Kelo v. City of New London was the test case which now is the frame for the law of the land on private ownership of property. This case went to the Supreme Court of the United States where there was a conservative court of five Republican appointees and four Democrat appointees in 2005. As expected, the final vote was five to four but we will keep which way the vote went until later. First, let us review the particulars of this case. The plaintiff was Susette Kelo who owned a private home and sued the city of New London, Connecticut, over their use of Eminent Domain to transfer land from one private owner to another private owner in order to further economic development. The city posed the argument that their transfer of these lands, which included the home of Susette Kelo, to a private developer would expand the tax base plus provide economic development and jobs which would benefit a much larger segment of the people making the taking of the homes of these citizens worth doing in order to promote the general good. The citizens represented by Susette Kelo based their claim that their homes, as private property, were a sacred trust protected which was a superior claim and that the claim to use Eminent Domain was not a legal use as the transfer was not for a public use building and that Eminent Domain was solely applicable to public works such as roads, schools, hospitals, libraries and other such structures and not for providing the lands to a developer to build which was referenced as a “Comprehensive Redevelopment Plan.”
We remember when this case was being discussed on talk radio and in many of the nation’s newspapers. The breakdown on which side was supported was predictable. The mostly older citizens represented by Susette Kelo were supported by the conservative and right wing media while New London, Connecticut, government representing the developers was supported by the liberal and leftist media with a few notable exceptions who were true liberals with a very libertarian outlook. The arguments went as expected. Those supporting Susette Kelo held that personal property rights were superior to granting a big developer use of these lands over the individuals whose families had lived in this neighborhood for decades. The leftists and many liberals supported the “Comprehensive Redevelopment Plan” as it would provide increased revenue for the city of New London, Connecticut, thus benefitting the entire city over the few people. This was the public debate and that was a heated debate for that time. One need remember that the Internet was still young and social media was still to come so this debate took place in the old school arenas, that being radio, television, cable TV, newspapers and magazines. As we have stated, it was straight-forward individual citizen’s rights who owned their property over the designs and dreams of a developer and the greed of city administrators licking their chops at the increased tax base. But there was a surprise waiting to take the day in court.
Susette Kelo and House (top) New London, Connecticut Kull Property Development Plan (bottom)
The argument in the court found their trumping argument, they portrayed the remaining homeowners’ properties as eyesores, rundown, in need of repair and every other degrading description they could imagine, and they were imaginative. They had bought the majority of properties and either leveled them or left them to fall into disrepair. This furthered their insistence that these properties were eyesores and many below standards for viability. One look at the residence of Susette Kelo shows a well kept and very livable condition, but there were sufficient other residences which were available for the city and the developer to make their case for demolition of the remaining residences allowing them to receive the orders for destruction in order to upgrade the entire area. The combined arguments and predominance of evidence supporting that this was an old and run down area played a main role in allowing the decision to leave the longtime homeowners with nowhere left to turn. Additionally, their losing the case meant they were forced to accept the city’s low figure for buying their homes. The homeowners who fought city hall did so out of a deep family attachment to their homes which many of the residents had grown up in as children and inherited from their parents who in some cases inherited them from their parents. When you live in a multi-generation house, the attachment is deep and often will lead one to become overly emotional. These homeowners would very likely had received a far greater amount for their homes had they simply taken the developers final offer rather than fight them in the courts. Such a fight is unfortunately a losing fight which the homeowner will lose, if not in the near time, then in the long-term, as was the case here. Going to court is always a last resort and even if you win the initial case, the developer has attorneys on their payrolls so it does not cost them anything but time to appeal and appeal and eventually they will find a sympathetic judge and once they win, the homeowner is highly unlikely to get that decision reversed as the higher court will defer to the judgement of the lower court as to the conditions at the local level. This was a case, pure and simple, of you cannot fight city hall. Apparently, the Supreme Court agrees with that adage.
