Break the Cycle: Trimming RI Government One Grant at a Time, Part I

Have you ever wondered how so many states came to be in such debt? How has government grown so big and expensive? Do you believe politicians when they say there's no place left to cut?

One debt factor is the old trick and ugly trap of unfunded mandates.

What are they? 

Those in charge of the federal government have 2 motives: (1) they need to justify their own jobs, and (2) they want more control over you so they can justify their own jobs. Therefore, whatever hare-brained idea for more social engineering pops into the latest bureaucrat or czar's head, it gets proposed.

But because of that pesky 10th Amendment in the United States Constitution declaring state sovereignty, the federal government can't directly replace state authority.

Instead, Washington dangles the carrot of federal grants to successfully coerce compliance. Cash-strapped municipalities and states eagerly grab the "free" money. I'll avoid the obvious point that you and I are still the source of that "free" money, even if local politicians are too stupid or too sly to admit it. So, states willingly adopt policies, pass laws, create new or expand existing bureaucracies, and implement programs they would never consider of their own volition -- and usually step on your liberty in some way, but that's another topic. To politicians accepting the "free" money, tomorrow's strings are of little consequence in light of today's financial windfall.

Oops! Tomorrow is Today!  

However, federal grant monies dry up after a couple of years, and states and cities are left with more employees, more departments, more equipment, more office space, more mandates to perform more programs. But no more money.

So, it comes to a decision: scrap the program and lay off the workers (as if the unions would permit that nonsense!), or find a way to fund the whole thing through existing funds or - far more likely - borrowing money. Or raising taxes.

Can you name a government program that has been eliminated in the past 10 years? I can't either.

Now consider that what I describe is for one grant, one program. Realize that the pattern is repeated over and over. 


Did You Say, "Nothing Left to Cut"?

Is it becoming clearer how we got where we are? Local governments don't cut programs when federal money runs out; after all, the "new" program is now a couple of years old and has developed an expectation of a "service" that must continue, right?

I say, "Wrong!" Rethink those unfunded mandates. Better yet, don't even accept the federal money in the first place. But if local government does accept a grant, then have the testicular fortitude to end the program when the money ends.

And what about federal taxes? When the feds no longer fund a particular program and the cost shifts to local government, do your federal taxes go down to make up for hike in local taxes? Of course not. The feds dream up another liberty-clipping, social engineering project to propose and fund.

Current example for Rhode Island? The Race to the Top education grant. That's Part II.

On Unconditional Love, Part III: Selfishness

This is the third blog inspired by a passage I read of John Galt's radio speech in Atlas Shrugged. Part I is here and Part II is here.

A well-heeled trick of the lovers of the Morality of Death is mis-defining "selfishness"- especially in regard to what they say is your moral obligation to give unconditional love to those and that which are unworthy of such a gift. I'd like to present a more rational definition.

Click for larger view

You are likely familiar with Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. (Here's a good commentary about it.) If you understand the pyramid, you know that unless your basic needs are met, you cannot progress to the next level of individual fulfillment. The key word here is individual. Cheating, by mooching off others or looting their achievements for your unearned benefit, doesn't count. Although it appears that some of these needs can be met by stuff that is given to you - and that is exactly what the poverty pimps and social engineers want you to believe - you cannot achieve successful progress unless it's achieved under your own steam.


Notice one of the basic needs - right above the needs common among all animals, is morality, a distinctly human trait. Morality is also found at the top of the pyramid - when one has reached the pinnacle of individual success and achievement.

Every quality in the top level of the pyramid - the ultimate fulfillment of the individual - springs from reason, a rational, thinking mind. You cannot create by accident. You cannot solve a problem by ignoring it. You cannot accept "facts" without thinking - they do not even become facts unless and until evidence is first examined, then tested, then results of what is learned are synthesized.

