Friday, September 30, 2011

Fixing Web Sites

My content web sites have been down for the last two months.

Bad things keep happening to me.

First, I made the mistake of entering a long term hosting contract with a second rate outfit called FastNext.com. I have two years left on the contract.

Anyway, Fastnext had some sort of server failure a month or so ago. My account was full of dump files as if the hard drive failed. Perhaps it was hacked?

I've had problems in the past when they had problems and restored old versions of the site. So, the code on my FastNext server is all jumbled.

The last time FastNext restored my account, they turned off the functionality that let me run PHP in files with the .html extension.

Earlier this year, I had purchased a cloud hosting account with WestHost for the Community Color sites. Since my content sites don't have much traffic, I decide to piggy back them on my WestHost cloud account.

Fearing that FastNext was hacked, I reworked the site from scratch before uploading it to WestHost. This took about 80 hours.

As I was completing the migration from FastNext to WestHost, my WestHost cloud server suffered a catastrophic hardware failure.

This hardware failure took several weeks to resolve.

So, I now have two versions of my content sites. An older version is sitting on FastNext and a newer version on WestHost.

I have absolutely no reason to think that the code on WestHost has a problem, but I am too paranoid to turn it on.

To make matters worse. I hit an elk last month. It cost $2K to fix my car. I don't want to spend the money on a new server until I pay off the repairs.

I think I've worked out a way to get the sites to run on the FastNext server and will start turning the sites back on.

I will start with Poems of Sunny Colorado. This is a simple poetry book my great aunt Susie wrote back in the 1920s.

Tuesday, September 27, 2011

Occupy Wall Street?

I was reading some really stupid blogs about an "Occupy Wall Street."

Apparently it is some sort of progressive movement in which absolute morons are protesting the inevitable results of the progressive ideology that dominates Wall Street.

This is like the idiots in Mao's Cultural Revolution rising against the depravity of Mao's Great Leap Forward.

Noam Chomsky and his merry band of mischieve makers have had hegemony in the schools the produced both Bush and Obama ... then they have the temerity to form thuggish groups that struggle against the very corruption that they brought into existence.

The captured federal reserve, centralized exchanges and other corrupt institutions of Wall Street were created by progressives.

Ever since Karl Marx penned Das Kapital, the left has been on a single minded mission to create corrupt financial insitutions that fail.

The goal of Marx was to use the tools of the capitalist to destroy the capitalist.

The progressive thugs who are occupying Wall Street are part of a ugly game of the left to seize power by undermining our society.

The progressive thugs who are occupying Wall Street are as ugly as the progessive manipulators who create the corrupt insitutions that crashed the world economies.

Sunday, September 25, 2011

What Ron Paul Could Learn from Herman Cain

Apparently Herman Cain's numbers surged after the Florida CPAC debate.

Meanwhile, Ron Paul's numbers are stagnant and there is zero reason to think Mr. Paul could ever win the election.

Why?

The reason is that Herman Cain is soaring is that Mr. Cain actually stated an idea.

Herman Cain's 999 Plan is not even a good idea ... but it was an idea stated in a strong affirmative manner in a nation desperately seeking for ideas.

Libertarians actually have better ideas about restoring prosperity than Mr. Cain.

The problem is that Libertarians state everything in dismal terms that the public just doesn't get.

The classical liberals of long ago realized that government was a limiting factor in society. Reducing government reduces limits and allows for an unlimited people … creating prosperity.

Marx and Hegel were reactionaries. They sought to destroy the new order created by the classical liberals and return the world to a structured society akin to feudalism.

The goal of Marx was to destroy the free market created by the classical liberals from within. To destroy the free market, Karl Marx created a perversion of the free market called "Capitalism."


Karl Marx was the father of Capitalism. Marx wrote a long treatise called Das Kapital. In Das Kapital, Marx described how a ruling class could capture and control centralized exchanges to become an oppressive force.

Marx showed that an unelected group of people ruling the economy from centralized exchanges and central banks can be as bad for society as a top heavy government.

