I haven't had much time to share my opinions on politics or anything else. Since the last entry I have been in Mexico, Bangladesh, Texas and New Jersey. I am in demand, at least commercially, for which I am thankful. I do encourage you to buy my book, Polar Bear in Parrot Jungle, available at all e-book outlets. Paperback should be out before Easter.

A visiting Chaplain asked my father, who was stoically waiting for cancer to end his life, what his religious views were. My father, 85 years old at the time, spent his life in the Methodist Church and his answer surprised me. “I am an eclectic pragmatist.”

I have reflected on that statement for 25 years. What is the level of faith, of devotion, in eclectic pragmatism?

His political views were conservative. Some might think he was a social liberal because he supported equal rights and was outspoken against racial prejudice. However, he did not support social welfare programs.
He embraced the idea of a hand up, not a hand out.

My father should have been starting a family in 1929. He was earning a decent living selling shelter belt trees to the farmers in central Minnesota for an Uncle who owned a nursery. He married a few years later, in the teeth of the depression and started a family. He knew first-hand the impact government intervention had on a society based on individual determination. He went on to become a mortgage banker and fought against red lining policies instituted by Woodrow Wilson liberals.

He was, however, a pragmatist. He had a secure, albeit low paying, position and enjoyed a degree of respect in the community. He turned down attractive offers that included relocation or were of uncertain longevity.
He had a wife and four children to provide for.

With this background as an influence I have become a political pragmatist. I offer this analogy. Our country is like a train out of control.
The track it is on is being destroyed by the speed and burden upon it. You are in charge of the railroad. What do you do?

The first thing to do is STOP THE TRAIN!

We must first stop the accelerating spending our congress loves so much. This is the first and only task in front of us today.  Those who want to think of repairing the tracks or building tracks to a new destination have to wait.  While Republicans are squabbling over issues they have no control over, the Democrats keep shoveling coal into the boiler of the locomotive. We have to kick the Democratic fireman off the train and put a Republican Engineer on board to close the throttle.

Democrats for years have been laying the track to their destination while Republicans stand by like so many cattle chewing their cud as they watch (or ignore) the scene around them. The time for focus is now. How can you sit by and watch Democrat Senators berate corporate executives about “shared sacrifice”? The Democrats have tossed off their masks of compassion that have fooled so many for so long, and still Republicans react like Mortimer Snerd.

First things first. Other issues will follow.  The government is not your friend or benefactor.  Benjamin Franklin’s concern over our ability to maintain the Republic was well founded. He knew that men desirous of power would combine with men of no expediency to subvert the foundation of our government.

All the while we ignore the pending train wreck and engage in fruitless discussions about personalities.

How is it homo sapiens create clothing, buildings, nourishment?  Why isn’t all of this just a house of cards?

The answer is that every product has a free component in it. The Lord has provided us minerals and soil and water and sunshine from which we plant and harvest or mine and drill. Seed, by itself, is free. The minerals are free. To plant and harvest, or extract a mineral, a person must expend energy in some form or another. The expenditure of human energy must be rewarded in some fashion, either by harvesting and consuming the crop or by exchanging the excess crop for another commodity or product. Every human being since Adam and Eve has been given the means to survive. The fish in the ocean are free. They will live and die regardless of whether or not we cast our nets.

Casting the nets for free fish is an expenditure of human effort and the fisherman is rewarded by first being able to feed his family. An extra fish can be exchanged for bread or cloth or a trinket.

Or, the extra fish might be taken away in order to pay for a government activity.

How did governments evolve and why do they still exist?

The short answer is most people don’t care if they are oppressed; they just want their children to have their next meal and not freeze to death that night. It’s not that they want better for their children; they just don’t want to outlive their children.

This may seem a harsh take on things, but look at our own country, or any country. Our country was founded on the premise that all men are created equal and the less government has to say in our lives the better our government will be. The concept is extremely noble, and is not reflected in any other place in the world.

There was a lot of world before 1776. The feudal system was in full force in the “enlightened” countries and everywhere else it was tribal or conqueror. Ancient Greece had democracy, but it wasn’t in effect in 1776. Rome had a system that spread the wealth among the faithful, but even that was long gone.

