The View From 1776

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4th of July without Fireworks - A Remembrance

By Robert W. Stapler

When I was a kid, the 4th of July meant parades with floats, veterans marching, flags flying, and speeches by town notables.  But more than anything it was about fireworks. Not just the big display over by the lake, but also every kid in town with a pocketful of firecrackers, cherry bombs, M2’s, stick rockets, snakes, and every other noisome pyrotechnic we could lay our hands on or make.  It was the freedom to get a little wild and dangerous.

We’d have firecracker battles in which all the kids in the neighborhood would choose sides and lob a mix of crackers and mud in every direction.  Of course, we’d be just far enough apart the ‘bombs’ would fall short, but the exhilaration of imagined battle was alive in us.  The big kids were our generals and we’d jump to orders as well as any seasoned veteran.  Someone would, invariably, ‘borrow’ a flag from a yard, and we’d rally to it.  We’d play half the day like this in a running battle that would start at one end of town and range through schoolyard, playground, ball-field, woods, grocery, movie-theater, creek-beds, bridges, swimming-pool, gas-station, church-yards, and trash-dump.  The heat of July was pale compared to the heat within us, so that we were impervious to the rivers of sweat streaming down dirt streaked faces.  We were expert in guerrilla tactics we imagined the stock warfare of minutemen and Continentals.  We’d find large sticks to aim like muskets, augmented with screams of “pow, pow” and “aghhh, ya got me!”  We’d fall down in make believe deaths so exaggerated women came running to see if we were really hurt; only to be startled when we jumped up and ran away screeching with hilarity.  Old men, veterans of ancient wars, would cheer us on encouraging us to be brave.

I was the maker of anything pyrotechnic.  For my eighth birthday, my parents gave me a used chemistry set.  I set up my ‘laboratory’ in the basement and soon exhausted the ‘tame’ experiments packaged with the kit, but wanting much more.  I wanted to do chemical magic that would be eye popping fun.  I learned to mix clear chemicals that would change colors, erupt from beakers, create vast clouds of noxious vapors, or boil away to nothing.  I learned which chemicals when added to sawdust or cellulose burned red, green, yellow, blue-white, or purple.  And I learned how to make things that went boom!  I couldn’t get enough of explosives and propellants.  By the time I was ten, I knew how to make magnesium flares, fulminate of mercury, gunpowder, hydrogen gas, and nitroglycerin. 

When I was nine, I became interested in rocketry.  President Kennedy had just announced his program to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade, and I wanted to be a part of it.  So, I read all I could about Goddard, Von Braun and Chuck Yeager.  I sent $6.50 plus handling to Estes and got my first rocket with three cartridge engines.  I carefully sanded, assembled, and glued the pieces together, painted it cherry red, tested the parachute deployment, borrowed a car battery, found a suitable site, and was ready for my first launch.  I was not disappointed.  My rocket flashed into the sky faster than eye could follow, and I had to strain to see it against a bright autumn sky that swallowed it whole.  For a moment I thought it must have gone so far it would never return.  Then I saw the secondary charge puff and the little parachute popped out; but it was tangled in shrouds and, instead of floating gracefully back to earth, it tumbled onto hard packed dirt.  Two fins were broken, the fuselage dented and the paint badly marred, but I didn’t care.  It had flown straight, fast, and furious.  It had strained to break free of the bonds of gravity, even to the point of risking injury.

I built dozens of other rockets, each bigger and more complex than the previous.  Some were multistage affairs to get greater altitude; just as our country’s multistage rockets were used to put satellites and, finally, men into space.  I took to putting little passengers in my rockets: crickets, spiders, tree frogs, mice, &c.  Some of them did not survive the trip, but that just made them heroes who I, and my cadre of friends, would bury with honors.  I also started adding telemetry to record temperature, pressure and ionization (a photo cell).  Of course, at the altitudes I reached, these varied not at all from ground readings.  Still, I could congratulate myself for being a thorough going junior scientist.  I even got one of those rocket cameras that allowed me to take birds-eye pictures of my neighbors from unsuspected height.

