Autism and ADHD are Super Powers

I wrote most of this out as a YouTube comment, but it's so long YouTube won't take it.  Here's the video I'm responding to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sw87u86i2E&t=3174s

I was diagnosed with ADHD quite young.  I'm not exactly sure when, but somewhere between 3 and 5 years old.  The doctor recommended medication.  My parents considered this very seriously, and they ultimately decided against it.  My ADHD made school quite difficult for me.  Up through 6th grade, I struggled.  I had a hard time paying attention.  I did do very well in some subjects, but I couldn't concentrate on others at all, and I got in trouble a lot for being restless.  In 6th grade the problems became to big to ignore.  I was in the Talented and Gifted program, thriving in it, but I was also failing 6th grade.  I'm sure my parents got some pressure to medicate me again at this point, but if so they never mentioned it.  Instead, they decided to homeschool me.  My mom bought a ~3 inch thick workbook that was supposed to cover all of 6th grade, and she assigned me 10 pages a day, which she calculated would get me done by the end of the school year (which we were halfway through, so it was basically a double course load).  Not only did pull it off, most days my school work was done by noon.  (Most people don't realize that ADHD doesn't just mean you are very easily distracted.  Most people with ADHD can also hyperfocus given the right motivation.  I've always really enjoyed learning.  The problem with public school is that it was way too slow for me, so I would get bored.  Giving me a double workload and letting me work at my own pace produced an environment perfect for triggering me to hyperfocus.)

Anyhow, I'm middle aged now.  I still have the symptoms of ADHD.  But now it's different.  I consider ADHD a super power.  I'm not a victim, because I've learned to use the benefits and largely avoid the negatives of having ADHD.  I got through college, both a Bachelor's degree and I just graduated with a Master's last month, with a consistent GPA well over 3.8.  I even regularly went far beyond the requirements on many assignments.  College lets me learn at the pace I want to.  I don't have a teacher discouraging me when I get ahead of the other students, out of fear that I'll be disruptive (which I certainly would have been and sometimes was in public school).  College professors (at least, the ones I had) love students who are excited about learning.  I was always the student that would take up the professor's sometimes flippant challenges, offering significant grade boosts for doing things that should be very difficult or impossible for inexperienced students (though I never needed the grade boosts...).  Even better, I came into college with almost 20 years of experience in my major, so I had to go well beyond the assignments, because I knew if I didn't, I would get bored, then get distracted, and then start failing my classes.  So I would intentionally do my assignments in unorthodox ways that would allow me to learn something new, while still technically satisfying the requirements.  I sometimes would ask professors for permission to do assignments differently, satisfying more difficult requirements instead of the normal ones.  If a professor made a flippant remark like, "If anyone manages to include [this expert level element that you won't learn about for three more semesters] in their project, I'll give them an automatic A in the entire course", I was the one who would do it.  I even had a physics professor who had a grading policy of giving the course grade of either the composite score or the grade for the final, whichever was higher.  So every time I got a graded test back, I would rigorously study everything I missed on the test.  That professor used to tell his students that no one had ever gotten a better grade on the final.  When my brother took his course after I finished it, he told me the professor now tells his students only one has ever done it.  My composite grade was a B.  A scored better than 100% on the final.  (I did miss one question, but I made it up with a much more difficult bonus question that was worth more than the one I missed.)  I worked hard for that, but I did it because I knew I had to hyperfocus to get a good grade at all.

Another really valuable power that comes from ADHD is being very observant.  I notice the tiniest things.  Most people with ADHD do this, but then they are immediately distracted by them.  If you can learn to refocus immediately though, after very quickly assessing whatever it is you've noticed and making sure it doesn't need immediate attention, this goes from liability to super power.  And with practice, it becomes automatic.  My brain will notice everything.  It will quickly analyze each thing it notices, and if it is more important than what I'm currently doing, it will "notify" me instead of returning my focus to my current task.  Otherwise, it will store it away for later.  This is extremely valuable in many situations.  In the simplest case, it just means that I can remember things that happened around me when I wasn't paying any attention at all, often days or weeks later.  The ADHD made my brain consider it important enough to maintain a memory of far longer than most people would.  More deeply though, it means that I can remember what people said around me when I wasn't paying attention, for example, in a class, when I'm getting distracted by something else.  It means that I can often  search for a lost object entirely in my own head and find it, even if it wasn't important enough to consciously notice at the time that I saw it.  (Like, something that belongs to someone else, that I may never have even seen before and didn't seem out of play or otherwise unique or interesting when I saw it.)  Fully leveraging this may require some memory training as well.  When I was young, my mom did a lot of memory training with me, which probably helped to amplify this super power by increasing retention time significantly.  But this is exactly the kind of thing that educators could do (and that doctors could recommend) to develop and leverage the powers of ADHD.

I'm so happy that my parents didn't listen to the doctors.  I know others who grew up with ADHD, drugged, and they still struggle with it.  They still have a very hard time focusing on things.  Because I wasn't drugged, I was forced to deal with it and to learn to control it, and that's why ADHD has become a super power for me.  I can deliberately hyperfocus when I want to now, and that allows me to be 10 to 100 times more productive than most people working in my field.  Allowing myself to be distracted when I don't need to focus also provides me with great value, both in terms of mental health, and in terms of learning.  I can spend my free time learning large amounts about a massive range of different subjects on YouTube, Wikipedia, and all sorts of other places on the internet.  As a result I have a solid education in hundreds of different subjects.  Because my parents didn't take away my ability to be distracted by every little thing, I can be interested in practically everything, and because I can hyperfocus on demand, I can go from being interested in something to learning a huge amount about that thing very quickly.  And that means I know a huge amount about a huge amount of things.  Every person I talk with who has some project, I can offer some insight or help on their project.  If you have some hobby or interest, I can probably hold a coherent conversation about that hobby or interest.  For any given person, odds are I have some interest in common with them.  And that's extremely powerful and valuable!

ADHD is a super power.  You aren't a victim because you have ADHD.  Like any fictional super power though, if you don't learn to control it, it will do more harm than good.  Some people with ADHD do need drugs.  My daughter has a friend whose ADHD is so severe that he literally can't function without drugs.  He's so incredibly excitable that he'll end up running around screaming at the slightest stimulus.  (And even on drugs, his ADHD is similar to what mine was before I learned to control it.)  But most people with ADHD are at least as function as I was in elementary school.  Instead of fearing ADHD and drugging kids who have it, we should be teaching them to control it, because we need more people who have and can control this super power!

It may also be worth noting that I have Asperger's (I've decided I'm not going to buy into the "spectrum" lingo/classification).  I'm not diagnosed (most qualified people won't diagnose the same person with both ADHD and anything related to autism, due to significant overlap), but I've gotten unofficial two professional opinions.  One was from a close family friend who spent a lot of time around me.  (She specialized in child psychology and provided in-home therapy and psych evaluations for children.)  She didn't tell me she thought I had an autism disorder, but after I was an adult and had moved away, she told my mom, and when I told my mom I suspected, my mom told me that this friend had said the same thing.  Then, around 5 years ago, I was in a situation where someone wanted an official autism diagnosis.  It is generally extremely expensive for an adult to get an autism assessment from someone qualified to give a diagnosis, and the entity that wanted the assessment wasn't willing to pay for it, so they settled for a regular psychiatric evaluation with a "is consistent with" or "isn't consistent with" diagnosis, and the psychiatrist who evaluated me basically "diagnosed" me as "consistent with" having very high functioning autism.  Again though, while this does come with some social issues, autism, when high functioning, also comes with significant benefits.  The combination of ADHD and autism might have made it easier for me to control the powers ADHD gives me.  But on top of this, the autism also helps me by making me care less about what other people think and more about objective reality, logic, and such.  I work in a technical field, where this is incredibly valuable.  Additionally, I have some friends who also have Asperger's or more severe autism, and we can have very frank and blunt conversations, and none of us are offended.  This allows for very concise and terse discussion, wasting nothing on pleasantries, hedging, or beating around the bush.  It's so efficient and results in discussions and debates that progress very rapidly, producing value at a very rapid rate.  I've learned to be decent at conversation with normal people (though I still tend to talk too much and sometimes ramble), but when I don't have to, the exchange of information and development of ideas is so much faster.  Autism, when reasonably functional and controlled, is also a super power!

