FINANCING THE PUBLIC HIGHWAYS
One hardly expects to hear anything sensible spoken in an election year, but such cynicism was shattered when Senator McCain proposed a “tax holiday” for motor vehicle fuel. The only thing that could be better for the general welfare would be absolute abolition of the tax.

The very idea of a price is that it balances supply and demand. The simplest soul can see that the supply of highway is fixed, but the demand varies from day to day, from hour to hour; hence the highways are sometimes running fast, sometimes choked. When the highway is over-loaded, the vehicles are wasting time and fuel and brake linings, but the tax collectors are contentedly collecting. Because of the fuel tax, everywhere we see STOP signs instead of YIELD signs, stop-on-red instead of go-on-green lights, maximum instead of minimum speed limits, highways divided to prevent the traffic sharing the lanes efficiently, “speed bumps” that are actually delay bumps . And in many, if not all, States, there are exhaust emission limits which demand wasteful engines.

If the highways were being managed to make a profit, there would be very expensive licence plates which gave access to county and State and Interstate highways, and less expensive ones for county and State highways, and quite cheap plates for only county roads. Where there were tolls, the tolls would be high at peak hours and low when traffic was sparse. If there were exhaust emission limits, they would be restrictive only for powerful vehicles with inter-state plates, permissive for small vehicles using county roads.

Observe that these reforms would indeed serve the general welfare; everything you consume was brought to your door by a vehicle using fuel which is, at present, taxed (unless you live in a city that is compressed into an island or peninsula, like Manhattan or San Francisco.) Do not fear that the highways would suddenly begin to deteriorate: firstly, they are already being allowed to deteriorate, and secondly, the fuel tax revenue is not dedicated to the restoration of wear and tear, it is squandered by the Congress.

Let me make plain what I am advocating. I am advocating an end to the public highways being publicly managed - which means, irresponsibly managed. I contend that they should be publicly owned but PRIVATELY managed, by the highest bidder: if any management does not succeed in attracting users and showing profits, then after five (or ten, or twenty) years someone more enterprising will bid the function away from hir.

Self-described Democrats seem to be at a loss in finding a candidate for the presidency this year. Should they meet in convention, or merely count up the delegates chosen in the several State primaries?
What do they think DEMOCRACY means?
Suppose you want to know, does a cannon ball fall faster than a musket ball? You ask one person, se says; “Certainly not.” You ask another; “Yes, of course.” What do you do? You ask them to come together and work it out, do you not?
Suppose the two can’t reach agreement, what then? You ask some more people to join. Soon, you have so many people they cannot all hear. What now?
Now, you have several small meetings, each one of which sends a trustworthy representative to a general meeting to settle the question.
Every political party, even the fiercely individualist Libertarians, holds a convention; the idea of a national convention is that it can consider and compare candidates from all the States. No individual knows all the possible candidates, but by taking counsel together they can cut the field down, fewer and fewer and fewer . . . .
However, much depends on the purpose of the party. Some, even most, of the members want the person who would make the bext president, but the ones running for office themselves want whoever is best at campaigning. And there have even been parties that existed to advance one person – President Roosevelt’s Bull Moose Party, Governor Wallace’s American Independent Party, Ross Perot’s Reform Party.
So that it would seem to be a good idea to make sure that the people voting in the convention really are equal; those running for office themselves should be excluded, or at least relegated to a second house.
But the Democrats have done the very opposite! They have made representatives and senators SUPER-delegates,
So that either the Democratic Party, the oldest party in the United States, is wrong, or I am wrong. Which is it?
Look at the Constitution. Art, II, Sec.1, para. 2: “Each State shall appoint . . . a number of electors . . . but no Senator or Representative, or person holding an office of trust or profit under the United States, shall be appointed an elector.”
If, in a State, persons holding offices of trust or profit (e.g. F.B.I., Customs, I.R.S., Homeland Security agents, U.S. attorneys) are allowed to vote, then hoi polloi [most people] are less fit to be trusted than the electors; those States that require the electors to follow the popular vote are, to put it politely, misguided.
Or, once again, perhaps I am wrong?
Look again at the Constitution. Art. II, Sec. 1, para. 3: “The Electors shall . . . make a list of . . . the number of votes for each; which list they shall sign and certify, and transmit sealed to the . . . President of the Senate shall . . . open all the certificates . . .”
The words “sealed” and “open” make it plain not only that the electors hammer out a decision of their own, but that the great mass of citizens do not even know what they have done until after the election has been decided. The great mass (which is all too great, including as it does the illiterates and the senile) are used for the purpose they can best serve, which is choosing the best person in their congressional district to go to the conclave and select one or two candidates.
Yes, it is a democracy in the classical sense that the many speak first, the few only later; but it is not a democracy in the populist sense, that the minority dominate over the minority.

