Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness, Version 4.0 - Page 5 of 13

Why a New Election Method is Required: The Failure of Current Systems

Posted on April 25, 2012 by Gordon AndersonApril 25, 2012

Bankrupt European economies and the out-of-control U.S. debt are problems symptomatic of democracies. Democracy was tried by Ancient Greeks, and similar problems occurred in ancient times. Plato, in the The Republic, listed several problems of democracy, among them:

Democracies encourage mediocre leadership.
Leaders must pander to the selfish desires of their constituents.
Leaders focus on short-term goals to get elected, and
Democracies tend to spend more than they take in.(1)

Plato’s proposal was to create a communist-type government that was run by philosopher-kings, Ancient Greece’s version of the technocrat. His idea was to assign the most qualified and skilled person to perform important tasks of leadership and education.

While sympathetic to Plato’s desire to create a better society, Aristotle shot down many of Plato’s ideas in his Politics. For one thing, Aristotle understood that the most skilled people may not motivate the average citizen. He argued that one mother with 5 children could better educate them than a philosopher-king responsible for 1,000 children. First, the mother would be personally motivated to care for each child, while the teacher could not give such personal attention to all. Secondly, the teacher would primarily be motivated by the desire to seek an income for himself, and the learning by students he taught would be a byproduct, not the primary concern of the teacher.

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Legitimate and Illegitimate Constitutional Amendments

Posted on March 28, 2012 by Gordon AndersonMarch 28, 2012

The purpose of a constitution is to regulate the flow of power, not to pass laws

In recent years, particularly in the state of Minnesota, constitutional amendments have become viewed as an alternative method of passing legislation when it is threatened with an executive veto. Such amendments get placed on the ballot by the legislature for a voter referendum. If passed, they become law with any action by the governor. The problem is that the purpose of a Constitution is to establish the parameters and machinery of government, including how legislation gets passed, and rights of citizens that must be protected—not as the vehicle for passage of individual laws.

The purpose of a constitution is not an alternative place to enact taxes or laws relating to the specific goals of political factions or interest groups. That is the purpose of the legislature, and a governor’s veto is an established check on the power of the legislature designed to ensure that bills serve the interest of all parties before getting signed. If a bill cannot get enough votes to override a governor’s veto it should be killed. Our founders did not intend contentious issues that had a simple majority to be an adequate form of government as it does not protect the people from what they called “mobocracy.” Continue reading →

Is the “Do-Nothing Congress” Responsible for Job Growth?

Posted on February 5, 2012 by Gordon AndersonFebruary 5, 2012

President Obama railing against the "Do-Nothing" Congress in December 2011.

In recent speeches President Obama has complained about the “Do-Nothing Congress” and stated this as a reason why he should get re-elected. He also has been talking about increased job growth and taking credit for this because it has occurred during his administration. But what if the increased job growth is a result of the Do-Nothing Congress and nothing to do with his administration?

Two reasons for job decline in previous years can be directly tied to an activist Congress. First, the housing bubble was created as a result of government intervention in the housing market by guaranteeing loans to unqualified buyers. This encouraged corruption in the mortgage industry because the lenders were protected in the case of loan failures, and they could make more money by creating bad loans. When this housing bubble burst, large unemployment, initially in the construction business, but later in secondary markets was the result. Hence, job decline can be directly tied to a “Do-the-wrong-thing Congress.” Continue reading →

A Glimpse at the Coming Death Panels in the U.S.A.

Posted on January 4, 2012 by Gordon AndersonJanuary 4, 2012

Newsweek, September 21, 2009

We all knew that the Affordable Health Care Act, popularly known as Obamacare, would lead to lead to rationing. Shortly after Barack Obama became President, he and Nancy Pelosi began promoting such reforms–to redistribute a shrinking pie more equitably. Instead of doctors and patients, or even insurance companies, deciding who would receive medical care, when they would receive it, and how much they would receive, there will now be 160 panels of bureaucrats whose primary mission is to reduce health care costs to the government.

