Thank You, One Percenters

I wonder how many of those we-are-the-99% OWS protestors know what household income it takes to join the evil 1% they seek to destroy: the answer is $384,000.

Not exactly the millions and billions President Obama keeps talking about, but why let numbers get in the way of a good demonizing?  Did you ever think about who makes that kind of money?  Well, doctors and lawyers for sure, dentists, optometrists, small business owners, architects, builders, lobbyists, chiropractors, motivational speakers, popular authors, professional athletes, pension managers, car dealers, couples who teach in Universities (or high schools in Wisconsin if both pull that double-dip retire and come back to work maneuver), retired Democrat congressmen, union bosses – folks like that.

And of course, those devil-dog bastard CEOs.  The AFL-CIO tells us that CEO’s average income is $11.4 million, calling it immoral that our top executives earn 642 times the median secretary salary of $29,980.  Not to diminish the profession, but I am pretty sure that a committee of 642 secretaries at Caterpillar could not run the company. The unionists demand is a return to the pre-Reagan 1980 ratio of CEO pay, when top executives made 29 times the median wage of all workers.  Give me a button; I’m in.

In fact, I would bet that a majority of CEO’s would take that deal, since the median CEO pay, according to Salary.com, is $706,000 while 29 times the national median wage of $49,000 would be $1.4 million.   Who knew the AFL-CIO would be the ones to make the case for doubling the pay of CEOs?  Not even them, apparently; and I bet the guys taking dumps on police cars and sniffing feet at OWS New York didn’t see that one coming either.   Some minds are a terrible thing to waste; others are just terribly wasted.        

Maybe CEOs should form a union, because the average income of the ten highest-paid CEOs is only $27 million, while the average income of the top ten celebrities is nearly double that – $43 million – and they are all union.  Clearly, celebrity greed is the cause of CEO suffering; let’s all go occupy Rodeo Drive.

Packer linebacker Clay Matthews is another evil one-percenter.  You want to talk injustice – how is it fair that one guy gets to be so handsome, rich, athletic, smart, and cool while the rest of us can’t see our shoes anymore and have to ask what fork to use?  And what is Clay Mathews supposed to do about our man-crush envy – cut off a bicep so we can have one, too?  Spread the hair around?  Share some of his snaps with the unemployed and uncoordinated?

Clay Mathews is in the top one percent of income earners because he is exceptionally good at doing something only a few other people on the planet can do; he got that way by working harder and longer at it than the millions of other kids who dreamed about being an NFL player but didn’t put in the work.  He earned it; just like the surgeon, singer, business owner, CEO, and derivatives trader who made it into the top 1% of income earners in this nation did.  They get paid a lot because they are worth even more.  Even Lady Gaga.

Drumming all day long won’t change a thing; it is the purchase of the drum that picks winners and losers.  That transaction decides which manufacturer, distributor, and retailer will take one step towards membership in the 1% club, the bane of the coveting class. The market decides who will be a one-percenter, and free market capitalism is the purest of all democracies; each dollar has one equal vote. 

$384,000 isn’t an excessive amount of money to pay for exceptionalism when you think how many civil service and political patronage jobs pay six figures for mediocrity these days.  Don’t you think the guy who repairs your baby daughter’s heart valve is worth four times more than the fellow who will teach her to read poorly when she reaches school age?  If she ends up on food stamps, it will not be the fault of that one-percenter surgeon; it is the slack-o-crat teacher and his union protectors who will condemn her to the impoverished life of the opinionated illiterate.

There are 1.4 million Americans who make up the top one percent.  They earn 16.9% of the nation’s income and they pay 37% of all the taxes.  If the eat-the-rich crowd got their way literally, our nation’s GDP would drop by 17% and taxes on the rest of us would go up 58% to make up for what we just devoured.  And we would still have a 1%, but it would be today’s second stringers.   

Is killing the one-percenters a little too extreme for you?  Ok, how about we just round up all 1.4 million of them and exile them to an island.  And then let’s round up the bottom 1% and send them off to their own island, too.  The socialists’ playbook says that the rich 1% are parasites who would die without the 99% to oppress.  They would also tell you the poorest 1% only find themselves in that predicament because their opportunities have been denied by the richest 1%.

If the socialists have it right, then the citizens of Poor Island would prosper while Rich Island would perish.  What do you think – who would prosper and who would perish?  Which island would you choose to live and raise your family?  Where do you think your children would have more opportunity?  Which would you throw in with if your life depended on it?

And now quit kidding yourself that it doesn’t.

The fools who are trying to destroy our nation’s one-percenters don’t understand that it takes wealth-builders to build wealth.  Ask the folks in Venezuela or Cuba or North Korea how much fun it is when The Occupation works.  President Obama and his OWS mobs have sent a clear message that one-percenters are no longer welcome here.  Well, I have a different message for them: thank you. 

Thank you for employing us, feeding us, housing us, clothing us, curing our illnesses, giving us sight, bringing abundance to market, financing our startups, inventing new technology, buying our insurance, contributing to our 401k, teaching us employable skills, heating our homes, sponsoring our educations, entertaining us, paying more than your share of taxes so we can pay less than ours, funding our charities, endowing our universities, and sacking opposing quarterbacks so the Packers go back to the Superbowl, as God intended.

Thank you very much.

“Moment Of Clarity” is a weekly commentary by Libertarian writer and speaker Tim Nerenz, Ph.D.  Visit Tim’s website http://www.timnerenz.com to find your moment.     

Separation Anxiety

While expressing his solidarity with the Occupy Wall Street movement this week, President Obama said something very weird – that OWS and Tea Party protestors share the frustration of feeling separated from our government.   

No we don’t. I desperately want to be separated from my government again; separation from government is the whole purpose of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.  It draws the lines between us and our government; it is our national restraining order against a stalking pervert who climbs through our windows every chance he gets to steal our stuff and cop a feel while we are sleeping.    

I doubt if separation from government is what makes the employees of Gibson Guitars frustrated these days.  My guess is that the feds busting down their doors and shutting them down indefinitely for no reason whatsoever is probably more of a concern.  They are probably more than a little frustrated that the guy who keeps yammering on about his jobs bill is the reason they lost theirs.  

