Words by Woods

In light of President Obama’s recent State of the Union Address, I decided to revisit the first State of the Union Address from President George Washington.

By my reading, President Washington’s address was less than 9 minutes long.  While it has become a modern convenience that the presidential budget address and state of the union address be combined, the first state of the union focuses on the highest priorities and lacks the laundry list of spending initiatives that we see on TV.

My favorite part of President Washington’s address expounded upon the importance of knowledge and education as a foundation for our experiment in free government:

Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness. In one in which the measures of government receive their impressions so immediately from the sense of the community as in ours it is proportionably essential.

To the security of a free constitution it contributes in various ways – by convincing those who are intrusted with the public administration that every valuable end of government is best answered by the enlightened confidence of the people, and by teaching the people themselves to know and to value their own rights; to discern and provide against invasions of them; to distinguish between oppression and the necessary exercise of lawful authority; between burdens proceeding from a disregard to their convenience and those resulting from the inevitable exigencies of society; to discriminate the spirit of liberty from that of licentiousness – cherishing the first, avoiding the last – and uniting a speedy but temperate vigilance against encroachments, with an inviolable respect to the laws.

Today, when we gaze into the maul of the federal Leviathan, we should understand that it is the failure of our education system that has accelerated our decay by lobotomizing the citizenry.

While the full text of President Washington’s address is available on-line, I have created a video with a reading of that speech.

WarVideo on YouTube suggested that I Google for videos of C. Bradley Thompson as there were a couple of interviews available on-line.

Related to Thompson’s excellent book on John Adams, I watched the following interview produced by Center for Ethics and Entrepreneurship:

CEE Interview with C. Bradley Thompson on John Adams, Part I

CEE Interview with C. Bradley Thompson on John Adams, Part II

RationalJenn has asked, “Which 15 books that you have read will always stick with you?”  The rules specify that you think about the issue for no more than 15 minutes and that you list the first 15 that come to mind.

My answer is below, with a video citing features of each.  I added a condition that I would not repeat authors.

What are your 15?  Answer in comments.

** My 15 Books **

1. For the New Intellectual: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (Signet) by Ayn Rand.
2. The Federalist Papers (Signet Classics) by Hamilton, Madison, and Jay.
3. The Autobiography and Other Writings by Benjamin Franklin.
4. Washington by Douglas Southall Freeman.
5. Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t by Jim Collins.
6. First Things First by Covey, Merrill, and Merrill.
7. John Adams and the Spirit of Liberty by C. Bradley Thompson.
8. The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement by Goldratt and Cox.
9. Sparrowhawk One: Jack Frake by Edward Cline.
10. The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else by Hernando de Soto.
11. Discourses by Machiavelli.
12. A History of Warfare by John Keegan.
13. A Turn for DeWurst by Sydney Kendall.
14. Tecumseh: A Life by John Sugden.
15. Macbeth (Folger Shakespeare Library)by Shakespeare.

Myrhaf at The New Clarion provides advice to the Democrats, after their recent electoral defeats.

Essentially, he observes that the New Left’s efforts to remake America according to their vision through the regular Constitutional processes have failed; therefore, their only hope to achieve their dreams are to manufacture a major crisis so that regular processes can be subverted in a tyrannical power grab.

In fairness, I observe that he does not support the New Left agenda and that the recommendation is tongue-in-cheek to say that they should be consistent and unmask their essential selves.

Taking a more charitable approach to the Dems as a whole (instead of simply the New Left Dems), I commented with the following advice:

Before the MA election, I thought that the Democrats were approaching the overreach of the Federalist, which led to their political oblivion beginning in 1800. The election of Brown may have saved the Dems from that fate.

My prescription for the Dems:

1) sack Pelosi as Speaker, as her “leadership” precipitated the Bush-Obama recession,

2) pass significant deregulation legislation, as the Dems did in transportation during the 70s, and

3) Obama needs to hire some grownups for the White House staff to teach him to be President instead of simply being the congressional spokesmodel.

My prescription for the Reps:

Embrace the economic policies of Thomas Jefferson and Albert Gallatin, who substantially reduced the debt of the United States by eliminating specific programs, offices, and taxes.  Such a program would undermine the spoils system associated with appropriating federal money to political supporters as occurs today.

