Leaders that value self determination and independence are denigrated by those who idolize the memory of a former president who said “Ask not what your country can do for you”—and then lowered taxes. John F. Kennedy allowed people more freedom and control over their lives, which conflicts with grandiose notions of governmental entitlement. He certainly knew that helping those in need is a high moral endeavor, but “helping” men become dependent debases and destroys them. Sophisticates who adhere to modern social-justice belief systems (the social-justice sophisticates) strive to make whole populations succumb to such “help”, by whatever means necessary. Our current president declares the constitution to be fundamentally flawed because it does not dictate what the government must do for you. The insidious effect of such a culture of dependence includes suffering that spans generations. Look to your children; will you tolerate such “help” being forced upon them?
In a televised interview democrat Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York observed that many of us believed that the socioeconomic system of the Soviet Union is the way of the future—right up to its fall. He had earlier been criticized from both major parties and academia for declaring Soviet decline and likely collapse. After Soviet collapse, devotees to social-justice belief systems (the social justice acolytes) were in disarray. Years later it became increasingly clear that China would not follow suit, so it again became possible to proselytize social-justice belief systems in the US. While China retains a totalitarian government and its economy works, this successful version of China has more in common with fascism than western notions of social justice or communism. Young Chinese compete as they grow and a child who falls short becomes a child left behind. Such vigorous competition adds to the prosperity of China and all Chinese, but the Chinese are neither free nor social-justice acolytes. Senator Moynihan did not live to see the recent ascendency of social-justice belief systems, but as a sociologist and public official he ascribed Soviet failure to its economic and social systems and reminded everyone that he predicted collapse. Despite predictable failure, social-justice belief systems promote financial dependence of whole populations on governments. This must be recognized as a direct attack on prosperity as well as freedom.
By promotion of governmental dependence and other means our American prosperity is under attack, and our freedom hangs in the balance. Even though many consider prosperity unimportant or even inherently undesirable, on our present course we will accept tyranny and suffering in hopes of regaining it. Growing numbers of Americans seek to forestall this suffering by removing those who threaten prosperity and freedom from positions of power and influence in all areas of society, which is increasingly seen as the only means by which to halt progressive use of the state to impose destructive beliefs on us all. These state belief systems directly assault prosperity and promote the deterioration of our system of rules, decimating it and ultimately destroying it. Threats to American security and freedom demand universal attention to prosperity; with our eye on the prosperity imperative we can neutralize missionaries of state belief systems found in our schools and other public venues, especially the social-justice sophisticates. At the ballet box and on juries, we must demand rational promotion of the public welfare, including a willingness to create and apply rules without notions of situational ethics, relative truth, and moral relativism that make those rules ineffective or worse. We may avoid the experience of many millions in diverse societies, including the sad experience of facing our own children as they plead to understand how we could have had so much and left them so little. If we strive to remove social-justice sophisticates and other sophisticates from positions of power and influence, we may meet this challenge, and America may remain a prosperous land of the free.
The desirability of prosperity was formerly unquestioned, but today prosperity is openly condemned together with free markets and capitalism, which are collectively credited with ills both real and imagined. Open attacks occur in numerous forums including our public schools, and are obvious because they are direct. Proxy targets like global warming are taken up in determined but less direct attacks; these antagonists of prosperity find it merely inconvenient that considerable carbon science is a mirage. Fraudulent though they may be, proxy target attacks unavoidably inspire true believers who introduce unintended economic and political consequences; for example, nuclear energy would reduce carbon emissions and thus interest those who honestly believe the carbon “science”, but solutions that might actually produce energy economically and promote prosperity run counter to the anti-prosperity crowd who created the proxy targets.
However convoluted, cloaked, or supported by political power the assaults on prosperity may be, in theory they ultimately must fail and so are destined for well populated trash heaps. Markets and economies press forward organically by independent actions of individuals. After the Soviet political collapse, Chinese and later Russian prevailing wisdom embraced key market tenants; notably, only market societies reliably compete with market societies. China emerged after many generations of economic obscurity with a functioning market. In contrast, the West’s reaction to the Soviet collapse includes notions of a new world order where competitive and market-based societies are not an issue because they are simply not allowed. So while China has evolved to embrace market competition, considerable intellectual energy of the formerly prosperous and competitive West is engaged in denying those principles. Social-Justice belief systems are central to such deteriorating thought.