One of the most misleading labels in all of American politics is the “Pro-Choice” label. These people are often the least in favor of you making any choice in your life ever. They are the people, especially the politicians, who demand to make almost every decision facing an individual in their life, and especially the most important decisions. Broadly defined, they believe that you and everybody like you without an Ivy League education and a doctorate in an “approved major field” which again is another example of taking away your choice of colleges down to less than two dozen and your choice of majors to the social and other soft sciences, are far too stupid and unaware of the world and how everything works to be permitted the right to decide for yourself. Heavens forbid you get to make any rational choice from your view point; you would most definitely damage yourself and society and upset their ability to sculpt that perfect world they are constantly attempting to carve out of our society.
Oh, you would like some examples. First, we define these Pro-Choice politicians and people as the supporters of Planned Parenthood and abortions on demand any-time, any-place, any-where, and for any-reason or even no reason and that is their big claim to being Pro-Choice. Well, here it comes as you asked for it. Let us look at the choice of how to best protect your home, family and everything you hold dear. Can you, according to the Pro-Choice politicians purchase a firearm, a rifle or handgun or even a scary-looking semi-automatic rifle which resembles some military styled weapon? Of course not and that is why all the red tape, forms and everything else including waiting periods and the occasional threat of being outed as owning a firearm in a public posting often by one of those from the Pro-Choice groups of people. So we now know you may not purchase a firearm to protect your house though it is legal thanks to the Constitution but don’t mention at the weekend services in many congregations that you own firearms as that could make you into some kind of pariah. The professed Pro-Choice class which is all knowing will inform you that you should buy a good alarm system and if it should sound that your house had been breached, then you should dial 911 and hide in a closet until a nice officer finds you to tell you all is clear or the intruder finds you and ends all that ails you after possible tortures such as, well, we will let you imagine the what, just realize it would be cruel, unusual and designed to be physically or mentally hurtful or both. The Pro-Choice will add that for an additional fee you can have the alarm system hooked up to a monitoring service who will call you and if you do not answer or use a code-word they will call the police presumably cutting down on your wait time. The Pro-Choice might even inform you of a service which hooks your alarm directly up to the police and this gets the fastest response but places the onus on you to prove there was a trespass or you can be charged a heavy fine for the false alarm response making this a less than perfect system. Hey, they are wealthy recipients of a doctoral degree from an Ivy League college which you should have found some way of achieving so you could be like them. You see they have a monitoring service with all the most high tech alarm systems and other means of detecting and even spotlighting, literal spotlights, the intruder as soon as they step across their property line. Also, their service includes anywhere from one to a platoon of well-trained and highly-armed professionals who will torture the intruder until you arrive to identify if this was a real trespass or just the neighbor kid trying to toss a few pebbles at your daughter’s window. Wait, to the Pro-Choice group that would be a trespass. They will point out incessantly how it is they see no need for guns in the house except in the hands of trained professionals and even if you are one of these trained professionals you may not have your firearm from your work kept in your house as there is safety in the fact that at their house you are monitored while at home you might go crazy because in unsupervised areas guns cause forms of insanity. If I ever get desperate and hold-up a convenience store, I will plea to the judge that the gun dragged me from bed to pull-off the heist which was why I was dressed in my pajamas.
Moving on to the next choice you might think of taking. Let us say your industrious pre-teen child decides to do simple gardening and lawn mowing and charges rates which come to less than the minimum hourly wage. As this is not a professional and recognized area such as waitpersons in restaurants, then the minimum wage laws apply without exceptions. This would mean that your child would be required to raise the charges for his services despite their selling them for a fair price and exactly what they believe their efforts are worth. You are not permitted to estimate for yourself what your efforts are worth nor may you charge less than your competition who is charging the minimum wage set and thus gain additional business. Even more important, your pre-teen is not permitted to even fathom such an enterprise as they are not even old enough to receive a work permit with your signature permitting them to work before reaching eighteen as they are not fifteen or sixteen depending on the location. There is an exception for family farms and other recognized family businesses where the child may be permitted to work at any age and may even not receive any wages if the parent does not desire to pay the minor child, and that is more fair than them working on their own for less than the minimum wage, free choice and all that you know.
