It's A Wonderful Life

I just finished watching It's A Wonderful Life again. I'll bet I've watched that movie thirty times since I first discovered it back in the late 1970's. I came home from work at the radio station very late one night and turned on the TV. The only station still on the air was WAKR in Akron, Ohio, which had recently moved from Channel 49 to Channel 23 and increased power. Their signal now reached the Cleveland area fairly well, even clearly if you had an outside antenna on a rotor. They were showing old black and white movies all night and It's A Wonderful Life happened to be running. It was near the beginning and I started watching it. I had no idea how long it was, but I didn't plan to stay up late to watch the whole thing. I was so captivated by the story, I had to keep watching all the way to the end. The sun was starting to rise before I got to bed!

Watching It's A Wonderful Life this time started me thinking about how much America has changed over the past 100 years. Something happened around 1909 that gradually, progressively, infected our political process and corrupted both political parties. This movie starts out with George Bailey as a young boy in 1919, right in the middle of the Woodrow Wilson administration. When George Bailey would have been born, Teddy Roosevelt was president. He was elected as a Republican, but he became a Progressive before his two terms ended in 1909. He formed a third party called the Bull Moose which formed the very beginnings of a Progressive movement. He was followed by William Howard Taft, a Conservative Republican, who served only one term. The Progressives were struggling to gain control of America, and they set about to do that by infiltrating the Democrat party. In 1913, Woodrow Wilson was elected. He called himself a Democrat, but he was actually a Progressive. He was very different from the Democrats who came before him. He was addicted to power and sought to greatly expand America's central government, and with it, the Ruling Class. This was directly in opposition to the original intent of our country, based on the Constitution, limited central government, States rights, and individual freedom. Prior to the infiltration of Progressives, these ideals were held sacred by both political parties. Things had changed.

Newspaper publisher Warren G Harding took office after Woodrow Wilson's second term. He was a Conservative Republican who campaigned as a supporter of the League Of Nations (now the United Nations). After he got elected, he fought to keep America out of that organization. On his watch, however, many of his friends began taking advantage of the positions of power they'd been given. The result was scandal. Some believed that President Harding was responsible for everything, including actions that took place without his knowledge or consent. Perhaps that's true of any President. President Harding didn't live long enough to find out how these scandals would be resolved. He died of a heart attack two years into his Presidency while visiting San Francisco. His Vice President, Calvin Coolidge, was sworn in on August 2, 1923.

Calvin Coolidge was a Conservative Republican who sought to restore the dignity of the Presidency. During his term, America's economy was booming. It was known as The Roaring Twenties. This period is depicted in the movie as the time when George Bailey and Mary dance the Jitterbug right into the school swimming pool under the gym floor.

George Bailey's father ran the Bailey Building And Loan. Mr. Potter was portrayed as an evil rich man who bought shares of that business and then tried to take it over when George's father died. The Board of Directors voted to keep the Building And Loan operating, provided George stayed on to take his father's place as Executive Secretary of the business. George reluctantly agreed to stay. Based on events in the movie, George gets married to Mary in October 1929, coincidentally on the same day the stock market crash begins what we now call the Great Depression. Mary offers up the money they received from wedding gifts to help George keep the business solvent through the initial crisis. Mr. Potter, meanwhile, bought out the bank for pennies on the dollar. He would have taken over the Building And Loan as well, if it had not been for the charitable gestures of Mary and George, which forced them to give up a honeymoon trip.

Now let's stop here and try to figure out the politics of these characters. George Bailey and his father were Capitalists. They were almost certainly Republicans. But, Mr. Potter was also a Capitalist, and most likely a Republican as well. But there was a difference. Like the Progressives who were struggling at this time to regain political power, Mr. Potter was drunk with power. He sought to rule over people like royalty, or even as a dictator. This leads me to believe that Mr. Potter, the rich guy, was a Progressive at heart, even though he may have called himself a Republican.

Let's compare the moral values of these characters. George Bailey, the Conservative Republican, was obviously a religious man. His family celebrated Christmas and he believed in Heaven and angels, although he was reluctant to think an angel could actually visit him on Earth! He was a family man who loved his kids and cared deeply about his wife, family, and friends. He was very brave, jumping into freezing water TWICE, once to save his little brother, and again to save the angel Clarence, a total stranger at the time. He was a man who truly cared about the poor working folks. He dedicated his life to helping them, not by giving them handouts or government programs, but by helping them grow their own fortunes and raise their own standard of living. He was a charitable man, giving money to his friends who found themselves in desperate situations, and passing up one opportunity after another to stick around and help out his family and his community. In my mind, this is the description of today's Conservative Republicans, even though the Progressives have spent the past 100 years trying to paint them as evil, greedy, rich people.

Mr. Potter, the Progressive Republican, was really the evil rich guy. He could have returned the money Uncle Billy had misplaced, but he didn't do it. Instead, he used that incident to try to steal the Building And Loan business, and send George to prison in the process. He had tried to sucker George into coming to work for him, offering a $20,000 a year salary and a three year contract. At first, George was tempted. That was a lot more money than the $45 a week he'd been drawing from the Building And Loan. It meant an opportunity to finally travel the world, which was his life-long, unfulfilled desire. But George saw through the scam very quickly. Mr. Potter didn't care at all about the working poor. He called them "riff raff" and did everything he could to keep them in poverty and in debt - to him. Would Mr. Potter have jumped into freezing water to save anyone? Hardly.

Today's Progressives are much more like Mr. Potter than George Bailey. Every Conservative can clearly understand that. When George experienced what life would be like if he had never been born, Bedford Falls had been transformed into Pottersville, a city consumed by poverty and immorality where evil, greedy, rich people like Mr. Potter owned and controlled everything and everybody.

Look at any issue today and think about it in the context of Bedford Falls and Pottersville. In which of these towns would they have taught gay history in school? In which of these towns would drug abuse be more likely? Which of these towns would have the largest percentage of people on welfare and other government entitlement programs? Which of these towns would have been more likely to take down a cross from public land?

