Your Mom’s A Blog

If you live in Missouri, the median income (i.e. the amount of income which 50% of people make either more or less than) is $63,274 for the average 4 person household.  If we assume no other deductions, filing jointly that puts you in the 15% tax bracket.  So, let’s do some math.

15% of $63,274 = $9491.10

In 2009 the US Federal Government spent the following:
Housing assistance: $41,387,000,000                       1.3% Total Outlays
Food and nutrition assistance: $62,431,000,000        2.0% Total Outlays
Other income security: $136,630,000,000                 4.4% Total Outlays

An outlay is what the government spends irrespective of how much they collected in taxes, duties etc.  Thus if we spend more than we collect there is a deficit, if we spend less there is a surplus.

Obviously in 2009 we had a deficit.  But let’s assume that if we hadn’t had a deficit that the percentage of the federal budget spent on the previously mentioned items has an equal analogous amount removed from an individual’s taxes.  Thus:

In 2009 the average Missouri family paid the following:
Housing assistance: $123.38
Food and nutrition assistance: $189.82
Other income security: $417.61

Grand Total: $730.81  or  $60.90/month

Why do I bring this up?  I’ve heard a number of people suggest that welfare programs generally benefit the unworthy.  Well, here is the average cost of taking care of the unworthy if you are a Missourian.

I now challenge you with the following questions.
1.     Are all recipients of welfare unworthy of aid?
2.    If so what are the criteria for judging worth in this instance?
3.    Many people on welfare, worthy or not have children.  Should we deny all aid to these people if even a small percentage ultimately goes to helping their children?
4.    Some have argued that individuals and community organizations should be responsible for social welfare programs.  Is it not more advantageous to leave these programs in the hands of the government which is capable of providing aid even during hard times like an economic recession?
5.    Even if these programs are wildly inefficient and ineffective, do they not employ some amount of people in an attempt to distribute aid?
6.    What are the causes of poverty?  Before actually answering this question, do you have proof, or is this just what you think causes poverty, or what is commonly held as the cause of poverty?

Some Sources:
http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/ocs/liheap/guidance/SMI75FY09.pdf

http://www.budget.gov/budget

http://www.gpoaccess.gov/usbudget/fy09/browse.html

http://www.cbo.gov/publications/bysubject.cfm?cat=35

The following post is broken into 5 parts that may be read from the top to the bottom.  The breaks in pages may not be logical, they are just there to provide natural stopping points.

Since the election of President Obama the other side has been continually grumbling about socialism and the end of the American “way of life.”  These complaints are most likely not very serious; they are simply the kind of thing that one party says about the other party.  In the United States socialism is generally synonymous with bad government and/or loss of freedom, at some level.  I rarely hear anyone talk about socialism in any very intellectual way; it is more like a curse word or profanity that gets peppered into political rhetoric to emphasize a point.

I have decided to take a moment and discuss the fact that every social and economic structure is flawed in some way.  I’ve chosen to pick on the idea of a free market because it seems to be so heavily idolized by so many people.  Before I begin I will take a brief moment to say that the free market is nominally a great way to move capital quickly and make any form of trade comparatively simple.  Currently, some form of a free market economy is, arguably, the best economic system is place.  With these praises out of the way, there are some serious flaws that we should not forget.

What is a free market? A free market system generally means a system where all facets trade (price, supply, demand, etc.) is unregulated by government.  Extending this idea, a free market is a system where ‘natural’ occurrences and interactions between those involved in the system dictate prices, etc.  We might also expand the definition to say that this is a system using some form of money as a means of exchange, as opposed to some barter system.

So what is wrong with a free market system?  The first obvious answer, demonstrated throughout history, is a tendency toward inequity.  This seems counter-intuitive and indeed many people argue that the system is inherently equal, but that is simply not always the case.  Theoretically, anyone can participate in a free market.  Anyone can grow food and take it to market, make some product and sell it, or provide some service for a fee.  The problem is that capital begets capital and no capital begets nothing.  “Ex nihilo, nihil fit.”  From nothing, nothing comes.