Ongoing economic leveling between EU nations encourages and manifests western visions of equal outcomes and unequal opportunity, for it is impossible to provide equal outcomes without holding many individuals and the society collectively back. Entire nations demand equalization in the EU as necessary to meet some loosely defined requirement for fairness or social justice. Support exists for forced leveling at granularities of nations, races, regions, individuals, and every other conceivable division. Promoters promise leveling to all possible divisions, so adherents are expected to simultaneously deliver on all of them. According to the theory, lower rungs are raised to the benefit of all, but outcomes fall short of the vision. The Chinese may view the rise of these notions in the West as curiosities or problems; but from experience they know that the problems are mainly ours, just as their former unsuccessful principles and plans for markets were mainly theirs. While Chinese were starving by the millions, Americans lived in a competitive, vibrant society—the situation is reversing.
In social-justice economic systems someone else pays—another country, class, race, region, etc.—but ever and always someone else. When there is no one else who can be made to pay or who can pay, then desperation and despair typically lead through generations of suffering to eventual rejection of social-justice belief systems and a renewed reach for prosperity. According to the old theory, an economy based on social-justice belief systems will increase productivity as a natural consequence of removing unfairness, and greater prosperity for all inevitably follows. Thus formerly, the adherents to social-justice belief systems could have been said to honestly differ with non-believers about how to achieve the greatest prosperity.
Though not always sophisticates, devotees to social-justice belief systems (the social-justice acolytes) sacrifice prosperity imperatives in favor of political nirvana (i.e., a blissful oblivion that results from government-enforced “social justice”) that has no possibility of prosperity as we have known it. According to this new belief system, the fall of the Soviet Union was not inevitable because countries like the United States at the time of the fall are simply not allowed. When social-justice acolytes say that they want prosperity, they mean that they want it in the same form as the Soviet Union, and not as we have known it. The past prosperity of America is undesirable and to be actively prevented. Unlike its predecessor, this new belief system avoids honest exposure of its intentions regarding prosperity. A major means of subterfuge is to masquerade as its predecessor unaltered. Many social-justice acolytes thus do not recognize that increased prosperity has been thrown under the bus.
But those sufficiently aware and honest with themselves have been forced by collective human experience to reexamine such beliefs; the social-justice belief systems and adherent states have resulted in untold millions of deaths from starvation, and millions more from mass killings of non-believers. A social-justice belief system spreads using any “necessary” means, and non-believers are assimilated or eradicated; this is the only way that adherents can bring about their nirvana. Nevertheless, honest assessment of the data demands rejecting expectations of higher prosperity in a social-justice belief system. In contrast to other belief systems, the new and old social-justice belief systems demand nirvana here and now. In order to retain their notions of political nirvana, remaining adherents to social-justice belief systems have overtly or covertly, wittingly or unwittingly, dropped prosperity imperatives. They demand that others to do the same. Many are more than willing to impose their social-justice belief system on the masses with full knowledge and expectation of its destructive effects on prosperity.
This contradiction between the true and purported goals dampens efforts to find and interest new adherents. However, the ability of belief systems to engender contradictions in the minds of men is historically unbounded. Fuzzy philosophical notions like situational ethics, moral relativism, and “relative truth” have rescued social-justice believers from considerations of absolute truth and overwhelming evidence against the workability of social-justice belief systems; so many have dumped the notion that absolute truth exists. These fuzzy ideas had already come a long way when President Clinton’s widely followed legal defense managed to redefine the most common two-letter verb (“is”). Adherents to these ideas form a creed that denies its own existence and eschews labels. We call adherents to this creed the sophisticates since they self-declare their personal sophistication and that of their ideas. Many of those who are today members of the so-called “ruling class” are sophisticates.
