Kesterson: a Microcosm of Government Corruption [tem] by D.A. Tuma

Commitment to living on dry ground

Our civilization started when we learned to live on dry ground and left our fins in the swamp, never to go back again. When we became air breathing kin of cousins whose descendants now look like amphibians, we made a commitment to our children, and their children, and all of our future progeny. I honor that commitment when I look at reality from a dry place.

I honor that commitment when I am angry over people being fooled into voting for an environmental protection political agenda that forces a minority, farmers (less than 3% is a real minority), into altering their life style to make room for more swamp. Swamp breeds critters we don't eat anymore. Like mosquitoes. We gave up mosquitoes when we quit looking like frogs. When we were adults, that is.

Interference with genetic code

At some early day in my post fertilization pre-life, I suppose I actually looked like a tadpole. But it didn't bother me. I have no recollection of being worried about my appearance. And I expect tadpoles aren't worried about their appearance either. I think they would be more worried about getting parasitic worms in their budding legs and then growing deformed legs. Because these worms apparently interfere with the genetic code of budding leg joint cells. Kind of like a sperm cell interfering with the genetic code of an egg to make it grow into who knows what? It could be a memory code challenged politician!

Child liabilities

What an argument for birth control! Women! Control your breeding! Or you too might set another earth-worshipping ingrate politician loose on civilization! And how could you live with that? Pity our mothers. Pity our mothers who hoped their children would grow up to be honest and not parrot gibberish to feign wisdom. Our mothers put a lot of effort into raising us. Are we not obliged to show our appreciation by being an asset to society rather than a liability?

Surplus kid subsidies

All of us parents seem to benefit from government subsidized liability indemnification from damages perpetrated by our children following, if not before, their eighteenth birthday. This subsidy, no doubt, removes a lot of incentive for potential mothers to limit the number of kids they bring into our world. They got a subsidy for freedom to breed. Sounds a little like "Freedom to Farm" payments to farmers. So the kids that continue to be supported by government funds, almost all of us, must be surplus to what parents can really afford.

Which do you suppose is a greater cost to our society? Surplus crops or surplus kids? From Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1994, we can check on 1993 federal subsidies that look like funding for surplus kids. From table No. 509:

Subsidy	Cost, $ billion
Federal correctional facilities	2.1
Housing assistance	21.5
Other income security	48.4
Unemployment compensation	37.8
Education	28.0
Education social services	12.4
Healthcare services	88.9
Food and nutrition assistance	35.1

I suppose we spend $35.1 billion on surplus crops to give to surplus kids. If we didn't have those surplus kids, would we spend as much on surplus crops? I presume our priority for child welfare is higher than for farmer welfare. So the $35.1 billion is for surplus kids.

In a distorted view that the federal government actually owns more of our income than what it collects in revenue, taxes foregone to deductions are a government subsidy. From table No. 510:

Deductibility of mortgage interest on owner-occupied homes	48.7
Deductibility of property tax on owner-occupied homes	13.1
Charitable contributions	16.9
Exclusion of employer contribution for medical insurance premiums and medical care	46.9
Exclusion of pension contributions and earnings	58.6

Of course we might not have spent that much if the expenditure was not tax deductible. We might have spent only the equivalent out-of-pocket cost without a deduction. So the deductions could be subsidies to all the industries and charities who received tax deductible money. But the decision on which specific business or charity would receive the subsidy was by us surplus kids, spending money our government claimed as taxes.

Looks to me like we surplus kids got federal subsidies of $370 billion for 1993.

Farm subsidies

Farm income stabilization cost was $17.8 billion. A large part of that, $16.0 billion, went to outlays by the Commodity Credit Corporation-apparently a subsidiary of the U.S. Agricultural Stabilization and Conservation Service, which was cited as the source for the costs shown below from table No. 1094. Also shown below are 1992 "gross receipts from commercial market sales as well as net Commodity Credit Corporation loans" from table No. 1095.

Cost, $ billion_______________

Commodity	Net Outlays	Cash Receipts
Feed grains	5.8
corn		14.7
Wheat	2.2	7.6
Cotton
upland	2.2
lint, seed		5.2
Dairy	0.26	19.8
Rice	0.89	1.23
Sheep and lambs		0.46
Wool	0.18
Honey	0.022
Peanuts	-0.013	1.29
Sugar	-0.035
Sugar beets		1.11
Sugar cane		0.92
Tobacco	0.24	3.0
Soybeans	0.12	11.3
Export programs	2.2
Disaster assistance	0.94
Other	0.93

A footnote to "Export programs" lists several government programs including "technical assistance to emerging democracies."

Farm income stabilization in 1993 looks like five percent of the surplus kid subsidies. Critics might say five percent is too much. I say subsidy cutting should be prioritized. I'd use the food chain to measure relative priority, because hunger interferes with reason. And reason preserves our moral memory code, without which we are not human.

