JUDGMENT - The Missing Moral Principle

Who is the Ragnar Danneskjold* of our time? Who is calling the destroyers of value to account?

We live in a time of a giant sucking sound. The WEST is flushing itself down the toilet.

Why? It cannot pronounce moral judgment. When I say "it," I mean that the culture is in such a weakened state that a strong pronouncement of moral judgment to true matters up would be shouted down as unseemly. Given this state, the strong pronouncement will have to be yelled through a din of naysayers. Someone will hear it anyway. I promise you, I will hear it if it can be heard.

I dedicate this piece to Bosch Fawstin. He's fearless, especially in his fingering the contradictions and inhumanity of the Muslims, and I love him for that. I really liked his entry into the Twin Towers Goes Global contest. Maybe now they can get why people don't want the Ground Zero Mosque.

Along this line, I've been thinking of all the "brands" that are being diminished because the people who speak for and work to enhance those brands will not pronounce moral judgment against Obama who, highly associated with them, is taking them down with him.

Here's some: Democrats, Harvard, Columbia, Chicago, Illinois, Oprah, Unions, Blacks in general, and the USA. (The only one I care about supporting is the USA. The rest will have to earn my respect one man or institution at a time.)

Wouldn't it be something if a leader from Harvard came forward and said that he now sees, with Obama as its currently most famous product, the enormous cost of Affirmative Action? OR wouldn't if be astounding if a black leader came forward and said that it's time for blacks to stop acting like a "pack" that "goes along to get along" and call Obama to account for all of his violations of human freedom, the most precious of conditions for the people who knew and tell the stories of slavery? Wouldn't it be amazing if a Democrat denounced Obama for enacting policies destroying the economy stating that it is time to call him to account regardless that he is black? Or gosh, wouldn't it be something if someone would stand up for America and apologize to "the best within us" for "forgetting who we are," by letting Obama, our President, besmirch the ideal that quickens the beat of the human heart around the globe?

All of us are going to pay dearly for "going along" with Obama - the Con. Every brand associated with Obama will pay. Oprah has never been held as high as she was before she endorsed Obama. (It's interesting about Oprah. People loved her and were always talking about her when her program was geared to all people. Who is she now that Obama favors blacks over whites in instance after instance and she says nothing? Swiss cheese?)

Harvard and Columbia are being drug through the streets insofar as providing a solid education for real values. They are gaining the reputation of being an intellectual hot house that doesn't know what goes on in the real world.

Chicago and Illinois have been corrupt for a long time, but now they have taken on a real and dangerous quality that they didn't have before. Why? Obama thrived there.

America granted grace, which I don't think has been an entirely good thing since freedom is its own reward, to blacks because their ancestors were slaves. That's over. I called the grocery clerk to account where before I would have let her slide.

The thing that is so clearly missing in the public arena of our era is judgment. No one will pronounce it. No one will take action for a proper standard. No one in Congress is making a dent on the corruption that is overtaking our government. It is simply missing.

In the ever-present choice of wings or spine, we've chosen wings.

36"w x 24"h acrylic on canvas, 2004

Where is the spine. It doesn't exist in this soupy, slurpy world of words. Just words - words that mean nothing except to have you think they do. For every statement coming out of Obama's mouth, we have a video or audio clip of him saying the opposite. Insanity reigns. Obama, the Con, spins more words tonight in his Jobs Speech. Words, just words. Except they are costing us not only our treasure, but our moral vitality.

Obama may paint a socialist utopia, but we all know that it shall not happen. Never has, never will. Why would it? No one gives a damn. And, no one does because the government won't allow it. Who can care when you are regulated from morning 'til night and this plague is spreading faster than we can get rid of it?

All will stop when someone with a voice that can be heard pronounces moral judgment - the judgment that gives one's moral vitality a bracing jolt!**

Who among us possesses THE VOICE THAT CAN BE HEARD? That is who we are waiting for.

_______________________________

*Ragnar Danneskjold is a character in Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. He was a pirate for justice. He calculated the amount a businessmen deserved from his production and trade, because he earned by trading value for value. Then he would attack ships which the government used to transfer wealth from America to People's States around the globe. (Sound like Obama?) When he got the wealth on board, he took it to a place where it was held in account for the producer of it. It became available to him when he chose to take his power back, go on strike and renounce being a sacrificial lamb.

