Simple Utah Mormon Politics

Conservatives are often portrayed as thinking that health care is just like any other commodity that can be regulated by the free market.  On the other hand, liberals are described as seeing health care as a form of protection that is a moral obligation for government to provide. This characterization of conservatives is misleading.

One of the purposes of existence is to serve one another so that we might become equal. This is the essence of the free market, as well as of the "Invisible Hand" of which the great economist Adam Smith wrote. Yet despite what free market principles may have been espoused lately, America has not had a truly free market for decades. Achieving a truly free market is not done by taking advantage of catastrophe, or by tearing down in order to build up. Yet through exactly such tearing down, referred to by author Naomi Klein as "The Shock Doctrine", the United States has promulgated a counterfeit version of the free market that has given freedom in general a bad name. The Soviet Union was a powerful machine, but it was much less powerful than American foreign policy gave it credit for. Based on a fraudulent representation of the Soviet Threat in the western hemisphere, the free market has come to have an undeserved bad name. As a result, nearly all of the American fo...

Every function of the Federal Reserve can be accomplished without a Federal Reserve. Why then, do we have one? For precisely one reason. To enrich the few at the expense of the many. Does it seem to you that you are one of the many at whose expense the rich are getting richer? Your mind is not playing tricks on you. The Federal Reserve is the primary cause of this phenomenon. According to Investopedia : the Fed's job is to foster a sound banking system and a healthy economy. Wow. They pretty much suck at their job, don't they? Investopedia continues: The biggest customer of the Federal Reserve is one of the largest spenders in the world - the U.S. government. So, the Fed provides its services for free, right? Nope. Every dollar that the Federal Reserve loans to the United States government comes with a price. It's called interest. In other words, every dollar that is loaned by the Federal Reserve to the United States government must be paid back with interest. Ba...

Why are pirates attacking ships off the coast of Somalia? Because it's very profitable! You'll be surprised just how profitable. This got me wondering...is profitability the same reason that most bankers want to be bankers? In the past year, pirates in the area of the Gulf of Aden have accrued "tens of millions of dollars" in ransoms. I'd say that's a pretty profitable business. Yet still the owners of the ships that are being attacked balk at carrying weapons to defend themselves. Wouldn't that make you angry if you found out that pirates were stealing tens of millions of dollars from you? They are. How about if they were stealing thousands of times that much? They are. It's ironic that the Somali pirates are receiving hours and hours of news time for stealing from cargo ships during the same period of time in which global economic pirates are stealing far more from you. Global financiers are gaming you and me, and they're not even asking for a...

On April 29, 2007, a bridge on Interstate 580 in Oakland, California collapsed after one of its supports was hit by a fuel tanker truck. Under the "give me a call and we'll take care of it" form of government that Barack Obama seems intent on creating, this bridge would still not be repaired. It's good that the only thing government did in the case of the I-580 was to let out the rebuild contract. The free market, awarded a contract by CalTrans, was left to work by itself, and the bridge was rebuilt in 17 days. I attended a computer conference this past week, during one session of which Dr. Moshe Rubenstein ( click here for one of his excellent books ), emeritus The new bridge opened 17 days after the old bridge collapsed. A socialistic government, such as the one envisioned by Barack Obama, could never hope to accomplish such a monumental task. professor from UCLA, told the story of the rebuild of the I-580 bridge in Oakland, California in a stunning feat of free...

Even today, students of Karl Marx seem to be enthralled by his supposed wisdom. Jesus Christ taught that "by their fruits ye shall know them." The fruits of Karl Marx were dark and hateful. As we learn more about the demonic life of Karl Marx, it becomes hard to imagine why anyone would believe his teachings. Chauncey Riddle, a former Brigham Young University professor, once remarked that Karl Marx made some accurate observations about life, but that the problem arose with Marx's solutions. It is much easier to destroy than it is to build something up. Karl Marx was a destroyer--and we're still paying for it. Everything that Karl Marx wrote came from a Marx implied that "capitalists" were capable of nothing but exploitation of the working men and women--a surefire recipe for class hatred instead of problem solving. framework of class combat. Everything that Jesus Christ taught was from a perspective of loving and serving one's neighbor. Marx's ...

