Adam Politics Weblog

Finally, some of the best news of all is that some smart, industrious, creative people have found ways to build enterprises that enable otherwise grossly-inadequte people to be productive. I may not like "vampiric" businesses like Walmart or MacDonalds, but they allow IQ=85, AverageMinusOne people to produce enough to earn a living without smarter people directly supervising them. The same goes for Henry Ford and his assembly-line manufacturing where the people who work the line may not be terribly bright, but their industry created an industry.

The downside is that within our cerebral-intelligent brains lie animal urges that aren't so nice. In the movie "The Devil Next Door" a small Ohio town finds out one of their autoworker friendly neighbors was "Ivan the Terrible," a notoriously brutal Nazi death camp guard. Many of my friends are smug that they could never do things like that, that this fellow is just a horrible person. I would point out the line between Good and Evil is far less clear. Most of us are a week of peer pressure, a day of starvation, or an hour of painful torture away from doing things just like this bad fellow.

It's worse than that, actually. There is a part of us, not just them, that glories in making somebody else suffer. There are sexual-bondage web sites galore and not all the people who subscribe to them are deviants and perverts. In his cool, early novel The Terminal Man Michael Crichton made the constrast between our primate-smart brain and our ancient-savage lizard-crocodile limbic brain. It's all part and parcel of who we are, wonderfully dramatized in "Star Trek" Episode 5, "The Enemy Within" where Captain Kirk is split somehow by the transporter into his good, sweet, weak human part and his nasty, evil, tough animal part and he realizes he needs both sides to command a starship.

Let's be realistic. For two centuries America has had a left-wing faction supporting just about everything awful and hateful from slavery through Hitler to Hamas and there's no way they didn't know how awful it all was, if not by Hitler in 1935, certainly by Hamas in 2023. This history is all about the beast rather than the brain.

Alas, the beast within us is a necesary part as our sexuality comes from the beast rather than the brain. I don't think it takes a lot of basic-biology understanding to realize that celibacy is not hereditary, that celibate couples do not produce celibate offspring. So our inner beast is supported by Darwin and God, take your pick. I suspect if we lined up 4000 million men on this planet with the most comfortable with rape at the left end and those least comfortable with rape at the the right end, only the right third would have any objection to forceful rape. It's not nice, it's not pleasant, it's not civilized, but I believe it's true.

If we accept the hypothesis that we have both beasts and brains within us, then democracy, doing what half the people want to do may not be the outcome that the most civilized among us would like. From the Magna Carta 1215 June 15 through the Constitution of the United States of America 1787 September 17 we recognize the need for agreeing on a code of behavior, a structure that transcends the momentary will of the majority, a "republic" enforced through community acceptance of law.

As a libertarian and, actually, an anarchist, I'm not sold that government is the only vehicle for this law, or even the best. I'm pretty sure it's better coming from state than church, that the history of religious law being the law of the land sucks and I'm comfortable using government, preferably local government rather than big, bad federal government to enforce the code of behavior. I'll point out that being a white person in a largely-white, upscale community it's easy to think of police as my friends. If I were a black person in the 1950s, in the Dixie south, in a not-so-good neighborhood in a bigger city, or driving on a Los Angeles freeway with dark skin, then I might not walk down the street thinking of uniformed police offers as my best pals. The agency of racism is often government, more often liberal, Democrat government.

1.1.5 2026 January 5 - My Summary of Human History

For most of maybe a million years of human history we were hunters and gatherers. Maybe we would sleep in caves or maybe we built temporary thatch huts. We lived in places like equatorial Africa where food grows plentiful and climate is temporate. Poverty is never fun, it's bugs and disease and generally-lousy living, but it's not life threatening in Uganda or Kenya or Zambia. Society ran according to the whims of the strongest members and I expect sex and rape were pretty much the same thing.

Somewhere along the way somebody discovered agriculture. Humans could stay in one place and grow plants for food. That kind of stability requires some kind of stability, some kind of ownership of the land. Maybe only strong people had farmland or maybe there was some social structure of land ownership, but there had to be some notion that the land sown now can be reaped later. Farms for growing plants can also be farms for raising livestock.

The earliest, most-primitive, most-basic structure of property is the biggest, strongest, toughest people get to own things and everybody else might get what is left over. It takes more political and social structure for somebody smaller and weaker to grow crops and to raise animals. There is a direct connection between the institution of ownership and the capability of a community to feed itself from farmland.

Given the ubiquity of religion in the past few millennia I have to figure there was religion in the old days before Rome, before Egypt, before Athens, before Jerusalem. People gravitate towards having gods, not so bad, and using those beliefs to exert power over other people, not so good. Given their presumed ability to control the wrath of the gods priests had control over people's lives, liberty, and property.

For the past ten or five thousand years farms coexisted with cities, grouping of people with housing and livelihood that were not farm based. We hear about the successful examples of human culture and achievement, the Library at Alexandra, Athens, Sparta, Rome. Later on major metropoles such as London, Paris, Madrid, and Vienna emerged in England, France, Spain, and Austria. Urban-cum-rural human civilizations formed in Asia, Africa, and even the colonies in the Americas. Cities were surrounded by farms. My own take is those cities first supported the farmers and later had their own productive industries while the farms produced food in exchange for their productive output. Cities and countryside in Roman times didn't look like today.

Cities and farms require some structure of private property, ownership of land and domiciles and tools of production plus owning living space and any food being stored for the future. If only the largest, strongest, and meanest individuals can reliably own anything, the community is limited compared to having property owned by people who aren't large, strong, or mean. Still, it took a long time between feudalism where a few owners dominated large communities of serfs and a time when just about anybody could own things and there was a legal infrastructure to support their ownership and police to defend them from theft. The notion of the unalienability of life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness was anything but self evident.

