ATTEMPTED MURDER

by Howard S. Katz
11-16-09

News item: Facts have recently been reported which have convinced me that certain members of the cancer establishment have tried to murder Suzanne Somers. Miss Somers was known to most Americans for her role as Chrissy Snow in “Three’s Company,” the popular TV situation comedy of the ‘70s and ‘80s, which starred John Ritter. More recently she has become known as a promoter of natural hormone replacement therapy.

In the current (Dec. 2009) issue of Life Extension Magazine, editor William Faloon writes:

“Earlier this year, actress Susanne Somers called me about a new book she felt compelled to write. She had been hospitalized with an infection [probably valley fever, a fungus in the soil of the American Southwest] but her doctors told her she suffered from metastatic breast cancer that required immediate chemotherapy.
“Had Suzanne believed her doctors, they would have dumped toxic chemo drugs into her body. She would then display classic signs/symptoms associated with cancer chemotherapy such as immune impairment, nausea, hair loss, emaciation, etc.
“If Suzanne died from chemotherapy-induced complications, which was possible since she suffered an infection that required her immune system to battle, her doctors would have proclaimed that she died of metastatic breast cancer. Suzanne wondered how many others perish this way at the hands of the cancer establishment.”

William Faloon, “As We See It,” Life Extension Magazine,
Dec. 2009, p. 8.

As background, cancer was one of the most feared diseases of the 20th century. Cancer deaths rose through the course of the century despite the fact that the Government singled it out for a special effort. In 1971, President Nixon declared war on cancer and announced the objective of curing the disease by 1980. (For younger readers, Americans used to think in terms of curing diseases in the sense of totally wiping them out. A large number of diseases were cured in this way in the early part of the 20th century, the last of which was polio.)

Cancer death rates now appear to have peaked in the early 1990s at just about the time that the Government (here meaning the Food and Drug Administration) suffered a major political defeat with the passage of the Health Freedom Act in 1994. This forced the FDA to legalize a number of beneficial natural products, some with anti-cancer effects. An example of this is melatonin, which is now available over-the-counter and has proven its ability to combat cancer..

The only exception to this peak has been in female lung cancer, which rose sharply from 1970 to 2005 as the feminist movement promoted smoking among women. (“You’ve come a long way baby.”

One of the incredible “blunders” of the war on cancer was the introduction of female hormone replacement therapy. It was discovered that certain female hormones had a positive effect in relieving many of the symptoms of menopause, drugs imitating these hormones were created and these drugs were given to millions of women over the past generation. More recently, scientific evidence proved that these drugs were more harmful than helpful, and female hormone therapy abruptly ceased.

However, at this time doctors who treat their patients by natural methods (as opposed to drugs) reported that in their treatment of women with actual human female hormones, instead of their drug or animal imitations, they observed only the beneficial effects with none of the harmful ones. This is not a surprising result because the exact same thing happened a generation back to men. In the 1930s, the male hormone, testosterone, was discovered. Several drug companies quickly manufactured drugs similar to testosterone. They would start with the testosterone molecule, which is quite complex, alter a single atom or chemical group and come up with a new substance, not found in nature, which had many of the effects of testosterone. These testosterone-like substances were then marketed to body-builder types. And then the body builders using them started to die. The very small difference between the drug and the natural product was enough to kill them. These drugs were then mislabeled anabolic steroids and are today regarded as highly dangerous.

The problem with this is that the category anabolic steroid is too broad. The drug anabolic steroids are fatal. The natural anabolic steroid, testosterone, is very healthy and invigorating. In one experiment, the testosterone levels of middle aged males were studied over a 10 year period. Those men who were lowest in testosterone suffered a much higher rate of heart attacks than the men highest in testosterone. Simply put, the drugs kill; the natural substance promotes life. After discovering this truth in regard to men, who are simpler in terms of hormones, the medical establishment made the same “error” in regard to women.

Enter Suzanne Somers. When drug hormone replacement therapy for women was ended because of its harmful effects, the medical establishment did not switch over to natural hormone replacement. With the exception of a small minority, the nation’s doctors declared hormone replacement (of all kinds) to be dangerous and ignored the proven benefits of natural hormones. (In the male area, testosterone, after being initially ignored, is now being positively slandered. For example, it is argued based on some very shoddy science that testosterone promotes the spread of prostate cancer. (For the scientific refutation of this point, see Life Extension Magazine, Dec. 2008.)

NOTE TO READERS. THIS IS A GOOD INDICATION OF THE STATE OF AMERICAN MEDICINE. YOUR LIFE MAY DEPEND ON EXACTLY WHOM YOU SELECT AS A DOCTOR, THE ESTABLISHMENT DOCTOR WHO TREATS WITH DRUGS OR THE NATUROPATHIC DOCTOR WHO TREATS WITH NATURAL SUBSTANCES.

Miss Somers played an airhead in “Three’s Company,” but she is a very intelligent woman. She educated herself as to the benefits of natural hormone replacement therapy, and over the past several years she has been making a noble effort to educate the public about this exciting news. Unfortunately, in doing this Miss Somers stepped on some very powerful toes.

In American medicine prior to the 20th century, almost all medicines were natural products. The same is true for all societies for all of human history. The great doctors of all time have highly praised natural medicine. Hippocrates, whose oath doctors still take today, once declared, “Let your food be your medicine and your medicine be your food.”

But as government began to worm its way into 20th century western medicine, events took a most evil turn. Basic American law (correctly) distinguishes between patentable and non-patentable products. If a product exists in nature, it cannot be patented, and anyone is free to use it. However, if a product was created by the mental labor of a human being, then that labor gives him the right to exclusive use of the product he has created. And this right is protected by a patent or a copyright. For example, if a poet writes a poem, he and he alone has the right to profit from it by printing up copies and selling them.

All this was established in American law long ago and is fundamentally in accord with justice. In 19th century America, patented products and unpatented products both sold in competition with each other. The unpatented were cheaper, and the patented claimed to be better. The consuming public made the final decision. This basically good system, however, was corrupted by the creation of the (modern) Food and Drug Administration in 1938.

The FDA quickly moved to violate the First Amendment rights of the manufacturers of natural (non-patentable) products. Scientific proof of the effectiveness of a medicine was redefined as that which is approved by the FDA, and FDA approval was granted by a system of big money. The FDA would require a complicated process of tests which were enormously expensive to perform. The proposition under question might have been proven by an academic researcher who demonstrated scientifically (and inexpensively) that the medicine in question worked. However, the FDA always pretends that this scientific proof does not exist and demands compliance with its expensive procedure. (The expensive procedure is worthless because, incredibly, the companies are allowed to perform the tests on their own product, and there is no effective way to stop them from cheating on their tests.)

A company with a patentable product can easily afford to pay the cost of the FDA tests. The patent gives it a monopoly, and this allows it to charge an absurdly high price. In effect, it pays nothing for the tests because the money is made up by the public. On the other hand, if a company makes a non-patentable product and can come up with the money for the FDA tests and if the tests prove effectiveness, then a competitor can come in and sell the same product for a much lower price (because it will not have the cost of the tests). Therefore, the original (non-patented) company would be undersold and driven out of business. It would be foolish to do this, and therefore this system makes it impossible to get FDA approval no matter how good the (non-patentable) product is and how many lives it saves.

The history of drugs invented under this system is a giant series of disasters. You have probably read a great deal of media hype about how wonderful drugs are. These are lies, pure and simple. The human being is a creature of evolution. Drugs are new substances on planet Earth, and humans have not had enough time to evolve natural protections from or biological harmonies with them. Thousands of chemical and electrical reactions are going on in the human body all the time, and the chances are very great that the new drug will interfere with one of these reactions and seriously injure or kill the patient. That is the story of new drugs. They are released without sufficient testing for side effects. Five, ten or even 30 years after release they turn out to have bizarre or fatal side effects (sometimes showing up in the next generation). (Remember Phen-fen?) Yet the vast majority of the sucker public takes these drugs because all of their authority figures tell them they are safe.

(One fact has always underlined in my mind the importance of evolutionary harmony. The original life form on earth was an anaerobic one celled animal. It did not breathe oxygen. Indeed, to it oxygen was a deadly poison, and it excreted oxygen in its normal metabolism. As this oxygen built up in the Earth’s atmosphere, this one-called animal was slowly poisoning itself. Life on Earth was about to destroy itself. Then, by an evolutionary accident, a creature evolved to which oxygen was not a poison. This creature breathed in oxygen and reduced the percentage of this gas in the atmosphere. Life on Earth was saved. Life had found a way.)

The whole point of paying for health care via insurance is to make this sucker public believe that these incredibly expensive drugs are free. (“It didn’t cost anything. The insurance paid for it.”) Thus most drugs do more harm with their dangerous side effects than good, but they bring in huge profits for the drug companies. For this reason, the drug companies pour out a constant stream of propaganda to the effect that natural products do not work. These lies are then backed up by the FDA because the drug companies have a sophisticated system of bribery (legalized) in place, and the FDA usually backs up everything they say. The bans on tryptophan (which is essential for life) and ephedra (used safely in China for 2000 years) are examples.

So when Suzanne Somers launched her campaign for natural hormone replacement therapy for women (and men also), she ran into the incredible power of these drug companies and those elements in the medical profession which have been corrupted by them. Go back and reread Mr. Faloon’s report on her recent incident. She was diagnosed as having a body full of highly advanced cancer (when in fact her only problem was a simple fungal infection, probably valley fever). After she refused chemotherapy, the cancer suddenly disappeared and was replaced by an (equally fictitious) contagious disease. (Again because of government invasion of our liberties, hospitals have been given the authority to hold a patient prisoner if they diagnose a contagious disease.)

