PRay TeLL, Dr. Hash

<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">America's healthcare costs are approaching 20% of its GNP. It's incongruently expensive because it's a natural monopoly, which means people have no choice in what they pay. How many ads do you see claiming lower prices for medical care? Where are the sales? Worse, in many situations consumers of healthcare have no choice whether to buy because their l...

<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">We've really savaged some misleading concepts about Government finances, let's review:</p> <ol> <li> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Government bonds obligate someone else to pay for your debts: good for you, not good for someone else.</p> </li> <li> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">The...

<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Bankruptcy is in the U.S. Constitution for a very important reason, to let people start over again after bad judgment or bad luck put them into a position they can't realistically come back from. Cities need to declare bankruptcy for the same reason. However, some State governments are so captured by Public Employee unions that they've made it illegal...

<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Government has its own accounting rules that don't include pensions & other future obligations among their liabilities. Their illogic goes: legislators can always vote not to pay the benefits, therefore those debts don't really exist. That concept is factually true but it does mislead rational people into drawing the wrong conclusions about our na...

<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Personally, I'm with Dick Cheney on one thing: deficits don't matter, but because all the economics most people understand is the erroneous assumption that it's something like balancing their home budget, demagoging politicians use the deficit stalking-horse to gin up outrage & condemnation. This has created a cottage industry of those self-same p...

<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Government pensions are three-way unconscionable contracts where government employees collude with other government employees while putting the obligation on the taxpayer. To show how big a problem this is, consider that government pension obligations are equal to the total net worth of the United States. Also, the idea of government pension “reserves...

<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Government employees are defined by the fact that taxpayers are responsible for their salaries, and they are not subject to feedback through Market Pressures. So many people work for government, almost 15% of the labor force, well over 20 million people, that it's a significant voting block, and acts like one, especially the union aspect. It's easy to...

<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Money is imaginary, just numbers in a computer. Every year Government spends the imaginary money. Someone who receives that money puts it in the bank which then loans 10x that amount of money to more people, who then buy things, and the people who get that money put it in the bank which loans out 10x as much, over-and-over, so that the original money...

<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Government has no money. That simple fact seems to escape most people. The only money Government has is the money it collects from taxpayers. Anticipating that revenue, governments borrow money, proposing to pay it back from tax receipts; the government can bond taxpayers to private money-lenders, which is why the concept is called a “bond.” Just thin...

<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Since most people don't have any political ideology except “what do I get?” and “don't change my life,” concepts like The Left & The Right are really only understood by wonks, and aren't a very accurate portrayal of political reality anyway. Usually the terms are used in the context of one side disparaging the other: The Left doesn't call itself “...

<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Any State is easily the equivalent in complexity, scope, and product delivery, to a major private-sector business. At the highest levels of a business, the management team is certainly upper-echelon quality-wise. “Qualified” people are easy to spot from their CVs. Of the 10,000s of resumes that pass through a business's Personnel department, only a sm...

<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Rudeness is not boldness; yelling your opinion in a crowded auditorium is not brave nor admirable; disrupting a gathering of people you don't agree with is not righteousness. Unfortunately, these actions carry the aura of protesting, but protesting should not occur at the expense of other listeners. The people whose time you interrupted were meeting i...

<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Political Parties are nothing more than groups of Special Interests. They certainly have no common ideology even though both sides condemn the ideology of the other as if they did. In fact, progressives used to be Republicans, while Democrats were conservatives; it's all a matter of who has the most entrenched power. Today, the Democrats are a loose a...

<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Spreading democracy around the world one coup at a time is an American trademark. Though the 1950s & 60s were the halcyon days: Reagan certainly made hay in Central America, both Bushes weren't too bad at it in the Middle East, and even Obama gets credit for Libya & Syria. There seems to be no place too ridiculously awful for America not to st...

<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Predicting the future is fraught with downside, just ask anybody in Vegas. People rely on statistics as a way to legitimize their fortune-telling, and statistics do work in many situations, which has made them a tool of the exploiters: the people who leverage the credibility of statistics for their own self-interests. For example, there's electioneeri...

<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">As American children, we are indoctrinated with the powerful mythology of voting, so every time we hear about someone trying to deny others the Right to Vote, we experience a visceral, almost irrational negative reaction. In fact, it's actually difficult for us to believe that people would be so selfish as to deny others the right to express their opi...

<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Over 250 years ago, America became the 1st modern democracy, the "Great Experiment," but true large democracies were not thought to be possible, primarily due to technology at the time. So far, things have worked out pretty well. Voting has the advantage of changing things that are subjective into something objective, and voting is an elegan...

<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Authority comes in many flavors, let's review the ones we've learned so far:</p> <ol> <li> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">You have no Rights except the ones you are willing to defend with violence.</p> </li> <li> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">It's difficult to argue who is in charge...

<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Most Americans do not like to give up their autonomy, the power to make their own decisions based on their personal set of values. When this country was founded, the 13 states united primarily to act in concert during their rebellion from Britain. The arguments for State’s Rights were measured against the strength achieved by subservience to a central...

<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Old White Guys have held authority in The West for centuries, and odds are they will maintain their hold on the reins, but challenges to their power are legion, fueled by democracy & Social Media. The resentment towards OWGs has been building for at least a generation. I wasn't aware of it when I was younger but maybe that was because I was young,...

<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Waves of control-seekers ripple through society and through time. They can sometimes endure for decades, but most often their tenure can be measured in years then the coalition breaks down for all the reasons that any carefully balanced alliance disintegrates. U.S. politics is a prime example of small groups of people building power until they have th...

<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Elitists are by very definition, people who think they should be in authority; that they are specially trained, or have exceptional mental capabilities, or are selected by god to be in control. Occasional, some arrogant person might actually live up to their high self-image, and these remarkable few provide cover for the vast majority of idiots who, i...

<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">It's true, the world does revolve around you, but that doesn't make you special because that's what everybody thinks. You are the paramount authority in your own mind, which is why you desire & deserve respect from others. You also expect your personal authority to remain sacrosanct as part of The Deal, that no one is going to be telling you what...

<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">There are many sources of authority: if you want Moral authority, you refer to your church; and legal authority is ensconced in the Judiciary; for authorities on commercial matters, you would ask someone from the business world; cultural authority comes from the ethnic group from which it derived; creative authority is reserved to artists; and the ult...

<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">The number one rule in life is that violence is the ultimate arbitrator, and we intellectually know that unbridled violence will keep a society mired in degradation & oppression, completely forestalling any chance of personal liberty, therefore when America was founded, as part of The Deal, Americans relinquished their personal Right of Violence &...