What are the best practices when looking for work?

I made a list and a video.

1.Prioritize
2.Referrals
3.Urgency
4.Automate Boards
5.Contact Management
6.Multiple Targets
7.Multiple Resume Versions
8.Track Results
9.Personal Projects
10.Blog

If you have anything to add to the list, please leave a comment.

Republican party chair Michael Steele complains against Senator Reid’s comparison of opposition to “health care reform” legislation with historical opposition to slavery.  I note:

Another pathetically weak position by the Republican leadership.

Historically, Democrats were the defenders of both slavery and Jim Crow.

Today, Democrats champion the idea that some must labor uncompensated for the benefit of others by order of the government.

However, the unprincipled Republicans can not name such compulsion as a new government enforced slavery because they are pragmatically complicit in the legal expansion of involuntary servitude as ordered upon the minority by the majority.

Jihad Watch reports that according to MEMRI, the Obama Administration is negotiating to give the Taliban control of territory in Afghanistan.  To which, I observed and asked:

Giving territory to terrorists, it did not work in Columbia when the Clinton Administration championed the concept.  Come to think of it, it did not work in Chechnya when the Russian attempted it.  Further, it has not worked in the West Bank and Gaza.

Given three points of evidence that such a policy does not work with terrorists, even non-Muslim terrorists, can the Obama Administration cite any instances of such a policy being successful?

While I find much value in Daniel Pipes writing, he missed the mark when he wrote that it was unproductive to consider whether the Ft. Hood attack was an act of terrorism, because there are too many definitions of terrorism and attacking soldiers is not terrorism.

In response, I commented:

I disagree with this pragmatic approach that finds it unproductive to question whether Hasan’s attack was an act of terrorism. Ideas matter as is reflected by the recommended narrower focus on jihad.

While there are numerous definitions of terrorism that prevent communication on the subject, an objective definition that represents the essential elements of the concept is possible. Based upon comparison to concrete instances of terrorism and effective counterterrorism, the best definition that I have found is that terrorism is “a belief that the initiation of force against symbolic targets by a non-state organization is an effective method for achieving political change.”

Using this definition, based upon news accounts, Hasan’s attack was an act of terrorism. The military personnel were symbolic targets representing American power and the threat modernity poses to reactionary interpretations of Islam.

Focusing upon jihad alone addresses the motivation for the violence, and is part of creating a backlash policy; however, it would prevent addressing other critical counterterrorism policy issues. For example, detaining terrorist criminals require isolation to prevent efforts to recruit those disposed to violence into the organization, in this case the “true” Ummah. Further, deterrence measures need to be taken to address terrorist infiltration into our military.

A narrow focus in the name of a pragmatic consensus obscures the proper course of action by evading the objective principles involved.

In a Washington Post Op-Ed with Texas Gov. Rick Perry (11/6/2009), Newt Gingrich focused upon what he must consider to be his best case against the Pelosi-care bill. His is a very pragmatic argument against expanding federal regulation of health care: if it has not worked then try something else, but do not stop and examine the failed premise at the heart of the problem. In his effort at opposition, Gingrich demonstrates that he is not in fact opposing the fundamental error, but instead accepts and embraces it.

According to Gingrich, the Democrats’ plan violates the proper relationship between the federal and state governments by imposing an unfunded mandate upon the states and ignoring state efforts seeking waivers to federal regulations that would enable state innovation in health care reform.

As evidence for his advocacy of multiple disjointed concurrent state-centric reform efforts, he cites 1) the positive impacts from Texas’ tort reform that resulted in the availability of more doctors, and reduced costs for liability insurance and lawsuit settlements, 2) the unpermitted promise offered by Texas’ Medicaid reform proposals to facilitate the indigents’ acquisition of private insurance and reduce emergency room expenses, 3) the poor quality of care under Medicaid caused by federally imposed price controls, and 4) the high costs of improper payments within Medicaid.

Essentially, his argument is that federal direction of health care policy has not worked and should not be expanded; instead he argues that this failed regulatory system should be reformed by devolving policy decisions to state governments. While this particular position pragmatically contradicts Gingrich’s advocating elsewhere that federal regulation of interstate commerce nullify state mandates upon private insurance contracts, inconsistency within his own positions is not his primary error.

