In case anyone is not paying attention, we are in the process of fighting a major battle for the future of America.

When I would read this kind of opening statement I would roll my eyes and say to myself, “OK …. let’s not get carried away here.    Yes, we have issues, but it’s not helpful to have this kind of wild hyperbole or generic panic messaging.   It doesn’t help to win hearts and minds to go over the top.”

OK, that’s what I used to say.  Now I am the one writing.   And forget the generic panic.  Let’s be specific.   What is “fast and furious” but an attack on the rule of law? What is the barrage of attacks on business and the financial sector being waged by the White House, (specifically the President of the United States) but a war on free enterprise? We are accustomed to some modicum of honesty coming out of the mouths of our leaders, at least when it comes to their agendas.

This is the first president in history who is an unrepentant, deliberate and calculating liar. This is not a character attack.  It’s a description.  Like asking, “how would you describe him so I would recognize him?  Oh, that’s easy, he is tall, handsome, articulate, sort of black, young looking and a liar.”

Not a compulsive, defensive liar, like Clinton or Nixon, but a calculating liar.  He lies because if he told the truth, people would know what he intends.  There are only two ways that President Obama publicly speaks about his agenda:  One is in code, using language that is at best ambiguous, but clear to those who are paying attention; the other is by accident, when he slips and makes a statement that carelessly reveals something that he didn’t want revealed.

We are not used to liars as presidents. Not that kind. We understand that a certain amount of dishonesty is, unfortunately, common among politicians, but we are not used to the leader of the free world deliberately misrepresenting himself; cloaking himself in obfuscation, about the things that we assume are givens for our leaders.

We assume he is like us.   And we assume he likes us.   We assume he is an American in the way that we understand Americans to be.  Americans love a winner and hate to lose.   Americans root for the underdog.   Americans are self-reliant, and independent.  They take responsibility for themselves.  Americans are supremely optimistic.   Americans care about others and want to help those in need.   Americans are generous, giving and kind.   Americans love and cherish freedom. Americans believe in paying their fair share, and don’t like it when advantage is taken of the less fortunate. Americans hate bullies. Americans don’t want to see others suffer.  Americans understand that there are good people and bad people in the world and that bad people will not stop being bad until good people do something to stop them.   Americans are willing to give almost anyone a second chance.   Americans try and live by the golden rule.   Americans think it’s bad to be envious and bitter and think it’s good to celebrate the success of others and to encourage people who succeed.    Americans are fair minded and want to see everyone get an even break.

These are characteristics that I think, for the most part, describe most Americans, no matter their gender, color, religion, ethnicity, or income level.   Its what makes us ONE nation and ONE people.

But Obama and the Left are not about unity. They are about divisiveness.  And they use the very things that bind Americans together, to drive them apart. We are inherently fair-minded, so Obama uses that as a wedge to promote jealousy and anger against those who have more than others. The Left knows we hate bullies, so they change the word to mean something else. You are now a “bully” if you don’t support gay marriage or you don’t believe homosexuality is equivalent to heterosexuality.

Obama has turned the word “Fair” into something ugly.   “It’s not “fair” in Obama’s construction that some people have more money than other people.  (Unless, the rich are enlightened like he is.)  The elite of course, don’t have to justify their wealth as the so-called “greedy” business person does.   The phrase “get rich on the backs of others” is a way to turn Americans of the lower and middle classes against those in the upper class. However, the fact is that no one ever was given a job by a poor person.  When people succeed, they are rewarded by the fruits of their success. They invest to become more successful, and create more wealth.  The people they hire, the companies they buy from, the companies and people they sell to are all beneficiaries of that success.  The infrastructure that their wealth builds, benefits all Americans.  (Thank you Elizabeth ‘Fauxcahontas’ Warren, government didn’t build the roads, taxpayers did).

It is success that produces other successes.  It has a multiplier effect that has made America the wealthiest nation on earth. But Obama and the Left turn attention away from these advantages and decry  the benefits the successful have earned. He does not explain free enterprise, either because he does not understand it (and why would he?), or he wants to destroy it.  Why would he want to do that: Because free enterprise decentralizes power and wealth and allows individuals to have that which is beyond government control. “Capitalism” is another bad word.   The president  thinks (like all good Marxists) that the government should “redistribute” wealth.  He told us that in 2008, but we just let it pass, “no, he didn’t mean it THAT way”.

Oh, yes he did.

The Left does not understand how wealth is created.  They think that wealth is finite.  That there is a limited supply and it must be controlled and redistributed by those (in his view) best able to do so in a fair and equitable way (according to his and their definition). Why do you think his former communications director said that the two people in history she admires most are Mother Theresa and Chairman Mao?  Why do you think President Obama surrounds himself with people like her, Van Jones, Andy Stern, and other avowed or practicing Marxists.  Do we not understand that this is who he is?

Apparently, not!   We believe that because he is the President he must be an American (not in the birther sense, but in the “soul” sense).  He is not even Black really. He claimed to be the first post-racial President, but he plays the race card at every opportunity.  The irony is thick.  Ask Jesse Jackson, who in his unguarded moments, has expressed his hatred for this “poseur”.

He is not like us. He doesn’t see America the way we see it.  He lies and tells us what he thinks we want to hear, but he behaves far differently. He embodies the Saul Alinsky playbook and the playbook of all Marxists.   Lie, deceive, divide; whatever it takes to advance the agenda of destroying capitalism. Whatever it takes to take America down a notch. In his view, we consume too much, we have too much audacity and the world hates us because we are arrogant and pushy.  So the answer is to diminish us and bow down to show humility. Forget the fact that we have died by the hundreds of thousands to give freedom to literally millions around the world.  Forget that the great technological innovations, responsible for saving millions of lives across the planet, came from the system he hates and thinks is unfair because it has prospered millions of Americans.  Forget (and lie) about the fact that America BY FAR has been a force for good in the world and improved the quality of more lives in the 20th century than any other nation in all of recorded history.  These are the facts, so we expect our president to be proud of America, not disdainful of its occupants.

He does not appear to like us, because he does not like us.  We see the flag and the dais and we think he is like others who occupied the Oval Office. It is a big disconnect for us to think there could actually be someone in the White House who dislikes us.   But once you learn to pay attention to his actions and to divine what he is really promoting, it’s all clear.

It doesn’t make sense when he claims to have created “or saved” (my favorite bit of misdirection) 5 million jobs, but everyone we know who was unemployed 3 years ago is still unemployed. It doesn’t make sense that the black youth unemployment rate is the highest in history at 45%, when in the evil racist America of the 50’s, it was only 8%.  It doesn’t make sense that taxpayers who don’t want to pay for abortion or contraception are accused of waging “War on Women,” or that there is $1 Trillion in student loan debt, yet national studies show that far too many college graduates lack basic knowledge of American history and institutions. Americans don’t understand why 20-25 year old unemployment is the highest in our history, or why there are more people on food stamps now than at any time in history, yet, our president says “things are getting better.”  Americans remember that this President promised the stimulus would revive the economy.  They also know that our national debt has gone up 50% in just 3 years, more than the entire sum total of our first 200 years. President Obama says that we don’t have sufficient resources to develop, but the Government Accountability Office told Congress the Green River Formation out West contains an “amount about equal to the entire world’s proven oil reserves.” We have more oil resources than Saudi Arabia and most of the rest of the world combined, but they are  not being developed.  Obama says he is not against the pipeline, but he stopped it from being built.  He says that oil production has increased during his presidency, but it only increased on private land where he had no control over it.  On public land, it decreased.  Divide, divide, divide, lie, lie, lie, and a complicit and unquestioning media emboldens him and his minions to do more of the same.

