Friday, December 08, 2006

The world darkens

9/11. Al Qaeda. The Taliban. Pakistan, and its unwillingness to expulge the terrorists in its northern regions. Its caving to terrorist demands. Its tensions with India. Iraq, and its insurgencies. The guerillas funded by Syria and Iran. Syria, who is aiding Hezbolla against the Lebanese government. Hezbolla and Hamas, striking against Israel. Iran, developing nuclear power and nuclear weapons at a daunting pace. Iran, who threatens to nuke Israel into oblivion. Iran, who seeks a day without the United States. Iran, who negotiates with China. China, who holds our economy in its hands, and who backs North Korea. North Korea, who has nuclear weapons and hates the United States. Indonesian riots. The caving of Europe to Islamic threats, especially France and England. The relapse of Russia. Venezuela, Colombia, Cuba, and their expanding influence. There is no corner of the globe where some threat does not exist to the United States.

This is not a failure of President George W. Bush and his foreign policies. This is the natural consequence of opposing ideologies. What people fail to realize is that any friend who demands we change our entire identity and bow in subservience to them is not, in fact, a friend. If the only way to be friends with someone is to abandon our identity, our dignity, and our integrity, then we are better off without them.

Why do these people hate us? Petty dictators like Hugo Chavez hate us because we are powerful enough that we diminish their power. Our words carry more weight, and we can ignore them without much worry. It can be infuriating to be taken so lightly. We threaten them with the possibility that we might step in and remove them from power, a very real threat when their people are oppressed and look to the United States as a model and potential savior. We can make their lives difficult through sanctions, and we have economic might to make those sanctions uncomfortable at the least. We threaten these dictators merely through what we can do, through what we are, because we are what the world could be without petty kinglets like Hugo Chavez. People, when they see what that world is like, do not tolerate dictators for long. Thus those dictators have to hide the truth from their people and demonize as best they can in a Machiavellian attempt to maintain power.

Alone, these dictators offer very little to worry about. We can play at negotiations with them when they have no allies to make contention troublesome. We can use peaceful measures to cripple them when they have no allies to resupply them. But when these dictators have allies, they can be bold and fling defiance at us and believe themselves removed from threat through strength in numbers. And it seems these numbers are growing at a frightening pace.

The Islamic people hate us for the same reason that evangelical Christians are so fervent in their hatred of evolution. Just as evolution contradicts their most sacred text (by saying it cannot be literally true, at least in the first chapters of the Book of Genesis), our very way of life--the freedom of religion, freedom of expression, our free market, our civil rights movements--is abhorrent and contradictory to Islam. Everything about us breaks their code of ethics, contradicts the will of their deity. Our very existence is temptation, a path to what they see as corruption and darkness. As long as we in the United States value those traits we hold the most dear, the Islamic people will ever and always fight us, for our beliefs are anathema under their tenets.

There can be no compromise with these people. Either they conquer us or we abandon our identity and take on theirs. That is the only outcome they will accept.

And their numbers are growing. They gather allies. Islamic terrorists and petty dictators see a common goal in our destruction. They work with cunning and guile against us. They have no benevolent intentions for us. Any reform they wish to force on us would revoke every founding belief we have.

And so few people understand what it is we face. So few people understand where we came from. Why does our prosperity exist? They do not know. They display their lack of knowledge in the succor of our enemies, in the protest of every move we make against our enemies, in endless efforts spent to make the United States the guilty party.

They do not understand that we are guilty in our enemies' eyes simply because we exist. There is no other reason. To accept that guilt is to embrace annihilation.

Thursday, December 07, 2006

Giving money away isn't the answer

For some reason, many people decry the rich for being rich. They have the wealth and all the trappings that accompany it, whereas the poor people have to make do with so little food, having to choose at times between eating and having a roof over their heads. The rich, they claim, should be giving more (money) to the poor to ease their difficult existence. More money would aid single mothers in putting food in the empty bellies of their children. More money would provide clothing, medicine, and school supplies for those same children. More money would mean the difference between a leaking roof and patched one. More money would provide the means to ensure the old clunker saved from the scrap heap would still run tomorrow. And that money should come, no strings attached, no return obligations from the recipient of such beneficience.

And why shouldn't the money given from the rich to the poor be a charitable donation? If religious calling doesn't compel one to give to the poor, at the very least it is humane to ease the suffering of people who are worse off. And consider this--a person worth $2 billion could give $40,000 to 25,000 people and still have a cool billion left over. That's 25,000 people who could, in an instant, have as much money as a middle class person makes in an entire year. And that's only half of the fabulous wealth said billionaire had acquired. That certainly leaves plenty left for him. Right?

