For a Healthy, Well Regulated Society Where Every Action is Regulated, Illegal or Mandatory

We live in the era of rule by bureaucracy. The path to this impossibility was a quick slide down a slippery slope of lazy politicians. At some point in time, the early 1960s is my best guess, our elected officials found an easier way to make laws while not needing to understand or research the particulars for the application and implementation of said laws. Their new operational model was they simply passed new legislation that gave a somewhat malleable and vague definition of the target ideas and ideals the legislation was targeted to produce and then assigned to different cabinet departments, cabinet Secretaries, select committees, or even in extreme cases some NGO to make the necessary regulations in order to fulfill the requirements stated and set in the legislation. Never in the wildest imagination of any conspiracy theory was there a more powerful way to slide down the slippery slope to a society where any and every act is either illegal or required or, in the best of cases, both. The epitome and perfection of this procedure will be taking effect throughout the rest of the year and is scheduled to be complete and workable by January 2014; but trust when we tell you that there will be more regulations spawned by this legislation in every year going forward for as far as one can envision. This strangling legislation is the Affordable Care Act which is better known as Obama Care. Most of us probably thought that everything would have been fully fleshed out and completely defined and everything that could possibly be required described in full and complete detail somewhere in the many hundreds of pages of the bill. After all, were we not told by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi that we had to pass the bill in order to see what was in the bill? Well, that probably meant something quite different than was understood by most of us.

 

The reality is that within the legislation were hundreds of pages enacting or setting in place the requirement for many items which had absolutely nothing to do with healthcare while also not defining definitively much of anything and simply left amorphous definitions of intent of coverage and systems and left much of the filling in of details and regulations up to Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius. What is even more worrisome is that when these laws are passed such as Obama Care there is no date which prevents new regulations from being added past that point. This was a peculiarity which President Obama decided provided an unintended plethora of new regulations. In order to mine this gold mine that never stops giving technically, President Obama made a position named Regulations Czar Cass Sunstein with the given job description of reviewing government regulations in order to delete those regulations which are no longer deemed to be fulfilling any necessary purpose. The actual work being performed by Mr. Sunstein is to review all legislation passed into law over the entire history of the United States mining them for potential application of new regulations which serve the intents and ends of the Administration’s legislative and policy aims. Since any new regulations, or any regulations, which are written in order to fulfill the required implementation of passed legislation does not require debate or even the knowledge of Congress and can be completely enacted and implemented by the Administrative branch of the government. Simply put, if the President can produce justification for any regulation within any piece of existing law, then the regulation can be written, implemented, and enforced without the knowledge or action from any other branch of government. If this worries you, welcome to the scariest of secrets with which the Federal government is being grown beyond the wildest dreams of the most ardent fascist or other big government advocate.

 

Now for the really worrisome part of this story, Obama Care. Just imagine what a policy wonk given unlimited power to write regulations with the intent of controlling all actions over such areas as diet, exercise, habits, risky behavior, participation in dangerous sports, accident avoidance, and virtually anything one can imagine a person either participating or avoiding in their lives as long as these regulations can be tied in any manner to healthcare costs. We have seen a small example of such in New York City with Mayor Bloomberg and his smoking ban, trans fat ban, salt limiting, and attempted soda size limitation. When addressing all things which can be considered as potential health risks, where risk is defined as requiring healthcare expenditures, and you quickly realize that everything in life is now legally defined as something that government may choose to regulate. With government health care where the government decides what care you as a patient are entitled to receive, just imagine what requirements can be placed on one so that they can qualify for the best possible care allowed. Your diet can be controlled by requiring a scientifically specified diet with excessively restrictive meal plan. You might also be required to perform specified physical exercise routine. Should your weight deviate from the governmental norms for BMI you could be placed on an even more restricted diet to address your potential health risk. You like trail biking, sky diving, scuba diving, or any other potentially dangerous or injury prone activity? Not if you want healthcare to cover sprains, broken bones or other injuries which could result even if one does not participate in any injury risk behavior. Or perhaps in order to enjoy such activities one would be required to be licensed after taking required instruction which is required for your own good and would presumably teach you the safest manner to participate in your selected activity. Of course the fee for the licenses would be directly proportional to the risks involved in the particular activity. In all honesty, nothing in life is beyond being controlled in order to assure you remain in tip-top healthy shape in order to minimize the likelihood for you to require other than normative healthcare treatments. There is already a system which will likely be the eventuality of Obama Care which is known as the Complete Lives System. This system sets up formulae which are to be used to determine whether or not it would prove to be cost effective for government to provide healthcare services depending on the cost of the care required, the prognosis for success, the age of the patient, and numerous other cold, hard facts which then make the determination whether or not you will be treated. This system almost guarantees that there will be nothing beyond the most basic care provided to the elderly and high cost procedures would also not be approved for youth, especially if the problem will require continued care. This is as impersonal a system and arbiter for the dispensing healthcare as one could ever imagine, but then government has never been accused of being emotional or particularly caring. The future under universal government healthcare, which is inevitable under Obama Care, will result in a tangled web of regulatory requirements and restrictions which will ensnare every life and strangle from them any deviance from whatever is determined to be governmental norm. The other unavoidable result will be the absolute and complete end to personal privacy as in order to assure your life meets all health requirements, your life will necessarily have to be totally monitored. The amount of privacy that remains today, as restrictive as it may seem, will seem like unbelievable freedom in a decade or two when the government has reached the point where it must regulate all activities, diets, exercise, and all else in order to assure the healthiest of populations under its care. After all, it will be for your own good, honest.