IF NOT NOW . . . ?

THE FRAMERS OF THE CONSTITUTION were great men, and one evidence of this is that they mastered one of the great problems of civilized life, that a man cannot measure whatever he uses as a standard: if you measure value in gold, you cannot know whether gold is becoming more, or even less, plentiful. (Thus Spain was ruined by inflation when her fleets brought back masses of gold from South America.) Therefore they demanded bi-metallism: Congress is mandated to mint coins, and even to punish the counterfeiting of those current in the States, but they reserved to each State the power to choose coins of gold, or coins of silver, as its tender in payment of debts.

If and when gold became more plentiful, the gold States – perhaps, the “staple” States that traded largely with Britain – would have boomed, and the silver States – perhaps, the “navigating” States that traded with the Far East – would have been depressed. The citizens would have been able to recognize a purely monetary phenomenon. (Strange to relate, only three States, Colorado, Missouri and Nevada, have exercized their power, and they all allow both gold and silver – thus defeating the entire merit of bi-metallism.)

And, as we are all too painfully aware, where Congress has jurisdiction the Federal Reserve Accounting Unit Dollar is legal tender. Every business strikes a balance on January 1st. and again on December 31st. – but the proliferation of the green dollar results in depreciation being under-stated and inventory being over-estimated – the accounts are flattering! Thus the books announce expanding “profits,” even as many of us find ourselves hard pressed to make our salaries or pensions stretch to cover necessities, let alone comforts.

However, there comes a tide in the affairs of men which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune – and, for the other forty-seven States, the tide is flooding NOW! The F.R.A.U.D. is depreciating against those currencies which are not arbitrarily tied to it, and today it is almost equal to the Swiss Franc. THE SEVERAL STATES SHOULD, URGENTLY, ADOPT THE SWISS FRANC AS THEIR LEGAL MONEY FOR SETTLING DEBTS AND, PARTICULARLY, FOR KEEPING PROFIT-AND-LOSS ACCOUNTS.

Let us suppose that two or four or eight States did this. Nothing would happen immediately; but in three, or six, or nine months’ time, people paying rents, or premiums, or fees would be told, “Sorry, but if you’re paying in green dollars, you will need another two/five/six per cent.”

Many businesses that had been showing only low profits would find losses – and shut down. Quickly, those States would find their tax receipts falling off.

And in one State, or perhaps even in two States, the legislature would ask, “Just why do we strive to keep the taxpayers in ignorance and poverty? Let us allow them the pursuit of happiness!” We might well see an end to highways with maximum instead of minimum speed limits, to STOP signs instead of YIELD signs, to signals that are stop-on-red instead of go-on-green, to tolls that are the same at peak and off-peak hours, to double yellow lines that prevent the traffic making the best use of the lanes, to minimum wage statutes that make it difficult to start a productive career, to the gambling and sex and narcotics industries being reserved to the criminal underworld, to children being compelled to attend school, to ages of consent in the ’teens, to the combination of collective bargaining and individual remuneration, to States presuming to “correct” competent adults.

And then the greedy capitalists would recognize that their capital was safer in the hard-money States: every time the legislatures convened, more States would conform. (Next year, there would almost certainly be a serious differential between the F.R.A.U.D. and the Franc; the effect of the change on balance sheets would be very severe in the tardy States.)

Thus there is nothing inevitable about inflation; each State can allow it or can extinguish it. And the Swiss Franc would be a particularly happy choice for us. If it is not exactly silver, it is closer than the coins of our congress, or almost any other money used in international commerce. And the Swiss are republicans after our own hearts – every citizen keeps a fine modern firearm within easy reach!