But Americans are catching on.  The disconnect between what he says, and what he does is no longer being ignored. As Abraham Lincoln said, you cannot fool all the people all the time.   It has taken awhile to penetrate the inherent decency that most Americans have: To give the president the benefit of the doubt. This President has abused our decency. He has maligned us. He disrespects us. He believes he is smarter and, better than we are. He has lectured us, he has lied to us, and he has condescended to us. He, unlike his predecessors, Democrat or Republican, does not care about us one way or the other, and I believe in my heart that he wishes only that we would shut up and do what we are told.

The question is, what are we prepared to do about it.

Section 1: Background on your book

Martin: How did you end up doing the project? I note that you are a political science professor rather than a historian.

Greg:  This grew out of a doctoral dissertation.  My specialty is American Political Thought.  I wanted to do something that explored the political thought of the American Founding.  There seemed to be a hole in the literature on Madison in the sense that  there is a dilemma about whether he supports majority rule or not.  I didn’t think this this had been dealt with in as direct a way as it needed to be.

Martin: Well, that makes sense.  But how did you go about putting this together?  It’s only about 150 pages, but it seems like there isn’t a wasted word.  How did you find the hole?  It’s obvious when someone points it out, but until someone does …, but what drew your attention to this hole in the literature?

Greg:  Well there is a tension in the literature in the sense that the great debate in Madison literature going back to the Progressive critics is about whether Madison believed in majority rule.  Where the tension arises is, if you read Madison carefully, he over and over says that empirically speaking there is no choice but majority rule.  Society won’t tolerate anything else.  How do you square that circle, because while he says majority rule is inevitable, he also wants majority rule to be reasonable.

Martin:  So you just noticed that there was an argument between those two things?  And your thesis was an attempt to rectify  the seeming contradiction between these.

Greg:  Yes, but I should also pay due homage to a famous, or what should be a famous article by George Carey and Willmoore Kendall on what’s called the intensity problem, that first stimulated my thinking on this.  This article really points the way toward this issue of deliberation.

Martin:  Have you always been interested in American History?  Or was this purely a vehicle for political science?

Greg:  Well, this is sort of a late career thing for me.  I was a political consultant in national politics for 15 years before I got into this.  I worked in the Senate for several years, and it always seemed to me that there was a mutual contempt, or at least lack of respect between the academy and practitioners of politics.   It always seemed to me that the Importance of ideas was being overlooked.   By the same token it seemed that in the academy there was not a full appreciation for how these ideas get applied.  So that is what led me to it.

Martin:  The cover art for the book is wonderful.  I’m a bibliophile, I look at books with some appreciation for quality.  When this book showed up from the University of Kansas Press, it just screamed to be read.  How did it come about?

Greg:  That came about by having absolutely nothing to do with me. Laughs.  Kansas does a wonderful job.  All their authors say this.   The first time I saw this it was in exactly in the form you see it today.

Martin:  So credit, where credit is due?

Greg: … and none of it is due to me!

Martin:  What did you learn in the course of publishing this book?  Not about the subject matter, but about the process of writing and getting it published.

Greg:   This was my first book.  I hope that I have learned that you have to pay careful attention what’s actually being said and not to an extraneous political agenda – particularly in the area of American political thought.  Because there is such a clear intersection between the theory and the practice, I think it tends to get distorted by political agendas a lot.

Kansas is a wonderful press to work with.  They were very supportive and there when you needed them, but they didn’t try to dictate the content in anyway.  From that standpoint the process was very smooth.  I hope it was meticulous.    I tried to make it meticulous. I went through literally every page of what was, at that point was 30 published volumes of his writings.  I certainly learned it’s a lot of work!

Part II The Book

Martin:  Looking at the bibliography (which is pretty extensive), it seems as though you spent a lot of time analyzing what others have said and often refuting their contentions.  How did you arrive at which to go after?

Greg:  Well it may not be as impressive as it looks in the sense that the literature on Madison and the American Founding is so vast … The typical process is to follow the footnotes, but on this particular topic there is just no end to that process!  But what I did know is that the major debates on majority rule had been framed by a few major thinkers.  Charles Beard and the Progressive critics were one group, but by the time Lance Banning came along they had been more or less refuted.  But it did seem to me that this influence was still lingering.

The main thing that I wanted to do was to track down the literature on majority rule, not just on Madison but on majority rule.

Martin:  How long did it take?

Greg: It was 2 years of work.

Martin:  You don’t come out and say it in so many words, but it seems as though you’re a Madison fan.  (I am – the more I learn, the more impressed I am with these guys, warts and all).  After all your study, what would you say was Madison’s biggest strength/weakness?

Greg:  I think his biggest strength is, he’s a very careful analytical thinker and a very historically oriented thinker.  He was someone who was capable of thinking in a very analytical way even in the midst of practical politics, which is a rare thing, particularly these days.   In terms of  weaknesses, one of the things I wanted to explore is the possibility that a lot of his political thought is uniquely influenced by the dynamics that occur around a time of founding rather than in a stable republic.  So, I think there are certain senses in which he did not see as far ahead as obviously we are able to see in retrospect today.  Faulted is probably not the right term.  Obviously he can’t be blamed for not seeing the internet coming or instant communication..  But I do think that there are certain strands in his thought that are tied to a time of founding which may not be as applicable in a stable republic.

Martin:  It seems like a there a lot of people on both sides of the political spectrum who try to stuff the founders into a box of their own design.  I got tired of being ignorant and didn’t want to be guilty of undeserved reverence for the founders.  Neither did I want to lack the information to either refute or understand the vitriol about, for instance, the meme of white aristocratic bigots.  For your part, why did you find it important to look to Madison for his take on our government versus somebody else?

Greg:  Well, because we are living in his republic.   That is not to say… as I say in the book I think he is miscast as the father, but he’s maybe it’s uncle.

Martin:  Midwife, or attending physician, I think you said in the book.

Greg:  Yeah, attending physician, I think it was.  We are living under institutions, that if he didn’t design, he at least gave the major theoretical defenses for.  I think a lot of the frustration we feel in contemporary politics has to do with the fact that we are living under 225-year old institutions, but with modern expectations.  I think it is very important institutionally to understand where we came from.  But I think it’s also undeniably the case that these guys thought about permanent questions and those questions are very much still with us.

Martin:  Is Madison still relevant today?

Greg:  Absolutely.  Gosh, let me count the ways.  I think many of the debates we’re having around the issue of terrorism, certainly go back to issues like separation of powers.  He certainly thought about human nature, which is many ways the central question of politics.  Certainly the issue of faction is very much still with us.  I think in some ways he doesn’t quite foresee, but it’s still there.   He is the major theorist of the Constitution and we’re living under his Constitution.

I don’t know if you know Ben Kleinerman’s work.  But he and I just did a paper for a conference in which one of things we argued is that one of the major sources of contentions in contemporary politics is the fact that the Constitution hasn’t changed, but that our expectations of politics has.   The Constitution hasn’t kept pace with what we want it do in the way that Madison would have wanted it to.  Which is to say we haven’t amended it.  But we want to do something new rather than sort of do it in paperwork, which is what Madison would have expected.  We just proceed and then turn around and get disappointed when there seems to be this tension between the Constitution and what we want to do.

Martin:  So we just proceed rather than use the mechanisms that are in place to handle such things?

Greg: That’s right.  There is an incident right at the end of his presidency, on the second to last day of his presidency, where he vetoes this roads bill – The Bonus Bill. And what he says in fairly casual terms is that he supports the underlying power, he supports what Congress wants to do.  When was the last time we saw a president veto something that he actually wants to do on the grounds it’s unconstitutional?  But that’s another story.  He says, look I want to do this, and you want to do this, just pass an amendment.  It’s not quite as grave and dramatic of a thing as we make it out to be today.  And in fact, if we didn’t make it out to be quite so dramatic we might be in better shape with respect to the Constitution.

