Why Administraive Law Judges Decide the Way They Do

On Tuesday, May 30, the Wall Street Journal published an editorial that criticized administrative law judges of the Social Security Administration for finding claimants disabled in 70% of cases in which the claimant appealed the initial, and most often also a reconsidered, determination that he or she is not disabled.  On the very next day, the Journal published an editorial criticizing the whole idea of having administrative law judges, the agencies most affected by their decisions are the same agencies that the judges are dependent on for their jobs and paychecks.  As the Journal points out, the administrative law judges are chosen by unelected bureaucrats and therefore have at least subtle pressure to make decisions favorable to the bureaucracy.   A vast majority of administrative law judges are employed by the Social Security Administration, which has more administrative law judges than the entire federal court system has judges.  At first glance, that would seem to mean that a majority of administrative law judges actually mostly make decisions that are adverse to the agency that employs them.

Although the fact that the administrative law judges of the Social Security Administration find such a high percentage of claimants to be disabled appears to contradict the notion that administrative law judges do not bite the hand that feeds them, it is not a contradiction at all, and can be explained by distinguishing between program costs and administrative costs.  Regarding disability benefits, program costs are the amount of the disability payments made.  Administrative costs are what it costs the agency to administer the program.  In theory, the distinction should make no difference to administrative law judges of the Social Security Administration.  An administrative law judge is nearly impossible to fire and gets the same pay regardless of what percentage of claimants he or she finds to be disabled and regardless of how many or few decisions he or she makes.  In practice, it makes a lot of difference.

When an administrative law judge is first employed by the Social Security Administration, the judge has almost no control over the hearing office to which he or she is assigned.  From their point of view, location is a very important part of working conditions.  Some locations are more desirable than others.  Before I retired from the Social Security Administration, I worked as an attorney in a few of its hearing offices.  Once, when one of my colleagues had applied to become an administrative law judge, I jokingly asked him that when he became an administrative law judge to send me a picture postcard from Fargo, North Dakota.  As I knew he would, he did become an administrative law judge, but he did not go to Fargo.  He went to Paducah, Kentucky.  I don’t mean to insult either city, but both rank low on the list of cities that prospective administrative law judges would consider to be prime locations.  The way for an administrative law judge to get assigned to a preferred location is to please the management of the Social Security Administration, and the way to please management of the Social Security Administration is to generate as many decisions per month as possible and to keep the average age of cases pending to a minimum.  In other words, their employment with the Social Security Administration tends to be more pleasant when they keep administrative costs under control.  When they do that, they get to work at the locations that they prefer and to get praised.  If they generate few decisions and let the cases that were assigned to them get old, they get social pressure.  Every month, a report is generated and circulated among the hearing offices of the Social Security Administration that ranks judges by number of decisions issued and average age of cases pending.  Ranking high on the list is a more pleasant experience than ranking low.

Being productive and keeping the average time down that claimants must wait for decisions is a good thing, but the most obvious and tempting way to issue many decisions and to keep them from getting too old is to find disability claimants to be disabled, whether they are truly disabled or not.  Issuing a favorable decision is relatively easy and tends to make everyone directly involved with the case happy.  Often, a favorable decision can be made without even conducting a hearing.  Issuing a decision that is unfavorable or partially favorable (that although the claimant is disabled, he or she was not disabled for the entire period alleged) tends to be much more time consuming and to involve considerably more administrative expense.  A hearing must be scheduled.  Often a medical expert and/or a vocational expert (each of which is a contractor who gets paid by the number of hearings attended) must be hired as a witness.  An unfavorable or partially favorable decision is much longer and more complex than a favorable decision because it must go into greater detail explaining the law and analyzing the evidence.  The decision may be appealed and the appeals decision may remand the case back to an administrative law judge to start the process again.  No court ever criticizes the Social Security Administration for erroneously finding a claimant disabled.  The courts don’t even see those cases.  If a court criticizes the decision of an administrative law judge, it is either for not finding a claimant disabled whom the court perceives as being disabled or for not having enough evidence to support the decision.

Many claimants who have been waiting a long time for a hearing or a decision, contact their members of Congress for help in expediting their case.  Typically, the thing the member of Congress wants is for the case to be processed as soon as possible, preferably in a way that make the constituent happy.  Since Congress determines how much money to appropriate to the Social Security Administration each year, the agency is very motivated to keep members of Congress happy, which usually involves trying to satisfy the wants and needs of the claimants who ask the members of Congress for help.  When Congress does appropriate money to the Social Security Administration each year, the money it appropriates is all for administrative expenses, and the Social Security Administration cannot spend more money than was appropriated.  However, the Social Security Administration has no effective incentive to keep program costs under control.  Since there is considerable pressure to keep cases reduce the backlog and keep processing time down and very little pressure to avoid finding persons disabled who are not really disabled, the fact that administrative law judges of the Social Security Administration issue decisions favorable to the claimant 70% of the time, on average, should not be surprising.

I am well aware that, even with all the incentive to find people disabled, the Social Security Administration denies benefits to many people who are genuinely disabled and makes many of those whom it eventually finds entitled to benefits wait an obscene amount of time for a final decision, but until something is done to limit the program costs, the combination of disability benefits and other entitlements and the rising costs of interest on the national debt threaten to consume the entire federal budget long before the end of the century.

If the Truth Offends ...

If what I am about to say offends you, get used to it and be prepared to be offended some more.  The University of Wisconsin and the University of California, and probably several other colleges and universities that I haven’t found out about yet, have begun requesting faculty to stop inadvertently perpetrating microaggressions.  Microaggressions are statements that may seem to be inoffensive, but that some people may find to be offensive.  Examples of things that professors are discouraged from saying because someone may be offended include the following:  “America is a melting pot.”  “America is a land of opportunity.”  “The most qualified person should get the job.”  “Everyone can succeed in our society can succeed if they work hard enough.”

I teach college classes, but I have not (not yet, anyway) been encouraged to avoid such inadvertent microaggressions.  To avoid being accused of inadvertent microaggressions, I would like to say the following as consciously and aggressively as I can manage:

America is a melting pot; you don’t have to abandon  you ethnic heritage, but you are free to if you want to, and making some adaptations to fit better into the dominant culture you find yourself if will make life more comfortable.  America is a land of opportunity; I have seen too many cases of successful people who came from backgrounds such that no one would have predicted success to believe otherwise.  The most qualified person should get the job.  Hard work may not guarantee success, but working hard and smart markedly improves your chances.  The function of educators is to help students become stronger and more self-sufficient, not to become weaker, more dependent, and whinier.  The truth sometimes hurts.  If the truth offends you, then the fact that you are offended by the truth is your problem; don’t make it someone else’s problem.  Life is sometimes unfair.  Do what you can to make it fair.  Otherwise, get over it and stop making life unfair for others.