Chemotherapy is a highly dangerous treatment. It is almost as dangerous to the patient as it is to the cancer (if one has cancer). Jacqueline Onassis Kennedy was killed by an overdose of chemotherapy. If I were on a jury, it would seem obvious to me that some of the doctors in that hospital were deliberately trying to murder Suzanne Somers. They would remove a dedicated enemy who was a substantial threat to their income (motive) and then cover it up by claiming that she had died of cancer. (One of Miss Somers’ early triumphs occurred when she did contract cancer and then cured herself by rejecting her doctors’ advice and treating herself with natural hormone replacement therapy. She was her own earliest success.) After leaving the hospital (in 2008) with a huge basket of drugs, Miss Somers was told by a doctor in whom she had confidence (Dr. Jonathan Wright):

“First of all, these drugs will kill you. Seriously, they are so toxic to the body that I don’t know what this doctor is thinking. Second, it is mandated by law that these drugs not be given unless there is an absolute diagnosis, which you do not have….these drugs have the potential to kill you or seriously injure and debilitate your liver.”

Dr. Jonathan Wright (speaking to Susanne Somers), as
quoted in Knockout, by Suzanne Somers, (New York,
Crown, 2009), p. 16.

If you are looking for heroes in this evil age, then Suzanne Somers is a true heroine. She is intelligent and courageous. She is fighting the battle for all of us. When they tried to kill her, they were trying to kill you and me and a great many of the American people.

Right now there is a movement trying to give more power to these evil people (President Obama and the Democratic Party). Miss Somers has given us a rallying point. Because of her celebrity status she can get the attention that you or I cannot. If we don’t fight now, then, when things get more desperate and we have to fight, we will fight from a weaker position. If the other fellow is trying to kill you, then you have no choice.

The nation owes this brave woman a giant thank you.
# # #

ELECTION 2009

by Howard S. Katz
11-9-09

It was a happy day for America last Tuesday as the voters confirmed recent trends in the polls and delivered a resounding rebuke to Obama and the majority of the Democratic Party. Republican governors were elected both in Virginia and New Jersey. And equally significant, an attempt by the Republican leadership in a New York State district to elect a wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing Republican appears to have backfired badly. The large majority of Republicans in the district bolted and voted for the Conservative Party candidate, who came very close to defeating the Democrat and who is now very likely the Republican nominee for 2010.

Prior to the 2008 election, I argued that one should always vote for the best candidate (from one’s viewpoint) and that doing an election calculus, trying to figure the likely result and adjusting your vote accordingly was a losing proposition. You are only one person, and you cannot determine an election result. However, you are one person, and it behooves you to cast your vote to maximum effect. And this can only be done by voting for (the person you regard as) the best man.

Thus in 2008, I urged you to vote either for Ron Paul or the Libertarian candidate (Bob Barr). Certainly this strategy looked bad in early 2009 when Obama won and tried to shove socialized medicine down the country’s throat. What is the result? The conservative movement has been energized and now appears capable of winning elections. It is no longer wasting its time beating up on poor illegal aliens. The Democrats are in complete collapse

In late 2008, the Republican Party was self-destructing. The country was in the grip of a financial crisis caused by the Bush economic policies. You remember that in the election of 2000 George Bush, Jr. described himself as a “compassionate conservative.” By this he meant that he would follow Democratic Party social programs but be conservative in foreign affairs and on certain social issues. By 2008, the Democratic Party social programs, budget deficits and easy credit had blown up in Bush’s face, and he admitted to the nation that there was a massive crisis – on his watch.

If you consider the average American, who does not vote on the basis of ideology, what would such a person do? Here the head of the Republican Party admits that his 8 years running the country have been a disastrous failure. It is only natural to think, “Give the Democrats a chance.” And so they did.

One of the jobs of the political party system is to make it easy for people to vote by associating different parties with different ideologies. In this way, people get to see which party is best for the country. The party with the best ideology does best. This is recognized by the voters, and they switch their votes accordingly.

This is what has happened in 2009. There has been a straightforward welfare state vs. small government split. The public has looked at this, and here are the results (Rasmussen Polls):



This is a devastating collapse, and it presaged the Democratic defeats on Nov. 3.

It is interesting that Americans fought several ideological battles in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Again and again the good guys won out. They would start as a hopeless minority, grow to a 50-50 split, then move to a decisive majority and finally win such an overwhelming victory that the opposition was simply buried, and the issue ceased to exist. Three good examples of this are Independence from Britain, the abolition of the central bank and the abolition of slavery.

Shortly before the constitutional convention in 1787 in Philadelphia, George Washington was asked to compromise his view for the sake of popularity. His immediate answer was:

"If to please the people, we offer what we ourselves disapprove, how can we afterwards defend our work? Let us raise a standard to which the wise and the honest can repair. The event is in the hand of God." - Comments at the First Continental Congress, May 14, 1787

By saying, “The event is in the hand of God,” Washington did not mean to get religious. This was a common expression at the time to mean that things are uncertain, and no one can be sure how they are going to turn out. Washington was the only President elected by unanimous vote.

Notice the first thought in Washington’s mind: “how can we afterward defend our work?” That is, for Washington a political battle was a contest of ideas. Both sides presented their ideas, and the best ideas, best presented, won the majority of the voters. Why then be stupid enough to present an idea in which he did not believe and could not adequately defend? That would be like a prize fighter dropping his guard before the first punch. That was the way that political contests occurred from the time of the American Revolution to the end of the 19th century, with the final ideological battle occurring in 1896 between McKinley and Bryan over the gold standard. When Americans voted their convictions, America was free.

In the 20th century, America moved away from liberty, but there was never any clear ideological victory by the anti-liberty forces. Some of the key events of this period are: a) the enactment of the income tax, b) the enactment of a third central bank, c) the first abolition of the gold standard (and the other New Deal measures) in 1933, (d) the enactment of the military draft and (e) the final abolition of the gold standard in 1971.

The original income tax was not perceived as a big government measure because it was accompanied by the abolition of the tariff. It was only gradually that it became a monster. The third central bank (the Federal Reserve) was not admitted to be a central bank, and to this day hardly anyone in the country knows what it does.

The first abolition of the gold standard was a perfect example of the disaster which the century later became. F.D.R. did not announce that he intended to abolish the gold standard. He ran on several sound money measures (cut Government spending, balance the budget). Libertarian editor, H.L. Menken supported F.D.R. because of his promise to abolish prohibition.
If this measure was popular, then why did F.D.R. carefully keep it a secret?

But probably the tragedy of the century occurred in 1936. On 5 previous occasions in American history, the election had hinged on gold versus paper money or a similar hard versus soft money question (1788, 1800, 1832, 1880 and 1896) The gold standard won every time. In the process, it (the gold standard) ratified the Constitution, elected Thomas Jefferson President, founded the Democratic Party, elected Andrew Jackson, Grover Cleveland and William McKinley President. It was blatantly obvious that what the Republicans needed to do in 1936 was to make F.D.R.’s abolition of the gold standard the center of their campaign. They never brought it up. And indeed, to this day there are still large numbers of Americans who do not know that the country is off the gold standard. Along this line there is a blackout in the media so that the gold standard is never mentioned. I would not be surprised if large numbers of young people did not know that countries had money systems and that the original American system had been gold and silver. If Washington had seen the election of 1936, he would have wept for his country.

The military draft was slipped in in 1917, 1940 and 1947. I was heavily involved in the campaign to repeal the draft in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. I had to abandon the conservatives to do this. But when we went to the people (1968), the anti-draft candidate won, and the military draft was abolished in 1973. As I look back on those days, I am very proud of my role. The leaders of the Soviet Union back in the 1960s were convinced that the U.S. was controlled by a cabal of Wall Street capitalists (such as engineered the bailout of 2008). When they realized that the American people could win a political battle against this cabal, then a huge load of fear lifted from them, and they concluded that peace was possible. This allowed the world to make it to 1989 without a hot war arising between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. And there is still no serious threat of a war between major powers. The major question in the world today is, “How can we improve our country’s economy?” Whatever other problems the world has, a major world war is not one of them.

That leaves the 5th major event of the 20th century as the dominant event of our age. When Nixon completed the abolition of the gold standard in 1971, it opened the door for an avalanche of paper money, and the economy of the U.S. is collapsing from this insanity. Europe is much better having abolished socialism and established a sounder currency (the euro). Note that Nixon gave no hint of his intention to abolish the gold standard. He promised (in 1968) to balance the budget and oppose price and wage controls. He gave us the first of a long series of Republican budget deficits and imposed price and wage controls. If these measures were popular and helped to win elections, then how come the savvy politician Richard Nixon did not shout them from the rooftops? The fact is that every poll taken going back to 1950 (and probably before) shows a very large majority of the American public in favor of a balanced budget.

Suppose you are in a discussion with a conservative. He tells you, “I am like you. I admire liberty. I am just more practical. I know that liberty cannot win in the election. So I do what I can for liberty between the cracks and crevices.” I put the practical above the moral.

Your conservative opponent does not realize that he is back in the Middle Ages. He (thinks he) knows the difference between right and wrong. Self defense is wrong. Planning for the future is wrong. Feeling an attraction for the opposite sex is wrong. He was taught this by Jesus of Nazareth, and Jesus of Nazareth was the son of God.

At this point, you might inquire of your conservative friend, “Isn’t it true that your God, this new God you believe in now that you are no longer a pagan, does not have any physical shape?” But if God does not have physical substance, He cannot have a male sex organ, and hence he cannot father a child via a human woman. So this is where our practical conservative gets his ideas. He has confused his new God with his old gods and is caught in an absurdity. But it doesn’t matter how stupid and absurd he gets, he makes it up by badgering you. The stupider he is the more confident he sounds. Modern conservatives, however, do not achieve the electoral victories of George Washington.

It was said of George Washington that he never told a lie. I do not know if this was literally true. But it certainly indicates that the Americans of the late 18th century genuinely wanted an ethical President. Now fast forward 2 centuries to 1980. The election was between Jimmy Carter, the ethical but impractical man, and Ronald Reagan, the tough (meaning unethical) but practical man. In 1980, America chose the practical over the moral. This is why in 1780 America had freedom, and in 1980 America did not have freedom.

