Confession of a Libertarian Socialist

So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do.
—John Woolman (October 19, 1720 – October 7, 1772)

William James observed that most of us human beings preserve and defend the same framework of beliefs and views we learned as children and that we change them only when, in his famous phrase, “experience boils over.” That is certainly true of me, at least in the area of political views and social attitudes. In those areas, my beliefs have not changed much at all, and like reasonable creatures, I have managed to find reasons for maintaining the prejudices I acquired from my parents and grandparents. I do not expect my reasons to persuade anyone whose inheritance of bias was different from my own, but it is an interesting exercise to spell those reasons out from time to time.

Up for rationalization today are two convictions, namely, 1) that government interference in the lives of private citizens should be kept to a minimum and 2) that government regulation of corporate entities is necessary. This constellation of issues is what the On the issues website calls a Hard-core Liberal position. The view that individuals should tolerate everyone’s freedom, since different people make different choices on moral matters, deserves to be called Liberal, since the word “liberal,” after all, comes from the Latin word meaning “free.” But what On the Issues website calls Hard-core Conservative, the view that markets should be free and unrestrained by governmental interference, has historically also been called Liberalism. When Ronald Reagan was President, Americans tended to call him a conservative, while European (and French Canadian) newspapers labeled him an ultra-liberal. While such labels are interesting, at least until they become confusing and cumbersome, what I find more interesting is the reasoning that leads to one of these positions. Allow me, therefore, to make a case for Hard-core Liberalism, or what I prefer to call Libertarian Socialism.

The defense of Hard-core Liberalism or Libertarian Socialism requires defense on two fronts. The first thing to defend is belief in government-managed economy. Second, since this political stance rejects the totalitarian authority that state communism holds over individuals and thus rejects attempts to legislate personal morality, it requires a defense of the policy of keeping governmental intrusion into the lives of individual citizens at a minimum.

The principal reason for having some regulation of corporate enterprises designed to make a profit is that corporations are not persons and do not have as part of their nature a tendency to consider a full range of consequences of their decisions. Corporations, of course, do not make decisions at all. The people who manage them make the decisions, but when people who manage for-profit corporations make decisions, the only consequences they are charged to take into consideration are those that have an impact on the profitability of the corporation. They are not charged with taking into account the effect that their decisions may have on employees, on members of the community in which they are situated, on animals, or on the environment. Given that decision-makers for corporations are not expected to take consequences other than profits into consideration, someone other than the decision-makers for corporations need to be appointed to consider the consequences that the corporation’s pursuit of profits has on employees, the community and the environment. In most nations, governmental agencies are assigned the task of monitoring the engines of the economy, and that system usually works out rather well, especially when the governmental agencies are not corrupted by the vested interests of the corporations they are charged to monitor.

In the United States, as in most other countries, corporations have resisted being monitored. They have tried to weaken or even to eliminate regulatory agencies that are designed to make sure that the drive for profits does not have an overly negative impact on the community and on the earth itself. In the United States, perhaps more than in most other industrialized nations, this effort to evade effective monitoring has been successful. The results for the environment and for the human beings who must share the world with corporations have been, predictably, largely negative. The drive for profits that has been the raison d’être of the corporations has been a significant factor in the degradation of habitats for both wildlife and human life. That drive has also been a factor in the creation of an economy in which a handful of families have accumulated far more wealth than they can possibly use, while far too many families (and individuals who no longer have families in any real sense of the word) struggle to find adequate nutrition, shelter, healthcare, safety and education.

There is a deep and abiding injustice in the American economy, and no one—even those who are apparently doing well in this system—is served well by injustice. Injustice is unsustainable, and when the imbalance of resources reaches a tipping point, the result is often violent revolution and its ensuing chaos. It is really in the interest of the wealthy to live in a society in which no one lives in grinding poverty of resources and amenities. So long as the wealthy do not take the responsibility of looking after their own interests, there is a place for governmental agencies to look after the welfare of both the very wealthy and the very poor, and of everyone in between those two extremes. The so-called Hard-core Liberals tend to realize that, while the so-called Hard-core Conservatives tend not to.

Having made a case for government serving as the conscience of essentially amoral for-profit corporations, let me now try to make a case for government not serving as a conscience of essentially moral individual human beings. When I say that human beings are essentially moral, what I mean is that human beings are strongly inclined to form opinions about what kinds of deliberate actions are acceptable and what kinds are not. About many kinds of conduct—taking or damaging property that belongs to others, embezzlement, extortion, various forms of physical violence, taking the life of a human being who clearly wishes to stay alive— there is a broad consensus, and those proscribed behaviors become the basis of criminal law. There are many other kinds of behavior, however, that some people disapprove, while others do not, and about which no amount of argument is likely to change the minds of those who have an opinion. It is folly for laws to be passed making behavior in that category criminal, as was made abundantly clear soon after Congress passed the 18th amendment to the Constitution in 1919, which prohibited the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors within the United States and its territories and the importation of intoxicating liquors into and their exportation from the country. That amendment was finally repealed by the 21st amendment in 1933, after the experiment in prohibition led to the thriving of organized crime, which supplied the goods that many people desired and found inoffensive. Attempts to prohibit or severely limit access to firearms, abortion and recreational drugs have had, or would have, similar results. Trying to legislate the prohibition of disapproved substances, services and items is rarely successful, as is legislation against sexual behavior that only some people strongly condemn.

During the administration of Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau in Canada (in office 1968—1979 and 1980—1984), a phrase that one often heard was that government has no business in the bedrooms of the nation; during those years the Canadian government largely got out of the business of regulating the sexual conduct of individuals and of saying who could and who could not marry whom. It also greatly simplified divorce laws. Any couple who lived together for a year and wished to declare themselves as a married couple were considered married in the eyes of the law. Any couple that separated for a year and declared their marriage over was considered to have met all the requirements for a no-fault divorce, and whatever assets they had accumulated as a couple during the time of marriage was divided evenly between them, as was responsibility for supporting any children born into the marriage. Trudeau was leader of the Liberal Party of Canada, and his attitudes in such matters were liberal and indeed libertarian. I lived in Canada during Trudeau’s years in office and came to appreciate the non-invasive nature of his policies.

In Canada, unlike the United States, marriage and divorce fall within the purview of the federal government, whereas the United States Constitution explicitly states that matters not made federal matters by the Constitution fall within the jurisdiction of the individual states; marriage and divorce are not made a federal matter, so they are left to the individual states to legislate. The jurisdiction, however, is immaterial to my position. The liberal position is that no government at any level should be in the position of imposing on all its citizens a particular decree in matters of marriage and divorce, consensual sexuality, abortion or recreational use of intoxicating substances. Those are all matters of individual taste, and taste cannot be successfully legislated any more than it can be settled by an appeal to reason or evidence. De gustibus non est disputandum.

As Jane Mayer has chronicled in her book Dark Money, a number of extremely wealthy families in the United States—families with the surnames Koch, Bradley, Olin, Mellon, Scaife—have for many decades sought popular support for their resistance to taxation and to environmental and safety regulations and to laws stipulating minimum wages for workers by suggesting, without evidence, that governmental regulation of the economy is necessarily linked to the limitations of individual freedoms. Any government that limits where an oil company can drill or what safety conditions a company must provide for its workers, they have argued, is also necessarily dedicated to enslaving its citizens and dictating every possible detail of their personal lives. In the view of these billionaires, there are exactly two kinds of society: laissez-fair capitalist economies in which individuals have maximal personal freedom, and regulated communist societies in which individuals labor under the burden of oppressive authoritarian governments. The very idea of a libertarian socialism, they have insisted, is a contradiction in terms. And despite the fact that a good many nations in Europe, Asia and the Americas have managed to cultivate successful libertarian socialist societies, a good many Americans remain convinced that such societies are logically impossible.