**Ayn Rand is the only one in my lifetime that has done this. And she did it the hard way. She earned it.

Are You Crazy?

Have Americans completely lost their minds?

America is the best producer of goods and services the world has ever known. Right now it has the best Health Care available for the most citizens of any place in the world. It produces more procedures and medicines and has more facilities to cure or ameliorate the ailments of mankind than anyplace else. There are some problems, but a poor person is rich in America compared to the poor around the world.

And you want to trade that for someone telling you what, how much and who you can go to for your health care? ARE YOU NUTS?

Every place that has GOVERNMENT Health Care must, by necessity, move to the lowest common denominator of health care. The GOVERNMENT harnesses, i.e., ENSLAVES, the doctors and all others in the system by refusing to pay them what they want and would otherwise get in a free market. The best ones leave the business. It controls the pharmaceutical industry and pharmaceutical research so that you get what the GOVERNMENT wants to pass out. It controls the hospitals, it controls the nurses, it controls the ambulance services, it controls every bit and piece of an otherwise complex system with abundant options and practices. It chokes, i.e., asphyxiates, i.e., takes the breath of life away from every doctor, every nurse, every office, every prescription and drug producer, every ambulance service, every person in the industry with paperwork.

And for that reason it will kill people too. Yes, I said kill them - by deprivation, by neglect, by policies which will follow the book, not the needs of the patient.

It will destroy the doctor - patient relationship. You will be a cipher, not a person.

Because the demand for Health Care will go through the roof because it is FREE, which it isn’t, it will be rationed. You will not be able to get the very thing that may save your life. You will have to wait too long or it won’t be available. What you will get are excuses and delays and government policies. None of these will do a damn thing for you!

In the scarcity of Health Care that will be CAUSED by THE GOVERNMENT, guess who will be selected to suffer this scarcity the most? The old, the infirm, the handicapped – anyone who is determined by THE GOVERNMENT to not be in the mainstream of productive citizens doing the work that the GOVERNMENT considers valuable. Of course they will never say that. It will just happen by default. Since you do not get to choose your health care, the GOVERNMENT will make the decisions. And they don't know if you are a genius or an idiot, a producer or a moocher. Why would a bureaucrat care about those things that are not reflected in their numbers? There is no other possibility.

And because Health Care will be costly and scarce, you will be regulated regarding your own life. If you eat a Twinkie, followed to its ultimate conclusion, you will violate the law, can be fined or taken to jail or simply spurned. If you smoke a cigarette, you will violate the law and can be fined or taken to jail or refused treatment. You will be required to diet, to exercise, to sleep the right number of hours, to eat the right things, drink the right things, everything that THE GOVERNMENT says, by fiat, you must do to obtain its health care. It will use ladles of guilt and post millions of banners and signs that no one reads about how you are a good boy if you follow their instructions. It won't be like that you say? Not immediately, but the pressure will always be in that direction.

And have you seen the GOVERNMENT’S health care facilities? Take a look at the public facilities they have now. Go to your county health department’s waiting room, get in line in a dingy shabby room painted institution green and see how you like it. Or go to the veterans hospitals and watch the tired nurses, who will be on a GOVERNMENT pay scale along with the doctors and secretaries and all the other employees, complain about their job. Or go to the big public hospitals where you wonder why it is not as clean as your home?

When the GOVERNMENT controls everything, there won’t even be the attraction of security that the GOVERNMENT offers to its employees. With everyone employed by the GOVERNMENT that distinction won’t exist. It will be all about we HAVE TO. Whining will be elevated to an art form. This is the result of having no choice.

And are you aware that regimentation via GOVERNMENT control causes stupidity? If you don't think the I-don't-care attitude of government workers will not spill over into their care, you are really crazy. Livers will be accidentally removed, a wrong leg will be amputated, the anesthesiologist will accidentally kill your loved one instead of anesthetizing them. Simple procedures will become complicated and complicated ones will be incorrectly made simple. Instead of keeping their mind on the business at hand they will be thinking about their latest tweet or when they can get back to Facebook.

