On Clarity of Ideas

I wanted to be a math teacher, but failed the ideological litmus test administered by the leftist professors at the University of Utah. I was required to write an essay on how I would apply Marxist ideology in my classroom. I wrote that I preferred the classical liberal ideals of the U.S. Founders.

I failed three courses in one quarter for supporting the vision of the US Founders.

The stated goal of the education department was to engineer a cultural environment where students never encountered classical logic, traditional math, or (God forbid) the ideas that led to the founding of the United States.

So, I actually sat in classes in which Marxist professors at the U openly discussed the use of propaganda techniques in the classroom. The goal was to make Marxist thinking appear normal and classical liberal thought to appear bizarre.

The same techniques were taught in journalism. They wouldn't even let me in that department having flunked out of the education department.

So, it is funny to watch the news and see the large number of pundits and so-called journalists pretending that the language and logic of the Tea Party is some bizarre RACIST-doublespeak.

It is the political maneuvering of the left that is classic doublespeak.

The Health Care bill of the 111th Congress is a case in point.

The proponents of the bill failed to give it a commonly accepted name. People did not know what was in the bill when they voted for it. Despite Pelosi's promise, a year after the legislation passed, there is still general confusion about what was in the bill.

There is simply an impenetrable wall of bureaucrats.

While the Tea Party is far from perfect, I applaud it for being a thousand times better than our evasive ruling class.

Unfortunately, Utah does not have a strong Tea Party movement. We have right wing politician who seek to capture and reframe the tea party message.

I wish our nation would find a way to relearn the classical logic and world view of the founders. We would find answers to our problems if we ever did so.

Three Part Zombie Movie

Here is my idea for a three part zombie movie: (This is a really gory movie where we slaughter zombies by the score).

PART ONE: (The Struggle for Unity) We are years into the zombie investation. There are just a few huddled tribes of non-zombies left ... the tribes are struggling to survive. Casualties in the zombie war keep mounting and the lone tribes realize that they must unite to survive.

There are some interesting differences between the tribes. Tribe A thinks the zombies were created by radiation. Tribe B thinks it was caused by stem cell research. Tribe A gets by on foraging for food. Tribe B is trying to grow food but keep getting raided.

Members of the two human tribes make contact with each other through encrypted radio and decide the tribes have to unite to save the human race.

They plan a meeting. When they get to the meeting place, they find it is crawling with zombines and a really big zombie battle takes place.

Each side takes on many casualties during the zombie war.

While trying to restore contact with the other humans the heroes of the zombie film suddenly realize that "the zombies" are in fact the other tribe of humans. There is a big fight scene at the radio room during which heros on both sides of the war realize that they are just perceiving the other side of the battle as zombies.

(The really cool thing about this zombie movie is that battle scenes mirror each other. A scene would show tribe A fighting zombie group B. The next scene shows tribe B fighting zombie group A. The actors get to play both zombies and humans. At the end of movie one, we realize the two tribes that are trying to unite are in fact fighting each other.)

PART TWO (The Reasonable Center)

At completion of PART ONE We have a small group of people who realize that zombie-ism is a matter of perception. This small group of people then must navigate the ongoing zombie wars to reduce the killing.

We know that ain't going to happen. PART TWO of the zombie film is as bloody at part one.

The killing keeps up at a brisk pace with only a small number of people catching onto the fact that whole zombie thing was a matter of perception.

The members of our hero click recount how each side of the zombie wars developed the impression that the other side was zombies. They recount how they came to believe they needed to kill the other side.

They lament that zombie-ism was created by the pig headed ideology of their fathers.

The small group tries to convince others of the truth. No matter how hard they try, the people they convince keep falling back into the zombie wars. Interestingly some switch sides in the attempts at conversion.

Finally, our heros learn of a place called "The Reasonable Center" and determine that the Reasonable Center would have the technology to reach compromise and end the horrific zombie wars.

So they battle their way through crowds of people who think they are zombies and reach the reasonable center at the end of Movie Two.


PART THREE (Zombie Catharsis)

PART TWO ends with our heros reaching the Reasonable Center. The Reasonable Center is all peaceful and pearly white. They think the good people at the Reasonable Center might be able to cure people of the false perceptions they built up about the different tribes being zombies.

