Stuff they don't tell you

There are things they don’t tell you and I sometimes wonder why—but sometimes it is obvious.

1)News tonight is that the OKC jail has a mold problem in the kitchen. TV made it sound like all sorts of bad practice in the jail.  But the real reason is that inmates stay out of trouble if they fix their own food.  More food, fewer fights. But these aren’t clean guys—druggies, robbers, mentally ill.  So they leave a mess and often it is almost impossible to manage by the jail.  Hence the mold.

2) Why are ice cubes in the shape of a D?  In the 1950s when icemakers for home fridges were being tried, they made a lot of shapes.  But the D cube made by one company was far less troublesome for low capacity makers.  Everyone began to use these icemakers and nothing has changed in 60 years.

3) Frustrated gardeners everywhere.”I can’t raise tomatoes anymore where I used to.” “I tried to raise fruit trees but the borers killed them.” Simple solutions.  Tomatoes develop a wilt if raised in the same location every year.  Rotate your crop and only come back to the same place about every 3 years.  Borers are laid by a fly from June 1 to September on the bark.  Then the larva bores under the bark either near the soil line or up a couple feet on the trunk, doing great damage.  Treat with borer spray every 3 weeks over the summer. So why doesn’t everyone in a garden center know this?  Beats me.

4)Why do most renters rent?  They can’t hold a job.  I know this not only by their histories, but also what I see.  Holes in walls and doors abound.  They got mad and pounded a hole in something.  They fight at work too—no faster way to get fired than fighting with the boss. Peter Drucker predicted this in the 60s, noting that so many kids were without parental guidance and we would likely raise a nation of poor workers, self-centered, insecure, uncooperative, when kids were raised by day care.

      Now a little politics.

5) Why did Repeal/Replace fail?  No matter what you thought of the Ryan-Trump-Price bill, it failed, as Rush Limbaugh pointed out, because too many people were successful in labeling it to mean bad things.  VP Pence pleaded that Stage I repealed individual mandates, would save $1T over ten years and give Medicaid entirely to the states.  What’s not to love if you are a conservative, and that’s just stage 1?  But here’s the deal.  If you run for office it’s brutal.  You’ll be called names, lied about, and it takes a tireless campaigner.  Who can endure? Very egotistical people. And so the US Senate in particular is full of prima donnas who insisted that if the bill wasn’t done their way, they’d vote NO.  When a party is minority, it’s okay to rant irreponsibly, but when you are in the majority, you’d better learn to be a team player or you will pass nothing and the public will sour on you.  But I doubt you'll hear this in the media reports.

6) The whole Russiagate thing now looks like a preemptive smoke screen to hide the fact that Trump’s people were under surveillance talking to Russians.  But the media narrative of Hillary losing steam in polls as election day approached due to Russian hacks/disclosures can be disproven by simple statistics.  Real Clear Polics Avg. two weeks out was Hillary +5.2%.  Day before election, +4.8%.  Exit polls day of election, +5%. No poll showed her at +1.8% as the popular vote actually was. What happened? Many people voted intentionally not talking to pollsters. But why didn’t the media point this out immediately?  Because journalists avoid math.  I saw this years ago teaching in college.  They get chills even over addition. 

Is "New Normal" bad economy permanent

In the 30s John Maynard Keynes, Brit economist, created a big following among the big government advocates.  In his attempt to explain the long recession, he suggested that people were too saving.  They needed to spend more.  Spending causes the economy to grow and all we had to do was to get governments to invigorate spending, not saving.  Gov could call for a lot of infrastructure spending, could soak the saving rich so that Gov had more to spend. And Central Banks could lower interest rates until savings made less sense and free-spending happened more.  This was music to the ears of FDR and other pols who loved the justification of their big Gov plans. And the theory ruled econ for 30 years.