There is an ever lengthening list of professions one may not freely choose. Presumably, in a totally free society anybody may choose any profession they desire and if they perform well people will pay them accordingly and if they fail they are free to try something more their style and fitting their ability or fail until they luck into such a profession. Nobody would pay a hairstylist whose only style is a crewcut unless that is what they desired and they were inexpensive. But to be a hairstylist today one must take courses and then apprentice and finally get a license. The claim is to protect the public from health hazards. Truth be told, individual demands of decent ability in their choice of hairstylists would take care of such a problem just as well. The problem is by allowing the public to control such through the demand of the market would take away thousands of bureaucratic jobs, put an end to most of the beauty schools which are more diploma mills teaching the average student all stuff they probably already knew simple by styling their hair and their friends’ hair growing up. It would also take away the licensing fees for running a beauty salon and that is additional yearly funds for the government and another level of government control taking away your free choice. This also applies to cab drivers only to a much higher degree as this has become a protection racket between government and the existing cab companies and thus the big furor over Uber and other Internet ride-share apps. There are quite a number of ways around the government using apps and the Internet which is one of the reasons that government desires control over the Internet and thus these types of free enterprises which circumvents the government assisting with your free choice. Government licensing is but one limitation of your free choice but is supported heavily by the Pro-Choice people, especially the Pro-Choice politicians.
Taxes are another idea which the Pro-Choice politicians and, as long as they are heavily progressive and only on salaries. Many Pro-Choice individuals think taxes are a necessity and often require taxes to be raised on some and lowered on others or eliminated altogether on a select group who are determined not to earn sufficient amounts to contribute to the functioning of the government. These Pro-Choice individuals also support giving refunds to people who did not actually pay any taxes and refunds of more than what was paid in for select others. These are done all in the name of equality and altruism. Altruism used to be voluntary as was charity of giving of your funds to the less fortunate. Taxes doing this for you are another stolen choice from your long list of choices. Further, the government chooses which charitable organizations it will support and which ones it will not and the amount for each. Chalk up another stolen free choice. But the government was just getting started; there are so many more choices the government has removed from the public square in the name of your own safety. Some argue that it also weakens the gene pool as it allows idiots to proliferate. Such limits would require motorcycle riders wear helmets, car passengers wear seat-belts, natural gas include a chemical giving it its odor, toilets to flush exact or less amounts of water per flush and many other things even one which does help, it enforces the standardized measures and sizes in tools and fasteners and of course money.
Children’s education is probably the most regimented and least Pro-Choice industry in the United States. This is sad as education would appear to be one industry which could benefit most from competition and a great variety in opportunities and different paths leading to different results. The current public schools system is dictated from Washington D.C. with requirements such as multi-cultural sensitivity, sexual education and a plethora of the latest educational theories including but not limited to new math, whole word recognition (a theory which was first proposed as a means of limiting the words included in people’s vocabularies by removing phonics making new words impossible to “sound out” as had been taught for the last centuries to great success), racially sensitive history, and dropped little things such as civics requirement, spelling as a requirement claiming that each student be permitted the freedom to use alternate spelling (whatever that is), and math such that attempts are more important than the correct answer (no wonder many students require remedial writing, reading and mathematics when entering college with some wasting their first semester and others their entire first year learning what should have been taught adequately in the public school system). While most of the Pro-Choice use private schools and claim that if you are unsatisfied with the public school system you can also send your child to a private school. Of course these same Pro-Choice people and politicians work to limit or exclude charter schools despite their having proven often to produce superior children with a far better and broader educational experience and they are working to strangle home-schooling with regulations and requirements making the home-schooled children and their families under greater stresses and heavy burdens forcing them in some locations into using the public school curriculum including the educational requirements often from Washington D.C. and also the exact reasons the families demand their right to educate their own child as they see fit. Apparently the one size fits all education of the public school system despite it failing in every testable means simply now is claiming that testing produces stresses which rob the child of self-esteem and thus should be limited or eradicated completely.
