Tea Party R.I.P. 2012

The New York Times declared the Tea Party dead.

As far as I can tell. The Times is correct.

As pointed out in the last post. There is not a single future event on the Utah United calendar. During the Tea Party, I made a list of all the Tea Party and 9/12 sites I could find in Utah, Colorado and Arizona. Most of the sites have gone dark.

The death of the Tea Party fills me with sorrow.

The Tea Party was the one spark of hope that there were people willing to stand up for the American Experiment in Self Rule.

Sadly, my experience with the Tea Party was not productive. During 2009 and 2010, I spent every penny to attend and support Tea Party efforts. My specific goal was to find people brave enough to discuss Free Market Health Care Reform.

By Free Market Health Care Reform, I mean alternatives to insurance. The thesis I wished to present is: "The problem in health care is the use of group-funding for individual consumption, and the solution is to restore the concept of self-funded care."

I put together a math based presentation that shows that self-funded care is not only is is possible, it is preferable to group funded care. Creating an alternative to group insurance based on self-funded care restore the pricing mechanism and realign the medical industry to the needs of the patient.

The program could have been used politically to defeat Obama in 2012. The insurance mandate in PPACA is the weak point of ObamaCare. Republicans could have attacked the weak point in ObamaCare if they were brave enough to discuss alternatives to insurance.



In 2009 and 2010, I spent all my savings trying to find a group interested in restoring America. I started with the ambitious goal of finding twelve people interested in free market health care reform. I cut it in half to six and now consider the idea of three people interested in the subject outlandish.

Several times I got close to the goal of getting six people in a room to discuss free market health care reform.

But in every case, a group of dull witted thugs called "conservatives" would stomped down their iron boots on our throats and silence the conversation.
 
Modern Conservatism, as you all know, traces back to a royalist by the name of George Hegel (1770 – 1831). In the game of modern dialectics one uses terms related to freedom in ways that result in a centralized state and economy.

During the Tea Party, conservatives encouraged agitation against Obama, but actively suppressed debate about real alternatives.

The goal, you see, was to capture ObamaCare.

The duplicity of this goal reached its absurd heights when Republicans gleefully nominated Mitt Romney (The Father of RomneyCare) to run against Obama. PPACA simply took Mitt Romney's Massachusetts plan and imposed it on a national level.

Can you believe it? Republicans actually had such a contemptuous view of the American people that they felt they could pull of running the Father of RomneyCare in a campaign against the Father of ObamaCare when the two plans are all but identical.

I guess the game is not that surprising when on realizes the nature of modern dialectics. The Modern Dialectics at the heart of Modern Conservatism is a game in which uses freedom-rhetoric to gain and centralize power.

Conservatives saw the Tea Party used the Tea Party as a tool of agitation while plotting in the background to capture PPACA.

The historical fact is that Republicans used the Tea Party to attack their partisan foe. At the same time Republicans actively suppressed debate about free market health care.

Now, the Tea Party is dead.

The Republican goal of capturing PPACA failed in 2012.

The right might try reviving the Tea Party in 2013, but do you think anyone will actually fall for it?

Personally, I fear that conservatives effectively killed both the Tea Party and Campaign for Liberty and that the opportunity to restore the vision of the US Founders has been lost for a generation.

Utah Untied

With the Utah Color project, I follow local community events very closely.

Through te years I've noticed that there are hundreds of events about expanding the state. Ninety plus percent of the public events I've attended in this state are about expanding the state and curbing individual freedom.

The voices for freedom in this state never do anything.

I was just looking through the Utah United calendar. This calendar was set up in 2010 by some group claiming to be conservative defenders of freedom.

There is not a single future event listed in the calendar.

For the last four years, I've been trying to find someone, anyone, willing to spend an afternoon talking about free market health care reform. So, I've followed this calendar since its inception.

I've made repeated attempts to contact the group, only to be brushed off.

I am screaming upset at the point that Conservatives push everyone aside with their claims of being defenders of freedom, then never do anything to advance the cause of freedom.

The group complains that the Utah media doesn't give them enough air time. But they don't get it.

It is not the media that's the problem. The problem is that Conservatives (at least in Utah) never do anything interesting.

The media is driven by the story. If freedom loving groups did things that were interesting, they would get media.

By being closed minded and failing to act, Conservatives undermine the cause of liberty. I believe that people would love to be active in defending the American experiment in self-rule. But that cannot happen as long as conservatives slam the door and shut everyone out.

The Utah United calendar is empty for 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020.

I want to act. It is driving me crazy that there is no one within 500 miles of Salt Lake interested in defending freedom; so I am back to thinking of hitting the road and creating a traveling show that discusses health freedom.

The experiment in self-rule started by the Founders of the US was a good thing. There has to be someone, somewhere interested in preserving it.
There is nothing happening in Utah, so I am thinking

Yelling Fire in a Burning Theater

In America we've reached the point where a person who stands up and yells "Fire!" in a burning theater will immediately be vilified as an alarmist, then be accused of setting the fire by the media and held at fault for the fire's damage in the public mind.

A Scary Distortion of Truth

The classical liberal view was that there is a truth, but that individual humans (or human institutions) don't know it.

The Mormon doctrine appears to be that Truth flows through the political hierarchy of The Church to the people. The degree to which truth flows through one's mouth is relative to how much power they've amassed in the Church.

This absurd notion that one's group owns the truth and everyone else is an evil gentile destroys the ability to communicate.

The video below, which I suspect was enacted, shows how the LDS Church ingrains this negative même into the thoughts of its young adherents: (NOTE: I have been to testimonials in which people were made to stand and declare their fealty to the hierarchy.)


The idea that there is a truth, but that we don't know the truth, can lead to wonderful discoveries as people pursue the truth.

The notion that truth flows through a political hierarchy is destructive. Trying to communicate with people who've gone through this indoctrination is next to impossible.

Interestingly, this notion that truth flows through a political hierarchy has the same effect as the idea that truth is relative.

If one holds that truth is relative, then the question arises: Truth is relative to what?

Moral relativists tend to conclude that truth is relative to political power, and that might makes right.

Seeing Red after Black Friday

Dang.

Black Friday was a total bust. I did not have a single sale on Cyber Weekend.

Rats.

I am still committed to this last ditch effort to start a conversation on free market health care reform.

My plan had been to get a small group of people together to start a business association. The business association would work on creating a ground up system for self-financed health care.

People could then use this association to claim that insurance is the problem. Rather than mandating that people buy insurance, people need a viable mechanism to opt out of insurance.

I admit. I've been completely unable to find people willing to talk to me. (I am a non-Mormon in Utah. Like the Muslim Brotherhood, Mormons are a closed and intolerant people.)

In 2009 and 2010 I drove to Denver, Phoenix, Reno and Las Vegas to find people to talk with. Unfortunately, it is hard to get a project up and running from a hotel room.

So, in my last ditch effort, I will form the association as a sole proprietorship. To join the association, I will ask people to pay a "One US Dollar" (as defined by the Coinage Act of 1792.) Coinflation says a silver dollar is worth 26.30 Federal Reserve notes.

The primary goal of "the association" is to host a meeting on Free Market Health Care Reform. People who pay the membership fee would get to vote on where and when the meeting takes place. Perhaps the meeting could include a conference call.

The first several membership fees have to go to legal fees to set up the organization.


If 20 people joined the association, I would have about $500.00 which would be enough to drive to Phoenix rent a conference room and drive back to Utah (assuming I slept in the car).

If 30 people joined, I might have enough money to travel to Southern California.

Of course, there are so many other things I want to do. I would love to publish a book on free market health care reform. This would cost $500 to $1000. I would love to make a YouTube video. That would probably cost $500, I would also love to support others who are standing up for freedom.

I am absolutely positive that the path I am following could be used to turn back ObamaCare. ObamaCare is premised on the assumption that insurance (or Socialism) is the only way to fund health care.

I can prove mathematically that this is a false assumption.

To create the mathematical argument is based upon a multidimensional model of health care, which is easy to do in a face to face conversation with a blackboard, but extremely difficult to do in a blog post.

Think back to calculus. It is extremely easy to write a calculus proof on a chalkboard, but very difficult to write the same proof in essay form.

The plan is to create an alternative to insurance. If there was an accepted viable alternative to insurance, people could strike at the heart of ObamaCare by demanding that they be given a way to opt out of ObamaCare.

Creating a viable alternative to insurance can only be done in a face to face meeting. Trying to do it online is doomed to failure.

Can you name the last blog post you've read that contains a mathematical proof?

Most people never see such posts because they don't work well.

