Why the Constitution Cannot Protect Illegal Aliens

Over the last decade the U.S. has been embroiled in controversy over the application of Constitutional protections to illegal aliens.  You might notice I've used the term "illegal aliens" rather than the more common politically correct term "illegal immigrant".  I've done this out of honestly and integrity.  The term "immigrant" means a long term resident and carries the implication that the person is legally permitted to be there.  The term "illegal immigrant" was coined and made popular to make the practice of illegal border crossing sound more benign and harmless than it actually us.  In the 1990s, when I was in my teens, "illegal alien" was the common term, and it is the more honest and accurate term, and thus it is the term I will use here.  Anyhow, in this article I will explain exactly why the idea of extending Constitutional protections to illegal aliens is impossible and why even trying to do it is potentially catastrophic.

The central question here is not whether or not the Founders intended for the Constitution to protect illegal aliens.  If it was, the question would be trivially solved: To the best of its ability, the early U.S. did not tolerate unauthorized entry into the country, and those who did enter without authorization were almost always treated as foreign invaders.  Proponents of open borders like to claim that the early U.S. was very amenable to large scale immigration and imply that this is the same as open borders, but this is completely false.  The early U.S. did encourage immigration.  At this time, the U.S. needed an enormous amount of labor, far beyond the capacity of its current population, to develop the nation, build infrastructure, and advance technology.  The country went through periods of mass immigration, facilitated and regulated by the Federal government.  Immigrants were required to pledge allegiance to the United States, and they were expected to integrate and adopt the same level of civil responsibility as native born Americans.  They were also required to give up their foreign citizenship.  During times of need the U.S. has, pursuant to the will of the people, opened up its borders to legal immigration, wisely regulated by the Federal government, temporarily until the will of the people dictated that the need had been met and the tide of immigration should be stemmed.  This is how immigration has been handled by nations for millennia, and for good reason, as we've seen with Biden's open borders experiment.  Regardless of all other factors, an excessively high rate of immigration will exceed the capacity of existing infrastructure and continue to exceed it even as the government attempts to catch up, resulting in the many disasters which were observed in border towns and in places immigrants were transported to during the ill fated experiment.

The central question in terms of Constitutional protections for illegal aliens is entirely one of jurisdiction.  Most Americans understand regional jurisdiction.  This is the idea that the place you are in has jurisdiction over you.  There are two other kinds of jurisdiction though, that most Americans do not understand, and the evidence strongly suggests that "most Americans" in this context includes many judges and lawyers, who supposedly have a far better education in legal matters than people like me.  The second most well understood kind of jurisdiction is one of levels, and this level should be understood by Americans better than those in most or maybe all other countries, due to our Federal system of government.  The U.S. Constitution dictates a separation of powers between the Federal level of government and the state level, only granting the Federal government power within a small number of very narrow domains.  If many Americans don't understand this, it is perhaps understandable, as our Federal government has overreached its bounds to an incredible degree, usurping an enormous amount of power that is Constitutionally granted exclusively to the states.  That is not important here though, as the critical type of jurisdiction here is that of citizenship.

Citizenship is the critical type of jurisdiction in the question of Constitutional rights for illegal aliens.  No matter where in the world I go, I am a U.S. citizen, and the U.S. government retains sovereignty over me.  This doesn't mean that I'm governed by U.S. laws and not the domestic laws of the region I'm currently in, but it does severely limit what that regional jurisdiction can do to me and how the laws of that jurisdiction apply to me.  For example, if I commit murder and the punishment for murder is death, they can't just kill me.  They would need to get permission from the U.S. government to enact that punishment.  In fact, they can't technically even keep me in prison for any extended period of time without negotiating permission from the U.S. government.  Now, generally speaking, the U.S. government is amenable to such requests, if the crime would earn a similar or more severe punishment in the U.S., and if the evidence is sufficiently strong for the conviction to be believable.  In addition, we also have standing agreements with some of our allies automatically granting them this permission.  But, the U.S. government does not have to grant this permission and can demand the return of their citizen.  And this is true of all governments.

Now, you've probably heard of governments that have imprisoned or executed U.S. citizens without permission from the U.S. government, and maybe because this gets in the news while punishments with permission don't, you think this is the way things normally work.  The truth though is that it isn't.  When foreign countries imprison or otherwise punish U.S. citizens without permission from the U.S. government, they almost always face serious repercussions.  A common response is trade embargoes, and where we can convince our allies to back us, other international sanctions.  We've threatened war over this, and we've sent in military strike teams to recover U.S. citizens imprisoned without our permission.  It is not normal for a nation to punish a foreign citizen without permission from the country that person is a citizen of.

What all of this comes down to is national sovereignty.  The United States does not have sovereignty over citizens of other countries.  No country has sovereignty over anyone who is not a citizen of that country.  Regional jurisdiction does give the country the right to police and govern its own region, but it does not give a country the right to hold or harm those who are not its citizens.  Those people fall under the sovereignty of the nations they are citizens of, and if a foreign country did hold or harm them, that would be a massive violation of the sovereignty of the countries they are citizens of.  If you are in a foreign country, and you commit some act that is a crime within that country, that country's government does not have unilateral rights to punish you for your crimes, because they don't have sovereignty over you.  What do they have the right to do?  They can hold you temporarily.  They can try you for your crimes (unless your own nation demands your immediate return, leaving no time for a trial).  They can deport you.  They can deny you future entry (banishment).  What they can't do is punish you, beyond banishment.  And this is something we've seen play out in the U.S., with illegal aliens being held to be tried for serious crimes and their nations of citizenship demanding their return.  When this happens our only viable options are to return the citizen as demanded, keep them and risk fully justified military or economic actions against us, or attempt to negotiate the situation to allow us to keep the criminal until we've tried and punished them.  This often ends with us returning the person with the agreement that they will be returned to our custody for trial later.  We've done this with Mexico on multiple occasions, and while we have a pretty good relationship allowing us to do what we want with illegal Mexican aliens who have committed crimes in the U.S., we've run into issues where the person was also wanted for crimes committed in Mexico, which they illegally entered to escape accountability for.  In these cases, we will normally return them to Mexico for trial and prosecution there, and then when their punishment is over, the Mexican authorities will return them to the U.S. for trial and punishment here.  This is not, to my knowledge, codified in any sort of national law.  Instead it is just how sovereignty and citizenship work and always have worked.

So, how does this apply to Constitutional protections?

1. We don't have sovereignty over any illegal alien in the U.S., whether they have committed any crimes or not.
2. We don't have the right to punish them without consent from their countries of citizenship.
3. We do have the right to banish them from the U.S..
4. We don't have the right to give them a trial, but as long as their countries of citizenship don't object we can get away with it.
5. We cannot legally keep them, if their countries of origin demand their return.

These are the most important factors.  The fourth and fifth ones are especially important, because they mean that we cannot possibly guarantee their Constitutional rights.  If their country of citizenship demands their return without a trial, we can't provide due process.  The Constitution only has jurisdiction within the context of U.S. sovereignty.  That doesn't just mean it only has jurisdiction within U.S. territory, it also means it only has jurisdiction in terms of U.S. citizens.  If lack of sovereignty means even one right can't be applied a person, it means that Constitutional rights cannot be applied to that person in general.  This isn't about what the Founders intended either.  The Founders could have explicitly written that all of these rights do apply to illegal aliens, and it wouldn't matter, because the Constitution can hold no sovereignty over illegal aliens.  U.S. law cannot require other countries outside of our jurisdiction to behave in certain ways, and one of those ways it cannot force them to comply is the application of our Constitutional rights to their citizens.  None of this is about what U.S. law requires, it's about the limitations of jurisdiction of sovereign states.