Marx was successful in getting people to rise in rebellion against his strawman capitalist. The dystopia Marx created with his false dichotomy; however, was a thousand times worse than his anti-thesis capitalism.

Unfortunately, Libertarians are caught in a rut of arguing for top-down capitalism rather than a bottom up free market.

Rather than trying to restore a free market that liberates everyone in society, Libertarians argue for Marx's anti-thesis … a capitalism in which a corrupt ruling class lords over the people through the manipulation of capital.

Since Libertarians are a notoriously pig-headed group, they never realize the extent to which they are dupes.

To restore the free market, Libertarians must confront both the bloated government and the captured markets.

Which brings me back to the topic of this post …

If Ron Paul went from just being a curmudgeon to a person who supported alternatives to the captured markets, then Ron Paul would surge ahead in the polls.

Mr. Paul is doing good with his effort to "Audit the Federal Reserve." Yet auditing the Federal Reserve does not create a vision for how we can restore society.

Simply repealing ObamaCare does not create a vision of how we could restore health freedom in a market dominated by top heavy insurance companies.

Libertarians could easily change this by creating free market alternatives to the captured centralized markets that dominate today's financial world.

Sadly, Libertarians would prefer that we lose the last of our Constitutional liberties before accepting that they are nothing but stooges when they argue for Marx's antithesis.

Ron Paul would rather lose the presidency than to take the half day required to present positive alternatives to oppressive institutions like insurance or the captured exchanges on Wall Street.

This effort to audit the fed is pretty much the only positive thing I see Conservatives doing at the moment (I will blog on the Utah Monetary Summit tomorrow). It is so sad that Republicans simply will not challenge any of the root assumptions of Marx's Capitalism.

Marx's Capitalism was corrupt. One does not resolve Marx's dichotomy by arguing for the anti-thesis. One resolves Marx's dichotomy by rejecting it altogether and by restoring the classical liberal vision of the US Founders.

Libertarians would win if they presented freedom in a positive manner.

Friday, September 23, 2011

What is Right About the Income Tax

There is one really good thing about the income tax:

The income tax is a personal tax. The tax confronts taxpayers directly with a portion of the money the government takes away from them each year.

The Fair Tax is a big tax placed against merchants. The FAIR tax will make consumers despise the small businesses saddled with collecting the tax. They won't associate the tax with excessive government.

A personal tax allows the government to set a personal progressive tax rate.

The ideal tax structure would be a personal tax that taxes consumption.

I developed a program called the "Object Tax." (The tax uses ideas from Object Oriented Design).

This design taxes an abstract object between income and consumption. Using advance design techniques allows us to combine the best part of the income tax with a consumption tax.

The tax structure is easy. All financial object have a tax attribute of "Pre-Taxed" or "Taxed." The tax is easy to implement.

Your paycheck will go into a pre-tax bank account. You will pay a tax at your personalized tax rate when you go to spend the money. The personal tax rate would be based on a combination of your estimated net worth and yearly income.

So, if I get paid $1,000 and my tax rate is 10%, then I would get only $900 when I withdrew the funds.

In other words, one pays the tax when transferring money from a pre-taxed account to a taxed-account for spending. People will pay taxes when they do their budgetting. This program does a great job raising awareness about the amount of money government takes.

The object tax eliminates capital gains tax. Investments will exist in a pre-tax account. Investors would pay a tax when they transfer money from their investment account to their spending account. This allows us to sock rich investors will a high progressive tax without adversely affecting investment decisions.

Inheritance tax would be as follows: Pre-taxed items would be inherited into pre-taxed accounts. Taxed items would be inherited as taxed items.

This way one can inherit the farm without breaking it up. It also allows people to inherit all the heirlooms without a lot of tax complications. The government will collect money if the heirs sell the family farm.

The Object Tax assures that all items will be taxed once at a personalized rate. The program also avoids double taxation which happens with Herman Cain's 999 tax.

Thursday, September 22, 2011

Speculation on Margin

Just a quick note:

The problem is not the Federal Reserve. The existence of a central bank or common currency is not all that problematic.