You must choose between life and death. It must be a conscious choice, using your mind - not your heart, which eschews reason - weighing your options and anticipating the consequences. There are standards to meet - objective standards beyond your immediate gratification - a moral imperative to value your life if you expect to survive, and a moral responsibility to make the most of your life if you expect to thrive - not through the charity of others, but by your own effort. That is rational selfishness.

The fruits of your individual achievement - happiness as a result of living by your uncompromising standards of self-respect - flow outward from you. Others who respect themselves will value your self-respect, too. There is no violation of rights among self-respecting humans. That is the reward of your rational selfishness and theirs.

Those who do not respect themselves envy and revile your achievement and cannot value your self-respect; they exist under the Morality of Death, and choose death - their own and yours. If you let them. That is the contagious lure of evil, one you must re-learn to resist and reject.

In a previous blog, I wrote about the intertwined conscience and consciousness. When you work to create something - anything - it's usually for compensation of some kind, whether it's simply for self-satisfaction or doing the work for which you get paid. For example, if you are in business for yourself, the built-in incentive of a monetary reward for your work is attained only if you simultaneously value your personal achievement - taking pride in what you produce and making it the best it can be because it reflects your character - and you acknowledge your responsibility to yourself to be the best you can be. That high personal standard does not permit the compromise of creating an inferior product.

See how they are linked? Using the example of the self-employed is just a clear illustration; the principle that the quality of your character (conscience) is connected to and comes through in the quality of what you produce (consciousness) is the same whether you build airplanes or flip burgers.

The well-formed conscience doesn't come from government nor from a misguided sense of obligation to perform for "social good." Whatever social good comes from your imagination, your creativity, and your productivity is the result of your quality work, not its primary purpose. The well-formed conscience comes from pride in your effort and your resolve to be and do the best for yourself, and then take one more step beyond. That is the ideal cycle of human evolution: explore, learn, discern and analyze what is learned, apply it, and explore some more. The bounty of your "Self-First Best" emanates outward from you and builds and brightens those around you who share the resolve. That is the Morality of Life.

Corrupted "self-first only" is what breeds the misery we experience. "Self-first only" is the devastating betrayal of your responsibility to yourself. It starts with compromising your standards a little, getting used to the discomfort, and compromising some more, until you no longer feel the pang of guilt over your own self-betrayal. That is the Morality of Death.

Those who exist under such a soulless code are the first to accuse you of being selfish for putting your self-respect above their emptiness, your survival above their comfort, your self-actualization above their abdication of their responsibility to care for themselves. Who, in reality, is selfish?

To treasure what is worthless, to demand what is unearned, to extort another's wealth, to expect one to furnish another's comforts, to blackmail one's virtues to support another's corruption... and to convince the victim that he - not the moocher and the looter - is evil and selfish unless compliant, is the ultimate crime of man against man, of man against himself. Who, in reality, is selfish?

Part I: Unconditional Love
Part II: God

On Unconditional Love, Part II: God

In Part I, I quoted an excerpt about love from John Galt's radio speech in Atlas Shrugged. It got me thinking about the fallacy of what we are told is "unconditional love" and how to reconcile that with what I've been taught and what I know about God.

In reality, even God - the ultimate, oft-cited example of unconditional love - sets conditions: you are saved if you repent and amend your life. If. That's a condition, folks. If you persist in a life of evil, corruption, depravity against your neighbor, against yourself (which are the equivalent of acting against God), the all-loving and all-powerful God will not save you. He's pretty clear on that. Even if those who preach in His name are muddy about it to save your "feelings."

The most evil thing a priest, rabbi, preacher, or any other "man (or woman) of the cloth" can do is mislead you. And every time they re-set the objective moral standards - the Morality of Life - to make you feel good about your bad choices - the Morality of Death - they mislead you.

There are many motives for that: their need to fill the pews, which in turn fills their coffers with donations; their warped personal morality converted into tolerance of yours; their misunderstanding of God, focusing on His benevolence but ignoring His justice.