Don't let the Progressives get away with painting Conservatives as evil and greedy. They're the ones who are drunk with power. They're the ones who think nothing of keeping others down so they can enrich themselves.

It really is a wonderful life. But I can't help wondering what it would have been like if Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson had never been born.

Redistribution Redux

Envy is a powerful member of the class of deadly sins. Ever since the dawn of civilization, envy has had a profound effect on our society. Envy is the foundation of the classification of people based on the things they have. If you're in the upper class, you have stuff. If you're in the lower class, you have less stuff. This doesn't mean anything, except that this guy has more stuff than this other guy. It doesn't make either man superior. 

In fact, in any society, someone must have something more than someone else. If the world contained just two people, let's call them Adam and Eve, there would be an inequality of stuff all the time. Eve would pick a flower. Now she has a flower and Adam does not. She becomes the "upper class" when measured by the number of flowers you have. Feeling envy, Adam picks two flowers. This moves him from the "lower class" to the "upper class" and repositions Eve from the "upper class" to the "lower class." So what? What difference does it make who has more flowers? What if Adam doesn't even like flowers? What if he's allergic to them? The idea that Adam hates Eve because she has more flowers than him is absurd.

Let me try to keep this simple. Think of a family with two children. Mom works, but dad stays home and takes care of the kids. In this micro-society, mom is the "upper class" because she alone generates all the wealth. She uses that wealth to provide for her own needs, as well as the needs of her husband and children. The system works fine and nobody cares that mom generates more wealth than they do.

Along comes trouble. The kids are approached by a politician who convinces them that mom isn't sharing enough of her wealth with them. This is really easy to do. One of the kids asked for a new smartphone and mom said no. Is she being greedy, or just a good parent? The politician suggests that she's being greedy. The other kid remembers that she wanted a new pair of shoes and mom wouldn't buy them for her. It doesn't matter if mom had a good reason to deny these requests from her children. Maybe she knew that the family budget would not support these extra expenses. In order to protect her family, she decided to use that money to buy something more critically needed for the family. Or, she may have decided that it was more important in the long run for the family to have the security of a nest egg, instead of the short term pleasure of owning a new phone or some new shoes. But the politician wants to steal control of the kids away from mom. It's easy to do that if he can convince the kids that mom was being greedy. Once he has control of the mom, he can force her to buy these things for her kids.

There was, of course, another way. The kids could have taken part-time jobs to earn the money necessary to buy these things for themselves. Dad could have taken a job, with the kids pitching in to help by doing some of the chores for dad. They could have compromised with mom, maybe working out a budget together to save for the things they wanted and buy them later.  They could have accepted mom's decision and learned to live without the phone and the shoes.

If the politician gains control over the mom, he can take mom's money and use it to buy the phone and shoes. Following through on his promise to the kids, he's made them happy, and they'll continue to vote him into power over mom. At first, it looks like a system that benefits the majority -- two kids over one mom.

But there are unexpected consequences. By taking wealth from mom, the family has not gained any total wealth. In fact, if the politician took more money from mom than he needed to buy the phone and shoes, that redistribution of mom's wealth to the kids cost the family some money. If the kids, or dad, had taken a job instead, the family would have had a net gain in wealth instead. The family would have been better off. Even if they decided to live without the phone and shoes, they'd be better off.

Now the mom loses her job. She doesn't have a nest egg to help her family survive the short-term loss of income, so they end up losing their home. The kids are forced to sell the phone and shoes to buy food. The politician is responsible for this. Mom had a better plan to protect the family. But the politician didn't care about protecting the family. He didn't care about mom's plan. He only cared about getting power over the family. He bought votes from the kids using their own envy as a tool.

Here's something really evil to consider. Suppose the politician owned the store where the kids bought the phone and shoes?  Now the politician has redistributed wealth from the family to himself. If you think that can't happen, think again.

This same logic works as well with a country of 300 million people as it does with a family of four. It works just as well with an entire planet of several billion people. Taking wealth from some people to give to others else doesn't generate new wealth. 

The desire of people to have more stuff is supposed to motivate them to create their own wealth.

 If the stuff they want is "redistributed" to them by government, there's no need for them to create their own wealth. The family suffers. The citizens of the country suffer. The people of the world suffer. 

Redistribution of wealth is evil. It only looks like a good idea if you allow envy to distort your perception of reality. What it really does is give someone power over you and your family. When they take away your power, you lose your freedom. Trading your freedom for a smartphone and some shoes is not a fair trade. You're better off being free to create your own wealth. 

Tell the politician to take a hike. He's not interested in helping you. He's only interested in helping himself. Tell him that you don't hate your mom because she didn't buy you some stuff. You love her for protecting her family, and you want to be free to do the same thing for your family one day. 

Occupy Tea Party

One thing that's puzzled me about Occupy Wall Street is how quickly it spread to well over a hundred cities. Even using social media (Twitter) to organize into groups, the crowds seemed to spring up much faster than you'd expect for a truly "grass roots" movement.

Another thing that had me scratching my head was the incoherent messages from individual members of these groups. If they all assembled together to protest something, wouldn't you expect everyone in the crowd to be angry about the same thing? YouTube is full of interviews with Occupy protesters who don't seem to have a clue what's going on! How is that possible?

Then came the bums. Homeless people from all over town were assimilated into the Occupy crowds. With them came drug addicts, drug dealers, street gangsters, and the like. Why did the Occupy protesters allow their movement to be polluted like that? Didn't they realize that those people would dilute their message by packing the crowd with people who were there for a completely different purpose? 

Ironically, the drug dealers thrive on capitalism, the very thing many of the Occupy protesters claim to despise!

Why did the union leaders quickly express support for the Occupy movement? How does corporate cronyism hurt union employees more than any other citizens? It seems to me that we have a President who supports the unions and who has been funneling taxpayer dollars into make-work union jobs at a record pace. These people should have no bone to pick with Wall Street or the President at the moment. After all, much of the money they take home to feed their families came through the very same banks and corporations they're protesting.