 

Beyond the Cusp

 

Another Visit to the Liberty vs. Security Debate

No article on this subject can avoid quoting one of the numerous variations on the Benjamin Franklin quote where he said something close to these reputed words, “People willing to trade their freedom for temporary security deserve neither and will lose both.” Often simply quoting Ben Franklin is enough to consider the discussion closed, but where does one draw the line allowing for the most amounts of freedoms and liberties while also ensuring comfortable levels of security. This is where the normal discussion debates the different segments which governments utilize in order to provide security and in this information and computerized age the line can be crucial and must not be drawn with any lack of clarity. The advent of miniaturization, high powered optics, computerized facial recognition software, super-sensitive microphones, spy satellites capable of reading newsprint from orbit, thermal imaging which can “see” through walls, laser sound detectors which can monitor conversations in a room by measuring the slightest vibrations of the glass in a window, abilities to activate cell phones in order to use the camera and microphone to monitor the room were the phone sits, electronic data surveillance capabilities and processing with untold capabilities, universal electronic monitoring capabilities, and other items which easily have the ability to make privacy a quaint old idea whose time has long passed. The majority of the capabilities mentioned above have existed and been utilized by the majority of governments in the industrial world since the middle 1980s or the early 1990s at the latest. The capabilities available to current government agencies leave the citizenry absolutely no place to hide and their lack of knowledge of any person of interest that is being monitored could only be explained by human error. For those who might propose that there are limits on the government spying on their own citizens, I am happy to report that you are correct in your belief that laws guard the individual against unofficial warrantless searches and data gathering. Unfortunately, for quite a while now there has been a treaty between the English speaking nations of Canada, Britain, United States and Australia concerning this problem. By this treaty a list of persons of interest from each country is presented to the other nations who in turn request surveillance on these individuals of their home country by one or more of the other countries. Often each of the member countries would request different set of requests thus should one request be discovered the rest of the investigation would remain undisturbed. The home country then collects the information and passes the raw data which is processed by the foreign nation. Once the data has been organized and processed it is returned to the home country which wished to observe one of their citizens.

The one reassuring item is the ability that governments have displayed for incompetence and missing the forest for the trees. I would not want my privacy or worse to depend on the government’s incompetence but with the investigatory powers available to the government with all the modern data processing and state of the art sensors, no individual is beyond the government’s ability to be able to tell you all of your most guarded secrets and even the smallest of facts no matter how mundane and inconsequential. With all the technical abilities available to law enforcement and intelligence agencies it is remarkable that any crime is able to be committed without the authorities lying in wait before the crime has been committed and nabbing the lawbreaker in the midst of the crime. About the only thing lacking for the government to attempt to emulate the movie “Minority Report” are the psychics wired up to a computer in the basement of the FBI future crimes division. The government is currently gathering agreements with credit card companies, banks, credit unions, communications companies, utility providers and so much more to get them to allow the government to splice into their data banks and use all the data they have gathered on anybody without any need to bother any officials for permission. This includes the coming smart meters measuring electricity and in the near future smart grid appliances which will be capable of reporting each individual appliance and its use of power. This will also allow remote control of these appliances, remote setting of thermostats on heating and airconditioning units, even recording the number of times the power to the refrigerator increased by the small amount that turning on the light causes when you open the door. So many items which were purely science fiction a few decades ago are now or soon to be possible to government in order to inspect every tiny bit of minutia concerning your life.