Ayn Rand, the author of Atlas Shrugged, did not believe in God. I do. She postulates that faith is a weakness, an excuse for the weakness of man. I say faith is the primordial source of strength. It's what you do with that strength that makes the difference.

Faith as permission for you to violate your moral code in a way that ultimately injures you (even if you don't think so at the moment) is not faith. Belief that "someone" will take care you no matter what foolishness you perpetrate, is not faith. A creed that others should live and toil to support your choices, no matter how irresponsible and self-destructive, is not faith.

Faith is believing - knowing - that what you may not understand right now will ultimately become clear -- not by accident, but because you apply yourself to its understanding. Because you forge ahead despite the disapproval of other, lesser beings around you who lack your ambition, your strength, your vision, your will, your conviction. Your faith.

"Blind faith" is a tool of the Morality of Death. It manipulates you to abandon what you know from the sum total of your knowledge, your aspirations, your experiences and your observations, in favor of what another tells you is true. Blind faith relies on accepting contradictions.

Based on my study, my observations, experiences, analysis, and synthesis of all those sources of knowledge, it is my conclusion that God is the well-spring of uncontradicted objective moral standards, the objective truth, man's essential foundation, the external standard not just for your survival but for your fulfillment and happiness. The Morality of the Living. It is up to man's rational mind to recognize the benefits of this morality and use his free will to pursue it. A well-developed conscience contributes to the well-developed consciousness, and vice versa. They are intertwined. Not the same - by any means - but interrelated. Faith is not a compromise of the mind, it is its reinforcement, its encouragement, its inspiration.

The greatest fulfillment for "being human" comes from living the Morality of Life, making the right (and so often difficult) choices, to choose life over death. That sounds like an easy choice, a "no-brainer" - life over death. There is no such thing as a no-brainer. Everything requires conscious evaluation of whether it is good or bad (evil). Objective moral standards are essential for survival and the only way to achieve happiness. And they are actually quite selfish. More on that in Part III.

God has set standards and expectations for our behavior - what will bring us life and happiness - even if we are free to choose or reject them. He is very clear that He is willing to forgive our lapses along the way - providing we recognize the lapses as deviations from the standards, with no expectation to permanently substitute the strengths of the standards with the weakness of our lapses. Failure to meet the goal is not a failure of the existence of the goal. Nor is it justification to change the goal. It is a reason to start again, choosing a different method, a different path, to achieve the objectively righteous goal. Or to accept the consequences.

Too many clergy today are, in fact, willing to substitute compromised standards and preach them as moral perfection to console the sheep's conscience - their corrupted conscience. Every compromise corrupts the next moral choice, making it easier to corrupt the next moral choice, and so on, until the moral code is not only amoral, it is immoral. Immorality means there are no consequences, everything is relative.

Umm... no it's not. God's "unconditional" love is only unconditional if you adhere to the Morality of Life. He gives it freely. Not because He wants to bend and twist you into obedience, but because it brings you the most fulfilling happiness. That is His love.

God is patient - and generous with His patience - but He is also just. Justice demands discernment of right and wrong, and embracing right and rejecting wrong. That means His standards - the same standards that nourish and protect the inalienable rights bestowed on you at birth - demand you cultivate self-respect through your thoughtful, deliberate work and achievement. Yes, "inalienable" rights of the individual are under attack. Unthinkable! But you know they are, even  if you refuse to acknowledge that reality. Those who reject God's Morality of Life - maybe it's even you - are the ones who destroy that which is rightfully yours by birth. Ironically, it takes work to keep inalienable rights inalienable.

God demonstrates what love is through the Morality of Life: love is valuing your achievement as an individual, acknowledging your imperfection but overcoming it to fulfill your potential, honoring the architect by constructing, sharing, appreciating and respecting yourself and others.

