It is getting difficult for me to talk with conservatives lately. Many, probably most, of my friends are fiscal conservatives. When I give them my current assessment of the situation in the US I have tobe careful in the way that I explain my views.
The great debate started either in 1913, with the introduction of the federal income tax, or in 1932 when FDR was elected as president. The debate has been, to use an old analogy, between the "people who are pulling the wagon and the people who are riding in the wagon." Reagan used to always warn that there was an urgency to getting the government under control. There were the arguments in the 1950s against "creeping socialism." There were warnings since the 1960s that entitlement programs were growing too fast. Now its too late. The wagon has already plunged off a cliff and it matters only to historians who was pulling the wagon and who was riding in the wagon.
Fiscal conservatism is dead. Even if we added zero new spending to the federal budget, our obligations are too much to be paid by the federal income tax. The reason is not the national debt, the reason is the interest on the national debt. Taxes cannot be used for a national health care program, for example, because all of our income tax revenues will be needed to pay for the inevitable expansion of social security, the growth of costs in medicare/medicaid and interest on the national debt. The people riding in the wagon have already destroyed us. It is too late to "halt the growth of government." By the end of 2009 I predict that the federal debt will be about $13 trillion. The projected growth in SS/MC/MC will mushroom that debt to $40 trillion by 2022. We are going to be paying about $500 billion in interest on the debt by 2010. By 2025 we could be paying $2 trillionin interest on the debt every year. This is assuming that there will be no new programs like national health care. The middle class will be slaves to the interest on the debt. There will be no wagon pullers. All the wagon pullers will be paying interest on the debt.
Can Congress pass a law enabling national health care? Oh, sure. They might even pay for it for a year or two by issuing government bonds (taking on more debt). Here is the problem, though; someone has to buy the bonds. People who buy bonds know how to do math too. At some point, very soon, potential bond buyers are going to realize that the US will not be able to pay interest on the bonds and will never pay off the debt or even get the debt under control. People and governments who buy bonds are not idiots. Not only are the buyers going to dry up, the current bond holders, including the government of China, are going to start getting nervous and selling bonds. Then what we we do?
I think the die was cast on this when GHW Bush was president. The die was cast about 1991. Clinton actually staved off doom by having budget surpluses, largely due to Newt Gingrich taking over Congress -not because Clinton was smart. But then GW Bush has more than made up for any gains in the 1990s by adding $5 trillion to the national debt since 2001, first with all the GOP earmarks and now with the bailouts.
You can have whatever opinion you want about how cool national healthcare would be, but there is no way to do the math.
There is only one way out of doom. Since it is too late to stop government growth, the only hope is that the government somehow findthe money or the platinum. The government can prevent doom if it can find about 250 million tons of platinum. Shrinking the government is pointless, we need to let government be big enough that it has thewherewithall to find, mine and bring back 250 million tons of platinum.
Its simple. They either find the money/platinum or we attack them with torches, pitch forks and molotov cocktails. They could also find themoney by becoming the world's energy supplier using space based solar power. Or they could do both. Who cares? The point is that they either get the money or prepare themselves mentally for the gallows. They will wish they had listened to fiscal conservatives over the last few decades, but that time is past.
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
Saturday, January 3, 2009
SLF Position on Secession
There are about 5000 cultural, ethnic, racial and linguistic groups in the world. There are only 189 nations. Many communities and regions would secede from their assigned nation states if given the choice. Many of these sub-groups have secessionist movements (by one name or another) and they have millions of adherents. Besides cultural/ethnic/racial movements; there are also secessionist groups based on ideas. Libertarians, survivalists, communalists, radical pacifists, devolutionists, anarchists, futurists and religious groups that are geographically concentrated may wish they could secede. These groups tend to have a commitment to liberty and believe that they should be able to enjoy self determination.
Why do you belong to a nation state? Were you born into it? Were you forced to join it? Did you voluntarily select it? Your relationship to the nation state is slave-master. If you were born into it then you were born a slave. If you were forced to join then you are a captured slave. It is impossible to enter into an agreement to become a slave, so joining a nation state (without secession rights) is invalid. All nations are oppressive, by definition, if they do not recognize secession as a human right.
The modern nation state has existed for about 500 years. What has been the result? Are we not on a course that will inevitably lead to intentional or accidental nuclear war? Are we not in a situation where nation states are used to benefit certain elites at the expense of the common people? Merely having a few democratic institutions and regular elections does not prevent rule by elites.