Tobacco smoke constricts blood vessels in our brains, not a favorable condition for memory. I've found that I can live without it. It is not in my food chain. I don't want to be forced to subsidize it. In fact, I don't want to be forced to subsidize any of these products. But if we switch government funding from forceful takings to voluntary contributions, stabilization of human food chains would remain a worthwhile social endeavor.

Protecting property rights for farms is not just good moral behavior. It secures expectations and trust in that part of our market that is the major source of our human energy supply. Stability in this market sector is like the stability we like to see in the foundation of a building. The rest of our market depends on people secure in their expectations of food availability. Protection of water supply contracts for farms is about as fundamental a priority as we can get. Environmental socialism that breaks those contracts is about as demented as we can get.

Jerking our market: corrupt government officials

So the federal government is jerking our market around with foreign aid and surplus kid subsidies that can change at the whim of government officials with their finger in the wind of public opinion, as sampled by focus group polls. Creative inclusion and exclusion of focus group members can, of course, produce a desired "public opinion". Who rules? Not focus groups. Corrupt government officials who claim they are just following public opinion.

In addition to guessing weather, pest, and disease assaults on crop production, a farmer has to also guess how much the federal government is going to jerk market demand with foreign and domestic policy changes.

Stability: human virtue

Aldo Leopold liked stability. He liked beauty and integrity too. He was human. I see his perspective of nature with the same virtues-stability, beauty, and integrity - because these virtues also appeal to me as what is right. But I think they appeal to me only because I am human. Why should I presume, as Leopold did, that what is right for humans is right for non-humans-all creatures, plants, rivers, rocks, beneficial water uses and standards, etc.?

If the federal government decides to stop our nation's wheat sales to China because it doesn't like China's human rights protection policy-as if our federal government, with prisons half full of political dissidents caught exercising their inalienable right to choose what to smoke, had a clue about human rights-who is going to get left holding the bag? A farmer with a field of wheat that no one wants to buy.

"Oh, but..." farm subsidy critics say, and they point to our market for commodity futures. A farmer could have gotten a contract for the sale of that crop at some future price agreed upon with anybody who voluntarily entered the commodity futures market. So the risk of market demand being jerked by the federal government is spread to lots of investors. And lots of investors wind up holding the bag. Are investors fair game for government plunder? Not if we like stability in our expectations of future events.

Stability in promises delivered is a human virtue highly appreciated among investors, like bank loan officers. Trained professionals we trust to find a stable environment in which to invest our savings. Why do we save? For lots of reasons. Some of us don't want to work for others until we die. We want to eventually rest or work at our own pleasure with security in the knowledge that our prior earnings as investments in capital market assets will support us. When our market is jerked by government policy changes, we suffer social insecurity.

National defense: foreign trade restrictions

We form government to protect us from foreign aggressors as well as domestic. So our federal government is doing its legitimate job when it acts to protect us from a potential aggressor that enslaves its people with communism. Our federal government is warranted by us to not only retaliate with lethal force against aggressors, but engage in foreign diplomacy to avoid such confrontation.

We can spend less effort nipping a potential problem in the bud than trying to clean up after damage is done. Call it warranted pre-emptive strike. Call it discretionary source control. Call it preventive maintenance. Call it national security. Call it "social security", not to be confused with the federal government inter-generational Ponzi scheme by the same name. It is done to secure stable expectations that promises will be kept, contracts between people honored. It is done for our safety. Safety and happiness is what our nation's founding fathers wanted from government. They pledged their sacred honor to support our independence, informing the world at the end of the second sentence their Declaration that safety and happiness is what we expect to get out of government.

We expect our federal government to protect us from China's potential aggression. If our government restricts grain sales to China, as it did until the Reagan administration, for the purpose of not feeding the growth of a communist aggressor, can we fault the intent? Of course we know roads to hell are paved with the best intentions.

But foreign policy is legitimate federal government business. And government policy decision-making is more inclusive by majority or super majority rule democracy than by the dictates of monarchy or aristocracy. Democracy for government decision-making is okay as long as we keep it limited from encroachment on market decision-making, a completely inclusive process among honorable property owners. And if our country's defense against communism fails, we will have neither private property ownership nor honor.

So if foreign policy in the interest of national defense finds manipulation of food commodity exports an effective tool to influence potential aggressors, I would not deny our federal government that power. And as an integral part of maintaining that capability to use food as an incentive for peaceful foreign relations, I feel obliged to compensate and subsidize farms, not farmers, as required to stabilize expectations for future crop sales.

Why farm crops are uniquely valuable for trade

Farm crops comprise the major source of human energy. Cut the flow of energy to people, and they slow down.

Where does human energy come from?

The energy of all life in the thin shell of earth's oxygen rich atmosphere is sustained by solar energy. This flow of useful energy shines from the gravity-compressed fusion of hydrogen, the most basic and apparently abundant element of all creation, as we know it from what our science, our systematized knowledge, validates as true. As daylight, sunshine falls on the leaves of green plants, including farm crops.

