Rights?

Written By Brandon William Woodward

Draft Status: Rough

Modern America is rife with people speaking about their rights and often how those rights are being stepped on. It's important to understand what a right is.

I hate quoting definitions, but I believe it's important here:

• "A right is an inherent, inalienable entitlement that every person possesses simply by virtue of being human."

If that's what a right is, I believe that we really don't have that many. If you're in the wilderness and encounter another person, good luck convincing him not to kill you and steal your food based on that it's your right as a human to keep your food and continue peacably on your way. You'd better have a gun or at least an enforceable law to back you up. The definition doesn't account for different countries or time periods. Rights vary widely around world and through history. So let's expand this a bit. How about, #1: a right is what you can take or defend for yourself. This is overridden by #2: a right is something guaranteed to you in the social contract of which you are a part.

Let's examine #1. If you claim to have property rights and you can bludgeon to death anyone who steps on your land. Congratulations, you just granted yourself property rights. If you want to have an abortion and shoot anyone who tries to stop you, well done, you now have the right to an abortion.

#2 gets a bit more complicated. Property rights are inherent to a stable society. The phrase "possession is 9/10th's of the law" has roots in early Roman society. A society has to say, "if you own something, it's yours and can't be taken from you." Without this, the baddest guy on the block would just take all the possessions and women of all of the weaker guys. This type of society would quickly break down and cease to exist. So any decent social contract has to have property rights. The big exception here is that the government...aka the baddest guy on the block, can come and take small amounts from you periodically in the form of taxation. We reluctantly agree to this because they protect us from all the other baddies out there. This is exactly how "protection" works in the mafia. Hey there, give me some money every week, and I'll make sure those criminals out there don't come and steal from you.

Where do we go from here? What other rights are people in a society guaranteed? All of a sudden we have to fall back to #1. The society at large has to demand any right and be willing to take or defend it, from both each other and the government. This is the best and most useful case to having an armed populace. Without that the population has very little retribution when rights that they believe are deserved are stepped on or not granted. We have the ability to request, plead, and vote for the things we want. But that is limited. If the politicians we vote for refuse to make and pass laws granting the rights we desire, we continue to impotently whine about the rights we'd appreciate if they granted us. It's when we're willing to do something more about it that change occurs and rights are granted and/or protected.

Where we as Americans are unique is that we have in our blood much more of #1 point i make up top, than the majority of the world. In most of the world, there are 1000s of years of conformity built in. You can see this clearly in Europe. Europeans are generationlly trained to serve their feudal masters who in turn serve their all-powerful kings. Rights were earned slowly and incompletely after the American Revolution showed it was possible. They have nowhere near the free speech rights that we are afforded by the First Amendment. Americans, on the other hand, are just a few generations removed from pilgrims, settlers, and cowboys. These people had very tenuous social contracts and had to fall back on #1 to guarantee they had any rights at all, including to life itself.

Preconceived Politics

Written By Brandon W. Woodward

The modus operandi of American mainstream media and many citizens is to evaluate politics based on who is performing the action. The actions and what they entail are often not even considered.  

Most of politics is a simple 1-2-3, the framework is as follows: 

1. A politician declares and/or performs an action.

2. That political party immediately justifies and/or blindly supports this action regardless of shortcomings or consequences.

3. The opposing side immediately declares this to be the worst possible action, regardless of this party previously supporting similar actions.  

This has never been so clear to me as in the case of DOGE. 

I have seen Democrats pivot on their anti-Doge argument over the last few months. Post-election but pre-inauguration, what I heard is that it couldn't or wouldn't actually be done. They dismissed the claims of slashing government spending as hollow rhetoric.  

Now that we have seen that the promises of Trump and DOGE are very real, two anti-DOGE arguments come to the forefront, thanks to prominent Democrats Larry Summers and Ezra Klein.  

• Summers suggests that by slashing the IRS, the amount of money that is eliminated from the budget by DOGE will be overshadowed by the amount of dollars that the IRS does not collect. Summers is a former Secretary of the Treasury. He is someone that I have followed for years even though I seldom agree with him.   I'm willing to accept that he may be correct. This argument is easily testable. All we have to do is look in 3, or 5, or 10 years.  If future tax receipts are the same as or higher than 2024 receipts and the amount of federal dollars received is a higher percentage of dollars spent, we will know DOGE has been successful. If tax receipts are lower and the amount of federal dollars received is a lower % of dollars spent, we will know it is a failure.  In either case, I give a zero percent probability of either Larry Summers or Trump supporters retracting their current position on DOGE.  