Martin:  I might argue with you on that one.  It seemed to me that that was part of the temporal republicanism that Madison put in place to make it not a light thing to change the founding document for the country.

Greg:  Well, no, no.  That I agree with.   So, I think the point is not that it is a light thing.   It’s supposed to be not an impossible thing, which is the standard we’ve set for it.  Let me give you example.  If you take the issue of health care reform, if the country wants to pass health care from, what Madison would have said, I’m sure he would have a lot of things to say, but I think the first thing he would have said, is pass a Constitutional amendment authorizing Congress to do this.  Instead what we’re trying to do is the last thing he would have expected, which is to settle big Constitutional questions through the an undemocratic or at least a-democratic institution, which is the court.

Martin:  Your exploration of Madison’s majoritarian views was really interesting and made me think – and I’m still cogitating on it, in fact.  In particular your take on Madison’s views on the potential for the tyranny of the Majority or conversely the tyranny of the minority made me look at Federalist 10 in a whole new light.   I tend to favor Bastiat’s view on the sanctity of property. In the book you don’t take sides, but I’d like to know what you think.  Was Madison right?

Greg:  That was a very interesting point in your review.  If I have forced you to think, you have forced me to do this same.   Let me put it in a couple different ways.  One is he is highly concerned about property.  In terms of Charles Beard’s thesis that the Founders were only concerned about property, in many ways Beard is right.  I call this the Seinfeld defense – “not that there is anything wrong with that”.  There is a very long tradition in Anglo Saxon thought about property being the key to decentralized power and so forth.  He clearly thinks it’s very important, but all rights have boundaries, and all rights get regulated.  What is unique about conscience is the empirical impossibility of regulating it.  That is not so much to say the conscience is important and property is not, it’s simply that you can’t regulate conscience in the way that you can regulate property.  So, the question becomes, in what institution of government do we want that regulation to happen?  Do we want it to be in one in which we have a voice, or do we want these things to be sorted out by the courts.  Madison clearly thinks that these are questions to be sorted out through political mechanism.   But I think in terms of Madison’s own preference.  There are some very intriguing passages in which he does suggest property can be heavily regulated.  I think his own personal preference was certainly that it be lightly regulated.  But I think he would say that that is a prudential question more than a Constitutional one.

Martin:  So, you’re putting your imprimatur on it.  In your opinion was he right?

Greg:  Well, I can’t weasel out of that question can I?  laughs  Do you mean was he right with respect to property being regulable? I think he was right.  I mean, very few would argue for no regulation, for instance you can’t just put a skyscraper next to somebody’s house.  The question, in this case for Madison isn’t is it regulable, but where does it get regulated?  And if you don’t want it regulated or you want it lightly regulated, where do you go to make that case? Madison’s answer is, you go to your neighbors.

Martin:  At several points in Madison’s Metronome, you point out that Madison felt it important to instill reverence for the Revolution and founding documents.  As a political scientist, do you see a concerted effort on the part of some, to denigrate the Founders and the Constitution today?  And do you think that is intentional or unintentional?

Greg:  I think to a certain extent there has been one ever since the Progressives in the late 19th century.  Ever since Woodrow Wilson said free men need no guardians.   To be honest with you, I actually prefer it when it’s intentional.  I think there is absolutely nothing wrong with saying, “I disagree with the Founders.”’ What I object to is trying to take the Founders and treat them as an ink-blot test where you project whatever you were already looking into what they said.  I think it’s important note that for Madison at least, reverence for the founding doesn’t mean you never change.  It means you change with a certain amount of reverence for what you’re changing from and you don’t do it lightly, and you don’t do it for, as Jefferson says in the Declaration, for transient causes.  The benefit of the way that the Progressives and the Woodrow Wilsons of the world criticize the Founding is that they actually come right out and do it.  You can tell where they are coming from.  I think the problem in contemporary politics – and this happens on both the right and the left – is that we treat the Founding as sacred and therefore we have to input whatever our beliefs are into the Founding.  And that, I think really cheapens their thought.

Martin:  You concluded the book in a cautionary way, saying that now we are more dependent than ever on virtue than on anything else.  You point out that Madison sought to avoid such reliance, instead seeking to put systems in place to ensure that time ameliorate passion.  What do you see in the future?

Greg:  That’s a good question.  I see time contracting more and more.  I think that is problematic for the Madisonian system.   I think there are so many issues on which we have to recalibrate our expectations and in an age of instant communication we seem very reluctant to do that.  I think that this is connected with this tendency to see whatever it is we want to see in the Founding.   So whatever our policy preferences are, if the Constitutional system doesn’t immediately produce that, then we try to assert corruption, etc.   I think this is going to be a real problem going forward and I think the Madisonian answer is the only way you can solve it, through the recalibration of public opinion.  I’m not sure that there are institutional answers to this.  I think that is why I ended the book on a cautionary note, because it is not immediately evident to me what the solution to this is.  Unless people will act like grownups and have adult expectations about what the Constitution is capable of producing.
Martin:  So you’ve just said what Madison said then.  You’re dependent on the virtue of the people.

Greg:  Yeah, although, here is the dilemma.  Madison didn’t want to depend on virtue.  He is very explicit in Federalist 51 that he doesn’t want to depend on virtue, but was in a position where, to a certain extent he has to.

Martin:  Well, he has to depend on patience at least.  That’s the virtue that you called out.

Greg:  Correct.  The difference is that in the late 18th century, early 19th century, patience was a fact of life and not necessarily a virtue.  This is in many ways the fix that we’re in. I don’t want to be entirely pessimistic either.   Madison was certainly not a pessimist about the country’s ability to adapt.

Martin: You made a comment about ⅔’s of the way through Madison’s Metronome which I found interesting.  You said that contemporary conversations about rights tend to leave out the greater mass of the population.  Please elaborate on that.

Greg: When we talk about rights today, we tend to think about them as reservations against the community.  That’s a compelling way to think about rights in a lot of ways, but it’s not the way that Madison thinks about rights.  But let me reiterate, the fact that Madison said something, even by Madison’s logic doesn’t mean that you can’t disagree with it.  All rights have boundaries, with the exception of conscience, all rights have natural boundaries that nobody would disagree with.  The question is, do you engage the public in that conversation? Or do you pursue rights through the courts?   The empirical evidence is fairly overwhelming, that when you try to pursue rights through the courts you end up with backlashes that leave you worse off than you were before.

There is a case, Goldman v Weinberger.  in which a Jewish Air Force chaplain, who was a rabbi that wanted to wear a Yarmulke.  This violates the uniform regulation.  He sues.  The answer of the appellate court, is if you want to do that is that you have change the law,  You can’t extract yourself from the community and ask the court to do it for you.  Interestingly enough, the outcome of this case is that Congress does change the uniform code to permit this    Madison’s take is that if you can build something on the foundation of public opinion, it’s going to be much more secure and strong in structure than if you simply do through the courts.  Does that answer your question?

Martin:  Yeah.

Greg:  And by the way, this happens on both sides.  Have you seen Harvey Wilkinsons’ new book?  He was a Reagan appointee for the 4th Circuit Court in Virginia.  His book is called Cosmic Constitutional Theory in which he talks about how the right and the left try to transmute policy disputes into rights disputes and try to settle them through the courts.

Martin:  I think I saw a review of that recently, now that you talk about it.  I don’t think it was a favorable review!

Greg: That wouldn’t surprise me, because there is a lot riding on this because of the healthcare debate right now.  There is a lot riding on how active conservatives want the court to be.

Martin:  That’s somewhat ironic to hear.

Greg:  Yes, and I think Wilkinson would say inconsistent.  You might want to check out Wilkinson’s op ed in the New York Times a few weeks ago, which was quite good.