This is the central idea which made Americans of the 19th century happy, wealthy, militarily secure, free and bursting with the energy to explore a continent. This is the central belief which distinguished the Calvinists of the 17th-19th century from the Middle Ages and from all the other peoples of the world. This is why, as the Nobel Prize Committee points out, America is different from the rest of the world. America is happy. America is rich. America is secure. In field after field, America leads the world, and Americans can do almost anything better than other people. Americans don’t kill helpless people by the millions (as Germans, Russians, Cambodians and probably Chinese have done in recent history). They do not fight interminable wars with each other, change their governments by successive coups or practice suicide bombing.

What is the cause of this? The cause is a set of ideas transmitted to the Anglo-Saxon people by John Calvin, and the basis of these ideas is the moral concept of justice. That is the idea which determines whether we will be successful and happy or whether we will fail and be miserable. Most people in history have slowly moved toward justice. This is why mankind has slowly improved its condition.. But there are occasions when the people of the world rejected justice. Their civilizations collapsed (5th century Rome). They suffered poverty, plague and war. Their populations declined. So it is a free choice, and every generation has to make it.

The message of the election of 2009 is that the American people appear to be making the choice in the direction of justice. The attempt to impose socialized medicine on America appears to be in serious trouble. We now have an energized conservative movement and, more importantly, a libertarian conservative movement. Prospects are good for a sweeping pro-liberty victory in 2010 and 2012. Integrity at the voting booth has always been the pathway to liberty.

# # #

PASCAL’S WAGER

by Howard S. Katz
11-2-09

I must apologize for the fact that, due to an error, a pro-global warming video appeared on my blog site last week. This has been corrected, but the incident is a good reason to discuss the concepts of global warming and Pascal’s wager, which is the argument used in the video by the speaker (who does not give credit to Pascal and evidently thinks that he has originated the argument).

When I first explored the issue of global warming, I found that in contradiction to the claim of its advocates that it is the consensus of the scientific community I could not find a single scientist supporting the view. However, this very claim discredits the movement as it argues from authority instead of from facts and proven principles.

I expect that the global warming theory derived from the space probes of Venus (which began in 1962). Prior to this time very little was known about Venus. Because of its beauty as a heavenly body and the romance associated with its name, most people had very positive expectations for the planet and speculated that it was a place where (human-style) life was possible. The discovery that Venus was too hot to support life was a shock to these expectations, and the fact that the high temperature was caused by the greenhouse effect of CO2 gas led to an unfortunate chain of reasoning.

I am sure you have all heard this argument. Human activity is releasing large amounts of CO2 into the earth’s atmosphere, and this will cause a warming of the earth ultimately leading to great disasters and a possible end to life on earth or at least life as we know it.

For this, however, there is absolutely no evidence. Indeed, there is a simple feedback mechanism to prevent this from happening. If the earth’s level of CO2 increases, this would cause an increase in plant life, which feeds on CO2. Since all vegetation takes in CO2 and emits oxygen, this would cause the percentage of CO2 in the earth’s atmosphere to fall again and establish a balance. This would give us the blessings of mildly warmer temperatures and more luxuriant plant life, a definite improvement over the earth’s present climate.

The global warming theory perfectly illustrates an important truth about human nature. Man is the animal who perceives reality by means of abstractions. Proper scientific method requires a balance between discovery of new facts and reasoning from abstract theories. We study the facts and from there we generalize to a theory. Then we make deductions from this theory and may predict hitherto unknown facts. But what mankind is all too prone to do is to cling fanatically to a theory and never look at the facts. That is, the great human error which more than any other prevents the discovery of new truth is the elevation of abstractions over concrete facts, and man, who is (pretty much) the only animal who perceives via abstractions, very often makes the mistake of relying on them too much.

On the global warming issue, there is a fact well-known to scientists which puts everything into perspective. About 60 million years ago, the subcontinent of India (which was not too different from Australia) moved northward and crashed into southern Asia causing the up thrust of the Himalaya Mountains. At that point, a certain life form common in the area started to take CO2 out of a gaseous state and through a complex process deposit it on the ocean floor. Thus due to the creation of the Himalayas a large amount of CO2 was taken out of the earth’s atmosphere, and this led to a definite global cooling.

If you study this period, then life on earth was more luxuriant than it is today. Temperate flora and fauna existed in Alaska (and left their fossils). Canada and Siberia were fertile and, had humans existed, could have brought forth enormous crops. In other words, if you get the idea of the Hellish place we now know Venus to be out of your head, then it is clear that the earth would definitely benefit from a moderate amount of global warming. Most of the life on earth is evolved to fit the temperatures of 60 million years ago (which are more normal in earth’s history), and a return to those temperatures would make the earth a happier place. Indeed, all human beings with whom I am familiar yearn for a warmer climate. It is a fact that humans evolved along the Rift Valley in (eastern) Africa not too far from the equator. Members of the Caucasian and Mongoloid races only migrated out of Africa about 100,000 years ago. We are suited to a warmer climate than that in which we live. Even here in New Hampshire, which is less than half the distance from the equator to the North Pole, there are bitter complaints about our New England winters.

Once the facts about Venus had become known, it is clear that a group of people who inclined towards socialism (such as Al Gore), mixed together their emotions about Venus and their desire for socialism, and behold, global warming was born. This is why government is put forward as the agent by which the terrible threat of global warming is to be defeated. That is, when we consider the global warming movement, we are talking about people who a) do not know that the United States was richer than the Soviet Union, b) that Europe revived in the late 20th century when it abandoned socialism and c) that here in the U.S. the North was richer than the South (n the pre-Civil War period) when it (the North) had a free enterprise economy, and then the South caught up and surpassed us in the 20th century when it turned to economic freedom. Freedom wins. Over and over, that is the lesson of history. If I had a goal to accomplish which is as serious and important as global warming is alleged to be, then the last institution I would select to accomplish it is the government. That very decision is strong evidence that the advocates of this goal are not serious about it and have an ulterior motive.

Further, the benefits of global warming, if the human contribution to CO2 is enough to make any significant difference in climate, are so great and so obvious that what has to be motivating the anti-global warming movement is the fear of change. Take the harping on certain Pacific islands which, we are told, will be submerged by rising sea levels. What is the land area of such islands as compared with the land area which will become habitable in Canada and Siberia? The whole thing is a joke, and it quickly becomes obvious that the movement is partially motivated by fear of change.

So here is a movement which constantly preaches to us that it is in favor of change; yet part of its motivation is fear of change. Stupid, stupider and stupidest.

But the video which slipped onto my web site is not using the traditional global warming arguments. It has taken an argument from philosophy which is known as Pascal’s wager. Blaise Pascal was a 17th century French mathematician who justified his adherence to the Catholic religion (in what was otherwise an enlightened age) by saying that even though the chances that God and heaven existed were very small and the chance that the Catholic Church had influence with God and could get you in was smaller yet, still the glorious bliss of heaven was so great that one should practice Catholicism even though one did not believe it – just on the off chance that maybe the Catholic priesthood could do what they claimed.

What was Pascal’s motive for saying he believed in the Catholic Church? Very simply, the Church appealed to large numbers of stupid people. If anyone came along and threatened the Church’s power, they would use this force to torture the critic to death. A generation before Pascal was born, the (Catholic) King of Spain murdered thousands of people in Holland who had bothered to read the Bible and gave serious consideration to the Second (of the Ten) Commandment(s):

“Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above...Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them….”

Angered by their discovery of what the Bible really said, these people, known as iconoclasts, went around smashing graven images.

This caused tremendous hostility in Charles I, the King of Spain, who was also ruler of Holland. With the full support of the Pope and the Catholic Church, he passed a special law making it illegal to be a Hollander. He brought the Spanish Inquisition into Holland to prosecute the Iconoclasts. (It never lost a case.) Thousands of people were burned alive. And thousands more were buried alive. King Charles made the statement that he wished that the people of Holland had one neck so that he could cut off all their heads with one blow.

It is interesting that just three years before Pascal was born the Pilgrims left Holland and set sail for North America. Their motive for this journey is not recorded in most of our history books. When the Independents (Brownists) first arrived in Holland, it was during a truce in (what later proved to be) an 80 year war between Holland and Spain. The truce was scheduled to end in 1621. And as that date approached, a faction among the Independents raised the possibility that the Catholics would win the war at which point all of them would be tortured to death (by one of the two above methods). The other faction gave this some weight but decided that the dangers of an American settlement were too great. (The first English settlement in America, in 1585, had completely disappeared. The second English settlement in America, in 1607, endured terrible hardships, and after a short time, 90% of the settlers had died. Those Independents who decided that the risk of a Catholic victory outweighed these difficulties decided to make the journey and are known as the Pilgrims.)

Pascal did not have the courage of the Pilgrim Fathers. He just wanted to live out his normal three score and ten, and that meant that he did every thing the Catholic Church commanded. But living in a more rational age than had existed for over a millennium, he felt uneasy about the decision that he had made and had a need to justify it intellectually. Thus he invented Pascal’s Wager.

Pascal’s Wager, specifically, says that even though the claims of the Catholic Church are incredible and have a very low probability of being true, the delights of heaven, should they prove true, make it worthwhile to believe. This situation may be generalized to any case where great benefits or evils are alleged with no proof offered of whether or not they are true.

Of course, the rational way to solve such a quandary is to make an actual calculation. First, calculate the probability that the beliefs are true. (In this case, let us say that the probability that heaven exists is .0000000001.) Then multiply this low probability by the great value to be attained if it does prove true. All human values cannot be expressed in money; however, since we are being mathematical, it is convenient to express this value in money terms (say $100,000,000). Then we would say that the effective value of heaven is 1¢. Against this we would weigh the expected value of the opposite course of action. If it turned out to be less (say ½¢), then we do what the Church wanted. The point is, one has to make the calculation. One can’t simply say that the eternal bliss of heaven outweighs the small chance that there is a heaven. One has, as Pascal should have understood, to actually do the math. This essential point is swept under the rug by those who use the argument because in fact they do have an ulterior motive (not to get killed by the Catholics). Our intuitive notions of very great and very small are not precise enough to give us a meaningful answer

Furthermore, an understanding of the concepts involved in Pascal’s Wager shows us that we are probably facing an argument fabricated as a conscious and deliberate fraud. For example, Catholic Christianity believes in the Jewish God. But the Jewish God, as taught us by Moses, does not have a heaven. Therefore, the probability that heaven exists is not very small. Rather it is zero.

