Quotes

Nothing rings so true as the quote Milton Friedman is known for above. Temporary government programs have a tendency to stick around for a long time- in many cases forever. It is notoriously hard to remove a government program, becuase the government employees people to keep the program running. Unlike the private sector, the profit motive has almost no effect on operation of a government program. The modus operandi is merely having jobs for the public. Hence why most government programs are always in debt- from the Mighty State Department to the mere senate barbershop.

Any and all programs from entitlements, to public works projects end up being permanent programs that are next to impossible to remove. One could argue big expenditures like the Income Tax or Welfare programs federally are temporary, given their origins (Lincoln’s Greenbacks and LBJ’s War on Poverty.) However the current use of each seems to haze the original intentions into a permanent apparatus to fund government & help the poor, respectively.

What about the programs that were clearly intended for temporary use? Here is a list of several programs that still exist today:

Tennessee Valley – “a federally owned corporation in the United States created by congressional charter in May 1933 to provide navigation, flood control, electricity generation, fertilizer manufacturing, and economic development in the Tennessee Valley, a region particularly affected by the Great Depression….TVA was envisioned not only as a provider, but also as a regional economic development agency that would use federal experts and electricity to rapidly modernize the region’s economy and society.”

The intention was creation of economic activity back in the great depression…so why does it still exist today?

Federal Crop Insurance Corporation: is a wholly owned government corporation managed by the Risk Management Agency of the United States Department of Agriculture. FCIC manages the federal crop insurance program, which provides U.S. farmers and agricultural entities with crop insurance protection…. The legislation was created in response to the economic difficulties brought to the U.S. farming industry by the Great Depression and the weather-related catastrophe of the Dust Bowl…Initially, participation in FCIC was voluntary. However, insurance premiums were subsidized by the U.S. government as a means of encouraging participation in the FCIC program. This changed with the Federal Crop Insurance Reform Act of 1994, which required farmers to participate in the program in order to be eligible for deficiency payments related to certain FCIC programs. Mandatory participation was repealed in 1996.

In Short- temporary relief to farmers in the great depression became a federal insuracne program on crops. What the definition neglects to mention is the crop-buying programs which has government forcibly by farmer’s crops each year in order to maintin higher costs. During the depression, these drops were intentionally destroyed to perserve the high cost. Now, they are sent to needy third-world countries. Why are we funding a program decades old to keep prices artifically high? Didn’t the depression end?

Just about any notable program from the great depression has stuck around to today. Here are some more famously known government programs that are now “corporations”, just like the TVA:

Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac- remember these folks? Federally-founded & still funded companies to help americans get into houses. Also intended to be a tmeporary program, the housing markets many fluctations seemed to have blurred the lines to keep these ‘companies’ as permanent figures in government. Yet, they were behind the very issue of the 2008 housing crisis due to those very genrerous federally-backed loans that undercut the true-market rate for a decade. Well, now it seems the federal government may in fact remove them…and instead control the entire housing market with legislation approving them to underwrite 100% of all mortgages. Not good folks…

A recent target of Republican politicans Mike Lee, Ted Cruz, & Justin Amash has been a “government corproation” that is glaring evidence of corporate welfare.

Export-Import Bank– the official export credit agency of the United States federal government… It was established in 1934 by an executive order, and made an independent agency in the Executive branch by Congress in 1945, for the purposes of financing and insuring foreign purchases of United States goods for customers unable or unwilling to accept credit risk….Its Charter spells out the Bank’s authorities and limitations. Among them is the principle that Ex-Im Bank does not compete with private sector lenders, but rather provides financing for transactions that would otherwise not take place because commercial lenders are either unable or unwilling to accept the political or commercial risks inherent in the deal.

If you want a glaring opposition to the fundementals of the Free Market, the Ex-IM bank is it. They are the epitimany of governmt meddling in the economy. No compeititon – undercut market credit rates- unattainable private risk? All are reasons a free-market thinker would NOT invest in a program in the first place. Yet the government is some form of dogmatic entity that defies human nature in order to better mankind. In the Ex-Im bank’s case, it is mostly just Boeing (and even the failed energy titan Enron, which was loaned 1+ billion dollars pre-collapse). I am 100% for the closure of the Export-Import bank with every fiber of my Libertarian Principles.

That is just the tip of the iceburg for temporary government programs. Not all are from the FDR regime, but his New Deal policies ushered in a larger government than any president in our history….almost all programs temporary.

Here is a continued running list of our current existing temporary programs:

Commodity Credit Corporation (1933)
Corporation for National and Community Service (Americorps) (1933)
Corporation for Public Broadcasting aka PBS (1967)
Federal Agricultural Mortgage Corporation (1987)
Farm Credit Banks (1916)
Federal Financing Bank (1973)
Federal Home Loan Banks (1932)
Federal Prison Industries (1934)
The Financing Corporation aka FICO (1989)
Legal Services Corporation (1974)
National Consumer Cooperative Bank (1978)
Neighborhood Reinvestment Corporation (1978)
Millennium Challenge Corporation (2004)
National Credit Union Administration Central Liquidity Facility (1998)
National Endowment for Democracy (1983)
National Park Foundation (1967)
National Railroad Passenger Corporation aka Amtrak (1971)
Overseas Private Investment Corporation (1971)
Panama Canal Commission (1903) – (still used as a military base, despite losing its established program name in
Securities Investor Protection Corporation (1970)

So when people say we have nothing to cut in our national budget…..here are plenty of temporary programs that well past their due time.