Martin:  I’ve discovered a number of different approaches to constitutional interpretation.  Hadley Arkes advocates a natural law perspective – and makes a persuasive argument citing the founding documents and things like the preamble to the bill of rights, etc.  The Tea Party is all about original intent.  In your book, you say that the Constitution is a living document, (which makes me shudder,) but one with a really slow metabolism.  Philosophically, what has more credence in your opinion?  After all, you took the time to research Madison’s intent.

Greg:  The problem with original intent jurisprudence, to which I am largely sympathetic, is that the clearest original intent is not to have policy questions decided by the court.

Martin:  So you think there is a little bit of a paradox there?

Greg:  Yes.  I think there is also a paradox generated by Madison’s position on the National Bank, which is once the people have consistently through all three branches of government, ratified a certain Constitutional view for a certain amount of time then it becomes law.  That’s what I mean by suggesting that for Madison the Constitution was a living Constitution with a slow metabolism.

Martin:  Let me stop you there for a second.   Because this was a point that really made me think.  I think that it is unfortunate that many times things are misinterpreted for such a long period of time that they become de facto law.  You say that this is part and parcel of the process.  I’m thinking of the 14th Amendment — being born here grants you citizenship.  I don’t think that it was originally intended that people come here from other countries and drop a kid here, but the fact is that it has been interpreted that way since the early 20th century.

Greg: There are different strands of original intent.  For original intent, what Madison would say is that the first place you look is to the words.  You only try to look at historical intent if the words are not clear.  The problem is, although I would certainly agree with you, that although it is not what they had in mind, it is what they said.  I think that to change that at this point would require an amendment. Now this is what I meant by saying that the amending process is not supposed to be quite so grave.  If the Constitution is being interpreted in a way that is not working for us, then amend it.   It wasn’t something that was supposed to be easy to do, but it wasn’t supposed to be impossible to do.

The problem that we end up with  … and I think this is a just criticism of what Madison does with the Bank … is that when we change the Constitution through practice rather than through amendment, we end up with what George Carey called a GARBLED.

Part III The fluffy questions at the end

Martin:  In the course of researching this book, what was the most surprising thing you found?

Greg:  The implications of what he does with the national bank were eye-opening.   The concept of a living Constitution is Madison’s position, and that wasn’t something I would have predicted before I did the research.

Martin:  That surprised me too.

Greg: At a certain point there is a question of whether there is a better option.  Short of amendment, there is nobody I’m aware of in mainstream politics, either on the right or the left who thinks that the Constitution, exactly as it was written in 1787, is compatible with what people on both sides of the aisle, seem to want government to do today. The question is not whether it changes, but how it changes.

Martin: You said something earlier … sure there are amendments which are no longer valid, time has marched on.  However, the genius behind the Constitution in my view is that it is a statement of human nature, an analysis of general principle.  Throughout, you can see that … necessary powers for example, Hamilton argues that you don’t give a power without all of the requisite authority to exercise that power, so be careful which power you give.  So here are the powers, and there is lot done by implication, and they did not specify down to the jot and tittle of every single thing that was possible, but they made a generic document that provided a framework for the arenas in which government can play.  So, I guess I would disagree a little bit. Everything in the Constitution is not exactly as it was written in 1787, but it has been amended many times.

Greg:  No, that’s correct.  I’m not sure we disagree.

Martin: So, perhaps we’re in violent agreement?

Greg:  There is no question in my mind that Madison’s preferred mode of Constitutional change is amendment.  For example, for the New Deal.  I would argue that the basic tenets of the New Deal have not been challenged by either Republicans or Democrats for at least two generations now.  But Madison’s preferred mode would have been that you amend the Constitution to provide the necessary authority.  The difficulty that Madison is in, is that if you take a look at how he says the Constitution is changed with respect to the National Bank, you have to say the same thing in steroids with regard to the New Deal.    I don’t think that you can conclude that the New Deal was based on Madisonian principles, but I don’t think Madison would view it is illegitimate.  I call this a sort of Madisonian paradox – that an un-Madisonian system acquires a sort of Madisonian legitimacy.

Martin:  What did you leave out?  I’m sure you had to excise things for various and sundry reasons – they didn’t fit, space, etc.  But, what did you leave out?  What killed you to leave it out?

Greg:  All sorts of diversions.  I am very interested in the political theory of rights and majority rule.    I would have liked to have gotten more deeply into the contours of that debate outside of Madison.  I am also very interested in the tensions between Madison and Jefferson.  They were political partners and lifelong political partners – there was some deep theoretical political tension. I didn’t get to delve into that as much as I would have liked to.

Martin:  One my colleagues here at WWTFT, James Best, has written about, and studied Madison a lot.  He likes to say that Madison was at his best when he wasn’t under Jefferson’s sway.

Greg:  Yeah, there is a sort of an older brother/little brother dynamic between the two of them.  I don’t mean to psychologize the dispute, but the purpose that Madison serves in that relationship is to reign Jefferson back in.  In many ways Jefferson is more than of a poet than a theorist.  If you look, for example at the exchange they have where Jefferson suggests that no law should last more than 19 years, the practical implications of that are nuts.  You just couldn’t do that.  This is a case where Madison has to be the more sober of the two.    But I think it is a fruitful tension between the two of them, and I think it is a very interesting one.

Martin:  What if anything did you discover that ran counter to your expectations?

Greg:  I found Madison to be much more strictly and straightforward of a majoritarian than I expected.  I went in with an open mind to deal with this puzzle of majority rule and found him to be much more consistently majoritarian than I would have guessed.  And also what I mentioned before about the living constitution with a slow metabolism.

Martin:  What didn’t I ask you that I should have?

Greg:  I thought you would ask about health care. I think you have been pretty comprehensive.

Martin:  What’s your next project?

Greg:  My next book is completely different.  It is a book on the political thought of Pat Moynihan.  I think he is  the Madison of his day.  The practitioner of politics who is very theoretically grounded and is able to keep up that dialog between theory and practice throughout his career.  So there is that commonality.   And I would like to add, that that’s one of the things I really appreciate about the University of Kansas Press, is that they understand that American political thought didn’t end with Calhoun.  I think it is also important to take more recent things into account, too.

President Obama has made taxes a campaign issue. Ronald Reagan once famously said, “If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.” A truer statement has never been made. Governments tax everything.  Most people have no idea how much they are taxed.

I was camping once with a progressive who said taxes should be raised on people like himself who made a comfortable living. We were sitting around a campfire and as I threw another log on the fire, I asked how much he thought he ought to be taxed and he said he didn’t think forty percent was unreasonable. I laughed. He asked what was so funny. I told him we both made low six figure incomes and I knew he was already paying over fifty percent of his income in taxes. He adamantly denied it.

I said let’s start with payroll tax. We’re both self-employed so we have to pay both sides of Social Security and Medicare. He said he wasn’t counting that, but admitted it was a painful 15.3%. We reduced it to 9.8% because his income exceeded the Social Security cut-off (Medicare has no cut-off).
Then I guessed his effective federal income tax rate had to be at least 25%, but he claimed it was only 21% of his gross income. Fine, that was still 30.8%.

And his California income tax? At first, he first said he wasn’t counting that, but admitted it was around 5%. Again, I thought he was purposely underestimating, but I accepted his number for a total of 35.8%.
Next I asked how much he spent on sales taxable items per year. Again, he said he wasn’t counting that. California sales tax was 8.75%, so after some haggling we settled on an estimate of about 1.5% of his gross income by averaging his vehicle purchases over three years. We were at 37.3%

How about his property tax, I asked. Again, he said he wasn’t counting that. Eventually, he admitted it was close to 4% of his gross income. We were up to 41.3%.