So, it is quite frustrating. I can see all sorts of things that could be done if a small group of people met together and spoke with each other. Yet the cost seems out of reach. I don't want to take anyone's money if I cannot produce something that makes difference.

This box shows eBay auctions for Silver Dollars. People are buying silver dollars for over $26.00. My guess is that buyers think the price will go up while sellers are thinking they would rather have cash than old coins.

Last Ditch Effort

Republicans squarely refused to talk about Free Market Health Care Reform during the long election process. The powers that be claimed that they had to get power first. They were scared that talk about substantive reform might hurt the election efforts.

The powers that be were wrong.

Because they failed to talk substantive reform, they lost in the general election.

After the election, Republicans are finally willing to talk about the Health Exchanges.

For four years, I've had the goal of getting a small group of liberty minded folks into a room to discuss real substantive free market health care reform.

I believe that the first step to restoring free market health care is for people to actually talk about the subject.

For that matter, I find it patently absurd to think that we could restore free market health care if people avoid the subject and slam the door in the face of anyone who tries to bring it up.

I've designed a wonderful presentation about Free Market Health Care. The presentation takes about two hours. In the presentation, I create a fictional entity called the Medical Savings and Loan. I then show that this entity would do a better job of funding health care than insurance or socialism.

The presentation delves into the mathematics of funding health care and cannot be adequately presented in a blog post.

The program includes a plan for defeating ObamaCare. If a group of people listened to my argument, they would be better armed to take on ObamaCare and the Health Exchanges.

I live in Utah. Utah is run by a group that includes Harry Reid, Mitt Romney, Mike Leavitt, Jon Huntsman, etc., who are all committed to socializing health care via health exchanges.

Since I live in a State controlled by a group that openly suppresses discourse, I must travel.

My last ditch hope is to  travel to Arizona to give my presentation on the Mathematics of funding health care. The trip will cost about $500, which I don't have.

$500 is not a lot of money.

I made a little affiliate site called A Fountain of Bargains. I've listed some 200 Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales and coupons on this site. I also run a small collection of directories for towns in the Mountain West called Community Color. The links marked (++) are affiliate links.
Any commissions I make from these sites would go to the trip.

It is possible to turn back ObamaCare. The process involves something that most people seem reluctant to do:

Thinking.

My plan is to get a group of people to discuss the mathematics of free market health care reform. The meeting would end with making a list of actions that the group could take to restore free market health care.

I will give more information on this last ditch effort next week.

Faith in the Party

Machiavelli taught the Prince that he needed to appear religious without actually being religious.

Transcribed into modern politics, Machiavelli's dictum is that a politician should appear to be for liberty while expanding government and centralizing power.

Our political parties are lined with politicians who seek to gain wealth and power by having a disdain for wealth and power.

In hindsight, one finds that the greatest enemy to freedom is not the open enemy seeking to take freedom, but the corrupt leader who declares himself for liberty, while letting the rogues take control of society.

In modern partisan politics, pundits have a keen eye for the faults of their opponents. Republicans can see clearly the faults of the Democrats and Democrats can see clearly the faults of the Republicans.

The Democratic Party is filled with wonderful people who believe strongly in social justice. They campaign actively and support strong-armned leaders who claim that they will impose social justice when they get in power. These wonderful people fail to realize that their strong-armed leaders are often a primary source of social injustice.

Socialism is a paradox. The concept is if one concentrates political power and wealth in a central political structure that there will be equality. Such a system leaves the people disenfranchised under the yoke of a corrupt ruling class.

In the previous post I examined faults of the Conservative Movement, which tends to mirror the paradoxes of the Left. The conservative movement has a history of shoving everyone else aside with the claims that they are the soul defenders of liberty in this and the adjacent two galaxies. After stomping everyone down, they sell liberty to the highest bidder.

Both parties have the same Machiavellian form in which they leaders appear to be for a cause they are eager to sell out.

So, this is where the trick comes in.

If we are ever to see a restoration of liberty, it will not come from the parties, but from the people.

The people matter more than the party.

A case in point is the Tea Party. The Tea Party was composed of people upset with the corruption of both the Bush and Obama administrations. It was right leaning but disorganized.

Conservatives infiltrated and captured the Tea Party. Conservative activists applied Alinsky techniques to transform the Tea Party into a branch of the Republican Party. This activation diminished the influence of the Tea Party.

People who were sympathetic with the Tea Party in 2010 now actively disassociate themselves from the movement.

When the Tea Party openly discussed ideas, it was hugely influential. As it moved from an independent group discussing ideas to a purely partisan protest group, its influence waned. Sadly, the movement accomplished relatively little.

Partisanship destroys. The only way to see a true restoration of liberty is for an independent group to form that aggressively defends its independence.

The primary concern of partisan politics is to consolidate wealth and power in the party. Faith in the party is misplaced. Faith should be placed in the people not the party.

On Undermining Liberty

After the election, I wrote a slew of posts on the topic of how partisan conservatives are undermining the cause of freedom.

For the last 50 years, partisan conservatives have stood up and claimed that THEY (and they alone) are the true defenders of freedom. Through this half century, Conservatives have had varying degrees of control of the government.

During this last 50 years, there has been a systematic erosion of liberty coupled with a growing gap between rich and poor.

Obama has been a terrible president both domestically and abroad. The 2012 election should have been a blow out election for the cause of liberty.

This fifty year failure to defend freedom leads directly to the question of why Conservatives have failed in their claim of defending liberty: Either Conservatives are incompetent or they are disingenuous in their claim to defend freedom.

During the election, I reluctantly came to realize that the latter is true.

The true goal of the Conservative is to preserve a top-down social order, with their group at the top.

In this last election, we saw Conservatives attacking ObamaCare because Obama was at the top. They sought to replace ObamaCare with RomneyCare.

ObamaCare is a state run health exchange based on the model of RomneyCare. RomneyCare is a state run health exchange. The only substantive difference between the programs is which band of rogues is on top.

During the election, Conservatives actively suppressed criticism of the Health Exchanges. I know, because I wanted to criticize the health exchanges and met a solid wall of suppression from the Conservatives in my state (Utah). In four years, I've not been able to find a single conservative in this state willing to discuss alternatives to the health exchanges. Not one Conservative in this oppressive state has been willing to even talk to me.

(My idea is that the best way to defeat ObamaCare is to promote self-funded health care as an alternative to insurance. It may be a bad idea, but how can anyone know if no-one takes the afternoon required to hear the argument?)

It was embarrassing. The people at Occupy Wall Street were more open to listening to free market ideas than Conservatives. OWS rejected the idea because it promotes property rights. OWS is opposed to property rights on a fundamental level, but they listened to the idea, when Conservatives simply won't.

I care about freedom. I do not care a lick about either of the two parties.

The doors are slamming shut on the American experiment in self-rule. I do not care about the parties but I do care about the cause of liberty.

Since conservatives are undermining the cause of liberty, those who love liberty must look beyond conservative rhetoric and address the reasons why conservatives undermine the cause.

Politics is tricky. A political movement formed around a cause loses its reason to be if the cause goes away. For a political movement to sustain itself, it has to reduce large groups of people to dependency around its cause.

Politics can get pathetic. In many cases we find political movements manufacturing crisis to maintain the political movement. The political class creates crisis and division so that it can use the crisis or division to sustain the political group.

Both Conservatives and Liberals use a technique called projection. The goal of this technique is to project faults onto one's opponents (while associating all that is right and good with one's own party).

Conservatives project a negative image onto their hated foe the Liberals. In turn the left spends its day projecting a negative image on "Conservatives."

If you are a Conservative, you've likely noticed that the Left projects racism onto Conservatism. If you are a Liberal, you will notice that Conservatives systematically project the image of Communism on the term Liberalism.

The racism charge is ironic, because the Left was using entrenched racism before the Civil Rights movement to advance its cause of big government. The charge that Liberals are communists is strange. Historically, Communism began as a right-wing reaction to the Classical Liberals who supported the free market.

The Conservatives of 1776 were royalists. They believed that the king had an ancient covenant with God stretching back to the patriarchs of ancient Israel. They saw the founders (classical liberals) as an unprincipled rabble sinning against God in their quest for liberty.

My posts on Hegel point out that the foundations of Communism evolved on the Right. The Kings of England were from Hanover Germany. The Kings of England funded the German Universities including Gottingen. German scholars were dedicated to reframing the ideals of feudalism. Hegel was a royalist-conservative who adored Napoleon. Karl Marx and Fueurbach were Young Hegelians who successfully reframed Hegel's arguments as revolution.

Modern liberalism actually evolved from a right-wing reaction to classical liberalism.

