"We Have Less and Less Say About the Shape Of Events Which Shape Our Future."

The title of this post comes from a longer quote that reads as follows:

"Every year, whether the Republican or Democratic Party is in office, more and more power drains away from the individual to feed vast reservoirs in far off places; and we have less and less say about the shape of events which shape our future."

Fascinating observation and how appropriate for life in America today. Many of us have an uneasy, gnawing feeling that we are no longer the land of the free, free to do as we please and to shape our future and the future of our families as we see fit. For a nation built on the principles of freedom, liberty, and personal responsibility, this is not a healthy condition.

Many times we have pointed out the numbing fact that American government, at all levels, confiscates over 40% of our earnings every year through taxes and fees, a confiscation level that:

1. Restricts our ability to seek out and pay for the best education for our kids.
2. Restricts our ability to expand or start our own business.
3. Restricts our ability to contribute to our favorite charities.
4. Restricts our ability to live and work where we would like.
5. Restricts our ability to spend our hard earned wealth any way we would like.
6. Restricts our freedom to live our lives as we see fit, not as some politician sees fit.

Any type of restriction is a hit to our freedom and by taking so much or our spending power in the form of taxes and fees, liberty is restricted to unheardful levels. And what do we get for these restrictions, what "vast reservoirs in faraway places" are the beneficiaries of our restricted freedom? These reservoirs are now deep, diverse, wide spread, and largely ineffective:

• Why do we still spend billions of dollars a year to garrison tens of thousands of U.S. troops in Europe, over twenty years since the Iron Curtain fell?
• Why do we still spend billions of dollars a year to garrison tens of thousands of U.S. troops in Japan, sixty six years after Japan surrendered in World War II and who has been a solid democratic country, a friendly ally, with a strong economy for decades?
• Why do we still spend billions of dollars a year to garrison tens of thousands of U.S. troops in South Korea, a country with one of the strongest economies in the world and which requires mandatory military duty, thus, having more than enough assets to protect itself from North Korea?
• Why do we still spend billions of dollars a year to garrison troops in Iraq, especially since our current President promised, but failed, during his campaign to wind down our military presence in that country?
• Why do we still give away billions of dollars every year to the agriculture industry in this country, the vast majority of which does not go to "family farmers" but ends up in the coffers of the major agricultural corporations, most of which are now enjoying recording breaking profits as world wide demand for American food products increases?
• Why did we spend billions of dollars to bailout auto companies and financial institutions whose sloppy, stupid, short sighted management was punished by the market forces and who deserved the same fate as ill performing companies received in the past: termination.
• Why do we continue to spend billions of dollars a year for various "corporate welfare" initiatives, initiatives that are little more than a re-election campaign donation source for incumbent politicians?
• Why do we continue to spend billions of dollars a year for a mammoth government bureaucracy that is redundant, wasteful, inefficient, and largely ineffective?
• Why have we allowed so much of our wealth and freedom to migrate to far away Washington D.C., a metro area that is now home to seven of the wealthiest counties in the country?
• Why do we continue to spend billions of dollars a year to support dictatorial regimes in faraway places who are faithful to us for as long as we pay for their loyalty, at the expense of freedom and liberty within their own borders?

Why, why, why? In total, the average American receives absolutely no benefit from sending their wealth to "feed vast reservoirs in far off places," whether these places are in the Far East, the Middle East, Europe, corporate boardrooms, or wherever. The only Americans who benefit are the politicians that control how and how much these reservoirs receive, usually in return for some help in funding their perpetual re-election campaigns.

Thus, our freedom gets a double hit when  you think about it. By using our tax dollars to feed these reservoirs, we are less able to live our lives as we see fit to to our reduced economic independence.

Second, we are usually stuck with the same, non-performing politicians since they always have a head start on campaign funding, given their reciprocal arrangements with unions, auto companies, financial institutions, agricultural corporations, etc.: they pay out taxpayer money via budget processes and earmarks to the reservoirs and the reservoir recipients are more than willing, as proven by campaign fund raising tracking, to return the favor in the form of campaign donations. This reduces our freedom of choice when it comes to our elected representatives..