Deliberate and persistent violation and stubborn rejection of the Morality of Life, blind faith and immersion - revelry - in the Morality of Death, leads to God's shrug. He does not "punish" you, or destroy you, or commit you to damnation. You punish yourself, destroy your own spirit, condemn your eternally joyous soul to eternal despair solely by the choices you make.

God's love is not unconditional. Like everything else you achieve, it's up to you to earn it.

Part I: Unconditional Love
Part III: Selfishness

On Unconditional Love, Part I

This is an excerpt from John Galt's radio speech in Atlas Shrugged.

"Love is the expression of one's values, the greatest reward you can earn for the moral qualities you have achieved in your character and person, the emotional price paid by one man for the joy he receives from the virtues of another.

"[However,] your morality demands that you divorce your love from values and hand it down to any vagrant, not as a response to his worth, but as a response to his need; not as a reward, but as alms; not as payment for virtues, but as a blank check on vices.

"Your morality tells you that the purpose of love is to set you free of the bonds of morality, that love is superior to moral judgment, that true love transcends, forgives and survives every manner of evil in its object, and the greater the love, the greater the depravity it permits to the loved.

"To love a man for his virtues is paltry and human, [your morality] tells you; to love him for his flaws is divine. To love those who are worthy of it is self-interest; to love the unworthy is sacrifice. You owe your love to those who don't deserve it, and the less they deserve it the more love you owe them - the more loathsome the object, the nobler your love - the more unfastidious your love, the greater your virtue - and if you can bring your soul to the state of a dump heap that welcomes anything on equal terms, if you can cease to value moral values, you have achieved the state of moral perfection."

The term "your morality" of which John Galt speaks is what he proves in the speech to actually be the Morality of Death - that which is embraced, expounded, and insidiously imposed on us by today's social engineers, globalist politicians, union bosses, poverty pimps... in general, the enemies of individual strength and achievement, evil enemies who seek power for themselves and desire to enslave us to their cannibalism of our mind, spirit, self-reliance, and creative productivity.

I, like you, was taught that true love is unconditional. I have spent most of my life feeling tortured, conflicted that I could not comply. My mind kept saying NO! to the irrational demand for "love" at any price, for whatever reason, no matter how unworthy the object, while I attempted to give it anyway because I was "supposed to."

Now I understand why it is not possible for me to love "unconditionally." It's not because I cannot tolerate mistakes or flaws - I certainly make plenty of mistakes and have numerous flaws. But it's uncorrected mistakes and cultivated flaws coupled with the sense of entitlement to the precious gift of my love without regard for its value and without any effort whatsoever to be worthy of such a gift as love.

For years, I have called it the "lie of  tolerance" on the social scale. We are mentally beaten into accepting what was previously and would be otherwise unacceptable in civilized society. And we are told that it now does define "civilized society." We are told to accept that which brings about our physical, mental, and spiritual demise in favor of pleasing someone else who has no standards, no values, no moral code of behavior, no motive of action except to bring about his own destruction - and ours, ultimately.
 
Those of us who espouse the Morality of Life simply cannot abide the Morality of Death that is all around us and espoused by those currently in political and economic power. We cannot accept behavior that contradicts our moral code - standards I cannot compromise, even though I have tried - without killing a piece of our own spirit. I've done that, too.

This applies to our society as well as our personal lives. Which moral code will you choose?

Part II: God
Part III: Selfishness

Atlas Shrugged Part 1 to be released on April 15, 2011

In August 2008, I went to Borders just to buy Atlas Shrugged. I got the hardcover "Centennial Edition" (pictured here). It seemed appropriate to buy the formidable-looking book, considering the legendary content.

The title and its author seemed to hover on the fringe of my entire life, but I resisted the embrace. It was written in 1957. My high school history teacher at Mount St. Charles Academy, Brother Leon Cyr, talked about Ayn Rand in class; I remember the name because it was so unusual, but I don't recall what he said about her. In ensuing years, I occasionally heard about this book, but never quite made the leap to buy and read it, or even take it out of the library for free. I knew the significance of the title - what a tantalizing image it brings to mind! - but not the significance of the title to the book.