You can’t come to the free market with nothing.  There must be, at the very least, an investment of time and energy, if not actual capital to able to trade on the free market.  Assuming a person has no capital to start out; the only thing they can bring to the free market is their labor.  The free market usually drives down prices.  It does this by allowing anyone to buy from the person offering the lowest price.  In a free market the person offering the lowest price for their labor is the most desperate person.  The desperate tend to be more concerned with survival than haggling for the best wage.  As a result the labor is artificially undervalued, which pushes down the value of other’s labor.  As a result, which history has shown again and again, the free market favors those who can wait the longest.  The people who can usually wait the longest are those with money, vis-à-vis, those who don’t have to worry about starvation, having no place to live, no clothes, etc.  Thus, a free market system can easily favor those who already have money.

The result of favoring those with more as opposed to those with less is a large disparity between the wealthy and the poor.  The rich become richer because they can turn a profit on their capital, the poor become poorer, because the rich can wait them out and drive down prices.  This isn’t always the case.  During the time of the Black Death huge portions of Europe’s population died over the course of a few years.  As a result there was a drastic labor shortage.  Europe at that time being primarily an agricultural society needed agricultural workers.  The smarter of the wealthy classes offered more money for the same labor that the peasants had been doing and thus drew more peasants to them.  This allowed the lords to continue business as usual while depriving their neighbors of the labor they needed to thrive.  As a result many peasants moved into the middle class and some even into the landed class.  This is a perfect example of the free market working for the mutual benefit of all and it required the greatest pestilence in European history to make it work.

As a brief aside, don’t believe the wealthy didn’t try to get wages frozen at pre-plague levels.  They did just that in many parts of Europe.  Some were nominally successful in that the ruling class agreed to freeze wages.  Since there was no way of enforcing these decrees it had little effect.  This simply illustrates that rich and poor alike are ready to abandon the free market system when it doesn’t serve their needs, the wealthy just have more power to change it.

This market which I have so far described is about those with money and those without money and skill.  A skilled laborer can command a higher wage in a free market because their skill is relatively scarce.  So how does an unskilled laborer become a skilled laborer?  They must learn a trade.  For thousands of years this has been accomplished via some form of apprenticeship.  Of course, not everyone can become an apprentice, because, as previously mentioned, the skill is scarce.  Moreover a craftsman or skilled worker doesn’t want to take on a lot of apprentices because they would eventually be rivals to him and potentially drive down the amount of money he can charge for his services.

This indicates that knowledge has a good deal of value in the free market as well.  If the people with the knowledge keep it to themselves and prevent others from easy access to it, they can force them into staying in lower paying jobs.  Because those with the knowledge do not want to diminish their own economic security they may charge a fee to transfer their knowledge to another individual.  This again requires money, which may not be readily available, even to a person who works very, very hard.

This is much like our situation today, except that real knowledge is less valued, up front, than perceived knowledge.  Many times a person’s skill in some field is valued at nothing if they can’t produce a college degree.  In the United States most college degrees are expensive, and require classes that are not necessary for some particular field.  I am a consultant and software developer, but in college I was required to take music appreciation, lifetime wellness, European history, biology, algebra, literature, etc., etc.  I paid anywhere from $90 – $120 per credit hour for these courses, plus usage fees etc.  My current employer wanted me to have a college degree, but doesn’t care that I am a decent historian, German speaker, or that I know a fair amount about British Literature or the anatomy of plant and animal cells.  This exemplifies another major flaw in the free market: collusion.

In an unregulated market the wealthy have the means to collude against others.  Collusion has been especially problematic since the beginning of the modern era (beginning around 1500.)  Adam Smith wrote “rarely do people of the same trade meet, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public.”  (The father of modern capitalism wrote this.)  People in the same trade usually have two things that allow them to unfairly manipulate the market, wealth and knowledge of their trade.  When competitors agree to artificially inflate their prices, what can be done to stop it?  They have capital and can wait if people are first reticent to pay unfair prices.  If they control a something that people absolutely need like food, water and clothing, there is little anyone can do besides go without or pay unfair prices.

Of course it is a free market, so if someone is selling something at too high a price anyone else can start selling the same thing at a fair price and turn a profit, forcing those in collusion to lower their prices or be pushed out of business, right?  Ideally that would be the case, but a person going into business is usually going into it for what is called the profit motive.  Once they have started to sell something what prevents them from entering into collusion with those artificially inflating the price?  There is also the Wal-Mart effect.  A person starting a business usually does not have the kind of capital as a person or group of people who have been in business for a long time.  If the established group does not want new competition they have the capital to sell at a loss and wait the new competitor out.  The more diverse the entrenched system is, the more likely they can wait out a competitor to one of their sources of income indefinitely.  In either case those with capital can intentionally skewed the system in their favor making it difficult if not impossible for others to enter and compete.