And it is a safe bet that the small regional banks that are being choked to death by regulators under the Dodd-Frank bank “reform” bill don’t see separation from government as a major problem.  Congressman Frank sees no conflict between his taking heaps of cash from the giant Wall Street banks and writing the new rules that effectively take out their smaller competitors while guaranteeing their profits.  He supports OWS, too, providing a role model for schizophrenics with political ambitions. 

And weren’t you happy to learn that First Lady Michelle Obama wants to “shape” your children for you?   Personally, I would like to establish some considerable distance between me and someone who thinks children should be shaped, like little pieces of clay.  Does she want to dress them up and take pictures, too?  We like our kids to be separated from strangers like that…and we like our First Ladies to be a little less creepy.  I’m not sure how the OWS crowd feels about it.

By linking the Tea Party and OWS, President Obama once again shows us he doesn’t know his country very well.  Most of us do not want government to sit in our lap; we want it to go lay by its dish. Americans are united in the things we are against; what divide us are the things we are for.

No one wants more crime, poverty, injustice, racism, drug abuse, inflation, illiteracy, pollution, unemployment, bankruptcy, fraud, illness, and premature death; we only disagree about how to combat them.  And everyone sees war as the last resort; we just disagree on what comes second to last. 

President Obama and his ideologically aligned liberals, Democrats, progressives, and socialists are for more government and less liberty.  Like helicopter moms, they see separation from government as way too risky for their citizen/children; they demand a government that protects us from ourselves at our grandchildren’s expense.  

Conservatives, libertarians, constitutionalists, principled Republicans, and political agnostics are for less government and more liberty.  We do not want to be mothered by government; we want to live free of government supervision and approval.  Separation from government does not cause us fear and anxiety; we crave it.  

When asked if we want more government or less of it, Americans consistently choose “less” by 2:1 margins.  That has been one of the most consistent polling questions over the past three decades.  OWS is not the 99%; it is some tiny fraction of the 33% who say “more”. 

When I went off to college, my mom and dad did not cry and neither did I; after 18 years of dependence on them, we were both happy to empty the nest. I was grateful to them for preparing me for that day, and they were even more grateful that it finally came. 

There were other kids who spent that whole day bawling with their parents; I didn’t understand why back then, but a little wisdom has stuck to me over the decades that have passed since.  We all grew older but we didn’t change much. 

Some Americans see every new day as an opportunity to learn and grow, to overcome new challenges, to succeed and prosper, to be responsible, to discover how high is up for ourselves and to help others do the same.  The happy kids.

Others wake to dread the dawn; seeing only hurdles that can’t be overcome, barriers that can’t be breached, disadvantage and unfairness, and a world so difficult to manage that only government can protect us from it.   The bawling kids.

The painful truth is that we choose which of those two worlds we will live in.  The happy kids and the bawling kids all went to the same campus.  And the awful truth is that politics is the imposition of one viewpoint upon the believers of the other.   The genius of democracy is that is allows us to change who wins without killing each other.     

In the natural order of things, the mighty fall.  The prodigal squanders, the haughty are brought low, nations decline, empires implode.  This creates space at the top for the lowly to rise.  Our iconic national story is one of humble beginnings which end in glory. 

The problem with government is that it disturbs that natural order; it props up the mighty and crushes the meek.  In a free market, privilege cannot be defended, it must be re-earned.  Enron’s separation from government allowed it to rightfully perish alone; Fannie Mae’s incestuous relationship took us all down with it. 

Maybe the bawling kids are still fooled by the teleprompter President, but the happy kids aren’t buying it.  We are not still mired in recession almost four years later because government can’t clutch us tight enough to its bosom; we are stuck in the ditch because it won’t get off our backs.  

Mr. President, with all due respect, we are not frustrated over our separation from government; it is that your separation from government can’t come fast enough.
    

“Moment Of Clarity” is a weekly commentary by Libertarian writer and speaker Tim Nerenz, Ph.D.  Visit Tim’s website http://www.timnerenz.com to find your moment.    

Occupied

The organizers of the Occupy Wall Street protest finally released their list of 13 demands, about two weeks into the protest.  Better never than late.

First among them is a demand for a law that raises the minimum wage to $20 per hour.  Leading with such a foolish idea makes it pretty hard to read the other 12 without thinking it is the first draft of a David Letterman Top Ten List compiled by someone who learned math in a government school.

Paying somebody $20 is easy, but it takes more than a law for someone’s work to be worth more than $20.  They have to possess employable skills that are in demand, exhibit a positive attitude, be accountable, and work well with others – and then actually do something that is worth at least $21 to someone else.  Coming in two weeks late with a badly composed single page list is not the kind of performance that is worth $20/hour to anybody – I can see why they think a law is necessary.

But they are wrong; minimum wage laws are unnecessary.  Median income in the private sector is just under $50,000 per year, or $25 per hour, which is roughly three times the minimum wage mandated by Congress.

What law makes a company pay an employee $25?  Better yet, what law forced that employee to become worth more than $25?  It is the Law of Supply and Demand; and it is apparently 3 times better, as laws go, than the one Congress passed to set a wage floor.  It is useful to remind ourselves why more than half of the people working in this country are already paid $5 more per hour than what these Wall Street occupiers consider “justice”.   The answer, of course, is that their work adds more than $25 to the value of the company which employs them.

The story is the same for the $12 wage and the $12 million salary.  Brett Favre used to be worth millions, and now he isn’t; Aaron Rodgers wasn’t worth millions watching Brett play; now he is worth every penny of the millions he makes playing, but in a few years he won’t be worth millions again.  It’s what you do that pays, not what you know.

There is no government legislation that forces companies to pay more than the minimum wage, just as there is no law that forces companies to provide benefits, or schedule 40 hour weeks, or name holidays, or grant paid vacations.  And yet most firms do.  Why?  Because the law of supply and demand tells them to; and they must obey the laws of economics or perish.  Unlike the perverted corporatism practiced in New York and Washington D.C., the free market has no mechanism to bail out fools, frauds, and failures.

