POLITICS - Veterans: You won the battle but lost the war

[PaulB]

Here is Aaron Zelman's Memorial Day commentary, an open letter to our veterans (especially WWII veterans):

http://www.jpfo.org/filegen-n-z/veterans.htm

As usual, he is right on target.

[AJMD429]

It isn't polite to 'dis' the 'greatest generation' and I just lost a close family friend who was a WWII pilot (he was in the American compound during the Greatest Escape, no less!). Having said that, and with all due apologies to that generation, things HAVE gotten alot worse since then.

They gave their souls to the cause of freedom, with the U.S. government serving as custodian. Unfortunately, the justified rewards the returning veterans reaped came with increasing costs - post-war economic boom times turned into corporate welfare before long, which trickled down to becoming individual welfare for the next generation.

Now I don't have the exact numbers at hand, but I read recently that if you add up the people a) working directly for the government, b) working for companies which are dependent on government contracts, grants, etc., c) Medicare, d) Medicaid, you have about HALF the population.
We are thus are very close to the point where more than half the voters are so dependent on the government that they will likely never vote to constrain any out-of-control power.

The WWII vets and men and women of that era I've known were people who didn't even take indoor plumbing for granted or view it as anything except a nice luxury if you could have it. Now we've a nation of people who can't imagine life without cable television.

Think about the PACE of change - My grandfather was 5 years old when Custer was killed. When I was a kid, we walked on the moon. Two generations cannot absorb that much technologic change without chaos, even if there weren't a socialist, power-hungry mass of fellow citizens so eager to tear our society down.

[Old Ironsights]

Too bad that many people will balk at reading anything identified as being from JPFO, Zellman or Smith. Dislike of the authors is too often more important than the truth of the content.

But in support of the article, read "When I was a kid, this was a Free Country" sometime.

http://www.amazon.com/When-Was-This-Fre ... bb_product

[quote]“I am a member of the last generation to remember what this country was like when it was free. When I was a kid, my buddies and I could walk down the street carrying a rifle, a handgun, or a shotgun that our dad or uncle had bought for us at the local hardware store, or through the mail (the way Bat Masterson bought his Colt revolvers). In the fall, the air would be redolent with the delicious aroma of leaves burning in the gutter. The farmer might be filling in a swamp on his land to make it productive. A man with a home on a riverbank might be cutting down a tree on his property because it blocked his view.

“People were free to speak their minds, even if what they had to say was contemptible; people who didn’t like it were free to say so in no uncertain terms-anywhere, particularly in that bastion of ideas, the university. Property owners felt secure in the knowledge that their possessions could not be taken from them, and at the very least that they would be afforded due process of law.

“These freedoms and more are gone now….â€

[adirondakjack]

In the late 1980s, I heard a respected social psychologist say we were not quite adapted to the changes created by readily available artificial light, and struggled with every change since.

Another famed anthropologist said the biggest problem facing society is the number of CHOICES a society has to make. In agrarian societies, choices were simple. Work the farnm for dad and grandpa, or run off to the city and face myriad challenges (but ya could always go back).

These days MIDDLE SCHOOL kids are expected to make career choices and shape their education accordingly, but things change so fast, entire career fields a 14 year old thinks about today may not even exist when he finishes college.

Yep, it an't easy "winning" sometimes.

[Old Ironsights]

The problem isn't in the winning, or even the rapid change of technology.

It's in the assumption that people can't handle these changes without an overarching Paternalist/Nanny State telling you HOW to handle them.

[adirondakjack]

The problem isn't in the winning, or even the rapid change of technology.

It's in the assumption that people can't handle these changes without an overarching Paternalist/Nanny State telling you HOW to handle them.

I agree the nanny state is a well-intentioned mistake, but the data shows that ESPECIALLY in the most free countries on earth, anxiety, suicide, patricide, and other forms of 'melting down" are highest, while self esteem issues dog many. Oddly, those who would appear to have the world by the tail often feel they are failures, etc.

Choice is a good thing, IF ya can decide and have the data to choose well.

Even within the realm of simple things, like say guns, it's odd. Back in the day, a working man MIGHT be able to afford a sears and roebuck thirty thirty and that would be his gun for life, and he'd be happy with it. Now we have so many choces that most of us CAN afford, it's simply mind boggling.