Evolution of social-justice belief systems from ones promoting prosperity to ones that renounce truth is not too surprising; from long human experience we know that sane notions of truth are often sacrificed to retain otherwise unsupportable beliefs. Many social-justice acolytes became adherents to the largest sophisticate sect today, the Social-Justice Sophisticates, who are now at the core of a pervasive and aggressive state-promoted belief system. This sect avoids “separation of church and state” issues by shunning something as basic as a name while at the same time existing within state organs. It seeks to in fact control the state and in some important ways it becomes the state. Its meeting houses are the state organs and necessary societal institutions, which includes universities, media organizations, primary and secondary schools, state and national governmental bodies, and both political parties. Heresy against this state belief system is punished relentlessly; there are no heathens—only heretics.
The social-justice sophisticates have become self-absorbed and drunk with power. Not only do they use state property to promote their belief system, they use state power directly and openly to suppress non-believers. They have proposed that government operatives secretly infiltrate and influence groups who do not share their belief system. Incredibly, one of their assigned tasks is to pose as group members and put forth notions that the social-justice sophisticates are not engaged in conspiracies! Success of that activity incongruously requires convincing the populace that the infiltration activity itself does not exist.
Societies can be unaware that they hamper or destroy prosperity. There were no prosperity haters to welcome the Great Depression, yet through ignorance prosperity was lost and the depression perpetuated. Only global war restored it. While individuals who strive are found in all times and cultures, conditions necessary for general prosperity are often absent. However prosperity is achieved, it requires societal stability in which governments play an important role. Some believe that America’s past prosperity is a consequence of self-governance and rule of law, but whether or not self-governance and the rule of law are present, prosperity is hampered without general responsibility and reliable accountability based on rational rules. Unfortunately, rules ensure neither economic freedom nor prosperity; at times they are no more than window dressing over seething corruption. Direct and proxy attacks in concert with the acts of elected social-justice acolytes have considerable negative effects on prosperity, but until recently these effects have paled when compared with effects of a continuing breakdown in rational rule-based accountability. Direct attacks on prosperity, including the social-justice attacks, are easier to recognize than those that proceed from the spread of situational ethics, relative truth, and moral relativism, which contributes to making our rules ineffective and thereby profoundly decimates prosperity. The rules have become so ineffective that it has even become necessary to justify notions that rules are central to prosperity.
As America proceeds in its decline into debt and corruption, which no sane nation should want to duplicate, Americans persist in lecturing China and others on how to prosper through the rule of law. Yet we assault prosperity through disdain for our rules and so hasten our decline, precisely as the theory we externally tout predicts.
When we enforce rules it is generally untimely; few ascribe the old dictionary meaning of “justice” to what now happens in our law enforcement and court systems. As a society we have become progressively uninterested in effective rules and accountability. Lack of interest notwithstanding, the speed, integrity, and surety of accountability can either encourage or discourage rule breaking. Today, at all levels, rule breaking is tolerated and insidiously encouraged, which correlates with breakdowns in our societal drive toward prosperity. Breakdown of the rules will ultimately lead to tyranny, which may be momentarily necessary to restore a semblance of order and productivity. While tyranny has its own negative effects on prosperity, it does not always destroy prosperity immediately, which is one reason we will accept it. However, if we accept tyranny from the social-justice acolytes, then we will have ruthless application of rules and neither freedom nor prosperity. By long experience the human race knows that such tyranny and suffering can last for generations.
Societal rules are subject to sophisticate thinking in courtrooms, classrooms, and street-corner discussions. To support sophisticate views, sophisticate guardians of the rules may break them by improperly launching investigations, audits, or writing improper indictments and rulings; they may also improperly fail to do those things. Action is all to the good if it promotes a sophisticate sect. Many sophisticates feel that ordinary honest folk ought to fail—after all they believe naïve, self-defeating, and unsophisticated things. Sophisticate acts are rarely presented with their honest motivations—that would be unsophisticated. Instead they may make straightforward assertions that proper procedures were followed, thereby justifying injustice. At such times sophisticates typically promote illusions that they defend process or tradition, and that they have merely applied procedural rules with worshipful rigidity, which is precisely opposite to what they actually do. When necessary they write sophisticate derivations built upon earlier sophisticate derivations, with no ultimate foundation, which might amuse if the effects did not wound the common wellbeing so grievously. They appear unaware of the naïveté that their audience sees in them when they point to America as they advise a country like China on prosperity by rule of law.