Some eighty years of billionaire-supported propaganda has been very effective in limiting the imaginations and perceptions of the American public. There are, however, signs that perceptions are beginning to change and that the Libertian Socialist or Hard-core Liberal view is being distinguished from the policies of authoritarian state communism and is being perceived by many as a viable form of government for the United States.

Are you listening, Mr Boehner?

Americans have entrusted Republicans with control of both the House and Senate. We are humbled by this opportunity to help struggling middle-class Americans who are clearly frustrated by an increasing lack of opportunity, the stagnation of wages, and a government that seems incapable of performing even basic tasks. — John Boehner and Mitch McConnell

Speaker of the House John Boehner and current Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell often state the importance of listening to the American people. When they emphasize the importance of listening, I am assuming they are stressing the importance of carefully considering all the many points of view expressed by Americans, and not only the opinions of those who make substantial contributions to the triumphant political party and those who can be counted on to vote for candidates who have been captured in the gravitational field of Messrs. Boehner and McConnell. Taking them at their word that they listen to American people, I am taking the liberty of writing this as an American person. I shall express my perspective on the state of our nation by offering a commentary to an opinion piece published in the November 5, 2014 Wall Street Journal by Mr. Boehner (R., Ohio) and Mr. McConnell (R., Kentucky).

Looking ahead to the next Congress, we will honor the voters’ trust by focusing, first, on jobs and the economy. Among other things, that means a renewed effort to debate and vote on the many bills that passed the Republican-led House in recent years with bipartisan support, but were never even brought to a vote by the Democratic Senate majority. It also means renewing our commitment to repeal ObamaCare, which is hurting the job market along with Americans’ health care.

First, it may be worth taking into consideration that many Americans find other issues every bit as pressing as the economy, especially given that when politicians talk about the economy, they are nearly always talking about that aspect of the economy that is measured in returns for investors in the stock market. A broader view of the economy also takes into account the level of wages for people who must sell their labor to make a living, the kinds of employment benefits available to workers, and the environmental sustainability of producing goods and services. It is disappointing, therefore, to see Messrs. Boehner and McConnell draw attention to their commitment to repealing the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (which they choose to call ObamaCare). This is a matter on which the American people do not speak univocally. Many have been able to afford health insurance for the first time in their lives, thanks to that Act; those people may like to see the Act strengthened in various ways rather than repealed. Not everyone is in favor of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, and those who are not contented with it are troubled by it for very different reasons. Some of us were hoping for a single-payer government-managed health insurance plan similar to what the citizens of Quebec enjoy; others would prefer to take their chances on remaining uninsured. Surely, when American opinion is so diversified, a more cautious promise to the American people would be to examine the PPACA carefully, rather than to repeal it altogether.

Secondly, it is worth mentioning that there were many factors involved in the undeniable dysfunction of the Senate. No small factor in the paralysis of the Congress was the tactic, repeatedly used by Republicans, of using filibuster to make debate impossible. The lack of a cooperative spirit in the Congress has by no means been one-sided. It takes at least two parties to participate in the condition commonly called gridlock. A common perception among American people of all political persuasions is that hardly anyone in the Congress is willing to put partisanship and ideological posturing aside. It is fundamentally dishonest for anyone in Congress to lay all the blame on those who sit on the opposite side of the aisle from themselves. It is the childish name-calling and sloganeering that many of the American people find distasteful about Congress. It is encouraging to hear a promise to remedy that infantile behavior, but the promise is unlikely to be fulfilled if all the newly empowered members of Congress can say are such things as “For years, the House did its job and produced a steady stream of bills that would remove barriers to job creation and lower energy costs for families. Many passed with bipartisan support—only to gather dust in a Democratic-controlled Senate that kept them from ever reaching the president’s desk.” The American people deserve better political analysis than that sort of one-sided finger-pointing.

We’ll also consider legislation to help protect and expand America’s emerging energy boom and to support innovative charter schools around the country.These bills include measures authorizing the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, which will mean lower energy costs for families and more jobs for American workers…

Given that estimates for the number of permanent jobs that the Keystone XL pipeline will create vary between 35 and 50, it may be worth giving priority to developing solar and wind power. The pipeline is designed to transport crude from the oil sands of Canada, an operation that has had devastating consequences for the environment in Canada. Moreover, importing fossil fuels only encourages continuing their use at a time when climate scientists around the world are warning that irreversible damage is likely to ensue if alternatives to fossil fuels are not developed around the word immediately. The continued use of coal, natural gas and petroleum for energy production may have very short-term advantages, but their use is an example of ways in which the current generation is living at the expense of our children and grandchildren and further generations to come. The Republican caucus has repeatedly shown sensitivity to the moral bankruptcy involved in this generation’s prospering at the expense of generations to come; the call for a review of entitlement programs demonstrates Republican concern for generations to come. While a review of entitlements is indeed overdue and will no doubt require making difficult and unpopular decisions, it is to be hoped that concern for the future will not be limited to that issue but will also include environmental issues.

More good ideas aimed at helping the American middle class will follow. And as we work to persuade others of their merit, we won’t repeat the mistakes made when a different majority ran Congress in the first years of Barack Obama’s presidency, attempting to reshape large chunks of the nation’s economy with massive bills that few Americans have read and fewer understand.

Helping the American middle class is an excellent idea. During recent decades, wealth and opportunities have been diminishing for the middle class, and even more so for those at the bottom of the economic ladder, while the wealthiest have been prospering at unprecedented levels. The playing field of the American dream has been dramatically tilted in favor of the millionaires and billionaires, and everyone else is suffering. Changing that situation is urgently required. It is encouraging to know that the new Congress will make reform of the plutocratic system that has evolved in America since the Reagan years a priority.

Also encouraging is the promise—if it is kept—to design shorter bills that deal with only one issue and that Members of Congress can read and understand (for it is far more important for the lawmakers to be able to read and understand bills than it is for the general public). The practice of attaching irrelevant amendments and earmarks to bills as a tactic may be politically advantageous in the short term, but the long-term economic and political consequences can be catastrophic. The time for refraining from such practices and returning to more streamlined, straightforward and honest legislation is long overdue.

Messrs. Boehner and McConnell list several other priorities, some of which deserve careful consideration.

• The insanely complex tax code that is driving American jobs overseas;

Presidential candidates have been promising since at least the mid-1970s to simplify the tax code. Attempts to do so have been constantly thwarted, largely by successful lobbying campaigns aimed at preserving provisions that individuals and corporations with vested interests find to their advantage. One can only wish the newly elected Congress luck in reducing the insane complexity of the code. It may also be worth exploring what other factors are driving international corporations to base their operations overseas rather than in America. Laying all the blame on the current tax code smacks of oversimplification.

Simplifying the tax code may be one of those tasks best accomplished not by trying to please the American people but by laying aside ideology and working in a bipartisan way. What is needed is for the Congress to figure out what is necessary and what is possible, to draft legislation and then, with the help of the Executive branch of government, to explain the solution to the American people and explain why the solution reached is to everyone’s long-term advantage.