These are but a select few of the limitations the Pro-Choice elite have placed upon your lives, often without anybody realizing this as they are too busy attempting to survive and make a living while not going out of their minds every April filing forms which make no sense even to the IRS as if you call for assistance and do not like the result, wait and call ten hours later and get a different person who will likely give you an entirely different set of directions and then choose which one you like the best. Well, maybe there is some Pro-Choice in the government after all and in the least suspected place possible. Imagine that.
In the most recent times there has seemingly been a war waged over who is responsible for raising children. This battle was best epitomized when Hillary Clinton came out and stated at the 1996 Democrat National Convention as if it were established fact, “It takes a village to raise a child,” (Full Speech Below). The entire speech may have been her best presentation despite her almost Al Gore like metered cadence throughout the entire speech though once in a while she appeared almost attached to or excited by what she was proposing and her meter increased briefly. But the advice that the village, a euphemism for the government, is vitally interested in the raising of the child is a direct threat to the stability and autonomy of the family. This has become the watchword for the school teachers who receive additional training through approved courses which instruct that the teachers and school nurse or other medical officer and the principal are the first line of defense against improper ideas and concepts from being introduced to children because parents have been known to introduce archaic religious “indoctrination,” their phrasing, not ours, which must be instead replaced with the new age socialized concepts where the whole society teaches that which is beneficial to the society instead and above that which is beneficial to the family. The society is known by another name, another reference and that is government. But before we can even address the war against parents and government as the first parent of every child, we must first look back at an earlier conflict between science and religion which morphed into a battle between government and religion and has brought us to the world we have today.
The first concept required is to realize that all relationships whether private, public, familiar, governmental, religious and whatever; can be studied as living entities where the healthy and most adaptable grows in scope, influence and power and the lesser entities wither and eventually die. The earliest times in human existence, even before Homo Sapiens appeared, the basic unit was the family. This was because most of the groupings were clan based and one could tell your stature, standing, history and almost everything else about you by your name as it was an indicator of to what clan from which you arose. Different clans would have cooperative agreements often sealed with the exchange of women to show good faith and create and actual binding between the two families. This also served genetic diversity thus avoiding to some extent the genetic failings such as hemophilia and other disorders. With time clans merged to forge stronger and more capable collections which would supersede the family or clan unit. These groups were the first tribes which granted greater genetic diversity. All of this arose before the first modern man but was instrumental to development of complex society. The tribes grew to include numerous clans with some better at hunting and others at gathering knowing what was and was not edible while still others showed aptitude for healing and tending the young. In these more primitive conditions there were those whose task was the care of the youngest children but as they grew they would be trained in the skill they showed the best attributes by others such as a huntsman would train the young hunters, the gatherers would train the next generation of gatherers and so on. Tribes also began the concept of history, then simply known as the story. The story was one which was uplifting and always made the hunters as great warriors defending the tribe and the gatherer who risked life regularly trying new untested fruits and vegetables and if they survived and approved the tribe would add another plant to their diet which could have allowed the tribe to use previously unexplored lands. Such a person who would live to old age was likely rare but one who had along with the oldest hunters who reached an age where their use became telling of the stories. These positions evolved to become the job of an entire group who were to be the first priests who would eventually weave a set of codes which made the first religions.
With the onset of herding and farming, the time of city-states appeared and by now the tribal leaders were chosen by some method of testing or perhaps a single family’s eldest surviving son at the time of their father’s demise became the next ruler and the age of government had begun. It is important to note that the family was the initial and earliest defined obligation followed by clan and then tribe. With tribe we had the loosest governmental forms but religion grew into an actual class with priests who may have also been a warrior class which led the defense or assaults taken on by the tribe. Finally, about the time of the first cities, which would soon become city-states, did actual government take root amongst mankind. This was the first time that there would be actual laws enforced with proscribed punishment or at least delegating the one who proscribed the punishment for a particular crime. There came formalizations with religion already having led the way in this and they were followed by government. There came positions assigned with likely the first being the close guards who protected the ruling figure, then the ranking members of an enforcement group, the forerunners of modern police and judicial system. Often times the judicial system was also run by the clerical priest class as they were also the most learned class. This started the initial conflict between religion and government, even when a wise leader tied religion and government, blurring the difference and thus granting themselves the highest position in governance and religion. This was exactly what the Pharaohs of Egypt did when they proscribed for themselves a godly aura and was closely imitated by the Caesars of Rome.
