

"...AND GULLIVER RETURNS"

### \--In Search of Utopia--

### BOOK 9--SMASHWORDS EDITION

### A LIBERTARIAN PARADISE

### THE UNITED COLONIES

By

### Lemuel Gulliver XVI as told to Jacqueline Slow

Copyright 2011 by Lemuel Gulliver XVI

ISBN 978-1-4580-3602-5

Dear friends—Obviously I wrote this series to be read from Book 1 to the end, but silly me! Readers often begin with what sounds interesting to them. This may leave them unaware of the characters, my friends and I. So let me introduce them. We were boyhood friends, as wild and as close as geese heading south for the winter. But our university educations split us philosophically like a drop of quicksilver hitting the floor. But like those balls of mercury, when brought together, they again become one. As have we.

 Ray became a Catholic priest and moved far to the right of where our teenage liberalism had bound us. He calls himself a neo-conservative. We think he is a reactionary.

  Lee slid to the left of our adolescent leanings, and somewhere along the line became an atheist. Lee is a lawyer.

 Concannon, Con for short, retired from his very successful business. I guess his business experience moved him a bit to the right, to conservatism—a conservative just to the right of the middle.

  Then there's me. I think I'm pretty much a middle of the roader—except for my passion to save our planet by reducing our population before global warming, massive poverty and far-reaching famines decimate our humanity. Hope this introduction makes our discussions make a bit more sense.

By the way, as most of you know, we have put our photos before every bit of dialogue. This should make you more familiar with us. So the books read more like plays. Since most of you read the books in PDF or EPUB format it is no problem. But if you read them in RTF or TXT you will probably lose the photos. This will make the transitions of the conversations more difficult to follow. LG

#

# Table of Contents

FREEDOM--RIGHTS AND RESPONSIBILITIES

WHAT IS THE BEST GOVERNMENT?

SOCIETAL POSSIBILITIES

ECONOMIC SUCCESS

ECONOMY AND GLOBALIZATION

IMMIGRATION AND CITIZENSHIP

OUR DEMOCRATIC VOTING

NO WELFARE STATE

TAXES

ACCUMULATED INCOME

EDUCATION

LIBRARIES AND MUSEUMS

THE ARTS

SCHOOL SPORTS

ETHNIC AND RELIGIOUS FACTORS IN A SOCIETY

SOCIAL CLASS AND ETHNICITY IN OUR COUNTRY

WHAT IS SOCIAL JUSTICE?

MEANING OF DEMOCRACY

SOCIAL CONSCIENCE

FOUNDING FATHERS

WHICH OF YOUR 'RIGHTS' AID REAL FREEDOM?

LIBERTARIANISM

THE HISTORY OF PUBLIC BORROWING

RELIGION AND SUBSIDIES

CHARITY

LAWS ARE FEW BUT WELL ENFORCED

EXAMPLES OF OUR LAWS

GUNS AND GUN CONTROL

FREE SPEECH

EMPLOYMENT AND UNEMPLOYMENT

SMOKING

RELATIONSHIPS

PARENT LICENSING

AFFIRMATIVE ACTION

ELDERCARE

LEGAL SYSTEM JUDGE MADE LAW—NOT JUSTICE

LAW ENFORCEMENT

THE BEST FORM OF GOVERNMENT?

#

It was an eight hour flight from Indus to Freedomville, the capitol of the United Colonies. The Colonies was a rather new country by international standards. It developed as citizens from one of the larger countries became much more vociferous about having freedom in their lives and minimum government. So part of the larger country seceded from the original nation. It was done without warfare, using only the ballot box and public opinion to develop the need for a new nation-- a nation founded on the principles of a limited government and libertarian freedom. So far the country has not experienced the problems that the US did in Civil War or that India did in its partition.

There was an orderly crossing of boundary lines for those who wanted a 'nanny' government that was taking care of them from cradle to grave and those who wanted more freedom and a laissez-faire capitalism of free enterprise and a very limited government. This seemed to be what the American Tea Partiers of 15 years ago seemed to want.

The confusing calls for liberty and equality in the American and French revolutions gave rise to people expecting both. The problem is, as political scientists know, that to the degree that you have one, you reduce the other. If people are free to develop businesses that make them a lot of money, the equalitarians want to tax them back toward financial equality through income and other taxes. They then use the money to give to the underclasses who have not been able to keep up. They do this with socialized medicine, required pension saving, and other welfare state measures geared to take care of those who can't take care of themselves. Our next trip will be to such a country. Northland is a Scandinavian country with principles based on equality. I'm sure we will find huge differences between the equalitarian country of Northland that we will visit in a few weeks and the Libertarian country that we are about to visit.

Throughout history we have seen that most societies were unequal. It was usually the survival of the fittest. Then the fittest passed on their superiority by blood and we had monarchies. Then God blessed the kings by giving them the divine right to rule. Or in the more modern countries it was money, passed along with the power that it brings, that gave an aristocracy of 'argent.'

The 18th-century revolutionaries didn't like the behavior of their masters, so they pleaded for equality. Their pleas prodded the peasants to pick up their pitchforks and rifles and eliminate the kings from their lives. Whether by guillotine or guns, the peasants won and their educationally accomplished leaders replaced nobles and the modern republics were formed.

At first freedom aided the businessman and farmers. Lower taxes and the rise of the 'natural aristocracy of men,' as Thomas Jefferson had predicted, produced the capitalists of the industrial age. But the revolutionary call for equality was heard from the pulpits, the sweat shops and the slums. As the 20th century grew into adolescence the call for equality again reared its head and unions forced industrialists to bow, if not to kneel. Equality was making inroads but it needed the government's long arm to sanctify the push for economic equality. As the 20th Century matured into middle age social equality became more of a reality with Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson and Martin Luther King-- each tilting the American society toward equality. In India Mohandas Gandhi sought not only independence from its British oppressor but also a social equality among Indians. In Europe the welfare state reached its highest levels, particularly in Scandinavia. In China Mao led his revolutionaries for economic and social equality.

But if there is, in fact, a natural aristocracy among people--those who remained down as others worked upward objected to their reduced riches and status. So the call for liberty, particularly economic liberty, became louder. Some capitalists just picked up their marbles and went to more friendly economic lands. But many more used their riches to change the laws in their favor. This was particularly true of the tax laws. The Koch brothers and Rupert Murdoch of the U.S. are notable examples.

As one might expect, allowing for the equality of the masses costs huge amounts of money. And one might also imagine that when the people with economic liberty are not paying enough taxes to support social and economic equality, something has to give. And we all know what gave. Rich individuals and countries lent money to those countries that were considered good risks. The politicians then saw an easy way to make both sides happy, just borrow! And as we all know, the recession of 2008 uncovered the political reality that at some point the piper must be paid.

As we saw, the equalitarians began losing some of their sickness and pension benefits and even some of their educational rights. The free enterprisers, too, were forced to pay more in taxes. Both sides had to begin to pay for the free rides they had been given. Here in The United Colonies the call was to foster liberty and forget equality. The reason we are here is to find out just how they are doing it now in 2025.

 -"Well guys we have our baggage, now we have to look out for Tyler Walls, the governor's right-hand man. He is supposed to pick us up. That must be him with the sign showing Gulliver bound up by the Lilliputians. Some sense of humor!

"Are you Mr. Walls or are you a representative of King Bomba?"

 "I would assume that the king is off with his Lilliputians trying to catch another giant!

"You must be Gulliver, I mean Commander Gulliver. Nice to finally meet you. I've been following your exploits for years. Well anyway, welcome to The United Colonies. Follow me men, the car's right over here. I'll get you to your hotel and pick you up in the morning and we can start our physical and political tour of our country.

We bedded down comfortably and slept well. At breakfast we were to meet Tyler again. We chowed down on the huge buffet breakfast and were ready to go by nine. Tyler was there to meet us with a minibus. We jumped right in with our questions about the libertarian country we were about to visit. After the modern countries of Kino and Singaling and the poverty-stricken state of Indus, we were eager to see a quite different, and I might say a selfishly directed, country.

#

#

# FREEDOM--RIGHTS AND RESPONSIBILITIES

 -"Tyler, I am really interested in how your country came about and what directions it has been taking. Can you give us a little background on your emphasis on liberty rather than equality as your basis for justice?"

" You really jumped right into the pit. I know that you are a businessman Con, so I assume that you will understand our philosophy of freedom. Beginning with your American Revolution, people have usually thought of justice as being primarily about both liberty and equality. They assumed that when the French chanted 'liberty, equality and fraternity,' it was really possible. The equality goal that your Founding Fathers called for in your American Declaration of Independence was what justice was about when you wanted independence. But in your original Constitution 'equality' is never mentioned. It is all about liberty--freedom. So what your founders did was to jump from one possible element of justice, equality, to another possible element, liberty, as they moved from underlings of the British king to being free of his yoke. Both liberty and equality are not possible to have at the same time at a 100% level. To the degree that you have equality you tend to reduce liberty, and vice a versa.

"Let me give you a quick outline of the principles of our society. As you will see we emphasize liberty, not equality. You people in the West, especially in northern Europe, emphasize equality. Our emphasis on liberty gives us a libertarian society which is quite different from those that you are used to in the West.

"Liberty requires responsibility. Without the responsibility to allow others freedom you have only anarchy. Among the elements of responsibility that we hold dear are honesty and the respect for others' freedom.

"Since liberty is our major concern. People are not equal but they must be given equality of opportunity to find out who are superior in intelligence, creativity, or in their work ethics.

"We must therefore have outstanding schools to allow people to achieve to their fullest. Along with this, a person must earn his citizenship. Being born here does not guarantee one's citizenship. Citizenship can also be rescinded. You may remember some years ago that President Sarkozy of France suggested stripping certain people of their citizenship, people like major criminals and drug traffickers. He was met with a great deal of criticism because once you are a French citizen it can't be taken away from you. Our Constitution allows us to take away citizenship. We have a companion country where we can send noncitizens. They run their own show there!

"Third, people are responsible for their own lives and can end them if they want to. Society does not attempt to prolong people's lives or to control them.

"Fourth, we tax low throughout life and tax high at the end of life.

"Fifth, if people want children they are financially responsible for them and must pay for their educations through the university level.

"And last, as I said, if you are going to have freedom you must have responsibility toward others or you only have anarchy.

"We believe we are on the right track to a better civilization. And you may remember what Arnold Toynbee said, 'Civilization is a movement and not a condition, a voyage and not a harbor.' He also said that 'Civilizations in decline are consistently characterized by a tendency towards standardization and uniformity.' We think that you in America have reduced your efforts primarily to owning guns, watching electronic screens and nationalizing your religion. It's a blanket criticism and I know that many of you have crawled out from under the blanket. I think that you four may be among those who are not 'in uniform.'

LIBERTY NOT EQUALITY

"Now let me spend the rest of the day explaining how these principles work in practice. For the sake of clarity I will usually use your country to illustrate the kinds of problems that can develop when equality or a lack of responsibility create problems.

I had seen in your country people who call themselves libertarians but are not actually devotees of freedom. I've seen this in your Tea Party movement.

"I think it is evident that people are unequal in their intellectual capacities, their educations, their knowledge, and their awareness of their own situation and the situation of their own country and the world. Look at the ignorant Christian minister who was threatening to burn the Koran, he thought that the Arabic word Allah meant a different entity than the Christian word of God. Of course he was mistaken. Allah is this the Arabic word for the same entity. It didn't seem to matter to him because he went on and burned it anyway. Then a number of equally stupid Muslims, in retaliation, attacked people from the West in Afghanistan and killed several.

"Look at the ignorant Muslims who burned down embassies of both Norway and Denmark because a Danish newspaper had published cartoons which were offensive to them. They didn't realize that Norway and Denmark are different countries. Look at the ignorant voters in your country who vote in representatives who don't have a clue as to how to solve your nation's problems. They often expect more social welfare perks while they want their taxes reduced."

 -"I think we all realize that, but we often have not identified it with our psychological drives and our values. Tyler, when we visited Kino and talked to Professor Wang (1), we got a good idea of the differences in values that people have. And we began to realize that most of those values are based on assumptions that are not provable. Then when we visited Singaling and talked to Dr. Chan (2) we saw how the differences in psychological motivations push us in certain directions. Dr. Chan emphasized the drive for power that motivates most of us. Certainly in the illustrations you gave, whether they be differences in religions, race or in social class, we can see how one's own values and physical makeup can give them a feeling of power--and with that power a feeling of superiority."

" True. Selfishness, or self-centeredness, is a basic for our human race. When we can amass enough money to live better, most people welcome the luxury. As a Chinese beauty queen recently told me 'It's better to cry in a limousine than laugh on a bicycle.' Everyone has his or her own carrot and stick. The stick may whip us out of the poverty of the ghetto. The carrot is nearly always money or other avenues of power. And when power comes, wealth usually is its guardian angel.

"So you see if we are selfish, an equalitarian social philosophy is the anchor dragging down our liberty-- at least our liberty in the financial area.

"In order to have real freedom in a functioning society there are two pillars that are essential. One is that you must be responsible for not impinging on another person's liberty. Then to allow everyone a chance to succeed you must have equality of opportunity. As we go through the day I'm sure that I will be coming back to these pillars of our society again and again."

 -"Tyler, what are our concerns here? Are we looking for world peace? Are we looking for the form of government that makes people the happiest? Are we merely looking for a government that pays its own way?"

" You tell me. What we have here in The Colonies is a system based on freedom. We like it. We are not trying to solve the world's problems, we merely want to have a place where it is safe to be free and where we must be responsible for ourselves." -" I

 -"Since the George W Bush days, non-thinking but fundamentalist Christian groups have taken over many of the legislatures. One of their big pushes has been to either outlaw or reduce abortions. And in some it was to allow the teaching of creationism."

- "I don't know what it is about your country. You talk so much about freedom, like freedom of speech and the freedom to own guns, but you don't give a woman the freedom to abort an embryo when she doesn't want to be a mother. Your male-dominated conservative religious legislatures seem to think that a fertilized ovum is a person. I can understand that if they are Catholic they might believe this because Pope Pius IX in 1854 decided, having been told by God, that the mother of Jesus had been conceived without original sin-- her Immaculate Conception.

 -" I wonder why God waited until the mid-19th century to tell His flock that the soul slid into the ovum along with the sperm. That might have been put in the Gospels, or better, in the Ten Commandments.

 -"Lee, Christian thinking that abortion is very bad, if not murder, has been the overwhelming Christian position since the earliest days. It is true that some, like St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, used Aristotle's ideas that the early embryo had the soul of a vegetable so theoretically abortion could have been performed. But this thinking was very far from the norm."

 \- "Actually, in those early days the major concern was the rights of the father, not any rights for the fetus. But from what I know about it, while some said that it was murder to prevent a child from being born, it was Pius who clarified the issue on the soul--if you happen to believe him."

"It seems to be okay to shoot children and adults because of your passionate concern for gun ownership. It certainly is okay for your own young men and those of other countries to be killed in wars or police actions. I would assume that even if you believe that an embryo or fetus has an equal value to a child or an adult, an adult death would equal the death of an embryo. But taking it a step further, I can't understand why you would want unwanted children in your society. There is no question that there are more criminals, more disinterested students, and more prison inmates among those children who were not wanted. If nothing else, stopping abortions seems to increase your need for tax money, yet you want to reduce your taxes. Is my logic somehow faulty? Or is there another reason for having unwanted children? Is it so that you will have more hateful killers for your armies?

RESPONSIBILITY

"In our country we are only concerned with liberty. But we have a strong requirement for responsibility. You know the saying 'your freedom ends where my nose starts.' We have all the freedom we want for ourselves but if we interfere with another person's freedom or safety we are curtailed from expressing ourselves. For example we are allowed to take drugs, drugs that would be illegal in your country, but if your drug taking somehow affects others, we stop you. So if a person has a traffic accident because of being under the influence of alcohol or another drug he is severely punished. In his own home or in another place where he does not negatively affect others, he can take all the drugs he wants. But I will get more into both the freedom and the responsibilities that we think are essential to our society as we progress in our discussions.

"We don't have many laws telling people what they can't do. But we do have laws that keep our government running fairly smoothly and that require responsibility from our citizens. As you know we are a big business country, like Singapore, and our responsibility laws protect our customers internationally from being cheated.

"What we are for is liberty and equality of opportunity. What we are against is a leveling of society where those who have underperformed are given things anyway. That's definitely a communistic idea, giving 'to each according to his needs.' I'll go into these in more detail as we move through our day. But suffice to say, the emerging idea of democracy has gone from the simple idea of giving an equal vote to each of the male citizens, as it was in ancient Greece, to an extremely complicated and costly idea of giving to everybody according to their needs. In fact it seems that the idea of democracy is now being equated with a society based on equality. The idea of freedom has been allowed in the economic realm in most countries, but equality has ruled the social realm. And since the neediest require finances to meet their needs, it is those at the high end of the scale who must pay.

"I heard one of your venture capitalists say that 'I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.' I'm assuming he meant that freedom and equality or freedom and the social welfare state are no longer compatible. As I remember it was Peter Theil.

"As I'm sure you can surmise, our nation is the exact opposite of a welfare state. The welfare state is actually a reasonably recent concept of governmental responsibility. If you are not aware of the rise of the welfare state, it was in Europe that it all seemed to start. In Germany it began when Bismarck decided to give pensions to older workers in the 19th century. This was just a few years later than the publication of Karl Marx's book Das Kapital. Eventually in Europe socialized medicine became the rule. Then there was pressure to take in people from other countries who were threatened by their regimes-- thinking that not only people in your society were equal but that people in other societies were equal to you. America followed the Europeans with Social Security during the Great Depression, and then later with Medicare.

"Do you remember the old story about the ant and the grasshopper?"

 -"Ya. The ant worked hard all summer, he built his house and brought in food for the winter. Meanwhile the grasshopper played and had fun all summer. He vacationed all summer long. But when winter comes the ant is comfy and cozy but the grasshopper has no food or place to live so he freezes to death."

" The moral of course, is to be responsible for yourself. But in your socialist equalitarian countries the story is much more likely to end this way. When somebody reports that the grasshopper is shivering and dying in the cold, the news networks do a big story on him. The grasshopper has a press conference where he asks why should some people be warm and cozy while others are freezing to death. People in the Western world send money and food supplies to all the grasshoppers who are freezing. Kermit the Frog guests on Oprah's program and reminds the world that 'it isn't easy being green.' Miss Piggy is interviewed on 'Good Morning America' and reminds the world that 'all we animals are equal.' Demonstrations are televised in front of the ant's house. Politicians respond to the indignity of the situation. They raise the taxes on ants and any other animal that has prepared for the winter by working hard. The ant is fined for not having hired green bugs to build this house. He takes it to court but left-leaning judges find that he was not being democratic. The grasshopper sues the ant in civil court and wins because new laws have made the ant's actions undemocratic and prejudicial. The ant pleads that the new laws violate the ex post facto clause of the Constitution. But the judges rule that the Supreme Court in the 18th century had decided that James Madison's intent, that the clause should apply to civil cases, was not what Madison really meant. The ant loses again. The grasshopper takes over the ant's house and his food supplies. But he doesn't take care of the house, he eats all the food and as the warmth of summer entices him to play in the sunlight, he leaves the house which he had not maintained, and heads for another summer of fun. The ant's now rundown house is taken over by spiders that terrorize the neighborhood that was once a fine middle-ant neighborhood. The ant, deposed from his home, died in the snow that winter. The grasshopper died from a cocaine overdose at a 'rave.' I guess that the moral of the story is that when somebody different from you appears to be leading the good life, It definitely isn't fair and is t-ant-amount to a criminal act and demands a punishment."

EQUALITY OF OPPORTUNITY

 -"But what about equality of opportunity? I thought you were against equality."

"I'm sure you know enough about semantics to realize that using a term alone and using it in a phrase might alter its meaning somewhat. 'Equality before the law' or 'equality of educational opportunity' both use the word 'equality' but have quite different meanings when put into those two phrases. I'm sure we would agree that as desirable as 'equality before the law' may sound, it seldom actually happens. The financial ability of the litigant will affect the quality of the lawyers hired. Then the skills of the lawyers are not equal and the prejudices of the judges will probably sway the decision. We cannot have equality of opportunity in education because teachers and curricula vary. The best we can do is to try to equalize education. You want to have as close as possible an equal starting line.

"In spite of these obstacles equality of opportunity in education is essential, so we must strive for it. But what happens when you have equality of opportunity--people achieve at different levels. This gives us exactly the inequality I have been talking about. And relative to semantics we realize that the meaning of a word can change depending on the speaker or the context.

"Equality of opportunity means that you have an equal starting line. Both the liberals, who want equality throughout life, and conservatives, who recognize our inequality, want equality of opportunity. But like I said, when you have an equal starting line, at the end of the race the racers will be scattered. We recognize this inequality and give everyone the freedom to achieve as high as he or she can. This is diametrically opposed to the equalitarian ideas we have seen in Europe, and to a degree in the U.S. You may start the race with equal opportunity but if you don't finish in a dead heat the liberals want to equalize the participants. They try to equalize people at the finish line.

"Here is an example. People in your countries are told repeatedly that smoking is bad for their health. That's the equal starting line. But some people choose to smoke. Some of them get emphysema, heart attacks or lung cancer. Then socialized medicine, like Medicare, is required to try to save their lives--because they are all equal, according to your societies these people were equal all their lives no matter how many stupid things they have done. Let's take it a step farther. Smokers are much more likely to be lower social class citizens. Because of this, they haven't earned as much money or paid as much in taxes. So the non-smoking people, usually the higher earners and higher taxpayers, have to pay for the smokers.

"The same is true of education. People who have more intellectual abilities or work harder to learn--are more likely to succeed in some field. They started with schooling as equal as possible. Obviously all teachers are not equal and not all parents spend an equal amount of time or an equal quality of time in helping their children learn. Not all parents have tried to enrich the education their children by bringing them to libraries, museums or by traveling. So opportunity is never equal, but we try.

"But in any case, whether starting equally or unequally they finish unequally. In the various academic and vocational fields some will be superior in philosophy, some in physics, some in engineering, some in economics. But they will definitely not be equal. As they live their lives some will be creative, some hard working, some well-educated, some will make good decisions some will make stupid decisions. I'll get into our education system later. I think we need to look at how we have arrived at our national direction first."

 \--"I would like to hear more about your equality of opportunity."

"We try to ensure that an outstanding education is available to all of our young people. As I mentioned, parents pay for the education of their children. Most are educated in our public schools, but private schools are available. As opposed to your country, all teachers in public or private schools must be certified by the state. We have a responsibility to the children that they are getting equivalent educations. In some schools one teacher teaches the same children from the first through the sixth grade. This is how they do it in Finland and have been very successful.

"I might mention here that our only foreign aid goes to increasing equality of opportunity in different countries of the world. You probably know that in sub-Saharan Africa less than one in five girls make to secondary school. Nearly half are married by the time they are 18. One out of seven is married by 15. But girls under 15 are five times more likely to die in childbirth than are women over 20. So the young girls are being doubly endangered-- both their mental abilities and their physical health. As you know, there is much more prejudice against, and subjugation of, girls and women in our world. While it is worse in the Third World countries, it exists in all countries.

"I recently saw an estimate that if the euro zone would merely close the gender gap and allow women into the areas where they were confident, their gross domestic product would rise by 13%. But look at Italy's record. They are 87th in the world in terms of equal employment for women. There are 121st in wage parity, they are 97th in the world in terms of allowing women to take leadership positions. All in all, Italy ranked 74th in the world relative to its treatment of women. Of course it does allow men to hold their 'rightful' places as superior not only to women but to about everybody else in the world.

"Even for the Italian women who work, they spend an additional 21 hours of work in the home. This is more than for any other Western European women. American women average only four hours a week of extra work in the home. Only 45% of Italian women work outside the home compared to 80% of Norwegian women and 72% of the women in UK.

"Even in your country women are showing their superiority. Your college enrollment is 57% female. There are more of them in universities, and more getting graduate degrees. This is also true in northern Europe. Women are less likely to be unemployed. They are marrying later and having fewer children"

  -"Women are the hope of the world. They live longer--and seem to be smarter. I dare say that if women ran the world we would have a whole lot fewer wars."

"I would agree commander. Equality of opportunity has allowed women to achieve what they had not been allowed until fairly recently. But it is not just educational equality of opportunity that holds back countries, just about anything that limits people's freedom is a brake on progress. Just look at Russia. It is a country that wants to be accepted as an equal in the West. In properly rights it ranks 119th in the world, on judicial independence 116th, on the reliability of news services 112th, on professional management 77th. There is definitely a link between the Russian mafia, with its fingers in property pies around the world, and the Russian government. You can't progress in a country fueled by crime. And how can Russia become great when many of its most talented people leave?"

  -"If it weren't for their natural resources their country would be dying."

"But back to equality of opportunity. We don't extend equality of opportunity to affirmative action. I know that recently Chinese were allowed to be classified as blacks in South Africa. This gave them special treatment such as getting business loans more easily. In your country women and ethnic minorities were given preferential treatment for many years through affirmative action laws. Our laws are designed to eliminate ridiculous prejudices and if they have occurred they can be taken to arbitration. But we don't try to somehow equalize things long after any equality of opportunity has been denied.

"But not all rights or wishes fall under the guise of equality of opportunity. If we had any Muslim women wearing the full face-covering veil someone might object. But we have none. If someone wanted minarets by a mosque it might be OK because they are pretty. But if a muezzin mounted it and began calling the faithful to prayers with his chants, I'm afraid there would be lots of objections. And remember our principle of responsibility! When you interfere with another's liberty, like one's liberty to sleep, you've gone too far.

  -"The muezzin chant is rather romantic and colorful about noon, but at 5AM it really irritated me. It was bad enough when it was only his natural voice, but now so many mosques have those hyped up loudspeakers and you are called to prayer with a 500 decibel chant, I find that the sound is more than my tympanic membrane can handle. Heavy metal 'music' affects me the same way. I guess I just like my peace and quiet."

"I agree with you Con, the way that the ideas **of** modern democracy have developed, so that every possible kind of freedom and equality can to be included in the idea, has bastardized a concept that really only means that the people can vote. In our country we laugh at what people are calling their 'rights.' Whatever they seem to want they think is a right. Another source of our merriment is when we see illegal immigrants and low-level workers claim that they are taxpayers when the only tax they pay is a bit of sales tax on their beer."

 -"Well, Tyler what do you think is the best kind of government?"

# **WHAT IS THE BEST GOVERNMENT?**

#

"Well for one thing I would certainly not recommend your American style of government. For one thing, because of your extreme politics, in Washington half of your people want the executive to fail. Winning your political battles is far more important than winning for your country. Then you have the lobbyists advocating not only for the preservation of the existing corporations, but getting them unfair subsidies and tax breaks that make it difficult for newcomers to enter the scene. This is an affront to the equality of opportunity in the business world."

## SOCIETAL POSSIBILITIES

  -"So you think that yours is the best possible type of government. Can you give me some options that you thought about when coming up with your ideas for a government?"

"There are so many options for a society, so it is highly unlikely that everyone will agree on one. You will always have an economic side of a society and a social-political side of a society. Each one has a possibility of behavior along a very long continuum. For example on the economic side you can have a range from totally free laissez-faire capitalism, or should I say 'a free enterprise system,' to a system that is totally communistic--'from each according to his ability to each according to his needs.' Along that range we have socialism, 'from each according to his ability to each according to his work.' That would come closer to the communist end. Further to the right we would have the union versus business possibility with negotiations, strikes, and lock-outs as part of the economic reality.

"On the social-political side, on the far right you could have an absolute monarch or a pope in total charge of the program. On the far left you would have anarchy. Somewhere in the middle we would have equalitarian democratic behavior and further to the right we would have representative government, a republic, where the more important people would be the rulers. They would probably be elected by the people or by power elites like business leaders or military commanders. A number of problems can pop up along these continua. For example we would have ultimate freedom or anarchy versus the constriction of freedom and possibly regression. We might have a feeling of loving humanity versus being uncaring. We can have the political question of whether we should be warlike or peaceful. And naturally we can have liberty, or possibly fascism, on one end and equality or communism on the other. There are so many psychological, political, economic and social possibilities that can be discussed or that may find their way onto one of these continua.

"So we have at least two continua, one economic and one social-political, both of them with the left end based on equality and a right end based on the inequality and superiority of one or a few. In various societies these continua may intersect at different points and give that society the philosophical underpinnings to push it toward a specific reality. Here in our United Colonies the continua intersect on the right side. We believe that people are unequal based on intelligence or work effort or physical abilities. We believe that it is right and just that the more unequal can keep what they make. And the citizens of each generation must start anew to prove their worth. But I'll talk more about that later.

"Other countries, notably those in Scandinavia but also those in the more developed states of the EU, emphasize equality as being the primary constituent of justice. Their taxes are very high and they, at least theoretically, treat their inhabitants equally. Their continua intersect on the left side of the middle."

   -"I have my opinion about liberty being essential. I never really thought about it too much. What philosophical underpinnings does your nation use to come up with its libertarian values?"

"I will try to indicate some of these values and our thinking about them, but tomorrow you will meet with Professor Kelsi Connor. She is the world's authority on the ideas of justice being based on either equality or liberty. We realize that you can't have both completely in one society. One has to be sacrificed for the other either in the economic or the social areas. To the degree that you have one or the other, those continua that I mentioned intersect at quite different spots. We like to talk about freedom and a free society, but depending on the concept of justice that your society has you will tend to find it 'just' if you are on the top, but unjust if you are on the bottom. There is no way that everyone can be happy.

"People like to talk about civil rights or human rights but those rights come from the society in which they live. The United Nations would like to think of us all in the same society. They make their pronouncements about human rights that nations can accept or reject. Most accept them legislatively but ignore them in practice. So the citizens don't have as many rights as they're told they have. I laugh at you Americans criticizing the Chinese government for not allowing more freedom of speech. Certainly freedom of speech has been listed as a human right by the United Nations--but so has the right to a job. China has done a better job than you have in getting people employed and increasing their wages. Based on what your politicians say in America, your people are most concerned about having a job. I daresay that if you take some of your unemployed Americans, and last I heard that was about 9%, and asked them whether they would rather have a job or free speech-- they would choose the job.

"I remember hearing about a group of lawyers from America going to China to try to increase their human rights. I was thinking at the time that if China were to use the American common law system they would have to take about half of their people out of the science universities and put them into law schools. Then they would need jobs for the lawyers, so those who could not be elected to run the government could work as lobbyists to influence the government. And because of their free-speech, lawyers could enact more pro-lawyer laws like they have in the US so that they could sue for medical malpractice, smoking illnesses, and all the other evils that their society might have. But China was already making great strides in eliminating corruption and making their society run smoothly. So they didn't really need your American lawyers!

