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 Maine and Nebraska are the only States which do this, if I am not out of date.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!)

Wot Empire?

DOUBTLESS I am wasting what remains of my precious life by reading the mass-circulation media, but I constantly come across the suggestion that there is today a United States empire comparable to those of the United Kingdom and the United Provinces (the Netherlands.) However, this is true neither de jure nor de facto.

It is false de jure, because the U. S.A. rejected dominion when it could easily have seized it, and freely accepted equality with the U.K., U.S.S.R., France and China in the United Nations.

What do we know about de facto empires? We all – or, rather, we Jews and Christians – know something about the Roman empire. Jesus of Nazareth challenged the Pharisees, the collaborators, “Show me the tax money.” The Romans demanded that taxes be paid in their own coins; because those coins were regularly being shipped back to Rome, they were valued at least 20% higher than the Greek currency. (TO "show" the coin was a challenge to the Pharisees, because the coins bore the image of Caesar, and to a Jew, any image of a living thing, created by God, was anathema.)

And we know something about the British empire; the early settlers in America objected to paying taxes to the king, because they had no representation in Parliament. (The Americans who are forced to pay the Alternative Minimum Tax today need to bear this in mind . . . equal representation, equal taxation!)

And it is fairly widely known what the Spanish empire in America was about; the Spaniards shipped great loads of gold home from South America – but, because Spain was on a gold standard, the result was that coins suddenly became more plentiful, a phenomenon for which we today have a word; INFLATION. Debtors were relieved, creditors were ruined, the social order collapsed – and Spain has never again been a world power.

But, in acute contrast, the U. S. A. taxes its own creators and then – if what we are told by the media is true – lavishes “foreign aid” upon Israel, Egypt, North Korea and countless other nations which declare their independence by both word and deed.

In addition, the U. S. A. perfects automobiles and moving pictures and mass production and sky-scrapers and aircraft and computers and semi-conductors and telecommunications and space exploration and the global positioning system and all the symbols of modern times, thus saving the other nations the cost and delay involved in developing these things for themselves. (It is amusing to notice how often the others do not dare even to tread in our footsteps; the Chinese boosters still do not use liquid hydrogen, which is incomparably the most efficient, but dangerous and intractable, of fuels.)

The role of the U. S. A. is not that of Zeus, the angry and self-centered dominator, but that of Atlas, carrying the world on his shoulders. The nations of the world should be asking themselves, what would befall if ever Atlas …?

ELECTION YEARS are notorious for giving rise to nonsense, and nonsense seems to have emerged early this time. One of the most respected minds in the country, Warren Buffet, is reported to have said – in open session of the House of Representatives – that he is not opposed to taxes on the rich (among whom he is, of course, conspicuous) being higher than on other people.

Once upon a time, it is said, there was a principle: “No taxation without representation.” Nowadays, the States make a fetish of equalizing representation: in State elections, members of Congress and other tax-spenders are allowed to vote. Why is there not just as much emphasis on equalizing taxation? If Buffett has only as many votes as the bag ladies and welfare mothers, and the people who can’t find their way across a butterfly ballot, why should he be more highly taxed? Ordinary citizens, in contrast to Buffett, dislike high tax rates; notice how much more income the elite have declared since the Republican administration reduced the rates they experience.

If Buffett wants to repay the great masses of consumers who have – willingly – endowed him with immense riches, he might very well remind the Congress that the Constitution is not only democratic – in the proper sense, that the many [State] officers have always the first and, in many cases, also the last words – but also politically correct: the privileges authorized, bankruptcy and patents and copyright, are all in favor of minorities (the U.S. is allowed to err neither to the Right, by oppressing minorities, nor to the Left, by favoring majorities.) Better still, he and his friends Bill Gates and Charles Munger and other notables might run for election as electors in their respective States: nowadays, candidates vying to be electors are all too often persons of little standing outside their respective parties.

I manage to have something that I deem worth saying about once a week. There are, of course, columnists who do it once a day, and one of them, Bill Bonner, has also co-authored at least two books, Empire of Debt and Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets. Bonner – in common with Buffett – exemplifies the “modern” (as opposed to classical) mind that reasons from data to theories. (Once upon another time – I remember it well – there was a saying, “Every educated man is a liberal:” believe it or not! What the words meant was, that the only way to reach agreement with other people is to reason deductively, from first principles down to particular cases.)

At the moment, Bonner is telling us that the all-too-familiar phenomenon of warfare is attributable to evolution; we are descended from males who were ready to fight to prevent strangers from carrying off their females. There is no way to test this theory, because we cannot alter the past. However, we can point out that it is flatly false to suppose (as Bonner seemingly does) that war is a fact of life that we must accept. If “war” means conflict between states, then it arises only if there is not free trade and free travel across borders. (The Iraqi invasion of Kuwait was an exception; the pretext was a reservoir of “public” oil extending across their common border.)

