Rodent Regatta

Screw everyone but the Amish
By Craig J. Cantoni
August 10, 2004

How does the government recognize and reward citizens who are model parents, spouses and citizens? It screws them.

For example, the government screws all of the many Americans who believe that they have a responsibility to themselves, their families and society to live below their means and save for retirement so that they don’t become a burden on anyone else or society. It also screws all of the many Americans who believe that they have a responsibility to take care of their elderly parents if they can no longer take care of themselves. And it screws all of the many Americans who believe that it is their responsibility to see that their children are educated, just as they believe it is their responsibility to see that they are fed, sheltered and clothed.

How does the government screw them?

By forcing them to participate in the Ponzi schemes of Social Security and Medicare, and to follow laws and regulations regarding K-12 education that harm their children. In essence, the government says, ”To recognize and reward you for being responsible citizens, we’re going to take your money, put it in the collective, and then pretend to be magnanimous by doing less for you than what you would have done for yourself with the same money.”

I exaggerate. The government doesn’t screw all of the many Americans who take responsibility for their own retirement, health care and education. An exception is the self-employed Amish, who are excluded from paying into, and participating in, Social Security and Medicare. The Amish also are allowed to educate their children for only eight years in one-room Amish schoolhouses, where the children are taught by Amish teachers who have only eight years of schooling and are not state certified teachers or members of a leftist teacher union. Interestingly, the students usually perform better than local public school students on standardized tests. And they certainly ”outperform” public schoolers in values and skills not taught in public school.

Why does the government engage in a double standard and screw all responsible Americans but the Amish? Because of convoluted logic.

The Amish are excluded from Social Security and Medicare due to the IRS deciding that since they take care of their own, the Amish don’t need the help of the state. And they are excluded from compulsory high school and other education regulations due to the Supreme Court deciding in 1972 that since they train their children to be homemakers, farmers and craftsmen, the Amish don’t need to attend high school.

These decisions are not convoluted, for it is entirely logical for the government to exclude people and groups from the coercion of the collective who take care of their own and teach their children to lead productive lives. However, it is illogical for the government to let the Amish escape from coerced collectivism but not all of the other people who take care of their own and teach their children to lead productive lives.

After all, there are plenty of non-Amish individuals, religions and organizations that take care of their own and teach their own, albeit far fewer than there used to be before the government began doing what people used to do for themselves.

Before the advent of the New Deal, the War on Poverty, the Great Society and compassionate conservatism, almost all Americans took care of themselves or were helped by neighbors, churches and mutual aid societies. After the advent of these programs, about 40 percent of Americans have become dependent on the government, with such dire consequences for society as skyrocketing numbers of out-of-wedlock births, single-parent families, obese ”poor” people, and other social pathologies. Now, because of our munificent government, Americans are immorally sending $40 trillion in unpaid entitlement bills to future generations instead of taking care of themselves and their children. Screwing other people has become a national pastime, thanks to the government being a role model for screwing.

In 1900, transfer payments were only two percent of government spending. Today, because of entitlements and welfare, transfer payments are 40 percent of government spending and growing. These payments do not include the $500 billion spent on public education, much of which is transferred from people without kids in public school to people with kids in public school.

Contrary to what Americans have been led to believe, all Americans do not need four years of high school to be productive members of society and support themselves and their families. Like the Amish, there are many young people who don’t plan on attending college, who don’t need algebra and science, and who would be better off skipping high school and learning a trade or taking the $40,000 that a high school education costs and starting a business.

Is it better for someone to graduate from high school and work in a call center, or for someone to skip high school and learn a trade or start a business? Judging from the intelligence, skills, hard work and business savvy of the Amish I visited this summer, that question isn’t as black and white as the government and the education establishment want us to believe.

But to the government, one size fits all. Thus, other than the Amish, it screws all Americans equally through coercive collectivism, whether or not they deserve to be screwed.

I don’t know about you, but I’m getting tired of being screwed.

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Mr. Cantoni is an author, columnist and founder of Honest Americans Against Legal Theft (HAALT). He can be reached at ccan2@aol.com

Pontificating about intelligence restructuring
By Craig J. Cantoni
August 5, 2004

Not being an expert in subjects has not stopped me and other big-mouthed pundits from pontificating about them. For once, I’m going to pontificate about a subject in which I have expertise—30 years of expertise to be exact.