So here we are, trying treat ADHD and autism, when we should be trying to develop them in those who have them, and help them learn to control them for their benefit.  I don't identify as ADHD or autistic.  That seems stupid to me.  In fact, I generally don't strongly identify with any personal trait I have that I came with naturally.  I am a human male, but these aren't major parts of my identity, because I didn't decide to be these things.  The things that make me unique and interested, in my opinion, aren't the things I came with.  They aren't the things that are beyond my control.  Having pride in attributes I can't control is stupid, because I didn't do them.  I'm very intelligent, but that doesn't give me any special kind of worthiness or superiority.  What I choose to do with what I have been given is what actually defines me.  I'm an engineer/maker, because I chose to learn the required knowledge and skills and then to use them.  I'm an artist, because I chose to learn and practice various arts.  I'm a scientist, because I chose to seek out and learn science and experiment with it.  I'm not as "smart" as I am because I have a high IQ but because I use what I have learn about everything I possibly can and practice those things that I have the resources to be able to practice.  This might sound a bit big headed, but I don't actually feel superior to anyone else who uses what they've been given to improve themselves to a similar degree.  How many athletes are there who may not have a high IQ, a very good memory, and the benefits of ADHD and Asperger's, but who instead have very high quality muscles, tendons, and bones, who have put as much effort as I've put into my super powers into their own special super powers?  And further, I recognize that even people who have no obvious specialty might have invisible super powers.  I've often wondered if there might be a kind of savant (in the actual psychiatric sense of the word) whose specialization is social skills.  We define savantism as a trade between social skills and some specialization, but what if it isn't?  What if it is just a trade between all other skills and that one specialization, and social skills just happen to be the most noticeable one, because they are so important in our culture?  If that's the case, then there could be actual social savants, who are beyond genius level at social interaction but lacking in everything else, and we might just see them as lazy slackers because very good social skills are just written off as "charisma" while bad social skills are treated as a huge problem.

Anyhow, I think we've barely brushed the surface of what ADHD and autism really are, and massive scale overdiagnosis and overtreatment are just muddying the water, making it more difficult to learn more.  I suspect the best treatment for most people with ADHD and autism would be a special educational strategy that helps them learn to control and focus these superpowers instead of just trying to suppress them.  The X Men narrative is prophetic.  Any abnormality is automatically treated as bad and we try to suppress it, even when we know that there is good in it.  If instead of focusing on the perceived bad and trying to suppress it, we focused on the good and tried to develop it and control it, we could have a world changing number of people with mental super powers on our hands.  I have several children with ADHD and/or Asperger's myself.  (Most actually diagnosed.)  We don't medicate them, because it isn't severe enough to need medication.  I figure society is lucky that my wife and I got these kids with these "disorders" instead of someone else, because I know how to develop them for great good, and I can (and have to some degree) teach my wife how to do this as well.  Unfortunately, there are tens or hundreds of thousands of kids with ADHD and/or autism that are being treated as dangerous mutants whose powers need to be suppressed to protect themselves and others.  We can and should do better, and maybe if we do, having tens or hundreds of thousands of additional people capable of hyperfocusing, broad learning, communicating efficiently without taking offense at every little thing, and generally solving hard problems, the world would become a much better place.

In fact, what if the problem with modern society is that we have suppressed the people who normally keep society from going off the rails by saying "That's an absolutely idiotic idea", with no fear of what people will think of them, every time someone comes up with some new idea of "justice" that is ultimately self destructive and bad for society?  What if autistic people and ADHD people are a necessary check and balance against illogical, destructive groupthink, and our deliberate suppression of their unique capabilities is partially responsible for where our society has gotten itself.

Are Housing Prices Mostly Regulatory Costs?

 I've done research on housing costs, inflation, and regulation many times over the last decade or so.  See my previous article for background information that might be useful in the following.  Recently I claimed that over 70% of material costs for housing are due to building cost, and someone challenged this claim, asking for sources.

Now, I may have gotten ahead of myself, and I need to explain a few things.  First, I don't actually think the costs are directly due to building codes.  Rather, building codes require specific types of materials.  Many other viable options exist that are much cheaper, but building codes generally don't allow them to be used.  These include things like compressed wood products that are stronger, more fire resistant, and often even cheaper than the much more heavily regulated 2x4s, plywood, and drywall that are practically mandatory.  (In fact, compressed wood products are even more fire resistant than most steel studs, which will weaken and even melt with heat that would require many hours to get through compressed wood.)  Why aren't modern homes just built with poured concrete?  Because electrical code has requirements that don't make sense and thus cannot even be followed with poured concrete walls.  There's a reason we don't see extremely cheap 3D printed concrete houses flooding the market.  It's because building codes assume houses must all be build with hollow walls where plumbing and electrical can go, and the requirements making those assumptions cannot be satisfied with any other architecture, even if it is far more fire proof, earthquake resistant, water proof, and generally safer and technically superior in every way than "traditional" construction.

If you need evidence of the above, see this source on legal problems with 3D printed construction.  If you need more, you can also look up legal problems with very low cost tiny homes and with cantilever homes.  Building codes also get in the way of underground construction, which can be much cheaper in some areas than traditional construction (and which can significantly reduce heating and cooling costs).

So, the point here is that building codes restrict what construction materials builders are allowed to use.  This is where regulatory costs of these "legal" construction materials becomes a building code cost.  I don't have the time or energy to find sources on every construction material used in modern home construction, but I can give you one very solid one: Wood.  Here is a 2018 article about the impact of tariffs (a form of regulation) on home construction costs.  It is estimated in the article that this increased home construction costs by an average of $9,000 (and apartment construction by $3,000 per apartment).  That's on the low end of regulatory cost increases, likely running around 0.25% to 0.33%.  And keep in mind that this is just one regulation increasing the price of wood.  EPA regulations on logging and on energy (used for milling and kilning the lumber) likely add significantly more than that.  That article also estimates that regulatory costs make up 32% of multifamily developments (mainly apartment complexes).

I also have some personal knowledge of concrete production processes, and one the steps is heating limestone to high temperatures and maintaining those temperatures for several hours.  This causes the calcium carbonate to release its carbon component in the form of carbon dioxide.  EPA regulation over the last ~10 years or so has hit the concrete industry hard both with regulations increasing energy costs and with CO2 emissions regulations, making concrete foundations (also legally required by most building codes) significantly more expensive.

A more recent article explores how lumber price volatility, caused in part by concerns about regulatory changes and the impact of U.S. Treasury interest regulation, has caused significant increases in home construction costs.  This article estimates that regulations on construction materials increases home construction costs by 14.94%.  I don't have data on what percentage of home construction costs goes to materials, but labor is generally the bulk of the costs, so the regulatory costs included in material costs are almost certainly well over 30% and it's certainly conceivable that they are as high as 70%.  (Also, thus far I've not seen a study that takes all regulatory costs into account, including trickle down costs like transportation, EPA energy regulation costs, and such.  So that 14.94% likely only includes direct regulatory costs at the last step before the materials are bought by the construction company, which is only a small portion of total regulatory costs.)

This paper explores the regulatory costs of construction during development and construction (which doesn't even include the regulatory costs that went into the gathering, fabrication, and transportation of materials), and it estimates a total regulatory cost during those stages of 23.8% for single family homes. 

