 In this lesson, we will be looking at much the same material as in the last, but with the purpose of discovering sources of harm or value that can be the basis for change. We will be looking at our investment potentials as the ultimate owners of our nation and its economy. Empowerment in this arena will face a common challenge inherent in our modern study of economics. It provides a well-valued and readily available knowledge base that would redirect economic concerns from what we value to what the economy does. It has an established focus on economic operations with a good concentration on cause and effect knowledge that provides a basis for leaders who would act to run the economy for our benefit. It favors those who would run the economy, those in authority who claim to take actions on behalf of owners. The performance alternative is what an economy can accomplish for us as its owners and for us as the ones who can benefit from its operation. We the people are this nation. The purpose for having an economy is our purpose. It has no other purpose. Its function is one of converting what we put into our economy into what we both value and receive back from its operation. What we put in is our personal time and effort and performance skills along with the resources of the nation and economic energies that we ultimately own. What we put in is our life energies and resources. Our commitment to these is partly choice and there is great personal value in having those choices. What we receive and get to value is food, shelter and companionship support for family. These are things that preserve life and meet our personal wants and needs and we receive for another value support for our personal decisions on what we choose to receive. We also receive economic freedom that we can value as prosperity. And in this we are both the owner of the economy and are its only real customer. We are the only ones who are to be served by its operation. In another aspect we are also individual people with needs and wants. We do not have different needs and wants as owners than we have as customers. We are singular units. As owners we give purpose to our economy as customers we evaluate what we receive. We the people are truly the only party in interest. There is nobody else to be served by our economy. Where others are served it will be at our expense it will be waste. From use of the black box we have the definition of economic waste and it is value that is redirected from the performance cycle. Waste is output delivered to non-citizens or output that we do not value. Waste is cost placed on us to serve someone else's purposes. We improve the value cycle by eliminating that waste. If we just stop expending our resources on waste we still get just as much from the economy at less personal cost. If we just stop delivering economic goods and services to non-citizens the cost of operating our economy will drop without affecting what value it does deliver to us. Public charity can have value but only as we are able to value it, valuing the notice of its delivery. Also as a review our modern science of economics is firmly focused on the internal operation of the economy. On cause and effect and what happens inside our economy black box. It does not address performance only activity. The science of economics is designed to provide technical support for those who would run our economy for us. Modern economic science is useful for many things but not performance. Our focus must be on its black box performance on converting what we put into the economy into what we receive and value as its output. Purpose is a challenge as we are individual human beings. Our purposes can vary widely. Our purpose as children is quite distinct from our purpose as working adults or as seniors. And we are still just one person. Our purpose as wealthy citizens is different than our purposes as those who are impoverished. Our purpose as women is not always our purpose as men. We seem to have almost endless variations. Our purpose even shifts as we are able to satisfy needs and wants. Once either is satisfied our personal purposes shift to other needs and wants. What we do share is basic humanity. We value having choices and results and that is freedom. We value economic freedom. We value economic choices and results and that is prosperity. Prosperity includes having sufficient economic value that we have choices in what we are able to gain from committing or buying with it. Prosperity is having sufficient options for our purchases that there are things that we value, valued opportunities. We value our interaction with other people and especially our effectiveness in dealing with them. The key is trust and we value our ability to trust one another as in the family. We value society with others. Once again we value these because they are human values and we are human beings. These are the values that we do share with other people. These are the values where we as people who own the economy and who receive a productive output can find natural agreement on the values we receive. It is where we can come to agreement that we can exercise the power and authority of citizen ownership over our economy. In the positive sense increasing our freedom, prosperity or effectiveness in society with one another will be a common source of value that can bring us to agreement on what the economy is to do. In the negative sense recognizing interferences with our freedom, prosperity or effectiveness in society with others will provide a common cause to eliminate that interference as waste. We also need to recognize that all our needs and wants cannot be satisfied by economic products. There are other human purposes that can be a basis for agreement among people. There are common needs to maintain our physical and emotional health. There are common needs to bring up the next generation as effective people. There are common needs to address the value of senior citizens who become increasingly needy as they age. We value rest and relaxation, the ability to temporarily cease our efforts to regenerate our persons or our bodies. We also value other things like the companionship of pets. We have some values in objects of beauty or pleasure, artwork of both physical objects and presentations by people of skill and talent. Many such needs must necessarily remain unfocused as specific products will be valued by segments of we the people instead of all humans. Still the knowledge