            But Keynesianism wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.  Democrats argued that the economy should be kept in a constant state of stimulation with big Gov spending and low interest rates.  Yet we had just as many recessions as ever, not fewer.  And then in the 70s as Keynesianism grew popular worldwide, it resulted in a huge spasm of inflation.  What was needed, said the Monetarist school of thought, was a consistent money supply, not the erratic fluctuations brought about by booms and busts. Thatcher/Reagan proved that to grow an economy, you need to concentrate on freedoms needed by businessmen, and a stable lendable supply of money.   And so, for 30 years, Monetarism ruled.  The idea of central banking was to stabilize both the supply of money, and balance the savings (supply) and investment (demand) by lowering interest when too many people saved.

            Not all Keynesians are social liberals, but you can see the partnership. To a small biz guy like me, the Economic Freedom of Reagan made a lot more common sense.  Then in March 2000, there came a crash that led to recession in 2001.  When the economy gets stressed, all sorts of theories get promoted.  When times improve, we forget most of them. The Keynesians, out of hegemony, had to have an explanation that things were now permanently bad, Secular Stagnation.  Simply put, Secular Stagnation happens when there are too many savers and Central banks can’t lower interest rates enough to balance against the need for investment.  There is chronic economic weakness; low growth, low inflation, low interest rates and constant threat of recession.   Well maybe the population is getting old and all they want is to save, not invest (spend).  Government needs to start a massive spending plan on such things as infrastructure.  Or maybe there has come an era of income inequality when the rich have all the money and free-spending poor don’t.  Gov should start soaking the rich and redistributing the wealth.  See why this appeals to Obama? And why he had that weird way of talking about government spending as “investment”.  The most pessimistic aspect of secular stagnation is that just because times are good, doesn’t indicate economic health.  There may be booms--bubbles of financial excess from time to time--but the chronic weakness returns after a disastrous bust. 

            So, Trump gets a boom.  Will it end the calamitously as the 2007-2009 housing bust? We will soon see.  If the secular stagnation idea is correct, the Fed will soon (after a recession) be stymied with zero interest and  paltry growth (the “new normal”).  But the businessmen like me and Trump think, we can undo much of the regulations and poor policies of Obamacare and taxes.  Free the people and they will achieve. An economy consists of dozens of factors working on each business multiplied by millions of businesses.  Free the businesses and they will make growth.  So will Economic Freedom win the argument or Secular Stagnation?  It won’t be too many years and we’ll know.  My guess is that the conceit of central bankers thinking they control economies leads to stuff like secular stagnation. 

           

Murray's observations of US education

Many of our prescriptions and some of our politics of education is misguided. So says conservative sociologist, Charles Murray. I’ll relate his reasoning over several posts beginning today.  You can test kids for many abilities and most are distinct—musical ability is not related to athletic ability, etc. But 3, mathematical, verbal, and spatial reasoning are somewhat correlated.  Call this “academic ability” and it is the basis for IQ theory. But half the students will be below average and they get frustrated by school. So here’s an achievement test question for 8^th grade.  If you have a company of 90 workers and the next year it has 10% more, how many workers does it have then? Only 62% of 8^th graders can answer the correct ‘99’. Many can calculate the 10%=9 but many don’t realize you have to add this to 90.  Now as teacher, you can teach the test by drilling on this type of question, but there are hundreds of others too.  So what happens are the first 3 blunders of public education.  (1) Politicians and educrats brag that they can make poor students improve markedly.  Sociology disproves this, but this romantic myth pervades education policy. (2) Teachers, expected to provide the miracles of education improvement of poor students, teach the test which they have either seen or have seen like tests many times.  (3) While it is proven that even poor students have an ability to memorize a great deal (it’s the “reasoning” that forms the basis for academic ability) memorization is greatly downplayed in modern education.  Too bad! In order to function in a culture, you have to know a lot of stuff about how things operate—core culture values—what’s a minuteman, a smoke-filled room, how do you make a cheeseburger or change a toilet flapper, and so forth.  Sans memorization, we create a body of students who cannot cope.  Teaching the test only works temporarily and does nothing to really elevate reasoning skills. Educrats who insist they can miraculously transform dullards into geniuses, ask the public to throw money at the problem. Hence more money only helps get better teachers and student scores in countries where dire underspending has been happening.