My picture of human history is we were kindling waiting for a spark for about a million years and, once that spark happened, the birth of agriculture, we followed the path through farms, livestock, private property, and the development of law. There were other sparks, notably the Renaissance circa 1500 and the Industrial Revolution circa 1800. Does the evil birth of Progressivism, collectivism sans religion, get its own historical marker? Does the emergency of the programmable computing machine also get its own historical marker? I'll leave that to historians of the Twenty-Second Century, but these things tend to emerge suddenly and then to grow exponentially. (I really mean "exponentially," not just a sloppy, popular synonym for "rapidly." It seems the growth of these things is proportional to how much there already is, and that's the fundamental mathematical concept of exponential growth.)

For most of the Common Era, between the years 400 and 1834, Christianity ruled the roost in western Europe. There were a millennium of Crusades all over Europe and one third of a millennium of Inquisition in Spain. When Christianity was 1400 years old it was about as nasty as Islam is today. So I attribute Islam's ferocity and nastiness less to anything specific about Islam and more to a phase that organized religion goes through when it become political.

Another common thread, for some reason or other, is hatred for one specific religion and ethnic group, the Jewish people. It goes back to pre-Common-Era Babalonia. There was brief relief for fifty years 1950-2000, maybe a Hitler-Holocaust guilt trip, and now we're seeing the world going back to the three-millinnia trend of naked hate for us.

So back to history. We the hunter-gatherer phase for hundreds of thousands of years, some kind of spark that created agriculture, farming, and the ownership of land and livestock. The stability of living in one place also begot architecture in the form of nice homes to live in and monumental buildings including cathedrals and great libraries in Alexandra, Prague, and other places. Sometime more recently there was another spark that created the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution. A planet that had maybe a few million humans can now support 8000 million people in relative comfort. That it doesn't support all of us is a matter of bad politics and worse economics rather than lack of ability.

On the political front there as been a lot of activity and most of that activity centered around various wars. My own interest centers around a thread of so-called "liberty" from the Magna Carta in 1215 through several great thinkers that culminated in my own country, the United States of America (USA). America rejected any collectivism in politics and wrote an expansive Bill of Rights to make the point crystal clear.

This new nation found its way not only to create and to preserve freedom for its free, male citizens, it eliminated slavery and offered citizenship to all born in families lawfully living here, "subject to the jurisdiction" of the USA. Religion. was aggressively kept out of our politics as was any attempt to use government to effect social policy.

Egregious imbalances such as the pitiful position of labor during the growth of industry were dealt with by private institutions such as labor unions so workers could bargain almost as collectively as management about pay and conditions. I'm told civil litigation was initially effective at dealing with some of the environmental issues such as coal-produced air pollution from railroad trains. There was a great deal of tension and some violence, but the private-enterprise system was offering significant relief from our problems.

The temptation of using coercive government was hard to resist and unions and environmentalists jumped on the regulation bandwagon. Unions were tied to politics and got special favors and regulatory agencies were formed allegedly to control railroads. Funny thing, those being protected got lazy and the regulatory agency became a tool of those same railroads. Government was able to get air pollution removed from the civil-claims arena and into a zone of environenmental law. It's the fox guarding the chicken coop where the regulators are sold to the highest bidders who are, no surprise, those who are supposed to be regulated. The airlines were born in a friendlier era and airfares were kept artificially high through government control. Healthcare prices are kept ridiculously high and then government programs swoop down to rescue us from the government's own mistakes at terrible cost.

My other historical marker is circa 1900 when a growing social and political force appeared, the Progressive movement. It was Marx's vision, blurry and pathetic as it was, that having government do and own everything was a good idea, that our Declaration and Constitution were "obsolete," and that rights formerly deemed "unalienable" were now given and taken at the behest of the state. The consequences of this change have been severe, 262 million killed by their own socialist governments and another 100 million largely supported by the American left-wing community.

Most of human history isn't very nice. The Progressive movement is Collectivism 2.0 where religion was Collectivism 1.0. Religion brought us oppression, narrowmindedness, Crusades, an Inquisition, and jihads. Socialism hasn't been any better.

1.1.6 2026 January 5 - Summary of Man and History

My conclusion from all this is that having legitimized collective institutions like the Christian church in the west, Islam in and around the Middle East, and socialism since 1917 around human beings is as dangerous and irresponsible as offering liquor to a hungry and thirsty alcoholic. Do we really expect despots to deter and tyrants to resist the temptation? Recent Western history in the last two millennia has given us Crusades, the Inquisition, Jihads, and socialism. The last, socialism, has killed 262 million of its own citizens plus about 100 million dead in wars around socialism.

Finding better ways to govern is like finding nicer ways to rape. My libertarian and anarchistic leanings suggest that the only answer is to have a kneejerk negative reaction to coercive religion or government, just as our American founding documents try to tell us. Making small government the law of the land isn't enough, we need a community fundamentally repulsed by the idea.

Just as we need swift and painful punishment for rape, we need swift and painful punishment for those expanding government or committing any kind of fraud. Since we're not going to get that from government, we need it to be part of our social fabric. I would feel a lot better if the next person who posts one of these compassionate, caring, universal-health-care posts gets the shit kicked out of him by his friends and colleages, that's not going to happen, but we can decide to reject church and state in favor of omnibus, uniform law that respects each individual.

The last bit of church oppression I see around me is the pro-life movement seeking to turn specifially-Christian sentiment about fetal life into secular law. (Charlie Kirk, whom I utterly and totally admire, got this one utterly and totally wrong in seeking to impose his religious views on the rest of us.) President Trump took the right position for his office and insists it's a state issue, presumably from his understanding of the Tenth Amendment. We can be religious as individuals without imposing on others as there may be many paths to righteousness.

On the fascist-socialist-communist side there is still an active volcano of pro-government sentiment supporting the same naked evil that gave us Wilson, Sanger, Stalin, FDR, Hitler, Castro, LBJ, Mao, Arafat, ISIS, and Hamas. Rather than attack each of those horrible failures and their people one at a time, it makes a lot more sense to inculturate the values of human decency. As I organize and present them, these are human life, liberty, livelihood, property, and contract.