Social Libertarian Frontierism has an inherent flaw. It is designed to fix one particular nation state – the United States. Currently, the United States government is in deep trouble. There is a huge national debt. There are entitlement program obligations that will be impossible to fulfill because the growth of the economy is not matching the growth of the program costs. Even without any additional discretionary spending, entitlements and interest on the debt could sink the US government. Yet the government views itself as an expanding entity that can grow forever; using the income tax, capital gains tax, and corporate taxes as the fuel of the expansion. It is truly insane. All government will accomplish is the slow strangulation of the private sector. The good news is that government’s successful effort to doom itself is a de facto protection of individual rights. In simple terms, the government will lack the discretionary funds necessary to take away liberty. Social Libertarian Frontierism shows government how to gain the funds to right the ship of state, so we are inadvertently giving them the resources to enslave us. Additionally, SLF allows limited socialism (albeit in a regulated form, under control of the Socio-Economic Supreme Court). Certain activities will be government owned and government controlled, which is socialist. The socialist aspects of SLF are necessary to enable the national treasury to capture profits and replenish national public wealth. Another problem is that SLF will create segmented pockets of socialist behavior, socialist thought and a socialist management structure which hopefully will confine itself to frontierist projects. These are risks of SLF and the widened risk requires additional checks and balances.
The three major checks against tyranny follow. Note that the Constitution is not included, because determined tyrants could bypass the Constitution much like current politicians do when it suits their beliefs:
Voting. Voting can be an important check, but only if the real will of the people is represented by the majority of voters and people are not being massively manipulated by false advertising, a biased media and an elite that can spend more on media than other constituents. Without campaign finance reform, voting is a very weak check on tyranny. The two party system undermines the effectiveness of voting as a check on government. SLF requires actions to enhance the degree to which voting can protect our liberty while also adding demands for better outcomes of government activity. This may include campaign spending limits and public financing.
Guns. Each and every home in the United States should be heavily armed. This is a key guarantee of liberty. The government must fear the people. The government must realize that there are strict limits on the use of police power. The second amendment should be reformed to guarantee that the citizen is free to arm himself or herself to the same degree that an infantry soldier is armed. Automatic weapons should be legal. Grenades should be legal. Maybe there should be restrictions or a line drawn with weapons capable of shooting down commercial passenger aircraft, but citizens must have the weapons to resist oppression and should not be technologically disadvantaged.
Secession. Remember, SLF will dramatically strengthen the US as a nation state. We must ensure that this nation state does not tend toward tyranny and the ultimate check against tyranny is the legal right to orderly, non-violent secession. A secession right will create tremendous pressure to be placed on the nation state and force the nation state to treat citizens as customers. If customers are displeased then they will shop at other stores or open their own stores. Secession should probably be made slightly difficult to prevent the secession option from being used in the heat of the moment over a single dispute. Perhaps a supermajority should be required. Certainly, the correct mechanism for secession is the referendum and the referendum should pass with 67%, lets say.
Why do you belong to a nation state? Were you born into it? Were you forced to join it? Did you voluntarily select it? Your relationship to the nation state is slave-master. If you were born into it then you were born a slave. If you were forced to join then you are a captured slave. It is impossible to enter into an agreement to become a slave, so joining a nation state (without secession rights) is invalid. All nations are oppressive, by definition, if they do not recognize secession as a human right.
The modern nation state has existed for about 500 years. What has been the result? Are we not on a course that will inevitably lead to intentional or accidental nuclear war? Are we not in a situation where nation states are used to benefit certain elites at the expense of the common people? Merely having a few democratic institutions and regular elections does not prevent rule by elites.
Social Libertarian Frontierism has an inherent flaw. It is designed to fix one particular nation state – the United States. Currently, the United States government is in deep trouble. There is a huge national debt. There are entitlement program obligations that will be impossible to fulfill because the growth of the economy is not matching the growth of the program costs. Even without any additional discretionary spending, entitlements and interest on the debt could sink the US government. Yet the government views itself as an expanding entity that can grow forever; using the income tax, capital gains tax, and corporate taxes as the fuel of the expansion. It is truly insane. All government will accomplish is the slow strangulation of the private sector. The good news is that government’s successful effort to doom itself is a de facto protection of individual rights. In simple terms, the government will lack the discretionary funds necessary to take away liberty. Social Libertarian Frontierism shows government how to gain the funds to right the ship of state, so we are inadvertently giving them the resources to enslave us. Additionally, SLF allows limited socialism (albeit in a regulated form, under control of the Socio-Economic Supreme Court). Certain activities will be government owned and government controlled, which is socialist. The socialist aspects of SLF are necessary to enable the national treasury to capture profits and replenish national public wealth. Another problem is that SLF will create segmented pockets of socialist behavior, socialist thought and a socialist management structure which hopefully will confine itself to frontierist projects. These are risks of SLF and the widened risk requires additional checks and balances.