In reality, there is no law that forces companies to actually pay that minimum wage either; most just eliminate the job that is only worth below-minimum.  Setting the minimum wage to $20 would eliminate all the jobs worth $19.99 and under.  This will add many tens of millions of Americans to the ranks of the unemployed and push us over 50% unemployment.

I don’t think the occupiers understood how this economics stuff works, but as luck would have it they don’t have to, since they included a separate demand that everyone who doesn’t work receive a living wage.  “Eaters”, Henry Kissinger called them; who knew it would become a professional vocation one day.

Another occupation demand is a free college education for everyone.  I’m all for that, but not for the reasons you might think.  A no-cost education is only possible if there is no cost to it – no salaries, wages, pensions, maintenance, heat, light, books, etc.  I think it is a terrific idea for University faculty and staff all across the nation to put their money where their mouth is and work for free in unheated classrooms to show their solidarity with the unionist occupation movement and stick it to us greedy, heartless, libertarian capitalists once and for all.   Fists up, anyone?
 
The rest of the demand list is pretty lame and predictable economic suicide – cut off all the energy that is charging the iPhones, Droids, Bluetooth headsets, pads, and notebooks they use to spread the word about the occupation.  And re-elect President Obama – appropriate, since their goal is to collapse the economic system.

But this one is bold: wipe out all debt all over the world. Private, public, corporate, sovereign – just forgive it all.  Write off the tens of trillions owed to bond-holders and bank stockholders and start over; one giant global financial mulligan.  I don’t suppose it has occurred to them that the entire U.S. Social Security system and every other pension plan in the country would be immediately wiped out and nobody would ever loan a penny to anyone ever again.  Dark Ages, Part Dieux, and not one of those fools could shoot his dinner once Taco Bell goes dark.

Maybe if the occupiers had another two weeks to think about it, they would demand we annul all the marriages in the world, too – as long as we are tossing aside solemn commitments.  Just throw the whole world’s car keys into one giant swingers’ bowl to give everybody a fair chance at landing Miss Venezuela or George Clooney, as you prefer.

Why not – this is all about fairness and privilege, right?  It is certainly not fair that the privileged 1% are so unnecessarily beautiful while us 99%ers have to struggle just to be presentable.  That is the whole point of this occupation thing – forcing the privileged few to give it up.  I bet most of those guys, and a bunch of the girls, would take Eva Mendes over Trump’s money if you gave them the choice of which unjust deprivation they would cure first. 

Don’t get me wrong; the protestors have every right to protest, and watching them comforts me that we are still a free country, Hank Jr. notwithstanding.  What they don’t have a right to do is occupy; private property is private and public property belongs every bit as much to those Wall Street brokers as it does the dude in the dreads calling them names.

The occupiers should watch and learn from the Tea Party: get your permit, hold your rally, pick up your trash, and go back to work.  Ask Nancy Pelosi if that was effective.  And not to rub it in, but it is a safe bet that the Tea Party will send more of its own to Congress in 2012 again than will the Occupation Movement.  Gingrich has a better shot of getting candidate pledges for his Contract Addendum with America than do the occupiers with their 13 points of light.     

The good news, if you are an occupier, is that you got our attention and made your point; the bad news is that you got our attention and you have no point.  You demand that we surrender our liberty to a mob that couldn’t even get your list of demands typed up on time.  Sorry, I’m taking “or else”.

Want to do something useful to stand up to the Wall Street banksters?  Why don’t you take a break from your occupation to read Ron Paul’s book “End The Fed” and then get back to us.  Some of us have been rousing the rabble long before you occupiers were even born.  Maybe we can do something useful together.

“Moment Of Clarity” is a weekly commentary by Libertarian writer and speaker Tim Nerenz, Ph.D.  Visit Tim’s website http://www.timnerenz.com to find your moment.     

Jack and Jill

Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water.  Jack fell down and broke his crown, and Jill became a libertarian.  What the…?

Here’s how it happened.  First, the IRS took half her water in taxes.  Then the Department of Justice took her bucket because it might be made out of illegal wood from India.  Then the DNR fined Jill for disrupting the habitat of some creek guppy no one ever heard of.

The NLRB ruled Jill could only fetch water in Washington State and had to pay union guys to do it.  TSA did a full cavity search and a double pat down of her mommy parts; that had nothing to do with the bucket of water, they just get off on that stuff.  When she gasped, the EPA fined her for an excessive carbon dioxide emission.

Then Bruce and Lance named Jill in a class-action lawsuit because she got to inherit her husband’s bucket of water while they couldn’t even get married.  She was banned from the Labor Day parade in Wausau because Jack never joined the water-fetchers union and voted Republican once.  The USDA had her detained when a tip came in that she might have raw milk in that bucket.

President Obama decided Jill had more water than she needed, and said we would all be better off with him “spreadin’ the wet around”.   Joe Biden later claimed he hydrated or moistened over 2 million Americans.  One solar panel company took 365 million gallons of government stimulus water and then moved to China.  Al Gore made a Power Point movie that showed Jill boiling polar bears in her bucket on coal-fired stove.  He made billions off the fakery.

An angry mob stalked Jill wherever she went because she wouldn’t buy their water, shouting “shame, shame, shame” and drumming for months.  When she suggested they could just Segway up the hill and fetch a pail for themselves like she did, the Congressional Black Caucus called her a racist and Maxine Waters told her to go to hell.  Jimmy Hoffa said he would take sons of bitches like her out; she was pretty sure he didn’t mean on a date.  

Afraid for her life, Jill went to buy a handgun but had to wait five days.  Then she found out she could not carry it in her purse in Wisconsin until November anyway. While she counted the days down, a teen flashmob beat and then pistol-whipped her after the state fair.  “Wow – how’d you guys get your training and permits already?” she marveled, spitting teeth.  Jill was a little naïve about criminals and guns. 

Meanwhile Ben Bernanke started printing trillions of new bucket-o-water redemption certificates, and Jill’s bucket of real water shot up in price from 300 certificates per fluid ounce to over 1,900 of the bogus Fed water-coupons.  Ron Paul and Peter Schiff said “toldya” while Michael Moore made a movie about Jill’s obscene water-wealth entitled “Koch Whore.”  When Jack Jr. got suspended from school for calling some gay kid a “teabagger”, Jill wondered why all those liberal commentators on TV still had jobs.   