I pointed at his fifth-wheel and extended-cab truck. (We weren’t exactly roughing it.) How much in personal property tax for that rig and your other car? He said he wasn’t counting that, but admitted it was at least another 1% of his gross income. Now we were at 42.3%

Doesn’t that thing use a lot of gasoline? His expression told me he had already figured out where I was going with that one, but was still surprised to discover that California had the highest fuel tax in the nation at 46.6 cents per gallon.  After some rough guesswork, we came up with about another .3% for fuel tax. Now we had a figure of 42.6%.

He looked smug and said that was less than 50%. I agreed. Then I told him he was still forgetting some things. I rattled off the following list.

Everything he spent, including his mortgage and vehicle loans, included a hidden 35% corporate tax—all buried in the price of goods and services.

He loved Irish whiskey, but had no idea there was a $16.80 combined state and federal tax per gallon.

I told him he was lucky he didn’t smoke because there was nearly $2.00 federal and state tax per pack.

Pistols also have a special 10% tax on the purchase price.

The price of many foreign-made goods included a hidden excise tax.

Every utility bill like gas electric, phone, and cable had special taxes to finance discounted or free rates for the indigent.

Since we both made our living by billing by the hour, I asked him how many earning hours he lost every year for tax preparation and record keeping. (He refused to theoretically charge the government the same rate as clients.)

Despite denying a tax deduction for Social Security and Medicare payments, it was likely they would tax the benefits after he retired.

There are numerous taxes hidden in ObamaCare, one of which is a 3.8% tax on all real estate transactions.

Finally, if during his lifetime he were able to save a reasonable nest egg, government would claim a piece of it after he died.

By this time our campfire had died down. My friend stood up and said he was going to bed. For the next three days he moped around. Finally, he took me aside to tell me he was already taxed enough, but still supported taxing the rich. They had plenty and could afford to pay more. I took a long look at his expensive rig before saying, that’s fine, but remember 95% of Americans are looking at you as the rich guy who can afford to pay more.

He stomped off without another word.

James D. Best is the author of the Steve Dancy Tales and Tempest at Dawn, a novel about the 1787 Constitutional Convention. Look for his new book, Principled Action, Lessons from the Origins of the American Republic.

Despite the carnage wreaked on business and industry by Obama surrogates, the intent is not to kill them off (with the possible exception of those who donate to the Romney campaign). They have been targeted because, as Willy Sutton once explained, “That’s where the money is.”  The more successful (read profitable) the more likely it is that the taxman cometh outfitted with a new pair of hobnail boots.

The administration wants to levy an “excess profits” tax (whatever that means) on oil companies. A 5/11/12 WSJ article entitled  “ObamaCare’s Killer Device Tax” is another example.

“Medical device manufacturing is one of the nation’s most dynamic and vibrant industries. The United States is the global leader in medical technology innovation, and it is one of the few major industries with a net trade surplus.”

In addition, the industry is a huge job producer making a great variety of devices used in patient care. The Obama administration has slapped an additional 2.3% excise tax on medical devices scheduled to take effect in the beginning of 2013. And it is assessed on sales, not profits. That means companies will be taxed on all the development, infrastructure and other production costs that are part of sale prices.

The president needs every dollar he can wrest from the productive sector to finance ObamaCare, other redistributionist programs and the hordes of bureaucrats needed to administer them.  The US already has the highest corporate tax rate in the industrialized world.

His war on business is why unemployment remains mired around 9%. It’s why, as long as the long blades hover overhead, businesses are loath to invest or expand. Some say this administration doesn’t understand that its policies are prolonging the recession. Others say that income equality, not jobs, is Obama’s goal.

Another four years and his goal will be achieved.  Everyone will be equally impoverished.

‘I was impressed as never before by the utter lack of logic of the man, the scantiness of his precise knowledge of things that he was talking about, by the gross inaccuracies in his statements, by the almost pathological lack of sequence in his discussion, by the complete rectitude that he felt as to his own conduct, by the immense and growing egotism that came from his office, by his willingness to continue the excoriation of the press and business in order to get votes for himself, by his indifference to what effect the long-continued pursuit of these ends would have upon the civilization in which he was playing a part. In other words, the political habits of his mind were working full steam with the added influence of a swollen ego. My deliberate impression is that he is dangerous in the extreme, and I view the next four years with no inconsiderable apprehension.”  Raymond Moley, leading New Dealer who later became its leading opponent.

In this well researched and extensively footnoted book, the author goes beyond the territory covered in his FDR Goes to War by examining in detail the results of major (and some minor) New Deal programs. He concludes that, contrary to prevailing myth, the New Deal failed to achieve economic recovery and, in fact, prolonged the Great Depression.

The author begins with the National Industrial Recovery Act  (known as the NRA), which became law in 1933 and was declared unconstitutional by the US Supreme Court  (9-0) in 1935. Prior to the Court’s ruling, this effort to centralize  economic planning through  industry “codes of fair competition” forced many small concerns out of business, causing their owners to be prosecuted, fined and even jailed. It also increased unemployment, stifled innovation, and raised prices on people already facing insolvency. Roosevelt, of course, condemned the Court, saying it had a “horse and buggy’ interpretation of the Commerce Clause.

Sound familiar?

Folsom next examines the Agricultural Adjustment Act, also passed in 1933, which was supposed to balance supply and demand for farm commodities. Farmers were paid millions of dollars not to produce crops while FDR railed that one-third of the nation was ill-fed. In fact, many farmers set aside their worst land and used federal payments for fertilizer to increase the yield of the remaining acreage. As a result, for almost the first time in our history, the US became a major food-importing nation. The AAA enormously expanded the size and reach of the Department of Agriculture and the nation is still living with the results.

Folsom examines federalized relief and its effect on the American work ethic. When money was raised at the state and local levels, frugality prevailed. That changed with the new incentives to petition Washington. Even FDR eventually figured out that when you are willing to pay more for something you get more of it.

Inevitably, the parceling out of aid was used to reward supporters and to obtain votes.

Even Henry Morgenthau, Jr., secretary of the treasury and FDR’s friend and confidant despaired of the New Deal. He admitted to fellow Democrats on the House Ways and Means committee:

“We have tried spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. And I have just one interest, and if I am wrong…somebody else can have my job. I want to see the country prosperous. I want to see people get a job. I want to see people get enough to eat. We have never made good on our promises  … I say after eight years of the Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started… And an enormous debt to boot.”

Folsom disputes the assertion, made by both FDR and BHO, that the free market is obsolete and needs to be transformed by the wizards in Washington.

During the 1936 campaign, FDR conceded that the nation “grew to its present strength under the protection of certain inalienable political rights,” but argued, “these political rights proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness.” Roosevelt wanted to equalize wealth. He wanted, and got high taxes on the rich. He “hammered away” at “economic royalists” and “malefactors of great wealth.” He singled out business as the arch villain and engaged in class warfare with a vengeance. He also used this rhetoric to win votes.

FDR wanted to permanently rearrange American economic life. “’Centralize power,’ FDR argued,’ and reduce the influence of free choice to create new economic arrangements between employer and employee, and between young and old.’”

In Obama’s Osawatomie, Kansas speech he argued that the nation has moved beyond what he called “the same old tune,” that the market “will take care of everything.”  He went on to say that “it doesn’t work. It’s never worked.”

Folsom connects the New Deal programs to their modern manifestations. He makes the point that the same failed theories still dominate public policy and will continue to do so until the myth of the New Deal is refuted. Of course, FDR was a piker when compared to today’s spender-in-chief.

Much like the Obama administration, the experts in charge of managing the economy were academics or others who had little or no practical experience.