Before they are seduced completely by the Reasonable Center an old man informs of them of the truth that the Reasonable Center is the group that created the false perceptions in the first place.

We learn that the founders of the Reasonable Center felt that they could engineer peace by creating a balanced conflict between the two sides. Schemers at the Reasonable Center just wanted to use the conflict for power.

Others at the Reasonable Center reveled in the fact that they could turn the conflict of false perceptions into open war.

We now discover that while the human tribes falsely perceived the other tribe as monsters, the real monsters were the mad scientists at the reasonable center who created and magnified the false dichotomy until society fell apart.

So PART THREE of the zombie movie ends with the last tribes of humans rising up against the Reasonable Center. During this last zombie battle, the zombie tribes start seeing eachother as human again and we finally recognize that the people at the "Reasonable Center" who project false images on both tribes were the real monsters from the beginning.

This would be a really fun zombie movie to film. I am worried a little bit about copyright infringement. My three part zombie movie seems to conflict with the business model of several media groups and political organizations. Such groups pretend to be the Reasonable Center while creating false dichotomies and projecting false images on the groups they label left and right.

Business Model - The Trivium

One of the first and most pernicious actions of the progressives was the removal of logic from the school. Replacing logic with Hegelian dialectics took place over 75 years ago.

I've been thinking that one could create a business model in which offered after school classes in the trivium (language, logic and rhetoric). The class would include an introduction to classical logic and traditional grammar and include a discussion of the role of language, logic and rhetoric in a free society.

The founders of the United States studied a refined version of classical Aristotelian logic ... usually Arnauld or Watts. I would be tempted to take the outline from Arnauld modified for a free society.

An after school class in logic would be beneficial for the students. It would have the side benefit of driving the progressive overlords at the public school batty as they would end up with free thinking students willing to question the public school indoctrination.

Unfortunately, as with most of my business models, the first step in the business plan involves moving out of Utah and finding a group supportive of the concept. If anyone is interested in this type of business model, I would be more than happy to help them pull it off.

Loving and Hating Insurance

One of the blocks holding me back on self-publishing a book on the Medical Savings and Loan as a web site is that the work includes a long drawn out criticism of insurance.

Insurance uses group funding for individual consumption. This absurd arrangement is inherently corrupt and prone to catastrophic failure.

The Medical Savings and Loan shows how we can deconstruct existing insurance pools and rebuild them on an individual basis.

The bulk of the argument for the MS&L is a direct comparison between the MS&L and insurance. In my unpublished writings on the subject, I tear apart each of the major complaints about insurance and show that they are a direct result of this attempt to fund health care with group pools.

The comments on this web site indicates that web browsers simply don't read complex arguments like a comparison of Item A to Item B.

Specifically, I've found that if I come up with a strong attack against insurance, progressives immediately take that attack and wave it as a banner saying single payer or socialized medicine is the only possible way to provide health care.

Anyway, I was working on the swamp cooler today and began running the scenarios progressives would use to mischaracterize the work when I hit on a wonderful insight.

The MS&L includes a long diatribe about the evils of insurance. Progressives rant and rail against insurance companies.

My insight was that I like insurance companies. I just hate the product they sell.

Progressives love insurance. They hate insurance companies.

I think the solution to the health care crisis is to create a new product to compete with. Progressives believe the solution is to nationalize 17% of the economy and to make a failed product absolute.

I am happy with my distinction and will repeat it:

I like insurance companies, but hate the product. Progressive love the product but hate insurance companies.

With this distinction in place, I might find ways to write a web site that is not completely mischaracterized by the attack dogs on the left.

Regardless, I would rather spend a day physically talking with freedom loving people than sitting in a dark basement writing blog posts after midnight.

New Cable TV Vegetarian Diet

I am starting a new vegetarian diet.

It is based on the observation that TV turns kids into vegetables.

Anyway, I called up the local cattleman's association and asked them to start piping cable tv into the stockyards.

Piping cable into the stockyards will turn the cows into vegetables. That way I could become a vegetarian without changing what I eat.

MS&L Conference

Big Finance (at the heart of our economic woes) was the creation of progressives. Centralized markets, insurance, big banking and big exchanges were created with the foolish notion that we could progress society through economic centralization.