Our increasing disregard for rules forced its way into the public consciousness during the Bush era, when rule breaking and its consequences bruised America’s self-image. We see in our American president a reflection of our own condition, but with Bush II it was more; he is widely quoted and alleged to have said that the constitution “is only a piece of paper”. America hoped that change at the head of the fish might begin a new era, so President Obama was elected. We had been disappointed before, but this time we had a new president unsullied by compromise with evil forces. Our euphoria supported collective visions of glorious transformation. Mere anticipation of withering rot and corruption was for those too cautiously optimistic. The planet itself was in rapture and the human race barely noticed when appointees to high office were tax-cheats and participants in public failure. Then, not to be outdone by the previous administration’s disdain for the constitution, our new guardians assert that reading and reciting the constitution presents a danger to the republic.
Sophisticate candidates are not obliged to inform—the citizenry showers votes in exchange for inaccurate and accurate campaign promises alike. While making promises is important, keeping them is not so important because voters are intellectually inferior and incompetent—i.e. not sophisticates. Accordingly, Bush I raised taxes; his promises to the contrary are only of concern to the foolish. Bush II created “no child left behind”, a ridiculous program without resemblance to campaign promises, and scattered the public coffers like rain over even less worthy notions. The Bush family presidents know that campaign promises matter—during the campaign. President Obama in turn promised many contradictory things. Within weeks of the election almost no one publicly risked sophisticate ridicule by recalling them. While it would have seemed impossible, Obama appears less accurately described by his campaign promises than the Bush presidents. How can an electorate express their will if they cannot know what the candidates honestly intend to do? To sophisticates this is precisely the point, the electorate is not supposed to express its will; it is more than enough that they vote.
Each dawn brings new awareness that the Bush era hastened our decline most by unfortunate effects on our choice of its replacement. The newly elected or appointed may be more disinterested, cynical, incompetent, or corrupt than their predecessors. Rot at the head of the fish is increasingly perceived, and erosion of support steeper than anyone remembers.
Political and economic wisdom are not the only casualties; the creed with no name has spread to science. When evidence of corruption and general rule-breaking by carbon science researchers in England was made public, the messenger was scorned while sophisticate scientists were justified by peer, politician, and reporter alike. The non-event status that the media assigned to such rule-breaking belies impressions that it was unexpected. Instead, bringers of truth are made to fear—an unbreakable rule of the unnamed creed is that their own rule breaking is not to be exposed. Participation in rule-breaking is demanded of scientists, who generally depend on sophisticate-controlled government support. While non-participation in the sophisticate creed may be naïve, some scientists surely are nostalgic for former notions of scientific truth. They may long for a colleague with stature who risks everything to expose this corruption, perhaps a modern Galileo. But they know that he would be and perhaps already has been silenced by sophisticates. Social-justice sophisticates are more thorough and wide ranging suppressors of truth than the Pope of Galileo’s time could have imagined. Scientific integrity is now a public illusion, truth relative, and ethically situational; scientists have become masters of long-standing sophisticate staples: disappearing evidence and “I don’t recall”. To observers of this scientific farce, it has become conceivable that truth-speaking will not be protected in America, not even officially, for scientists or anyone else.
Overt Acorn-style rule-breaking is also expected by the media. These elected, appointed, and self-appointed guardians of the public welfare are more likely to persecute a messenger than demand accountability. In this sophisticate situational ethic, evidence of repeated conspiracy to finance importation of underage Latina girls for sexual exploitation warrants no prosecution and only passing scrutiny. In the sophisticate creed, this rule-breaking also is justified as part of the broad promotion of a “greater good”. Nevertheless, public exposure offends sophisticate sensibilities, and that is what must be discouraged in the most unambiguous manner.
Attacks on prosperity introduced earlier were categorized as direct, proxy, social-justice, and sophisticate. There are many in positions of power and influence that engage vigorously in all four; i.e. it is common for social-justice sophisticates to engage in direct and proxy attacks as well. Such persons often hold professorial positions at universities, positions as judges, and other positions as elected or appointed officials. Seemingly single-issue promoters such as Al Gore actually engage in all four categories of attack. The most subtle of these forms of attack, and the most damaging in the U.S. (at least until fairly recently), are the sophisticate attacks that undermine our system of rules.
