Can faith-based groups discriminate? Should they be allowed to?

More accurately, What is a religion?

On August 14, PBS's "Religion and Ethics Newsweekly" had a story about faith-based groups that get public funds, but have discriminatory hiring standards.

Apparently, the 1964 Civil Rights act actually permits faith-based groups to have discriminatory hiring. Good? Bad? Proper?

What about federal funding? Is it fair, or appropriate, for federal funding to go to groups with this type of hiring? Should the federal funding come with a "you must not take advantage of a 50 year old law with flaws"? Should that law be fixed?

Well, what does the constitution say? Amendment one is pretty clear. The federal government has no authority to say "You are a religion" and "You are not". If someone says that they are a religion, and the federal government says "No, you're not", then the government is saying what is and is not a valid religion. That's a very steep, slippery slope that has no bottom in sight.

Yes, the IRS tries to claim that Scientology isn't a religion, and isn't entitled to religious tax exemptions. The IRS is wrong. But a better question: Why do religions get a tax exemption?

Why do religions get exemptions from laws? If the first amendment prohibits the government from deciding what is and is not a religion, then anyone can claim to be a religion -- for example, a fraternity that realizes that zoning laws permit 50% more people in a building classified as a religious building deciding to call itself a religion to have a bigger membership. (That's from memory; sorry if I have a few details off, but the basics are valid. I think it was in Texas.)

Well, frankly, There should be no religious exemptions of any kind. Period.

Want to give charity organizations a tax break? Fine. Give all charities, religious or not, that break. Scientology isn't a charity, and doesn't pretend to be one. It becomes a taxable, business-oriented religion.

Want to give some kinds of organizations a hiring exemption? Ouch -- what if it's a group that believes that white males are superior to anything else, and even quotes the bible as proof? Kantankerous Kalamities Kan follow such a determination. But if you allow faith-based exempions from the law, you have to permit such organizations.

Should tax dollars go to fund charitable organizations that are faith based? The real question is, should tax dollars go to fund charitable organizations? "Faith based" should not ever enter the picture.

The real answer is simple: Federal funds should go to people; people should give as they choose to various charities. If donations to charities are income-tax deductible, fine. Let that be the -- as in only -- source of public funds to charities.  Instead of funding charities, the government should run similar programs itself.

Federal funds should go to people. That's a theme that I'll keep harping back on. Right now you have "Tax and spend", and "Don't tax, don't spend". Micro-economics teach that "Tax and redistribute" is better. Right now you have federal funds going to banks, and large companies that get federal contracts, on the theory that this will result in hiring people, and that will get federal funds to the people. That's a demonstrated failure. Federal funds needs to go directly to the people, and not indirectly through banks and companies that pay their boards/bosses big salaries and hire cheap foreign workers.

Does this mean no direct federal spending? Schools? Roads? Etc? What about the USA's bill for clean air? (Oh, that's right -- we currently don't pay for our air. No cost to just burn a ton of coal and put lots of CO2 into the air.) No. Government spending on things that are directly beneficial to society as a whole -- and that includes education, transportation, etc., and the infrastructures for those industries -- that's fine. See "Promote the general welfare" and "for ourselves and our posterity". Spending on things that help the next generation, before they have any chance to speak up, that's fine, at least as far as the preamble and overall scope of the constitution is concerned. Whether or not it satisfies Article one's list of powers of Congress? Schools almost certainly do not. Roads do.

An open letter to President Obama -- How to solve the national economy and debt limit

An open letter to President Obama:

Mr. Obama:

I am writing to talk about the debt crisis. I understand that many programs are referred to now as "Entitlements", and that this has become a bad name.

I want to give them another name: Promises to pay from the government.

And yet another name: Just compensation for a past taking.

You are a lawyer. You know that the taking of private property (including money) for the public good (including retiring older workers to make sure that newer workers have job opportunities) without just compensation is unconstitutional. The federal government has engaged in a taking, and has undertaken a promise to pay. The federal government has no authority to reduce the payment without risking lawsuits about just compensation for a forced taking (social security is an example of a forced retirement and disability insurance program). For all the talk of forcing people to engage in private insurance, consider that if the federal government cannot keep its insurance promises, why would anyone expect private insurances to keep their promises? (And look at Katrina, Louisiana, and the private insurance companies there).