1.1.7 2026 January 7 - My Views on Political Issues

First and foremost, I'm a libertarian anarchist. I share the moral, normative, libertarian value system that Thomas Jefferson characterized as the "unalienable" rights of life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. I extend the list to five values, human life, liberty, livelihood, property, and contract. I'm not sure the actual optimum short-term and long-range size of government is actually zero, I think it is, and I'm pretty sure it's a lot less than we actually have anywhere today.

I'm told Iceland and Ireland were both anarchies for centuries and did rather well, but these stories are of different-enough times and cultures that their messages may not apply as directly to today as I'd like and, more important in an age before aviation, they were both islands. More recently and closer to home, the first 125 years of the Unites States of America were astonishingly successful by any measure I would care to apply.

If government can protect us from outside invasion, resolve interstate conflict, and provide good advice, then I think I can be cheerful about it. The "good advice" I'm thinking of would include national-scale collection of statistics and research in fields like meteorology, geology, pharmacology, and product labeling.

Just as giving people choices of schools improves education by offering choice, I believe we can remove geography from many aspects of government. If you don't like the laws here, then you can move somewhere else, but much of law and advice isn't bound by place and can be offered by multiple vendors. It's kind of hard to separate crime-protection from location, but there are many aspects of regulation that can be matters of choice. One of my home venues had a deal where actual electricity providers sold their power to vendors who sold it to homeowners with various price packages and options. Maybe crime prevention and air-water-quality assurance can be similarly packaged and sold so consumers have choices. I think there are opportunities there.

So much for the big picture. I'll look at some of the more-localized issues in subsequent sections.

1.1.8 2026 January 8 - My Views on Education

There are many reasons to go to school, to become more elegant and erudite and better mannered, for examples, but the economically-compelling argument for better schooling is it makes people more productive in their work. The only "socially-compelling" reason to pay for somebody's education is because their increased productivity produces more wealth. Since that wealth mostly manifests itself in the student's future earned income, the only socially-redeeming action for education is to facilitate loans so those people who don't have tuition money can pay for their education from their future paycheques made larger by that education.

The case that secondary school enhances a community developing better mannered adolescents is easily refuted by anybody who has an actual school in the neighborhood. My daily commute 1997-2000 past a local high school certainly wasn't an experience of well-mannered drivers.

So here's my take on education. One hundred years ago less than half the population had a high-school diploma at a standard considerably higher than today's typical college graduate. We send two-thirds of our young people to college, not by improving their education, but, instead, by dumbing down college. The vast majority of young Americans should learn one or more useful trades where they can make a good living and add value to their communities. We have acute shortages today of people who build things, make things, and fix things. How about adding social incentive to trades? How about having proud bumper stickers "MY KID IS A MASTER PLUMBER"? Tradesmen should be proud to be productive people and not be treated as failures for their lack of college degree.

The other effect of public funding of near-universal college is to drive prices up. If in-state tuition for government colleges is low, then somebody else is paying for it, but it's not cheap.

If you can afford college, then great. If rich, "fat-cat" colleges like Princeton and Harvard with rich, fat-cat endowments want to pay the way for lots of lower-income smart kids to go there, then even better. But there's no case, in my opinion, except out of friendship or love, to pay for any education for somebody else unless that person is going to earn a lot more than the tuition.

So here's my deal. We have mortgages for people who can't afford houses now but will eventually earn enough to pay for them. They put their homes on the chopping block with the risk of foreclosure for the chance to have a nice place to live that only their future income can pay for. Since the bank can't take education back and sell it to somebody else like a repossessed car or house, I would suggest we build a legal infrastructure that gives a lender for student loans ironclad ability to garnish a capped percentage to pay back tuition loans. I suggest ten percent (10%), so when I sign a student-loan agreement I agree to make so-many payments for so-many months and years and if, perchance, I start missing payments, then the lender can get 10% of my paycheque without any consent or permission on my part. If I'm a deadbeat for multiple student loans, then those lenders may have to split the 10%, but I don't get to keep the money no matter what, just like I don't get to stay in a foreclosed home.

That covers post-secondary education pretty easily. What about primary and secondary K-12 education? I know I'm not happy having government pay for it. Local school funding is far better than state funding and state funding is hell-and-gone better than federal funding, but I prefer a society where people pay their own way.

While I prefer private systems, I'm comfortable having government qualify schools and certify their graduates. When I went to primary and secondary school 1961-1974 in Cheltenham Township we had local management and funding of the schools but the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania ensured our schools met some broader state standard of education. New York State goes a step further and requires students pass a state-wide Regents Exam to get their high-school diplomas.

Let's say thirteen years of kindergarten through high school costs one hundred thousand dollars ($100K). Some parents have the resources to pay for their kids, maybe a payment plan on the same scale as the property tax that pays for school now. Unlike the current case with property tax, families with students in school should pay for all their students attending school.

It's a bit silly to expect a five-year-old child to select a school responsibly and to assume a six-figure debt for it. Most children today get school chosen for them by their location and their expenses are paid through involuntary taxes. There is no choice of school and no financial responsibility assumed.

I would suggest a legal structure be built just like we have legal structure around rented and owned residence. It would allow a guardian to enroll a five-year-old in Kindergarten through high-school with any tuition not paid by guadian, friends, or family to be assumed by the high-school graduate. There are smart, legally-trained people who could work out details for a good system, but I'll suggests there be a cap on the total amount committed, a periodic, percentage cap on what can be garnished if the graduate doesn't pay, and strict supervision to make sure the guardian is not compensated in some underhanded way for school choice.

Let's try this as my example: Government certifies primary and secondary schools (K-12) and allows banks to lend money for those schools to kids with parents or guardians not able (or willing) to pay for it. Those kids who have to borrow this money can pay it back on a voluntary schedule when they graduate and get jobs and, if they can't (or won't) pay it back, then the bank can garnish up to 10% of their income for payment. Just as we have legal structure around mortgages for people who can't otherwise afford houses they live in, this legal structure supports education for people who can't otherwise afford primary and secondary schooling. I haven't thought through how truancy laws would be enforced, but I figure they might be kept the way they are today. The only change is that the student, who is the nearly-sole beneficiary of the education process, has an obligation and an opportunity to pay for it. I would also add the provision that repayment of subsequent student loans for trade school or college be capped so the total repayment be capped at 10% of income. Furthermore, any fraud or kickbacks would be dealt with harshly with significant, mandatory prison sentences.

