They want government power used to remake the world into their narcissistic image, to tell others how to live their lives, and to infringe on the rights of others, especially on the right to keep the fruits of their labor. In other words, they want to use coercion against others, not realizing that others will retaliate by using coercion against them.

In this very important sense, the nation is no longer a constitutional republic based on individual rights and liberty. The Progressive Era, the New Deal, the Great Society, and the neoconservative movement have transformed the U.S. to a nation where political might makes right. The individual is now at the mercy of the will of the plurality, or the collective, or marauding special-interest groups--all of whom are backed by the rule of law, which in turn is backed by armed government agents.

Barack Obama wonders why we all can’t get along. Well, it’s because politicians like him want to do things for some people by doing things to other people. And generally, the people he wants to do things to are the good people in society--the people who defer gratification, invest in their future, lead virtuous lives, sacrifice for their children, and help their neighbors without being coerced to do so by the government.

Coercion has become so accepted that the word “coercion” is not mentioned at all in Congress, in the establishment media, in K-12 schools, in universities, or in any other centers of influence. Instead, people speak euphemistically about the common good, volunteerism, social justice, equal opportunity, fairness, income equality, and other platitudes du jour. Of course, history shows that the greater the rhetoric about the collective, the greater the coercion against the individual.

President Bush says he believes in “compassionate conservatism,” but he really believes in coerced compassion. Sen. Clinton says “It takes a village,” but she really believes in coercively taking the village’s output for her political uses. Sen. Obama says that he wants to put hundreds of thousands of Americans to work in government job corps, but he doesn’t say that millions of other Americans will be coerced to pick up the tab for something that is economic and social folly. McCain says that he wants to stop money in politics, but he has used coercion to limit political speech.

Politicians embrace coercion because the American people embrace coercion. Farmers embrace it to obtain subsidies that raise the price of groceries for everyone else. The elderly embrace it to get free medicine at the expense of future generations. Spendthrifts embrace it to take the savings of the frugal through the tax code. Cities embrace it to take private property for the benefit of developers. Preservationists embrace it to tell homeowners what color they can paint their homes. Anti-smoking zealots embrace it to tell owners of bars and restaurants what they can do on their private property. Arts aficionados embrace it to have their cultural interests subsidized. Sports fans embrace it to have non-fans build their sports palaces. College students embrace it to get cheaper tuition at the expense of those who don’t go to college. The stupid and greedy embrace it to be bailed out of their bad mortgages by those who are smart and financially conservative.

Examples of the use of coercion in our supposed free country could run for hundreds of pages.

Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and John McCain indeed have what it takes to be the president of the United States. For that matter, so does Vladimir Putin.

By Craig J. Cantoni
Feb. 18, 2008
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Comments are welcome at redstatepatriot@hughes.net. Please include the title of the article as your subject line. Selected responses, in whole or part, may be published (appended to the article).

An author and columnist, Mr. Cantoni can be reached at ccan2@aol.com.

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The question came with these background facts: The physician will pay approximately the same $190,000 in public education taxes over his lifetime as my wife and I will pay. But he will get about $360,000 in education services in return (the school district’s cost of educating each of his children for 12 years) and we will get no direct benefit in return. In a real sense, the difference of $170,000 between what he pays and receives will be picked up by my wife and me.

I don’t know about you, but $170,000 isn’t chump change to Kim and me.

A typical answer to the question in bold above is that “Public education taxes are for the common good.”

Beware of abstractions like the 'common good'. It’s an historical fact that such abstractions have been used to justify putting people in railroad cars for delivery to the gulag or showers. Invariably, some people are excluded from the common good, such as peasants under Stalin, Jews under Hitler, and, by no means even close in evil to these two examples, people who have their money taken in a liberal democracy for other people under the pretense of the common good.

But even if someone buys into the rationale about the common good, how does it help the common good for the physician to be subsidized by Kim and me? After all, because he would educate his kids without the subsidy, the subsidy does not result in a net gain to the common good. It’s a net gain to the physician, but not to the common good. It might be a different matter if the subsidy only went to the poor, but that’s not the case with public education taxes or most other collectivist programs.