This article discusses the study and includes some nice breakdowns of data from the paper.  It also includes some additional data about regulatory price increases of lumber (mainly tariffs and market volatility caused by unpredictable economic regulatory changes) and lists a number of other materials impacted.  It also mentions delivery delays caused by pandemic regulations, which also contribute to cost increases significantly.

On top of all of this, I did construction work off and on in my late teens and early 20s, and I learned about additional impacts of regulations that don't typically get counted in estimates.  On one construction site I worked on, a team of plumbers spent their entire work shift sitting around doing nothing, because the electrical union had convinced the state government to add to building code a restriction on who can even touch electrical equipment.  Some electrical equipment, I forget what but something like a breaker box or some such, had been left too close to a sewer line or water line, such that the plumbers couldn't do the work they were supposed to do, and they couldn't legally move it.  The electrical workers weren't scheduled to come in until the next day, but the plumbers couldn't just take the day off, because they had families to feed, so the construction company paid for a day worth of labor from some 3 or 4 plumbers for nothing.  And it actually ended up costing a bit more than that, because the plumbers weren't scheduled for the next day, and they had to get their job done before insulating (what I did) and drywalling could be completed.  Delays caused by regulations don't just cost time, they also cost the wages of people scheduled to work who can't because of the delay, because people still need to make a living, whether everything is ready for them to work or not.

Anyhow, I don't have the time or energy to go step-by-step through the supply line working out the exact percent of the cost that comes from regulations.  I've provided plenty of sources showing that individual steps can end up costing at least 30% each in regulatory costs for the end product of those steps, and there are many more steps than just one for any kind of construction material.  Just 30% per step hits 69% in a mere two steps.  (This is a compounding increase, not an additive one, so the math is 1.30^2, which gives 1.69 or an increase of 69%.)  The truth is, I was really hedging when I said 70%.  It's probably closer to 80% or 90%, and that's just material costs.  When you include labor regulations, direct costs of build codes, licensing, and all of the other stuff, the total cost of a home is probably no less than 60% to 70% regulation, likely at least 80%, and if the math on regulatory compounding in my last article is right, it may be as high as 90% or possibly even higher.

The fact is, a significant majority of the cost of houses today is regulatory costs.  Even before loan costs and bank fees, you are mostly paying for the regulation.  You are paying for contractors to use more expensive, inferior materials.  You are paying for vehicle safety regulations that provide only marginal safety benefits.  You are paying for emissions and energy restrictions intended to solve problems that haven't even been proven to be real problems.  You are paying for plumbers to sit on their butts all day, so that the electricians can feel more secure demanding excessive pay for their labor.  And after all of that, the little bit of money remaining is what is actually paying for your house and the legitimate labor that went into its construction.

How Regulatory Costs Can Compound to Suffocate an Economy

 Around a decade ago, I wrote a college English paper on the topic of inflation.  I went into my research with the assumption that inflation is primarily caused by greedy businesses raising prices faster than wages, and at the time I though my research supported this assumption.  I was wrong, but I did not realize this until several years later, when I was discussing my research with a friend over email, and he asked me some questions I had not considered.  When I did the math, it proved my original assumption wrong.

For the paper, I looked at inflation over the 50 year period from 1960 to 2010.  Now I don't recall all of the exact details, and I don't have the time or energy to search my archives for the original paper, but a few figures were hard to forget.  Average inflation from 1960 to 2010 was 659%.  That means that prices increased by 6.59 times over those 50 years.  Housing prices increased by somewhere in the neighborhood of 1,000% (a little more, I think), and car prices increased by somewhere in the neighborhood of 800% to 900%.  That's 10 times and 8-9 times.

I did some math on these figures, and they seemed to match up with some claims by others that greed driven inflation caused prices to increase, and businesses just deliberately lagged on wages, so that they would come out ahead.  I don't recall the exact value, but wages during that time period increased by significantly less.  A smoking gun?  I thought so.  Now, I did find some evidence that some of the inflation was caused by government regulation, so in the paper I accused businesses of taking advantage of regulation to justify bigger price increases than the actual cost of the regulation.  Again, the numbers seemed to support my claims.  I'm pretty sure I got an A on the paper.  It was a little controversial, but the professor graded based on my English writing skills and not the subject matter or opinions.

As mentioned above, several years later I was discussing this with a friend over email.  He wondered exactly how much role the government regulation played.  We both agreed that government regulation couldn't have contributed much, probably not more than a few percent.  At the same time, he wanted to know why houses and cars had inflation so much more than the average, and the obvious answer was regulatory costs.  During that time period, building codes grew quite substantially, and regulations around selling and buying homes grew a lot as well.  Similarly, this was the time period where all of the safety and emissions regulations for cars were put in place.  But could regulation alone really explain such a huge difference?

So I did the math.  Say regulatory costs increase prices for something by an average of 2% per year.  Over the course of 50 years, that's a 269% cost increase for producing that thing!  2% doesn't seem like much, but when you compound it over time, it adds up fast.  Of course, we don't have new building codes or car manufacturing regulations coming out every year, so this surely can't explain all of the difference.  This is true, but the 2% is an average.  Emissions requirements for new vehicles increased prices by far more than a measly 2%.  Each new safety regulation added significantly more than 2% to the price of new cars.  Periodic large regulatory cost increases can increase prices at least as fast as constant small ones.  A 15% increase each decade adds up to a 201% increase over 50 years.  When you intersperse that with multiple 2% to 5% increases every 3 to 5 years, that can easily add up to enough to explain the difference, and building codes are even worse, because they typically have a bigger impact.

Ok, so regulation can explain the difference between average inflation and the much higher inflation for houses and cars.  Those are only two products though.  Surely it doesn't play a big role in average inflation?  Unfortunately, this is also wrong.  It's easy to miss the impact of multi-stage supply lines, which are hit by regulatory costs at every stage.

Consider this: A car dealership gets hit with a new regulation requiring them to record some additional data about each sale or repair.  That data takes extra time to collect and extra space (physical or digital) to store.  Maybe that increases operating costs by a couple of percent per transaction.  So they must pass that cost onto customers (businesses can't take loses, therefore it is necessary that every cost be passed on to customers or be recovered by paying less for labor).  But also the manufacturer gets hit with a new safety regulation that costs an additional 2% (pretty low end for safety regulations).  That cost gets passed to the dealership, which passes it to the customer.  So now we've got a 4.04% total increase.  (Cost increases like this tend to compound, rather than adding.)  But wait, the steel mill supplying the manufacturer also gets a 2% increase, because of some additional regulation, and so that regulatory cost "trickles down" to the customer, compounding for a total of 6.12% inflation.  The steel mill isn't where the raw material originates though.  They are getting scrap steel from garbage dumps, recycling collectors, and scrap yards, who also got hit by a 2% regulatory cost increase requiring them to pay more for their electricity to meet new EPA requirements, and if they are smelting raw ore, the mining companies were probably impacted by the same regulation.  Now we are up to 8.24%.  There can also be cycles in here that cause additional compounding steps, for example, the mining company, the scrap companies, and the steel mills are also all using steel products, so their cost of operation increases a bit more than the 2%, any time they have to repair or replace steel equipment.

Now, this is a contrived example.  Odds of all of these getting hit all in the same year are pretty low.  At the same time, 2% is a really low estimate for cost of new regulations for any of these.  Not only would most of these regulations increase prices by more like 5% to 15%, government regulations rarely affect only one element of a business's operations.  One safety regulation might only cost 5%, but the bill with that regulation is going to have another two or three, each also adding 5% or more, because "Well, now that we are thinking about auto manufacturing, we might as well look at everything about it."  Additionally though, some regulations affect all industries.  For example, any new vehicle regulation is going to impact over-land shipping costs, and practically everything depends on transportation infrastructure in the developed world.  Fuel regulations also impact transportation costs heavily.  And there are tons of cycles in here as well.  If gas prices go up by 10%, prices for everything at the supermarket are going to increase by at least 5% to cover that, and now I'm paying more, so I have to ask for a raise to cover the increase in cost-of-living, and that will eventually trickle back to the supermarket prices adding an additional fraction of a percent to prices.  Anything that impacts electricity prices (basically and EPA regulation) will raise costs for every company that uses electricity, and businesses can't take losses, so that means prices increases across the board.

