Will the United States Collapse or Decentralize?

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The Collapse of Rome

I wonder whether the United States will act like a big bubble with its elites clinging to power and collapse like the Roman Empire, or eventually rise to the challenge and transform itself, decentralizing and seeking constructive social solutions like China since the rule of Deng Xiaoping.

This week, in a class I am teaching, we talked about whether the centralizing tendencies in the US economy and government can be reversed. There are a growing number of populist movements, left and right, that feel the loss of community and the destructiveness of corruption in both centralized corporations and governments. They have a nostalgia for the old life in the small town, where people took care of themselves and a highway was their only involvement with a state.

Let’s start by asking whether we could revert to small towns, and whether there would be a social consciousness to do so. The United States is much more populated than at the time of the founders, and there is probably not enough land for everyone to have a subsistence farm. Continue reading →

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Fixing Washington Requires an End to PAC and Corporate Donations

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Presidential Candidate Mitt Romney in front of a Washington is Broken sign

Ending PAC and Corporate donations to political parties and election campaigns is the first step to solving Washington’s problems and returning the government to the people. Candidates from both political parties agree that “Washington is broken.” At left is an image of Mitt Romney saying this on his campaign tour. President Obama made similar statements when he was running. There are many systemic viruses in the U.S. government that need fixing. Many unprincipled laws and constitutional amendments have been passed since the U.S. founding. However, people work for those who pay them, and currently our political parties and platforms are funded by special interests and not average citizens. Reforms that change this funding stream are necessary to return the U.S. government to its citizens.

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Why Christians Should Oppose a Government Definition of Marriage

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Should a Government Define Marriage?

Social conservatives have been put on the defensive by gay activists who have been getting laws passed that support homosexual marriages. They have reacted by promoting laws and constitutional amendments in the states and the federal government that would define marriage as a union of a man and a woman. They hope this would effectively put an end to legalizing gay marriage.

In this article, I am not going to either defend or oppose homosexual marriages, but argue such an amendment is against the founding principles of the United States. The proposed constitutional amendments would put morality in the realm of government and effectively violate the principles of separation of church and state. Social conservatives who want to make Christianity the official religion of the United States might support this legislation, but political conservatives who believe in the First Amendment should oppose it. Government has no role in defining religious values.

The very groups promoting a Constitutional Amendment to define marriage as a union between a man and a woman should realize that this would put the government, not God, in charge of marriage. It would undermine the separation of church and state, be a totalitarian law, and desacralize marriage.

The purpose of a good government is to create a rule of law that protects people and allows them to live together peacefully. Unfortunately the general ignorance of that purpose and the desire instead to see government as a means to force others to believe or pay for something we want has become the norm. The founders were worried something like this would happen and turn their republic into a mobocracy.

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The High Road Response to the Death of Osama bin Laden

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I am not surprised at the jubilation in response to the death of Osama bin Laden, yet I believe, a more wise and mature response would not be to cheer or gloat over the defeat of an enemy, but only to feel that a perpetrator had been brought to justice. Paragon House author David Gushee has reminded us of the verse Proverbs 24:17:

Do not rejoice when your enemies fall, and do not let your heart be glad when they stumble.

Jubilation in front of the White House after the announcement of the death of Osama bin Laden.

The jubilation in the U.S.  seems in some way parallel to the jubilation by Islamists in the Middle East after the towers came down on 9/11. Americans were suffering great pain and considered such celebrations very callous. We looked up to those many Muslims who we believed to have a higher consciousness, those who were more somber after 9/11 and expressed sympathy and grief for Americans who lost loved ones. Do we feel sympathy for the relatives of those who died and belonged to a group that professes to be our enemy? Continue reading →

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Corporate Taxes, Mass Envy, and Economic Justice

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In recent days it has been popular to attack General Electric Corporation for not paying any corporate taxes on the $14.2 billion in profits it made last year, $5.1 billion of which was made in the U.S. When the country is so badly in debt, it is easy to become insecure and hysterical and to look at any source of money and go after it, like a hungry wolf. However, this is a non-rational form of envy. Not only is envying the wealth of others a sin according to the Ten Commandments, in the case of corporate taxes it is economically unwise. In fact, corporate taxes and tax breaks are part of our social sickness, not the cure. In fact General Electric received a tax benefit of $3.2 billion last year as a result of this sickness.

(Reuters) – Most U.S. and foreign corporations doing business in the United States avoid paying any federal income taxes, despite trillions of dollars worth of sales, a government study released on Tuesday said.

The Foolishness of Corporate Taxes

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Growing Patent Abuse by Corporations: Seed extinction and bio-piracy

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Western-patented corn is forcing India's farmers out of business

Some large corporations are now using patents to gain monopoly control of products that have been used by traditional societies for hundreds of years. These patent abuses are particularly alarming in the areas of medicine and food, the things necessary to sustain life. When a large corporation controls the supply of medicine or food to entire populations, the situation is far more serious than a copyright on a book or patent on a better mousetrap.

