From the Left

A Quick Take on Interest Rates

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It was reported today that the Federal Reserve Board(FRB) will most likely raise interest rates (the Federal Overnight Funds rate) in March. The FRB raises the rate it charges to lend to other banks, or the rate at which banks lend to each other. The FRB raised the FOF rate from .25 basis points to .50 basis points. In December 2016. Their new target is seventy-five points .75 an second twenty-five point raise.

The FRB meets every six weeks. They try to respond about six months in advance. That is how long a move by the FRB takes to make itself felt in the general economy.

The FRB has two goals: full employment, low inflation. If the current economic conditions hold up, I think we can expect to see continuing .25 rate hikes, if not every six-weeks, once a quarter which would add .75 to the current rate which would end the year at 1.25%. This would make the prime rate approximately 4.25%. 30-Day LIBOR would be around the same level.

For the past several years, there was a peculiar relationship between the FOF rate and 30-day LIBOR. They were both essentially set at zero, the infamous "zero bound." Used to just call it, 0. (Since we can have negative interest rates, it isn't even a bound, just a marker.)

For those of you who calculate the cost of funds into their projections, you should begin to project an increasing cost of money into your operations.

 

 

A Drug Based Monetary Policy

Monetary policy is the management of the amount of available credit in the economy through a pricing mechanism called the overnight federal funds rate. There are two ways of managing the price of money. By fiat as when the Fed raises rates as policy, and by supply and demand, as through Quantitative Easing, by, basically, printing money. Which puts more money in the system which lowers its price in both the short term especially. For example, for years, 30 Day LIBOR, where corporations raise operating capital, was around or below 25 basis points (.25%) for several years. Even now, 1 Year LIBOR, the rate at which banks borrow on the open market is less than 2%.

One way to get a large infusion of money into the market would be to legalize drug money. It's a nasty business, but it must be done. There is too much violence and corruption in the world to continue this shameful waste of money – the so-called war on drugs. If the global economy could get the caches of illegal drug money into legitimate financial institutions the price of money would go down and stay down for a long time. It could be that this money will fuel a global economic investment boom (even though I've written about the speculative and arbitrage nature of excessive capital concentration).

Just taxing it will fill the coffers of most of the governments in the world. There will still be a black-market because any good that is taxed can be sold cheaper on the black-market and there will always be people who choose to make their living in that way. A concomitant issue is violence. I would not expect this is go away over-night. People have become inured to this. Even the Israelites had to spend a generation in the desert before they could enter the promised land. It's just a good metaphor for the way social psychology works. Just think of it.

Mexico should be able to raise enough taxes to pay their police adequately enough to eradicate most corruption. Because, like I said, there'll always be those people who'd rather do it the easy way, people who take short-cuts. People like Trump, for example. Colorado is reaping a tax windfall with few repercussions or social consequences to legalizing the private use of marijuana.

This will bring with it some social dislocation. For example, if we release current felons convicted on drug charges into society it's possible that unexpected consequences can be expected along the lines of increased social violence. Some accommodations would have to be made to allow these people to find work and be reintegrated into society, both its political and economic institutions. On the other hand, there'll be a lot more jobs in drug production, distribution and sales. There'll be jobs in all different sectors of the economy, from agriculture to finance. There'll be companies who go public; hedge fund investors, banks, drivers, etc. A virtual boom in taxable income which goes untaxed now because it is illegal.

Legalizing these types of social drugs will probably be followed by increased usage and addiction. We could take all the money we currently expend prosecuting drug organizations and put it toward drug treatment processes, we wouldn't spend more money and have a much more effective social program. But, again, after a while this reaction will diminish. In the long run, perhaps not long enough for us to be dead, new social programs and private investment of these shadow funds will bring prosperity and reduce violence and corruption. (Well, a guy can dream.)

 

Economic Growth in the US 1.0

This article uses unemployment as its main metric.