The problem is fractional lending. With fractional lending, a bank makes multiple loans from the same dollar. It is fractional lending that creates the business cycle. Even worse, fractional lending multiplies the debt of a society and creates systemic fault.

People love to hate speculators. IMHO: Speculators play a positive role by providing valuable pricing information to a market.

Problems occur when speculators speculate on margin. A margin play happens when a speculator borrows money for their speculation or places a short order ... which involved borrowing the stuff to sell.

The margin plays sends tainted information into the system. Margin plays also have the effect of magnifying the ill effects of the business cycle.

As we enter a debate about the Federal Reserve, I hope people realize that the real problems lie with this debt culture and margin plays and not with the Fed creating a common currency.

To develop the Two Bit Diner project, I've followed the spot price of silver which follows silver on centralized exchanges. The price appears to be manipulated by margin requirements. The fact that people buy and sell precious metals on margin clearly artificially inflates the price and leads to greater instability.

Monday, September 19, 2011

Applause for Herman Cain

A few months ago, Herman Cain was a strong advocate of the Fair Tax.

There is a strong case to move from an income tax to a consumption.

However, I dislike the Fair Tax (a national sales tax) because it would make America's small businesses the nation's tax collectors. Small businesses have enough to worry about without adding micromanagement by the IRS.

In recent interviews, Mr. Cain is a strong advocate of a new plan called the 999 Tax.

Personally, I am trilled to see Mr. Cain change his position.

The executive is the person who administers the decisions made by Congress. The Constitution makes the Legislature the the decider and the executive the doer.

The doer needs to become an advocate of the decisions of Congress.

A fault of the Community Organizer Barack Obama is that he does not support ideas that fall outside of his ideological spectrum. Having a mixed Congress with Barack Obama as president is painful.

In contrast Bill Clinton was much more successful in that he did a better job supporting the compromises that came from Congress.

I believe Ron Paul is correct in his view of politics the Constitution and all.

Dr Paul has been such a strong supporter of Constitutionally restricted government that I am left in doubt that he would support an Unconstitutional Laws passed by Congress ... which is problematic.

If Dr. Paul really understood the Constitution then he would recognize that that the Constitution makes the legislature the decider.

If the legislature passes a law that the Supreme Court holds as Constitutional, then the executive must support that law ... even despite the fact that Doctor Paul holds the correct view of the Constitution.

So much of the mess today is the result of emperor-like presidents imposing their interpretations of the Constitution.

Even when the president holds the correct view of the Constitution, the Constitution does not give the president the authority to act like an emperor.

That Mr. Cain was a strong supporter of the Fair Tax and is now making a strong case for the 999 Tax tells me that he would be an executive who would be a strong administer of any good new taxation structure.

(PS: I am blogging about the Utah Legal Tender Act on the site Utah Gold.)

Sunday, September 18, 2011

Back from the LPAC Conference

I got back from the LPAC Conference by the Campaign for Liberty. I hope that the organization is able to grow this conference each year. America really needs more educational events about the Constitution with a focus on liberty.

The major political parties all have different takes on liberty. Modern Liberals emphasize an image of liberty backed by a Hegelian/Marxist dialectic.

Conservatives seek to conserve the social order that had evolved in the classical liberal tradition. In their bid to preserve social order, conservatives are often the worst enemies of freedom.

The Reactionary Right believes that it defends liberty by knee-jerk reaction to whatever crazy ideas spew out of the progressive camp. The reactionary right is simply a manageable tool tweeked every so often by the radical left.

Ultimately the defense of liberty will come from people who are directly engaged in a discussion of liberty.

I got the feeling that many of the participants were people like me who've spent their whole lives on the marginal fringes of society because they have the audacity to support the Constitution and the vision of the US Founders.

Unfortunately, in the months leading to the conference, I was plagued by a long series of programs at two different web hosts that prevented me from preparing for the convention.

I had really wanted to draw people into a discussion about "Health Freedom and the Medical Savings and Loan." But I was not able to create a call for action with a web site.