All these things are problems that can and do occur with varying frequency and intensity in free market systems.  When the system is essentially controlled and defined by the movement of capital, those with the most capital have the most power.  They also have the ability to increase their ability to artificially increase their worth while artificially decreasing the worth of others.  It is possible that some entity in the free market system can essentially short-circuit the market and dump virtually all the money into their pockets.  They can collude to push out competitors, they can inflate prices to such a level that the people dependant on their services have to pay them because the nearest competitors are too far away to make it cheaper to get services anywhere else.  And, of course, because we do have governments, those with a lot of capital have more power to lobby or otherwise convince legislators to pass laws favorable to them.

As a country we seem to have some idea of fair play.  We want things to be fair and we seem to pride ourselves on our fairness.  The wealthy in the free market can very literally spit in the face of fairness or fair play and get away with it totally unscathed.  Let us belabor the obvious for a moment.  In a free market there must be buyers and sellers.  Without both of those there isn’t much of a market.  There must also be producers and consumers.  Without production, there is nothing for the sellers to sell, nothing for the buyers to buy and therefore nothing for anyone to consume either.  The wealthy are usually able to gain control of production because, as previously mentioned, the system favors wealth.  The wealthy are able to more easily collude and manipulate the market and the government to their ends.  But the bottom line is that there must be people at the bottom producing the items that are being sold and people at the bottom buying the items that are being sold.  Without those there is no system.

The wealthy have fought to prevent anyone else in the free market system from manipulating the system as they have.  In the early days of American economic growth and expansion, companies hired mercenaries to scare people through the threat of physical harm or even death from joining the union.  They would use these same people to break strikes.  And they could go back to the oldest trick, praying on the desperate to get what they want.  The number of companies guilty of these kinds of abuses in American history is long indeed.  But, mysteriously, when the union tries to organize, the company is the little guys’ best friend.  The teamsters are the big scapegoats of the corporate world.  They say things like “fair day’s work for a fair day’s wage.”  But for something like a thousand years they have been proving that without intervention they would rather pay a full day’s work with a starvation wage, if they can.

Some people have argued that a person should have the right to do with their money what they see fit.  It has been said that no one has the right to tell you how you must spend your money.  But this only seems to be applied to companies fighting off unions.  As an average middle or lower class citizen, how much we pay for anything is often dictated to us.  In the US most of us need fuel to thrive.  Our cities are spread out and we can’t live, shop and work within easy walking distance.  Yet early in 2009 the price of oil was as low as it was in 2000.  Gas in 2000 in Missouri cost 99¢, today it is around $2.50, which is about what is cost in early 2009.  If supply is not shrinking and demand is not shrinking and demand is not outstripping supply, what other factor is making gas so expensive?  Moreover, in many places the individual cannot choose the provider of basic services.  Water, trash, electricity and gas, are all provided by one entity and the users of these utilities have prices dictated to them, no negotiation is possible.

In certain situations the free market, even when it works perfectly and no one is cheating the system, causes problems.  Consider the United States legal system.  We have a system where the prosecutor’s job is to prove guilt regardless of the defendant’s guilt and the defense’s job is to prove innocence regardless of innocence.  You might argue that this system is inherently flawed and perhaps it is, but the free market and profit motive render it even more ineffective.  A good prosecuting or defense attorney must win cases to be considered good and therefore get more clients.  Statistically speaking since a person can only be guilty or innocent, the by random chance, any accused individual should be guilty 50% of the time and innocent 50% of the time.  Granted this is a vast oversimplification.  Though I have no proof, I suspect that an attorney who only wins 50% of his or her cases is not considered a great attorney.  What this indicates is that a great attorney must sometimes convict the innocent, or acquit the guilty.  Thus, in order to make as much money as possible, an attorney has a clear and obvious motive to subvert the legal system when and where they can to guarantee a win.

There is currently, before the Supreme Court, a case challenging the immunity of prosecutors.  Two prosecutors were determined to have framed two men for murder.  Both were sentenced and served 25 years of a life sentence before the prosecutors’ misconduct was discovered.  If these attorneys had not been motivated to win in order to make money they would have simply lost their case due to lack of evidence as opposed to manufacturing evidence to get a bogus conviction.