 

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/24/upshot/the-big-question-for-the-us-economy-how-much-room-is-there-to-grow.html?ref=business&_r=0

 

This article refers to a concept of a macro-economic level of full employment after which inflation is incurred. This idea traces its origin to one of the founders of the Chicago School of Economics, in the mid-twentieth century, the renowned Milton Friedman. One of the boundaries Mr. Friedman's theory called for was a "natural rate of unemployment" (see here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milton_Friedman ) which contemporary economists put at around 5%. As unemployment reaches this number, labor shortages emerge and the cost of labor rises. This is not bad in itself. Generally, proponents of this theory would agree that if wages remain equal to or less than productivity, inflation will be kept under control. National monetary policy takes as its early warning sign of coming inflation, the "canary in the coal mine" of inflation, rising wages. That is the point at which the Fed will start to slow growth by raising interest rates.

There is no likewise measurement and policy prescription when assets or investment income increase. As we've recently, the practice of Quantitative Easing (QE) had the effect of raising asset prices, allowing firms and individuals to increase margin borrowing, that is, borrowing on the increased value of the asset without having to invest cash in building the total unit underlying assets. When the stock market is rising and hedge funds are growing, raising interest rates and collateral requirements would slow this down lowering the growth in asset prices, reducing the amount of money/credit is available. However, it doesn't appear that even Janet Yellen is willing to confront the institutional bias toward financial institutions as creditors. Legislators should also realize that the return to capitol is taxed at a lower rate than returns to labor; the type of income that is reported on a W-2; whether the individual also has other forms of income to report. The typical college educated knowledge worker probably claims 90% of their income as wage labor on a W-2.

The author also looks at the per cent of workers in the labor force as a proportion to the numbers of workers available. That number is at a low point. This would imply that there is a supply of acceptable workers not yet in the labor force. One issue is that much of the long term unemployed are older manual laborers in the construction industry and unionized factory workers from the "rust" belt industries; auto workers, steel workers, coal and other miners in the extraction industries, there may even be some aerospace and civilian/military contractors such as Boeing, industries which have been modernized, automated, and occupy many fewer jobs than the post-WWII period, say 1948 – 1974, from Truman's first election through the first Arab oil embargo and the end of US participation in the Viet Nam war.

We should not accept the specious free market argument that the growing economy creates more jobs that it destroys. While on the macro level, this may be true, there remains the problem with the value of the new jobs and the actual people who will occupy them. The economy has not created enough of the right sorts of jobs to absorb the workers shed by the old economy. We have with us a large unemployed group/class of people; white, black and Hispanic and other Pacific Island nationalities (that was PC), who are skilled in manual labor for which the largest market is government investment, e.g., infrastructure repair.

Another metric the author uses is productive capacity. How much is America producing compared to how much it can produce. If America, or any finite economy, is producing by using up all its assets, productive capacity would be at 100%. However, most economists of this school would suggest the after productive capacity gets over about 80%, the economy becomes unable to replace the assets it uses up in producing revenue. So, the economy slows. Current productive capacity has not yet reached this level. These three factors, the unemployment rate, the employment rate and the rate of current productivity creates that topological map for economic growth.

I suggest there is a large group of under-employed workers. This is not only people who want to work more hours, but, more importantly, people who are qualified to work at more rewarding knowledge work. This type of work has been increasingly off-shored to India and China where is has supported a growing middle class at a much lower value that the American middle-class. There has been a huge transfer of wealth from the American middle/working class to the middle/working class in Asia, but also to the upper class in America. There are also under employed manual workers. Government is a good investment in both our country and will put people to work using their skills. This will increase productivity on the macro level. The migration of both under employed manual workers and college educated knowledge workers to more productive occupations/work will increase the overall wealth of our economy.

My conclusion would be that the most likely place to accommodate growth would be in creating productive jobs that currently under-employed knowledge works can fulfill. As the pool of under-employed move into more appropriate employment, they will become more productive. Modern occupations are granular. That is, in the final analysis, there's a person carrying out the functions of the job. So as each under-employed person engages in more productive labor the more assets society creates. More assets equate to more revenue and in this conception more per capita revenue, which is another way of saying increased productivity on a macro-economic level.

Unfortunately for Republicans, tax reductions don't lead to productive investment. The current accumulation of wealth in fewer and fewer hands, once again the idea of granularity, leads to economic inefficiencies. Extreme concentration of wealth, or the accumulation of wealth among fewer people encourages speculation and arbitrage, that, is, income generated from non-productive economic and financial manipulation. These are two methods of investing capital which are highly destabilizing to the market. They lead to bubbles and, of course, the eventual burst which affects many more people than just the speculators and arbitrageurs as we saw in the last recession; the privatization of wealth and the socialization of risk/loss.