"But enough about rights, let's talk about politics. Pundits and politicians tell the people what they want to hear. Some will talk about 'liberal.' Some will talk about 'conservative.' But they can't include all social and economic factors in the single term. For example Norway offers very conservative treatment towards ship owners. Their taxes are low. Their state regulation is low. But on the other side of the economic spectrum, the farmers, the government gives a great deal of money to them because they have only about one growing season in a year. So economically the treatment of farmers is quite liberal.

"In the US gun sales and manufacture are given a great deal of freedom, so this is conservative. But teachers, with their unions, are given a great deal of equality. So their economic treatment is quite liberal. On the social side, all of your students are entitled to a free education. Theoretically this starts them equally. But in actuality the rich people send their children to high-level private schools or they live in rich areas where the public schools pay more for teachers and get better teachers. The richer parents are also more likely to be pretty concerned with their children's educational progress and their entrance into the better colleges.

"The result of the reality of parents' wealth on the one hand and the increasing poverty on the other, means that we can't categorize the US as either liberal or conservative economically. In the great recession of 2008 the government bailed out the big banks and industries. This could be seen as the government aiding the economic conservatives. At the same time it extended unemployment compensation to the unemployed at the bottom of the society. This was definitely economically liberal.

"So the economic and social continua, that I mentioned, can intersect at an infinite number of points along the two continua. We might have a society that is economically conservative but socially liberal. Or we might have an intersection that is economically conservative and socially conservative. The other options are being economically liberal and socially liberal or being economically liberal and socially conservative. Let me briefly look at each of these possibilities, realizing that each of my illustrations can be widened or narrowed at any point along the intersection.

"Let me start where we are in the Colonies. We are economically conservative and socially liberal. This is a libertarian viewpoint. Economically you're on your own. It's sink or swim. No one has responsibility for another person's welfare. If a person made the wrong choices in life that person suffers from them. We keep the government minimal and keep the taxes low. If you have a baby you pay, you even pay for your child's education. You have freedom to choose, but you have the responsibility for your choices. Freedom and responsibility go hand in hand.

"The second option is being economically conservative and socially conservative. In this approach you have the freedom to achieve economically but the values of society, commonly religious values, keep the people in line. It may be to a reward of heaven or the pains of hell. It may be the social rewards of recognition versus the social denigration of criticism. The social conservatism might reduce drunkenness and promiscuity, and possibly corruption in business. The costs to government for a legal system and jails is reduced because of the 'ideal' behavior of the people. I remember reading some years ago that your libertarian congressman, Rand Paul, was against abortion while being very economically conservative. This illustrates the point I'm trying to make relative to being a libertarian in an economic sense but conservative in social terms. Your former president George W. Bush was also in this mold. He thought that abstinence education would curb illegitimacy. It didn't. But the scientific facts don't usually change people's philosophical beliefs.

"Another option would be being both economically and socially liberal. Here people would have the freedom to do what they want and society would still take care of them. They can have children without being able to care for them. Society would give them money or will take the children into foster care. The people can become alcoholics or heroin addicts and society will provide for their treatment and care. Everyone is equal so everyone is entitled to be taken care of, even if they don't take care of themselves. You might imagine that some people who are paying most of the bills for those who don't take responsibility for themselves may get a little upset. Recently this has become more true in our world and conservatives have been moving up in the political minds of the people.

"The last of these four options would be the economic liberal but socially conservative approach. In this model the people should behave in a certain way in the society, and if they do this society will take care of them. Here again there is the assumption that people are equal and should be taken care of. But they also are not capable of determining their lives. The smarter or holier people must do that for them. Some totalitarian ideas fit this model. Soviet communism and the Catholic Church are both examples of organizations that require strong commitment to the ideals of those in power while recognizing that those on the bottom of society need to be taken care of.

"These four models illustrate four intersection points along these continua that I mentioned. One question is which is the most just. But another question is who is to decide what justice is? If we leave that up to the people we might very well have 7 billion different ideas of what is just. But like I said, Dr. Connor will take you on the intellectual voyage looking at whether or not we are actually equal. And if we are not actually equal, should we be treated equally? I remember what Milton Friedman wrote 'A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both.'"(3)

   "All right let's get back to political science. What is the best government?"

"I don't think there is any best government for everybody. We humans have so many varied potentials and interests that there is no way that we can all be content with our government. Probably the best proposal, at least the one that I like, was that of Plato in his Republic. The rule by an educated oligarchy, the rule of the best educated thinkers, seems to me to be the best. It seems to me that China, and probably Singapore, come closest to that today with its elites from its one-party or an intelligent Prime Minister doing the ruling. The worst governments seem to be those dictatorships in Africa. There is no concern at all for the people other than to rape them financially. I think that the multiparty approach in the Scandinavian countries is a pretty good approach. But even there you see every few years the swing toward liberalism or toward conservatism. So there seems to be no path that keeps the whole electorate happy. And I'm not sure that keeping the whole electorate happy is necessarily the best government. Possibly the best government is the one that advances the society the fastest economically and educationally. I would have to say that I'm not so excited about your approach to democracy in America either. So many of your legislators are really uneducated and don't seem to be capable of thinking. They seem to be stuck at the level of 10-year-olds.

"For an advanced group of educated people, I think our approach is pretty good in today's world. I certainly don't see any society that is working too hard to hold down the financially elite. Socialistic China certainly has allowed the birth of billionaires. The ever backward Russia seems to cater to the rich criminal elements. India certainly encourages the competent, as does your country. So freedom, at least economic freedom, is certainly a reality in today's governments-- even those that support the equalitarian welfare state.

## ECONOMIC SUCCESS

"At least in today's world, economics seems to rule supreme. The financially successful are looked up to more than any other group. I don't know if riches will always be the jeweled crowns of our societies. Maybe someday intellectual achievement will be looked upon as supreme. Maybe we will go back to the days when our race looked up to warriors as the fittest of rulers--and the heroes to emulate. We might even revert to the days when professed holiness was the highest of callings. But today success is related primarily to accumulating wealth through some special kind of talent.

"We have to be aware of the continual changes in the economic realm. When jobs are no longer needed they need to be eliminated. At the same time we need to look into the future and see where the opportunities for employment will be. For a number of years the opportunities have been in internet technology, robotics, nanotechnology and the environmental fields. These, of course, require high levels of education.

"I remember a number of years ago when the British railroads were running on electricity but were still required to have firemen whose only job was to put coal into the boiler. Of course there was no boiler. Unions had, as usual, held back progress while keeping useless jobs. Then there was the conservative government that moved into power back in about 2010. They found many useless jobs that required elimination. I remember one that paid a person $60,000 a year to encourage people to play musical instruments. Then there was the guy who was paid $25,000 a year in a part-time job where he had to carry the sword in the processions for the Lord Mayor of Newcastle. There have al ways been these highly paid political appointments that drain a government's finances."

 \- "We've had those kinds of political jobs in the state of California for eons. Retired politicians were put on committees that met a few times a year and were paid very high salaries."

 -"But I think our major problem is in keeping employment high. We sure had a worldwide recession about 15 years ago, about 2010. But how do you keep the excess capacity of a producing country to not feel an economic downturn? How can the workers avoid being laid off and the machines idle while prices are dropping and there are few buyers. It appears to me that the world has far too many unskilled or low skilled workers. There is not room on the assembly lines for all of them. So commonly workers are treated very poorly. I think of the Burmese refugees in Thailand packing fish for only a few pennies a day and living in what most of us would consider unlivable conditions. Sweat houses not only exist in third world countries but we find them in our own country.

### ECONOMY AND GLOBALIZATION

"Meanwhile the rich keep getting richer. In the US recently the average worker's pay went up 2% while the average CEO salary rent up 23%.Moreover the average CEO pay for the top 200 firms in the US was $11.4 million a year.(3a)

"Farm subsidies for not growing food or cotton, government subsidies to produce ethanol and to search for more oil, tax breaks for businesses for employment no matter where in the world they employ people. I don't want to appear antibusiness or anti-globalization but there is this moral streak in me that sees injustice and seethes. I know that our government pushed for globalization, thinking we would profit more than anyone. But 'lo and behold' the Chinese and Koreans outsmarted us. The Germans outsmarted us. The Norwegians outsmarted us. Even the Somalian pirates had done better than we had during the recession.

"But I see other social factors that have oozed into our world as we have forgotten our individual wellbeing and joined the pack of treasure hunters seeking our fortunes. As the world becomes more globalized people tend to identify themselves with racial, ethnic, religious or to causes rather than identifying themselves by the political boundaries in which they live. So being Muslim, Catholic, black, Hispanic, Pakistani, Somalian, a Tea Party member, a Greenpeace adherent, a PETA member and so forth become more important than being Americans, Swedes or Spaniards. National identities have been losing ground as more asylum-seekers and manual laborers immigrated into the once 'pure blooded' nations. Is this a better way of framing our world? Certainly we need some kind of identity, but must these identities be so divisive?"

 -"People criticize China because it does not 'democratize' quickly enough. If democratize means free speech no matter how inflammatory, they are right. If it means giving the people a better life quickly, no country has done a better job in this short period of time than China. Of course, for Americans who had been traditionally the major world power, China is a real threat to our national and individual power drives. So it is natural, psychologically, to criticize them in whatever way possible. It is the only way to try to keep our superiority feelings once our actual superiority is crumbling."

 -"The Chinese are becoming even more successful because they are highly educated and don't have the welfare state burden anchoring them economically." (3)

THE TEA PARTY MOVEMENT

 -"True Con, but Tyler I know that your country is pretty far to the right. That scares me. In my country the right-wing lunatics today seem to want states rights, individual freedom and yet a government by a Christian God. But if they ever read their Bibles they would find that Jesus taught that government and religion should be separate and that we should take care of the poor. They don't seem to put the two together."

"Whoever said that people are rational?"

  -"Tyler, I am sure you have heard of Dambisa Moyo from Zambia, with her PhD, she is one of the world's leading economists. She might agree with you. She is very much against giving aid to Africa. She is also against the protectionism that some countries use to keep out African products. Did you know that for every hundred dollars worth of coffee sold at the retail level the Ugandan farmer who raised it gets only 66 cents"

"As a matter of fact she spoke to our people about a year ago. We agree wholeheartedly with her."

# IMMIGRATION AND CITIZENSHIP

 -" Do you allow immigration or are you a closed society?"

"People can come and visit but they can't stay. As you may know all of our transactions from workers pay to purchases are done by a type of debit–credit card. When people come to visit they can purchase a temporary card with a certain amount of monetary value. If they run out of money they can have more added to the card. But when the stay is completed, which is usually a maximum of three months, the card is automatically invalidated. So it would be difficult for somebody to stay illegally when they couldn't be paid anything and they couldn't spend anything.

"Of course people are invited to visit or to work here. Their cards are usable as long as they are in the country legally. Some of these people are invited to stay indefinitely. Some might even become citizens."

 -"But if they have children in your country while they're working here. Are they then citizens?"

"Yours is the only country I know that allows for citizenship because the person's mother happened to be in your country for a day or two, or even an hour or two. Everybody knows that it has been common for Mexican women to cross the border to give birth to their children who then become American citizens. But did you know about the richer Chinese women who are becoming maternity tourists. They visited the States about the time they are to deliver. The child then becomes an American citizen, and since America allows dual citizenship, the child is also Chinese.

"The number of children with at least one illegal Hispanic parent is now 4 million. 73% of all children of illegal immigrants are now US citizens. They occupy 7% of all school places in the elementary and secondary levels of the US. And one third of them live in poverty. So we can assume that their parents are not paying much in taxes to take care of the children they have in school. (4) Your deeply held belief in equality for all has put you in grave financial straits.

"But you in America just see part of the problem. More than half of the world's refugees are in Asia and another quarter in Africa. They invade neighboring countries that may offer them jobs or they try to make it to an equalitarian in country, such as those in Europe."

 -"Do you take refugees such as those whose lives are in danger. It would seem that your emphasis on freedom would require it?"

"Not on your life. Of course if it were a very talented scientist or business person we would probably consider it. But a poor refugee would not be able to support himself here, and we require that people be responsible for themselves. We let those welfare states that believe in equality do all of that rescuing.

"We are not like the U.S. We don't ask for 'your tired, your poor or your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,' if people want to come here they must've shown that they are special. They must have achieved in some area such as business, academics or medicine. We are a society of achievers. If you can show that you have achieved in a socially valuable area, we might give you a work permit to work with us.

"We will let you Americans bring in your illegal immigrants so they can work cheap on your farms, in your building industry and in your hotels and restaurants--then cost you more with their editorial expenses, retirements, educational costs and judicial and prison expenses. Every country who has taken in lower-class people, whether they were workers or asylum-seekers, find that their crime rates go up, the welfare costs go up, and that their assimilation into the society is next to impossible."

 \- "Are you making a blanket statement that all minorities are bad for a welcoming society?"

"Well the evidence is quite clear to that effect. There are some exceptions. Upper-class people who immigrate are more likely to fit in somewhere. But they often are treated unfairly. I have seen medical doctors from India and Pakistan who have to take jobs sweeping the floors or driving the trams in Scandinavia. Prejudices always exist, even if the object of prejudice is actually of a higher social class and is a worthy contributor to the society. Then I would have to say that the Chinese and Japanese immigrants are usually very hard-working and do not cause trouble. They are positive additions to most societies. The problems are with the uneducated immigrants from Latin America, Africa, the Mideast, Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe and other overpopulated areas where education has been scant.

"As you know, people's basic motivations are their self-centered needs. But societies want to preserve their culture and language. Immigrants generally want to preserve their own language, religion and culture. These are often in conflict with their new society. The good people of the welcoming West, steeped in their democratic ideal of equality, will bend over backwards to accommodate their legal and illegal guests. In schools they may require bilingual education. In the voting booth they may print the ballots in more than one language. In their cities they allow the immigrants to band together geographically and ignore their hosts culturally. So we have: Chinatown, Koreatown, Little Italy, and the ghettos and barrios of the Jews, Blacks, and Hispanics.

"The Prime Ministers of Germany, France and United Kingdom have all said that multiculturalism isn't working. The electorates of Finland, Sweden, Norway, Netherlands have all swung to the right largely because of their unhappiness with immigration and its results. In your country the right wing Tea Party has fixing the illegal immigration situation as one of its major objectives. Being nice is now often seen as being stupid. When the prosperous countries are controlling their populations and working to provide jobs for them, why must those countries try to right the mistakes of the overpopulated underdeveloped countries that are not taking responsibility for their own citizens?

"Just look at your own country, killing itself from within by welcoming people with the same skill level that built your country 150 years ago. Chinese built the railroad eastward from Sacramento and the Irish built it westward from Omaha. The progeny of those Chinese and Irishmen have since moved up the educational scales becoming the teachers, engineers and doctors of today. But today you are not building railroads with picks and shovels. It is true that you still need unskilled labor for your farms and slaughterhouses, because your pampered citizens will not do such lowly work. Still that work could be done by temporary workers who would return home after their jobs were done.

"One thing I think you're doing wrong is allowing for multiple languages. Every language that is used as a primary language in the country tends to split the country. While it is laudable for individuals to speak two or more languages, having language divisions within a society weakens the society. Look at Canada with its English-language through most of the country, but French in the Montréal area. You see continual efforts of the French-speaking Canadians to separate from Canada. This is not the healthiest of situations. When you have multiple languages such as you may see in France or Spain, each language tends to bring with it a culture and that culture prefers not to be lost in the majority population. Look how long the Basque separatists have fought in Spain! For how many centuries have the Flemish and French speaking Belgians wanted to separate?

"Multiple religions may be even worse than multiple languages. Look at the problems in Palestine and in your country where it is the evangelical Christian versus everybody else. The official religious position of China is atheistic and look at the problems that Tibetan Buddhism, Roman Catholics, and other Christians have caused. Different philosophies also bring problems, look at China's communism and the philosophy of Falun Gong or even the reactionary American Tea Party and the liberals. Every difference between groups is likely to cause problems, seldom does one group learn from another the ways to be better people.

"Minorities of any sort are likely to cause problems, with the majority often looking down on those who are different because of social class, religion, ethnic variations or cultures.

"In your country is it true that since your Black and Hispanics drop out of school far more often and are imprisoned more often than your Anglos and Asians it is merely a matter of prejudice? If this is true, should you not invest both private and public funds to raise the standards of your underclass, without attempting to slow down their birthrate?

"Do you think that when your fastest-growing population groups are the least educated, that your country will be better off because of it?

"And certainly you would want to be politically correct. Don't ever even hint that all people are not equal to all others and that their feelings will be hurt if they are told that they are not pulling their weight in society.

"Don't ever think of changing your Constitution or any law because you must conserve what you have done in the past whether it works now or not.

"I might mention here that in our country citizenship must be earned. The children of our citizens have a better chance because our education system is so much better and so much longer than in other country. Our immigration is tight, as I said. We have many educated and industrious people from many countries who come to us. Many are accepted with work permits. Most are from China, India and other far Eastern countries. But we have some from your country and from Canada and some from Europe. I have heard of one or two from the Mideast. I'm not sure we have any from Africa or South America. But we probably have.

"Citizenship is earned through being productive. If you do not make use of your work permit effectively, you are invited to emigrate. And of course you can't refuse that invitation! We have an adjacent territory where our own children can be sent if they do not measure up to our standards. They do much of the manufacturing that is planned here in The Colonies.

"Those who are not accepted with work permits can serve in our Armed Forces for 10 years, work on their educations, and get a temporary work permit. If they make it, they can stay. Of course anyone who was invited to be a citizen must sign a contract with the state relative to taxes, overseas investments, and the eventual death tax.

"One of the best ways to prepare for citizenship is an effective education. You Americans have gone from being the best in world being very questionable."

 -"Sounds like you run a very tight ship! Let's get into how you vote."

##  OUR DEMOCRATIC VOTING

##

"We have our president determined by a majority vote, not by the electoral system of the US. Your system made sense in the 1700s, but they refuse to change it because it is easier to win the presidential election by targeting the critical states, not by campaigning for all the people. Your reactionary and anti-democratic approach of not obeying the will of the majority gave you the worst president of your history in 2000 and denied you of Al Gore who probably would have been among your top five presidents. We'll stick with the majority in our voting and let the electorate take the credit or blame for our president's decisions.

"As you know we want a limited government. We also want more direct input into the workings of our society. We have copied some of the ideas that we learned from Singaling (5) such as direct voting on many issues. We elect representatives, like most democratic countries do, but we hold a good deal of power with the people. As you have heard, some countries give everyone one vote but give additional votes for more knowledge and political competence. We do that. Every five years there is a national televised program that gives us questions to answer about our understanding of economic issues, social issues, logic, and whatever appear to be areas of interest for the next five years. One time it might be about immigration, both legal and illegal. Another time it might be about our economic competitors. Still another time it might be about considering more equality or more inequality in our society. Those who want to increase their voting privileges, by adding one to 10 additional votes, over the next five years of elections, answer questions on their computers. A panel of experts in the various disciplines has made up the questions. They have also determined a ranking of the multiple-choice answers given on the television. The higher a person scores on the two hours of test questions, the more votes he or she will be given for the next five-year period.

"Again you see how responsibility fits into our idea of freedom. If a person keeps abreast of the problems of the world and is aware of some of the possible solutions to those problems he has shown more responsibility, so gets more freedom.

"When bills are presented to our representatives they are then sent to two committees to have them evaluated. One committee looks at all of the positives of the proposition. The other group looks at all the negatives of the proposition. They look at the possible costs and advantages or disadvantages of the proposed legislation. These findings are then presented to the citizens via television and Internet. This should make them much more aware of what they are voting for."

 -"That doesn't seem very democratic to me."

"It's at least as democratic as in ancient Athens where only free men were allowed to vote. And it is a system that we are quite content with. Do you know that every few years a thousand American citizens are given the same test that aspiring citizens must pass. 40% of your citizens failed the test. 29% could not name your vice president. 73% could name the major cause of the Civil War. Your failure rate year in and year out seems to be about the same. Do you think that these people are really qualified to vote?"

 -" Let me change the subject. I know you are not a welfare state but on the international rankings I have seen you are not rated among the bottom countries in terms of inequality.

# N O WELFARE STATE

"Right Ray. South Africa is the worst and Brazil is the next worst in terms of having inequalitarian societies. You probably know that in South Africa as blacks took over ownership of many of the mines the working standards of the black employees went down from what it was when there were white owners. Naturally the Scandinavian countries come up at the top of the list. But I think that our emphasis on equality of opportunity keeps us reasonably high on the list. And since our living standards are so high we are not seen as being oppressive."

  "As a businessman I have been very negative to many of the welfare state perks. In California we had a 51-year-old former fire chief who was collecting a pension of $241,000. 3700 retired New York government employees were earning over $100,000 a year in pensions. All this while 47 of the states were running deficits at the end of the recession. California had a $19 billion deficit and New York a $9 billion deficit. The states are about $1 to $3 trillion short of what they have promised in pensions for their state employees."

"So many of your older people have not prepared for retirement, once they reach it and find that their reduced income doesn't support them, they start running up credit card debt. In fact over half had credit card debt when they retired, then on their reduced income they just continued to run it up. Medical and funeral expenses were major factors. (5a) We take no pity on people like this."

 -"There are lots of perks that are nice if you can afford them, like retirement benefits and health care. The question is which are essential for a society. When 10 years ago, in 2015, the world's public debt went up to $48 trillion, the developing nations were only accountable for 1/7th of that figure. Mostly it was the US, Europe and Japan that had run up the debt. There seems to be such an effort to fight inequalities in the West––inequalities of wealth, of age, of education––but there is no attempt to define why equality is either true or good for society. It seems that this fragile ideal has come from the calls of independence from Kings-- particularly in the revolutions of the US and of France. So a number of countries across the world are now transferring cash to their poorest citizens. Brazil has been a major mover in this area. Indonesia has followed suit. Countries like Brazil and Mexico are spending about a half of 1% of their GDP to run such programs. Ethiopia spends only 1.7% for its programs. But the US spends 4.4% of its GDP on welfare and 15% on healthcare. While the EU is spending about 18% of its GDP on its programs."

"Your generous welfare countries had better follow the example of those who are trying to reform.

"Welfare mothers can work in day care, where they can bring their babies. They can work under the supervision of a licensed pre-school teacher who can fire them. They go to high school or college and leave the baby at the day care center. So they work some and study some and hopefully will get off welfare. A couple of these countries have even gone so far as to take the babies away from their mothers and put them up for adoption. After all it is the babies, not the mothers, who should have the major rights.

RESPONSIBILITY FOR OUR OWN LIVES

"The way we look at it, your life is no more important than you make it. If you don't care about your life and do dumb things, like dropping out of school, committing a crime or smoking--why should we care what happens to you?

"One fundamental difference between us and most of the Western countries is that we recognize that death is going to occur and it is not society's duty to prolong every life--or even any life. Our approach to many of the problems of government is that people will die eventually. Everyone born over 150 years ago is dead. Some of us die as embryos, some as fetuses, some during childbirth, some when crossing the street, some in wars, some are shot by friends or enemies, some kill themselves, some die on operating tables. The point is since we're going to die today, tomorrow or sometime in the future, society doesn't have any real control over life and death. If you want to live longer you won't smoke, you won't drive recklessly, you won't participate in life threatening pursuits. If you don't want to live long you have the freedom to leave life whenever you want. You can commit suicide without having to talk to three doctors and a minister. You have the freedom to choose if and when you will die.

"If you want to live fast, die young and have a good-looking corpse, do what you will. If you want to make sure that you are taken care of if you are sick or when you are old and incapacitated just buy the right insurance.

"This solves a lot of problems that you supposed freedom loving people, who deny others their personal freedom, have to contend with. There are so many people in your society who want to keep people alive when they are terminally ill, in a perpetual coma, or have committed crimes such as murder-- and you will spend millions of dollars keeping them alive and in the court system.

"Our citizens know that we have capital punishment possibilities for treason, premeditated murder, human trafficking and rape. You have the freedom to choose your behavior. At least that's our assumption."

 \- "But what about legal insanity? If a person doesn't have the capacity to choose right from wrong why should he or she be punished?"

"Like I said, we are all going to die. If you have an excess of dopamine in the part of your brain that deals with violence, that's too bad. It should've been found out before you embarked on your criminal path. If you had a lesion or a tumor on your brain that makes you act in a criminal manner, it should've been found in our extensive health evaluation facilities. If you had a genetic propensity for violence or against honesty it is not society's problem to cure you. But if you did not avail yourself of these tests, the problem is yours-- not ours. I know that makes all of you equalitarian leaning people upset because you always want to equalize people-- 90-year-olds with metastasized cancer need to be kept alive for another day even if it costs your taxpayers another $20,000. Your serial killers must not be quickly executed but should be given state paid lawyers to pursue appeal after appeal costing you millions.

"If a person dies a day earlier or seven decades earlier, it really doesn't affect the workings of our society. That person could have bought insurance to cover any of these contingencies."

 -" But if you don't respect human life how can you have a solid basis for your society."

"We respect human life probably more than you do. We want to help people to have the best life they can have. But we don't pretend to know what will make that person successful or happy. If he or she chooses to take an expensive vacation in Tahiti or sail around the world rather than buy health insurance, that is that person's choice. The only time we will qualify one's choice is when it can impact upon another person."

 \- "Can you give me an illustration?"

"Well, smoking is an illustration. Smoking in a restaurant where some of the people are not smokers would not be allowed. Another negative for smoking would be if a smoker wanted to have a child. Whether a father or mother smokes, the carbon monoxide can cross the placenta and affect the embryo or fetus. Once a child is born carbon monoxide can get into the mother's milk and might have a negative effect on the child. Then there are the epigenetic factors that might affect the child."

 \- "What is epigenetics."

"Epigenetics is a reasonably new science that looks at how environmental influences can affect the DNA of a person by turning on or off elements of the genes. It doesn't change the DNA, so doesn't change heredity, but it does change how the genes work for one or possibly a few generations. Let me give you some examples relative to pregnancy.

"There are genes in the placenta that are affected by smoking and other environmental influences. This is most likely during the first three months of pregnancy but it can occur at any time during the pregnancy. (6) Smoking is a major problem in the development of cancer. It seems to cause three times more changes to the cancer suppressing gene. (7) Asthma is also far more prevalent among children who were exposed to cigarette smoke during pregnancy

"Epigenetic changes are found in children whose mothers had used acetaminophen (Tylenol) and a number of other substances such as domestic spray substances and the mother's use of antibiotics. Vitamin D deficiency can also be a factor.

"The University of New South Wales replicated a typical American diet for rats. The 43% fat diet forced the rats to put on weight and they developed insulin resistance and glucose intolerance, like type II diabetes. This was expected. What was not expected was that the daughters of the male rats developed the same problems even though they had not eaten the fat diet and their mothers were normally weighted.(8)

"But this isn't a medical lecture, we were talking about political science. If any of you want to find out more about epigenetics I would suggest that you check your Internet. It is pretty current."

 -"I get that feeling that in America we are not as responsible for our own lives as many of us would like to be. I recently saw a survey of a number of countries and when the question was asked about whether the people were satisfied with their standard of living Americans came out 28th on the list. When it came to having adequate food and shelter, however, we were 11th. When it came to how optimistic we were about finding a good job, we were 86th. I just saw that last year over 100,000 people, half of whom were children, slept in homeless shelters in New York City. Is it possible that we are doing something wrong?"

"Our social scientists here have concluded that Americans are too concerned with the 'here and now.' They buy on any whim. Save little. In fact they were about 84th on that list countries you just mentioned in terms of saving. But I did see another survey that showed that among the world's largest countries you are only second behind Germany. Still it seems that most Americans think they are on the top in everything.

"America is trying to protect the past rather than compete in the future. Back to that same survey you just mentioned, you rank 27th in terms of the percentage of workers who have who have completed high school. I don't doubt that this is why America now ranks 10th in the world in prosperity behind: Norway, Denmark, Finland, Australia, New Zealand, Sweden, Canada, Switzerland, and the Netherlands. The US was number one in just 2007."

 -"And our problems start before secondary school. We rank 79th in elementary school enrollment. We have dropped from number one to number 12 in college graduation rates among developed countries. Our infrastructure is ranked 23rd in the world, behind every advanced country. We are 27th in life expectancy and first in obesity. We have the most guns and the highest crime rate among the rich countries. Being afraid to spend money on taxes for education and infrastructure certainly has its effect on employment today."

"Your equalitarian ideas for your government employees' pensions has been a real drag, particularly on your state and local governments. In spite of your equalitarian bent, your recent census showed that 14.3% of Americans are poor and the number is increasing. In just about every area of American business the percentage of workers is falling whether it's in technical, sales, management or the professional areas, the trend is severely downward.

"Businesses can adjust to changes in technology and finance. They can downsize operations, move to other countries or to other areas in the same country, but the workers are limited in their options. They may not be able to move to another area or another country. Their financial obligations, such as a home mortgage, can be too high to afford if their wages are reduced. They may not want to uproot their children. And moving to China or India is out of the question for a carpenter or plumber. But it might be quite possible for a high-level management administrator, scientist or a health professional. So technology does not benefit a worker like it does the corporation.

"Along with the general cost of labor, your private health insurance coverage has gone up 59% largely because you don't have enough competition. If you're going to be an equalitarian country, you really should have had a government option for health insurance. Lobbyists for the health industries have really done a great job for their employers, while your health consumers, like I mentioned. have taken it in the neck. Then of course, like I said, pensions for government workers have increased 135% so your workers who are making less money, must make it up through their taxes. I don't know if you know this but since 1974 American wages have only gone up 19% in constant dollars. But their productivity has gone up 96%. I guess this can be explained by having to compete with lower wage workers in other countries.

"I think that your antiquated, slow-moving, government worked fine in the 19th and 20th centuries. But it is far too cumbersome now. The slowness of your legislative process and the lobbyists' corrupting influences, along with your judicial process are anchors on the nimbleness needed in today's economic world. I suppose that part the problem is that your education process is so poor that most of the people don't understand the real problems. They believe whoever they hear and have no solid evidence to counter it. Of course watching football on Sunday morning television is a lot more fun than watching the news programs that compete for the viewers."

## TAXES

 -"Let me change the subject a bit. As we all know, every government runs on the taxes it collects from its citizens. When the citizens want more than they are willing to tax for-- the government borrows. It sells bonds to whoever will buy them and the future citizens will pay the bills for their parents' wishes--their ancestors who did not want to pay for what they wanted. How do you handle taxation in this libertarian country?"