Hegel describes the process of terms turning into its opposite as sublation.

Sigmund Freud popularized the term "projection." Lakov popularized the term "framing."

Both concepts trace back to Hegel's study in projection.

From the revolution onward, Conservatives have played the game of projecting negative images onto the term "Liberal." By projecting negative images onto "liberalism" the term "liberal" came to mean its opposite.

Historically, the cause of liberty was a liberal cause.

Today, we find the conservative cause is dependent on the images they project onto Liberals. Case in point, there was no substance to the Romney campaign beyond the images that conservatives projected on Obama.

This race would have been a blow out if there was substance.

Conservatives love to pretend that they are the Founding Fathers. If Conservatives were the founding fathers, then why were the Conservatives of 1776 (the Tories) siding with the British?

The left/right split did not exist in 1776. This split came from the French Revolution. The left wanted social change the the right wanted to preserve the social order of the ancient regime.

The modern conservatism came after the Revolution. The ideals of Modern Conservatism seem to come from  Hegel, not from the US Founders.

The underlying structure of Hegelian is called dialectics. In Marxism the process is called Material Dialectics.

This dialectics is a systematic process of creating division. This modern dialectics is at the core of both Modern Conservatism and Modern Liberalism.

The conservatism movement fails in its stated cause of supporting liberty because Conservatism has embraced the modern Hegelian dialectics.

The modern conservative is dependent on the images it has projected on liberals over the years. I know this for certain because, during the 2012 campaign, conservatives spent more energy defining Obama than they spent on defining themselves.

The fact that Conservatives are dependent on the images they project on others shows that the movement is inherently dishonest and inherently flawed.

It is not simple incompetence. The conservative movement fundamentally undermines the ideals for freedom.

Lets jump back to the Conservatives of 1776. The conservatives of 1776 believed the King had an ancient covenant with God stretching back to ancient Israel, and that the Founders were a rabble or rogues who should be hung.

They lost and a great realignment of political bedfellows ensued and partisanship set it.

The primary concern of Conservatism is the preservation of the social order. Conservatives want the people who are on top to stay on top, and they want the masses to stay subdued.

The best way to achieve this objective is to capture the term liberty.

People love liberty, and do not want to give up their freedom. The best way to take liberty from a people is to capture the term liberty and twist it toward your advantage. Both left and right played the game of pushing definitions of liberty that suit their advantage.

In conclusion, I want to talk about the biggest problem I see with American politics.

The easiest way for a group to destroy liberty is for the group to set itself up as the defender of liberty.

Once the group has convinced the gullible that it is the defender of freedom, the group can play the role of gatekeeper, kicking legitimate voices of freedom aside while compromising liberty with the forces of tyranny and centralization.

For fifty years Conservatives have claimed to be the voice of liberty. During this period, Conservatives systematically project false images on others. They kick people aside. They suppress debate and always the first to compromise with the powers seeking centralization and control.

At what point will American patriots finally stand up and start questioning these conservative overlords?

Budget in a Mixed Congress

Senators run every four years. The 2012 election is likely to undo the Democratic sweep of the Senate that took place in 2006. During this sweep, many traditionally Republican states went Democratic.

In 2012, 21 Democratic seats are up for election, along with 10 safe Republican seats. It is likely that Republicans will take the Senate.

The Congress controls the budget.

The last time we had a balanced budget happened during the Clinton Adminstration when we had a Democratic President and Republican Congress.

If Republicans take the Senate then we will have a lame duck president standing against a Conservative Congress wishing to earn its free market credentials by cutting government spending.

In contrast, if Romney wins, we will have a Progressive Republican president seeking to court favor with the people by expanding government spending. We saw this combination under George W. Bush who increased government spending through a dramatic rise in deficit spending.

If the driving issue for your vote is deficit spending, I believe the best option for the 2012 election is to vote for a Republican Senator and for a Third Party.

If there is a Split Vote and Obama wins a lame duck term without winning 50% of the vote, then the split vote will force Obama to move to the center.

Austerity Measures and Decline

Europe is trying to throw off its economic slump through austerity measures, and the plan simply is not working.

The failure of the austerity measures is not surprising.

In a socialist society, the government is the engine of growth. When one tries to impose austerity measures on a socialist society, all one gets is more economic decline.

The United States seems doomed to follow the same path. Conservatives have convinced themselves that our economic decline is the result of losing our "conservative values."

Rather than nominating a candidate interested in restoring a free market system, Republicans nominated the progressive Mitt Romney who has vowed to impose health exchanges at the state level and is dedicated to kicking down all talk of free market health care reform.

Groups like the Sutherland Institute are absolutely punch drunk with the idea that they will be able to use State run health exchanges regulated by an unelected Health Compact.

Rather than discussing ways to restore free market health care, the severely conservative right is set on the course of actively suppressing debate while drooling over the concentration of wealth and power that will take place with the Health Compact and socialized Health Exchanges.

The combination of "conservative values" and socialism pushed by Sutherland is a very ugly thing.

Let's look at the ugly: Conservatives love to point out that Nazism and Fascism were socialist economies.Such conservatives fail to acknowledge that fascism is a socialist state run by social conservatives.

Yes, I know, there are some "conservatives" who want to conserve the principles of the US Founders. But the term "conservatism" is not a synonym for the socio-economic system of the founders. The term "conservative" means a person set on preserving the current social order.

When social conservatives get their hands on a overbearing state, their native impulse is to use that overbearing state to impose their values. This is why the right is almost as bad as the left at expanding government power.

Conservatives wave images of the Founders when they are out of power, but then work to centralized and consolidate the nation when they are in power.

Conservatives are not the founders of this nation, they are people who use the images of the founders to grub power.

The Founders of the United States had a liberal arts education. They applied classical logic to the question of liberty (which they saw as self-rule). They fought a revolution to liberate themselves from the crown and drafted a Constitution in an attempt to preserve the freedom they gained.

The Founders were driven by ideas about liberty. These guys were classical liberals. They were not conservatives.

The conservatives of 1776 were called "Tories." Tories were royalists who fought against the founders and who wanted to restore the social order of the ancient regime after the revolution.

Conservative slave owners in the south wanted to conserve the peculiar institution of slavery and spewed forth with complex arguments (rife with logical fallacies) in favor of slavery. This will come as a complete shock to many, but conservative slave owners will not all that keen on the liberal talk about liberty.

Conservatives of 1776 wanted to preserve the ancient regime.

The ancient regime (feudalism) was a society built on social order. The kings ruled through a network of local Lords and Ladies who imposed local control through  a tight political hierarchy.

Feudalism was a system with a centralized king and order imposed locally (Feudalism is exactly the ideal of the Sutherland Institute).

The Lords did not own the land. They gained their position by ruling over the serfs. The serfs owned nothing and depended on the bounty of their local lords for their benefits.

Supporters of the ancient regime were not without reason. They claimed the order was endowed through an ancient covenant stretching back to Israel. The king saw himself as a grand patriarch who showered the benefits of the state down upon the undeserving peasantry.

The people of the ancient regime were flowing with "conservative values" but the serfs lived pathetic lives in abject poverty.

Classical Liberals (including the US Founders) began toying with the concept of widespread ownership. Adam Smith argued that owners seeking to maximize the return from the stuff they owned would increase the wealth of the nation.


The Kings of England were German and sponsored German Universities. After the US and French Revolution, German Universities set to the task of reframing the ideals of the ancient regime. It was clear that the serfs suffered under the yoke of feudalism. But, imagine a feudalism in which the lords and ladies kept to their promise and showered the people with benefits.

The arch-conservative Hegel created a new modern logic in which he pulled every fallacy and paradox in an attempt to rework the ideals of feudalism in a favorable light. Hegel was clearly right wing. The Young Hegelians (eg Karl Marx) framed the who set up as revolutionary left.

Communism was born of this radical effort to reframe feudalism as progressive. The key difference was that socialism de-emphasized the social order and promised to actually shower people with benefits.

Don't you see? Socialism was born of an effort to attack the liberal notion of a society built on ownership and revive the ideals of the ancient regime which was a society based on power and social order.

Socialism is an idealized version of feudalism in which the government keeps its promise of showering benefit on the people. The ideal was born of a conservative philosophy. Hayek called this process the Road to Serfdom. The Left uses revolutionary rhetoric on a path that will achieve the conservative goal of restoring the feudal social order.

Socialists use heavy taxes and debt spending in attempts to build their fantasy of a feudalism that works. They soon exhaust the treasury and swamp the engines of commerce.