A metaphor I've devised for understanding the inefficiencies in the distribution of wealth is the structure of the universe. There are various structures in the physical universe, as we see it in modern scientific instruments like the Hubble Spacecraft. These structures are the result of gravity working on mass. If there is one big gravitational object, all other masses become attracted to it and the result is one large gravitational body, say a monopoly. When gravitational masses are equal and equally spaced out, the gravitational bodies will end up spread out in a grid that is gravitationally stable or a ridged grid with no motion. It's only when there is a discriminatory but balanced distribution of gravity that forms the various structures we see in the Universe. Similarly, in the economy we need some concentration of wealth. The current ratio is, in my opinion, weighted to heavily in favor of concentration. Too much money, in too few hands. To paraphrase Churchill: "Never have so many, owed so much, to so few." (I have to say, I just made that up. I like it.)

In the end, the problem is not the productivity or productive capacity of the American economy. It is not a problem that can be solved by giving more funds to the small group of people in which it accumulating. Tax reductions on the wealthy, eliminating the estate tax (one of the oldest taxes on the books going back to eighteenth century England, tax discrimination favoring rental income over labor income benefits the already wealthy. Concentration of capital contradicts essential market principles of mass based social institutions. In the economy, it is the problem of demand, mass demand. This is the underlying principle of modern, administrative, bureaucratic, industrial and financial state, ethnically mixed states. It's the principle of the concentrated mass that imparts power to social institutions. What this implies is that economic growth will be driven by mass demand.

Increasing mass demands leads to a policy of progressive taxation and equalizing the taxes between capital and labor. The estate tax should be raised as well as the limit at which the estate tax is activated. The more you leave to your heirs, the more we tax the inheritance. This transfer of wealth can be distributed in one of two ways: with government planning, or, as direct tax refunds to individuals, if you like the free market theory. As a person, I can think of social investments that ought to be made. That is a different theory of government action, the state should provide social benefits to its citizens. Both have their strengths and weaknesses. That's a topic for a different time.

Chaos Reigns in the Trump Administration

I hate it when the MSM makes things up with their, by implication, erroneous facts and hysterical fear-mongering headlines, i.e., Fake News. I think there's a problem when most of the standard conservatives in the professional institutions, the military, the State Department, the Director of the FBI, even the Vice President, his appointees, continually refute his public pronouncements. His cravenly pandering to his acolytes by throwing red meat to his constituency and creating deep fissures in the American body politic. It will be interesting to see how long they let him go like this, or if they can restrain him and/or Bannon and Priebus. They're a modern-day triumvirate,

(skip this part: a cabal of three generals, Roman politicians, who had recently headed armies and saw victories abroad, Cassius Marcellinus being the best known of the earlier lot who took-over the Roman Republic supported by three professional armies. This was the end of the Roman Republic which had lasted from the mid-750s BC, although with great modification. But that was the genius of Rome. This military coup changed the view of power in Rome. It became possible for powerful people, usually Roman consuls who were victorious in war and therefore had an army at their disposal, to usurp power. Caesar was part of at least two during his reign, the last being between Augustus who kept the Wets and Marc Anthony who kept the east after the triumvirate was whittled down to two. There was one in the 80-60BCs and one with Caesar from about 50BCs until Caesar defeated Pompeii at the battle of Pharsalus in 48 BC. (After some continued fighting in Spain against Pompeii's sons, Caesar consolidated his position. The banished aristocracy returned, under Caesar's good graces. A group of them assassinated Caesar at the forum in 44BC. Augustus inherited Caesar's domains and continued to oppose Marc Anthony and finally defeated him at the Battle of Actium. That's usually dated as March 15, the turn of the lunar cycle from waning to waxing or the other way 'round. Every month to the Romans had an Ides. It was just the middle of the lunar cycle. He could have been killed on the Ides of November, don't know if that sounds as good.) Which says plenty about their approach to political power. See the significance of the Ides in Roman culture here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ides_of_March