"Well, there are good taxes and bad taxes. Certainly you need enough money to run the government but you don't want to discourage business and you don't want to discourage earning. For those reasons you want to keep corporate taxes and income taxes low. You also want them to be fair. In your country it is true that the rich pay most of the income taxes. But it is also true that they have huge numbers of deductions. Your deductions for religions and for contributions to them we think are ridiculous.

"Our tax needs are lower because our citizens pay for what they need from their own pocket. If you need to retire at some point, buy retirement insurance or save your money. If you want extra police protection or fire protection, buy home safety and personal safety insurance. I have already mentioned that you are responsible for your own health care and for about 75% of your children's education until they are finished with college. If you want to build a home or a building you must pay the actual cost of permits and inspections. So our needs for taxes are significantly reduced from just about every other country.

"Our economy is about the same size as Switzerland's, about a half a trillion dollars. But they pay about 30% of their GDP in taxes. We pay about 7% of our GDP in taxes. This is less than Singapore's 13% which is one of the lower taxed countries. Compare that with Denmark's at 50%, Germany's at 40% and China's at 17%. So we need about $35 billion in taxes every year.

"So what we spend from our federal budget is salaries for government employees. Most of our federal expenses would parallel what you have at your state and levels such as education and safety services. But our parents pay about three quarters of the expense of education. Our safety services are minimal because there are private companies that provide police and fire service, burglar alarms, and other things that should make you feel secure. So our government is responsible for certain services like police and fire, garbage collection, and such things. While you need about 36% of your GDP to run your country, we get by on about 10%.

"I see that Norway spends about 40% of their GDP to run their government. They have no interest on the national debt. You pay about 30% of your GDP to run your country plus the 6% interest you must pay on what you borrowed. As I remember your interest on the national debt has ranged from 4% to about 14% over the years, depending on the cost of money. But it is now over a quarter of a trillion dollars a year, which is considerable. We would never borrow to run our country.

"Your federal budget spends about 23% on Medicare and Medi-Cal, 20% on Social Security and 20 to 25% on military expenses. We don't have health insurance or Social Security so that takes a big chunk out of what we need to tax for.

"It is obvious to any thinking person that the aging societies in the West are central problem of government. Medical technologies continually being invented or improved, pharmaceuticals cure diseases and lengthen lives, and the medical profession continually increases its knowledge and skills. Since 1960 medical expenses have gone up about 2 ½ times faster than the gross national product. Then when these life- extending improvements are multiplied by the increased number of people who are aging or elderly, you can see the problem. From 2010 to 2030 your Medicare spending will double from 4.2% to 8.4%. At the same time your Medicaid expenses, for your poorer people, will triple. I don't see any of your legislators asking for a 3% increase in Medicare payroll taxes, but of course they did they would probably not be reelected. And I don't remember seeing your legislators queuing up to increase payroll taxes and decrease benefits 20 years ago.

"I don't know how long you can support the world's most expensive military. They get 20% of your taxes. We pay you $500 million a year to protect us. That's a good deal for both of us because we don't want the expense of a large military and you want money to defray your own military costs, and with you protecting us people think twice before considering attacking us. We also have a contract with Eric Prince, who started Blackwater. We pay him $1 million a year as a retainer in case we need him, then we pay all his expenses. You know he has a private militia that works around the world. Right now that are based in the Emirates. Meanwhile our kids are in college or working rather than shooting an AK-47. We don't have to spend money buying weapons from you, Israel, Russia and China. With your unemployment problems you need military jobs available for the otherwise unemployable.

OUR TAXES

"Since our government is limited, our tax needs are much less than yours. We have a flat income tax on a person's gross earnings of 2%. We have don't any deductions. We have a flat corporate tax of 1% of the gross earnings. Again, there are no deductions. We have a 3% value-added tax on all goods and services, including food. We have no excise taxes, personal wealth taxes, import duties or any other the other taxes you might find in other countries. One of our big sources of taxation is the nearly hundred percent tax on one's holdings at death. Let me go into a little more detail on each of these.

"Our salaries, dividends, stock earnings and other types of income amount to about $300 billion so our 2% income tax brings in about $6 billion. Our 1% corporation tax brings in about $2 billion because many foreign corporations have based themselves here because of our low tax rate. Our value-added tax of 3% brings in between $3 and $4 billion. We have become a Mecca for shoppers around the world because our 3% value added tax is so much less than is found in many countries. Most of your European countries are charging 20 to 25% for VAT. Additionally we have developed some outstanding vacation resorts. I'll talk about some of them later. So when shoppers come they use our hotels, our airports, our resorts, our restaurants, et cetera.

"Let me talk about our income tax. Since we have no deductions allowable, having more children or being married does not give you a deduction. There are no deductions for home interest or any other interest expenses. There are no deductions for charity. In your country your religious ministers get big tax breaks, for example if their home is part of their salary it is not taxed under your tax codes. So you have a source of income untaxed. This is often abused, as are so many of your other allowable deductions.

"As soon as you are paid, that 1% tax goes directly to the government. Penalties for avoiding the payment of taxes by employers is very strict. You probably know that many merchants collect as much in cash as possible so there is no paper trail to indicate how much money they actually made. But since our tax is only 1% there is not a lot of incentive to try to cheat.

"Corporate tax rates across the world are generally in the 20 to 40% range but they allow so many deductions for research and other expenses that the amount paid may be quite low. In fact last year according to the OECD, the **Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development Greece didn't get any effective money from their corporate tax** rate of 24%. In the U.S. 28% is the average rate but the American government got less than 3% of its total taxes from that rate. In fact many of the major companies, such as General Electric, Exxon Mobil, and Chevron paid no federal corporation income taxes to the US in some recent years. That doesn't mean they didn't spend money avoiding them in fact Chevron paid about a half a million a year in campaign contributions to legislators and about $9 million a year in lobbying expenses to keep their taxes low. During this time they got over two and half billion dollars worth of government contracts. Last year alone they made $10 billion in profits and got a $19 million tax refund. This is typical of big corporations in your country."

 -"The giant companies spend a lot of money on campaign contributions and lobbying to get their taxes low, and their subsidies and government contracts high, while their profits are maximized. The last I looked at government reports, such as SEC filings, I found that the big guys were getting away with murder. For example, Exxon in the last 10 years has spent $5.7 million on campaign contributions, $138 million on lobbying and as a result got government contracts of $6.8 billion. The total profits last year were $19 billion and they paid no U.S. income taxes but got a $156 million tax rebate. Looking at banks I saw that Bank of America spent a little over $1 million a year in campaign contributions and $2 ½ million a year in lobbying. In the bailout funds during the recession it was given $20 billion and another $25 billion to buy Merrill Lynch. It made $4.4 billion last year and had a tax refund of $1.9 billion. Citigroup is another bank. It pays no income taxes. It contributes about a half million dollars a year in campaign contributions and six million in lobbying expenses. It got $45 billion in bailout funds during the recession and hundreds of billions in loan guarantees. Last year it had $4 billion in profit and paid no income tax. Goldman Sachs, the huge investment group, did pay $1.1 million in income tax on its profit of $2.3 billion. That's about five dollars for every $10,000 profit. It spends about $2 million a year in campaign contributions and another 2 million in lobbying expenses. In spite of the fact that it was one of the major causes of the housing bubble bursting in 2008, it received billions of dollars in bailout funds. The fact that two of its former executives, Henry Paulson and Robert Rubin, were Secretaries of the Treasury at different times probably didn't give Goldman Sachs any breaks!

"But oil companies and banks are not the only recipients of tax breaks. Boeing gets about $17 billion a year in government contracts for its $1 million in campaign contributions and $11 million in lobbying expenses. It paid no income taxes last year but got a tax refund of $124 million. But most of the big companies are in the same boat. Whether it is Verizon, Federal Express or Carnival Cruise Lines-- they all feed at the public trough.

"But we small business owners didn't get all those breaks so the government actually gets about 3% of its tax revenues from corporations. While the top tax rate in America for corporations is 35%, which is the second highest in the world, the average corporation seems to pay about 28% of its profits in taxes. That 3% tax income from corporations is about same internationally where governments get between zero and 4% of their operating budgets from corporate taxes. Of course you must look at the good side of corporations. They employ people. This keeps the citizens happy and gets the government personal income tax money."

 -" I think you guys might be painting a picture that's a little more bleak than it is in reality. For example General Electric pays a large number of taxes throughout the world and has traditionally paid some taxes to the states. Also in the United States nearly all states have some corporate taxes, so most businesses are paying something. The question is what is a fair tax for corporations. When you have a country like Ireland which has a rate much lower than Japan's, it will get more corporations doing business in Ireland. Is this fair internationally? Then, should we give tax breaks for research expenses and other positive things or should we eliminate all the breaks and assume that any corporation that wants to succeed will do the necessary research to make that happen? It does seem to me, without studying all the issues, that the flat tax that they have here makes sense, even though it will put a lot of accountants and tax collectors out of business!

"It does gall me that companies can owe negative taxes because they lost so much money. It seems that if the company is losing money it shouldn't be in business. Or maybe they should fire their leadership. But if they sold nothing during the year why should they get tax credits or deductions for the next years?"

 -"I remember taking an economics class about 25 years ago and seeing how few corporations paid meaningful taxes. While the maximum tax rate was 35%, we looked at the 275 Fortune 500 companies that make profits every year from 2001 2003. For these companies the average tax paid was 17%, but it varied from minus 60% for Pepco, the Washington DC utility, to 34.5% for the retail pharmacy company CVS. About a third of these 275 companies that had earned money every year paid no corporate income taxes in at least one of those years. 28 of these high earning companies paid no federal corporation tax in any of the three years Because according to the tax laws actually lost money. 46 companies paid no tax in 2003 even though their pretax profits for the year were over $42 billion. In fact they received tax rebates of about 5 ½ billion dollars. Then when the law changed making it easier to carry back excess tax losses the government had them $63 billion. I know that today corporations are paying the lowest levels taxes since World War II.

"I'm not an economist so I don't know if we should not tax corporations and have more international corporations coming to our country employing our people or whether we should tax them, and if so it should be high taxes or local tax? I just know about if we're going to tax them we are doing it all wrong. I think Tyler's approach of a flat tax on gross earnings makes a whole lot of sense."

 -" There are so many ways to beat the tax if you have a creative accountant. Accelerated depreciation is one. You depreciate your assets. I wonder if all those pro-sports fans realize that their favorite players are being depreciated by their owners. Those high salaries don't cost the club owners do nearly as much as they do the government and the other taxpayers. So those fans on the sofa with their beer and chips are paying more than they think to watch their favorite teams. Then there are the stock options for high level executives. If they do option to buy shares in the company at $10 and they exercise the option when it gets to $20, that loss is deducted by the company, just as it would a salary.

"Of course there are tax credits which are actually money in the pocket because they are deducted dollar for dollar from any tax owed. The government has put lots of tax credits into the laws so investments in affordable housing, alternative energy and such are much better than deductions. Then money can be hidden in offshore areas like Bermuda and the Caymans. The results of all these tax deductions, tax credits and creative accounting is that US corporations with the second highest tax rates in the world actually only amount to about 2.2% of the GDP but the average corporate tax amount collected in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development was 3.4%. So while the tax rate was high, the effective taxes collected was rather low.

 - "What about the long-term capital gains taxes where you pay much less in taxes if you have held a stock for over a year. The capital gains taxes are only 15% compared to the top income tax rate of 35%. Why should people pay less in taxes from what they earned on an investment than on income that they actually physically worked for? That is just another break for the rich people. Another tax break that really irritates me is the amount that the federal government, as well as the state and local governments, give to religions.

"I tried once to find out what the loss to the federal government was from tax breaks associated with religions-- like parsonage allowances, where a minister gets part of his salary in housing but does not have to pay tax on the value of the housing. Then there are the deductions for charity that people give to churches. There must be billions of dollars lost to the government which could have helped reduce our national debt. Then there was the Supreme Court decision that we talked about a while ago that gave tax credits to people who paid for religious school tuition.

"I did see a few things that indicate the cost of religion's tax exemptions. In Los Angeles County the value of religious property is placed at just under $40 billion. At a 1% property tax rate that would yield $400 million. Then to this you would add whatever bond interest the voters had determined. The religions do not pay any part of this. This amounts to about a 10% loss in the county's property tax income. Another kind of religious tax break was found in Florida where sales tax was not charged for religious items. This costs the state about $10 million. Naturally people who are nonreligious or non-churchgoing are paying for this. And the people in small congregations are paying for the expensive Catholic, Morman, Jewish and Protestant mega-churches."

"You give tax breaks to so many interest groups that your tax income is nowhere near what it could be. Tax breaks to churches cost you billions. Tax deductions on home mortgages are over $300 billion which costs the government about $77 billion in lost taxes. The deductions on property taxes costs the government another $20 billion. And the major beneficiaries are your rich people. The people with bigger houses or two houses are the ones that save the most money. Poor people with their smaller homes save much less in terms of total dollars. In Canada and the UK they don't have deductions for home mortgage interest but that have the same percentage of homeowners, so it seems that the deductions don't really increase homeownership. Another advantage of doing it the way we do, by having a simple 1% tax on all income, it reduces much of the cost of collecting taxes, which for your country is in excess of $13 billion a year to collect your 2.7 trillion dollars. Then another $250 billion is spent on preparing taxes and avoiding them.

"Then this collection process brings in about $2.7 trillion in total taxes. Half of that is in personal income taxes. Then there is your corporate income tax that takes in about $400 billion, your excise taxes of about $53 billion, your estate taxes of $25 billion and your gift taxes of $2.4 billion dollars. On top of that there is your $850 billion in employment taxes for Social Security and Medicare.

"But heck, half of your households do not pay income taxes. And I saw in your IRS statistics that your 400 people with the highest adjusted gross incomes, nearly $350 million a year, had an effective federal tax rate of only 17%. That was down from 26% less than 10 years ago. Even your average taxpayer pays less than 10% on their taxable income. You lose more than $1 trillion in your tax breaks for individuals. That amounts to about $8000 per taxpayer.

"Just look at the amount of your deductions in addition to your mortgage and property tax credits, there is: $54 billion for the per child tax credit; $40 billion in deducting state and local taxes; $35 billion in religious and charitable deductions; and $24 billion was deducted because people didn't have to pay taxes on some of their retirement contributions."

 -"In a democracy people can vote to tax the rich more, but the rich then will vote with their feet and leave the state or the nation. It reminds me of a story.

"Some years ago ten men went to a bar to buy some beer and the bill for all ten came to $100. If they paid their bill the way we pay, it would go something like this:

"The first four men (the poorest) would pay nothing.  
The fifth would pay $1.  
The sixth would pay $3.  
The seventh would pay $7.  
The eighth would pay $12.  
The ninth would pay $18.  
The tenth man (the richest) would pay $59.  
So, that's what they decided to do.

"The ten men drank in the bar every day and seemed quite happy with the arrangement, until one day, the owner threw them a curve. 'Since you are all such good customers,' he said, 'I'm going to reduce the cost of your daily beer by $20.' Drinks for the ten now cost just $80.

"The group still wanted to pay their bill the way we pay our taxes so the first four men were unaffected. They would still drink for free. But what about the other six men - the paying customers? How could they divide the $20 windfall so that everyone would get his 'fair share?' They realized that $20 divided by six is $3.33. But if they subtracted that from everybody's share, then the fifth man and the sixth man would each end up being paid to drink his beer. So, the bar owner suggested that it would be fair to reduce each man's bill by roughly the same amount, and he proceeded to work out the amounts each should pay. And so:

The fifth man, like the first four, now paid nothing—a 100% savings.  
The sixth now paid $2 instead of $3--a 33%savings.  
The seventh now pay $5 instead of $7—a 28%savings.  
The eighth now paid $9 instead of $12—a 25% savings.  
The ninth now paid $14 instead of $18-- 22% savings.  
The tenth now paid $49 instead of $59-- 16% savings.

Each of the six was better off than before. And the first four continued to drink for free. But once outside the restaurant, the men began to compare their savings.

'I only got a dollar out of the $20,' said the sixth man. He pointed to the tenth man, 'but he got $10!'

'Yeah, that's right,' exclaimed the fifth man. 'I only saved a dollar, too. It's unfair that he got ten times more than I got!'

'That's true!' shouted the seventh man. 'Why should he get $10 back when I got only two? The wealthy get all the breaks!'

'Wait a minute,' yelled the first four men in unison. 'We didn't get anything at all. The system exploits the poor!'

The nine men surrounded the tenth and beat him up.

The next night the tenth man didn't show up for drinks, so the nine sat down and had beers without him. But when it came time to pay the bill, they discovered something important. They didn't have enough money between all of them for even half of the bill!

"The moral of the story is that the people pay the most taxes will get the most benefit from a tax reduction. If they are taxed too much they may just leave and move to another country. Or maybe they will put all or most of their businesses in the country where the taxes on the wages are lower. So who then gains from taxing the rich more than they can bare?"

"That's my point exactly. The tax rates will be the same but the amount collected may vary. Of course our tax needs are a lot less than yours. You Americans have a tax take for all of your government levels of around 26%. That's only about half as much as Denmark's. China's is only about 13%. Ours is about 7%. Obviously having a welfare state or a large army is going to make your taxation needs higher.

"I suppose you know that your military spending is about $700 billion a year--about six times higher than China's and 12 times higher than France or the UK. It is almost 5% of your gross domestic product. That's more than twice China's percent. But it is not quite as high as Israel's or Saudi Arabia's. I guess you think that the one with the biggest guns will win the fight. But many of us think that the one with the biggest national debt will eventually lose the war.

 -"It seems like you may have something there. Something that really irritates me is people calling themselves 'taxpayers' and wanting their rights. Because they pay a little sales tax does not mean that they are paying their fair share! If you have three children in school, are driving two cars on the state's roads, and are using government services, are you paying $30,000 or so a year? Illegal immigrants may pay sales taxes on their nonfood purchases, but do they pay significant income taxes? It seems that citizens or noncitizens who pay the least are the ones that want the most 'rights.'

"If it is true that we are the government. If we want something we must pay for it. Ambassadors, an army, the latest weapons, social security, health care, roads, schools, electricity, farming subsidies, a reduction of illegal workers, police, prisons, fire fighters, regulation of securities and banks, bank deposit insurance, and the list goes on and on.

"Just look at the married people or the people in domestic partnerships and their children, whether homosexuals or heterosexuals, . When they are allowed to share pension, health and other 'rights' they must be paid for. It the wage earner works in the public sector then our taxes pay for it, if he or she works in the private sector the costs are reflected in the price of the products. In either case such insurance costs to the employer are tax-free to the individual and they are actually paid for by credits from the federal government. China doesn't grant such rights, so their products cost less. It is just another small factor in their lower production costs.

"We seem to always be looking for a free ride in spite of the cost to the government. The Bush tax cuts were a major factor in the increased deficit of the country. The tax cuts added deficits of $230 billion a year."

"Your fairy tale view of taxation in the U.S. has put you in a Grimm state, or should I say 'grim' with a small 'g.' Look at what happened during the recession that started in 2008. States' outlays in health went up but their income went down. Home values went down so the property taxes were reduced. Sales taxes dropped 1%, personal income tax dropped almost 3% and corporate taxes by almost 6%. You definitely hadn't planned for a rainy day. This, along with the traditional spending brought many states near bankruptcy. States cannot run a deficit like your federal government can. They must be funded by taxes or bond issues––which taxes your future citizens.

"Again you place your bet on the good fairy. You people in the US spend too much time trying to find tax sources that don't affect you. And they usually don't yield much money. For example your people on the left want to tax the rich more. Even Bill Gates and Warren Buffett say they should pay more taxes. A significant increase in taxes on the rich would yield about $40 billion, but that amounts to only 0.3% of your $14 trillion national debt. Your President Obama appointed a high-level committee to look at how to handle the debt. But the obvious necessary cuts in your Medicare and Social Security were objected to by both parties and the cuts in the military budget rejected by all who wanted to see America remain as the world's major military power. Naturally tax increases are out of the question for politicians in America if they want to be reelected."

 -"As long ago as 2011 Social Security was paying out almost $40 billion more than it took in that year. (9) Now in 2025 it is paying out over $120 billion more than it takes in. It has been a real Ponzi scheme, assuming that more members at the bottom will pay those who reach the top and retire. Supposedly there is a $2.6 trillion dollar trust fund, but of course there isn't. It is merely IOUs from the federal government that has been using the Social Security money to fund other projects."

"I laugh when I hear your conservatives railing against communism and socialism when you should know that the Social Security program is a combination or socialism and communism and your Medicare program is definitely communistic.

"Social Security, the military budget, and Medicare-Medicaid each account for about 20% of your federal budget. Then you have about 14% of the federal budget, or $482 billion that is in areas that benefit families facing hardships. Then you have another 6 to 7% for federal pensions and benefits. Add to that 11% for your interest on the national debt, and you have over 60% of your national budget in socialistic and communistic programs for your citizens and the interest on the money you had to borrow to pay for them."

 -"That's true Tyler. For the sake of argument. let's look at the costs and benefits of Social Security and Medicare. Let's start by looking at the average of two workers, one who ended up with a salary of $25,000 year and the other one a salary of $65,000 year. Retirement benefits are paid based on one's recent high salary. For the sake of argument we will assume that these two people made the same income throughout their 45 year working lives. But actually their initial salaries were probably less than 10% of their ending salaries. Of course there would have been interest compounded on their lower salaries throughout their working lives, but it would still be far below the following estimates.

Life expectancy at birth is 78. But each year that you live increases your chances of living longer. So if we use the estimate at birth we would expect a 66-year-old to live only 12 more years, however as we age our life expectancy keeps increasing so the average life expectancy at 66 is actually 17.5 years. For white males it is 15.9, for black males is 14, and women generally have 18.7 more years to live after age 66. So when someone has reached 66 the average person will live to be 83.5 years.

A worker earning $25,000 a year would have contributions to Social Security from himself and his employer of $3100 a year or a total of $140,000 from his 45 year working career. His $860 monthly pension, $10,320 a year, is 41% of his ending pay. His contributions would pay for 13.5 years assuming our inflated contribution estimates. So for a white male the government would have to borrow to pay for his last four years-- about $41,000. For a black male the government will have to borrow about $5000 to pay for his last six months. For women the government will have to borrow over $60,000 to pay for their last six years."

 -"You are very generous in your calculations. since his average income was probably little more than half of the $25,000 you suggested, in actuality his contributions probably would've been less than $75,000 so they would have paid for a little over seven years of retirement pension. So the government would have to come up with over $100,000 if he lived out his expected 13 and a half years more of retirement."

 -"You're right, Lee. I was just trying to make it simple. The government is on the hook for lots of dollars for the average Social Security retiree. Now let's take the person who earned $65,000 a year or 45 years, he and his employer would have put in $363,000. His pension would be about $1609 which would last about 18 years. His pension would only be about 30% of his top wage, or $19,300 a year. The government would earn a little on men and lose a little on women. Of course since the above estimate on contributions is far in excess of what is really contributed, the government loses on this level also.

"What about Medicare? The employer and employee contributed about 2.90%. For the person earning $25,000 a year this would be a total of about $32,600. For the person who earned 65,000 a year for 45 years it would be about 85,000 in total contributions. According to the Kaiser Foundation the average retiree spends about $12,000 a year on medical expenses and about half of that comes from Medicare. So the person who earned $25,000 a year would have contributed enough to pay for five years of Medicare, so for men the government will have to borrow about $6000 for 11 years, or $66,000 to pay for their remaining Medicare expenses. For women it will have to borrow about $82,000.

"For the people earning $65,000 a year for 45 years they would have contributed $56,500 which would pay for about 9 1/2 years of Medicare. So the government will have to borrow about $39,000 for white males and about $55,000 for women.

"I guess the question is whether these are entitlements covered by borrowing from China or whether they should be insurance benefits that you must pay for!"

 \- "But I saw where the director of the U.S. Office of Budget Management said that it was not a problem for Social Security, the problem was in other parts of the budget. (9a) And I guess he is right, if we took in the same amount of taxes and only paid out Social Security and nothing else that's in the budget, there would be no problem!"

"David Cameron, when Prime Minister of England, made his cuts in welfare saying 'never again will work be the wrong financial choice.' Further he said 'the system has created a benefit culture. It just doesn't just allow people to act irresponsibly, but often actively encourages them to do so. A working welfare system should drive growth.' That of course is something like what we are saying, but we say it the whole lot stronger. I have to agree with him though when he said 'that the collective culture of responsibility has in many ways been lost.'

"Then he really got tough, saying that 'For those people who refuse to play ball, there will be increasingly severe sanctions.' And 'Anyone who repeatedly refuses to take up a job offer face losing their benefits for as long as three years.'"

 "I hate to disagree with you Tyler, but I don't see enough equality in our country. It seems to me that the rich people and the corporations have pushed the common people to the bottom. People are getting poorer. A few at the top are getting richer. Our tax codes keep giving the people on top more ways to evade taxes. Lobbyists seem to control Congress."

"Lee, if 'pro' is the opposite of 'con', then what is opposite of progress?

"You are certainly right about the lobbyists. When I started following the politics in your country just before the turn of the century, your special interests had spent a half billion dollars on lobbyists. 10 years later it was up to 3 ½ billion. I would guess by now it is over 10 billion. But this is what your American freedom is about."

 -"Banks, other financial institutions like insurance, and real estate are the biggest spenders on lobbying--spending almost a half billion dollars a year. Pharmaceuticals and the health industries are next with about a quarter of a billion dollars a year spent on lobbying. Electric utilities spend almost $200 million and business interests about $ as170 million, then comes oil with only about $150 million a year to get its billions in tax breaks and subsidies.(9b)"

 -"But the people keep getting screwed by the rich and their corporations. I think of the health care bill that President Obama wanted to get through. There was no comparison to the amount of money spent by consumer groups and the money spent by the healthcare industry and the doctors. As a result what would have forced the private healthcare people to deliver cheaper services was eliminated from the bill and healthcare costs immediately increased. Our country was already paying more for health care than any other country but was getting less in return. Big business won again."

"On the other hand, when you have recessions more people remain out of work, government aid increases, more people get Medicaid and more go on food stamps. And in spite of your laws that are supposed to deny welfare benefits to single mothers after they have had one child, and to married mothers after they've had two--multiple babies keep being popped out of your young women and society often has to pick up the bill, either by increasing aid to the mother or by paying foster parents to take care of the children. You see this is your ridiculous idea about equality. Every person, no matter how irrational and unconcerned they are about having others pay for their decisions, expects, and seems to get, money from the government.

Lee, I know you are a lawyer so you must be familiar with that early Supreme Court case McCullouch v. Maryland.(9c) You remember that Chief Justice John Marshall, who was among your founding fathers, ruled that the Constitution tells you what the government cannot do but it doesn't say what your government can do. So when your government creates banks, requires health insurance, issues food stamps or creates an income tax--it is within its rights. But the establishment of programs since the days of Franklin Roosevelt had tended to be primarily towards the left and equality. Prior to Roosevelt the government tended to lean far to the right. Since Roosevelt it was primarily Ronald Reagan and the Bushes that pulled it rightward."

 -"As you know, I'm quite happy with the movement to the left, towards equality. But we keep getting these far right people who don't understand the Constitution. The Tea Party movement is the biggest but there are all these fringe militias that are anti-income tax or anti-something that they think interferes with their freedom. They seem to think that the Constitution means only what they think it means. They remind me of the French where the principles of governing are pretty well laid out in their Civil Code. But in America we have a more fluid interpretation of the Constitution and of our laws. The people who wrote the Constitution were among the smartest that ever walked our land. They designed a governing document which could be flexible. Although I would have to admit that some of our court decisions have undone some pretty solid Constitutional principles. I know I have mentioned to the others how they completely eliminated the civil ex post facto constitutional provision.

"You couldn't have a nation today run by the states. Even in the 18th Century the Articles of Confederation were a failure But Tyler, you had mentioned a different type of taxation that you seem to be happy with. What about it?"

"Our big taxing difference is in our 'end of life tax' which you call an estate tax. In this tax all that a person has accumulated in terms of business value and personal property, like a home, is returned to the state when he or she dies. If you are married, this tax does not kick in until your spouse also dies. This is true even if the spouse has remarried, but it doesn't carry over to that new spouse.

"In your country, a number of years ago you got about 6/10 of one percent of your total taxes with an estate tax. Now you get about a quarter of one percent. With a $5 million deductible for a single person or $10 million for a married couple and with your charitable deductions, you lose a lot of potential tax money. Then your highest tax rate on this inheritance tax is about 35%.

"Here in The United Colonies this is our major tax. A person can deduct 5% of whatever the value of his or her estate is up to $10 million. So the maximum is $500,000 if your estate is worth $10 million. And no person or group can get more than 1%. The one exception is that your estate will pay the education expenses of your children through the university level if you and your wife both die before your children have finished their education. Once their education is completed our 'end of life tax' rules apply.

"The people who have left large estates from their lifelong work are recognized in our Citizen Hero Hall. A person who has contributed over $10 million in this 'end-of-life tax' is awarded the Citizen plaque. For those who have contributed $50 million, they are awarded the Gold Citizen status and a marble bench in our museum is inscribed with their name. If their contribution was $100 million, a Platinum Citizen level, a room is added to our museum in their name. If their end-of-life contribution was $500 million, a Diamond level citizen, a school or university building will being named after them. If their contribution was over $1 billion, they are enshrined as a 'Founder of the Country' and a statue will be erected in the capitol and an important public building will be named after them."

 \- "But if the person made the money, why can't he or she pass it on to their children. It doesn't seem fair."

"Our reason for this is that since our taxes are so low during life, it allows the citizen to earn much more money they can in any other country, then spend and enjoy the money they earned, the taxes need to be paid after death. A second reason is that we expect every person to make his own way. Living the good life on somebody else's earnings doesn't fit into our national philosophy. Every person starts anew with approximately the same equality of opportunity. It is true that some children will have up to a $100,000 inheritance and others will not, but all children should have been able to enjoy as much education as they needed and wanted because the parent had the responsibility to pay for all of a child's education. And as I said, if the child has not completed his or her education when the parents die, the necessary expenses are taken from the parents' property when they die. This comes before any other inheritances."

"In your country last year there were only 56,000 tax returns dealing with the estate tax. Even so it brought in 24.5 billion dollars. But that was only about 1% of your total tax income. In our country everyone has some estate tax due. You just can't go through life without acquiring property or money. So in our country our 'end of life' tax provides almost 70% of our total taxes.

"In comparison in America you get about 50% of your national budget from personal income tax and about 15% from your corporate income tax then borrow whatever else you need to fill in your budget. Last I saw you had to borrow $1.3 trillion for the year because your expenses exceeded your income.

### ACCUMULATED INCOME

"Let me show you how we go about estimating our tax income.