And then Jill started to notice that fewer and fewer people were hiking up the hill to fetch their own heavy pails of water, while more and more people sat at the bottom of the hill, demanding government quench their thirst.  After a time, they did not even know where the water came from; and they did not care.  They just wanted more; they said they were entitled to it.   

They elected politicians who promised them free water.  Her government blamed the rich water-fetchers like Jill for the thirst of those who sat at the bottom of the hill in poverty.  That same government took and more of Jill’s water away from her in taxes; they forced her to pay fetching permits; they regulated her route; they mandated airbags for her buckets; they forced her to buy insurance she did not want; they invaded other countries and sent her the bill.

And they did not stop at taking her property. They told her where she could send her kids to school and what they must be taught. They made her pay a union in order to fetch buckets of water for herself.  They told her what she could eat, drive, smoke, own, sell, buy, wear, drink, study, build, party with, heat with, light with, listen to, watch, flush, shoot, visit, record, say, write, and marry.

They told her she could not be trusted to make those decisions for herself; and they built new prisons to hold her if she made choices they did not like.  One Party told her this is what democracy looks like; the other Party couldn’t even come up with a catchy slogan for it.    

Both Parties buried the nation in debt so deep that neither Jack Jr. nor Jack III would ever see it paid back.   They spent Jill’s money on themselves and their friends; then they had the nerve to call her greedy and heartless for wanting to keep what she earned for herself and her children. 

And then one day, Jill had a moment of clarity.  She read somewhere that liberty is the absence of government in choice; that government is the absence of liberty in choice; that tyranny is the absence of choice in government.  The dairy-queen light bulb finally went off for Jill.

She saw tyranny for the first time in the good intentions of those who would take her liberty for her own good.  She never asked them to save her, and they never asked if they could. Jill discovered they did not care about her. She remembered that her rights were endowed to her by her Creator, not created by any legislature. She realized that they only took as much liberty from her as she gave away.  

Jill reclaimed her liberty.  She made liberty her first principle – that is what it means to be a libertarian.  Did she live happily ever after?  No, that only happens in fairy tales and in the imaginations of empty heads who believe the lies of politicians who promise happiness they cannot deliver.     

But she did live free ever after; she owned herself.  And so should you.

“Moment Of Clarity” is a weekly commentary by Libertarian writer and speaker Tim Nerenz, Ph.D.  Visit Tim’s website http://www.timnerenz.com to find your moment.     

Heartless

A reader called me “heartless” recently for my libertarian view that three sacred-cow entitlement programs – social security, Medicare, and unemployment compensation – should be abolished as we return to Constitutionally-limited government.

I didn’t take personal offense; the bar has been set pretty high for fighting-words by liberal elected officials who have recently called me a terrorist, declared war on me, called me a lyncher, and told me to go to hell.  “Heartless” has been downgraded from its previous AAA rating.

As difficult as it might be for the unquestioning govbot to imagine, life without these safety-net programs would not simply be possible, it would be better – much better.  The market mechanism for insuring against calamity is called, conveniently, insurance.  

In a 1995 study, Cato Institute concluded that if a worker born in 1970 would purchase private insurance with the money paid into social security taxes each month over a working lifetime, the annuity benefit paid at retirement would be six times higher than the benefit he will receive from social security.  Six times higher.

Tell me, govbots, how is increasing the retirement benefit six-fold heartless?

Let’s try Medicare.  Most of us are covered by employer-provided insurance, or were until President Obama decided to screw that up.  If the Medicare taxes we paid over our working lifetimes would have been invested into private accounts, the annuity stream at retirement would purchase health insurance far superior to the Medicare benefit we will receive from the current government program.

Tell me, govbots, why is better health insurance for seniors heartless?

Unemployment compensation already is insurance; employers pay your premium into a state-run insurance fund.  We are just starting to get socked with premium increases in response to the high numbers of unemployed and the extended periods of benefits doled out by the government.  Don’t kid yourself that you are not paying; those increased premium costs reduce the money available for wage increases or in extreme cases force layoffs.  

How much better for each of us to purchase his/her own unemployment insurance suitable for our circumstances and desires; think AFLAC without having to injure yourself.  It would be risk-weighted, just like car insurance or property insurance; people with stable work histories would pay far less, while people who have trouble holding jobs would pay far more.  Employers with lousy layoff history would have to pay higher wages to attract workers.  You – not the State – would decide the amount and duration of benefits you would receive and you could insure your full salary if you choose to.  I would.     

Tell me, govbots, what is heartless about giving workers control over their own income continuation plans? 

I’ll tell you what is heartless: forcing people into a crappy government pension program that pays one sixth the annuity of private plans is heartless.  Forcing people into a crappy government medical insurance program that costs more, delivers less, and drives the best doctors out is heartless.  Forcing hardworking people to subsidize chronic job-droppers in a crappy government salary insurance plan is heartless.

What is cruelly heartless is that our government officials knew these entitlement programs were unsustainable 15, 20, even 40 years ago and decided to ride them to perpetual re-election anyway – all the way into bankruptcy.  Lying to young people about the certainly of their benefit, lying to old people about the security of their next check, lying to the nation about a trust fund that was raided years ago – now that’s heartless.
 
Government is heartless, not me.  I’m a hunka-hunka burnin’ love compared to the Republocrats who continue to promise benefits that can only be paid if Ben Bernanke succeeds in turning dollars to nickels over there at the Fed’s printing presses.  Speaking of things that we would be better off by abolishing… 

Liberty is compassionate, and don’t let any overeducated simpleton repeating 1930’s talking points tell you different. If social security were abolished, you could receive six times the retirement benefit.  If Medicare were abolished, you could have more money to spend on health care.  If unemployment insurance were individualized, you could continue your weekly pay while you looked for a new job.  And if the Fed were abolished, you would receive those benefits in real dollars.  What sucks about that?

But you can’t, because the government won’t let you.  They don’t need a reason. 

Chile privatized their public pension program years ago.  Even those who transitioned in mid-career received double the benefit in retirement than what would have been paid under the old government social security system.  Doubled it – top that, Congressman Ryan.  Why are we trying to save ours?

