There is no doubt in anybody’s mind that the United States is suffering mightily from a social and economic malaise. All of the candidates running for office are professional politicians who, while promising to provide relief from the current conditions and right the foundering ship of state, will say or do almost anything to get elected.
And then what?
They will bring back the party apparatchiks, those unquestioningly loyal subordinates and party operatives who will first attempt to consolidate their power before moving on to preserving their power and then on to reducing the power of the opposition before ever embarking on doing the people’s business.
The sad fact is that the current malaise is a result of government policies, not the marketplace …
Each major failure of a market can be traced back to the politicians who are attempting to convey privileges and profits to their special interest supporters and party faithful. And when things go wrong, like most politicians, they believe that the ONLY cure is more legislation. Thus compounding the problem in an overwhelmingly burdensome tangle of red tape that often results in economic death as surely as a underwater swimmer dies underwater forever tangled in a kelp bed.
Death by a thousand lawyers …
It seems that everything coming out of Washington, and increasingly our State legislatures, is a muddled concept buried in legalese designed to either obscure the original intent of the legislation or convey some advantage to a special interest. Even parsing the words and attempting a rational explanation will not guarantee that you will not be involved in a lawsuit and subjected to outrageous damage claims by an increasingly whimsical court where the political appointee on the bench has no clue to what issue they may be deciding other than the information contained in an equally complex legal brief containing a jumble of citations which may or may not be applicable.
Where we are going wrong …
Over protection of so-called intellectual property. Or what I refer to as the Disney syndrome.
Consider the original intent of the copyright and patent laws. In exchange for creating and revealing your work to the public, the creator was granted a period of time in which they could exclusively benefit from their work. After this period of time, the work was absorbed into the public domain and could be exploited by anyone – under the theory that competition would further reduce the price to the public and society, as a whole, would move forward.
Enter the Disneyesque world where the distribution of content was extremely a highly profitable endeavor with very large margins. In fact, margins wide enough and profits great enough to hire a phalanx of lawyers and lobbyists to subvert the legislators into extending that protected period of time into a period exceeding the lifetime of the author. And when that fails to protect the content, criminalizing the tampering with the electronic wrapper around the work now in the public domain – thus extending the copyright to infinity or the day when the content no longer has commercial value.
We have seen this protection of content spread malignantly in the electronics industry where computers and other digital devices are electronically crippled to produce inferior copies or tangle the user in a web of authentication schemes which are detrimental to all users as it destroys our privacy and opens up our personal lives to scrutiny by government and snooping private individuals who believe that they may have been the subject of illegal copying.
But even worse than the electronic protection of content is the subversion of our patent system into granting so-called business process patents for the automation of what previously had been a manual process. Any number of patents have been granted for business processes and techniques which should have never been patentable. Not only are they simply an automated version of a manual process and thus fail the “new and novel over prior art” test, but they are so basic that they inhibit all future development of any similar process.
Of course, no patent is really valid unless it is defended in court … which gives rise to large, well-financed, companies who simply collect patents and then attempt to extort others with the threat of a lawsuit unless they pay the company a licensing fee. In this system, the small independent inventor or entrepreneur does not stand a chance against well-capitalized entities who can simply steal the work and defend the theft in court. At the most, the court will reward the aggrieved party with reasonable compensation and treble damages – mostly after years of fighting. But the likelihood is that the aggrieved party will simply settle for a pittance or just go off into the sunset – poorer, but wiser.
But it gets worse, the legislators, in their infinite wisdom, allowed for the patenting of living matter and the very genes and proteins contained within the human body. Thus crippling our development of new medicines while insuring continuing profits for those who hold patents. To develop a single medicine or even engage in research, one may need permission from a number of patent holders before proceeding with the project and, even then, the up-front or back-end royalties may make the end-result economically unfeasible. Consider the development of a cancer cure with the manufacturing cost of an aspirin tablet but burdened with millions of dollars worth of royalty payments?
Interference in the free marketplace -- when legislators say the marketplace is free and then encumber the marketplace with legislation designed to preserve political power by engaging in social engineering.
One need only look so far as the GSEs (Government Sponsored Enterprises) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Both of which were created by the government to regularize the mortgage marketplace and assure sufficient liquidity in the markets by allowing them to borrow funds at preferential government funds rates and to act as the mortgage buyer of last resort.
Fannie Mae was created as part of FDR’s New Deal and Freddie Mac was created to give the behemoth Fannie Mae competition. Both were turned into quasi-governmental entities only to remove their massively rising obligations (debt) from the U.S. National Debt and to resolve budgetary problems existent when they were turned into GSEs.
As GSEs, both firms were controlled by politicians and their friends. Even though the leadership was paid multiple millions of dollars in salaries and bonuses, while losing billions of dollars worth of net worth, they continued to lobby Congress for additional powers and privileges. Their funds were seen by some politicians as a public piggybank that could be used to finance low income housing and other politically sensitive projects that would result in political benefits for friendly politicians as they engaged in housing operations in the politician’s area of influence.
Now we find that the once implicit United States guarantee of all GSE obligations is being made explicit and that the private investors in the GSEs are reaping the rewards of taxpayer money. All for political purposes. With the passage of new legislation, these highly-leveraged relics of the past present a growing systemic risk to our entire economy in such a manner as only a relatively small 90 or so billion dollars serves as the core capital requirements for obligations totaling $6 trillion or more. With this degree of leverage, even a small upset in the marketplace can have an overwhelming effect on our economy. And if you scrutinize the legislation carefully, you will see shades of social engineering involving “affordable housing” and other such initiatives.
And it continues …
We now find Barack Obama planning to engage in socialistic programs which feature the “coercive collective” over the “rights of the individual,” planning to massively raise taxes, ostensibly on the very rich, to increase entitlements for political purposes. And then there is John McCain, strong on defense but weak in economic matters.
A hell of a pickle as the American public is forced to endlessly run between first and second base with each trip bringing greater and greater risk of being tagged out!
What can YOU do?
Demand that the politicians start writing single-purpose legislative bills in plain English. Legislation which repeals previous laws so as not to create an exploitable patchwork of legislation or legislation with unintended consequences.
Start at the local level by electing non-lawyers and non-professional politicians to office. Do not vote for any politician who seems inordinately corrupt or beholden to the special interests. It is fairly simple to check a website to review a politician’s campaign contributors to see what might be taking place under the public’s nose.
Flood your legislator’s office with your message. E-mail your opinion, print out additional copies and fax one to the legislator and then mail one to his main office in your area and another one to his office in the capitol. Follow it up with a phone call to discuss the matter and start by reading your e-mail. Send a copy to your local newspaper and other media outlets. If enough people invested the time and effort to make their positions known, politicians would at least be put on notice that they are being watched and held accountable for their actions.
Do not patronize firms that support a corrupt legislator and make your opposition known to the leadership of these firms.
While it may seem futile in the beginning, there is always a chance that the collective energy of the people can translate into the type of action which forced Congress to back down on the SHAMnesty bill that granted citizenship to the very illegal aliens which were crippling our infrastructure.
Keep fighting injustice, illegality and politicians who do not represent the American mainstream.
-- steve
Quote of the day: “Americans will put up with anything provided it doesn't block traffic.” -- Dan Rather
A reminder from OneCitizenSpeaking.com: a large improvement can result from a small change…
The object in life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane. -- Marcus Aurelius
Comments