None of this means we can't give illegal aliens the same benefits our Constitution guarantees as rights for us, but it cannot guarantee them those rights, because it does not have sufficient jurisdiction over them.  We could pass Federal laws (but not state or city laws, because the Federal government has exclusive power concerning immigration) giving them those rights so far as their countries of citizenship permit.  This is ultimately up to the voters and the people they choose to represent them.  In the end though, no foreign national on U.S. soil can be guaranteed any Constitutional rights, except as explicitly legislated by the Federal government and permitted by their specific countries of citizens, and that means that illegal aliens definitely don't have religious freedom, freedom of conscience, freedom of the press, the right to peaceful assembly, the right to bear arms, or any of the other freedoms and rights protected by the Constitution including the right to a trial and the right to due process!  They definitely don't have any Constitutional right to vote in the U.S..  Even the rights to life  and liberty cannot be guaranteed by the Constitution or any U.S. law for illegal aliens, whether the document says it explicitly or is merely interpreted by judges to mean it.  Neither the Constitution, nor Congress, nor U.S. judges even have that power!  It is completely and entirely outside of the jurisdiction of any government to guarantee rights to foreign nationals.  The closest any government could get is a code of treatment of foreigners that apply only to the extent that they do not infringe on the sovereignty of another country.

There's one more right the Constitution cannot guarantee illegal aliens, and that is citizenship for children born to them in the U.S..  This does and has created serious sovereignty issues, because by default the child of a citizen of some country is automatically claimed as a citizen of that country.  For another country to claim a child as a citizen merely because that child was born there is a huge violation of national sovereignty.  There are some countries that, for the purpose of keeping us appeased, allow dual citizenship in these cases, but the truth is that this is just a workaround of those far weaker than us, to avoid a fight over citizenship.  It's their way of keeping some of their own sovereignty without starting a fight, and it is evidence that applying birthright citizenship to children of foreign nationals is completely out of line.  The U.S. is not the king of the world and does not have the power or right to unilaterally claim the legal citizens of other countries as its own without due diplomatic process!

Unfortunately, most U.S. politicians, lawyers, and even judges, don't seem to understand the concept of national sovereignty.  This is likely because the U.S. has been a dominant superpower in the world for so long that we've forgotten that we aren't the unilateral rulers of the entire world.  We've gotten away with violating and abusing the rest of the world for so long that we've come to believe that this is our right.  This puts us in a very precarious position though, because the truth is, while we are stronger than any other individual country, if a significant portion of the world turned on us, we would lose that fight.  It's even worse when we do it very close to home, because there's less time for warning, and it's less expected.  If Mexico and a bunch of Middle and South American nations ganged up on us, they could easily kill a significant portion of our border populations and probably as far as LA, Phoenix, Austin, and Houston before we could do much about it.  If Canada joined that alliance, our northern states could easily see very high casualties as well, before we had much chance to respond.  We might win such a war and manage to recover and hold all of our territory, but in lives lost, we would be a huge loser.  And we have violated the sovereignty of Canada, Mexico, and a handful of South American nations already.  We are still on friendly terms with Canada and Mexico, but setting a precedent of violating the sovereignty of other nations on a massive scale, by holding their citizens for "due process" could easily send a message that we are everyone's enemy, and that could end very badly for everyone.

Thankfully, our current President, Donald Trump, seems to understand the place of the U.S..  He doesn't take our dominance for granted.  Instead of insulting the leaders of nations who posed us the greatest danger, he was polite and friendly, as standard protocols of international diplomacy dictate.  He acknowledged their national sovereignty even when he disagreed with their modes of governance.  Instead of working through threats of national sovereignty, like most of our previous Presidents in the last few decades, he works through things like tariffs that the U.S. government does have jurisdiction over.  Most Americans don't seem to recognize it, but as much as our trade partners don't like the tariffs, they appreciate that their sovereignty is not being challenged, threatened, or violated.  Again, most Americans can't see it, but Donald Trump is actually repairing our reputation, by respecting the sovereignty of other nations.  But, when Democrats step in and challenge things like deportations, that undermines those efforts.  And when they force Trump to keep illegal aliens on U.S. soil at the demand of their countries of citizenship, that undermines U.S. sovereignty over its own territory, sending a message to our enemies that we are weak.  When our government is not allowed to deport illegal aliens in a timely manner, that sends the message that we don't care about anyone's sovereignty.  It strengthens the view of the U.S. as a country that believes it already controls and rules the entire world, and that's a recipe for disaster.  The last time a country decided that it should own and control the world, most of the rest of the world banded against it and put it back in its place.  If we continue down this path, we won't have time to be torn apart by civil war, because the world will fear us more than China or Russia, and they will align against us, conqueror us, cut us into pieces, and distribute the U.S. among the nations of the world, to use as slaves and colonies in hopes of wresting from us some portion of the wealth our ancestors and us worked hard to generate and fought hard to protect.

Anyhow, the takeaway here is that regardless of all other factors, the idea that we can guarantee illegal aliens any rights at all is absurd.  The Constitution does not govern the world, nor does it govern the citizens of other countries.  It can't, especially if they are here illegally.  (Legal immigrants have formally agreed to be governed by U.S. law, and the U.S. has formally agreed to govern them under U.S. law.  Illegal aliens have not agreed to be subject to U.S. sovereignty, so there's no justification for us to violate the sovereignty of their countries of citizenship.)  The best thing we can do with illegal aliens is get them out of the U.S. as soon as possible, to minimize any chance of an international diplomatic incident caused by their unauthorized presence in our country.  The only due process they should receive is making absolutely sure they are not a U.S. citizen before deporting them, and that should not require any sort of trial or other "due process".  Legal due process for illegal aliens is deportation, because we don't have the jurisdiction over foreign nationals to do anything more.

Should Protests Be Legally Protected in the U.S.?

First, my goal here is not to answer this question.  I think this is a question we should all be asking, and I think we should be giving it serious consideration, rather than knee jerk responses based on emotion.  My goal here is to explore the information so that the reader can developed their own informed position on this matter.

Let's start with the law.  Does the law legally protect protests?  It is generally accepted in the U.S. that the First Amendment to the Constitution protects the right to protest.  Here is the text of the First Amendment.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

First it establishes freedom of religion, then freedom of speech including free press.  These are not directly relevant to this discussion.  I've highlighted the text following those, which is what is generally regarded as protecting the right to protest.

There are two clause in the highlighted section.  Let's start with the first, "the right of the people peacefully to assemble".  What does this mean?  It's fairly clear to me that this means the people have the right to gather together in group, and it is implied that they are doing this for some purpose that is legal.  Committing crimes is not generally considered "peaceful", so if the assembly of people is committing crimes, they are not protected by this.  But, there's more to "peaceful" than just not committing crimes.  We don't hear much about it today, but when this Amendment was written, it wasn't uncommon for people to be arrested and jailed for the misdemeanor of "disturbing the peace", which wasn't a strictly defined crime but included any action that interfered negatively with the lives of others that wasn't explicitly protected.  "Disturbing the peace" is a situational crime where context is important.  I fishmonger in a public market hollering at the top of his voice to advertise his goods during the day wouldn't be regarded as disturbing the peace, but if he was doing it at night, in the middle of a neighborhood, outside of a school, or didn't actually have any fish to sell, he could and probably would be arrested and charged with disturbing the peace, if he did not immediately comply with law enforcement ordering him to stop (and in some of those scenarios, they would just arrest him without giving him the opportunity to stop).  "Disturbing the peace" has not been broadly legalized in the U.S..  It's still a crime, but some governments have used different names for the crime.  A common one today is "being a public nuisance".  This is where we run into our first problem: A large group of people impeding the movement of others and making a big racket with chants and signs is inherently an act of disturbing the peace and public nuisance.  In the Founders own understanding, what we consider a peaceful protest today would not have been considered a peaceful protest by those who wrote this amendment.  The Constitution doesn't intend to make this kind of protest protected.  There is a way for governments to make protests of this nature not qualify as unpeaceful though, and that is to explicitly authorize each protest.  If the protest is authorized by the government that has jurisdiction, then it does not legally qualify as disturbing the peace or as a public nuisance, even if technically speaking it does do those things.  This is where we get licenses for protests.  The Constitutional right to assembly does not obligate governments to do this.  What it says is that Congress (note that this doesn't even apply to state and municipal governments) cannot make laws respecting the right of the people to peacefully assemble.  It does not say that Congress has the grant people permission to assemble so that it can legally be considered peaceful despite disturbing the peace.  Further, it does not say that state and municipal governments cannot make such laws, nor does it say they have to grant permission.

