30Dec09
Looking back at 2009, it's been a hard year.

While on a personal level I've done well, really, I feel like it's been such an awful year for our nation.

Ongoing war and threat of terrorist action, deepening recession, an unprecedentedly rapid expansion of government power; have all touched off a kind of ideological civil war in this country. A war between those who place faith in themselves, and those who place faith in the state.

In a sense it's overdue. It's a culmination of political struggle throughout the 20th century, and more people are waking each day to the reality of it. More everyday people are involved today than arguably any other time since the American revolution.

Those on the side of the individual are at a disadvantage, however. The left is far more homogeneous in their opinions and aims. We are more fractured and disparate, railing against any perceived authoritarian overtures even from our own side.

Politically, 2010 must be for me the year of building alliances. I've been involved running a chapter of Liberty on the Rocks for a few months now. It's a grassroots political/social movement in support of less government, lower taxes, and greater personal freedom.

I met on Monday with the national president of the organization, and we discussed at length the need to take a "Big Tent" approach in getting people to the group. Those who support the three plank platform, regardless of what else they believe or what party they come from, are the people I need to reach.

There's a meeting tonight at 5:30 PM at the Ducktail Lounge in Clive, Iowa. Bring a friend.

23Dec09
In the recent Wall Street Journal MarketWatch survey, Des Moines was named the best city for business in 2009, beating out Washington D.C.

Despite having a low concentration of Fortune 1000 companies (41st of 101 cities) and low economic diversity, Des Moines' economy is also remarkably stable and companies from the industries we specialize in (insurance and finance) weathered the recession better than their peers because of it.

The Metro area grew at a healthy rate during the survey period (26th) and despite downsizing in some of the cities larger firms, medium to small firms are still hiring. Des Moines' unemployment rate is just 6% compared to 9.8% nationwide.

Small business especially has been a driver of the local economy as start ups for the year have slowed less than the national average, and the four years survival rate is considerably higher (54%).

As someone who's often thought of starting a sideline, that's real food for thought. In the meantime, it's good to have another reason to like where I live.

15Dec09
You cannot be secure while living on borrowed money.

You cannot stay out of trouble by spending more than you earn.

You cannot establish prosperity without first establishing thrift.

You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong.

You cannot help small men by tearing down big men.

You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich.

You cannot help the wage-earner by tearing down the wage-payer.

You cannot further the brotherhood of mankind by encouraging class hatred.

You cannot build character and courage by taking away man's initiative.

You cannot help people by doing for them what they should do for themselves.

14Dec09
This blog has been in something of a holding pattern in December. I've done a great deal of thinking about the direction I'd like to take the blog in, and my organizing/activist efforts as a whole.


I think I know now where I need to be.

I've also been thinking about some of the relationships in my life. I have some family members who are liberals. Hell, I have a friend who'd probably be a full communist if it didn't require such a substantial time commitment. As I've become more politically active and less able to hold my tongue when one of these people plays fast and loose with the truth, my relationships with these people have become increasingly strained. They have poor respect for my opinions or boundaries and at times I've been subject to their disrespect, resentment, passive aggression, and even outright spite without fully knowing why.

I've been thinking about when I was reading Brett's blog a while back, and came across a link to an editorial about wishful thinking and the political left. You should read it for yourself, so I won't recount the entire thing here. But basically the author points out two kinds of people in this world; those who observe how the world functions and build their world view based off of what they observe (materialists), and those who think there's a greater purpose to things and discard what they observe in favor of how things "should" be (teleologists).

It is a powerful contrast.

Once I read that it got me to thinking about a thing Brett mentioned in a previous entry. It was phrased differently than what I'd previously heard. But it's something that I recognized from, of all places, my post traumatic stress group:

"Anger is what happens when one's outcomes differ from one's expectations."

Which is why there's so much friction with some of the people in my life, I've realized that they're Teleologists. They're stuck in the way they think things "SHOULD" be rather than how they are. While I as a Materialist look at the history of Liberalism and Conservatism in the 20th century and can see their various failures for what they are, none of that matters to them. How the world really works doesn't matter to them. What matters is that they "know" their ideas are how things should be, and that whoever doesn't share their ideas is the bad guy. The person who must be at fault for the failure of those ideas. Black and White, Cowboys and Indians.

They see themselves as intelligent people, with a right world view, and everything would be just hunky dory if the right wingers weren't always foiling their plans. They struggle with the idea that anyone else could be intelligent and yet not share their view. I will also say without malice that these liberals I know all have another thing in common, that they're all in some level of financial crisis. Not because of the economy or bad luck, but because of their own poor decisions and flawed view of what the world "owes" them.