Between 1960 and 2010, we had a lot of significant increases in regulatory costs in industries that impact all other industries.  Gasoline and diesel fuel were significantly more heavily regulated.  Vehicle manufacturing was more heavily regulated.  Electrical power generation was more heavily regulated.  Even communications (from post office to every kind of electronic communication) saw heavy regulatory increases.  And housing costs do broadly affect the economy, so the very heavy regulatory increases in housing costs did contribute significantly to all of the other inflation.

When you put this all together, most industries saw significant cost increases due to regulation between 1960 and 2010, every single year, even when the new regulations didn't target them specifically.  The average annual regulatory cost increase to produce average inflation of 659% over 50 years is a mere 3.84%.  (You can calculate this including the compounding effect with 1.0384^50.  The 1.0384 is equal to 100% (the original cost) plus 3.84% (the average increase), and the 50 is the number of years.)

The truth is, it's actually surprising that average inflation was so low, despite the constant barrage of regulatory cost increases.  It's not just easily believable that most of the inflation was directly caused by regulatory cost increases, it's actually feasible that almost all of it was caused by rampantly growing regulation.  (Only "almost" because increasing government debt also causes inflation very directly.  That's a topic for another article though.)  And cars and houses increased in price faster because they were more frequent direct targets of the additional regulation.

Sadly, it really is that simple.  I was wrong.  Inflation wasn't and isn't driven by greedy businesses.  It's mainly driven by constantly growing government regulation, slowly suffocating the economy.

New Age Slavery

The Democrats are determined to revive slavery.  This shouldn't be a big surprise.  After all, the party was created with the express intent to protect the institution of slavery, and ever since the Republican Party successfully abolished slavery, the Democratic Party has been subtly trying to bring back various parts of it.

So what's this all about?  How is the Democratic Party trying to bring back slavery?  I must be some crazy conspiracy theorist right?  Actually no.  There's no conspiracy.  This is just how the Democratic Party operates and how it was designed to operate.  Fundamentally, the Democratic Party is about trying to create an economy where poor people are required to work for the lowest survivable compensation, for the benefit of the wealthy elite.  First, see slavery.  It wasn't actually successful in this.  Modern Democrats like to claim that slavery significantly benefited free Americans (whom they assume were 100% white, as if black people were incapable of surviving without being slaves in the early U.S.), but the truth is, states that allowed slavery never did as well economically as the northern free states, and they consistently did worse by a large margin.  Slavery was a scourge that caused economic harm, not an exploitation that created some kind of utopian society for the free people or even the elites.  (The reason the South lost the war was that they didn't have a strong enough economy to provide the resources to win it.  Their economy was weak because slavery can't produce strong economies.)  Anyone who preaches that one particular class or race in the U.S. has some special privilege granted to them by the benefits of slavery is painting slavery as far more good and desirable than it actually is.  Are Democrats painting slavery in a good light intentionally?  Probably not, but intentional or otherwise, they are making it look better than it ever actually was.  Strong economies are produced by maximizing participation and keeping regulation light, and slavery inherently limits participation, so slavery powered economies will never beat lightly regulated capitalist economies.  (Some people believe slavery was part of capitalism.  This is false.  Capitalism is all about protection of private ownership, and the most fundamental part of this is ownership of self.  Slavery was an artifact of the colonialist economic system that has no place in a capitalism economy.)

After slavery, Democrats pushed for segregation, because racial segregation gave them the power to decide who could work what jobs.  Black people, ex-slaves and their descendants, were restricted from public facing work and separated from everyone else to limit association, leaving them mainly stuck in the domestic service sector, a sector where they had traditionally worked as slaves before abolition.  By the 1960s, even many state level elected Democrats had realized how obviously morally corrupt this was, many segregation states had abolished segregation, and the remainder were rapidly heading in that direction.  The Republican Party (a little late to the party this time) introduced the Civil Rights Act to codify the reforms that were already happening into Federal law.  This was shut down repeatedly by Democrats, until Kennedy was assassinated and Lyndon B. Johnson, possibly the most racist President in U.S. history (yes, even counting pro-slavery Democrats before abolition from Andrew Jackson up through James Buchanan), pressured Congressional Democrats to vote in favor of the bill as a tribute to and legacy of Kennedy, posthumously making Kennedy a martyr).  It's popular among Democrats to blame Republicans for all of the work requirements attached to our welfare programs, but those were actually part of the Democratic welfare agenda starting right after the Civil Rights Act was passed.  Without segregation, Democrats needed a new strategy to force poor people to work for as little as possible, and welfare programs with work requirements were the solution.  (Making welfare more like a subsidy for employers than charity for the poor.)  Republicans were easily convinced, because they were skeptical of expensive welfare programs in the first place (and rightfully so, as they were so disastrous that they've been being reformed (often by Democrats) regularly ever since to fix problems and they still are absolutely terrible), and work requirements that limited welfare spending mitigated the cost.  Since then, Democrats have consistently favored welfare with work requirements, and Republicans have largely acquiesced to mitigate waste.  Many Democratic voters have fooled themselves into believing that work requirements are concessions to the Republicans, who wouldn't help pass welfare programs without them, and while it is true that without work requirements fewer Republicans would vote to pass welfare bills, the truth is that this is merely a side effect of Democrats doing exactly what they wanted in the first place.  Since the welfare programs of the 1960s and 1970s, Democrats have had control of both houses of Congress and the White House many times and for quite a large portion of that time, but they've never removed or reduced work requirements, and they've consistently included work requirements in most new welfare legislation.  (The one exception is medical welfare, where qualification requirements are mostly managed at the state level, and most states, including Republican dominated states don't have work requirements.)

So, what now?  It's not so much now as it is something that Democrats have been throwing around for a while.  It's definitely a new strategy for getting cheap work out of people.  Now, some might argue that Democrats can't be trying to pull stuff like this, because they support raising the minimum wage to a living wage.  Even back during slavery, slave owners understood that underfed slaves whose needs weren't met couldn't be as productive.  There are even manuals from that time period, instructing slave owners on how to maximize the productivity of their slaves.  Ideas that slaves were generally underfed, housed in facilities with insufficient protection from the weather, and generally treated poorly are false.  Even plantation slaves were fed quite well, provided with solid quality shelter (often group homes with many families though not always), provided with decent clothing appropriate to their work, and most plantation owners also treated their slaves with respect.  (The stories are true, some were disrespectful, abusive, and even murderous, but these were a small minority.  We hear the reports of the bad far more than the good.)  This is because they were far more productive this way.  After slavery was abolished, the Civil War was won by the North, and the slaves were freed, many continued to work on the plantations of their ex-masters, precisely because they had been treated well.  Not to suggest slavery was ever anything but a horrific moral travesty, but Democrats from the very beginning wanted slaves to have enough to live contently, because content slaves are more productive.  Raising the Federal minimum wage to provide that lifestyle of reasonable contentment is completely in line with the Democratic goal of controlling and extracting maximum labor from the poor!

