Tag Archives: profit

Crime, Culture, Economics, Education, Family, Taxation

BUSINESS, PROFITS, CHARITY & FREEDOM

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Taking care of business…

Fewer and fewer people understand capitalism, despite every, single, one of us being a capitalist.  This is an odd distortion of knowledge and understanding, and it has taken a lot of work.  There are two kinds of capital: earned and unearned.  Figuring out which is which will make clear where each of us is on the spectrum.

Consider a newborn baby.  He or she will cry and fuss until he or she receives food and/or comfort – often the very same things.  There is no sense of sacrificing for greater rewards an hour or two later, or of “saving up” cries in order to obtain a larger portion at a later time.  Babies exhibit raw capitalism: pure barter.  I won’t make your motherly instincts feel the discomfort of a crying baby if you will provide what it takes to comfort me and put enough food into me so that I will sleep… like a baby.  We all start out as capitalists.

We might also note that a baby doesn’t save any food or comfort for later, nor does he or she offer more quiet alleviation of motherly guilt in exchange for food than it takes.  Everything is on the expense accounts as “current” – no accrual.

It takes a while for infants and toddlers to figure out that kindness and caring can be “banked,” as it were, for increased pleasure and happiness any time later.  It’s a big concept.  If lovingly raised, however, children do learn to avoid punishment for “bad” or costly actions, and to express love and kindness toward parents and others when they are not hungry or uncomfortable… and even to share possessions.  At some point they learn to trade possessions for perceived “profits.”  Something Tommy has seems more desirable than what Jeffy has – and vice-versa – and both parties “profit” from an exchange of goods.  Also a big concept.

Like all human “isms,” even incipient capitalism requires regulation and “institutionalized” bounds.  Almost every child learns that simply taking something of Tommy’s is extremely profitable: nothing is given up in exchange.  Parents or other adults are, at that point, obligated to punish – or dis-incentivize – that practice.  Jeffy’s taking, or stealing the possession of Tommy’s, must be made costly enough that Jeffy learns as immediately as possible, that there is no advantage or profit in that act or acquisition.  And, it must be a cost that exceeds the simple return of the stolen property.  Whether it’s a period of disfavor from a parent, or deprivation of a desired activity, a slap on the hand or something else proportional to the “crime,” there must be a cost that the perpetrator, Jeffy, will do his best to avoid going forward.  Otherwise, stealing becomes a habit and will be perceived as profitable and worthwhile.  Several big concepts.

It’s easy to imagine the fairly short-term consequences of the lack of institutionalized sanctioning of “bad” actions.  In this case, the “institution” is the “law,” or, at least, the automatic and swift punishment (let’s hope, by parents) of theft in addition to retribution.  This is the fundament of civilization; capitalism is woven amongst all the threads of civilized society.

Now let’s assume that our properly guided and sanctioned child grows up, essentially according to the Ten Commandments.  People of faith attempt to obey all ten, there being nothing negative about any of them, which is to say: nothing that hurts social cooperation and quality of life, or the raising of new adults with civilizing self-control.  Strictures against creating and worshipping graven images instead of God; taking the name of God in vain (cursing involving God’s name or power); keeping the sabbath day holy is also a good idea, albeit one that we in America have cleverly set aside; honoring our fathers and mothers is both logical and essential to the health of society; not killing one another; not committing adultery; not stealing; not lying about our neighbors; and, not coveting the property of our neighbors.  These are essentially society-protecting strictures that we attempt to talk ourselves away from only at our peril.  The hate-based riots of 2020 are the clear and clarion proof of the fragility of civilization in the absence of “the Commandments,” whatever their source.