More prophetic words were never spoken than Benjamin Franklin’s reply: “A lady asked Dr. Franklin, ‘Well Doctor what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?’ ‘A republic,’ replied the Doctor, ‘if you can keep it’” [i]

The secret of keeping the republic is to adhere to the Constitution and its restrictions on the government. Before ratification the first ten amendments were added which enumerated citizen’s rights, not in favor of government, but in favor of individuals.

Unfortunately, when children have absolutely no adult supervision they grow up asocial. So it is with populations in general. With no law and no supervision the populous creates their own rules and sense of justice. I am purposely omitting a discussion of the history of law because it has little to do with politics in this discussion.

The sticking point in every discussion is how much government is too much. For the strictest of conservatives the answer is simple: the Constitution is enough.

That would be all well and good except our founding fathers were of the opinion each man should be able to determine his own destiny. Yes, I know slavery was the contradiction, but it is the first example of what happens in the name of political expediency and is the ultimate demonstration of economics and politics being two sides of one slice of bread.

The country was formed because England was demanding tribute. Colonialists saw no need to pay while getting nothing in return. A simplistic argument, but the point is the colonials were producing goods cheaper than those in England and the interests in England didn’t like that.

So now we have a brand new country with endless resources and a government that can’t do much and a populous that expects nothing. There are no checks on anything. As good as this sounds to libertarians, the fact is without checks what you get is wild swings in the economy, shoddy, if not outright hazardous, products and scams galore.

Still, the bulk of the population persevered, tilled their land, tended their shops and forges and grubbed in the earth for minerals. That’s all anyone wanted.

The question of slavery wouldn’t go away. Once again it was a matter of economics as much as morality. Northern farmers felt at a disadvantage with slave state farmers and their “free” labor. The truth is slaves weren’t without cost. They were purchased and then had to be housed and fed. There was a slight economic advantage, but I think history has shown that if the confederacy had rolled on the slave issue there would not have been secession and the states-rights fight could have been waged over more defensible grounds.

Whoever thought using slave labor would be a good idea was not only morally bankrupt, but an economics idiot.

It aggravates me when contemporary pundits compare every swing in the economy to the “great depression” of the 1930’s. The 1800’s was one boom and bust after another. Huge fortunes were created, gambled, lost, stolen, mismanaged and some retained with almost no government intervention.

The railroads and the post civil war expansion of the west brought about some interesting circumstances. The congress somehow thought linking the east coast to the west coast with railroads was a good idea, after railroaders lined the pockets of enough congressmen. And here is where economics and politics come together. There was no reason to build a railroad in Dakota Territory, Montana or Washington; nor in Indian Territory or Utah. Although there was economic sense in railroads in part of Kansas or Colorado there was certainly none in New Mexico or Arizona.

There was no commerce to support a railroad in any of those places.  East of the Missouri River the country was being settled in an orderly fashion and farmers and manufacturers provided an arguable level of traffic to justify the capital expenditure for track and right­of-way acquisitions.

But, what the heck, we have the best congress money can buy, and that goes back two hundred years. The western railroads were built without anyone to use them. The railroaders were not stupid and they launched promotions all over Europe for emigrants to head to the USA with unlimited farming opportunities. Shiploads of Czechs, Germans, Swedes and Italians were brought to the US, put on a train to North Dakota or Minnesota and shown the land they could purchase, from the railroad, and have a farm of their own.

The odd thing is that the farmers started growing more crops than the local markets wanted and that meant they had to ship their surpluses via the railroads. Clever, huh? Except the railroads ended up charging the farmers more to ship the grain than the grain would sell for. So, what did the farmers do? Well, my grandfather’s brother said he had enough of the USA and returned to Norway. My grandfather turned to politics, deciding that it was the government’s doing that led to this fiasco and the government ought to do something, instead of grandfather realizing that raising crops nobody wanted was a bad business model.