CLASH OF CULTURES

The prominent conservative, Patrick J. Buchanan, has published yet another book, “Day of Reckoning.” He relates that he was a friend of the famous economist Milton Friedman, who tried to convince him that he was wrong in objecting to free trade: Friedman argued that if some Japanese were ready to give you a working television set in exchange for pieces of green paper, you should take advantage of the deal! Buchanan, in contradiction, prefers to make his own television – or, at least, to pay another American resident to make one. Being a conservative in the post-modern sense of the word – that is, one who advocates what he may call regulation, but is in truth dictation – Buchanan wants to see tariff barriers to stop the best man winning. He does not trouble himself to give any reason why he denies the paper-and-pencil proof that David Ricardo devised, almost two centuries ago, showing that free trade advantages both nations, even if one is less efficient in producing ALL goods: still less does he mention what caused the War Between the States, i.e. the 1860 Lincoln-Hamlin platform, “Protection for American Industry.”

Within Buchanan’s memory, these United States – and no other nation -- explored the Moon. How was it done? Someone asked an astronaut what he thought about when he was in space, and he replied that he thought that his safe return depended on a thousand systems, every one of which had been engineered by the lowest bidder. Our scientists and engineers and designers and draftsmen and machinists and craftsmen and pilots explored the Moon, half a century ago: the Russians are still confined to our gravity well, the Chinese have not even put men into orbit (because they still dare not try to utilize liquid hydrogen as fuel.) Why, then, in the twenty-first century, can we not earn our livings triumphantly in competition with all comers?

One has to wonder how Buchanan proceeds from his study to the t.v. studio: has he never noticed that the highways have maximum instead of minimum speed limits, that there are STOP signs instead of YIELD signs, that the signals are stop-on-red instead of go-on-green, that the tolls are the same at peak and off-peak hours, that the double yellow lines are laid down to prevent the traffic making the best use of the lanes, that expensive aircraft are spend time queuing on taxiways or stacked up on approach, that minimum wage statutes make it difficult to start a productive career, that the gambling and sex and narcotics industries have been reserved to the criminal underworld, that the majority of children attend schools that are subsidized by the taxpayers, that almost every profit-making transaction is taxable, that aggressive competitors like Standard Oil and the Aluminum Company of America and General Electric and Microsoft are victimized by anti-trust enforcers, that the money given to the U.S. for the common defense and the general welfare is being diverted to the United Nations and Israel and Egypt and a host of other clinging parasites, that in almost thirty of the States there is collective bargaining but individual remuneration? (The Soviet Union, which he, of course, despises, had collective bargaining, but remuneration also was collective; the labor unions know very well which members are the Stakhanovites.)

Buchanan asks us to believe that a nation whose several governments flagrantly worship waste can nevertheless survive by relying on its own resources, even when other nations can produce goods either cheaper or quicker! And it has never occurred to him that if the United States resorts to armed force to keep their goods out of the country, those countries may feel that they also are entitled to use force to pursue their aspirations – “if goods can’t cross frontiers, soldiers will.”

However, war is another subject on which Buchanan has quite singular ideas. He wishes that the United States had not taken part in World War I; in plain words, he would like the aggressor to have been rewarded with victory in March, 1918! So now, one can call oneself a conservative without accepting the dictum, supposedly of Edmund Burke, that "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil, is for good men to do nothing." He says the same about W. W. II; in truth, in 1940 Roosevelt was frightened out of his wits by the prospect of confronting the combined fleets of the German, Italian, French and Royal navies. Of course, Buchanan never mentions that W.W. II occurred only because Buchanan’s forefathers, the Republican Senate, refused to allow President Wilson to lead the United States into the League of Nations.

If Buchanan were indeed a conservative, in any ordinary sense of the word, what would we see in his pages? One blazingly obvious reform that is long overdue would be for the several States to follow the U.S. example and exclude office-holders from voting in elections: the reason why we see the worship of waste propagating so successfully is that the tax-spenders, the police and prison guards and parole officers and patrolmen and national park wardens and U.S. prosecutors (all of whom are violating their oath to uphold the republican form of government, which requires all officers to be elected) are voting together with – or, rather, against – the tax-payers.