The new plan of Democrats is the Federal Job Guarantee.  On the surface, this looks like a good idea.  If you want a job, and you can't find one, the Federal government will provide you with one that pays wages equivalent to the cost of supporting a slave (sorry, perhaps you prefer "person"?) sufficiently to maximize productivity.  Now we can reduce unemployment to nothing, right?  That's actually a separate question that I won't get into here (spoiler: the answer is no), as is the question of whether 0% unemployment is even a good thing (spoiler: also no).  Anyhow, providing jobs for everyone that pay a living wage must certainly be a good thing that will eliminate poverty, right?  The goal of eliminating poverty is a good one, but a Federal Job Guarantee is more like voluntary slavery than an effective anti-poverty program.  Now the Federal government has 20 million lackeys, doing its bidding.  If this isn't terrifying, you probably haven't studied world history (or even U.S. history...).  I can raise you one here though, add any sort of welfare with work requirements and now you have involuntary slavery!  On unemployment?  You are legally required to look for a new job and accept any job you are offered, or you can just starve (your unemployment is canceled).  If you don't accept a job you are offered, you don't only lose your current unemployment benefits, in most cases you no longer qualify ever again.  This is true even if you are offered a job you are incapable of doing, due to disability, severe allergies, or other physical limitations.  With a Federal Job Guarantee, this dynamic gets worse.  Now if you lose your $120k job and get on unemployment to cover the gap while you find a new job, you can (and let's be honest, states will adjust their laws to ensure that this is the case) be required to apply for a Federal Job Guarantee position, which pays a minimal living wage.  You will obviously qualify and get a job offer, because it's a job guarantee.  Without the unemployment, you won't be able to pay your bills, and the slave wages of the Federal Job Guarantee won't even begin to make up the difference.  So now you lose your home, your vehicles, and many of your other assets, even if you manage to eventually get a new $120k job.  SNAP (food stamps) has a work requirement as well.  It's not terrible, as it only applies to one person in the household (and everyone else can have benefits even if that one person, typically the oldest adult male, doesn't qualify), but single people will be forced to get a "guarantee" job to qualify, and smaller families (~3 people) often don't get sufficient food stamps even when one adult is working and everyone qualifies.  And of course, there is also EITC.  It's built directly into our tax code.  The only welfare benefits you consistently qualify for if you don't have a job is health care, and even that is hit and miss in some cases.  For example, in some states, college students don't qualify for Medicaid unless they also work 20 hours a week.  You are covered if you are lazy, no good freeloader, but as soon as you start trying to improve your education to qualify for something better, nope, you are getting punished if you aren't splitting your time with a low pay, part-time job, limiting your ability to learn effectively.  And even some states that don't have strict work requirements for SNAP in general do have similar punishments for college students who want SNAP benefits.

The fact is, the Federal Job Guarantee is the worst solution to unemployment ever conceived, aside from actual chattel slavery.  Combined with welfare programs that include work requirements, it gives the government the right to force you to work for them or deny you any welfare benefits, if you can't instantly get some other job, and that's potentially a far worse welfare trap than any we have right now.  Finding a job is a ton of work.  How can you be expected to put in that much work on top of working 40 hours week doing the bidding of the government?  Sure, some people manage to find a new job while working 40 hours a week.  Ever wonder why so many Americans work in jobs they hate instead of finding new jobs?  It's because those people who can manage finding a new job while working are very rare.  In fact, most of them aren't looking and are offered new jobs unsolicited, without ever actually looking and working at the same time.  The Federal Job Guarantee isn't some charitable government program, designed to improve the lives of Americans and provide work for all of the poor.  It's a program designed to restore much of the mechanics of slavery, maximizing the productivity of the poor as efficiently as possible and forcing the poor to become cogs in the American economic machine.  The fact is, this idea that people are merely elements of a giant economic machine that should play their roles with maximum efficiency and minimum complaint died in the 1920s, and should remain dead and buried, but the Democrats insist that this idea should be revived and that they should be put in charge of powerful machine they believe it can create.

The Federal Job Guarantee is fundamentally a pro-slavery program.  The Republican Party abolished slavery over 150 years ago for good reason.  If we allow this program to become law in the U.S., we can expect an economic nose dive, as the whole country returns to the terrible economic state of the 1800s, slavery powered South.  Supposedly the majority of Americans on both sides of the aisle put the economy at the top of their list in terms of political importance the majority of the time, and even during global pandemics economics doesn't go below third place.  If Americans truly care about the U.S. economy, support for the Federal Job Guarantee should be a reason not to vote for a candidate regardless of any other part of that candidate's platform (and regardless of that candidate's race, sex, sexual preferences, or personal beliefs about the candidates sexuality).  The alternative is losing our status as a major economic power in the world and heading rapidly toward a collapsing slave economy, where most poor people work for the government being very productive in things that don't actually benefit anyone.

Maintaining a Tank

Something recently reminded me of something from "In the Beginning was the Command Line", where the author, by way of allegory, compares Windows to a horrifically leaky and inefficient SUV and Linux to a tank.  The buyer complains that he doesn't know how to maintain a tank, and the Linux vendor points out that he doesn't know how to maintain an SUV either.

So, here's the backstory: My kids are playing Minecraft.  We were doing multiplayer, hosted by me, on my Linux laptop.  (Which required no special setup to work.)  They are playing on Windows 10.  They decided they wanted to play together in a world of their own, so now they are trying to connect to each other.  It's not working.  The connection attempts just timeout.  Sadly, this is pretty much par for the course for Windows.  The problem is usually some obscure thing going on with Windows Firewall, that it just shouldn't be doing on a private network.  I've fixed it before, but Windows has a way of magically breaking itself again periodically, and sometimes I just can't figure it out (and I'm what many people would call a "tech wizard", so that's saying a lot).  So, I Googled a bit to see if I could find something that might help, and I came across this:

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/minecraft-windows-10-edition-unable-to-connect-to/a6d1103a-885a-45f7-a292-7ed5e47f5379

If anyone ever whines to me about having to drop down to the command line in Linux, or complains about how hard it is to use Linux because you "have to" use the command line, I'm going to have to tape my butt back on, because I'm going to laugh it clean off.

There may have been a time when Windows was easier to use out-of-the-box than Linux.  That's no longer true.  In fact, in my experience, it hasn't been true since the mid-2000s (when I was using Kubuntu and Lubuntu, which "just worked").  And now, even Windows own tech support people are giving many lines of cryptic command line commands and expecting casual users to be able to be able to use them to fix problems that Linux never had in the first place.  Welcome to MS, suckers!

Here's the first line from the MS rep: "Online gaming requires periodic resetting of your network configurations."  What the crap MS?  I've never found myself having to "periodically" reset my network configurations to keep my online gaming working, even in Windows!  And I've played my share and then some!  This has nothing to do with needing to reset stuff periodically (and let's be clear, only crappy software ever needs regular resets to work properly).  Windows is a stinking pile of crap, that can't do even the simplest things Linux does out of the box without having to do arcane magic at the command line.  That's the problem.  Online gaming doesn't "require" periodic resetting.  A complete trash network stack does.  Software that is completely incapable of detecting its own failure and handling errors gracefully does.

To be fair, Windows 10 is better than every previous Windows back through Vista, and it's about on par with XP, though the final iteration of XP was less buggy and the networking wasn't as crappy.  But better isn't the same as good.

My laptop has Windows 10 on it.  I haven't booted into it in months.  The last time I clearly recall booting into it was more than 6 months ago, though I might have booted into it once since then to get a URL from a browser tab.  Steam's Proton allows me to play my Steam Windows games on Linux flawlessly (thus far, anyhow; addendum: I had to boot into Windows since writing this to play Age of Empires 2 (2013), however note that AoE2: Definitive Edition works fine in Linux through Steam).  I also have PlayOnLinux, which allows me to play Blizzard games (which is the rest of the Windows games I have), pretty much flawlessly as well (though I've only actually tested Heroes of the Storm on this computer).  I'm going to have to resize partitions to install more Blizzard games, but since I'm not even using Windows 10 anymore, I should be fine just taking 90% of its free space without any issues.  (Maybe I should boot into Windows 10 one last time, to uninstall all of my Blizzard games there, to free up even more space to install them on Linux...)

Anyhow, it turns out maintaining a Linux tank is now substantially easier than maintaining a Windows SUV, whether you are a noob or a wizard.  I find it a bit funny how MS keeps making their OS more and more obsolete.

