The Wonder Springs Chronicle

Structured For Failure

8 September 2010

Volume 12, Issue 35

Access now the “The Wonder Springs Chronicle” Front Page. Be sure to check out the grizzly times wisdom and fresh insights of Brute’ Griz every Friday here at The Wonder Springs Chronicle and every Wednesday at Deep Woods Moola and Redux Rendezvous.

To make a donation to the Wonder Springs community please do so at the address below, or follow the donation links on the website.

>>PDF copy

>>Print copy

To do his thing on Labor Day, Barrack Obama got on Air Force One and took a little trip to Wisconsin to roll out a new central planning jobs bill. The $50 billion proposal, over 6 years, is being touted as an opportunity to build and rebuild American infrastructure. Charles Krauthammer mentioned the audacity of the program, because those old fashioned communists, never proposed anything beyond a 5-year plan. The real problem with the plan is that it is really just a deferred maintenance bill that brings things back to some working status, which we have been too cheap to fix for decades.

That really brings us to a couple of deeper questions. If we haven’t maintained this infrastructure, as we should, do we really need it? Are we just spending money we don’t have, on something we should be doing different in the future?

However this proposal seems rather foolish, to think that even if the bill is frontloaded to over $10 billion the first year, this will be much more than chump change in a $14 trillion economy. It looks more and more like our current form of Federalism is structured for failure. Trickle down, whether it comes from the government or through a corporate structure — doesn’t. This is especially true in the government sector when deficits are used to fund Eisenhower’s Reagan-Bush neocon military industrial complex, or the liberal agenda of social justice through wealth redistribution; primarily focused on big unions at the expense of everyone else.

What is the American vision? Seriously, What is the vision to take the United States of America into the twenty-second century?

It seems rather obvious that buying stuff, we don’t need, with money we don’t have, until we can retire to ease and cease to do anything in anyway productive, is nothing more than a structure for failure, the chaos of destruction, the reality of the sin-cosmos.

Where do we begin, or should we just start over?

We have learned through Glenn Beck, that the intellectual design behind the Obama presidency is really Saul Alinsky coupled to Cloward and Piven. That program is to essentially create enough chaos to collapse the system and then install a model which is essentially Marxist. The problem with that is that this is just an irrational pipe dream from people who have never run anything, just talked about it. We are rapidly “slouching toward Gomorrah,” accelerating the inevitable is not rocket science; it just points to the lunacy of the whole concept.

In Monday’s “What they won’t teach you in Cult Football,” we learned that what is really happening is that Divine Providence is creating the environment in which the redux of society will take place. Beck’s discussion after the “Recovering Honor” rally on 8-28 tried to make this into the third religious Great Awakening in American history. We will deal with the Great Awakenings in a future Cult Football article, but for now we should not get too concerned about the imperatives, until the indicatives have been defined. Those indicatives rest in natural law, which everyone likes to talk about, but no one wants to learn.

The first reality of Divine Providence is that you move from American prosperous comfort, into a wilderness of a pilgrimage, and you might not have to even move physically. That is the wonder of the grace of God. Because by the nature of wilderness pilgrimages, we have moved beyond our knowledge, wisdom, and comfort zones. The old has passed away and the future is in the process of becoming. The Biblical concept of God’s blessings being new every morning becomes the reality of life. This context is found in Lamentations Chapter 3.

Now let us look briefly at things that we take for granted, that in current forms might not provide the organization infrastructure required to move us into, or forward into this providential worldview.

The focus of pretty much all currently defined liberal, elitist, or progressivism angst somehow always projects intellectual distain through a spectrum, climaxing in overt hate of capitalism. This is generally dismissed as just the rants of a bunch of liberal do-gooders who want to control corporate profits to fund their egalitarian utopian pipe dreams.

Some of the more serious critiques of the world’s only true wealth production system is that the corporation is immoral and only wants and is designed to make money, hence it must evolve into a much more benevolent organization that essentially seeks not only profits but some sort of social justice to help the poor and oppressed.

But if we step back a we bit, just as with all of society, capitalism really didn’t begin as this uncontrollable monster of greed and corruption. Just as with our loss of individual freedom and liberty, through the growth of government, so too did our corporations evolve into greedy fat cats. What that really means is we can’t fix one without looking at and fixing the other.

The first step in that understanding is that corporations were first created similar to today’s limited liability companies, to protect individual assets from legal repercussions of business failure. Businesses should be begun, live, and die as businesses, not extensions of the investors and management. In other words corporations are a legal creations to limit legal litigation. Corporations are not capitalism, they are just a created tools to help capitalism work more justly.

Corporations, beginning in England and becoming the business model of the United States and now throughout the world, is that this legal protection has been given the right of human individuals, without the requirement of any human attributes. Put in truly obtuse terms, this legal creation has more rights than a human fetus. The truly sad state of human affairs is that we have never made the connection.

