It’s human nature to fear the unknown or unfamiliar, but let’s be clear-eyed about Muslim people. The fraction of Muslims fomenting terrorist acts in the U.S. is only a tiny fraction of the U.S. Muslim population, which is estimated at 3.3 million. Since 9/11, up to May 2016, Islamic-inspired violence in America has resulted in 95 deaths, compared to 35,000 fatal car accidents the year before. But, each killing episode magnified through the media, does what the proponents of terror want to accomplish to strike fear throughout the land.
The following article articulates this fact. This, from an article in the Tampa Bay Times, “Muslim Group Using Intervention Teams”, 7-5-16, I paraphrase:
“In response to the Orlando nightclub massacre, NazarHamze, an officer in the Broward County Sherriff’s Office, wanted to prepare a mosque’s congregants in Miramar (just north of Miami) for what might come next. Attacks and threats against Muslims are rising, along with suspicion and fears, he told the group. He says the American Muslim community feels the backlash immediately, and needs to protect itself. In this, CAIR-Florida is bucking many other initiatives by prominent civil and human rights groups and many different federal programs. He says American Muslims who kill are rare, but they exist. ‘For us not to have a program in place and the community trained to get people help in these situations is irresponsible.’’In mosques throughout South Florida, he tells them about CAIR-Florida’s new intervention teams, made up of mental health professionals, social services workers, religious leaders and others. Since the program started nine months ago, mosque members have called on the teams seven times,’Hamze said. In a few of those cases, the team contacted law enforcement…. ‘If anyone is concerned that a family member, friend, or community member might be going down the wrong path, don’t just avoid them,’ Haze told his audience in Miramar, a suburb of Miami. ‘Surround them with love,’ he said. ‘And you don’t have to do it alone. All you have to do is pick up the phone.’Hamze has the rare perspective of an American who navigates two separate worlds. He is a member of a religious minority under fire from politicians like Trump and is frequently wary of the FBI. And he is a law enforcement officer, a member of a profession that deals regularly with criminality coming from all types of people, including Muslims…. People say, ‘Nezar, what are the signs? Can I have a list?’ he continued. ‘There is no list. But you know if something is not right with a member of your family.’
Note: ‘Over the past few years, federal prosecutors have charged 88 people in connection to the Islamic State, and around 250 people are believed to have traveled abroad to join the extremist group in Syria or Iraq. Most have been Muslim, representing a small fraction of the estimated 3.3 million Muslims living in the United States.’”
So, it appears that some thought provoking insights and some initiatives to address domestic terrorism are starting to appear. Welcome and good, I say.
PART FOUR – CLOSING DOWN
19 - THAT LEFT UNDONE
I started out with a desire to also write on mental health, illegal drugs, and the homeless, but decided to leave those for the future. My interest in these things arose from the exposure I received at home while growing up. My dad was an attorney in Omaha, Nebraska. He was admitted to the Nebraska Bar in 1924, and served many years on the Douglas County Board of Mental Health (which includes Omaha). The board consisted of one attorney, one psychiatrist, and the clerk of the county court. They committed those seriously mentally ill to the state’s hospitals. The state had five: the criminally ill went to Lincoln, the “feeble” minded, to Norfolk, and so forth. Pop took this assignment very seriously, and when we traveled and passed by a mental hospital, no matter what state, he always stopped and visited it. Growing up in the ‘50s, I was unaware of any homeless people. Starting in the Kennedy years (the early ‘60s), for the first time, somewhat effective drugs to treat psychosis and depression and some other mental disorders became available, and a national movement was started to attempt closing of all mental hospitals and to start treating those who were once in-patients as out-patients in mental health clinics. This followed a story that ran in Reader’s Digest about how about how an angry person in Omaha could go to the local mental health board and file a complaint on someone, such as their neighbor, and without due process, the victims could be “sent away.” For reasons like this, and some other reasons, Nebraska closed all its state mental hospitals. This movement swept the country. Later, the phenomena of the homeless people started appearing throughout the land. I’ve read that most of these unfortunate souls are either on alcohol and drugs, or are severely mentally ill. But no matter, for a country as rich as us, it is a national disgrace, and should be ended. How, I don’t know, but there must be some promising ideas out there. I hope so.