The idea of an afterlife was taken into Christianity from the ancient Egyptian religion (which was a form of polytheism and to which both the ancient and the modern Christians assigned a probability of zero) The afterlife was then thought to lie in the Western Desert, which we today know as Libya. At that time, no one had ever gone to the Western Desert. When mankind advanced and some people (from Egyptian society) actually went to the Western Desert, they did not find heaven. (Instead they found Omar Qadhafi, which leads to some bizarre speculations.)

When heaven was proven not to lie in the Western Desert, its scene was then shifted to the sky. This was a much more clever fraud because, as far as the people of the first millennium B.C. were concerned, it could never be disproved. (This was from the Babylonian religion, whose gods dwelt in the sky.) However, today we have gone to (what the ancients thought of as) the sky, and there is no heaven and no eternal bliss. When we consider that the ancient Egyptian priests were the beneficiaries of people’s belief in the afterlife, it is clear that heaven was a deliberate fraud, and when it was proven not to exist in the first location they selected for it, they simply shifted to a location which could not (they thought) be disproved.

Things are very much the same with regard to global warming. The very likely case that global warming would be beneficial is never allowed to be discussed. And no one in our generation will ever forget the image of the polar bear on a shrinking ice floe drifting off into the unknown. What is this but a blatant attempt to manipulate our emotions?

That is, somebody wants, very badly, to convince us of this. That fact alone completely shifts the terms of the debate. It used to be normal in American social action that whenever anyone had a project which they felt worthwhile, they organized a group of their fellow Americans and accomplished their project. (I once had a passing acquaintance with a fellow involved in such a project. Some naturalists had discovered the Arabian ork, a type of antelope which serves as the basis for the unicorn legend. Orks have two horns but sometimes one breaks off and in other cases the two horns, when seen from a distance, line up and appear as one. The project was to collect such orks as could be found in zoos and purchase and then release them in the wild in their native environment. Nobody connected with this project got the Nobel Peace Prize, but it is precisely such voluntary cooperative action which succeeds in attaining its objective and on a large scale helps make America into a wonderful place.

But just on the very small chance that the great bliss of global warming will be prevented by these people, perhaps they should all be rounded up and sent far away to a very bad place so the rest of us good people can be left in peace.

And then all you people could call this Katz’s wager and award me with the Nobel Peace Prize.

# # #

DEPRESSION

by Howard S. Katz
9-26-09

I want to make this blog a change-of-pace because there is an entire area of human activity which is sadly confused and hence the source of enormous pain and failure to the people of our society. This is the area of psychology, and my example will be psychological depression.

The great evil of our age is an idea I call the wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing. Shortly after the American Civil War it seemed as though mankind had gotten itself off on the right foot. Human slavery was being abolished all over the world. The correct principles of governing had been discovered and were being applied (with great increase in human happiness) in several countries of the world. Wealth was being created at a level never seen in human history. War, while not completely banished, was much less frequent than in any previous century, and those wars which were fought were fought according to rules recognized by both sides and designed to minimize human suffering. New inventions made many areas of human existence more successful and pleasant. Human life seemed to be advancing on all fronts.

Then somehow things started to go wrong. Students of American politics often point to the creation of the Interstate Commerce Commission (1887) as the first misstep. The income tax and the creation of the Federal Reserve System in 1912 are, to the knowledgeable, a sign that things had suddenly gone out-of-joint.

There were, at this time, a group of intellectuals who arose (mostly) in German-speaking Europe and were openly against all of the progress that humankind was making. They were against democracy and in favor of monarchy. They were against freedom and for such institutions as serfdom, torture and various forms of authority. In virtually every field of human endeavor, these people were against the progress which the human species was making and for returning to the old ways which had brought such unhappiness and misery. These intellectuals were called Romantics, and, while the word “romantic” has good connotations, there was nothing about these people which was good. They are called Romantics because they favored emotion over reason, and they bitterly opposed the rational spirit of their age. An example would be Charles Fourier, the French Romantic, who wrote:

“Discouraged by its ill successes, human reason plunges into atheism – materialism – the spirit of commerce – and a thousand errors and absurdities, which have so distracted and led it astray, that it is now in the deplorable position of the insane or benighted traveler, who goes on, neither knowing where he is going, nor where he would go. [Charles Fourier, Political Economy Made Easy, (London, printed by W.A. Wright, 1828), p. 10 (Fourier’s italics)]

Some other Romantics were John Ruskin, Johan Gottlieb Fichte, Karl Ludwig von Haller, and Friedrich Ludwig Jahn.


My subject this week concerns the Romantic psychologists. What happened to the Romantics was that they mostly disappeared and are unknown to the 21st century. The Romantic psychologists were disciples of Plato, and of course, the entire character of the Middle Ages had been shaped by Plato. The school of Romantic psychology flourished in German speaking Europe (mostly Austria) from about 1810 to 1860.

If I were to explain to you the doctrines of Romantic psychology, you would be stunned because although you do not know these people, their ideas are in your minds and determine your actions This is the idea which I call the wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing: reactionary ideas (against science and progress) dressed up and disguised as pro-science/ progress.

If I were to tell you the ideas of Romantic psychology, you would say, “All this was discovered by Sigmund Freud:” the division of the human psyche into 3 parts (known to us today as ego, id and super-ego), the curing of mental illness by talking to the patient, belief in an unconscious mind. But we today are taught that these ideas were discovered by Freud and that they constitute the modern science of psychology. In truth, these ideas were known prior to the 1870s (the time when Freud attended college).

Freud went to college in Vienna, a Romantic stronghold. A book by one of the Romantic psychologists was found in his library after his death. However, the Romantics were unabashedly against science and reason and are known as religious extremists while Freud posed as a defender of science and reason. Indeed, Freud is known to the people of our age as the founder of the science of psychology.

I want to focus on the subject of depression because it is one about which I have a great deal of knowledge and because it is an important social problem of our age. All you have to do is review the top ten selling drugs for any recent period, and a substantial number are treatments for depression. Aside from the human suffering just the economic cost is a measure of how important this issue is.

It is one of the characteristics of our age that most everything considered to be a social problem is asserted to be a disease. You have heard it chanted as a mantra:

“ALCOHOLISM IS A DISEASE.”

That’s it. There is no explanation. There is no scientific proof, just the assertion. The “politically correct” left-wing student has been told this by his authority figure (his professor). Both the concept that the professor could be wrong and that he ought to have reasons for anything he believes are foreign to him.

A disease is a state of the malfunction of a living being such that if carried far enough could lead to the being’s death. We humans are different from many other life forms because we have free will, and our actions are divided into both involuntary and voluntary. It is in the nature of disease that it concerns only the involuntary aspects of a human being. Disease is something that happens to you. It is not something that you choose to do. If a virus attacks you, then you have a disease. If you choose to drink too much alcohol, then you are guilty of bad judgement. This is not a disease, and at any time you retain the free will to put the bottle down and not take the next drink.

The modern habit of calling all sorts of problems diseases itself comes directly from Freud. To complete his disguise as a scientist, Freud adopted the doctrine of determinism. Determinism is an old doctrine and was much discussed in classical Greece. It has always had the aura of being scientific because inanimate objects are determined. However, determinism was never proved by scientific method and remained in the backwaters of philosophy until Freud rescued it and made it popular. Once you have studied Romantic psychology, you realize that there are two aspects to Freud’s teachings. In one aspect, he is a classic Romantic. In the other aspect, he has adopted several doctrines to give him the image of being a scientist.

For example, Freud wrote a book entitled, “The Future of an Illusion,” which was a critique of religion. The late 19th century was an age of great conflict between science and religion, and one way to “prove” that you were a scientist was to denounce religion. (Karl Marx used this exact same technique.) Another similar Freudian doctrine was the doctrine that small children (about 5 years old) had sexual desires. Freud never presented one bit of scientific evidence for this. He simply asserted it loudly and repeatedly. His intent was to outrage religious leaders and the conservative elements of the community so that they would denounce him. This would then look like the battle which had recently been raging between science and religion over Darwin’s theory of evolution. (However, Darwin proved his theory. Freud didn’t.) We today know that in order for an animal to feel sexual desire, it must have testosterone in its blood. Puberty is the time when blood levels of testosterone (in both males and females) rise sharply. If five-year old children had sexual desires, then it could be proven by measuring their blood testosterone. But of course five year olds have no blood testosterone. QED.

Depression, like alcoholism and excessive dieting, is loudly asserted to be a disease, and the existence of all the anti-depressive drugs shows that this assertion is widely believed by our society. As in all intellectual matters, we must begin by asking, “What is it? OK, what is depression? The answer, which should be very obvious with only a little thinking, is that depression is an emotion. Depression certainly can be unpleasant, but this does not make it a disease. We humans have the capacity, along with the higher animals, to feel emotions. These move us in various directions, the intent being to further our lives. If something threatens our lives, we feel the emotions of hate or fear. If something furthers our lives, we feel love. Then there are a more complex group of more subtle emotions which are combinations and degrees of the basic ones. For example, anxiety is a type of fear. However, it is the type of fear where we can’t quite put our finger on just what is the threat to our lives. If you see a lion running toward you, you feel intense fear. This fear gives you tremendous strength and may help you run fast enough to get away from the lion. However, if your employees are (or your boss is) acting strangely, and you can’t quite put your finger on what is wrong, you may feel anxiety. It is unpleasant. It is similar to fear. But you don’t feel the same impulse to action because you do not know from what direction the danger comes, and so you do not know what to do about it. In a similar manner, liking is a milder version of loving and also has the effect of drawing you toward the (liked or loved) object.