My last point is the urgency of getting government out of the education business. When each of my professors was funded by some government agency it was no surprise their allegience was to that same agency. My primary and secondary education was spectacular, but there was sympathy towards the Progressive Era and the New Deal where a privately-paid-for school might have had a more honest presentation of these failures.

1.1.9 2026 January 9 - My Views on Heathcare

Universal government healthcare is a quicksand quagmire. Let me start with a story about my own dental insurance. When I was two weeks short of my first-job dental insurance I had a filling fall out of my third molar (wisdom tooth). The dentist said I could wait two weeks and hope nothing bad happens or get it pulled that day for thirty-five dollars ($35). Piece of mind was worth a lot more than thirty-five bucks to me, I paid it cheerfully, and found myself with thirty-one teeth instead of thirty-two. When, later on, it came time to remove the other three wisdom teeth I got a bill for $105 more than the insurance paid, so my out-of-pocket was $35 with or without insurance. I believe most healthcare insurance works that way as my own story suggests.

Good healthcare is not a right or even a necessity. People all over the world live with lousy healthcare or none at all. Most of what healthcare offers us doesn't cost very much while there are procedures and cures that cost a lot. There is some mindset that says we should all be equal, we should all get very-expensive healthcare, and we should tax people to pay for it. That has the obvious effect of driving up the cost without driving up the quality of the actual care. People should actively care how to get the bottom 10% better care rather than jealously complain how much better care the top 10% are getting.

I'm an American and I think like an American. When I got a parrot-beak tear in my medial meniscus of my knee, I got my scans and went to my orthopedist on Wednesday. He said he could fix it, I asked when, and he asked if I was available to come in Friday to get it done. I hear nightmare stories from government-health-care countries of people waiting months while I'm getting my surgery done in time for the weekend. That's the way it's supposed to be.

If government can certify doctors, hospitals, and medications, then that might be a nice thing to do. Telling a low-cost clinic they can't practice medicine because it's not as good as what Bill Gates can get is criminal. I like the idea of having a truly-neutral federal drug administration (FDA) put green, yellow, or red stickers on the pills I want to take, but not to restrict life-saving drugs for years.

I don't know the details and maybe my story isn't quite right, but go along with me to make a point. Vioxx was a wonderful drug for relief of arthritis pain, people in arthritic agony sang its praises, they found it caused heart trouble a decade or two later, so Vioxx was taken off the market. While I would suggest a twenty-five-year-old athlete look elsewhere for palliative care, should an eighty-five-year-old patient doubled over in pain have to forego a cure because there's a higher risk of heart disease in fifteen years? We have people trained to make these judgment calls, they're called doctors, and I prefer to rely on them than on government agencies.

The other thing that really needs changing is the tax status of healthcare versus insurance that drives us to get our health insurance through our employers. It means we have all kinds of problems when we change jobs, not much of a problem when most people kept one job for a career, not so good in a world where people change jobs every few years. Health insurance (and tuition for that matter) should not be taxed as income.

The short version is that government regulation of healthcare is almost always keeping it from people of limited means and stealing wealth from Peter to pay for Paul's medicine. It's also a slippery slope as giving government control of our medical care is the first step towards giving government control of our lives in other horrible ways.

Besides the obvious iniquities and inadequacies of government-regulated and government-funded healthcare, how long does it take before it becomes motivation to support the right agencies in the right places or a supply of transplant organs for the right people?

1.1.10 2026 January 9 - My Views on Economics

I don't care how well the rich people live. The mantra of the political left wing is jealousy, hatred and spitting anger that some people live better than they do. Maybe those people are smarter, maybe they're more skilled, maybe they're better at their jobs, or maybe they are just plain luckier. Somehow that enrages the holier-than-thou spirit of progressive, liberal, left-wing Democrats.

While the Obama presidency was trying to fix the injustice of economic inequality, in particular raising their own financial status, median family net worth in the Unites States went down by half. I'm sure somebody statistically savvy can speculate on ways the middle can go down by half without devastating the positions of the poorest people, but I can't see any way that could believably happen.

If I had to pick a single measure of economic success for a community or a country, then I would pick the economic status of the tenth percentile. Those are the people with nine-tenths of the people better off than they are and one-tenth less well off. The bottom few percent may reflect some "slackers" that just don't want to do anything and I can visualize circumstances where differences in median don't reflect how the actually-miserable people are doing. While, in fact, I believe rising economic tides have raised all boats with astonishing consistency, I'm comfortable with the tenth percentile as an honest measure of how well a society takes care of its less-well-off people.

The primary source of wealth is productivity. Gosh, said that directly it sounds awfully tautilogical, but it's amazing how few left-leaning, progressive, Democrat Americans can see that. If we can get people making things, building things, fixing things, et cetera, then there's more stuff to go around. It isn't some kind of super-subtle "trickle-down" effect, just that people making things, building things, fixing things, et cetera are getting paid for their efforts and living better and they can buy the stuff they made, built, and fixed.

Having a large blue-collar-style working class means we have more stuff and folks live better, tenth percentile and everybody else. I'll point out, however, that if we had a society of similarly-skilled artisans with no concentrations of wealth, we would be far worse off than we are now. It takes real resources to build factories that make real things like cars, airplanes, and housing, and that make transportation systems like railroads, highways, et cetera. Big things take big resources like smelting plants, foundries, manufacturing centers, assembly lines, and all that stuff that takes a lot of capital to build. While I suppose we could do this raising capital from the savings of lower-middle-class-level Americans, it's a whole lot easier with people like Henry Ford, Andrew Carnegie, Henry Ford, and Elon Musk.

So our ideal society is one where we have a large community of hard-working laborers compensated for their efforts, often aided by some form of collective bargaining, and a group of rich capitalists with the vision to make new things. It would be even better to have a community of smart people mathematically and scientifically trained to figure out which tasks those laborers should work on to make the most money.