It wasn’t long before the novelty of assembling someone else’s rocket paled.  I wanted to build my own rockets and learn how to design the things; make them entirely from scratch.  Most of it was pretty obvious.  But what about the propellants used in the little cartridges?  What was in them?  How much was needed of each ingredient?  Do you just stuff it all in and light a fuse?  Of course, the first thing I did was to try to disassemble one to see what was inside.  I got a utility knife and dissected it down the middle.  It took awhile to get through the casing, but I was rewarded with my first look inside the mystery of solid propellant rocket engines.  The outer casing was a thick, stiff cardboard, denser than most wood.  I did not know it then, but it was made with resin and fire retardant to contain the fierce heat and pressure of the burning fuel.  Inside the casing was a cement-like material that is the actual propellant.  There were three parts to it I latter learned were propellant, delay, and ejection charge for the parachute or to ignite the next stage.  The propellant had a funnel shape at the bottom and a hole up the center to provide the fastest, most efficient burn.  I didn’t know all this looking at the thing and had to find books on the subject. 

My local library didn’t have anything and I was pretty frustrated.  Then, one day, my dad took us to the university where he’d just gotten a job as a steamfitter.  It was summer and my parents thought it a good idea for getting us out of the house.  While he was busy and my brothers were checking out the dairy and athletic facilities, I wandered off to the engineering library where I found what I was looking for and much more beside.  I thought I’d found heaven.  It was after dark before my dad found where I’d vanished to.  I was scolded for having disappeared, but he let me tag along again as long as he knew where I was.  I was soon mixing compounds and trying out other types of rockets.  I built magnesium-sulfur rockets, gunpowder rockets, and nitrate rockets. I had to learn to pack, shape and core my propellants.  I learned to make and use treated wadding; both to retard and to accelerate my burns.  I had a lot of miscarriages, but also some spectacular successes. Later, I built a few liquid fuel rockets, but never got quite the same results.  I tried pressurized alcohol, but, although it made a blinding flame, it had no real thrust and merely burned to death on the launch pad.  From the university, where I’d made some friends, I got damaged parts of real liquid engines to study.  Fortunately, the fuels and oxidants needed turned out to be expensive or restricted.  Besides, had I succeeded in making a real liquid rocket my parents would have had a fit.  Interestingly, my dad showed me a simple liquid rocket I’d never have guessed at.  He took an empty CO2 cartridge, filled it with R-22 refrigerant, stuck the cartridge in a length of pipe (launch tube), and then uncorked it.  It flew as fast and high as one of my solid rockets.  And, so simple!

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On a bright 4th of July in 1963, I came to the annual battle of the revolution armed with an assortment of homemade grenades and rockets.  It took a wagon and two extra kids to carry them all.  Besides this arsenal, the other kids had their usual collection of purchased armament.  It promised to be our grandest battle yet.  We staged the battle at the town athletic field where we’d be well away from property and fussy adults.  The field was wide and flat with sloping areas going up on three sides and down on the fourth.  A drainage creek bordered one side of the field with a wood on the slope.  Another slope was a grassy knoll that served as our primary area to launch the rockets.  The two opposing armies formed up on the far side of the field at right angles to me, where they could occasionally infiltrate commandos into the woods for a ‘sneak’ attack on the flanks.  Bombs were made by scooping mud from the creek, mixing with straw from the high sunburned grass, allowing it to dry to a half mud cake, and sticking an M2 or cherry into it.  These would explode showering mud on all of us.  We learned to roll them more than toss them to keep them from coming apart too soon.  I made my grenades to be all flash and smoke, but otherwise fairly harmless.  That is to say they had no more ‘bang’ to them than, say, a cherry bomb.  This was largely a matter of not packing them too tight.  They were no good for sticking in mud, but had a different use.  They were about the thickness of a cigar, wrapped with treated grocery bag paper, surrounding a mix of wadding, charcoal, phosphor, sulfur, a pinch of magnesium, wick, and wound together like a blanket roll.  They were hollow at the center for even burning, and burned for over a minute after half exploding to make clouds of dense, smelly smoke.  I handed out equal numbers to each side.  The rockets were made to burst above our heads, whistle with ear satisfying screams and pops, and provided a greater sense of battle.  With my wagon I cruised the edge of the battlefield launching random rockets.  It was tacitly understood I was there to provide stage effects and not be molested as one of the combatants; at least until the rockets were exhausted after which I was fair game.  I was the wizard of the magic, and, for the moment, the hero of the revolution. 