That is why the fifty steps to freedom outlined in "Love My Country, Loathe My Government" are so important if we are to drain these vast reservoirs of waste and start to shape events so that we can shape our own futures as we see fit, not as the political class sees fit. This is totally consistent with the insights embedded in the above quote.

By the way, who actually penned the quote above? Was it a member of the Tea Party who realized that government was draining our wealth and our liberty at the same time? Was it a contemporary journalist who recognized what is happening in this country today? Was it a courageous and current politician who understands first hand how wasteful government is today? No, the quote actually comes from William F. Buckley, Jr., and appeared in the November 21, 2010 issue of the Washington Post, but was written ALMOST FIFTY YEARS AGO.

Even back then, the political class and the government it runs was already creating vast reservoirs and diverting our wealth and freedom to those reservoirs. Let us hope that their fifty year head start can still be overcome. If the Egyptian people, with no tradition or history of freedom, can overcome thirty years of oppression where their freedom was diverted into a vast reservoirs of a secret police state, I am sure that with our over two hundred year tradition of freedom we can eliminate our reservoirs that Buckley writes so elegantly about.



Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at http://www.loathemygovernment.com/. It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.


Please visit the following sites for freedom:

http://www.cato.org/
http://www.robertringer.com
http://realpolichick.blogspot.com
http://www.flipcongress2010.com/
http://www.reason.com/
http://www.repealamendment

Making Government More Efficient - A Lesson From BMW

As our national debt levels have skyrocketed, most rational and knowledgeable Americans in the country realize that something has to be done to get our government spending and budget under control before we bankrupt the country. This blog has previously suggested any number of ways to start the downsizing process:

• Bring home the hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops we have deployed all over the world in deployments that serve another time and another era but which no longer serve any military or diplomatic purpose, saving hundreds of billions of dollars a year in defense costs.
• Aggressively address, track, and prosecute those that defraud government programs such as Medicare and Medicaid or who do not pay their fair share of income taxes. The Obama administration has conceded that almost $100 billion is lost every year in government medical programs through fraud and criminal activity.
• Eliminate all earmarks, which only serve as a deceptive way of financing incumbents' re-election campaigns, saving almost $20 billion a year.
• The Cato Institute has been working on a long term project where they have been going through the Federal budget line by line and have already identified places and programs that can be cut or scaled back to save over $600 billion a year.

Thus, there are many obvious ways to get our government growth under control. However, an article in the October 10, 2010 edition of the St. Petersburg Times provided some insight from BMW that could be used by the Federal government to wring additional savings and efficiencies out of the Federal government bureaucracy. According to the article, by 2007 BMW was faced with an aging work force and declining productivity. Older workers tended to call in sick longer than the younger employees and they had to work harder to keep up with the demands of their work. To combat the increasing inefficiency of an aging workforce, the company put together a pilot production line, staffed by older workers, and let the workers make whatever changes they felt were necessary to keep this production line productive and efficient. This experimental production line resulted in the following accomplishments: 

• The older workers came up with 70 process improvements to their work.
• These changes included using larger fonts on their computer monitors and installing wooden floors to make standing easier on older knees and legs.
• They adapted their tools to larger handles and started using orthopedic footwear to make standing and working easier and less painful.
• Workers were rotated between more physically and less physically stressful jobs during the same shift to keep them fresh and installed adjustable chairs which allowed workers to sit for at least part of their shift.

What was the result of instituting these worker-identified changes? Productivity went up 7%, absenteeism dropped to 2%, which was lower than the overall plant average, and the line achieved zero defects. The cost for all of these wonderful, money saving performance improvements was only $50,000 which included both the cost of new equipment and additional training.