Contrary to the paradoxical claims of progressives, centralization of authority widens the gap between rich and poor. The totalitarian centralized state admired by progressives is actually regressive.

The society envisioned by the US Founders distributed authority. Decentralized authority allows people the realize their full potential. Decentralizing authority allows more people to realize their potential. Freedom leads to real progress.

Progressives gain power by working on both the economic and political front. Progressives create big centralized markets, then attack the free market when their big centralized markets fail.

For the Tea Party to successfully restore the vision of our Founders, the tea party must work on both the economic and political fronts. Yes, patriots need to seek political victory. They most also seek to create new financial tools which decentralize the financial system.

I am not good at politics.

However, I could contribute to the creation of alternatives to big finance.

A great sample of my thinking process is the Medical Savings and Loan.
The MS&L reconstructs health insurance along free market principles.

I have not published the full specifications of the project because I want to talk to people about it first.

For the last three years, I've been stuck in a rut of trying to find a group willing to spend a few days to talk about the project.

Did I mention that I am terrible at politics?

I have absolutely no interest in political organization. But there are people who are good at this and who revel in putting together meetings.

So, I have a great idea that would make a great meeting for a pro-liberty group.

I have zero interest in developing a political group.

I love ideas. I hate politics.

So, for the last three years, I've been desparately trying to find a group willing to host a conference on the Medical Savings and Loan.

A group that is seeking to preserve liberty would find the Medical Savings and Loan fascinating. The meeting would provide a perspective of the health care crisis that has been ignored. The meeting would prove that self-funded health care would solve a myriad of economic and political woes.

There are people who love the vision of the US founders and who are good at hosting meetings. I have a fascinating meeting that provides insight into the free market.

The full presentation takes about six hours, but I can morph it to fit any time slot.

I live in Salt Lake City. Salt Lake and Park City are beautiful places to meet, but I am also willing to travel. I am a native of Denver. At this point, I would travel to any location where freedom loving people are gathered trying to find a way to fight the oppressive forces of the progressives.

Overflowing Streams

Streams are overflowing in the Wasatch.

While most of the flooding is natural. Some of the flooding problems are manmade.

Foolishly, hikers like to drag tree trunks across streams to create "bridges" at the places where the trail crosss the stream. In the early Spring, when there is little water in the creek, placing the trunk on top of the stream bed lets people cross without getting their feet wet.

The hikers who build these "bridges" fail to realize that their little bridge will end up damming the creek at high water.

In Neff Canyon, hikers had effectively built a solid dam across the creek at a ford. This dam diverted the creek down the trail and created a horrible mess.

So, I took it upon myself to fix the problem.

My first thought was to try and build up the trail so that it would be higher than the dammed creek. This would be hard because a lot of water was flowing down the trail and would wash away anything I tossed on the trail.

So, I decided to get my own feet wet and walked out in the creek. I discovered that by moving just two rocks, the creek would return to its original path.

Basically, the best way to fix a problem is to remove the impediment that caused the problem.

Personally, I wish our government would take this approach to financial regulation.

Before adding any complex new regulations, they should start by examing the existing regulations. If the problems are caused by existing regulation, the government should start by removing the failed regulation.

For example, short selling is an anti-market tool created by regulators of decades past. These regulators felt that they could govern unruly stocks by selling phantom shares on the market that they would buy back later.

The attempt at regulating stock by selling phantom shares faile. We now know that selling increases overall volatility and dramatically decreases liquidity in economic down cycles.

Regulators are currently spinning in circles trying to create new regulations to handle the problems caused by short selling.

Adding new regulations is foolish.

If we simply looked at short selling we would realize that it is a failed regulatory mechanism created by past generations of regulators. If we removed the regulations that allow short selling we would remove all of the problems caused when this inherently anti-market tool runs amok.

There are many other regulations that appear to be doing more harm than good. Before we rush to create new regulations to fix all of the problems of failed regulations, we should consider the possibility of removing the failed regulations.

Insurance is another case in point. Insurance was created to regulate health care expenses. Insurance, by nature, is a public private partnership. With insurance every single medical transaction is a legal claim.