It's fairly obvious that these crowds were assembled and organized by someone with an agenda. They didn't really care that much about what the protest was about, either. They simply wanted bodies in the streets. They wanted media attention. They actually counted on the filth, violence, and anger. They wanted the crowds to be seen by all Americans, and eventually despised. But why? What purpose can that possibly serve anyone?

It didn't make any sense at first. But then it him me, like a bright light suddenly appeared and exposed the truth from within the shadows of mystery and confusion. These crowds were intended as surrogates. They were assembled to create negative impressions that could be transferred to another group - namely, the Tea Party.

Progressives fear the Tea Party. Despite their efforts to marginalize them, keep them out of the media, and paint them as racist bigot homophobe lunatics, they had no evidence to support those claims. They needed to incite the Tea Party, to make them angry enough to become violent. That would give the media ample footage to demonstrate to all Americans that the Tea Party was nothing more than a bunch of crazy people way out on the fringe of the right-wing. That would let them scare people into ignoring their message. Call them Nazi's and nobody will pay any attention to them anymore.

It didn't happen.  

The Tea Party eventually assembled in clean, well-behaved, and peaceful gatherings and meetings. They didn't cultivate anger and hostility. In fact, they represented just the opposite. They were concerned citizens who shared a common goal, determined to work together peacefully to spread their message and encourage change. 

The Progressives were not happy about this at all. If the "under-informed masses" who are the "swing voters" in America learned who these Tea Party people were and heard their message, it could signal the beginning of the end of years of Progressive infiltration into American politics. The 2010 elections proved that the worst fears of the Progressives were coming to pass. The next big election in 2012, the one that would give America another four years of the most Progressive President this country has ever known, might be lost to the Republicans. Worse yet, it might be lost to a Tea Party candidate. What the Tea Party stood for was poison for the Progressive movement. Something had to be done to stop them.

Enter the Occupy crowd. The Progressive machine went into action, filling the streets with their Useful Idiot armies. These were mainly union thugs who would do anything their union leaders asked, thinking they were somehow fighting to keep evil management from taking away their jobs, benefits, and pensions. They threw in college students, indoctrinated and thoroughly confused by their Progressive professors into embracing Marx, Che and Keynes, and fired up with class envy and anger toward the evil rich.  They knew that gathering these people in a public place would attract some unsavory characters. That's what they wanted. They wanted a crowd of angry protesters, modern-day hippies, drug addicts, confused idiots, dangerous criminals, and any other disgusting vermin these crowds would attract.

Then the media, either willingly or unwittingly, swooped in for the kill. At first they could portray the Occupy crowds as generally peaceful young citizens who were, in many ways, angry about issues that were very "similar" to Tea Party concerns. They established a common concern, big government and political corruption through corporate cronyism. The Progressives had managed to stage their own "Tea Party" movement, and they fully expected it to get completely out of control. That's what they wanted to happen. 

It did.

Eventually, the Occupy movement's media exposure focused on the negatives. They filmed anger, class hatred, racism, bigotry, violence, and vulgar filth. Then came the police. Scenes of crowds being dispersed with tear gas and bean bag guns were shown over and over on American television, and around the world as well. It was Breaking News everywhere. Even the under-informed paid attention.

The Tea Party generally dismissed the Occupy movement as yet another example of America being infested by Progressives and a Federal government that's ever increasing in size and power. It galvanized them and helped convince them they were on the right track.

But what about the under-informed Americans? These are the people who don't pay close attention to politics. They're nearly consumed with their family, their jobs, their friends and community. They only consume news in little bites, just enough to stay current, or so they think. They're easily manipulated by the media. Many of them believe that political comedy and satire are always inspired by the truth. They think that a comedian wouldn't tell a joke about a politician or a political party or movement unless it had at least some basis in fact. The audience certainly would not laugh at a joke that was nothing more than a complete fabrication offered only as a vicious attack on innocent victims. That's not funny, after all. But, when the audience laughs, everybody can relax. No matter how mean-spirited a joke sounds, the victim somehow deserved the barbs.

They open their New York Times and scan through the pages looking for quick bits of information. They may turn on the television news channel and play it in the background while getting dressed in the morning. They give it their divided attention. The human interest stories grab their attention. The stuff in between makes an impression, but it's mostly subconscious. 

When the television news channel tells them something is really important, they believe it must be really important. Someone of "authority" took the time to bring this matter to their attention. Whatever that person tells them must have at least some degree of accuracy. If it's violent and ugly, it will leave a negative impression on them, even if that impression is only subconscious.

When the Occupy crowd and the Tea Party are "merged" into a single entity in the minds of these under-informed Americans, the result only benefits the Progressive movement. They've now managed to leave the impression that "crowds" of "protesters" are being dispersed with tear gas, defecating in the streets, raping each other, stealing from each other, interfering with small businesses, and generally causing chaos. They're painted as evil. The Tea Party is made up of "protesters" too, so they must be evil as well.

The Progressives hope that the "evil" paint will spill over onto the Tea Party, leaving the impressing that ANY protesters are simply the lunatic fringe of society. They can ALL be safely ignored. The police will take care of it. We can all relax.

Is the Tea Party message being drowned out by the noise and confusion of the Occupy movement? Think about it. What do you think?

The Earth Will Die

We call her Mother Earth because she gives all of us life. But, like any good mother, it's very easy for us to take her for granted. She won't always be around to protect us. She will die one day, and we will all die along with her. Well, actually not "we" who are alive today, but the people who swarm over her at the time of her death; who are less significant than fleas on the back of a dog.

Politicians who use scare tactics to trick people into supporting more taxes and government control are despicable. Those who accuse us of contributing to the death of our planet are not just despicable, they're also very wrong. Global Warming, now called Global Climate Change because the Earth isn't really getting warmer, is junk science. It's a combination of lying with statistics, logical fallacies, and plain old-fashioned lies. Why would anyone do this? Simple. To get your money.

Even if you fall for the crap, and trade money for peace of mind, nothing will happen, except that you'll help make some politicians and their cronies a lot richer. 