Beyond the homeless, it seems we are always on to some new drug crisis; today it’s the synthetic opioids, the use of which has exploded. To some extent, this is because so many became addicted to legal painkillers, but then went on to the synthetics because they were hugely cheaper. Whether the legal painkillers were prescribed properly in the beginning, whether adequate controls were in place for the recipients, and whether drug pricing is rational, the United States has a mess on its hands today. I doubt that we as a nation have even gotten close to a reasonable debate on this matter, and yet innumerable victims are dying from overdose in epidemic numbers. This, while the 50 laboratories of government (the states) wrestle with questions like: should we legalize marijuana, and if so, what should the particulars be? I thought I might write on my libertine views, that I don’t believe the state has any business telling me what I can and cannot put in my body, but with the current more serious drug epidemic out there, I am just left speechless. So, maybe I’ll comment about this in the future.
Finally, I started out hoping this to be a book that could attract others of like mind to start a movement to attract politicians willing to represent these ideas. I was thinking this to be the more rational way forward than for people like me to wait around for politicians to appear with similar ideas to mine. I still hope this can be achieved, but it also came to me that there is so much ignorance over issues like economics, that I could be of service to help others understand some concepts that apply to business, finance, and markets in general that seem to be poorly understood. I’m thinking here about socialist tendencies to confuse the public so as to steer them away from capitalistic ways, and at their economic disfavor. Here is an example: “well, before we talk about cutting government’s budget, we need to separate out first, the legitimate items on which everyone would agree are natural areas of government responsibility, then we can focus down on the items of government luxuries, like taxing gifts to wealthy corporations and individuals. And, above all, make sure that the wealthy pay their fair share.”
I take issue with that kind of reasoning. First off, we have the real economy, where people work and create value, which includes every income and expense in the country that is not the government. Then, we have the government side. Remember, every government expenditure, federal, state and local, is an expense to the economy, which is extracted from the private and real economy, period. The government does not create value. Therefore, every bit of government spending must be considered potentially an unneeded expense and should be considered a candidate for the cutting-block. Again, all government expenditure is a tax on the real economy. And, for all people outside of government, in the private and real economy, this tax extraction works as an impediment to the national wealth creation, and thus works against the well-being of all citizens.
The public discourse includes many conflicting and competing myths mixed with truths. This works to confuse and bewilder most everyone, so it becomes easy to lose sight of what is important, and especially important to us individually. If my writing has separated any fact from fiction and helped enlighten anyone, I’ll be satisfied. And being human, I may have some wrong ideas, SO I WELCOME CRITICISM.
20 - ENDING
Notable & Quotable:
Novak on Democracy
From “Firm Foundations: Democracy, Capitalism and Morality,” by Michael Novak inThe Wall Street Journal,12-27-94. The full article is available at WSJ.com/opinions.
“My own field of inquiry is theology and philosophy. From the perspective of these fields, I would not want it to be thought that any system is the Kingdom of God on Earth. Capitalism isn’t. Democracy isn’t. The two combined are not. The best that can be said for them (and it quite enough) is that, in combination, capitalism, democracy, and pluralism are more protective of the rights, opportunities, and conscience of ordinary citizens (all citizens) than any known alteration.
Better than the Third World economies, and better than the socialist economies, capitalism makes it possible for the vast majority of the poor to break out of poverty; to find opportunity; to discover full scope for their own personal economic initiative; and to rise into the middle class and higher….
[One] service to capitalism that democracy performs better than dictatorship draws upon its representational function. A free economy has a great many parts, and a parliament or representative congress tends to represent all these parts. Thus, in a democracy every part of the economy has a least some active voice….
