New America

In the New America people have the choice either to become Citizens with the right to vote or remain Civilians with all rights and liberties except voting. To become a Citizen you must serve a term of service. A person is not allowed to pick their service though they can state a preference. A placement officer pays attention to the choice and checks whether there is a need for such a position as you would think this would make you happy. If such a need is found then the person is tested for innate ability and preparation. Do not be surprised if everything matches only once in every twenty or so. Only birth certificates and I.D.’s are required to join. The next step would be to get a medical examination. No one and I repeat no one fails the medical examination since the law would not permit it. Every person has the choice to become a citizen. The purpose of the physical exam is to find out what duties you are capable of performing. The only way a person could fail to join is if a psychiatrist says you simply cannot understand the oath. After the medical examination; signatures and fingerprints are required to assure that the same person is still present and mentally competent. Should the person enrolling not be under the influence of alcohol, narcotics, disabling drugs or hypnosis the oath is taken. “I being of legal age, of my own free will, without coercion, promise, or inducement of any sort, after having been duly advised and warned of the meaning and consequences of this oath do now enroll in the Federal Service of the Terran Federation for a term of not less than two years and as much longer as may be required by the needs of the Service. I swear to uphold and defend the Constitution of the Federation against all its enemies on or off Terra, to protect and defend the Constitutional liberties and privileges of all citizens and lawful residents of the Federation, its associated states and territories, to perform, on or off Terra, such duties and any lawful nature as may be assigned to me by lawful direct or delegated authority and to obey all lawful orders of the Commander-in-Chief of the Terran Service and of all officers or delegated persons placed over me and to acquire such obedience from all members of the Service or other persons or non-human beings lawfully placed under my orders and, on being honorably discharged at the completion of my full term of active service or upon being placed on inactive retired status after having completed such full term, to carry out all duties and obligations and to enjoy all privileges of the Federation citizenship including but not limited to the duty, obligation, and privilege of exercising sovereign franchise for the rest of my natural life unless stripped of honor by verdict, finally sustained, of my sovereign peers.” After the path a standard 48 hour cooling off period and if the person does not return then nothing happens. Nothing, except the papers get stamped, Term not completed satisfactorily, and you never ever get a second chance. One week of aptitude testing is standard with a multitude of written and oral tests.

One thought for the day, is value relative or an absolute? The value of a thing is always relative to a particular person, is completely personal and different and different in quantity for each living human. So market value is fiction, merely a rough guess at the average of personal values, all of which must be quantitatively different or trade would be impossible. Now this personal relationship has two factors: What can he do with the thing, the use to him and second, what he must do to get it, its value to him. The saying, the best things in life are free is not true, it is utterly false. This is leading to the fall of modern day democracy. This noble experiment is failing because people have been lead and still thinks that they can simply vote for whatever they want and get it, without toil, without sweat, without tears. Nothing of value is free.