For those who cite the benefits of roads, bridges, and buildings created by the Works Progress Administration, (WPA), Roosevelt’s largest New Deal program responsible for employing millions of unskilled workers, Folsom turns to economist Henry Hazlitt:

“Every dollar of government spending must be raised through a dollar of taxation.” Whatever the WPA built, “had to be paid out of taxes … (F)or every public job created” by a project a  private job has been destroyed somewhere else… High tax rates, approaching 80% of income on the wealthy, depressed investment and job creation…”

One point rarely mentioned by admiring New Deal historians is that New Deal programs were financed in large part by the poor. Excise taxes were imposed on items of consumption popular among the poor. “In the first four years of Roosevelt’s presidency, revenue from excise taxes exceeded that of income and corporate taxes combined.”

Nor is Roosevelt’s civil rights record discussed. The great liberal, fearful of angering Southern politicians, refused to support anti-lynching legislation. He refused to publicly support a constitutional amendment to abolish the poll tax, nor did he pressure the American Federation of Labor to permit Blacks to enter skilled trades. However, he did stage events to persuade Blacks he supported their causes.

The author also reveals Roosevelt’s less than stalwart character. The record shows he was duplicitous, even in dealing  with members of his own party. Morganthau reported a revealing exchange.

“’Never let your left hand know what your right hand is doing.’  ‘Which hand am I, Mr. President?’ Morganthau asked. ‘My right hand,’ Roosevelt replied, ‘but I keep my left hand under the table.’ Morganthau added: ‘This is the most frank expression of the real FDR that I ever listened to.’”

FDR was vindictive. In his relentless quest for power he used the FBI and IRS to harass political opponents and did his best to intimidate the members of the press he had not charmed or provided with incentives to support his administration.

One of the last chapters in the book explains why, given Roosevelt’s  failed economic policies, so many historians praise him. Folsom writes that about the time of Woodrow Wilson’s presidency,  the constitutional views of the Founders gave  way to “the progressive view of history.”

Folsom’s contrast of progressive ideology with the views of the Founder is one of the best this reviewer has read:

“In crafting the Constitution, the Founders emphasized process, not results. If we follow the Constitution, we won’t have a perfect society, which is unattainable by imperfect humans. But we will provide the opportunity for people to pursue their natural rights to the acquisition of property and their personal happiness. The results may yield sharp inequalities of income, but the process will guarantee chances for almost everyone…”

“The Founders emphasized the lessons of experience, not the opportunity to create utopia; they stressed fidelity and the rules of the game more than good intentions…”

“Where the Founders wanted government mainly limited to protect rights, Roosevelt and the progressives wanted expanded government to provide jobs, recreation, education and houses.  ..Results in Roosevelt’s view, were more important than process; intentions more important that protecting natural rights; plans and new ideas more important than experience….In the progressive view, intentions and sincerity are among the noblest virtues a president can possess.”

In other words, admiring historians did not attend “to the 18% or more of the people who were unemployed during much of Roosevelt’s second term; their emphasis is on the caring intentions of his programs.”

The Founders were unimpressed by good intentions.  “Good intentions assume that the leader, or leaders, know what is best for society… People with good intentions, however can be busybodies  who use the power of government to do more harm than good.”

“Constitutionalists stress fidelity to process, obeying the rules, and the importance of duty and integrity. Consistent application of rules means people know what to expect and how to plan their businesses and their lives.”

Republicans have not coped very well with the massive increase of  federal involvement in American lives since the 1930s, or with the new incentives for presidents to use subsidies for political purposes. They have been hesitant to antagonize the New Deal coalition even though “they have the most electoral success when they have challenged federal programs, as Ronald Reagan did in 1980 and as congressional Republicans did in 1994.”

This is an important book that should be read widely. Fulsom lays out the choices represented by the two political parties, assuming Republicans regain the courage of the convictions they espouse. It seems to this reviewer more than likely that the next election will be decisive: when we determine if the all consuming state will continue to take our money to buy our votes and our liberties, or the Founders’ vision will prevail.

I guess there is a tipping point.    For years, we have been awash with the propaganda, historical revisionism and culture (if you can call it that) of the Left.   The media, Hollywood and the education system all have in varying degrees, infiltrated our homes and have spread their lies and deception over all of us.   We just were too busy raising families and trying to run our lives to give it a lot of attention.    We knew it was going on, but we tended to filter it out.   We watched the plot lines of movies and television dramas pillory the “evil corporation”, rotten capitalists, and abusers of the environment, as though this represented reality instead of propaganda.  We watched as the bad guys weren’t Islamic terrorists anymore, but “right wing extremists”.   (Note there is never a “left wing extremist” villain)  We contented ourselves to be entertained by the chase scenes or the really neat special effects and tried to ignore the rest.

Eventually, the lies and the attacks on our values got more aggressive and became overwhelming.  We are inundated with the politics of envy from the orchestrated Occupy movement, the attack on success and the assault on the traditional  family.   Now, it’s not enough to “live and let live” when it comes to homosexuality.  We are now required to accept it as an equivalent alternative to heterosexual behavior or be condemned as “homophobes” (whatever that means) or bigots.  It’s not even behavior anymore.   It’s Identity,  like being black or Hispanic or a woman.   Somehow, character stopped counting.    When someone lies, and they have the right Identity or are “right-thinking,”  it doesn’t matter.  After all, Elizabeth Warren probably is 1/32 Native-American.  Sure.  Whatever it takes to move the agenda forward.

“Forward” … another new-old Leftspeak word meaning continual deconstruction of the old values and systems.  Deconstruction is in itself a goal.  Destroy, revise, tear down.  The institutions that served us throughout our history and promoted the values of freedom, individual rights, protection from the government, and the free expression of recognizing a higher moral authority than government, our Judeo-Christian heritage, must all be “deconstructed” to make way for the great leap forward.  Funny how the rhetoric is always the same.

At some point in the past few years, I realized that the Left has declared war on my family.   This is a new revelation to me, because like most of us, I was irritated, even angry with the Left for the misinformation, but I didn’t think they were at war with me.   I recognized the necessity to decode my children’s school books and filter the television shows and movies they were watching.   I realized the importance of  explaining that the world was not coming to an end because of Global Cooling (70’s-80’s), Global Warming (90’s) or Climate Change (current), and that fossil fuels were plentiful, not evil.   Furthermore, CO2 is not a poison gas, but an absolute requirement for life on earth.    I have had to explain that DDT actually saved lives and that over 50 million people have died worldwide from malaria because of a lie from someone named Rachel Carson and the irresponsible idiots that followed.  I have pointed out that nuclear energy is not evil, but the safest most efficient and least environmentally intrusive of all energy sources and that “millions of people” did not die at Chernobyl.  The number was less than 50 and there was no increase in infertility.   Lies, lies. Lies.  It’s what they do.  Lie and demonize.

And when they are not lying, they are all about disruption and self-justification.   I have had to explain that a child is not a “choice” but a human life that deserves protections.  And that some 30 million children since 1973 have never had the opportunity to take a breath because it was inconvenient.  I have taught that people should not get special treatment, or tax breaks, or different standards to meet, just because they are a particular color or gender or practice a particular religion.    After all, if it is wrong for whites to get special privileges, should it not be equally wrong for any other group?   It seems obvious that marriage is between a man and a woman – check the plumbing.   Marriage is not with two men, or two women, or a man and a sheep, except in Iran, or a man and a 6 year old girl, or a man and 5 women, except in Saudi Arabia (or Arizona City.)

I have had to explain that there is evil in the world.  People have the capacity both for great good and for horrific evil, and we cannot ignore what happens when good men do nothing.  The history of the world is an ever unfolding story of the battle between good and evil.   There are virtues that transcend results.  The end does not justify the means.