The profit motive promoted by the free market often presents people with the choice of doing what is right, or doing what is profitable.  It is difficult to make an argument for the benefit of hard drugs.  Despite the fact that their use is basically always detrimental to someone or some group, there are people who sell these drugs.  It might be argued that the profits from these drugs are very high because of their relative scarcity due to the fact that the government has made them illegal.  However, people still sell cigarettes, cigars and pipe tobacco; people still sell soda, chips and candy.  Obviously the government has hindered free trade when it comes to drugs, but the system still rewards it.  The system also rewards decisions that take capital from the workers and gives it to the shareholders.  The system rewards plans that increase prices legally or illegally to take more money from the consumer and put it in the pocket of the company.

At this point some might ask “why then is America so wealthy and successful (not as much now as in the past)?”  Surely the free market must work on some level.  The market does work, “on some level.”  The real problem is that people forget that the government has stepped in a number of times to make sure that things continue to be fair.  I know some of my Republican/Libertarian friends don’t like that I’m saying this, but I haven’t seen any good evidence to the contrary.  I will elaborate.

At the end of the Civil War the United States began to rebuild and expand.  The Industrial Revolution had begun so fewer and fewer people were needed to produce the food required to feed the nation.  As a result, more and more people became industrial laborers (previously the majority of the population was involved in food production.)  The lower classes made up the majority of the population, with a growing middle class found in towns and cities and a small upper class.  Conditions in most industries were appalling.  Women could be paid less than men, so factories preferred women.  As a result men took a cut in pay meaning two incomes from a man and woman were less than they might otherwise have been.  Children could be paid less than women, so factories began to prefer children.  As a result men and women took a pay cut, meaning three or more incomes from a man, woman and child were much less than they would have been.

A factory would spring up, they would build a city around it or one would begin to grow there.  The owners would start a store where people would have to buy the things they needed to live and work in the factory.  The owners would also prevent other stores from coming into the area, often through strong-arm techniques.  Cars weren’t available, even if they had been the factories paid people just enough to survive, so purchasing a car would have been out of the question.  Some industries were nightmarish.  Some men in the steel industry would work 12 hour days.  This made the shift break up easy for the owners, there were two a day.  Some owners would have workers change the shift they worked every month.  This meant that once a month half the workers got a whole day off while half worked the ‘long’ shift (in this case a 24 hour shift.)  The people who had it good were those who only had 10 hour work days and worked only 6 days a week.  (Fortunately as a nation of mostly Christians many industrialists were wary about making people work on Sunday.)  There was no such thing as overtime, vacation or health benefits.

Aside from the bad hours, the work was dangerous.  Industrial accidents were common and fairly disastrous for the individuals involved.  As previously mentioned, a person injured after working in cramped dark dirty conditions for 16 hours for barely enough wage to survive, was usually fired.  There was no health insurance, no law protecting worker health and safety.  If you needed your hand to do work and that hand was crushed in a machine, you were simply out of luck.  In 1911, 146 garment workers were burned, died of smoke inhalation, fell or were crushed to death when the Triangle Shirtwaist factory caught fire.  Managers had locked the doors from the outside because it was payday and they didn’t want the workers leaving early.  It is not certain what caused the fire, though a factory full of grease for machines, open flame gas lighting, stacks of cloth and no fire suppression system might burst into flames simply from karma.

Everything that contributed to these deaths was done in the interest of cutting overhead.  Doors locked to get the most work from the workers, cheap open gas lighting and potentially faulty wiring, no fire suppression system, a fire escape not big enough or strong enough to allow people to flee the building, etc., etc.  And this was not the first time people had died in industrial accidents or the last.  These were not new problems in the history of industrialization; the companies know about them, had the capital to fix them and simply chose not to because they considered it a waste of money.  It was the government which eventually began legislating that the work place should be as safe as possible, that the work week should be 40 hours, that children under a certain age shouldn’t work in factories, that workers should be fairly compensated.