The subject is the 9/11 Commission’s recommended restructuring of national intelligence. My expertise is not in national intelligence, but it is in making large, complex organizations more effective. Here, free of charge, is what I’ve learned over the years:

- When departments, or stovepipes, within a large organization are not communicating, cooperating and coordinating effectively with each other, tinkering with the organization structure is almost always the wrong solution.

– Likewise, establishing a new layer of management or ”assistant to” and ”coordinator” positions is almost always the wrong solution. – Investing in an expensive computer system is almost always the wrong solution. – Having the problems ”solved” by top management or committees of high-level people with no front-line experience in how work gets done lower in the organization is almost always the wrong solution.

-Having the problems ”solved” by attorneys and other narrow staff specialists who have worked at the top of the organization all their careers without any operational experience in the ”real” work of the organization is almost always the wrong solution.

So what is the right solution? The right solution is for cross-departmental teams of lower-level employees to identify, prioritize and solve the interdepartmental problems, and then to establish fluid processes and mechanisms that will enable them to communicate, coordinate and cooperate with each other across departmental boundaries without having to crawl up their stovepipe for approval, and without worrying about violating their job descriptions and getting in trouble with the head of their stovepipe or with the personnel department.

The role of top management is to support, encourage, reward and exemplify such cross-departmental teamwork, and to establish pay and promotion systems that incentivize employees to operate in the best interest of the entire organization and not in the parochial interest of their own department.

The 9/11 Commission and Congress, where most of the Members are attorneys, have it exactly backwards. They have recommended a super-coordinator position of Intelligence Czar, whose responsibilities and authority viz a viz the FBI, CIA and Military Intelligence will be even less clear than those of Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge and even more removed from employees on the firing line than the current directors of those agencies.

Incidentally, there is now an Assistant to the President for Homeland Security. In other words, Tom Ridge, who supposedly reports to the President on matters of homeland security, has a counterpart who reports to the President on matters of homeland security. I kid you not. It is unfathomable how this bizarre setup improves communication, cooperation and communication between the various agencies and departments that are responsible for homeland security.

The reason for the extra homeland security position might be the fact that Ridge (and other cabinet members) spend most of their time appearing before congressional committees, the number of which has skyrocketed over the years, due to self-serving Members wanting the status, power and publicity of serving as committee chairs. Since taking office, Ridge has had to appear before 130 committees. By contrast, Osama bin Laden does not have to appear before any committees to plan direct and coordinate his evil work.

All of this would be funny if it were not so serious. When The Decline and Fall of the American Empire is written 100 years from now, one of the later chapters will be about the lawyers in Congress who restructured American intelligence.

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Mr. Cantoni is an author, columnist and president of Capstone Consulting Group of Scottsdale. He can be reached at ccan2@aol.com

Why don’t left-liberals have epiphanies?
By Craig J. Cantoni
August 4, 2004

Many people are libertarians and classical liberals because they had an epiphany at some point in their lives about the danger of concentrated state power, central planning and socialism, often from reading such novels as Atlas Shrugged and such economic treatises as The Road to Serfdom.

My epiphany began as a kid from reading every history book I could find on the evils of the Third Reich, which, as I came to understand, was exactly like the Soviet Union in terms of putting the interests of the state before the rights of the individual. The totalitarianism of both the Third Reich and the Soviet Union sprang from poisonous cultures that had a long history of squelching individualism.for the ”greater good” of society.

Now, 40 years later…

...I’m wondering why left-liberals do not have similar epiphanies. Why do they and their allies in academia and Hollywood demonize Hitler and fascism so much more than Stalin and communism? And why are there so many more popular books and movies about the horrors of Hitler and fascism than about the horrors of Stalin and communism?

Whatever the reasons, the result is that left-liberals only get it partially right. To their credit, they respect civil liberties. To their discredit, they espouse group rights based on class and race, they enact speech codes and restrictions on political speech, they restrict the right of free association, they believe that an individual’s money belongs to the collective to be redistributed for the ”greater good” of society, they see nothing wrong with the government and unionized teachers having a monopoly on K-12 classroom thought, they have utopian notions about what people should drive and where they should live, and they disparage capitalism, which is nothing more than the manifestation of economic freedom.