Thus, by default, the only right this actually gives is for people to assemble in ways that do not disturb the peace of other people or create a public nuisance.  People don't have the right to assemble together and holler and yell slogans and chants.  They don't have the right to assemble and wage obnoxious signs.  They don't have the right to assemble and imped traffic, whether foot traffic, bike traffic, car traffic, or any other legal form of transportation.  Depending on the venue of the assembly, it might still be protect to get out a soap box and have one person at a time give a speech.  Assuming this is a public location (we will get to that in a moment), if the location is not in a place where it can reasonably be expected to have peace and quiet, it wouldn't qualify as disturbing the peace to merely have one or a series of speeches, and perhaps even a bit of cheering now and then would even be appropriate.  But as soon as it escalates to disturbing the peace or public nuisance, it's no longer a peaceful assembly.  If it escalates to vandalism, arson, and violence, even in the slightest amount, it exceeded the threshold for "peaceful" a long time before!  There is no "mostly peaceful" when crimes beyond disturbing the peace are being committed, because the threshold for "peaceful" is so much lower.

Anyhow, there's one more critical thing we need to consider before moving to the second clause.  Let's look at the first clause again, "the right of the people peaceably to assemble".  Let's say there's a building in Pennsylvania.  A group of people come to that build and assemble for the purpose of peacefully drafting a document defining a new government to replace the current ad hoc one.  This isn't necessarily public property.  It's certainly not open to the public.  It is a peaceful assembly though.  Let's say a group gathers at some individual's house.  As long as its peaceful, that's also a peaceful assembly.  Why do people insist that the "right to peacefully assemble" must always mean "on public property"?  That's not what the Constitution says!  It does prohibit Congress from making laws regarding peaceful assembly, so if Congress made a law explicitly prohibiting peaceful assembly on public property, that would certainly be invalid, but again, states and municipal governments are not mentioned in this.  If we assume this does apply to them, that creates a problem for protest licensure laws, because those are "laws regarding peaceful assembly".  But without the protest licensure laws, there's no way to make it not criminal to protest on public property, because protests are inherently a public nuisance and disturb the peace.  It turns out that the Founders probably didn't mean that people should have the right to protest on public property at will.  As mentioned before, the understood "peace" to mean more than just refraining from violence, theft, and property destruction.  They understood that public demonstrations are inherently not peaceful and therefore Congress and other governments would not be restricted from forbidding public protests if they so desired.  Licensure of public protests wasn't a way to protect the constitutional right to protest; it was an additional concession of government, to give people the ability to legally hold moderately less than peaceful protests.  When the Founders said "assembly" they meant the kind of assembly they personally did, largely in private spaces, not public disruptions of society, disturbing the peace, and public nuisance.

The second clause is much simpler, "to petition the Government for a redress of grievances".  The people have the right to petition the government for a redress of grievances.  At the deepest level this means that the people have the right to sue the government.  Ironically this is a right that has been largely eliminated.  Nearly all governments within the U.S. have implemented unconstitutional laws making them largely immune to lawsuits.  How can you petition the government for a redress of grievances when there is no formal process for submitting a petition and no judicial process for suing the government?  This clause also seems to be intended to protect the right to informally petition the government.  The most obvious way of doing this (at least, to me) is communicating with your Federal representatives.  And this actually works.  It won't always get you what you are asking for (a petition is not a guarantee but rather a request that may be accepted or denied), but it at least will get consideration.  At this point, thousands of veterans have gotten services and other compensation they were entitled to but that the Federal government was withholding from them by writing to their Senators.  This isn't a formal petition to the Federal government explicitly, but with unconstitutional laws protecting governments within the U.S. from lawsuits and a lack of any other formal petitioning procedure, it's the best thing we have, and if you are willing to put in the effort, it does work.  How does this relate to protests?  In the terms of the Constitutionally protect right, it doesn't!  A protest is not a petition.  It's more like a tantrum.  If we go back to historical precedent involving the people who wrote this amendment, we can determine the actual meaning.  Before even drafting the Declaration of Independence, the Founders tried to resolve the problem by petitioning the British government for redress of grievances.  They began with peaceful assemblies, on private property and in public buildings that were often closed to the public during the meetings, and which they were explicitly authorized to use for this purpose.  In those assemblies they discussed the situation and drafted petitions.  Then the petitions were sent to the British government, often accompanied by someone assigned to the role of diplomat.  No one gathered in front of parliament or wherever the king happened to be.  No one shouted slogans or held up signs.  That kind of protest was considered, both in the American colonies and in Britain, to be extremely unpeaceful.

When we put these two clauses together, and consider the historical context, it becomes fairly clear.  This amendment was never intended to protect the right to take to the streets with massive signs, gather in public spaces, and wave the signs while shouting chants and slogans.  Protests like that are not "peaceful" and in fact they are quite specifically a public nuisance and disturbing the peace.  Regardless of whether we apply the First Amendment just to Congress or to all governments in the U.S., the allowance of modern protests is not a Constitutionally protected right.  It's a concession given by our governments, in spite of failing to be peaceful.  What these clauses do protect is the right to gather privately to produce and submit petitions to the government for a redress of grievances.

Now that we've worked out what is actually Constitutionally protected, we should consider the value of modern non-protected protests.  In most cases the costs in term of disturbing the peace and public nuisance are pretty low.  As long as protests like this aren't very frequent in any given location, the mild annoyance and inconvenience they may cause isn't really a big deal.  Some things even justify disturbing the peace over, right?  Yelling and hollering in the middle of the night to alert people that there is a fire is certainly well justified.  So if there is some disaster going on in terms of governance, shouldn't the same thing apply?  While it was fairly easy to analyze the First Amendment and draw solid conclusions based on historical precedent, this question is much more difficult, especially when people don't agree.  Most protests going on now aren't people petitioning for redress of grievances cause by the government.  They are people trying to use protest as a form of campaign against people they disagree with.  In fact, the vast majority of the time, they are protesting against policies desired by the majority.  The current protests and riots in LA are a great example.  The protestors are targeting ICE, but their grievance isn't against what the government wants, their grievance is against the majority of voters who elected our current government, and the non-voting Americans who support that government.  In short, these protests aren't even being done for the purpose given in the Constitution for protected peaceful assembly.  They aren't peaceful, and the purpose of the protests is rebellion against democratic governance, not redress of grievances that the government is solely responsible for.  And worse, their "grievances" aren't even for themselves.  This is far closer to insurrection than January 6th ever was, and insurrection is not a protected right.  But, people keep trying to justify and rationalize by saying this is Constitutionally protected behavior.  Now, we've established that this is not true.  This kind of assembly very much is not Constitutionally protected, whether it is violent or merely is disturbing the peace.  The question though is: Should it be a protected right to gather in a public space to protest with large signs and loud shouting, so long as no laws beyond disturbing the peace are broken?  Last year the Utah state legislature attempted to pass an amendment to the state constitution giving the legislature the power to repeal laws enacted through voter initiatives.  This would have essentially negated the entire ballot initiative process by letting the legislature repeal laws the people voted to pass directly without the consent of the people.  The amendment ultimately never made it to the polls, because the legislature failed to provide sufficient public notice under Utah law and because the state supreme court ruled that the proposed description of the amendment on the ballot was misleading and dishonest.  It should be easy to see, though, how such a government act would severely undermine the rights of the people and the accountability of the government to the people.  There were a lot of protests over this before it was ultimately removed from the ballot by the state supreme court.  Where the protests in LA and surrounding area against the actions of ICE authorized and desired by the majority of Americans are clearly not protected by the second clause we analyzed because they target grievances against the majority, not the government, this case clearly is targeting grievance against the government specifically.  The people of Utah did not ask for the legislature to attempt to take power away from the people to empower itself more.  Technically the people did vote for the dishonest lawmakers who desired to usurp the power of the people in this way, but the whole point of the right to petition the government for redress of grievances is that the Founders knew that elected officials would sometimes be tempted to renege on their duties and obligations to their constituents and there needed to be a means of holding the government accountable when this resulted in grievances.  At the same time though, these particular protests still use the modern pattern that is not Constitutionally protected, because it disturbs the peace.  Obviously though, the people should have a way to protest this kind of usurpation of democratic power.