This was the work of the “incompetent” government “meddling” in the affairs of business and the free market.  And, no surprise here, they called it socialism back then as well.  And what happened when companies started to compensate their workers fairly?  The lower class started becoming the middle class, so that today the largest class of people, in the United States, is the middle class.  As it turns out, the middle class spend more money than the lower classes do, buy more products and services, thereby helping companies and the wealthy.  But left to their devices, the wealthy couldn’t figure that out.  They took the short term gain at what was considered an unacceptable human cost only to make less money than they might otherwise have made.  So it would seem that the free market also encourages a short sited and somewhat myopic view of capital and gain.

I’m sure that some people are still unconvinced.  There are people saying that anyone can improve their station in life with hard work or by getting an education.  If that is the case I pose the following question.  What is your station in life?  Do you go to work on average between 60-80 a week like most Americans did from 1865-1915 without ever taking a vacation?  Did you get an education?  Did that education include a public or private high school?  How would you get an education without a public education system?  How would you get an education at a private school if you could barely afford to eat?  Is it a coincidence that as soon the free market began being legislated to the benefit of the workers there was a huge increase in the number of middle class citizens?  What is indicated by the fact that after legislating the free market to the benefit of the workers the economy not only didn’t collapse, it began a fairly rapid expansion?

So what am I trying to say with all of this?

1. If you have a good middle class life, you’ve been helped by the government in ways you may not know.
2. The free market is both good and bad.  When it is bad, it can be really bad.
3. If you aren’t wealthy (and I don’t mean upper-middle class I mean upper class) the upper classes are not necessarily your friends.  Moreover the likelihood that they achieved their success in life without a good deal of help somewhere along the line is slim (it does happen, but not often.)
4. Poor does not necessarily equate to lazy.  I have known some very hard working poor people and I have known some very lazy middle class and rich people.  In fact, think of the top 5 laziest people you know and see if at least one or two of them doesn’t seem to be leading some sort of middle class existence.
5. The American Dream/Ideal that hard work and ingenuity will get you anything you want in life is just that, a dream.  The system is based on capital and it supports those with capital.  Usually no one can amass enough cash to really achieve the American Dream in a single generation.
6. If you think socialism is evil, hang out with the Swedes for a while, 50% socialism + 50% free market = 100% awesome.

The Great Gate of Kiev is definitely the seminal work.  As shillings pass from hand to hand the final destination becomes less and less clear as the probabilities founder in a sea of sorrow.  St. John’s point is thus well taken when he makes reference to starlings.  Their dung sits heavy on the branches like black and white snow.  The similitude between them and Irish pudding is tomato-y.  Despite this, the vice presidential candidates amongst Democrats have always seemed like silly men in general.  While this is not universally the case black holes may be at the center of many of galaxies and directly responsible for the appearance of small amounts of heavy water in the Great Lakes.
Detroit is a ghost town of epic proportion.  If we consider that an emotional appeal runs directly counter to the idea of justice, we begin to see why.  The people of the mouse have made great strides in the halls of learning, particularly at Oxford and Tweed.  Though the hat is often considered stylish it no longer has a place in modern society aside from the flying of balls and the face.  Steak sandwiches concur with these findings but are quick to point out that stereophonic systems are not the only viable option.
Cato was Greek like a honeycomb that the bees have all abandoned for better working conditions in Hollywood.  The whip like movement of the tower was more disconcerting to those on top while those on the bottom quickly tried to pick their Dippin’ Dots off the ground before they melted.  Having never thrown a silver dollar into a wishing well, the old woman was sure that her needlepoint would never be finished.  This is clearly illustrated by the fact that word processors used to have blue backgrounds and only a few fonts; Arial, cumulous and astronomical logarithm.
Spaghetti is generally considered better when warm and cozy near the fire.  Spiced wines match with camel and khaki pants, though common at archeological digs.  The reader will note that, in this particular instance, nothing specifically, is being conveyed, in as many useless or as few words as humanly and necessarily possible.  This is in stark contrast to construction in Japan during the Middle Ages.  Though the tea was superior it was nothing compared to the beauty of the female form.  Why did anyone even argue the point?  We are left to assume that society must have deemed it important, otherwise they would have deemed something else important.
Only 15 minutes remain in which to remain a minuet.  The stream was found clogged with grasshopper shoes, authorities say.  Even with such a vehement denial oats have been found to have healthful properties no longer or shorter than a standard computer cord.  Demolition experts attempted in vain to dismantle the bomb chicka bow wow.  Had they been successful businessmen, great damage would have been done to bananan republics’ economic stability.  It is simply a matter of capital, said Washington to the blind man.  He picked up the hammer and saw many things glorious to tell tale heart.
In conclusion, knight to kings rook 4, check was made out to an as yet undetermined individual.  Although it bounced, other such devices like trampolines and pogo sticks were not found at the scene.  Movies are great way to understand American pop culture, unless you’re not into that sort of thing.  The overall effects are conclusive and beyond the scope of this document.  Special thanks should be given to those who risked their life to make this possible.  Give me a call when you get this or just whenever is convenient.  I’ll be in town until the 21st.  Say hello to the pimp for me.