            Besides romanticizing education, not teaching core cultural knowledge and teaching tests, there are more problems with public ed.  (4) Disruption and lack of discipline hurts all the students in a class and this is the biggest indicator of schools with an F grade.  Bad teachers, no standards, few resources often go with this. In the 50’s the Coleman Report on education found, to the stunned surprise of politicians, that quality of schools did not yield achievement, but family values did.  Pols didn’t listen.  They gave $$$ to poverty area schools under Title I.  Acheivement actually fell!  No Child Left Behind penalized schools which didn’t progress.  No change in student scores. (5) Hence throwing money at the problem doesn’t fix it.  US schools are almost twice as expensive as any others in the world, and kids scores are about #30 in OECD.  Parochial (religious-based) schools spend half what public schools do and get higher test results—even when applied to low-income scholarship students.  But the parochial schools have discipline, memorization, allow teachers more often to teach freely and some other things we’ll cover tomorrow.

            (6) Too many kids are told to go to college.  90% are encouraged to attend by high school counselors but only 35% of them will get a degree.  The other 65% will struggle with college and drop out. They should be advised, “Hey, you like to operate equipment?  Do you know a crane operator makes a lot more than a pizza delivery man?” Colleges estimate IQ of 115-120% or about 9-12% of seniors will be able to handle college material. (7)To try to handle the excess, colleges have done grade inflation (easier grades) and steered students to curricula with less rigor in math or verbal skills like social sciences, humanities, and things like recreational science. But there are too many grads and few jobs in these areas. Colleges are saavy.  Employers use a BA or BS as a screen for abilities, so colleges pack ‘em in and charge more. (8)But the lesser grading standards mean the smartest students aren’t getting enough education and are slowed down.  Thus we see widespread statistical illiteracy among the gifted, little history, and almost no liberal arts. (Some things like humanity and humility are so important for a gifted leader, that we MUST think about them.) (9) Both HS and colleges promote self-esteem which promotes a risk-averse, selfish, foolhardy, autonomy. No wonder we have less entrepreneurship. For the first time in 400 years, America has fewer business start-ups than closings. Next post: How to fix it.

            So here’s Murray’s solutions. (1) re-install memorization of core cultural values that are not politically motivated in K-8.  (2) Get rid or education’s romantic myth that they can make a genius out of an average student. (3) provide a stable, disciplined environment that gives all kids a shot at maximum learning. The upshot of these 3 things is that if you aren’t a genius, you can still come out of school having enjoyed it, armed with a lot of know-how, a very good person even if you aren’t Einstein. (4) Teachers should be free to teach and evaluate one another informally with shared ideas. (5) Involve families.  16 hours a day, students aren’t in school, so what are they learning. 4 & 5 are often the two most widely observed factors in highly education-successful countries.  (6) Let the gifted go as fast as they can. (7) Teach the forgotten half how to make a good living—dependable, good attitude, hard workers, cooperative—and enhance career tech programs. (8) School choice.  Competition among schools.  Not one size fits all. (9) Use more certifications (like CPA exams, bar exams, plumbing license exams) instead of degrees.  Murray then notes that private schools have no magical monopoly on this basket of techniques, high-scoring countries are not all alike.  These are just principles found from sociological studies. Yet as I pass this around to the many teachers in my family they agree that Murray is spot-on.

The New China

It is not the same China you grew up knowing.  The communist government decided to give in to capitalist plants in the country in order to modernize.  That has given way to a new middle class that wants individualism, something totally new to Confuscian tradition and Communist party ideals.  Meanwhile Christianity has spread and become a quiet but important minority while income inequality has skyrocketed in the home of socialism. 