It seems so nice and respectable. But, I may ask, what then? Once that money is given away, what then? A family of 4 needs something around $15,000 a year to barely eek by, assuming no great calamity strikes. Assuming one such household receives the aforementioned $40,000, that money will not even last 3 years. Supposing that this household is a single mother with three children, where the mother only brings in $10,000 a year, she could possibly make that wealth last for 8. But what then? Well, what if she brings home $12,000 a year? She could stretch the $40,000 across a little over 13 years. If she brings home $13,000, we jump to 20 years. She could see her kids out of high school by that point. Why, if she managed $15,000 a year, she could just save that $40,000 for emergencies and sending her children off to college. In fact, if she invests that $40,000 in stocks, bonds, or even just a CD, she could more than double that $40,000 by the time her kids leave home for college.

But life does not run so smoothly. The additional $40,000 to supplement her meager income won't last near that long. Her car will break down. Her kids will catch pneumonia and require medication. She might decide that her kids will be healthier if they have something other than ramen noodles for each meal. They might fare better in school if they had nicer clothes. At the very least it will give the bullies one less reason to pick on them. And maybe now she can afford that new stove so she doesn't have to cook all their meals in the microwave, two of which have already burned out from overuse. Even a conservative spender making $15,000 a year will probably see that $40,000 disappear rapidly, probably in fewer than 3 years.

So what then? Should that billionaire channel another billion dollars to all those families that have spent his generous gift? Surely in 3 years' time he'll have recouped a portion of his losses. But how long did it take to make that $2 billion in the first place? 20 years? How long will it take him to earn half of that back? 3 years is probably an underestimate. Suppose, just for the sake of argument, that he could. So every three years he gives out $40,000 to 25,000 people. So that's 25,000 households out of a projected 7 million taken care of. And he can't afford to give away any more, else he'll start losing all the money he has, preventing him from making an everlasting commitment. But hey, with another 299 billionaires, we could more or less keep the entire poor population somewhat afloat, right?

However, this ignores the realities of how the billionaires (with the exception of inheritence) are acquiring their money. That billion dollars isn't just sitting around at home in piles of fat stacks of hundred dollar bills. That money is tied up in investments. A large portion is probably tied up in the billionaire's business. Another chunk is probably in the stock market. What people fail to realise is just what it means to have money invested like that. When someone invests, they are essentially loaning the money to other people, expecting them to make enough of a return in whatever business endeavors they embark upon to pay that loan back with interest. Investing in the stock market, or even just putting money in a bank account, is not some magic method of making money. That money goes somewhere, to someone, who hopefully increases the overall money in the system.

So what then, if a billionaire pulls a billion dollars out of investments? That's a billion dollars less going to people who would otherwise use that money to start or upkeep their own businesses. That overall money out of their pocket, which is additional money out of the billionaire's pocket. But some would argue, why is that so bad? That money was just going to people who had enough money to begin with, right? Not necessarily. A business is expensive to start up, and so loans are often necessary just to get off the ground. But where does that loan come from? In fact, loans borrowed from a bank are nothing more than the investsments people make! If there are no investments, there are no loans, because the money just isn't there. And that means businesses that never get started, or fall apart, and that's just increasing the poor population.

So, let's leave the billionaires alone, or at least not expect so much of a contribution from them. Instead, why not simply ask for the extra money people have lying around, money that would be spent on frivolous odds and ends anyway? Suppose, for example, we shopped smart and cooked all our own food and never went out for fast food. We'd save money, since cooking for ourselves is almost always cheeper than ordering out. And we could use that money to donate to the poor. Everything is happy, right?

Not really. If we estimate the poor population initially at 10% of the country, that's 30,000,000 people. Now, there are at least 6,000,000 people employed in the fast food industry (probably a very conservative estimate). If everyone stopped buying fast food, those 6,000,000 people are unemployed. That increases the poor population by 20%! That wasn't something we intended, now was it? But we had better take care of those additional 6 million as well, so we'll cut back on something else. And lo and behold, another several million people are out of jobs. We keep going at this pace, and pretty soon, nobody's will be employed, everyone will be poor, and then there will be no money to distribute around.

Giving money away isn't the answer. A solution to many problems is to see the poor employed in jobs that will earn them enough money. But where do those jobs come from? There have to be businesses that employ, and there has to be a need for those businesses. Not only do businesses have to sell items to make a profit, people have to buy those items for the products to be sold. The conclusion then is that people need to buy more--that will increase the demand for products, which will increase the number of businesses that provide those products, which will finally increase the number of jobs available. At that point, a billionaire servers a poor person better by creating a large enough business that he can afford to hire that individual.

Perhaps there's more wisdom in that adage "Give a man a fish and feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and feed him for a lifetime" than we originally thought. Certainly, we can provide for our poor better by giving them the opportunity to provide for themselves than trying to take care of them directly.