• Health costs that continue to rise under a hopelessly flawed law that Americans have never supported;

Health costs are bound to rise in a for-profit system. Opportunistic pharmaceutical companies, manufacturers of medical appliances, clinics and other healthcare providers have learned that people who are desperately in need of care are willing to pay handsomely to have their health restored. Rather than viewing healthcare as a potentially profitable business, it is time to view it as it is viewed in most other industrialized nations—a government-provided service that should be universally available to all legal residents of a country.

It is false to say without qualification that Americans have never supported the current law known as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Many Americans did, and still do, support it. Many of those who did not support it were disappointed that it did not include a single-payer option. Public opinion on this matter has been truly divided, and that must be acknowledged if any progress is to be made. Simply claiming that Americans are united in their opposition to the current law is a misrepresentation of the facts and does not manifest the kind of bipartisanship and integrity that everyone hopes will characterize the newly elected Congress.

• A savage global terrorist threat that seeks to wage war on every American;

This is an issue that must be examined honestly and in some depth. It must be asked why some people are so displeased with America that they are prepared to visit violence on Americans and on people from countries that cooperate with America. Simply characterizing other people as savage is not a good beginning at finding a way to bring their anger to an end.

The United States of America is the largest military presence on the planet, and the leaders of the United States have not always used military power well. US military operations in foreign countries have not always been altruistic, and have not always been welcome. It is not at all surprising that the US is perceived as a colonial power and as a bully. Our collective response to threats has nearly always been to use force, and the constant use of force is a significant factor in alienating people in other countries. It is not that the United States has enemies so much as that the United States has policies that turn friends into enemies. Bringing an end to the global terrorist threat can only begin by honest and careful reflection on what kinds of policies have turned other people hostile and made them resort to measures that terrify us. No enemy can ever be pacified until we have collectively made an attempt to understood what we have done to make them hostile towards us.

• An education system that denies choice to parents and denies a good education to too many children;

This is so vague as to be nearly meaningless. While it always seems pleasant and benign to offer people choices, it must be asked what kinds of choices are being talked about here. Are we talking about giving people a choice to have their children taught in Spanish or Arabic instead of English? Are we talking about giving people a choice to have their children taught a particular religious mythology instead of the findings of science? Are we talking about giving parents the option to have their children taught the speculations of conspiracy theorists instead of the historical perspectives of mainstream society?

It may well be that it is not so much a lack of choice in curriculum that is depriving children of a good education, but other facts such as poverty and its attendant problems of malnutrition and homelessness. There are more children living below the poverty level in the United States than in any other industrialized country. For far too many children in this country, poverty stands as an insurmountable obstacle to getting any kind of education other than what they learn on the streets. For them, offering choices in curriculum and pedagogical style is meaningless, since all choices are equally out of reach to too many citizens and legal residents of the United States.

• Excessive regulations and frivolous lawsuits that are driving up costs for families and preventing the economy from growing;

This is another example of an oversimplification. Surely there is far more to rising costs than excessive regulations and lawsuits, and surely regulations and lawsuits have consequences other than simply driving up costs. Some costs go up because of a scarcity of resources; others go up because of greed and opportunism on the part of those who provide goods and services; others go up because of the lack of real competition in the marketplace. Most of the regulations that exist nowadays were designed to prevent abuses to consumers, abuses of workers, and abuses to the environment. While it is no doubt true that many regulations fail to offer the full protections they were originally designed to produce, the remedy to a poorly designed regulation is to replace it with a better-designed regulation, not simply to jettison regulation altogether.

As for lawsuits, it is really the Judicial branch of government that has the task of deciding which lawsuits are frivolous and which are legitimate. That sort of thing is not for Congress to decide. Just as it is not in anyone’s interest to have judges legislating from the bench, it is also not in anyone’s interest to have legislators passing judgment on matters of law. Lawsuits are, and should be, legal. Leave it to the courts to decide when a legal lawsuit has merit and when it does not. That is the Judicial branch’s job.

• A national debt that has Americans stealing from their children and grandchildren, robbing them of benefits that they will never see and leaving them with burdens that will be nearly impossible to repay.

Early Americans such as Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine stated that government is for the living and not for the dead, by which they meant that no generation has a right to live in such a way that subsequent generations will not be able to live at approximately the same level of flourishing. Very few people today would argue against the claim that the decisions that the current generation of Americans are making will saddle the future generations with almost unbearable burdens. The impact of our collective lifestyle on the environment has already been mentioned. Current fiscal behavior is also in urgent need of addressing carefully and honestly.

By far the greatest amount of wasteful expenditure in the world today, and especially in the United States of America, is money put into the military. Finding a way to trim the swollen budgets of the military is the most urgent economic task before the nation today. Finding a way to bring the military budget down to a more modest and reasonable size would reduce the debt and make money available for education, healthcare, providing shelter for the homeless and taking care of the physically and mentally disabled. Spending money for those constructive endeavors instead of for the essentially destructive endeavor of preparing for military campaigns on foreign soil may well be the single best way to improve the American economy.

In closing, let me point out that the turnout in the 2014 election was only 36.4% of all eligible voters, which is the lowest voter turnout since 1942. Those who voted in 2014 have collectively expressed their preferences in local elections, but an aggressive attempt should be made to research what the priorities are of the 63.6% of eligible American voters who chose not to cast votes in the 2014 elections. It may be worth trying to learn why nearly two-thirds of voters chose not to make their voices heard. It is no doubt true that the American political system has become dysfunctional in many ways, and one of the manifestations of the malaise is the apparent indifference, and perhaps even despair, of the American people. Many of them seem to have given up hope. It is time to give all Americans, and not just those who write large checks to support their favorite political party, a truly good reason to hope. A first step in offering that reason to hope is for those in power to listen.

Life in the southwest quadrant

There's abundant evidence for the need of it. The old one-dimensional categories of 'right' and 'left', established for the seating arrangement of the French National Assembly of 1789, are overly simplistic for today's complex political landscape. For example, who are the 'conservatives' in today's Russia? Are they the unreconstructed Stalinists, or the reformers who have adopted the right-wing views of conservatives like Margaret Thatcher? (The Political Compass)

The designers of The Political Compass website make the case that rather than a linear political spectrum along which views, and the people who hold them, can be identified as left-wing or right-wing, what is needed is a more sophisticated tool that allows for distinguishing between managed-economy leftists such as Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili (better known by his assumed name Joseph Stalin) and leftists such as Nelson Mandela and Mohandas K. Gandhi. What distinguishes these two styles of leftist, argue the authors of the website, is their differing attitudes of authoritarianism. While the Marxists who ruled the Soviet Union, China and North Korea were highly authoritarian and ran states in which individual citizens had little personal freedom, Gandhi and Mandela were communitarians of a different kind altogether who were strongly in favor of personal freedoms held in societies filled with ideological and demographic diversity. For the authoritarian leftists it is important not only to control industry, agriculture and the markets but also to control the access that citizens have to information and to impose a uniformity on thinking and opinion. For the more libertarian leftists, it is important to regulate corporations in order to protect citizens from the excesses of corporate greed but to protect the freedoms of individuals from governmental excess.

The authors of The Political Compass have devised a test, which enables visitors to the website to determine their own location on the political and social map. The horizontal axis of the map indicates one’s attitudes about how much governments should be involved in the economy and in markets; the left favors more involvement, the right less. The vertical access indicates one’s attitudes about how much governments should be involved in the personal lives of individuals. The higher one is placed on the vertical axis, the more one feels comfortable with governmental efforts to control the behavior of citizens, the more authoritarian one is; the lower on the axis one is, the more libertarian one is.