Sure, software is the exception where two or three guys can work in a garage and do serious breakthroughs, and, yes, I've been part of companies like that. But the big things take big money and I'm delighted to see American heading back to that mindset.

1.2 2026 February

1.2.1 2026 February 10 - Example of Good Writing

Earlier, last year in fact, I wrote a bit about bad political writing from Ted. I figured it's time to point out a good example from Arnold Kling.

The context of the piece is here, but this paragraph stands well on its own as a stellar example of a political expository paragraph. I can easily tell what issue he's talking about, what he's concluding about it, and what he thinks ought to be done, or, in this case, what ought not to be done. The issue is unrest from perception of economic inequality, he's pointing out that the inequality itself isn't the issue, rather relative economic status, and that redistribution isn't going to fix that.

What a beautiful piece, at least Nine out of Ten.

"Kotkin strongly believes that economic inequality is rising and that this phenomenon is destabilizing. I think that what is destabilizing is a widespread sense of loss of status. While economic well-being can be positive-sum, status is zero-sum. If redistribution of wealth would also serve to redistribute status, then this would promote social stability. But I am not sure that perceived loss of status can be addressed that way."

I imagine my own writing, maybe Seven out of Ten would be more verbose and less clear.

"Kotkin is concerned that economic inequality is rising and this is something that needs to be corrected by some political force, not just free-market economics. Economic change is not a zero-sum game and I think we agree a freer economy makes everybody better off than a more-regulated economy. However, an economy that makes everybody better off is unsatisfying to some people if it makes the wealthier people proportionally wealthier. I would assert that economic inequality is not really the problem. It is a perception of economic status that is the main concern and, no matter how much better off everybody is, there will be unrest because somebody else is better off. So not only does regulation make almost everybody worse off, even if it were possible to regulate a more-equal economy, regulation and redistribution do nothing to alleviate the jealous concern that some people are richer and, presumably, happier than others."

Now I believe my paragraph communicates the same message, but with neither the brevity nor the clarity of Kling's writing. That's why he's a Nine and I'm only a Seven out of Ten.

1.2.2 2026 February 11 - Sad Day for Grant

My friend Grant has been a joy to me for twenty-two years. We've talked about mathematics and hiking the Grand Canyon and a bunch of other assorted fun topics. I don't recall any discussion of political issues.

All of a sudden he's posting political positions, not on Facebook where it's sort-of appropriate, but on Linkedin, a job-hunting site sharing contacts and skills. His post wasn't about tariffs and visa policies affecting recruitment and employment opportunies, or anything remotely on point about career planning.

No, he went on a wild pissing spree about the 2020 election here in the United States. (One of the outcomes of that election process was an administration that enabled the Hamas invastion of Isreal that killed three thousand of my aunts, uncles, and cousins. My high-school classmate Ira was at a wedding a few years back in that part of the world and almost all those attending that ceremony are now dead from that act of terrorism, so, to use a business-buzzword phrase, "I have some skin in the game.") What I don't see is any way that post, whatever side you're on, is in any way appropriate on LinkedIn.

In case that wasn't enough Grant followed it with another post ranting about saving our democracy and calling the political faction in the United States that opposed Stalin and Hitler fascists, Nazis, Gestapo, and SS. Again, whether you're from the U.S. political party that supported Stalin and Hitler or from the party that opposed them, there's no way this sort of sniveling drivel belongs on a professional-career forum.

When I confronted Grant about his inappropriate behavior, and the terrible consequences of his stated political views, he said I clearly did not understand him and he demanded an apology.

Here are his posts and my replies. See what you think.

1.2.3 2026 February 19 - I'm Proud of my High School

My high school, my Alma Mater, Cheltenham High School just outside Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, offered the following to its students regarding the anti-ICE marches that are happening here in the United States.

They defended the freedom-of-speech issue that the students were free to attend these marches while maintaining proper discipline by insisting that student absences would be "unexcused" for that time.

I suppose an unexcused absence will go on the student's Permanent Record that we were threatened with when I was in Elementary School. You know the story, the teacher wags her finger at a wayward boy and says, "That infraction is going on your Permanent Record!" I still wonder about all the homeless people down and out on Skid Row because their employment attempts were thwarted by what was in their primary-school Permanent Records.

It's the right answer. Any freedom of speech guaranteed by the Bill of Rights is not freedom from the consequences of that speech, only that the government does not directly interfere with it. I'm sure the administration has their own feelings one way or the other as I have my own feelings, but this way they can allow the students to express themselves while they face whatever consequences are appropriate.

1.3 2026 March

1.3.1 2026 March 11 - Obama vs. Trump

I saw another Facebook page taunting President Trump about how much smoother and sweeter and more "intellectual" President Obama sounded when he spoke. I'm sure he sounded better, but I prefer to listen to what he said as opposed merely to how he said it.

On 1994 July 4, American Independence Day, Viclav Havel, President of the Czech Republic, gave a talk, "The Need for Transcendence in the Post-Modern World." I was about ten miles away from Philadelphia's Independence Hall where President Havel was speaking and we were watching the talk live on television.

The talk was frightening to me because his pitch was we are past the modern-world reliance on reason and ideas and are now entering a postmodern world "where everything is possible and almost nothing is certain." There are no facts, there is no truth, only what we feel.

My liberal mother was enamored with what she heard. He was smooth and educated, especially so as I would imagine English was not Havel's first language. What was interesting to me is I responded to the content of the talk while my liberal mother responded to the eloquence of the talk. She was moved by the beauty of the words while I was terrified by their content and that there were reasonable people who would be sucked in by the talk's demeanor.

History has shown us that demaguogary that leads to tyranny comes surprisingly easily from oral verbal presentation. I have seen it in person in a minor setting, an orator convincing an angry mob of local arts organization to violate carefully-written bylaws protecting the integrity of their umbrella organization and a judge responding not to their rationale but only to their passion. If rhetoric can work for mob rule in a local-town arts organization, just think how it can work for communists, socialists, and other revolutionaries.