As 2014 approaches, what Sarah Palin called “death panels” are starting to take shape. In this recorded interview with Mark Levin, Jeff, a neurosurgeon, describes what it will mean for his profession.

“If someone over 70 years old has a bleed on the brain in the middle of the night, I have to wait for a panel in Washington to tell me whether I can operate…. I’ve been 9 years in medical school and 10 years in training and now I’ve got people who don’t know a thing about what I am doing telling me when I can or cannot operate.” Without special permission to operate, the new prescription for a bleed on the brain for people over 70 years of age will be “comfort care.” Such decisions will not be determined by a doctor’s evaluation of whether a surgery would provide the patient with many more years of a high quality life; they will be a death sentence.

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The Presumption of Reason

Posted on December 15, 2011 by Gordon AndersonDecember 15, 2011

In this address, perhaps the last paper he wrote, Professor Hayek elaborates on the relationship between the evolution of the moral order and evolution of reason, arguing that the latter is dependent on the former, and that rationalists, like Marx and others, who try to construct a social order based on reason (just a small portion of the spontaneous social order) are doomed from the start.Hayek could be considered a pioneer in the field of Integral Political Economy, although he didn’t use that term. His approach is interdisciplinary and integrates scientific and historical approaches to knowledge.

The Presumption of Reason¹

F.A. Hayek on receiving the ICUS Founder’s Award

F. A. Hayek

The relationship between the theory of evolution and the development of culture raises a number of highly interesting questions, to many of which economics as a science provides philosophical access that few other disciplines offer.

There has however been great confusion about the matter. So-called social Darwinism, in particular, proceeded from the assumption that any investigator into the evolution of human culture has to go to school with Darwin. This is however quite mistaken. The idea of evolution stems from the theory of language and from the theory of law, not to mention economics, and long antedated Darwinism. Indeed, not only is the idea of evolution much older in the social sciences than in the natural sciences, but I would even be prepared to argue that Darwin got the basic ideas of evolution from the social sciences. As we learn from his notebooks, Darwin was reading Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations at just that time, in 1838, when he was formulating his own theory. In any case, Darwin’s work was preceded by decades, indeed by a century of research concerning the rise of highly complex spontaneous orders (such as the market order, and other institutions and traditions) through a process of evolution. Even words like “genetic” and “genetics,” which have today, long after Darwin, become technical expressions of biology, were by no means invented by biologists. The first person I know to have spoken of genetic development was the German philosopher and cultural historian Herder. We find the idea again in Wieland, and again in Humboldt. Thus modern biology has borrowed the concept of evolution from studies of culture of older lineage. If this is in a sense well known, it is also almost always forgotten. Continue reading →

Fixing “Failed Capitalism” with Principled Rule of Law

Posted on December 6, 2011 by Gordon AndersonDecember 6, 2011

Protests Against Capitalism Often Fail to Understand It

Today I was referred to an article in The Times (London) by Matt Ridley titled “Yes, capitalism failed. It’s just too cosy.” What Ridley was criticizing is the “crony capitalism” that reflects our current economic systems in the US and Europe. The Solyndra failure and the housing bubble are archetypical examples of the failure of crony capitalism, where politics and capital investment are too cozy.

Matt Ridley, like many neo-classical economists reminds us that this is not the economics of Adam Smith who was for a free market. Ridley concludes by stating that “capitalism represents the interests of the rich, whereas the market represents the interests of the poor.”

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Government and Unions: Where’s the Referee?

Posted on October 21, 2011 by Gordon AndersonOctober 21, 2011

The culture war in the United States can be compared to one big labor dispute between employers and workers. When the 20th Century began, the United States was in the middle of a great growth of industry, and there were many industrial labor disputes. These disputes occurred in the private sector, between capital and labor. These disputes were settled by governors and courts and eventually legislation was passed that legalized private unions and placed limits on the use of power of both parties, so that labor disputes could be settled peacefully. Government served its proper role of creating rule of law and serving as a referee.