The Political Compass situates various political figures from world history on the map. Stalin and Castro occupy the northwestern quadrant, occupied by those who favor strong governmental regulation of both the economy and the behavior of individuals. The northeastern quadrant is populated by every Democratic and Republican presidential candidate since 1980, for all have been relatively laissez faire about the economy but relatively willing to manage ordinary human behavior. The differences between the politicians that Americans consider conservative and those they deem liberal are minuscule; American politicians collectively occupy a remarkably small amount of territory on the map as a whole. About this more will be said below. The southeastern quadrant is home to Ayn Rand and her followers, people convinced that government has no business regulating corporations and markets and also no business regulating such personal matters as marriage, sexuality, the use of drugs, access to abortion and other issues. The southwestern quadrant is occupied by those who favor some degree of regulation of the economy but relatively light regulation of personal behavior; this is where one finds names such as Gandhi, Mandela, and the Dalai Lama, along with such American politicians as Dennis Kucinich of the Democratic Party, and Jill Stein of the Green Party.

Looking at where nearly all the influential American politicians are clustered together, with hardly any room between the dots representing Barack Obama and Mitt Romney and very little room between them and Hillary Clinton and her husband Bill, makes it clear that in American politics most ideological differences are more imagined that real. The media do their best to make it appear as though there is an unbridged gulf between liberals and conservatives, but in fact they are all pretty much on the same page. That page is paid for by corporate special interest groups who spend billions convincing both consumers and politicians that the ideal society is one in which markets are unencumbered by regulations and people all have the same tastes and the same cravings for barely distinguishable products, most of them unnecessary.

American society is—perhaps always has been—essentially delusional. No delusion is more persistent than the conviction that Americans love freedom and have more of it than the citizens of any other country on earth and are eager to bring their beloved liberty to every region of the world. For at least a century and a half those who have controlled the wealth of the nation have tirelessly worked to convince the rest of us that there cannot be governmental regulation of agricultural and industrial production and distribution without governmental interference in the lives of people. Abridging the freedom of a corporation to pollute the environment and pay substandard wages and minimal benefits to workers is carefully presented as leading inevitably to limiting the rights of families to worship as they choose, live where they want to live, and own the weapons they need to keep criminals out of their homes. The attitude being fostered was summed up by Ronald Reagan in his often-quoted pithy mantra, “Government is not a solution to our problem, government is the problem” and in his more verbose (for him) claim that “The Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people, it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government—lest it come to dominate our lives and interests.”

When it comes to limiting personal freedoms, poverty is far more effective at achieving that condition than governmental regulations. According to Jacob S. Hacker, a professor of political science at Yale University, “Most Americans (58.5%) will spend at least one year below the poverty line at some point between ages 25 and 75.” At any given time, 16% of Americans live in poverty, which is operationally defined as a condition of not being able to afford to buy goods and services commonly taken for granted by mainstream society. (Mainstream society arguably takes far too much for granted, but that is a subject for another essay). Poverty is a complex phenomenon that cannot possibly be reduced to a single cause, but there is little doubt that a significant factor in the rise in American poverty is the dramatic maldistribution of wealth in a society that has, since President Reagan’s administration, whittled away at laws and regulations designed to curb the insatiable greed and the feeble social conscience of most international corporations and the people who run them and invest in them. And yet many of the very people whose lives are pinched back by poverty are the most avid supporters of spurious claim that all governmental regulation of anything results in diminished freedom for everyone.

My score on the political compass test was -9.38 on economic matters; that is 93.8% as far to the economic left as the compass measures. On the vertical axis my score was -7.44; that is 74.4% as far to the libertarian side as the compass measures. That makes me an anti-authoritarian communist, pretty deep into the southwestern quadrant. So what would life be like if we south-westerners were to get the upper hand in this country? That may be the subject matter of future blog posts, but a quick sketch would look something like this:

• Wages earned in exchange for labor would be taxed lightly if at all, and income gained through investments would be taxed rather heavily. Inheritance taxes would be higher than they now are, perhaps as high as 100%.
• Education at all levels would be provided at no cost to the individual, and students would receive stipends to enable them to meet living expenses.
• Health care would be provided to everyone at no cost to the patient, through revenues raised in taxes. Pharmaceutical companies and other health-product providers would not be allowed to realize more than a modest profit on their products. (Both these measures have been successful in keeping health costs low in the province of Québec and the Dominion of Canada).
• Neither the federal government nor any of the states or municipalities would be empowered to pass laws concerning marriage that limit the gender or number of spouses that any one person can have. Any group of people living together for one year and deeming itself to be a marriage would receive all the rights now extended to a legally married couple. Divorce would be granted automatically to any married partners who ceased to live together and who wished their separation to be construed as a termination of their commitment to be married to one another. Marriage and divorce would both be purely de facto rather than de jure matters.
• The criminal justice system would be oriented entirely toward reforming miscreants rather than punishing them. Sentences, therefore, would be dramatically reduced for all crimes.
• Recreational drug use would be decriminalized, as would prostitution. Governmental agencies would be established to provide help to tobacco, drug and alcohol addicts who desired help in overcoming their addictions and to provide quality-controlled substances to those who chose to remain addicted.
• All organized religious institutions would lose all tax exemptions and would be taxed at the same rate as all other commercial enterprises.

The utopian southwest-quadrant nation would be open to anyone who wished to live here, and those who did not wish to live here would be free to leave at any time. The institution of citizenship would for all practical purposes cease to exist. Many of the most expensive governmental agencies, such as the military, the FBI, the CIA, the TSA and the NSA would be significantly curtailed, as would such agencies as ICE. (A nation with open borders has no need of costly and wasteful immigration and customs enforcement). The elimination, or at least significant reduction, of all such agencies would reduce the amount of money the government needs to spend and thus make the tax burden on everyone less onerous.

I take the unofficial motto of my village—“Just South West of Normal”—quite seriously, although I have serious misgivings about the concept of “normal”.

Rethinking America

Listening to the debates among the candidates contending for the nomination as the Republican presidential candidate in 2012, I have been struck by how many references there have been to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States. There seems to be a feeling, among some candidates at least, that these documents are unambiguous and that one can simply read them and understand immediately what the law is without any further interpretation. One gets the feeling that some candidates feel that much of the history of the Supreme Court has involved replacing the constitution with new laws rather than arriving at legitimate interpretations of the guidelines provided in the document. One candidate, Newton Leroy Gingrich, has even suggested he would, as president, feel free to ignore court decisions he disagreed with and perhaps even impeach judges whose decisions he found objectionable.

All this talk of the constitution has made me wonder whether the problem of current American politics has been properly identified. It could well be that the source of the deep divisions that have paralyzed America's legislators is the Constitution itself, since that document was the product of legislators who were incapable of seeing eye to eye on how the nation could be governed. Although it would admittedly be a big task, it might be time to put the Constitution of September 17, 1787 into the nearest shredder and start all over again trying to provide a more workable set of guidelines in order “to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” If a new American constitution is written, I would recommend making a few minor changes in the structure of the country. A few of the suggestions I would make are the following:

• Abolish the states. The very idea of trying to unite states was wrong-headed in 1787, when the only states were Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North and South Carolina, Georgia, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, all of which are clustered together on or near the Atlantic coast. Now that the nation that grew out of those twelve states whose representatives signed the constitution in 1787 has fifty states that cover many times as much territory and have over one hundred times as many people as in 1787, the prospect of uniting them all is incalculably more difficult than it was as the nation was just getting started. The task of running the country as a country is hampered at every step by the existence of states with artificial boundaries, many of them so large that there is very little common ground within those boundaries. If one looks at a state such as Colorado, just to give one example, it is obvious all four of its borders were drawn on a map with a straight-edge rather than following natural geographical features. The eastern third of the state is prairie, the middle third is mountainous terrain, and the western third is a mostly arid terrain of mesas, canyons and hills. All three of these regions have different ecosystems, different economies and different demographics. What is now called the State of Colorado is an absurd monstrosity, an outrage to both reason and emotion. And Colorado is but an example of a kind of absurdity that is multiplied across the expanse of land between the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans.
  