So because I'm the bad guy, any success that I may have is an affront, not in keeping with their world view. They're experiencing cognitive dissonance from so wholeheartedly believing that their idea of how the world "should" work is reality, then observing things as they really are and noting the contradiction. Liberal angst, a feeling of victimization and anger, are a result of their highly charged emotional state.

Their Liberalism is like a hypochondriac's mental illness.

That illness has made these people a toxic presence in my life that does not add value to my days, it only detracts. Like a toxic chemical I know the only way to avoid sickness is by minimizing contact with the offending substance. To allow them to bother me is giving them claim upon my life and my time. That they do not have.

04Dec09
Continuing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. A failed stimulus package. Pending nationalized health care, and cap and trade legislation. With record national debt fed by declining tax revenues from this economic recession, and the treasury hemorrhaging cash, a government bankruptcy seems inevitable. How do our elected officials propose to stop it?

They don't.

Obama crony turned White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel has been famously quoted for saying "Never waste a good crisis". It could as easily have been the words of Saul Alinsky, or even Machiavelli. There is a radical progressive element within today's Democratic party that's feeding the current crisis, to resurrect an old proposal, and fundamentally transform our nation.

In 1966 two Columbia university professors of sociology named Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, frustrated with what they saw as the slow progress of American society and being loyal Marxists, formulated a theory of national transition to central economic planning AKA Socialism.

It became known as the Cloward-Piven strategy. Cloward and Piven noted that a majority of the people legally eligible for government assistance chose not to take advantage of that assistance. Their theory involved a massive drive to de-stigmatize public assistance, and enroll all eligible citizens.

They theorized that a sudden massive expansion of entitlement spending, during a time of high overall government spending (war), would overwhelm the system and cause a budget crisis that would force federal redistribution of wealth to maintain the government's solvency.

With that door opened, and chaos threatening to ensue, grassroots pressure would be brought to bear on the Democratic party to eliminate poverty and civil unrest by establishing a guaranteed minimum annual income. Thus completing the redistribution cycle, and America's transformation to socialism.

While Cloward and Piven were referring specifically to the welfare entitlement system, in the larger context of the Vietnam war, does not mean their ideas died simply because they didn't succeed the first time out. Today's conditions are even more ripe because of the current recession, and the student dissidents indoctrinated in Marxist philosophy in the sixties, are the people running our government and grassroots organizations today.

One of those individuals is ACORN founder Wade Rathke. While Cloward and Piven were referring only to swamping the welfare system, ACORN has made it their mission to overwhelm the entire federal entitlement system from welfare, to housing assistance, and pushing organized labor. ACORN calls it their "Maximum Eligible Participation" program, they want to ensure that every person who walks through their doors wrings every last penny they can out of taxpayers.

But ACORN is only one player. There's also the Tides foundation that funds them, SEIU that's trying to unionize every service worker in America, The New Party, The Working Families Party, The Democratic Socialist of America. All of them are on board.

But the most dangerous players in all of this are the elected officials who are either willfully ignorant of the consequences, or complicit in the effort. I tend to believe it's the latter. Howard Dean, former Democratic party chairman has declared "The debate between capitalism and socialism is over". The Democratic party intends to give us all the benefits of capitalism to let us work our way out of poverty, then tax us to death when we succeed, using socialism to drag us down to the median. European style socialism.

The only solution is an informed public, exposing their efforts to the light of day, and making them admit their agenda. The American people will never knowingly accept socialism, we need to open their eyes so they see it coming.

03Dec09
Ahh, the social contract.

Sooner or later all pseudo intellectual collectivists trot out social contract theory as their trump card. Because I must give up some of my rights as they exist in nature to enjoy the benefits of society, I must have no rights that society does not bestow upon me.

That argument, of course, is fallacious.

My rights are inborn. The social contract is the voluntary exercise of individual rights by a group. I lend some of my rights to government in a mutually beneficial exchange, to achieve goals in a scale that I could not achieve myself in a timely manner. Individual rights exercise by a group. This is the nature of group effort.

For example, I have the individual right to defend my life and that property that is essential to sustain my life. Defending my life is a full time job, and I could scarcely accomplish anything else, so I choose to lend my right of defense to a group effort to accomplish my goals. I call them the police, and the military.

Infrastructure, basic government services are much the same. Things that I could achieve myself, but choose not to. They are the only proper place of government.

But because the rights I lend to the group are individual rights, the group cannot possess any right that the individuals behind it do not. Therefore the right of the group cannot supersede the right of individuals.

If you as an individual need something that I have, you do not have the right to take that thing for your use because that would be a violation of my rights. So why would the group have the right to take that thing from me, and give it to you? They do not.

If they choose to do so anyway, my participation in the contract is no longer voluntary. They have both coerced me, and violated my rights. The contract is invalid.

It is my right to establish a new contract, a new group to govern society.