            Let’s take it in order.  1.4 billion Chinese with 800 million Han Chinese are rapidly rising, both as a power, especially with a rising middle class, and yet the ruling Communists find themselves in a fix—how to manage this new bourgeois without suppressing their productivity.  The middle class, now 250 million storng don’t trust their government.  They aren’t about to rebel or even ask for the vote, but they gripe, frustrated with corruption, lack of transparency and accountability of the rulers. Since 1990 the blistering pace of economic growth has been the party’s most important source of legitimacy which supports its most important goal, stability.  But the critical citizens have taken to social media en masse.  The question is what happens after the growth peters out.  It surely will because you can sustain 7-10% growth by copying current technology, but when your nation has to create, entrepreneur, invent on its own you are doing well to get 3%.  Hence the pickle that leaders find themselves in.  The party fears its own people. 

            But how the people have changed.  The old tradition of living in an extended family fell flat as soon as the one-child policy was instituted.  Nowadays people are allowed two, but one child means marriage is no longer for the procreation of family.  And with kids getting educated and moving hundreds of miles from home, the elders aren’t taken care of as in the past.  The grandchildren as sparse.  And the educated kids are individualistic.  They want love instead of arranged marriages.  The older generation can’t quite understand this.  There are marriage “fairs” where brides and grooms advertise for a mate.  He advertizes a salary and position and has a mortgage paid.  She advertizes she is beautiful, decent, quiet, and not fat.  Except that the 20-somethings on the ads didn’t write their own ads.  The parents did, in hopes of arranging a nice marriage.  The kids fight this not wanting any arrangements.  Hence the age-old family system is crumbling, except in rural areas.  And, China will get old before it gets rich because of the one-child policy.  Today 12 workers for every retiree.  2050 will be 2.5. Unlike USA which will arrive at about the same ratio, there is little social welfare (kids are expected to take care of parents), no pensions, and savings in Chinese banks pay less than inflation.  The growing individualism of the youth also has brought about a sexual revolution of shacking up.  58M young people live alone. There is a rank shortage of eligible marriagble women since a lot of male sexual selection took place with the one child policy.

            The elders remember famines, the kids think high speed trains and pork every day. Government encouraged entrepreneurship and thus many Chinese work at small businesses rather than the state factories as in years past.  Yet the Party is nervous about the rise of so many uncontrollable businesses who march to the own drummer.  In the old days, people knew  by face just about everyone they came in contact with.  Strangers were treated with a degree of caution.  This is indicative of the personal networks everyone had.  But today the personal networks have been shredded as is true in western urban areas.  And just as in New York City, people in Beijing see a mugging and stroll right past it. Hence the Party and Chmn. Li have a campaign on to indoctrinate in socialist core values.  These values are diametrically opposite western values of liberty.

            Thus the people have discovered religion.  Buddhism has exploded in membership but since it is so philosophical and most people just do the rituals and not the serious engagement, the Party tolerates this.  Christianity is another thing altogether.  It has grown for ½ million in 1950 to 100 million today--9% compounded annually.  This growth far outstrips any other country or period of Christianity’s development.  It was 2.9% in the first 3 centuries of Rome. Of course Christianity is a true religion which governs hearts apart from politics.  So the government has cracked down but then tolerates it at other times.  Likewise civic clubs and charities would be able to help the government big time—if only the Party weren’t so nervous about groups of people gathering and thinking of things to do without government consent.  Public morality is increasingly at odds with private.

            Inequality in a communist country might seem an oxymoron.  But like Russia, oligarchs were granted an inside edge with the government resources and if they played it right became billionaires.  China has over 500 billionaires, more than USA.  And they cluster in urban areas, as does the middle class who work in their plants.  Less than 10% of rural youths go to senior high school compared to 70% of urban kids.  Income inequality is measured by the Gini coefficient.  China is .49 while USA is .39 and most European countries are about .3.  Another way to look at this is that the top 10% of earners in China make 21 times as much as the bottom 10%.  USA is 6.

            Which means that with pitiful returns available on savings in China’s banks, those who can do invest abroad.  And as the economy slows down, many in the middle see the system as “rigged.” Some government run investment schemes have turned out to be Ponzi schemes benefitting Party members. Owning property is popular.  Now don’t think of this as we do in the West.  People have long tern leases of government apartments.  Yet these are going up astronomically in places like Shanghai and there is a market in trading properties just as if the people owned them.  85% of city folks “own” their homes. Yet any false move by government in the housing market will cost homeowners enormously and a couple of these have occurred.  So people now question whether their assets are secure.  Chinese have little appetite for political change, but security is tantamount.