I don't think it's cheating to judge an orator on the content of his speeches rather than the quality of his elocution.

1.3.2 2026 March 25 - Terrible Times

I have been listening to people whining how terrible our times are right now. There certainly are things to worry about. There's a looming national debt so terrible there's a serious threat that the world will leave the U.S. dollar for its international currency and use euros or Chinese yuan which would be a horrific loss for the United States of America.

I hear over and over again in social settings and from speakers and performers how terrible and scary things are today.

They're right, things are terrible and scary. But are they really more terrible or scarier than other times? In the last century we had a world war, a cold war, and divisive politics that were scarier. For those of us whose names end in "berg" or "stein" the Twenty-Teens decade has been chilling stateside and the decade before that made my Jewish friends in western Europe concerned. The year 2020 had COVID-19, George Floyd, and an election upset.

Am I worried about the debt and the dollar? Am I worried about China? Am I worried about a rising tide of left-wing anti-semitism? Am I worried about Iran? Of course I am, but I'm not more worried about any of those things than I was five, ten, fifteen, and twenty years ago. The big difference today is that these issues are in the forefront of America's political discussion and action.

Here in America the same divisive atmosphere that came from black-vs.-white in the 1960s and 1970s is coming from Jew-vs.-gentile in the past fifteen years.

The United States of American enjoyed a balance of trade that gave us low-cost goods and services that we didn't have to pay for for decades. Instead of investing that wealth into new manufacturing and research we spent it all on having a good time and now, suddenly, we're having to work for a living in the global economic theater. Some of us saw this coming decades ago.

I don't want to reassure people. "The public had better be as unreassured as it has the wits to be." They should have been this scared a long time ago. The hard part is getting people to do the right things about it.

1.3.3 2026 March 29 - Electoral College

There are all kinds of reasons for and against aggregating the U.S.-presidential election by state with the Electoral College. They say forty million (40M) Californians would dominate the election as they dominate the population. Maybe that's okay.

My own issue is different. Given that tens of millions of votes came out of nowhere in 2020 I figure that a Democrat state like California with forty million people might come up with fifty or sixty million votes. If nobody noticed the large number of counties in 2020 that had more Democrat votes than voters, then it wouldn't be a surprise if big, Democrat states like California and New York padded their voter roles.

By restricting the representation of each state to something more-or-less its population of legitimate voters, big, liberal states can't steal an election just by padding their total vote counts.

I admit the 2024 election is an oddity with its Fourteenth-Amendment Electoral calculation of 64 for Trump and 38 for Harris. Since the Constitution specifically specifies only citizens count for the Electoral count and the 2020 Census "forgot" to count U.S. citizens, according to the law of our land, each state in 2024 and 2028 gets the same two Electoral votes. (I didn't write the Constitution that way nor did I support removing any census question about who is and who is not a citizen, but it is funny that it turned out that way.)

1.4 2026 April

1.4.1 2026 April 2 - Birthright

We have a bunch of issues around "undocumented" immigrants. I agree with the sentiment that's like calling a burgler an undocumented houseguest or a drug pusher an undocumented pharmacist. We have tens of millions of people who came into our country who should either not be here or should have applied for entry. I have entered three dozen countries in my travels and I have had explicit permission to enter all of them. There are explicit reasons why Democrat left-wing progressives would want to have an artifically-high number of immigrants, lawful-legal or not and I agree with the sentiment that this was an invasion and these invaders should be sent home.

That's not my question here. My question here is the citizen status of their offspring.

The Fourteenth Amendment, the Constitutional center of this controversy, says, "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States."

There are two specific citizenship paths to like about this. The first was getting freed slaves to have automatic citizenship. They were clearly born here and they clearly were subject to U.S. jurisdiction, so they're citizens. As far back as I go, I don't personally know anybody old enough to be directly, positively affected by freed-slave citizenship.

The second is a little more subtle. I'm told there are foreign communities in other countries that have been there for generations and have been foreign for generations. Think of a German village in Switzerland whose parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents were German and they are German. Barring a lengthy naturalization-application process, they're never going to be Swiss citizens. We don't do that here in the U.S.A. A German or Swedish or Chinese community legitimately and lawfully living here can declare its children Americans without that kind of hassle. If your parents live here lawfully above board and you're born here, then you're one of us. That's an especially wonderful American sentiment and I believe the authors of the Fourteenth Amendment had that situation in the backs of their minds when they wrote it.

I think there's no ambiguity that anybody not lawfully here, people who are undocumented, are not subject to our jurisdiction and their children are not Americans without a lengthy application process like any other foreigner. That one is easy.

The only gray area is people legally visiting who happen to give birth while they're visiting. While I can imagine an expecting family here for two weeks happening to find themselves in a hospital delivery room, it's much easier to imaging a foreign woman having labor contractions showing up at immigration passport control desperate to have her "birthright baby" become an American citizen. That's not quite what I think the Fourteen-Amendment authors had in mind. It certainly isn't what I have in mind when we're lifting our lamp beside the golden door.

Shame on anybody trying to use the Fourteeth-Amendment birthright for children of visitors to our country to become citizens.

1.4.2 2026 April 2 - The Fair Tax

I'm seeing a new groundswell for a national sales tax where they're calling it the gimmicky name "Fair Tax." If we could replace all our federal taxes with a single tax on consumption or value added, then, yes, that would be better than what we have now. The Byzantine regulations around income taxes (made Constitutional by the Sixteenth Amendment) and various corporate and excise taxes (still prohibited by Constitution Article I combined with the Tenth Amendment) drive all kinds of personal and corporate decisions that are not in our country's best interest.

The American vision really is in Article I where every citizen gets the same vote and every citizen pays the same tax. "What is the fair tax burden of America's wealthiest five percent?" should get the immediate answer from any ideological American, "Five percent, of course." There are deep-seated philosophical and economic reasons for this viewpoint, not to mention that 262 million people would not have been slaughtered by their own socialist governments had our American left-wing Progressive Democrats not supported those same socialist governments.