The continual "walking back" Trump's pronouncements, especially in foreign, most notably his apparent espousal of overturn decades of American policy by championing a "two China" policy. His views on NATO's relevance to the contemporary political world has been replaced by Pence's reassurances to European leaders that so-called President Trump is not going to change American policy toward NATO, but we will insist that they begin to raise their share of the 2% of their GNP that they're supposed to spend on military contributions to NATO forces. His cozying up to Russia is beginning to embarrass his Republican supporters in Congress. Issa is starting a committee to look into the connections between the Trump campaign staff and Russian diplomats (a benign description). Aiding and abetting the enemy is surely a treasonous act. What will they do if they find real evidence of a more-or-less close relationship between the two? His exclusion of news organizations from attending at least one press conference is puerile. It is also an attempt to control their message. But, it's not like the NYT, WP and Manchester Guardian, won't find a way to report on it. As I said in another entry, the entire press corps, print and media, should ignore him.

His appointments reveal his approach to evaluating successful people. Mainly they are very rich. They also ran big institutions. At least his Secretary of State realizes that Russia is a danger to American geo-political interests. It doesn't matter how cozy Trump is with him, or how beholden he is to him because of his business, which is another matter to consider later, Putin and thus Russia, clearly is adventurous in its foreign policy. He is playing a very 19^th and 20^th century vibe. Putin is expanding back into the so-called marches, the border areas, around the old Russian/Soviet empire. That's what Crimea is and what the Eastern Ukraine is. It's all one long steppe. There are several rivers that present natural borders, but they all cut through land the Ukraine would claim as historically theirs, while the Russians would see it as contestable and geo-politically necessary for their natural defense. In a war, you don't want your enemies creating a front in Crimea. If you're a Russian that is.

DeVos barely made it in, thanks to the "nay" votes by Susan Collins (Rep. Maine) and Lisa Murkowski (Rep. Alaska) requiring Pence to cast the deciding vote as President Pro-Tem of the Senate See here: http://dailysignal.com/2017/02/07/these-are-the-two-republicans-who-voted-against-devos/. A usually ceremonial role, but as President Pro-Tem of the Senate, the VP, ex officio, does have the right to cast a vote in the Senate in the event of a tie. He cast the deciding vote for Ms. DeVos. The Democrats are flexing their political muscles and doing whatever they can to disrupt the Trump administration's ability to run a smoother operation. It's politics.

Through all his actions so far, so-called Donald Trump has shown a complete disregard for our nation's institutions; the intelligence community, the media community, public schools, the last several decades of environmental policy, concepts of non-interference that have held generally for several generations are being broached on personal whim of a perhaps emotionally unbalanced President. Many Republicans in the House of Representatives do not trust that he is a "real" Conservative. Many of them favor more complete restraints on government interference in economic life, while at the same time trying to impose moral values. These particular moral values derive from the Christian religion. I'd be more afraid of the States imposing Christian law before worry about Shari'a law.

One final note should be touched on. I got a whiff somewhere that the Trump administration is thinking of military re-engagement in Iraq. Put simply, more troops in Iraq. Leaving out the matter that Iraq is a sovereign country and if we forcefully land troops there without permission we would be attacking/invadeing Iraq. This would unite both Shi'ia and Sunni militias to unite against a common enemy. If we get Iraqi permission to engage more American troops, what form will that take. Will it be primarily adivsors with American artillery and air assets? Will it be combat troops? I think adding 140,000 combat troops to the Midde East wars, both ISIS and Syria, is a recipe for disaster. If we're going to go into Iraq, we need enough troops to impose order on our own, without any need for the Iraqi army and national policy. Although, we would naturally encourage their participation. But we would have to have enough troops to impose our will unilaterally whether we did so or not. This would I believe cause a constitutional crises as the administration will have to institute a draft to fulfill those quotas. I don't imagine that the majority of Americans would approve of that and so Congress might not go along with a Trumpian adventurous foreign policy.

As always, we'll have to wait and see how far traditional Republicans will let them go.

 

Fascism in the White House

http://money.cnn.com/2017/02/24/media/cnn-blocked-white-house-gaggle/index.html

 

This story is about the current White House policy to exclude certain new organizations from an off-camera press briefing. Without saying so, an off-camera press brief already excludes television broadcasts of any station. Soon they'll allow FOX in only. They just haven't thought that far ahead, which to some extent is scary.