When conservatives step into impose austerity and conservative values on the top-down socialist state, they complete the circle and force us back into a feudal order. It is not surprising that fantasies about an idealized feudal order in up back in the oppressive state of a real feudal order.

The left puts us on the Road to Serfdom with the promise of a socialist state which showers entitlements onto the people who own nothing. Conservatives stand in the wing ready to put the shackles back on mankind after the socialists squander the treasury and force the imposition of austerity measures.

Sadly, the only way out of the trap is to reject both the left and right and to campaign for the classical liberalism based on an ownership society. This is a difficult game opposed by both left and right.

Conservative Socialism

Most self describe Conservatives these days self-identify with Reagan, Goldwarter or William Buckley. This Tea Party definition of conservative is relatively new.

The Reagan definition of Conservatism is relatively new. There are many older definitions.

The heart of Conservatism is a desire to conserve a given social structure. The former Communists ruling Russia are Conservatives. The Taliban wants to conserve their ideals of an Islamic state. Slave owners in post Revolution America wanted to preserve their peculiar institution. Slave owners saw themselves as wonderful people and praised themselves for the meager care they gave to their slaves.

Royalists in England and Tories in the states wanted to preserve the social order of the monarchy.

The royalists had a vision of the feudal order that is different than we have today. They saw the kings and lords as monuments of virtue that showered bounty upon the undeserving masses. They saw the kingdom as the state as the owner and the bounties of the state flowing through the royalty and lords to the people.

The royalists despised the classical liberal notion of a society built on self-ownership. They believed that people belonged to a social order. The Lords and Ladies of Feudalism did not gain their position by owning and investing, they gained their position from ruling over a region.

The serfs, of course, owned nothing. They toiled through the day and owed with livelihood to their Lords and Ladies. Yes, many serfs adored their lords.

The classical liberalism of the US Founders was a foreign ideology that came from the merchant class. This middle class gained their position through ownership. Merchants, factory owners and professionals would re-invest the gains from their efforts in their business.

Royalists, who dreamed of a return to the social order of the ancient regime, despised people who made built their status through ownership and spared no invective in their scorn of the merchant class.

After the US Revolution, there was a massive religious revival. During this period people seeking shelters from the uncertainties of the business world sought to create Utopian societies.

The Mormon Church appeared during this revival. In In No Man Knows My History (buy at Overstock.com) by the apostate Fawn Brodie puts forward the thesis that the Smith family was most likely Tories who were forced from the city to the frontier after the Revolution to brood in silence.

The Book of Mormon seems to reflex the thought of the 1800s. People wondered about the origins of the native Americans. The pseudo scientists of the day assumed a young earth. Joseph Smith wrote a story on the speculation that the Native Americans were descended from the Lost Tribes of Israel.

The Native Americans had a conflict driven history (See Hegel's philosophy of history) that reached its climax when King Benjamin (no relation to Benjamin Franklin) granted the people a Democracy. An evil group called "Lamanites" formed a voting block and won the election that led to a big war.

God was displeased and smited the Nephites and turned them into red savages.

On publishing the Book of Mormon, Smith hooked up with Oliver Cowdery and Sidney Rigdon who had congregations that experimented with building utopian societies. This conservative movement was using a radicalized religion to built a utopian society that harkened back to the ideals of feudalism.

In early American history, the concept of ownership was considered liberal. Conservative slave owners in the South sought to deny blacks self-ownership. Utopian societies of the north created utopian societies that harkened back to the ideals of the ancient regime.

The early utopian societies tended to build on radicalized religion. A "Young Hegelian" named Fueurbach realized that one could use radicalized anti-religion to the same effect. Another Young Hegelian named Karl Marx figured out how to use the dialectic to frame socialism as revolutionary.

Legislating Morality

I am stuck in Utah and have to drive thousands of miles to talk to a human. I read the Sutherland Institute Blog simply because they are part of the State Policy Network. I've traveled to Denver to talk to the Independence Institute and Phoenix to speak with the Goldwater Institute in my desperate attempt to find people interested in free market health care reform.

In every case, I am referred back to Sutherland Institute because I suffer the misfortune of living in Utah.

The Sutherland Institute is not a free market organization. If anything it is the opposite leaning more to fascism than to freedom. Hell will freeze over before these clowns will ever spend a second in serious consideration of free market health care reform.

The group takes money claiming to support the free market then does inane things like dismiss an argument because a women has a hyphenated name!

I am writing this post simply to make a place to post the following gem from Paul Mero today:

"Let me remind my conservative and libertarian friends that the whole purpose of law is to legislate morality. The whole intellectual and logical framework of law is to address the everyday realities when two or more humans interact and what is best for people as human beings and best for them when they interact. "

Is this guy smoking pot, or what? The law cannot see our intentions it can only see our actions. No matter how complex one makes the law, there will always be cases when people commit immoral acts which are legal, and people breaking laws to commit moral acts. Most laws have nothing to do with morality. There is not a moral imperative dictating that we must drive on the right side of the street. Traffic laws were designed to reduce accidents.

The Founders realized that all the well intentioned attempts in history to legislate morality failed. The classical liberals realized that law should be limited to those areas necessary to prevent civil breakdown.

The Left makes the mistake in believing that we realize morality through the largess of the state. The Right plays the same game.

I am not a big fan of the drug legalization movement. The tragic history of both Prohibition and the War on Drugs seems to show that attempts to legislate morality have a very deep cost.

Anyway, the only reason for this post was to cut out this gem from a group that takes money from the State Policy Network with claims they support the freedom movement.

They don't.

Sublation of Liberalism

Modern political terms are absurd. Conservatives claim to defend the tradition of liberty while liberals adore an increasingly oppressive totalitarian state. How did this happen?

It appears that the muddling of terms happened during the reaction to the American Revolution in the early 1800s.

The US Founders had a liberal arts education. The applied traditional logic to the question of liberty which they saw as self-rule. The founders fought a war to liberate themselves from the monarchy and created a constitutionally limited government to preserve liberty.

The US Founders were LIBERALS. They simply had a different definition of "liberty."

The US Founders fought a middle class revolution for freedom. They were seeking liberation from a corrupt ruling class. They were not seeking to impose social justice on their enemies. The founders had a deep distrust of the rabble and mob rule.

The Founders saw liberty as self-rule. They saw the failure of free societies in the past and realized that to stay, people needed to be of strong character. The founders promoted a set of virtues and values that they saw as necessary to maintain freedom. This set of values is similar to what Modern Conservatives claim to be "Conservative Values."

While a strong value set is necessary to maintain freedom, Conservative Values do not, in and of themselves, bring freedom.

The serfs in feudalism had "conservative values" and lived in abject poverty. Radical Islam has "conservative values."

Nazism and Fascism were socialist states which promoted strong "conservative values." The guards at the death camps did not have liberal values. If they had liberal values, they would have opened the gates to liberate people. I imagine it required great moral fiber to guard a death camp. I couldn't do it.

The founders were liberals who had a value set similar to "conservative values." This does not make them "conservatives."

The Conservatives of 1776 were called Tories. The Tories were royalists who supported the crown during the War. The Tories lost the war and had to cope and adapt.

Yes, I know. How could the royalist philosophy be written in German? It is not as if the English Kings came from Hanover and were jointly kings of England and a large section of Germany (Hanover). It is not as if English Kings were the primary patrons of German Universities such as Gottingen.

Wait a second. It says here Hanover is in German. How did that happen? Holy cow, the Kings of England were fundamental in setting up the German University system. If this is the case, then Hegel and friends were deeply and directly influenced by royalist thought. Go figure?

The royalist adaptation to the US Revolution was encapsulated in the works of Hegel.

A primary interest of Hegel was change. He advocated a dialectical view of history with the world spirit evolving through conflict (like Fox News). Hegel also studied the way words changed (sublation) with a specific interest in the master/slave relation. Hegel had a large number of examples of how freedom becomes slavery and slavery freedom.

The Conservative/Royalist view of the 1800s was encapsulated in the works of Hegel.

In philosophy, the term "modern" applies to the branches of philosophy that appeared post Kant (1724-1804).

The US Founders despised the factionalization they saw in Europe. Modern conservatives thrive on partisanship.

The US Founders saw "Machiavelli" as an evil word. Modern Conservatives bow in worship of Machiavelli.

A case in point is the way that Conservatives have deluded themselves into believing that ObamaCare is communism and RomneyCare is free market ... when they are essentially the same program!

Speaking of Communism, Karl Marx was a young Hegelian. Marx took the ideas of the arch conservative Hegel and reframed them as revolutionary and progressive.

Communism is simply the monarchy reframed. There is a direct chain between the conservative royalist view to the communist view. Socialism is a top-heavy statist philosophy that has been framed in a manner appealing to people with liberal leanings.