Here's a video interviewing ordinary people in Canada about their healthcare. And here is an interview with someone who lived under England's single-payer health care system. They don't even get Novocaine when their teeth are drilled.

This is your future. Are you willing to trade the riches that a free system which encourages superb service and good care in order to attract business FOR THIS? What are you thinking?

People do not get that Universal Health Care is a DIRECT ATTACK on them as human being. It attacks everything that gives rise to being human: your valuing nature as such, your particular values, your mind, your reason, your life and those you care about.

An American watching the above video can see how Canadians are no longer people in the full sense of the word. They have given up. They have ACCEPTED the system, its craziness, and their plight. They make excuses for it. Most Americans I know would have said, "Enough of this horseshit. I'm going some place else!"

ARE YOU CRAZY?

Health care is too costly, you say?

Then free it up. Allow more competition, not less. Allow it to meet more needs at all levels instead of less. Already health care is bound hand and foot with regulations that are completely unnecessary. I don’t remember anyone complaining about health care 60 years ago. You had the doctor you trusted and you went to him if you had a problem. You worked out the cost and paid it. Insurance was varied and available at any level you wanted it. If you want better and less costly health care, FREE IT UP! Freedom is the answer, not GOVERNMENT control and regulation.

Here is a conversation about getting the GOVERNMENT out of the way.

Freedom has always been the answer. It unleashes the human engine that produces a torrent of goods and services. It unleashes the ideas and production of the best minds as well as the lesser ones. It unleashes the entrepreneur. There is no waiting in freedom. If you want it, you think about it, you work for it and you pay for it. If you don’t want it, you don’t.

I can’t believe that people are willing to trade abundance for poverty, pennies for the gold they now have and could have more of. But apparently they are about to do so. What has gotten hold of you? Are we now to wear hair shirts for no reason except to prove we are suffering? Are the Liberals, the Progressives, among us as unenlightened as medieval Christians? We have to be gripped by some vast superstition.

When Obama, Reid and Pelosi give up their special government health care program and go stand in line in Canada as an ordinary citizen, I will believe they have something other than pure lies to say to us.

ARE YOU CRAZY?

STOP RIGHT NOW, AMERICA.

WAKE UP!

CALL AND WRITE YOUR CONGRESSMAN AND THE PRESIDENT NOW. NO UNIVERSAL HEALTH CARE. ABSOLUTELY - NO! NO! NO!
ARE YOU CRAZY?

Bail Bill Upholds Unreality - Kill It

Here is an article by Robert Tracinski who writes the TIA Daily column. I'm copying it whole as it is great to get your feet on the ground in terms of free market principles. Also, I must say that I am shocked regarding Bernake's complete disregard for what has the free market work. After reading this and his attempt at Czardom, I'm persuaded the guy is a psychopath.

TIA Daily • October 1, 2008
Kill the Bailout
The Government Can't Rewrite Reality

The House of Representatives deserves praise for taking swift action to avert a growing economic crisis—by not approving the trillion-dollar financial bailout plan.

The bailout bill was blocked Monday by a rebellion among House Republicans, who voted two-to-one against a plan they consider a step down the "slippery slope to socialism," in the words of Texas Representative Jeb Hensarling.

They are absolutely correct, and the 133 Republicans who voted to stop this coup against the financial markets—not to mention some of the 95 Democrats who may have balked for similar reasons—need to find the courage to stand firm. That's especially true since the Senate is likely to vote today to approve the bailout.

The Senate is supposed to serve, in James Madison's analogy, as the "cooling saucer" for the hot tea served up by the House—but in this case, it is the House that has remained cool and refused to panic. That's because the hysterical demand for a bailout didn't come up from the people; it came down from the elites in Washington and Manhattan. The House is reflecting the sensible skepticism coming up from the folks on Main Street who don't want to pay the bills for bailing out Hank Paulson's former colleagues on Wall Street.