If you were selling chocolate fudge, and you were also in charge of the world, wouldn't it be in your best interests, financially, to convince everyone that chocolate fudge made you live longer and healthier lives? If you could, you'd pass a law making it mandatory for everyone to buy chocolate fudge. Those who refused to buy your chocolate fudge would have to pay a hefty fine, so they might as well eat your fudge. Of course, you'd also want to seize control of the manufacturing of chocolate fudge all over the world. Just to make it less obvious, you'd want some of your closest friends and "supporters" actually running the chocolate fudge factories. That would divert suspicion from you so the people wouldn't see how (and why) the trick was performed. Your friends could quietly pass some of the proceeds back to you later. After all, there'd be plenty of dough to spread around.

The irony of all this is that the Earth really will die one day. It could happen when the Sun grows old and expands beyond the orbit of our planet. The Earth will first burn to a crisp, then become vaporized as temperatures rise into the millions of degrees. Now THAT's Global Warming!  

It could happen the same way we suspect life on Mars ended. The molten iron that surrounds the Earth's solid iron core is cooling. Over time, that molten iron will solidify. When that happens, the Earth's magnetic fields will shut down. Those magnetic fields are like the shields on Star Trek. They protect the Earth from deadly radiation that's constantly pouring off of the Sun. With our shields down, the Earth's water and atmosphere cannot survive, and without those things, we can't survive either.

It could happen sooner, too. There's all kinds of junk flying around in space. Thanks to gravity, our Sun and planet Earth itself are giant vacuum cleaners. The Earth is in orbit around the Sun only because of its forward momentum. It's actually falling into the Sun at a constant speed. Our momentum causes centrifugal force which perfectly balances out the force of the Sun's gravity. But what happens when a giant lump of rock wanders into our solar system? Once it gets close enough to the Sun, it will be pulled in toward the center. If we're lucky, these rocks will miss us. They'll swing around in a huge elliptical orbit and come around again in thousands of years. This happens all the time. We call them comets. But what happens when one of these comets happens to pass too close to the Earth? If even a very small comet slammed into the Earth it would immediately kill every living thing on the planet. A large enough object could blow the planet apart, turning us into another asteroid belt.

I won't even get into the other ways we might all die, like global thermonuclear war, an epidemic of an incurable disease, genetic mutation, alien attack, and so on. 

My point is that none of these things can be prevented by mankind. Our world is going to die one day. Odds are, we'll know it's coming, and there won't be a damn thing we can do about it.

Even if the Earth is getting warmer, and even if that warming is somehow caused by mankind, we're far more likely to die from one of these other causes before we could possibly commit suicide.

So the next time a politician, or a professor, or some other person of "authority" tries to frighten you into thinking that the sky is falling, pay close attention to the "cure" they're proposing. If it involves stealing your money or your freedom, there's a very good chance you're being conned.

The Lemonade Link

Many children in America first tasted Capitalism by giving others a taste of lemonade. As a kid, I raided my mother's cupboard, fetched some Kool Aid and a bag of sugar, whipped up a pitcher of the stuff, grabbed a pile of paper cups, and set up a store in my front yard. I made a sign from a piece of cardboard and a magic marker. I wanted to raise money for something, I don't recall what, so I set my price based on the cost of buying that thing.

Let's say the toy I wanted cost $100 and a pitcher of Kool Aid yields twenty servings in tiny paper cups. If I sell my Kool Aid at $5 per cup, I'll end up with the hundred bucks. I can close up shop, take the bus to the store, buy the toy, and live happily ever after. Right? Uh, nope.

Nobody would buy my Kool Aid for $5 per cup. That's too much to pay, even for some adult passing by who thinks my little venture into entrepreneurialism merited encouragement. After my ice started to melt, and a few people told me my price was way too high, I'd change my strategy. I could ask someone how much they'd be willing to pay for a nice, cold, refreshing cup of tasty Kool Aid. Let's say they tell me they'd happily pay 25 cents. No problem! I'll sell them for 25 cents a cup and make only $5 for the pitcher. I can always make 19 more pitchers, sell them all, and end up with my hundred bucks. Right? Uh, nope.

When I run out of Kool Aid and sugar, mom tells me I have to buy some more. I can't run my Kool Aid business at her expense. So I learn the first lesson in Business 101: Stuff you sell costs money to make. I give mom my $5 and ask her to buy more Kool Aid, sugar and cups. She does, and I make another pitcher. Great! At this pace I'll have my toy in my hands in no time! Right? Uh, nope.

Because it costs me $5 to make $5, my profit margin is zero. I can make and sell Kool Aid at that rate forever and I'll never get ahead. I may have a zillion happy customers, but I'll be working for nothing. No problem. I'll raise my price to 30 cents. Maybe fewer people will buy at that price, but at least I'll make a nickel a cup in profit. My total earnings will be $1 per pitcher, after expenses. I'm on my way to getting that toy now! Right? Uh, nope.

I get a bunch of my friends together and hire them all to run Kool Aid stands all over the neighborhood. Since I make a buck a day from my stand, twenty stands should make me $20 a day. Heck, I'll get my toy in less than a week now! Right? Uh, nope.

You see, I was working for free. My labor costs were zero. As sole owner of my corporation, I was taking the $1 profit out in the form of a dividend. You could also call it wages. My friends don't get anything in return from investing a day in their life selling Kool Aid for me. If they demand $1 a day in wages, my profit from each of their stands would be zero. Therefore, there's no point in expanding. It's not profitable. Besides, I might flood the market with Kool Aid, making it much harder to sell. The "Supply" of Kool Aid would now exceed the "Demand," to put that in business terms. I'll just have to work for 99 more weeks before I can buy my toy. Right? Uh, nope.

Let's say it takes me all day to sell one pitcher of Kool Aid. But, over the course of the day the ice melts and I have to waste the last five cups. I would have made $6 selling 20 cups at 30 cents each. But selling only 15 cups leaves me with only $4.50. Instead of making a dollar profit, I've lost 50 cents. The next day, I'll just raise my price to 50 cents a cup. That should do the trick. Right? Uh, nope.