It's beginning to look like we've reached the bottom as far as gas prices go. That's okay with me, as long as it doesn't return to previously exorbitant rates. I'd rather spend my money on products like books and restaurant food than gasoline whose price has become overly inflated due to speculation. I suspect, however, that prices won't get so high as they did a few months ago--at least not for the reasons that they did back then. That loophole has been closed. Update 11/30/2008 : I think it important to correctly identify for the financially flummoxed what laissez faire actually means. See below. Back in June, Republicans were It's more than coincidental that gasoline prices have gone down markedly since the Enron Loophole was closed on September 30th. claiming that oil prices had been on the rise because Democrats were blocking off-shore drilling, but they didn't talk much at all about the upward effect on prices due to speculation and the pri...

The number of phone calls from snake-oil salesmen to my home telephone makes me want to put myself on the Do-Not-Call list. I probably should, because I'm getting to the point where I don't even want to answer the darn thing. E-mail spam is easy (although I'll admit that so far my phone spam is not nearly so illicit). You get to your spam box when you get to it, and if a message makes it through the spam filters into your inbox, you just delete it with the click of a button. It's not so easy with the telephone, though. There's always that long pause, right before you hear something like: Hello, did you know that you can consolidate all of your credit cards onto just one credit card and reduce your monthly payment if you act now? Stay on the line, and an agent will be with you shortly to give you the shaft! I don't think the product they're selling would be good for anyone. Especially someone like me who has no credit card debt. Hi, this is Lisa, and did...

When I was a kid, I was somewhat surprised that the local grocer, being Latter-Day Saint like me, had a large assortment of cigarettes for sale behind his counter. After all, smoking is against the Word of Wisdom of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. But, I told myself, not everyone is LDS, so they should have that choice. Now I am beginning to wonder. The proprietors of the Marriott Hotel chain are LDS as well. Yet in some of their hotels pornographic movies are sold. I think this is a bit weird--much more weird, actually, than a Mormon selling cigarettes. Do you think Marriott should sell porn? I attend one or two computer conferences per year, and almost invariably my hotel room has "Adult" movies for sale. Occasionally, I stay in a Marriott hotel room. It surprised me greatly the first time I stayed there, and it still does when I stay in a Marriott room, that Marriott is one of the hoteliers that sells adult pornographic movies in addition to other ...

Delta Airlines is on hard times, and is thinking about moving its hub out of Salt Lake City. Utah Republican legislators are thinking about giving Delta a tax break in an effort to entice them to keep their hub here. I think that smacks of unsound government. What do you think? For once I'm with Governor Huntsman on this one--sort of. The Deseret News is reporting that the governor is in disagreement with GOP legislators on the issue: Speaking Wednesday to the Deseret Morning News editorial board, Senate President John Valentine, R-Orem, said GOP senators like the idea of changing the corporate income tax to give specific breaks to the transportation industry, which would include Delta Air Lines, which has its Western hub in Utah. The governor warned, as valuable an asset as Delta is to Utah, state officials still must be careful not to get into a tax-cutting bidding war that could ultimately harm state revenues so much that it would not be worth it. This is where my "sor...

Karl Marx's solutions to the problems that he saw were not very effective or correct. But he was correct in his observations of slave-type labor in Britain, as noted in his book Capital . If he were alive today, I wonder if China would be the object of his opprobrium. It would deserve to be. Yesterday on The Right Balance , Greg Allen made a keen observation. He said, to wit, that China gets away with both the excesses of Capitalism and the excesses of Communism. China in 2007 is very similar to Britain of the 1800's. In his book, Capital , Marx refers to the business owners as having "the were-wolf's hunger for surplus labor". The Chinese government is today's 'were-wolf' business owner. Capitalism to excess is bad. Communism is just plain excessive, and therefore always bad. We complain--and rightly so--when American capitalists use capitalism to the point of extortion. But we are strangely silent when the Chinese Communo-capitalists do the ...