that they are valued in general, promotion of the arts and human sciences can be a matter for agreement. We can come together for assuring the economic choices of human entertainment, even though we may not be together in which entertainment is most valuable. We can come together for supporting the education and training of our next generation or the maintenance of ourselves as senior citizens. These are common values because we all start out as children and then all hope to continue living. We are both complex and variable. The things that bring us together today may be replaced by something else tomorrow. The only true focus that we share is our basic needs and wants as human beings. Our ability to come together to assure a valued result is most easily focused on freedom, prosperity and society. But there are other matters that are worthy of our time and effort. There are things that we value because they are valued by others in our environment. We value the welfare of our family members. We value the people in our immediate presence. We value human membership in our divisions of society. We are being daily urged to waste, giving of ourselves for important matters from which we receive nothing. Perhaps the most alluring is doing things for the good of following generations or for the good of our future society. The flag should go up immediately for those in this course. Family is how we care for our next generation. The same people who would secure our world or our environment from us for the benefit of future generations will also secure it from future generations for the same reason. If nothing comes to you, then you have no good basis for valuing it. If it comes to you, then your own understanding of cost and benefit can be your guide. Quite simply, when and where our economy is not serving us, it is not serving society and is not serving the public. We are the society. We are the public. There is no other society or public to be served. There will be no future society that is in any different than ours unless we are the ones who create it. And the value for change does not belong to leaders. It is our value that counts. What is it that you must do for the good of the nation or the economy or the environment or some people in a country 5,000 miles away? What is so important that you have to surrender your children to military training and transport to the scene of battle? The first performance question for you as owner and customer is, what will you receive from such efforts that you will value? We have learned that hard lesson of customer relations. Only those who receive are able to effectively value what they receive. Only the customers have real purchase decisions. We have also learned that companion lesson of the willingness of leaders to limit or remove personal choices that might interfere with the way they have learned to run things. We also have an observation of human character that is appropriate. You will make personal decisions based on your own expectations of cost and benefit. If you have to be ordered to do something, it is likely to be something you would not do, except someone else is able to enforce consequences. The dark side of this rule is that those things that someone has to order you to do under penalty of law is not representing you or your interests. It is regulating your choices to meet criteria that are valued by others. It is likely to involve waste. You are also the public calling on some directive as being for the good of the public is just one more cause for concern. If public officers have to order the public to do it, it is not effective representation of the public. Such regulatory orders and laws are common examples of political misrepresentation. In government management of our economy, we are addressing massive waste created by leadership trying to meet goals and objectives of public leaders. In this lesson, we are addressing those specific directives that require the time, effort, and other resources of citizens without delivering or like return for them to value. Consider real estate taxes. These are commonly collected from those who own property. The performance question is one of what the taxpayer both receives and values that is secured through this taxation. When we expend on police and fire protection services, that value is clearly there. But then we are left with the nagging question of why it has to be collected by threatening legal consequences upon those who fail to pay. Is funding police and fire protection somehow not worth what it costs to citizens? On even asking the performance question, we are challenging the privilege of those who are set into positions of authority. Taxing us commoners is a privilege of rule. Property taxes also fund the county administration, which does its best to run things. It can fund public parks and roads. It also funds the county schools who return nothing to the taxpayers for the considerable expense that this incurs. It provides resources for a large number of services that may or may not produce anything for the taxpayer and public to receive. Consider the process of selling your property to another citizen. You both get real estate attorneys to represent their interests. The sale is accomplished through real estate professionals. The public support service you receive is so bad that you have to hire professionals at your own expense to deal with the government entities. You have already paid for it with your tax dollars. And then you add the additional fees and requirements for your transfer. Instead of service, you receive massive costs and burdens of requirements just to deal with your own property. Instead of service, you get additional waste. These demand, time, effort and resources that you have to expend just to exercise your personal ownership of your property. The waste is incredible. It is punishment delivered to the landowners instead of services that citizens might value. We have come far enough in our performance studies to see the direction of solution. And it is to identify what value the government's land management and taxation services can deliver to the citizens who pay for it. From another perspective, it is how the public service can team with property owners in getting what they value. Of course, teaming with citizens is unlikely to be pursued by public leaders. Teaming with citizens to do things is not considered as a proper way to run things. If anything, the preferred