When I get out there and open my stand the next day, people who used to buy my Kool Aid just keep walking. They glance over, see the new price, grumble something about "ripoff" and then walk across the street to a little girl who has just started selling Lemonade for 30 cents a cup! I've got to go back to the 30 cent price. I can't compete with that girl if I don't. I don't know how she does it, but she MUST be making a profit at that price. I just KNOW it! Right? Uh, nope.

I ask my dad for help. He says he'll go find out how my competitor is able to make a profit. In business we call this intelligence, market research, competitive analysis, maybe even espionage. My dad learns that my competitor's parents have been subsidizing her little business venture. They're "helping her learn business" by making her pay only HALF the cost of the materials and GIVING her the rest. Little do they know, they're not actually helping her. In the real world, nobody gives you anything for free. Well, unless you're a "green energy" company and the guy you supported became President and handed you some taxpayer money. But I digress. My dad won't help me, even though he could, because he doesn't think that would teach me how business really works. I hate him for it now, but I'll thank him later. But all I have to do is stick to the original plan, except to make sure I sell all 20 cups in every pitcher. I'll make my $1 profit every day, plus I'll come away from the experience with a more realistic view of how business really works. All is good. Right? Uh, nope.

At the rate of $1 per day profit, it will take 100 days to earn the money to buy that toy I want. Well before that happens, Winter will come and it'll be too cold to sell Kool Aid. The best I can hope for is that my parents will get me that toy I want for Christmas. Maybe if I bribe them with the $40 profit I made during the summer? Perhaps.

Now lets break this down from a purely business perspective:

The Kool Aid and sugar are my raw materials. They cost $5 per pitcher.

The $6 I get from selling each pitcher are my gross receipts.

Costs:

Materials = $5

Total operating costs = $5

Income:

Inventory = 20 cups of Kool Aid

Unit price = 30 cents

Total gross receipts = $6

Profit = Income minus Costs = $6 - $5 = $1

The profit is paid to the only shareholder, me, as a dividend.

Now imagine that the Kool Aid stand is Apple Computers. They make something called an iPhone and sell them for $500 each. Of course, they have a LOT more things going into the "Costs" side of the balance sheet. But, essentially, the principles are the same. This is hypothetical, because I don't have access to Apple's financial records, but:

Costs: 

Materials = $550,000,000

Research & Development = $35,000,000

Legal expenses = $10,000,000

Marketing = $50,000,000

Labor = $800,000,000

Shipping and Distribution = $250,000,000

Taxes and fees = $100,000,000

Total operating costs = $1,800,000,000

Income

Inventory = 5,000,000

Unit price = $500

Total gross receipts = $2,500,000,000.

Wow, Apple is rich! They make $2.5 BILLION dollars a year from this one product! Uh, nope.

Profit = Income minus Costs = $2.5B minus $1.8B = $700,000,000

Still, that's a LOT of money. If they had 70,000,000 shareholders, each one would get a $10 dividend for this one profitable product.

Again, I have absolutely no links to support these numbers. They're completely made up and probably WAY WAY off.  I wasn't trying to analyze Apple Computers. I set out to prove another point.

Let's say that Apple pays $800,000,000 to Chinese workers who each make about $2,000 a year. Let's say that American workers doing the same job would cost $30,000 a year to do the same job. That means that the American workers make about 15 times what the American workers make. Good for them, right? Uh, nope.

If Apple made those iPhones here, their labor would cost 15 times as much, or a whopping $12,000,000,000. That would raise their total operating costs to $13,000,000,000. If they kept the prices the same, they would lose money. In fact, that would turn a $700M profit into a $10.5B loss! In order for Apple to break even, making NO profit at all, they'd have to sell each iPhone for $2600. Just like my 50 cent Kool Aid, most people would just walk on by mumbling something about 'ripoff' as they passed without buying. That's the end of the story, right? If Apple didn't outsource their labor, there would be no iPhones at all, right? Uh, nope.

You see, some other company, either in America (think Google or Microsoft), or in some other country, WOULD make the iPhone, and they WOULD outsource, and they WOULD sell their equal quality phones for $500 each. Apple would no longer exist, but someone else would take their place.

What's the solution to this nightmare? Certainly American workers cannot feed their families on a $1500 a year wage! We certainly can't afford $2600 iPhones!

I think I know the solution, but I'll save that for the next post.  In the meantime, I hope somebody tries to dispute my math. Plug in the real numbers, if you can. See if you can show me where I'm wrong. I'm willing to learn! When you realize that I'm right, see if you can come up with some actual solutions to this problem. We'll see how close we come to the same conclusion.

The Abortion Solution

Some people didn't get that my last post (Green Government) was a parody. Actually, it was an attempt to demonstrate how anyone can lie with statistics using a logical fallacy. When you see a magician make a quarter disappear right before your very eyes, you have at least three choices. You might assume it was a trick and wonder how it was done. Or, you can believe the quarter actually disappeared. Or, you can be a magician yourself who knows how the trick is done and simply admire the magician's skill. Almost everyone who sees this trick for the first time believes, at first, that the quarter disappeared. What makes this trick so entertaining is that you don't know how the trick was done.

Your brain, which is forever trying to make sense of the world by filtering you senses through your memories and experiences, is momentarily confused. The magician used a technique called "misdirection" to distract you, basically tricking your brain to pay attention to the wrong thing.

People use the same trick in politics to convince you that something is true when it's not. Like the magician, these people are tricking you on purpose and they're often very skilled. If you're not extremely careful, you might think the quarter really did disappear. When watching a politician, or a magician for that matter, you should question everything you see or hear because it just might be a trick.

But I didn't intend to write about magicians or misdirection today. Today's post is serious. It's about abortion, a controversial issue that most people don't really understand.

Some of my friends tell me the issue has been settled by a Supreme Court case, Roe v Wade, which made abortion legal back in January 1973. The case wasn't even close, they tell me. It was 7-2 in favor of legal abortion.

Some of my friends tell me the court got it wrong. Abortion is the murder of an unborn human child. Since killing is more wrong than denying someone their right to privacy, abortion should be illegal.

