Please don't shoot me

It is important to remember that government interference always means either violent action or the threat of such action. Taxes are paid because the taxpayers are afraid of offering resistance to the tax gatherers. They know that any disobedience or resistance is hopeless. As long as this is the state of affairs, the government is able to collect the money that it wants to spend. Government is in the last resort the employer of armed men, of policemen, gendarmes, soldiers, prison guards, and hangmen. The essential feature of government is the enforcement of its decrees by beating, killing, and imprisoning. Those who are asking for more government are asking ultimately for more compulsion and less freedom. -- Ludwig von Mises

DEMOCRACY

democracy equals inflation

The Front

Still no vacancies so far this year. Everyone is paying rent. No problem collecting rent.
I do see a lot of "for rent" signs up around the neighborhood. Like the wolf is roaming nearby.
So I remain vigilant.

One tenant has told me she will be moving in August or September. Getting married!
September is a good time to find tenants as college students are coming back into town.

Still seems to me like we all can live well on much less. Our per capita consumption is much greater than it was in the past. Why do people get so upset when they need to cut back?

Every Day Is Mother's Day

Whatever is our source is our mother.
We are reborn in every instant.
We are eternally reborn.


5/10/09
Dear Laura,

This day has a lot of context
Regarding labor and regarding rest

Things you have done for me
Things that we both can see

Surrounding us here in our little nest

Today is a day for family
We are busy doing our duty
Driving up and down
With smiles not frowns

Looking at the source of all that is
We call it mother
We call it father
What it really is we cannot say

Back to the church we will meet
With all the loved ones who make us complete

You will bring flowers and hope and faith
I will bring our children the buds of our youth

What is it all about?
We see each other
We touch each other
We share food with each other
We tell our stories to each other

So what if the sun sets?
We know it also rises

And we know our wounds will finally heal
And we know that love is really real
And we know that the world is truly vast
And we know this supper will not be the last

All my love,
Bix
　
　
　
　
　
　

GROSS NATIONAL HAPPINESS

Under a new Constitution, government programs must be judged by the happiness they produce, not by the economic benefits.
Seth Mydans/International Herald Tribune

By SETH MYDANS
Published: May 6, 2009
THIMPHU, Bhutan - If the rest of the world cannot get it right in these unhappy times, this tiny Buddhist kingdom high in the Himalayan mountains says it is working on an answer.



Prayer flags above a monastery in the kingdom of 700,000.

The New York Times

"Greed, insatiable human greed," said Prime Minister Jigme Thinley of Bhutan, describing what he sees as the cause of today's economic catastrophe in the world beyond the snow-topped mountains. "What we need is change," he said in the whitewashed fortress where he works. "We need to think gross national happiness."
The notion of gross national happiness was the inspiration of the former king, Jigme Singye Wangchuck, in the 1970s as an alternative to the gross national product. Now, the Bhutanese are refining the country's guiding philosophy into what they see as a new political science, and it has ripened into government policy just when the world may need it, said Kinley Dorji, secretary of information and communications.
"You see what a complete dedication to economic development ends up in," he said, referring to the global economic crisis. "Industrialized societies have decided now that G.N.P. is a broken promise."
Under a new Constitution adopted last year, government programs - from agriculture to transportation to foreign trade - must be judged not by the economic benefits they may offer but by the happiness they produce.
The goal is not happiness itself, the prime minister explained, a concept that each person must define for himself. Rather, the government aims to create the conditions for what he called, in an updated version of the American Declaration of Independence, "the pursuit of gross national happiness."
The Bhutanese have started with an experiment within an experiment, accepting the resignation of the popular king as an absolute monarch and holding the country's first democratic election a year ago.
The change is part of attaining gross national happiness, Mr. Dorji said. "They resonate well, democracy and G.N.H. Both place responsibility on the individual. Happiness is an individual pursuit and democracy is the empowerment of the individual."
It was a rare case of a monarch's unilaterally stepping back from power, and an even rarer case of his doing so against the wishes of his subjects. He gave the throne to his son, Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck, who was crowned in November in the new role of constitutional monarch without executive power.
Bhutan is, perhaps, an easy place to nimbly rewrite economic rules - a country with one airport and two commercial planes, where the east can only be reached from the west after four days' travel on mountain roads.
No more than 700,000 people live in the kingdom, squeezed between the world's two most populous nations, India and China, and its task now is to control and manage the inevitable changes to its way of life. It is a country where cigarettes are banned and television was introduced just 10 years ago, where traditional clothing and architecture are enforced by law and where the capital city has no stoplight and just one traffic officer on duty.
If the world is to take gross national happiness seriously, the Bhutanese concede, they must work out a scheme of definitions and standards that can be quantified and measured by the big players of the world's economy.
"Once Bhutan said, 'O.K., here we are with G.N.H.,' the developed world and the World Bank and the I.M.F. and so on asked, 'How do you measure it?' " Mr. Dorji said, characterizing the reactions of the world's big economic players. So the Bhutanese produced an intricate model of well-being that features the four pillars, the nine domains and the 72 indicators of happiness.
Specifically, the government has determined that the four pillars of a happy society involve the economy, culture, the environment and good governance. It breaks these into nine domains: psychological well-being, ecology, health, education, culture, living standards, time use, community vitality and good governance, each with its own weighted and unweighted G.N.H. index.
All of this is to be analyzed using the 72 indicators. Under the domain of psychological well-being, for example, indicators include the frequencies of prayer and meditation and of feelings of selfishness, jealousy, calm, compassion, generosity and frustration as well as suicidal thoughts.
"We are even breaking down the time of day: how much time a person spends with family, at work and so on," Mr. Dorji said.
Mathematical formulas have even been devised to reduce happiness to its tiniest component parts. The G.N.H. index for psychological well-being, for example, includes the following: "One sum of squared distances from cutoffs for four psychological well-being indicators. Here, instead of average the sum of squared distances from cutoffs is calculated because the weights add up to 1 in each dimension."
This is followed by a set of equations:
= 1-(.25+.03125+.000625+0)
= 1-.281875
= .718
Every two years, these indicators are to be reassessed through a nationwide questionnaire, said Karma Tshiteem, secretary of the Gross National Happiness Commission, as he sat in his office at the end of a hard day of work that he said made him happy.
Gross national happiness has a broader application for Bhutan as it races to preserve its identity and culture from the encroachments of the outside world.
"How does a small country like Bhutan handle globalization?" Mr. Dorji asked. "We will survive by being distinct, by being different."
Bhutan is pitting its four pillars, nine domains and 72 indicators against the 48 channels of Hollywood and Bollywood that have invaded since television was permitted a decade ago.
"Before June 1999 if you asked any young person who is your hero, the inevitable response was, 'The king,' " Mr. Dorji said. "Immediately after that it was David Beckham, and now it's 50 Cent, the rap artist. Parents are helpless."
So if G.N.H. may hold the secret of happiness for people suffering from the collapse of financial institutions abroad, it offers something more urgent here in this pristine culture.
"Bhutan's story today is, in one word, survival," Mr. Dorji said. "Gross national happiness is survival; how to counter a threat to survival."

Stranger than fiction

"Bernard Madoff's longtime secretary says she believes the disgraced financier is not cooperating with authorities to protect others.
CNBC.com
Bernie Madoff
Eleanor Squillari, Madoff's secretary of more than 20 years, says in an article she co-wrote for Vanity Fair that she helped the FBI gather evidence against him. "

So the crook named Madoff had a secretary named Squillari who is now writing articles about Madoff telling of his misdeeds.