Let’s move on to murder, drug addiction, larceny, assault and vandalism. These things are common place and take place in out parks, on our streets in daylight, on school grounds and in school buildings. There are more police and more courts and both are overworked. So please define a juvenile delinquent. Well, juvenile delinquent is a contradiction in terms and gives a clue to the problem and the failure to solve it. The easiest method to solve the problem is to look at raising a puppy. If the puppy messes on the floor you put his nose in it and paddle him. The puppy thinks you are angry and you watch to see if he does it again. Should the puppy mess again on the floor you paddle him still harder, this must be done right away or it does no use as the puppy has no idea why he is in trouble, this transcends verbal communication. The most viscous of our criminals started out their lawless lives while in high school. These children are often caught by police are arrested. They are scolded and then their names are kept secret to protect those under the age of eighteen. Were they spanked, indeed not. In fact these children were never spanked even by their own parents as it is widely believed that spanking or any form of punishment involving pain, did a child permanent psychic damage. Corporal punishment in schools is snubbed at. While a judge should be benevolent in purpose, his awards should cause the criminal to suffer, else there is no punishment. Since pain is the basic mechanism built into us by millions of years of evolution which safeguards us by warning when something threatens our survival, why would society refuse to use such a highly perfected survival mechanism. But still today, we are overloaded with pre-scientific pseudo-psychological nonsense. Back to these young criminals: the first offense was usually a verbal warning, often without a trial. After several offenses a sentence of confinement but with the sentence suspended and the youngster placed on probation. After still more arrests and convictions the boy was confined with others like him from whom he learned even more criminal habits. If he kept out of major trouble while confined, he could usually evade the most of the even mild punishments and be paroled. This incredible sequence could go on for years while his crimes increased in frequency and viciousness, with no punishment, whatsoever save rare dull-but-comfortable confinements. At the age of eighteen this ‘juvenile delinquent’ becomes as adult criminal and usually wound up weeks later or even months later in a death cell awaiting execution for murder. Suppose you merely lock your puppy up in an outbuilding whenever he messes on the floor. You scold him and soon let him back in the house. Then one day you have an adult dog that is still not house broken whereupon you whip out a gun and shoot him dead. There is no difference between what the puppy learns and what a human learns. Why don’t people spank children, perhaps the time-tested method of instilling social virtue and respect for law in the minds of the young do not appeal to a pre-scientific pseudo-professional class who call themselves social workers or child psychologists. Apparently, they believe that patience and firmness are too simple and since anyone can do it that they should keep a vested interest in maintaining disorder. They assumed Man has a moral instinct. Man has no moral instinct. You are not born with it. We acquire moral sense, when we do, through training, experience, and hard sweat of the mind. What is moral sense? It is an elaboration of the instinct to survive. The instinct to survive is human nature itself, and every aspect of our personalities derives from it. Anything that conflicts with the survival instinct acts sooner or later to eliminate the individual and thereby fails to show up in future generations. The truth is mathematically demonstrable, everywhere verifiable; it is the single eternal imperative controlling everything we do. These juvenile criminals hit a low level. Born with only the instinct for survival, the highest morality they achieved was a shaky loyalty to a peer group, a street gang. But the do-gooders attempted to ‘appeal to their better natures,’ to ‘reach them,’ to ‘spark their moral sense,’ Tosh! They had no ‘better natures’; experience taught them that what they were doing was the way to survive. The puppy never got his spanking; what he did with pleasure and success must be ‘moral.’

The basis of all morality is duty, a concept with the same relation to group that self-interest has to individual. Nobody preached duty to these kids in a way they could understand that is, with a spanking. But the society they were in told them endlessly about their ‘rights.’

“The results should have been predictable, since a human being has no natural rights of any nature.”

What of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness? What right does a man drowning in the middle of the ocean have? Will the ocean give him his life is he cries loud enough? Liberty, the heroes who signed the great document pledged themselves to buy liberty with their lives. Liberty is never unalienable; it must be redeemed regularly with the blood of patriots or it always vanishes. Of all the so called natural human rights that have ever been invented, liberty is the least likely to be cheap and is never free of cost. The third right, the pursuit of happiness. It is indeed unalienable but it is not a right; it is simply a universal condition which tyrants cannot take away nor patriots restore. Cast me into a dungeon, burn me at the stake, crown me king of kings, I can pursuer happiness as long as my brain lives but neither gods nor saints, wise men nor subtle drugs, can insure that I will catch it.

Juvenile delinquent is a contradiction in terms. Delinquent means ‘failing in duty.’ But duty is an adult virtue, indeed a juvenile becomes an adult when, and only when, he acquires knowledge of duty and embraces it as dearer than the self-love he was born with. There never was, there cannot be, a juvenile delinquent. But for every juvenile criminal there are always one or more adult delinquents, people of mature years who either do not know their duty, or who, knowing it fail.

And that is the soft spot which will destroy out nation and out culture. The junior hoodlums who roam the streets are the symptoms of a greater sickness; their citizens glorified their mythology of ‘rights’ and who lose track of their duties. No nation, so constituted can endure.

What does the future hold? Sooner or later government will collapse and something has to fill the vacuum, in many cases it will be veterans. Whether you lose or win a war when they return home they have no jobs, many are sore over their treatment both home and abroad, but they know how to fight. It is proposed that veterans should band together and form a committee and not let anyone else in except veterans. Within a couple of generations it will be constitutional practice. Also there would be no need to let any bleeding hearts, profiteering, black-market, double-time-for-overtime, army dodging, unprintable civilians have any say about it. Why would this work when all others have failed? This is a trick question. The practical reason for doing it this way is because it works satisfactorily. Throughout history men have labored to place the sovereign franchise in hands that would guard it well and use it wisely, for the benefit of all. An early attempt was absolute monarchy, passionately defended as the ‘divine right of kings.’ Sometimes attempts were made to select a wise monarch, rather than leave it up to God. The objection to this rule is that the supply of ‘wise monarchs’ is limited. Mankind has tried thousands of ways from absolute monarchy to utter anarchy. Some even as weird as the antlike communism urged by Plato in the misleading title The Replublic. But the intent was always moralistic: to provide stable and benevolent government. All systems seek to achieve this by limiting franchise to those who are believed to have the wisdom to use it justly. All systems, even the so-called ‘unlimited democracies’ excluded one quarter of their population by age, birth, poll tax, criminal record or other. How can a thirty-year-old moron vote more wisely than a fifteen-year old genius? These governmental systems will pay for they will fall eventually. To place rules such as place of birth, family of birth, race, sex, property, education, age, religion, et cetera on a people would work but none of them well. All are regarded as tyrannical by many, all eventually collapsed or were overthrown.