We have two examples here.  One is a blatant abuse of right to assembly that doesn't legally qualify for protection and also is not covered by the intent of the protection.  The other is a protest that very much does fall under the intent of the Constitutional protections but still doesn't qualify, because it's still a disturbance of the peace.  It seems like, if we could find a way to protect protests that aren't peaceful but don't involve any crimes beyond disturbing the peace, and if we could limit that protection exclusively to protests of legitimate grievances against U.S. governments, it would be a good thing.  There are a lot of problems with doing this though, the most basic of which is: Who gets to decide what is a legitimate grievance against the government and what isn't?  I'm sure there are plenty of California Democrats that would argue that the LA riots over ICE are legitimate grievances against the government, even though the core policy behind the government actions are supported by the majority of Americans who deliberately voted for candidates with that agenda.  And I'm sure if you asked Utah legislators who supported the attempted coup, they would say that because the people have to vote to pass the amendment, that wasn't a legitimate grievance against the government.

There's one more thing that requires consideration here.  That is this: https://crowdsondemand.com/.  Yes, there is an organization from which you can hire protestors.  This begs the question, is a protest even valid, when many or most of the protestors are hired actors who may or may not actually care about or even be affected by the grievance in question?  It gets worse though.  While the owner of this company vehemently denies any connection with the LA anti-ICE riots, there is significant evidence that most of those rioters are also not legitimate protestors but are actually paid actors themselves.  Further, we also know that most of the anti-Israel protestors demonstrating at U.S. college campuses over the last few years were also paid protestors who were hired, trained, and paid to protest in favor of the Hamas terror and genocide campaign against Israel and Jews in general.  Do protests continue to carry any meaning when the majority of protestors are paid actors rather than people with potentially legitimate grievances?  Because it turns out that at this point the majority, and perhaps the vast majority, of protestors in the U.S. today are merely paid actors.

Understanding this requires us to understand the core purpose of protests in the first place.  The shallow explanation, which is how most people understand protests, is that a large number of people protesting where lawmakers can see them sends the message that the people aren't going to continue to put up with whatever it is the protestors are protesting against.  The message is that we won't vote for you, if you don't do what we want.  While it does send that message, it's more complex and nuanced than that.  If an elected official's region has say, 100,000 voters, and that official normally wins reelection by say a 5,000 vote margin (that's 52,500 votes for and 47,500 for other candidates), and there are 500 people protesting from various nearby regions, that sends the message that maybe 50 or so votes are on the line, and possibly less, because some of the protestors probably dragged so people along with them that are too young or too apathetic to vote.  That's 10% of the margin the official normally wins by, which isn't a threat at all.  Further, if the agenda of the protestors opposes the agenda the official was elected on, odds are none of those 50 voted for him in the first place, so there's no loss in votes by ignoring the protestors.  For this particular official, the protest accomplishes nothing.  For an official that agrees with the agenda of the protestors, there's also no gain, because protesting doesn't magically make that official's vote for the agenda stronger.  The only officials that might be swayed by the protest are those who were elected on margins significantly smaller than the number of protestors present.  If there are 500 protestors, and the official won by a margin smaller than say, 250, that might be enough to cause some fear.  The number of protestors who are in their voting region is probably more like 50 or less, but maybe there are some likeminded people who didn't make it to the protest.  Even then though, if the agenda of the protestors is opposite that of the platform the official won on, that indicates that doing what the protestors want will probably lose more votes than it will gain.  The dynamics of protesting are far more complicated that most protestors understand.  A protest that has a poor turnout will almost certainly do more harm than good, because officials who don't have a strong position on the agenda of the protestors will see that the agenda of the protestors isn't popular enough to bring very many people and may choose to vote against that agenda to avoid losing or even to gain appeal to those who oppose the agenda of the protestors.  It's all about numbers.  With good numbers, protests are likely to have some influence in the direction they want, but with poor numbers they are likely to have some influence against their own agenda.

Now, what happens when we add hired actors to the mix?  Elected officials generally aren't stupid or uninformed.  They know that most protests now are a majority paid actors.  This creates a serious problem in terms of the effectiveness of protests.  We already have a numbers problems, and that is the fact that most elected officials have tens or hundreds of thousands of constituents.  If a particular official consistently wins with a margin of 5,000, and he estimates that maybe 10% of the people present are from his district, and only 10% of those people (1% of the total) are people who normally vote for him in the first place, the protest would need to have 500,000 people to indicate there is a significant danger to him.  500,000 people just won't fit.  Supposedly the largest protest in history was the February 15, 2003 Iraq-war protests.  That protest is estimated to have had between 6 million and 10 million protestors worldwide, in more than 600 cities.  If we are extremely generous, and assume the maximum number of protestors estimated and the minimum number of cities, that's an average of only 16,666 per city.  The world has never seen a protest with anywhere near 500,000 people in one place, and yet that's the kind of numbers we would need for a modern protest to have real teeth.  (And note that 10 million people in 2003 was a pathetic 0.16% of the population of the world.  Despite being the biggest protest in world history in terms of total participation, the relative number of people who showed up was almost no one.  And relative numbers are all that matter when it comes to voting.  Hillary Clinton had the popular vote majority in 2016 by 2 million, but that's less than a 2% difference, so in relative terms the popular vote was basically a tie.  2 million out of 150 million total is almost nothing.  And 10 million out of 6.272 billion is insignificant even compared to that.)

So first, we can't really do protests big enough to be meaningful anymore, because our population is too big.  We can't fit enough people in one place to show elected officials that there are enough people opposed to their agenda to significantly impact their reelection odds.  When we add paid actors, that makes the problem even worse.  If it would take a protest of 500,000 people to indicate a significant danger to any particular candidate, and then we water down the protest with 50% hired actors, now it would take a million.  With 75% paid actors, it would take 2 million.  Some of the protests promoting the complete genocide of the Jews were almost 100% paid actors, and there's evidence that close to 100% of the anti-ICE protestors are paid actors.  When you get to numbers like that, protests no longer carry any meaning.  But protesting as a means of petitioning the government for redress of grievances lost all meaning long before hired actors entered the field.  The general top end for protest sizes is between 15,000 and 20,000.  The average number of constituents per state legislator in 2020 was over 60,000, and the average per state senator was 167,820.  The average number of constituents per House Representative was 747,000 and the average per U.S. Senator is around 3.5 million.  Voter turnout for state level elections tends to be low, so if 2020 Presidential election turnout was in the 60% range, voter turnout for state level elections might fall as low as 25%.  This means that the typical state legislator is probably competing over a total of around 15,000 votes.  Winning margins can vary dramatically, but 5% seems to be a common lower end.  That's 750 votes.  If the typical protest is attended by people from the closest 10 electoral districts (this will vary by state and region within the state), that means that for any given official, probably only 10% of the protestors are from his district.  That means to be a serious danger, there have to be at least 10 times as many protestors as the count of the vote margin.  That's an average of 7,500 protestors.  But, not all protestors are people who show up to the polls to vote.  In fact, it turns out that a lot of protestors are people who don't vote, because they don't believe voting is effective, which is why they are protesting.  To be as far as possible, let's assume the voter percentage of protestors is the same as the voter turnout.  That's 25% for state elections, so we have to multiple the previous total by 4 to get the minimum adjusted for voter turnout.  That's 30,000.  So if 100% of protestors are honest people with no hired actors, we need 10,000 to 15,000 more people than the largest protests to make a difference to the average elected official.  If 75% of the protestors are also hire actors, we have to multiply by 4 again (only 25% are legitimate protestors), for a grand total of 120,000 people, or 6 times the absolute largest protests, to make a difference for the average state legislator.