"The total wealth of the world is estimated to be $125 trillion. The annual gross product of the world is about $30 trillion. If we use these estimates as the basis for determining the eventual tax income from our citizens, we could assume that our accumulated wealth is four times our GDP or about $2 trillion. This should give our average citizen an accumulated wealth of about $250,000. Deducting 5% for the inheritances, we come up with about $240,000. Our population is about the same as Switzerland's, 8 million people. Assuming that life expectancy is 80 years we will have about 100,000 deaths a year. With an average of $240,000 in 'end-of-life tax' we will have about 24 billion dollars a year in tax revenue from this tax. This is just about two thirds of our total tax needs.

"In your country you seem to believe you can take your estate with you when you die in spite of the common truism that 'you can't it with you. Here in The Colonies it is our most popular tax. We have a national philosophy that we should accomplish as much is possible before we die, enjoy the fruits of our labors, pay as little as possible for government services, buy what we think we need for our own lives rather than being forced to pay for other people's needs. We also believe strongly that all people should start life evenly then see how far they can go.

"We emphasize 'the present' in our national philosophy. By 'the present' we mean the life of the person. It reminds me of a saying I heard from Jiri Kylian, the famous choreographer. He said that 'Yesterday is history. Tomorrow a mystery. But today is a gift, that's why they call it 'the present.' So for each of us our own life is 'the present,' and everyone is responsible for their own 'present.'

"I know that you people want to keep your money into the grave. I think you are like the old Egyptian pharaohs who wanted to be buried with all their possessions because they thought they got to keep them when they arrived on the other side of the River Styx. But did you know that if you had a tax like our 'end of life' tax on your baby boomers you could just about wipe out your national debt?

"In your country the amount of inheritance that your baby boomer population will inherit is about $11.6 trillion, about $64,000 per person. You can see that if all of those inheritances were applied to your national debt it would just about wipe it out.

"Probably most of your baby boomers will require end-of-life care paid for by Medicare. So you borrow to pay for what they could pay for themselves. In the UK the government now requires that people pay for their elder care until their money runs out then the government will step in and pay.

"Contrary to public opinion, your older people in the US are not necessarily impoverished. (10d) In 1959 your older people had the highest poverty rate of all age groups, with 35% being impoverished. Children were the second-highest group with 27% impoverished. By 2007 10% of older people are impoverished compared to 18% of children. The median net worth of households of married people over 65 was $385,000. For single people over 65 it was $152,000. So you see that the government doesn't have to pay for all of the end-of-life medical costs. As we have said, our longer lives are creating financial problems for you equalitarian welfare states.

"In 1930 the average life expectancy was 59.2 years at birth. If you lived to be 65 you should have had a life expectancy of 12.2 years more. Today, because of the increased lifespan, your life expectancy is 78 years at birth and if you live to be 65 you should expect another 18.5 years.

"I just don't think your country is acting in a financially prudent way. But I have seen when somebody suggests a raise in estate taxes, that the gargoyles appear on your capitol's terraces ready to fight the government ghouls who attempt to prey on the dead."

 -"Don't you find that many rich people will hide their money in offshore accounts? It seems that the selfishness you preach, would allow such practices. Another thing, can your university graduates go to other countries after college or must they stay for a while and pay off their debts?"

"Everyone who wants to work in our country signs a contract with the government relative to our taxation system, it spells out what is expected, and what is not allowed. Hiding money abroad is definitely not allowed. It is actually quite easy to see if this is happened. In fact most of the previous tax havens have been forced to open their books to all. But we have a national pride in our ideas of freedom and responsibility along with the necessity of having equality of opportunity. We do have laws to protect us from such fraudulent practices and we have international banking agreements that would make it difficult to hide money. You might also remember the rewards of prestige given to those who have contributed their society after their death. These people will always be remembered. They are essential to our history.

"To answer your other question. When a person finishes education here there is always the option to go to another country to do business and to pay their taxes. But most people would like to enjoy the fruits of their labors while they are living, so our approach is much more appetizing to most people. Most of our citizens realize that they have a responsibility to the state that accompanies the freedom and the equality of opportunity that they have been given."

"We had talked about the power drive in people. Here they are challenged. They start even, then they run the race. You don't start 50 yards ahead because your daddy was Henry Ford or John Rockefeller. A real competitor wants this kind of life. There is a prevailing pride, both individually and nationally, in seeing our people achieve."

 -"What if a person had been paying your low taxes for 25 years, had become a billionaire, and wanted to take his business to another country so that she could pass on to her children a rich inheritance."

"She can certainly leave the country but her business would have to be returned to the state. Consequently not many people want to leave. I think you Americans are so intent on trying to take it with you after you die that you can't understand our approach to individual freedom. And you know you can't have everything."

 -" If you had everything, would your house be big enough to store it?

 -"But what happens to the companies that are taken by your government when a person dies?"

"All businesses are required to be valued as stocks. If you have your own business you might have just one share of stock and you own it all. Or perhaps there are five owners and each one owns a different percent of the hundred shares in the company. When one owner dies the stocks go into the government's portfolio. They can then be sold within the country or to interests outside the country. Our government, as the stock owner, decides what price it will get for the stock and whether it will be sold within or without the country. It is a tradition that if possible the company is sold to the owner's children. But that only works if they seem to be competent to handle the business.

 -"How do you prevent people from spending all their money abroad and having nothing left when they die for you to tax?

"Good question Con. We encourage people to travel and to use their money. If you like to ski you probably have skied the Alps--Chamonix and St. Anton and you have probably skied Vail and Whistler. You have probably lain on the beach in Tahiti and Malibu. But it is just as likely that you've vacationed here, like so many of the world's rich. You haven't seen our domed resorts where the weather is always perfect. Our winter resort is more than 20 times the size of Dubai's indoor ski facility, whose longest run is 400 meters. Our longest run is over a mile and we have five black diamond runs as well as a number of less difficult slopes. So you can ski all year in varied terrain. And when you want to eat you can choose French, Italian or Austrian chalets and have your fondue, pizza or schnitzel in authentic environs.

"If you like golf you can play Pebble Beach, with its surf and sea lions; St. Andrews, with its pot bunkers; or you can play Rancho Mirage with its winter desert heat and its long fairways. Because they are under domes the weather is always exactly what you want, perfect weather for that course.

"If you want the beach we have our domed island with 10 foot surf on one side and calm lagoons on the other. So you see Con, there is little need to travel if you want luxury. Our domed resorts bring people from all over. We are one of the top vacation destinations of the world. So it's almost a 'wash' with our people going out and vacationers coming in.

"But while we cater to those who want relaxing vacations we can't do much for those who want historical vacations. And we encourage our students to travel to see the wonders that we cannot reproduce. The temples at Angkor, the pyramids of Giza, the forum of Rome, the Buddhist shrines of Japan and Thailand, the Taj Mahal and the Lake Palace at Udaipur, the ruins of Troy and Machu Picchu are but a few of the gems of our civilization that must be seen and understood if we are to be educated citizens of the world."

 -"What about our natural world. I think the wonders of God are even greater than the wonders of man."

"True father. We encourage our people to see all of the wonders of the world. Without experiencing nature's marvels we may forget to preserve the world that they adorn. Just look at the wonders of your country. I think that the main valley in Yosemite is my favorite view of nature. But Niagara Falls and the Grand Canyon are certainly things that everyone should see. My favorite natural site in Europe is the Sognefjorden on the west coast of Norway, but the views of the Alps or from the Alps are also breathtaking."

  *  "My idea of a wonder of nature has me sitting on a beach in a lush tropical paradise of Polynesia, mai tai in hand, marveling at the thunderheads shattering the sun into splinters of rainbows across the Bruin blue sky. The shifting kaleidoscope never duplicates its aesthetic wonder --as 'old sol' sinks slowly in the West for a well-earned rest.

"Amen to that, Con. But I'm getting ahead of myself because this is all part of our education, which we expect to continue throughout our lives. So I might as well talk about our education now."

## EDUCATION

 -"I assume that you have a national curriculum. That's what we need in the US. I know that about 15 years ago, in 2011, some educators, business leaders, labor leaders and politicians from both parties began a move to have a common school curriculum nationwide. We had been beaten so bad by so many countries using their national curricula and our local school leadership was so backward so often.

"By 'curriculum' I mean a coherent, sequential set of guidelines in the core academic disciplines, specifying the content knowledge and skills that all students are expected to learn. I don't mean performance standards, textbook offerings, daily lesson plans or rigid pedagogical prescriptions. The national curriculum that was proposed was to account for 50 to 60 percent of a school's available academic time, with the rest added by local communities, districts and states.

"We seemed to be trying to compromise between a curriculum set up by experts who are knowledgeable and our local school board control which often is a brake to real education."

"Like most countries, here in The Colonies we have a national curriculum in terms of what information should be passed on. But learning information is only a part of a real education. Developing an attitude of wanting to learn and wanting to be a good citizen is equally important. From what I understand in your country your schools try to pass on information, then when students go home they may or may not have homework but they always have television or video games to entertain them. In our country our education system is geared to wanting the students to learn because it is exciting."

 -" I hear you Tyler, I had one truly great teacher at UCLA, he was considered the best teacher in the whole University of California system, and I would guess he was probably the best teacher in the US, if not the world. His lectures stimulated me to want to travel and to study philosophy. When I finally did travel to Europe I felt that in my first day I had learned more than I had learned in college, except for that professor's course and a few tidbits from other courses. My traveling in Europe as a young man stimulated my long time major hobby, which is world history. I don't know how you can walk the roads of the ancients and not wonder more about their arts, philosophy and politics.

"But how do you do it in practice?"

"Well there are some things that just must be learned by rote. How to write the alphabet, how to add and multiply, how to use effective grammar and so forth. For these we use robots, computer programs and video games. Interactive lessons in these areas requiring rote memory are made as enjoyable as possible. Let's face it, the people who develop video games and cartoons are very creative. We use that creativity to stimulate interest in a study area and the desire to learn. Our video games are educationally directed. The objective is not to shoot as many aliens as possible, as it is in so many of your games. Our objectives are to learn and to accomplish while we are having fun. So one game might be about traveling through ancient or modern Greece. Another might be showing a Civil War battle. Another might be understanding how engines work. Another might be designing a bridge or a building or an airplane. Certainly history, science, advanced mathematics, logic, geography, Shakespeare, Bible history, music appreciation, the history of art, and every other area of academic interest can be made more interesting when the various media are used and interactive learning is possible.

"While the teachers have age-appropriate curricula for their students they must also evaluate the best path for each student to learn it. We have clear learning objectives and specific tasks that must be mastered for each objective. And we have criterion-referenced tests to determine whether or not a student has mastered an area or needs more work. This is where the teacher is essential. As I said, we learned much from the way the Finns teach. Every teacher in elementary school keeps the same students for six years. During that time the teacher should have a pretty good idea of the strengths and weaknesses of each student. There may be personality plusses and minuses. There may be academic pluses or minuses."

 -"That all sounds very idealistic. But where do you get the money for developing such projects?"

"We put a great deal of our national budget into education. It makes it potentially lucrative to develop educational products. We also put a large amount of money into teacher education and encouraging the best people to go into the field. We have taken some of the ideas of the Finns in terms of only letting the best people into the field. Our educators are well-paid from the government and from the supplemental tuition that all parents are required to pay. While our educators will seldom make the kind of money that our entrepreneurs make, they hold a place of honor in our society."

  \- "It sounds like you are rewarding their power drives with psychological applause while their economic needs are being well met."

"You're right Ray. As you know, we are not all motivated by achieving in the business world and making a great deal of money. Some of us are motivated by love and some by the drive to find meaning in our lives. It's these people that make the best teachers. I might also say that, opposed to your country where administrators make more money than teachers, in our society you are paid by how well you have produced, so an effective teacher might make a good deal more money than an average administrator. So while in your country in order to make more money during your working life and enjoy a higher pension afterwards many people want to move up the administrative ladder, but our people can get both while working in the area that they enjoy."

 \- "I was impressed with the work of Orrin Hudson in Atlanta. It sounds like you are using some of the ideas that he had in terms of preparing young people for the challenges of an effective life. Mr Hudson is a former state trooper and business owner who decided that working with young people was the only way to reduce crime and to get the young people started on a path to success. He was working with disadvantaged young people through the game of chess. His thinking was that in chess every move you make can be positive or negative and sometimes a negative move made early in the game can affect the outcome. When you apply that to life, you can realize that doing some dumb things in your early years can haunt you forever. He called his program KASH. K for knowledge, A for attitude, S for skills, H for habit." (10)

"Great idea! I think I will suggest it to our education people. There is no one way to get to every child. Some learn by hearing. Some learn through art. Some learn better through gross body movements, some through refined body movements. Not all learn through a logical sequence of facts and ideas. We continually test students' interests to let the teachers know the best directions for a student to go to increase his or her knowledge, interests and aptitudes."

 \- "It seems that you have a very aggressive and effective approach to education. A problem that we have in the US is that while many of our legislators, at least those with educations, think that education is important-- when it comes down to cutting the budget, education is one of the first things to go."

"It seems that in your country you don't recognize that by improving education at the primary and secondary levels you will eventually reap great rewards in your sciences and businesses. I wonder if it is your pragmatism--where you seem to think that unless it is practical today it is not worth it. On the other hand, when ignorance is common, political techniques such as fear, anger and hate are more able to direct elections so it is easier to manipulate the electorate."

 -"You may remember that President Bush developed his No Child Left Behind program. But president Obama said 'In the 21st Century it's not enough to leave no child behind. We need to help every child get ahead.' We are so blind so often. Just look at how we handle foreign language. 10% of our high schools offer Latin, 30% offer French but only 4% offer Chinese. Did you know that there are over 40 million foreigners studying Chinese, and only one in 800 of them is an American. At the same time the Chinese are learning English almost universally.

"Tell me Tyler how does your university system work?"

"Okay, but let me fill you in a little bit more about our lower-level education. At the primary school, as I mentioned, there are some things that need to be learned by rote. We use computers and video games to do much of this. To interest the students we take them into the community at various times to see what is happening and to make them curious about that part of our world. If we take them to a zoo we can elicit interest in the geography that gave birth to these different animals. We can look at biology and zoology and see how evolution has taken the development of life in so many different directions. We can take them to the harbor and talk about where all the ships have been. Then go back to school and show films and use other media to make it clearer how the different societies have developed socially and economically. We can take them to our City Hall and discuss how laws are made and how society functions philosophically, economically and socially. We can take them to research institutes and show them how physics and chemistry work in the real world. There is no end to the wonders of our world.

"At the secondary level we do more of the same but go into greater depth in many areas. We may spend six months learning a language, such as Chinese. Six months isn't enough to really learn the language but it may be enough to stimulate some students to study it further. While we are studying Chinese, and speaking only Chinese, we look at Chinese history, culture and economics. We might use another few months in studying religions or chemistry or the environment or any number of other areas that may be of social or vocational concerns.

"During secondary school students must work ten hours a week at some prescribed job. They might work in some of the jobs in a hotel or restaurant. They might work in a preschool. They might work in a recreational area. But every semester they must change jobs. By the time they have graduated from high school they will have worked at 8 different jobs. The money they earn goes half to support their education and half to themselves. We think it is very important to teach children the value of money."

 -"That's why I borrow from my son!"

"Of course thinking, writing, and speaking are extremely important in today's world. We emphasize utilization of both inductive and deductive logic in developing our communication skills. This is an essential area for our teachers. We use computer programs and video games in many areas to transfer information. It is a shame that so many people think that merely transferring information is real education. Our concept of education is that we must be able to take the information that is available, treat it logically and express it clearly on paper and in public. It is certainly not enough to just know some facts, they must be put together creatively then the community can deal with them. If you are a politician, you must be clear and logical if you are to convince the community to go with you. If you are a business leader or a scientist you must be able to work in the community of your peers or advisors. In today's world we can't go it alone. I would guess that today even a da Vinci or Solon would not be able to go it alone. There is just too much knowledge, too many problems and too much potential for any one mind to answer all the questions and accomplish all the tasks required in our modern world.

"When students go to the university they continue their work program but at a higher level. Our university system is a minimum of eight years. The first four years are like your liberal arts colleges where students learn to be thinking people and effective citizens. Here they go more deeply into philosophy, history, the social and natural sciences and economics. We think that with the world becoming far more complicated, four years is not enough. I have been impressed that Abu Dhabi has also emphasized liberal arts with its cooperation with New York University. (10a)

"And some of your schools in the US and Europe are reducing their university experience to only three years. I have also seen, particularly in Europe, that higher-level education has become more of a vocational training ground.

"For us the vocational training comes the second four years of the university. With the world being as complicated as it is, every economic pursuit needs a thorough grounding in theory and extensive practice in making that theory a reality.

"Graduate school begins after those eight years of education so the student is about 26 years old when he or she goes for a Masters degree. This takes another two years. It can also be done while the person is working in gainful employment. Much of this is mastering advanced subject matter so it can be done largely at home. Those who are planning on entering teaching will study pedagogics in the varying disciplines for the level of education to which they aspire.

"Doctoral work begins after the Masters and takes another 4 to 6 years. We have several tracks for doctoral level work. There is the health track which can include medical studies. This is one of the professional paths toward mastery. Others choose to go into advanced work in one of the liberal arts, in business or in the sciences. Here again a student can choose to perform more effectively in such fields as: in entrepreneurship education; in research in the natural or social sciences; or into university teaching.

"In all other countries when a person obtains a PhD degree it is a research degree, but most of the jobs are in teaching in universities. They have no training or skill in teaching but it is their main vocational possibility. Being a researcher and being a teacher are quite different occupations and require quite different preparations. So in our country if you want to be a researcher you can get your PhD but you will not be qualified to teach. If you want to teach, you prepare for that but your research skills will be questionable. So if you want to teach at the university level you will need your doctorate in education and a second doctorate. If you want to teach English you would get a doctor of literature degree, a D.Litt. If you want to teach in a science area you would get your doctor of science degree, a D.Sc., and so it is for special degrees in music, the arts, history and so forth.

"With people living so long, there is no reason to get them into the marketplace by age 18 or 20. Today's citizens must have more knowledge than citizens at any time in our history. To work in our modern world you must have more theory and background than at any time in the past. It is silly to rush people into the workforce before they are prepared for today's realities and tomorrow's eventualities. If we don't get people into the workforce before they are 25 or 30 it really doesn't matter. They are going to have a work-life of 50 or more years. Hopefully they will enjoy their lives so much that they never retire. I've seen so many of my friends in your country who are forced into retirement and hate it. We want to prepare our people to enjoy life both in and out of work. In fact if you have chosen your field of endeavor wisely, your work will be the most important part of your life.

 -"As college education has become more common in our country the level of the entering student and the graduating student has lessened. With teachers and professors more poorly paid than most professions and trades you can understand that either the professors are not drawn from the most qualified people or that they must work at other jobs to make ends meet. My father taught at Pierce College in Los Angeles where the highest paid person on the campus was the carpenter, who received union wages. The college president, deans and professors all were more poorly paid—often earning less than half of the wages of the carpenter.

"A college degree can carry with it high prestige and a high level of learning or it can be worthless. In California, for example, a few years ago anyone could start their own university by merely putting up a $10,000 bond. Since the university was recognized by the state, students could get federal loans to attend the 'university.' The university's courses were recognized by the state so a graduate in psychology was qualified to apply for a license as a family therapist or clinical psychologist. Thankfully for the future patients, the state increased the testing and interview processes so that people who once were considered 'qualified' by the state now seldom pass the tests.

"I knew a person who wrote a three page paper on how she once taught roller skating. That, with several hundred dollars, gave her three college units at one of these phony, but legal, colleges. She wanted me to be her advisor for a PhD. I had never heard of the school so I went by the house that served as its campus. I looked through a number of doctoral dissertations and didn't find a single footnote. I was amazed at the fact that the state would back such a farce. While legitimate high schools, colleges and universities are evaluated and accredited by legitimate bodies, these phony schools have set up their own equally phony accrediting agency—that has no credence among legitimate schools of higher education. I had heard that the state was toughening up on these supposed universities. I hope it's true."

 -"Studies show that in the U.S. only half of the college students and a quarter of the community college students have the basic skills to handle their required daily living needs—such as, understanding credit card obligations, analyzing news stories, even handling a check book. I wonder if they are alumni of these phony colleges!

"I don't think there's any question that today's graduates must be able to think, write, speak and work in multicultural environments throughout the world. I have seen in other countries, particularly India, that because many colleges were not doing their job a number of corporations have started their own universities for the vocational side of higher education because the traditional universities were not really up to date in what was needed vocationally.

"In our higher education we try to imitate the best we can find in the world. China has leaped to the forefront of science in particular. In 1996 it had only a 12th as many respected scientific papers as had the US, by 2008 it had leapt to 60% of the US total. And now they have left the US in the dust. The US is still considerably ahead in medicine though. So we try to imitate China in many of our scientific studies and imitate the US in many of the health areas, particularly in the medical fields. I don't think there's any better model of good liberal arts programs than there are in many of your smaller high level colleges, like Amherst or Pomona.

"As in the more advanced countries, we decided that we need to increase the number of universities we have. China has doubled theirs in 10 years. They now have well over 2000. Since they are one of our chief competitors we must compete also."

 -"I agree with you on the need for a broad education, particularly in the liberal arts, but we must recognize that neither formal education nor age is necessarily a factor, but a practical education is. Stanford graduate students Larry Page and Sergey Brin were 23 when they founded Google. Mark Zuckerberg was 19 when he developed Facebook."

 -"There is no question that we have had some young geniuses but it seems as though we are not getting enough from our women. The last survey I saw showed that only a third of American college educated women described themselves as being very ambitious, but in China that number was double. The communist ideology has always said that women can do the same things as men and should have equal opportunity. This has been true in Chinese education for many years. China has more than a fifth of its national parliament as women. Far more than the US--at 16%.

"Since women now outnumber men at every level of the university, I would assume that many more will move their careers up higher on their 'to do list' and put marriage and family a few notches down."

 \- " In the Scandinavian countries there are 40 or more percent women in the parliaments. They also have more women in universities and they're doing better than the men. A number of countries have initiated quotas for women, usually in the 30% range for parliament. But the champion country is Rwanda where 55% of the parliament are women. There is no question that we have to equalize education for both boys and girls, men and women, if we are to optimize our economies and our democratic systems."

 -" This brings us back to the importance of education. What is the goal of education? Is it to have a happy and short school day and school year or is it to prepare for adulthood--and success in adulthood. And what is success in adulthood? Is it to be successful in business, in golf, in rooting for a successful sports franchise? Is success to be judged by what you have done or who you have watched?"

"I think you understand that in our society it is what you do that counts. We think that in your country you believe that school days should be fun and the school year short. Other things being equal, how can you learn more in a five-hour day than in a seven hour day? How can you learn more in eight months of classes and you can in 11 months of classes? So the question is should school days be fun and adulthood filled with the sadness of unemployment or unfulfilling jobs? Or should the childhood days prepare for an adulthood where there is more joy than sorrow? It is clear that China is moving rapidly ahead in both primary and college education. It is equally clear that their economic system is moving at warp speed. It is also clear that America's education is losing ground at the same time that their unemployment rates are rising and their lifestyle is decreasing. Smaller homes, older cars, fewer vacations and less foreign travel or indications of the downward trend in American affluence and the rapid evolution of the American dream into an American nightmare."

 -"You are right Tyler, our school days and school years were set up when we were an agricultural society. We needed the summers off to harvest the fields. We needed the Christmas and Easter vacations to give us time to venerate our God. And in those days it was usually enough to learn to read, write and count. But times have changed and we don't need time off in the summer to harvest our computers."

 -" And most of those religious holidays are consumed with nonreligious activities. Rather than contemplating the Resurrection, children hunt Easter eggs and college kids head for California, Florida or the ski slopes. And in the winter Santa Claus, not the baby Jesus, is the star of the show. While I would hate to see any vacations lopped off of our school or working weeks, there is no question that they cut into our learning and working time."

 -"So do we follow the American and European models of shorter school days and longer vacations or should we copy our neighbors in the Far East--in China, South Korea and Japan?

"It's like Wanda Wang outlined, self-centered values versus society values and self-centered values which concern only the present time or those that are based on our future.

"If learning is important to prepare ourselves for life we had better do a much more effective job of education. We have talked about how poorly our American students do internationally but they don't believe they have done poorly. They think they are best. (10b) They are very self-confident because they have been loved and told how good they are. But the reality is that they are not very good academically. It's strange but the French have just the opposite approach. They do pretty well academically but they don't think they have done well. So we have our American superiority complex and the French have their academic inferiority complexes."

"Your President Obama recognized problems and developed a program that he called 'race to the top'. A $4 billion fund was set up to be used for states that adopted national standards which were to raise student performance. Almost immediately two-thirds of the states adopted the program.

"It will probably help somewhat, but your American conservative values hurt you so much because you are afraid to change the amount of time you give to learning and you don't seem to want to give up your local control of schools. It keeps coming back to you people thinking that your opinion is true even if it is counter to the scientific evidence. Look at your reticence to accept the facts of global warming. It didn't matter that it was causing stronger tornadoes and hurricanes, your flooding and snowstorms were much worse, and many parts of your country were parched. Then if the facts don't support your opinions, you merely deny them.

"This is a major difference between your conservativism and our libertarianism. We are free to follow the findings of science. I think that the difference between our countries is that we are much better educated so we have more ability to sort out the facts. Because of your poor educational system for the masses, you haven't been prepared for the future. Naturally I'm not talking about your better schools and colleges. There are none better. I'm talking about your schools where the teachers are ill-prepared and where the parents are undereducated. We have tried to aim all of our education in the same direction that your best education allows. And our well-educated parents expect their children to be better educated than they are.

### LIBRARIES AND MUSEUMS

"An important part of our lifelong education system is our libraries and museums. Museum curators and librarians act as teachers when they work to develop creative interests in many of the areas that have excited humankind. I think that creativity is best fostered by reading, and seeing and experiencing the words and the thoughts of others. With so many exciting areas in our world it is essential that our young people can experience the thoughts and imaginations that they can get through reading, the vivid sights of the world that they can see in video presentations, and the real achievements of human ingenuity that we find throughout history. These are the things that we add to our educational experiences.

"The curators and librarians help to bring experiences to the masses. It may be a printed book or a piece of art. It may be a video game or film that is not available through the Internet. It may even be evaluation tools that a person may want to use to get a better picture of who or what he or she is."

### THE ARTS

 -" it seems that your concern is primarily for making money, that your freedom is largely directed towards economics. Is that true?

"Not at all. But whatever you do you must be able to take care of yourself economically. If you're good enough as a concert artist to make enough money to support yourself, we applaud you. While so far we haven't produced the great voices of Placido Domingo, Renée Fleming, Thomas Hampson or Cecilia Bartoli, we have had some of our artists in major roles in a number of famous opera houses. And while we haven't produced any Dalis or Rembrandts, we do have some artists who are making their marks on the national and world scenes. We have had two of our actors play on the London stage and one on Broadway. But of course we have a number of singing, painting, and acting 'wannabes.' But they must support themselves in other jobs while they search for the right pitons to climb the edifice of artistic success."

## SCHOOL SPORTS

 -"What about after school activities in high school, such as sports, and extracurricular activities in college, again-- such as sports?"

"As a matter-of-fact we do have them but they are not as important or as time-consuming as the sports in your country. In your country you may practice three or more hours a day in your sport or in your other areas of interest. We limit our afterschool experiences to two hours. When I see the huge amount of time commitment to a sport in your high schools, I really believe it is overdone. There is so much emphasis on winning but not much emphasis on learning. Your 'will to win' is an essential element of freedom but to be responsible requires that you are winning in an important area. When the whole town thinks that the Friday night football game is more important than reducing your national debt, I question your values.

"On the other hand when I compare it with the club sport system in Europe I like your system a little better. Actually I think both systems should be in all countries. The fact that most of your coaches are credentialed teachers is a big plus in your high school sport system. Too many youth coaches have no understanding of child psychology, sport fundamentals or a commitment to fair play. Our requirement for responsibility makes it imperative that we honor the letter and the spirit of the rules of fair play.

"I suppose too that because we don't have college scholarships for sports and we don't have any professional sports teams, there isn't the incentive for the student athletes or their parents to make such a big thing out of a game."

 -"Boy that sure is a lot different from what we experienced in school. I would have to say that I really enjoyed my high school playing days and my college playing was unforgettable. If you've never been to a football game at Notre Dame you can't imagine the sense of responsibility to win and the 80,000 fans who are as concerned as you in winning. They love you 'win or tie.'"

 -"As much as I enjoyed my college sports, I think that things have gone too far today. It seems to me that a combination of things has changed college sports from being primarily fun, especially if you win, to a legally mandated program where revenue from a few sports must pay for all the rest. I think that Title IX was a mixed blessing."

 -"Title IX, Tyler, was a national law that required gender equality in colleges and high schools that were receiving federal money. That idea was good because women did not have equal rights in college sports. Consequently a group went to trial to obtain equal rights for women in college sports. This was then interpreted to give women as many college scholarships as men and it increased the salaries of coaches. In order to accomplish the goals laid out in the court decisions, the number of men's sports had to be reduced and revenue had to be increased in other areas.

"Since there were 105 football scholarships and 15 basketball scholarships in the two sports that had a chance to raise any revenue, women scholarships had to equal that 120. But scholarships had also been given to baseball players and track athletes. Over the years swimmers and water polo players were also given scholarships as were tennis players and golfers. So women needed an equal share of the total scholarships available. These were all non-revenue sports. To equalize scholarships many men's sports had to be eliminated."

 -"At UCLA a new wrestling facility was built but the team was canceled before its first practice. The men's water polo team had won a number of national championships but was dropped to make way for a women's water polo team. But a number of the former water polo players chipped in to keep the sport going as a club sport, with no university support, it kept winning national championships so it was reinstated as a university sport. The 1984 Olympics men's gymnastics win was done primarily with men from the UCLA team. But the men's gymnastic team was dropped a few years later. However the women's team still exists.

"When I was a student, in the spring I rowed on the crew. Our coach was a volunteer and we raised the money to run in sport. There were no scholarships. Now there is no men's team but there is a woman's team. Women's crew is one way of trying to equalize the scholarships that men have in football. Men have 85 scholarships for football now, women have about 25 for crew. Men have 13 for basketball, women have 14. At UCLA men have 10 sports, the women have 12."

 \- "Another factor is that while women are the majority of students in most colleges, the number of female athletes often totals only about 25 to 30% of the total number of athletes. But this may be because football has so many players. I know we have talked about this before and we pretty well agreed that we would like to see either no scholarships or only scholarships for revenue-producing sports. And for the huge majority of colleges no sports produce revenue so those colleges sports must be funded from the general university budget. It makes no sense to have athletic scholarships when there is no revenue. It's a different thing to have an academic scholarship for a person who happens to also be an athlete."