Gingrich, Pelosi, and the Democrat sponsored health care proposals share an invalid view of the proper role of government. All agree that through democracy our representatives can dictate via statute any health care policy that is ephemerally supported in a public opinion poll by 50% + 1 of the electorate, and that such policy can be changed to the opposite tomorrow when the poll results shift. Their elevation of popular whim evades the fact that such democratically based legislative commands on health care policy violate individual Americans’ fundamental right to association and contract.

Currently, public health care policy is based upon the premise that government should force someone other than the patient to pay for the patient’s medical bills, a compelled risk sharing scheme. Consequently, public health care plans (Medicare and Medicaid) are going bankrupt; meanwhile, government subsidized employer-based health care plans erode jobs and wages by diverting capital from productive investments. In response to this government sponsored failure, our two political factions argue about how an intrusive government can solve the problems created by intrusive government policy.

Instead of focusing upon what novel pragmatic actions could be taken by government to maintain the premise that each of us must be forced by government to pay for someone else’s health care, a new perspective is needed to focus upon individual rights, an individual’s freedom to act without compulsion while respecting others’ freedom to act independently upon their own judgment. Concretely, this focus upon individual rights in health care policy would result in protecting individual contract rights from state mandates, civil suit reform to facilitate the timely and just resolution of private disputes, ending the expansion of government’s policy domain through legislative abuse of the tax code, and winding redistributionist public welfare programs down to their complete elimination.

Reposted from Conceding The Future

I have been talking to an artist about doing a draft concept for a book cover.  Unfortunately, my jargoned brief summary was full of terms that did not effectively communicate what the book was about.

Rousseau this…General Will that…Dewey the other…and it starts to sound like “blah, blah, blah.”

Here is a break down of the idea behind the book:

• Obama sucks.  Gingrich will be the brain and megaphone for Republican ideas; he will become the new change.
• Because Bush sucked, people choose Obama and they are starting to learn that Obama sucks too.
• Our politics change from suck to different suck to another different suck.
• Recently, each President is worse than the one before.  The last time that downward pattern continued there was a civil war.
• The environment for the release of the book is that people will by then know that Obama sucks and so Gingrich’s ideas will look better.  The book is to broadcast that Gingrichism (through his 21st Century Contract with America platform) does not really represent a fundamental change from Obama.
• The book is to explain what a real alternative would be to the unthinking blind pragmatism (do and try anything that feels right without reference to principles based in reality) shared by the Dems and Reps.  It will do this by defining the follow terms, explaining how they relate hierarchically (think step pyramid), and demonstrating how they relate to current political reform:  Reason, Justice, Freedom, Production, and Achievement.

As an example of a visual concept to give a flavor of the criticism within the book:

• Gingrich sits in the posture of Rodin’s “The Thinker,” except his features and body are not concentration embodied; instead Gingrich is slack, slouched, and puffy.
• His eyes are out of focus and crazy to represent his disconnect from reality.
• He has the manner of a dirty savage Neanderthal in a soiled American flag loin cloth.  On his bicep is an “I Heart God” tattoo, or something upon that theme.
• He is larger than life and sitting upon the House wing of the Capitol (south wing), as a representation of his demagoguery (panderer to popular opinion; Gingrich is an admitted and proud poll follower).
• Beneath his bare and muddy feet is a parchment of the U.S. Constitution with the Bill of Rights prominent and particularly soiled by Gingrich.
• Several groups of small bipedal elephants in suits are on the hill below.  They would be doing, as a symbolic representation, what Republicans at their worst do:  crucifying somebody, burning books, abusing a pregnant woman, beating a gay couple, wastefully burning piles of money, marching school children in regimented obedient conforming order, holding a gun to someone’s head to make them pray, breaking scientific equipment, etc.

I think that picture illustrates the working title of the book, Conceding the Future:  Gingrich Republicans and the Evasion of Individual Rights.

Rodin’s The Thinker

Image Source: WikiMedia Commons, copyright 2006 David Monniaux

U.S. Capitol, West Front view (House wing to the right side of image)

Image Source: The Architect of the Capitol

Cross posted from Conceding The Future