media.

And this is where the proverbial rubber hits the road for President-elect Obama. The earlier so-called “stimulus” package under George Bush failed to stimulate the economy and mainly managed to bail out well-connected people who were already multi-billionaires at the cost of impoverishing the children and grandchildren of ordinary Americans. It was a classic example of Keynesian economic principles — AND an illustration that they are nearing the end of their usefulness.

Keynesian economic principles are the inevitable result of massive disparities of wealth. The essence of the problem can be explained thusly:

The people who own the widget company seek to sell their widgets for the highest price possible while paying their workers the lowest wage possible. As long as there is ample opportunity for other people to start their own widget companies, this tends to equalize.

But if wealth is allowed to concentrate and startup capital becomes limited mainly to cronies and the well-connected so that new widget companies can’t be created; enterprises tend to endlessly consolidate into ever-larger entities. In other words, finance capitalism destroys the free market. When this happens, we eventually end up with a situation in which the people employed making widgets can’t afford to buy them. That’s when you have a recession or even a depression.

Keynesianism — which is just a form of socialism under another name — seeks to correct the imbalance so that workers at the widget factory can afford to buy the widgets. It does this by government spending in various forms; and this spending is funded through deficits that are paid back in the form of taxes by the folks who own the widget factory. In other words, wealth is re-distributed to correct the imbalance.

Technically speaking, this sort of game could go on forever: a huge wealth disparity occurs which creates a recession and then government comes along and takes money from the “haves” and gives it to the “have nots” until the “have nots” can finally afford to buy widgets again.

But there are a lot of issues with this. I think that any person concerned about ethics should have some reservations about using the government as a mechanism to do something that — if it were done by regular citizens — would be felonious. That is, using the government to take one person’s wealth by force and then give it to someone else.

Remember, as the Declaration of Independence noted, governments derive their JUST powers from the consent of the governed. Obviously, I cannot give someone else “consent” to do something that is highly illegal for me to do as well. That’s why people who hire assassins go to jail just as if they had conducted the assassination personally. Well, then … as I have no right to go taking away other people’s stuff, I can’t give government “consent” to do so on my behalf, either. Thus, the entire Keynesian premise flies in the face of the underlying tenets of our system of government and is ipso facto UNJUST.

But, even if it were just — Keynesianism has reached the end of its rope. You can see this in the form of the details of President Obama’s mis-named “stimulus” plan as he has now decided that tax rebates will not be issued to anyone making over $75,000/year; and will also be issued to people who paid no taxes at all because they didn’t work.

You see, the very same problems with so-called “democratic capitalism” (which is really crony capitalism) that cause the enormous disparities in wealth also hamstring Keynesianism.

In any free market, there will always be natural disparities in wealth. Some people are smarter than others, some people are more industrious than others, and some people are just plain lucky. Sometimes very bright people find themselves following a calling or cause that doesn’t pay well. Some people just don’t care about money. Others are incredibly acquisitive. This is just the way the world works, and government shouldn’t be interfering to make things work any differently.

But in spite of these relatively minor disparities, as long as the market is truly free, you will not end up with such enormous disparities of wealth that recessions become inevitable. That’s because, in a free market, as soon as the widget manufacturer raises prices high enough; someone else starts making widgets to force the price down. As soon as the first widget maker effectively lowers the wage of workers, someone else steps in who is willing to pay those worker more and steals them away.

But we don’t have a free market in the United States. What we have is democratic capitalism with a huge dose of crippled socialism thrown in.

That’s because finance capitalists figured out long ago how to buy influence in the halls of Congress. As Congress makes its own rules regarding ethics, 99% of this outright corruption is entirely legal; but it should suffice to say that many people who entered public service near penniless leave their “service” as multi-millionaires.

So what happens is once a corporation reaches a large enough size that it can easily cope with new regulations, new regulations are passed that effectively prevent the entry of new competition. Without all of these regulations, it would be entirely feasible to start (for example) a car company with less than $1M; but with these regulations it’s almost impossible to do for less than $1B. The same situation occurs in thousands of industries. Thus we are faced with corporate behemoths that grow ever larger by gobbling up other companies and no effective competition entering the mix. Without effective competition, those who control the corporations have free reign to charge as much as possible while paying as little as possible — and stratospheric wealth disparities result, with workers ultimately finding themselves unable to buy the widgets they make.

So it isn’t the free market that causes the problem; but rather interference in that market prompted by the unique form of corruption engendered by so-called democratic capitalism.