But war is not necessarily frequent and widespread. The safeguard against it is called by the French fraternité, by the workers solidarity, by the Christians righteousness, by the States common defense, by the nations collective security: if any one is wronged, all hir equals join in hir defense. The sophisticated and cosmopolitan Bonner must have observed that, even in this republic (meaning, that every officer can be removed with ballots, rather than bullets,) there is a Confederation Of Public Servants that practices collective security and enjoys a remarkable measure of liberty.

RECENTLY, I read an article by a black author, Idang Alibi of Nigeria, discussing the remark of James Watson, of “Double Helix” renown, that black people are measurably less intelligent than others. Alibi agreed that the facts are so, but asked why the Blacks continue to allow their societies to be so dramatically, emphatically inferior.

Alibi is flattering, particularly, the Whites, it seems to me. Think back a century to, perhaps, the greatest of all Whites, Henry Ford I. He employed anyone who wanted to trade a hard day’s work for five dollars (except members of his own family.) In fact, the Ford foundry was run almost, if not entirely, by Blacks, whose melamine could withstand the heat and glare of molten iron. If Blacks could satisfy Henry Ford, the most successful industrialist in the United States, then they can satisfy any employer competing on a free market! Anyway, the Ford workers did not need exceptional intelligence: Ford succeeded because he left it to very many minds to find the best solutions to problems (in contrast to the “Scientific Management” preached by F. W. Taylor.

If Blacks cannot compete today, it is not because the Blacks have changed, it is because the market is no longer free. The notion is abroad today that "democracy" means, not liberty and justice for all, but government for the greatest good of the greatest number; thus there are seen minimum wage laws and compulsory health insurance and other measures that shut out the black minority. Black-majority nations have adopted bad government too, with the result that Whites with experience and judgment have been discouraged, if not indeed expelled: as Alibi remarks, the most successful nation in Africa is South Africa, where there are both Whites and Blacks in the same market.

The heuristic Gillaspy, in "The Drive to the North," remarked upon the historical trend for civilization to move from the most favorable places, such as the Golden Crescent in the Near East, to colder and colder climates, up to Scandinavia, Canada, even Alaska. His thesis was that as some country becomes more populous, the society becomes more conventional, less tolerant of non-conformity – and so the brightest and best men move out, to test their powers in a more difficult environment. This theory might very well explain Alibi’s lament that the black countries are falling behind, or even deteriorating: it is not because they are black, but because they cling to familiar failure.

If we have understood the phenomenon, can we make practical recommendations? We can indeed: ask yourself, “Is this an open society? If I invent a better mousetrap, am I free to make them and market them – or do I need permissions, permits, protection? Can I say, with the Lord Jesus, ‘Is it not lawful for me to do what I wish with my own?’ (Matt. 20:1-15.)”

RECENTLY, I read an article by a black author, Idang Alibi of Nigeria, discussing the remark of James Watson, of “Double Helix” renown, that black people are measurably less intelligent than others. Alibi agreed that the facts are so, but asked why the Blacks continue to allow their societies to be so dramatically, emphatically inferior.

Alibi is flattering, particularly, the Whites, it seems to me. Think back a century to, perhaps, the greatest of all Whites, Henry Ford I. He employed anyone who wanted to trade a hard day's work for five dollars (except members of his own family.) In fact, the Ford foundry was run almost, if not entirely, by Blacks, whose melamine could withstand the heat and glare of molten iron. If Blacks could satisfy Henry Ford, the most successful industrialist in the United States, then they can satisfy any employer competing on a free market. Anyway, the Ford workers did not need exceptional intelligence: Ford succeeded because he left it to very many minds to find the best solutions to problems (in contrast to the “Scientific Management” preached by F. W. Taylor.)

If Blacks cannot compete today, it is not because the Blacks have changed, it is because the market is no longer free. The notion is abroad today that democracy means, not liberty and justice for all, but government for the greatest good of the greatest number; thus there are seen minimum wage laws and compulsory health insurance and other measures that shut out the black minority. Black-majority nations have adopted bad government too, with the result that Whites with experience and judgment have been discouraged, if not indeed expelled: as Alibi remarks, the most successful nation in Africa is South Africa, where there are both Whites and Blacks in the same market. The more the individuals differ, the more easily each one can specialize on what he, or she, does best.

The heuristic Gillaspy, in The Drive to the North, remarked upon the historical trend for civilization to move from the most favorable places, such as the Golden Crescent in the Near East, to colder and colder climates, up to Scandinavia, Canada, even Alaska. His thesis was that as some country becomes more populous, the society becomes more conventional, less tolerant of non-conformity - and so the brightest and best men move out, to test their powers in a more difficult environment. This theory might very well explain Alibi's lament that the black countries are falling behind, or even deteriorating: it is not because they are black, but because they cling to familiar failure.

If we have understood the phenomenon, can we make practical recommendations? We can indeed: ask yourself, “Is this an open society? If I invent a better mousetrap, am I free to make them and market them - or do I need permissions, permits, protection? Can I say, with the Lord Jesus, ' Is it not lawful for me to do what I wish with my own?' (Matt. 20:1-16.)”