[Harry O]

> "In the fall, the air would be redolent with the delicious aroma of leaves burning in the gutter. The farmer might be filling in a swamp on his land to make it productive. A man with a home on a riverbank might be cutting down a tree on his property because it blocked his view."

When I was a young man, it was also alright for people, small towns, and even larger cities to dump their sh*t in the nearest creek for the people downstream to deal with. I can remember the smell of sh*t (and the occasional floating turd) in a stream nearby my familys house.

It wasn't until 1968 that the darned Gubbamint passed the "clean water act" that required, first the largest cities, then smaller ones, and recently, the smallest ones, to treat their sewage before dumping it into a stream. A lot of people said the Gubbamint stepped over the limits in doing that. There is nothing in the Constitution that says we CAN'T dump our untreated sh*t in the stream that someone had to drink out of. They still think it is their God Given Right to do that.

Anyway, I am not a fan of a lot that the government has done or is doing, but I have spent a lot of time thinking about where things went wrong. When individual people don't do what is right, other people complain to the government and the government steps into the vaccuum. They are not doing what is the best, but since we have not taken it among ourselves to do what is best, they are the only game in town.

BTW, I am an engineer that have worked on many of the things that the government has decreed (Interstate highways, streets, sanitary & storm sewers, and most recently, a certified bridge inspector) so you can say I was bought off. However, I have also seen the effects of leaving decisions to the local politicians that are speaking directly in place of us. Lack of wastewater treatment plants is only one thing.

[AJMD429]

...There is nothing in the Constitution that says we CAN'T dump our untreated sh*t in the stream that someone had to drink out of. They still think it is their God Given Right to do that.

Anyway, I am not a fan of a lot that the government has done or is doing, but I have spent a lot of time thinking about where things went wrong. When individual people don't do what is right, other people complain to the government and the government steps into the vaccuum. They are not doing what is the best, but since we have not taken it among ourselves to do what is best, they are the only game in town.

BTW, I am an engineer that have worked on many of the things that the government has decreed (Interstate highways, streets, sanitary & storm sewers, and most recently, a certified bridge inspector) so you can say I was bought off. However, I have also seen the effects of leaving decisions to the local politicians that are speaking directly in place of us. Lack of wastewater treatment plants is only one thing.

I agree that the government MUST do some things, but the Libertarian solution to many environmental issues is to use property rights and tort law, and it makes alot of sense (as opposed to the misuse of tort law we see nowadays in other areas).

I think that if you use the smallest unit of government able to handle any given issue (starting with the FAMILY!), then you get a good system. The federal government would thereby duly inherit some of the things you mention - interstate highways, major environmental regulations, etc. I am actually all FOR those things, but the problem is now that the way the "interstate commerce" clause is interpreted, how many feet wide my driveway is, or how many hours per day I water my tomatoes, becomes a federal issue, and THOSE things shouldn't be.

[Harry O]

I flirted with the Libertarian party back in 1988-1990, but after going to their meetings (in a Denny's), listening to them rant (especially about drugs and pornography), and seeing what they actually accomplished (absolutely nothing), I swore off on Libertariansism. I think it is a beautiful idea that cannot ever work in real life.

I have also seen first hand that their mantra of using lawsuits to enforce things will not solve anything. In order to clean up the water at the mouth of the Mississippi river, a person there would have to sue everyone upstream of him and PROVE that whatever the person flushed personally harmed the downstream person. Totally impossible. Class action lawsuits was an attempt to overcome this problem, but that has become the personal moneymaker for lawyers instead of people.

In my capacity of working as an engineer on public works projects, I have worked with "conservative" and "liberal" politicians and every combination inbetween. As far as I am concerned, there is not a bit of difference between the two. The problem with the smallest unit of government (starting with the family) is that doing what is right and doing what is in our own best interests are frequently in conflict (in the wastewater treatment plant example, why spend our OWN money to clean up our own waste for the benefit of those who live downstream and who we don't know and will probably never meet). Unfortunately, there are not enough individual people who will put principle above self interest -- and among them there are NO politicians who will do that.

Our form of government is the worst possible kind -- except for all the others (paraphrased from someone smarter than me).