The lesson to be learned form this BMW success story is that there is much to be learned by the people that do the real job everyday. They can see where efficiencies and savings can be found, if only you give them the chance. This phenomenon was suggested under Step 1 in "Love My Country, Loathe My Government."  Step 1 calls for an annual 10% downsizing of government for five years in order to wring out waste, fraud, and redundancy. A major process envisioned under Step 1 was to set up a procedure where Federal employees could easily suggest ways to improve the operating processes of the Federal government by either identifying waste or suggesting new ways of doing things.

As an incentive for looking for changes in operations, a lottery system would be set up where Federal employees would have a chance to receive a monetary reward if their suggestions were actually implemented. It is pretty obvious from watching any Congressional hearing that members of the political class sitting on those committees are quite clueless when it comes to understanding how the intricacies of how government functions work. They would never be able to identify the small ways to save taxpayer money without sacrificing functionality or quality. If you find enough ways to save a small amount of money, you eventually end up saving a lot of taxpayer money. As Senator Everett Dirksen once said: " A billion dollars here, a billion dollars there. Before you know it we are talking about real money."

Let's do some math. Obama's current budget is $3.5 TRILLION. If you could repeat the experience of BMW, where they used their line workers to identify cost and time savings, and get a 7% increase in productivity of the Federal government, you could cut the Federal budget by about $245 billion ($3.5 TRILLION times 7%) without sacrificing any quality or service. $245 billion and we are all of a sudden in Dirksen territory. That comes down to an equivalent of more than $1,200 per U.S. family per year. For the first time in our history, you would have the Federal government doing more with less, a mantra that has driven the private sector of our economy from day one.

Thus, reducing the size of government needs to be attacked at both the macro and micro level. At the macro level, we need to do the big changes such as bringing our troops home, eliminating earmarks, and prosecuting fraud. At he micro level, we need to exploit the knowledge and insights that our veteran Federal workers can bring to the table to fine tune the government so that it acts and looks more like a lean, mean fighting machine and less like an overblown Jabba The Hutt.

Our new book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at www.loathemygovernment.com. It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Please visit these other sites for freedom:

http://www.cato.org/
http://www.reason.com/
http://www.robertringer.com/
http://www.realpolichick.blogspot.com/
http://www.flipcongress2010/

Tell Me Again Why We Still Have U.S. Troops Stationed In South Korea?

I found an article in the April 19, 2010 issue of Business Week to be very interesting. It was titled "How Korea Fretted Its Way To Success" and was written by Moon Ihlwan. Among the more interesting facts and observations shared by Moon were the following:

• South Korea's exports to nearby China jumped almost fivefold from 2000 to 2009, giving the South Koreans a very strong trading foothold in the fastest growing economy in the world.
• Samsung, a major South Korean electronics manufacturer dominates in the newest television technology, LED, with 85% of the U.S. market.
• South Korean companies won half of all gas and oil contracts in Abu Dhabi in 2009.
• South Korean companies won the contract to build four nuclear power plants in the United Arab Emirates, beating out established U.S. and French companies.
• Samsung was the primary contractor for Dubai's Burj Khalifa Tower, the tallest building in the world.
• Government programs are focused on the future by supporting South Korean companies involved with robotics, solar energy, biotechnology, green transportation, etc. The government expects these new fields to double the value of its exports in these fields within three years and add a million jobs to the workforce.

Obviously, South Korean is a nation on the rise with a strong present and a focused sense of the future. Thus, the question arises: why do we spend billions and billions of dollars every year by garrisoning thousands of U.S. troops in the country while the South Koreans use the money they would have spent guarding their country from North Korea on expanding their economy and workforce? Why not let them pay for all of their defense needs, let us bring all of our troops home and save the expense of stationing those troops there.

This is a relic of historical thinking, when South Korea was ravished by the Korean War and needed protection while it rebuilt itself. Well, it has rebuilt itself and will start kicking our economic pants off if we continue to waste taxpayer money doing things that are no longer necessary. We are facing massive spending deficits, we are not looking to the future, we are trying to survive the present from an economic perspective. Let's bring home the tens of thousand of troops we have not only in South Korea but in Japan, Germany, and elsewhere. We cannot afford to do many of things that we have historically done and probably do not need to do anymore or should not do anymore. Let those countries pay for their defense with their tax dollars and their troops. Let us spend those U.S. tax dollars on U.S interests such as reducing the deficit and returning taxes to those that paid them. Step 30 in "Love My Country, Loathe My Government" proposes this exact strategy.