Our new adult decides to start a business.  Having been raised “with a conscience,” Jeffy plans to sell his skills as a carpenter, and he recognizes that he’ll need a partner with similar skills in order to keep his contracting promises and to help avoid mistakes.  He makes arrangements with a local lumberyard to establish an account with sufficient credit to do significant renovation or add-on projects.  The account is based on Jeffy’s reputation as an honest person and, in part, on his father’s equivalent reputation.  The lumberyard considers the potential of a growing business customer as a worthy risk of a certain level of credit, or debt.

By virtue of hiring Aaron, a friend he knows from High school, who also loves building things, Jeffy takes on a remarkable burden of employer obligations, including various benefits that must be paid, including health care and liability insurances, and, of course, meeting “payroll.”  As owner of the business, Jeffy also is responsible for legal contracting with customers, and for other tax consequences of success.  He and Aaron still believe in their abilities and respective roles. and business commences.

“Jeff’s Construction” finds itself busy and able to pay both the owner and his employee reasonable wages while gaining assets in the form of two trucks and several power tools, and while accumulating some money in a local bank.  In other words, “Jeff’s” is profitable.  Knowing that his little company was facing taxes on his profits at both the state and federal levels, Jeff decides to make a donation to his church’s Christmas Food Drive.  With profits on the books of about $12,000, Jeff donates $2,000 to the food drive.  He and Aaron get their picture in the paper handing over a big cardboard check to the chairman of the Drive committee.  The minister and several other key people are also in the picture.  Jeff makes a handful of new connections, as a result, a couple of whom later contract with “Jeff’s Construction” for renovations of their homes.

As the years go by, “Jeff’s Construction” becomes “J & A Builders, Inc.” incorporated and no longer a proprietorship.  They grow to 6 full-time employees.  Each summer J & A work with the regional technical high school to provide summer jobs to budding carpenters.  Aside from income taxes to state and federal government, J & A’s building and garages plus the property taxes on the two partners’ and their 6 employees’ homes total over $100,000 per year, while excise taxes on their vehicles kick in another $26,000.  Donations to the Food Drive, the Boys and Girls Club and to the local “Y” for Summer Camp sponsorships plus support of a local Little League team, amount to nearly $25,000.  J & A also matches 401-K contributions up to 5% of income for all 8 personnel.

Those who misunderstand the immense values of honest profit are always looking for “businesses” and “business owners” to right non-business wrongs in society, perhaps because they are “fortunate.”  But that is not a business obligation.  The business is obliged to operate legally and honestly, delivering what it promises and not cheating customers, and to do so at a profit so that all legal obligations to employees and suppliers are met.  By providing multiple streams of tax revenue, businesses provide for all that civil society is relied upon to provide for residents.  Charity is in addition, and a blessing, not an obligation.

Of course, everything is different for those small businesses that have a room in the back that’s full of cash… cash they’re just too greedy to share with their oppressed workers and every poor person in town.  But, there are damned few of those. 

There are  many ways to add new wealth to an economy and to a nation.  The first of these was personal manufacture, in a sense, where the best tools or weapons compared to other groups or tribes created an advantage in terms of safety, hunting and survival.  Next came agriculture, permanent villages and cities and the need to defend them, which latter need spurred invention, metallurgy, and more.  Along with agriculture, fishing also introduces wealth and spurred marine technology.  In the presence of defensive pressures came a third major source of new wealth: mining.  Everything, of course, required managed labor and the necessary efficiencies that make ever-larger projects, whether construction or war-fighting, possible.  Indeed, it all made the Roman Empire possible – a success of management and leadership that taught some lessons to all of today’s successful – and failed – governments.  Religion, particularly in terms of Judaism and Christianity and the economic and familial ethics they spread across Europe, led, eventually and often unpleasantly, to the enlightenment and the explosion of technology, which made intellectual invention a new source of wealth and source of medical advantage, which is another form of civic wealth.

Today, virtually pure intellect is like a global form of mining.  New products are “manufactured” from a raw material of electrons, bringing new wealth into existence.  Construction, of homes or factories or office towers or highways and bridges, adds new wealth, too: fixed assets, from which use is derived for years and decades, enabling other wealth and our gigantic “service economy.”  Still, no matter the type of business in which one engages, the obligations of businesses and business owners – including stockholders – are the same.