In short, left-liberals believe that the individual is secondary to the state and society. They believe this because they have not had an epiphany about the nexus between socialism and fascism. And they have not had an epiphany, I believe, because Hollywood and academia have not demonized socialism to the same extent that fascism has been demonized.

Such thoughts are on my mind for two reasons. First, I am reading an excellent new book about Stalin and the Bolshevik Revolution: Stalin: The Court of the Red TSAR, by Simon Sebag Montefiore. Second, for about the tenth time, I recently watched the classic movie Judgment at Nuremberg, starring Spencer Tracy, Burt Lancaster, Richard Widmark, Marlene Dietrich, Maximilian Schell, Judy Garland, and Montgomery Clift. Clift felt so strongly about the importance of the movie that he acted in it without recompense—and, in my opinion, gave one of the best performances in the history of cinema.

The movie is a fictional account of German judges being judged by an American tribunal for following Nazi law and holding sham trials. I know of no comparable film that dramatizes how Soviet judges followed the diktats of Stalin and held sham trials. Nor do I know of any left-liberal actor who has starred without recompense in a movie that shows the horrors of Bolshevism.

Of course, there were never Nuremberg-like trials of Stalin’s evil cabal after the Second World War. To the contrary, in an ugly display of hypocrisy and double-standards, Soviets were allowed by the United States and the other allies to join them in sitting in judgment of the Nazis for crimes against humanity that rivaled the crimes against humanity committed by the Soviets.

I understand the political reasons at the time for the hypocrisy and double standards, but I do not understand why the hypocrisy and double standards continue today in the unequal treatment by Hollywood, the publishing industry and academia of the two equally evil ideologies.

Yes, equally evil.

Stalin and his henchmen killed as many of their fellow citizens as Hitler and his henchmen. The difference was that Stalin’s genocide was based on class while Hitler’s was based on race. Ironically, many of the perpetrators in the Politburo and Congress of Soviets were Jews, while most of the victims in the Third Reich were Jews—a fact that some people stretch to explain why Hollywood has demonized fascism more than communism.

In any event, images are permanently etched in American minds of the unspeakable horrors of Nazi concentration camps. I still remember horrific documentaries that were shown in Catholic elementary school in the 1950s of the concentration camps being liberated and the piles of bodies, spectacles, gold fillings and hair. (No mention was made by the nuns of the Vatican’s Concordant with the Third Reich.) The images have been refreshed by such fairly recent documentaries as Shoa and by such powerful movies on the Holocaust as Schindler’s List, Sophie’s Choice and The Pianist.

Speaking of the The Pianist, it shows, through the masterful direction of Roman Polanski, the destruction of the Warsaw ghetto by Nazi troops. But to the best of my knowledge of movies, there is not a similar American movie that details the complicity of the Soviets in the quelling of the Warsaw Uprising. Soviet troops were close enough to Warsaw to come to the aid of the city, but Stalin chose to let the Nazis do the dirty work that he would have to do later to subjugate Warsaw and Poland.

Tellingly, there is a paucity of movies about Stalin and a plethora of movies about Hitler. For example, I recently went to Hollywood Video to rent the movie Stalin, one of the few movies about the Bolshevik dictator, starring Robert Duvall. The store did not carry the movie.

There were only two movies at Hollywood Video on the Bolshevik Revolution, Doctor Zchivago (1965) and Reds (1981), neither of which glorifies communism but both of which gloss over Bolshevik atrocities.

The same is true for the movie Stalin. Having seen it before, I know that it touches on Stalin’s genocide, but unlike movies about Hitler’s genocide, it does not show graphic reenactments or actual footage of the genocide. For example, it does not show millions of peasants being sent to Siberian concentration camps for the ”crime” of owning land and wanting to keep some of the fruits of their labor. Nor does it show women and children dying ghastly deaths from starvation, unlike movies on the Holocaust that show women and children being gassed in the ”showers.”

In a similar vein, there is a Holocaust museum and memorial on the Capitol Mall but not a museum and memorial dedicated to the hundred-million or so who have been slaughtered in the name of communism.

Even current political language and labels perpetuate the unbalanced view of the Left and Right. For example, the epithet ”right-wing extremist” is used far more in the mainstream media to describe conservatives than the epithet ”left-wing extremist” is used to describe liberals—as if left-wing extremism is somehow morally superior to right-wing extremism.