Is Cancel Culture Fundamentally Religious?

There was a time, when the Catholic Church ruled Europe, through threat of excommunication.  As time passed, and Europe became more enlightened, the Catholic Church lost most of its power, and individual countries chose their own religions.  Within each country, the state religion (or "establishment") was legally enforced to different degrees.  Even in the most free countries, there were penalties for adhering to beliefs and values opposed to those of the established religion, including losing your job and not being eligible for employment.  In the least free countries, you would just be killed for adherence to beliefs opposed to the established religion.  Over time, culture continued to evolve, and many countries began to tolerate other religions, so long as they were not too loud.  Religions that were not the national establishment did not necessarily have to hide, but if they started proselyting or causing any sort of unrest, members would often still be slaughtered or at least imprisoned, and even if they were not causing problems, it was often hard for them to find employment.  Once immigration to the Americas become feasible, culture was allowed to progress again, as many anti-establishment people immigrated to the Americas in search of religious freedom.  Despite the religious freedom in the Americas though, there were still problems with religious tolerance.  Now that there was an option for people to practice their beliefs without the oppression of religious establishment, many of the religious groups developed their own forms of punishment and intolerance for outside beliefs.  The foundation of the U.S. government put a stop to religious cities, where the local government would discriminate against people who were not of the primary religion in the city.  Religious freedom was Constitutionally protected, and for the most part, all governments complied.  This did not end religious intolerance though.

In the U.S. until fairly recently, a lot of religions practiced "public shaming" and ostracism of members that did not adhere to the standards of the religion.  This still happens in some isolated religious communities, notably including some Amish communities.  There are also reports of public shaming and ostracism in some Jehovah's Witness congregations, though it is not clear how widespread this is.  For the most part though, public shaming and ostracism as a form of religious punishment has become very uncommon, as humanity and U.S. culture have become more civilized.

Unfortunately, it looks like the less religious left never got the memo, that public shaming and ostracism are uncivilized and completely inappropriate punishments.  In fact, public shaming as a punishment for actual crime was abolished in the U.S. in 1905.  The pillory was a device used to subject the victim to public shaming.  Most of the U.S. outlawed the use of the pillory in the mid-1800s, acknowledging that public shaming qualified as cruel and usual punishment.  Delaware continued using the pillory until 1901 and finally outlawed it in 1905.  A hundred years after every U.S. state acknowledged that public shaming was similar enough to torture to outlaw its use as judicial punishment for serious crimes, many people on the left decided it was appropriate to revive it for use against people who merely had different opinions from their own.

Let's be clear: Cancel Culture is a religion.  It is a religion that publicly shames and ostracizes people who violate its beliefs.  It is a religion that is lobbying the government to make it the established religion of the United States.  Because it is not a registered religion and does not have any specific beliefs regarding deity, it is easy to overlook this fact, but the fact is, Cancel Culture is a religious movement that uses practices generally agreed upon for almost a century as morally corrupt to punish people who disagree with its beliefs.  Cancel Culture is a religion stuck in the 1950s and earlier, that is intolerant of beliefs that are not its own, and that has taken the abominable practices of public shaming and ostracism outside of its own congregations.  Cancel Culture is not only like 1800s to mid-1900s religions that used these disgusting forms of punishments against their own members.  It has reverted to practices used by dominant religions before the founding of the U.S., that punished anyone in their territory with these torturous punishments who disagreed with their beliefs, regardless of membership.  Cancel Culture has reverted to cruel punishments used by corrupt and intolerant religions over 230 years ago.

How can civilization revert by over 200 years in only two decades?  Simple, and bunch of self righteous tyrants take it upon themselves to abuse the power they have gained through social media to trample democracy and punish those who are guilty only of disagreeing with them.

Commentary on Supreme Court Ruling Concering Religious Discrimination Against Religious Students Attending Religious Schools

This week, the Supreme Court ruled 5 to 4 that prohibiting the use of government funded scholarships and other financial from paying for attendance of a religiously oriented school is unconstitutional, on the grounds that it constitutes religious discrimination against students who are otherwise eligible for the scholarships.  A number of comments have been made regarding this ruling, both positive and negative, including commentary from the four dissenting justices.  I would like to add my own commentary both on the ruling and on some of the comments.


In my personal opinion, the Supreme Court ruling was correct.  There are three parts of the Constitution that address religious freedom.  These are generally referred to as the "establishment" clause, the "free exercise" clause, and the "no religious test" clause.  The establishment clause, contained in the First Amendment says, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion..."  This is mildly ambiguous, which is probably why it is so often misinterpreted.  The phrase "establishment of religion" is generally interpreted to mean any religious organization, however this is not how it was intended nor what it actually means in this context.  A brief review of the history of the period as well as some of the discussions on the Bill of Rights that occurred during its drafting reveals that the term "establishment of religion" was a reference to the concept of a state established religion.  Thus, the Anglican Church would be an "establishment of religion", but in England, where the Anglican Church is the state religion, the Catholic Church wouldn't be considered an "establishment of religion".  In the U.S., no establishments of religion exist, because the establishment clause prohibits the establishment of a state religion.  Further, this can be verified by the general use of the word "establishment" back when the Bill of Rights was written.  In modern times, "establishment" is often used to refer to buildings or organizations that are "established" by individuals.  When the Bill of Rights was drafted, "establishment" did not mean this.  It actually referred to a command or organization created or endorsed specifically by the government.  In the context of religion, "establishment" entirely on its own was understood to mean "a single dominant ecclesiastical institution (or religion, church, denomination, faith, sect, creed, or religious society) that enjoyed a government-preferred, government-sanctioned, government-financed, or government-protected status within a state, and which represented an indistinguishable union with the government and the preferred (or 'established') ecclesiastical institution."  (Source of quotation)  Further, "establishment" religions were at least partially run by the government, giving the government operational powers over the religion, including the power to define church doctrine and set church boundaries, the power to control the hiring and religious authority of clergy, the power to build church buildings, the power to fire clergy, and the power to control what rituals and such individual members of the establishment church were allowed to participate in.  Governments with establishment religions were also known at the time to exercise powers like requiring civilian attendance of church services, punish citizens who did not attend the establishment church or who openly professed beliefs opposed to those of the establishment church, deny those who were not members of the establishment church government jobs, and suppress dissident movements with fines, bans on the use of civil services, and in some cases imprisonment and even execution.  Most of the current Supreme Court Justices are trained as lawyers, not historians, and have little education in the history and intent of the Constitution that is absolutely critical to understanding it.  Instead, they interpret it as they please, without any regard for the actual meaning.  In this case in question, the establishment clause is not even relevant.  No state in the U.S. has an established religion, nor does the Federal government or any county or municipal government.  Allowing religious schools to accept and benefit from state funded scholarships would only constitute anything near an establishment of religion if it restricted the scholarships to one specific religion, and it wouldn't outright violate the establishment clause unless that religion was generally funded and controlled by the state.  (One could reasonably argue, however, that providing scholarships to students of one specific religion was a violation of the intent of the establishment clause, even if that religion wasn't officially owned and controlled by the state.  Though it does not explicitly say it, this clause is generally regarded as also meaning that the government may not favor one religion over another.)