Later that year, two days after my 13th birthday, Jack Kennedy was shot dead.  With him, my exuberance for rocketry died, or maybe I was just leaving childhood behind.  It’s hard to say from this long remove.  But, things were definitely changing; both in my world and in the larger one outside our town.  Before that moment, all things had seemed possible.  Afterward, caution and pessimism took hold and it would be years before I, again, felt that enthused about a sitting president (i.e., Reagan).  We moved that year, so I don’t know if our town tradition continued or died out with all the rest. 

The firecrackers, rockets, and the rest are outlawed now.  Only six states still allow unlicensed possession of anything more dangerous than a sparkler, and, even those that do, limit fountains to 20 grams and aerial rockets to mere squibs.  Roman candles, M2’s, and cherry bombs are non-existent.  Any kid over the age of seven will tell you he’s not the least interested in sparklers.  Where’s the fun in that?  Where’s the freedom?  I know we must protect property and keep children safe, but I sometimes think we go too far.  No doubt I was lucky I never harmed myself or others, but, then, safety never held half the attraction of risk.  If I were a kid now, there is no way my parents would indulge the things I did.  My creativity, imagination and spunk would be stifled.  Playing at war is frowned on so that heroes are found only in the common-place rather than the extraordinary, and so our kids have little practice in what it means to be heroic.  The kids of summer are gone, they are trapped in air-conditioned cocoons designed to insulate from discomfort and risk alike.  The younger ones we park in front of televisions wired with all sorts of captivating entertainments that teach them to be adept without ever taking risks.  The older ones hang out in conditioned malls where the only option for rebellion is to be obnoxious; ignorant of the unfettered mischief we enjoyed.  Summer itself is banished, only allowing a minimum exposure to its caustic rays for aesthetic preference.  When I ask other adults about this, invariably it was okay for us but not now.  I can’t imagine a childhood without the freedom to get a little crazy or hazard a little invention.  And, I can’t imagine a 4th of July without sweaty, hazard exposed children running joyously amuck.

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The Freedom Battle

Day breaks in searching beams
turns dank to haze on glistened glade
burnished orb rising banishes night
creatures startle, and shadows fade

Small boys stealing from over-warm beds
ripe with adventure of glory’s capture
brave feats enact from recounted tales
of genius, honor, sacrifice and rapture

Emerging in ones and twos, forming clusters,
clusters become ranks, and ranks formations
generals and sergeants reflexively elected,
the flower of each determined nation

Taking up arms, wherever found,
barking sticks about the ground,
cap-pistol, air-rifle, and water-guns enjoined
to hot-fused devices of arresting sound

What ingenuity spawned, what magic learned
transforms mud, grass and popper to exploding grenade,
child’s wagon to war-wagon, bicycle to mount,
and rope wound spade to cannonade

A banner found (or more likely stolen)
Brave lads! Rally ‘round Old Glory!
Regiments converge on this, their pennon
hearts race the faster to her wind whipped fury

Marching madly about the field,
seeking advantage, their foe to yield,
taking measure of each other’s guarded mettle,
and oft bellowed score yet to settle

Salvos exchange and hearty bluster
banners rise and riotous boys muster
headlong they hurl into the fray
making their names this famous day

Muskets level and vocally discharged
Ranks fall, yet ... made new arise,
persuasions of death, all but disguise
scorning eternity, this deathless race