What are they?

  • Operate legally (but don’t hesitate to challenge regulations and laws that are irrational and which amount to unequal application of the law)
  • Earn a profit legally, without cheating customers
  • At best, manufacture a product (best way to create new wealth benefitting the most people)
  • Next best, grow a product and/or improve the growing process
  • Treat employees equally and provide appropriate training and safe conditions for work
  • Provide real services that add value to products and their use or availability
  • Deliver what is promised, never less than promised, and more if you can
  • Do not employ false advertising or sales tactics
  • Maintain honest accounting, pay applicable taxes
  • Do not dirty your property, the air or the waters

Individuals, business owners or not, are always free to be charitable and to take part in politics or social issues they believe in.  But these should be personal decisions and personal resources.  A business owner fails his or her basic obligations to a community , to customers and to employees, by diverting business resources that should be enhancing working conditions, or providing insurance against future threats to the business.  Otherwise, if this sense of purpose and obligation to the health of the business is being weakened for any number of reasons, the business should be sold to those who will work to meet the listed obligations, or folded, having fulfilled, or no longer fulfilling, its mission.

Biden, Economics, Elections, Governance, Politics 2021, Responsibility, Taxation

Biden’s Billingsgate

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Who was that masked man? Why, he’s grown stranger…

President Biden is proposing to exceed the THIRTY TRILLION dollar debt level.  What he suggests is not only partisan and disingenuous, but includes multiple effects that restrict and undercut capitalism.  If he ever understood the relationship between debt, productive surplus and growth, he has forgotten it… along with Constitutional provisions and any semblance of American exceptionalism: down the memory hole.

Under his and other socialists’ direction, American will be exceptional again:  among all industrialized nations we will lead the world in our concerted, legislated efforts to destroy our hard-won success and relinquish our sovereignty.  Biden wants to “go big” – biggest fool, perhaps.

The only system that can both destroy debt and increase freedom, is free-enterprise capitalism.  That is, NOT monopoly capitalism OR globalism, both of which concentrate money and power OUT of the hands of free citizens and OUT of the hands of their elected representatives – although not out of their pockets in many cases.  Those must be stopped before it’s too late.  Some serious trust-busting is essential to restoring America.

Practically, a clear course-correction would be to limit the level of corporate net-worths or levels of gross revenues that may donate ANY money to candidates or PAC’s – ANY money.  Perhaps companies with $50 millions in assets or $25 millions in revenue or LESS, may donate, not larger.  Also, companies that have government or military contracts may not donate.  Then trust-busting could proceed.

Already we’ve experienced reduction in job and business growth – returning to pre-Covid levels – because excessive, socialist, “rescue” or “stimulous” payments are keeping people from returning to work!  Work… where guided labor produces things, including taxes.  We know where idiots… umm, ignore that… “progressives” think economic growth comes from: unemployment checks.  Nancy Pelosi said so.  Only as employment increases will freedom, independence and tax revenues increase.

People earning their own livings strengthen both responsibility and financial freedom.  Having more taxpayers increases political freedom.  2020 has shown that weakening election laws weakens political freedom, and it disenfranchises citizens from our most fundamental and hard-won civil rights.  Adding greater responsibility to the exercise of the franchise will clarify honesty in elections – a fundament of the American promise.

Back to what Biden has forgotten… if he ever knew it.  Debt is a superb tool for growth, but not for maintenance – period.

Imagine a factory producing, say, refrigerators.  Its lines are operating, workers are working and every unit that comes off the line is sold within days.  In fact, there is a shortage of refrigerators; people are forced to devise meals for their families without foods that need refrigeration.  People are denied good nutrition for lack of a high-enough rate of refrigerator production.  Even if the government passed a law requiring more refrigerators to be made, only so many can be.