I was going to do the math for the other officials, but there's no point.  The average number of constituents for state senators is close to three times that of state legislators, which means they would need around 300,000 protestors to be meaningful.  U.S. Representatives have more than 4 times that, which would require over 1.2 million protestors in one place to make a difference.  U.S. Senators have over 4 times that, which would require almost 5 million protestors in one place to be meaningful.  We've never seen even close to 30,000, which is the smallest viable number for non-municipal legislative positions in the U.S..

So here's the question: If protests cannot be large enough anymore to have any meaningful impact on law makers, is there any value in allowing them at all?  I've spent some time on internet forums discussing and promoting protesting, and it seems like a great many people believe that protesting is a more effective means of promoting political change than voting.  There are thousands and maybe tens of thousands of Americans who are authorized to vote but instead of voting they protest, because they are convinced that protesting actually scares lawmakers into doing what they want.  The above proves that protesting does not influence lawmakers significantly, aside from occasionally giving them horrifically bad ideas that have resulted in absolute disaster (defund the police anyone?).  They didn't need protests to make them stupid though.  They were already stupid, and if people had written polite letters to them asking them to defund the police they still would have done it, and a piece of paper, some ink, and envelope, and a stamp costs a tiny fraction of the price of protests (or they could write an email at the cost of only a few minutes of their time).

There might be some value in continuing to allow protests.  I don't know.  It does create a sense of connectedness and community for likeminded people, and while this doesn't seem to have turned out great for political stability or wise governance, maybe it is good for their mental health.  Liberals seem to think that there is significant value in "being heard" whether it has any real impact on anything else or not.  Maybe it's true.  Making tolerating protests that definitely aren't peaceful, but are at least respectful of other people's lives and property, allows people to let off steam that might otherwise build up into more violent rioting and insurrection.

I'm not going to decide for you, because I don't know the answer myself.  The evidence proves that protests aren't effective engines of positive change.  The Constitution clearly does not the protect the right to protest in ways that cause significant inconvenience or annoyance to others going about their lives.  But we do have a long history of tolerating public group vocal dissent that does not injure people or damage their property.  Despite the fact that it doesn't actually work, maybe there is some value in the tradition and the symbolism it contains.  The right to protest is symbolically associated with our identity as a free people who are protected from government oppression by a formal agreement with our government.  Protesting is closely associated with patriotism and with our right to liberty.  Is the damage caused by dishonest protesting justified by the sacred place we have given it in our culture?  Protesting is certainly not justified by effectiveness, because it isn't effective, but maybe it is justified in other ways.  Again, I don't know the answer to this, and I'm not trying to tell you want to think.  I do think this is an important question though, given that protesting is no longer effective and is now becoming a profession people get paid for rather than organic dissent.

There is one more thing to consider though: If protesting was effective, then the ability to hire protestors for money would give a huge advantage to the rich.  This is probably irrelevant, because protesting isn't effective, but it feels like the advent of professional, hired protestors is just another scam by wealthy people to allow them to purchase power and influence with their wealth.  I guess at least they are spending their money on something that doesn't work instead of on things that do.

Are the Olympics Even Relevant Today?

The Olympic games were originally held in Ancient Greece over 2,000 years ago.  The participants were citizens representing the various Greek city-states of the period.  We don't know how many people participated, but it is estimated that the population of ancient Greece at the time fell between 7.5 and 10 million people.  (For comparison, NYC has a population around 8.3 million, right in the middle of the estimated range for Ancient Greece.  Imagine the Olympic games, but it's just the suburbs of NYC competing against each other.)  It is very unlikely that more than 1,000 people participated, and it was probably more like a few hundred.  Perhaps somewhere between 1 in 10,000 and 1 in 25,000 people living in Ancient Greece participated in the original Olympic games annually.

The Olympic games were held as a sort of way for the different city-states to show off their best athletes and prove them in competition against the best of the other city-states.  The actual games held during the Olympics changed over time, with some long standing favorites, but also with additions as the grounds and control of the games changed hands over time.  The Roman Emperor Nero is recorded to have added music competitions to the Olympics.  The games generally followed the cultures controlling the Olympics.

The Olympic games ended around 400AD, during the decline of the Roman Empire.  The modern Olympics began in 1896, with some of the same games as the original but also with new games more relevant to the modern culture of the time.  Over the last century we've seen many games come and go, largely due to the changing cultures over time.  Today there are many more games than the original Olympics started with, which makes sense as we have so many more people and thus so many more sports.  We've also integrated sports from more cultures.  Ancient Greece was a geographically small region with a very small population compared to the number of countries involved in the Olympics today.  There just wasn't enough population to support that many unique sports.  When the Olympics were revived in the late 1800s, the world population was up to more than 1.5 billion.  That's over 150 times as many people as the region that participated in the original games.  Now the world is up to a population of around 8 billion.  Over the last two decades, we've had around 10,000 to 11,000 participants for each Summer Olympics, somewhere around 35 times as many as probably participated in the original games.  And that's the first place we can see the problem.

With a current population of 8 billion, we have 800 times the population of the region that participated in the first Olympics, but we only have around 35 times the number of participants.  The games have scaled very poorly.  We should expect more on the order of 240,000 participants, given the current population. This means that for each participant in our current Olympics, there are more than 21 people who would have qualified to compete given the original population that have been pushed out.

Now, it might be tempting to argue that we filter much better, so those 21 people per participant wouldn't have won anyway, but we've seen how an Olympic athlete can have a bad day and fail.  Every time that has happened, any of those other 21 people who weren't selected (or the other hundreds that were pushed out by their competitors) would have had a chance to take it.  It's even worse though!  We are really only looking for those 10k to 11k people.  What about all of the people who get missed, because some coach thinks they've found "the one" and stopped looking?  With smaller populations and higher participation rates, it is much harder to miss the real Olympians because you think you've found the right one already.  With a world population on the order of 8 billion today, what are the odds we are successfully finding the actual best athletes of any country to participate in the Olympics?  Odds are for each Olympic gold winner, there are at least 5 to 10 people in their country alone who are better than them.  The Olympics is no longer about sending your best to represent your country.  It's mere pageantry, worshipping times long past.

This might all seem harsh.  Where's the hard proof of any of this?  Well, that's where all of this started.  Get on YouTube and look up videos of people doing "epic" or "awesome" things.  A good search term is "people doing amazing things", and you can swap out "amazing" for "epic", "awesome", or many other superlative adjectives.  There are thousands of videos on YouTube that are compilations of tens to hundreds of people doing things that most Olympians couldn't hope to achieve.  Sure, a lot of them require tens to hundreds of takes, while the Olympics generally requires you to get it right on the first try, but even if only a percent of a percent are true skill rather than multiple takes, that still outshines the Olympics like a thousand Suns!  The truth is, you don't need to watch the Olympics to see the best of the best show off their skills.  The only place you can find that, at least for now, is on YouTube.  The Olympics are where you can find the people who were a little better than average, who were coached to become a little worse than the actual best.