Now, I don't hate "conservatives." For that matter, I've been a big supporter of the Goldwater and Buckley branch of the conservative movement. However, my support for the freedom coalition in the conservative movement has not closed my eyes to the troubling fact every bad thing that exists on the left also exists, to some extent, on the right.

As the Conservative movement drives its freedom coalition underground, we will see all of the negative aspects of conservatism emerge.

If You Vote Third Party, You're ...

I am amazed at the large number of Republicans who claim: "If you vote third party, you are voting for Obama."

No, the truth is, if you vote third party, you are voting for a third party. If you vote for Gary Johnson, you are voting for Gary Johnson. If you vote for Virgil Goode, you are voting for Virgil Goode.

If you look at the two candidates, find them both lacking and vote third party in protest; you are actually saying out loud: "A pox on both your houses!"

There are only a few swing states in play. For most of us, the vote we cast is just a statement. A Democrat who feels let down by Obama and votes Green or Libertarian is not voting for Romney anymore than a Tea Partier who votes Gary Johnson.

A vote for third party is not a vote wasted. Political pundits have been obsessing over polls throughout the year. They will obsess even more over the vote count. A large third party vote would show extreme displeasure with the state of the debate.

Good will come from a sizable third party vote.

IMHO, the worst possible outcome is Romney winning the electoral college while Obama wins 50% plus of the vote. In this case, Democrats will rail that Romney was an illegitimate president. A massive third party vote will temper this claim.

If Romney wins in the face of what he perceives as a massive voter defection from the Republican Party, Romney would be forced to listen to the much maligned libertarian vote.

No matter how you go about it, voting third party is not a wasted vote but a loud statement against the corrupt and captured parties.

If you vote third party, you are neither voting for Obama or voting for Romney. If you vote third party; you are making a statement against the political machine. As political pundits will obsess over the election return, your vote for a third party will be heard and will affect the structure of the political platforms for 2016.

Royal Hubris

The US Founders had a conflict with the monarchy and royalist.

Back when I was researching the US Founders I decided that, to understand the Founder's side of the conflict, I also needed to read articles supporting the royalist perspective. (Please Note, the Tories and Royalists were the first American Conservatives. They fought against the US Founders.)

Apparently, the royalty of old saw their kings, queens and lords as monuments of virtue who had an ancient covenant with God. Royalists saw the the king (i.e., the state) as the fountain from which the bounties of the kingdom flowed outward to the people.

The royalty had great contempt for the serfs who they they saw as needy, greedy subjects who weighed upon the resources of the kingdom.

In feudalism, the king was the central legal authority. This authority was imposed on the local level through a hierarchy of Lords and Ladies.

Most people in feudalism were serfs. Serfs worked long hours toiling away for their lords upon whom they were dependent for food and low quality health care. Most serfs had what Sutherland Institute would call "conservative values."

There was a growing middle class. The middle class owned property and had a small amount of autonomy. Classical liberal thinkers latched on to the idea that property rights and ownership were key to prosperity.

The American Revolution was inspired by classical liberal thought. They created a limited government set on protecting property rights.

The royalists (aka the conservatives) did not disappear. They simply spat venom at the liberal US Founders who they saw as treasonous vermin.

The Hanoverian Kings of England were German. The Hanoverian Kings funded German Universities. German scholars, like Hegel, wrote philosophies sympathetic to the Germany Royalty (who just happened to rule England).

Hegel was a Conservative who adored Napoleon and wanted a restoration of a top-down empire or monarchy. Hegel spoke how the Germanic people the chosen of the World Spirit to lead a new world order and other nonsense.

Hegel was fascinated with sublation. Sublation is the tendency of words to change meaning with time. Often words would turn into their opposite. The arch-conservative Hegel hated the Classical Liberalism of the US Founders and wrote a number of arguments that turned freedom into slavery and slavery freedom.

The Young Hegelian (Feuerbach, Marx, etc.) took Hegel's dialectics and reframed the ideals of the monarchy as new, left wing and revolutionary.

Through the process of sublation, Hegel and Marx managed to make the monarchy appear to millions as radical and egalitarian.

Interestingly, the radical left seems to have kept the same intellectual hubris of the monarchy.

NEWSFLASH: Woman With Hyphenated Name Claims To Be LDS

NEWSFLASH: Paul Mero of the Sutherland Institute reports that a woman with a hyphenated name claims to be LDS. Mero reports:

"In the Deseret News, a woman with a hyphenated name defends LDS Democrats by arguing, 'We believe it is the Democratic Party that best meets our values.' "

What about "sealed for eternity" does this woman with a hyphenated-name not understand? There are no hyphenated names in the Heavenly Kingdom.

In related news, a spokesman for the Utah Democratic is a homo! Paul Mero of the Sutherland Institute Reports:

"All of this cheerleading comes on the heels of a year-long effort by the homosexual, former Mormon chairman of the state Democratic Party to try to win over Mormons into the Democratic fold.

To complete the scandal. Democratic Members of the LDS Church have a caucus, while Republican Mormons who have a super majority in the Utah Legislature don't. What's this with having caucuses outside the super-majority?

I mean, it is not as if Thomas Monson, the president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, sent a letter "(to be read in sacrament meeting)" that beseeches members to actively engage in caucuses.

The letter clearly says "both parties." Surely, the head of the LDS Church was not telling its members to vote as a block for Mitt Romney during the Republican campaign.

The Sutherland Institute is a group that takes money claiming to support free markets, then doesn't.

Partisan Prayer

Dear Lord, Please vanquish my partisan foes this election ...

I can't believe it! After the Tea Party and protests against PPACA (ObamaCare), all conservatives have come up with is feeble talk about returning to the gold standard and a prayer rally.

Sorry, but praying to defeat a partisan foe in an election is something that is simply too cynical for my taste. Praying that someone else loses is just plain wrong.

Anyway, it appears that FreedomWorks is planning massive partisan prayer rallies to defeat the hated Obama. If I understood the commercial right, the prayer rallies are being organized in swing states on the site freePAC.com. This site says:

At FreePAC you'll discover the technologies and strategies that we can use to turn back the Progressive agenda.

This approach to restoring the American Experiment in self-rule simply won't work. It is very easy to see why by examining the word I emphasized: "progressive."

What exactly is "progressivism"? Progressivism could be described as a collection of technologies and strategies to move our nation to an unstated goal of "socialism."

The activists on the right are trying to beat a strategy with a strategy. Each time conservatives attempt a new strategy, the progressives counter. Attempts to fight strategy with counter-strategy leads directly to a world ruled by action and reaction and a loss of targeted goal of restoring freedom.

A government ruled by action and reaction invariably grows as it responds to each crisis.

Now, there is a place for strategy in politics. However, the best path toward beating "progressivism" is for the champions of liberty to state their end goal (freedom) and call out the progressives for their end goal of socialism.

The Tea Party and Conservative movement are failing because the leaders and activists in these movements have focused too heavily on strategies and counter strategies and have failed to engage the American people in a discussion of the goals of the campaign.

I contend that it would be easy to defeat PPACA (ObamaCare) if a group of free marketeers got together and discussed substantive free market health care reform (Insurance is not free market health care).

Instead, Conservatives concentrate exclusively on strategy. For example, the Sutherland Institute advocates regulating Health Exchanges through a State Compact instead of the Federal Government. This is simply a strategy. Health Exchanges regulated by a State Compact is of the same basic form as Health Exchanges regulated by the Federal Government.

Because Republicans refuse to discuss ideas, the advocates of the American Experiment in Self-Rule are systematically losing the war of ideas.

I find it pathetic that the once proud Tea Party movement has been reduced to holding partisan prayer rallies in swing states as a political strategies to vanquish a partisan foe.

Prayer has its place but, in my humble opinion, a partisan prayer against another partisan group is a base and cynical act. I will not pray against my fellow man, I will pray that someday, somewhere a group of patriots builds up enough courage to actually discuss free market health care reform.

Although, I suspect that it would take a miracle beyond the capability of even the Heavenly Father for a Conservative to grasp the point that insurance (group funding of individual consumption) is not free market health care. Free market health care is individual funding of individual consumption ... with individuals helping those who cannot help themselves.

Which Path is Better?

I wrote this blog post to ask a person a question twitter.

PPACA was based on Romney's Massachusetts' health care plan. (ObamaCare was based on RomneyCare).

PPACA is a network of Health Exchanges implemented by the states regulated by the Federal Government. The government run health exchanges are setups in which the government defines and tightly regulates the administration of benefits while large politically capital pools speculate on the cost of care.