In a recent e-mail exchange I was given one man’s perspective on Conservatism; what it means and how it is manifested.  My knee jerk reaction was to ignore his points as being overly biased, somewhat emotional, and generally uninformed.  As I thought about it I began to realize that I have never looked into the origins of Conservatism to determine if Conservatism in America is anything like Conservatism elsewhere or if it bears a resemblance to its earliest formulations.  To that end I did a little research and found a simple outline of Conservative philosophy which I will quote after a few more words.  I was hoping anyone reading this would contrast and compare my findings with their personal definition of Conservatism.

Conservatism as a philosophy, political or otherwise seems to have its origins in a gentleman by the name of Edmund Burke.  Burke was writing in response to events that took place during the French Revolution.  For those who are not historians, there are mixed responses to the French Revolution.  On one hand it saw the overthrow of a monarchy, that was resident in the nation where the revolution took place, and established a republic.  At the same time there where huge numbers of people slaughtered, France didn’t fair well in the world in the time immediately afterward and arguably this paved the way for Napoleon to come to power.

[Here are the essential tenants of Burke’s philosophy.
(1) Man is basically a religious animal, and religion is the foundation of civil society.  A divine sanction infuses the legitimate, existing, social order.
(2) Society is the natural, organic product of slow historical growth.  Existing institutions embody the wisdom of previous generations.  Right is a function of time.  “Prescription,” in the words of Burke, “is the most solid of all titles…”
(3) Man is a creature of instinct and emotions as well as reason.  Prudence, prejudice, experience, and habit are better guides than reason, logic, abstractions, and metaphysics.  Truth exists not in universal propositions but in concrete experiences.
(4) The community is superior to the individual.  The rights of men derive from their duties.  Evil is rooted in human nature, not in any particular social institutions.
(5) Except in an ultimate moral sense, men are unequal.  Social organization is complex and always includes a variety of classes, orders, and groups.  Differentiation, hierarchy, and leadership are the inevitable characteristics of any civil society.
(6) A presumption exists “in favor of any settled scheme of government against any untried project….”  Man’s hopes are high, but his vision is short.  Efforts to remedy existing evils usually result in even greater ones.]

Ultimately Conservatism is the espousal of the status quo in all things except at the utmost end of need.  What do you think?

Information in brackets is copied from Conservatism As An Ideology, by Samuel P. Huntington, Harvard University

Continuing in the same vein as my previous post. I’m finding it very difficult to determine what and how I should think and feel about any individual or party because of the amount of propaganda being spewed by both sides. Since World War II propaganda has had a very negative connotation and rightly so, though both sides engaged in it. Today it is no less a source of unnecessary paranoia, mistrust and fear than it ever was. (If you want something really interesting, look up the etymology of propaganda and how it has been used in the past, specifically the College of Propaganda.)

What is propaganda? It is information, ideas, or rumors deliberately spread widely to help or harm a person, group, movement, institution, nation, etc. This definition implies that legitimate information that is spread to discredit someone or something also falls under the definition of propaganda, but for my purposes I’ll focus on propaganda of a very particular sort, the unsubstantiated and rhetorical. Unsubstantiated propaganda is the type we all know well and is spread via something like an Internet chain e-mail. Rhetorical propaganda is of the type that uses something besides logic or proof to convince the individual. An example I’ve seen lately was one in which Che Guevara was referred to as “the mass murderer” Che Guevara. This is clearly an attempt to prejudice the listener against Che Guevara, especially if the listener does not know much about this particular Cuban guerilla leader.