 -"There is certainly a huge difference between the major revenue producing sports universities, like Texas and Ohio State, where their total income exceeds $120 million a year from sports, and the small colleges. Even my alma mater, Notre Dame, brought in over $80 million in total revenue last year. And Lee, your alma mater, Stanford, brought in more than $75 million and Con and Wreck, your poor Bruin program even brought in over $65 million. So it still made the top 25 of revenue producing university athletic programs. But then there are other major athletic schools, those in the top 120, that have budgets of under $10 million. You also have schools that get no real revenue at all so must rely on the general university budget for survival. It makes no sense to have athletic scholarships when there is no money.

"I know that we all want to see college athletics continue, but the financial requirements of scholarships, the multimillion dollar contracts of some football coaches. the generous full-time contracts of other coaches, and the extensive travel required all seem to point to the fact that if we are going to continue sports and offer them to as many people as possible, we must reduce the expense of the sports.

"Recruiting is such a full-time job and is essential for winning. Even small cottages with no income from sports do a great deal of athletic recruiting. Coaches all want to win so recruiting is an essential for top-level teams.

"I think that we should just have interested people who want to coach, pay them a minimally acceptable amount, reduce travel to under 500 miles, increase the number of sports for men and women, and eliminate scholarships. We all know this would be an ideal but the hunger of Americans to sit on their sofas and root for a winning team while criticizing the losers has become for many the weekend way of life. It is a simple way to handle their power drives. It is better to sit on the sofa and know everything than actually go out and compete."

 -" I certainly agree with you, Ray, but there is another reality. You know the history of our sport, football. In the early days students would hire whoever was a strong guy in the community to play for their student team. So from the earliest days fairness has not been a hallmark of college sport."

"I think you Americans could learn a little bit about responsibility from the Brits. Traditionally they have been much more guided by the principles of fair play in their sports. We would see that as responsible behavior which would be necessary to winning. But you Americans have always looked for a way to bend the rules because winning was all-important. When I hear you describe your college sports programs I can relate to your emphasis on winning. But I can't relate to your lack of a guiding philosophy. Is winning the only thing that's important or is education in any way a function of the university?"

 -" I remember the saying of one of our best coaches, Red Sanders, that 'winning isn't everything, it's the only thing.'"

 -" I thought it was Vince Lombardi who said that."

 -" No, it was Red. What Lombardi said was that 'winning isn't everything, but preparing to win is.' But it seems like whenever there is a quotable quote in football people think that Lombardi said it."

" I hate to bring you back from nostalgia-ville but where does all this money come from that your sports programs in college are earning?"

 -" Where have you been Tyler? Don't you have TV here in The Colonies? What do you do five nights a week in the fall and all day Saturday if you don't watch college football? I assume you're watching debate programs or world news, but that is so depressing. As an advanced country you should be watching pro football from August to February, college football from August to January, basketball from October to May, baseball from March through October, then you would have an occasional major competition in swimming, track, soccer, horse racing, boxing, along with the Olympics and a number of other sports programs. But back to your question, college football and basketball sometimes bring in quite a bit of money. The other sports all lose money.

 "My firm did some work for a Pac-10 school in trouble with the NCAA So I got a bit of an insight into the money side of today's college sports. Look at how much money was made from ticket sales for football. Texas brought in almost $45 million, Nebraska was fifth in ticket sales earnings with $30 million. Then there is TV income. Ohio State made $16 million on TV, Kansas was fifth at $7 million. Then you can get guarantees for playing games away from home. Michigan State got $4 million. Army got $3 million. But from this income there are expenses. Alabama's athletic budget was $124 million. When we look at coaches pay, Texas paid $18 million dollars, Michigan. $14 million. Scholarships cost athletic departments money for the tuition of the athletes. Stanford paid $16 million, Notre Dame almost $15 million.

"Then is there the cost of recruiting. Notre Dame spent $2.3 million, Duke $1.6. Team travel can also be expensive Kansas spent over $8 million in team travel, Connecticut was fifth at $7 million. Only 25 of the 119 universities in the college bowl subdivision reported a surplus. Their average surplus was under $4 million. The other 95 schools averaged a loss of almost $10 million.

"Here are some other interesting statistics. For the BCS schools. Tyler, the BCS schools means the Bowl Championship Series. There are 119 universities that are allowed to compete to play in the postseason intersectional games. These are called 'Bowl' games. They usually add $1to $3 million to the school's athletic income. They also give the football team additional prestige. So when we talk about BCS teams we're talking about the major athletic programs in universities. But there are several levels of university athletic competition below the BCS level. In those schools the university must nearly always fund the athletic program.

"Looking at the BCS teams, football averaged making $11 million profit, men's basketball averaged a $3.7 million profit, but women's basketball averaged a $1.2 million loss. Of the 119 schools in the BCS division only 45 made profits on football and 46 made profits on basketball. Only three universities made money on women's basketball. For the smaller colleges, at least those who are not in the BCS program, the average loss for football was $730,000, the loss for men's basketball was $97,000, and average loss for women's basketball was $417,000. At this level 20 colleges made money on their football programs, 30 on the men's basketball programs and 12 women's basketball teams made money. Of course no other programs made money. Rowing, baseball, softball, soccer, track and field, swimming, water polo, gymnastics, golf, tennis, skiing, rugby, wrestling, volleyball, and any other sport offered. "Why should there be scholarships, high coaching pay, unneeded assistant coaches, travel out of the area, extra conditioning coaches and trainers, recruiting coordinators, and all the other expenses for a non- revenue-producing sports program. We can offer so many more sports to both men and women for a whole lot less cost. I am certainly for college sports but it has gone way past what is required for a good educational experience."

 -" I was thinking, the pro football teams have 45 players but the college teams have 85 scholarships. It's possible that that is more than they need. I'm glad they had them when I was in school, but I would've played anyway."

"This is very interesting, I'm almost surprised that we don't have such high profile programs here. We are for winning at least as much as you are. But it looks like your sports programs are really locally or nationally important. They are certainly not important internationally. But how did we get into college sports? I think I had better get back to how we run our society. And I think I may have neglected looking at our basic principles. So let me get back to those because those principles find their way into about everything we do. Freedom and responsibility are those principles.

## ETHNIC AND RELIGIOUS FACTORS IN A SOCIETY

"As you can all guess, societal problems are not limited to equality versus liberty. It seems that every society has problems even with its own ethnic base. But when you bring in non-Christians into a Christian country, blacks and Asians into a Caucasian country, or unskilled workers into an advanced economic system––there will usually be problems. It isn't just that there are usually different social classes, but it tends to create a caste system. Muslims on one side of the line and Christians on the other. Atheists on one side and believers on the other. Asians on one side of the line and Caucasians on the other. Christians on one side, Jews on the other. Doctors on one side of the line and plumbers on the other. The divisions are there in our minds, if not our laws."

 -"Of course things can change. In California in the 1850s the Chinese were the lowest of the low castes. They endured terrible, and often murderous, prejudices. But because they took advantage of California's schooling and they worked hard, they became the most successful ethnic group in California. They far surpassed the Caucasians in education and in achievement. Jews, too, were historically a sub-caste, but again through education and hard work they surpassed most of the Christians in their society."

 -"We sure saw that ethnic prejudice with the American Tea Party movement that started back around 2008. We saw it in Europe with anti-immigrant, particularly anti-Muslim, feelings. Part of it can be understood because of the violence of some Muslims against the West. But we all know that it was a very small part of the total number of peace seeking Muslims. Still we saw the percentage of Muslims admitted to European countries severely reduced. We saw the Swiss outlaw minarets next to mosques in their country. Equality sure took a hit when Muslim terrorists were found in nearly every Western country. It also took a hit when the recession of 2008 reduced the jobs available to the citizens and the immigrants. Right wing parties gained strength from the UK and France up into Finland, Sweden and Norway."

 -"I agree with many in the Tea Party who see a sacredness in our Constitution. America has certainly been a blessed land. And with many I believe that Irving Berlin's song 'God Bless America' should be our national anthem. If not 'God Bless America' then 'America the Beautiful.' It seems to me that the reason so many of us are religious is that we thank God for such a blessing as our country is.

"Tyler, I would have to disagree with you that equality is not an essential element of a good government. Jesus certainly emphasized the need for us to help others. The good Samaritan, the Sermon on the Mount, His miracle with the loaves and fishes and so many of His other miracles and sayings indicate that God wants us to be concerned with others. Every religion says in one way or another 'do unto others as you would have them do unto you.'"

 -"Well Ray, we are finding ourselves on the same side of this intellectual battle. Once you put your collar on backwards I never thought we'd find another thing to agree on. Of course I don't believe that God had anything to do with it. I think it's more about having happy citizens living harmoniously in our country.

"You know that the Constitution never mentions God or Jesus and the Founding Fathers were scared to death that any religion, particularly the Catholics, would take over our country. That's why it strikes me so strange that some of your Republican Tea Partiers, like Sarah Palin, think that our constitutional rights come from God. I don't know if it is wishful thinking, a lack of historical knowledge, not having read the Constitution, or just a political technique to get other non-thinkers to pay you to speak to them or to vote for you."

"We are not trying to tell you what to do. We just think that emphasizing freedom is the only way to go. It seems that in your country you have allowed a great deal of freedom in the economic area, given the unbelievable tax breaks you have given to corporations and rich people, but you have also given money to the poor people to keep them from revolting. In order to do that you have to borrow to pay for what you were giving to people to convince them that they were equal. Of course that borrowing actually created huge troubles for you. Here in The Colonies we want to give everybody an equal opportunity to achieve financially or in what other areas they choose--as long as they can pay their way financially. We are just not going to bail out those who don't make it. And we would never borrow to support those who have not shown they are worth supporting.

"I laughed at your Tea Party movement. Women running for Congress stating emphatically that the Constitution as it was originally written should be followed to the letter. But under the original Constitution they wouldn't have even been allowed to vote, let alone run for public office. The Constitution is clear that when both sexes are meant it uses the word 'person' but mostly it uses the male personal pronoun 'he.' Of course slavery was allowed under the Constitution. Are these people still for slavery?"

 -"Since the earliest days of our republic, we have, like the Tea Partiers, spoken of the Constitution in religious terms. James Madison wrote that 'common reverence...should guarantee, with a holy zeal, these political scriptures from every attempt to add to or diminish from them.' And George Washington's Farewell Address asked that the Constitution 'be sacredly maintained.' In his Lyceum speech of 1838, Abraham Lincoln cited the document as the source of 'the political religion of the nation' and demanded that its laws be 'religiously observed.' More recently Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black called the Constitution his 'legal bible.' I am with the Tea Partiers in their reverence for our Constitution.

"But I would have to say that by and large they don't understand the meanings of the doctrine that was meant to be both fundamental and flexible. And as much as I hate to say it, the document does separate church and state and does not constitute a Christian doctrine as I would like and as the Tea Partiers hold."

 -"I agree with you again Ray. Are you converting me or am I converting you?

"We actually have a number of constitutions. Every time we pass an amendment it becomes a new document. I remember that Thomas Jefferson wrote that 'men who look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them like the arc of the covenant, too sacred to be touched . . . ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human, and suppose that what they did to be beyond amendment.' They need to realize that one generation is as capable as another in taking care of itself and handling its affairs. He saw the Constitution not as a Rosetta Stone imprinted for all time but rather as a serial experiment pragmatically encountering the novel problems that every society must face as it evolves.

"But back to the Tea Party and it's ridiculous inconsistencies. They are for states rights but they hold Abe Lincoln as a model. As I remember he started the Civil War to end states rights, particularly in the slavery area. His actions started the movement of equality for the slaves. So it seems that people are often citing as heroes people who were diametrically opposed to what they want—0+nd think they believe."

 -"That is no surprise, Lee. Look at the illustrations that Dr. Wang gave us in Kino, that Chuck Chan did in Singaling, and that Dr. Singh gave us in Indus. There are huge numbers of people who have not thought their way into their philosophies of life or their political philosophies."

### SOCIAL CLASS AND ETHNICITY IN OUR COUNTRY

###

"Social stratification is a major factor in our country just as in every country. As those of you who have studied sociology know, people stratify themselves and others. (10c) How we are stratified may depend on who is doing the stratifying. Professors might stratify people by their intellectual capacities or achievements. Politicians would stratify people by the amount of power they wield. Neighbors may stratify each other based on the kind of house they own or the kind of car they drive. Evaluating the elements of our world brings us some sort of order. (11)

"Historically people have been divided. It might be men and women, freemen and slaves, lords and vassals, Brahmins and Untouchables and other such categories where it is difficult or impossible to change status. This would be what we call the caste system. I think in your country the moneyed and the impoverished are often seen as being in a caste. But when you have a class system it is easier to move up or down the scale. In modern democracies this is usually true. In our country we think it is even more true because of the equality of opportunity we give to our citizens.

"You might think that we judge and stratify entirely with financial criteria, but that is not true. Achievement in any area is respected and socially rewarded. So if we have the best violinist in the world, the richest person in the world and a Nobel Prize winner, they would be treated and judged approximately equally.

"In your country, where you have so many impoverished undereducated people in the lower social classes, you have more violence. 100 years ago it was the Irish and Italians who fought their way up, in the boxing ring or in politics. Then it was the Polish and Russian Jews fighting and working their way upwards. More recently it has been the African-Americans and Hispanics that have entered the athletic and political rings as they pull themselves upward. One of the problems that you have had is your legal and illegal immigrations that keep feeding your lower classes with Hispanics from Mexico and Latin America and your blacks from the Caribbean and from Africa. So as some Hispanics and blacks move up the social scale, often to a very high status, their places in the lower classes are quickly taken by other similar ethnics. This didn't happen with the Irish and Italians or with the northern European Jews. So you have tended to have a permanent underclass, even while many in the class have escaped upward.

"Our strong legislation relative to immigration has eliminated the people who would have been in the lower social classes. Consequently our society is really made up of middle class and higher class individuals. We still stratify, as all people do, but we are stratifying, from a much higher base.

"I would assume that some of you would object to our stratification starting at such a high level.

"As you know, one of the hottest topics for many taxpayers in your state is the cost of illegal immigrants. The  question of whether taxpayers should provide services to illegal residents became a major political issue in California's last deep recession. And I also remember the ballot fight over Proposition 187 in 1994.

"Some of your American activists who were opposed to illegal immigration launched a campaign for an initiative that would, among other things, cut off welfare payments to the U.S.-born children of illegal immigrants. But those children are eligible for welfare benefits because they are U.S. citizens. But California has almost 3,000,000 illegal residents. So about 7% of California's residents are illegal. With the Supreme Court decisions requiring states to give children of illegal immigrants the same rights as those of their citizens, what could the voters do? If they were able to somehow eliminate all the illegal aliens they could save about $640 million annually in welfare payments, and between $4 and $6 billion annually for the costs of prisons, schools and emergency rooms. Additionally there are other governmental costs that they do not pay for such as for police and fire protection, parks and recreation facilities, et cetera. Most of the illegals do not pay income taxes and pay little of the sales taxes because in California there is no sales tax on food. If they had a value-added tax on everything, as many European countries do, they could pick up at least some of their expenses through taxes. But of course the tradition in America of not taxing food goes against this possibility.

"In our country we would not have this problem because people must pay their own way. Parents pay for the schooling of their children or go to jail. If you are in jail you must pay your own prison expenses. We don't have welfare so if you can't support yourself you die."

## WHAT IS SOCIAL JUSTICE?

 -" It seems to me that the question here is 'what is social justice'. I understand what you are saying Tyler, but it goes against the principles of Jesus that the poor are very important to God. Additionally, If God made us all in His image we are certainly all equal."

"I can only tell you what we are doing, philosophical ideas that you might want to debate can be better discussed with Kelsi Connor whom you will meet tomorrow. She is a professor of political theory at our university."

 -" It seems that every place we go we run into professors, particularly professors of philosophy."

 \- "Well who better than a philosopher to help us to understand people's thinking? Heck, Con, it seems that you enjoyed our philosophy classes with Abraham Kaplan and Nelson Pike at UCLA as much as I did."

 -"Right, Wreck. As I remember I even thought about majoring in philosophy. But the call of money won out over being intelligent! But back to Ray's question. What about social justice? You do have a democracy of sorts don't you?

## MEANING OF DEMOCRACY

## " We have more democracy than you do. You have a republic where your representatives make over 99% of the laws. I know that some states, like California, have an initiative process where the voters can make a law."

 -"But sometimes the majority vote for a law and a single judge overturns it as being unconstitutional. Actually it doesn't happen that often! But throughout the history of California hundreds of initiatives have been proposed. Many don't get enough signatures to go on the ballot. Once on the ballot many of them lose. When you do win it is sometimes a negative for the state. Like Proposition 13 in 1977, it severely lowered property tax income. This initiative limited the amount of tax that owners of property could be assessed. It was a time when California land values were increasing rapidly so property taxes could have gone up significantly and forced many poor people out of their houses. That law was good for them. But local governments and schools suffered severely from the initiative. Alternate taxes should have been a part of the initiative, like sales-tax increases. But we Americans don't like taxes of any sort!"

"That initiative process is true democracy. We have that too, but even in our day-to-day legislation we have more direct input into our laws than you do. We vote like they do in Singaling-- from our TVs or computers. Our representatives can make laws, but we can overrule them immediately. And we don't allow judges to get in the way of our democracy. After all, democracy really means that those who are affected by the laws get to vote for them.

"The problem with using the term 'democracy' is that so many conflicting ideas have been incorporated under the umbrella term of 'democracy.' For some it means low taxes. For some it means a welfare state. For some it means freedom. For some it means equality. For some it means affirmative action. For some it means 'a republic.' For some it means that God must direct it. For some it means that there should be no God-based influence on the state. For some it means free education. For some it means 'tax the rich.' For some it means that everyone should have a job. For some it means laissez-faire capitalism. There are just so many meanings attached to the term that it has lost its original meaning of one person--one vote. In fact if we look at Athens as a model for the development of the idea of democracy, only certain free men got to vote. It seems that the first thing we should do is to find out what we mean by 'democracy,' 'social justice,' 'equality' or 'liberty.' We should also separate the political definitions from the economic definitions."

 -"And it is obvious that we need a fairly high standard of education before we can attempt such semantic clarifications. And in our country, with such a high level of illiteracy, I don't hold much hope for having a real democracy in the near future. The big-money guys can buy off the media, like Fox News, and influence the elected representatives through lobbying. So I guess that the rich people have more real voting power than do the poor people because their money can buy so much propaganda and lobbying.

"The gap between the rich and the poor is constantly widening. I think that the greed of the rich, like in your country, may be too powerful to counteract. Look at the Russian Revolution fighting for equality, the Chinese revolution fighting for equality, the American Revolution fighting for equality, the French Revolution fighting for equality-- all of them just knocked down the people on top and replaced them with the intelligentsia that was just a notch or two below the royalty. I can certainly see how a few people in The Colonies have come up with your idea of a government based on inequality. But I don't like it. I don't like the ever widening gap between the rich and the poor. I don't like the greed of capitalism that seems to put the accumulation of money ahead of the survival of our species and the happiness of our citizens."

"Why do you say that our way threatens the survival of our species?"

 -"You may not have noticed but our world is getting warmer, our natural resources are being depleted, our fresh water is becoming more scarce, our air is more polluted as are our rivers and oceans-- and you flaming capitalists don't seem to care. Filling your wallets with cash is more important to you than anybody else's happiness. You don't seem to care that rising waters are enveloping our low-lying islands, are flooding coastal plains and diminishing great agricultural areas and stopping their production. But why worry, you rich guys will still have lobster and steak on your plates and wine in your glasses while southern Africans will have no flour for their bread and the Bangladeshis will have no rice in their bowls. Don't you care about that? Maybe it won't strike home until the rising seas inundate your beachfront houses in Malibu and Maui!"

"Most people are concerned with their own lives today. Even the future is not much of a concern. And I would guess that even you, Lee, are more concerned by the pain of a pebble in your shoe than by a dozen starving babies in Zimbabwe or the dying revolutionaries in a North African country. I admit that there are a number of people really concerned with the problems of the world, of: famine, disease, climate change, overpopulation, crime and all of the other nastinesses we find in our nations. But these people are really relatively few. There are some people who give money, rather than their time, to help those less fortunate. I do that myself. But I can't see me running off to a village in India or a favela in Rio to help people, who seldom have worked, to help themselves. Having children you can't afford, and not availing yourself of whatever opportunities there are for education, not working as hard as you possibly can to improve your standard of living-- are the actions or inactions that cause most of the suffering in the world.

"When I see people fleeing their own countries in order to better their lives, I applaud them. I will have to admit that I have occasionally bought a purse or trinket from an African in Spain and a wooden sculpture from an Indian on the beach at Baja. This is the kind of charity that I believe in-- helping people who were trying to help themselves. But I don't have any pity for those who were able to escape from Africa to the welfare states then sit down and let another country's citizens feed, house and clothe them. I applaud those who aspire to better themselves by working hard or by getting an education. It is a shame that we can't do more for those aspiring people in our country. The problem of course is that no country is big enough or rich enough to take care of all of the people of the world who deserve some help. It may be unfortunate that we have an apartheid on our planet that separates the rich from the poor, the educated from the uneducated, the lucky from the unlucky. I would have to agree with the commander that if we are going to allow for people to achieve we must reduce the babies born to the poor or the incompetent. It's not fair to those children. But how many times have we heard that 'life is not fair.'

"The realities are that the rich will be provided for. Just look at South Africa where half of the water goes to the richest 12% of the population, while 25% of people have no electricity. Naturally there are those do-gooders who want to give free water and electricity to the poor. Why? Have they done anything to deserve it? The only thing I can think of is that they have the second highest murder rate in the world so they are doing something to control their population. I have no pity for people who cannot think a day or two ahead or a generation or two ahead. Our finite world cannot give riches to every inhabitant or handle all of the Earth's populations' needs for sustenance or handle all of our wastes. I think I heard it first from the famous historian Anthony Giddens that 'unlimited growth is not possible.' But I have heard it from just about every intelligent thinker for many years."

 \- "Your tough approach to the realities of our world saddens me, but I understand where you're coming from. It's just that we have been raised in America to think of democracy as allowing both freedom and equality. So often we have made laws to equalize opportunities. Some years ago we had the affirmative action laws that gave women and racial minorities advantages over the male Anglos. It wasn't fair because often there were less qualified people who moved ahead of the more qualified people. If a person was either a black or Hispanic woman she was able to count as two minorities hired. This worked out well for many people. It allowed qualified minorities, who had not been given a fair opportunity, to achieve. But it also often put incompetent minorities in areas where they replaced competent Anglo men. Of course there were lots of incompetent Anglo men already in the hierarchy. Whether we talk about Anglo men or minorities, whenever you have an incompetent person in a position it is a doubly unequal situation. At least that is what Aristotle thought. It is doubly unequal because you have an incompetent person taking the place of a competent person. Both are in the wrong place.

"But your approach leaves me somewhat philosophically perplexed. I wonder if you are serving the psychological needs of your people. You may well be serving their economic needs––especially those of your population who are economically productive. It seems to me that you are advocating what Erich Fromm called 'having' rather than ' being.' (11) Is it possible that you are bypassing the essence of humanity, or at least the most desirable essence, and substituting the acquisition of things as your definition of freedom? Should we be free to 'be' what we might be or are we to be stuck with 'our being' being equated with possessions?

"You miss the point, my friend, we believe in taking freedom in many guises. For many people it is the accumulation of goods. You may think this is wrong but how do you judge people in your own country? My experience with Americans is that you are judged more highly if you drive a new Lexus, BMW or a Maserati than if you drive an old Ford. It also strikes me that people in your country judge a person more highly if she lives in a six bedroom four bathroom home in a gated community in the suburbs than if she lives in a trailer park. We allow the freedom to achieve just as you do. We also have philosophers, artists, outstanding professors, classical musicians and others who have chosen their professions freely. Of course if that profession does not pay they may die. We certainly require a level of economic success that must be satisfied to a minimal degree if one is to live. If you are a philosopher you will either need to have income from your writing, your lectures or your teaching. You can't just sit in a cave and think--if you want to eat! So you are free to do what you will, but you had better make provisions for earning a living at the standard which you choose.

"And Lee, you were talking so fast before that I didn't have a chance to mention our concern for the environment. Remember that responsibility is a major pillar of our political philosophy. We feel responsible for minimizing our damage to the environment. What we don't feel responsible for is the people who are not pulling their weight. We have regulations that bind us to a responsibility for the environment. Our electrical power comes from tidal energy and solar power. These are both renewable resources. In fact much of our export business is in providing the expertise and the products for these energy sources to other countries. And one of our major competitors is Kino. I know you have seen what they are doing. And while we don't license parents to have babies like they do in Kino, since we require them to pay most of the expenses of child raising, our people don't have many children. I'll get into that later, but our parents are responsible for most of the education expenses along with the normal expenses of having children. As I remember in your country a middle-class child costs about $250,000 to raise to college age. But it's much more expensive here because of the education expenses. So our fertility rate is under one child per woman-- well below the replacement rate."

 -" I consider myself to be a conservative, but you guys go way beyond my style conservatism."

"I understand, Con. There are actually several roads that conservatives might take. Ours is the libertarian approach. We want low taxes and minimal government. It is enough that the government takes care of some of the police and fire expenses and handles our national security. Naturally they have to provide an infrastructure including roads and so forth.

"I should probably mention that I see several major approaches to conservatism.

"The first one is libertarian conservatism, reflected in leaders from Barry Goldwater to Ron Paul. Libertarian conservatives believe that government should be small and weak and kept that way through low taxes. From their point of view, the primary role of government is to police the streets, protect private property, and protect the country from external threats.

"The second approach, with which libertarianism is entirely incompatible, is social conservatism. This can include conserving the Caucasian race as superior, the middle class and above as superior to the lower classes, or one's religion as being necessary to conserve. In America that means preserving the Christian religion, in Muslim countries it means conserving Islam. In America Christian fundamentalism, both Catholic and Protestant, has been a real force to reckon with. Fundamentalists of any sort believe that they have a privileged knowledge of God's will so they have the right to use whatever methods available, including executive orders and laws, to impose their will on others. It is one thing to believe, as many evangelical Christians and conservative Catholics do, that life begins at conception. It is another to believe that because you hold certain unprovable beliefs that everyone must follow your shallow thinking. But there is so much money in your religions that people like Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, James Dobson or the Catholic bishops can influence large numbers of people. If they can just convince you that God is on your side, you have a high pulpit to preach from. This social conservatism might also harbor prejudices that have been evident in the past--such as ethnic or religious prejudices.

"A third aspect of conservatism is fiscal--keeping your books in balance while you reduce spending. But generally these conservatives want to keep some equality in the program to take care of those who are negatively affected by the economic forces of the world through no fault of their own. This would be counter to the way we see it here in The Colonies.

"There is another aspect of conservatism that deals with protecting and conserving our values through military might if necessary. Any of the conservative groups might advocate such military force if they are threatened. But it seems that the economic and religious conservatives are the most likely to be ready to pick up a gun. It is strange that Jesus wanted to separate church and state and wanted to live in peace, while his followers would go to any degree to enforce the religion that they say he started.

"So your brand of conservatism depends on what you are trying to conserve-- liberty, your national military system, your social caste, your religion, or your pocketbook. Here in The Colonies we are trying to conserve liberty and our finances. Those other areas of conservativism are not in our sights, in fact we would generally oppose them. We are generally not religious, we're against any caste system and we certainly hope we don't have to fight to save our society."

## SOCIAL CONSCIENCE

 -"Tyler, you might guess that I have been very much influenced by the work of Erich Fromm and Ashley Montagu and also Alfred Adler. I can see how your successful people who accumulate wealth can overcome some of their inferiority feelings, that Adler discussed. I can see too, how important it is for people to work. Freud, Montagu and Fromm all agreed on this. But isn't there a need for socialization, for loving, for caring for others like Montagu and Fromm believed?"

"Okay, let's talk about Fromm. In his later life he advocated a type of socialistic humanism. This we reject. He saw what he called 'production' as a positive personality factor. His ideas of production are far more expansive than ours. We want to produce in economic and other areas but, unlike Fromm, we are not concerned with loving all mankind. Admittedly we are selfish. But that is the basic nature of humankind. I don't say that at some point our society might not move towards loving everybody, like the welfare states of Europe-- but with the enormity of the population and the problems it develops and magnifies, such a loving and unselfish philosophy of life is not realistically possible today. Philosophers may dream of it, but politicians and the people they lead are not psychologically or economically capable of delivering such a dream.

"I might say that, with Freud and Montagu, that to be mentally healthy you must have the ability to love and to work. We emphasize work. But in our families love becomes very important. We just don't extend it to all of humanity as Erich Fromm did when he said that the ultimate extension of love is loving all humanity. I'm not sure you will find any country that has that as a goal. Certainly there are countries, and I'm thinking primarily of Norway, that have a large welfare state for its population, take in a number of refugees, and give a great deal of money in foreign aid. Still the primary concern is its own citizens. In fact over 15 years ago, before 2010, Norway began reducing its immigrant quota and sending many illegal immigrants out of the country.

"As individuals and as nations we think first of the people closest to us. I would agree that the Scandinavian countries are more geared to looking at most people as equals, but we are not at the other end of the continuum. We are to the right of center. They are pretty far to the left. But we are not at the extreme right. But back to Fromm. I think you will see that we agree with him in some cases.

"You remember Fromm's four negative personality orientations. One was the 'receptive' type. He said that it was a negative to expect that others should take care of you. We agree with him there. In fact this is the personality type that wants the welfare state. So our society does fight, in our own way, what he saw as a major negative. It reminds me of a news story I saw when I last visited Norway. A Somalian woman had received over $150,000 from the state saying that she needed money for her many children and that there was no husband in her house. There was in fact a husband. Over 100 other Somalian women in Norway were found to be using the state to support them illegally. Each would get a divorce from her husband in Norway then collect very generous payments from the government for being a nonworking mother and for each of the children—an the former husband was with his family all the while. A Norwegian friend told me that it was quite common for the Somalians to have a number of children, each supported legally by the country. (11a) The average Somalian woman in Norway has four children. We would not permit that at all."

 -"I remember meeting a Scandinavian taxi driver in the Canary Islands. He was receiving a full state disability benefit for being unable to work. So he left the snow and ice of the North can settled in the sun with his second job. I remember too meeting a Norwegian living on a disability pension in Phuket, Thailand. He was running a bar there. A Dutch friend of mine complained that the Dutch government was also sending disability checks to people in Spain who said they were unable to work in Holland."