Another service provided by capitalism to democracy is less well understood. The founders of the U.S. understood it very clearly, however…Envy, it turns out, is the most destructive social passion –more so than hatred, which is at least visible and universally recognized as evil. Envy seldom operates under its own name; it chooses a lovelier name to hide behind, and it works like a deadly invisible gas. In previous republics, it has set class against class, sections of cities against each other sections, leading to family against leading family. For this reason, the early American stood against division (“divided we fall”) and sought ways to neutralize envy.
To accomplish this task, the Founders determined that a republic cannot be built upon the clerical (priestly) class; nor upon the aristocracy and military (whose interests in “honor” caused so many rivalries and contemplations); but upon a far humbler and typically more despised class, those engaging in commerce. They opted for what they called “a commercial republic.”
When all the people in the republic, especially the able-bodied poor, see that their material conditions are improving from year to year, they are led to compare where they are today with where they would like to be tomorrow. They stop comparing themselves with their neighbors, because their personal goals are not the same as those of their neighbors. They seek their own goals, at their own pace, to their satisfaction.”
From the Opinion Page of The Wall Street Journal, 2-18-17. Michael Novak, a thinker who argued for the morality of free markets.
Over a long life, Michael Novak traveled from writing speeches for George McGovern to serving as Ronald Reagan’s ambassador to the U.N. Commission on Human Rights, reflecting an intellectual journey from socialism to capitalism. He died Friday at age 83, but in many ways, he remained the boy forged in Johnstown, Pennsylvania; a working-class town of steel mills, coal mines, and immigrant Slovak families trying to find their way in this new land called America.
Raised as a Roman Catholic, Novak believed as a young man that socialism was the ideal economic arrangement. But he noticed a flaw: While socialism sounded good in theory, in practice it didn’t work—and non-elites fared the worst.
Capitalism had a little high-minded theory, but in practice, it literally provided the goods. If ordinary folks did so much better under capitalism, maybe its caricatures—e.g., that it is all based on greed—were wrong. Maybe free markets had their own virtues and were defensible, and even superior to other economic systems on moral grounds.
From this recognition sprang his most important work, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism, which changed America’s public debate when it was published in 1982. “Democratic capitalism,” he wrote, is “neither the Kingdom of God nor without sin. Yet all other known systems of political economy are worse. Such hope as we have for alleviating poverty and for removing oppressive tyranny –perhaps our last, best hope –lies in this much-despised system.”
Too many religious leaders, Novak argued, have no understanding of how economies work, and thus they focus on redistributing wealth without regard for how wealth is created. As for business leaders, he encouraged them to think of their careers as a calling, and the rest of us to recognize that capitalists are “the main hope” for billions around the world still locked in poverty.
Michael Novak also wrote for these pages, and we reprint one of his pieces nearby (above). As we mourn his loss, we also celebrate a life dedicated to the same proposition put forth in the Declaration of Independence: that the Creator fitted everyone to flourish in freedom—and America was founded to prove it.
I have been told that all major religions of the world have a clause against envy; in Christianity, the anti-envy clause is written in the Ten Commandments as “thou shall not covet.” In my words, I put it like this: think of two farmers, living across from each other. One has a nice house, new tractor, and a well-organized farm yard. The other farmer across the road, has a run-down house, falling-apart tractor, and a disheveled farmyard. While the down-on-his-luck farmer could wish for having the government take from his well-to-do neighbor and give it to him (socialism), the better approach would be for him to work harder to achieve the same for himself (capitalism).
Between the two systems, there are sets of opposite ways of thinking; one side wants smaller government, the other side wishes for a large and all-encompassing government, as in “government needs to solve all problems,” or “should we lower taxes for everyone” versus tax the rich more, and wanting economic growth versus redistribution. Further, one side is thinking of natural resources as abundant versus scarce (from “there’s plenty of oil” to “we’re running out of oil”). Bringing in the entrepreneur who takes the scarce and expensive and improves it so that it is abundant and cheap is another way of looking at how the economy changes with time. Then, there’s the group that treasures freedom and independence, while the opposite group wishes for more rules to guide people to do the “right” thing. The capitalist sees the socialist as the elitist-wolf watching over his flock of sheep, while the socialist believes the capitalist needs to be restrained by the government or he will steal everyone’s wealth. It is pitting the founders of the United States government against the Karl Marxes of the world.