Insurance is anti-market. It was created by progressives with the expressed goal of progessing the state. Insurance takes trillions of dollars away from the middle class and gives it to a corrupt ruling class.

Insurance has done more to harm the American middle class than any tax or act of the Federal Reserve ... but Republicans so staunchly protect this failed regulatory regime that they won't even let people talk about alternatives.

Because of the inherent inefficiencies of insurance, we are caught in a cycle where each year we get less care for greater costs. Insurance has failed to deliver on its promise for decades causing people to seek new regulations.

Before we add complex new regulations to regulate a failed regulatory tool, we should consider removing this corrupt contrivance and find ways to return to self-funded care.

In conclusion: If you are hiking along a trail and are tempted to pull a log across the creek. Don't do it. You will end up making a dam that floods the creek.

If you are having to fix a creek that is flowing over its bank, it might be easier to remove the impediments restricting its flow than in building a levee.

Finally if you are a regulator; you should consider removing the impediments created by past regulators before adding new layers of regulation.

Ready to Wok and Roll

To reduce my carbon footprint, I've been cooking with a rocket stove. A rocket stove burns twigs and small branches from the garden. Pretty much all of the biomass that doesn't mulch well burns well.

The rocket stove has one intense flame that rocketing out of the main chamber. Many of the cooking techniques for an electic stove don't work.

So, I decided to get a wok. A wok is a round bottom cooking vessel popular in the far east.

When I ordered a "wok" from Overstock, I received in the mail a flat bottom vessell with steep sides. A flat bottomed cooking vessell with steep sides is called a saucier.

Since then ran from store to store in town to discover that some insideous beast has been systematically flattening the bottom of all the woks. I discovered a few places with round bottom woks ... but they were expensive.

Finally I discovered a traditional Mandarin Wok at Katom Restaurant Supply. The site says the retail price is $20.15. The current price is just over ten bucks.

You can use a round bottom wok on a gas stove, but you need to order a wok ring along with the wok. You also need a wok lid.

I ordered ground delivery and it took a week and a half to arrive. Slow delivery aside, I am thrilled to be cooking with a round bottom wok on my rocket stove.

Now, we're cooking with twigs.

Mobile Site On

Blogger just added a mobile view for blogs. I believe that all web sites should develop both a mobi version and regular brower version. So I am overjoyed to see this feature and turned in on.

The mobi url for this site is blog.yintercept.com/?m=1.

In the community color program, I am actually making a separate directory for Mobi sites. If there is both a regular and mobi version of a site, I will link to both versions.

Righteous Indignation

I just finished Righteous Indignation by Andrew Breitbart which details the authors conversion from a complacent lefty to an active righty.

The book is a quick read which provides the inside scoop on the culture wars in the media and Hollywood.

As for the genre of political conversions, I still prefer the compelling story of David Horowitz in Radical Son which provides a deeper compelling conversion of an active Marxist to Conservative.

Mr. Breitbart is a happy culture warrior who drew some blood in the last election cycle. The launch of the site bigGovernment.com helped defend the tea party against false accusations and helped bring down the corrupt ACORN fraud machine.

For a quick read, the book provides some good insights into the intellectual corruption of the left wing media and makes a compelling argument for citizen journalists to stand up and start reporting on the corruption that the main stream media systemically ignores.

Chapter 6 provides a very quick overview of the radical foundation of the modern left as the dialectics evolved through Rousseau, Hegel, Marx and was popularized in California by lost souls like Eric Fromm and Herbert Marcuse.

I am really happy that Breitbart is having success a culture warrior. Though as I read yet another political conversion in a long stream of political conversion essays, I can't help but wonder if Breitbart has realized that switching from left to right does not actually defeat the dialectics.

Karl Popper's work "The Open Society and Its Enemies" is a deep criticism of the dialectics, but the Open Society Institute that bears the name of this work preserve in tact all of the intellectual corruptions Popper's work exposed.

Breitbart is doing a great job using new media to counter the tactics of the left. The tactics themselves are not sufficient to dig us out of the swamp of Marxism.

Righteous Indignation is a fun short read that might shock some people out of complacency. To actually pull of a restoration of the American experiment, the defenders of liberty need to engage in a deeper fundamental discussion about epistemology and the history of ideas.