There were a few exceptions to the basic complete authority of the governing leader or even the governing and clerical leaders which we have discussed a few times before, and that was the Torah which was the founding document for the Israelites who became over time today’s Jews. The rules given approximately three-thousand to three-thousand-five-hundred years ago were the framing of some of the ideas used by the Founding Fathers when drafting the United States Constitution leading to the proposed tight restraints on the Presidency. Such restrictions such as a President being withheld from granting themselves property or wealth derived from their knowledge of government workings nor could they simply invent and apply laws without the consent of Congress and were made answerable to both the Congress or the Supreme Court should they stray from the defined limitations of their office. These concepts along with the right of a state to leave the Union if they would so choose and do so in a prescribed manner and other limitations on a President were badly damaged or destroyed by Abraham Lincoln who basically became the government during the Civil War as he all but declared formally a State of Emergency permitting the President all but unopposable powers. Still, the limitations which were first set in Torah, the laws given at Mount Sinai in the book of Deuteronomy 17:14-17 which found their way even presumably to the present day in limits on the President of the United States and were placed as the very first laws limiting the powers and impositions of Kings where it read:
14 When you have come into the land that the Lord your God is giving you, and have taken possession of it and settled in it, and you say, “I will set a king over me, like all the nations that are around me,”
15 you may indeed set over you a king whom the Lord your God will choose. One of your own communities you may set as king over you; you are not permitted to put a foreigner over you, who are not of your own community.
16 Even so, he must not acquire many horses for himself, or return the people to Egypt in order to acquire more horses, since the Lord has said to you, “You must never return that way again.”
17 And he must not acquire many wives for himself, or else his heart will turn away; also silver and gold he must not acquire in great quantity for himself.
Meanwhile, somewhere between the gathering at Mount Sinai where the Israelites responded to the coming giving of “The Law” said, according to many translations, “We will obey and we will listen,” and today in much of Europe and the developed world where the people would not even listen to the religious codes and laws, let alone obey them as religion has been supplanted by government and the new priests are the lawyers who believe themselves the ultimate interpreters and applicators of the law twisting it to their will and whim. At some point around the rise of Persia and the rise of Rome religion and government became permanently separated in what would become Europe and much of the rest which came under either Greek or Roman rule. This began the contest between the two main centers of power outside the family unit. At that time the two still crossed boundaries with government infringing on religion for their advantage and religion infringing on government very much to their advantage. A sign of both comes as part of the Inquisition. Where it was an obvious usurpation of prosecutorial powers taken into the hand of the Church striping that power for the priest class who acted as judge, jury and often executioner, their prosecutions were also abused by government to destroy adversaries or other challenges to the throne or regional power structures. At the same time King Philip II of Spain used the purification edicts from the Church in Spain to raise and launch the famous invasion fleet of the Spanish Armada against England and Queen Elizabeth I which ran afoul of vicious storms and the fleet of English gunboats which were smaller, faster and more maneuverable capable of passing between the huge troop carrying Armada frigates who when firing at the English fleet had their shot pass over the top of the low slung English ships and simply blasted the other Armada ships in their own fleet. Almost all of the Spanish ships sunk and the remainder limped home and that ended this threat to England and its Church of England, a Protestant Church closely tied to the Tudors after being created by Henry VIII. The creation of the Church of England was another perfect example of religion out of the needs of the ruling monarch. Henry VIII needed a divorce which the Pope refused him; so he made his own Church after he went home.