Some cold, realistic scrutiny of the bailout is desperately needed because this plan is not just an attack on the free market. It is an attack on reality. The financial crisis was caused by more than a decade of using government power to rewrite the facts of reality and override the judgment of the market, and the bailout just offers more of the same fantasy economics.

Congress wanted everyone to be able to get a mortgage to buy a home, regardless of income, credit history, or ability to save for a down payment. The name for this contradiction was "affordable housing," an initiative aimed at providing the benefits of home ownership to those who could not, in fact, afford it. So when the market concluded that low-income borrowers could not meet the credit requirements for mortgages, the Clinton administration invoked trumped-up charges of racism to expand enforcement of the Community Reinvestment Act, bullying banks into dropping as "arbitrary" such old-fashioned credit standards as proof of income. And when the market balked at the increased credit risk created by these loans, Congress backed the expansion of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, government-sponsored enterprises that used federally guaranteed money to buy up the increasingly risky mortgages.

At every point, when the market sent the message that reality would not support the higher level of risk being taken on by mortgage lenders, the government used its power to override this message.

The vigorous government-created market for riskier "sub-prime" loans masked the real dangers, creating the illusion that increased profits could be obtained without increased risk—an illusion that encouraged some private lenders to follow Fannie and Freddie's lead. To be sure, some of this private risk-taking was part of the normal process of failure in a capitalist economy. A large part of the current financial upheaval originated with high-risk investment banks and hedge funds that held large amounts of mortgage-backed securities. These securities were carefully balanced against one another according to mathematical formulas that were calculated to cancel out their risks. But the mathematical formulas were new and hadn't been tested in a bear market. When the downturn came, they failed.

This is a normal part of the rough and tumble of capitalism. All of the current talk about the "failure" of the free market ignores the fact that the process of failure is a crucial benefit of the free market. In a capitalist system, high-risk firms are always trying out new and untested ideas, and failure is the messenger that tells the market which strategies work and which strategies don't. It is also an indispensable corrective mechanism that moves capital from enterprises with failing strategies to those with successful strategies.

But the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve have repeatedly short-circuited this mechanism by trying to outlaw failure. When the market sent the message that too many bad loans had been made and that this needed to be corrected by a contraction in the amount of available credit, the government wanted to avoid the unpleasant consequences of such a contraction. So the Federal Reserve papered over the facts—with a flurry of paper money—by artificially reducing interest rates and loosening up credit just when it needed to be tightened.

But that didn't change the underlying facts, and the bad investments still went bad. Yet as the market has sent the message that some firms have become over-extended and are no longer solvent, the government has still tried to avoid letting the market face the facts. The Treasury and the Fed kept trying to rewrite reality by orchestrating a series of government-backed bailouts.

Over at RealClearMarkets, Joseph Calhoun points out a crucial part of this assault on facts:

There has always been a stigma attached to borrowing directly from the Fed and for good reason. If a bank can’t get other banks to lend it money, that tells the market something about the condition of the bank in question.

Last August, Bernanke convinced three large banks to borrow at the discount window in an effort to remove that stigma. When that didn’t work, he concocted a scheme to allow banks to borrow from the Fed in anonymity via a mechanism he called the Term Auction Facility. When Bear Stearns blew up, he added the Term Securities Lending Facility for investment banks. By removing the stigma of borrowing from the Fed and hiding the identity of the borrowers, Bernanke removed important information from the market.

So the Fed's approach to potential bank failures was to try to help failing banks pretend that they weren't failing.

Or consider the SEC's ban on short sales for a list of about 700 stocks—with more companies lobbying to get themselves put on the list. Again, the whole approach of the SEC is not to prevent companies from failing, but to help them pretend that they are not failing, by outlawing trades that would tend to drive their stock prices down.

In fact, all that this sort of policy has achieved is to expand business failures. When Lehman Brothers went bankrupt, for example, it had been in negotiations with several major financial institutions who were considering investing billions in a private buy-out of the firm. But they balked at making the deal because they were waiting for the Fed to offer incentives and guarantees. Thus, the Fed's yelping about how each bankruptcy of a Wall Street firm poses a risk of "systemic failure" turns out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy, because the prospect of an open-ended series of bailouts is blocking all of the mechanisms by which a free market actually prevents widespread failure.