The goal is to find a system that works quite well. The so-called perfect system of government would be where many still complain but none rebel; personal freedom is at its greatest, laws are few, taxes are low, living standards are high as productivity allows and crime is at its lowest ebb. Do we have this now? No, take a look around and open your eyes. Is it possible to get all that was mentioned? Yes, and you do it by utilizing people that have demonstrated through voluntary and difficult service that they place the welfare of the group ahead of personal advantage. These people may then be described as failing in wisdom or lacking in civil virtue but their average overall performance is enormously better than any other class of rulers in history. If you learn nothing, if you understand nothing then remember this. To vote is to wield authority; it is the supreme authority from which all other authority derives. Force if you will. Whether it is exerted by ten people or ten billion, political authority is force. What is wrong with requiring each person who wishes to exert control over the state to wager his or her own life and lose it if need be to save the life of the state. The maximum responsibility a human can accept is thus equated to the ultimate authority a human can exert. Yin and Yang, perfect and equal.

It has been asked why not let everyone serve and everyone vote. Well; you would find it much easier getting pigs to fly than to instill moral virtue ‘social responsibility’ into a person who doesn’t have it, doesn’t want it, and resents having the burden thrust on him. This is the precise reason it should so hard to enroll in the service, so easy to resign. Social responsibility above the level of family, or at most of tribe, requires imagination, devotion, loyalty, all the higher virtues which man must develop himself. If he has them forced down him, he will vomit them out. Need still more proof go study conscript armies.

You cannot buy fighting spirit. It is scarce, so scarce in fact that the service should use all of it and waste none. The goal is to have the smallest army in history for the size of population it guards. Each service man is a free man and all that drives him comes from inside. It should be known and practiced that everyone works, everybody fights. What does matter and should matter is that every man in the service knows that everybody from general to private fights along side everybody else. Are there any side effects, yes. Fewer officers. How many officers would a fighting force designed as such require? It is easier to use the ground assault troops as an example. Of 10,800 men in 216 platoons each with a lieutenant. Three platoons to a company calls for 72 captains; four companies to a battalion calls for 18 majors or lieutenant colonels. Six regiments with six colonels can form two or three brigades, each with a short general, plus a medium-tall general as top boss. You win dup with 317 officers out of a total, all ranks, of 11,117. There are no blank files and every officer commands a team. Officers total 3 percent. Many platoons are commanded by sergeants and many officers wear more than one hat. Even a platoon leader should have ‘staff’ his platoon sergeant. Though each can get by without the other.

A general must have staff however. He needs a big planning staff and a small combat staff. Since there are never enough officers, the team commanders in his flag transport double as his planning staff and are picked form the very best mathematical logicians. When the general enters battle, he enters with a small combat staff of the meanest men whose sole job is to keep the general from being bothered by rude strangers while the general is commanding the battle. As staff has dictated, any team larger than a platoon ought to have a deputy commander. In the past as is so evident in the present many armies commissioned 10 percent of their number, or even 15 percent and sometimes a preposterous 20 percent. This may sound like a fairy tale but it is fact. What kind of army has more ‘officers’ than corporals? And more noncoms than privates! An army that is organized to lose wars. What do ‘officers’ do that do not fight? Fiddle work, officer’s club officer, morale officer, athletics officer, public information officer, recreational officer, PX officer, transportation officer, legal officer, chaplain, assistant chaplain, junior assistant chaplain, even nursery officer. These are best left to civilians who can do the jobs better and cheaper. Though the casualty rate is always highest among officers one should not commission a man simply to fill vacancy. Each boot regiment should be required to supply its own share of officers and the percentage can’t be raised without lowering the standards.