Mitt Romney has already announced that he intends to keep most of PPACA. So, he will have a symbolic repeal of PPACA. This repeal will leave the state run Health Exchanges in place. After the symbolic repeal of ObamaCare, the Republicans will write legislation to support the exchanges.

The new legislation will pretty much force states into running health exchanges.

In the current Republican Plan, the Federal Regulation of the health exchanges is being replaced by a "Health Compact." A compact is a non-elected extra-governmental entity created by the states that will coordinate the Health Exchanges.

Once the Republican Plan is in place, there will be this massive Health Compact scheme between the states that voters have little ability to influence that regulates the exchanges.

Romney will repeal Federal mandates that individuals buy insurance, but he will give the states the ability to mandate purchase of insurance. I suspect that the states will systematically pass mandates because if they don't they will have massive unfunded liabilities created by the exchanges.

In the Romney plan, states will have the ability to pass a public option and to create state run health insurance agencies. You will see the blue states adopt these measures in a move to fully socialized care.

If Romney wins the 2012 election, we will be further along the road to fully socialized health care than if Obama is elected.

I am opposed to the Health Exchanges and socialized medicine. I am absolutely livid that Republicans steadfastly refuse to debate the merits of the free market contrasted with government run health exchanges.

So, I decided to start this split the split the vote effort to encourage people to vote third party. I will be voting for Gary Johnson. But, you know, feel free to write in people of vote for any candidate except Romney or Obama.

Imagine if 10% of the people voted third party in this hotly contended race. Both parties would look at the vote and determine that their message and methodology fail. They will then go back to the drawing board to work on a new platform and election strategy. This is especially true if the third party vote in a swing state affected the outcome of the election. Imagine if the third party vote in Colorado was 10% while the vote for two primary candidates was close?

Imagine if Obama takes Colorado, while the vote total for Romney and Johnson was greater than Obama's? The Republican Party might realize that throwing the Tea Party under the bus was a bad idea.

Yes, I realize that a split vote will give Obama a lame duck term, but I ask: Which is better?

An election in which Obama is left as a severely weakened lame duck, or one in which Romney rebrands PPACA as a Health Compact and moves the Republican Party left?

I want to see a restoration of free market health care. I see the 2012 election as a choice between worse and worse. If Obama is elected because of a split vote, both parties would attempt to create free market platforms to attract the independent vote. If Romney is elected, he will impose the Health Exchanges while moving the Republican Party left. The Democrats will react to Romney by moving even further.

I am a free marketeer who dreams of a restoration of the American experiment in self-rule. From my point of view, we will be in a much worse situation in 2016 with Romney as president than with Obama as a lame duck president.

Worst Case Scenario

In my opinion, the worst possible scenario for the 2012 election is for Obama to win over 50% of the popular vote while Romney wins the Electoral Vote.

In such a case there will be a shrill call to arms claiming that the Republicans twarted democracy and that the the Romney election is an affront to the world spirit. Winning 50% + of the vote would set up Obama for a run in 2016 on the grounds that Romney was an illegitimate president. Romney is very likely to lose if Obama ran in 2016.

If there was a strong "Split the Vote" campaign and a large number of undecided voters realized that splitting a vote would force both parties to change, the split vote campaign would deny Obama the majority.

Imagine that Obama got 48% of the vote and Romney got 46% of the vote but won the electoral college with Libertarians getting 3% of the vote. The majority of people are clearly against the Obama regime. The claims that Obama was the true victor of the campaign diminishes. There would still be protests in the street, but the protests would not resonate.

More importantly, the inability to get a majority would reduce Obama's chances of getting the 2016 Democratic nomination.

If a split vote resulted in an election with Obama receiving less than a majority, then he would be an embattled lame duck without a clear mandate. Remember how the Republican party completely fell apart in the lame duck years of Bush?

Get Out and Split the Vote

Republicans are running full force with a fear campaign. In general, people who run on fear are scarier than the people they fear.


Personally, when I look at Obama, I see a lame duck who will fully discredit progressive socialism in his second term. This is especially true if Obama wins because Libertarians split the vote.

Yes, the MSM is currently in a full blown campaign for Obama. But Obama cannot run for a third term. The press will turn on Obama and his agenda in the next four years. Remember how the world turned against Bush in his lame duck years?

The global consensus is that the president of the United States has way too much power. The result of this consensus is that the world turns away from the ideology of the US president. If Obama has a lame duck term, the people of the world will turn away from the progressive, international socialism he advocates.

In contrast, really bad things will happen if Romney executes the plan where he wins the electoral vote while Obama wins the popular vote.

The press and Occupy Wall Street will hit the streets with shrill protests against the electoral college and claims that Republicans suppressed the vote with photo-id laws.

Romney will receive blame for the economic decisions of the Obama years. Notably, the press has ignored inflation. When it starts to report about inflation, it will project inflation on Romney while ignoring the quantitative easing that set up inflation.

The same thing happened with Bush. The press blames bush for the deregulation of derivatives. The deregulation of derivatives happened in the Clinton Administration. The Commodities Future Modernization Act of 2000 was signed by William Jefferson Clinton, not by George Walker Bush, yet Bush bears the blame!!!

Romney has already declared that he intends to keep most of PPACA. The freedom movement will take a substantial hit for little gain.


The 2012 presidential election is one of the most anticipated and divisive votes in US history. Usually a vote for a third party is a throw away vote. The nature of this vote means that the election returns will be scrutinized in minutia. Pundits and analysts would be force to react if the people reject their false dichotomy.

The parties are spending billions in one of the most divisive campaigns in history. If the American people voted in droves for a third, the American people would shake the political machine to its foundation and force both parties to change.

For this reason, I've decided to vote third party and encourage others to do so. I will post articles about why I am voting third party on the page yintercept.com/split.html. I will use the Twitter Hashtag #SplitTheVote on tweets arguing for a split vote.

Life in Zion

I appreciate Richard Mack's arguments for the independent sheriff who is elected by the people and sworn to uphold the Constitution and individual rights.

The sad reality is that the local sheriff is often corrupt.

In the paper today (WSJ Article) I read about how the police in Springdale, Utah would issue citations to foreigners visiting Zion National Park. Demand on the spot cash payment, then destroy the citation.

NOTE: Springdale is a small town in Washington County at the entrance to Zion National Park. It is an epicenter of the conflict between local and Federal Control.
This small corruption is nothing compared to the billion dollar police confiscation industry, which is nothing compared with the trillions of institutionalized theft in the financial industry.

This minor corruption is simply the report published the day after the Utah Freedom Conference. The primary thrust of the Utah Freedom Conference was to push for a massive expansion of state powers and local law enforcement to counter the Federal Expansion that has taken place during the Obama administration.

I see this effort as doomed to failure because local corruption is ubiquitous and federal corruption. For that matter, living in a small county with a corrupt sheriff is extremely oppressive.

The Utah Freedom Conference has great arguments for state sovereignty, but the arguments will not be sufficient to restore the American Experiment in self-rule.

END NOTE: I believe we could win the argument for restoring self rule if a group will willing to discuss free market health care reform. Sadly, there are no conservatives who are willing to discuss that topic so we are doomed to a systematic clamping down on individual liberty.

Undermining Liberty to Get at the Land

I feel even worse about the future of America after the Utah Freedom Conference than I did before.

The primary aim of the conference was to use anger aimed at Obama to get at the land.

The Mountain States have large mountain ranges and expansive deserts. Because Western States have little arable land, most of the land is public land.

The highlight of the meeting was a speech by America's Sheriff (Richard Mack of Graham County) who spoke about the long standing tradition of the local sheriff who extolled that Sheriffs have the authority to toss federal agents off the land.

Utah has a long and hostile history with federal agents. For example, after the Mountain Meadows Massacre, Brigham Young had admonished the Saints in Southern Utah to be on the look out for Federal Agents.

In 1869, John Wesley Powell and 9 federal agents headed off into the Utah Territories to survey the Green and Colorado Rivers. Three of the men panicked at Lava Falls. These men climbed the North Rim in search of settlers.

The settlers claimed that the men were killed by a peaceful band of Indians (You know how them injuns are). Letters and diaries from the settlers seem to indicate that they were done in by the settlers who were briefly overcome by excessive righteousness (Sandra Tanner).

Americans love their public lands and open space. Attempts to get at the land will be perceived as an action with a great cost to the many that benefit only a few.

With our captured financial system, few in the middle class will be able to buy the liquidated public lands. Most of it will go to people with inside connections at the banks. Efforts to sell off public lands will turn open lands into gated lands that only the upper income will be able to access.