So-called President Trump is trying to run this country by the seat of his pants, and it looks as if he has no idea of what he is doing. He's had to change foreign statements several times, the "One China" policy and the importance of NATO. High ranking government officials, the VP, the SoS, to name two, have, as they say, walked back, these two issues.

The Democrats are successfully obstructing many of his nominees. This adds to the confusion, but the number of appointees is large and it doesn't seem as if the White House staff has gotten very far.

Gen. Flynn, his appointment to the National Security, blew up in his face and he had to start over. This time he went for, what we would call, an old military hand. Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster. A true military intellectual. He's written insightfully about the political decision making during the Viet Nam War and was one of the officers in Iraq who along with Petraeus changed the Army's anti-insurgency policy which succeeded in pacifying the Sunni population. Here is his Wikipedia entry (which I've read and I think is realistic.): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._R._McMaster This includes the so-called "Surge." (As if putting more troops in was an act of genius and far-sightedness, when in fact, everyone knew they should have had more troops.)

Now people consider him, Secretary of State and the Vice President as the backbone of the administration. As in, they're the only ones with any backbone. Although Comey, head of the FBI, may be coming around. Here's a link to his Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Comey His refusal to buckle in to Trump's demands over following up on or publicly communicating about the connections between his staff and "un-named" Russians. As they say, we know Flynn both did it and lied about it, who knows who else is taking the same stance. Until they get exposed, we'll never know.

The White House staff, Bannon and Priebus, are believers. They people think they know what's best for America. It's ironic that Bannon is having his staff read David Halberstam's classic, "The Best and the Brightest." Here is Ellsberg's Wikipedia entry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Halberstam Bannon says the book teaches how little mistakes can turn into long term, far reaching and accumulating consequences. He doesn't see that the book is really about the hubris of people in the government, McNamara and his defense department wiz kids like Daniel Ellsberg, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Ellsberg really thought they knew more than other people because they were privy to classified information both about the country's politics and about its social structure, and, of course, the war.

This is about the tendency toward authoritarian or fascist sentiment among the White House staff and evinced by Trump's political appointees and his conflation of his personal and political roles. His management of the media and the attempt to control the intellectual landscape is one of the ways fascist/authoritarian governments control their population. North Korea is the prime example of this. His exclusion of supposedly un-friendly media, which for him and his adherents are represented by the meme, MSM, or main stream media. This includes most of the print news reporting outlets, but especially the New York Times and the Washington Post. Not only that, but the press conference was off-camera. That excluded the MSM broadcast networks, especially CNN. This is clearly an attempt to strictly control what the administration wants the public to think.

I would say that all journalists should cease attending all press conferences and broadcast networks cease covering him. This administration more than others thrives off gratuitous media coverage. It's time to stop treating Trump like a clown and take him seriously. As a serious threat to American political culture. Bannon said they were going to change the character of the administrative state. I don't know what they'd replace it with. Like I said above, they really haven't thought that far out yet.

His attempt to control the FBI and its investigations is clearly megalomaniacal. That's the only word I can think of. Soon he'll be wanting the IRS to turn over peoples' tax returns so he can prosecute them, or ordering the IRS to audit perceived enemies.

One aspect of fascism is the one-party state. Other political parties are outlawed and forced to disband. Although, how much more disbanded the Democrats can get, I don't know. But the Republicans are approaching that situation with their dominance of all three branches of the government. I don't think they can outlaw a political party, other than the Nazi or Communist parties, in the U.S. Per Scalia, we shouldn't use foreign law as a basis of American law. In Europe, Nazi Parties are banned. There is not historical reason to ban a Nazi Party. There is a Communist Party allowed to organize in America. But there's no history of fascism in this country in the Nazi sense.

In summary Fascism has the following aspects:

One aspect of fascism is racism. At least historically. Fascists use race to create and excite a difference between an "us" and a "them." I only put them in quotes because this is a social creation. There is a very primitive drive to associate with those like you and in a finite world finding that banding together is better than standing alone in the hunter-gatherer past. This lead to the idea of "family" and then "kinship." This feeling of identifying with a group is very basic to human psychology. One could call it a structure. Fascism inflames this antagonism in order to both motivate and inflict violence on the stated "other."

It believes that military action is a good thing. Say that war imposes one Nation's will over another. A fascist government/party glorifies war. Fascism, Nazism, believed that war "purified" the nation's "blood-line" A culling of the weak, so to speak. We would refer to it today in genetic or evolutionary terms.