  Once the monstrous fiction of a state is removed, dozens of now-untractable problems will immediately disappear. Gone will be the conflict that now exists between federal laws and state laws. In the absence of state laws, there could be (as in Canada) a single set of federal criminal and civic laws. People who favor reducing the size of government should welcome the total elimination of fifty state legislative bodies, and people who favor the reduction of the tax burden should welcome the complete elimination of all state taxes. Much of the waste and redundancy that cripples the United States of America would be eliminated immediately by the elimination of states. (Of course, if there were no states to unite, the name of the country would no longer make sense, but it should not be difficult to find a new name for the more streamlined and much-improved country. It could be called Atlanto-Pacifica.)
• Abolish the Senate.The Senate exists only because the founding parents could not agree on whether each state would be represented in the federal government by a number of representatives proportionate to its population or each state would have equal weight just by virtue of being a state. (This whole issue was made even more complicated by the fact that some states that had a large number of human beings living in them, most of whom were slaves, wanted slaves to count as represented population, even though they could not vote to choose their representatives.) If there were no longer any states, there would be no need for equal representation among them, and hence no need for a Senate. Again, people who feel that government has grown much too large should be overjoyed at the prospects of eliminating one of the two bodies that make up the current Congress.
• Abolish the office of President. The office of President of the United States (POTUS) is surely the second most ridiculous political idea in the history of governance, the first prize going to the office of Vice President of the United States. No country needs a president elected separately by the people, let alone a president elected by an electoral college. A country does need some kind of leadership (unless it is a country run on Quaker principles), but a prime minister will suffice. If the House of Representatives were structured more like a House of Parliament, then the leader of the party with the most elected representatives would automatically be the Prime Minister. A Prime Minister appoints a cabinet of elected members of parliament, who may be, but are not required to be, of the same political party as the Prime Minister. The cabinet is both an executive branch and a legislative branch.
• Abolish an electoral cycle with fixed periodicity. Rather than having elections every fourth year, elections should be called as they are in all countries that have a parliamentary system. It should be the law that a government in power must dissolve parliament after five years of rule, but there would be provisions for the ruling party to call elections more frequently than that, and there should be mechanisms in place for the opposition parties to have motions of non-confidence that would force an election if governance is going badly. In order to reduce the amount of time and money wasted on political campaigns. elections should be held no more than thirty days after parliament is dissolved. In an age of rapid communications, thirty days is ample time for a political party to inform the voters of its platform and for the voters to evaluate the platforms they are asked to consider.
• Reconstitute the Supreme Court. If judges continue to be appointed by the party in power, they should be appointed for a limited amount of time, say, a non-extendable term of eight years. If judges are elected by the people, as perhaps they should be, then they should have to stand for election every time there is a parliamentary election.

These are a few of the structural changes that could be made to enable a more efficient and streamlined and much less costly form of government to emerge in the country now called the United States of America. If the Constitution of 1787 is retired and replaced with an improved document, many of the amendments to the current constitution, including the Bill of Rights, would also be retired. Many of the ideas now rather poorly and ambiguously expressed in the Bill of Rights that came to be attached to the original constitution of 1787 could be expressed more clearly. The ambiguous amendment calling for the separation of church and state, for example, could be replaced by a provision declaring that there be absolutely no reference to any sectarian religious dogmas within the Parliament or Supreme Court or in federally funded educational facilities or health care providers, but guaranteeing that no individual ever be limited in his or her choice of religious views and practices, so long as those practices do not violate the criminal laws of the nation.

There are other reforms that I personally would recommend, but some of them are controversial, and I do not wish to enter into controversial issues here. They can wait for another communication. Suffice it to say for now that it seems perfectly obvious that the Constitution that has been in place since 1787 is no longer a fit instrument for effective government. It was never particularly good, but as times have evolved its few good points have ceased to be as good as they once were. It's time to bring an end to the United States and to replace it with a constitutional democracy more like those in most European countries and in such countries as India, Korea and Japan—or our next-door neighbor, Canada.

Green Tea Party policy on national holidays

The Green Tea Party of the United States of The Milky Way recommends that all national holidays be abolished on the grounds that patriotism is unseemly, undignified and irrational, and because the celebration of nationhood serves to divide the human race into artificial and unnatural divisions that too often lead to warfare, closed borders and other forms of inhumanity. 

It seems fitting for the Green Tea Party to add this plank to its platform on July 4. For some reason, Americans have gotten into the habit of celebrating July 4, 1776 as the date when America was born. It is celebrated by those who don't know any better as the date of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. In fact, nothing important concerning the Declaration of Independence happened on July 4, 1776. The document was approved on July 2 by the Second Continental Congress, which John Adams predicted would be the date on which the birth of the new nation would be celebrated. It was not signed by anyone until August, and people dribbled in to add their signatures until November. So the document that Americans worship—the one with all the signatures—did not yet exist on July 4, 1776. (For more on common misconceptions and erroneous beliefs about the declaration of independence see the National Geographic website.)

Surely it makes no difference whether anything important happened on July 4, 1776. Patriotic sentimentality has little to do with historical accuracy. July 4 came to be the date for celebrating Independence Day in the United States, and to insist on any other date would be as pointless as insisting that Jesus of Nazareth was probably born in the spring rather than in December (if one is a Western European) or January (if one is an Eastern European). What's in a date? It's really the content of the Declaration of Independence that matters, not the date when it was voted on, or the date on which the first signature was affixed, or the date on which the final signature was affixed.

It is really with the contents of the Declaration of Independence that we of the Green Tea Party of the Milky Way have the strongest misgivings. The Declaration gets off to a very bad start in the opening paragraph.

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

An axiom of the Green Tea Party it that it is never necessary for one people to dissolve its political ties with another. It is not only never necessary, it is rarely even advisable. While it is generally speaking a rash and foolish move for one people to dissolve its political association with another, it was certainly an unnecessary and imprudent move for the Second Continental Congress to make. That it was foolish is evidenced by the fact that it led to a war that was financially ruinous and that resulted in pointless deaths and injuries and loss of agricultural and industrial productivity. So while political separation from England was frivolous, the resultant war was a calamity from which it took the new nation decades to recover. Moreover, the entire sordid affair set a dangerous precedent of hot-headed recklessness rather than cool reflection and careful deliberation. The sooner the whole sorry mistake of the American revolution is forgotten, the better the United States, and indeed the entire world, will be.

After getting off to a most questionable and rocky start, the Declaration of Independence then ventures into unwarranted theological speculation with the following dubious claim:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

This statement is so riddled with unsupportable assumptions that no rational man or woman could affirm it. First of all, no truths anywhere are self-evident. The very idea of truth is highly controversial. At best one can say that people concoct narratives to support their irrational desires, and the more improbable the narrative, the greater the temptation to call it self-evident or to attribute its authorship to a superhuman agency such as God. There is no evidence of any kind that men were created, so in the absence of such evidence, the authors declared it self-evident that men were created.