On top of all of this though, there's one more thing you can learn from YouTube: With 800 times as many people, we also have more than 800 times as many games, and the Olympics can't hope to include every relevant game.  For every weightlifting competition there is in the Olympics, there are a bunch of people lifting the same weights with one hand, lifting the same weights while on a rolling platform, and at least 10 or more additional variants that make it significantly more difficult than anything seen at the Olympics.  If you thought Simone Biles was good (and she was), there are at least 100 or more other people on YouTube doing far more complex and difficult routines.  This is just how the world is now.  There are legitimately too many people for scouts and coaches to find and select the actual best from, and most of the time they can't even get one of the top 100!  I mean no disrespect for Olympians who put in enormous amounts of effort to train and approach being the best in their sport.  They certainly deserve that respect for the effort and dedication they've put in.  But they aren't the best.  As talented and above average as they started out, they just can't compete with the absolutely massive population of humans now on the Earth, many of whom are more talented than them but will never be discovered by the scouts and coaches.

There's nothing wrong with watching the Olympics, if that's what you want to do.  I'm not trying to ruin for you.  But the idea that Olympians are actually the best of the best just isn't true anymore.  If you want to participate in a pageant for the worship of a particular historical event, then the Olympics is a great way to do that.  If, however, you actually want to see the best of the best, you can get on YouTube and watch what truly talented and dedicated humans can do!  The Olympics are nothing more than a dim reflection of the true potential of humanity.

My Kids Tried Communism

 My kids tried communism, multiple times, and it has failed every single time.  I have two sons who love playing Minecraft.  We play together on servers I host.  Every few months we end up starting a new server from scratch, so we can start over with a new version of Minecraft or some new set of mods we want to try.  This is a lot of fun for all of us, but, my boys always decide they want to build a house together and live together, sharing all of their resources and such.

Now, this isn't that different from how I have played with my older friends in the past.  We generally have separate houses, and we each own our own stuff, but we share as well.  If someone needs something and someone else has extra, the person with extra will share.  We often build and maintain a central warehouse of extra stuff we don't need that anyone can come and take from if they need it.

As similar as these two economic systems appear, they are actually wildly different.  In the first case, sharing is compulsory.  If one of my sons decides he needs a bunch of skeleton bones to make bone meal to fertilize the crops, he can go and take them without even asking.  Because ownership is shared, he owns them as much as anyone else, so he can go and take as desired, for whatever use he feels is necessary.  If my other son decides he wants to use them for something else, he can do it without asking as well.  Two days ago, this exact scenario led to a heated argument.  The bones in question were collected by one of my sons and used by the other.  The one who collected them went to use them and discovered they were all gone.  He believed that as the collector he had some kind of special right to use them before anyone else.  My other son was playing by the rules they had agreed upon, where everything was shared ownership, and right to use was based on immediate need.  In the second case, sharing was 100% voluntary.  Whoever worked to obtain the materials didn't just have first dibs but had sole ownership.  We chose to share our excess as we desired.  And we didn't always share all of our excess.  Diamonds are rare and precious in Minecraft, so if someone asked if anyone had spare diamonds they could have, odds are the request would not yield any willing to give diamonds, even if some of us did have more than our immediate needs called for.  If you want diamonds, you can go mining for them yourself.  I worked hard for mine!  Alternatively, I might be willing to sell you some of my diamonds, in trade for something of similar value.  On the other hand, if someone wanted to cobblestone to build a house, a tower, a castle, or whatever with, pretty much everyone would be willing to share, because cobblestone is not rare and is trivial to obtain more of as needed.  We were also generally quite willing to give food, as it is not super rare and not hard to get.  In fact, I would often go to great pains to build a machine to produce unlimited food on nearly every server we played on, and then I would allow anyone to take as much of the food it produced as they wanted, because food is a pretty important resource in the game.

Another way of putting it is that the system my sons keep trying to use is communism, while my friends and I use a system of capitalism, but we also share, because in capitalism, reputation matters, and in capitalism sharing is a good way of earning a good reputation.

The outcomes of these two systems, even in Minecraft, is quite different.  The capitalist system my friends and I use is conducive civilized, friendly gameplay, where we all build wealth together.  Yes, there are some people who are poor.  They build low quality houses, spend a lot of time exploring, and spend very little time mining and accumulating wealth.  Some of us are very wealthy, with massive herds of all manner of livestock, multiple houses, towers, castles, and even cities full of villagers with valuable trades.  We build automated machines for producing certain valuable resources in massive quantities.  We spend a lot of time mining, accumulating massive amounts of valuable resources.  We put a great deal of effort into obtaining the best gear possible.  We decorate our properties in gold, lapis lazuli, and beautiful marble and quartz.  Some of us have different kinds of wealth than the others.  Some amount of trading happens.  We are generous with common resources that we have plenty of, but we are tighter with rarer resources that require a lot of time and effort to obtain.  We even go our of our way to either mark our property or claim property far enough away from others that disputes won't arise.  This system keeps everyone friends.  It avoids petty arguments.  We don't steal from each other, because we are all civilized human beings, so there are no arguments about property rights at all.  If the wealthy won't share with the poor, the poor either do without or work harder to get what they want.  The poor don't whine and wail that the rich are taking advantage of them or exploiting them, even when the poor have to trade with the rich to get what they want.  In Minecraft, it's easy to understand the work that goes into generating and accumulating wealth, so civilized humans playing the game understand that they have no call to blame the wealthy for their own poverty.  Sadly, in real life capitalism is poorly understood.  Many people believe that CEOs get paid a lot of money for very little work, when that is not true at all.  Many see wealthy business owners as leeches exploiting the poor, when the reality is that creating and maintaining a successful business is an incredible amount of work.  The "exploited poor" could be wealthy, if they worked as hard as the owners and CEOs.  Many people choose employment over ownership specifically because they understand how much work ownership is and aren't willing to do it.  This is not to suggest that exploitation doesn't exist within Western capitalism, but the truth is that it is extremely rare.  I've done the math, and I've found that the average American could easily make a living making and selling artisan soap, with a startup cost of less than $100 (even after "Bidenomics" rampant inflation).  It's a trivial skill to learn.  All you need to do it is a large pot, some cheap chemicals and other ingredients, and something to mold the bars in.  The time required is low enough that a stay-at-home mom could do it at the same time as caring for 2 children (maybe more).  But, running the business is a lot of work.  You'll probably need to setup a website, unless you can find enough local stores willing to resell your product.  You'll have to take care of orders in a timely manner.  You'll have to keep up with demand even if you don't feel like working today.  When you are running your own small business, you can't just call in sick and let someone else cover your shift.  You are accountable, if you make a mistake.  Most people don't want that level of responsibility, even if it means they can work from home and make more money for less hours.  Even if you can make a living working only 30 hours a week, running a business is much more stressful.  You might hear that some CEO makes $400k a year, and that might sound unfair.  The problem is, if that CEO wasn't getting paid that much, it wouldn't be worth the stress of the job, and without a CEO the business would collapse and all of the "poor exploited" workers would lose their jobs.  Some of those workers might think they could do the job, but odds are the business would still collapse when any one of them in charge.  In Minecraft though, there are no employers.  You kind of have to run your own business.  I suppose on a server with a huge number of people, there might be a few willing to run businesses, and that would create the opportunity for others to be employees instead of owners, but few Minecraft servers have that many people, and if they did, running business would be just as stressful as it is in real life.  The key though, is that capitalism creates a space and atmosphere for civility.