Benjamin Franklin would become apoplectic if he was transported to our modern world. Once he realized the powers to intrude into the citizens’ private life by government he would likely turn hermit and remove all electronic devices from his residence. Paranoid delusions would be the likely psychological diagnosis of Ben Franklin’s mental breakdown as he was taken away babbling something about liberty has died in his dear loved country of America. The debate of how much liberty or freedoms we might compromise upon to grant government the necessary powers to make us more safe is mute and no longer necessary. We no longer have any liberties or freedoms against government interference and monitoring of every iota of our existences to trade away for security. The real problem is that even with total knowledge at their fingertips the government is still incapable of providing us with absolute security. Yesterday’s bombing in Boston stands as a case in point. About the only power the government does not possess is to be able to read your mind and know your intent, though there is a partnership between the government and Google working on understanding how the mind thinks and developing AI (Artificial Intelligence) where the government will permit Google complete access to the vast majority of their collected data collected by government agencies such as the IRS, Census Bureau, and many others at all levels of government, Federal, State, County, Township and City. They are gaining permission from all levels of governments around the nation with promises of providing better services and other benefits from this research. The amounts of data mining being accomplished by government at all levels is beyond imagination and the lack of security in our persons, houses, papers, and effects has dwindled out of existence and with it our rights as guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment which reads;

“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

Liberties and Freedoms as envisioned by the Founding Fathers have evaporated before the heat of advancing technologies. There is virtually nothing which can be considered beyond the government’s ability to know if they are persistent and bring all of their capabilities to bear. The only hopes we have is to retain our protections against having such information from being used against us in a court of law. Beyond that we are likely fighting a losing battle. Our hopes for security of our privacy are now relegated to the whims of government bureaucrats and the officers of the government. Should this make you feel uneasy and raise your levels of concern then you probably have a desire to some level of privacy from the encroaching eyes, ears and sensors of government. It is not so much that we the people have surrendered our liberties, freedoms, and privacies as much as it is the government’s power to compromise these rights have become overtly formidable. How we regain the upper hand in this struggle is beyond me but that does not mean it is not an effort worth taking. If we can rescue even the slightest measure of our eviscerated privacies then any effort expended was worth the struggle.

Beyond the Cusp

Is Our Money Safe?

The answer all depends on how much money you have, where you have it invested, and how aware you are of the various and diverse challenges which can devalue your money other than straight confiscation. The Cyprus bank debacle introduced the world to the unthinkable, the bald-faced theft of people’s and business’s monies from their bank accounts. The current story on the great Cypriot bank robbery is that the European Union (EU) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have agreed to take as much as half of the money in any account above the guaranteed insured deposit amount of one-hundred-thousand Euros. This larceny has redefined the presumed safety of our bank accounts if we have over the government guaranteed deposit insurance amount which is dependent upon the country that has jurisdiction over your bank. The next obvious question is what would happen if the government reached a deal with the IMF in order to receive a bailout and changed the amount they guarantee after they had frozen all accounts, as was done in Cyprus, and instead of guaranteeing $250,000.00, as the FDIC does in the United States, and lowered it to a mere $50,000.00 allowing the world banking powers of the IMF to take even a larger amount of money? The answer is there is nothing which would prevent such a move. So, this makes every penny you have in even a presumably guaranteed deposit of a bank or other financial institution could be adjusted overnight while also denying you access to your account in order to take your money out and keep it safe.