It is always curious to me that we don’t educate each other that the cost of personal liberty means understanding that you can’t spend every last dime during good times when you know the next bust is soon on its way. It is a shame that our founding fathers included slave colony representatives who were more interested in their narrow interests than admitting slavery was a concept that wouldn’t endure.

The truth is there are no righteous people elected to any office, because there are no righteous people alive. So we elect people who covet, because everyone covets, and if anyone wanting an advantage somehow realizes this truth, all they need do is fulfill the desire of the representative and the advantage is granted.

The progression of granting advantage to certain people leads to other people being disadvantaged economically. When the disparity appears to be unbearably large, the disadvantaged rise up. When politicians sense an uprising they smell votes, much as a shark smells blood in the water. “If elected, I promise a chicken in every pot.”

“I am the savior. I know what’s wrong. You are economically oppressed and I will undo the social injustice in your community.”

Now we are at the crossroads of this little lesson. How does our political model (a representative republic in case you had forgotten) square with our economic system (capitalism for those who may have wondered)?

Neither model exists in its pure state. Part of the reason the representative democracy doesn’t exist in a pure form is that the Constitution safeguards us from certain problems inherent in such a model.  The framers of the Constitution were beyond smart, they were wise and crafty! All of us are protected from the tyranny of the majority.  Maybe not the tyranny of the courts, as it turns out.

Unfettered capitalism: It produces booms and busts, except the booms end up enriching the wealthy disproportionally. Well, what did you expect? Wealth is relative, but a wealthy person is one that has some amount of money beyond that required for basic food, clothing and shelter needs. Another feature of unfettered capitalism is producers of goods may (and do) cut corners in order to increase the profit margin, often at the peril of the consumer. China is suffering from this today.

So where we have the melding of political and economic systems is  when one function of government is to protect the populous from fraudulent endeavors. However, and this is a big, big ‘however,’ fraud is only proven if one can prove INTENT. So maybe the producer wasn’t INTENDING to make a dangerous product, but was just ignorant or the victim of an unscrupulous supplier. 

Americans were pretty much on their own until milk producers started doctoring milk and children died as a result.  The government stepped in with regulations. It took some time for the citizens to stop dying from a multitude of other man-made, greedy capitalist disasters.

Okay, I will stop here and ask the musical question, “Anybody object to your kid’s milk being safe?”

Well, that is where the rub comes in. Regulation means power. How much regulation is necessary? For what product or service or activity are YOU willing to shrug off potential risk? I personally think bicycle helmets are stupid, if only because they are the symbol of raising a society AFRAID of risk, more over, apathetic about their own safety and willing to let the GOVERNMENT be the arbiter of what is safe enough.  Not just mostly safe enough, but completely safe for every citizen, regardless of mental or physical ability.

How much law/regulation is enough? How about this; look at the Ten Commandments. No, just look at four. Thou shalt not kill. Thou shalt not Steal. Thou shalt not commit adultery. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor. True, in Leviticus one will find many other directions for living a righteous life, but for this argument I focus on four, since the others are how to get on the pathway to heaven.

ALL OTHER LAWS have been made to accommodate one person’s advantage over another. The problem is people keep coming up with ways to convince legislators they are disadvantaged and need relief, or schemes that sound advantageous, but turn out to be a government sanctioned scam.

And the motive is ALWAYS economic. The tax code is the most blatant example of this. Everyone must pay taxes EXCEPT… the ten thousand pages of exceptions. Is your name among the exceptions? How much did you have to pay your representative or senator to become an exception?

We are in our current state of economic distress because of a multitude of factors, brought on equally by Democrats currying favor with the “poor” and with Republicans currying favor with the “rich.”  Those of us in the middle just keep plodding along enjoying the benefit of paved highways.

There are many issues at hand at the moment. Before flying off the handle, parroting your favorite noon time orator about things specious, I urge you to ask the rhetorical question, “Who stands to benefit from this proposed legislation?” 

Follow the money. The Democrats succeed by promising lazy people they can live as well as industrious people because they are ENTITLED to live well. Republicans just keep beating the same old drum: work hard and the Lord will reward your efforts commensurate with your talents and abilities