One aspect of fascism is extreme nationalism.

Both nationalism and racism serve to distinguish between "us" and "them." "Us" is then dealt with through the application of political violence, both formal and informal. That between political violence meted out the government edict and therefore public policy and the civilian organizations that arm themselves and attack the "other." This takes place on both a public/group and private/individual level. It's like the difference between the SS and the SA. The SS being an arm of the state; the SA being an arm of the Party and therefore a private organization.

How to Unleash Economic Growth in the US.

Our contemporary national economy is growing at a moderate rate of about 2% per year. Many people think this is sluggish, comparing it to the much higher growth rates the US experienced in the years after WWII up through the early 1970s. That era was essentially ended with the first Arab oil embargo and the stagflation of the Carter years. Since then the economy has been moving in and out of recessions. The most well know, prior to the Great Recession of 2008-10, was the Reagan recession of the early 1980s. Since then we have experienced faster growth during the last years of Reagan and the Clinton years. The Reagan boom was fueled by increasing government debt. The Clinton years were fueled by private growth. Underlying all this was an expansion in productivity spurred by technological progress, especially in computer driven productivity. There are only two ways for an economy to grow: demographically or productively. That is, either more people are added to the economy or workers produce more per worker. Productivity is a measure of how much each worker produces in either goods or services. For example, we currently produce about the same amount of steel now as in the 1970s, but with about 1/3^rd fewer workers: that's productivity. The personal computer has also increased productivity by allowing fewer employees to produce more output. This is how many white-collared workers were replaced. It is thought that the productivity enhancements of the early computer era have been gained. Our population is not growing rapidly and with the current mood favoring reducing immigration, we are not getting a boost from the demographic side. So what can we do to unleash economic growth?

I think the answer lies in two areas: student debt and personal housing assets that are not worth the value of the mortgage. Student debt prevents young people from investing in assets and spurs them to accept jobs that do not pay as well as these people might otherwise get because they can't wait for better paying jobs to appear. The "underwater" housing assets deprives owners of investment capital and prevents them from moving, i.e., selling their homes, to places with better job prospects. I would propose two courses of action that might alleviate these problems. Both of these solutions call for increased government participation in the economy. Both solutions rely on current free market theory and both will help the middle and working classes more than the rich or poor. First, I would forgive all student debt, second, I would buy up the mortgages on all the houses.

On Originalism as a Judicial Philosophy

Interestingly, the issue of gun control decided in District of Columbia v. Heller is a great learning tool for examining the judicial philosophy methodology for understanding the purposes of the Constitution based on perceiving the Constitution as the so-called Framers, understood it. This is the core principle of "Originalism." Originalists claim to understand the meaning of the Constitution as it was understood by the "Framers," that is the white, wealthy, males who wrote the Constitution. As it was said in Sicario, Medellin referred to a time rather than any one individual. So the metaphor of Framers. The actual signers of the Constitution lived in an mental atmosphere that was composed of local government actors as well as national level actors and institutions. State versus Federal government. At the time the Constitution was written many states had already written State Constitutions under the coalition the Constitution replaced. Many of the signers of the national Constitution helped write their state ones; Thomas Jefferson being probably the most well known – he wrote the Virginia state constitution. There existed an intellectual milieu that Americans could agree on. One of the mostly widely discussed issues during colonial and early United States political maturation was the discussion over the obligations and rights required for an independent militia, or state based militias. The idea of the local militia as a semi-professional militarized force fielded from the local population. So the issue of gun ownership, who owned guns? Who was required to own guns? What gun owners were required to do? When gun owner/militia men were required to carry their weapons, What kinds of weapons and who was required to posses them. There is a prolific literature around the issues raised by the 2^nd amendment written at the time the Framers are writing the Bill of Rights. Then there is the secondary literature which presents a meta-narrative on the meaning of both the 2^nd amendment, the meaning of a militia, the meaning of "arms," the actual grammatic structure of the Bill itself. Although it seems awkward to us, is a rhetorical device widely employed and widely understood which defined which is the subordinated clause. As we'll see, the case can be made that the second clause is the operative clause in this construction and the first clause is subordinated to it. This type of cultural norm needs to be incorporated in the philosophy of Originalism.