A similar phenomenon (propaganda?) has occurred with respect to the portrayal of Israel by Hollywood and academia. In such movies as A Woman Called Golda (1982), early Zionists, many of whom were Bolsheviks, were shown as beleaguered heroes standing for democracy against Arab barbarians. The portrayals conveniently overlooked the sordid history of the Balfour Declaration, the fact that Jews and Moslems were living in relative harmony in Palestine before Britain and France began carving up the Middle East after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, and how American Jews hypocritically went against their commendable belief in the separation of church and state by influencing American foreign policy to support the religious state of Israel.

The adjective ”left-wing” was not used by left-liberals to describe the early Zionists, even as they formed collective communes. Today, however, as left-liberals have come to see the Israeli government as increasingly capitalistic and militaristic, they use the adjective ”right-wing” with regularity to describe it.

In summary, left-liberals do not have epiphanies about the evils of leftism for one reason: They believe their own propaganda.

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Mr. Cantoni is an author, columnist and founder of Honest Americans Against Legal Theft (HAALT). He can be reached at ccan2@aol.com

Craig Cantoni’s regular opponent in point-counterpoint columns for the Arizona Republic is quitting the column. Craig’s last faceoff with him ran on August 4th.

John is the winner
By Craig J. Cantoni

As my worthy opponent leaves the space next door, I want to wish John well in his new assignment of public school principal. I also want to concede that he and his fellow liberals have won the political debate in America.

Congratulations, John.

Much of the world has come to understand that central control and collectivism hurts people, especially the poor. Yet the United States continues on a path of centralization and collectivism, thanks to liberals like John and their big-government allies in the Republican Party.

Take ”transfer payments,” which is a euphemism for ”theft.”

In 1900, almost all government expenditures were for the common good—for government services like national defense that benefit all citizens. Back then, transfer payments, which benefit some citizens at the expense of others, were only two percent of government spending. Today, they are over 40 percent and growing.

In 1900, total government expenditures were 8.2 percent of Gross Domestic Product. Today, they are about four times higher. A century ago, 60 percent of government spending was at the local and state levels. Now, federal spending is twice as much as local and state spending combined, costing each household a whopping $23,000 per year.

In 1914, the year after the ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment, the income tax per capita was $69 in today’s dollars, versus $2,500 today. Less than one percent of the population had to file a tax return in 1914, versus 45 percent today. There were 4,000 IRS employees and four pages of IRS forms in 1914, versus 100,000 employees and over 4,000 pages today.

Politicians bray about the small percentage of jobs outsourced to other countries but are silent about the millions of jobs ”outsourced” to the government. There are now almost twice as many wealth-consuming public-sector employees as wealth-producing manufacturing employees.

Health care is increasingly unaffordable, due to the government destroying a consumer market in health care 60 years ago. Now, economic illiterates want to make health care ”free” and thus more expensive.

As a result of our spending binge, the U.S. is a debtor nation, capital is fleeing to other countries, and we are sticking future generations with a $40 trillion entitlement bill.

Big-government Republicans and liberals like John have won, but the nation has lost. At the risk of sounding like a sore loser, I take back my congratulations.

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Mr. Cantoni is an author, public speaker and consultant. He can be reached at ccan2@aol.com

It’s been a long hot summer in Arizona. My friend, Craig Cantoni, has taken some time off, traveled a bit and refueled for the fall foolishness. His latest attempt to escape the heat in Phoenix just made things hotter. Get ready. This one pulls no punches.

Public ed plunderers at 7,000 ft.
By Craig J. Cantoni
July 28, 2004

Last week, my wife and I drove 110 miles to Flagstaff, Arizona to escape the summertime furnace of Phoenix and to take our minds off of political issues, especially the meeting of plunderers and economic illiterates known as the Democratic National Convention, which will be followed by a meeting of plunderers and economic illiterates known as the Republican National Convention.

Pulling into the hotel in the pines at 7,000 ft. elevation, our soaring spirits took a nosedive when we saw the marquis, where, emblazoned in large letters, was a welcome to plunderers and economic illiterates.