Are the Chileans inherently smarter and more responsible than Americans?  I’ve been there; they seemed pretty ordinary to me.  If Americans really are too stupid to fend for ourselves, then for Heaven’s sake let’s quit hiring us for government jobs where we will have to take care of some other human being, too.  Let’s just hire nothing but Chileans from now on.  Maybe that’s the President’s next jobs plan.

The choice is not liberty or compassion; it is liberty or government.  You must decide whether you wish to govern yourself or be governed by someone else.

In Wisconsin we get an up close and personal view of just who that someone else is nearly every week, as they disrupt Special Olympics, vandalize elementary schools, harass food pantries and sheltered workshops, threaten school boards, occupy public buildings, hound the children of elected officials, slander judges, target businesses, abuse the court system, stalk elected officials, and discriminate at parades they insist be given in their honor.

Even if that guy was right about me, heartless still beats mindless any day.  I choose liberty.

“Moment Of Clarity” is a weekly commentary by Libertarian writer and speaker Tim Nerenz, Ph.D.  Visit Tim’s website http://www.timnerenz.com to find your moment.    

Chi Ni De Dou Xi, Obama!

I finally discovered a way to listen to President Obama’s economic team without risking my sanity – watch them on TV in China.

In English, their incomprehensible gibberish is an offensive mix of spin, blame, Keynesian superstition, guess, bravado, rubbish, half-truths, and full-out lies.  In Mandarin Chinese, it is just incomprehensible gibberish. Upgrade.

Zhengzhou is an industrial city of 9 million people in Henan province in the heartland of China; that is where I happened to be when Standard and Poor’s dropped the hammer on the debt-mongers at Treasury and the Fed last week, downgrading U.S. sovereign debt from its long-standing AAA rating. 

The local news showed U.S. officials responding to the downgrade, their comments dubbed – sort of like a Kung Fu movie in reverse. With a little imagination, you could pretend they were actually making sense.  Ok, with a lot of imagination.

Whatever spin they were pitching, the Chinese were having none of it.  Commentators’ body language gave away their disdain for our official excuse-making, Chinese officials harshly scolded the President and Congress for their fiscal irresponsibility, and the Chinese people were angry at their own government for buying so much lousy U.S. debt in the first place. 

On the plus side, I learned a new phrase, “Chi Ni De Dou Xi, Obama!” (eat your own peas, Obama!). 

They are living the American dream over in Henan Province – incomes are rapidly rising as productivity skyrockets and labor skills improve.  People are grateful to their industrialists, entrepreneurs, and traders who rescued them from four decades of spreadin’ the wealth around and the poverty, famine, war, oppression, and death it brought to China. They revere American businessmen, and it was frankly refreshing to be appreciated. 

The entrepreneurial industrialists of Henan Province are young – in their 40’s mostly, and running the firms they founded in their 20’s.  Their squeaky-clean factories are filled with new machine tools, overhead cranes, computer controlled production lines, state of the art environmental protections, automated material handling systems, and six-sigma black belts.  Want to make a Chinese factory worker laugh?  Explain the word “exploitation” to him.   

That investment capital comes from the 30% savings rate of the new Chinese middle class and the low tax rates on corporate income and capital gains.  Factory workers don’t want a union; they buy stock in their firm, share in its profits, and look forward to striking it rich in a future IPO.  They get it; and they learned it from us.

Less than two decades of movement towards free-market capitalism has repaired the damage Mao and his brand of hope and change did to China.  Economic liberty is bringing with it greater personal liberty, prosperity, and peace.  My trip was an eye opener; I could not find the slave labor sweatshops I expected to see, my Facebook was not blocked, and the only government official calling for suppression of free speech was U.S. Senator John Kerry’s call to silence the tea party. 

An Op-Ed in a Chinese newspaper denounced Kerry’s idea, while the American press remained sock-puppet silent.  At a private dinner with the Mayor of Zhengzhou, he called me “genius” (granted, his vocabulary is limited); that same day Joe Biden called me a terrorist.  There is your moment of clarity. 

China is not what’s wrong with America.  Freaks like Biden, Geithner, Bernanke, Obama, Pelosi, and Reid are what is wrong with America. 

Throw in McCain, Bush, McConnell, Boehner, and every other Republican statist masquerading as a conservative at election time.  And include the growing legions of loafing sacks who think the world owes them because they breathe; eaters, Henry Kissinger called them.  People whose idea of justice is to share your money equally among themselves – that is who have brought us low. 

Since 1985, we have bought over $3 trillion of goods from China; in doing so, we have saved over $3 trillion in lower prices for those goods.  I just spent two weeks looking at what the Chinese did with their $3 trillion – new factories, machine tools, power plants, roads, bridges, mines, dams, cars, refineries, stores, offices, railways, ships, ports, vocational training, private schools, and new jobs by the tens of millions.     

Where did ours go?  More government, foreign wars, bad loans, domestic partner benefits, TSA gropers, six miles of orange cones leading up to 8 guys watching the 9th drive a blacktop roller, Viagra for public pensioners, 19 new czars, tens of thousands of pages of new regulations, bank bailouts, more drug prisons, government agencies suing each other, bone-headed recall elections  – stuff like that.

The Chinese are not kicking our ass; we are parking it on their foot.

Did we really think we could sustain a debt economy where some of us flip houses and the rest flip burgers?  Did we really think our private sector would thrive under the thumb of an expanding army of government workers whose career goal is time off?  Did we think taxing and regulating our industries off-shore would make us better off than the countries who welcomed the jobs we chased away?

While we slog through the third year of the Obama depression, China’s economy is growing at over 9%; you have to go there to truly appreciate the joy of real prosperity.  Sound money, lower taxes, less regulation, available energy, hard work, entrepreneurship and invention, labor mobility – there is no magic juice.  The Chinese are simply following the capitalist game plan that they learned from reading American economic history and watching it work in nearby Hong Kong and Taiwan.  It is not China’s fault that our guys don’t read Milton Freidman.