The bailout package would have the government buy out up to $700 billion worth of bad loans. But this is merely delaying the re-pricing of those loans to their proper value. Left to themselves, the holders of these loans would eventually find it necessary to sell them at pennies on the dollar; Merrill Lynch sold its bad loans at 22 cents on the dollar. Private companies could then recognize the magnitude of the loss and start to rebuild their businesses with the remaining assets they possess. But now no firm has an incentive to sell off its bad loans. Why dump them for 22 cents on the dollar when the government might buy them, a few weeks later, at 50 or 80 cents?

So instead what is going to happen is that the federal government is going to go into the financial markets and dictate which securities are worth how much. It is still unclear exactly which loans the government will buy or how much it will pay for them, so no private investor can say whether an investment will pay off or not. This is how the prospect of a government bailout blocks the private buyouts that would actually clean all of the bad debt out of the system.

Instead, this plan transforms the US Treasury into a trillion-dollar hedge fund, making investments in securities whose proper market value is unknown and promising its shareholders—us—that unlike the best Wall Street investment banks, Treasury bureaucrats really know how to make a profit on sub-prime mortgage loans. That's why probably the best comment on the bailout is an e-mail making the rounds on Capitol Hill presenting Paulson's pitch for the bailout deal—in the style of a Nigerian banking scam. "I need to ask you to support an urgent secret business relationship with a transfer of funds of great magnitude," it begins. Time to hit the "delete" button.

The bailout represents more of the same problems that got us here because it is backed by all of the same people who created those problems. And I'm not just talking about Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, who organized the series of ad hoc bailouts that spread uncertainty through the financial industry. Much worse is the fact that a chief negotiator for the bailout is House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank, the chief sponsor of the "affordable housing" scam. And as for Barack Obama, Stanley Kurtz exposes the role played by ACORN, Obama's former employer as a "community organizer." It turns out that a big part of ACORN's "community organizing" was to use thug tactics and the threat of government regulation to intimidate banks into making high-risk mortgage loans.

Fortunately, the public has the good sense to smell that something is rotten. I just got an e-mail recounting what Virginia Representative Jim Moran told Fox News: that calls from constituents commenting on the bailout were running 50-50—50% "no" and 50% "hell, no."

The House should not simply delay the bailout bill or mitigate its worst features; that will prolong the uncertainty in the financial markets. Instead, they need to make sure that the bailout meets with firm and repeated rejection over the next week, preferably by a growing margin of votes.

It is time for the House to kill the bailout and kill it decisively.

It is time for Congress to stop the government from rewriting reality, so that the market can be free to recognize the facts, pick up the pieces of failing firms, and begin rebuilding.

From Moocher to Producer

I was exploring the internet this morning when I came across this quote from Atlas Shrugged. Thanks to Dirk for excerpting it on his blog: http://econoblog101.wordpress.com/2008/03/29/atlas-shrugged-text-excerpt-2/. It is from the paperback version, pg 662.

"He chuckled. 'Market? I now work for use, not for profit - my use, not the looter’s profit. Only those who add to my life, not those who devour it, are my market. Only those who produce, not those who consume, can ever be anybody’s market. I deal with the life-givers, not with the cannibals. If my oil takes less effort to produce, I ask less of the men to whom I trade it for the things I need. I add an extra span of time to their lives with every gallon of my oil that they burn. And since they’re men like me, they keep inventing faster ways to make the things they make - so every one of them grants me an added minute, hour or day with the bread I buy from them, with the clothes, the lumber, the metal' …"

The lens through which I look at life produced a clearer vision when I read this quote. How many times have I looked at my bank account thinking it was how I knew where I was in my mastery of life? Ellis Wyatt has been through all this and has gone on strike. He's now at a more fundamental value: use. He has now selected his market based on what is useful for him rather than being a slave to the market for what he can get. Who is his market? Those who produce. Those are the only ones that are safe and fruitful for him to deal with.

So, if there is to be a shift here, what would it be like if instead of the bank deciding it can loan you money based on your bank balance and your credit report, they loaned you money based on whether you can produce? Would they not upgrade their portfolio? And would they not do something to shift people's attitude if they win the lottery or come into an inheritance?