Help Create America 2.0

I need some help. I have had an idea for a book bouncing around in my head for a long time. Although I am fairly good at writing shorter pieces of work, I am not, as my wife could verify, a very organized person. Therefore, I've come to realize that, although it may be possible for me to write the type of book I want to write on my own without any help, doing on my own be a very long and inefficient process. However, there are couple of things that have happen that have inspired ideas to make this project work. One of these things was a textbook for a class that I had a few years ago in a course about computer programming in the Java language. The textbook was the second edition of Thinking in Java by Bruce Eckel. What inspired me about this book was not so much the subject matter but the fact that Mr. Eckel published his Book on the Internet at the same time or before he published it in print. Furthermore, he allowed anyone free access to the book without charge and yet he profited from sales of the printed version of the book.  Publishing on the Internet first allowed him to use the various comments and criticisms of the visitors to his website to improve the quality of his book. Another thing that is inspired me is the fact that there are tools on the Internet to ease the process of collaboration. One of these tools is Google Docs. A document in Google Docs format can be set up so that persons who have a link to it can make comments or edit it. That is where some of you who read this, come in. Following are the links to the beginnings of my writing of the book, an outline, and the Google Drive folder that contains them.   If you click on the link for the folder, you can view the documents in it.  To add comments to either the Introduction or the outline, you need to click on the link for each document.

Folder

Outline

Introduction

The Outline document also links to the Introduction.  As the work progresses, the headings in the outline will be links to documents that will represent parts of the book.

What I want to do is first make the case that the United States America is on an unsustainable path that is a result of its straying from the principles upon which was founded and accumulating more debt than it will ever be to repay, because of promises the various politicians have made that over the long run cannot be kept. I want to come up with some ideas for slowing down or preventing this destruction, or for re-creating a new United States of America based on nearly the same set of principles on which the current United States of America is founded. In other words, what I have in mind is sort of an America 2.0. I am therefore asking whoever reads this to read my paper and look at my outline and what I have written so far and to give me constructive criticism. Add comments and make suggestions. When this project becomes fit to publish I tend to publish it at least as an e-book and perhaps a printed book as well.  My wife suggested asking other people to write chapters in the book, which is something I am considering, especially considering that one of the points that I want to make is that all viewpoints should be considered and respected.  If anyone wants to be a collaborator, either to add content or to edit, contact me.  Comments about what content should or should not be included and suggestions about how to improve organization are also welcome.

The Creative Commons license at the bottom of each document is to allow anyone to share copies of the documents as long as the license at the bottom is included as part of the copy.  In other words, share them with whomever you want as long as I am recognized as the original author and I reserve the right to be the only person to make commercial use of them.  This may seem trivial now, but the importance of it will grow as the work grows.

Rethinking "Rethinkin' Lincoln"

In a previous blog post, “Rethinkin; Lincoln,” (http://make-it-so.blogspot.com/2011/01/rethinkin-lincoln.html)

in January 2011, I pretty much trashed Abraham Lincoln and said because he put such a high value on preserving the Union that he gave it a higher priority than even ending slavery.  I had indicated that slavery was destined to end eventually anyway and that since there was nothing in the Constitution to prevent a state from seceding from the Union, President Lincoln should have let the eleven southern states go that had seceded from the Union because it would have prevented the Civil War, a war that has cost more American deaths than all the other wars in history combined.  Since I published that blog post, I have come to the conclusion that the Constitution, although it does not state so as clearly as I would have liked, does forbid states from seceding, and that President Lincoln’s oath to support and defend the Constitution required him to do what he could to bring the rebellious states back into the Union.  There is still that inconvenient fact that the Civil War cost over 600,000 lives and caused unimaginable suffering.  If Lincoln had known that the war would last so long and cause so much death and suffering, he might have decided differently.  However, at the beginning of the war, nearly everyone on both sides thought that the war would be relatively short and hardly anyone could have predicted the suffering it would cause.  I was wrong to second-guess his decision to bring the Confederate states back into the Union by force.

In his book, America’s Constitution, Akhil Reed Amar, a law professor at Yale University, makes a convincing case that the framers of the Constitution intended the federal government that they were creating to be an indivisible nation which no state had a right to secede from once the state became a part of the nation.  The Constitution begins with the words “We the People” rather than “We the states” or “We the delegates from the states” to indicate that the relationship between the states was to change from a confederation of independent, sovereign states to a federal republic in which each state sacrifices a portion of its sovereignty and its right to break free from the union of states in exchange for the benefits of being in the union.   At the other end of the Constitution, it states that it will become effective after being approved by conventions in the states rather than by state legislatures.  In other words, it was to be approved by the people, or at least by persons elected by the people for the sole purpose of deciding whether the Constitution should be ratified.  In other words, the new federal government under the Constitution was not intended to be a compact among the states as the Congress under the Articles of Confederation had been.  During the period between when the Constitution was originally proposed and the time when all thirteen of the original states ratified it, both the Federalists who argued on behalf of ratification and the Anti-Federalists who argued against it stated in their arguments that they understood that once a state became a part of the form of government that the Constitution was creating there was no turning back.  In fact, that was one of the main points in the argument of each side.  They agreed that the union was to be indivisible; what they disagreed on was what that indivisibility implied.  The Federalists argued that it was a means of protecting the freedoms of Americans; the Anti-Federalists argued that it was a threat to those freedoms.  Eventually, the Federalists prevailed, but not before an implicit agreement was reached to add a Bill of Rights to the Constitution after it had been ratified to protect  the freedoms fo individual Americans from the threats implied by the creation of a more powerful national government.

Although he stated that he gave a higher priority to preserving the Union than he did to ending slavery, Abraham Lincoln was a strong opponent of slavery.  His Emancipation Proclamation freed, if not all the slaves in the United States, at least the slaves that he had authority to free in his capacity as Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces of the United States.  The Emancipation Proclamation freed the slaves in the states that were still in rebellion against the United States and not yet under control of the Union forces.  That excluded the slaves in the slaves states that had not left the Union, but the Constitution gave the President no authority to free those slaves.