There is inequality everywhere and envy is evil.  Money or lack of it does not determine happiness.   Some people are born into wealth and some people are not.   Some people are born handsome or beautiful and slim and trim, and some people are not.  Some are tall and some are short, some are athletic and some are clumsy.   Advantages are given to some and some have to work harder than others to get the same results.  The things that separate us and define us and distinguish us are what we do with what we were given.  The quality of our choices matter, not the things we have no control over.  The best opportunity for the greatest number of people comes when folks are left free to chart their own course, to innovate, to invent, to produce.  A rising tide floats all boats.   There are no limitations to what benefits occur when people are released and free to pursue their goals and dreams.    This is not an opinion, it is a fact of history.    It is also a fact of history that government only restricts and limits and creates the lowest possible equivalency level, not our highest potential.

I have had to explain the obvious in a world filled with liars and miscreants who are so confused they don’t even believe in right and wrong, let alone have the ability to discern it.

But what’s changed for me in the past few years is the revelation that the Left is not content to let me live quietly with my values and raise my children to believe in those values.  My existence to them is an existential threat.   I have realized finally, that the Left hates me.   They want me to go away.    They want my values to go away, and they understand that my values are MY identity.    And it’s my identity that they hate.   They hate my God, they hate my bookshelves, my love for John Wayne, my belief in right and wrong, my independence from “help”, and most of all they hate my Truth. And the fact that I share it.

In truth, the Left wants me to die.   And the sooner the better.

They have been content to plant their worms into our institutions and patiently and gradually corrupt them.    But they smell victory and they are tired of waiting for our generation to die out.  We are the reason that Ronald Reagan was possible.  We outnumbered them.  Those of us not corrupted by the endless onslaught of 2 generations of propaganda.  We had too much real world experience and knowledge.  We understood the blessing of freedom and the tyranny of elitism.  We knew better than what they were trying to teach us.  We offered Truth as an alternative to their wishful thinking and the John Lennon reflections of their “Imagine-nation”.     Like cockroaches, they cannot stand the light.    Many of them have created a world of darkness where they don’t ever have to be exposed to truth.  They only talk to those they agree with. They serve and live within institutions of their making, but paid for by our beneficence.  They live in the illusions that they have created at our expense.  We foot the bill for their Imagine-arium, their university colonies, their public institutions.   And they want to grow these dark communities.  They want to expand Mordor and as time goes on, they can no longer tolerate the light, like Morlocks.  Those of us who carry the torches must be eliminated.   This is the war that they have declared on me and my family.   And suddenly not a day goes by that I don’t realize that I have decisions and choices that this realization forces me to make.

For some, it started with Avatar and the Dixie Chicks.  James Cameron and Natalie Maines were in our faces.   Should we pay for entertainment to enrich the pockets of Sean Penn, George Clooney, Matt Damon and others who have declared war on our values?   Hell no.  Not a dime.  I won’t listen to NPR, or read Rolling Stone, Time or Newsweek.  I don’t need to wallow with the pigs to know what their excrement smells like.  It is enough for me to know what they spew.  I don’t need to know the brand.  And I don’t need to wear it.

Every day I learn a little more, and as much as it is possible, not one minute or one dollar of my resources will go in the direction of those who want me gone.  Why would I possibly fund my own destruction?   Why would we allow a nanosecond of our precious time on earth to be infiltrated by more lies and corruption.

I am paying more attention now.   I am finding out who and what is part of the virulence.  AARP, Arby’s, Progressive Insurance, GE, NBC (owned by GE), and the vast majority of the Hollywood establishment. Do your research.  It’s a big list, much bigger than I ever realized.  And a good share of America’s universities are on that list.   The irony is that today there is over 1 trillion dollars in student loan debt, and God only knows how much of that was used to fund useless and unmarketable degrees in Social Justice, or Urban Studies and the like, for which there are no jobs in the real world for these victims.  Is it any wonder that Obama is reaching out to them for support by promising relief for the very enslavement that his ilk has created?   We have a whole new dependent class.  And what decisions do we now make for educating our children?  Do we, like lemmings, continue to fund Mordor?

No, I am not filtering anymore.  It is not enough.  I am rejecting, and I am turning away.    I am revolting against those who seek to destroy my way of life and my family and the future I want them to have.  Revolution starts in the heart and in the home. It’s a matter of refusing to be silent and speaking truth against the wall of lies. Of praying against evil and for the truth to reign.  We have to set an example.  We have to reject and then propose.  We have to turn the lies aside and tell that truth. They won’t like that.  Remember, Morlocks hate the light.  It will not be convenient and it may be expensive.   And in the end it will likely cost more than time and money.    We may have to learn the meaning of sacrifice.  I don’t expect to change any of them.  If there is one thing I have learned lately, it is that they have likely been turned over to reprobate minds.   It’s really not about them anyway, it’s about Truth for its own sake, and it’s about me and my family.   It’s about choosing which master we will serve.  The outcome is not for us to predict.  In truth, as believers, we know the outcome.  As the old 60’s saying goes, you are either part of the solution or part of the problem.  As Bob Dylan said, “you gotta serve somebody”.

What choice do we have really?    Who is not for them is against them.   And if you reject their lies, then they are most definitely against you.   The lines are being drawn.  So it has always been.

Hello World gets its name from the output of the first program in Kernighan and Ritchie’s landmark programming book, The C Programming Language.  Since that time, it’s a tradition for all programming tutorials, regardless of the language, to start with a program* that when run, prints out,

Hello World!

Fortuna is clearly more than slightly conversant with geek lore and it shows in the unaffected way he weaves technology into Hello World.  If you’re a programmer or gamer, you’re sure to appreciate his deft touch.  Unlike Jeffrey Deaver’s attempt in The Blue Nowhere, there isn’t a single false note when it comes to describing the tech culture. From this standpoint alone, Hello World is sure to appeal to any Stephenson fan.

But, you don’t have to be a technologist to appreciate this book.  Fortuna also does a great job with dialog.  His characters have some pretty smart conversations about the nature of things.  Here is an excerpt of a conversation between the villain and one of the protagonists, in which he attempts to get her to join him in his evil plot to release a paranoid self-aware bot onto the internet.

Businesses employ severe measures all the time. They fire hundreds of people. They force other business to go under. They pay for legislation. And they shortchange their own employees whenever possible. And those are the legitimate people. Then you have organized crime. They also understand that there are certain requirements that come into play when you need to guarantee the success of a venture. The idea is to remove uncertainty from the equation, because uncertainty carries with it the possibility of failure. To date, our software has been uniquely successful because we’ve been willing to do what it takes to guarantee success. We’ve established the standard in gaming, and thousands of people out there have risen to that standard. To move ahead we need to redefine the model. That means taking things literally out of the box. Off the screen. Off the keyboard. Beyond the mouse. Into the heads and hearts of the gamers themselves.

Aside from clever and believable dialog, there is a fair amount of tongue in cheek commentary tucked in as subtext in the convolutions of the plot.  As one would expect, not all of Fortuna’s characters are likable, but they’re all pretty believable.  Fortuna shows them for what they are and even provides a convincing back story for his villain.  In depicting this character, Fortuna engages in some fairly unpleasant scenes where the villain and his psycho top-geek conduct sessions in which they try to concoct ever more awful torture scenarios.  These conversations are difficult to read and leave mental pictures in the mind of the reader that this reviewer could have done without.  But, it’s the difference between  saying that such and such a character is a sicko, and giving the reader a glimpse into his mind.

Because of this, and frequent references to some of the more socially maladjusted characters pleasuring themselves (a la Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon), Hello World is not a book suitable for children or those with more delicate sensibilities.

Still, Hello World is an interesting book that gets better the farther one reads.  The plot is not predicable and offers some surprising turns along the way.  If you like Neal Stephenson’s books, buy Hello World.

*Hello.c

#include <stdio.h>

void main( int argc, char * argv[])
{
   printf(“Hello World!\n”);
}

This is a book worth reading despite its somewhat misleading title.  Mr. Kernen disappointed by not establishing the bona fides for his title.  Some examples of the political, economic and environmental biases conveyed by the public school system would have been helpful prior to launching into his discussion with daughter Blake.