I visited a shipyard in Nan Tong City where tens of thousands of skilled tradesmen are newly employed building semi-submersible drill rigs for Brazil’s booming off-shore oil industry.  Those jobs should have been created in our own Gulf coast yards and those rigs should be operating in our own waters; China only got into the game after Obama shut down our domestic off-shore oil industry. 

It is not the difference in wages that caused those jobs to be lost to Brazil and China; it is the difference in Presidents.  Theirs are better.  Chi Ni De Dou Xi, Obama!

“Moment Of Clarity” is a weekly commentary by Libertarian writer and speaker Tim Nerenz, Ph.D.  Visit Tim’s website http://www.timnerenz.com to find your moment.    

Thank You, Scott Walker

The past few weeks debt-ceiling jabberwocky in Washington D.C. has produced only one clear winner – Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker.

Watching our nations’ leaders flop around like carp in a bucket trying to concoct some incomprehensible mix of bullsnot and pixie dust that will make doing nothing look like doing something has become even more boring than it is pathetic, and that is no mean feat.  Markets have not lost confidence in America; they have lost faith in America’s President and our Congressional leaders.  We all have.

Governor Walker is looking like Winston Churchill next to these cobs.  Residents of the Badger state are lucky to have a Governor and legislature who did their jobs and passed responsible budget reform as their first order of business. The results have been immediate, remarkable, and indisputable.  Washington could learn something from Wisconsin, and here it is: you balance a budget by balancing a budget.  Go do your job.

Walker inherited a $3.3 billion deficit mess from his predecessor, including a cynical $144 million turd dropped in the punchbowl on his way out the door.  Unlike some U.S. President who shall remain nameless, Governor Walker did not make blaming the last guy his re-election strategy on day one of his first term.  He went to work; he did his job; he fixed the budget.  It was not easy; doing the right thing rarely is.

The socialists unleashed a torrent of hate at the new Governor more furious than anyone ever feared might be directed at our first black President, but Walker did not sulk or pout or pitch a fit in prime time.  He did not berate his adversaries.  He did not say an unkind word about the public employees whose unions vilified him and his supporters.  While the opposition party abandoned their posts and fled to another state, the Governor quietly went to work each day and moved his plan through the legislature.

Walker’s budget fix liberated the state from the fiscal death grip of its public sector unions.  He saved taxpayers hundreds of millions, and he saved the jobs of tens of thousands of state workers, municipal employees, and teachers who would otherwise have been laid off, as was the case in Milwaukee and Madison where teachers’ unions shot themselves in the foot by extending contracts before the Walker budget reforms took effect.  Those workers whose jobs were saved won’t say it, but I will:

Thank you, Scott Walker.

All over the state, local government and school districts are saving money, instituting merit pay for teachers, reducing class sizes, improving services, and reducing tax burdens on the real working class. The rank-and-file teachers in Milwaukee have now mutinied, forcing their own union leaders to re-open contract negotiations to bring back teachers laid off by their union’s intransigence.  Whose plan do they demand their unions adopt?  Governor Scott Walker’s plan – imagine that.

Wisconsin has already paid back its long-overdue debt to the state of Minnesota, and it is paying back its debts to trust funds raided over the past decade.  Walker’s fiscal responsibility led to favorable borrowing terms, saving millions each month in lower interest and fees.  Paying down debt improves credit ratings – did you catch that, junk-bond U.S. President who shall remain nameless? 

Governor Walker began his term by announcing, “Wisconsin is Open For Business”.  With changes both overt and subtle, he has turned a hostile business climate into a far more favorable place for businesses to operate.  While a certain anti-business President’s state-suckling show ponies used their subsidies to move overseas – GM to Mexico and GE to China – Walker’s Wisconsin companies stayed here and led the nation in job creation in June, creating over half of all net jobs in the country.  40,000 jobs have been created since he took office in January – that is how you raise revenue without increasing tax rates on anybody.

Employers across Wisconsin have thousands more job openings we can’t fill for the lack of qualified, educated workers.  The Governor has announced an initiative to reform our education system to improve the relevance and effectiveness of our schools, once the best in the nation.  The state teachers’ union, still seething that Walker’s budget fix did not cause the sky to fall, refuses to participate.  Thank God for that, and now Governor Walker is going ahead without them.

It is ridiculous that Wisconsin taxpayers must indulge the vengeful unionists who are trying to recall Walkers’ legislative allies out of pure spite.  Those legislators did nothing wrong; they did their jobs – unlike a certain U.S. President who shall remain nameless, or a certain U.S. Senate who has not passed a budget in two years, or a certain Wisconsin former Governor and his legislatures who spent eight years digging the hole Scott Walker filled in only six months on the job. 

Recall?  Here’s what I recall:  I recall that the Democrats who preceded Walker raised billions in taxes and still left the state billions in the red.  I recall they looted state trust funds earmarked for transportation and malpractice insurance to feather their union nests and then pleaded for federal rail and health care.  I recall that the eighth graders who spent all eight grades under a liberal Democrat governor and legislature tested out at 39% proficient in math.   I recall an attorney general’s DUI, springing a legislator out of jail to vote a bill, a prosecutor hitting on rape victims, and bonuses paid to Capitol staffers while 300,000 Wisconsinites lost their jobs. And I recall a few million dollar pile of useless train cars the former Governor bought in secret on a junket to Spain.  Drum on that.  

All those millions being spent this summer by the unions to recall a handful of State Senators could have been used to help their members meet those new contributions to their own health premiums and pensions that caused them to come unglued.  That is, if the unions gave a spit about their members.  But they don’t; this week’s union priority is harassing a charity for the developmentally disabled that the Governor supports.  You can’t wash off that kind of scum with a chemical peel.   

Libertarians like me can find plenty to criticize in Governor Walker’s first six months.  He killed Constitutional Carry, supports the smoking ban on private property, is dragging his feet on raw milk, sold out micro-breweries, extended unemployment benefits, is on the wrong side of medical marijuana, and should have passed school choice and Right To Work while the AWOL Democrats were channeling their inner Jay Cutler down in Illinois, moping on the sidelines with their hoodies pulled up tight.