By today’s standards, Abraham Lincoln would still be considered a racist.  He indicated that he believed that European Americans were generally superior to African Americans and that the races should remain separate and should not intermarry.  However, he did believe that all people, without exception, should have equal rights under the law and that no person had the right to enslave any other person.  We have learned from subsequent history that there is no significant difference between the races and that there should be no laws to enforce segregation of races.  Race is very much an artificial concept.  It may take a while, but we do learn from history, and have more history to learn from than Abraham Lincoln did.  Abraham Lincoln was not an angel and had his faults, but he was a remarkable and heroic human being and I owe an apology to his memory.

One Thing About Obamacare That Fiscal Conservatives Should Like

Since we fiscal conservatives believe that the less the government gets involved in the economy the better the economy will function, there is plenty about Obamacare to dislike.  However much we should like the rest of it to go away, there is one effect of Obamacare that we should rejoice in.  That is the beginning of the end of government encouragement of employer-based health insurance.  I have no disagreement with the idea of an employer voluntarily offering health insurance to its employees.  However, there is something wrong when most Americans and their families obtain their health insurance through an employer.  The major disadvantage of this situation is the insured person typically loses the health insurance when he or she loses the employment, and it is no longer common for an employee to work for decades for the same employer.  Therefore, periods of unemployment also become periods in which health insurance is lost.  The reason why most health insurance is obtained through employment is that the federal government does not tax money that he business spends to provide health insurance for its employees, but it does tax the money that most individuals would spend on purchasing health insurance on their own.

How did this situation come about?  It began during World War II when the federal government imposed wage and price controls at a time when it needed to support manufacturing of military goods while at the same time millions of men became unavailable to work in private industry because they were scattered around the world fighting the war.  This created a severe labor shortage in the domestic economy.  Since employers could not increase wages without violating the law, they had to provide increased compensation by other means to attract qualified workers.  The other means included offering benefits that did not violate the wage and price controls.  The facts that tax rates were high and money that an employer would spend to provide health insurance for its employees the health insurance a very popular benefit for employers to offer.  In my opinion, it would have been simpler and would have made much more sense to end the wage and price controls.  However, the federal government is not good at doing things that are simple and sensible.

Among the consequences, both intended and unintended, of Obamacare has been that it has caused many employers to abandon providing health insurance for their employees because many of the mandated additions to coverage have made it too expensive for many employers to continue to provide health insurance.  Unfortunately, those same mandates have also driven up the cost of health insurance policies sold to individuals.  When Obamacare finally collapses under its own weight, there are going to be many proposals for health insurance reforms to replace it.  Since Obamacare has already seriously disrupted the market for health insurance, there may be an opportunity to set things right.  Therefore, I propose that if the federal government must subsidize health insurance, it do so by providing tax breaks and/or direct subsidies to individuals to buy their own health insurance rather than by subsidizing employers to provide it for them. Individuals may also be able to obtain health insurance at reduce cost by getting group rates through an organization or association that is not tied to a specific employer.  That will make it less common for workers to lose their health insurance when they lose their employment.  Also, the absence of a perceived obligation to pay for health insurance coverage for employees with free up money that employers have available to hire new employees, retain all the employees, or to increase wages.  There would be simple and sensible, but given the history of the way the federal government works, the fact that something as simple and sensible may decrease its probability of happening.

Education Bureaucracy in the Twenty-First Century

I received a couple of messages dated July 10, 2013 right next to each other in the inbox for my e-mail account at Housatonic Community College, where I am a member of part-time faculty.  I thought the combination of those two messages have a lot to say about the state of the educational bureaucracy in the twenty-first century.  The first message was resending a message dated June 17 with an additional comment.  The original message said that because of a serious budget deficit at the college, agreement was reached in a recent Administrative Team Meeting to adjust the air conditioning temperature at the college to 74 degrees (Fahrenheit). A comment added when the message was resent on July 10 said, “If anyone is having difficulty with this temp. setting you should contact your Dean with your concerns.”

This message raised all kinds of questions in my mind, including the following:  Why does it take an Administrative Team Meeting to determine the temperature at which to set the thermostat?  If saving money is a goal, it seems to me that much money could be saved by having an individual make the decision to adjust the temperature of the air conditioning by a couple of degree rather than using up the time of several people who are making a good salary and who could be doing more productive things with their time.  Why was it necessary to tell everyone about changing the temperature on the thermostat?  Not knowing at what temperature the air conditioning was set at before, I assume that it was set at 72 degrees.  Would anyone in the buildings have known that the temperature had gone from 72 degrees to 74 degrees?  If the goal is to save money, why is the temperature set as low as 74 degrees?  Why is the school inviting anyone who feels uncomfortable at 74 degrees to complain to the dean?  Is anyone who claims that they were comfortable at 72 degrees and uncomfortable at 74 degrees going to be referred for a mental status evaluation?  Is any dean who takes such a complaint seriously going to be referred for a mental status evaluation or a job performance review?  When I read the message, I checked the temperature in my office here at home (I work at home, since the classes I teach are online) and it was 82 degrees.  I was not uncomfortable enough to bother turning on the air conditioning, but then an online instructor can get by with working in shorts, sandals, and a sleeveless T-shirt during warm weather.

The second message was from the Director of Public Safety announcing that the college is hosting an enrichment program, emphasizing math and literacy skills for students entering high school in the City of Bridgeport.  The program includes security provided by the Bridgeport Board of Education, with guards posted outside the classrooms and in the cafeteria during lunch.  If the guards are needed, they I am happy that they are being provided, but the fact that all those guards are thought to be needed shows either that Bridgeport schools have a serious issue with security, or that a lot of unneeded security guards are drawing paychecks.  Neither conclusion gives me comfort.

Confession of a Tea Party Extremist

One of the major items in the news lately has been the alleged targeting of groups with the words "tea party" or "patriot" in their names and other conservative. Also,their have been stories about units from the Department of Homeland Security monitoring rallies which were organized to protest the targeting of these groups. The Tea Party movement has been considered by many people, including some members of Congress to be an extreme and dangerous movement having approximately the same status in the minds of many people as terrorists who committed violent acts or advocate the violent overthrow the government. I take great interest in the stories because I have a faded bumper sticker on the back of my care that has been present since 2009 this says "Tea Party Patriots." I certainly don't consider myself to be a terrorist extremist and the people that I've met in Tea Party groups or at Tea Party rallies are the farthest things from violent terrorist extremists that I can think of.