[Old Ironsights]

Harry, you need to read Garrett Hardin's "The Tragedy of the Commons". The Gooberment Boot is NOT necessary to ensure clean water/air. There are plenty of Activists who would be MORE than happy to sue on the basis of personal injury.

From wiki:

Articulating solutions to the Tragedy of the Commons is one of the main problems of political philosophy. The most common solution is regulation by an authority. Frequently, such regulation is in the form of governmental regulations limiting the amount of a common good available for use by any individual. Permit systems for extractive economic activities including mining, fishing, hunting, livestock raising and timber extraction are examples of this approach. Similarly, limits to pollution are examples of governmental intervention on behalf of the commons. Alternatively, resource users themselves can cooperate to conserve the resource in the name of mutual benefit.

Another solution for certain resources is to convert common good into private property, giving the new owner an incentive to enforce its sustainability. Effectively, this is what took place in the English "Enclosure of the Commons". Increasingly, many agrarian studies scholars advocate studying traditional commons management systems, to understand how common resources can be protected without alienating those whose livelihoods depend upon them.

Libertarians and classical liberals often cite the Tragedy of the Commons as a classic example of what happens when Lockean property rights to homestead resources are prohibited by a government.[13][14][15] These people argue that the solution to the Tragedy of the Commons is to allow individuals to take over the property rights of a resource, that is, privatizing it.[16] In 1940 Ludwig von Mises wrote concerning the problem:

If land is not owned by anybody, although legal formalism may call it public property, it is used without any regard to the disadvantages resulting. Those who are in a position to appropriate to themselves the returns — lumber and game of the forests, fish of the water areas, and mineral deposits of the subsoil — do not bother about the later effects of their mode of exploitation. For them, erosion of the soil, depletion of the exhaustible resources and other impairments of the future utilization are external costs not entering into their calculation of input and output. They cut down trees without any regard for fresh shoots or reforestation. In hunting and fishing, they do not shrink from methods preventing the repopulation of the hunting and fishing grounds.[17]

Critics of this solution have pointed out that many commons, such as the ozone layer or global fish populations, would be extremely difficult or impossible to privatize.

Psychologist Dennis Fox used a number, what is now termed "Dunbar's number", to take a new look at the Tragedy of the Commons. In a 1985 paper titled "Psychology, Ideology, Utopia, & the Commons", he stated "Edney (1980, 1981a) also argued that long-term solutions will require, among a number of other approaches, breaking down the commons into smaller segments. He reviewed experimental data showing that cooperative behavior is indeed more common in smaller groups. After estimating that "the upper limit for a simple, self-contained, sustaining, well-functioning commons may be as low as 150 people" (1981a, p. 27).

The Coast Salish managed their natural resources in a place-based system where families were responsible for looking after a place and its resources.[18] Access to food was the major source of wealth and the empowerment of generosity was highly valued so it made sense for them to take care of the resources.

A popular solution to the problem is also the "Coasian" one, where the people using the commons support one another so not to destroy the resource.

In Hardin's essay, he proposed that the solution to the problem of overpopulation must be based on "mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon" and result in "relinquishing the freedom to breed". Hardin discussed this topic further in a 1979 book, Managing the Commons, co-written with John A. Baden.[19] He framed this prescription in terms of needing to restrict the "reproductive right" in order to safeguard all other rights. Only one large country has adopted this policy, the People's Republic of China. In the essay, Hardin had rejected education as an effective means of stemming population growth. Since that time, it has been shown that increased educational and economic opportunities for women correlates well with reduced birthrates in most countries, as does economic growth in general.

[Harry O]

Thanks, but I have already read that book. I have been involved in public works projects for nearly 40 years now and clean water for about 20 years. In working with all kinds of people, I have learned that "doing what is right" for us, and our posterity, is not very common. One might say that it is uncommon. So called "unintended consequences" are not unintended for anyone who cares to exercise their God given intelligence and look down the road. I know of the problem of the "commons" and don't think that the proposed solution will work.

There are a number of reasons I think this, but the most glaring one is that "someone" must decide who gets a discrete claim on what was once available to everyone, they decide who is violating the agreement, and then they enforce any decision. That someone is the gubbermint. What is a lawsuit other than the government enforcing a law of some kind?

I see the "libertarian" solution as a "full employment act" for lawyers. It is a sure way to increase the size of government, not decrease it.