            As a result, many people want out.  10M have left China in the past two decades not to return.  A poll showed 57% of Chinese would send their kids overseas to study if only they could afford it.  Government charges $11K just for a passport.  Students who come to Canada and USA often are highly serious.  Their entire family depends on them getting a good enough job to import mom and dad and others.  This has bled China of the best and brightest yet the government knows that many will remain.  Cash flows to international markets too as the wealthy establish companies and domiciles abroad. 

            The repression of expression has increased in the last few years, making a slow burning fuse burn faster.  Mr. Xi’s “Chinese dream” a competitor to the American Dream has proven largely empty.  The American ideal is to be whoever they want to be which conflicts with the tightly scripted social and moral codes of the Chinese Communist Party.  And so at some point, another Tianamen, in some other form is likely.

            This article makes much use of plagiarism of The Economist’s Special Report from July 2016.

Reformers

This being the 500^th anniversary of the Reformation, some thought occurs about what it takes to be a great reformer.  Of course the Reformation was far more than 1517 and the nailing of 95 theses on a church door.  It was 1519 and the Luther-Eck debate that threw down the theological gauntlet to the Dominicans, the vernacular Bibles going back to Wycliff, the theology of Hus and Calvin, the preaching of Zwingli and a good deal of politics about things like German wanting out from under Italy and Netherlands wanting out from under the Hapsburgs and Sulieman wanting everyone under him.  Reformers have to be tough and lucky.  But above all, you must be Plainspoken. 

            Zwingli, the redfaced blonde Swiss preacher and Hus who did the same in Prague were plain-talking guys whom the masses understood, “preached in their language”.  Luther was the son of a guy who owned 7 mines and 2 smelters, who grew up loving the songs of the tavern, the work ethic of his entrepreneurial father and the simple language of the miners.  About the only people who could read and write were clergy who hired out to do technology, accounting, and architecture. To flaunt their position, they often used big words and wrote in Latin which only their peers could discern.  All the reformers could do this but chose to speak simply in a way that thrilled the ordinary people. Only perhaps Calvin, with his categorization of Christian teaching was more of an austere lawyer than a son of the soil.  But all the movements generated what is called Protestant work ethic. Some Reformation thinkers were left behind in the Catholic church to spur reform from within.  When Catholics met Protestants in America, they formed a pact of religious freedom and Lockean government. So resonate was Hus that his movement, though stamped out as he was burned at the stake, fled to the hills of Bohemia and lived on to this day as the Moravian church.  Zwingli and Calvin’s dogma spread widest. Luther transformed Germany to this day.  His love  of song, gave rise to half the great German composers of the Baroque/ Classical/Romantic era and lived in “the singing church” that continued Western music to the Beatles and to Christian Contemporary music.  Luther’s zeal for reading and writing spawned public schools and a German public that to this day publishes 6 times the printed volume per capita as the next country, USA. 

            So apply this to politics and we see the ultimate in plain-spokeness in Trump.  Where an intellectual reformer is just a dissendent, a true reformer gets things done.  FDR, Disraeli, Washington were like this.  Trump is a get ‘r done guy who communicates with the people.  All this would seem to say that we are seeing a revolution in a revamping of government—if he can get by the hurdles of Democrat obstructionism and Republican blankie clutching.  By the time it is over, it may not be entirely what you and I wanted, but it will be lasting in many ways.  This, not Obama’s executive orders, is what legacy is about.

Is Trump Legitimate?

Democrats have been arguing that Trump did not legitimately win. They argue 1. Electoral College win isn’t legitimate, 2. Russians cheated Hillary, 3. Comey did it.  But I think we should be able to devise some somewhat scientific tests and have the number tell us. 

 

First a few results.  Trump got 62.98M votes, Hillary got 65.84M, Others 7.80M.  136.63M cast.  Even though Hillary won, she won by 2% less margin in popular vote than Obama.  And this was a heavy turnout.  The population grew (320.1M from 312.1M in 2012) by 2.5% but turnout grew by 8.0%.  Only MS, IA,OH, and WI had slightly fewer voters than in 2012.