Decision Making v. Risk Analysis

In the decision making process, it is common to weigh risk against reward.

In this article I ask: "Which is more important: The distribution of decision making or the form of risk analysis?"

I hold that the distribution of decision making of greater importance.

Modern thinkers tend to hold that risk analysis is more important than the distribution of the decision making process.

My first observation is that most of our decisions don't involve a substantial risk. For example the decision between polka-doted wallpaper and zebra-striped wallpaper is a decision of aesthetics. They both cost the same and they both look fabulous.

The decision between the Mexican Restaurant and Chinese Restaurant does not involve risk analysis. Some might argue there's a risk involved in going to the sushi bar.

I argue that the defining characteristic of the free market is the distribution of the decision making process. In the free market, the decision making process is pushed to all of the free minds actively engaged in the market. In a working free market people, people are involved in an ongoing process of adjusting the property they own.

The process of adjusting one's personal property involves weighing risk and reward. However, I find that the process of the free mind is much more about defining one's values than it is about the mathematical analysis of risk.

Of course, all important decisions involve risk and reward. So it is possible for an economist to draw up an economic model that claims we are all entrenched in an epic dialectical conflict between risk and reward.

For the last half century, economists and investors have been obsessed with risk.

We've developed a massive grab bag of tools to analyze and mitigate risks. The tool bag includes insurance, hedge funds, government backed insurance for mortgages, mortgage backed re-insurance, CDOs, credit default swaps, centralized exchanges, short selling, and a plethora of derivatives.

The economic collapse of 2008 shows that when we put all of these tools together, we simply created an unstable house of cards that undermined the productive sector and while making a small number of people incredibly rich.

This modern emphasis on the dialectical conflict between risk and reward seems to have led to a top instable market.

Our efforts to analyze and mitigate risk led to top down centralized solutions that actually created deeper systemic risk than we would have epxerienced in a true free market.

In my opinion we would do well to drop our obsession with the dialectical conflict between risk and reward and concentrate instead on finding ways to distribute the decision making process.

Capping Profits

Is capping earnings really a solution or just a feel-good anti-market gimmick.

The WSJ Reports: "Blue Shield of California said it would limit how much of its earnings it keeps, amid public pressure to control health costs. The nonprofit said it would cap its annual net income at 2% of revenue."

First off, Blue Shield self-righteously declares itself a "nonprofit" so what business does it have to be making any profit? Shouldn't a nonprofit be making no profit?

There are so many ways for a big complex financial entity to syphon off money. A declaration to cap profits at a given percent might simply indicate that the firm has a different way to syphon off money.

It is easy to cap the profit of any company. Simply spend the money. One could give the executives big salaries with big bonuses and the profits go down.

BTW growth stocks often go years without positive earnings because they actively re-invest all income. Apple Computer and Microsoft went for years without a reported profit.

Finally, the profit of insurance companies can be deceptive. The profit is calculated as a percent of the size of the pool. 2% of a pool with $100B is two billion dollars.

Another business without a big pool of cash might report no profit. For example, a garage band does not involve a big capital investment. When the garage band makes a hundred bucks playing at a bar, that hundred bucks is all profit. The expense for the band might be a few bucks for gas and 90% profit. Despite the fact that they just make 90% profit, their earnings are far less than the big insurance company whose profit was calculated as a percent of a big pool.

BTW, the medical savings and loan lets people keep the bulk of their health care dollars. Because the MSL is not reporting earning as a percent of the total health care dollars, its profits would higher than the small amount of money it actually does handle.

I am filing this announcement by a nonprofit that its profit is only 2% under "self-righteous snittery."

Kevin's View of the Free Market

Following is a brief overview of my model of the free market.

The free market is about people with free minds running around in a physical world trying to find the best use of their time and resources.

If you consider time to be a resource, you can simplify the model even further.

Another name for the resources under one's control is "property."

When classical liberals talk about property rights, they are saying that people have a fundamental right to own resources for use in the market.

The fundamental task for each of us is to figure out how to best use the resources under our control.

Since we are not islands unto ourselves, we end up negotiating with each other and exchange goods and services. In these negotiations, I might choose to sell time to an employer. At other times I might negotiate the purchase of time or services from others, in which case I am the employer.