Mortar to targets fly and burst
scattering formations in disruptive glee
spattering retreat with muddied ‘gore’
that riddled boys in mock horror flee

Rocket’s high boom, above the brawl
warriors wince and note the blast
parsing victory in graphic scrawl
refusing ground, by burst made fast

Ebb and flows the battle rage
bright, scorched hours, the lighter made
flagging boys rally from reserves of power
but, at last, admit their war’s nigh over

Handshakes and backslaps, twixt erstwhile foes
resurrecting friendships that none’s master perceive
Yet, each believing, it was they this fine day
assuredly the greater honors achieved

And, as the sultry orb retreats to darkness,
boys on meadow all fallen down
recount the day’s wonder amidst rocket’s splendor
painting heaven with their July 4th renown.

-

Bob Stapler is a mechanical engineer living in Columbia, Maryland

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THE FOURTH OF JULY AND THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

By Jan Paul Burr

The United States of America is a name that for most of us, brings to mind the beginnings of a great nation. It stirs our emotions when we think of all the great things that this nation was involved in. We saw millions come to our shores in flight from poverty, oppression and starvation. Our nation gave them opportunities they had never seen before.

But, for many here, now, this nation is not the nation of opportunity they seek. They want a nation were “fairness” reigns supreme. They want a nation where government levels out the playing field so things aren’t so hard for those with less skills or money than others. They want socialism where the wealthy and business carry the burden of financing our government and social programs.

Oh, they dress it up with words like “progressive” and “liberal” and tell people that it will be “fair”. They promise things that sound like utopia. And, how will they do all these wonderful things?

They say they will do it through government at the Federal Level and the Federal Court system, for the most part. We have seen 70 years of their efforts so far and so maybe it is time to look at how well they are doing.

One of the best places to look is Social Security, since it is what they brag has been their crowning glory. It is a good example of how well almost all of their policies work. What started as a low tax, simple program, that would help those who didn’t save or prepare for retirement and the setbacks on the road to retirement, developed into a monster. Even FDR envisioned a time when the program would be funded in a manner that the flow of money into the system would be for the worker’s future retirement, not current retirees’ benefit checks.

Over the 70 years the program has existed, we have seen 20 tax increases, 11 times the system failed to have inflow meet outflow, and the payment of benefits that is nothing but wealth redistribution. We see 90% of earnings up to the meager $606 income level count toward your benefit check. Try living on that.

From $607 to $3,653, you only get to count 32%. Try living on 32% of what you make. Above that, you only get to count 15%. Name one investment you make where you pay in for a future withdrawal at retirement and they only let you count 15% of what you pay in. But, that is how socialism works.

What we find is that just 4% of your salary invested in bonds like those in the two bond funds found in the Thrift Savings Program that 11 million people use, returns as much at retirement as a low wage earner gets from social security and he also has a couple of hundred thousand dollars to leave his family.

Now, it is bad enough that you pay your share in but, the 7.625% the Company pays in and which is added to the price of their goods and services is passed on to you to pay as well. In other words, you pay and pay and pay under socialism to get back some of what you paid in.
When you look at how our social programs are funded, we find that we, the working men and women of this nation, not only pay, in prices for what we buy, for all the programs but, pay the cost of collecting the taxes for all those programs, as well. We not only end up paying for them but, the cost of collecting those taxes from business and the tax, itself, often puts the price of goods and serviced above the level of competition.

Therefore, we not only pay more but, lose jobs as well. In our last job growth report, 75,000 jobs were created. But, in that report were another 18,000 jobs lost in manufacturing and 10,000 lost in high tech employment because we can’t compete with India, Ireland, China, Korea, “new” Europe and other places. Why?

It is simple. We can’t compete because those old socialist nations went back to the principles of capitalism and rewarding individual effort and placing the responsibility for social programs more directly on the working men and women. While we were moving deeper into socialism and losing jobs and creating virtually stagnant wages, they were growing tax revenues at the same time wages have been rising. While they were creating tax systems so simple it was hard to cheat on them, we were adding pages to the over 60,000 pages of tax code and tax rulings our businesses have to comply with.