As the subtitle says, the book is devoted to countering the influences of school, the MSM, television, and the prevailing culture.  It begins, as all good discussions should, by defining terms.  The ones that have dominated the national news: Cap and Trade, inflation, derivatives, mortgage, stimulus among them, and also words that are rarely if ever heard: words like creative destruction, capitalism, Hiiggs effect, supply and demand and risk. Along the way, Blake and the reader get a short course in the “ABC’s of the Free Market.”

The chapter on the “Properties of Property” delighted this reviewer by including a recap of the once famous (now mostly forgotten) Julian Simon-Paul Ehrlich 1980 wager.  Economist Simon challenged scarcity-monger Ehrlich to pick any basket of commodities, hold them for ten years, and if prices increased because of Ehrlich-predicted shortages, Simon would pay the difference. However, if they decreased, Ehrlich would do the same. Ehrlich lost and paid Simon.

The reason Ehrlich lost–why ‘shortages’ are always (at worst) temporary is central to understanding free markets: So long as people have incentives to find a commodity, in the form of a price that is greater than the cost of finding it, they’ll do so.  In economic terms, there are no shortages; there is simply a lag while price catches up to demand, and once it does, inventive people go get it.

Presuming, of course, that government stays out of he way and the finders are permitted to assert a property right over what they find.

(Shale oil is a case in point.  Unfortunately, more than 70% of the total oil shale acreage in the Green River Formation, [portions of Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming], including the richest and thickest oil shale deposits, is under federally owned and managed lands.)

In chapter 4, Kernen recaps Leonard Reed’s classic “I, Pencil” by substituting his son’s shoelaces for Reed’s pencil.  Reed demolished the case for central planning as does Kernen.  The author uses his son’s shoelaces to show how people around the world–without a single government planner to direct them–guided by prices, property, profits, and incentives, combine to produce shoelaces.  The point is that free markets feed, clothe, and house hundreds of millions of people at ever higher levels while centrally planned economies, i.e. the former Soviet Union and North Korea today, produce shortages, misery and famine.

A market produces just about everything more efficiently than any other system, but it might be that the most important thing it produces is information. It turns out that millions (or billions) of people choosing where to spend their money creates a giant pool of information that millions (or billions) of people can use to choose where to invest their labor and resources. The way to produce the kind of abundance that makes $3 dollar shoelaces and $50 video games available is pretty simple, though hard to understand: just get out of the way and let the information flow both ways, in the form of price signals. That’s how the self-organizing magic works.

The author’s discussion about people choosing brings to mind the iconic book by Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman entitled “Free to Choose” (1980). It was made into a PBS TV series narrated by Friedman and is available  (for free) by courtesy of the Palmer R. Chitester Fund.  It is a must for everyone interested in defending economic and political liberty.

But I digress. Kernen also devotes a chapter to explaining why the Obama administration in particular, and Progressives in general are so enamored of regulation.

Regulation is a way for smart people to tell everyone else what to do. And because regulations are government’s way of substituting for the free market, they don’t have to meet the first criterion of a market-based solution, which is that costs shouldn’t exceed benefits. Regulators don’t have to count, for example, the number of jobs lost because of their good intentions.

(According to an analysis by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, 953 economically significant final rules were issued in the first three years of the Obama Administration. That’s more than a thirty-fold increase over the 30 issued in the first three years of the Bush Administration.)

No book on capitalism would be complete without a chapter on unions.

The notion that everyone’s labor is equal to everyone else’s is central to the whole idea of union.” In other words, people with the same number of years on the job are supposed to be paid the same hourly wage“ regardless of competence. “As a result unions reward mediocrity–or at least they don’t punish it.

The author points out that public employee unions are a special problem for a free-market economy. And the biggest problem of all is one that directly affects the Kernen family, and every family with school-age children: unionized teachers.

At the end of the book Joe Kernen does a retrospective on Obama’s presidency.

Three years into the worst economic crisis in more than eighty years, the president of the United States is still convinced that the solution is taking money from one group and giving it to another. It’s no surprise that they don’t care either how much they spend, or even what they spend it on. Like I said, a lot happened in the last year” (since the book was written).  “But actually, it was really only one thing, over and over again, which was t the government of the United States acting like it could make better economic decisions than the people of the United States. Until it stops, Blake and I will still have plenty of stuff to talk about.

Any parent trying to inoculate his offspring against the delusional contagion known as progressivism should buy Joe and Blake Kernen’s book. Their book, combined with Friedman’s “Free to Choose” (in book or video format), will explain to anyone why free market capitalism works and progressivism doesn’t.

According to a documentary aired on the Seoul Broadcasting System, Chinese drug-makers are collaborating with abortion clinics to make the pills.

Read more here:

South Korea Boosts Fight Against Infant Flesh-Pill Smuggling – Bloomberg.

What is more disturbing: the possibility that the Chinese are harvesting babies for human consumption? or that fact that there is a market for these pills?

Admittedly, cobbler/musician/computer scientist/cum author, Joey Fortuna’s novel, The Route is not the standard fare for WWTFT book reviews.  But it’s a masterwork of creativity.

The Route is a morality play of good and evil in which the dark forces of the anti-Claus are pitted against those of Santa and his elves in an evil plot to destroy Christmas. Think you’ve seen this movie?  You haven’t.

In Fortuna’s world, the elves are quasi-magical creatures who once co-existed with human beings, but who long ago abdicated their realm in the face of growing human greed and selfishness.  In accordance with their nature of generosity and goodness, the elves employ metaphysical technology to stop time and allow Santa to deliver Christmas joy to millions of children world wide.  So far so good?  Well, here’s the part of the story you haven’t heard.

In this story, Santa has an evil nemesis who dubbed himself Saulc Atnos.  Saulc is bent on destroying Christmas and putting the “s” back in elf – self.  His dastardly plan involves replacing the “give” endemic to Christmas with the  “take” of human greed. In order to further his designs, he and his evil assistant Miktor figure out a way to create an army of psychopathic gollums called gimmes – as in: gimme that.   They aren’t terribly bright, nor are they terribly effective.  But they’re easy to make, and outnumber the elves.

Preventing their success hinges on The Route which Santa takes every Christmas.  This closely guarded secret is all that stands between the gimmies and world domination.  Each year The Route is calculated anew, in a seemingly random manner, through the use of a mysterious elvish device.  But now Saulc and Miktor have figured out how to recreate The Route!   Only the bravery and brains of a handful of elves can prevent disaster.

No spoilers.

The Route is as full of twists and turns as it’s name implies.   The prose is easy to read and sparkles with imagination and clever nuances, like “elf help,” “elf control,” and “elf improvement.”  But the puns aren’t hammer-handed or overwhelming, and serve to add interest.  Fortuna manages to construct a world with enough detail to make sense, without dwelling on the technology so much as to make the story drag.  On the contrary, his characters have character, and his dialog is brisk and believable. There are two brief scenes toward the end of the book in which elves converse with human children.  These were especially poignant and fun.

The Route is a bold experiment which skirts some cultural taboos in its treatment and explanation of Christmas.  It’s a book which might not be quite every parent’s idea of a kid’s book.  In fact, it seems as though Fortuna recognized this about half way through the story, and began to back peddle on some of its darker elements involving the “extraction” of The Route.  Fortuna takes the reader just to the point of discomfort, and then eases off.  But that doesn’t mean that the story slows down.  In fact, The Route picks up speed as the story progresses and becomes steadily more and more enjoyable.  In the right hands, this would make a terrific movie.

If you have an afternoon on your hands with a few hours to spare (and .99), The Route won’t disappoint.  It’s a clever story and a lot of fun.