Let's accept that District of Columbia v. Heller established the right of citizens to own guns. People in the US now have the right to own guns for the purpose of self-protection. This is the Scalia majority ruling in 2014 (http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2014/06/the_supreme_court_doesn_t_want_to_touch_the_second_amendment_this_term_here.html) .

Let's further agree that "guns" is a term that includes semi-automatic versions of military rifles, hunting rifles, all sorts of pistols, any that can be described of a projectile weapon, it shoots a bullet or something similar. Because Scalia, who wrote the opinion claimed he adhered to the Originalist methodology of interpreting the meaning of the 2^nd amendment we can compare his reasoning and see if it follows Originalist methodology. Does Scalia really understand the Farmers state of mind when they wrote the 2^nd amendment.

We accept this conclusion we can look at the claims of Originalism and compare them to what adherents of this methodology actually do. How they actually substantiate their reading of the Constitution based on their understanding of how a judicial/political representative would view the issue at hand. Claiming that we can understand the mental life of a person in the past is hubristic at worst and misleading at least. To understand the Framer's political social world Originalists claim they peruse writings extant during the Framers era, say 1720s through the 1820s, the Framers generation. It is that intellectual milieu that the Framers understood what they were doing. This social understanding is heavily influenced by the English and French Enlightenment. The antipodes of Enlightenment thinking is represented by the difference between John Locke and Jean-Jacque Rousseau. English empiricism traces its epistemological foundations to Locke, German Romanticism to the more irrational Rousseau.

The American tradition follows the British rather than the so-called Continental schools of thought which are given more to deduction rather than induction; theoretical sociology or empirical sociology? Habermas or ??? some empiricist. We will examine the ideological discourse over the role of the militia and the ownership of, essentially muskets or rifles, usually at this time flintlocks, either smooth bore or rifled, but all were muzzle loaded. While there were handguns, most of the discussion of gun ownership related to participation in the state militia and so the discourse is around long barreled firearms. The public discourse had very little to say about private gun ownership. Gun ownership was ubiquitous throughout the colonies. It was a practice imported from Europe. In the English colonies guns were used for both hunting and self and community defense. They were encroaching on Amerindian land and attacking Amerindian towns and villages. Amerindians attacked back killing settlers on the semi-settled perimeters and sometimes penetrating significantly in colonial society many times driving European back or stopping it for extended periods of time.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Problem with Conservative Women

In the Sunday, February 12, 2017, issue of the New York Times, columnist Susan Chira asks: "Since When is Being a Women a Liberal Cause?" (New York Times, Op-Ed sec. p. 9) She refers to several conservative female activists disputing the gender identity politics usually associated with the liberal left. She writes, "For years, conservative women have wrestled with the very idea of feminism. Many refused the label because they saw it as tarnished by association with the left, even as they pursued careers or won prominence in public life. (Italics added)." Here is the problem. Feminism is generally defined, as among other things, as emphasizing examination of women's issues. Among these issues are the legal status of women in our society and their economic rights. Feminism and feminists are largely credited with removing the restrictions placed on women's attainments since the beginning of recorded history. While it is true that some Western societies have been more or less accommodating to women, Rome was more liberal in its laws defining women's ability to inherit, head families and engage in independent economic activities, although it barred women from participating in political institutions, than ancient Greece and subsequent Western societies based in Christian morality. In more contemporary times, in the U.S. it was necessary for women to obtain the consent of a male relation for women to acquire credit cards or a mortgage in their own names. Women were legally discriminated against in both employment and college admissions. It was not until Title IX that women's equality in college admissions and then in financial support of women's sports was legally established. All of these gains were founded first on Feminist theory and then fought for by women who had no problem identifying themselves as Feminists. Conservative women would not have the rights and opportunities they enjoy today without the struggles undertaken by feminists of prior generations. Leaving out abortion, they would not have access to any sort of birth control other than condoms. The birth control pill and the IUD were direct outgrowths of feminist struggles. One of the women, Chira refers to in her article, Cleta Mitchell, is a partner in the New York law firm of Foley & Lardner. This would have been impossible in America prior to the 1960s. And though we can point to Phyllis Schlafly as a counter-argument, I would say that she is the exception that proves the rule.