From my perspective, Qwest has improved its service and offerings in several ways, but holy cow, they still have some silly policies. This past June, our Qwest DSL modem went out. A technician came to the house and found nothing wrong. It took four days for him to get there. Ironically, just after he left it started working again. Then, about 3 weeks ago, it went out again. I called Qwest DSL tech support and was greeted by a much friendlier representative than before. He pointed out that electrical surges, and particularly lightning storms, cause problems with the particular modem that I had. It all started to make sense--there had been lightning storms in close time proximity to when the modem had failed, sometimes for a few hours, sometimes for a few days. They agreed to send me a newer-model modem for nothing but a deposit fee of $99.99. I have the new modem, and it works great. I sent the old modem back via UPS two weeks ago. My bank account is now overdrawn, because Qwes...

The previous federal minimum wage was so low that it had little effect on the nation's economy, and particularly Utah. Which confirms my opinion that, instead of increasing the minimum wage, the government ought to be doing the kinds of things that government can do best--promoting the general welfare--so that business can thrive and grow amidst fair competition. If the minimum wage is raised in a forest, and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound ? The nation's lowest-paid workers will soon find extra money in their pockets as the minimum wage rises 70 cents to $5.85 an hour today, the first increase in a decade. It ends the longest span without a federal minimum wage increase since it was enacted in 1938. The previous increase came in September 1997, when a bill signed by President Bill Clinton raised the minimum 40 cents, to $5.15 an hour. Legislation signed by President Bush in May increases the wage 70 cents each summer until 2009, when all minimum-wage jobs wil...

Whenever the private arena can provide a service, it is better that public entities try not to compete with them. Provo is finding this out the hard way with its ill-conceived iProvo project. Yet it refuses to give up, only destined to make the problem worse. It sounded really cool. Most projects usually do sound that way. For their compensation, everyone told Provo that it would be a home run . iProvo would be a slam dunk. A soft ball that they could hit out of the park. Woops! About the time I got interested in running for Santaquin City Council several years ago, the extant city council voted to go into the natural gas business, thus directly competing with Questar, who was already a gas provider in town. By the time I got on the City Council, our city manager and our contract engineering firm painted a rosy picture, giving us a break-even point of 110 homes. Every amount of revenue generated by the 111th gas customer and so on was just money in our pockets. When Questar f...

In his scientific magnum opus, An Inconvenient Truth , Al Gore opined that he was rather sure that man-made global warming would cause a rise of 20 feet in the earth's oceans in fairly short order. Alas, we have found a way to solve that problem. While using radio waves to treat his leukemia, John Kanzius discovered that at the right frequency, salt water will combust . The possibility of powering cars with radio waves and salt water is as of yet far fetched, but imagine the ramifications. Salt water is much more plentiful than oil. And the combustion of salt water would counteract the effects that Ambassador Gore says are sure to come. Excellent! Eat, drink, and be merry, for we have conquered global warming!!!

Why are so many of the things that are made in China delivered to American shores? Because China subsidizes its industries that make products for delivery in the United States, and because China devalues its currency to its own benefit. Even when I was a kid, I noticed that a lot of stuff had the label "Made in China." As I got a little older, I discovered that a lot of what is made in China was not of very high quality. I've probably indoctrinated my kids a bit too much, because they can be heard to say, if a toy or electronic device breaks, "Oops! Must be made in China!" The truth is, the quality of most Chinese products is improving dramatically. This probably has a lot to do with the fact that Chinese workers can demand much higher wages than in the past. This is a good thing. Higher wages bring higher standards of living, which brings parity among the workers of the world. In other words, higher quality products produced by workers in other countr...

Henry Hazlitt's book, Economics in One Lesson , begins by saying that " Economics is haunted by more fallacies than any other study known to man." European economics is based on perhaps the simplest of those fallacies to avoid: "Bite the hand that feeds you." There are a lot of electronic music players in the world. One of them is the IPod. I don't own an IPod because it is too expensive and its music will not play on any other player. The Europeans have gotten around to noticing this lately, and rather than buying something else, they want to force Apple Computer's ITunes store to provide their music in other formats. Yes, by all means! I have just created the FSMF (Frank Staheli Music Format) and I am appealing to the European Union to including me in their list of supported formats. I think it's the same stupid economics that made the Macintosh a second player to the PC market. But the Europeans think it is illegal. And knowing their laws...