Happy 250th USA

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

— Thomas Jefferson, Declaration of Independence (1776)

On this Independence Day, that bold promise still echoes as the beating heart of what makes America exceptional: a nation founded on timeless ideals: freedom, self-government, and the dignity of every individual. 

God bless the United States of America. 

A Note from Ayaan Hirsi Ali

"I became an American not by birth or by right, but by choice. Like many immigrants, I came to this country from a world in which I’d had no right to speak freely; no right to choose whom I would marry, or where or how I would live; no hope for the kind of life and career with which I am blessed today. I came from a culture in which my station was assigned at birth, by virtue of my sex, and could never be appealed. Looking back today, I can hardly find words to express how grateful I am, every day, to call this country my own."

Largest American flag in the world with mural of whales.

Mural and flag by Wyland, the Marine Michelangelo

All photos courtesy Gary Firstenberg, America's Photographer

Related Link

Spotlight on Wyland, the Marine Michaelangelo

Finding Balance with Regards to Crime

Last week, while reading a chapter from economist and social thinker Thomas Sowell's Knowledge and Decisions, this statement jumped off the page: “While the concept of an ‘optimal’ quantity of crime may be uncomfortable, it is also clear that no one is prepared to devote half the Gross National Product to stamping out every residual trace of gambling.”

It is a bracing statement. Steven Spielberg's Minority Report immediately came to mind. In the film crime is nearly eliminated through pre-crime technology that arrests individuals before they act. The result is remarkable safety—but at the cost of due process and moral agency. The film underscores this same tension Sowell sites: in trying to eradicate crime completely, a society may sacrifice the very freedom it seeks to protect.

No one likes the idea that some level of crime may be inevitable. We instinctively want safety to be absolute. Yet Sowell’s point, and Spielberg's, is not that crime is acceptable, but that trade-offs are unavoidable.

Every society must balance liberty, cost, and security. Eliminating every infraction would require a surveillance state, vast expenditures, and a level of intrusion most citizens would reject. Cameras on every corner, or as in Orwell's 1984, every home. Police in every transaction. Bureaucracy in every exchange. The cure would likely become more oppressive than the disease.

The American experiment has always wrestled with this tension. We prize freedom—freedom of movement, enterprise, speech, and association. But freedom carries risk. A society that leaves room for initiative also leaves room for misconduct. The question is not whether crime can be reduced; it can and should be. The question is how far we are willing to go, and at what cost to other goods and values we cherish.

There's also a moral dimension. A mature society must distinguish between different kinds of wrongdoing. Violent crime threatens life and order and demands serious response. Other offenses—regulatory violations, minor vice crimes, youthful mistakes—raise different considerations. Treating all infractions as equally intolerable can produce overcriminalization, overcrowded prisons, and strained public budgets without meaningfully improving safety.

Finding balance requires clarity about priorities. Government’s primary duty is protection, but protection must be proportionate. Resources are finite. Tax dollars spent on marginal enforcement are dollars not spent on schools, infrastructure, or public health. Excessive time spent policing low-level infractions may be time not spent addressing serious threats.

Another out of balance feature is that because of efforts to hold police under the spotlight lest they misbehave, they now spend four hours out of a twelve-hour shift filling out paperwork. This distrust of police ties up more of an officer's time so that they have less time for responding to real crime. (EdNote: These numbers from our Duluth police department may vary from other police districts.)

George Orwell warned, “In a society in which there is no law, and no police, and no one willing to enforce order, there is no freedom.” Freedom is not the absence of authority; it is the presence of reliable order. Businesses large and small depend on contracts being enforced, property being protected, and disputes being settled peacefully. When theft, vandalism, and intimidation go unchecked, commerce shrinks and ordinary people retreat. When businesses close it also reduces the number of jobs available. And as statistics show, fewer jobs has a direct correlation to higher crime.

Movements to “defund the police,” whatever their intentions, risk weakening the very conditions that allow neighborhoods and businesses to flourish. Police accountability matters, but dismantling enforcement erodes trust and investment. Law and order are not enemies of liberty—they are its scaffolding.

In the end, the search for balance reflects a deeper truth: human beings are imperfect, and any free society must manage that imperfection without surrendering the very freedoms it seeks to defend. No question that finding balance is an ongoing challenge, but wisdom isn't found in extremes. Finding the "Golden Mean" is an imperative.

What Is America?

What do you see when you look at these two photos?

Photo: Gary Firstenberg

Photo: Steve Harvey on Unsplash

This is from our pledge:

"Liberty and Justice for All"

*

May your Fourth be a time 

of reflection, family and celebration.