But the $75,000 income limit in the stimulus package truly tells the tale.

Remember, Keynesianism takes from the “haves” and gives to the “have nots” so that the “have nots” can afford to buy widgets. The trouble is that the very very small group of true “haves” in this country has bought itself immunity from that system. In practice, this means that all re-distribution takes place by taking from the “have a little somethings” to the “have a little less somethings.” Or from the “Have enough to get by” to the “Can’t quite make it.” Because the vast wealth at the top of the pyramid is off-limits, Keynesianism can only work with re-shuffling the lower layers of that pyramid. Because there just isn’t enough money in those layers, our government is then forced to borrow the money. Let’s face it: the government already takes fully HALF of my income, and there comes a point of diminishing returns where if they take any more I won’t be able to afford gas to go to work so they lose everything. There comes a point, as it has in Sweden, where people refuse promotions and “aim low” to avoid being taxed to death. In order to avoid this, the government turns to deficits rather than taxes to fund their Keynesian scheme.

When government borrows the money, it takes up investments that would otherwise be available to fund new companies, transitory payrolls or purchases of homes and cars. This makes less money available to prime the real economy.
Even worse, as most of that money is simply printed out of thin air, there is an inflationary response that makes the value of dollars that people already own worth less. So this creates a hidden tax upon the people who save their money and transfers it to the people who don’t.

Bailout II simply won’t work any more than Bailout I did.

Bailout I stole our money through diminishing its value in order to disproportionately enrich a bunch of privileged cronies whose only merit was in their personal and family connections. Greenburg’s AIG was bailed out for billions of dollars — and what did they do? They turned around and gave the personnel in the division responsible for putting them in a bad fix bonuses coming out to over $1,000,000 per person. This is just the tip of the iceberg of the abuse of taxpayer money — BILLIONS of which has already gone missing and nobody can figure out where it went. Isn’t it amazing how the IRS and SSA can both tell me, to the penny, exactly how much money I make and from where, but billions of dollars can just go missing and hardly anyone notices?

Bailout II is more of the same, but even worse. What makes it to the final bill is still a matter of conjecture, but so far it has included $150 million for birth control, $4.6 billion for community organizers to ensure Obama’s re-election and other garbage. What it can’t do is fix our broken economy.

If you wish to fix a problem, then you identify and repair the underlying causative factor. The only thing the bailout bills accomplish is deficit spending, inflation and perks for the well-connected. What the bailout bill DOESN’T do is much more informative than what it contains. It doesn’t do anything to bring back the true industries of this country that form the backbone of the economy. For better or for worse, all wealth originates from the application of human effort and ingenuity to natural resources in order to make them more useful. Certainly, at the levels of “high finance” and big-time law you see more money — but that money floats to the top after having originated in the blood, sweat and toil of many millions of hardworking people. If you have nothing at the bottom of that pyramid and all you have is “services” such as paper-shuffling, stock trading and ambulance chasing — then you don’t have an economy. That’s the core of the issue; and Bailout II doesn’t do nearly enough to address it.

I can already see that even the Obama administration is dubious about the likelihood of success of Bailout II. This can be discerned by noting that the Democrats now have enough votes to pass whatever they want without any Republican participation. Yet, they keep trying to get Republicans to sign on. Why? Because if this plan were a sure success — they would want teh credit, accolades and VOTES it would bring. But if it fails, they don’t want Republicans out there two years from now saying “I told you so.”

Bailout II is only possible in this country because people are so woefully educated about economics.

Read, and share the following book: Economics for Helen.

Mother Earth News Finds an Economic Clue

I subscribe to many periodicals. Some, which I commend highly to your attention, are directly relevant to the business of European Americans United, and include The Occidental Quarterly and Mankind Quarterly. Others pertain mainly to my technical and scientific interests, such as Power Electronics, Electrical Engineering Times, Journal of Organic Chemistry, Scientific American Mind and so forth. But along with this sort of “heavy reading” I subscribe to a couple of magazines pertaining to my hobbies and self-sufficiency; including Backwoods Home magazine (which I highly recommend) and Mother Earth News.

Mother Earth News (MEN) is almost universally identified with the left. When I first subscribed, I suddenly found myself on the potential donors list of every left wing kook politician in existence and started receiving solicitations from far left-wing organizations. The association of MEN with the left is a bit perplexing to start with; and demonstrates just how useless such labels can sometimes be.