Depression is an emotion related to fear. In both cases, there is a threat that you will lose a value. The difference is that in the case of the lion you know exactly what is going on and what to do about it. With depression you just know that things are not right, but you have no idea as to what is wrong or what to do. Depression differs from anxiety in that the latter concerns something that might happen in the future. You can’t act because it hasn’t happened yet. But depression is the emotion you feel when you do not have the slightest idea of what is wrong. It makes you want to draw into yourself because what is necessary for you to do is to discover what is wrong. That is, when faced with the lion, what is required is action. When faced with depression, what is required is discovery. You need to accomplish an intellectual act. This is why people with depression mope around. They feel bad, but they don’t feel like taking any action. They are too busy reviewing the events of their life to discover what is going wrong.

I had an incident with depression at an early age. I solved my problem (“cure” is the wrong word), and I think the incident will be helpful in making my point. I had just started a new business. It was a stock market newsletter based on some theories I had been studying about how to predict stock movements. Suddenly, and for no reason that I could discern, I began to feel depressed and started to mope around.

To solve the problem, I had to get a perspective on myself. That is, I had to step back and view myself much as I would view another person. “Hey, Howie, what is going on that is important in your life and is not successful?” As soon as I asked that question, I knew the answer. My new business was not working out, and my stock market predictions were not successful. This reflected not only on my current income but also on my ability to earn a living in the future. Of course, if I did not have the ability to earn a living, then I was not going to have much success as a human being (not a very pleasant thought to a young person).

How does modern psychiatry deal with depression? They give you a pill. The absurdity of “treating” an emotion by taking a pill can be easily illustrated by the example of fear and the lion. You see a lion. You feel intense fear. “Wait,” says the psychiatrist. “I have the solution for your fear. Take this little blue pill.”

You take the pill. Wow, it works. You don’t feel the fear any more.

No pill, no fear, no great strength. You are lion meat.

Depression differs from fear, but the argument is the same. If you could take a pill that alleviates your depression, it would interfere with your solving your problem of discovery. Actually, our society long ago discovered a “pill” that alleviates depression. It is called booze. It has some nasty side effects, but so do virtually all modern drugs. And the booze is probably cheaper. Aside from that both the old fashioned “cure” for depression and the modern “cure” for depression interfere with your mind’s ability to solve its real problem. (I am aware that these anti-depressive drugs are handed out in our society not by psychiatrists but by medical doctors. Fortunately, the American public had enough sense to say as far away from psychiatrists as possible. To get a psychiatric drug from a medical doctor is better than from a psychiatrist, but the only real solution is to solve the intellectual problem.)

In my case, I reviewed the thinking that had gone into my decision to start a stock market newsletter. I remembered that the stock market theories I was following did not claim to be perfect. They merely claimed to work a reasonable percentage of the time. I had not really given them a fair chance. I made a decision. I would give the stock market another six months. If my theories were still not working, I would close down my business and seek another line of work.

The effect of that decision was like magic. My depression lifted like the sun coming out on a cloudy day. I had solved my problem. I had made a decision. I knew what action to take to further my life. Now I stopped moping around and took action. That was the end of my depression. (My stock market decisions got better and better, and I invite you to check out my market advice today by reading my promotional articles on some of the pro-gold web sites and checking out my website www.thegoldspeculator.com.)

This illustrates that, just as it is normal for all of us to feel fear a few times in this life (ditto, ditto, love, hate, anxiety, etc.), so it is normal to feel depression. To take a perfectly normal human emotion and call it a disease is either outrageous incompetence or outright fraud. If it happens to you, then I hope that my experience above will be of help. Both our culture’s traditional way and the “modern, scientific” way of dealing with this problem are equally disastrous to your personal happiness and success. Good luck.

Below is an open letter I am writing to my congressman about the current health care legislation:
To contact your congressperson, google: US House of Representatives, write your representative/
OPEN LETTER TO CONGRESSMAN PAUL HODES
by Howard S. Katz
Oct. 26, 23009

Dear Congressman Hodes:

The Congress of the United States will soon be voting on the subject of a Federal Government health care plan. There has never been such a thing in American history, and I hope you are giving careful consideration to your vote.

Socialized medicine first appeared in Germany in 1880-81, sponsored first by the Social Democrat Party and later by Chancellor Otto von Bismarck. The German Government undertook to provide free health care for all of its citizens. Over time this became more and more expensive. Finally the Government got the idea of saving money by killing those people who were expensive to treat. This was called “mercy killing” and killed about 100,000 Germans over the course of the 1930s. This killing program later expanded into what we today call the Holocaust.

The Social Democrats who championed this program made a big show of being full of love and were what we today call bleeding hearts. One hundred years ago Germany was considered a “progressive” country because of such programs. Then, to everyone’s surprise, Germany turned from the country of love into the country of hate and launched a world war to make itself the master race. Adolf Hitler himself was a Social Democrat and up to the age of 29 considered himself a bleeding heart. In one week, he converted from a person of love to a person of hate, and the rest of Germany followed him.

Other countries imitated German socialized medicine. They all ran into the same problem (of cost), and all of them solved it in the same way. Kill those people expensive to treat. Other nations did not carry it as far as Germany. They kill people in more subtle ways. But given the absurd expenses run up by a government operated health care system, no one has ever found a way to control costs except by killing people.

Shamefully, this issue is now being discussed in America. In the Sept. 21, 2009 issue of Newsweek Magazine, Evan Thomas wrote an article entitled,

“THE CASE FOR KILLING GRANNY.”

“We cannot afford to sustain a productive economy with so much money going to health care.” [p. 39]

For myself, I hold with the Ten Commandments, which state,”

‘THOU SHALT NOT COMMIT MURDER.”

There’s your choice: Adolf Hitler or the Ten Commandments. I expect there is justice in this world (as there turned out to be for Hitler), and I urge you to vote against any further government intrusion into health care in America.

Sincerely,

Howard S. Katz

OBAMA HATES AMERICA

by Howard S. Katz
10-19-09

The big news of last week was the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Barack Obama. The Nobel Peace Prize, unlike the Nobel Prize in Economics, is an actual Nobel Prize, having been stipulated in Alfred Nobel’s will. (Literature, Chemistry, Physics and Medicine are the others.) However, it does not have a good reputation. Since nobody in our society knows how to get peace or what actions cause peace, the Peace Prize has been given to all sorts of people. For example, Woodrow Wilson won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1919 after bringing us into war (in 1917) and pursuing it to victory. Obama seems to have won the Nobel Peace Prize for breaking his campaign promise to give us peace in Iraq and for starting a new war in Afghanistan.

But actually, we do not have to speculate about the Nobel Committee’s motives as they were very explicit, declaring:

His [Obama’s] diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world's population.

This is a very interesting question. If America is to lead the world (and the assumption is being smuggled in that the world needs to be led), should it lead the world by America’s values or by the world’s values?

I do not really need to explore this question because I know the answer. I know the Nobel Prize Committee’s answer, and I know the true answer. The Nobel Prize Committee’s answer is the answer of 99.999% of all intellectuals in the modern world, and it is the answer that was drummed into my head incessantly at Harvard: Values cannot be determined rationally, and any values are as good as any other values. Of course, if this is true, then how can the Nobel Prize Committee give an award based on values? To give an award is to say that the winner of the award is in some sense superior to the loser. The winner of the race is faster than the loser. The winner of the football game is athletically superior to the loser. To give any award for anything presumes an objective universe where some things are better than others.

You see, we are all human beings, and we spend all our time struggling to live, meaning to acquire the values necessary for life. For example, food is a value necessary for life. And I am confident that primitive humans gave an award for success in the hunt. They don’t understand this at Harvard, but humans are in a constant struggle for life. Values are those things which are necessary for life. For example, food, clothing and shelter are values. But in addition to these physical values, there are also spiritual values, such as intelligence, justice, or the idea that man has rights.

If we look at how different human beings have lived throughout history (and pre-history), we find an amazing variety. There/are a large number of different places to live in the world, but it is not obvious that any one of them is terribly superior to any other. Most humans tend to like their place better, and certainly human societies have been successful in many different environments: desert, jungle, mountains, bitter cold, tropical heat, etc. But one noticeable fact is that there is a much greater variety of success or failure in different human societies than there is in environments. Take, for example, the land bordering the Mediterranean Sea. In the period 500 B.C. to 1 B.C. the people living in this land blossomed into a rich, happy and successful human society. But then in the period 500 A.D. to 1000 A.D. (at least in the western portion) the population shrank, poverty spread, war became the dominant way of life, and the intellectual life of the people of this region collapsed. There was no significant change in the land, and indeed the people living in this place in the second period were the descendents of those who had lived there in the first. Why was the first society conducive to human life and the second not?

And how is it possible for my professors at Harvard to say that there are no objective values? On Dec. 31, 999 A D., many of the people of western Europe climbed up to the roofs of their (very modest) homes in the expectation that Jesus would come down to earth and begin a 1000 year reign of peace and love. As the night wore on, they fell asleep. In the morning they woke up to find the world as it had been before. Jesus had not come. There was no universal peace. There were only the same corrupt human leaders and their senseless wars: ignorance, poverty superstition, hate, death. Now Western Europe today is not the ideal place for which we all wish, but it is one large step better than it was in the year 999. Ask any of my professors, in which society would he rather live? It is hard to imagine even a single one of them choosing the Middle Ages.

Again, a scant half century ago almost all of the continent of Europe was plunged into a Hell in which 50 million human beings died. This was because of the values advocated by a new movement which called itself the Nazis. Is it possible to say that the Nazi values were objectively no worse than our modern (or the pre-Nazi) values? Not by the standard of human life. We are all human beings, and we all value human life. (If you hold yourself as an exception, then there is no need for you to take part in a discussion of values.)

Actually, the idea that values cannot be discussed by reason is due to the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas, who divided the world up into a realm of faith and a realm of reason, two areas which were considered mutually exclusive and exhaustive. Morality (the study of values) was put in the realm of faith, and therefore it could not possibly have anything to do with reason. I wonder how my Harvard professors, who made such a big show of being atheists and agnostics, would respond if you point out that they were disciples of a Catholic saint?