The economy: Fixing the money supply: Introduction and initial questions

On PBS's "Fixing the Future: NOW on PBS", this question was asked: Does the economy exist to serve the people, or do people exist to serve the economy?

Here's a better thought: The economy exists to allocate scarce resources in the best (or near-best) possible way, such that everyone benefits from a share of the better allocation.

Yes, the economy should exist to serve the people. At the moment, it doesn't.

What is the central flaw? It turns out that there is one, and only one, central flaw. But how to solve that central flaw ... not so simple, not so clear.

(To clarify: This is not the only flaw. It is not the only big flaw. If you are familiar with the assumptions of micro-economics at the base of economic theory, you know that they all have flaws and problems. You know that the flaws inherently introduce feedback into the equations, and equations with feedback are subject to chaotic behavior that cannot handle station analysis and needs simulation or dynamic analysis that is completely "hand-waved" out in normal economic studies. But this is, as far as I can tell, the single biggest, and most impactful / far-reaching flaw of them all.)

The central flaw: A scarce resource is used to determine the allocation of other scarce resources. Money is used to determine how resources are allocated. But money is scarce -- artificially. There is an artificial limit on how much money there should be, and it's less than what's needed to make things actually work. It's short because the planning for how much money there should be never took population growth into account. And it's been short since the baby boom -- the "stagflation" of the 70's comes directly out from this viewpoint as an expected behavior (and normal means of looking at the economy have trouble explaining stagflation).

But this means that inflation is a result of three different factors -- supply of money, supply/demand for goods, and population levels. Population levels are normally ignored in this analysis.

How do you solve this issue? How do you put more money in to fix the scarce-ness of money? Do you want to put more money in? Should you? Do you reduce the costs of things to let the buying power of the existing money increase to handle the increase in population?

I cannot say that I have "The" answer. But I do have "An" answer that works.

It requires the understanding that money has no value in and of itself. The pretense that a dollar should be about equal to one Spanish gold doubloon has to be completely abandoned.

Here's the "punch-line". You are not expected to understand this, any more than you'd understand a joke if you just heard the last line without the buildup.

It is meant to be something to think about, to wonder. Just like a joke's punch-line by itself might make you think about word meanings, sound-alikes, or similar, this is for you to think about.

The punch-line: The government needs to directly give cash to people as a source of money, balanced by taxes taken from those entities -- people and non-people -- that concentrate money. The "Fountain and sink" model from RPG's and online games is the way to re-build the real life economy.

If your first thought is, "That's crazy", then good. What's your second thought? Your third? If you're so sure it must fail, why?

Did home loans cause the financial crisis?

Today, on Fareed Zakaria GPS, one of the guests was O'Neill. He was a treasury secretary during the Bush (2001-????) years.

O'Neill laid the blame for the housing crash on home loans with little or nothing down. According to him, the crash would not have happened if all home loans had required 20% down.

This seems silly to me. I saw many loans issued that only made sense if you assumed that the value of the house would go up, and then require you to sell or refinance to pay off the loan -- in other words, the loan assumed that the house would pay for itself. Loans that had a low interest rate during the first few years (5 to 7), and then either a large interest increase, or a balloon payment. Loans where your interest rate was higher than your payments (so your balance would increase; in theory, your house value would go up faster).

Why is this bad? If you require that a loan is only issued if it is likely to be paid off, then a high house price will not sell -- no one that wants it can afford the loan. If a house is priced so high that the loan is not likely to be paid off, and therefore cannot be issued, then the house needs to come down in price.

That's how a market makes sense. When prices go up, up, up, people stop buying, and the prices have to come back down. That's functional.

Instead, we had a market where prices went up, up, up, and bankers proceeded to make loans on the assumption that not only would they continue to go up, up, up, but someone else later would buy a loan thinking that it would continue to go up, up up.