" Totally unfair and illegal yet quite common in those welfare states. They seem to believe that everyone is good and truthful--and equal! But the reality is that many people are very selfish and are willing to let others pay for them to lead the 'good life.' There is no way that would happen here in The Colonies!

"But back to Fromm. He said, being exploitative was a negative. Here I would both agree and disagree with him. Freedom economically requires some exploitation. If I'm going to produce goods I want the best price I can get for them and the possibility to be able to produce them as cheaply as possible. At the same time I don't want to be exploited as a citizen. So depending on which area of society we are talking about we can approve or disapprove of this Frommian negative.

"He talked about hoarding as a psychological negative. While his idea was much broader than I want to examine, we believe that if a person wants to see his world in terms of things and accumulates things that he values, there is no problem there. Again, the welfare state people would want to take what the rich have hoarded and give it to the receptive people. We think freedom allows us to do what we will with what we earn. But as people always say 'you can't take it with you.' And in our case, as I have explained, whatever the hoarder had kept will go back to the government on his death.

"Then he talked about 'marketing' as being a personality trait that is negative. Here he was criticizing those who continually mold themselves into what they think society wants. They are in effect, marketing themselves. They are the guys with the trophy wives, expensive cars and the designer clothes. I think I would go along with Fromm here because freedom is not following. I think freedom should allow us to lead."

 -"Fromm also postulated eight basic needs-- basic psychological needs. He said that we needed a sense of identity-- being a unique person as part of a social group."

"I could accept that but I don't think it's universal. It's nice to see yourself as part of a group. Some of our people do, and are happy. Some of our people don't, and are happy."

 -"Another of the humanistic needs that he saw as important was the need for 'relatedness'. He thought it was essential to have relationships with others and to care for and respect them."

"Again I can both agree and disagree. With freedom you can associate with others and care for them and respect them. But I don't think it's a universal need. Some people are quite happy pursuing their our own interests. You remember that he also listed 'rootedness' as a need. He said we also need a feeling of belonging. I have the same answer to that one.

"You remember that he also listed several needs that I think we meet much better than the welfare states are designed to do. He listed 'excitation and stimulation' which meant that we should be actively striving for a goal, not merely responding to outside influences. He mentioned 'unity' meaning a feeling of oneness between the individual and the outside world. We recognize that and we want to achieve within that world. He listed 'transcendence' meaning being creative and living an interesting life. We do that. Of course he also listed under 'transcendence' that we need to be in a loving life. While personally I would like that, I don't think that this is necessary for all. Was John the Baptist happy in his solitary life? What about the yogis in their caves in India pursuing what they think is the greatest of all pursuits-- attaining moksha. What about the philosopher Immanuel Kant, actress Sarah Bernhardt, Joan of Arc or Queen Elizabeth I? They all were incredibly successful without a committed love in their lives. Fromm mentioned 'effectiveness', the need to feel accomplished. I don't know of any country that allows for the possibility of this better than we do in The Colonies. The point is that your humanistic goals do not necessarily need to be met in a socialized welfare state. Allowing freedom, as we do, opens the opportunity much wider in some areas of our human potential, while admittedly reducing them in others."

 -"OK, but what if your democracy wanted to change and to help all of its citizens?"

"I can't imagine people here voting to eliminate our freedom and replacing it with equality. It would be possible but highly improbable. Our life is too good here to change."

 -"I wonder if we could say that a belief in democracy is a basic assumption?"

 -"Is it an assumption if it has worked? I think once an idea is a reality it has passed the assumption level."

"It worked in early America and in early France. It does keep people happy because they think that they have chosen their rulers. The problem is that as we become more globalized there are many more issues for a voter to deal with. This is true also of the legislators and the administrators. Today to have a functioning democracy you would have to have highly educated voters and elected officials who are even more educated and experienced. Few, if any, can understand all of the ramifications of every religious belief, every economic theory, every political theory and have a great knowledge of history. Because no one has all of these attributes many of the so-called advanced countries are shrinking their mental boundaries and becoming more nationalistic. Not only that, but they are shrinking their expansive and expensive welfare states.

"You might say that when people are afraid they tend to come back to their families. When the European Union wished to allow free movement within the states, as is true in the US, the poorer East Europeans, Middle Easterners and Africans wandered west and north and tapped into the lucrative welfare states that the Western citizens had provided for themselves. When their eastern and southern cousins had tapped too deeply into the till, the welcoming hosts decided to close their doors. The self-centered, often criminal, attitudes of the immigrants had soured the welcoming hands of the West and North. Parties of the right gained strength as the more prosperous people decided to keep what was theirs. This was done through democratic means. But the actions ran counter to what many democratic idealists held dear-- that all people are equal.

"Asylum-seekers became more numerous while the asylums were erecting higher fences. There comes a point when people's generosity has tapped too deeply into their purses. As I remember, in around 2010 and 2011 several European countries began moves to tighten the reins on the illegals in their countries. You may recall that in the 1980s the Schengen Agreement was signed which eliminated passport controls in Europe once you were within the countries of the signees. In the 90s more countries joined. But when it was found that people could get into one country legally or illegally then travel to any other country without a passport, more welfare frauds and crime entered the relatively peaceful European countries."

 -"I can understand their thinking,"

"Here is another point. People nearly always base their political expectations on hope rather than on reality. Sometimes it is realizable, sometimes not. The American and French revolutions eventually allowed for what the Founding Fathers called a 'natural aristocracy of men' to emerge through some type of equality of opportunity. But the Marxist hope of a truly equalitarian society never proved possible. The truth is that people are not equal. They may like to call for equality in some political pleas, such as when the non-royal elite, as the American and French founding fathers, wanted to be freer to think, to lead and to earn. The French called for 'liberty, equality, fraternity' while the American declared that 'All men are created equal.' But once they had their freedom from the monarchy their call was for equal political and legal rights--not for actual equality. As Article 2 of the French Rights of Man clearly states: 'The aim of all political association is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man. These rights are liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression.

 -"But Tyler, isn't it possible that the right to property and to security can be expanded to include equalitarian treatment throughout life?"

"Why should such rights be extended? Equality of opportunity is the major right that we espouse. In the French 'Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen' it called for equal rights before the law, which was meant to give the citizens an equal starting point, but so often this has evolved into the right to equal treatment from cradle to grave. In our Colonies we have kept the original intent of the revolutionaries and we fight the Marxist ideal for unearned equality.

"Let me quote from a few of the French 'Rights of Man' and as they saw it in 1789. They proposed both rights and duties of citizens of the new Republic. The document said in Article 1 that 'men are born free and equal in rights.' In Article 2 they listed those rights as liberty, property, security and the resistance to oppression. In Article 4 it said, and I quote, 'Liberty consists in the freedom to do everything which injures no one else; hence the exercise of the natural rights of each man has no limits except those which assure to the other members of the society the enjoyment of the same rights. These limits can only be determined by law.' Then in the next article it said that law can only prohibit actions that are harmful to society.

"Naturally there were rights related to people being charged with crimes and that they were innocent until proven guilty. But as you move down the list we see that in number 10 it said that everyone is entitled to his own opinions, including his religious views, providing that their manifestation does not disturb the public order established by law. In Article 11 freedom of speech was allowed but had to be responsible as allowed by the law. It was not seen, as your Supreme Court has ruled, that all speech is legal. There were more rights, of course, but you get the picture. You have rights and you have responsibilities. Our country's Constitution was based more on the French 'Rights of Man' than on your American Constitution. You talk about your checks and balances in your Republic. We don't want nine people on the Supreme Court to direct our democratic ideas. Of course because our country was founded in this century we had much more experience than did your Founding Fathers in seeing what would work and what would not. We certainly would not allow a small colony, like your Rhode Island, to have as much representation has a large colony, such as California. The way we see it your Senate and your courts are set up in a nondemocratic way.

"As I keep repeating, we are all about liberty and responsibility. We are admittedly individually selfish and that is the kind of country we want to guide us.

"You must remember a few things about modern governments. One is that democracy is not the only way to run a country. Two, is that there are no governments that are actually democratic. Many call themselves democracies and are really republics. Others call themselves democracies and are really monarchies, run by dictators. And the third thing is that if we are to be pragmatic we should look at what works. China's one-party system, an oligarchy, has been the most efficient system for a large country in recent years. At the local levels the Chinese do have something close to a true democracy, but at the national level it is run by the Communist Party. In the Mideast there are some small sheikdoms that are run very efficiently by the leader. Undoubtedly the people are better off than if they were in a democracy. But admittedly telling people that they have democracy is a way of keeping them happy because they have to blame themselves for the messes in which they find themselves.

"We were amused by the revolutions in North Africa 15 years ago. We were delighted that they were overthrowing tyrants who were robbing them blind. But there was no way that any leader could emerge immediately within their populations and give them all university educations and jobs. Democracy is not magic, but it is certainly an effective call for revolutionaries. But once you have revolted you will probably find that your situation is still revolting!

"But there is more to developing a nation today. We have touched upon the political system and how democracy may or may not work. We have touched upon the economic system and how liberty and equality may or may not work. But there is also often a national attitude which can goad or rein in the populace. I see in you Americans an unrealistic Pollyana attitude. You seem to believe that nothing will go wrong. The levees in New Orleans were known to be weak. But all was positive. Then Katrina came and smashed the dreams of many. On the other hand that Pollyanna attitude seems to help you when you go to war, which for you seems to be a perpetual pastime. You always think that you will win and that things will come out as you believe they will. In Iraq you toppled Hussein and were thanked by suicide bombers terrorizing both you and the Iraqis. Your idea of a democracy for Iraq was a secular state. But lo and behold, a Muslim democracy emerged in a Muslim country. How could that happen?

"As opposed to your positive attitude, I see the Brits and the Scandinavians as often quite pessimistic. Maybe you Americans have been too much influenced by Walt Disney, where everything always turns out happy in the end!"

 \- "I see some truth in what you are saying, Tyler. But where do you get your societal values?"

"Well like I said before, freedom and responsibility are our core values. If responsibility is of value, then certainly honesty must be held very high. Our values are societal but with strong self-centered values as essential in our mores-- and enlightened self-interest, as you say, must be considered in our thinking. But those self-centered values cannot be taken to the point of anarchy. Society must hold us responsible if we don't hold ourselves responsible. Maybe you're thinking of some other questions, like: abortion, euthanasia, suicide, and capital punishment. We don't have religious values that have flooded our government like you have had. Consequently our freedom allows us to have abortions and to die when we want. If you want to end your life you merely take the pills that you can get at any pharmacy. You don't need three doctors and a minister to try to talk you out of it or to say that you're not ill enough to die. Relative to capital punishment, it is allowed for some traitors, murderers, human traffickers and rapists-- they have gone much too far in being irresponsible."

 -" Tyler, it seems that the development of your country is along the lines of what the American Tea Partiers have been demonstrating for since the early part of this century. Are you familiar with them?"

"Naturally, in fact some of them have come over to see what we are doing. But from what I understand their ideas are self conflicting. They also don't seem to have a firm grasp of what they are after and what history should be showing them. For example, most of them seem to be Christian and they want freedom within a Christian sense. First, if you are going to let religion into your country as a major principle for its values, you really must let all religions in. This is what freedom is about. And if you are going to let in one ethnic group, such as the Anglos, all ethnic groups should be allowed in. Of course these ideas are qualified by the concept of freedom and responsibility. For example, if you are going to have a Protestant Christian ethic, it would seem that the message of Jesus was to exalt the poor. So the pursuit of riches seems to be contradictory to His message. However if you use as a model the actions of the Catholic Church or many of the Protestant mega-churches, then you have a model for acquiring riches. But the model is based theoretically on getting riches for God, rather than yourself-- even though it is the people at the top, the popes and cardinals and the mega-ministers who are actually profiting. The God model is contradictory to individual freedom. It allows those who say they are 'holy' to amass fortunes under the guise of freedom. But it is not responsible. It is robbing the vulnerable, telling them that they are buying hope, telling them that they are good and wise. But I think if the people were wise they would grab their purses and run."

## FOUNDING FATHERS

 -"As you know Tyler, they want an America that never was. They talk about the Founding Fathers as if they were freedom loving Christians. But in fact, as we have seen before (12), the major five or six were primarily deists, who believed in a creating God that is not involved in the world. It was certainly not a personal God that so many in America believe in today. Most were deathly afraid of organized religion, particularly Catholicism. And even those who believed in a more theistic God, like John Adams, did not believe in the divinity of Jesus. Among the 50 or so signers of the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution most were Protestants, at least nominal Protestants, three were Catholic. But in fact, as we have seen before, there were five to seven men who were not necessarily Christian. Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, John Jay, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton. Even Abe Lincoln was said to be a non-believer. Certainly he was not a church member."

 -"Then why would Jefferson write about us being 'created equal' or Lincoln write in a letter to the Loyal Colored People of Baltimore, after they gave him a Bible, that 'All the good the Saviour gave to the world was communicated through this book. But for it we could not know right from wrong. All things most desirable for man's welfare, here and hereafter, are to be found portrayed in it.' It seems that there was a belief in God by those people."

 -"You remember, Ray, when we met with Dr. Singh about how when people use politics that they use whatever techniques are necessary to get their message across. There is no question that Jefferson was at best, a deist. And some people close to Lincoln said that he was a nonbeliever. Some thought he was also a deist, but I would agree that he was probably a Christian but never belonged to a Christian church. It is surprising that so many American presidents did not seem to become openly religious until they ran for public office. In our country it is political suicide to not be in the Judeo-Christian tradition. This seems to be particularly true today. It was not nearly as true in the days of Adams and Jefferson. Could you believe that someone who did not believe in the resurrection, as John Adams held, or did not believe in a personal God, as Jefferson, could be elected today? So if you want to be elected you at least have to 'talk the talk' and you occasionally must 'walk the walk' in the National Cathedral. But let's get back to the Tea Party and their ideas about improving government."

"You have so many people in your country who don't have a clue about history. They seem to believe that your country was founded on Christian principles. If that were true then revolution would be a Christian necessity, but Jesus said to 'render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's.' Revolution would not be part of the teachings of Jesus. The Founding Fathers wanted a separation of church and state. That might be very well within the teachings of Jesus. As you said the major founding fathers were deists-- people who believed that there was a creator but that creator was not involved in the world. (12a) They were not privy to the science we have today that certainly eliminates the possibility of any truth in the creation story of Genesis.

"Your Constitution never mentions God or Jesus. The Declaration of Independence says we were created but does not say whether we were created by God or by our parents. The main thrust of the Declaration was that the government gets its power from the people not from the king who supposedly rules by the grace of God."

 -"The 1796 treaty with Tripoli states that the United States was 'in no sense founded on the Christian religion'. This was not an idle statement, meant to satisfy Muslims. This treaty was written under the presidency of George Washington and signed under the presidency of John Adams."

 -"We discussed this with Dr. Wang in Kino. (13) The major founders of the United States were deists--neither atheists nor Christians. There may have been a creator billions of years ago, but that creator was not involved in the lives of people. This is so different from what American evangelists believe. They believe in a personal God-- a God who judges, who can be prayed to, who knows everything we do. Had Darwin lived in the 17th or 18th century, rather than the 19th, it is highly likely that the founding fathers would have been atheists. They were certainly thinkers."

 -"You may be right about the six or seven major founders, but a huge number of those in the Continental Congress and those who signed the Declaration of Independence were religious. I know that three were Catholic. A number of others were Protestants. And these people changed Jefferson's words in the Declaration of Independence. He originally wrote that 'all men are created equal and independent. From that equal creation they derive rights inherent and inalienable.' Congress changed that phrase to increase the religious idea of many of them. So it was finally written 'all men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.'"

 -"But Ray, you know that the Declaration of Independence is not a law. It is a call to revolution against the king.

"We had already mentioned that George Washington's pastor said he thought that George was an atheist. Then there was the Episcopal minister Bird Wilson of New York, who protested in 1831 that: 'Among all our presidents from Washington downward, not one was a professor of religion, at least not of more than Unitarianism.' The remarks of the minister were reported in the newspapers of the day.

"In fact, if the founding fathers had been followers of the Judeo-Christian tradition there probably would never have been a revolution. As I remember, the Old Testament said that 'For rebellion as is the sin of witchcraft.' (14) Then in the next verse Saul tells Samuel that he had made a mistake because he followed the will of the people rather than the will of the Lord. In the New Testament we come back to the words of Jesus and 'rendering unto Caesar.' It seems that true Christians would have suffered in silence and waited for their rewards in heaven. This would have been more in accordance with Peter (15) 'For the Lord's sake accept the authority of every human institution, whether of the emperor as supreme, or of governors, as sent by him to punish those who do wrong and to praise those who do right.' And Paul wrote to the Romans 'Let every person be subject to the governing authorities; for there is no authority except from God, and those authorities that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore whoever resist authority resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment.' (16) Do you think that God fearing Christians would have thought of rebellion, revolution?

"But the colonists would not suffer in silence. Let me read you this part of the Declaration. I always keep a copy in my wallet. 'That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security. --Such has been the patient sufferance of these colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former systems of government.' Does that sound like it is in accord with the New Testament verses I just cited?

"But back to their beliefs in smaller government and lower taxes. If I were to talk to Tea Party members- would want to know what they would give up in the government: defense, healthcare, Social Security, inter-state highway construction and maintenance, national parks, commerce incentives to help American businesses, international relations, farm subsidies, then I would like to know what kinds of taxes they would impose to cover what they wanted government to do: value added taxes, flat income taxes, a graduated income tax, corporate taxes, use taxes for-- gasoline, education, etc. and would they plan to pay off the national debt fairly or would they merely print more money to pay it off?

"I would also want to know where they stand on giving tax subsidies and tax deductions to churches. Even the Supreme Court has now affirmed that states can allow tax subsidies and tax deductions to religious schools. _In the Arizona Christian School Tuition Organization v Winn opinion that was decided in 2011, five of the six Catholic judges on the court voted for overturning the lower court's decision. So in the 5 to 4 decision it ruled that states can give tax credits for tuition paid to religious schools_. It also decided that taxpayers cannot challenge the tax credit worth millions of dollars to support religious schools. They can challenge a direct appropriation from the government to a religious school but not a tax credit given to those supporting religious schools. I don't really see the difference. In either case the taxpayers are subsidizing the religious school. Somebody has to make up the difference in the taxes needed when some people are getting tax credits. The facts in this case were that $50 million was donated annually to tuition scholarship funds. That $50 million was then deducted from tax bills as direct credits. So the state lost $50 million in taxes which have gone to support religious schools. Since the Catholic schools were the major beneficiaries, by far, I can see why those five Catholic judges ruled for their church-- and against the democratic principles of the country and the separation of church and state. I think this is exactly what Jefferson was afraid of. Arizona had a budget deficit of $1 billion. So it certainly didn't make fiscal sense for the state."

 -"But Lee, if those people were not going to religious schools the government would have to provide for them in public education. It's much cheaper for the state to have private schools do some of their work."

 -"That may be true, but like Justice Kagan said in her dissent, it devastates the ability of taxpayers to challenge government actions that favor religion. And like I just said, she said there was no difference between a tax credit and a direct appropriation."

 -"However dominant in terms of numbers, Christianity is only a thread in the American tapestry—it is not the whole tapestry. Our God who is spoken of and called on and prayed to in the public sphere is an essential character in the American drama."

 -"But He is not specifically God the Father or the God of Abraham. The right's contention that we are a "Christian nation" that has fallen from pure origins and can achieve redemption by some kind of return to Christian values is based on wishful thinking, not convincing historical argument. Writing to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1790, George Washington assured his Jewish countrymen that the American government 'to bigotry no sanction.' The Founders also knew the nation would grow ever more diverse; in Virginia, Thomas Jefferson's bill for religious freedom was 'meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and the Mahometan, the Hindoo and infidel of every denomination.' And thank God—or, if you choose, thank the Founders—that it did indeed.

"Understanding the past may help us move forward. When the subject is faith in the public arena, secularists generally point to Jefferson's 'wall of separation between church and state" and think the argument should end there; still many conservative Christians defend their positions by calling the Founders Christian, as though Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Franklin were Calvinist missionaries."

 -"But Lee, to claim that religion has only recently become a political force in the United States is uninformed and unhistorical; in practice, the 'wall' of separation is not a very tall one."

 -"It's certainly not as tall as it once was. Religious judges on the Supreme Court along with the Bible Belt legislators have whittled away log after log until we have a nation where religion controls much of the public treasury and stipulates many of the national and local laws. This is a situation that would make our founders turn over in their graves."

## W HICH OF YOUR 'RIGHTS' AID REAL FREEDOM?

-"That's a major part of America's problems. If you didn't give all those tax breaks to religions you could save a bundle. But your religions so often are anti-science that it severely restricts your education, even in many universities. I look at the bills presented in some of your southern legislatures where they are trying to get creationism on an equal footing with evolution, or where they want to fight science instead of teaching it. The students in those anti-science areas are left way behind those of us who are competent scientists and are using science to change the world while we make money. I think of your students who get inferior educations as being in the same boat as those in third world countries or in countries where they only learn the Bible or the Koran. Your holy scriptures don't tell you how to use the Internet, make a microchip, develop a pollution free engine or tell you how to eliminate global warming. The inferiority of so many of your schools shows clearly in the international tests on math and science. Just like the Third World countries' students, your students are hobbled in their educational handicaps, in their lack of knowledge or in their dubious knowledge of things that are not true.

"Compare yourself with other nations relative to the effects of climate change. Only 66% of Americans want the government to help in wind and solar energy use. Compare that with South Korea where 96% of the people want it. Even Kenya has an 87% favorable rating for this. China, the UK, and France are all above the US in this necessary concern. Or look at the number of people who are active in environmental groups in the US it's 6.1% at. Compare that with Mali at 26%."

 -" I wonder if we are getting so many often meaningless inputs into our brains from twitter, blogs and the media that we can't make intelligent decisions. a number of researchers have found that with so much information entering our brains that we can't make the best decisions. Often recent information is more important to the brain than quality information."(17)

"It is a shame that all people who are intelligent hard workers do not get an equal break, an equal starting line. The children of citizens in our country get a pretty good shot at it. But so many in the world don't have such rights. I really feel bad about this. I don't feel bad about people who don't want to achieve, but I would love to help those who do want to better themselves. It's a shame that we don't have real universal human rights. But there is not enough money in the world to allow a universal equality of opportunity.

"So much time is spent on all kinds of other 'rights' in the US and in Europe. For example in your country a mentally ill person may be taken to court to determine if he needs treatment. His rights are defended by a government paid lawyer. But no one has a lawyer for the people that he might damage. Then you have the people from the far right who are defending gun rights while fighting taxes and government spending. Where did they expect to cut expenses, education?, police and fire protection?, mental health?, Medicare?, Social Security?, defense?, roads?

"It seems that the world is not nearly globalized enough. Globalized commerce is one thing, globalized individual freedom is quite another."

 -"I have some other thoughts about unfairness in our world. People are citizens of their country by luck. Should we rank all the people in the world according to intelligence and their work ethics then let them choose the country they prefer? This of course would never work. So we have a basic unfairness in life. Some people are born to the good life in Norway, some are born as slaves in Mali. Some want to leave the country and work to achieve. I applaud this. But others want to leave the country and be taken care of by others. I don't like this at all."

# L IBERTARIANISM

"This brings us back to libertarianism. For years in America you have had people who want total liberty. And as you know, liberty and equality are quite opposite. You really can't have both. For example if you tax the rich more than the poor but they get the same services, it's not equal. You tax incomes to bring down the rich then you give the money to the poor. In your American Social Security all the workers contribute the same percentage, but after they retire the wealthier receive a lower percentage of their contributions than do the poor. In your Medicare also you are treated equally even though some contributed much more money from their salaries. In your Medicaid programs, the richer people pay so that poor people can have medical attention. You punish those who have succeeded and reward those who have not. We don't think that's fair."

 -"But you have the problem of allowing liberty without letting it degenerate into anarchy."

"You may remember that a number years ago Ayn Rand published her massive works, 'The Fountainhead' and 'Atlas Shrugged.' She emphasized libertarianism without it leading to anarchy."

 -"I never read those books."

 -" Let me try to synopsize them. In 'The Fountainhead' the author portrayed a young architect, Howard Roark, as a person who preferred to go his own way into obscurity rather than compromise his ideals and work with a major architectural firm. He followed his calling to design according to his ideas of modern architecture, rather than copying the Greeks and the Romans as most architects had been doing. After a number of projects that he had designed, often anonymously, were accepted as brilliant he eventually becomes known for his genius. Not only was his architectural genius acclaimed, but the object of his love, which he had lost, eventually returns and they are married. So his lifelong struggles, repeatedly hurdling failure, are rewarded in the end by all the rewards that anyone could dream. Liberty raised its head through the muck of the stagnating society and Roark and his principles triumphed.

"In 'Atlas Shrugged' Rand developed her philosophy of 'objectivism' even further. She saw the United States as what we might call 'dystopian,' that is, the opposite of a utopia. The government takes more and more power and thwarts the efforts of the people. It makes the society run for the benefit of the industrialists and capitalists--the moneymakers. To work effectively a society needs the great minds of the movers. If a person is not free to create, it kills the spirit of that person and puts another brake on the society. The best society is not one where people are enslaved and held down, it is one that is powered by the great minds and the profit motive.

"She said that her book described 'the role of man's mind in existence.' If the human race is to achieve its highest, the brightest people must be encouraged and allowed to achieve. You can see here the influence of Nietzsche on her thinking and of the morality of his 'supermen' being shared among themselves, without considering the rest of us in the 'herd' that includes the great majority of us. We in the herd are no better than animals. But some of us may have some potential. According to Rand the government is our enemy, the blanket of oppression that attempts to keep us all equal must be slit so that truly remarkable and motivated minds can slide through and achieve. The blanket must be lifted if humanity is to breathe.

"While we need thinkers and movers, most social systems keep them bottled up."

 -" Isn't that what your church did with Galileo?"

 -" I see your point Lee. The Church has made mistakes but not as many as Kings, revolutionaries and governments. How many intelligent minds did Lenin and Stalin take? How many did Henry VIII take? How many had bin Laden taken? In fact look at how Jesus and Paul were taken."

 \- "But I think that the message of Jesus was more about equality, or even the superiority of the poor. His message seemed to be quite the opposite of that of Ayn Rand. Her ethical system was the self-centered morality that Wanda Wang talked about. (18) But I would see it even more in the philosophy of Nietzsche. She abhorred socialism while championing laissez-faire capitalism.

"But guys, did you know that while she abhorred government welfare programs in theory, in actuality she availed herself of both Social Security and Medicare. Since she had paid into Social Security all her life she felt she was entitled to it. Then because of her two pack a day smoking habit she needed Medicare's help to try to treat her lung cancer. It was comical that she called the scientific evidence against smoking a hoax, but in the end she was humbled and humiliated by that 'hoax.'"

 -"Some would say that she was two-faced in that she preached small government and self responsibility but in the end she took Social Security and Medicare benefits. Actually she was true to her philosophy. Self interest was her basic thesis and she stayed with it even if it meant tapping into what the government allowed."

 -"Even though I'm an atheist, I think I am more on the side of Jesus than of Rand. But Con, I would guess that you would agree with her."

 -"I think she makes a very strong case for the survival of the fittest in the workplace and of the essential nature of laissez-faire capitalism. In 'Atlas Shrugged,' her character Dagny Taggert was a strong woman who worked to keep alive the railroad company that her grandfather had started. She was so far superior to her brother James, who was afraid to take responsibility while the company he headed was drowning. She unites economically, philosophically and romantically with Hank Reardon, a self made steel magnate. The fight for freedom, for economic freedom, requires fighting the socialistic government.

"We have been so indoctrinated by religion and society that we believe that we must help the poor and pull down the rich. Rand, through her characters, makes the case for the survival of the fittest and for the essential nature of the 'dog eat dog' mentality necessary for society to succeed. Money is not evil. It is merely the evidence that the person has succeeded in the workplace. When the government tries to take away that product of one's labors, it is going against nature. Naturally the majority of people will want economic equality but we can see from the Soviet experiment that it doesn't work-- particularly with a large society."

 \- "But what happened after the communist regime was toppled? The riches were taken by the cronies of the old rulers or by the gigantic mafia that grew in the new Russia."

"Self centered interests move nearly all of us. Soviet communism certainly thwarted this natural impulse.

The Tea Partiers you had in your country a few years ago sounded like what Ayn Rand was talking about-- smaller government, less equality, fewer taxes and no socialism. The big difference was that when I heard many of them interviewed on TV they didn't seem to know what capitalism or socialism actually was. They didn't have suggestions for which parts of government spending they wanted to cut. The older ones didn't want to cut Social Security or Medicare and most didn't want to cut the military. And they certainly wanted no gun control. It seemed that they didn't have any real theory, they just wanted lower taxes and smaller government but they didn't have a well thought-out program. Maybe their financial benefactors, the Koch brothers and a few other billionaires, want more freedom to drill for oil anywhere and to pay fewer taxes. But the Tea Partiers had no concrete and comprehensive theory like Karl Marx, Adam Smith or Ayn Rand had.

"Our social philosophy is well thought out, like Ayn Rand's, but we emphasize that responsibility must go hand-in-hand with freedom. As I keep reminding you it is our responsibility to not interfere with another person's freedom."

 -"Relative to Ayn Rand's approach to freedom I would add that these movers and shakers often show their potentials early. Some drop out of high school, some drop out of college before they graduate, some stop the pursuit of their graduate degrees. But it depends on what you want to do. If you want to get into the internet technology game, college sure helps but experience and practice also help. Bill Gates had a near perfect score on his college aptitude tests, started at Harvard, but dropped out when he had all the knowledge he needed to do what he wanted. And like we mentioned, Mark Zuckerberg got his idea for Facebook while studying at Harvard, but dropped out when he got it going and his project became more important than acquiring more knowledge and a sheepskin diploma.

"While I don't think that one's yearly income is the only criterion for success, Ayn Rand seems to think it is quite important. I think that the passion to achieve is essential. When Robert de Niro dropped out of high school, he knew where his passion was pointing. It seems that the star-struck hoards occasionally squeeze some of their members to the top and a high school diploma is not a necessarily the golden key. Catherine Zeta-Jones, Peter Jackson, Billy Joel and rapper Jay Z are all multi-multi-millionaires yet never heard their high school principals charge them at their graduation that 'the world is their oyster' and there is nothing they can't accomplish. Hotel owning billionaire Kirk Kirkorian dropped out of school in the 8th grade."

 -"Probably the most successful of the high school dropouts is Richard Branson who dropped out of high school to start a magazine, then continued his entrepreneurial passions into records, airlines and a number of other pursuits."