• Klein's argument is basically just wordplay, as he says that in the Department of Government Efficiency, nothing is being done efficiently. Eliminating a service that a department is providing decreases, not increases, its efficiency. Klien just wrote a book, "Abundance", detailing how Democrats can't get out of their own way. They bog down their own projects, resulting in a vast resource drain with no result. However, his current argument is that any federal budget cuts need to go through examinations, debates, and committees similar to the failed state and federal projects that have spent hundreds of billions of dollars with absolutely nothing to show for them. Many Democrats are using this argument and pointing out that people who might be doing important work are losing their jobs. They are also showing that there are some good programs that are being eliminated with the bad ones. I'm sure both of these things are true.  It reminds me of an interview I saw with Andrew Cuomo during COVID. He said that if all of the money that New York state spent had only saved one life, it would be worth it. I don't know if I have been more intellectually offended by a statement since Obama said, "you didn't build that.”  With any dollar spent, there are opportunity costs and opportunity losses. It's my main problem with the movie The Martian. You should not spend a billion dollars to save one life when that same billion dollars could save thousands of lives. Elon and DOGE are slashing the budget so fast that I'm confident that they will at least get close to their goal of slashing a trillion dollars from annual spending. There will absolutely be good people who lose important jobs and life-saving programs that are cut. Here are the two points that matter:

  • We don’t have the money to spend.  Our increasing debt along with an increasing interest rate on that debt causes more debt to be issued and creates a downward spiral that ends in complete debasement of our currency.  Here is the most important line of this article.  THIS WILL HURT POOR PEOPLE THE MOST!  They don't have stocks and property to insulate them from the inevitable inflation. Monetary policy isn’t an easy thing to understand. It’s ignored almost completely by mainstream media, especially on the left.  

  • We were getting an absolutely abysmal return on our investment for that trillion dollars.  If you look at what is being eliminated, you'll see that only pennies on the dollar were well spent.  Instead of putting each of these cuts in never-ending committees, slashing all of them and replacing the best ones is a more effective way to go.  If you have only listened to one side of this argument about the useful and important people and programs that are being cut I encourage you to go to doge.gov and read for yourself… post by post… what is being eliminated. Ask yourself if these things are necessary expenditures, and even if you think the money allocated is going where it is intended?

Klein's point is testable as well. Someday, a Democrat (or someone from the left) will be back in the White House. If that person instantly reverses all of the DOGE cuts and turns all of these programs back on, we know that Klein had a point. If that Democrat continues to enjoy a healthier federal balance sheet, a better economy, and a stronger dollar, we will know that DOGE served its proper purpose.   The other possibility that I’m hearing rumblings about is that the Republicans will begin redeploying these dollars for far right Republican ideals around the world. So instead of $45 million for DEI scholarships in Burma and $3 million for girl centered climate action in Brazil we’ll see $45 million for pro-life programs in Uruguay and $3 million refreshments for Aryan marches in Bhutan. In my opinion this would also signal a failure for DOGE. The point is not that the money is being spent on frivolous programs that only small percentage of our population believes in. This money should not be spent at all.

After the last 10 years of the American political climate, I thought that I could no longer be surprised…

The reaction of the left against DOGE completely proved me wrong. Even though we have seen billions of dollars of clear fraud, waste, and abuse, any admission that DOGE, Elon Musk, or Donald Trump, is doing something positive is a mental roadblock that is impossible to overcome for as much as 30% of our country. I support DOGE unlike I have supported any government action during my lifetime. I also want to put in writing for future review metrics that will show if I am right or wrong in supporting this.  

Whatever opinion you have on this subject, please go through the mental exercise of writing your future self a note. This note should articulate one clear idea,  "Under what criteria am I completely wrong?" Know that you are fallible. Remember, people with their own agendas have told you things that may not be true. We have all succumbed to a non-zero amount of propaganda. And perhaps, people whom you hate are capable of doing good.

Let me go on the record here:

• Past:

  • I stopped considering myself a Republican 20 years ago due to my view that I no longer saw any aspect of fiscal conservatism in the party. Each party when in power would take up the cause of overspending, printing money, and devaluing our currency. In general, Republicans would lower taxes and continue to increase spending. Democrats would try to raise taxes but then increase spending at an even faster rate. This worked for a long time due to the massive growth that the country experienced. 

• Present:

  • We have been in a sustained bull market with only hiccups since the early 80s.  The best 15-year time period to own stock in our entire history is the last 15 years ending in 2024. The growth in the real estate and equity markets vastly outpaced inflation, and this ushered in a time of abundance and wealth for anyone invested in either. Keynesianism and Modern Monetary Theory thrived as our nation's economic ethos as our debt to GDP* increased. 

• Future:

  • If I'm right, the dollar will continue to be the world's reserve currency. We will have vastly decreased our federal deficit and have something much closer to a balanced budget. Interest payments on our debt will no longer be the nation's largest expense.  

  • If I’m wrong, tax receipts will plummet. The deficit will not improve, and the money saved from eliminating waste and leftist agendas will be redeployed for waste and right based agendas. 

"It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. 

It's what you know that just ain't so." 

- Mark Twain

*I take issue with debt to GDP being constantly used as a metric for a nation's economic health. A more accurate measurement is tax receipts to interest payments needed to service the debt. This takes into account the interest rate on the debt which if we are being honest is the most important thing. What we're talking about here is, can we pay our bills or not.