To upgrade the factory and machinery to produce a third more – a 33% increase – will cost $100 Million.  Because the refrigerator company has made a profit over the past 15 years, of $30 Million after all expenses, cost of goods sold and payroll… and taxes, it is able to borrow, or gain a debt of $70 Million.  They’ll be able to make a productive surplus of not $3 million, but $4 million per year at 133% of current production, since all costs won’t increase proportionately.  Each refrigerator will cost a little less to produce with the new machinery and facility improvements.  The $70 Million loan, combined with investment out of increased operating profits, will be paid back with interest to the lender, in less than 20 years.

The earning of profits – creation of productive surplus – enables “Refrigerators, Inc.” to become more productive and efficient, able to modernize, hire trainees who can become highly paid refrigerator builders, and pay taxes to support our civic institutions and even donate money to charitable causes.  Productive surplus also enables the company to destroy debt – make it disappear – while increasing production, the only purpose of investment.  That’s it.  It’s NOT an investment to provide living expenses for people who do not work enough to support themselves or their families; it’s an emergency… it’s charity, not a way of life.

Meanwhile, everyone who wants a refrigerator can buy one – or, contrary to socialist dogma – go to work to earn enough to buy one.

Capitalism is the only process that can destroy debt or, in fact, make investments at all.  All other bills incurred by a society that is complex, are paid, or financed, by the productive surplus of profitable, capitalist enterprises.  All of government: schools, police fire departments, hospitals, military, public works… everything, is paid for from tax revenues that derive only from productive surplus in a profit-making economy.

The growing tragedy – growing weakness – is our habit of borrowing for current expenses from generations into the future, now to the tune of $28 Trillion.  About one-third of our annual federal “budget” is borrowed, not paid from current revenues.  This part of economics Joe Biden has not forgotten, even embraced: the lie of modern politics.

For a long time the U. S. borrowed real money… from banks, individuals and even other countries.  The Treasury sold bonds: saving bonds, Treasury notes (“Treasuries”) of different maturities and yields.  Investors used real money to “invest” in U. S. debt – one step removed from investing in future productive surplus, itself.  This was bad enough; we lived beyond our means but we could afford the interest on those debts, not so much affording repayment of the loan principals.

Unfortunately we have worn out our welcome among real investors.  Now we “borrow” from the Federal Reserve. 

(See: http://www.prudenceleadbetter.com/2020/09/27/knife-edge-election/)

The “FED” is a private bank consortium that can legally “lend” us money they do not have – $Trillions of it.  So, they lend us “air” and we pretend it’s money and pay interest on it.  Oddly, the Federal Reserve is also granted power to set interest rates, which for a long time have been near 1%, God bless their charitable hearts.  What will we do when they decide the rate should be 3%?  On $10 Trillion?  That’s $300 Billion in real money.  That’s a lot of Meals on Wheels.

Wait a minute… wait a minute.  Did I say, “$10 Trillion?”  I meant $30 Trillion, if we fulfill Biden’s plans.  Why, that would be $900 Billion… a YEAR… close to a $Trillion, itself – just interest!  That’s a lot of everything, including our own defense.  We literally cannot afford more multi-$Trillion spending plans; they are actually taxing plans. 

Many in government believe these “air-debts” never have to be paid back!  “We owe them to ourselves,” they think.  Ooookaaaay… aren’t the UFO people going to usher in a new era of no worries?  Oh, absolutely.  And, Joe Biden is going to unite the country, end racism and borrow us into prosperity.  And equity.

Economics

A Degree of Economics

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Everything so new and fresh

Prudence has successfully resisted the temptation to counter the many ignorant statements uttered by the impressively ignorant Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, of late an elected representative in the U. S. House of Representatives.  She has a college degree… in economics.