On the money side of things. I hit an elk during an ill timed trip to Denver. Two trips and an accident have wiped me out financially.

The only way to get the Medical Savings and Loan before the public is to make trips like this.

I spent the morning adding advertisers to the Community Color sites. I get a fair amount of Salt Lake Haunted Houses. Hopefully, I could sell a costume or two.

I put up some AllPosters.com poster stores. I get about $1 for every thousand page views. I hope to get 50,000 page views.

Unfortunately, I have not been able to find a revenue source that is not marginal.

The only way to get interest in Health Liberty and the Medical Savings and Loan is to go to things and pound the idea until people start accepting the idea that group funding of individual consumption is a problem. To accomplish this task, I need to be aggressive both on pushing the idea and scraping what ever marginal sources of income I can find.

Tuesday, September 13, 2011

LPAC 2011

I bought an advance ticket to LPAC 2011 several months back.

My hope for attending the event was to find people interested in Health Freedom and the Medical Savings and Loan.

Since buying the tickets, I hit an elk and spent every last dime on car repairs.

To make matters worse, two of my webhosts had catastrophic failures destroying my income for the months of August and September. Essentially, I am down two grand because of the faults.

The hotel and gas for the drive to Reno is an additional $250.00.

I watched the Republican debate last night. The debate showed people consumed with partisan bickering. The candidates made a few good points, but failed to address the issues in a substantive manner.

Although each of the candidates were good at partisan bickering and talking points, nothing about the debate made me feel that Republicans were poised to restore our health freedom.

As health freedom is the single most important issue of our generation, I decided that I needed to go to LPAC with the faint hope of finding a person or group interested in health freedom.

It is so idiotic. If Republicans were discussing the ideas of liberty rather than posturing to see who is the "most conservative," the Republicans would win the 2012 election hands down.

As it stands, I see little hope for the future. Republicans will tear each other apart grubbing for power.

I wish Conservatives understood, one cannot restore liberty through reaction alone. One must actually discuss ideas.

I will be heading off to Reno tomorrow, but am feeling glum about the whole thing. I fear I will see nothing but political posturing and come back with nothing but empty talking points.

It's A Hopeless Trap

Conservatives are incapable of defending freedom.

Conservatism is a reactionary movement that started with the French Revolution. In the left/right paradigm of the French Revolution, the progressive left sought social change while the reactionary right's sought to preserve the social order.

The partisan split between left and right consumed the French people and the country sank into genocide.

Hegelian and Marxian dialectics institutionalized the left/right split.

In modern America, Conservatives stand for preserving the social order that evolved in the United States.

Conservatives in Russia defend the social order established during the Soviet Union.

Conservatives in the Middle East wage Jihad against the west in order to preserve the social order of traditional Islam.

Yes, Conservatives in a country founded on liberty like liberty, but conservatism is not inherently a philosophy of freedom. The Conservatives during the US Revolution were called Tories. They actively fought against every single one of the ideas Conservatives claim as their own today.

Because reactionary conservatives depend upon reaction rather than reason, they have a nasty habit of presenting ideas in the negative.

Yes, the Founders created a limited government. The founders realized that the state was a limiting force on the actions of the people. Limiting government removed limits on the people.

The argument for liberty is an argument for an unlimited people.

Conservatives care first and foremost about preserving the social order. The conservative ideology now has constraints on both the government and the people, dramatically restricting the ability of people to grow and prosper.

I've been trying to argue for health freedom in the most conservative state of Utah for over three decades. Conservatives treat advocates of freedom as pariahs.

Even worse, since Conservatives dominate the freedom movement in America, loud mouth conservatives systematically undermine efforts to defend freedom.

Conservatives actively oppose Health Freedom. Conservatives see big insurance and big heath care monopolies as means for preserving the social order.

Look around you. Conservatives have been spouting "liberty" rhetoric for over a half century. Despite all of this shrill noise, we have systematically lost our freedom.

Because Conservatives are interested first and foremost in preserving the social order, they systematically fail to pass legislation that enhances freedom. The Republican Party is simply the party that passes statist legislation at a slower rate than the Democrats.