That connection however needs to focus upon morality. An embryo, fetus, or unborn baby, when left to the laws of nature will become a moral human individual, that through free agency can choose to become immoral, but with a human birth, comes the reality of the soul created in God’s image. As the production of legal fiat, the corporation can never really have a soul; hence it never really can be guided by the invisible hand, that Adam Smith attributed to the success of capitalism.

To solve this problem the general intellectual solution, by some evolutionary mechanism, the corporation is supposed to develop some sort of desire for social justice, just like government. In other words corporations are to become quasi governments. Where this really falls apart however, when real governments try to provide “incentives for business” what they are really doing through their regulations and rules is to create this social justice hybrid with multitasker abilities, into something designed as a uni-tasker. This is the essence and source of the popular Internet video “The Story of Stuff.”

Now for those of us who cling to our religion, guns, and family, who might have gone to a teachers college, or a udder university, we are just not smart enough to understand how this transition is supposed to work in the real world. It just seems logical in that real world, if you plant a seed of a pine tree, it should be allowed to grow into a pine tree, and a cabbage seed should be allowed to be a cabbage. Now we might want to water the seedling, or till or plant it in good soil, and maybe control the weeds, but to say to the tree you have to evolve from a grass, makes about as much sense as saying humans evolved from monkeys. At least that evolution myth takes millions of years.

Now shucks, let us say that Divine Providence allows for very bad times to occur for all the highly evolved human systems of governance and enterprise on this blue, miraculously conditioned planet. That would mean that some individuals with no other evolving opportunities would like to take a chance and create a new business. That business for some would mean a little enterprise where they could do what they thought God wanted them to do. Others with some proper unique talents might decide they wanted to change the world.

What separates these enterprises, no matter their legal paper structure, is that they reflect the hopes and desires of individual human beings; they therefore by nature have a conscience, maybe even a social conscience. Underlying this sort of Wild West outlook is that this conscience is a gift of God, and hence human regulations only get in the way of human creativity. That creativity, by its God given nature, produces something almost extinct in our current world. That commodity used to go by the name of true wealth. Money is not true wealth, but just one, of many mechanisms, for keeping score.

The worried response from the elite classes and their bureaucrats is that we need to protect consumers from all these scam artists, profiteers, greedy capitalists in training, so we need to regulate how they do business and how they get their capital, and most importantly so that we can collect taxes, so that we can maintain our bloated regulatory infrastructure.

The simple answer is no we don’t need these regulations and impediments to human creativity. Furthermore these consumers really are not consumers, but investors, and if investors don’t do their own research they lose their money. It happens in SEC regulated crony capitalism all the time. The major difference we have natural law truths at work here on the enterprise frontier, that no longer work in the nation and the world in general. The first real change is true free markets, for both goods and services, not crony capitalist elites, manipulating or manipulated, by the political class elites. More importantly the invisible hand of God can then again provide the opportunities of human success and the true development of a just society for increasing numbers of individual people.

This stupid idea still has one major limitation. That is the collection of taxes. If it were really just all about “show me the money” we could close right now; but it isn’t. Taxes have become the ultimate Ponzi scheme that government uses to pick the winners and losers.

The president is now hyping some tax incentives and loan proposals for small business. The president, may be so out of touch with enterprise that he believes, that these schemes will make some difference, maybe it is just political spin of an attempt to blame his opponents, and to articulate his superior oratory skills to change the world. Needless to say throughout the history of banking, like all of the history of banking, if you were a worthy borrower, you could get a loan to wisely fund certain aspects of your business that is best served by debt service.

What has happened in the last generation however, government has manipulated the markets so that debt is the only capital available to business. In the process instead of businesses actually growing and adding jobs, through leveraged mergers and acquisitions, this type of growth provides a net reduction of jobs, and the rapid consolidation of wealth in the hands of those who have access to that leveraged capital. To the rest of the markets and the people, be damned, without some sort of risk guarantee provided by the government.

This would all go away with what is called a flat tax. That initially would plow a lot of sterile ground, and put a lot of system-sucking people out of work, but just like tilling a field, if good seeds are rapidly planted, a bountiful harvest will rapidly ensue. If not the weeds will come back over time. However that weed patch is subject to natural laws and not the manipulation of crony capitalists, unions, and other special interests. Flat taxes would mean you make so much money, you pay so much in taxes. If you want some sort of income floor that still provides for a stable enterprise climate that is no big deal. The emphasis requires we must be assured that this taxing authority is controlled by the invisible hand rather than government regulators and politicians.

So these are just some stupid ideas from someone who is in the process of learning that real thinking is something we humans can do quite well, when given the opportunity. The problem is that our current systems are structured for failure, because we have been conditioned to think, that the real thinkers in this world, really know how to do something else — but think. That is a mythical illusion of our present times.