The Ongoing Conflict Between Security and Individual Liberty: Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan

I bought this book at a garage sale
for 10 cents over 40 years ago
as a way to bone up on the 
classics of Western thought.

In his book The Church at the End of the 20th Century, Dr. Francis Schaeffer made an observation that stuck with me. He wrote that people will gladly give up freedoms in order to be "safe." 

The statement has proven to be remarkably prescient. Individual liberties are being eroded and even freedom of speech is being shackled. Will freedom of thought be next?

In 1651 the philosopher Thomas Hobbes wrote an influential book dealing with this topic. His comprehensive theory of social and political organization was titled Leviathan and has been considered one of the most important works of political philosophy in the English language.

Hobbes argued that the natural state of humanity is a state of war, where individuals are in constant competition with each other for resources and power. This state of nature is characterized by a "war of all against all," where life is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."

To escape this state of nature, Hobbes argued that individuals must come together to form a social contract, surrendering some of their natural rights in exchange for protection and security provided by the state. In other words, we are encouraged to accept this trade off: give up your freedom to do whatever you want want in exchange for the security provided by the state.

Nowadays we use Wikipedia and Google to 
fill in some of the gaps in our learning.

In Hobbes' view, the state should have absolute power to maintain order and prevent conflict. This absolute power is necessary to ensure that individuals do not revert to their natural state of war. Hobbes calls this absolute power the "sovereign." That is, we should have one supreme ruler and the people should have no right to rebel against it.

The sovereign's responsibilities include the power to make and enforce laws, judge disputes, and make war and peace. Hobbes also argued that the sovereign's power should be based on the consent of the governed. That is, the people should be able to choose their sovereign.

Hobbes also discusses the relationship between the sovereign and the individual. When it comes to individual responsibility, he argued that the individual has a duty to obey the sovereign, even if the sovereign's commands are contrary to the individual's interests. The individual should only disobey the sovereign if it is a matter of self-preservation.

In Leviathan, security and stability have priority over individual liberty. The state should have absolute power to maintain order and prevent conflict, and that individuals should surrender some of their natural rights in exchange for this security.

It seems that the history of our country has been a conflict between these two forces: individual liberty vs. the (absolute) power of the state. Writers like John Steinbeck and people like Chief Justice Earl Warren focused on protecting the interests of the underrepresented and the basic freedoms our nation was purportedly founded on.

Orwell's 1984 and Huxley's Brave New World each address this in different ways. The great risk is that by embracing security as a supreme value, we give up our humanity.

Your thoughts?

Thought Food: Ludwig von Mises

"Contemplation" -- ink on paper

According to the Brittanica, Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973) was an Austrian-American libertarian economist known for his contribution to liberalism in economic theory and his belief in the power of the consumer.  (EdNote: Liberalism had a very different meaning 100 years ago than it does today,) 

He is as relevant today as when he penned his ideas 50 to 100 years in the past. 

“He who is unfit to serve his fellow citizens wants to rule them.”
― Ludwig von Mises, Bureaucracy 

“Every socialist is a disguised dictator.”
― Ludwig von Mises

“Socialism is an alternative to capitalism as potassium cyanide is an alternative to water.”
― Ludwig von Mises, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics

“The worship of the state is the worship of force. There is no more dangerous menace to civilization than a government of incompetent, corrupt, or vile men. The worst evils which mankind ever had to endure were inflicted by bad governments. The state can be and has often been in the course of history the main source of mischief and disaster.”
― Ludwig von Mises

“It is vain to fight totalitarianism by adopting totalitarian methods. Freedom can only be won by men unconditionally committed to the principles of freedom. The first requisite for a better social order is the return to unrestricted freedom of thought and speech.”
― Ludwig Von Mises, Omnipotent Government  

“Every step which leads from capitalism toward planning is necessarily a step nearer to absolutism and dictatorship.”
― Ludwig von Mises, Omnipotent Government   

“The market system is the basis of our civilization. Its only alternative is the Führer principle.”
― Ludwig von Mises

“Doctrines which can stand the trial of logic and reason can do without persecuting skeptics.”
― Ludwig von Mises, Omnipotent Government 

“The issue is always the same: the government or the market. There is no third solution.”
― Ludwig von Mises, Planned Chaos  

“If one rejects laissez faire on account of mans fallibility and moral weakness, one must for the same reason also reject every kind of government action.”
― Ludwig von Mises, Planning for Freedom, and Sixteen Other Essays and Addresses

“The state is a human institution, not a superhuman being. He who says “state” means coercion and compulsion. He who says: There should be a law concerning this matter, means: The armed men of the government should force people to do what they do not want to do, or not to do what they like. He who says: This law should be better enforced, means: The police should force people to obey this law. He who says: The state is God, deifies arms and prisons. The worship of the state is the worship of force.”
― Ludwig von Mises, Omnipotent Government 

Veteran Recalls Death “By Friendly Fire”

On one level Pat Tillman was just another soldier. To quote my father-in-law who served in World War II, “The short lives of those killed were hardly a flicker here on earth. Though most of their names will never appear in history books, they were all heroes. Every battle left heroes, the survivors and the dead. I can only have nothing but sad respect for the men who had so few joys and so many miseries, and who gave their lives so others could go on living.”