Following are some examples of the ideas hostile to the Tea Party movement that I have seen, which I will follow with an explanation of why they are wrong. As part of an online class in American Government that I taught at Housatonic Community College in Bridgeport Connecticut in the Spring semester of 2013, one of the assigned books was a collection of debates on current issues (2012 You Decide!; Current Debates in American Politics by John T. Rourke).  Another part of the class is a discussion board on which students are to discuss different topics based on the reading material. One of the debates in the reading material was "Tea Party Members: Irresponsible Zealots or Responsibly Dissenting Citizens?" and one of the questions for discussion on the discussion board was "Are tea party members extremists or ordinary citizens with legitimate complaints?" Here are relevant excerpts from comments on the discussion board: "… I do believe that the tea party members are extremist with and it's my way or the highway attitude." "I think the Tea Party are mostly ordinary citizens who have legitimate complaints but like in every group I'm sure that there are a few that can be categorized as extremists." "The Tea Party, started a good idea, but has become an extremist organization. It seems to be filled with people who have all sorts of crazy notions about the government, have some racist hatred of Barack Obama, or have other ideas that are ultimately destructive to American society. Most Republicans are in the Tea Party.… I believe between the GOP and the Tea Party, one is openly racist and the other uses code words to show the racism." "Of course tea party members are extremists. Therefore for ordinary citizens with legitimate complaints. They complain about all the wrong things instead of what is at hand. Such as, job lost I really do not hear much of the tea party address this issue. They want to sit around and address non-important things instead of what can actually help this country we live in today. In my opinion, they are not just ordinary citizens, but on the extremist side."

In the book of debates, the supposedly objective introduction to the debate regarding tea party members describes supporters of the Tea Party as "… overwhelmingly white, over age 45, and identify as Republicans and conservatives." It goes on to say that a majority of them are men, or least $50,000 here, and are Protestants.  I fit part of that description in that I am a white man approaching 65 years of age, a member of my town's Republican Town Committee, and have income over $50,000 a year, although most of my income as a retirement pension from my 38 years of work at the Social Security Administration. I doubt that most people would consider a retired employee of the Social Security Administration to be a typical Tea Party member. Also, most other college professors, particularly in the social sciences, have views quite the opposite of those of the Tea Party, but that is another story.  The characterization of the Tea Party movement as "overwhelmingly white" is misleading. Although a majority of members of Tea Party organizations are white, that is to be expected considering the majority of the general population is white. At every event I've been to, I've been in close proximity to African-Americans and at some events, African-Americans were among the organizers. I have no idea what the typical incomes were, since I never asked and never considered it relevant, and do not know the religious affiliation of most members, although I note that a majority of the general population of the United States that attends church attends Protestant churches. Although I'm not a particularly religious person, when I do occasionally attend church, is a Catholic Church, because my wife is Catholic.  Many critics of the Tea Party movement focus on stereotypes of what the people are in are like instead of addressing their ideas.

The side of the debate in the book describing the tea party members as irresponsible zealots comes from remarks made by Senator Frank Lautenberg to the U.S. Senate on March 10, 2011. Senator Lautenberg described the Tea Party as being busy trying to eliminate opportunities for the American people to stay in their homes, have adequate healthcare, and provide education and a better path for the lives of their children. By his description, the Tea Party opposes affordable college education and even education of of small children before kindergarten. They are against protecting the health of women, and funding for medical research in general. According to him, the Tea Party opposes making the air cleaner and wants to get rid of the air traffic control system he claims that the Tea Party, and the Republican Party want to cut funding to help states protect drinking water and that "the water is not safe for dishwashing, much less consumption." I don't know where in United States Senator Lautenberg finds drinking water that is not fit to drink. I've lived in many places the a number of  states, in environments that they been rural, small-town, urban, and suburban. I have never encountered drinking water that is unfit to drink. Most of the time, the husband said to breathe, except when I lived in Chicago it was easy enough to detect the air pollution from the steel mills on the south side of the city and the Indiana suburbs on hot summer day in which there were no breeze.  Yes, there are such days in the Windy City.  As for getting rid of the air traffic control system, let me say that as an occasional airline passenger, I am very much in favor of air traffic being controlled, but I think it can be done better than the federal government does it.

I will skip describing the side of the debate in the book that portrays Tea Party members as responsibly dissenting citizens, because frankly I think I can do a better job of it than Senator Mitch McConnell did. Since the Tea Party movement is not one organization, but is made up of many organizations, any general statement about what a Tea Party member or Tea Party organizations like would have to be qualified with exceptions. The core principle or belief of the Tea Party movement is the federal government of the United States spends and borrows far too much money because it is incapable of being efficient, of setting priorities, or of recognizing that most issues involve making trade-offs. Tea Party members and libertarians are often accused of being anti-government. They are not anti-government. I, for one, believe in a strong and efficient government that does well what governments are supposed to do. What is it that governments are supposed to do? According to the Declaration of Independence, governments are instituted among men to protect their inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. At best, government enables us to pursue our own happiness; what it cannot do is provide happiness for us. Voters and politicians alike tend to forget that the government's resources are limited and that the only way it can obtain more resources is by taking them from someplace else. We also tend to forget the economic law of diminishing returns. With that means is that even if of the particular sum of money spent for a particular purpose, such as housing, education, or health care improves the product or service for which it is spent by certain amount, spending twice as much does not make it twice as good. We also tend to forget that for every benefit, there must be a cost, and that if we're not very careful the costs can easily outweigh the benefits. Like many other Tea Party members and supporters, I believe that housing that is affordable is better than housing that is not affordable, that is desirable for people to get education, that is desirable for them to be healthy, the it's desirable for them to have clean air and water, and so forth. It is also desirable that we have police to protect us from crime, firemen to fight fires, and armed forces to protect us from those who would do us harm. Unfortunately, the federal government cannot, as many voters and politicians think it can, do everything at once. When the government does too much, it ends up doing most things not very well and wasting a lot of resources.