Sophisticate speeches, lectures, and publications laud the dependency of prosperity on a system of rules. Making more rules is a fundamental tenant of the sophisticate creed, which means that existing rules must be defective and violated. Thus sophisticates become hypocrites, making rules ineffective, then lauding and taking credit for new rules as they are made. They propose ever more rules, often to remedy defects seen only by sophisticates and expounded in esoteric theories. The sophisticate more-rules imperative entails perpetual exercises in inadequacy of rules; in this way sophisticates insist that there are no viable solutions, just ever and always more rules. Indecipherable piles of rules have proven inadequate to satisfy sophisticate imperatives. Those who make rules now propose individual rules described in thousands of pages, and reading just one rule is unwanted and perhaps unrealistic. Even the sophisticate rule makers do not read them. It is no coincidence that elected officials declare citizens who read or recite the constitution to be clear and present dangers to the republic.
So instead of reading and understanding rules, citizens are expected to leave complicated matters like rules, including the constitution itself, to sophisticates. But understanding rules, as the public understands the meaning of “understanding”, is not what sophisticates do. It is not even intended that there should be substantial understanding—it is subject to relativism and changes from one sophisticate theory to the next. The public may indeed be collectively incapable of a sophisticate grasp of reality—after all they generally aren’t sophisticated enough to realize that attempts to fathom the rules are naïve. Such sophistication may be a delusion created by intelligent but nevertheless unsound minds, and shared with others similarly limited. Thus there may be nothing overtly difficult about sophisticate thought that actually requires understanding. It is nevertheless important to understand the direct cost of ever increasing numbers of sophisticate attendants required by ever increasing piles of indecipherable rules.
It is difficult to imagine a greater danger to rule-of-law notions than the sophisticates, and the evidence is almost everywhere; we have discussed their general disdain for the rules, and there is a seemingly endless parade of egregious examples. They include:
- As part of the recent “financial reform” and financial “transparency” act, the SEC is no longer subject to public disclosure requirements, i.e. the Freedom of Information Act.
- California grossly miscalculated pollution levels by 340 percent in a “scientific” analysis used to toughen the state’s clean-air standards. When caught, the Air Resources Board blamed the difference on the economic slump!
- Fraudulent carbon science is being used as the basis of innumerable rules and regulations.
- The New Black Panther party, its leader, and two of its members were successfully accused of voter intimidation, a charge that they did not even attempt to defend, but the DoJ dropped the case before sentencing. Naturally, the attorneys who found the intimidation criminal have been attacked as biased.
- The Acorn conspiracies and subsequent non-enforcement of rules became an issue because they generated bad public relations, never mind that what was done is wrong.
These examples amongst many illustrate just how far we have come in this sophisticate-led disconnect from reality. Considerable damage is done when rules specifically meant to promote prosperity go unenforced, and so are made ineffective or worse. Some rules promote the general economic welfare by limiting economic behavior detrimental to prosperity. These rules have become largely ineffective by sophisticate design.
Rules protecting intellectual property, suppressing monopolistic practices, and enforcing contracts are intended to promote prosperity directly. These rules promote the economy in part by encouraging and protecting innovation-driven progress, a key component of American prosperity. Monopolies by nature tend to suppress innovation; they typically ignore intellectual property rights and intimidate parties to contracts that they do not and may never have intended to keep. Innovators with a “new thing” are routinely asked by investors how their business will survive market attacks by an interested monopoly, and the attack is presumed to use the full power of the monopoly—rules notwithstanding. Innovations whose inventors have no ready answer may not come to market. Innovations that never occurred go entirely unknown. Their potential markets lie in that part of the economy subject to the monopoly’s control, i.e. in the monopoly’s kill-zone where their economic nukes work. A monopoly’s kill-zone is studiously avoided by many investors and hence innovators. A monopoly’s nukes may include intellectual property acquisition-by-infringement, redesigning their products to make others’ innovations unusable, intimidation of those who might do business with targeted innovators, combinations of the above, and similar business practices. Monopolies can and do economically nuke what annoys them in their kill-zone, even though such practices are nominally against the rules.