Spanish Armada of Giant Frigates Holding Hundreds of Troops and Cannon Ports Only capable of Shooting Over the English Fleets Comprised of Sleeker and Low Slung Ships with Deck Cannons and by the Hand of G0d Seen as the Weather
Over the ensuing years as science explains more and more of the unknowns and all appears to be explainable, the place of religion has diminished in the developed world. The need for religion to explain those things we did not understand had been greatly diminished but the final understanding is just as far out of the grasp of science now as it has ever been. The question surrounding the why, what and who caused the explosion which science has named the Big Bang is unknown and seemingly will remain unknown for the foreseeable future. Using Einstein’s equation of E=MC2 where ‘C’ is the speed of light which is times itself and multiplied just by the weight of the objects in our own little solar system and one gets a very large number and should that computation be done for all of the presumed objects just in our galaxy, the Milky Way, and that number almost becomes unimaginable and finally, if we add the viewable estimated number of Galaxies which the Ultra Deep Field Hubble Telescope took of a postage stamp piece of the sky thought to be virtually empty by all previous observations and that number is unimaginable by the average physicist, let alone the rest of us (see image below).
Ultra Deep Field Hubble Telescope Picture Each Smudge and Pinprick of Light is an Entire Galaxy
Using science as a weapon of ultimate destruction, government in the developed world has assailed religion attempting to make any religious belief or system presumably archaic, its practices the equivalence of a rain dance, the prayers comparable to a voice at a séance, and its commandments, covenants, decrees or other rulings as the equivalence to Ouija board revelations. Concurrently government has replaced religion as the determiner of right and wrong, the provider of charity, the reason for a Sabbath renamed weekend, collector of alms as an integral portion of taxes and slowly rendered any expression of religious observance unacceptable in public. About the only suppressive action government has yet to take concerning religion has been to make religion illegal. The reason is likely because should they actually make religion illegal, religion would likely make a comeback just because it was outlawed. Especially any reference to Judaeo-Christian ethics,codes, holidays, prayer, deity, prophet or Bible passage, the government put the final clasp subduing even the slightest religious thought from the marketplace of ideas. Meanwhile, ignoring the dangers, those in governments are permitting Islamic religious teachings claiming that it is study of culture and comparison of governance and civics. This plus an extra-judicial importance placed on a statistically insignificant threat posed by anti-Islamic acts which have remained relatively constant since 2002 after a noticeable rise in the second half of 2001 while anti-Semitism acts are rising in some locations many folds but these acts are minimized or completely ignored. There have been those who have theorized the governments’ in the developed world preferences for Islam stem from the Islamic anti-Semitic and anti-Christian ethos and actions. This may also be behind the initial rush for European and developed nations taking in of “Syrian refugees” while not considering taking in Christian refugees facing persecutions in the Sudan and other nations in the Middle East and North Africa.
Finally we get to the family and the initial start of governmental infringements on the family unit. One of the initial assaults on the family used the equality for women fight to weaken any male claim of being better suited at any particular field of employment due to the differences which were previously thought to differentiate men and women. The most ridiculous of the denied differentiations was the strength requirement as it was agreed that strength requirements for men had to be restructured for women such that they required a similar percentile for women to be passed. One of the first to be altered was the strength testing to be a firefighter. The requirement for men to carry a full body double along with his fire suppression and breathing gear including wearing the mask down two flights of stairs and out of a building under fire simulated conditions had to be scalable. They had to take the weight of the dummy and scale it to meet the same percentile as women as it took for men to pass as well as scaled gear weight and so forth. This required new sized dummies and smaller breathing apparatus and other expenses just to train and test women applicants. The argument made by one Fire and Rescue company in court that in an actual fire the size of the person who may need be carried would not be scalable was rejected when they had a number of fire squad captains admit that they often set an order of people entering a building or if inside chose the largest and strongest to be tasked with such carries and thus the test really was not about actually carrying a real person from the building but actually a strength test and thus would meet those requirements for scalable testing. This argument was also the initial scaling of military combat arms testing including for Ranger, Green Beret, Seal and other special forces testing and training. The real aim was just as much blurring differences between men and women and removing any male dominated jobs from having such as their label. This blurring has continued that there exist work environments where the surname for all employees has been simplified to the unisex denotation using the letter ‘M’ for both genders. Then came the real punch to the gut, when some schools began to use a new picture book titled “Heather Has Two Mommies,” to depict that a family was not the conventional one of a Mom and one Dad. Such attacks were later continued with any combination which desired the status of a ‘family’ to be so denoted.