But for the life of me, I cannot understand why Republicans in this state have not turned this recall nonsense into a victory dance.  Walker took on the unions and he won.  He had a plan and it worked. The left revealed its vile and corrupted true self for the whole nation to see.  Each day’s new clown act in D.C. reminds us of how much chaos the voters of Wisconsin avoided by having that little recall of our own last November that gave the GOP a shot at governing in Wisconsin.

If they don’t have the nards for it, let me say it for them and every other fiscally responsible citizen of this state: Thank you, Scott Walker.      

“Moment Of Clarity” is a weekly commentary by Libertarian writer and speaker Tim Nerenz, Ph.D.  Visit Tim’s website http://www.timnerenz.com to find your moment.     

And We Wonder

Liberal economist Robert Reich is all over the internet these days explaining that our economic problems would end if banks extended more credit to Americans of modest means.  There’s the path to prosperity – take on more debt.  

And Congress has recently moved to legalize internet gambling in order to generate government revenue.  Debt and gambling – this plan gets better.    

A liberal friend sent me a link to a piece that advocated mandatory unionization of all working Americans.  Debt, gambling, and unions – because it worked so well in Detroit.     

President Obama finally got into the debt ceiling negotiations this week, demanding $600 billion in new taxes.  Debt, gambling, unions, and taxes – that’ll put the “gee” in GDP!   

And he proposed a standard for fuel efficiency that no car can meet.  Debt, gambling, unions, taxes, and no driving – look out, China!  We’re back!  

The President also announced some convoluted public/private partnership with 11 of our largest corporations.  Here’s how it works: we give them billions to invent things we don’t want and they take it. Debt, gambling, unions, taxes, no driving, and malinvestment – heart, heart, smiley, winkey, LOL, whatever that stuff means.

What else…oh, yeah, he wants to get rid of ATMs.  Debt, gambling, unions, taxes, no driving, malinvestment, and no cash.   I’m thinking Nobel Prize #2.

Treasury Secretary Geithner said we must shrink the private sector in order to grow the public sector.  Debt, gambling, unions, taxes, no driving, malinvestment, no cash, and more government.  Take that, Arthur Laffer! 

And finally, ex-czar Van Jones is back in the news, announcing the country is not broke because you still have some money; he is forming his own Tea Party to take it from you.  So there’s the whole plan – debt, gambling, unions, taxes, no driving, malinvestments, no cash, and communism. 

And we wonder why our economy is in the ditch. 

These are the same guys who tell us we need to increase the debt ceiling.  They want us to co-sign for a few trillion of new loans so can keep spending money they don’t have on things we don’t need.  And their plan to pay it back?  Debt, gambling, unions, taxes, no driving, malinvestments, no cash, and more government.   

Not only does this insanity make sense to liberal economists, but they warn that if we don’t let them borrow more money, there will be bad consequences.  Really? Worse than the collapse of the dollar and interest rates with a comma in them?  Here’s a consequence, Mr. Bernanke: everything you have tried has failed; go lay by your dish.     

Van Jones is half-right.  The nation is not broke; it is our government that is broke.  Not because we don’t give them enough money; we will give them $2.6 trillion this year.  It is because the twitterin’ wieners on Capitol Hill spend $1.4 trillion more than that.  If we gave them $10 trillion they would spend $15 trillion – and it would still be still be your fault that kids can’t read.  Because you are a greedy racist, that’s why.   

There is no reason to pass another debt ceiling authorization; we already have one.  And if the one we have doesn’t mean anything, then why bother with another one?

On second thought, Van Jones is right – the federal government is not broke, it owns almost $6 trillion of land.  Put it on E-bay, with no reserve.  Can’t bear to part with it?  My son didn’t want to sell his Mustang dragster either, but he had bills to pay. Man up, Geithner. 

If the IRS can force Green Bay Packer legend Fuzzy Thurston to sell his Super Bowl ring to pay his debts, we can sure as hell force President Obama to sell off a few million acres to cover his golfing and Michelle’s trips to Africa and the lunacy that is the Obama EPA. 

So what will you give up, Mr. President – trees or tree-huggers?  You’re pro-choice, so make one.  And leave our old Packers alone, you heartless Bear-loving Blagonad.
  

“Moment Of Clarity” is a weekly commentary by Libertarian writer and speaker Tim Nerenz, Ph.D.  Visit Tim’s website http://www.timnerenz.com to find your moment.    

Un-American

Many Americans have forgotten who we are, and many more were never properly taught. This nation was founded with liberty as its first principle; it is liberty that made us exceptional, and exceptionalism that made us great.  Simple formula, really.

Citizens of the United States are independent and separate from our government.  Our government exists only to protect our rights; rights that are endowed to us by our Creator.  This is the distinctive American understanding of the relationships between our God, His people, and their government. 

We are a nation of limited, defined government powers, distributed across several authorities and jurisdictions to preserve the sovereignty of the individual.  We are nation of law, not of laws, where the Constitution prevails over the ambitions of partisans.  We are a Constitutional republic, not a democracy.

We trust our prosperity to free market capitalism, the only economic system that respects the principle of self-ownership.  We own our individual economic capacity, and we are free to trade or retain our labor and our property as we see fit.  We are not victims of economic exchange; we are empowered actors who secure our own prosperity through innovation, industriousness, and trade. 

Free to choose; that is the American idea condensed to its essence.  Equal at the starting line; free to determine our finish line for ourselves. All of our freedoms are freedom from government.  The Bill of Rights does not list grants from government; it is a recounting of specific prohibitions and limits put upon government as a condition of its employment.

If there were no government whatsoever we would be free to speak, associate, worship, bear arms, publish, secure our homes, defend our honor, and reserve testimony.  Creating a government to protect those rights does not diminish them.  The mansion owner does not turn the deed over when he hires the lawn boy. 

Individual rights, self-ownership, free trade, private property, and limited government are the original American ideals we revere.  Their opposite numbers are by definition un-American – group rights, collective claims, trade-by-permission, public property, and unlimited government.   They may be what we have become, but they are not who we are.  I pray.

Those are the un-American ideals that guide the liberal/progressive movement; a movement which has dominated our politics and government for a century now.  Creeping socialism is not progress; it has brought our nation to the brink of ruin.