Often we hear someone say how we have high wages and they have low wages. But, seldom do you hear it put in terms of buying power. Some places now have 2, 3, 4 and even 5 times the buying power of our $1. So while we point out some worker in China in an auto plant may only make $2 an hour, he may have $10 an hour in buying power and his wage increases are occurring faster than ours. Ireland, for example, in about 15 years went from about ? our average manufacturing wage to $1.30 more than ours.

Now, that isn’t as great as it sounds since their cost of living rose so they haven’t made the buying power gains some in Asia have, but, they are much better off than when they had 15% unemployment and 120% debt to GDP. Those have dropped to 4.3% and under 30% respectively.

While this nation may still be the land of opportunity, we need to realize that it won’t be for long if we don’t stop our slide into socialism as the means of funding the social programs “we the people” may want. Don’t let socialists confuse you into believing that having social programs isn’t socialism. Socialism and Capitalism are choices in how we fund our society and the things we want society to provide, including opportunities as well as, education, assistance for truly needy people, defense, good monetary policy, good international policy, and the freedoms we outlined when our nation was founded, not what some five-of-nine Justices on a Court says they should be.

Until voters understand why socialism doesn’t work, they can be lured by all the promises utopian socialists claim socialism provides. Yet, look at any socialist nation and ask yourself, “Do I really want to live like that?” We would be much better off funding the social programs we want by using the policies rapidly growing nations are using, not socialism.

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“The Da Vinci Code” movie is a purely fictional attack on Christianity employing, as part of the background material, one of the gnostic gospels to provide a patina of ancient, secret wisdom powerful enough to unravel existing civilization. 

Mr. Gore’s movie, “An Inconvenient Truth,” goes further, making the gnosticism of his book “Earth in the Balance” the whole content. 

Mr. Gore is the loudest spokesman for an elitist group who are dead certain that only they know the truth, a group prepared to impose their doctrine upon mankind regardless of the costs in human life and well-being.  In that respect, the Gospel of Al follows the pattern of gnostic irruptions from the earliest days of Christianity, through the 18th century advent of socialism.

Mr. Gore unites in a single personality the messianic pretensions of the gnostic mystic and the scientistic (pseudo-scientific) materialism of today’s liberal-socialist theoreticians. 

Karl Marx’s gnostic vision inaccurately predicted the inevitable, revolutionary triumph of socialism.  In the Marxian manner, Mr. Gore, a liberal-socialist, preaches a sweeping, gnostic revelation of earth’s End Times, a catastrophic destruction of life that will befall civilization, if we don’t repent and follow the Gospel of Al. 

Mark your calendars.  The Gospel of Al predicts that the End Times of atheistic materialism will commence in about ten years.

In his book, Mr. Gore writes, “But [writing this book] has also led me to undertake a deeper kind of inquiry, one that is ultimately an investigation of the very nature of our civilization and its relationship to the global environment.”  He fears that, “...we will not be able to see how dangerously we are threatening to push the earth out of balance.”

This is the gnostic core: the deep knowledge revealed to Mr. Gore, without which we are doomed.  He stands ready to save civilization, if we will only heed his gospel and accept him as our savior (i.e., elect him President). 

This is remarkably similar to Auguste Comte’s founding The Religion of Humanity in the 1830s.  Comte was confident that he uniquely had fathomed the Immutable Law of History that was propelling civilization into the age of scientific socialism.  He predicted that all of humanity would abandon ancient traditions and forms of government to follow his positivistic philosophy.

To construct his Immutable Law, which has proved somewhat more flexible that he imagined, Comte took fragments of history and reworked them to fit his hypothesis.  Mr. Gore and his greenhouse-gas gang have used the same approach.