The goal of the people in the free market is to better their conditions. We employ our free minds to figure out how to make the most of our existing property and how to create new property.

As Adam Smith noted, when a large number of people are actively engaged in this process of improving their property, then the nation becomes wealthy.

BTW, I should point out that, in a truly free market, there is no such thing as unemployment. In a market where people own their time and their bodies, they will employ themselves in the way they find most fruitful.

Activism and Power

The post on Activism and Anger spoke of the model in which activists agitate a population to create anger. Political groups harness that anger to rise to power.

Most activists use freedom centric rhetoric in their agitation; However, since the goal of the activism is a naked grab for power ... activism invariably leads to greater centralization and a redudction in freedom.

Interestingly, even when a disparate group of people wanting to maintain freedom (like the tea party) engages in the activist model, the result is usually a reduction of freedom. The freedom seekers agitate with no-one to harness the anger. Existing political groups, sitting on the side, will use the anger in the grub for power.

I suspect that the primary reason the left leaning press dwelled so long on the anger of the tea party and ignored the ideas of the tea party was a belief that they could capture the anger and use it to further their political causes.

Because inevitable result of the activist model is greater centralization, the activist model will ultimately fail those seeking greater freedom.

To actually succeed in preserving freedom, the tea party must move away from the activist model to a model that emphasizes the benefits of freedom.

Activism and Anger

Apparently there was a poll out today claiming that there is increasing anger in America.

Images indicate that there is a great deal of anger abroad as well.

When people talk about anger, there is a tendency to direct the anger at one's political opponents. The progressives I know aim their talk at conservatives and conservatives at progressives.

In my opinion, the base anger that we feel today is not caused by the faults of one particular party. The anger is a direct result of the activist model of politics.

In this model a group seeking political power will send out a legion of activists to agitate for change. This agitation creates an underlying sense of anger that the politicians then use to garner support and gain power.

A community organizer who unites one part of a community against another is actually creating deeper divisions and a seriously unbalanced community.

This model of activists agitating for change was developed and perfected by the left. The reactionary right has the tendency to adopt the techniques of the left. Many self-described centrists play the dialectical game of fanning the flames of the dialectical conflict hoping that they could fool people into seeing the corrupt center as a balanced solution to the conflict.

The agitation model can lead to a feedback loop where the agitation amplifies through the left, right and center until people start killing each other.

The best way to dampen the problem is for people to realize that much of the anger is the result of the methodology used by the political class to grab and centralize power.

If we learned to recognize the tricks used by the political class in their never ending grub for power, we could avoid the traps they set for us and maybe even figure out how to restore some of the freedoms we have been systematically losing.

Uniting the Ends Against The Middle

Republicans like to claim that the American Revolution was a "conservative revolution."

They forget that the great dialectical conflict between left and right did not yet exist. So, the claim makes very little sense. It is better to describe the American revolution in context of the social structure of 1776, and not the social structure of our day.

The United States inherited the class structure of feudal Europe. This feudal class structure had an entrenched ruling class that dictated the decisions, a small but growing middle class composed of merchants and other property owners. There was also a sizeable working class that subsisted by selling labor and begging favors.

The ruling class is people who get their income from ruling. The middle class secured their living through property ownership and the produce of their own creation. The lower class got income by selling wage labor.

The US colonies had only a small ineffectual ruling class and a much larger middle class. There was a great deal of social mobility between the working and middle class.

The American Revolution was a rebellion of this property owing middle class against the entrenched and corrupt ruling class.

The US Revolution led to an international reactionary movement. The reactionary movement sought to unite the ruling class with the lower class in a rebellion against the middle.

The first great reactionary leader was the emperor Napoleon. The German philosophers Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1830) and Karl Marx (1818-1883) demonstrate aspects of the new reactionary movement.

Names for the new reactionary movement include Socialism, Communism, Progressivism and Modern Liberalism.

The American Revolution was a revolution of the middle against the entrenched ruling elite. This revolution of the middle against the ends pulled a large number of people out of the lower class into the middle class and led to a widespread prosperity.