And what if instead of getting up in the morning and asking yourself what you are going to do that day, you ask yourself what you are going to produce that day?

And what if the political candidates appealed to production as a value rather than need as a value? What if their conversations and political speeches encouraged being a producer rather than being a moocher living off the State? Both Hillary and Obama slop around in the poor, downtrodden travails of life as if their political fortune is justified by people's need, rather like Mother Teresa's except they will use a gun instead of charity as their means of providing.

If a politician is in favor of a healthy society, his policies have to encourage production as a virtue and winnow people from "moochuction" as a virtue.

I've been given a piece of advice when times are slow: "Fill the pipeline." This means that depending on the actions one puts into gaining income, one will draw out income. This is true in one sense, but where I am left with this advice is that effort and action are a virtue and we all know that effort and action can also produce no results.

I like the idea of production as a virtue better because it focuses on the essence of the matter rather than something that is involved in it but not the heart of it. A further point is that it shifts one's orientation from materialism to objectivism - a view of life that is an integration of mind and body, not a split between mind and body. It does this by integrating effort with results which are not only material but spiritual. What pride there is in producing what one says he will produce and needs to produce to forward his life. But that is a whole other subject.

What will I produce today?

Distinguishing Empty and Meaningless

Empty and Meaningless, a term familiar to Landmark Education graduates, is the point at which you get in a course where you can now create something new. People go into the course to break through something that has stopped them in their lives. It can be in a relationship. It can be in one's progress in one's career. It can be in any area of life where one feels stuck.

After almost two days of deconstruction of the world that you have built, you come to a place in your mind where you are sufficiently clear of that to create a new future. You have seen where you've erred, interpreted events incorrectly, have taken into your being (i.e., adopted as a basic premise in your knowledge and/or evaluative structure) something that has been stopping you from moving forward.

This place, free of past attachment of any kind, is called "empty and meaningless." As a point to which one gets himself to be free to create something new beyond the way he has been able to create in the past, he has to let go of the meaning that the old way had for him.

The distinction I want to make is this. Life is not, I say NOT, empty and meaningless, and to think that it is has serious consequences. (Those consequences are for a later post.) Life is an aspect of particular kinds of entities - namely living ones. These entities are to be distinguished from stones, tables, books and all sorts of inert, lifeless entities. The existence of these lifeless entities just is. They cannot take action to prolong their life because they don't possess life. They are just "banged" or moved around in the universe based on their own identity and the identities of the entities around them via the law of cause and effect - rather like billiard balls.

Entities possessing life, however, have a completely different situation. They have to constantly take action that keeps their lives in existence. Life is not automatic. It is maintained by action consistent with what the life needs to exist.

In the lower animals, this is automatic in the sense that they act to maintain their life until they are killed or die naturally. But in humans, who are distinguished from the lower animals by the faculty of reason, this is not automatic. A human being can choose at any moment to end his life and take the action to do so. In other words, life, for a human being is something that he chooses to keep in existence or not.

Because of this fact, everything around a human being is imbued by him with meaning. The basic meaning is, "Is this for me or against me?" "Does this further or hinder my life?"

Man's life and his faculty of reason are part of his nature. His creation of meaning is automatic. He will create meaning regardless. It is said that "Man is a meaning creating machine." That's true, except that he isn't a machine, and he has no choice in this matter. Thus life is not empty and meaningless. On the contrary, life is everywhere filled with meaning.

Given that, the area where you have choice and control is the meaning that you give a particular situation, event or attribute. And the Landmark exercise is valuable in altering the meaning that you give something - especially events and situations that happened in your past.

A person can see a difficult childhood as bad or he can see it as good or some combination. There were things he didn't have and didn't experience. On the other hand, he learned to be strong in the face of that and those ways may lead to success in many areas of life.

The point of this distinction is to not blithely say, "Life is empty and meaningless" as a way to dismiss worrying about something or to dismiss another person's concern. The point is to get in there, take charge of and be responsible for the meaning you create. Each of us, after all, is responsible for this individual human capacity.