Paradocracy

One of the great social, political fallacies of the day is found in the unexamined and nearly unconscious belief that all expressed human demands ought to be realized through the market, that money ought to match everywhere with everything that one could possibly desire.  The popular refrain on this matter follows from the unstated supposition that the market, an abstract and unidentifiable entity representative of innumerable moving parts and human participants, bears certain responsibilities for others who wish to benefit from its activities, even after those individuals have personally failed to contribute anything of their own to that mechanism.  Unwittingly, those critics assume those other individuals ought to relinquish their freedom of discretion, or some margin of the product of their labor, to satisfy the requests of the specified few who have done little more than to exercise their mouths in communicating their selfish wants.  The cohorts of people who ...

In the San Francisco Bay Area, many residents work tirelessly throughout the year to pay tens of thousands of dollars in annual property taxes. In addition to this, they are charged an extra 10 percent on all expenses through local sales taxes. It doesn't stop there. In addition to their massive federal tax bill, the busy state of California capitalizes on the opportunity to seize another 10 percent through their own sizable state income taxes. But guess what! It doesn't stop there. No, no, no, no.  In California, there's always another tax. After all of these taxes, which have all the while been reported to cover every nook and cranny of the utopian vision, the Bay Area resident is left to face yet an additional tax at the grocery store, this time on soda. The visionaries within government, and those who champion its warmhearted intentions, label this one the "soda tax," which unbelievably includes Gatorade, the preferred beverage of athletes ...

A great measure of the disparity between philosophies, especially within the realm of economics and other social sciences, can be attributed to the agreement between the way the world organically operates and the way it might otherwise ideally or hypothetically operate per the proposed model. In truth, such a contrast is born out of the impassioned philosopher’s demand for a world which is better than the one in which we actually, even regrettably, live. In this particular case, the perseverant philosopher has journeyed beyond the purview of logic and reason to the realm of fiction and wishful thinking, which proves risky by imbuing the unwitting and impressionable public with pretense hinged to hypotheticals which operate to the tune of tantalizing fantasy rather than to the immutable cadence of reality. The lazy philosopher, then, works not in search of truth, which proves reliably elusive, but rather to affirm his model and to squeeze data into it despite any apparent disagr...

The best and the brightest don't become teachers; they become engineers, innovators, entrepreneurs and leaders of the boardroom.  The idea that children must learn inside a classroom is an antiquated notion which will fade with time as we introduce more progressive, interactive forms of learning.  The present education system in the United States is a cautionary tale for those who presume that blindly throwing money at an institution will fix it; instead it only proves to drive up the costs of a failing enterprise.  This has been the trend since the introduction of the Department of Education in the late 1970s, when the United States began to witness climbing costs and declining academic performance, consistent with the American household relinquishing responsibility to a faceless institutional entity.  Education begins and continues at the household and personal levels, whereas the classroom, wherever that proves to be in the future, whether...

Today marks the end of the life of Barbara Bush, who served as First Lady of the United States between 1989 and 1993.  While 151,600 individuals die each day across the globe, Americans will pause to collectively grieve the loss of this one woman whom they've never met, much less ever had the chance to know at a more-than-academic level.  And the total of this mourning across the nation will represent a manifestly glorified adoration for a family which symbolizes fantasy and concocted imagination far more than any strict rendering of historical happenings.  Despite the horrendous implications of the Iran-Contra scandal, the devastating casualties of Iran Air Flight 655, and a set of monetary, fiscal and social policies which unequivocally conflict with the original thousand-points-of-light Bush campaign, a great many Americans remain enamored with the family which appears nearly immune to reproach and primly primed for induction into the immutable annals of white...

As the elite competitors of the 2018 Boston Marathon endure bone-chilling rain and stifling winds, the U.S. government sits idly by, comfortably prepared indoors and removed from the elements, awaiting their share of the winnings. It is disturbing to think that the men and women who effectively place their health at risk, who compete under the most dire of circumstances, who press the limits of the human spirit, would finish only to be identified by the federal government as debtors to the state. That government bears no interest in any other part of the athlete's heart-wrenching odyssey, yet it is there all the while waiting to assume its part in his crowning achievement, not to extend any congratulations, but rather to deliver the bill. For what? For being the best. For adding value. For winning. Incredibly, this government effectively interprets the athlete's achievement as equivalent to the windfall attending the gambler's roll of the dice. While both of t...

There is a rather simple distinction between the freethinker, the capitalist, and the statist.  When the independent thinker enters the wilderness, he sees the beauty of it, the way the leaves flap in the wind, the formation of the birds.  He hears the whirring of the wind, the quacking of ducks, whistling of friendly flyers.  He escapes into the fields, basks in the shimmering sun of independent thought, and gets lost in the exploration of the terrain, the cosmos and the subject of his very existence.  He is guided inexorably by an unquenchable thirst for knowledge, an undefined set of tantalizing answers to curious questions, and a resolute and nearly desperate fascination with meaning.  When the capitalist enters the wilderness, he sees opportunity.  He views the trees, the streams and the wildlife as fountains of harnessable energy, usable materials for shelter, grazable and cultivatable lands for farming, formable trails for hiking and ru...

Consider for a moment how much of your own life you actually remember.  Combine that with the total of moments you’ve blinked.  If that represents the total of what we’ve missed directly in front of us, consider for a moment how much we’re missing behind the scenes or beyond the field of view.  Beyond this, consider how much of our lives is constructed on beliefs, virtues and even memories recreated for us by other people; even our own memories, which we were ostensibly there to enjoy, endure and only fail to remember.  And even of those memories which remain with us, only fragments or incomplete snapshots are retrievable.  As such, we have assumed a great deal when we’ve accepted those narratives at face value as truths or representations thereof, and we have likewise filled the gaps of unknowns with storyline after storyline of the contrived yet familiar sense of normal.  Such is the case as we pass by the stranger who’s been apprehended by ...