Blaming the people who wanted a house loan with little or no down is crazy.
Blame the lenders who decided to issue loans that could only be repaid if the house was sold at a large profit.

Can corporations be subject to jail or execution? Should they?

Over at The Archdruid Report, there's an interesting take on corporate responsibility:

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2010/01/housebreaking-corporations.html

The kernel of that is in two points:

First, something which I would agree with, but use somewhat different wording:

Still, the most obvious difference between corporate persons and natural persons these days is that the corporate kind are noticeably more antisocial. They pursue their purposes – primarily, making money – with a single-mindedness and a lack of concern for consequences that, in natural persons, would be accurately labeled psychopathic; they’ve proven themselves consistently willing to lie, cheat, steal, and kill whenever the likely return on these acts outweighs the risk of punishment.

Can you force an insane person to be committed to a mental institute? Used to be yes; now it seems to be no. Can a psychopath be locked up if they present a danger to others? Can a corporation that acts in a manner that causes danger to others be locked up? What does it mean to be locked up?

One popular proposal would subject corporations to regular review by some independent body which could annul the charter of any corporation that refused to be properly housebroken, forcing its dissolution. What would keep this body honest in the face of the fantastic potential for corruption, the proponents of this notion do not say, but there’s another issue here: we’ve actually got a tolerably effective way of responding to antisocial behavior; we just don’t apply it to corporate persons the way we do to natural persons.

Sadly, I have no solution to the corruption issue, and fear that this cure would be worse than the disease. What about review by the courts? Archdruid has an even better answer at that point:

This is why natural persons who are convicted of felonies, by and large, can’t get away with just paying a fine; they go to jail, or if the crime is heinous enough and it happens in a jurisdiction with capital punishment, they die. While it has its failings, this approach to antisocial behavior generally works a good deal more effectively than the wergild principle.

From this perspective, the problem with corporate persons is simple enough: the only risk they run in breaking the law is that they have to pay wergild, and that doesn’t constrain antisocial behavior any more effectively now than it did in Anglo-Saxon times.

A little history since I'm taking away some context: "the earliest version of English common law, from which our American legal system descends, operated entirely on the basis of fines. The principle of wergild, as it was called, gave each person a cash value". If you can pay the fine, you can get away with anything. We've had similar things in this country at times; pay a fee to support the war, and avoid the draft ("There's no difference between a conscript and a convict"), etc.

Archdruid even goes so far to recommend jail, or dissolution (death) for corporations that break the law. Jail consists of the government taking over the corporation, possibly firing people at the top, stock losing all value (dividends, voting rights, etc) during this time. Profits go to the government. Death even includes creditors getting zero; all assets sold at auction, funds going first to victim restitution, etc.

Is this a good idea? I like the idea -- the kernel is great. But the execution is horrible.

Consider one company at the start of this whole economic mess. A bank, that was in the business of "junk loans". Instead of junk bonds, many of which would be worthless, you had junk bond funds -- lots and lots of junk bonds, so that even with some worthless, the whole group paid well. Now take that same approach to home loans. Lots of loans, many worthless, sold and packaged as a group.

One Monday, that investment bank was $120 per share. Employees there were required to keep their retirement package in, at least in part, company stock.

By next monday, the banking regulators had shut it down. They turned down a $4 per share offer, for a $2 per share offer. They wanted the death of the bank to hurt.

But they wound up hurting people whose job required them to invest in that bank, more than people who had the choice to invest in that bank.

What's the problem?
1. Lack of information. Had the true state of Bear Stearns been known, there's no way it would have had a share value of $120.
2. Lack of choice. Employees that are forced to choose from a company's choice of stock investment options are unfairly hurt by this.

Archdruid also makes the same mistake that the SCOTUS made -- the confusion between "corporation" and "Corporation that exists to make profit". Note that I'm also trying to distinguish "Corporation that makes profit on behalf of shareholders, publicly traded". A private corporation really does look like a group of people getting together as a group to excersize the rights of people as a group.

Maybe private corporations need to lose the liability limits that public corporations have. More rights comes with more responsibilities. Isn't that what we teach our children?

Is that what corporations are today? Children that have no parents?