public direction is empowering the right side of any issue to prevail over what others want. The proper way for privileged leaders to do things can be horribly wasteful. Consider the business of justice. The very purpose for government is stated in our Constitution. It includes assuring justice. If you want justice in today's courts, you have to hire an attorney. Justice is at least partially for sale. Performance? Consider that the entire system is built on advocacy, on taking sides in a contest. It is straight out of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. This is for adversaries to pick their champions to do battle with the idea the most virtuous side will surely be able to prevail. Competition creates drama, not performance. Justice is not something secured by a contest. It is to be a service provided by government. What we have requires further expense, which often has to be partially covered by those who seek legal justice, just to have a cause heard for resolution. It is a same old system of privilege, assigning judicial responsibility for implementing the law that legislators and authority direct for use. We have assignment in place of service, exercise of authority in place of serving a purpose. Those with the authority of privilege will not change anything. We have the same basic court system that existed in England before the Revolution. It is proud to be doing the right things and to be doing these things as well as they can be done. Again, we have been developing the vision that will open our understanding of what we are not receiving from our economy and government. We can see where we get punitive costs for demanding government services even after we have been required to pay for them. When we address what we can do about it, then we will be looking for those things that can be presented to others that will bring agreement on a course of correction. Until then, we continue in frustration. We currently have something like 125 million taxpayers. The first task is to apply our analytic tool to see where we apply the cost of taxation. It is immediately obvious that we have to be ordered to pay tax. We do not value it. We pay it in order to have a working government and we pay it under threat of public prosecution. Well then, the tax dollars go in. How are they productively used? Again, those who govern use our tax dollars as they feel to be most appropriate. The dollars are redirected from the productive efforts of the economy to fund government. What we have is support for government and it provides us some services but it also expends on its internal operations that deliver nothing to people like us for value. We have tax dollars that are removed from the working economy altogether. As to our economic performance cycle, they are waste. There may be government services but they are not part of the economic value cycle. We also want to zero in on the specific cost the time and effort required for us to pay our taxes. It includes the time and effort of employers to track, collect, and pay employer taxes on behalf of employees. That becomes an operating cost that has to be covered by those who own or are customers of the employing business. It also includes the time and effort people must put in to understand what citizens do or to pay separately for someone else to prepare taxes. It includes the time and effort required to produce and deliver tax documents. I estimate that effort at equivalent of eight man hours of effort per taxpayer per year. That is an annual cost of eight hours in paying taxes for each of 125 million taxpayers or one billion man hours expended from our economy without any return at all. This is equivalent to a government operating a full time and unpaid tax force of 500,000. The kindest word is unpaid employment which is the effect temporary slavery. For cost we have to also add on the people who are employed by the IRS to take part in this no value effort. They have to be paid too and that cost has been over $11 billion a year. There is no value return to the citizens for this expenditure. The cost for our method of taxation which is in addition to any taxes paid is approaching half a percent of the productive capacity of the nation. And why is this expense set upon us? It appears to be just so our leaders can proclaim they have not taxed us unfairly. On the performance side there are flags all over the field. The people who are empowered to serve us are issuing orders instead of providing service. Those orders are issued under threat of public enforcement and that really gives definition to the nature of us and them that is currently supported by our privileged leadership. Why are we taxed? The common answer is that this provides for the operation of our government. Let's try to define the performance for this. Is there a difference between success and failure in our government's operation? That of course is the performance question. What measurable results does our tax system have to accomplish that defines its successful operation? Is there even a difference between its success and its failure other than doing the right things? There is nothing that is to be gained by the taxation effort. It is not only unmanaged but effectively unmanageable. So what about funding our government? We just find a new and higher us and them wall. It is in the form of a massive public debt. The efforts of the IRS are not able to fund the government of the United States. It is not even accomplishing that. It is unable to meet any reasonable purpose. Can we fix this? Can we change things so that the IRS can fund government? One most unhelpful answer is that Congress is a body of privileged leaders engaged in ruling over common citizens. It is commoners who do the productive work and privileged leaders get to harvest it. It is the old feudal model that is still with us. No, the answer is no. There is no fix through congressional action. The strength of privilege is in its stability not performance. Any change is resisted. The known cure for failed management is to apply the missing management. This cure is likely to require public action to direct the appropriate changes. Those will be the changes upon which we, as citizen owners of the United States, can agree upon as personally valuable to us. Until then, we get to be economically abused by the existing system, watching it waste our time, effort, and much of our resources as it collects. We do have the Constitution