For the record, my family subsidizes the education and living expenses of an orphan at a Catholic orphanage in southern Mexico. But we do so voluntarily and not through coercion. I’ll use that fact as a segue to the next point.

Another typical answer to the question in bold is that because I have chosen to send my kid to private school, I shouldn’t complain about being coerced to pay public education taxes. That’s like saying that Russian peasants shouldn’t have complained about having their land expropriated by the Bolsheviks, because they chose to own private land instead of joining the collective. Using that logic, if the US government were to nationalize the food industry and collect taxes for government commissaries, people shouldn’t complain about paying extra to shop in private supermarkets, because that would be their choice. The same with nationalized healthcare: If American healthcare were to be nationalized, people shouldn’t complain about paying extra to see a physician outside of the nationalized system.

Still another typical answer is that if it were not for public education, children would not be educated and taught to be good Americans. Sigh. First, that is not an answer to the question in bold. Second, it’s hogwash.

What kind of thinking is behind such answers? A cynic might say that the answers are driven by self-interest--that people like the retired public school teacher at the beginning of this article are on the receiving end of the subsidy but don’t want to admit their self-interest, choosing instead to hide it behind lofty rhetoric about the common good or personal attacks against me.

A cynic might also say that most people don’t question the status quo or think philosophically. They accept what exists because it has always existed in their lifetime. And since 90 percent of Americans have been taught in government schools, they have not been encouraged to think differently about government schools or other forms of collectivism.

But after years of being attacked for my belief in individualism and opposition to collectivism, and after seeing the leading presidential candidates be cheered by the masses for proposing more collectivism, I believe that the reason for the prevailing thinking is more basic: that people are hardwired for collectivism. As such, when the idea of individualism is inserted into their mental cage, they respond with the civilized equivalent of barred teeth, screams, somersaults and hair standing on their backs. “Destroy the threat” is their programmed response.

The blessings of industrialization, the division of labor and the Enlightenment are too recent to have changed the hardwiring that developed from a million years of living in hunter-gatherer tribes, or collectives. Clearly, my different hardwiring is due to a genetic mutation.

As such, it would be wise for me to stay away from chimpanzee cages.

By Craig J. Cantoni
Jan. 24, 2008
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An author and columnist, Mr. Cantoni can be reached at ccan2@aol.com.

Comments are welcome at redstatepatriot@hughes.net. Please include the title of the article as your subject line. Selected responses, in whole or part, may be published (appended to the article).

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Okay, insults or not, the facts are still the facts. And the facts are as follows:

A. Total government spending (federal, state, local) has increased from 6.9% of Gross Domestic Product in 1902 to an estimated 34.6% in 2008.

This fact alone does not prove that government spending will increase from one year to the next, because spending as a percent of GDP has fluctuated widely from one year to the next, especially in years in which the nation went from peace to war and from war to peace. For example, the figure increased from 9.8% in 1915 to 22.1% in 1918. Conversely, it decreased from 35.9% in 1946 to 23.9% in 1950

However, if the year-to-year fluctuations are smoothed by drawing a regression line through the data for the last 100 years, the slope of the line is positive. There is no reason to expect that the slope will change, especially considering other facts that we will turn to momentarily.

Notes:
(1) For annual GDP and spending numbers from 1902 to today, go to http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/index.php.
(2) Some economists believe that national income is a better denominator than GDP in determining government’s share of the economy. If national income is used instead of GDP, the government’s share of the economy climbs to 44%, as shown at http://mwhodges.home.att.net/piechart.htm.

B. The unfunded liabilities for Social Security and Medicare are over $60 trillion, according to reliable estimates.

To put the $60 trillion in perspective, this staggering number is over four times the estimated economic output of the country for 2008. And the number does not include the unfunded liabilities for state and local pensions, most of which are significantly under funded, due to dishonest government bookkeeping that makes Enron’s bookkeeping look saintly by comparison. These liabilities are not reflected in current deficit numbers.