I fear that a culture war between fanatics screaming "state's rights" and wanting to sell public lands will not play out well. It will be a battle that turns millions of Americans away from the cause of liberty with very little gain.

Selling public land does not advance the cause of property rights.

People often confuse property rights with land. The ideal of property rights is the ideal that individuals have rights to the things they own. For example, I have a property right to this article I just wrote. My mind and my body are my property. I don't own any land, but I do have property rights to my car, my computer and my writings. If someone wanted to buy this article from me and republish it, they would have to pay me. My copyright is a property right.

The ideal of property rights does not say that all land must be privately owned. There is a great deal of land on Mars which no-one currently owns. After people move to Mars, there will be open questions about property rights on Mars.

People who claim that the ideal of property rights demand that all land must be privately owned end up undermining the cause of property rights with an absurd absolute.

Using the anger directed at PPACA (ObamaCare) is unlikely to go well. It will most likely detract from efforts to repeal ObamaCare.

Which leads me to why I am so horrifically depressed … for four solid years I've been trying to find a group interested in discussing Free Market Health Care reform. Despite the fact that I spent my every last dime trying to find groups to discuss this issue, conservatives slammed the door in my face.

After four years of watching Conservatives steadfastly refusing to discuss free market health care reform, they turn on the American people with the aim of using anger about PPACA to close off access to public lands.

This strange ideal that county sheriffs should throw Federal Agents off state lands will not end well. The cause of State's Right harkens back to the Confederate side of the Civil War, Jim Crow Laws and segregation.

There are positive aspects of state sovereignty. When states defend the people against the excesses of the Federal Government, the states look good. When the Federal Government defend people against the excesses of the state, the Federal Government looks good.

I applaud the admirable efforts made by states to defend people against PPACA. However, this cause can quickly go astray when local power brokers simply use anger at the Federal government to grab the land or to grab power.

By focusing on the wrong issue, the Utah Freedom Conference is undermining and not advancing the cause of liberty.

Personal Attacks Posing as Science

I snorted coffee through my nose when I read this "news story" by George Wuerthner,on a supposed newspaper called News West.

"The wolf-hunts are predicated upon morally corrupt and inaccurate assumptions about wolf behavior and impacts that is not supported by recent scientific research. State wildlife agencies pander to the lowest common denominator in the hunting community—men who need to booster their own self esteem and release misdirected anger by killing."

The article is primarily personal attacks on people the writer dislikes with a few vague allusions to science. When did the author develop magical powers to see inside the minds of others. I've met people who claim to have had their animals killed by predators: Wuerthner dismisses them with the statement:

"While any loss may represent a significant financial blow to individual ranchers, the livestock industry as a whole is hardly threatened by wolf predation."

Imagine the outrage that would ensue if a Libertarian said: "Yeah, a few houses would burn down if we stopped paying firemen, but the housing industry as a whole would hardly be be threatened by fires."?

Lost livestock is a tax that ranchers must pay to feed Wuerthner's self-righteousness. The consumers bear the tax in higher food prices. A large wolf population will put free ranch meat out of the price of most Americans.

BTW: If I ever demanded a tax on others to feed my self-righteousness, I would be drummed out of the country.

Wolves happen to be biological entities that experience exponential growth in their population. Hunting is a way to manage that exponential growth.

Supporting Community

I realize it's a waste of 50 bucks, but I decided to go to the Utah Freedom Conference after all.

Yes, I am upset that the "Utah Freedom Conference" fails to advance "freedom." The conference is held by a bunch of politicos who wish to use the anger aimed at Obama to grab power. Topics of the conference include expanding the sheriff's office to counter the Feds. (POWER GRAB) Expanding state powers to counter the feds. (POWER GRAB). Getting state hands on Federal Lands (POWER GRAB). The only interesting topic is in starting a local currency to counter Wall Street.

Health Care is the most important issue of our day. The second one mentions alternatives to insurance, Conservatives shut their hears and make incoherent bubbly noise to defend their power base in the insurance industry.

Anyway, the Utah Freedom Conference is by people who want to use fear of Obama to gain power themselves. They refuse to discuss issues that diminish their power. The conference is pure hypocrisy.

But it's the only game in town.

I decided to attend the conference because I happen to believe it is very important to support the people around me.

As you see, the American experiment in self rule is not the ideal of people living in isolation. The Founders discovered the secret of prosperity. Strong individuals make for a vibrant community.

Conversely, when people try to make a strong community (at the cost of individuals) they end up diminishing both the individual and the community.

We become strong individuals when we support the people around us.

I actually do put my money where my mouth is. You may have noticed that I've created a collection of directories for the Mountain West under the banner: Community Color. Sites included are Missoula.ws Salt Lake Sites, Denver Color, Provo Utah dot US, gjct.com I started making link lists for local communities back in 2000.

These sites exist simply because I believe in supporting people around me. The real heart of a free society is free minds that freely associate.

A free society, by its very nature, should be open and inclusive. Conservatives undermine the free market when they automatically close their minds to challenges to the power base (insurance).

Anyway, I will attend the Utah Freedom Conference even though I suspect it will simply be a waste of time and money. It would be fun to someday attend a conference that is actually about freedom, and not simply a game of political players grubbing for power.

Is Mormonism a Secret Combination?

I am a big fan of the American Experiment in Self-Rule. I would love to find people in Salt Lake actually interested in talking about free market health care. I simply cannot find any such group.

Regardless, I follow any local online conversation I can about freedom. Anyway, Someone with the alias freedomfighter wrote on LDS Freedom Forum a post called: 61 points about Secret Combinations in the Book of Mormon that begins:

"Secret combinations existed in times of old" (2 Nephi 26:22),
"They [evil gentiles] have secret oaths, covenants, agreements, signs, wonders, and plans (Alma 37:27,32)

A common thread of conspiracies is that they start with a belief that some other "evil" entity is engaged in a conspiracy. Therefore, our group must counter their group.

The Book of Mormon is about how an evil conspiracy destroyed a Democracy set up by a fictional group called the Nephites. The article cites some of the ominous warnings of the conspiracy (aka, the secret combination).

Since the LDS Church is a large organized group (with secret rituals) that seeks power, it is very easy to accuse it of being a "secret combination."

Anyway, I've been trying to figure out the dynamics of the local system in which people use freedom rhetoric, but fail to carry through in promoting individual liberty.

There will be a Utah Freedom Conference on September 15th. This conference does not include discussions on individual freedom; nor does it include discussions about free market health care reform.

The subjects of the conference are: Expanding state powers to counter the expansion of Federal Powers. Expanding the powers of local sheriffs to counter evil environmentalists. Getting at public lands, Creating a Utah bank to coin a new precious metal backed currency, and (most important of all) expanding the power and influence of the Mormon Church.

Every single one of these topics is about making select local institutions bigger. There is no talk about defending or expanding individual freedom.

Shouldn't a freedom conference have discussions about freedom or at least discussions about expanding individual liberty?

The most significant issue of our day is health freedom. Free market health care reform is not even on the docket. I should note that, in four years of active search, I've been unable to find a single person in Utah willing to discuss free market health care reform. They throw me out the door when they realize that I am serious.

Why are the minds in this state so completely and utterly shut to the discussion of free market health care reform?

The Utah Freedom Conference reminds me about why I gave up on "liberalism." Modern liberals talk about freedom. When "liberals" talk about "freedom" the conversation always ends up with a demand to expand the state and reduce individual liberty.

I gave up on liberals because they don't support liberty. I am sad, but not surprised, to see Conservatives pulling the same stunt.

The trick of using freedom rhetoric to expand the state started with conservatives. This trick was first perfected by royalists after the revolution. (The Hegelian Right came before the Hegelian Left)!

Hegel (1770-1830) presented a philosophy of history in which the world spirit progressed through national conflicts on the world stage. In this theory Hegel develops a strange ontological concept of freedom in which individual freedom is part of the mechanism through which the world spirit progresses. Individual free will is a little like the random number generator used in computer games to help keep the game of war interesting.

This clever redefinition of freedom allows royalists to dismiss the American Revolution as simply a phase in the evolution of the world. The American experiment in self-rule was just a historical mistake that will soon be rectified.

The Keynote Speaker of the Utah Freedom Conference, Tim Ballard, plays a similar game in his book The Covenant. The book claims history is an ever changing progression of collective covenants between the Heavenly Father and man.

The idea of covenant is not new. Prior to the Revolution, royalists claimed that the monarchy received divine authority through a covenant between God and the ancient patriarchs of Israel. (The Divine Right of Kings).