As luck would have it, the Arizona School Boards Association was holding a conference at the hotel. The parking lot was full of cars from school districts across the state, and the lobby was full of people who looked, spoke and dressed like Soviet apparatchiks on a weekend retreat to a dacha.

There, in all of their bureaucratic glory, were members of the public education establishment. There, in all of their political power, were the people who have a stranglehold on the Democratic and Republican parties, who are responsible for the economic illiteracy of the American public, who have a dangerous monopoly on K-12 classroom thought, and who, when they retire to their bedrooms at night, get in bed with their masters, the teacher unions, and engage in disgusting sadomasochistic rituals with public money.

After adopting a bureaucratic persona and attire, I spied on the meeting and schmoozed with some of the attendees.

Tellingly, the meeting agenda had nothing about academics, cost reduction or school choice. The three main agenda items were: 1) what to do if you are threatened with another district wanting to take over your district; 2) a presentation by Jamie Vollmer; and 3) a luau in the evening.

Who is Jamie Vollmer? He is a retired businessman, a popular speaker at education conferences and a fool.

To his credit, Vollmer admits his past foolishness. He says that he once believed that public education could be run like a business. Apparently not knowing anything about public choice economics, he did not realize that government schools are going to behave like the government and thus be held hostage by politicians, bureaucrats, rent-seeking unions and other special interests.

To his discredit, Vollmer continues to be a fool. After having an epiphany about the true nature of government schools, he has become a big fan of government schools. He is like a smoker dying of lung cancer who, after learning the true nature of smoking, becomes a cheerleader for the tobacco industry, earning a good income by speaking at industry conferences about the glories of tobacco.

Vollmer’s new shtick is to change America in order to improve public education. To quote from an article of his in the March 6, 2002, issue of Education Week: ”For the most important thing I have learned is that schools reflect the attitudes, beliefs and health of the communities they serve, and therefore, to improve public education means more than changing our schools, it means changing America.”

Well, it certainly doesn’t mean learning proper grammar, as the above sentence shows.

Borrowing a page from the Bolsheviks, Vollmer arrogantly believes that America should be changed to meet the needs of the government, not vice versa. And how does he propose to do this? Through propaganda, of course.

But Vollmer doesn’t call it propaganda. He calls it ”marketing” and ”getting good information to the community.”

Education associations and teacher unions love his message. For example, The Washington Education Association had this to say about Vollmer’s ideas in a recent newsletter:

”The solution requires getting good information to the community. That doesn’t mean holding a meeting at school, a setting where many may already feel alienated. It doesn’t mean sending home a letter to the small portion of families who have children. It does mean teachers and concerned parents (not administrators) taking their message on the road, to the community’s turf—the Rotary Club, the senior center, the church socials—and on the community’s time.”

The above paragraph is astonishing. The WEA says that meetings should not be held at schools, where ”many may already feel alienated.” So instead of addressing the alienation and giving alienated parents the freedom to escape the government school monopoly, the WEA agrees with Vollmer that ”You must talk to the community about your successes.”

The WEA then lists people who have ”their own narrow agendas.” According to the WEA, they include ”talk show hosts, school board wannabes, disaffected parents, tax fanatics.”

The list does not include the WEA, because it does not have its own narrow agenda. Guffaw, guffaw! But it does include a tax fanatic like me who has the temerity in a free society to question why my wife and I are coerced to pay $190,000 in public education taxes over our adult lives, although we exercise our constitutional right of religious freedom and send our son to parochial school. To the WEA or a Bolshevik, only a ”tax fanatic” would dare to ask such questions about the redistribution of his money.

The WEA also agrees with Vollmer that the ”three Rs” are outdated and should be replaced by the ”three Ts” of ”Thinking, Technology and Teamwork skills.” What the WEA and Vollmer really mean by ”Thinking” and ”Teamwork skills” are ”group-think” and ”conformity,” which are the ”skills” needed to be cogs in the bureaucratic wheels of big government and big business.

I left Flagstaff sick to my stomach—not from altitude sickness but from a sickening realization that bureaucrats, Bolsheviks, propagandists and buffoons have a monopoly on K-12 classroom thought and a stranglehold on American politics.

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Mr. Cantoni is an author, columnist and founder of Honest Americans Against Legal Theft (HAALT). He can be reached at ccan2@aol.com