Communism, on the other hand, creates conflict.  When property is shared between multiple people, that creates circumstances perfect for breeding conflict.  This is true of more than just communism to.  Business partnerships are significantly more likely to fail than sole proprietorships.  Part of the reason corporations are governed by a board of directors rather than collectively run by the shareholders directly is exactly because of the potential for conflict in systems of shared property.  In Minecraft, on a small scale, this is extremely obvious the first time people start arguing about who gets to use what.  My sons have tried communism this way tens if not hundreds of times now.  It always ends the same way.  They get in a fight over something one of them used that the other was planning to use, and then they stop doing the shared ownership of everything they have, until eventually they are using the same system of capitalism my friends and I use.  Now days, they no longer start by sharing a house, because they know how that is going to go.  They still start with shared resources though.  And here's where things get really interesting.  It's always the same one who suggests the shared ownership.  In my experience, communism is almost always the idea of people who aren't very wealthy and want more without having to work for it.  Even Karl Marx, the one who wrote the Communist Manifesto, giving communism a formal definition, meets this definition.  He came from a wealthy background, but he wasn't wealthy himself.  He even spent a lot of his life in poverty.  He was well known to be a lazy drinker.  On several occasions he wrote articles on communism and related subjects in exchange for alcohol.  He came from a family that was originally wealthy enough to not need to work for a living, and he spent his entire life trying to avoid working for a living.  Of course he wished for a communist system, where all of the wealth of society was shared with him, so he could live a lavish lifestyle while still avoiding work!  Similarly, look at which Americans promote communism the loudest.  It has always been college students who would rather protest than do their coursework or get jobs after graduation.  Now and then someone who isn't lazy will get suckered into promoting the movement, but the vast majority of those who promote communism are looking for a handout, not a morally superior economic system.  I can even see this in my sons.  The one who suggests this system is always the one who wants something someone else has and would gain access to it through the institution of a communist system.  Now, it might be tempting to believe that in practice the conflict potential can be eliminated through government.  This is false though.  Government itself is a system of shared ownership, and it is plagued with conflict.  Government within communist systems can give the illusion of reduced conflict, but this is actually false.  Government can mitigate some conflict by forcing people to accept a particular decision, rather than letting people argue and fight over it.  More importantly though, conflict is constant within government.  Every large scale communist government has been plagued by these new problems.  When you give an individual or group greater power within a communist economic system, conflicts are always resolved in favor of the individual or group with greater power.  In Russia, members of the ruling Soviet Party had exclusive access to special stores where they could get stuff that was not available to the general population.  The Soviet rulers had the authority to take whatever they wanted, rather than abiding by the communist rules of shared ownership.  We see the same exact kind of system in North Korea right now.  Those who are part of the wealthy ruling group literally have stores only they are allowed to go to, while the general population lives in poverty.  Communist China gives members of the ruling party more resources and greater access to resources than everyone else.  Communist Cuba does this too.  It is literally impossible to have a communist system of government where the government doesn't give itself special privileges with regards to resource access.  The whole point of communism is that the resources are shared among everyone, but in practice it is impossible for this to actually work.  If there is no government, this facilitates mass contention that would lead to civil war if attempted on a large scale.  If there is a government, the resources are no longer shared among everyone, because the government will always claim sole ownership of a portion of the resources and special privileges over the rest.  The only way a communist system ever could work is through divine intervention, forcing people to remain civilized without a government that takes more than its share.

Some people will argue that none of these are "real" communism, but the truth is, two kids sharing resources, without any sort of government or higher authority to siphon resources and distribute them preferentially to government officials is about as pure as communism could ever get, and even it doesn't work.  Maybe it would work with adults.  Plenty of married couples share resources like this with little or no conflict over resource allocation.  The truth though, is that even this is closer to capitalism.  As a married person myself, I can tell you that it is not like communism.  I do have property that I own.  My wife has property she owns.  We share ownership of our home and vehicles.  We share ownership of income and money savings.  That shared ownership, however, still isn't like communist shared ownership.  For big expenses, allocation of space, and vehicle scheduling, we discuss and negotiate.  It's not "take what you need", and it's not "whoever needs it first gets it".  For small necessary expenses we don't always need to discuss, but when funds are low or the expense is significant, discussion is critical in maintaining civility and avoiding conflict.  Under this system, distribution of resources is not equal.  The resource pool is not a free-for-all or a communal pot.  It is literally owned by both of us, and this means that every single element is half owned by each of us.  If I want to spend a dollar or even a penny, my wife is necessarily part of that, because she owns half of it.  And I don't mean she owns 50¢ of each dollar and I own 50¢ of it.  I mean, she half owns the whole dollar and I half own the whole dollar.  There is no division so small that we don't both own half.  In communism, it's all about equal distribution.  In marriage it is not.  It's more about need and negotiation.  My wife sews and I do software development and mechanical engineering.  So she gets sewing machines when she needs and we can afford, and I get computers, laser cutters, and desktop mills as we can afford and I need.  We don't keep track of cost, because it's a lot less important than meeting our needs and maintaining a civilized relationship.  We are going to be getting a bonus soon.  I'm not going to be buying anything big out of it, but my wife will likely be getting a new sewing machine to replace an old one that's worn out and damaged.  That's definitely not communism.  It's much closer to the kind of capitalist cooperation my friends and I engage in when playing Minecraft together, where resources are individually owned, necessities are shared based on need, and other resources are sometimes freely given and other times negotiated over.  This kind of relationship can look like communism from the outside, but the truth is, it isn't, and even if it was, it's not very scalable.  What works for two people who have formally covenanted to live and work together, acting as single entity, won't necessarily work for a country of 330 million people, who mostly don't know each other and many of whom are not trustworthy enough to have a national credit debit giving them unfettered access to all of the country's wealth.

The truth is, if none of this is "real" communism, then it proves beyond a doubt that real communism is completely impossible.  That said, according to Marx's definition of Communism, which is the official definition, what the USSR did and what Cuba, China, North Korea, and Cuba are all doing is "real" communism, probably even more so than the massively overregulated capitalism of the U.S. is "real" capitalism.  (Note that regulation is inherently socialist, so a economy that is free market by default but where nearly everything is touched by massive amounts of government regulation is probably more honestly called a socialist economy than a capitalist one.  As such, any failure of the U.S. economy right now is actually more evidence that socialism doesn't work, not evidence that capitalism doesn't work.  The decline of our economy actually followed the rise of our socialist regulatory system.  The less capitalist our economy has become, the worse it has functioned.)  Anyhow, communism doesn't work, not even in Minecraft with only two people.

Response to "The Conservative Argument for a Liberal Arts Education"

This is a response to the YouTube short "The Conservative Argument for a Liberal Arts Education".  YouTube sometimes issues mysterious "returned error" messages when attempting to post comments, without any explanation of clarification.  I generally assume that my comment must be too long for YouTube, so I'm going to post it here instead and drop a link in the video comments for anyone who might actually care.

The problem is that most colleges offering “liberal arts” degrees are actually teaching liberal politics rather than liberal arts. Classes that claim to be teaching critical thinking only pass students who come to the same conclusions as the teacher and fail students who don’t. That’s not critical thinking, it’s just teaching students not to question things and to follow “authority” figures like sheep, by punishing them if they don't come to the same conclusions.

If U.S. universities’ liberal arts programs actually taught liberal arts, yeah, it would be well worth pursuing. But they don’t, so it isn’t.