Conservatives are simply a lesser evil than the social progressives. As long as politics is dominated by the false dichotomy of the Progressive/Conservative split of the French Revolution, we will simply see the freedoms won by the Founding Fathers gradually slip away.

Sunday, September 11, 2011

Bad Service equals No Tip!

I was camping up in the Sawtooth Mountains a while back. I was on the East side of the mountain. The east side of mountains photograph best in the morning; So, I planned a long morning walk with no breakfast.

My plan was to lunch in Stanley after building up a good appetite.

I had not been to a restaurant for several months and was really looking forward to a warm restaurant meal.

It was my one indulgence for the trip.

To my delight, I found a quaint looking cafe on Main Street in Stanley.

The decor was nice, tables clean and it looked like I would be in for a treat.

I was the only customer at the time, which seemed odd. It was as if everyone decided to stay home for some mysterious reason.

The restaurant was well staffed, but I sat at the cafe for about 20 minutes for the waitress to serve me.

The waitress was glum and barely acknowledged my existence when she took my order. She looked as if she wanted to say something, but couldn't find the words.

She didn't even look at me when she plopped the plate of in front of me.

The food itself was undercooked and runny. If I wasn't hungry, I probably wouldn't have eaten it.

To make matters worse, the whole restaurant staff was in the back room with their eyes glued to a small TV.

I felt like standing up and screaming: "There is a customer in the building!"

Now, I am a pretty easy person to please. I had entered this restaurant with a good appetite and in a mood where I would have enjoyed even mediocre service and a bad meal.

I had slow service, an inconsiderate waitress, and near inedible food served by a staff too busy watching TV to acknowledge customers.

So, I did something that I rarely do.

I tallied up the many transgressions of the restaurant and decided I wouldn't leave a tip.

I did not decide to leave a small tip.

That's right. I decided to leave no tip.

I paid my bill to the penny and skipped the gratuity altogether.

The whole point of a tip is to acknowledge good service.

For tips to have meaning, a restaurant with bad service, bad food and a staff glued to the TV should get no tip.

Am I right?

Anyway, ten years ago to the day, I decided not to leave a tip at a restaurant. I probably would have left one if I knew what they were watching on TV.

Monday, September 05, 2011

A Laborious Post

On Labor Day we recognize the important contribution of labor to our economic well being.

In classical economics, labor is one of the primary elements of production. Other elements include land, management and capital.

Karl Marx was a dialectician in the school of Hegel who despised the merchants and manufacturers who were rising to prominence in the industrial age. His goal was to unite the ruling class with the workers in a revolution against the bourgeoisie.

Hegelian dialectics claims that history evolves through thesis/antithesis conflicts that resolve (usually in violent ways) with a catharsis.

In the work Das Kapital (1867), Marx presented a wildly unbalanced view of economics in which capital owners were in some sort of death struggle with labor. Marx encouraged his followers to fan the flames of discontent with hopes of rising labor in violent revolution against management and owners. He believed the revolution would resolve in a catharsis called Communism … a workers' paradise.

Apparently, the fantasy was compelling. Activists and community organizers around the world led the people in revolutions that took hundreds of millions of lives and impoverished billions.

Even worse: A large number of intellectuals took to arguing Marx's antithesis in favor of an economic system that overemphasized the role of capital.

Yes, Karl Marx is the father of modern Capitalism. Intellectual twits poured over every word of Marx to create the modern top-heavy, unstable financial system.

In a sound economy, capital and labor are factors in production. If one realizes that labor is a resource owned by the laborer, then one can develop a holistic approach to the economy that sees capital and labor working together.

The American Labor Day was set aside on the first Monday of September. Internationally, labor groups gather on May Day.

I hope that some future generation rejects the false dichotomy of Marx and the dialecticians and return to seeing labor as a component of production and reject the false dichotomy that labor is in a death struggle with capital.

I wish that we might someday reject this top-heavy system that overemphasizes capital and pits labor against the companies they work for.


Happy Labor Day to all.