C. The cost of complying with government regulations is estimated to be 14% of national income and growing.

My 1992 book on bureaucracy detailed the natural tendency of all bureaucrats and bureaucracies. The tendency, of course, is to increase their power. And an increase in power means an increase in the compliance costs inflicted on others.

As an example, the US General Accounting Office estimated in 1994 that state education agencies had to hire 13,400 employees to administer federal education diktats. Another example: According to the US Office of Management and Budget, the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 burdened state and local education agencies/districts with 6.6 million hours of paperwork.

(see http://www.heritage.org/Research/Education/wm1406.cfm)

I posit that if the federal bureaucracy were reduced to one bureaucrat, that one bureaucrat could destroy the economy single-handedly if he were given unrestrained authority to issue diktats to other government agencies and to industry. For this reason, the size of the government workforce is less important than the authority given to it. There are approximately 23 million federal, state and local employees. It would be less costly if the 23 million had no authority than if the government workforce were shrunk to one bureaucrat with total authority.

An anecdote: When Bill Bradley was a U.S. Senator and testified with me before a congressional committee, he said that if he were to decide to leave government, a primary reason would be that even a Senator was powerless to control the federal bureaucracy.

A rant: The ignoramuses in the mainstream media blabber about the loss of manufacturing employment but say nothing about the growth in government employment.

D. Over half of Americans are dependent on the government.

Over half of Americans are either dependent on entitlements, on welfare, or on subsidies; or they work for the government or make a living administering government regulations. Many of them are self-described conservatives who rail against big government, but they are not about to vote in the privacy of a voting booth to do away with their government rice bowl. The cold reality is that we’ve passed the tipping point. It’s now politically impossible to right the teeter-totter.

E. Since 1990, the number of federal subsidy programs has grown 44%.

The US Department of Agriculture had the largest increase in subsidy programs: 78. (See the Cato Institute’s “Tax & Budget Bulletin No. 41)

Have the presidential candidates been asked if they would end farm subsidies? Have they been asked if it is morally right for a fat-cat on Park Ave. to invest in a farm in order to receive a subsidy that comes at the expense of poor people who have to pay more for groceries? Well, no. Tellingly, they really aren’t asked any tough questions about our culture of kleptocracy. Why? Because such questions aren’t asked in a culture of kleptocracy.

The truth is that whoever ends up in the Oval Office, the new president will be powerless to end farm subsidies. Yet many Americans believe that their favorite presidential candidate will be able to fix more complicated problems and save the nation from decline. Ha!

Subsidies prove the political science theory of concentrated benefits and dispersed costs. That is, those who receive a subsidy will be better organized and more politically influential than those who foot the bill, although those who foot the bill vastly outnumber those who receive the benefit. This is the fatal flaw of those democracies that allow some people to receive government loot at the expense of everyone else. The United States has the fatal flaw.

F. Ninety percent of Americans are educated in government schools, and teacher unions and the rest of the public education establishment comprise the most powerful lobby in state legislatures.

Next to their families, impressionable children spend most of their time in their formative years in government schools. We can debate the value of that education, but one thing is not debatable: It is not in the self-interest of government schools and their minions to teach that big government is bad. In my experience, Americans who have come to that conclusion have had an epiphany outside of the classroom.

In closing, you can ignore these facts and call me a selfish, mean-spirited jerk, cynic and defeatist. But your insults won’t change either the facts or my prediction. Happy New Year!

By Craig J. Cantoni
Jan. 2, 2008

Mr. Cantoni is an author, columnist and founder of Honest Americans Against Legal Theft (HAALT.org). He can be reached at ccan2@aol.com.