While the extremes of socialism made it easier for the dictators to get control of the people and not only lead society to impoverishment, but to deaths of tens of millions over the decades since Karl Marx first wrote. That, while only capitalism has given tens of millions the opportunity to escape out of poverty to enjoy the fruits of their labor and to have the luxury of freedom to pursue their dreams, whatever they might have been. Capitalism has made it possible for the philanthropists to address the needy, and caused ways to help lift them out of their predicaments. It is most certainly tied to democracy and freedom, for,however, we all choose to define it.
I have attempted with this writing found in my book to better inform people what it is that many sense is right, but is easily confused in the busy, cluttered life so many of us lead; the school teacher who has always worked for a salary and has never had to start a business and meet a payroll, to the government bureaucrat who thinks his work is necessary to steer the private sector to do the “right” thing, and massing to support politicians of one stripe. All while another group responsible for creating wealth in the economy that pays the cost of government supports politicians of another stripe. Most certainly there can be middle grounds where the vast majority can all agree and find agreeable and gives them the room to live their life in the most satisfying way.
The true extreme ideologues of either side find it easy pickings to assemble hordes of people from the masses of either persuasion to follow them and put them in positions of power over us. The only antidote to this potential tyranny is educatio
n of the masses of what truly constitutes an open and free society where all comers can rise up out of the shackles of poverty and achieve enough wealth to not only satisfy their basic needs, but to have the luxury to pursue their dreams and fully use all their talents. To that end, I have tried to shed light on issues that aren’t necessarily difficult to understand, but are not of the common thinking of the masses, so that poorly thought out ideas easily emerge through ignorance. Truly, knowledge and truth will set you free. So, for trying to explain why a gold standard would benefit all, or why the trade deficit is so dangerous, or why failing to address the federal debt is a grave sin, along with some other issues, I hope I can start a dialogue that will lead us away from socialism and a return to capitalism.
APPENDIX
The CAT Scanner– I present in this book the fact that I personally bought an early CAT scanner. It’s hard to fathom what a big deal that was. I mentioned that I agreed to borrow half a million dollars at 21.25% in 1980.The physicist, Godfrey Hounsfield, while working at EMI (Entertainment and Music Industries in Britain and owners of Apple recording which brought forth the Beatles) took the back-construction math that three others had invented and built the first CATscanner in 1973. And no, the Beatles didn’t invent the CAT Scanner. Back construction math comes from the concept that if you have a point on a surface and want to know where on the surface the point is located, this can be determined by moving an x-ray beam in a circle around the point. By taking multiple readings going around the circle, back construction allows precise determination of the point’s location. By putting together millions of such readings, an actual picture can be made of a “slice” through the subject being investigated. It’s just like x-raying a loaf of bread, then pulling out a slice, laying the slice down, and examining the slice. The name CAT Scanner came from the more scientific name; computed tomography. Three originally went into the U.S. at Mayo Clinic, Washington University in St. Louis and I believe at Cleveland Clinic. A local fellow took his dad into Mayo Clinic and watched their unit scan his father. He was so impressed that he wanted to buy one for his hospital. However, his town’s hospital was so small and couldn’t use such revolutionary equipment, so he came over from about 35 miles away and offered to buy us one. I write in my book that we first had to get certificate-of-need approval, which took a year, and by that time this would-be philanthropist lost interest. He was later diagnosed with a brain tumor at age 48, which may have made him philanthropic to begin with, but it later killed him. I had hoped my hospital would buy one, but they were too scared of the unknowns and declined. So, I bought it.
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