The three major checks against tyranny follow. Note that the Constitution is not included, because determined tyrants could bypass the Constitution much like current politicians do when it suits their beliefs:
Voting. Voting can be an important check, but only if the real will of the people is represented by the majority of voters and people are not being massively manipulated by false advertising, a biased media and an elite that can spend more on media than other constituents. Without campaign finance reform, voting is a very weak check on tyranny. The two party system undermines the effectiveness of voting as a check on government. SLF requires actions to enhance the degree to which voting can protect our liberty while also adding demands for better outcomes of government activity. This may include campaign spending limits and public financing.
Guns. Each and every home in the United States should be heavily armed. This is a key guarantee of liberty. The government must fear the people. The government must realize that there are strict limits on the use of police power. The second amendment should be reformed to guarantee that the citizen is free to arm himself or herself to the same degree that an infantry soldier is armed. Automatic weapons should be legal. Grenades should be legal. Maybe there should be restrictions or a line drawn with weapons capable of shooting down commercial passenger aircraft, but citizens must have the weapons to resist oppression and should not be technologically disadvantaged.
Secession. Remember, SLF will dramatically strengthen the US as a nation state. We must ensure that this nation state does not tend toward tyranny and the ultimate check against tyranny is the legal right to orderly, non-violent secession. A secession right will create tremendous pressure to be placed on the nation state and force the nation state to treat citizens as customers. If customers are displeased then they will shop at other stores or open their own stores. Secession should probably be made slightly difficult to prevent the secession option from being used in the heat of the moment over a single dispute. Perhaps a supermajority should be required. Certainly, the correct mechanism for secession is the referendum and the referendum should pass with 67%, lets say.
Friday, January 2, 2009
Space Based Solar Power
Find a need and fill it. This is what the federal government should be doing to replenish the national treasury. Well, the world needs clean, renewable energy.
The straightforward concept is to place solar panels in space and beam down the energy from space. The most likely way of beaming the energy back down is by using microwave technology. Another possibility is laser beaming. One small solar power generator could transmit one gigawatt of energy to Earth, which is about the output of a single nuclear power plant, but it is scalable! Simply build more generators/panels or build larger generators/panels until energy needs are met.
In space, solar irradiance is about eight times stronger than on Earth. Solar energy, in space, can be collected 24/7 since there is no night, and weather is not a problem because there is no weather. 1.3 Gigawatts of energy travel through every square kilometer of space around earth. There would be no pollution generated by the system. There would be no waste. It would be safe. The receptors would be out in the Gulf of Mexico, but even if people were accidentally exposed to microwaves it would not be more damaging than exposure to a microwave oven in your home kitchen. What if SBSP technology falls into the hands of terrorists? This is a major concern with nuclear power. If SBSP ever falls into the hands of terrorists then terrorists will be able to power toaster ovens, refrigerators and electric cars. Proliferation is not an issue. The physics and engineering know how are already in place.
SBSP can result in an exportable product. Either energy can be directly exported from the power grid or it can be exported as hydrogen. Screw Saudi Arabia, why not make the United States be the largest exporter of energy. There is no good reason why this is not underway. There are a couple of bad reasons. First, we have a useless bunch of punks in government. The Department of Energy and NASA have been passing management responsibility to NASA and NASA has been pushing it back to the Department of Energy. This is one of the greatest opportunities in human history and we have government agencies are basically saying, “This is hard, you do it.” Well, this is what citizens should say to NASA and DOE: “You are relieved of all management responsibility. In terms of the SBSP project you are underlings of the Department of Defense.”
This is fundamentally a defense project anyway. Energy security is extremely important and potentially a killer for our civilization. Our war making capability depends on energy. Fossil fuels threaten the planet and, therefore, threaten our defense. Our ability to grow our economy and afford national defense and homeland security depends on energy availability. With Space Based Solar Power the military would have the option of bypassing supply lines and beaming the energy directly to the conflict theater. This is a Department of Defense project and DOD should tell NASA and DOE exactly when to jump and how high.