Monopolies often need not innovate. Their inside talent is frequently competent to copy, but even copying is often unnecessary unless a would-be competitor has the temerity to put himself in the kill-zone. The desired effect is often achieved for a particular innovation without overtly improper acts—having nuked others with impunity may be enough to intimidate and achieve cheap acquisition of intellectual assets. For a monopoly, knowing when and how to nuke depends on accurate understanding of market dynamics and a target’s resources, especially its revenue sources. They must also recognize the boundaries of their kill-zones, the areas within which their nukes will work. While a monopoly may misjudge such things, it has the power of its monopoly to extract excessive prices from the public and with those resources attack competitors again and again.
This leads us to a major example of rule ineffectiveness—the endlessly farcical Microsoft antitrust case. It ought to be a cause célèbre of social-justice acolytes; but those in power are also sophisticates—who apparently see neither personal nor sophisticate sect gains from factual pursuits of justice. The US Attorney General and his lieutenants know the Microsoft case well; they created it during the Clinton administration. But now it has done its work: sophisticates have made millions in fees and salaries and now it becomes just another case of failed rules, and perhaps evidence that we need new rules. Microsoft lost the case, yet their operating profit margins have increased, their revenues have more than doubled, and their overall profit margins have remained the same since 2003. While Apple now has revenue almost equal to Microsoft, Microsoft’s profits are almost equal to those of Apple and Google combined.
Nevertheless, the court sanctioned judgment in the case has almost run its course, and a central question before the court is whether Microsoft has complied—as they agreed to do several years ago. A naïve observer might assume that the court records would answer that question, but the court records instead contain nebulous weaseling statements that surround the phrase “substantially complete”, and redefine it as meaningless. There is also an agreement with the US Department of Justice (DoJ) that the oversight will shut down if Microsoft deals with some known bugs in its documents. To help them in that effort, the DoJ, the New York/Maryland group, and the California group of states have agreed that the oversight committee will conveniently stop adding bugs to the statistics on January 1, 2011. Who does not instinctively understand that the poorest products have the largest numbers of bugs? Given the absurdity of a bugs-fixed measure, why the DoJ doesn’t just cook nice statistics for the court is an obvious question—but then again perhaps they have done so.
Whatever the mechanism is for generating irrelevant but pretty bug statistics for the court, Microsoft has these many years missed golden marketing opportunities. If a federal judge will buy the fixed-bugs story, then Microsoft could honestly have advertised that they fixed more bugs in Vista than any would-be competitor had imagined, and doubled their market share by sucking in the judicial system. Less sophisticated consumers are purportedly even more susceptible to technical gobbledygook than Federal Judges. Microsoft may have infected the plaintiffs and the Court with the idea that they are done because it is time to be done; i.e. they outlasted the government. The plaintiffs may be tired of fighting Microsoft over their documents, since the executive and judicial branches of government together are apparently incapable of actually enforcing much against so powerful a corporation. Instead they create the kind of scenario that the judge requires to finally end this unseemly display of governmental impotence and farcical enforcement.
Easily snookered though the court may be, the sitting administration ought to have desired social-justice at least insofar as the facts and the rules support it; instead, its sophisticate imperatives trump any need for facts and rules based outcomes, even where a final judgment is already in place and where social-justice sits on the balance. If in-power social-justice acolytes cannot factually pursue a healthy capitalist monopoly that already lost its case, then who can rationally depend on them for anything?
This case raises the question of whether the present administration actually comprises social-justice acolytes. Perhaps, despite ubiquitous and continuous press to the contrary, they are mainly sophisticate opportunists seeking only increased power and control over our lives—like any other kind of sophisticate might do. Whatever labels accurately apply to the administration, the various sophisticate sects have destroyed notions that the electorate has reasonable expectations of their representatives. With sophisticates everywhere, no candidate of any stripe can be relied upon to apply the rules as written based on the facts. Notions of rule-of-law require that some of us factually apply the rules; who does that now?
The Clinton administration pursued the Microsoft monopoly, and the antitrust chief first appointed in the Obama administration stated that the new administration would aggressively pursue antitrust cases. But that did not happen. Application of antitrust law is now effectively suppressed regardless of the party in power. Sophisticates per-se have no interest in actual rule-of-law, which may explain the lack of interest during the Bush administration. Nevertheless, in hindsight we now know that the Obama administration is less likely than its predecessor to adhere to rule-of-law, including anti-trust law. Something changed between the Clinton administration and the Obama administration. The idea of incrementally transforming the United States to a social-justice economy appears to have been dropped. Incremental movement requires that things work along-the-way with some consistency. Today, the idea of future catastrophic failure and a single transforming event appears more in keeping with the Obama view of things. Actually fixing something with existing rules, i.e. making things work, does not fit with that idea.