Propaganda in politics is particularly prevalent because it has a built in benefit (at least in America) of warning you about threats to your freedom. The problem we face is that we do not ask anyone to substantiate any claim they make about anyone or anything. Let me put forth a few examples from the previous election. Obama was involved with a shady real-estate deal with a notorious Chicago political “fixer.” McCain told secrets to prevent being tortured in clear violation of standing military orders.

I’ve heard both of these and have one comment. Prove it. More importantly, after proving it, do something to prove malicious intent or malice aforethought by either candidate. A big problem we seem to have as Americans is taking a very G.I. Joe, black and white view of everything. Every human on the planet is guilty of bad judgment at some point in time and every person falls short of their own ideal goals. What is troublesome is how blind we are to that when we like the person and how it is all we see when we don’t.

If you are reading this and going “Yeah, but…” for either of the previous scenarios please stop for a moment and consider the following.

1. What primary source document have you seen to prove your opinion one way or another. Most news and talk radio do not count because they do not reveal their sources of information. Think primary, someone who was there, who saw with their own eyes or heard with their own ears and who does not have a clear political agenda or obvious reason to lie.

2. What do you know about your own party? Without going to Wikipedia or Google can you tell me the basic philosophical tenants of your party, i.e., what is the main goal of conservatism, what are the primary branches of liberalism?

3. What information do you have to suggest that one idea is better or worse than any other idea besides how you feel about it? You want to deregulate business? What study can you show comparing business ventures with more regulation to ones with less regulation? You want to provide universal health care? Has anyone else done that, has it worked, why or why not? Simply thinking about the problem is not sufficient. That mind set held the sciences back for hundreds of year. Just because something seems obvious or right to you does not mean that it is obvious or right to someone else, or objectively correct.

I am personally guilty of forming opinions without much in the way of proof one way or another. It is a problem I’m trying to rectify and one I’m finding very difficult. The amount of information out there is enormous. How do you filter legitimate content and then how do you find the information you need? I suspect that if I have this problem most people must have a similar problem. The fact that people are so vehement on both sides when the evidence to me seems at best contradictory and at worst indiscernible leads me to believe we are not forming opinions on facts as much as feelings.

You may have heard the expression “Never discuss politics or religion in mixed company.” I intend to break that rule, but only in the realm of politics. Apparently I’ve given people the impression that I am a Republican. I am not. Nor am I a Democrat. I’m a swing voter, depending on the issues, the stance of the party and the comments of the candidate. The problem is that the American populous is making it harder and harder to make a good decision about who to vote for. This begs the question, “how does the populous make voting more difficult?” The simple answer is by being uninformed about the general function of government.

If anyone has followed a presidential election since the 1980’s you’ve probably noticed some hot button issues. Abortion, gun control, immigration, welfare reform, etc. are all perennial giants in the political scene. The reason that we hear about these every four years is because the public wants to hear about them. The problem is that the president of the United States has little say in these topics. I’ll use abortion as the example. In the United States abortion is legal under certain constraints, some of these constraints are set by the federal government, some by the state.

Irrespective of any personal opinion on the matter, the Supreme Court made a ruling on the constitutionality of abortion. Under the 9^th and 14^th Amendments to the Constitution the Supreme Court decided that a woman ultimately has the right to decide what happens with her own body. This is based off a right to privacy which has a long (emphasis on long) history in the law. This is contrasted against the rights of the fetus or unborn child. Because we are a nation which has it’s roots in past precedence and there is much less in the way of past precedence for legal issues involving beings as yet unborn, the rights of the mother won out.

For those against abortion I should say that it is unlikely that Roe v. Wade will be overturned in its current state. Doing so means going directly against 2 Constitutional amendments. Most likely the balance will have to be struck between the rights of the mother and the rights of the unborn child, but even this is problematic. What is even more problematic is a president saying he is going to do anything about this issue at all. Why? For starters he doesn’t introduce legislation, he doesn’t debate legislation and nominally does not amend legislation (save for the line item veto.) That is the job of the legislature. The president can surely choose to pass or veto something once it has been approved by the House and Senate. Even then, the law is subject to Judicial Review.

This is the whole point of our system. Every branch of government is subject to every other branch so that no one can take truly unilateral action unless all branches agree. This is a fact that is totally ignored during most presidential campaigns. As a result, all we really hear is some vague idea of how the president plans to lead the party, not the country. A problem that also makes it very difficult to determine a real political agenda when both sides spend all their time pandering for additional support with empty words and razzle-dazzle.