Within the pages of the most recent edition of MEN are instructions for homemade bread, detailed information on raising potatoes, raising chickens and building a built-in bed. Past issues have carried articles on how to construct a mortgage-free home. When I think of the left, I think about welfare statism, and the sort of overbearing government regulations that would make raising chickens in your own back yard impossible. I think of folks sitting on the welfare dole and getting fat without ever lifting a finger to help themselves.

Nevertheless, MEN buys into the multi-culti fluff-bunny love for all things which would displace European-Americans in America. That seems pretty stupid to me as a casual look at their advertisers indicates that their buying demographic is overwhelmingly European-American, so without us they (and their advertisers) would go out of business.

Either way, in their opening editorial — “Three Mountains we Must Climb” — they list environmental conservation (with particular note to global warming), population control and economic reform.

Being a critical thinker with a lot of science under my belt, I have to admit that I’m not convinced that global warming — to the extent it may be occurring at all — is substantially affected by human activities. There are much larger and more profound cycles that play out over a geological time-frame (such as ice ages), the causes of which are not known with certainty even by experts. If one doesn’t understand the causes behind the most profound climatological shifts in the world’s history; then such causation cannot be accounted for in calculations purporting to attribute global warming to human activity. So right now, I don’t buy the whole global warming scare.

But forgetting global warming, environmental preservation in and of itself is incredibly important. No matter what, our life ultimately springs from the land, water and air around us; and gratuitously polluting or abusing these diminishes our quality of life and increases diseases and misery. We are a part of nature — and don’t stand apart from it. As a result, no matter how much we may insulate ourselves, nature affects us. So conservation doesn’t need global warming as a justification: it just needs self-interest and a caring about future generations.

One key to conservation is population control. The MEN editorial points out that a simple voluntary mindset of “2 children per couple” would be sufficient to achieve that goal. Well, they miss an awful lot. For one thing, their primary audience of European-Americans has been at below-replacement-level reproduction for quite some time. If that’s true, then why is the U.S. population rising? Because of immigration from areas where a voluntary mindset has little or no effect, and reproduction is limited almost completely by availability of resources. And when they overcrowd and destroy their own corners of the planet and deplete their resources — they move into our corner of the planet.

While I’m sure the ultra-politically-correct folks at MEN would never dare to point it out, the simple fact is that the entire Western world would be at or below replacement level population already if one simple thing occurred: a complete shut down of immigration. And the populations in the other regions would become sustainable if the U.S. and Canada in particular stopped exporting the precious fertility of their soil to Third World countries in the form of crops.

You see, throughout the third world, most areas have long-since exceeded their human carrying capacity. They simply cannot produce enough food for their masses. The United States, Canada and (to a lesser extent) the rest of the Western World makes up the difference — largely through charity. In essence, U.S. taxpayers get taxed to pay for the food that gets sent overseas. Then U.S. taxpayers get to pay higher prices for their own food because of the artificially inflated demand. As I said, most of these third world populations don’t understand voluntary mindsets as espoused by MEN. What they DO understand is insufficient resources; so if we stop exporting our food and shut down our borders to immigration, their populations will drop to sustainable levels.

Of course, the status quo — including MEN — won’t entertain such notions. The big agribusiness corporations won’t stand for it, and the fluff-bunnies who bury their heads in the sand and lie to themselves about the unpleasant realities of human existence would rather die than face such realities.

But MEN mentions a third “mountain” in their editorial which leads me to believe that someone over there is actually reading WVWNews and listening to the Western Voices podcasts. To the best of my knowledge, we are the only organization that has pointed out the flaws of a growth-based economy time and time again. Here is what they said:

“That leaves the third and tallest mountain, economic reform. As our economies are now structured, we depend on population growth to support economic growth. Imagine a world in which demand for all the fundamental human necessities — food, shelter, etc. — were shrinking every year. To sustain our population at lower, healthier levels, we’ll have to invent a human economy that can maintain prosperity without growth. To do that, we’ll need brand new economic tools. We need new systems in which no one is placed at an unfair disadvantage. That doesn’t mean turning to socialism, communism or any other obsolete social system. Instead, we need something new that rewards human innovation without requiring human expansion.”

Naturally, their editorial goes on to discuss surmounting “cultural” barriers and other multi-culti propaganda.

Either way, it is clear that our economic ideas are gaining the attention of not just the traditional right — but the traditional left as well. This is not surprising. At their core, many people on both ends of the political spectrum are simply aiming for human good, happiness and prosperity. Our economic ideas are oriented toward achieving those objectives. So I’m glad that some on the traditional left are finally seeing that socialism and communism are as much dead-ends as capitalism. They are starting to look hard at third-way economic ideas — and clearly doing so through reading our websites as we express these ideas in a unique fashion.