If you want to learn real liberal arts, maybe start with the Federalist Papers. Read some Jane Austin. Read the Bible. Those are impressively good sources for starting out. Look up books that the Founders read, and read those. There are lots of gems in there, and you can learn why they designed the U.S. government the way they did. In college, I was looking for sources in a comparison I was writing of slavery in different cultures, and I came across a book in the university library from the early 1800s on how to best care for plantation slaves. Know what I learned? Most slave owners weren’t abusive tyrants. Most slaves didn’t hate being slaves. And slave owners generally understood that if you want productivity, you must ensure your slaves are well fed, get sufficient rest and free time, and are generally happy! Now I’m not trying to suggest this justifies slavery, but reading about history is a great way to actually understand it! I grew up thinking every slave owner beat their slaves regularly and murdered slaves for fun, and that all slaves were miserable being slaves and wanted their freedom. It turns out that’s just not true. Slavery is certainly tragic and exploitative. It should be avoided at most costs. But as bad as it was, many slaves voluntarily continued working for their masters after the Civil War, often for the same compensation they had as slaves (sufficient room and board to live comfortably and be healthy). And did you know that during times of war, when plantation slave owners had to ration their food, they rationed their own food aggressively, so that the slaves could continue to eat their normal diet or as close as possible to it? The slaves were the workers. They couldn’t afford to underfeed the slaves, otherwise they wouldn’t have energy to work. So instead they rationed their own food and that of their family, so the slaves could continue to get all of the necessary nutrition.

The best way to get a strong liberal arts education is to real a whole lot! Consuming a wide variety of media also helps, in moderation. I grew up watching Cheers and Star Trek, because that’s what my dad liked watching when I was young. In my teens, my parents started picking up boxed DVD sets of older TV shows, so I’ve watched a fair amount of The Andy Griffith Show, Hogan’s Heroes, I Dream of Genie, and a while slew of shows ranging from the '50s through the 1970s. We also sometimes watched stuff currently airing, so I’ve watched some Hercules, some more recent Star Trek, and other shows through the '90s. I moved out in the early 2000s, and I watch very little TV myself, but I watch the occasional movie, and I consume a moderate amount of YouTube and have since the late 2000s, so I never lagged too far behind. I also watched bunch of the original Dr. Who and bits and pieces of other older TV shows on my own in the 2010s (as well as some of the current Dr. Who series).

What this means is that unlike the typical Millennial (or any other generation), I have exposure to a massive timespan of American culture. I have studied the U.S. Constitution, in its original context. I’ve studied U.S. culture within difference parts of the 1800s (with significant overlap), in terms of politics, in terms of household cultures, and in terms of industrial, farm, and different work cultures.

On top of that, I’ve also studied Japanese culture, from the mid-1800s to now, and certain eras of the past. I’ve studied the Japanese Constitution and compared it with the U.S. Constitution (if you’ve never done that, you should; do while keeping in mind that the people who wrote it were American diplomats (not legal scholars), who consulted with the Japanese peasantry to determine what the majority of Japanese people wanted, rather than merely what the ruling class wanted; you may notice some very interesting differences between the Japanese Constitution and the U.S. one that only people with experience with the application of the U.S. Constitution would ever think of).

Very little of this is taught in any U.S. university, in liberal arts or anywhere else. The only element of this I learned anything on in college was the portion around the founding of the U.S., which I had already studied, aced all of the tests on, but did learn a bit more on. And I wouldn’t have had any classes on this in any other college in the world. I attended a religious college for a faith that holds freedom of religion and liberty in general to be extremely sacred. No other university cares enough about religious freedom and liberty to even consider it.

Now days, what is called “liberal arts” isn’t actually liberal arts. The only real option today is to take the effort to learn it on your own. It is well worth doing though. You will gain a much broader view of life and a better understanding of where we came from and how we got to where we are (politically, technologically, and such).

Technically, I’m considered an elder Millennial. (Elder, because I’m at the very beginning.) In reality, due in part to my upbringing and in part to my choice to educate myself very broadly, I don’t really fit into any particular generation. I’ve learned from generations spanning from George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin all the way up to the generations on popular media today. I’ve even learned from more ancient generations than that, through scripture, like the Bible, and published books by authors including Jane Austin, Edmund Spenser, and many others.

While I’m a Millennial by birth date, I am timeless by culture. This is largely by choice. I’m aware of Millennial culture. I could embrace it and be “Millennial”. But why? I can see so far back into the past that I’m fully aware of how absurd Millennial culture is. Even Gen X, Boomer, and Silent generation cultures are absurd compared to the sum culture of all humanity through the ages. Gen Z and “gen alpha” are no different either. Every generation seems to want to separate itself from previous and future generations (except in isolated tribes with no technology and small populations, that are so close to abject poverty that they have to be more concerned with survival than petty garbage like that). The result is always the same: A constant mix of cultural progress and cultural backsliding. Do you really think that the hippie free love movement was some huge new cultural invention? It’s not. The Romans did it, and when their leadership bought into it, they became so distracted by it that they let the empire decay into irrelevance. Before the Romans, there were civilizations that worshipped Isis/Ishtar (and other names), a fertility goddess, whose temples were basically centers of “free love”. It didn’t end up working out for them either, and when those civilizations collapsed, they were replaced with superior cultures that were more “prudish” and that survived much longer. Homosexuality is no new thing. Plenty of ancient cultures allowed or even embraced it. But those cultures consistently went extinct in favor of, again, more “prudish” cultures. Cultural evolution is at least as real as biological evolution. History shows us that destructive cultural mutations show up frequently, and the good ones stick around while the bad ones decline and disappear. All of these new trends of modern “morality” have all happened countless times in the past, and the reason our culture didn’t already have them is that past cultures that included them died out every time. The moral trends that always survived through cultural collapse or evolution are things like marriage, the sanctity of sex, the importance of family (not necessarily the “nuclear” family, but blood relation, and at least two generations living and working together), belief in a faith that emphasizes personal responsibility, a good work ethic (not necessarily the “Protestant” work ethic, but ideas like valuing quality and honesty in your work), binary gender roles, individual charity, and basically all of the values taught by Christ, whether those cultures were actually aware of Christ or not. Those are the cultures that survived. The ones that didn’t are the ones that embraced many of the things modern Western generations starting from the 1920s have embraced. If the supposedly hardcore feminist Amazons are so great, where are they now? Where is their culture? Heavily feminist cultures have existed in the past, but they’ve been rare and have almost never lasted more than one or two generations. They went extinct, because they weren’t fit in a battle of cultural survival of the fittest. (Some of those fertility cults where temples were basically free whore houses leaned that direction. Where are they now?)

And no, there is no, “But they just didn’t do it right.” All the ways that are necessary to rule these terrible ideas out have been tried! If a cultural idea is only valid if it is done just right, it’s not fit enough to survive. It’s too fragile. Communism is a great example. It’s destructive and oppressive, and it always tends toward collapse. “Oh, but no one has tried real Communism.” First, yeah they have. Read Marx and compare. All of these different “types” of Communism were done according to his definition (and Marx is the definer of Communism). They all failed. Second, a system that only works if it is perfectly balanced and doesn’t work otherwise, can never work, because there’s no such think as perfect balance. A system can only work if it works at least proportionally to how close to "pure_ it is. Capitalism and democratic government both work proportionally. More capitalism works better, but it still provides proportional benefits if you only do a little bit of it. Look at China. They’ve allowed a moderate amount of capitalism in certain contexts because it doesn’t need to be done “right” to work! A little capitalism works a little bit. But a lot of communism doesn’t work at all! A little communism doesn’t work either. Why would anyone think that “pure” communism would work, when there’s no amount of communism less than that that works? That’s absurd. Even if pure communism did work, there’s no way to keep it pure once we’ve gotten it pure, so it’s only a matter time, probably only a few minutes, before it’s rolling back down the hill. A perfect system that isn’t stable enough to last is a terrible system! It doesn’t matter if no one has done it right, because even if we could do it right and managed to get there, it wouldn’t be long before we are back to mass murder and extreme oppression.

This is the kind of stuff we can learn from studying liberal arts far beyond the scope of anything you could learn in college. I don’t think most liberal arts even belongs in college, because they can’t teach enough to be a significant benefit. If instead though, we taught personal responsibility, basic civics, and strongly encouraged people to study and read to improve themselves throughout their lives, maybe Americans would eventually have a good enough real liberal arts education that this stupid “generational” bull crap would end, and everyone could get along and “common sense” might actually be common.