A side benefit might just be better international relations since it would reduce our military presence around the world and possibly lead to more responsibility being shown by other nations. Heaven knows that putting U.S. troops just about everywhere has not been successful in many areas of foreign policy, maybe bringing them home would.

Our new book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at www.loathemygovernment.com. It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Afghanistan Math Part 2

Yesterday we examined how much the Afghanistan campaign and our tendency to deploy troops all over the world was costing the American taxpayer. We also reviewed how many of the world's leading economies (Japan, China, Brazil, India, etc.) were contributing nothing to the terrorism fight in Afghanistan and were strengthening their economies as we were weakening ours. Today, lets look at two ways how our allies in the Afghanistan conflict are actually supporting us.

In the first approach, I increased the current U.S. deployment in Afghanistan by 30,000 troops, and divided the new total by the population in the United States (in millions). This ratio gives me the number of deployed troops in country per million U.S. citizens. I also did the same thing for the rest of our allies in Afghanistan, dividing their number of in-country troops by their country's population (in millions). The results are very interesting:

• After the increase in troops deployed according to President Obama's directive, the United States will have about 308 troops deployed for every million citizens.
• This ratio is about 50% higher than the nearest country which is Estonia at 222 troops per million in population.
• The top six contributors, after the United States, based on population are Estonia, Britain (174), Denmark (136), The Netherlands (130), Norway (100), and Canada (84).
• Our traditional European allies from NATO were ranked way down the list at 16th (Germany), 19th (France), 20th (Italy), and Spain (25th).
• Spain's contributions are especially disappointing since they have suffered first hand from terrorist attacks several years ago, you would expect and hope they would be more active.
• If you do this analysis on the total troop deployment of our allies, you find that they would have to increase their deployment by fivefold in order to match the United States troop deployment levels, relative to their population levels.

Now, one could say this is not a valid analysis since many of these allies are not as wealthy as us so lets do another analysis where we calculate a ratio based on each country's Gross Domestic Product. I divided the number of troops deployed by each nation's annual GDP level in billions. The results are as follows:

• The United States has deployed about 6.6 soldiers for every billion dollars in GDP.
• However, this analysis places us seventh among our allies with Romania, Albania, Macedonia, Georgia, Estonia, and Bulgaria ahead of us in deployment based on economy size.
• Our traditional European allies are also poor performers according to this ratio with Italy ranked 22nd, Germany ranked 23rd, France ranked 24th, and Spain ranked a woeful 29th.
• This poor showing is put to shame by the six countries ahead of the United States along with Lithuania ranked 8th, Latvia ranked 9th, Croatia ranked 10th, Britain ranked 11th, and Poland ranked 12th.
• If you do this analysis on the total troop deployment levels of our allies, you find that they would have to increase their commitment by a factor of 2.5 to match the United States commitment based on GDP.
• I find it interesting that ten of the top twelve contributors are from eastern Europe, countries that spent decades behind the Iron Curtain. Perhaps they have a greater appreciation of freedom than Germany, France, et al.

Bottom line today is the same as yesterday: for the most part the United States is shouldering a disproportionate amount of the fight against terrorism, whether measured by population, GDP, or those countries who contribute nothing such as Japan, Brazil, and the like. That is why Step 30 in "Love My Country, Loathe My Government" is so important. We must reduce our troop global footprint to be consistent with today's domestic and international needs. The status quo is from a different time and a different world. Our economy, our freedom, and our future need to be our priorities. Saving Afghanistan makes no difference if we destroy our economy and our Federal budget in the process.

Visit our website at www.loathemygovernment.com to order an autographed copy of the book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government -Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom and Destroying The American Political Class" and to sign up for the cause. The book is also available online at Amazon and Barnes And Noble.

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