Evidence that contradicts the greenhouse-gas hypothesis is removed from consideration.  For example, Mr. Gore’s charts and graphs ignore the Medieval Warm Period, from approximately 1000 AD into the 1300s, and the Little Ice Age, from the late 1300s into the 1800s, both worldwide phenomena.  During the Warm Period, today’s uninhabitable, ice-covered areas of Greenland were cozy enough for Vikings to establish farming colonies.  In the Little Ice Age, glaciers advanced all over the world, in the Swiss Alps crushing whole villages.  Yet Mr. Gore belittles these massive phenomena with jokes. His followers dismiss them as fiction.

Mr. Gore is, of course, free to speak his mind.  The mischief arises from his call for us to repent our sins by abandoning use of fossil fuels and subscribing to the Kyoto Protocol.

When assessing the reliability of Mr. Gore’s all-or-nothing gospel, let’s not forget that the same crowd who now champion Mr. Gore’s word as revelation of gnostic truth were, thirty years ago, equally firmly convinced that the earth faced an imminent disaster from a new ice age.  In its April 28, 1975, edition, Newsweek featured an article titled “The Cooling World.” (see Peter Gwynne’s op-ed article in the Washington Times).

Let’s also not forget that these same liberal-socialists in the 1980s was firmly convinced that President Reagan was about to provoke the Soviet Union into World War III by re-arming the United States and branding the USSR an evil empire.

Becoming followers of the Gospel of Al will entail more than just piously mouthed sentiments.  There will be a real price to pay.

Many studies have documented the enormous economic costs from compliance with the Kyoto standards of CO2 emissions control.  All have demonstrated that the actual costs in lost jobs and reduced standards of living will far outweigh any theoretical benefits.  (See The Kyoto Protocol: an Economic Free Rider Problem).

In an article posted on the Slate website, “New Republic” editor Gregg Easterbrook wrote:

“This raises the troubling fault of “An Inconvenient Truth”: its carelessness about moral argument. Gore says accumulation of greenhouse gases “is a moral issue, it is deeply unethical.” Wouldn’t deprivation also be unethical? Some fossil fuel use is maddening waste; most has raised living standards. The era of fossil energy must now give way to an era of clean energy. But the last century’s headlong consumption of oil, coal, and gas has raised living standards throughout the world; driven malnourishment to an all-time low, according to the latest U.N. estimates; doubled global life expectancy; pushed most rates of disease into decline; and made possible Gore’s airline seat and MacBook, which he doesn’t seem to find unethical.”

A less respectful review of the movie can be found in Wesley Pruden’s column in the Washington Times.

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Senator John Kerry is not the only Francophile socialist in the upper ranks of Democratic Party policy-makers.  New York’s Senator Charles Schumer, the author of filibusters to prevent Senate consideration of judicial nominees, is zealous to protect consumers against Merk’s plan to price one of its drug below the generic drug price.  He has written the Federal Trade Commission to declare:  “I find this practice highly disturbing and anticompetitive.”

It’s anticompetitive to compete with generic drug manufacturers when the result is lower prices for consumers?

According to Yahoo News, “A New York senator accused the drug giant Merck & Co. on Tuesday of conspiring to undercut a cheaper generic alternative to its cholesterol-lowering drug Zocor just days before it becomes available to patients.

“Sen. Charles Schumer (news, bio, voting record), a Democrat, charged that Merck is quietly collaborating with health insurance companies to create lower copays for customers buying Zocor than for those buying the generic equivalent.”

Now this all makes sense if you view it from the socialist perspective.

The Senator apparently believes that you and I are not able to make decisions on our own.  We need the nurturing support of hundreds of pages of Federal regulations to tell us what not to do and what to do.

Remember that President Clinton opposed tax cuts in his first term, because, he said, people would spend the money on the wrong things.

The French connection was explained by Alexis de Tocqueville.  In “Democracy in America,” he wrote that French socialism is a system under which no village is too small to have at least one official from Paris whose duty is to prevent any sort of local initiative.

Since the Revolution of 1789, French intellectuals, the government, and a good part of the citizenry have perceived market competition as barbaric, uncivilized conduct.