The next thing I recommend, though, to our readers at Mother Earth News is that they read The New Racial Consciousness. In this podcast, I explain (with copious citation) why sustainable economic systems — which depend upon both altruism and cooperation — can only be brought into fruition in a condition of ethnic homogeneity.

The desire for ethnic homogeneity has absolutely nothing to do with mindless hatred for “the other,” and everything to do with understanding that many of the best of human characteristics are most operative in conditions of ethnic homogeneity. You can see this, to this very day, in certain remote tribes. You can also see it, to a certain extent, in countries such as Israel and Japan that have a clear and unambiguous ethno-racial basis and core. The bottom line is that multi-culturalism and multi-racialism are completely incompatible with the sorts of cooperation needed to move to sustainable populations, conservation and economics.

So as a pre-condition of solid economics, sustainable populations and environmental conservation we must also synchronize ethnic and national borders. This will ultimately be to the benefit of ALL unique cultures and peoples.
And this is the fourth and highest mountain that MEN left unstated, and dares not mention.

Invention Continues …

I mentioned in an earlier post that I’ve switched to the Arduino platform for embedded systems development because that will allow other EAU members to duplicate my electronics products more easily. These will be licensed under a modified Creative Commons license that allows any EAU member to duplicate or enhance the designs either for themselves or for profit so long as the original creator is noted and improvements are put back into the knowledge pool.

The good news is that my latest Arduino-based design is nearly complete. A couple of prototypes are working fine in the field and I should have some professionally made printed circuit boards delivered next week. If these work as they should, we’re only a couple of weeks away from me uploading a zip file to our members-only site that includes schematics, printed circuit files, software/source-code, descriptions and pictures.

Oh — what is this device you ask? You’ll just have to wait to find out. It’ll be put on the members-only site. Membership, after all, has its privileges.

Parasites to Seize 401(k)s

I’ve described, at great length and with detail, what is wrong with Social Security. The core issue is inflation brought about by a combination of fiat currency and a government that wants to spend (get power) with taxing (suffering consequences).

The inflation creates a situation where the only way to pay for social security (which would otherwise work just fine) is to have an infinitely expanding tax base. Obviously, this is impossible; and if anything the pool of people being taxed has shrunk over the years until, if Obama’s latest proposals are enacted, the majority of voters will finally draw more from government than they contribute. So in such an environment, and when faced with the prospect of having to repudiate their communist principles in order to set things right, legislators are prone to opt for measures that are even more communistic and draconian than those that already exist.

One thing you can count on is that the commies always wait for an ideal opportunity to strike — and right now, with the market down and people having short memories, they see such an opportunity.

Over the long run, the stock market has been the most worthwhile investment a person can make. If you had invested $1,000 in blue-chip stocks in 1982, despite the ups and downs of the market, you would have over $8,000 today. If you had put that money in a savings account at 3% interest, you would have about $2,200 today. If you had put that money in gold, you’d have around $2,500 today.

In other words, historically, when money is invested for the long term, the single best place a person can put money is in the common stock of solid companies. It’s just that simple.

But most people don’t have a long time horizon. All they know is that their 401k is worth 33% less than it was a year ago. In their mind, they have “lost” that money; which shakes their confidence in the stock market as a whole. This is especially the case for people who are close to retirement age and are much more interested in security. Though, I should point out, well-proven investment strategies have long advocated that the closer you get to retirement age, the less of your money should be in stocks. That’s because, taken on the short term, stocks are quite volatile — they’ll gain or lose 10% in a day. As you get closer to retirement age, the risks of volatility outweigh the benefits of gains, and smart folks move their money from stocks to either bonds or even money market accounts.

Either way, many folks aren’t knowledgeable about that stuff, and are either unnecessarily worried about their current portfolio value or left their money in stocks right up until the time to retire. So, in their minds, they’ve been fleeced — even though, taken over the long range, anyone who has been saving for 30 years via the stock market has had returns more than double the compound rate of even real inflation. (Real inflation is 5% higher than what the government reports.)

So they are ripe for the next attack. That next attack from the commies cuts right to the core of wealth by putting 401Ks under the Social Security Administration and giving back a “guaranteed 3% annual return, adjusted for inflation.” In addition, 401Ks would no longer be tax deductible and when you died, half of it would be seized by the government. No, I’m not kidding. Just look at this article.