For me, Tillman was more than just another soldier because he was more than just another person even before he entered the war. What I mean is that Tillman demonstrated his values by his choices. During his football career he turned down a 9 million dollar contract with the St. Louis Rams to play at one-third this price for the Arizona Cardinals. Later, Tillman gave up the money altogether to enlist in the armed forces to participate in Operation Iraqi Freedom. He was later sent to Afghanistan.

I remember in April 2004 when the news carried the story of his untimely death while in the service of his country. Tragically, two months later, another Pat Tillman story crossed the newswire. “FormerNFL player¹s death caused by ‘friendly fire'.” Friendly fire is a euphemism for “Oh no, we shot our own man.”

Mistakes happen in life, but when I overtighten a lug nut and it breaks, it is only a hassle. No one has been killed by this foolishness. Mistakes like the death of Pat Tillman are on another scale. Sometimes it takes a lifetime to process the confusion and grief. I know this because my father-in-law Bud Wagner has recently been telling a few stories that did not make the pages of his published war memoir, And There Shall Be Wars.

Today as we celebrate our own Independence as a nation, I wanted to share one of these untold stories which reveal the true costs of our freedom.

There are many, many things not written down in the book as they actually happened. One that comes to mind right away is on page 359 when four American bombers came over a bunch of us. I was out of range but some of the 125 F.A. weren't, and four were killed. Ken Kramer was one of those killed. Read it again. American bombers dropped four 500 lb. bombs to lose weight and get back to England. The Second Corps came out with the report that unidentified bombers dropped bombs.

Kramer was a friend of mine starting in Ireland. Truth is truth, as well as error is error, war or not. Articles like this one were ones that would grip me and others. You could compare it with a person not familiar with the Bible. After he read it you could say, "Well, what did it say?" He would probably say some little thing about it and would have to say, "Well read it again." Probably omitting the statement that those bombers were unidentified. We knew which were enemies and which were friendly bombers. Well, so did the corps.

Many accidents occur because of carelessness. When they permanently take away something that might have been, how does one process this?

While talking with Bud the incident came up yet again. It is also powerfully revealing of why returning soldiers are often so mute about their experiences. Heart breaking. They want to share, but others who were not there can be brutally insensitive or dismissive, or worse.

Once more let’s turn to page 359. Read it again and then try to imagine just what happened. I can't recall much of the details anymore but have to pounce on the fake statements that those bombers were unidentified. First of all by the time they dropped the bombs many on the ground, including myself, knew they were American. Then when they got back to their base they would have known about where they were dropped. This of course was far from the Air Force policy and what about Ken, my old friend who was on radio duty who had to be the one who was killed. The confusion is unbelievable in a situation like this. Medics were close by and all help was used.

The other statement that came to me years later and long after my diary was written was from the original 2nd Corps account of Feb. 7, 1944. I quote, “unidentified aircraft dropped three bombs in the division sector, one of which destroyed the radio relay station slightly infuriating Sgt. Paul Staken, Pvt. Robert Staples and Corporal Bernard Reno. Sgt Kenneth Kramer who was operating the radio received more serious (wounds) and died the next day.” The rest of us knew better. It was a cause of one of the bombers crews missing the target and wanted to get back faster, probably to England or south Italy, and get rid of the bombs. What a morale builder. Try telling this to some civilians fifty or sixty years later and the response is sickening.

I can't go on without telling of the night I came home after four and a half years. Remember I had just got home that day...all my uncles and some others were there to welcome (me) and of course wanted to know all about the war. The youngest uncle asked me afterwards about the Germans killing unnecessarily and I told him a little and his response was "they all do that in war." I kept my mouth shut but much later was able to tell him to try and prove to me where any American soldiers lined Italians up alongside a building and shot them down... men, women and children. Then they covered them up with hay; others weren't always (covered). He would just shrug his shoulders and we soon found out when someone wanted to talk about the war you would get further to just keep your mouth shut. They would mostly think that it was probably true for some but not you as you came back and saw a lot of the country.

And so there was nothing more about the unidentified bomber except what we already knew and my old friend Ken had to do without the years that most of us survived.

As we remember the Fourth, let's make a special spot in our hearts for our veterans.