The second bad reason that SBSP is not underway already is that we need better and cheaper space faring. Frontierism requires that space vehicles be constructed on assembly lines using the skills and even the facilities of the auto and heavy equipment industries. We cannot be content to build one vehicle at a time. This is another justification for making this a DOD function. DOD needs to be heavily involved in the construction of space vehicles in any case, for national security reasons, so why not just put them in charge of design and development?
Because the biggest obstacle to SBSP is the cost of access to space, there will be temptations to make deals with the private sector to gain funding. While this would reduce the initial costs of the project, this would make it useless as a Social Libertarian Frontierism. The end is not the development of SBSP, the end is the use of SBSP as a profit center to eliminate the national debt and help in the elimination of the income tax and the capital gains tax. Shared risk means shared profits. The objection that this might be done more efficiently by the private sector is offset by the government need for wealth and by the fact that any private involvement would essentially be making the profits international. Legally, there could not be a provision that prevents foreign ownership of stock in private sector entities. International involvement decreases the security advantages of SBSP such as the economic and battlefield advantages. This argument also holds with cooperation with other governments on this project. SBSP should be a socialist project. The means of production and the control of the project need to be public.
The straightforward concept is to place solar panels in space and beam down the energy from space. The most likely way of beaming the energy back down is by using microwave technology. Another possibility is laser beaming. One small solar power generator could transmit one gigawatt of energy to Earth, which is about the output of a single nuclear power plant, but it is scalable! Simply build more generators/panels or build larger generators/panels until energy needs are met.
In space, solar irradiance is about eight times stronger than on Earth. Solar energy, in space, can be collected 24/7 since there is no night, and weather is not a problem because there is no weather. 1.3 Gigawatts of energy travel through every square kilometer of space around earth. There would be no pollution generated by the system. There would be no waste. It would be safe. The receptors would be out in the Gulf of Mexico, but even if people were accidentally exposed to microwaves it would not be more damaging than exposure to a microwave oven in your home kitchen. What if SBSP technology falls into the hands of terrorists? This is a major concern with nuclear power. If SBSP ever falls into the hands of terrorists then terrorists will be able to power toaster ovens, refrigerators and electric cars. Proliferation is not an issue. The physics and engineering know how are already in place.
SBSP can result in an exportable product. Either energy can be directly exported from the power grid or it can be exported as hydrogen. Screw Saudi Arabia, why not make the United States be the largest exporter of energy. There is no good reason why this is not underway. There are a couple of bad reasons. First, we have a useless bunch of punks in government. The Department of Energy and NASA have been passing management responsibility to NASA and NASA has been pushing it back to the Department of Energy. This is one of the greatest opportunities in human history and we have government agencies are basically saying, “This is hard, you do it.” Well, this is what citizens should say to NASA and DOE: “You are relieved of all management responsibility. In terms of the SBSP project you are underlings of the Department of Defense.”
This is fundamentally a defense project anyway. Energy security is extremely important and potentially a killer for our civilization. Our war making capability depends on energy. Fossil fuels threaten the planet and, therefore, threaten our defense. Our ability to grow our economy and afford national defense and homeland security depends on energy availability. With Space Based Solar Power the military would have the option of bypassing supply lines and beaming the energy directly to the conflict theater. This is a Department of Defense project and DOD should tell NASA and DOE exactly when to jump and how high.
The second bad reason that SBSP is not underway already is that we need better and cheaper space faring. Frontierism requires that space vehicles be constructed on assembly lines using the skills and even the facilities of the auto and heavy equipment industries. We cannot be content to build one vehicle at a time. This is another justification for making this a DOD function. DOD needs to be heavily involved in the construction of space vehicles in any case, for national security reasons, so why not just put them in charge of design and development?
Because the biggest obstacle to SBSP is the cost of access to space, there will be temptations to make deals with the private sector to gain funding. While this would reduce the initial costs of the project, this would make it useless as a Social Libertarian Frontierism. The end is not the development of SBSP, the end is the use of SBSP as a profit center to eliminate the national debt and help in the elimination of the income tax and the capital gains tax. Shared risk means shared profits. The objection that this might be done more efficiently by the private sector is offset by the government need for wealth and by the fact that any private involvement would essentially be making the profits international. Legally, there could not be a provision that prevents foreign ownership of stock in private sector entities. International involvement decreases the security advantages of SBSP such as the economic and battlefield advantages. This argument also holds with cooperation with other governments on this project. SBSP should be a socialist project. The means of production and the control of the project need to be public.
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