I have run into libertarians who got snippy with me about halfway solutions, school vouchers for example. Of course government funded primary and secondary schooling dumbs down our education product for far-too-high a price, but if we can get from funding schools to funding schooling, the world will be a far better place than it is today.

Let's assume for a moment that we agree, first, that the partial step towards American liberty of a sales tax over an income tax is what we should do and, second, that we can do this through a Constitutional Amendment similar in wording and scope to the Twenty-First Amendment. This amendment would, of course, start with a single sentence repealing the Sixteenth Amendment. I don't want to pile a euphemistically-named "Fair Tax" on top of the whole mess of taxes we have now.

There is an important transition issue. Total U.S. consumer debt is eighteen trillion dollars ($18T) which, according to my latest Google search, is one hundred and five thousand dollars ($105K) per household. Assuming a transition from income tax to sales tax that debt will be free of income tax when it is earned and was free of sales tax when it was spent. On the other hand, households with significant savings (about one trillion dollars ($1T) for the whole country) paid income tax earning their bank accounts and will pay sales tax when they spend it. So we're shifting a major tax burden from historical borrowers to historical savers, not the right message to send to American wage earners.

This is a massive shift of tax burden and an astonishingly-negative message to Americans responsible enough to have savings instead of debt. If the proposed Fair Tax is ten percent (10%) and the average marginal federal income tax today is twenty-five percent (25%), then it is a six-trillion-dollar ($6T) subsidy for current debtors and, conversely, a penalty of three hundred and fifty thousand million dollars ($350G) for savers.

We can envision appropriate transition plans. One plan is a slow-enough transition over a decade or two, but if the sales tax is the better option, then it seems a pity to delay for many years. Another plan is a complex, one-time fair tax for debt with a simultaneous fair reward for savings. I'm sure the Fair-Tax people could come up with good paths from here to there, but I haven't heard them talking much about that problem, not to mention a solution.

I'm having trouble being comfortable with promoting a Fair Tax without some notion of a Fair Transition.

1.4.3 2026 April 9 - The Darker Side of Humanity

I'm seeing posts on Facebook with stories of outright heroism on the part of civilians under National Socialism (Nazi) Germany where these people took great person risks to smuggle Jews and other about-to-be victims out of Nazi territory to less-hostile places. I stand up taller and straighter knowing there are people like that in the world.

What goes unsaid most of the time is what made it possible for people to do the horrifying things Nazi leaders and followers did to people. It's not just Hitler's Germany, or Poland or Czechoslovia or France, it's not just Stalin's Russia or Mao's China, or even Pol Pot's Cambodia. There must be something in people to do these awful things. I'll point out that religious history isn't a lot more uplifting and cheerful than socialism with its crusades, inquisitions, and jihads.

The hatred of all things Jewish is a mystery that goes back 3500 years. I would love to see an explanation that has some way of making that ancient specific hatred of my own ethnic group go away, but I don't think that's likely to happen.

I don't believe the bad people in these regimes are as singularly terrible as we would like to believe. I believe that most of us are one week of peer pressure or one day of starvation or one hour of torture away from doing things like this to other people. The same humanity that gave us Bach and Shakespeare also gave us Auschwitz and Dachau. Alas, for good or for bad, mostly bad in this case, that's who we are.

There were a couple of famous experiments, in the 1960s I think, where ordinary people with not-terrible peer pressure were able to do awful things to other people. There was the Milgram experiment (1961-1963) where people were in a faux psychological experiment were training other subjects with electric shocks and were willing to induce terrible pain in others. There also was Jane Elliot's classroom experiment (1968) giving privilege based on eye color and it didn't take long until the dominant group seriously abused the subordinate group. It was scary stuff back then, it's scary stuff today, and the message I draw is that people are quite capable of doing terrible things to each other.

So the only path to "Never Again" where we hope that Hitler's Nazi regime is the last time for all history, is more than awareness and caring. It's making sure the social and political structure of religious and socialist collectivism is lost and gone forever.

If we can free our political and social culture from the progressive, collectivist mindset, then maybe we have a chance of living holocaust free, at least for a few decades.

By analogy, there's a health-fitness trend out there where people seem convinced they can live forever if they can just keep their lives fit and totally germ and fat free. I'm all in favor of healthy living eating healthy amounts of healthy foods, but you know the obsessed type who act like totally-healthy living is a ticket to immortality. While I may mock the crock-of-shit zealots, I'm pretty sure an obese person spending his weekends watching football games eating fried chicken is likely not to live life that is a good advertisement for healthy lifestyle.

In the same way, while I personally believe the only long-term stable path to "Never Again" is total aversion to church and state, I realize we're going to have a tough time getting that far. Government providing national defense against invading outsiders and elevated arbitration for large-scale internal differences is part of our American Constitutional culture. I share in the pride when concert performers stop for a moment to acknowledge the contribution and sacrifice of America's armed-forces veterans, even for wars I didn't like. I don't have to like his war to admire a warrior.

It's causes like government feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, housing the homeless, educating the ignorant, healing the sick, funding the arts, and making sure every American has enough Internet pornography that make me wince. Taking from every citizen for border protection and countrywide arbitration isn't nearly as likely to degrade into holocaust-level tyranny as taking from every citizen to provide health, education, and welfare. The slope from those programs to Stalin's Russia, Hitler's Germany, Castro's Cuba, and Mao's China is all too slippery. Even in our second-amendment-protected, guns-and-freedom-club America Margaret Sanger could strap Negro women down and sterilize them and FDR could incarcerate yellow Americans.

America wasn't like that when our culture didn't tolerate government redistribution and provision of goods and services. America from 1789 to 1900 wasn't a panacea, but many good things happened, slavery went away, we became wealthy and powerful enough to win world wars, and we became a beacon of hope for the rest of the world.

The dark side of the moon will stay dark, the dark side of humanity will similarly stay dark, so the path to no more holocausts is strong social revulsion to any government other than the most basic functions in our country's founding documents as they existed in 1791 and a strong sense of vigilance to make sure it stays that way.