Directly following the establishment clause is the free exercise clause, which reads, "[Congress shall make no law...], or prohibiting the free exercise thereof...".  This clause was intended to protect people from religious discrimination by governments.  The correct interpretation, based on historical records, is that the government cannot favor or disfavor people based on religion or religious beliefs.  It may not make behaviors illegal that are essential parts of the exercise of a particular set of religious beliefs, with the intent of discriminating against those who participate in those behaviors for religious reasons.  There is some ambiguity around this, highlighted very effectively by the outlawing of Mormon polygamy.  Specifically, courts ruled that the outlawing of polygamy was legal, on the grounds that it affected everyone not just Mormons.  The reality, however, is that this law was explicitly and deliberately passed with the express intent of discriminating against those of the Mormon faith.  Nearly all future rulings on laws infringing on religious exercise rights have either mandated religious exemptions from the law or upheld the law on the grounds that discrimination was not intended.  (Under modern legal precedent, the anti-polygamy law would have been shut down so hard.  It may be important to clarify here that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, aka Mormons, abandoned the practice of polygamy over a century ago and no longer practices nor endorses the practice.)  So, how is this relevant to the Supreme Court case?  It's a little complicated.  The first question is, how does prohibiting the use of scholarships to pay for attendance of a religious school violate the free exercise clause?  Taking the clause literally, it doesn't.  It doesn't prevent people from engaging in religious behavior in any meaningful way.  Yes, the scholarships might facilitate engagement in religious behavior, if attending a religious school is a mandatory practice of that religion, but denying the scholarship does not remove any existing ability to engage in religious exercise.  We know that the clause was intended to mean more than its literal interpretation though.  It was also intended to prohibit the government for favoring or disfavoring people on grounds of religion.  Knowing that many of the Founders of the U.S. were not particularly religious, it should be fairly obvious that this clause wasn't written assuming that 100% of people would have religious beliefs and thus was also intended to protect less religious people equally.  In that context, favoring or disfavoring any group on grounds of religious beliefs or lack thereof is a violation of this clause.  And that means that this clause protects religious and non-religious people equally and by extension it protects religious and non-religious schools equally.  The free exercise clause was actually included in the First Amendment expressly for the purpose of preventing the kind of religious discrimination that this case is about.

There is one more religious rights clause in the Constitution, the "No Religious Test" clause.  Article VI, Clause 3 of the Constitution says, "... ; but no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States."  This clause is intended to prevent the religious establishment practice of restricting public office holders to members of the state religion.  This clause is actually obsolete at this point, as the establishment clause of the First Amendment covers this and is more broad.  As part of the establishment issue, which is irrelevant to the Supreme Court case in question, this clause is also completely irrelevant.

Before continuing on to quotes regarding the case, it is worth noting that the establishment clause may not be completely irrelevant here, despite what I said.  We've discussed the fact that the establishment clause is not about maintaining some broad distance between the government and religious organizations but is rather about prohibiting a specific state religion either officially or unofficially.  It is not about keeping the state from ever doing anything that could benefit religious organizations.  There is some ambiguity, however, in what even constitutes religion in this context.  For example, are Atheism and Agnosticism religions in this context?  Defining religion is generally difficult, but a commonly held definition is a belief or connected set of beliefs regarding the existence of a supreme power.  Ideally though, we would consider the definition generally accepted by the Founders, as that would give the most accurate interpretation of the Constitution and Bill of Rights.  We can start with the known fact that many of the Founders were not considered "religious".  Most notably, Thomas Jefferson was not even considered Christian, but contrary to popular belief now days, he did actually believe some sort of God existed, but he wasn't overly attached to overt signs of worship.  People of that time period generally agreed that Jefferson acknowledged the existence of a God but was otherwise Agnostic.  Agnosticism is a form of irreligiousness.  Agnostics generally don't care whether God exists or not.  Agnostics are not Atheists, because Atheists explicitly believe that God does not exist.  Most modern Agnostics do not believe in God, but they also do not disbelieve.  Atheists disbelieve.  It turns out this is a critical distinction that is not generally appreciated by native English speakers who typically do not understand the difference between passive and active negatives.  Disbelief is a positive belief against some idea, while merely not believing is more like having no opinion or position.  The reason this distinction is so important is that positive belief defines religious belief, which neutral lack of belief does not.  And that makes Atheism a religion but Agnosticism not.  However, in the relevant historical context none of that matters.  The evidence suggests that they didn't define religion in this way but rather regarded any person's personal opinions on things as that person's religion, which would make Agnosticism and Atheism apply, and this also extends to secularism.  If we interpret the establishment clause with this understanding of religion, we will immediately see that it is fairly likely the Founders would have viewed excluding religious schools while allowing secular schools to participate as a real establishment of religion, where that religion is secularism, and a quick look at government control and influence on science and secular organizations in general will easily support the idea that we are about half way to the establishment of scientific secularism as the state mandated religion.  (The reason we are not already there is things like religious exemptions for things like mandatory vaccination.)  The point here is, if we really consider the history and intent of the establishment clause, there is actually some evidence that it is relevant here, in ways that further support the Supreme Court's ruling.



Let's start with the majority opinion.  Chief Justice John Roberts wrote, "A state need not subsidize private education. But once a state decides to do so, it cannot disqualify some private schools solely because they are religious."  This is completely in line with the correct interpretation of the three religion clauses in the Constitution.  What is concerning is that most Supreme Court rulings don't even cite the Constitution, though this one actually does, which is a breath of fresh air.  Let's note though, none of the Supreme Court Justices are actually familiar enough with the historical context of the Constitution to have any business interpreting it.  U.S. judges are generally trained as lawyers, not as historians, however for the Supreme Court, which is tasked with interpreting the Constitution, this is completely inappropriate.  Supreme Court nominees should be automatically rejected by the Senate if they don't have significant education in Constitutional history, including history of Europe around the time the Constitution was drafted and ratified.  Contrary to past comments made by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and other Justices, interpretation does not mean taking language and updating its meaning to fit current circumstances.  Any educated interpreter will tell you that interpretation is purely about expressing intent, even to the point that if something like a joke, compliment, or insult does not translate literally, the interpreter will just tell the other person that the comment was a joke, complement, or insult and to respond appropriately.  The fact is the Constitution is a living document.  It was designed to be updated as needed.  If it has not been updated to mean what a particular Justice thinks it should mean, it is the responsibility of Congress and the people to update it, not the responsibility of the Supreme Court to interpret it differently from how it was intended.  This was a deliberate check and balance included in the system, and Supreme Court interpretations that are not what was intended is a usurpation of legislative power exclusively given to Congress, not the Supreme Court.

The majority opinion also included this text, "Montana’s no-aid provision bars religious schools from public benefits solely because of the religious character of the schools. The provision also bars parents who wish to send their children to a religious school from those same benefits, again solely because of the religious character of the school."  In my personal opinion, this wasn't so much discrimination against public schools as discrimination against individuals.  The schools are not barred from public benefits.  The students are barred from spending public benefits on education from religious schools.  This isn't about discrimination against schools.  It is about religious discrimination against individuals.  It is worth noting here that Montana's no-aid provision actually doesn't apply.  Scholarships are not aid for schools and should not be regarded as such.  They are aid for individuals, which ends up being paid to whatever schools those individuals choose to attend.  The wording of this provision is this, "The legislature, counties, cities, towns, school districts, and public corporations shall not make any direct or indirect appropriation or payment from any public fund or monies, or any grant of lands or other property for any sectarian purpose or to aid any church, school, academy, seminary, college, university, ..."  Again, the scholarships are not aid to schools, thus thus law does not apply, and the Montana supreme court was entirely out of line in its ruling.  Montana needs to replace its supreme court with justices of sufficient competence to tell the difference between aid to individuals and aid to organizations.  On top of that, even if this provision did prohibit public money from ever making its way to religious organizations, it would be unenforceable.  Does the state of Montana pay wages to religious employees that pay some portion of those wages as a tithe to their churches?  The way the Montana supreme court ruled on this issue, it would be illegal for the state to pay wages to religious employees, and note that this includes elected officials, and that would constitute a religious test for public office which is explicitly unconstitutional.  Thus, the Montana supreme court ruling actually does constitute an unconstitutional religious test for public office, though admittedly very indirectly.  The law itself, however, does not actually prohibit state scholarships as aid to students to be used as tuition for religious schools.  It is not the U.S. Supreme Court's job to interpret state laws though, so instead it was forced to consider a much deeper question, which revealed that Montana's law is just straight up unconstitutional, not just misinterpreted.