Their religion, socialism, decrees that competition arises from private ownership of property, which is the genesis of society’s crime and war.  A civilized society like that of France will leave prices and availabilities to the elite graduates of the Hautes Ecoles, who are the only ones qualified to plan how people are to live.

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Today’s Washington Times’s article reports:

“Sen. John Kerry said yesterday that redeploying combat troops from Iraq by July 2007 is the best way to “empower” the fledgling nation, despite accusations from Republicans and Democrats that his plan for withdrawal is irresponsible.”

In other words, when you look out your window and see your neighbor being beaten by thugs, “empower” him by looking the other way.

Never mind that the Iraqi government have repeatedly rejected that idea.

The background, of course, is that in Vietnam Senator Kerry was supposedly a wounded hero; returning home he immediately took to the ramparts to denounce his fellow troops, falsely alleging atrocities and lying to that effect in testimony before a Congressional committee.

More recently, Senator Kerry voted for the invasion of Iraq, voted for additional funding for troops in battle, then voted against that funding, then declared that he was, all along, opposed to the invasion.

We need a dial-up service to report, “At the tone, Senator Kerry’s position will have changed to ...”

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Socialists (American liberals) are fighting to keep the inheritance tax, because it is a symbol for their ideal of egalitarian wealth distribution.  The religious tenets of socialism ascribe all of humanity’s ills to the existence of private property, which throughout history has been unequally distributed because of variations in humans’ interests and capabilities.  Get rid of private property, in socialist theory, and human nature will change; we all will magically have the same interests and capabilities, and aggression, crime, and war will disappear.

Confiscating private property via the inheritance tax is the quickest route, short of armed revolution, to this egalitarian bliss.

In the religion of socialism there is no distinction between capital (savings) and the income from invested capital.  Not content to take the milk, liberal-socialists also want to take your cow.

Because of socialism’s theory that only manual labor can create value, no value is ascribed to the innovator or the entrepreneur who, at great financial risk, develops a new product or starts a new business.  That’s why liberal-socialists call Bill Gates’s income from share-holdings in Microsoft “unearned” income.

From this it follows that individuals or families who have saved over the years and accumulated sufficient capital to invest for the creation of new companies or expansion of existing companies are social parasites whose wealth really belongs to the political state, the surrogate for the workers.

In socialist theory, the planners of the collectivized political state, having no profit motive, will maximize efficiency and benefits, at the lowest cost, to the workers.  The socialist state in which business is regulated or supervised by social engineers will be more productive than a capitalist economy, and everyone will live happily ever after.

But, in the cold light of the real-world dawn, handing over private capital to the political state is the equivalent of taking all your money out of the bank and burning it in your fireplace to produce a brief period of warmth. When the capital is gone, the political state can’t replace it, because the political state knows only how to spend your money. 

Our New-Deal socialist state’s emphasis on consumption as the creator of jobs flows directly from this failure to distinguish between capital and income.  What liberal Republicans and Democrats advocate, when we remove the camouflage from their rhetoric about “investing” in the future, is the impossible proposition that giving people money to spend via Federal grants will, of itself, create jobs and wealth.  In fact, all it does is increase the money supply and feed inflation.

The reality, however distressing to liberal-socialists, is that jobs and useful goods and services are created only when businesses increase production.  Businessmen may ramp up production in anticipation of a new Federal spending program, but there are unpleasant collateral effects. 

Taxes will have to rise, or the Treasury will have to market more debt.  Either will increase business costs and reduce profits, and selling more Treasury debt adds to the money supply and increases inflation.  All of these lessen the incentive to increase production or to start a new business.  Worse, they start the cyclical process that proceeds to an economic recession.

The soundest way to create new jobs and to raise everyone’s standard of living is to support personal savings and accumulation of private wealth.  That means repeal the inheritance tax permanently.  When private investors, and the financial intermediaries investing in their behalf, face risk of loss from poor investments, in real life they make better risk/reward calculations than the social engineers of the socialistic political state, who face no consequences from squandering public funds on PC and pork-barrel projects.

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