Not only were all men created, says the Declaration, but all men were created equal. That claim sounds appealing, but it can hardly be called a truth. It is at best a pious wish, a pathetic whimpering articulation of a desire that social realities could be other than they are. Nowhere in any society have all human beings had equal access to the resources of nature and human civilization. This sentence in the Declaration of Independence was penned by males, many of them slave-owners, hardly any of whom had any intention of including women in the political process, most of whom believed that only property owners should be allowed to vote. These were men who knew that not all human beings are in fact created equal, and most of whom would have staunchly resisted a society in which all members of the human race would be given equal access to nature's and human society's resources. The line was utter hypocrisy when it was written and remains so now by most people who recite it. It is a mantra falsely supposed to have magical powers.

If there is no evidence that all men were created, then there is surely no evidence that they had a Creator, let alone a Creator who endowed them with inalienable rights. There is no such thing as an inalienable right. Rights are dispensed by powerful human beings to those whom the powerful favor, and since the favor of the powerful is subject to change without notice, every right can be revoked with a simple act of pernicious will. The very idea of absolute rights is a farce, for all rights are contingent on the will of those who deign to tolerate some of the behavior of their fellow human beings. Rights are dispensed to those who pay tribute to those human beings who wield power over them. There is no justification for bringing the Creator into the picture, and nothing but unrealizable expectations can come from the mischievous claim that the Creator has endowed his creatures with inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. (Earlier drafts of the Declaration had spoken of the pursuit of property, but fortunately a more felicitous piety was inserted in the final draft, even though it is probable that most of the men present really did believe that God had given them the right to take whatever property they could from the Indians.)

Life is clearly not inalienable. Every being that is born eventually dies, and death is alienation from life. Even if it could be granted that there was a Creator, and that She granted rights to her creatures, surely it would have to be conceded that the only inalienable right of anyone who is born is Death. So the claim that the Creator endowed every creature with the inalienable right to life is plainly false. It is another example of a wish that reality could be other than it is.

Liberty is also quite obviously not inalienable. Every human society has some mechanisms available for depriving those who do not act to commonly accepted norms of proper conduct of their liberty to continue acting. Human beings are being alienated from their liberty all the time through incarceration, banishment, exile, shunning, and ostracism. Some alienation from liberty is rationalized by an appeal to questionable claims of justice, but nearly all such claims are barely disguised exercises of the capricious use of power. Liberty is always alienable, and it can be seen as a right only when availing to it does not disturb the selfish pursuits of human beings who are in power.

This brings us to the pursuit of happiness. That phrase is, at the very best, a platitude. Of course anyone can try to be happy. Nothing exists to prevent a person from trying to be happy. But the obstacles that stand in the way of anyone actually attaining happiness in anything but short and infrequent bursts are, for the vast majority of human and other kinds of sentient beings, insurmountable. Given the sheer misery of most of human existence throughout all of recorded history, it would be a cruel joke to say that people have an inalienable right to happiness, and it is a meaningless verbal flourish to say that people have the right to pursue that which they have almost no chance of attaining.

The first two paragraphs of the Declaration of Independence are based entirely on either unverifiable assertions or demonstrably false claims. After saying that the Creator endowed all people with inalienable rights, the Declaration goes on to declare that it is the purpose of government to secure these rights. (But surely, if the rights were truly inalienable, there would be no need to devise human governments to secure them. Wasn't the Creator supposed to take care of that? Didn't the authors see that the call for human government was an obvious contradiction to what they had just said about inalienable rights?)

Next the claim is made that whenever any government is destructive of the allegedly inalienable rights, then people have a right to overthrow that government. This is a very Confucian idea, of course. The early Confucians claimed that when the Son of Heaven fails to carry out the will of Heaven, then the people have not only the right but the obligation to overthrow the failed Son and replace him with a Son who is more reverential toward the will of Heaven. But whether such an idea is articulated by a Confucian or a Deist like Thomas Jefferson, it is little more than a rationalization on the part of those whose anger has boiled over to such an extent that they have taken it upon themselves to seize power from those who have it and to wield it over a different set of unwilling victims.

The Declaration of Independence was a triumph of rhetoric over reason that led eventually to a rupture in the bonds of love that ideally bind all human beings together and that bind human beings to all other forms of life and to all non-living forms in the universe. It was a bad document when it was written. It was voted on and passed precipitantly, and it led to a disastrous war. Why anyone would want to celebrate such a series of failures is beyond all comprehension.

For this reason, the Green Tea Party of America, on this July 4, 2011, hereby declares the celebration of July 4 an act of folly that serves no useful purpose. And with the abolition of this national holiday, the Green Tea Party also abolishes Presidents Day, Memorial Day, Columbus Day and Thanksgiving. If people wish to take the day off to barbecue dead animals, drink insipid American beer and start wildfires with fireworks, then let them do so in the name of the pursuit of mindless and transient pleasures, but not on the pretense of honoring noble principles.

Green Tea Party educational policy

Say to yourself in the early morning: I shall meet today inquisitive, ungrateful, violent, treacherous, envious, uncharitable men. All these things have come upon them through ignorance of real good and ill. (Marcus Aurelius)

Public education in the United States has always been fraught with political complexity. Consider the following facts about the history of public education in the United States.

• There was no system of public education until the late 1820s.
• The decision to provide public education was motivated by the thought that citizens in a democracy should be sufficiently literate to become informed about political and social issues so that they could make informed choices when voting. Since women did not have the right to vote in many states until the 19th amendment was added (passed by Congress June 4, 1919 and ratified August 18, 1920), public education was offered only to males at first.
• Because it was widely believed that without a solid moral education, a person would not be capable of making good decisions in voting, moral education was seen as of the greatest importance in public education.
• Because it was widely believed that there can be no morality in the absence of religion, it was decided that the Bible should be at the center of a boy's public education. But since the first amendment prohibits the establishment of a religion by Congress, it was decided that children would be taught no particular religious doctrines; each child would be allowed to interpret the Bible in his own way and to arrive at his own understanding of its moral teachings.
• Almost immediately, there were major protests against the newly formed system of public education based on what was called non-sectarianism.
• Conservative Christians claimed that the educational system showed a strong liberal permissive bias (because it gave freedom to students to interpret the Bible in their own way) and a Unitarian bias (since the doctrine of the Trinity was not allowed to be taught). Many leading evangelical Christians therefore threatened to refuse to pay taxes that would support schools that they could not in good conscience send their own children to.
• Catholics claimed that the educational system showed a strong Protestant bias, since all students would be taught from an English translation of the Bible that was not approved by the Vatican. Moreover, a document from the Vatican declared that allowing people to read the Bible without the guidance of properly trained priests is deliramentum (folly, nonsense, madness). Many leading Catholics therefore refused to pay taxes that would support schools that they could not in good conscience send their own children to. (This issue became so heated at times that riots broke out. In the worst of the so-called Bible Riots, nineteen Roman Catholics were killed, and several Catholic churches were burned to the ground.)

The issue of public education has become even more complex now than it was in the nineteenth century. The demographics of the country have changed significantly with the result that a religious text associated with Christianity is no longer suitable as a basis for public education. Although 76% of the US population are people who identify themselves as Christian (51% Protestant and 25% Roman Catholic), 15% consider themselves as having no religious beliefs and another 5% say they do not know what their religious beliefs are. 4–5% of the US population identify themselves as following a religion other than Christianity. (See source of these data.) Taking societal and demographic factors into consideration, the Green Tea Party recommends the following policies for public education.