Independent analysis by the nonpartisan and reasonably objective Congressional Budget Office indicates that the federal government's current pattern of spending and borrowing cannot be sustained. Currently the interest rate that the United States government pays him and on the national debt is at or near historic lows. The Congressional Budget Office has projected that unless the rate of increase in the National Guard brought down, within a few decades, the combination of paying interest on the national debt, and paying for Social Security and Medicare will consume the entire national budget, leaving no money for such essential government services as national defense or protecting the environment. As the economist Herbert Stein has put it, something that cannot go on forever must stop. Many critics of the Tea Party movement claimed that the Tea Party does not care about children. What kind of future do our children face when the government becomes insolvent and no matter how hard it tries it is unable to raise enough revenue to pay for the most basic of government services? I, for one, and not so much worried that the government is currently doing more than it should as I am that within the lifetimes of our children and grandchildren the government will burn itself out and be unable to function at all. If worrying about that and standing against it makes me extremist, then that is something for which I make no apologies. If that causes me to become a target of the Internal Revenue Service or the Department of Homeland Security, then so be it.

I don't know were many critics of the Tea Party movement have gotten the idea the members or supporters of the movement are prone to violence. I've attended local events in which there were hundreds of people. I've attended events in Washington, D.C. in which there were hundreds of thousands of people. Not only was there no violence at any of these events, all interactions between the people that attended these events and law enforcement officers were courteous and respectful. Many people brought garbage bags with them so they could dispose of their own trash and even the trash that they found on the ground. They left the site of the event in better condition than he found it. Compare that to the behavior  the people attending Occupy Wall Street and similar events. Who are ordinary citizens respectfully requesting common sense changes and who are the extremists?

Demonization vs. Persuasion

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Every now and then I see someone say what I think better than I can myself.  That is exactly the case with the article “Persuasion as the Cure for Incivility” by John J. Jenkins, president of the University of Notre Dame in the opinion section of the January 9, 2013 edition of the Wall Street Journal ( http://on.wsj.com/TJEAEZ ).  Read it and ponder it; it is more persuasive than anything I could conjure up.

I read a lot of political commentary on the Internet and one thing that disturbs me a lot is the abundance of name-calling and demonization and the lack of language that might actually persuade.  In my last post, I asked people of different political ideologies to recommend books, articles, blogs, or other material that they found persuasive that their ideology was correct.  I got an underwhelming response of one comment.  However, it was a comment of high quality from my state representative, James Albis.  He is a liberal Democrat and I am a mixture of conservative and libertarian who is a member of my local Republican Town Committee and have worked in the political campaigns of the opponents of Mr. Albis.  However, I have to say that I have a lot of respect for his civility and integrity even though I disagree with his political philosophy.  I am about a third of the way reading the book he endorsed, A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn.  It is taking a while because at the same time, I am re-reading A Patriot’s History of the United States by Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen, a book, by the way that has some critical things to say about Howard Zinn.  I am alternating between chapters of each book to compare what each has to say about approximately the same time period.

What I am finding so far is the Howard Zinn’s book is a valuable supplement to more traditional history books.  I would not recommend it as a substitute for another history book because it is far from complete and is slanted toward a particular ideology.  However in the introductory part of the book, Mr. Zinn makes it clear that the main goal of his book is to tell the parts of the story that most history books leave out, which is the impact of historical events on ordinary people – of all genders and races.  It is not intended to be a complete and thorough history; so one has to forgive his omission of important historic events (as in most of the Civil War) and accomplishments of famous people.  I found Mr. Zinn’s intentional avoidance of detailed footnotes to be annoying.  He mentions things that authors of other books have said, but not where in the book they said it.  On the other hand, I was favorably impressed with his use of primary sources, such as excerpts from letters of people who were involved in history, which make the book more interesting as well as more informative.  I don’t share his view that the history of the United States is primarily one of victimization of oppressed classes by elites, but it is important to remember that such victimization occurred and that some of the people who have traditionally been worshipped as heroes also had a dark side.  Like too many people, Mr. Zinn is very critical of capitalism and does not make the very critical distinction between free-market capitalism and crony capitalism.  Free market capitalism is relatively benign.  Crony capitalism, the collusion between business and government, is what is dangerous.  Although, according to Wikipedia, Howard Zinn was an active member of the Communist Party of the United States, his book is generally skeptical of the wisdom of government in general.  I share his skepticism of government, but I wonder how an admitted socialist and communist would expect either to function without the heavy hand of government.  Since Mr. Zinn died in 2010, it is too late to ask him.

The book by Schweikart and Allen is also an excellent book.  I have less to say about it because it is more traditional.  To the extent that it strays from the usual history book, it places more emphasis on the importance of religion in the development of the United States.  It doesn’t ignore the dark side of American history, but it doesn’t dwell on it as Mr. Zinn’s book does.  The book is more academic in that of Mr. Zinn in that it is full of detailed notes.

Both books are recommended reading.

Preaching to the Choir

The recent election in the United States, the reactions to it, and the news of the looming “fiscal cliff” in which rising taxes and decreased government spending are said to threaten driving the economy into a second recession or worse unless the President and Congress (particularly the House of Representatives, which is dominated by the party the competes with the President’s party) can reach a compromise agreement have served as reminders of how polarized the country has become.  Compromise seems to be getting more and more difficult.  There is a tendency among not just politicians but people of all political ideologies – conservative, liberal, and libertarian – to think of those who do not share their opinions to be at best misguided and at worst extreme and dangerous.  We tend to associate mostly with people who share our opinions and reinforce our belief that they are correct and based on reality.  We read books, watch television programs, listen to radio programs, and view websites and blogs that reinforce our opinions and avoid those that express a contrary opinion.  I am as guilty of this as anyone.  There are a couple of reasons why we should resist this tendency and communicate with those who have ideologies that differ from our own.   One reason is expressive, a reason why we should express our ideas to those with whom we disagree, and another is receptive, a reason why we should seek out opinions different from our own and examine them seriously.  The expressive reason is that we can’t spread our ideas by preaching to the choir.  Trying to convince those who are already convinced is not productive; to continue with the religious analogy, we need to leave the congregation at least once in a while and go out and become missionaries.  The receptive reason is that some of what we believe may be false and some of what we don’t believe may be true.  We should be grateful to those who help us align our beliefs with the truth.  Even people we distrust or despise most of the time are right some of the time.  We should recognize that and learn from it.