 -"Wasn't it Thomas Edison who said that genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration?"

"Whatever it is, we want that freedom to be able to nurture the doers. Graduating from a university is necessary for most of us to have the knowledge to do what we want to do. But like you have said, you only need enough education to give your engines the fuel they need to get you where you want to go. While I don't want to get into it now, education has two essential prongs. There is the vocational education that you have alluded to, but there is also the education needed to make you a thinking and reasoning person and a competent and worthwhile citizen. But I don't want get into that just now.

"With all the push for equality the Western millionaires are not being reduced to paupers. The rich are definitely getting richer. Naturally those who want equality complain that the rich are just greedy selfish people. But the fact is they are the ones who run the world and make things happen. Where would the world be without the Microsoft of Bill Gates, the computers and iPhones of Apple's Steve Jobs, and the brains behind the airlines, the oil and energy companies, and the men and money behind the manufacturing and businesses of the world?

"In most of the world today people make their money themselves. So we see a meritocracy. There aren't nearly as many people who get rich just by inheriting. The older money of the Vanderbilts, or the more recent money of the Kennedys doesn't place people on the Forbes list of billionaires. Bill Gates, Carlos Slim, Warren Buffett made their money themselves—as did about 80% of billionaires. So the realities of the world today fall in with our philosophy of freedom. There is still some old money like in the royal family of England and the inherited oil riches of Saudi Arabia and Brunei, but in the main, today's billionaires have made it themselves. They have made it in Mexico, the US, France, England, Russia, China and India. They have made it in spite of a pervading religious or social view that people are equal. They are not. Or should I say 'WE are not.'

"You probably know that the top five percent of US households hold 63 percent of the entire country's wealth. The bottom 80 percent holds about 15%. So your equalitarian country does not seem to be all that equal. Do you think that Thomas Jefferson would be upset? He was a pretty rich guy but he didn't share his wealth, heck, he didn't even set his own slaves free!"

 -"When we have so many rich people paying so little taxes I don't see why we have to borrow from China to support them and give them tax breaks. I really don't like to see us borrow to pay for our deficits but public borrowing has probably been going on as long as governments have operated.

### THE HISTORY OF PUBLIC BORROWING

 -"When kings needed money to fund wars, to build monuments, or to enrich themselves they usually raised the taxes if that was possible, if not they borrowed from somebody. In fifth century BC in Greece taxes were not sufficient to fund the Peloponnesian wars so the rulers of the states borrowed, often from the religious institutions that had hoarded gold and gifts from the faithful. It is common nearly everywhere that we find a government that we find borrowing to cover the wishes of the rulers. From the 1200s to the 1400s in Italy-- Venice and Florence along with other states borrowed copiously. The American Revolution was funded by borrowing. But when the debt becomes too large the country must repudiate the debts and declare bankruptcy, as France has done several times. It happened, too, with Venice and Genoa in the 15th and 16th centuries, and Spain and Amsterdam in the 17th and 18th centuries.

"When borrowing has reached unlivable levels, like in Greece and Ireland as well as the UK and the US 15 years ago, severe measures must be taken. Cutting spending, often by reducing government pay and government services, raising taxes, devaluing the currency which leads to inflation, and bankruptcy are the most likely negatives. If a country is industrious and can grow its economy sufficiently, it may be able to pay off its debts. But of course it needs foreign buyers to absorb its wares and use its services.

## RELIGION AND SUBSIDIES

 -"What about religion in your country?

"Remember we have freedom here! People are free to believe what they will, build churches and make contributions. But our government does not support religion in any way. There are no tax deductions for anything, let alone religion. And we keep a strict separation between church and state.

"Actually religious people are very few because, as you know the more educated the person the less likely he or she is to believe in a religion, especially the big three religions of the West. We study science, the fact of evolution, and the inconsistencies in the Western Scriptures. Certainly the Bible and Koran are among the most, if not the most, important books in Western history. That does not mean that they are true, only that they have been very influential. Just as the story of 'Little Red Riding Hood' may be influential to a child in making her cautious when going out of her house, the story is not true. The Bible and Koran have been influential in the history of the Western world, even though they are not true."

 " Well that is certainly a matter of opinion. I would like to debate that with you but it would take days or weeks."

" Ray you know it is useless to debate basic assumptions. But we are tolerant of people's freedom to believe what they will. But in your country you have had a long tradition of intolerance to people who are not solidly within your Christian confines. Thomas Jefferson, while running for president, was criticized for his deistic beliefs. William Howard Taft was criticized for his Unitarian beliefs. John Kennedy, you well know Ray, was suspect for his Catholic beliefs. And even Dwight Eisenhower was criticized because he didn't attend church much and his parents were Jehovah's Witnesses."

### CHARITY

 -"What about charity? I don't think it's possible for a group of people to be totally selfish."

"I agree with you. I think our charity starts at home with our children. Beyond that our people can donate as much as they would like, up $100,000, to any group. Because of our dedication to freedom, most people seem to give to freedom causes. By far our most important charity is to stop slavery, both child slavery and sex slavery. There is no more an affront to allowing people equality of opportunity than slavery. A second important area of our charity is to educate children throughout the world. Often this means giving more money to educating girls because they are the ones who are most prejudiced against by their own families and societies. Here again, they are being denied equality of opportunity. The charities lower on our list are those that help people who have helped themselves.

"What I was just mentioning are our private charities. Our government also gives some money to support equality of opportunity, particularly in reducing slavery. While this isn't really a charity, a couple of our largest businesses are geared to both fighting slavery and to mass education. They sell their wares to a number of other governments and to philanthropists. For example, our very inexpensive solar powered computers and televisions are the best and least expensive in the world. We often give away our educational programs to go along with the televisions and computers that are sold.

"We also have an international detective agency that sells its services to Interpol, the FBI, Mossad and other national security agencies that may be investigating sex slavery and prostitution. One of our more successful operations along this line is the development of extensive worldwide contacts with the common people. They are paid for leads on sex traffickers and child slavery operations. We also have a similar program for rewarding tipsters about criminals who help people immigrate illegally. As you can imagine there is money to be made from both philanthropists and governments in these areas.

"The international education programs that we have developed, using village televisions has been astounding. I have to admit that we borrowed the idea from Mrs. Doors' work in Indus. (19) We just took her ideas, internationalized them, and sold them to governments and philanthropists as better methods of foreign aid than just giving money to the countries' presidents. Of course, with better education, better presidents were being elected. However not all Third World countries were interested in having their youth better educated. But this remnant of the past has been rapidly declining as international groups have pressured their individual members to work for education as a way out of poverty and as a way to forestall revolutions. The Arab League and other such groups can wield a good deal of pressure among its members.

"I might mention that we not only supply the inexpensive hardware for this mass education, we are among the leaders in producing software and video games that make them effective. Because of our own extensive liberal arts education, our programmers have a good knowledge of how to make education become more meaningful and enjoyable.

"So our charity work involves the use of many of the products that we have developed and manufactured. In fact many countries buy from us for their own foreign aid charities.

"We are not much for the 'forestalling death' types of charities like heart disease and cancer research. Nationally our priorities are for freedom and for equality of opportunity which is basic to that freedom."

 -"What about the idea that charity begins at home? One in seven people in the US get help from the federal government in putting food on the table. Don't you have a program to help some people when they really need it?"

"We have a small amount of money set aside for emergencies such as if both parents of a small child were killed and did not yet have insurance, the government could take care of child. But we can't set aside money for every negative contingency in the population. That would increase our taxes."

#  LAWS ARE FEW BUT WELL ENFORCED

 -"OK, so we now have a little bit of the philosophy of government and education that you people want to live by. What kinds of laws do you have, or do you have any?"

"As you can imagine we don't have near the number of laws that you have. Every law passed is a single law with the requirements on how it will be financed—what new taxes will be required or what previous spending programs will be eliminated to pay for it. We don't have the number of loans and deficits you have, and we don't have a number of people getting government benefits. However I guess that every government has some economic fat that can be trimmed. In our bills there are no earmarks allowed. In your country it is ridiculous that you can have a bill for healthcare with earmarks tacked on to the bill by different legislators giving money to improve roads in Alabama, establish a recycling center in California, give subsidies to cotton growers in Mississippi, and, build a bridge to nowhere in Alaska. Your legislators bribe the bill's sponsors by promising to vote 'yes' if their pet projects are included. This is definitely corruption from our point of view. With us every spending bill must be separate. We learned what not to do by watching your American system.

"We in the public don't vote on every law, just the major ones. Our representatives do most of the work. But if it turns out that the lawmakers

didn't see the eventualities of their legislation and a law was not working out but the representatives did not see fit to change it, we can do something like your California voters. We don't get signatures, we do it all on the Internet. I'm sure that about every advanced country has their laws available on the Internet. I know the US does. The way we do it is that if the citizen does not like a law he or she can go to the statutes and check a box that indicates that it should be changed. When 50,000 people have done this, the law is reevaluated by the legislature and will be voted on by the electorate.

"We don't give the courts authority over our legislature or our democratic voting. We citizens keep control. In California your electorate's democratic vote can be overturned by a judge or eventually, if it reaches the U.S. Supreme Court, by five of the nine judges. You people seem to be proud of your checks and balances between your legislative, executive and judicial branches.

I know that many of your founding fathers, particularly Jefferson, read Montesquieu's 'Spirit of Laws.' It advocated the separation of powers. You Americans really like that idea of dividing authority. But it is no surprise that Montesquieu's work was banned by the Vatican. There is no question that a single power is more efficient than divided powers but the traditions of the Papacy were around long before our modern democratic governments came into existence.

"In spite of the thinking of Montesquieu and Jefferson, we think that the majority of citizens should be the total weight of any balance needed. So our people control the legislature and the legislature controls the laws. We can veto the laws, but our executive cannot. Judges only interpret the laws, possibly based on what they actually say or what was the legislative intent behind the law. They can't go beyond that. We think that your Supreme Court system is ridiculous. You have politically appointed people, with lifetime tenure who can, by a majority of one, overturn a law passed by your two houses of the legislature and signed by your chief executive. And you call that a separation of powers!"

 -"Sounds much more democratic than our republican form of government with our judge made laws. It makes a lot of sense to have fewer laws but to enforce those you have."

 -"Speaking of laws, Lee, have you seen some of those recently proposed laws in our country? They make my head swim. Recently I read of proposals to eliminate drivers licenses in Georgia because driving is an 'inalienable right.' Then in South Dakota there was a proposal to make everybody buy a gun. And in Kentucky there was a proposal to separate the state from the environmental laws so that coal mining would not be negatively affected by laws designed to protect the earth. On the other hand I think it is a good law to stop people from texting while driving but 30% of our drivers under the age of 30 have sent text messages during the last month while they were driving. They think the law doesn't apply to them.

## EXAMPLES OF OUR LAWS

### GUNS AND GUN CONTROL

" I hope your legislators are more intelligent than ours. Tyler, what about gun control in your country?"

"We don't have many gun control laws because we believe in freedom. But we do have some because we have a responsibility to protect our citizens from irresponsible gun use. We don't have as many guns as you have. Our people are aware that the more guns a country has, the more murders there are. The US has 90 guns per hundred people. In the UK they have six per hundred. And the murder rate in the US is 44 times higher than it is in the UK. It's funny how your gun ideas came into being. The right to own a musket so that 'a well regulated militia' could be maintained was a very liberal idea in its time. But now it has become a conservative value because you people want to conserve what you think are your rights. It was one thing in the late 1700s to have a musket so that you could protect the country against another war with England. Of course many of your people had guns for hunting. Both of these values were good for your society. The question now is whether that old value still has merit.

"When you have a doctor killed because he performed abortions, or you have a president murdered or a legislator shot, some people want to change that right. But it's not all bad, whenever a criminal was killed while robbing a bank it saves the state money in trials and the incarceration of that person. And another plus might be that overpopulation is being controlled by the murdering of people by criminals. So even though they are killed by criminals, it's still good for society because it reduces overpopulation. It seems to me that there are far more bad guys killed in your society than doctors, legislators and people who just happened to be in the way of the bullets.

"Then with so many people having guns and learning to shoot by target practice, you have many more people who can be quickly trained to be foot soldiers for your American armed forces. And maybe another advantage is that it provides jobs for munitions makers and law enforcement people."

 -"I think that the human right to safety is more important than the civil right to own a gun. Is American society better off because Abraham Lincoln and John and Bobby Kennedy were killed by people who disagreed with their politics? What about that shooting in Tucson, Arizona in 2011 where the killer severely injured a national legislator and killed several other people. Admittedly he was severely mentally disturbed, but why was he able to buy a rapid firing pistol?"

"According the American Psychiatric Association (20)

the National Comorbidity Survey, published in 1996, found that 28 percent of Americans had experienced psychotic symptoms at some point in their lives. In the US there are 2 1/2 million schizophrenics, many of them violent, and most able to purchase firearms. We think this leads to violent anarchy. Some might say that the libertarian approach would not have any gun control, but remember we stress responsibility and mentally ill people certainly have an impaired ability to act responsibly. And these are people who are not in mental institutions. So you have a lot of mentally shaky people who can buy and use guns."

 -"The same week that the American legislator was shot, the governor of Pakistan's Punjab province was assassinated by one of his own guards because the governor thought that Pakistan's anti-blasphemy law was too strict. It allowed punishment by death for an insult to Islam, the Quran or the prophet Mohammed. A Christian woman had recently been sentenced to death for blasphemy under the law. The people rallied around the assassin. Obviously their ideas of how to protect their religion take precedence over how to protect their democracy. The governor had recently said that he was not afraid to stand up for his belief and had told his wife that she would probably soon be a widow. Then a few weeks later the Pakistani minister for religious minorities, also an opponent of the blasphemy bill, was assassinated."

 -"We have crazies everywhere on earth. But they don't all have access to firearms! I support our right to bear arms but I think there should be some kind of a mental test in order to get the license. And I am not alone. I read a survey a few years ago that indicated that 81% of gun owners and 86% of all Americans favored personal background checks for all firearm sales whether the guns were bought from a dealer or at a gun show. (21) Our relaxed gun laws have made it easy for criminals and terrorists to arm themselves. Last I heard the Mexican drug war that had claimed over 31,000 lives up to 2011, and of the 90,000 Mexican weapons seized by the government, 80% had been made in America."

 -"At least that keeps our people employed!"

"Don't forget that we see responsibility as an absolute essential of liberty. Some people show they are not responsible through their actions or even their words. A person who drives recklessly, endangering others, can be denied a driver's license. People who have behaved irresponsibly at school or in their jobs may be tested and evaluated by our psychologists and psychiatrists. If a person cannot be certified as rationally responsible, he can be denied access to guns. We assume that people are rational but if they indicate otherwise we must do whatever is necessary to protect society from them."

 -"Relative to gun control, how many innocent lives lost in a year would be required before licenses for gun ownership would be limited for those who had a propensity toward violence? Look at the six lives lost in the Arizona shooting of the Congresswoman. A nine-year-old girl who can only be seen as outstanding. A couple of people who were volunteers in the community or in the church. A young man who was engaged to be married. Interested citizens, nice people killed by a psychotic. When should we require stricter licenses? After 10,000 innocent people are killed in the year? After one innocent person is killed in the year? If a particularly important person, such as the president or a high level scientist is killed? Is there any level of gun violence that would make our country tighten up our freedom to carry guns?

"Did you know that last year 50 people on the government's terrorist watch list bought guns. And they bought them legally."(22)

"Private gun ownership is not mentioned in our constitution. But we do have some laws to control the types of guns that can be sold. Remember our freedom comes with responsibilities."

 -"We have such a romantic history of the old West with the good guys shooting the bad guys. Even today in Tombstone, Arizona that famous gunfight at the OK Corral in 1881 is reenacted. Actually what is reenacted is the myth. The real fight occurred in an alley and Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday were not seen as heroes originally, in fact they were charged with murder. It wasn't til later when books, then television and movies, made them heroes.

"Back in those days Tombstone had much stricter gun laws than we do today. In fact that famous gunfight started when Marshall Virgil Earp tried to enforce a local ordinance that barred carrying guns in public. Earlier that day a judge had fined one of the victims $25 for packing a pistol. In those days you could wear a gun into town but you had to check it at the Sheriff's office or at the hotel and couldn't pick it up again until you left town. Tombstone's laws had been enacted to reduce violence.

"But today Arizona has some of the most lenient gun laws in the nation. While you can't take a gun into a doctor's office, you can carry a concealed weapon without a permit. You could carry a concealed gun into a bar, as long as you're not drinking. You can carry a gun to a school as long as it is not loaded and you stay in your car. And any law-abiding citizen 18 or older can buy and keep a rifle or shotgun. Of course to buy a handgun you must've reached the ripe old age of 21. There are some limitations however. Firearms can only be sold for 14 hours a day seven days a week and cannot be sold on Christmas."

 -"Those NRA people keep telling us that if everybody caries a gun the crime rate will go down. But the truth is, the nations with the toughest gun-control laws have the least number of gun related deaths. Not only that, many of the people killed by guns are family members of the gun owners. But maybe that's an easy way to get rid of your in-laws or your unruly kids!"

"We allow guns but not the way that you do. Our hunters are allowed rifles with two shots or shotguns with two shots. Homeowners are allowed the same. I suppose if someone could come up with a good reason for having assault rifles or automatic pistols we might allow it. So far nobody has come up with good enough reasons, in fact it really isn't even discussed. Remember that our freedom comes with responsibilities to others. The more of anything you have, the more likely it is that there will be some negatives. Look at the number of murders in your country. Obviously there are a lot of irresponsible people carrying guns."

 "It seems that the right to own guns is so strong that American jurisprudence would find it difficult to reduce the present rights. But that is exactly what the Supreme Court did with the constitution's ex post facto protection that James Madison said was to be civil, not a criminal, right. Bills of attainder were to be the criminal equivalent. So if the Supreme Court can change one constitutional guarantee can't it do it for another one?"

### FREE SPEECH

 \- "What about free speech? I would assume that you would allow everything just like we do."

"Not really. People can state a position, but they must validate it with evidence. Remember that our freedom comes with responsibilities. You seem to keep forgetting that. We insist on intelligent freedom of speech, not irresponsible or false rhetoric that seemed more designed to inflate an illiterate's ego than to put forth an issue worth debating. It is commonly believed in this country that because so many Americans' lack education and lack concern for world politics, you Americans seem to often deny facts. If you listen to the far right wing programs that denounce taxes and Democrats, you may believe that Barack Obama was raised in Kenya as a Muslim. The truth course is that he was raised in Hawaii by Republican grandparents. He was a Boy Scout, not a student in a madrasah. Your freedom of speech rules don't require any truth in your speech. You are not required to validate your opinions. You can say anything you want as long as you are not inciting people to riot in the next few minutes.

"We believe that a person has not only the right, but also the duty, to speak out when there are wrongs that need to be righted or positions that need to be addressed. But because of our emphasis on responsibility we must think through our position when we advocate a cause. Your right and left leaning pundits in America could never get a job in our media unless they straightened up their acts! Their wild claims seem to be geared and targeted to inflame their audiences to believe and act without proof."

 -"Doctor Wang was clear that a voice that we think is authoritative is a major source of our evidence. We believe our mother when she said Santa left the presents and we believe our ministers when they tell us that God will judge us on the last day. These far right and far left media and clerical voices work on our psychological sides not on our logical sides."

"Our commitment to responsibility requires that we address the intellectual side when speaking to our population. You remember that minister who burned the Koran and set off a number of murders of Westerners in the Mideast, he would have to have been tested on his knowledge of the Koran and of Muslim history before he could have been given a public media acceptance. But your media pumped up what should've been a nonissue. Your media was interested only in a sensational story and making money on that story. It was not responsible. In our country I can't imagine anyone paying any attention to an obviously ignorant person just because he called himself a minister of God."

 -" I would assume then, that you couldn't submit ideas or articles to newspapers or Internet comment sections if they were anonymous."

"True Con. Again it comes back to responsibility. You must be responsible when you are putting out an idea for the public to consider."

 -"Again you are so different from us. Our Declaration of Independence was released anonymously about a year after we had already started the war with Britain. But it was soon signed. Our Supreme Court has traditionally protected the free speech of people who were anonymous. The Internet has allowed the extensive use of anonymous contributions. The fact that many are absurd, untrue, obscene and grammatically incorrect does not limit their authors' opportunities for publication. Although some sites, particularly those of the Catholics and Mormons, filter every comment and disallow those they don't think are acceptable."

"So your free speech is sometimes limited, especially when it goes against the belief of some religion. Eh?

### EMPLOYMENT AND UNEMPLOYMENT

 -" Let's move on to another area. What about employment?

"Keeping people employed is not much of a problem here. For one thing, unless you are a millionaire, you need to keep working. But more important, most of us have chosen to do jobs that we like. When you love to go to work, it isn't really work. Another thing, is that because it is so expensive to have children, a majority of people choose not to have them. There is certainly no pressure to make people retire to make room for young people who want to enter the workforce. Obviously the fact that people all over the world are living longer and healthier lives puts any thought of retirement further down the road of longevity.

"We can take vacations whenever we want to recharge our batteries. We can change our occupations if we are qualified and desire a change.

"Of course there are some problems. With selfishness as our underlying psychological pillar and altruism generally frowned on, when people haven't prepared themselves to be contributors in our modern workforce, they can stay and starve to death or they can try to emigrate. The 'do-gooder' Scandinavian nations often take our people in. Those countries are intent on showing the world that their equalitarian path to justice is superior to our idea of justice based on inequality and liberty.

"Con, as a businessman I know that you understand the inequalities I am talking about--intelligence, likeableness, effort, honesty, continuing education, punctuality and other elements of the work ethic."

 -"I'm sure you know, Tyler, that in the past much of unemployment was cyclical, today much of it is structural. By cyclical I mean that no society creates exactly as many widgets as somebody wants to buy. When there is an overproduction of something and not enough sales of the product the production workers may have to be laid off. But when the inventory has been reduced they can then be rehired.

"By structural I mean when the industry no longer exists or where more effective means of production can be used. In one case that might mean using robots to assemble parts of an automobile or a jetliner. In another case it might be outsourcing the production to a country that can produce it more cheaply. The obvious example is the US moving production to Asia. Another example of structural change can be seen where the middle classes of countries are increasing and are buying more goods-- and those goods and services may be provided more cheaply if they're made near to the buyers. Both India and China are examples of this."

" We recognize that, Con, that is why so much of our business is in research and development and providing service industries. We do very little manufacturing and what we do is of a more advanced level than can be done in the developing nations. Naturally we have to stay ahead of the third world, and even the developed world, technologies."

 -"What kinds of manufacturing. Do you do?"

"We do very high level manufacturing. For example one of our big projects now is developing and manufacturing synthetic rare earths. As you may know, rare earths are essential to many of our modern conveniences such as: televisions, cell phones, computers and in fiber optics and automobiles. There are two major sources today, one is in California and the other in Mongolia. We have developed super high pressure, high temperature technologies that we think will be able to duplicate many of these elements.

"You may know that Japan tried to recycle rare earths from electronic wastes but found it extremely difficult and finally gave up on the project. China of course has a near monopoly on many of the rare earths. They have used this strategically, for example in 2010 they stopped shipments to Japan because of a dispute with Japan about an island. But they also reduced shipments to all other countries. Unless more deposits are found in other places on the Earth, somebody had to try to make these, or substitute products, otherwise many of our modern technologies will grind to a halt.

**"We on making Lanthanum which is an important catalyst in oil refining. We also make** **Europium** which is used in TV and computer screens and in fluorescent lighting which is far more energy efficient than incandescent lighting. We are working on others, but it may be several years before we have the technology. After we develop these elements we need highly educated people to manufacture the products in which they are used. Even our noncitizen children are pretty highly educated so it gives them a far better opportunity to be productive than would any Third World manufacturing setup.

"Another area where we will develop the technology and manufacture the products is in eldercare robots. These robots replace the people who would have been changing the beds, washing the patients, cleaning the rooms and even talking to the patients. Every morning local and international news as well as the situations of fellow patients is programmed into the robots' computers. So they can answer and ask questions and carry on low level conversations with the patients.

"An area where we lead the world is in educational video games. We have developed programs that ingest large amounts of information and categorize that information into the appropriate grade levels and subject matter areas. Let me give you an example. We have a prototype program for history. It incorporates social mores, religions, the economic situations and problems, the wars and power struggles, the heroes and villains, the art and music, the philosophies and other areas that are evident in a society. The program reads thousands of books about the era. It then categorizes information according to the areas I just mentioned into the appropriate grade level from grade 1 to the doctoral level. At this point history specialists analyze the information according to appropriate grade levels and make whatever changes they think are mecessary.

"At this point the animators and writers are called in. They develop the programs for each grade level of history and for each subject area. For example our students study the history of our own country exclusively for the first three years. Then we begin to study world history. By the sixth grade we are studying economic systems and political systems. At the high school level we continue to study our own society but we also enlarge on our place in the world. At this level and into the college level our students may study in depth a number of different societies or different historical threads. For example they might study economic history or political history or perhaps the history of Egypt or India. Our repertoire of historical studies is immense. We sell many of these video programs throughout the world.

"Of course we do this in every possible academic area: mathematics, French literature, chemistry, American literature, physics, astronomy, geography, physical and social anthropology, sociology, economics-- you name it, we either have a program or are working on one. This is an area where experts are encouraged to come to our country and participate in our grand plan. It is so exciting and we have many of the best people in the world working on this project.

"So far we have been successful in avoiding a recession like you people in the West have experienced. I think the major reason is that our education is so extensive that our leaders and our workers are quite flexible in what they can do. They are not just welders or carpenters or accountants. They can move in many directions. That is not to say that a world wide depression wouldn't affect us. But we have to be prepared to be able to shift our economy towards upper-class tastes because rich people always seem to have spendable cash."

 -"You seem to be in a pretty good position to be able to ride out economic downturns. As you said your extensive education is a major factor. Along with that is the fact that you don't have as many babies as other countries so you do not need to provide them with jobs by the time they are 18 or 20. What we saw in the world back around 2010 was that people needed to be more responsible for themselves. Just about every Western country made promises to society that they couldn't keep.

"They just let the babies keep coming while unemployment was rising and paychecks were decreasing. It's something like Greece when they hit the financial wall 15 years ago, salaries were cut while the EU price structure stayed put. The Greeks therefore became poorer. They had been used to low prices and entitlement perks. Their fairy tale economic tradition became a science fiction horror story-- the Big Bad Wolf blew down all the houses of the little pigs and ate both Little Red Riding Hood and grandma. A world of Draculas had sucked the blood out of nearly every Western society."

 -"But Wreck, some of the welfare states seemed to be able to handle the problem. In Denmark when workers were displaced, the government paid them while they retrained for jobs in other areas where there was a need for workers."

"As I said, I like our approach. We have high levels of education and we have every possible type of insurance available to our citizens. They just have to choose what insurance they want in order to guard against the inevitable misfortunes that too often befall us. Whether it is illness, joblessness, accidents or whatever-- it is up to us to protect ourselves.

"When I look at the trouble that so many societies are in because they did not control their populations or educate them, I feel sad for them but vindicated for us. Just look at the under 30 group of people in the world-- mostly unemployed. In Algeria 60% of the population are under 30, in Tunisia 52%, in Libya 58%, in Egypt 61%, in Sudan 67%, in Iraq 68%, in Saudi Arabia 60%, 58% in Iran and in Somalia 70% and so it goes! Just where are these societies supposed to manufacture jobs? They can revolt peacefully, as in Egypt, or violently, as in Libya, but no political system can create a utopian economic paradise. You can protect the dictator or fight for democracy-- there is no system yet devised that can absorb this ever-increasing number of young people. Commander there is no question that you are on the right track in your quest to reduce population. But my question is which hardship will be worse for people to endure, the unemployment and poverty that we have today or the lack of employment we will need as a population reduces. Both will be painful."

 -"You are right! But one will be permanent and the other will be temporary. But unfortunately even the temporary problems will last a few generations and I'm not sure that people can handle it. But I see many people responding to the needs of government to reduce spending and increase taxation. I never thought I would see that in my country, but even in California the citizens understand the need for more tax money. Of course asking them to have fewer children is asking for a much more difficult sacrifice than just increasing their taxes. But it seems that the government's needs are more evident, and have been more widely publicized, than the need for the survival of the human race.

"Serious scientists are somewhat split between whether we will be extinct in 100 years, as Dr. Frank Fenner of Australia believes, or whether our population will reduce to about 500 million people, as Professor James Lovelock of the UK believes. Professor of Microbiology Fenner, of the Australian National University, was a major mover in the eradication of smallpox. We might assume that he knows something about eradication. Professor Lovelock has earned doctorates in both medicine and biophysics and has eight honorary doctorates. He has published over 200 scientific papers, several books and has 50 patents. These men are obviously highly intelligent and involved in the workings of the earth and its biology. I think we should listen to them. They both see they need for population reduction as the major avenue to climate change. The question is whether it is too late. Dr. Fenner thinks it is!"

"I certainly hope it isn't. But when I look at the facts of overpopulation, climate change and the unwillingness of people to change, I can't help but be afraid for the world. But naturally I assume that our country will survive. But I guess every country believes the same thing."

  \- "You have told us why you probably don't have unemployment problems, but you haven't said what will happen if you do have them."

"If the people haven't bought unemployment insurance or haven't got families or friends that will support them while they are unemployed, they might emigrate or they just die on the street."

### SMOKING

 \- "Why can't you people understand that God will provide. He will not let his children vanish. So let's get back to some other laws. Everybody knows that smoking is harmful to the individual and to those in the immediate area of the smoker. Many of our states have outlawed smoking in public buildings, restaurants etcetera. But because of your emphasis on freedom, do you allow it?"

"We allow it but it is extremely uncommon. Some of our immigrants have brought the habit with them, particularly those from Asia. But remember our requirement for responsibility. If you smoke your health insurance rates double. You are not allowed to smoke where non-smokers can smell it. And as I said previously, if you want children smoking is not allowed because of the epigenetic and environmental negatives that may affect the child."

###  RELATIONSHIPS

 -"All right, what about relationships. Do you allow partnerships between heterosexuals or homosexuals? What about homosexuals being parents? What about surrogate mothers?"

"Any kind of relationships are permissible. We do recommend checks for sexually transmitted diseases when people decide to live together. The government has developed checklists which a couple might want to discuss before they enter into a relationship. There are questions dealing with sex, domestic responsibilities, and other areas that have been found to be important in relationships. But the couple need not discuss or agree on any such issues. But in our education they should have learned that we humans are pretty complicated beings and there is more than meets the eye in our personalities. So they know that it is wise to explore these possible issues. But I don't have any idea of how many actually do.