This said, let us consider the Nobel Committee’s assertion that the world should be led by someone who shares its values. Indeed, what are the values of the people of the world? To get an insight into this let us first look at how the people of the world live.

To the south of us are the people of Latin America. They live in poverty, superstition and ignorance. They have very little freedom. They are continually engaged in internal violence against each other, and they take out their hatred by mistreating dumb animals.

But their neighbors across the Atlantic Ocean are even worse. They fight wars with child armies. Periodically they rise up and slaughter large numbers of their neighbors: disease, poverty, ignorance and misery of every type. Continuing east we come to the Muslim World. This is an improvement over Africa, but it leaves a great deal to be desired: again poverty, ignorance, continual violence, hate. At the time of the Crusades things were quite different. It was the western Europeans who were the barbarians. The Muslims were cultured and civilized and valued education. Today the two societies have reversed.

If we look a little north, certainly both the Germans and the Russians value education, but it was not so many years ago that they gave the world a lesson in pure evil. The intellectuals of the left have done a good job of exposing Hitler’s barbarism. However, a few words have to be said about Stalin. When Hitler attacked the Soviet Union in 1941, Stalin issued a “no retreat” order. He created a special Soviet military unit whose job was to kill any Soviet soldier who tried to retreat. Was this a desperate, but necessary, military order? Not exactly. The Germans broke through the Soviet lines on the flanks and threatened to surround the Soviet forces. The only way to escape the trap was to retreat. But retreat was impossible because your own soldiers would kill you. As a result, millions of Soviet soldiers were entrapped by the Germans and made prisoners of war. By the way, what had happened to the original Bolsheviks who made the Russian Revolution in 1917? By 1941, they were almost all dead. Stalin had killed them. (These were the people who called each other “comrades.”) It isn’t a very pretty story, and I haven’t even gotten to Pol Pot’s Cambodia.

If we search for some tiny bit of decency in the modern world, we do meet with a bit of success. Starting about 1600 A.D. the peoples of the Anglo-Saxon world and those peoples who imitated them and followed their lead established livable societies where the achievement of human values was possible. They created more wealth than any other societies in human history. They established societies based on freedom where human beings had security and were not in continual threat of their lives and physical safety. They set an intellectual standard never equaled before in history, and along this line created technological devices for the furtherance of human life such as never had existed on earth. The societies they created abolished human slavery for the first time in history. They eradicated one disease after another and created unparalleled increases in the human lifespan.

Neither was this a gradual or complicated change. It began very close to the year 1600 A.D. By 1688, England was a democracy. By 1689, she had declared that human beings had rights. The American Revolution of 1776 was an extension of these same English ideas based on a clearer and more logical exposition of them by John Locke and America’s Founding Fathers.

“We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights and among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness….That it is for the protection and preservation of these rights that governments are instituted among men.”

These are American or Anglo-Saxon values. Which are the true values? Which are the values which make human life possible? What about a Zimbabwe citizen who was reduced to starvation over the past few years because the dictator of the country printed money at a rate of over a trillion to one? Does he want to live by Zimbabwe values, or does he want to live by American values? Does he want to starve or have food in his belly? Does he want liberty? Does he want peace and security? Does he want medical advancement? These are what the Nobel Committee means by American values.

It is tempting to say that the Nobel Prize Committee and the intellectuals who are supporting Obama are doing this deliberately, that they imagine themselves to be an elite class who will walk into a position akin to that of Plato’s guardians whereby they are the rulers, and we are their serfs.

Fortunately, that is not the way it works out. Most aggressors attack the weak. They don’t attack the strong. Some examples from history illustrate the point.

1) In the collapse of the Roman Republic into an empire; the enemies of liberty on two successive occasions formed a triumvirate. In both occasions the members of the triumvirate then went at each other. The most famous of these battles was Mark Anthony vs. Octavius (Actium, 31 B.C.).
2) In World War II, the entire continent of Europe was thrown into turmoil. But Germany never attacked Switzerland. Switzerland was a rugged mountain country where every man was armed and trained. The Swiss rode out the war without fighting a battle. On the other hand, Belgium counted on her status as a neutral. Germany had signed a treaty recognizing her neutrality. In early 1940, a German officer in the west was ordered to bring the German invasion plans for Belgium to Berlin. He missed his train and in order to make the meeting hitched an airplane ride from a friend. But the plane got lost in the fog, wandered into Belgium and crash landed. The invasion plans were captured by the Belgium police, who took them to the Government. The Belgium Government pretended that the plans did not exist and clung to its strategy of relying on a treaty. They would not even allow British and French armies to enter their country to better take up defensive positions against the Nazi attack (which came May 10, 1940).

Who was more successful in achieving peace, Switzerland or Belgium? Again, Germany never attacked Britain (or even France). Both Britain and France declared war on Germany after the German attack on Poland. The Germans were attacking the weak. Similarly, Saddam Hussein was full of fire and brimstone vis a vis Israel. But in reality he attacked his Arab brother, Kuwait. The ancient Romans had a saying, “If you wish for peace, prepare for war.”

Is the Nobel prize committee’s assumption correct that the world wishes to be ruled by its own values? The values of the great majority of societies in world history have led to war, poverty, disease, internal violence, ignorance and superstition. But until the year 1689 no one had any answer (leaving aside ancient Rome). But in 1689, the people of England declared a Bill of Rights. All of a sudden Englishmen had rights. At that time, a small group of Englishmen had journeyed half was round the world to buy tea in India and sell it back home. Many other Europeans had heard of the benefits of tea, and many European nations had their East India Tea Company. In 1757, the British Tea Company was attacked by the Nawab of Bengal. 4400 British tea company clerks inflicted a stunning defeat on 50,000 soldiers of the Nawab. This was followed by a series of British victories until the British East India Company controlled a territory the size of Western Europe.

Why were the Indians so easily defeated? Because they wanted to live under British rule. The British had rights. It was a better way of life. In the same way, why did people from all over the world give up their language, their culture and their way of life to come to America? Because Americans had rights. They wanted to live under American values, not their own values.

In words of one syllable, values are objective. All people around the world want the good things of life: food, clothing, shelter, security, happiness, cures for disease, knowledge. All of these more specific values are derived from the more abstract values discovered by the English puritan movement in its struggle for democracy in the 17th century, values which were brought to a more complete expression in the American Revolution of 1775-83.

Does the world want to be led by its own values? Do the Hutus and Tutsis of Central Africa want to continue to slaughter each other as they were doing a few years ago? Did Western Europeans want to be enslaved and slaughtered by the Hungarians and Vikings, as they were in the 10th century? What about the socialist values of eastern and central Europeans in the 1940s? No, the world does not want to live under its own values. These have proved evil and wrong. The world wants a better way. It is only backward thinking intellectuals (such as the Nobel Prize Committee) who believe that in the new socialist order they will emerge as philosopher kings and be giving the orders to others. In reality, they will be the first victims of the “new” order. In the early 17th century, the English Puritans were a small minority. But by intellectual and political activism they “conquered” Britain. Soon their descendants had an empire upon which the sun never set. And that is the true course of world history. These are the true values, and these are the values toward which the people of the world are slowly moving.
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THE MID EAST

by Howard S. Katz
10-12-09

There are very few weeks that go by in this day and age without some news item about the turmoil in the Mid-East between Israelis and Arabs. In part this is due to the fact that the media have made a decision to feature and over-dramatize this area of the world. There are similar incidents of low-level violence (short of outright war) in many areas of the world. The Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka, for example, have been waging a full scale war for over 30 years (until this past May), and it was almost never mentioned.

For another part, the troubles in the Mid-East are a perfect example of the philosophy of peace and the manner in which it leads to almost continual violence. And finally they are a very good example of the way in which the media today will report almost any event via a succession of lies. That is, first one lie is told. In the world of the “respectable” media this lie then becomes sacrosanct, and anyone who questions it is met with a campaign of vilification and hate. Then the lie becomes a basic “fact” in the narrow world of media figures, and soon another lie is laid on top of it, and then another lie and another lie, etc. I can deal with what I call this onion of lies (because they lay over each other like the layers of an onion) in the field of economics by simply making predictions of the future. Since my view of reality (in economics) is correct, I am able to make correct predictions about the future, and this past week’s explosion in the price of gold and fall in the U.S. dollar (which is making my subscribers very happy) is one example. Events, however, are more confusing and difficult to predict in the field of human relations. Things are not as black and white, and often both sides of an issue will claim, after the fact, that their predictions have proven correct.

Be that as it may, I would like to explore the Arab-Israeli conflict and try to untangle the onion of lies which the media has created.

The first, and most important, point is that there are no Palestinians. And indeed, it is only via a severe twisting of history can there be said to have ever been a Palestine. If you read the Bible (Catholic, Protestant or Jewish), it provides us with our earliest history of that region, and the name by which it is known is not Palestine. It is Canaan. After the Israelite invasion circa 1250 B.C. the land is known as Israel or Samaria (in the north) and Judah or Judea (in the south) These names are used until the defeat of the Jews in their second revolt against Rome in 135 A.D. At that time, the Jewish population is forcibly removed from Judea and scattered through the Roman Empire. The Romans rename the territory Palestine, meaning land of the Philistines. The Philistines, as you know, are the people of Delilah and Goliath who fought the Israelites at the time of King David. They were Greeks, not Arabs, and had disappeared long before 135 A.D. (By the way, the Philistines are a very interesting people and not at all the bad guys we read about in the Bible. They were also known as the Sea People and were the first people known in history to use iron weapons, i.e., to enter the Iron Age. They fought their way down the coast of Asia Minor and attacked Egypt while Moses and the Israelites were wandering their 40 years in the wilderness. Egypt was the super power of the day, but the Philistines came within a hair’s breath of defeating them, after which they settled down on the western coast of Canaan. The poor Canaanites were then caught between the Philistines (the coastal people) attacking from the west and the Israelites (the mountain people) attacking from the east, all leading up to the famous battles which are described in the Bible.