The gender wars and war on conventional definitions continued and we even saw women enter the military training at all levels until today women have been cleared to serve in any combat role even in actual combat condition, though this has not been tested to the best of our knowledge, not even in Europe where such equanimous ideas go to be tested. There was the court challenge against the classical definition of the family in a number of states establishing the right for other than heterosexual couples to adopt children. Eventually, we suspect, that multi-coupled relations will also seek equal rights in adoption as well as tax codes dealing with deductions for married couples where communal communities will be permitted treatment as what will likely be referred to as a ‘greater family’ or a ‘communal family’ and demand they receive treatment equal to a traditionally defined family. Eventually, through whatever means are required, the definition of what constitutes a family will be so weakened such that a person suffering from having multiple personalities will be able to be granted status as a family. Then, as with religion, the government will claim that they are the ultimate family and thus children will be raised by a licensed individual who will soon become a government employee much in the manner that teachers are now government employees. In an age gone-by, some name it the frontier age but really was anywhere a town was small enough and in an unpopulated area where there is no overseeing governance, when the citizens, particularly parents, desired a teacher who was knowledgeable in what was called the three ‘R’s (Reading, wRiting and aRithmatic, they were very adaptable) the wealthy peoples or person would hire a teacher and the one-room schoolhouse would be erected by the townsfolk and that was how early schooling was accomplished. Eventually the town would grow where grades by age groups, usually the young, middle and advanced groups, and multiple teachers were required, where in some fortunate places the wealthy people still provided the salary for the required teachers but eventually the entire community would jointly provide the teachers’ salaries with each parent paying their share according to the number of children they placed in school. This would eventually become some form of taxation collected by the governing body who also hired teachers and this will eventually become the department of child-rearing with the law eventually requiring all children to be raised from birth by the government.
Caring, educating and making every individual dependent on the state for everything from birth to death, cradle to grave care, thus makes everyone completely comfortable with doing exactly what the governing bodies demand. Just pray that by that time some overseeing the governing has been taken over by a self-repairing computer system and not by very fallible human politicians such as the wonderful and kind imbeciles who are elected or appointed in far too many societies for such to become all-powerful. Still, it is the nature of any organism, be it an individual organism, a collection of similar organisms, a collection of differing mutually beneficial organisms, a collection of balanced organisms, a collection of prey and hunter organisms, an organism composed of a collection of organ or any other imaginable system of organisms as such as today’s political class where they are dependent on others on which they prey (we are somewhat unsure which class they fall into to be honest) which exist in the many strata which we find defined in our modern society. The government grows by replacing existing and often very functional systems by meddling and regulating until they have subsumed the entire system and then they start to lower the expectations such that they are able to claim by the lowered standards how government run programs are superior. They will always point to the area where by their own defined criteria they prove to be superior. Often the criteria they point to first is inclusion as they will find groups which was at the margins or preferably outside the margins of the private run systems were capable of including and claim superiority due to the sheer numbers served. This has been evident most often with schooling where minorities of students are able to afford private school and the public education system serves all including those who would be unable to afford private school at the current cost. What they hide is that should they give parents a voucher which can only be used for attending private schools, that the very students they point to would easily be able to afford private school education. The truth is that there would be an entire market of schools which would educate children for less. The same would very likely be true in other government run institutions, but government has two basic advantages; first is they accomplish the assigned tasks with the minimal amount of effort from the people served and, even more importantly, they can make their providing of the assigned services required to be provided by government trained and licensed individuals thus making only government the sole provider by law/regulation.