There should be a forum for open-minded people of all ideologies to get together to debate and share ideas in a civil manner.  Certain ground rules would have to be followed.  Each person would promise to be open to new ideas even from those with whom he disagrees most of the time.  In return, he would have an audience for his ideas that would be open to being persuaded.  It would be a place in which attacks on ideas would be encouraged, but attacks on personalities would not be tolerated.  A visitor to such a place would be exposed to a wide variety of ideas that he might find both entertaining and enlightening.  It might be a blog with a number of contributors from all perspectives.  It might be a magazine.  It might be a show on television or radio.  There have been some efforts along this line, such as “The Five” on Fox News Channel, in which four conservatives gang up on one liberal, or “The View “on ABC, in which the liberals gang up on the lone conservative.  Sometimes conservatives appear as guests on shows dominated by liberals and the other way around.  However, there never seems to be balance, and the problem with television format typically used is that everyone seems to be trying talk over everyone else, with no one listening, which is annoying and not enlightening to the viewer.  A blog or Internet site seems the best format because it can be timely, inexpensive to operate, and avoids the problem of everyone talking over everyone else.  I have toyed with the idea of creating such a blog, or turning this one into such a blog, but frankly, I don’t know if I have the time or the ambition right now.  I mean so far, my blog posts have been sparse and irregular.  The last one was in May and it is now November.  However, I do have some acquaintances who are liberal but who seem to be respectful of people with conservative and libertarian ideas and, being a combination of conservative and libertarian myself, I have some friends with conservative and libertarian opinions.  So, here is the plan:  I plan on contacting people whom I know to have liberal political views who seem to be respectful and civil and ask them to point me to the sources of information (books, blogs, television programs, etc.) that seem to them to best explain the liberal ideology and which they think would be most convincing to someone who does not share their ideology - yet.  I have some ideas of my own about sources of information about conservative and libertarian ideas.  Naturally, I hope to convince rather than be convinced, but I am willing to read, watch, or listen to anything that might change my mind in return for persons with political ideology completely different from mind to so the same.

Whoever reads this can help out in this project is asked to help.  Whether you are conservative, liberal, libertarian or have some political ideology that I haven’t mentioned, please comment about what books, articles, blogs, or whatever you think is most likely to persuade someone that your ideology is the correct one.  I will start off with one of mine:  The book The Road to Serfdom by F.A. Hayek is an excellent explanation of why, in spite of the best of intentions, socialism tends to lead to totalitarianism.  I challenge any liberal to read it and tell me he or she has not learned something.

Time for Constitutional Convention 2.0?

One of the best things about the Constitution of the United States of America is that it created a process for amending the Constitution. The people that created the constitution (who are called the “framers” in political science literature) knew that despite all the work they put into it the Constitution was not perfect. Even if it had been perfect for the time in which it was written, many things have changed. In the almost 225 years of its existence, the Constitution has been amended 27 times. Although Article V of the Constitution provides two separate ways of proposing amendments, every one of the amendments has been proposed by the same method. The means of proposing amendments that has always been used has been a vote by a two-thirds majority of both the House of Representatives and the Senate. The means that has never been used successfully (the process was started, but not completed) is the calling of a convention for the purpose of proposing amendments upon application by two-thirds of the states. It is time we started thinking about using the constitutional convention process. Relying on Congress as the only means of proposing amendments means that the only amendments that are proposed are the ones that Congress finds convenient. If there is a need for an amendment that reduces the power or prestige of the Congress or its members or which Congress finds to be inconvenient, it is highly unlikely to be proposed. For example, the 22nd Amendment limits the President of the United States to two terms. Congress would never propose a similar amendment limiting the number of terms of office of members of Congress: they could limit the terms of the President because the President has no role in the process of amending the Constitution. Polls have shown that the American public is losing faith in Congress as an institution. It doesn’t make sense for an institution in which the American public has so little faith to have exclusive control over proposing amendments. It is time to give more control to the people and the states.

The method of proposing an amendment to the Constitution that has not yet been used successfully is that of a convention for proposing amendments that Congress calls on the application of two-thirds of the states. Such a convention is referred to in political science literature as an “Article V” convention, because Article V is the part of the Constitution that says how the Constitution is to be amended. There are a number of problems involved in applying for and calling an Article V convention, and much of the problem comes from the wording of Article V itself. For example, there is no standard about what an application by a state for an Article V convention is. Must a state call for a convention that may then make whatever amendments it wants and as many as it wants, or can a state restrict its application to calling for a convention that is restricted to proposing one amendment on a specific subject matter? If several states apply for Article V conventions regarding amendments on similar subjects, how is the decision made about whether they are about the same subject matter? Who keeps track of how many applications are submitted? May a state retract an application for a convention once it has applied? How is representation at a convention apportioned – by population or be each state having an equal number of delegates? Who chooses delegates to a convention and by what method? In order to keep any potential Article V convention from becoming a big controversial mess, I propose first that Article V itself be amended to clear up these issues.

In future posts, I intend to discuss the history of applications by states for an Article V convention, the problems with the process that the history reveals, and specific suggestions I have to clean up the mess. Meanwhile, I ask readers of this blog to participate in the discussion. If you could propose amendments to the Constitution, what amendments would you propose? Some people have suggested that an Article V convention could degenerate into a “runaway convention” proposing many amendments that could do harmful things such as limiting the rights protected by the Bill of Rights. Others think that the fact that amendments needed to be ratified either by three-fourths of the states or be conventions in three-fourths of the states (whichever method of ratification is proposed by Congress) prevents a possible runaway convention from being a realistic threat. What do you think? Post a comment with your thoughts. Comments may not be available for others to view right away because I moderate the comments.