Despite the resolve in 2008, when I got it home, I was intimidated by its 1,350+ pages with relatively small print... it felt heavy in my hands. I used to read a lot, but the habit had been broken somewhere along the way. This would represent an ambitious return to reading for pleasure. I... hesitated.

Consequently, the megamonster volume sat on my bookshelf for two years. I felt a vague guilt as I packed it into a box when I moved; there was a possibility it could languish in the dark for years.

Last Christmas, my children bought me a complete 12-book series I wanted to read. Those volumes had thick, hefty pages with large type - inviting to read - and, although it took me a while to get started, I zipped through them. The habit was re-established! So much so, that when I closed the cover on the last book in mid-March, I felt an emptiness.

The cure niggled at my consciousness. I was ready. I ransacked the boxes in the attic and retrieved Atlas Shrugged. I actually heard the pages sigh, "It's about time," when I pried open the stiff cover.

Ironically this week, I learned that the first third of the book (it is divided into three parts) has been made into a movie - Atlas Shrugged Part 1. (Does anything really happen by accident?) It's an independent production with a small budget by Hollywood standards - $25 million - the first in a planned trilogy.

It makes one wonder why - if this is the second most influential book ever, after the Bible* - hasn't it been made into a movie before? LOL, the answer lies within its pages, of course! Wikipedia describes the interesting 40-year "development hell" of this film. Note some of the names.

Atlas Shrugged Part 1 will be released on April 15, most fitting if you know Ayn Rand's philosophy about taxation. It is not scheduled to come to Providence in its initial release; the closest it will come is Bellingham, Massachusetts. (Bellingham??) But, according to the Web site, we the people have an opportunity to influence distribution by "demanding" Atlas Shrugged Part 1 come to a theater near us. Of course, this is a nothing more than a grand viral marketing scheme for free publicity and build buzz, but I will gladly participate because it is in my self-interest to do so. (Ayn Rand would be pleased.)

Visit the official Atlas Shrugged Movie Web site.

[UPDATE: Atlas Shrugged will, in fact, be screened in Providence! Providence Place Mall, here I come. :)]

*1991 survey by the Library of Congress and the Book-of-the-Month Club

Urban Collaborative Accelerated Program (UCAP) Auction

The Urban Collaborative Accelerated Program (UCAP) is a charter school in Providence committed to keeping at-risk middle school students on the right education path by giving them the opportunity to complete two years in one. Each child accepted to the school has stayed back at least once.

The founder and principal is a man who has faced his own extraordinary personal challenges, Robert Deblois, left quadriplegic after a swimming accident in college. He and the school's dedicated staff shine in a documentary, Accelerating America, which follows the compelling stories of three students (America, Yazmine, and Jason) for a year. WSBE Rhode Island PBS (digital 36.1) aired the award-winning documentary by Tim Hochtner, which is how I became aware of UCAP's great but very difficult - almost impossible - work. As a Rhode Islander, it was surreal to watch; I had to keep reminding myself that this was happening in my state, my community, not some neighborhood in the Bronx. Here's a link to an online version of Accelerating America (sorry, it's a very poor resolution video).

In addition to all of the hard work and a very special kind of patience and commitment it takes to help these kids focus and succeed, it also takes money. UCAP hosts different fund raisers throughout the year.

My recommendation, my request: Watch the film. Then browse the Spring Fling Auction to benefit UCAP. Or make a direct donation.

Proper Preposition

I received this announcement in an e-mail today:

"George Weigel to discuss his book on Pope John Paul II"

Please read that again. Does anything about the statement strike you as odd?

When I saw the headline, I immediately pictured a man waving a thick hardcover book, barking some schmaltzy marketing pitch, while standing on the body of the dead pontiff.

That's the power of the preposition.

"George Weigel to discuss his book about Pope John Paul II" 

Jes' sayin' ;)