Leaves block the flow of solar energy like dams block the gravity flow of water. And like the reservoirs of water held by dams, leaves hold reservoirs of useful solar energy in the excited and expanded electron shells of atoms in organic molecules formed in its tissues. A formation of stored food, according to a genetic code for photosynthetic conversion of solar energy. This genetic code is a continuum of knowledge, a spirit that passes through generations of individual choice with irreversible consequences as different as all species of life on this planet are different from each other.

Except for the creation of this genetic code, there is not much mystery here. This is just a family tree. Recombination of different branches coming back together is no more mysterious for genetic code carried by egg and sperm as for solutes carried by tributaries of farm field drains and ancient buried stream beds of sand underlying those same fields. The genetic code comes from a common creation of life. The solutes come from a fusion of lighter elements in the gravitational crucibles of stars that have since exploded, their cores of elements-like carbon, oxygen, iron, silicon, sulfur, selenium, boron, and molybdenum-scattered into space.

By providence, by the vagaries of gravitational fields of other passing matter, collections of spent star debris gravitated back together in groups, attracted by each other's gravity and the gravity of other stars and matter scattered throughout the universe since its creation in an event scientists call the big bang. When a flow of solutes, useful energy, or even an idea can be traced step by step back to an apparent point of creation, we need not be mystified about the flow as we might be with the creation.

Choosing where we want to be

As long as matter and energy aren't being spontaneously created or destroyed in our environment of mass and energy flow, those of us with reason can figure out where we want to be in these flows. And we can individually act on our own reason, like shrinking a government that gets in our way.

A government that decides selenium is a contaminant, regardless of context of dedicated purpose established by contracts between people, is in our way to benefit from lower production costs for farms upstream on our human food chain energy flow. Farms which can directly benefit from improved drainage. This government interference with our food market access deprives us of greater individual liberty in financial freedom because we can not live without food. We will buy food from more expensive sources because we are dependent on food energy. So we are being enslaved by working more to pay higher costs of food resulting from government arrogance to proclaim selenium a contaminant in all waters of the State.

We are being denied our individual right to choose where we want to invest our efforts, where we think we can reap the most satisfaction, by stupid government limits on inanimate natural solutes, including selenium in San Joaquin Valley drainage. These limits are not based on patterns of flow of water and energy. They are not based on morality. They are based on corrupt political power.

Solute limits disregard gravity and the Second Law

These solute limits disregard the natural force of gravity and the one irrefutable, undeniable, unbreakable natural law of all creation following the original creation: the Second Law. The first law is that the creation of energy is over, and energy doesn't ever get destroyed. It might get transformed into mass, as discovered by Einstein. But in our limited nuclear reaction environment, mass-energy conversions other than the sun need not concern us in our consideration of drainage solutes.

The creation of energy happened with the big bang, some fifteen billion years ago. We don't know why, and religions will, no doubt, come and go for a long time with variations on why God put us in her universe. But we don't have to get in a huff over differences between religious explanations for the creation of energy and natural law. We can learn about what happened after creation of energy and understand how energy flows according to the Second Law.

Physicists discovered how energy flows several decades ago. They discovered it always flows from more useful states to less useful states. These are not political states. These are not mental states. They are states of energy. Potential energy is a state. The potential energy in water stored behind a dam is more useful than the potential energy in the water below that dam.

Energy flows, like water from upstream to downstream, from more useful to less useful. And like the gravity flow of water, energy always flows to less useful. The irreversible nature of this flow of energy was named by physicists "the Second Law of thermodynamics". By understanding the Second Law, engineers built trains. By understanding the Second Law, would-be inventors gave up on searching for perpetual motion machines and limited their search for new ways to divert and use energy flow.

Diverting energy flows

New ways to divert and use energy flow included the diversion of energy from water falling through a penstock and turbine into generation of electric current. Thus, some of the energy of falling water at Shasta dam flows through electric power lines to pumps near the Central Valley Delta town of Tracy, on the opposite side of the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta outfall to the sea. And there in the intake to the Tracy pumping plant some of the same water that fell through the penstocks of Shasta power plant is lifted nearly 200 feet with some of the same energy it had in Shasta Lake.

The diversion of water energy at Shasta Dam flows back to the water at Tracy Pumping Plant, completing a flow path like separate branches of river water coming together after splitting to go on either side of a long island. Like separate branches of genetic code coming together as egg and sperm after splitting to go in separate lines of heritage for many generations. Nothing to get excited about. It's just part of the natural flow.

Sacramento River water in the Delta-Mendota Canal, nearly 200 feet above the town of Tracy, could have just as easily flowed by gravity through a long, big pipeline from Shasta Lake. Federal government engineers could have designed and built such an aqueduct, but they didn't for good reason. The flow of energy through electric power lines gets the job done, and not as much energy is required for construction of power lines as for big pipelines. What drove the choice of alternatives was an understanding of the Second Law.

Part 8