1. Given the importance of moral education, but taking into consideration the need to maintain a non-sectarian (and preferably non-religious) basis for morality, all students in public school should be exposed to a broad spectrum of the moral thinkers who have influenced human beings throughout recorded history. At the minimum these thinkers should include Aristotle, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, Mengzi (Mencius), Zhuangzi, Zhuxi and Wang Yangming.
2. Given the importance of historical context for any public policies, all students in public school should have a thorough grounding in the histories of ancient Mesopotamia and of all the continents on the earth.
3. Given the importance of religion in human history, every public school student should receive an education in the histories, beliefs and practices of all the major religions of the world. Given the breadth and depth of this topic, comparative religions should be taught every year of a student's educational career.
4. Given the importance of reasoning and critical thinking, every student should receive training every year in informal logic, formal logic and mathematics. This should be supplemented with a grounding in the theory and practice of scientific method.
5. Given the importance of knowing a human being's place in the natural world, every public school student should have a grounding in astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology and geology, with an emphasis on the canons of reasoning and assessment of evidence practiced in each of these scientific disciplines.
6. Given the importance of understanding how laws are made and interpreted, every student in a public school should study some aspect of constitutional law, how bills are formulated and approved by the Congress, the functions of the executive branch and a history of Supreme Court decisions. Such education should be a part of every year of his or her educational career. Every student should also receive an education in state and municipal government.
7. Given the importance of languages as an access to cultures, and given the fundamental importance of multiculturalism in today's world, and given the ease with with young children learn languages, every student in an American public school should be taught, from the Kindergarten level to the completion of secondary education, at least the following languages: English, Spanish, and French, plus one Asian language, one African language and one native American language. (Given that Kindergarten is a German word, and given the importance of both the Germans and the Dutch in early America, every child should also learn German or Dutch, or at least Norwegian.)
8. Every child who is a resident of the United States should receive the basic education described above, and this education, and all educational materials necessary to carry it out, should be completely funded by federal monies. All students should receive allowances for transportation to and from school and for healthy food consumed during school hours. (Students caught eating Oreo cookies provided by Red Tea Party mavericks during school hours should lose their food allowance privileges for a week.)
9. The core curriculum should be determined by the federal government; no state or municipality should have the right to determine its own curriculum for any subject other than state and municipal history or civics.
10. No educational institution funded by public monies should have a sports team that competes with other institutions of learning. Monies now wasted on inter varsity sports should be diverted to exercise and fitness programs and courses in basic nutrition, which should be available to all students but required of all students whose BMI index places them in the overweight or obese range.
11. No person who has not successfully gone through the curriculum designed by the federal ministry of education should have the right to vote in any elections at any level of government unless he or she has passed an examination equivalent to that required of all naturalized citizens. (This is in keeping with one of the Green Tea Party's principles, namely, that unearned citizenship is a contradiction in terms.

Some Americans, especially those given to extraordinary levels of ignorance, may object to what they see as too large a role played by the federal government under a Green Tea regime. The official Green Tea Party response to such people is “Tough carrots!” Let people who have no interest in responsible democracy move to a plutocracy, where all their thinking is manipulated by greedy capitalists and where hardly anything is available but misinformation carefully doled out by people with vested commercial interests. As for America, may it become a democracy in which political decisions are made by representatives chosen by informed voters who have demonstrated their abilities to think critically and for themselves. That is, after all, what the Founding Fathers and Mothers had in mind.

Green Tea Economics

Consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production; and the interest of the producer ought to be attended to, only so far as it may be necessary for promoting that of the consumer. Adam Smith (1723—1790)

A perfectly obvious observation that served as a point of departure in a previous post was that the desideratum of a balanced budget can be achieved only when expenditures do not exceed income. No serious economist believes the government's budget can be balanced by attending only to cutting expenditures or attending only to increasing income. What is needed is a combination of decreased spending and increased acquisition of public funds.

It is remarkable that hardly any figures in the American political arena have had the combination of wisdom and courage needed to point out that the most costly item in the American budget is not Medicare and Social Security (as Tim Pawlenty, John Boehner, Michelle Bachmann and hordes of Black Tea Party enthusiasts incessantly but inaccurately aver), but rather the military. The wastefulness of military spending has already been discussed on this blog site (and will be discussed again in the future). In this squib, the focus will be on how to increase governmental income.

So far, the public discussion of how to increase revenues has been focussed on raising tax rates for the wealthiest 2% of taxpayers, putting into place a national tax on purchases of goods and services, increasing the rates of taxation on inherited assets, and closing loopholes that enable corporations to write off business expenses so that they do not pay taxes on substantial portions of their profits. The Green Tea Party favors all those measures but notes that even if all of them were put into place, the increase in revenues would still be modest. What will be discussed here are other measures needed to increase revenues.

An axiom of economics so basic that even I have heard of it is that the wealth of any nation depends on three factors: population, productivity and ingenuity. The greater the number of people actively participating in a nation's economy, the higher their level of efficiency, and the more skilled a society is in delivering goods and services to their intended markets, the more overall income there is in that nation; the more income there is, the broader the base that can be taxed.

A major weakness in the United States economy is that the country wastes human resources. The country fails to increase its population of workers, and it fails to make good use of the population it has. To rectify these two types of waste, the Green Tea Party proposes two policies: increasing legal immigration and decreasing the prison population.

Increasing legal immigration

There are millions of people around the world, many of them in the Americas, who are ready and able to come to the United States to work and to start up small business enterprises. What prevents them from entering the US workforce are unrealistically strict quotas on immigration. Perhaps the ideal solution would be to establish a pan-American economic union similar to the European union that would have a single currency like the Euro (called, perhaps, the Americano) and porous borders that would allow any citizen of any country in South, Central or North America to take up residency and work legally in any other country on the American continents. The ideal would be an economic zone in which anyone from Ellesmere Island to Tierra del Fuego could move freely. Under present free-trade agreements, only goods can move freely across borders. This policy serves corporations seeking markets, but it hamstrings laborers seeking employment.

While an American economic union would be by far the rational most solution, it is, precisely because it is rational, unlikely to succeed immediately. It may take time to implement, since some people will no doubt perceive that economic justice would erode their unfair advantages, and maintaining the unjust status quo will become a major preoccupation to them. So while North, Central and South America work slowly toward an economic union with a single currency, the United States can unilaterally increase its own labor force by making dramatic increases to immigration quotas. It makes no sense at all to build walls and fences and electronic surveillance systems across the border between the United States and Mexico to keep people out of the country who are eager to find honest employment and to provide labor that the United States desperately needs. The American economy would take a nosedive overnight if it were not for the millions of migrants who have come to this country to work illegally. It is time to recognize the American economy's indebtedness to those people and to make their presence in the country perfectly legal. There is absolutely nothing that eliminates crime more effectively than abolishing laws that make some behavior criminal. It is time to stop making seeking honest work, and doing honest work when it has been found, a crime.

Decreasing the prison population

The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world. 743 out of every 100,000 American people are in prison. In second place is Russia, with 577. In the United Kingdom 141, and in the Netherlands only 94, out of every 100,000 are in prison. According to an article published in 2008 in the New York Times, 25% of all the prisoners in the world are in the United States.