Comments are welcome at redstatepatriot@hughes.net. Please include the title of the article as your subject line. Selected responses, in whole or part, may be published (appended to the article).
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Addendum from the author: I found a supporting study in the current issue of Reason Magazine, which is retyped below. It supports my contention that government will grow, regardless of tax cuts and changes in tax methods, as long as the root problem isn't solved--namely, Americans thinking it's okay to use government coercion to take money from their neighbors for themselves.
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The beast still eats
Cut Taxes and Spend
Brian Doherty

Reason Magazine
February 2008

From Milton Friedman to Ronald Reagan, fiscal conservatives have hoped tax cuts could keep government from overspending by denying it revenues--a theory dubbed "starving the beast." A new study by University of California at Berkeley economists Christina D. Romer and David H. Romber, published by the national Bureau of Economic Research, indicates that the beast is thriving despite the tax cuts of the last three decades. Government spending seems to march on regardless of revenue or tax rates.

The economists studied the effects of four major legislated changes in U.S. tax rates and policy since World War II, choosing episodes where the "starve the beast" motivation was most conspicuous. After looking at the data every which way, with multiple regressions and time lags, and accounting for wars and military spending, they found that the one thing most clearly connected to tax cuts was not spending cuts but future tax increases.

"Although a tax cut leads to a sharp fall in revenues in the short run, it does not have any clear impact on revenues at horizons beyond about two years," the economists write. "Between one-half and four-fifths of the tax cut is offset by legislated tax increases over the next several years."

And spending cuts? "In no episode [of postwar American tax cuts] was there a discernible slowdown in spending following the tax cut," the economists conclude. "Indeed, in all of the episodes, there was an acceleration of spending." The beast finds its food, no matter what.

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Yes, indeed. If only we would elect an alpha male or beta female who cares about each and every one of us, partisan bickering would end, pork barrel spending would end, global competition would end, foreign interventionism would end, global warming would end, increases in the price of gas and healthcare would end, the invasion of brown people would end, radical Islam would end, and in-grown toenails would end.

But what about farm subsidies? Are they going to end? Well, no, not if someone wants to be elected president.

Then if a president is powerless to stop something as uncomplicated as farm subsidies, why would someone think that a candidate would be able to stop, well, anything putting Americans in a funk and feeling the nation is in decline?

Beats me. But I do know that the nation has been transformed into a kleptocracy under majority rule, or mob rule, if you will. Over half of Americans are now either mooching off the minority through the tax code, or working for the government, or working in private-sector jobs that owe their existence and good pay to government regulations.

They might complain about the other guy's rice bowl, but they will do anything to protect their own rice bowl. The result, of course, is the status quo, and the farm bill. The status quo is a kleptocracy and ever-growing government.

These people all depend on force for their jobs, subsidies, entitlements and handouts. For example, if it weren't for farmers banding together to compel the government to give them taxpayers' money, non-farmers would never hand their money to them.

Unfortunately, government force doesn't work well in the other direction. As political science and economic principles explain, it is nearly impossible for citizens to band together, legally speaking, and get government to stop farmers (or any other organized special-interest group) from using force against them. If they can't stop 2.1 million farmers, they certainly can't stop 3 million unionized teachers, 35 million AARP members, or 48 million Social Security recipients.

Well, that's not completely true. They can stop them, but it would require something that I don't advocate: the use of extra-legal force. It would take only about 100,000 men and women marching on the Capitol with torches, pitchforks, feathers and hot tar to convince members of Congress that it is in their best interest to stop taking people's silverware and giving it farmers, teacher unions, wealthy geezers, and other special interests. If it came to a choice between losing an election and being tarred and feathered, they'd pick losing.

Enough fantasy. Back to reality.

The reality is that the nation isn't going to be brought together by Barack, Hillary, Mitt, Rudy, Mike, John, Fred, or anyone else. When government degenerates into a political spoils system as our Congress has, it is impossible for citizens to trust each other or their government.

An author and published columnist, Mr. Cantoni can be reached at ccan2@aol.com. Mr. Cantoni is also a frequent contributor to Alan Korwin's highly informative Page Nine.

Mr. Korwin is the author of "Gun Laws in America" and many other fine 2nd Amendment and firearms-related publications. Please visit www.gunlaws.com where you can subscribe to an Internet version of Page Nine and order your own copy of his highly educational publications.

Comments are welcome at redstatepatriot@hughes.net. Please include the title of the article as your subject line. Selected responses, in whole or part, may be published (appended to the article).

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