Actually, Roe v Wade does suggest that some abortions are murder. The tipping point is something called viability, which is where the art of misdirection can be applied. At what point does mommy's egg and daddy's sperm turn into a human being who is CAPABLE of continued life outside of mommy's tummy?  (By the way, I defy the gay marriage supporters to prove that a baby can be made by anything other than one man and one woman. But that's another blog post, I guess.)

Most of my friends don't know this, but Jane Roe was a fake name, like John Doe. The real person involved was a redhead named Norma Leah McCorvey, and her life story is pretty tragic. She was born in 1947 in Louisiana and moved to Houston at a very early age and raised as a Jehovah's Witness. Her father took off when she was too young to know what was going on. Her mom, Mildred Nelson, was a violent drunk. But wait, it gets worse.

Norma dropped out of school when she was 14. Despite the fact that she was sexually attracted to other women, she married a guy named Woody McCorvey when she was 16. She got pregnant two years later and decided to split up with Woody. She gave birth to her daughter Melissa.

Apparently, she was still sexually active, maybe even with Woody, and got pregnant again. She gave birth to another daughter, Paige, and gave that child up for adoption. Then Norma moved back in with her mother. When Norma told her mother she was gay, Her mother disowned Norma and kicked her out of the house, taking custody of her granddaughter Melissa.

Norma went to live with her father and took some low paying jobs to support herself. Apparently, she wasn't as gay as she thought, since she managed to get pregnant a third time in 1969. Unemployed and depressed, her friends advised her to move to Dallas and claim she was raped. Under Texas law at the time, you could get a legal abortion if you got pregnant after being raped. There was just one little problem with Norma's plan. She couldn't prove she was raped. There was no police documentation or evidence, so her appeal for an abortion was denied.

She tried to get an illegal abortion, but the clinics she'd planned to use were shut down by the authorities. She ended up being referred to a couple of lawyers named Linda Coffee and Sarah Weddington. According to Norma, these were activist lawyers who were searching for a case they could use to overturn the anti-abortion laws. It took three years, but they finally managed to get the case up to the Federal Supreme Court where they prevailed by a 7-2 decision. During the proceedings, Norma gave birth to her third daughter, Mariah, who was also given up for adoption.

Many of my friends see Norma (who they call Roe) as the Rosa Parks of the pro-choice movement. Actually, the story is much more complicated than they think. Norma was confronted by a pro-life activist minister named Philip "Flip" Benham. It made her think about what she'd done, and it made her confused and depressed.

She stayed in Dallas living with Connie Gonzales for many years. She became a pro-life activist. She fell into deep depression and ended up abusing drugs and even trying to commit suicide. At one point, Jesus took the wheel and Norma's life got turned around. Norma ended up getting baptized in a swimming pool on television.

Norma published her autobiography, I Am Roe, in 1994. She published her second book called Won By Love in 1998. She was received into the Catholic church. She announced that she was no longer a lesbian.

Did you know any of this? You should read her books! Not shocked enough yet? Let me continue.

In 2005, Norma asked the Supreme Court to review Roe v Wade in a case called McCorvey v Hill. She wanted to present new evidence to prove that abortion harms women. Her petition was denied.

Norma has now endorsed Republican Ron Paul in his race to become president in 2012, saying, "I support Ron Paul for President because we share the same goal, that of overturning Roe v Wade. He has never wavered on the issue of being pro-life and has a voting record to prove it. He understands the importance of civil liberties for all, including the unborn."

Norma participated in a pro-life demonstration at the University of Notre Dame on May 17, 2009 before President Barack Obama was scheduled to deliver a commencement address to the graduating class. His invitation to speak at this Catholic school raised a lot of controversy, given his pro-abortion stance.

Norma got arrested on the first day of confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor after she joined another protester who was yelling at Senator Al Franken during his opening address.

You'll even get a chance to see Norma in a movie called Doonby that is scheduled for release this month. It's been called It's A Wonderful Life without the Wonderful part. I intend to see it.

When I explain all this to my pro-choice friends, many of them are shocked to learn that Roe never actually had an abortion. I'm always surprised by the number of people I meet who don't know the story behind Roe v Wade.

But I wanted to talk about viability. That, I believe, is the key ingredient in the controversy. The exact date when a fertilized egg turns into a person cannot be determined. The fact is, this is different for every fertilized egg. Based on observations and such, it was determined that a baby becomes viable an AVERAGE of seven months into the pregnancy.

But this is just an average. A baby has a 50% chance of survival, on average, after only 24 weeks.

My pro-life friends tell me that this doesn't matter. Only God can make a baby, and it is a living thing right from the start. Science has done some amazing things. We can fertilize an egg in a test tube, but it has to be planted back inside a mom in order to grow into a baby. We cannot create a human being from just an egg and a sperm, at least not yet.

So the question becomes, is it murder to kill ANY living thing, or only a human being?

Personally, I'm in favor of abortion, provided the unborn child waives his or her right to live. Seriously, since you can't know for sure when viability occurs, any abortion can result in the death of a viable human being. That would be murder, and that would be illegal despite Roe v Wade. If you know with absolute certainty that the fertilized egg has not become a viable human being yet, then abortion would simply be the termination of a non-human life, albeit a life that most likely would have become a viable human being at some point if not aborted.

You can't have it both ways, by the way. When someone murders a woman who is found to be pregnant, her attacker is usually charged with two murders, one for the mother and one for her unborn child. If killing her resulted in the death of two human beings, and these cases have been won and have, therefore, set precedents, then ANY fertilized egg must be considered viable. Again, since we don't know for sure when viability occurs, we are left to assume that this particular mother, this victim of a horrible crime, would not have aborted her child and would, therefore, have given birth to a brand new human being. The murder did take two lives. One was certainly a human being, while the other may have been, but almost certainly would have been. Still with me?