Perhaps one makes oneself look ridiculous by mentioning The New York Times, but it is fairly staggering to see just how ignorant an American journalist can be. After the New Hampshire primaries – which were indeed surprisingly early, this year – the Times discussed – favorably! – the notion of having national primaries, the East one week, the South the next, and so on.

How many States does it take to dictate to the remainder? Three fourths, as to amend the Constitution? If several, or even all, of the States did make a compact to such an effect, the Congress would have the power to approve or disapprove it. But the Constitution commands only the Congress, the president, the judiciary: the States are authorized, but not required, to admit immigrants, to choose a legal tender. If this is a democracy, it is not one in which the minority merely obeys the majority.

Why have primary elections at all? Presumably, to instruct the delegates to the party conventions. But this is absurd; every party holds a convention because by meeting and discussing one learns better than one knew beforehand. Is not this why the electors of each State meet together? What is ludicrous is that several of the States require their electors to follow the popular vote, instead of combining their – presumably – hard-earned knowledge of the candidates. Nowadays, there are so many people on the public payrolls – police and prison guards and “security” personnel and public school teachers – that tax spenders are roughly as numerous as tax payers; but in State elections, all of them have equal votes!

Why not choose more of the electors – up to 535 of them – by congressional districts? Maine and Nebraska are the only States which do this, if I am not out of date. Presumably, the citizens know the residents of their own districts better than they know people from other districts; because some districts are rural and some are industrial and some are cities, the result should be that the electors are widely different, too.

Why do we have a president elected for a limited term, rather than a monarch serving indefinitely? Because we want to have a competent, conscientious executive, not merely a harmless figurehead. Is that what we get? No, we get fiercely ambitious professional campaigners: F.D.R., Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Bush 41, Clinton, Bush 43. Those who have made their reputations in other careers, Eisenhower (perhaps!), Carter, Reagan, are few.

Another obvious point; presidential campaigns are very, very expensive, and for all except one candidate, the money is wasted. Why are they expensive? Obviously, because the candidates are trying to influence enormous numbers of widely different people.
A system that costs a great deal and gives poor results is hardly a credit to these United States!

However, both of these complaints exist only because some of the States have willfully corrupted the process, by instructing their electors to follow the popular vote. The popular vote is more or less guaranteed to be misguided; for one thing, the States allow office-holders – tax spenders! – to vote, and for another, they allow senior citizens to vote, even though they cannot judge between candidates aged 40 or 50, and they are liable to have very short-term interests.

What would actually be an improvement would be to follow the intent of Article II and Amendment XII, which both require that the lists of persons for whom the electors have voted be “sealed” and that the president of the Senate “open” said lists. Why must they be sealed? Because the intention is that the electors vote in camera, not in public: why specify that the electors shall not include office-holders, if the electors are not to use their own best judgment? If no-one knows which candidates have the most votes, then there is no unseemly quarrelling – as in Bush vs. Gore in 2000.

Following the mandates of the Constitution would indeed mean that there would be an agonizing delay between the voting of the electors and the counting of the votes by the president of the Senate. However, a brief period of uncertainty and speculation would be a trivial price to pay for the assurance that only people who were highly regarded by citizens who actually know them could ever be chosen president.

Is the constitutional system democratic (as opposed to Democratic?) The Constitution is democratic here, and everywhere else; always, the first word belongs to the many (the legislators, in the U. S. government.) But it is not Democratic, if that implies the majority voting itself privileges at the expense of the remainder: the only privileges authorized by the Constitution are in favor of minorities, such as bankrupts, inventors, writers.

The system that has been instituted de facto means that the choosing of candidates – persons who might possibly become president – has been privatized: it is done by the parties, not the States. Is not privatization a Good Thing, because it avoids or reduces the spending of public funds? No, it is not: the political parties met in convention are schizophrenic: they are choosing not so much the person who would be the best executive, but the person who would be the best campaigner (no one has ever denied that Clinton was, and is, an excellent campaigner!)