When you see the article, the language used by proponents of this plan and their Democrat/Communist partisans should make your blood boil. They talk about the fact that 401K contributions are deductible as being a “government subsidy.” It’s only a subsidy under one condition: that everything I earn belongs to the government by right. And there is only one form of government where this is true: communism.

Let me make it clear to these communist idiots: Hey! Commie Idiot! What I earn is mine! Everything taken from my paycheck subsidizes YOU. You are subsidized by my hard work. Or, to put it another way: I am productive and YOU are a parasite. Letting me keep what I have earned by the sweat of my brow is not a subsidy, it is JUSTICE. And de-funding your miserable existence on the back of hardworking people would likewise be JUSTICE. Be careful how far you push the goose that lays the golden egg.

Arduino Embedded Systems Design

I really enjoy engineering generally, and electrical engineering in particular. My favorite toys for such endeavors are transceivers and embedded systems. For about a zillion years I worked mainly with Z80s and the like, but a few years back I switched to PIC microcontrollers. In recent times, I’ve migrated to Atmel’s 8-bit RISC AVR platform.

AVR development is already easier and cheaper than PIC development right out of the box, along with full-fledged free C compilers (AVR-GCC) and the whole nine yards.

But, now along come the Italians and give us something really cool and really nifty: Arduino.

The Arduino platform — complete with free software and libraries for all the most common stuff — makes embedded development incredibly inexpensive and ridiculously easy. (At least, for folks who are into that sort of thing.)

Now — you may ask — what does this have to do with the normal subject matter of my blog?

Well, for one thing, no rational person is one dimensional. But, for another … it just so happens that I invent all kinds of stuff — hardware, software, gizmos and you name it. 99% of the time, I just use whatever I invent for my own purposes or even put it into the public domain.

But here’s the cool thing about Arduino (and Freeduino). By using Arduino as a common reference platform, it will make it easy for me to express at least a subset of my inventions in a form that can be easily duplicated by people who don’t own a bunch of specialized hardware. All they need to get is an Arduino, a Shield and the parts that I specify — hook them up the way I illustrate, and program the beast using the software I provide (which they can update) and — shazaam — they can duplicate my work.

What this means is that, using the Arduino as a reference platform, it will be practical to share a subset of my inventions via the EAU Members-Only website. Why? Because I’m always talking about things like starting a home business, making your home the center of your family’s economic life and that sort of thing. By providing some of my inventions to members via the EAU Members-Only website, any member who wishes to use those inventions as a means of starting a home (or other) business — or just to add to his/her own level of self-sufficiency — can do so.

This is called in-group altruism. It’s adaptive.

The first Arduino gizmo I’ll be posting is a device that I’m designing for my chicken coop that turns on brooder lights at very low temperatures to keep my chickens from freezing and keeps their water at around 40F in the winter. This general design could be adapted for about a million other purposes. There’s no real rocket science involved — I just haven’t found a device in existence that does what I want, so I’m making my own.

So you’ll see the first designs of this sort up on the EAU Members-Only website in about a month.

Employment is not Empowerment, Ownership is

In a recent discussion with a friend of mine, she alluded to women entering the workforce as a path to personal empowerment.

This is where I feel compelled to point out something fairly obvious.

Income flows into one hand, then exits the other to pay for necessities and maybe a few luxuries. Income is absolutely meaningless except to the extent that it supplies the very bottom tier of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs: food, water and shelter. Beyond that, only income that is retained in the form of wealth is actual empowerment.

If you have income, you eat for today. If you have wealth, you can eat for life. And if you can eat for life, then you have the time and ability to exercise control over your immediate environment — and possibly even over the environment of others. If you have income, you donate $10 to the candidate of your choice. If you have wealth, you donate $10,000 via various mechanisms. If you have income, you are just a statistic. If you have wealth — you are represented in Congress.

Employment means going and coming according to someone else’s dictates, doing whatever they say once you are there, and sometimes even living by their rules once you are at home. That, friends, is not “empowerment.”

Wealth, on the other hand, means ownership. When you are the owner, then you can come and go on your own schedule, and do as you please while there. And you get to be the one dictating the schedule of others.

Thus, our objective is not employment — but ownership. Ownership can be facilitated by employment either through ESOPs (Employee Stock Ownership Plans), or through retaining income earned through employment rather than spending it.

In other words — for employment to be a source of empowerment, the employee must first learn how NOT to spend. Anyone who doesn’t learn that lesson first ends up on a glorified plantation.