I'm easily surprised these days, I guess. But I'm still amazed at the number of people who think Roe v Wade was all about preventing kids from being raised by parents who can't take care of them. It had nothing to do with that, even though from what you now know about Norma, her baby would probably have been in that category, at least for awhile. In fact, Norma admits it. Norma now has a good relationship with her daughter Melissa, who has blessed her with two granddaughters.

Norma McCorvey

I hope Norma, her daughters Melissa, Paige, and Mariah, and all their children, get together one day in  Heaven. I'm sure they'll have a lot to talk about, and an eternity to do it.

References:

Robin Acton - Pittsburgh Tribune-Review 01-20-2008

Cornell University Syllabus - Roe v Wade Supreme Court Case

Roe v Wade - Wikipedia Article

Norma L. McCorvey Wikipedia Article

Flip Benham Wikipedia Article

Operation Save America Wikipedia Article

Operation Save America Published Statement

Purchase I Am Roe by Norma McCorvey on Amazon.com

Purchase Won By Love by Norma McCorvey on Amazon.com

Green Government

There's no argument that mankind emits carbon dioxide and other gasses into the Earth's atmosphere, nor that these emissions have been increasing over time. The contentious debate has been about the cause of these increases, as well as the consequences if they are not controlled. It's also been assumed that the only way to control these emissions is through government intervention. To put it bluntly, government must identify the sources of these emissions, then force those responsible, through legislation and regulation, to monitor, report, and reduce their carbon output. Simply charging offsets to encourage carbon limits will not work. These offsets simply raise the cost of production, and those increases are eventually passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices for goods and services. The amount of carbon being emitted into the atmosphere, meanwhile, continues to increase.

Current theory suggests that increased industrialization correlates directly with the increase in carbon in the atmosphere, and therefore must be the direct cause. Opponents argue that changes in the atmosphere and global climate are cyclical and have been constantly changing over time. If there is indeed a cause and effect correlation, one could argue that there's another factor to consider: The expansion of government also directly correlates with these changes in the Earth's atmosphere.

As government has grown larger, the amount of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere has increased in direct proportion.

Nobody can argue that government hasn't been getting larger. Over just the past few years we've witnessed explosive growth in the Federal government in the United States. This expansion of central government may be responsible for the ultimate destruction of the planet!

Since we know a correlation exists, and we can't prove there's not a direct cause and effect linkage, we must act now to radically reduce the size of central government, not only in the United States, but all over the world. America should make the first move, setting an example for other nations to follow. If we cut the size of the Federal government in half, we may be able to turn things around before the Earth becomes an uninhabitable planet like our nearest planetary neighbor, Venus.

The reduction of government will not be easy. We've created many entitlement programs that lots of citizens have come to depend on over the years. Able-bodied people will have to return to work. We will, of course, take care of those who cannot work. But, instead of relying on a large central government to protect them, we will have to move this responsibility to our local communities. Neighbor helping neighbor, friends helping friends, and family helping family, will take the place of the dangerous central government and, ultimately, bring down the levels of greenhouse gasses that threaten us all.

One thing is certain, we have no time to lose. The time to act is now. Let's reduce the size of government immediately, before it's too late. Every creature on Earth depends on us.

In The Beginning

Never before have I been this interested in politics. My interest has grown geometrically like Al Gore's infamous Hockey Stick graph. Since time is finite and constant, this has naturally impacted my productivity in a negative way. But I have children. They mean a lot to me. It's my duty, I believe, to do whatever I can to make sure they have at least the same opportunities I've had to succeed. These opportunities did not just happen. Unlike Al Gore's ManBearPig, they really are man-made. They were purchased with blood, sweat and tears (not the musical group) over two hundred years ago.

America didn't have a normal delivery. It was more like an emergency caesarean section that didn't go well, but ended up breathing life into a healthy baby country. Despite British attempts to perform an abortion on the new nation, our forefathers bravely fought until victory was assured and independence was certain.

After they fought, they thought. You might say they Blogged. They knew what they didn't want their new country to become. It would not resemble any other place on Earth at that time, or at any time in man's history. It would be a place where people could live free; assemble and express opinions freely; share thoughts on paper freely; own land; make their own rules; and, in short, protect each citizen's rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Before my seventh birthday, I lived in the 1950's. This was a very interesting time to be alive in America. It was a time of great pride because we had recently defeated not one but two evil dictators who were hell-bent on world domination. Our enemies were on opposite sides of the planet physically, and on the opposite side of liberty and freedom, philosophically. The war was difficult, but America met the challenge. We were the heroes of the world who had come to rescue peace-loving people from tyranny and persecution. They saw what America was able to accomplish and stood in awe of it's might. That made every American very proud, and as a result, they worked hard to push our country to new heights. They built roads and bridges. They expanded railroads and ship yards. They pushed skyscrapers  ever higher until the man-made mountains of our largest cities could be seen miles away, while their impact was felt around the world. Oh, and people were so happy and proud, they had plenty of time to produce babies. So many babies, in fact, that the population surge they created was given a name: Baby Boomers. I was one of them.

During my school years I watched things change. In the 1960's, the doo-wop music on my little transistor radio turned into something else. They called it the British Invasion. We'd had one of those a couple of hundred years before and it was nasty, even though it ended pretty well. But this one was much more fun. It was led by an army of clean cut kids with bad teeth and haircuts that looked like mops. They spoke with an accent that intellectuals to this day automatically associate with intellect. Did you ever notice how people who try to sound intelligent take on a British accent? The music was still the same, but different. Mostly it was about love. Love desired; love acquired; love abandoned; love unrequited. But one thing I noticed was that these invaders didn't share my feelings about America. Instead of being the proud policemen who sailed across the Atlantic to help beat back the Nazi devils, they were the victims who we saved. Most people didn't even remember how just a century and a half earlier, these folks were the ones we were trying to escape.

Folk music crept into popular music and changed the soundtrack of my life. We'd gotten ourselves in trouble as the policemen of the world trying to beat back more evil dictators in a distant land called Vietnam. The place was full of cities we couldn't pronounce and a culture that was completely alien to ours. This wasn't like the big war. It wasn't even like Korea, which was basically an echo of the big war fought with leftover equipment and soldiers. This new war didn't pull our country together like the big one did. It left many people wondering why were there at all. Folk music evolved into protest music and, when embraced by young minds full of mush, like me, it helped divide the country.