Today the situation has changed. The big labor dispute is between government unions and taxpayers. They battle it out between political parties that represent factions, with Democrats shouting “the rich need to pay their fair share,” and the Republicans repeating the phrase “no new taxes.” If a member of either party gets elected as a governor or president, he (she) is expected to represent the partisan position of the party that elected them. In no case will the government get a leader in the position to settle the dispute, one that sees both the vices and virtues of both sides. We have to ask, “Where is the referee?”

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FDA gives patent on public domain gout drug

Posted on October 17, 2011 by Gordon AndersonOctober 17, 2011

The corruption in US regulatory agencies has reached a new milestone as the FDA gave URL Pharma the sole right to sell Colcrys (colchicine), a drug used to treat gout for thousands of years. Now the price of the drug has increased from $34.83 for 60 tablets to $306.86 for 60 tablets. This problem, exposed by CBS 60 Minutes, exemplifies the ever more urgent need for US regulatory agency reform that I wrote about in April 2010. We are heading down a road that can lead the FDA to authorize one company to sell all drinking water.

This blatant conflict of interest between a corporation and the agency supposed to regulate it has turned the FDA into a pipeline for favors to friends that turns US citizens into their unwitting slaves. Ending such conflicts of interest created by regulatory agencies can greatly reduce the cost of health care in the United States, in this case nearly 10 times. Ironically, many of the proposed “solutions” provided in Obamacare rely on creating similar agencies lacking proper checks and balances that will only increase prices and divide the spoils of such a corrupt system among a few more foxes. Continue reading →

Solyndra and Foreclosure Rentals: When the Referee Becomes a Player

Posted on September 26, 2011 by Gordon AndersonSeptember 26, 2011

Its easy for politicians to believe promises of lobbyists.

When a referee of a football game starts choosing sides he gets fired, and Washington’s attempt to become a player rather than a referee in the U.S. economy should cause the same outrage as we would see against a football referee choosing sides. The Solyndra scandal shows how easy it is for governments to back the wrong horse when attempting to become a player, wasting millions of taxpayer dollars and creating unviable jobs when market forces are defied. The entry of the government into the rental market after it foolishly backed private home mortgages is another example of government destruction of the economy when it becomes a player.

The proper role of government vis-a-vis the economy is that of referee, not a player. Government, by its very nature, creates and enforces rule of law. The basic principle underlying governance is power. However, the basic principle that underlies an economy is the market. A market is governed by the principles of production and exchange. These are not the principles that drive a government.

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Collective Farms as a Solution to the Welfare State’s Demise?

Posted on September 14, 2011 by Gordon AndersonSeptember 14, 2011

A Radical Overhaul of Welfare

Growing Vegetables on a Modern Collective Farm

This article proposes the radical overhaul of government welfare in the United States to solve many social ills the present system creates. Instead of cash payouts and food stamps that cause social dependency, despondency, and ghettos where the poor are jammed together in cities, it is proposed that the government provide a social safety net through living on collective farms. This is a type of communism, but not communism for the entire population, only the welfare class. While providing a safety net, it would put people in a constructive setting where they could work for their sustenance or be cared for largely by others who are not employed by the private economy.

This type of system would be a modern version of the Babylonian system of temple welfare that lasted over 1,000 years and was discussed on this blog on August 16. It would dramatically reduce taxes and crime, and provide self-esteem and personal life skills necessary for employment in the private economy. It would provide a path for those who wanted to join the private economy in a productive capacity. These collective farms could both produce healthy organically-grown fruits, vegetables, and eggs and provide places for social security and long-term care for those too old or ill to work who had not adequately saved or have family who can care for them. They could be modern facilities.

This system is not a foreign concept in the United States, in fact this pretty much describes the social function of the Shaker communities that were often places of refuge for the unemployed and widowed in 19^th century New England. The Shakers not only cared for their members without state funds, but were also known for their fine hand-crafted furniture. In ancient Babylon the temples may have taught basket weaving and pottery skills and earned some income from the sale of such items.

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