So the name “Palestine” was a fraud made up by the Romans, and it was never very much accepted by the (few) people who lived in the territory. For example, if you study the Crusades, you find the country being referred to as The Holy Land, not as “Palestine.” When the Crusaders were driven out, by Saladin (1138-1193 A.D.), and the land reconquored for Islam, it was resettled But since Saladin was a Kurd and hated Arabs, he did not use any Arabs in the resettlement of The Holy Land. (And in fact the entire mid-East was Christian from the 4th century A.D. until the Muslim conquest. These people were conquered by the Arabs and converted to Islam, but they are not ethnically Arab. An Arab is a person who comes from Arabia. To call such people Arab today simply refers to the fact that they speak Arabic and has nothing to do with their ethnicity.)

The Turks conquered the land in 1517 A.D. and returned to the name Palestine. However, they were better at conquering than governing. The residents were driven off the land and the population reduced to a very low level. Karen Armstrong reports:

“Peasants began to leave their villages to escape from rapacious pashas….In 1660 the French traveler L. d’Arrieux noted that the countryside around Bethlehem was almost completely deserted, the peasants having fled the pashas of Jerusalem.” [Karen Armstrong, Jerusalem, One City, Three Faiths, (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), p. 342.]

This set up the situation which led to the modern Zionist movement. An 1840 census recorded the population of Jerusalem as 10,750. [Karen Armstrong, p. 352.] The modern city is about ¾ million. I have seen an estimate for the total Arab population of the Turkish province of Palestine in the mid-to-late 19th century as 65,000.

Mark Twain visited The Holy Land in 1867. He reported:

“We never saw a human being on the whole route [meaning the section from the Sea of Galilee to Mount Tabor]….There was hardly a tree or a shrub anywhere….Palestine sits in sackcloth and ashes…Jerusalem itself [whose population Twain put at 14,000] is become a pauper village.” [Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad, (New York, Grosset & Dunlap, 1911), pp. 371, 397, 438, 439.]

In short, the basic assumption reported by the modern media when dealing with any Arab-Israeli issues – that there was a viable nation of ethnic Arabs who lived in a place called Palestine for a long period of time prior to the Zionist movement – is another lie.

In the late 19th century, Theodore Hertzl began a movement to urge European Jews to return to Zion. Zion was the mountain in Jerusalem on which the ancient Temple had been built, and Hertzl used the term to refer to the entire territory of Judah/Israel. This movement to return to Zion was called Zionism. It began slowly in 1880 when the country was still under Turkish rule. However, the Turks were defeated by the British, who took control in 1918.

One problem that most modern writers on the Mid-East have to face logically but try to bury is, since there were so few Arabs in the country in 1880, how come there are so many today? Where did they come from?

The answer is that;, when the British took over, they had greater respect for people’s freedom. They allowed more Jewish immigration into the country. Many of these Jews then hired foreign (Arab) labor (at higher than prevailing wages for the Mid-East). Arabs flocked into “Palestine” to get these high-paying jobs, and these were the people who began to object when the Jews created the state of Israel in 1948. Basically they were transient labor with no real ties to the land. One of the real injustices of the situation (never mentioned by the media) was the refusal of the surrounding Arab countries to take back their own citizens after 1948 when they indicated a desire to return home. These were the people who later wound up in camps supported by the U.N. (which means by your tax money). The media blamed their plight on the Israelis and used it to stir up hate.

According to John Locke’s labor theory of value property can only be owned by adding one’s labor to a piece of land. No state, as such, owns land (with a few exceptions such as land purchased via its citizens tax money). Certainly no state owns the entire territory in which its citizens live. Land ownership is an individual, not a collective, concept. The only power that a given state has is if the people of a territory voluntarily choose it as their government. This gives it the right to govern (not to own) that territory.

The Jews of “Palestine” of 1948, being very much influenced by the British tradition declared the State of Israel along the lines set out by John Locke. It was very similar to what the 13 colonies did in 1776. This is the moral basis of the claim to legitimacy of the state of Israel. In general, any human being has the right to travel to any point on the surface of the earth (his right of liberty), and if a group of people chose to travel to the same spot, they have the right to form a government.

The Arabs, on the other hand, had an archaic, ethnic concept of government. One belonged to a government by virtue of one’s ethnic group, and this was not a matter of choice. This was why the young state of Israel was attacked, not by any entity which could be called Palestinian by any stretch of the imagination, but by 6 Arab countries which had no conflict with Israel other than the fact that it existed.

This is the biggest of all the lies which are continually told about the Arab-Israel conflict. Israel has been attacked by people who consider themselves to be one entity, the Arab nation. They feel themselves offended not because they were attacked, not because they have been economically disadvantaged, not because they have any kind of practical conflict., but because people who are different from them want to live next to them. For example, Barack Obama recently made a comment about the “occupied territories” in the Mid-East. implying (but not saying explicitly) that Israel had committed aggression and conquered Arab territory. The facts are that in the process of their aggression against Israel, Jordon and Egypt conquered the West Bank and Gaza Strip respectively, and they were then thrown back from these territories. And the Israeli “occupation” of the West Bank and Gaza is simply a result of their victory in a defensive war.

Having been defeated in their war of nation-states the Arab countries have resorted to subterfuge. They are pandering to the western media by pretending to be engaged in a war of national liberation. As noted, the war between the Arab peoples and the state of Israel broke out in 1948. Some 16 years later, after several defeats, the Arabs got the idea that they were Palestinians and had always lived in the country called Palestine. (1964 was the year of the formation of the PLO.) The Encyclopaedia Britannica tells us:

“the idea that Palestinians form a distinct people is relatively recent. The Arabs living in Palestine had never had a separate state. Until the establishment of Israel, the term Palestinian was used by Jews and foreigners to describe the inhabitants of Palestine, but it was rarely used by the Arabs themselves; mostly they saw themselves as part of the larger Arab or Muslim community.” [Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th Edition, Vol. 25, p. 421.]

And, of course, this is what has been going on since 1948, a war between the Israelis and the Arab community. In this sense, it is like 99% of the wars that go on in the world. There are two groups of people. They live next to each other. They don’t like each other. So the stronger attacks the weaker. The Arabs thought that they were stronger because they have an enormous advantage in population, but they were whipped badly. Now they are whining, pretending to be victims and trying to get the major powers of the world to come into the conflict, destroy the state of Israel and give them a victory they cannot earn on their own. This is why a central Arab precondition for “peace” is that Israel cease to exist. Who would agree to such a condition and how sincere is such a desire for peace?

But on a deeper level the reason for the conflict is the left-wing media of the world. These are composed of people with a philosophy of love and peace, as per Jesus of Nazareth. As I have explained in previous blogs, such people talk loudly of peace, but there is an enormous amount of hate in their hearts. Always being careful not to put themselves at risk of physical violence, they work tirelessly behind the scenes to stir up hate and violence.

The first experience I had with this alliance between a love/peace faction and a hate/violence faction was at Harvard in the 1950s. The professors kept agitating to stir up violence among American union workers. “We are your friends. We are peaceniks and cannot engage in violence ourselves, but your cause is just, and we are on your side.” The union workers, mostly average (or below average) guys fell for it hook, line and sinker. The peacenik professors were able to enjoy the vicarious violence but did not have to get their hair mussed or their faces bruised by angry workers whose jobs they were stealing. One sees this alliance between what seem on the surface to be two very opposite types of people. The professors’ technique was to look for a group of people dumb enough to believe pretty much anything they were told and then to weave their web of lies and finally declare, “We are on your side.” They then sit back, out of the range of whizzing bullets and swinging fists, and get the violence they want. It is a lot of fun.

You will find such people in various odd places where they can champion the cause of the “Palestinians” (and incite them with hatred) without themselves actually being at risk of violence. If the Angel of Death could walk through the Mid-East and strike down such people, then, lo and behold, the Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza would suddenly be able to live in peace with their neighbors in Israel. (Remember that the two groups first came into contact because the latter offered attractive jobs to the former.

Dwight Eisenhower was a fairly decent person, but after the 1956 war he forced the Israelis to give up their conquest of the Sinai Peninsula. This was later formalized as the land-for-peace idea. However, when Eisenhower defeated Germany in 1945, there was no talk of American withdrawal. Germany was severely punished for her aggression. She gave up her thoughts of becoming the master race and concentrated on economic development. On the other hand, the Arabs were repeatedly rewarded for their aggressions. This is why there is no war in Central Europe, but war continues in the Middle East.

A portion of the blame lies with the Israelis. “Peace” became a greeting (substituting for “hello” and “goodbye” in the Hebrew language of the mid 20th century although it is not such in biblical Hebrew). Whenever, there is any kind of crisis or conflict in the region, all of the newspapers start to scream “peace.” And so the war has continued for over 50 years.

The way to bring real peace in the Mid-East is for the world media to recognize the truth that every nation has the right to fight in its own self defense In the words of Patrick Henry, “Gentlemen may cry ‘peace, peace’ but there is no peace.” That has been the case in the Mid-East since 1948, and that is why the war started in that year continues to this day.
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WHAT TO DO?

by Howard S. Katz
10-5-09

With the publication of “The Case for Killing Granny” in its Sept. 21, 2009 issue, Newsweek magazine, a prominent establishment weekly, has come out in favor of state sponsored murder. This is, quite simply, one piece of evidence that the American establishment is turning Nazi. What it means is that your life and my life are in danger, and we have to face the question, what to do?

The policy of the libertarian (and pre-libertarian) movement in the past has been to answer this question via the intellectual sphere. Ideas are the ultimate determinant of human action, and the winner of the intellectual battle will ultimately shape society. The catch here is “ultimate.” The reversion of central Europe to the Middle Ages during the 1940s did have an intellectual basis (the Romantics of late 19th century Germany), but those ideas took the better part of a century to permeate German culture and create the Nazi movement. Those people who faced the death camps were not given the opportunity to change their murderers’ minds. They had to deal with the immediate situation. Similarly, we in America face a movement which goes back almost 80 years. Our danger is more immediate than that.