There are many factors leading to the fact that the percentage of prisons in the USA is eight times the percentage in the Netherlands. Two that deserve special attention are the lengths of sentences given for crimes, and the kinds of behavior deemed criminal. Both of those factors are linked to the fact that in many states, the running of prisons is done by for-profit private companies whose profits depend on a steady flow of customers for their beds. Accordingly the Green Tea Party recommends taking criminal law out of the jurisdiction of states and replacing it with a federal criminal code (similar to the one in Canada) with much shorter sentences for most crimes. It further recommends that all prisons be managed by the federal government and that no correctional facilities anywhere in the country be within the domain of private enterprise. Justice (like health care) is far too important to be entrusted to the hands of profit-seekers.

Reducing the lengths of sentences would only partly reduce the number of people in prisons. A larger factor would be to make significant reductions in the kinds of behavior that is considered criminal. It was mentioned above that seeking and doing honest work should never be made into a crime. (For that matter, it should never be a crime to cross a border and to take up residence in a country.) In 2009, the number of people arrested for drug-related crimes was 13,687,241. Nearly 20% of all inmates in American prisons are serving terms for felonious drug possession or trafficking, and the average length of sentences for drug felonies are only slightly shorter than the average length of sentences for violent crimes. Moreover, 17% of all those convicted for property crimes report that their crimes were committed as a direct result of seeking to find money to pay for drugs. Making drugs illegal makes them expensive, and making them expensive gives drug-users an incentive to commit crimes. People with drug addictions need treatment, not punishment.

Another source of human waste in the American prison system, aside from the unreasonably high number of people imprisoned for behavior that should never have been deemed criminal in the first place, is the scarcity of educational programs made available to prisoners. As a result of serving unreasonably long sentences for minor crimes, people coming out of prisons usually lack marketable work experience. Scarcity of financial resources has led in almost every state to a decrease in programs designed to educate inmates and give them marketable skills. As a result, the recidivism rate all over the United States is remarkably high. The Green Tea Party recommends that money (most of it saved by reducing the overcrowding of prisons by reducing the number of behaviors deemed criminal and by reducing sentences) be put into improving education and job training both inside and outside of prisons.

Decriminalizing international migration, decriminalizing drug use and trafficking, and shortening sentences are three measures that would result in a significantly larger workforce, which would in turn increase the tax base. The government's income could thus be increased significantly without any taxpayers (except for the wealthiest 2% of the population) paying higher rates than they pay now.

Generally improving the quality and availability of education would result in an increase in the productivity of the workforce. Educational reform will therefore be a topic for a future plank in the platform of the Green Tea Party.

Green Tea Party

Let every man make known what kind of government would command his respect, and that will be one step toward obtaining it. (Henry David Thoreau)

Preamble

There is no political party in American politics that represents my interests. In saying that, I realize I am joining a queue that grows longer each day. Some disgruntled Americans have identified themselves with a movement called The Tea Party, so called because its policies are as loose and random as raw tea leaves. There may be some affinity between the twenty-first century Tea Party and the Boston Tea Party of 1773. The eighteenth century protest action that came to be called the Boston Tea Party was a protest against the Tea Act, which lowered the taxes on tea imported from Britain, thereby driving down the price of tea to consumers. Lower British tea prices endangered the business of smugglers who had been making a handsome profit by smuggling Dutch tea into the colonies and selling it at lower prices than British tea fetched. Rowdies paid by the smugglers threw a shipload of British tea into the harbor, and greedy criminals have been rousing the rabble ever since against any governmental policy that threatens their interests by passing laws and regulations that benefit ordinary people. The twentieth century Tea Party movement follows that original model much too closely for my tastes. I have little use for it.

The twenty-first century Tea Party movement, insofar as it has any focus, seems to be interested primarily in wringing its hands over governmental spending that would benefit ordinary people rather than a handful of billionaires. The allegation of some of its followers is that such programs as Medicare and the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act have the potential to bankrupt America and that they represent a governmental takeover of the healthcare system; apparently what the Tea Party Movers prefer is a continued takeover of the healthcare system by rapacious corporations that make fat profits by keeping the costs of poor-quality medical interventions artificially high. Be that as it may, one can have a certain amount of sympathy with the concern that the American government spends far more than it makes and is therefore running up a debt that could bring considerable inconvenience to future generations. If a concern with unsustainable levels of public debt is what makes one a Tea Party sympathizer, then I propose a new branch of the Tea Party that takes the interests of ordinary people and some of the better policies of the Green Party into account. Let's call this new movement The Green Tea Party.

The Platform

If a new political party hopes to sweep the nation in the next election cycle it needs a platform, which is a list of policies and promises that will be forgotten or ignored once the party gains power and finds itself besieged by highly paid and ruthlessly efficient lobbyists representing the major corporate interests that actually determine how the country will be run. The Green Tea Party's platform is still under construction, or it will be as soon as the planks and nails arrive. So far only one plank has come, but that's a start. As other planks and shims (and, of course, wedges) arrive, they will be announced in future posts to this blog site.

Balancing the budget

There is no hope of balancing any budget unless expenditures are equal to or less than income. A government's income is made up largely of various kinds of taxes and tariffs. Most reasonable people can be persuaded that it is to their advantage to pay taxes if the money raised is spent on programs that support the well-being of the population. For at least a century in the United States, governmental policies have resulted in spending that not only does not foster the well-being of the population but actually undermines it. The greatest single source of counterproductive spending is the military budget. Therefore, the most important bundle of expenditures to examine is the bundle resulting from the policies that result in the United States spending nearly half of all the money spent in the entire world on military enterprises.

The military is a twig on the executive branch of government. Its stated purpose is to defend the country. Arriving at a reasonable military budget requires coming to a clear understanding of what the United States needs to be defended against. Aside from natural events such as floods, hurricanes, tornados and earthquakes, the people of the United States are endangered by very little. No other nations are poised to invade the country and colonize it. (That has already been done by the Europeans, with quite a bit of involuntary help by African slaves.) The only human enemies that threaten to disturb the peace of Americans are those created by the unwelcome presence of the US military itself. The US has military bases in more than 130 countries. It also has a stockpile of expensive weaponry, some of it kept in the United States and some of it stored elsewhere, that could destroy most human life and that still costs a great deal of money to maintain. The Green Tea Party therefore recommends saving money by closing all military bases overseas, bringing all military personnel in foreign countries back to the United States, dismantling the entire arsenal of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction, and reducing the army to a few thousand people trained to help victims of natural disasters. That would result in a reduction of government expenditures by about 35% of its current levels. If Wikipedia is anywhere near correct,

The U.S. Department of Defense budget accounted in fiscal year 2010 for about 19% of the United States federal budgeted expenditures and 28% of estimated tax revenues. Including non-DOD expenditures, defense spending was approximately 28–38% of budgeted expenditures and 42–57% of estimated tax revenues.

In addition to cuts in the military budget, The Green Tea Party recommends cutting all military aid to foreign countries and replacing it with non-military humanitarian aid to promote health and education in developing countries. This change would surely result in good will toward the United States, thereby reducing the resentment and hostility toward the country that has arisen through decades of interference in and exploitation of developing countries around the world.

It is impossible to take seriously any political party in the United States that does not make a dramatic reduction in the influence of the military a top priority. Some members of the other branch of the Tea Party (which, to distinguish it from the Green Tea Party shall henceforth be called the Black Tea Party or perhaps the Red Tea Party) agree that the current level of military expenditures are destroying the United States. In future postings, an attempt will be made to persuade them that the Green Tea Party has policies that make more sense than those of the Koch Brothers and other enthusiastic corporate sponsors of the Black Tea Party that have grown wealthy through entrepreneurship like that of the pirates in the eighteenth century who used to trade in stolen Dutch tea.