One recent evening she purported to explain – obviously only to those more ignorant than herself – what “capitalism” is.  In the process she confused it with “free-market economy,” and then jumped to explaining how one might have a “mixed” economy where the “state” doesn’t own the means of production but “workers’ cooperatives” do.  Neither the origins of the means of production that workers’ cooperatives will “own,” nor the means of managing their cooperative labor, were revealed during her explanation.

To the likes of Ms. Cortez the Marxist concept of capitalism is not a solution to the human condition, but the cause of suffering and injustice.  Unfortunately, modern capitalists are proving many of Marx’s theories.  Thanks to the vapid connivance of ostensibly democratically elected governments (crony-capitalism), international banks virtually direct public policy and national economic decision-making.  Most “workers” – wage-earners, are relatively comfortable and not about to revolt against anonymous masters, but not all.  The obscene concentrations of economic and productive power run the risk of collapsing the edifices of international capitalism.  There’s plenty for social justice warriors to despise.

On the other hand… socialism cannot destroy debt – only productive surplus does and can do that.  It is not possible, at least human nature will not allow, a financially complex society to grow without practical amounts of debt.  Not to be pejorative, “debt” is merely paying for a product or “good” over time.  No, that sounds too simple.  “Debt” is only true and practical when a financing agent has judged a borrower likely to pay back the loaned cash with interest, oftentimes with the financier holding a chattel interest in the good for which it has loaned the purchase price, because of two factors: 1) The financed “good,” or product or house or car or medical procedure has sufficient desirability, utility or comfort value for the borrower as to make its value or worth obvious (and its potential loss undesirable enough) and valued by the borrower; and 2) The borrower or beneficiary of the good’s utility or comfort is, by test of available income over time, able to make periodic payments on a timely, contracted (promised) basis.

In the ideal case, then, debt is simply a tool that is “rented,” as it were, the value of which is clear enough to cause timely, interest-bearing, repayment.  The manufacturer of the good (debt properly employed should always, as in every single time, be employed to facilitate the transfer of a “hard, or manufactured, good” and not a temporary expense) obtains immediate payment, enabling additional future manufacture, while the customer of the good obtains the use and facility of the good immediately upon need when it may be too costly to afford a single cash exchange for it.

Much is misunderstood about “productive surplus.”  It’s “margin,” which is to say, revenue that exceeds the cost of manufacture.  “Oh, well, that’s profit for a capitalist,” some will say, “and you shouldn’t “overcharge” poorer customers or else you should share it with your exploited workers.”  But margin isn’t simply “profit,” and the “exploited” workers are paid according to their productive capacity and value to the production of the goods the manufacturer makes and sells.  Margin provides “working capital;” what does it actually do?

Working capital means cash in the bank, and it serves to improve efficiency within the manufacturer’s operations by enabling investment in better manufacturing equipment, often by being committed to pay off equipment acquisition debt, which shifts that portion of margin to cost-of-goods but which can reduce the costs elsewhere with more productive equipment (which is also a good result for the people who make that new equipment).  Working capital enables the company to train its workers to higher skill levels and greater productivity, yielding higher pay.  It also enables the company to hire more employees as production increases and, let’s hope, quality and sales also increase.

Productive surplus destroys debt; it’s the only engine that can.  In the presence of productive surplus, debt is a useful and valuable tool for growth and for improving overall living standards.  But what happens to “profits?”

Profits belong to shareholders, who are, in fact, the owners of the company.  Socialists feel as though no one person or small group should “own” a means of production, but that it should automatically “belong to” or be controlled by, the workers, to whom all the profits should be distributed.  History, the bane of socialists’ existence, teaches that humans are good at some things, bad at others, and one of those “others” is collective decision-making or, the corollary, collective self-leadership, an oxymoron that socialists insist on believing in.  Let’s start at the beginning.