The situation whereby a party of love forms, turns into a party of hate and then starts an orgy of large scale killing is extremely common in history. To conclude that this is happening here in our society today should not be a surprise to any person who has studied history.

Things are not so bad that we need to resist violence with violence today or in the near future. But we most definitely need to take preparatory action. We need to decide what to do and take the first steps toward doing it. If you study Hitler’s victims, then they simply idled away their time, and when Hitler struck, they were caught completely unprepared.

For example, take the Slavic peoples of Eastern Europe. The Germans of the 1920s and ‘30s spoke openly of “living room to the east.” It was not much of a secret that the Germans intended to attack them. Now these Slavic countries did not have strong armies or strong economies. But they did have a very large population. The obvious thing that they needed to do was to get together in a pan-Slavic alliance. Such an alliance of all the Slavic nations between Germany and the U.S.S.R. circa 1935 might have deterred Hitler from his attack. (I have mentioned that Hitler’s attack on Czechoslovakia just prior to Munich was considered so foolhardy by the German generals that they had made plans to overthrow and kill Hitler. These plans were only called off when Neville Chamberlin betrayed Czechoslovakia at Munich.)

One hopeful fact is that the American people are strongly resisting the Democratic program. Obama has been steadily falling in the polls. It is possible that conservative Democrats will start running away from him as fast as they can, and he will be unable to command a majority in Congress. This would then lead to a decisive Republican victory in 2010, similar to that of 1994. Obama would be repudiated, and it would be questionable if he could capture the Democratic nomination in 2012.

You have all been taught that the phrase the U.S. is a democracy means that the majority rules, all of us avoid violence by obeying the will of the majority and further this was the system set up by the Founding Fathers.

But if you study the system set up by the Founding Fathers and read what they said they were doing, you find nothing of this type. It is another outrageous lie told by the social democrats.

The first concern of the early democrats and the Founding Fathers was to ground government on a moral basis. This is obvious from the concept of political rights. A right is a freedom of action. Why were political rights called by that name? Because, in the eyes of the Founding Fathers, political freedoms of action were right (in the moral sense). The very first question they asked was what was the moral justification of government? In other words, how can government, which gives orders, makes threats, puts people into prison and even kills people, be considered ethical?

The Middle Ages never considered this question. It was their view that government was inherently immoral and could not be made moral. (This idea was picked up by Murray Rothbard and incorporated into what he called libertarian anarchism.)

The early democrats decided that the only way the powers of government could be made ethical was that these powers were granted to the government by its citizens. For example, in order to do its job of protecting the people’s rights, the government must provide a police force and a system of courts. But these cost money, and there is no other ethical way to get the money besides getting it from the citizens who are being protected. Therefore, each citizen must agree that government has a right to tax him for this purpose. But if government took the citizen’s money without his consent, this would be robbery, one of the very things that government was created to prohibit.

It therefore follows that ethical government must be based on the consent of all its citizens – not in the social democrat’s sense of the majority of its citizens but each and every one of its citizens. As was stated by the (pre) Revolutionary War writer, James Wilson:

“…the only reason why a free and independent man was bound by human laws was this – that he bound himself.” [Andrew C. McLaughlin, Wilson on Blackstone, The Foundations of American Constitutionalism, (New York, 1932), pp. 83-84.]

If it is morally necessary for each citizen to give his consent before the government can do its job, then it is necessary to draw up some kind of document stating the way it is constituted (made up or formed) so we can know exactly what it is to which the citizen is giving his consent. This document is the constitution of the government, and it is not an accident that precisely at the time that democracy entered the world the need was felt to draw up a written constitution. This happened, of course, at the time of formation of our own government, in 1787. But history also records that an attempt was made to set up a constitution of government at the time that the English democrats overthrew the king in the late 1640s. The democratic movement was weaker at this time, and so the attempt to draw up a written constitution failed. But the British, to this day, speak of their unwritten constitution. This same idea was stated by John Adams (later the second President of the United States) when he wrote the Constitution of Massachusetts in 1780:

“The body politic is formed by a voluntary association of individuals; it is a social compact by which the whole people covenants with each citizen and each citizen with the whole people.” [Constitution of Massachusetts, 1780, chiefly the work of John Adams, from Documents of American History, 8th edition, ed. Henry Steele Commager, (New York, 1968), p. 107.]

The Constitution of Massachusetts of 1780 was so admired throughout America that it was imitated in most of the other state constitutions

Think of a ski club whose members kick in dues to take trips to the mountains on winter weekends. Surely membership in the club is voluntary. Surely majority rule should decide which ski resorts to visit on a given weekend. But just as surely the majority does not have the right to compel all members to paint their house white, donate to the cancer fund or adopt a certain religious belief. The ski club has a defined function, and the dues paid in can only be used for that function and no other. This is just common sense, and to point out that the same common sense applies to a government should not be a debatable issue in our society.

Therefore, acts of the legislature to set up retirement insurance programs, health insurance programs or to murder people are not laws. No act of the legislature can be a law unless it is in accord with the Constitution. To steal from someone or to murder them while falsely pretending this is a law is called acting under color of law. This was how the Nazis secured widespread obedience.

Further, the U.S. Supreme Court was never given sole authority to interpret the Constitution. The Founding Fathers were radical Protestants. They were opposed to authority in all forms. The decision as to whether a given act of Congress was constitutional was left to the people. The President can veto a proposed law saying that in his opinion it is unconstitutional. A congressman can vote down a proposed law saying that it is unconstitutional. And an ordinary citizen, called to jury duty, can acquit a defendant on the grounds that the “law” he is accused of breaking is unconstitutional. The interpretation of the Constitution lies with all of us, and no one’s interpretation is any more valid than another’s.

Anarchists raise the objection, what if many of the people of a certain geographical area do not consent to the constitution? The answer to that is very simple. The government of that territory does not have the authority to exert its power over them, but it is also under no obligation to protect their rights. For example, if they will not pay for the police force, then the government will not send a policeman to investigate when their house is burgled, when they are assaulted or when a careless driver smashes into their car. The government has the same powers with regard to such an anarchist as another individual would have in case of a dispute. (For example, if a crime is alleged, the victim, in pursuit of justice, has the right to conduct reasonable inquiries to ascertain the guilty party, and his government has the same right on his behalf.)

Actually, anarchists do a lot of bitching and moaning but take very little action in pursuit of their anarchism. A good example is the town of Rough and Ready, California. In a burst of anarchist sentiment, the residents of Rough and Ready seceded from the United States. The United States did not oppose the secession, and Rough and Ready had apparently become an independent country (either that or an anarchist territory).

Reality, however, intervened with a message from the United States Post Office. Since Rough and Ready was no longer part of the United States, to whom should it deliver mail addressed to residents of the town? (It was no longer the responsibility of the U.S.P.O. to deliver it.) As it turned out, the residents of Rough and Ready had not thought about this problem when they were declaring their independence. They never answered the Post Office’s request and from that point simply pretended that they had never declared their independence. So things continue to this day.

And that is the problem with anarchism. To have an institution that will protect you from crimes committed by your fellow man is so valuable that anarchists are all talk and no action. There is a lot of discussion of anarchist theory, but there are no significant number of people who actually want to live under anarchism. If there were, then a (moral) neighboring government would simply respect their rights, collect no taxes from them and ensure that they did not violate the rights of its citizens. End of story.

Therefore, the United States Government legitimately has the 17 powers which are stated in the United States Constitution and no others.(The no others point both follows from common sense and is stated, for clarification, in the 10th Amendment.) It, of course, does not have the power to murder innocent people. And the concept of killing human beings in order to save money is morally abhorrent to any human being who subscribes to the Ten Commandments. (Note that the original Hebrew version of the Sixth Commandment says, “Thou shalt not commit murder.” The King James version is incorrect in translating this as “Thou shalt not kill.” There is no prohibition against killing in self defense, in defense of an injured party, in the execution of a person deserving capital punishment or in the case of a just war. Moses makes this clear when he enjoins killing a murderer [as per “a life for a life.”] Note, the Catholic Church has bastardized the concept of a just war by using it for any war of which they approved. But then the Catholic Church, being based on the concept of love, does not know what justice is. Justice is correctly defined by Isaiah, Ch. 3, vs. 10-11, as giving a person the consequences of his actions. Most of us have a decent concept of justice when it comes to interpersonal relationships. If you want to know whether a given war is just, then simply imagine that the countries involved are individuals and ask who is in the right?)

In words of one syllable, the individuals who murder people under the Obama health care program are not acting in accord with law. It is impossible to legalize murder under the United States Constitution. Bureaucrats who accept jobs with the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology are murderers. The congressmen who voted for the creation of that agency and the President who signed it into law are murderers. And the doctors who actually carry those murders out are, of course, murderers also. What is happening is the take-over of the Government of the United States by a criminal class who is pretending to be justified by law. This is the concept of under-color-of-law (the commission of a crime while pretending to be acting as upholders of the law). This idea was extensively employed by the Nazis. Once they abolished the German constitution, there was no law in Germany, but the Nazis managed to convince the majority of the German people that there was and that it had been changed from “thou shalt not commit murder” to “thou shalt commit murder.” The bizarre behavior of most of the German population and its willingness to obey Hitler’s orders came in large part from this concept of under-color-of-law.

What we are seeing as a social phenomenon is the party of love turning into the party of hate. This happened in Germany in the 1920s as the Social Democrats turned into the Nazis. The party of love in America did not have a special name. From 1933-2008, it was simply the left wing of the Democratic Party. Under the leadership of Barack Obama, these people are turning from love to hate and moving from left to right. We know what happened in Germany, and we know what happened in previous periods of history. The party of love turned into the party of hate and perpetrated mass murders on a scale which shocks us today. Then the world made up a pack of lies so that they could hide this fact from themselves.

Members of the party of hate are cowards and will be most aggressive toward the weak. To be strong, one must make the resolution in one’s mind to be willing to fight if necessary. One must also put time and energy into organization so that the good people can act together in a coordinated manner.

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