Marxism used a perverse dialectical process to unite the ends against the middle. The intelligentsia would agitate and raise the proletariat in revolution against the growing middle class.

The United States has been in an operating mode with the ends united against the middle since FDR. Not surprisingly, with the ends united against the middle, the middle class is waning while a detached ruling class thrives and dependency grows in the lower class.

(NOTE, one of the dialectical tricks of the modern age has been to redefine the middle class. Traditionally one defined the classes as follows: If you secured your income through ruling then you were part of the ruling class. If you secured your income through the ownership of productive property such as a farm, store or manufacturing concern you were middle class. The middle class also included professionals who owned productive knowledge. If you secured your living through wage labor (or begging) you were considered working class.

Progressives changed the definition of middle class to mean distribution of income. This allows them to claim that the swelling population of government workers is middle class and that any merchant who succeeds is ruling class.

If we held to the traditional definition of middle class, we would find that the American middle class is all but completely vanguished, and that the progressive left is the one that did the vanguishing.)

Park City Trip

I spent the day in Park City with my niece Kacey. I took this shot with my Android and am just seeing how easy it is to blog on the road.

Inheriting Greatness

The generation of Americans that fought WWII stands out as one of the greatest generations of modern history.

They were followed by the Baby Boomers. Many of the boomers carried on the hardworking ethic and commonsense drives of the WWII generation. On the philosophic side, the boomers stand among the most intellectually corrupt generations. The rogues in power used every negative trick in the book to reframe the efforts of their fathers to grab and consolidate power.

I contend that the same thing happened in the early days of America.

The Founders, who fought the Revolutionary War and drafted the Constitution, were among the greatest generations of all time.

The generation that followed the founder contained a populace that worked to carry on the legacy of the US founders and a horrifically corrupt ruling and intellectual class that worked feverishly to pervert the new classical liberal order to their advantage.

Hegel (1770 – 1831) was widely popular in US intellectual circles. Writings in the early 1800s were fused with intellectual snits spinning ancient dialectical conflicts to their advantage.

Much of the intellectual corruption in the early US came from people in the newly freed colonies who wanted to justify the continuation of slavery.

The generation that followed the founders mucked things up to the point that our nation fell apart into civil war.

One great problem that occurs when studying the Founders is that much of what we know about the founders was distorted by the generation that followed the founders.

If you want to understand the founders of the US, you need to look at what was going on before the founding of this nation.

If we approach history with the understanding that there was a great generation (the US Founders) followed by an intellectually corrupt generation that sought power by reframing the works of the founders, then I think we could start a dialog about restoring the freedoms envisioned by the founders.

Notably, the partisanship built around left/right and center came after the founders. The founders would be baffled by the modern use of the terms "conservative" and "liberal." They might even recognize that the self declare "center" is as bad as the end.

Any person who declares: "These are the folks left of me. These are the ones to my right and I am the fair and balanced center" is a dialectician.

The US founders were people, trained in a refined version of classical logic, fought for freedom. I like to call them "classical liberals."

Hegel and Marx developed a conflict driven method of thinking called dialectics.

The US founders fought for self rule and wanted to experiment with the free market. They did not use the term "capitalism." The capitalism that we know and loath today came from the pen of an intellectual snit named Karl Marx who sought to define a dialectical conflict.

Conservatives today accept without question Marx's definition of capitalism. Conservatives are such idiots that they fail to understand that Marx's goal in redefining the free market as capitalism was to create conflicts that would bring down the experiment in self rule and establish a new totalitarian state.

Marx's goal in writing Das Kapital (the foundational work for modern capitalism) was to use the tools of the capitalist to destroy the capitalist.

This is intellectual corruption at its most vile.

Conservatives, like Sean Hannity, dedicate their entire career to defended Marx's definition of capitalism. Why? They end up doing as much damage as good.

To restore our freedoms, we need to start asking big questions like: What is the difference between the free market and capitalism?

Is the system of centralized exchanges really a free market?

Have our exchanges been captured by groups opposed to liberty?

If we accept that early American history experienced a great generation that fought for liberty at the end of the 18th century followed by an intellectually corrupt generation who sought to redefine liberty to their advantage in the early eighteenth century, then I think we could make positive steps to restoring the visions of our Founders.