There Ought to be a Law, But Not So Many

The fact that the last time I published anything on my blog was July 16, 2011 make it seem that I am missing the whole point of having one, but I have been finishing up a Master of Arts degree from American Public University in Political Science and writing for the courses there has drained my energy for writing. I have now finished the requirements for the degree (with honors); conferral date is May 15. It will be my fourth degree, which makes me nearly as much of an education junkie as my wife Sandy, who has six. Now that I am done writing about things because I have to, I can write about things because I want to. Sandy also has ambition to do more writing, both on her own and in collaboration with others and me. A couple of topics that interest me are (1) the rule of law (2) Article V of the United States Constitution, the one about how the Constitution is amended. I intend to write more about both topics in later posts, but let me get started scratching the surface of one of those two topics, the rule of law. Plato sparked my interest in the rule of law when I read about an observation of his in my course on the history of political philosophy. Plato observed that lawlessness does not mean the absence of laws. It can also mean the habitual disregard of laws by the government, especially those laws that are meant to restrain it. A government that can change laws merely because it finds current laws to be inconvenient is lawless. He made that observation more than 2000 years ago. It occurred to me that we are currently developing a type of lawlessness caused laws that are too numerous, too complicated, and even laws that contradict other laws. It is becoming more difficult to be a law-abiding citizen because to obey the law, one must be able to know what the law is (or at least be able to find out what it is with reasonable effort), be able to understand it, and not be forced into a situation in which to obey one law one must disobey another. In most cases it is easier to obey laws that are harsh and unreasonable than laws that cannot be understood, are too numerous to follow, are contradictory, or can be interpreted in unpredictable ways by an adjudicator. Since I am writing this in early April and haven’t filed my income tax returns, the example that springs first to mind of a set of laws that is way too complicated is the Internal Revenue Code, or what it would be named if names of acts of Congress were more accurate – the Attorneys and Accountants Full Employment Act. If the only goal of the federal income tax were to raise revenue, the Internal Revenue Code would be simple and complying with it would be uncomplicated. However, the Internal Revenue Code has developed multiple goals that are designed to engineer behavior – to encourage behavior that the federal government approves of and to discourage behavior that it does not approve of. More recent examples of laws that are not only large and complicated by themselves (over 2000 pages each) but invite countless regulations to be written to further complicate the lives of people in regulated industries trying to obey the law are the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (otherwise known as Obamacare) and the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. I have much more to say about the rule of law, but that will have to wait until later. Meanwhile, I would appreciate comments from readers about personal experiences regarding difficulty following laws because of their volume or complexity or situations in which following one law required disobeying another. Comments reflecting a different viewpoint are also welcome.

Two Lies for the Price of One

Recently, President Obama responded to the question of a reporter about whether Social Security checks would go out on August 3 if the debt ceiling was not raise by August 2 by saying, “I cannot guarantee that those checks go out on August 3 if we haven't resolved this issue because there simply may not be the money in the coffers to do it.”

I have seen a few comments that this points out the lie that politicians have told for years that there is a Social Security trust fund that guarantees that Social Security benefits will be paid. In truth, the so-called trust fund is a promise by the rest of the government that when payroll taxes become inadequate to pay the Social Security benefits that they are intended to finance, the government will raise the money to pay the short fall – by either taxes or borrowing. In other words, the trust fund is not really backed by anything other than a bookkeeping entry and a promise by the government to pay – provided of course that it is able to.

What everyone seems to be overlooking, however, is that even in the absence of a trust fund and even in the middle of a weak economy, there are enough payroll taxes being collected to pay for nearly all of the Social Security benefits that need to be paid. More importantly, as long as they are needed to pay Social Security benefits, those taxes cannot legally be used for any other purpose; they are dedicated specifically for the purpose of paying Social Security benefits. In other words, there will be plenty of money in the coffers that can be used to pay for Social Security benefits and for no other purpose. There may be some shortfall, but I am so confident that the government can and will make up whatever shortfall there may be with the other tax revenue that comes in, that I will do what the President is unwilling to do and guarantee that Social Security benefits will be paid in full. Well, OK, I am not really guaranteeing that because I don't actually have the billions of dollars it would take to make good on such a guarantee, but the point is I think the President has made so many promises that he has no ability, and perhaps no intention, to keep that he overlooked that a promise to pay Social Security benefits on August 3 is one of the easiest promises off all to keep – no matter what happens with the debt ceiling by August 2.

The President's Real Plan to Improve the Health of Americans

I finally figured it out. President Obama has a plan to improve the health of Americans and it isn't the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (otherwise known as Obamacare). That was a distraction. The President was never really serious about that, as evidenced by the fact that he let Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and the other Democrats in Congress write it for him with little or no help from the White House. He didn't care what it said because that is not his real plan to improve the health of Americans. To understand what his real plan is, you need to understand that that most of the health problems of Americans are related to obesity and physical laziness. You can tell just by watching the President that he is not a fan of obesity and sloth. For one thing, he is skinny. For another, have you ever seen him walk slowly up a flight of stairs? No! He jogs up stairs. Since I am a former resident of Chicago myself, I also recognize that he plays basketball Chicago-style – meaning it is not a foul unless blood is drawn and someone needs stitches. He is one tough dude, and he wants the rest of us to be equally tough. He wants us to eat less and get more exercise.

The main part of President Obama's plan to get us to eat less is to take an idea that began under a previous President's administration and run with it, and that is to require cars to burn ethanol in place of part of the gasoline that they burn. In simple terms, the idea is to make sure that we take crops that would normally be turned into food and burn them in our motor vehicles. We are converting about 40 percent of our corn crop into ethanol for fuel, which is probably healthier than turning it into ethanol for making liquor. Mixing ethanol with gasoline is less tasty than some other things you can mix ethanol with, but cars don't run well on mixed drinks. To make sure that it is American corn that is used to make ethanol for transportation and not something else, the American government does two things. First, it subsidizes growing the corn, using it to make ethanol, and making sure that the ethanol is burned as fuel. Second, it puts a stiff tariff on ethanol imported from Brazil, which is made from cane sugar and is much less expensive to produce. Obviously, the government's policy to encourage the burning of ethanol for fuel has nothing to to with benefits of ethanol, or we would be buying inexpensive ethanol from Brazil rather than paying extra to produce it here. The goal is obviously to reduce the amount of corn in the food supply. Since most corn in the United States is actually grown for animal feed, it affects the price of meat and dairy products even more than food made of corn. This makes it harder for Americans to get fat on a diet of bacon cheeseburgers and Doritos. It also has the unfortunate side effect of making food more expensive in the rest of the world. Since hungry people tend to get grumpy, this may have something to do with the rioting and demonstrations in other countries, but the President's responsibility is to the health of obese Americans and not to the health of starving foreigners.

The President's plan for getting Americans to exercise more is to get us out of our cars and walk or ride bicycles. The best way to do that is to raise the price of gasoline to the point that it is barely affordable for the average American. He had some help in this with the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico about a year ago. He used it as an excuse to shut down much of the drilling for oil that was happening in the Gulf of Mexico and to delay the issuing of permits until after many of the deep water drilling rigs were moved to other parts of the world – like off the coast of Brazil. Maybe we can buy some oil from them to make up for the ethanol that they aren't selling us. Unlike most countries, which jump at the chance to tap energy resources, the policy of the United States seems to be to discourage oil companies from drilling where there might actually be oil, like in parts of Alaska that give the appearance of what hell would look like frozen over, and in shale oil deposits states in the middle of the country. One might think that discouraging domestic oil production might increase imports of foreign oil, but President Obama has been working on making less foreign oil available by stirring up a civil war in Libya, a major oil producing country, and using the time-tested Vietnam strategy of fighting just hard enough to make sure the war goes on for years without resolution. I guess he felt he had to do that because of the winding down of the long war in Iraq, another oil-producing country. Maybe if the fighting in Libya dies down, he can stir up enough unrest in Saudi Arabia to mess up their oil production. In any event, so far the President's strategy to get Americans to drive less seems to be working. The price of gasoline is more than double what it was when he became President and is continuing to climb.