"Maybe you are wondering about the financial aspects of relationships, Ray. We are all independent. If and when a relationship ceases to exist, the partners go their merry way continuing their lives. There is no spousal support. We keep what is ours or what we have bought during the relationship. Any child support would have been determined before the contract with the government was signed. As you remember, the parents are equally responsible for the expenses of a child until he or she finishes the university. In the contract with the government those expenses could be shared equally, in proportion to incomes, or one might take full responsibility for the financial costs of child. If there is no contract, the law is that all child expenses are shared equally."

 -"Do you allow polygamy?"

"We don't have any laws against it. But I understand in your country a lot of the polygamous families have a number of children. I heard of one man who had 250 and I've heard of several with over 100. It would take an awfully rich person to have that many children in our society where you have to pay for most of the child's education. I've heard of some of the polygamist cults in your country that allow for underage marriages and incest. We would not allow those because they do not indicate responsible behavior."

 -" I've heard of a couple of hippy type groups that have some polygamy or group marriages, but I think that most of them are Mormon based and have a strong religious overtone. When some guy says he is a prophet and he tells you that you have to have a lot of children to get into heaven, I am more than a little skeptical."

"Like I said, a prophet like that would be asked to prove his commands.

### PARENT LICENSING

"I guess that brings us to our parent licensing. Anyone can have a child but the state requires that both parents are responsible for his upbringing and education. As I just mentioned, that includes their 8 to 12 or more years of college education. The parents will pay about 75% of the education costs. Once the child is in the workforce 20% of his gross wages go to paying back half of what the parents had spent on his or her education from preschool through graduate school. The child is responsible for these payments during the first 10 years of his employment. It normally amounts to about 30% of what the parents actually paid."

 -"And what if the parents don't pay?"

"Well, most parents take out insurance to cover the possibility that they cannot meet their financial responsibilities. However if they don't prepare for these eventualities, as responsible citizens should, one parent will be required to go to prison. The parents can alternate this prison time or one can spend the whole time. In prison, as in life, you are responsible for your own maintenance. This can be rather expensive. Once you have paid for your maintenance, the rest of the money goes to what you owe the government for your child's education. I'll get more into that in a while. I want to talk about our prisons later.

"I have to admit that we have debated along with some other countries how much to tax for a child license. There is the cost of the carbon footprint for the child and his or her progeny, the cost of desalinating water for an additional being, the increased cost of growing food hydroponically. If we're going to be responsible we really should be concerned about future costs to the world because of our children."

 -"I have heard a price of about $800 per year per person to get rid of carbon and other negatives that they produce. But I can't see how we would actually get rid of the carbon. You can't have 7 billion people buying parts of a Brazilian rain forest to take care of the carbon they produce. Then when the tree falls down and rots or is burned, the carbon escapes again. So who pays the tax then?"

 -"The economy has a lot to do with family size. When the recession hit in 2008 many couples decided to be childless or to have only one child. In fact one in five families now in the US have only one child. On the other side of the world, in China, economic progress reduced the desires for more than one child. It is ironic that in China they have changed rapidly from Mao's idea that 'of all the things in the world, people are the most precious.' It wasn't long after that a voluntary program reduced the fertility rate of Chinese women from 5.9 to 2.9. Then the one child policy was implemented and eventually made a law and the fertility rate dropped to about 1.6. But Tyler, I would assume you have to be pretty rich in your country to have a child."

"Well most things are easier if you are rich. But if you really want a child you may just have to sacrifice some of the other things in your life that cost money.

"You might be interested in some of the things we have discussed when we considered licensing parents. One was the carbon footprint that you just mentioned. Another is that when there is a chance to harm others some kind of training and licensing should be required. That's why doctors, pharmacists, drivers, teachers, psychologists and lawyers need licenses.

"We already require other kinds of clearances for adoptive parents, child care facilities, foster parents and youth coaches so why shouldn't we require them for the people who are going to be around child the most?"

 -" But how would you determine what makes good parents?"

"In our discussions we are really looking at eliminating bad parents. We think that is much easier than trying to determine exactly what criteria would make a good parent. Maybe as science advances it will be possible to make such determinations. Right now we only have some indications--but they are very good indicators. But this is why we don't have licenses for parents yet. And we may never have to them."

### AFFIRMATIVE ACTION

 -"I think you are in opposition to a basic human right in requiring financial responsibility for all parents. What if you had a poor couple that could be very loving parents? Don't you have some program, like affirmative action, that would allow them to have a child?"

"Father Ray, you're not in a socialist country here. Here you have to earn everything yourself. You have to 'walk the walk.' I know that in your affirmative-action programs, from the mid-1960s, in the states there were some good things that happened."

 -"True. African-Americans have increased their high school graduation levels from 19% to 35%, while whites were up 31%. Blacks increased their college graduation rates from 5% in 1965 to 19% in 2009, compared to 30% for whites. Their business ownership went from 2.2 percent 7.1%. So affirmative action seems to have made some real differences in our society."

"Well, good for you. Our affirmative action starts in school with equal opportunity, If you don't cut it there life may be a bit tough for you. Of course we have a few very successful people who did not complete school. Some have not even passed our citizenship tests. So our affirmative action affirms those who achieve.

"I suppose I could approve of the new rules in India where in their elite Indian Institutes of Technology only one student of every 50 applicants makes it into the university. But recently they have set aside 30 places for deserving students from the lowest social classes. I'm interested to see how that works out. Will it be true equality of opportunity or will it only be an exercise in futility?"

 -"I can be pretty sure of your answers here but I must ask anyway. Do you have any entitlements such as Social Security or medical care or anything else that your citizens are entitled to?"

ENTITLEMENTS

"Who should be entitled? You in America seem to spend your money on those who are voting rather than on those who are the future of your country and who will be the voters.

"You Americans spend four dollars per citizen for every person over 65 and only one dollar per potential citizen under age 18. We think money is better spent at this earlier stage of life. We want equality of opportunity when you are young rather than a useless equality at the end of life when you are no longer productive and just want to play golf or bridge or be cured of your diseases.

"You should be investing in your youth and in your infrastructure, like roads, communication, renewable energy, research technology and the like. Instead you are putting your money into Social Security, high pensions for public servants, medical care for terminal patients, and a large military complex. The East Asian countries have been investing more in these essential things than the Europeans and Americans for over 15 years. You see where it has gotten them while the West has been going backwards.

"Just look in New York City as an example. Every year they have reported that they have all the money they need to pay the city's pensions. Naturally, city workers are an important group of voters. While the annual budget would appear to indicate that there is plenty of money, more realistic calculations project that the pension fund shortfall could be as high as $50 billion, about the amount of a year's total budget. So if the promised pensions eventually become expenses, and the retired city employees continue to live longer and collect pensions for many more years, either city taxes will have to be raised or severe budget cuts will have to ensue. Pensions are one of the fastest growing expenses for New York. In the last few years nearly $5 billion a year have been needed to bolster pension funds and it now requires 10% of the city's budget to fund the pensions.

"It seems to be quite common in your country to allow pension funds to project earnings from investments when those earnings are only hypothetical. When you have a downturn in the economy, as you did in 2008, you had huge real losses and no hypothetical gains.

"Here in The Colonies you are in charge of your life. If you want to be entitled to a wealthy retirement and to lifelong medical care, that's a matter between you and your insurance company."

 "For years people have been saying that our Medicare and Social Security funds will be exhausted soon. Medicare funds were exhausted in 2024, five years sooner than had been previously proposed. Social Security funds are now projected to be exhausted in 2036, a year earlier than previously thought. (23)

### ELDERCARE

 -"Tyler, I just can't accept that you will not take care of your older citizens. The more advanced countries are quite grateful to those who have gone before. In fact in France, Spain, and Italy 25% of their gross national product goes to care of the elderly. Even China spends about 8% of its GDP on the elderly. And as for India, they spend almost 4% of their GDP on their older citizens. In US it is a little over 16%."

"Such expenses obviously require huge increases in taxes. We don't want these. The truth is that a huge number of elderly have not contributed to their society and will have nothing to contribute in the future. Why should we tax our citizens to pay for people who chose not to take care of themselves and have nothing to offer us?"

 -"But they are human beings. They are your citizens. They are your parents and relatives. It seems to me that there is a duty, a moral obligation, to take care of them."

"Yes they are human beings. But are they equal to us, or to you? Yes, they are citizens. But have they been responsible citizens? Yes they are your parents or relatives. But if there is a duty to take care of them, why shouldn't it rest with their children and relatives? We keep coming back to the idea of responsibility. If you haven't been responsible for yourself, why should I be responsible for you? I am well aware of the large number of your elderly and retired people who do not have enough money to live on. They run up credit card debt in massive amounts. But often they started that practice well before they retired. Then medical and funeral expenses kept increasing their debt. (24)

"As I have said before, we are all going to die. So how many elderly are there that would contribute significantly to your society if you keep them alive? How many will patent an important invention? How many will enact an important law? How many will write an incisive book? I dare say that it will be a very, very few."

 "We seem to be getting nowhere on this one! So let me ask you about your legal system."

### LEGAL SYSTEM--JUDGE MADE LAW IS NOT JUSTICE

"You use the British common law system. We use the Napoleonic system. Your system promotes 'judge made laws' rather than legislature made laws."

 -"That is true. When we lawyers try a case we look at court decisions rather than at the laws and statutes. In California when I am working on an important case I go to our California appellate decisions first. If it is possible that the Supreme Court of the state or the nation has ruled on the issue, I go to those decisions. I would probably look at the appropriate statutes, and in some cases the debates that went on in deciding the law in order to determine legislative intent. But the intent of the majority of legislators is not nearly as important as a 2 to1 decision by our local appellate judges. And at that lower court level it is primarily the prejudices of the judges that are controlling. A few years ago I handled two pension cases with identical facts. Judges in adjoining courtrooms took diametrically opposed views and came out with opposite decisions. It was clearly the prejudice of the judges that ruled the day. In Napoleonic law, you just look at the statute, is a whole lot simpler. But if we used Napoleonic law we wouldn't need nearly so many lawyers. So I'd probably be out of a job."

 -"And Lee, I think criminal law is probably going to change even more. It was one thing when the insanity plea became a reality. People no longer had to be held accountable for their actions. But now with neuroscience entering the picture they will probably be able to find every murder, rapist and robber to have some excesses or reductions in neurotransmitters in some part of the brain or to have a cyst in an area that might cause some irrational action. Or possibly they had an alcoholic or violent parent or neighbor."

" Exactly. Actually since all of our behavior is caused by our brain we might say that every negative action should be excused because we had no control over our thinking. In The Colonies we allow no excuses. Either you broke the law or you didn't. It doesn't matter why. Here again we deal with freedom and responsibility while your country seems to deal with the hope of equality and an evening out of responsibilities so that few people are held accountable for their actions. There is always an excuse. If they have lung cancer because they smoked, provide them with medical care--and charge somebody else for the bills. Then sue the tobacco companies. In fact, sue everybody because nothing is your fault."

  -"There are just too many lawyers in our country—to eat they must sue and take 33 to 40 or more percent of the take. Since nothing is ever your fault in this society you sue to get your just deserts. Fall on a sidewalk because you were running on ice, sue the owner of the building and the city. Drink too much at a bar and get in an accident, sue the owner of the bar, the bar tender, and anyone else you can think of."

"I didn't mention one thing, when there is a money issue in court the judge as to determine where the money will come from to pay the debt. It's not difficult if it's between two people, but if it is a case against our government or another government it becomes a little tricky. If our government were to lose a case, let's say it was a police brutality case or a case of incompetence or a mistake by a simple employee-- the judge would have to determine who would pay the judgment and how much would be paid. So if a building inspector were to approve a building and there was a massive problem with building, how much would the inspector pay and how much would the city pay?"

### LAW ENFORCEMENT

 -" So you do have some laws, but with all your freedom how do you enforce them?"

" We do have some uniformed police but most of the enforcement comes either from our population or from surveillance. For example if our speed limit is 65 miles an hour, we have hidden cameras and GPS devices to catch any irresponsible drivers. If it is a house break-in most people have surveillance cameras and other antitheft devices installed in their homes.

"Every citizen knows our laws and most choose to abide by them. If they don't, they can be imprisoned, fined or they can lose their citizenship.

"You people in the US spend so much time giving rights to minorities even if they don't deserve it. We try to treat everybody individually, but we are very much concerned with the majority. As I remember that's what democracy is about.

"A number of years ago I was in Los Angeles when the Rodney King case was being heard in your courts. I remember the situation. A former criminal who was on parole was driving down a highway at 100 to 117 miles an hour. That was about twice the speed limit. The police chased him for 8 miles and he not only ignored him but drove faster and more recklessly. The chase then went into a residential area where the speeds ranged from 50 to 80 miles per hour. When he finally stopped, they tried to get him to sit down but he refused. They shot him with a taser but it didn't seem to faze him much. When he kept refusing their commands to lie down and put his hands behind his head, they took out their night sticks and began beating him into submission. An amateur photographer, coming on the scene late filmed most of the beating and only the last few seconds of the original encounter where King refused to submit to the officers' requests. The occupants in his car submitted to the police, were taken into custody, but were not charged and were released. King suffered some severe injuries, but they were not life-threatening.

"The case was brought to court. King testified that if he were apprehended while drunk driving it would be a violation of his parole from prison where he had been sent for robbery. He was both drunk and under the influence of marijuana. The police were exonerated from having used excessive force.

"While ghetto youth commonly look for excuses to explode, the acquittal of the policemen gave them a perfect excuse. By the time the police and the armed services quelled the riot, 53 people were dead, almost 2400 were injured, there were 7000 fires, over 3000 businesses were attacked and there was a financial loss almost a billion dollars.

"But then the federal government brought a suit against the police saying that they had abused King's civil rights. Two officers were found guilty and were sent to federal prison for two years. One had been considered a model policeman. But as ex-felons they cannot get jobs as policemen again.

"In an eventual civil suit King was awarded 3.8 million dollars and his attorneys got $1.6 million. In later years King was arrested for: hitting his wife with a car so he served 90 days in jail for 'hit and run'. He was later arrested for speeding while under the influence of alcohol, and for resisting arrest. Nice fella!

"About the same in Arizona a border guard shot and killed a drug smuggling illegal border crosser in the back while he was running away. He too was brought to trial for violating the civil rights of the smuggler. An Arizona jury acquitted him.

"Here in The Colonies we would probably not have brought any of these officers to trial for civil rights violations. In the Rodney King case there would be no action at all against the police. In the Arizona case there might well have been. But you have a difference in your juries in liberal California and conservative Arizona. Our prejudices go with the law enforcement people not the criminals. Only if there is a serious breach of regulations would we discipline a law enforcement officer. When it is clear that the criminal instigated the altercation, he certainly did not show any responsibility so he would have abrogated any civil rights that he might have had.

"When people make the decision to prosecute law enforcement people and they have never been in the situation they are judging, we think it is irresponsible. It is different if the chief of police or another law enforcement person brings a charge against an officer but when the charge is brought by a politician or a lawyer who has never been on the front lines, it is like an African tribesman criticizing the refereeing of an American football game. He doesn't know anything about it.

"I might say to that juries that are giving out millions of dollars of taxpayer's money that might be better spent building roads or hiring civil servants, should be required to determine where is the source of this award money. I dare say that a school custodian or a librarian might think twice before awarding a million and a half dollars to attorneys for defending an obvious criminal who was breaking the law. I know how you lawyers look at it Lee, that everyone is entitled to the best defense possible but we look at what was justice in the case.

"But as you can imagine, our country is a lot more peaceful than yours. I have read that there are 731,000 gang members in the U.S. but only 708,000 policemen. I have heard that there are nine organized crime families in the US, with five in New York.

"A few years ago I was talking to a Norwegian policeman. He told me that the foreign criminals had no fear of prison because staying in a Norwegian jail was like being on vacation. It was not like the ruthless prisons of their home country. The Norwegians wanted to send them back to Lithuanian or Somalian jails, but their home countries` didn't want to take them back. So the criminals had a win-win situation. If they stayed out of jail they could make good money. If they went to jail they lived well and were even given a salary while in jail."

PRISONS

 -" I am interested in your prison system and whether you are primarily punishing or educating prisoners. I also wonder about the cost to your society. In the US prisons cost taxpayers over $50 billion a year. In the UK it costs $57,000 per year per prisoner.

"In our Western world there seem to be a lot of criminals. In the UK there are 154 prisoners per hundred thousand population. By contrast the US has 750 per hundred thousand. Russia's percentage is lower at 600, with Israel at 325 and China under 20. In Germany it is 87 and in Norway 71. The number of men is higher than these figures would indicate. For example in the US over 1300 men are imprisoned per hundred thousand but only a little over 100 women per hundred thousand are behind bars."

  "Our rates are not nearly so high. I know there have been studies showing that there is more crime among those people with lower IQs. Our people do have quite high IQs so this may be a reason. Another reason might be that our education system and our media continually preach responsibility, so there seems to be a good deal of public pressure to behave. Another factor might be that we have almost no illegal immigrants. In other countries about a third of their prison populations are noncitizens. As I mentioned all of our financial transactions are done with a credit card type of identification. It would be impossible, or at least highly unlikely, that any noncitizen could obtain such a card. And he would have to have a bank account in order to use the card.

"As you might expect, we prefer not to imprison our people.

"You may remember that some years ago in Canada because of a budget crunch they released 11% of their prisoners. They introduced more community-based sentences. Their murder rate went down 42%, burglaries reduced by 35% and assaults and robberies by 22%. (25) For this reason in both the UK and the US prisoners are being released before they have fulfilled their sentences. This indicates to us that people need not always be imprisoned in order to behave sensibly."

 \- "A big problem we have in America is our high recidivism rate. About 40% of our ex-cons are back in jail within three years after being released. It seems that our rehabilitation efforts are not too successful. If California could only reduce its recidivism rate by 10% it could save almost a quarter of a billion dollars a year."

"A good part of your prison population is there because of either drug use or drug sales. We have tackled both of those areas in a rather interesting way, a way in which you may not approve. I'll get into that in a few minutes.

"If you go to prison in our country we want you to feel somewhat punished but also somewhat smarter. We don't have much of a gang culture here among our prisoners like you do in the states, with your Mexican mafias, Aryan Brotherhood, Crips and Bloods. Nevertheless we don't want our prisoners learning more criminal behavior while in prison. This is something that your prisons and juvenile detention centers seem to be pretty good at teaching."

 -"Just look at how many of the major gangs were started in our California prisons. In fact most of the major American prison gangs were started our state. The Mexican Mafia was formed at the prison in Tracy. Nuestra Familia was formed at Soledad. The Texas Syndicate was formed at Folsom. The Black Guerrilla Family was formed at San Quentin as was the Aryan Brotherhood. And the Nazi Low Riders were formed in a California Youth Authority facility. Meanwhile the Crips and Bloods take their identities from the streets of Los Angeles into the prisons with them. In our state our prisons seem to manufacture criminals."

" That's the reason our prisoners start in a single cell, sort of solitary confinement but not unpleasant. They have a computer with Internet and television along with approved books. But our Internet and television are filtered. They can get news from a number of different sources and they can watch approved television programs. Many of the old programs like 'Ozzie and Harriet', 'Mash', and dramatizations of great literature are always available. As brutal as Shakespeare can be, we still allow it. But we don't allow them to see detective programs such as the CSI series because they might get more criminal ideas and see how to avoid the law. We want to give the prisoners only positive influences. Our prison system is geared to make them better citizens and not better criminals.

"Anyone in prison who has shown any violent tendencies is not allowed to lift weights. No sense making stronger rapists and muggers. We want to give the prisoners only positive influences.

"They are able to talk to approved people by phone and to our prison teachers and psychologists. Because these prisoners could not operate effectively in a free society we can't give them total freedom in prison. They would have to earn freedom. If a prisoner is judged to be psychologically balanced and able to communicate with other people, the psychologist or the teacher can recommend an additional step to freedom in which he can communicate with others during free social periods. A career criminal would find it very difficult to get this kind of permission.

"Nearly everyone speaks English, but if a prisoner did not he would be given the opportunity to learn English reading, speaking and writing. It is an option if he plans to leave the country on his release. It is a requirement if he has an invitation to stay. In the rare case that one of our citizens is illiterate he will not be allowed out until he can read at a 6th grade level. Every one of our prisoners will advance his learning in prison if his sentence is more than two years. If he had only graduated from primary school, he will have to satisfy the requirements for graduation from a middle school. If he is a graduate of the middle school, he must graduate from high school while in prison. If he is a high school graduate, he must graduate from a community college while in prison. If he has done that, he must graduate from college before being released. So every prisoner has the responsibility as part of his sentence to improve himself.

"There is also an option for training in a trade. Sometimes we merely have to get them started then they can progress at home. It is very individualistic in terms of what percentage of a sentence is punishment, what percent is ethical training, and what percent is preparation for a higher level job when he or she is released."

"I had mentioned that inmates must pay their own upkeep. Many have a trade or business that can be carried on in prison. Others work on the prison farms or in other parts of the prison such as the library or the hospital. They get paid a fair wage for this work then have their incarceration expenses deducted from that pay. If they owe money, such as for their child's education expenses or business debt, the additional money earned goes into paying off that account."

 \- "You mentioned solitary confinement. Does that mean that your prisoners have no contact with others?"

"Once we evaluate the prisoner we can put him with others in a social group that will not harm him, and may possibly help him. But if there were members of a gang, we would not let them associate with each other."

 -"In California 20% of male prisoners and 30% of female prisoners are there because of drug offenses. About 16% of the prisoners were convicted for trafficking and 15% for possession. Of course many of those in jail for possession had actually pleaded down to that charge from a more serious charge for which they had been arrested..

DRUGS

"There is no question that alcohol and illegal drugs are a problem for most societies. Your country has a high rate of alcohol and drug abuse. 20% of your people binge drink every year. Denmark had over 40% of its teens get drunk at least 20 times last year. The UK, Finland and Ireland are not far behind. Whether they drink because it is an adult type thing to do and satisfies their power drives or whether they are really unhappy with their lives and want to escape--the fact is that excessive drug use is not good for the individual or the society.

"Drugs are a such a simple way of handling one's basic psychological problems. You can drink alcohol or use heroin because you want to forget your life. You can use marijuana or LSD because you want to change your perception of life. You can use cocaine or amphetamines to give you an excitement that makes your life more exciting. But these drugs have negative effects for societies. They increase traffic accidents, many increase neuroses or psychoses, most will negatively affect one's working life, and when they're outlawed they bring in criminal elements to supply what these injured psyches want.

"Then there is the fact that so many drugs are getting stronger. For example, the first research on marijuana was on 0.5% THC. This low level of the hallucinogenic was the research object into the 1950s, then stronger marijuana began to arrive with THC levels of 2, 4 and 5%. Then came 12% sinsemilla, then 25% White Widow. Mixtures of cocaine have also become much stronger as the years have passed. Then there is the fact that even younger children are using alcohol and other drugs to excess. No matter what their age, unexpected drug reactions are cited for many hospital admissions.

"And it's not like it's getting better. In Afghanistan they have increased the number of square miles of opium poppies to over 500. That's a two thirds increase in 10 years. Then you have all that marijuana growing in Mexico and California. And of course illicit laboratories turnout all kinds of synthetic drugs.

"As in your country, in fact most countries, we have laws against most drug use, because its use is often irresponsible. But like your country, with 25 to 50% of your jail inmates there for drug-related offenses, we thought there might be a better way to handle the situation.

"We debated for years the best approach to handling drug problems. One compromise the government developed allowed for the self-centered drug users and those who wanted to safely pursue their drug habits without having to rob and burglarize and run the risk of jail time without drugs. That compromise was to build drug houses for those who wanted to pursue their drug habits. The society built huge drug houses in which addicts could sign themselves in and get all the drugs they wanted for nothing. But they had to sign that they would not leave the building unless cured—or dead. They also had to sign that they would take daily their contraceptive drugs. Both the males and the females were on contraceptives. They also had to work two hours a day to provide for the rent, food and drugs. For those who wanted it, medical help was available as was psychological help to get free of the habit. But few availed themselves of this option. Most feasted on the free cocaine and heroin and delighted in the society provided routes to pleasure. At the same time the society profited by being safer for all, with fewer burglaries and robberies. The cost of the drug houses was less than 10% of the cost of the crimes which had been committed by the drug crazed population. Illegal drugs almost dried up because the addicts were being treated to government grown crops or opium and coca. With no profit motive, illegal drugs nearly dried up.

 -"Do any leave?"

"Very few ever leave. Their drug heaven is too cozy."

 -"How can you let these people kill themselves under the guise of government?"

"As I have tried to indicate before, we are not here to judge how they want to use their freedom except that we insist that it be done responsibly. When a person chooses a drugged life we don't think it's very responsible but as long as they are not interfering with other people's lifes' choices we accept it. And as I keep reminding you, we are all going to die. If someone wants to die earlier from a cocaine overdose that is their choice. Of course you would say it is not a rational choice, and I would agree with you. But so far in human history we have not been able to keep a whole society drug-free, consequently to reduce the impact on the psychologically healthy population we allow drug users an easy path to pleasure.

"A number of years ago we heard about drug clinics in Vancouver, San Francisco and a number of other cities in the world that allowed drug addicts to inject heroin, cocaine or other drugs under the supervision of nurses. They did this to cut the number of drug overdoses and to reduce the amount of Hepatitis C and HIV transferred. We just did it to get them off the street. Eight countries already have such facilities. But I don't really care whether the addicts live or die. They certainly aren't living responsible lives."

 -" I saw that the RAND Corporation said that legalizing marijuana would cut the street price. And the former president of Mexico, Vicente Fox, now advocates legalizing drugs because he thinks drug use is better than the murdering has been going on in Mexico. So maybe there is a solution that our country can use somewhere. We certainly haven't found one so far."

 -"How would you handle drinking, Tyler? You probably heard that Russia has about 40,000 alcohol poisoning deaths a year and that the average man's lifespan is only about 60 years. It seems that there are several countries in East Europe that are as high as the Russians, consuming 16 to 18 liters of pure alcohol per person per year. While the US is high, it is a little more than half of the Russian rate."

"Like I said, if they are problems to other people, such as driving drunk, we can take them into our drug houses. If they won't do that, we put them in prison. They're free to drink, but they can't harm others because of their drinking. That includes traffic accidents, spousal or child abuse, a poor safety record at work, or any other socially negative actions. If they drink from the time they get home until midnight, then wake up sober and do a good job at work, there is no problem."

# THE BEST FORM OF GOVERNMENT?

 -"Well Tyler, you have seen a little bit of the world, what do you think is the best form of government?

"We definitely need more responsibility in the world. And it seems that people will not be responsible for our human race without a stronger push toward international responsibility. It is understandable that our self-centered desires come first.

"For the starving Indians or Africans naturally filling their bellies is the primary concern. Usually that means that they have to have a job. If you have a job and your belly is full, you either move upwards towards Maslow's meta level and attempt to accomplish worthwhile things (26) or you spend your free hours trying to amuse yourself with whatever toys you can find.

"Probably the toys that are most fun are in the genital area and contraception may not fit into your 'pleasure now' mentality. I think there are three things that must be done. Commander I think you have hit on two of them, fewer babies and a higher percentage of babies that are wanted and loved. But I think there has to be a financial responsibility for any little 'munchkins' you bring into our land of Oz.

"And what kind of government can do that? It has to be a government that's sees individual responsibility as a key to societal survival and to its flourishing. The governments that have done this best are China and Singapore. In both cases you had a strong central power. In the case of China it was a communist oligarchy. In the case of Singapore it was a respected dictatorial Prime Minister. I am hoping that we are offering a third alternative. In The United Colonies we hope that a combination of a high-level of education, an earned citizenship, an equality of opportunity that starts anew with each generation, and then the emphasis on the democratic aspects of a democratic republic. All other democratic republics emphasize the Parliament's duty to make laws.

"Whatever government is to be 'best' must have the combination of equality of educational opportunity, with a very strong liberal arts education, and a national commitment to responsibility.

"I guess that a key factor is having the people in charge being well-educated in the liberal arts. So whether you have a single monarch, an oligarchy, a republic, or a true democracy--education is the key. You can't have people just studying the Koran or the Bible, or how to be a carpenter, or how to be a doctor-- the people who are to run the government must have a broad background in education and be current on what is happening in the world. Without education a society can only wither. As our favorite historian, Arnold Toynbee, said 'Civilizations die from suicide, not from murder.' And as your great patriot Thomas Paine said, 'We have the power to begin the world all over again.' I hope we are leading the way.

## NOTES

1. Book 4 of this series

2. Book 6 of this series

3. From 'Created Equal,' the last of the Free to Choose. PBS television series-- 1990 volume 2

3a. Time May 16, 2011 p 16

4. Pew Hispanic Center, 2009

5. Book 5 of this series

5a. Newsweek Jan. 11, 2011. p. 10

6. Pozharny, et al. 'Genomic loss of imprinting in first trimester human placenta. American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology. 2010, 202 (4)

7. European Society for medical oncology. October 11, 2010

8. Ng, S-F. et al. Nature 467, 963-966 (2010). (Morris, M. J. Expert Rev. Endocrinol. Metab. 4, 625-637 (2009).

9. USA Today, February 22, 2011, p 8A

9a. Ibid.

9b. Time Magazine, April 25, 2011. P. 15

9c. _McCulloch v_. _Maryland_ , 17 U.S. 316 (1819)

10. Hudson, Orrin. One Move at a Time--How to Succeed at Chess and at Life. Morgan James Publishing, 2004

10a. International Herald Tribune, April 18, 2011. P. 6

10b. Newsweek September 20, 2010, page 50

10c. Giddens, Anthony. Sociology. Second Edition. Cambridge, England: Polity Press. 1993. p. 212

10d. Office of Management and Budget, Older Americans 2010, Key Indicators of Well-Being. 2011

11. Fromm, Erich. To Have or To Be. Cass Canfield (1976), in Continuum; Revised edition (2005)

11a. Dagsavisen, March 10, 2011, p. 13

12. Book 4 of this series

12a. See Book 4 of this series.

13. See Book 4

14. 1 Samuel, 15:23

15. 15.1 Peter 2:13

16. Romans 13:1

17. Newsweek, March 7, 2011, pp 22–27

18. See Book 4 o the series

19. See Book 7 of this series.

20. Psychiatric News June 1, 2007, Volume 42 Number 11 Page 16

21. Released by bipartisan coalition of Mayors Against Illegal Guns. Reuters, January 20, 2011

22. Time Magazine, April 29, 2011, p 9

23. Thomson Reuters, May 13, 2011.

24. Newsweek Jan. 11, 2011. p. 10

25. Time Magazine August 9, 2010. Page 31

26. See Book 6 of this series.