Monsanto has been getting great scrutiny recently. They are gaining a virtual monopoly on the world’s food supply by controlling the market on seeds.

In the US, Monsanto owns 90 percent of soy, 85 percent of corn, and 95 percent of sugar beets — all genetically modified… When Monsanto purchased Semenis, just one of its many subsidiary seed companies, it gained control of an estimated 40 percent of the US vegetable seed market in one go — from peppers to peas, lettuce to lima beans.

The company’s seed library dominates the market so much that American farmers, even organic farmers, have little choice but to buy from them.—Ourfutureplanet.org

A monopoly on the food supply is sufficient cause for great concern, not only for prices but for health and human security. But perhaps worse has been the abuse of genetic patents Continue reading →

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The Smaller the Government, the Greater the Representation

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The truism “The Smaller the Government, the Greater the Representation” is going to be difficult to implement in Egypt, Tunisia, and elsewhere as the world clamors for democracy. For, the model they look up to, the United States, has largely abandoned its Republican form of government to rule by special interests. And, one of the largest and most powerful special interests is bureaucracy itself, especially as more people seek government jobs.

The modern world, while it desires freedom, has largely forgotten the lessons of the past. It is useful to meditate a moment on these words from Immanuel Kant:

The democratic mode of government makes [representation] impossible, since everyone wishes to be master. Therefore, we can say: the smaller the personnel of the government (the smaller the number of rulers), the greater is their representation and the more nearly the constitution approaches to the possibility of republicanism; thus the constitution may be expected by gradual reform finally to raise itself to republicanism.—Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace

Is our desire to personally use the government to influence others? Continue reading →

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Seven Moral Reasons Governments Should Not Borrow Money

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As we watch the out-of-control debt rise in the United States, it is worth thinking about whether it is wise, or even moral, for a government to borrow money. I will argue that, in most cases, it is immoral.

  1. Borrowing money makes Citizens Vulnerable. When you buy something from savings, you have true ownership and control. There is no lender that can call in the loan or force you into bankruptcy. When a government borrows money, its citizens become vulnerable to a fiscal collapse. However, the primary role of a government is to protect its citizens. Borrowing money is a violation of this sacred trust.
  2. Government borrowing is an oppressive abuse of power. In the private sphere, a borrower is an individual person who can be held accountable to his own contracts. However, in the public sphere, the borrower is usually not the person to pay back the loan. Such borrowing is a form of oppression of others and their future.
  3. Government borrowing creates economic injustice. The lending of money to government comes from passive investors, who earn wealth from taxpayers. This is a system that shifts wealth from the working class to the elite. Continue reading →
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Anatomy of a Government-Caused Bubble

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Cybernetics is a simple way to analyze systems of any type, and can be used to graphically display government tinkering with normally stable social systems. The black box is the simplest way to describe inputs, outputs and feedback without having to understand the complicated workings of what is in the box (e.g., Congress). Here is a simple diagram:

Black Box with feedback control loop

In diagram above, you could imagine the black box as a thermostat. The input is electricity; the output is a signal to turn on the heating unit. The feedback loop is a temperature sensor that kills the input signal if the temperature becomes too hot or enables it if the temperature becomes too cold.

Next we can view a diagram of stable home mortgage system: Continue reading →

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Ending U.S. Pension Fund Bubbles

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The graphical progression of an economic bubble

There is a long history of economic bubbles in the United States going back to the Mississippi bubble in the 18th century. Bubbles are caused by speculation in which people grow wealthy by some scheme in which later comers to the scheme fund earlier members. Bubbles are all theoretically unsustainable and eventually cause a crash that hurts the last and widest ring of speculators. The role of government should be to provide a rule of law that makes ponzi schemes illegal as many ordinary people get hurt when bubbles burst. Many defined benefit government pension plans qualify as such schemes.

Unfortunately in the United States the budgets of both state governments and the federal government have become based numerous ponzi schemes. Governments, while making an effort to punish promulgators of ponzi schemes like Bernard Madoff in the private sector, have failed to curb or prosecute the creation of their own schemes. They have been jaundiced by their own power to tax and spend. And, they have been swindled into promoting such schemes by special-interest campaign contributions.

While there are many forms of government ponzi schemes that need to be corrected, the concept of defined pension fund benefits is the current bubble bursting. It is been playing out graphically on television in the standoff at the Wisconsin capitol as I write this article. Let’s begin with a primer on bubbles so that we can better understand the pension-fund scams that have been sold to school teachers and others by union leaders and corrupt or gullible politicians.

One necessary political and economic reform will be to understand and outlaw the creation of government ponzi schemes, for the role of government is to provide rule of law that protects people and creates a genuinely fair and democratic economic playing field, so we do not have such bubbles arising and causing social chaos in the future. Continue reading →

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