A person has an idea for a widget/product/thingy that other people will want to have because it makes, ummm… it makes baking cakes, breads and muffins easier and more efficient with fewer bad results.  The person has no factory but he (let’s say it’s a he) learned in trade school (paid for from taxes that derive from profits) how to work with metal as well as how to apply himself to a problem and how to concentrate and to research the things he doesn’t know.  First he figures that being able to have a baking oven that has even, steady heat would lead to uniformly baked goods, so he tries various kinds of pipes and shapes and pressures to provide even gas flames that won’t make hot spots within the oven.  Aha!  He gets it and finds a way to generate even heat, cobbles together a metal stove and burns his first cake to a crisp, as the whole oven became a hot-spot.  Hmmmnn.

Our inventor/entrepreneur realizes he must regulate the heat to achieve one temperature and hold it there within very narrow limits…   The process goes on for weeks and months, absorbing every spare hour and weekend until he has a metal box of a specific shape with special gas burners, elaborate temperature sensors and controls, insulation and directions for installation, use and cleaning.  But he has just the one.  If he sells it for more than it costs to make he’ll have a brief profit but it takes so long for him to make just one that he’ll go hungry before he can get the next pulse of “profits” from selling the second one, assuming that he quits his 9 to 5 job and works on the oven business full time.

He has some savings that he has been slowly accumulating to provide for his family if something happened to him, and he’s been careful to leave them intact.  His idea is good and he’s proven that it’s the best oven design potentially on the market.  How to get it there?  He needs capital, of which he has only a little.  He and his wife decide to take the risk, pledging their savings and their house(!) to secure a loan that will allow for several key things needed for producing 10 ovens per week, and selling them, at a margin that will allow for repaying the loan with interest (which employs people at the bank), insuring against the risks and liabilities manufacturers face, making payroll (and benefits!) for the 5 people they must hire to make and market the ovens (including payroll for himself, the owner/inventor, and to invest in an inventory of parts and gizmos needed to assemble ovens such that orders for ovens can be filled promptly.  And, oh, yes, they have to lease some suitable – or nearly suitable – space for manufacturing and testing, on which there is a large deposit.  Everything is at stake.

With much struggle and worried nights things get done.  The first 10 ovens are produced, tested and packaged for shipping.  The sales “department” of one former kitchenware sales rep, has secured an order for 4 of them, one of which is to a small mom-and-pop bakery not far away.  The owner/inventor goes to their small shop, attached to their house, to oversee installation by the plumber/gas-fitter, and personally teaches the operation to the new owners, who took a risk of buying an expensive new oven based on its description and manufacturer’s test results.  They agree to let the inventor/capitalist advertise their success with it – for a fee.  It performs as advertised and they start to do more business thanks to the creative new pastries their new oven bakes to perfection (damn those wood-fired stone ovens).

Well, the advertising kicks in and the sales department manages to sell the rest of the first ten and the next ten and things start humming at the “Great Perfection Oven Company.”  Soon, a major catalog sales company makes an offer to carry the oven at a discount to them which, if they can prepay for a certain number and sell at least 10 a month, the harried owner/inventor agrees to provide, even though he’ll make less margin per oven.  The advantage is that with that new revenue he can afford two more production employees and more leased space and increased advertising.  And on it goes…

Within a couple of years he and his wife celebrate the pay-off of the first loan that had put their house and savings at risk.  The business has grown to employ 40 employees and a large commercial bakery has approached them with a request for a production-size version of the “Perfection Oven” with its now-patented gas burners (patenting cost over $30,000) and the inventor/owner commences to design just such an oven which will require more manufacturing equipment and changes to one of their production lines… and so on.