It is un-American to require citizens to purchase their rights from government.  It is un-American to force individuals to join unions.  It is un-American to dictate wages, prices, working conditions, and benefits.  It is un-American to legislate from the bench.  It is un-American to rule by decree using executive orders to circumvent the legislative process.  Forced equality of outcome is a fundamentally un-American goal.

It is un-American to grant special government privileges to one group at the expense of others.  It is un-American to subsidize industries, corporations, and technologies.  It is un-American to tax some citizens and not others.  It is un-American to invade other nations without a declaration of war.  It is un-American to take from those who earned and give to those who did not.  Redistribution of wealth is the primary objective of socialism; it is a particularly un-American goal.

The Democratic Party has sold out entirely; the Republicans only somewhat less so.  Socialist government is like a grizzly bear mauling and devouring everything it encounters. Democrats want to rile it up and point it towards their successful neighbors, while Republicans think they can potty train it to keep its crap out of their family rooms. Libertarians want to kill it, or at least send it back to Canada. 

Restoring American to greatness will happen in spite of, not because of, the establishment political parties.  There are only two paths forward: more liberty or more government. One leads to prosperity, the other, Greece.  One guides the tea party movement, the other, the public sector union protests.

We will not fix the problem of too much government by choosing a new management team every four years.  We must hire a demolition crew to dismantle the apparatus of the state and pare the beast back to its only purpose – to protect our rights and our property.  That is the job the 2012 Presidential hopefuls should be applying for.

The way forward is to go back – back to the founding principles that made America great in the first place.  America will be great again as soon as we quit being un-American.  Let’s start now.

“Moment Of Clarity” is a weekly commentary by Libertarian writer and speaker Tim Nerenz, Ph.D.  Visit Tim’s website http://www.timnerenz.com to find your moment.
 

RINO

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If you ask me, Ron Paul is the RINO – Republican In NameOnly. 

Don’t get me wrong; that’s a good thing.  I have been a Ron Paul guy since I firstheard of him in 1988 when he ran for President as a Libertarian Party candidate.  I just think it amusing that the term RINO isthe pejorative used by those on the fringes of the GOP to smear the Republicansthey don’t like – i.e. most of them.   

Who is under the fat hump of the GOP bell curve?  47 Republican senators signed on to a non-bindingbalanced budget resolution which, if enacted, would require Congress to balancethe budget within five years.  But yesterday,40 of those 47 Republicans voted againsta real budget bill – Senator Rand Paul’s – that does exactly that.  

Those 85% whose gut-check bounced are not RINOs; they areR’s.  They are the mean plus one standarddeviation, the center-cut, the sweet spot of the Republican Party. They talklike libertarians when they are running for office, talk like conservativesafter they win, and then vote like schmucks. Heartbreakers.

Paul the Younger did himself doubly proud this week; he alsofilibustered the Patriot Act singlehandedly on the Senate floor this week.  How pathetic is that?  One lone defender of the 4^th, 5^th,and 2^nd amendments out of that whole Republican Party that made sucha grand show of reading the Constitution to start the session.   

And while Dr. Rand Paul fought his own Republican Party todefend our 2^nd Amendment rights in Washington,D.C., Dr. Pam Galloway fought her own RepublicanParty to defend them here in Madison, Wisconsin with her ConstitutionalCarry bill that the leaders of her own Party are trying desperately to waterdown. 

The mind boggles; two doctors – rookies with no priorlegislative experience – are our fragile grip on the Constitution.  And thank God for both of them.  What a perfect commentary on the absurdity ofour times: our doctors are fixing government while our government is ruininghealth care.        

Here is the list of Republicans who have won their Party’snomination for President since I have been old enough to vote: Nixon, Ford,Reagan, Bush, Dole, Bush Dance Remix, and McCain.  Congressional leaders I remember include BobMichaels, Newt Gingrich, Bill Frist, Mitch McConnell, Denny Hastert. 

There hasn’t been a Goldwater Republican since…Goldwater.  

So quit calling big-government Republicans RINO’s; call themNADS, but not because theirs are particularly large.  It stands for Not A Democrat, which most daysseems to be the only principle they have left.  If Obama is for it, they are against it andvice versa.  I would not be surprised ifthey reverse themselves and vote to double the subsidy for wind energy after itmussed up Michelle Obama’s hair in England.    

Is there even such a thing as a DINO?  Do the anti-war lesbian unionists reef on thefoodstamp PETA greenies for not being Hispanic enough?  I don’t know that much about Democrats – justthat they want to take all my money and tell me what to do.  I’ve never gotten past those two things to discovergoal #3.      

And I’ve never heard a Libertarian called a LINO, either, althoughI did recently learn that we have been further subdivided into Cosmotarians and Paleotarians.  I think thedifference is whether you base your Presidential campaign on legalizing drugsor ending the Fed.  It sounds a lotbetter than wing-nut A and wing-nut B.

Paleotarians, I am told, hold conservative personal valuesbut oppose the imposition of values by the state.  Works for me. And if we strip away all of the Party labels, I think that thumbnailsketch describes a majority of Americans.  We don’t want Democrat government orRepublican government; we want lessgovernment.   

What we want most from government is to be left alone.  We don’t want someone else’s values writteninto law.  We don’t want someone else’schoices to be our mandates and prohibitions. We don’t want to tell others how to live their lives and we don’t wantto be told how to live ours.  We want topay our own way and choose for ourselves the means to help others lessfortunate.    

Is there a label for that?   Yes, it is called American.  The idea thatgovernment is limited and liberty is not; the belief that free people and freemarkets improve the human condition.  It’snot a Democrat thing, or a Republican thing, or a Libertarian thing; it is anAmerican thing – or used to be.  Thisweekend we honor those who have given their lives for that American thing. 

How many of our politicians in either party vote as if theytruly believe in free people and free markets? How many of them vote as if the United States Constitution they swore anoath to protect and defend is the law of the land? 

How many are Americans In Name Only?  Too many.          

“MomentOf Clarity” is a weekly commentary by Libertarian writer and speaker Tim Nerenz, Ph.D.  Visit Tim’s website www.timnerenz.com to find your moment andwatch for the upcoming release of his new book, “Capitalista!”