The last thing which is an evil by which government grows and makes the government the beginning and the end in all places government desires to control is the power of laws made by fiat and without review by elected officials. The Federal Government is the most guilty of this intrusion and dictation over the people without review by the people’s elected representatives. This mechanism is known as regulations. The House of Representatives and the Senate will all too often pass legislation which sets goals and not mechanisms and then assign the flushing out of the how to accomplish these goals to a cabinet or department within the government to figure out who, what, where, when and how these goals will be defined and met. They do this without any input beyond the vague and often amorphous set of goals even leaving the final definitions of the goals and then formulate regulations. http://hls.harvard.edu/faculty/directory/10871/Sunstein/ target=blank>Cass Sunstein was appointed by President Obama to be his Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs Regulatory Affairs and assigned to review existing Federal Laws and find those laws which would allow for new and varied regulations to be fashioned in order to complete desired acts, actions, positions and requirements desired by President Obama and his team of Czars so that they could accomplish policy goals without involving Congress. Many of the regulations which Cass Sunstein wrote will lay waiting for complimenting laws and regulations to be passed or written and then they will also be applied. Very few if anyone other than the President and his former Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs actually know all of what was found, written and sitting waiting for the appropriate time that these regulations will be required for government to accomplish another expansion of its powers. The regulatory route is what is most vital for government to grow and expand into new and various areas.
Sometimes one is required to look back centuries and research deeply into cultures and societies in order to see that which has changed. One area where this is particularly true is printing. There have been some radical advances in printing made because of computers but that is more in preparation as when printing mass numbers of items such as newspapers and books, the methods used have remained very constant since the invention of moveable type which was where each letter of the alphabet and each number from 0 to 9 along with spacers and punctuation were made on individual pieces as blocks and thus could be arranged in any order. With enough of each particular block one could print many pages of the same letters very quickly. Before that invention printing was done by a specialist carving out a master copy reversed often in wood and it would be used but had a limit on how long they lasted. Additionally, the letters carved into the master were permanently in place and could not be used in another page. A whole new master would need to be made. Before this method, things were even slower as the only people making books were a few crafts-people known as calligraphers and specialist Monks trained in calligraphy. Books in these times as well as anything else we would print today and requiring more than one copy were all made each copy by hand individually. The Monks trained in calligraphy would spend their entire lives on one book if many, many copies were required and those who had the finest styling and abilities would be permitted to make copies of the Bible. Making a Bible was the highest form of calligraphy. There are still some who are studied in this art who are hired to make such books and these books are rare, often one of a kind, and are extremely expensive, some priceless. There are still books and scrolls made today by hand. Torah scrolls are one such example and are written by trained Rabbis who often spend years making a special Torah scroll and months making normal Torahs. Just for the record, the government used to hire private companies to make their respective printed material such as pamphlets, maps, tourist informational material, records of Congressional actions and other necessary items. Today most of these are printed by the government with a vast number done at their Pueblo, Colorado printing facility. Of course all money is printed by the government at the mint. Thus far, schoolbooks are written and printed by private companies often following set guidelines set by, you guessed it, regulations. These regulations are changed at intervals as the government, the Department of Education, change their requirements or decide to emphasize different concepts. From some of the most recent textbooks we have read, it appears that much of what we were required to learn in school has changed drastically and not necessarily for the better. Concepts such as whole word recognition which replaced phonics and sounding out worlds, new math or newer new math, and history as well as civics texts have changed drastically. There is a reason so many college educated students know so little about history and government which may make for great fun on the Lettermen Show but is less funny when these same people vote. The lack of making informed choices was made, if one follows the news, obvious to many ‘informed experts’ by the two choices made as the candidates for President by the two major parties. We believe it could have been worse, but it might have been better. Our closing remark is a quote from Thomas Jefferson. It may be a reference to Jefferson’s comment to his nephew Peter Carr, “State a moral case to a ploughman and a professor. The former will decide it as well, and often better than the latter, because he has not been led astray by artificial rules.” As noted in Jefferson to Peter Carr, Paris, August 10, 1787, in Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 12:15.
Beyond the Cusp 