on our side. What we earn is ours, and we have property rights in it. We have the protection of private property that is seized by government. Even that's seized for a valid public purpose. Our leaders can be held to account for providing just compensation for what is taken. And that is just compensation that comes to us, what we both receive and value, not some vague good of the nation result. When doing something about it becomes a priority, we have this one possible starting point. The general rule is simple and to the point. If the output from government actions does not come to us, it can have zero public value. We only get to value what we receive. That turns out to be absolutely scary to modern leaders that they have to produce something for the people they would rule over. Consider public secrecy, securing information from the public. There is no value to the public. It is denial of even the concept of representation in favor of rule. The generation of information that is withheld from the public and even worse from our representatives is the cost incurred through denial of public purpose. If such things are simply terminated, there would be no difference at all. Secrecy is the exception, not the rule. It is only to be supported where it is necessary for the effective operation of our government. We the people are the ones who set purpose on our government, not some privileged employees. We set that purpose on office holders, both elected and hired, through the agreement by and among ourselves as to what government was to accomplish. There is no value in withholding public products from the public, denying delivery as voluntary waste that can be eliminated. Also, it is embezzlement, a felony to direct money collected to operate our government to the benefit of foreigners. If you, as both owner and customer, would not expend what you earn on an effort, then any spending on it certainly does not represent you and you are the public. It is right back to that simple and potent rule. If it does not come to us, then it has no public value. It is the nature of privilege that it invents its own purposes and then serves those purposes. It is generally termed public charity serving the special needs of some people and claiming this as the right thing to do. And if that form of public charity is not offensive enough, modern leaders are willing to use tax dollars to give special support and services to the citizens of other nations who come among us without permission. It is equivalent to raiding the bank account of a homeowner to the benefit of someone who has broken into their home and tried to stake out a place for themselves. Our challenge is reinforcing the meaning of representation. The one who assumes privilege in his or her actions is not representing anyone except themselves. Again, as owners, all these provide us with opportunities. When it comes to official management by regulation, the rule is that there is waste whenever people have to be compelled by law. Quite simply, you do not have to order people to do what they want to do anyway. If you have to direct people to do or not to do something, you are establishing an us and them relationship. There will be no teaming. There will be waste. In another perspective, if the leaders have to order people to do or not to do some action, you can be pretty sure they are not representing the people. This becomes doubly problematic when most of the people are ordered to act or to stop action for the benefit of some small number of people who have special needs or situations. It is when leaders would rather represent those in greatest need instead of representing the public. Such leaders will create great waste. They feel justified in spending other people's money on good causes, on doing the right things, serving leader goals and objectives. Modern political leaders are perfectly willing to impoverish the people they lead and destroy their lives if they accept that they have a good cause. We have the harshest of witnesses to how maniacal they can be that lesson of our civil war. That war was not caused by slavery. It was caused by the worst sort of misrepresentation and total rejection of law to do something that should not have been done in the first place. The cause was slavery and leadership took sides for and against it. It was so important to leaders that they rejected the very concept of representing we the people. The very idea that some law banning or mandating slavery would represent the people was so obviously an error that it never should have been considered for a government action claiming the representation of the people. The war was the price of having leaders who are willing to take sides of some people in their dispute with others. It is leadership who have no interest in the Constitution's mandate to create a union. Their economic correction was to seize private property to slaves as a public purpose but to refuse to pay for them. It was to trash the Constitutional mandate when it would not serve their political goals. Nobody wins a war. This is leadership at its worst, working to divide the people against each other and focusing on their divisions to the point where the unity of the nation is denied. The result was dead Americans, the worst sort of waste. The cost was piles of dead Americans who were supposed to be protected and represented by our elected leaders. And as a final insult, modern leaders point to the Civil War as one of the greatest accomplishments and economically ruin South and impoverish North and dead citizens. Political leaders do not change. They have learned nothing. Their efforts create stability, not improvement. In addressing the larger economy with government as a means for servicing the economy for our benefit and our purpose of prosperity, we bring focus on the unity of our purpose in seeking prosperity and our personal and public support that government is duty bound and legally required to deliver to us. In our next session, we will be addressing that singular business we recognize as a stock market. It was initiated as a timely service to a growing nation and has been wonderfully successful at what it does. It has also become a major source of waste that is fueled by support for privileged people who have become an effective part of the operation of this business, even though not part of what it was set up to do. Government interference has just increased the challenges of operational waste.