But there are far more devious ways that governments and world organizations can steal your money. What we have to remember is our money is all relative and only worth what the world market allows it to be worth. The usual worth of any particular monetary unit be it Dollars, Euros, Shekels, Rubles or Yen is how it measures with all of the other currencies. This can often be figured by comparing the worth of an ounce of gold in two currencies and figuring out the ratio will give you their relative worth. The current system recognized in much of the world is every currency is weighed against the Dollar as the United States currency is taking its turn as the standard reserve currency. In previous periods the standard reserve currency has been the English Pound Sterling, the Spanish Dollar, and in ancient times it was the coinage of the preeminent empire be it Rome, Greek, Persia, Babylonia, or Egypt. At some times in history salt was used as currency and in the earliest of times there was straight barter which made trade difficult which is what led to making forms of currencies. Gold has been a standard which has withstood the test of time and will likely be recognized along with silver and other precious and semi-precious metals for the foreseeable future. For much of history most countries held their currency value against a set amount of Gold which was presumed to be the amount of Gold and other precious metals in their vaults, in the United States the vault was presumed to be at Ft. Knox. Currently currencies are all relative in value and are no longer pegged to Gold or other forms of set and measurable value. This is what is implied by guaranteeing a currency like the Dollar is backed by the full faith and credit of the United States, whatever that actually means.

One manner in which our monies become devalued is inflation. We all have probably seen the effects of inflation most evident when doing the weekly food shopping. Over time the price of the grocery bill rises despite the fact that we are eating the same amount of food. The prices have gone up because the money we are paying with has less buying power. When inflation gets out of control it can become something called hyper-inflation where the amount of food or other items you can buy with a set amount of money changes weekly if not daily and in the most egregious cases, hourly. When the hyper-inflation was at its worst in Zimbabwe employers would pay their employees daily at lunch time for the whole day and allow them to shop for food and then return to work as if they waited until the end of the day to shop the prices would have gone even higher than they had been at lunch time. The rise of the Nazis before World War II was facilitated by hyper-inflation which befell the German economy after World War I during the Weimar Republic.

But there are policies which governments can willingly pursue which will cause inflationary practices and devalue the people’s monies eventually making saving money counter-productive which only serves to exacerbate the problems as a certain amount of savings are necessary for investment to be possible. The most obvious of these policies is when government introduces additional monies into distribution. This can be accomplished in numerous ways. Government can print more money which will devalue the currency in a direct amount equal to the percentage of the newly printed monies to the previous total amount in circulation. Government can run deficit spending actually borrowing through selling bonds to a foreign or private interest that purchases these bonds as an investment. This is another way that the government has invented more money into the money supply though it has less of an effect as the bonds accrue value over time which spreads the effect out over time. The final path to devaluing a currency is to have the government monetize their deficit spending which means that they simply spend money without taking any money from accounts and without actually selling assets or bonds to outside entities. This can be accomplished by the government or semi-governmental institution buying bonds in order to literally invent new money. This acts exactly the same way as printing more money and placing it in circulation. This is a dangerous risk to run as the effects can easily run out of control which can lead to a period of hyper-inflation and cause the currency to crash in value compared to the rest of the world currencies. This makes import of goods prohibitively expensive and weakens the country’s place in the world directly proportional to the devalued worth of their currency.

With the economic crisis befalling countries in Europe spreading slowly across most of the Euro Zone nations and the repeated crises addressed by the United States Congress recently are signs that both the Dollar and the Euro are in trouble and difficult decisions are going to have to be made going forward. There have been rumors and mention that similar actions to those utilized to bailout Cyprus may be taken in the future in order to stabilize other countries within the Euro Zone such as Spain, Italy, Greece and possibly France. Should this theft become accepted practice, the world can expect banks to become more frail and subject to failure as the people take their monies out of banking institutions and put them elsewhere to keep them safe possibly including their mattresses. Though it has not been mentioned as an alternative approach that may be used in the United States, it does not mean that there are not people in positions of power considering a similar theft of American’s bank accounts. This theft in Cyprus may have a ripple effect far wider and more severe than anybody may have calculated. One can only hope that the potential reaction to this bold sacrifice of trust in the financial system was not something the powers who executed this potential disaster were counting on in order to facilitate some even more draconian and sinister act in the near future. This has the stench of a strong poke at the people with the intent to threaten the sensitive trust upon which our banks and financial institutions use as their foundation. That begs the question of what is the goal that these actions are aiming to attain and what is the desired result. Danger abounds and Europe is under financial attack while the Middle East and North Africa are being politically targeted and governances completely transformed. Perhaps this is simply coincidence but what if it is intentional and there exists some devious change being formulated and thrush upon the peoples of the world?

Beyond the Cusp