The increased cost of food and gasoline will probably help me improve my health. My doctor wants me to lose some weight and says that a diet of bacon cheeseburgers and Doritos would be really bad for my health. I already took my bicycle to the shop to get it tuned up, so I am ready for the cost of gasoline to go up more. I am ready to lose weight and get fit. One thing bothers me, though, and that is how I am going to keep up the exercise when winter comes again. I haven't found any way to use snow tires or chains on my bicycle wheels. I guess I will need to buy snowshoes or cross country skis.

Rethinkin' Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln used to be one of my heroes. I bought into the idea that he was one of our greatest Presidents. After I graduated from law school and passed my Illinois bar exam and went to the state capitol in Springfield, Illinois for the swearing-in ceremony. While there, I visited Lincoln’s home, which is a national monument. A few years later I worked in the federal building in Fort Wayne, Indiana, across the street from what was then the national headquarters of the Lincoln National Life Insurance Company. I toured the Lincoln Museum, which is in Fort Wayne. I had some pride that Lincoln and I had something in common, which was that each of us had spent most of our childhood in Indiana. I have visited the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. and Ford’s Theater, where Lincoln was killed. I have visited the battlefield at Gettysburg, where he made is famous Gettysburg address. Lincoln is credited with freeing the slaves and saving the Union. However, after learning more about Abraham Lincoln and reflecting on what he did, I have begun to think that much of the legend of Abraham Lincoln is a result of the fact that the victors of wars get to write the history books. I still have great respect for many of his qualities as a human being; by all accounts, his nickname of “honest Abe” was well deserved. Also, nothing can take away from the fact that Lincoln was an outstanding orator and commander-in-chief. However, the fact that he launched the war that caused more American casualties than all other wars put together and contributed the process that has led to the Constitution to be ignored diminishes his reputation as a President greatly in my estimation.

Although the popular belief about the Civil War was that it was fought primarily over slavery, Lincoln himself had little interest in ending slavery and did not have a high opinion of African Americans. In 1858, in the fourth of the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates, he declared that he was not and never had been in favor in any way of bringing about the social and political equality of the white and black races, was not in favor of making them voters or jurors, qualifying them to hold public office, or to intermarry with white people. He went so far as to say that whites were superior to blacks and that the difference between whites and blacks were so great that they could never live together in social and political equality. In 1861, he supported a proposed amendment to the Constitution that would have prohibited the federal government from interfering with slavery in the states where it existed. Lincoln’s primary goal was to save “the Union” and he said that if he could save the Union by freeing the slaves, by freeing no slaves, or by freeing some slaves and letting others go free, he would do so.

Between the time Lincoln was elected President and his inauguration, seven states had seceded; the other four members of what was to become the Confederate States of America seceded shortly after his inauguration. If there were a strong consensus that states had no right to secede from the Union and that allowing them to secede was destructive, then perhaps Lincoln was justified in treating the southern states as rebellious and to launch the Civil War. However, an argument can be made states had (and still have) a right to secede and that whatever benefits there may have been to forcing them to stay in the Union was not worth the terrible cost. The U.S. Constitution does specifically whether states did or did not have a right to secede, although it does state in the preamble that one of the purposes of the Constitution was “to form a more perfect Union.” However, in their ratifying resolutions, the states of Virginia, New York, and Rhode Island reserved the right to withdraw from the Union if the new government became oppressive. In the nation’s history, the first states to give serious consideration to seceding from the Union were not the southern states, but the New England states because they perceived that the federal government was dominated by southern interests and because of opposition to the War of 1812. In the 1830s and 1840s, some abolitionists, most notably William Lloyd Garrison, called for northern states to secede because of the federal government’s support for slavery. Some felt that the breakup of the Union would encourage the end of slavery. Many of the Founding Fathers assumed that states had the right to secede from the Union. In short, the issue of whether states had a right to secede from the Union was not settled on the “battlefield of ideas” but was instead settled on real battlefields with real deaths, real injuries, and real disruption of lives.

The Civil War set new standards for incivility in warfare. Until then, the standards of warfare discouraged targeting civilians. The Union army, particularly the part under the command of General William Tecumseh Sherman, made a point of destroying homes, crops, and anything else in its path. By the time the war was over, it cost more American lives that all the other wars in American history combined. The Battle of Gettysburg was the biggest battle fought in the history of the Western Hemisphere. In addition to causing massive devastation, primarily to the southern states but also to the northern states, the Lincoln administration so dramatically increased government spending that the United States still has not recovered from the debt from the Civil War. It had finished paying the debts incurred by the American Revolution and was completely free of debt during the administration of Andrew Jackson. Before the Civil War, the federal government had never spent more than $75 million in a year. By the end of 1861, the first year of the war, it was spending $1.5 million a day, and in 1865 the United States became the first nation in history to spend more than a billion dollars in a year. Since then, the least the government has spent in one year was $236.9 million, in 1878. By the time the debt from the Civil War of about $2.8 billion was almost paid, the United States entered World War I and has not come close to being out of debt since. Although it is necessary at times for the nation to go into debt, it should make every effort to repay the debt within the generation that borrowed the money. Any debt that is not repaid during that generation must be paid by taxing future generations to pay not only the debt but interest. Since future generations could not vote and are saddled with taxes, this is taxation without representation. It is also a form of slavery - not as bad as the slavery that the Civil War ended, but slavery nonetheless.

What would have happened if Lincoln would have let the southern states secede rather than causing us to fight the bloodiest war in our history is subject to speculation. Slavery probably would have lasted a few years longer than it did, but with slavery disappearing in the rest of the world, it probably would not have lasted long. The states in the Confederacy may or may not have rejoined the Union. One thing that we can be sure of is that a lot of death, injury, destroyed lives and families, property destruction, and debt would have been avoided. Was preserving the Union really worth all that?