Because there were only sophisticates running for office, including a social-justice sophisticate, it turns out that there was no one to vote for who would have taken a rule-of-law approach to the presidency. In his most recent book; Newt Gingrich declares that democrats are more likely to be in bed with anticompetitive corporate interests than are republicans—perhaps he is spot-on. On the other hand, perhaps Microsoft and corporate monopolies in general are merely off the hook for now while the social-justice sophisticates wait for their big opportunity in an expected economic collapse—hopefully a long wait. Multiple unworthy motivations are possible so the question arises; precisely how is it that the New York/Maryland and California groups of states have gone along with the DoJ in the Microsoft case? This should be asked of their Attorneys General.
Now underway for half as long as the Exxon Valdez case, the Microsoft antitrust case joins a menagerie of other “endlessly interesting” and “important” examples of our rules in action. By causing “important” cases to become “endlessly interesting” sophisticates make rules ineffective and promote the “need” for more rules. Twenty three years after the Exxon Valdez oil spill many victims are deceased; the remainder still await relief for damage to their lives and livelihoods. American imperatives for personal justice make this outcome unconscionable and people who justify it loathsome. Proposals for more rules do not always wait for “endless” characteristics to set in. A “crisis” allows sophisticates to short-circuit the slower process; for example, they immediately began proposing new rules after the BP oil leak. Enforcement of existing rules is never the answer to sophisticates, it is ever and always more rules that are needed. Nevertheless, mistakes are made; they seemed surreal and even comical when filing lawsuits appeared to be our national plan for plugging the Gulf oil leak. Louisiana and other states needed effective action by accomplished people who are grounded in truth and reality. Preventing the leak in the first place may have been achieved by honest application of myriad existing rules. But sophisticates need not apply rules, whether to Acorn, oil companies, Microsoft, Black Panthers, or anywhere. To them it just isn’t necessary or even desirable. Disconnected from reality, sophisticates whose primary skills are holding meetings, speaking in sound bites for the evening’s news, making rules “endlessly interesting” but otherwise ineffective, and generating proposals for ever more taxes, rules, and lawsuits are unqualified for office.
When against all odds an existing rule promotes prosperity and general welfare, and even the sophisticates find it difficult to relegate that rule to the “endlessly interesting” and “important” category, then they arrange to undo it. With congressional complicity, George Bush I effectively signed away the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings act of 1985 and 1987, which had provided executive power over federal deficits. It was that power specifically that many expected him to wield—but instead he signed it away and turned Gramm-Rudman into yet another failed rule. George Bush II wouldn’t have used that power willingly; he spent money like water. Obama wouldn’t have used it willingly; he is showing us just how green water can be. Bill Clinton wouldn’t have used it willingly; he wanted health care reform then as now, but having lost his first mid-term elections there was then no pressing need for Gramm-Rudman. All of these presidents claim to abhor deficit spending, but would not have wanted the power to stop deficits that George Bush I conveniently removed from consideration before the others took office. The last president to serve approximately as advertised was Ronald Reagan, who signed Gramm-Rudman into law, only to watch his successor and one-time VP drop the core concept. We have now had two presidents each from the two major parties since Ronald Reagan, who was the last non-sophisticate among them.
While sophisticates generally do not embrace freedom, democracy, and rule-of-law, prosperity at levels formerly enjoyed depends on economic and political freedom as well as rule-of-law and predictability of rule application. We may yet keep our freedom and prosperity, but the sophisticates must go.
We must halt the election, appointment, and promotion of sophisticates at all levels, or regardless of party we will have only sophisticates to choose from at the ballot box. With our children’s future and prosperity itself in the balance, we must remove sophisticates and especially social-justice sophisticates from elected and appointed positions across society. Nevertheless, by long experience we know that replacing one sophisticate with another accomplishes little. We must focus on the core of the problem and replace sophisticates with non-sophisticates—in whatever party and wherever they are found.