1.5 2026 May

1.5.1 2026 May 24 - Gerrymandering Mathematics

I'm seeing various posting on Facebook, my social medium of choice, about partitioning states into congressional districts and the issue of "gerrymandering" those districts to favor one major party or the other.

Step back a minute and observe the Electoral College counts compared to popular votes. In particular, look at the differences and, to my point, the differences in the differences. For 2024 Trump vs. Harris the published popular vote difference was less than one percent while the published Electoral count difference was sixteen percent. Aggregation tends to overstate the differences.

Let's take a mathematically-simplified example of a state with ten million people divided into ten districts. Let's assume we have two parties, call them Orange and Green. If the state is 70% Orange and 30% Green, then it sounds fair in some way to have seven Orange districts and three Green districts. If the ten districts were homogeneous enough to have all Orange or all Green, then that would happen as the 70% Orange would be seven solid-Orange districts and the 30% Green would be three solid-Green districts. But that doesn't happen in real life. Suppose we have the other extreme that the population is uniformly seven-to-three down to the individual city block. Any geographic partition will have ten Orange districts each of which is 70% Orange and 30% Green and each of which will, in a majority vote, choose Orange.

Consider it this way. Look at a newspaper or magazine stipple image of a dark gray background. The picture doesn't have anything gray, just a mix of black dots and white background that is 70% black dots and 30% white background. Can you take your scissors and cut the gray part into ten pieces of paper seven mostly black and three mostly white? It may be clear with a good magnifying glass that the gray-looking paper is actually 70% black and 30% white, but it would take a more than a surgeon's hand to cut the paper to separate black and white in a "fair" manner.

Similarly, a state with somewhat-uniformly distributed 70% Orange and 30% Green is likely going to end up with nine or ten Orange districts and one or zero Green districts. That's not anything sneaky or smarmy, just mathematical statistics. So, at least on this one issue, assuming we want a "fair" distribution of the districts by party, the undesired outcome of nearly all the majority party is not necessarily the result of some underhanded conspiracy.

"Gerrymandering" is the term for deliberate division into districts that favor one party or other political position.

That doesn't mean there is no underhanded conspiracy, and we all love underhanded conspiracies, only that even an open-and-honest geographic apportionment likely will produce majority-heavy district representation.

There may be deliberate divisions that mitigate the inherent bias in geographic partitioning, maybe letting people choose their districts based on the beliefs or positions rather than their geography, but that would dilute the advantages of having truly-local representation.

1.5.2 2026 May 29 - High School Football Hazing

I just read a social-medium story that Cheltenham High School just outside Philadelphia is cutting out its football program because of hazing. I'm Cheltenham Class of 1974, so it has been a few year. Fifty-two years later I wonder if kids going out for the football team were abused in my day.

Lots of things can change in half a century. The nature of abuse can change between then and now and the standards of acceptable treatment also can change. We can all think of things we did then that nobody would do now, maybe because of standards of decency and maybe because people are more-easily offended today. I'm looking through a one-hundred-year lens, remembering half a century ago and projecting those standards forward half a century.

My first reaction isn't to dismiss these kids as "wusses" because they can't take a little kidding. It's on my list and I have to wonder just how badly kids coming out for a sports team can be treated to merit concern, but stranger things have happened in familiar places.

My first reaction is to question the school's inability to control something like this without jeopardizing the football program. High school football is an important part of growing up in America and I would think controlling hazing abuse would be the first choice rather than ending such a valued tradition as the top-dog sport at the school.

I liken it to ending the Science Department because some teachers and students were growing pot in the greenhouse. Surely there's some way to solve the problem before abandoning such an essential part of our educational experience.

1.6 2026 June

1.6.1 2026 June 25 - Trillionaire Gains

I see a lot of fuss how it's not fair for Elon Musk to be a trillionaire when there are poor people out there. First of all, the price of trying to be fair, the historical price of communism and socialism and income redistribution and all that has been staggering, but that's not my point here.

I do take some humorous solace that Elon is African American, the term black people started using when "black" became as pejorative as "Negro."

Where did Elon's wealth come from and what is it, really? Does Elon have more houses, cars, airplanes, yachts than he had when he was a lowly hundred-billionaire? I doubt it. The wealth he has is the productive value of corporations he created.

Liberals fuss he didn't actually invent all the technologies that have made him so rich. On a micro scale, my partners and I just sold a retail-science company Clear Demand and, yes, I actually invented a lot of the science that made our clients a lot of money. On the other hand, much of what we did was just doing what had been done before better than it was done before. The wealth now sitting in my bank account from the sale is wealth that didn't exist before. I didn't take anybody's housing, food, health care, or Internet porn (the essentials) to make the world incrementally a better place with my company.

In the same vein, where Clear Demand was a capillary, Elon's companies have produced a great deal. The beauty of capitalism, above and beyond just free-market economics, is the ownership of enterprise. I can sell stock in my company to somebody else who wants to participate in my ability to produce wealth and, in the reverse, I can buy stock in somebody else's enterprise. Elon produced corporations of such productive value, or, at least, of such perceived productive value, that people are willing to buy his stock. His wealth is almost entirely the market capitalization of his enterprise. If we actually went out and sold all of it, then he would get far less than the $1T ($1,000,000,000,000) that stock represents in the market.

So Elon got rich by producting productivity, wealth that didn't exist before, not by taking anything from anybody. So those of us who are mere millionaires (not a lot of money when lunch with two friends is $100) should stop being envious and be proud that our economy can produce so much wealth for Elon.

Look at it this way. If Elon can become a trillionaire, then that means the rest of us have our own chances to succeed.

1.7 2026 July

1.7.1 2026 July 28 - Socialism and Social Programs

There are numerous left-wing, progressive, liberal posts in my Facebook stream saying I have to be in favor of socialism because I use the post office or some other government services. Social programs and socialism are quite different, one is having a basically-free economy with tax-funded benefits while the other is government ownership, or at least control, of the means of production.