During the early 1800s, several people presented fantastical histories in which there was an ever progressing covenant with God. God made the first covenant with Adam. Adam's first son (Cain) killed his younger brother (Abel). God was so upset at Abel for breaking the covenant that he smited Cain and turned the descendants of Cain black (the mark of Cain). Some people used this fake history to justify slavery.

The Book or Mormon claims that the lost tribes of Israel (the Nephites) built a submarine and came to the new world to establish a new collective Covenant with God. Depraved evil gentiles formed secret combinations that destroyed the covenant. God got mad. God smited the Nephites and turned them into red savages.

Golly, We know these stories are true because there are people with black skin and indigenous Americans have darker skin. There must be a reason for this!!!

Tim Ballard claims that the US Revolution was directed by the Heavenly Father to create a new covenant. His book presents the US Founders as hapless fools used by the Heavenly Father to create the conditions for the restoration of the true church (The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints).

In this view, The Declaration of Independence and Constitution were scriptural works revealed by the Heavenly Father. They were not the product of reason, as evil gentiles such as myself contend.

Joseph Smith (1805-1844) advanced a theory called "free agency." Free agency is a little like the random number generator used in a computer games. In the game called life, The Heavenly Father created an ever progressing conflict between the righteous and evil gentiles. Individuals have free agency to side up with the righteous (the one true church) or with the evil gentiles (everybody else). Free agency plays a part in the Heavenly Father's collective covenant because we have to side up for the conflict.

Perhaps this strange definition of "free agency" could explain why a conference on freedom is all about expanding the power of groups that the conference givers control. The righteous need to make the political entities they control stronger to counter then things controlled by the secret combination of the gentiles.

Tim Ballard's thesis that the purpose of the Constitution is simply to create conditions for the rise of the LDS Church might explain why I've found it so difficult to get Utahans to actually talk about freedom. After all, I am an evil gentile who must be part of the secret combination of gentiles.

Anyway, having just read about how evil gentiles set up secret combinations and form secret covenants to undermine the righteous, I thought I should point out that it is easier to make the case that the LDS Church is a secret combination than to claim that all the gentiles not the church are part of a secret combination.

The LDS Church is a large politically active entity with a top-down political structure. The hierarchy makes claims to covenants, it has secret rituals and it promotes a fantastical history of ancient submarines and cultures that vanished without a trace.

Of course, my suggestion that the LDS Church is the same form as the secret covenants Joseph Smith warns against can be dismissed because I am obviously one of those evil gentiles your bishop warned you about.

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ADDED: I just discovered a short article by Darrin Andrews called "Waking Up to Secret Combinations. On LDS Freedom Portal. LDS Freedom Portal reiterates the notion that the Constitution was revealed by the Heavenly Father. From its Homepage:

"Over the years the leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have written and spoken much on political matters. In addition, ancient and modern scripture make reference to revealed and inspired governmental laws."

Idea Free Zone

I watched substantial portions of both the RNC and DNC Convention.

My first observation was that the conventions contained almost no new information. Both conventions were about positioning their presidential candidate, while framing the opposition in a negative light. The conventions themselves were idea free zones.

I feel that the parties are bringing our nation to the brink of failure and there is nothing that the millions of people who are disgusted with the parties can do about it. The corrupt parties have the people locked out.

I wish to emphasize that the parties were not part of the Constitution. The US Founders hated factions. Sadly, they failed to anticipate the two party system.

In my post on the Hegelian Left and Right, I argue that the parties (both Conservative and Progressive) seem to reflect the rational style of the royalist opposition to our experiment in self rule.

Both the DNC and RNC had the same form. Both conventions focused exclusively on the presidential race, and both conventions really pushed ideas to the back burner.

The political parties are top-down centralized constructs. The form of the parties creates a political dynamic that favors political and economic centralization.

Because of the structure of the parties, America is forces into an unending cycle of economic and political consolidation regardless of which party wins.

The president is the head of the Party. If Romney wins the presidency, his inclination will be to move to the center in preparation for the 2016 election. In his efforts to shift left, he will silence the free-market voices in the Republican party while passing legislation to expand the state.

To counter Romney's moving left, Democrats will move radically left.

The absurd structure of the partisan system actually means that it is better for the freedom movement to lose the presidency. If Obama wins a lame duck term, he will have to bunker down to defend the unwarranted government expansion of his first term. If Obama wins because Libertarians split the vote, we would have four years in which both the Democrats and Republicans competed for the freedom vote.

During the conventions, I kept vacillating between which candidate I want to vote against most. Voting against both presidential candidates by going third party is the best route.

Democrats Controlled the Government in 2006

Dear Mr. Biden,

Just a reminder. Democrats won the Congress in 2006 in a landslide election. George Bush was in complete bunker mode from the 2006 to 2008 and spent every dime of political capital on the surge.

Internationally, the world turned left in reaction to Bush's wars. One by one, countries were electing in socialists or outright communist regimes before the great crash.

As pointed out in the last post, the derivatives that played a role in the crash were created during the Clinton Administration.

A final observation. People invest looking forward and not looking back.

It was clear to anyone with a brain that 2008 would be a blow out for Democrats. The people who were removing their money from the market did so because they felt the future would be bad, not because they thought the past was bad.

I reject completely the notion that the king is the economy. I think it is dangerous to develop a cult of the presidency in which we attribute the economic condition to the president.

When we begin to believe pure speculative statements like "Obama saved us from a Depression" we fault in a mode of superstition and not reason.

Advocates of the Austrian School of economics actually claim that Obama's policies turned a recession into a prolonged recession because the bailouts failed to let the economy hit bottom.

Restoring American Individualism

Communitarianism is a system with the community as the primary focus. Individualism is a system with the individual (or family unit) as the primary focus.

Communities are composed of individuals. When you have strong individuals, you get a strong community. Community is an abstraction. When we focus on the community as it it were a solid thing, the individuals languish and we get a weak community.

The left seeks power by consolidating the community. To do this they attack individualism by ridiculing a straw-man called the self-made man. The self-made straw-man is absurd. Individualism simply means that the free individual is the focus of society. Free people in a free market make more associations in the community than people living in top-down structured societies.

Unfortunately, the advocates of liberty do an absolutely pathetic job of defending individualism. Reactionary conservatives make the mistake of defending the straw-man. Defending the straw-man allows the left to project false images on to the free market. When the right defends the straw-man, the left is able to project the false image that the free market has people living in isolation in a winner take all society.

Free marketeers are also prone to start defending the free market on economic terms instead of moral terms.

We have a top down financial system with money produced by the feds, which trickles down to the people through the banks and Wall Street. Wall Street is a centralized market with all trades tightly regulated. We proponents of the free market attempt to argue finance, the left is able to project all of the faults of the financial system on the free market.

The free market is about free minds defining values and pursuing aspirations.

Deregulating a top-heavy captured financial system does not lead to a free market. It leads to a top-heavy society dominated by its worst elements.

A large number of the devices in our financial markets were designed by progressives to regulate the market. Insurance, short selling, derivatives, CDOs, Mortgage Backed Securities, hedge funds, etc., were created for the expressed purpose of regulating the economy.

Since so many financial tools were designed to regulate, financial deregulation involves deregulating regulators ... which is a formula for disaster.

We see this clearly with the Commodities Future Modernization Act of 2000 signed by William Jefferson Clinton. (If floored me to see Clinton blaming Bush for a bill that he signed!) The dervivatives created by this act were designed to create a regulated market. The belief was that the complex derivatives would be self regulating. When William Jefferson Clinton created the dervatives that crashed the economy, William Jefferson Clinton believed that he was creating a self-regulating regulatory regime.

Conservatives keep being duped into thinking that the financial system is the free market. IT IS NOT.

To restore the free market we have to start creating financial tools that empower individuals from the ground up. The Medical Savings and Loan is such a system. It empowers people by giving people direct control over the first block of their health care.

Rather than talking about tax cuts, Republcans would be wise to look for tax reform that gives people greater control over their finances. For example, in our current system, employers do the bulk of the accounting for their employers. Republicans should define a new tax system such as the Object Tax. This is an account based tax in which your entire paycheck is deposited into an account. You pay your tax to withdraw your money. Such a system gives individuals greater control over their money and taxes.

Unfortunately, as long as we play the game in which we allow the enemies of freedom define the terms of the debate, we will continue to see our precious freedoms diminish.

The American experiment in self rule held the individual in high esteem. In this experiment our forefathers discovered that a community with strong individuals is a strong community. The left seeks to destroy the experiment in self rule by ridiculing a straw-man. Unfortunately, since conservatives are reactionary idiots, the left is able to get away with game.