“A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both.” – Milton Friedman

The previous article on equality & freedom took the recent cases against a Colorado bakery owner, a New Mexico photographer, and the shot-down law in Arizona exempting people from discrimination laws based on religious beliefs. Never mind the subjective nature of discrimination, the tug-of-war between groups of the population via collectivism has led to an all-out war on the social dominance of opinion. Crony equality has taken pages from the McCarthy era and the religious right to use mob-mentality to force out the viewpoints they do not agree with in order to justify an end-goal of their version of equality.

Case-in-point: Mozilla’s CEO being ousted by the mob-mentality. The man donated money to a campaign in support orf Proposition 8 in California to ban gay marriage – which passed – and was chastised with the internet’s form of a scarlet letter. The fact he also support republican Pat Buchanan’s presidential campaign in 1992, and perhaps other right & libertarian affiliations contributed to the group mentality of targeted hate to the newly crowned CEO of Mozilla. the LBGT lobby were the mob in this case, with the supporters in Silicon Vally making a push against the man calling him an enemy of “love, equality, and freedom”.

The rest, as they say, has become history. But the discussion on the matter is furiously going on in the hive mind of the news. Conservatives are up in arms, and some liberals oppose it as well. Bill Maher cracked a joke about the “gay mafia” in california on the matter, and well-known public figure & journalist (who I know from Demand Progress’s campaign on SOPA legislation) Andrew Sullivan denounced the action as a “scalping”. Conservatives have thrown up hyperbole across the board from tyranny, fascism, reverse McCarthyism, and outright hypocrisy of the coup of the now-former Mozilla CEO. The outrage is justified, but the surprise from the action should have been seen years ago.

This may be a tipping point for the general public, but history has shown this mentality among the collective & organized left has been apparent for almost two decades. The Machiavellian mentality of “equality” is nothing more than a power struggle taken from history’s chapters back in the 1950s & 1960s. The very actions these activist leaders lived through, directly or vicariously, with the government demanding the NAACP’s member list, the communist party member lists, and public witch-hunts reminiscent of Salem Massachusetts. The level of hyprocrisy is certainly not a hyperbole. What is astonishing is how vehemtely the collective equality crowd defends such a deplorable action. The ends seem to always justify the means to them.

What does the Mozilla CEO Coup Imply?

We have a Victim Industrial Complex. Much like the Military Industrial Complex, or the Pharmacudical Industal Complex – the institution of equality is a government-backed industry that never intends to solve the problem it intends to fix. The fight for equality in today’s world always seems like the talking points never left the 1960s; the mindset is that America is stuck in the 1960s forever in terms of racist mysogynist bigots. Sound familiar?

Sure does. Look at the military industrial complex: we build bombs, warships, drones and other drestrutive gadets at the good graces of government contracts that seems like it will never end. They never intend to- that is why many conspiracy-leaning folk claim their existance provokes the actions of war. In an economic sense, that is literally true; a government-backed military complex is in defense of war actions. Stimulation of bombs means the consumption of bombs by US, our friends, and our enemy’s of our emenies (heck, sometimes our enemy’s in the near future! See the history of Iraq’s weapons).

Take it from former President Dwight Eisenhower:

“This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence — economic, political, even spiritual — is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society…

… In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists, and will persist…”

The Fight For Equality Will Never End…By Design

The Victim Industrial Complex has no intention of ending the fight for equality. Not becuase the threat of inequality is always there; because the fight for equality is how they pay the bills. Government involvement helps keep this institution alive and well- just go to any statehouse or federal building, and the rhetoric is all the same messages these non-profits are pushing for.

Look, the social acceptance of people’s indivdual choices that do not harm others is indeed progress. But claiming the government is instrumental to this change is categorically false. Government is not society, so it cannot have opinions. Society is what changed the opinions as a whole. Governemnt is a vaccum of thought & opinion until it changes by legislation. Governemnt takes at least 4 years, 6 years- whatever the term limits are. Therefore, government cannot ever be an effictive method of social change if it was indeed a part of society.

Deabte me on government involvement all you want, or even the ‘privellege’ of a non-white heterosexual male- but the existance of figures like former Snitch Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, Gloria Allred….all make a living off of the substance of your pain and suffering. The mob rule forms from these crusades against folks like the CEO of Mozilla are the result of the V.I.C in American life. We used to govern as a constitutional republic…but this democracy-oreitned government would prefer the majority speak for all of the minority. That is what the recent Mozilla CEO coup tells about our society. Expect more of it.