The division was sold to us as peace-loving youth versus an older generation of war lovers. Never trust anyone over thirty. But the culture it created wasn't all that peaceful. There were violent protests, and they escalated until four college kids lay dead on the campus grounds in a place near my home called Kent. The war was quickly shut down and we moved along like nothing ever happened. But something did happen. Radicals were born, and those radicals studied the radicals who came before them and became the evil dictators of countries we never wanted to emulate. I didn't know it at the time, but America had been infected by people with an agenda. There were Progressives among us. Joseph McCarthy called them out, but he was quickly squelched. Those intent on taking America in a different direction had already gained enough power to wrestle enough control to keep themselves alive.

The distant war was over, but the fighting never stopped. It just moved into America. It was a stealth war fought with the very freedom of speech we took for granted. As I started my adult life in the 1970's, politics became more real for me. I had an opportunity to vote, but I took that about as seriously as I did my homework in school. Not much. I remember going in to vote not knowing anything at all about the names on the ballot. I'd just pick the names that sounded most "American" to me. By the laws of probability, I'm sure I got it wrong half the time.

As the 1980's passed, I watched America move back toward those good old days of the 1950's, at least a little bit. We'd just tossed out a President who seemed to embrace the Progressive ideas that were still bubbling under the collective consciousness of most Americans. We knew something was wrong because gasoline started to cost a lot more money, and short supplies meant standing in long lines at the pump, sometimes not being able to fill up. That didn't sit well with folks like me who were used to racing their hot rods in the streets at night. Something was wrong, and we all knew we needed a "good" man to get it fixed. Along came Ronald Reagan. A good man.  He may have been the first guy I ever voted for on purpose. I liked what he had to say as much as I liked the way he said it. My friends didn't agree with me. We were starting to go in different directions. I like to think I was getting more mature, while most of them slid into a plateau and stopped growing up.

I started a business in the 1980's, mostly by accident, and watched it set down roots and blossom into something bigger than I'd ever expected. Maybe it was just coincidence, but I still credit some of my success to the big man in the white house. Ronald Reagan, I believe, kept big government away so I could get on with the business of growing a business. He gave me back some of my hard-earned pay so I could expand and hire more people. Instead of just feeding my family, which had just expanded to three people, I was now able to feed multiple families. It was an exciting time and I never wanted it to end.

I wasn't happy to see Bill Clinton become President in the 1990's, but I didn't think of it as a tragedy. I trusted our system of government to keep the Federal government arms length away from me and my business. But when his wife started conducting secret meetings right away with the intent to suck the health care industry into a bigger central government, I got more concerned. Hillary made me pay closer attention to politics. I thought Bill was just a big dumb hick lawyer who was having some fun at the taxpayers expense. Turns out, I was right. I watched very closely when his sexual indiscretions started to come to light. I had a good feeling about what was going on. It was entertaining to watch on the then-new 24/7 news channels. The President I didn't like very much was going down. All the while, I came to admire Newt Gingrich and his Contract for America. When I hear people talk about Clinton being impeached for having sexual relations with that woman, Monica Lewinsky, I always try to correct them. He was impeached for lying under oath. That's a thing a lawyer knows all about, and certainly not something you want your President doing. But, here it is more than a decade later and lots of people still get this point wrong. That has to be a red warning flag of some kind, don't you think?

When my kids started going to school, I was fortunate enough to be able to send them to private school. I watched as public schools went from the healthy learning environments I wasted my time attending to indoctrination centers run by those Progressives who were now growing stronger. The infection was spreading. I started to wonder how we were ever going to cure it. I assumed America would heal itself. I still had faith in the Constitution. It would see us through. The invaders, I thought, might always be around as a chronic low-level infection, but I didn't see the disease being terminal.

The new century brought with it some real crazy stuff. I watched the towers fall in New York City in real time on my television. People I knew, who I had met while working in that great city, died in that building. New York was my city, at least for several months back in the 1980's when I helped launch a new radio station there. I worked in the Monkey Building (Empire State), up on the 86th floor above the first observation level. I sat in the open window eating lunch sometimes, gazing in awe at the carpet of humanity below and the vast array of skyscrapers all around. New York City made me proud. If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere. That's true. That song doesn't lie. I'm here to tell you.  But someone had just attacked my adopted city, and in doing so, they wounded me as well. I would never be the same after that. I started to take politics even more seriously.

When Barack Obama got elected, I felt at first a little proud that America had finally sent petty racial discrimination to the graveyard. We elected a guy who wasn't white. That was historic. But, I was also very concerned. In our haste to make a change of any kind, we also elected a guy who didn't seem to have the experience needed to do the job, or at least do it well. When I found out that Mr. Obama had also been a devout Progressive, I really began to take politics seriously. In fact, it threw me into panic mode. I remember hearing the election results while sitting on an airplane somewhere over Germany. I turned to my friend and told him I wasn't happy about the news. I think I was the only person on that airplane who felt that way. But I'm sure they all know what I meant now. He's demonstrated that my worst fears had been underestimated. Things were actually worse than I thought. My country was being fundamentally transformed by a Progressive. The disease had taken hold of the body. The condition was upgraded to critical. It's time for me to learn enough political medicine to see if I can help save my country, just as my dad helped save Europe and Asia in the 1940's. This is war, and like the big one, the impact will be felt all over the world. We must prevail. Never give up. The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. Well, that's almost the only thing.

I've started this blog to think out loud about how we can stamp out the infection. I fully expect opposition as well as support. Feel free to leave your comments. If you are obnoxious, rude, vulgar, or stupid, that's ok. You won't make ME look bad if you do that. But you'll tell us all we need to know about YOU. If you'd prefer a healthy debate, I'm up for the challenge. Give it a go. Let's see if we can wiggle our way out of this mess and get back to the Leave It To Beaver days when government was smaller and life was a whole lot bigger and better.