Ms. Ocasio-Socialist, do you think he doesn’t “own” this business?  He and his wife are the only share-holders.  Do you know what else “margin” dollars must do?  They have to provide long-term benefits like pension contributions to trusted, valued employees: the ones who help the company succeed and be profitable.  They have to create a reserve fund in case other threats to the company materialize, cutting into profits, challenging its patents, creating knock-offs and look-alike ovens that sap Perfection Oven sales and margins, as well as changes in tax laws or state-mandated benefits, paid leave laws and new health-care coverages… not to mention changes in OSHA and EPA regulations that could hamper production or require costly new changes to production facilities, unionization, higher fuel costs for delivery of both raw materials and finished goods (ovens).  Lots of future risks that must be insured against, sometimes with simple cash reserves.  THEN there are profits.

Ms. Cortez, do you, with your costly economics degree, understand any of this?

Uncategorized

Conservational Conservatism

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Real conservatives are also conservationists.  Liberals, of course, will scoff at this, but Prudence tells us that this is a logical relationship.  The nature of true conservancy can illuminate the right thinking of true conservatives.

Those who fight for conservation of nature have drawn political lines mainly along economic – often anti-economic – lines.  The in-group of conservationists tends to view all those who are not as rabid about conservation as they as somewhat backward, perhaps rapacious exploiters who care about only profit… even if it will “destroy” our home planet.  Planetary destruction is a tall order, but humans have been quite industrious about modifying our environments, plural, although the greatest, planet-wide climatological changes have occurred with no human input whatsoever.  Still, our increasing need for energy has changed the lower atmosphere, at least, making humans ever more suspect.

As defined by conservationists, conservatives are all greedy, overweight and driven by profits; very conservative people, however, see such people as enemies of honest capitalism similar to their being enemies of conservation.  Real conservatives are not in favor of unregulated, monopoly capitalism, like that which results from close connections to politicians and their overreaching governance.

Real conservatism is not reactionary, but it does desire to conserve good philosophies and, with them, the best of ethics for organizing and governing our society.  This also means conserving the best of our culture, not plural.  It is, viewed without hate, not all bad.

Some conservationists would sacrifice human civilization to preserve a pristine habitat for every other form of life, or at least, white Anglo-Saxon Protestants wouldn’t be missed, especially if snail-darters would then thrive.  Once enthralled by being smarter and more sensitive than everyone else, rabid conservationists tend to ally with others who are equally so convinced.  Political power follows.  Now, the very overreaching government that makes so-called capitalism an enemy of vast majorities, is seen as the one force needed to assure adherence to their beliefs – whether conservationist, abortionist or racist (anti-white).

True conservatives can discern which of these causes should be opposed and which are worth working with.  We oppose abortion-on-demand and racism of all colors.  We believe in non-wastefulness, non-pollution, and clean environments.  We tend to be religious and we do NOT seek for the government(s) to enforce our beliefs, but to protect them.  We oppose globalized, monopolistic crony-capitalism since it tends toward organized theft of both wealth and sovereignty.  We trust individuals to perfect themselves, yet we insist on firm application of laws and sanctions for wrongdoing… for everyone.

Conservatives believe in balance and in courtesy toward all.  We tend to accept others as good or, at least, right-motivated until proven wrong.  To true conservatives, what someone feels is not nearly as important as what one DOES.  That is, anyone who is willing to ACT like an American, including respect for our laws and for other people, is welcome to live in America.  It’s fairly simple.  Respect for other people includes respect for their environment – everyone’s environment, while enabling economic opportunity and private property rights that make it possible for individuals to be FREE to the greatest degree possible… FROM GOVERNMENT.

The most passionate conservationists are well-advised to be conservatives, as well, and to recognize human nature as individual and not monolithic.  Conservationists seem to have fallen into encouragement of a police state that will enforce conservation as they see it; conservation that pits its desired ends AGAINST people, requiring, therefore, government to force compliance with conservationists’ corner on a part of science.  This ignores other parts of science, particularly that of human nature, yielding a somewhat fascist liberalism that has rendered America a rich-appearing debtor, barely able to afford conservation or even self-defense.

The success of the American experiment will be recognized in the shrinkage of government, not its growth, and in its honesty of education, not its bias.