The four dissenting Justices had their own opinion of the case.  Justice Stephen Breyer wrote, "The majority’s approach and its conclusion in this case, I fear, risk the kind of entanglement and conflict that the (Constitution’s) religion clauses are intended to prevent."  Notice that Breyer admits that what is important here is the intent of the Constitution, not the "modernized" interpretation of activist Justices who want to change the law without the consent of the people.  Also note that Breyer is totally wrong.  Again, Breyer is clearly no Constitutional historian and thus has no clue at all what the actual intent of those clauses was.  He is pulling intent out of his [donkey], instead of consulting with historical records to determine what the actual intent was.  There is also a problem here of building a hedge around the law.  He has not said that this ruling is unconstitutional or otherwise wrong.  He says he fears it will lead to actual violations of the Constitution.  If you know much about Jewish history, you will know that they also had a problem with building hedges around the law that lead to rather extreme oppression in some cases.  If something illegal happens, we can deal with it when it happens.  We don't need to engage in blatant religious discrimination, to reduce the risk that other kinds of religious discrimination could happen.  Of course, none of that is really relevant to Breyer's argument, because the risks he is speaking of don't actually conflict with the Constitution's religious clauses, and he is merely echoing the concerns of other historically uneducated Justices who were and are in no way qualified to be interpreting the Constitution.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg expressed the opinion that the state supreme court's ruling and order to dismantle the scholarship program was sufficient resolution to the problem, because it eliminated the program that produced the legal ambiguity.  We've already discussed Ginsburg's incorrect definition of "interpret" designed to let the Supreme Court usurp legislative power with neither the consent nor the representation of the people.  She clearly does not understand he job, and this highlights that again.  The job of the Supreme Court is the interpret the law, not to give opinions on how states try to resolve their legal problems.  This is about the Constitution and a specific state law.  The state supreme court ruled that the state law was Constitutional, and it ruled that a particular interpretation of the law was valid.  The consequent order to dismantle the scholarship program was completely irrelevant to the case, and Ginsburg was wasting the Court's time bringing it up.  The conservative Justices and some of the other liberal Justices understood this clearly enough to continue the case, ultimately collectively rule mostly correctly, and write opinions that did not waste space on this completely irrelevant information.  (Justice Elena Kagan joined Ginsburg's worthless position.)

Justice Roberts also wrote, "Any establishment clause objection to the scholarship program here is particularly unavailing because the government support makes its way to religious schools only as a result of Montanans independently choosing to spend their scholarships at such schools."  Aside from the fact that the establishment clause would only apply if the law was attempting to establish a state religion, Roberts was perfectly correct here.  As I have said before, the scholarships were given to students, not to religious organizations.  The choice of the student to spend the money on education from a religious school is no different from a government employee choosing to donate a portion of wages to his or her church.  If the Montana supreme court ruling was allowed to stand, that would justify religious testing as a condition of holding public office, to prevent government paid wages of elected officials from being donated to their churches as tithes or other donations.  Breyer was concerned that this ruling would make it easier for states to violate a false interpretation of the establishment clause.  However any ruling upholding the ruling would have straight up made it illegal for religious people to hold public office in Montana (and many other states with similar laws), because paying them wages would likely end up supporting religious organizations.

A number of advocacy groups were unhappy with the ruling on the grounds that the ruling was a violation of longstanding funding rules.  It's nice to see that the current Supreme Court is more interested in upholding the Constitution and protecting Constitutional rights than adhering to "longstanding funding rules" that were clearly unconstitutional.  The only failure here is the travesty that unconstitutional rules were upheld for long enough to called "longstanding".

Maggie Siddiqi, the director of the ironically named Center for American Progress said, "Today’s ruling erodes the constitutional separation of church and state that has long prevented government from funding the exercise of religion. This is a clear violation of the religious freedom of all taxpayers, who may now be compelled to support religious schools with traditions they do not follow."  The irony in the name, is of course, the word "progress", when the director of the organization is clearly more interested in regression of the progress in religious freedom that is one of the cornerstones of the U.S..  That aside, this quote is also proof that Siddiqi, someone who professes to be a protector of Constitutional rights, is just as uneducated in Constitutional history as the entire Supreme Court.  No where in the Constitution is separation of church as state mentioned.  The establishment clause forbids the government from establishing a state religion, not from providing scholarships to individuals who want to attend religious schools.  There is no separation of church and state issue, and there is no establishment issue here.  What there is, is egregious religious discrimination, justified by gross misinterpretations of the Constitution, due to lack of education.  This is not a violation of religious freedom for taxpayers, anymore than spending government money on providing abortions and birth control to women is a violation of religious freedom for taxpayers who are opposed to those things.  (Note that the Center for American Progress advocates in favor of Medcaid and other U.S. healthcare programs using taxpayer money to pay for elective abortions, despite the fact that a significant number of Americans are religiously opposed to most elective abortions.)

Holly Hollman, general counsel for the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, pointed out that religious organizations often benefit from being treated differently, and she suggests that this opens the doors to government having greater influence in employment decisions within religious organizations.  Honestly, this sounds to me more like a threat than a legitimate concern.  It sounds like a threat to push for fewer accommodations and exemptions for religious organizations.  This, of course, would be a massive violation of the establishment clause.  Recall one of the hallmarks of establishments of religions is state influence in hiring and firing decisions.

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops issued this statement, "This decision means that religious persons and organizations can, like everyone else, participate in government programs that are open to all. This is good news, not only for people of faith, but for our country, by ensuring the rights of faith-based organizations’ freedom to serve, the court is also promoting the common good."  And interesting historical fact is that most Islamic countries were not forced on pain of death to accept Islam.  The Islamic jihads/violent expansion that lead to the ubiquity of Islam in the Middle East, Western Asia, and parts of Northern Africa weren't blood baths of infidels who wouldn't convert.  They were merely wars for territory and control.  The conversion of the indigenous populations occurred over many generations.  The method used to encourage conversion was simple, non-violent government discrimination against all undesirable religions.  Infidels (non-Muslims) had fewer rights and were not allowed to hold government office (textbook establishment of religion).  That's it.  Infidels were denied access to certain kinds of government aid and services.  In some countries, they were denied access to education.  In some, businesses owned by infidels were denied access to government contracts and were limited in who they were allowed to serve.  They basically made it inconvenient to not be Muslim.  Within less than a generation, more than half of the populations in most of these countries had converted to Islam, not because they actually believed, but because non-Muslims were second class citizens, without access to a lot of protections and benefits that all Muslims enjoyed.  Within three generations, very few non-Muslims remained.  Now days, very few Zoroastrians (the original dominant religion in many modern Islamic countries captured during the early violent expansion) remain, though as religious freedom is slowly increasing, Zoroastrianism is seeing a revival.  Anyhow, the point is, mild religious discrimination of the sort perpetrated by Montana can have a huge impact on religion.  This strategy has been used in the past, most notably by Islam but also by Catholicism in parts of South America, to change or establish a dominant religion in a region, but it can also be used to discourage religion and establish a form of secularism as the dominant religion, which is exactly how it was being used by Montana's government and other governments in the U.S., in the (ironic) name of religious freedom.

Obviously many religious organizations are quite pleased with this ruling, as it prohibits state and Federal governments from discriminating against religious individuals on grounds that treating them the same as others might benefit religious organizations.  Sadly, even they don't understand the real Constitutional reason Montana's behavior was illegal, nor do they understand that upholding such laws would technically require states to discriminate even more against religious people, potentially even to the point of denying people who would spend government wages on donations to religious organizations any form of government employment to the point of requiring religious tests even for elected officials.  This was actually a much more significant case than perhaps anyone realizes, as precedent from this case could have ended up supporting far more oppressive religious discrimination.