            Dem margins were down in 12 of 13 swing states.  Their margin was up in AZ but down in CO, FL, IA, ME, MN, MI, NV, NH, NC, OH, PA, and WI.  The shifts in IA and ME were 15.4% and 12.3% to the R-Pres., Trump.

            R’s were -3 in the House and -2 in Senate but picked up 6 state legislature houses where they now lead 69-30.

            So let’s take the first argument, that the Electoral College screwed Hillary.  Here, Trump won 30 states compared to her 20.  That’s +6 states more than Romney got (24, compared to 26 by Obama).  Clearly Hill lost the electoral vote and the flyover states.  Both Madison and Hamilton were clear in the Federalist Papers that they designed a constitution so that just a corner of the country couldn’t lord it over the rest.  They wanted majority of not just votes, but wide areas of representation.  Hence the electoral college compromise.  It was also thought, in those days, that electors were state leaders who would, with a clear head and with much study, vote for the right man for Pres.  We have a republic, not a democracy.  To seat Hillary would surely go against this reasoning.

            Second Dems say the Russians hacked them and spread false stories, thus causing polls to soar for Trump at the last minute.  Here’s the math problems.  We had record turnout amid record disapprovals of both candidates.  Maybe people were casting votes "against".  So then why didn't 3rd party guys get big votes? Thus, this must have been a lesser effect.  Polls all had Hillary +7 to +10 the week, even days, before the election. For an October Surprse to create this much change would be historically unprecedented.  [For a similar experiment, look at George H.W.Bush who went from perhaps -1% to -2% the last week when Leonard Walsh brought forth the Iran-Contra charges which supposedly implicated Bush.]  Nor did 2016 polls discover a big turnout, which clearly happened nationwide. Why did they miss it?  Answer: Apparently people weren’t telling pollsters(any pollster!) the real story. Hence it was a large unknown turnout of R-votes that scuttled Hillary.  Doubt this?  Then look at state results.  R Congressmen and Senators were returned to seats. (Senate R’s defended 25 out of 33 seats!)  R’s gained state legislatures. Had this been a last minute poll shift for Trump, it wouldn’t have shown up in all these other offices. Another measure of the fact that voters were telling pollsters to leave them alone were the exit polls which also showed Hill ahead by+5.  But that wasn’t the actual vote! Trump voters weren't answering polls, but registering their vote.

 Certainly the Russians hacked but were they effective in drawing down her votes?  At  the same time as Wikileaks-Russia the FBI was releasing files, more damaging than Wikileaks.  So were the allegations of O’Keefe who caused several Democrat personel to be fired. The hacking seems to have been just an auxillary story.  And as yet, we don’t hear any Dems saying this or that allegation was false. Were all thes stories true? The lack of protest of specifics would say so.  But does that implicate Comey’s investigation?

ND a tiny poulation state with a big Intel presence went more negative for Hillary than Obama. But another small but heavily Intel-dominated state, UT, swing was muddied by a third party candidate. Mixed result. But again the misfire of polls shows that any October surprise was minimal in effect.  It was the voters coming out of the woodwork to vote Trump that killed her campaign.  Surprising big vote, nationwide, big loss of Obama margins, rest of races bearing results out.

You can’t argue with Math.     

English politics

            We often discuss American History & Revolutionary War but miss the broader main points of the British experience and how it made the colonies think.  In 1776 practically all the Americans thought of themselves as good British subjects willing to do what came natural in throwing off an English king.

            Kings of England were a subset of the feudal order, where a strong tribal leader doles out privileges and land to his best warriors, then has a contract with them to solicit soldiers and money to defend the realm.  It was all about war and defense.  The best warriors were called dukes (counts in France from which we get “county”) and the soldiers were knights, a class of men who trained from age 7 in warfare.  Few could read.  Only the church and monasteries had literate personnel. If you wanted an accountant or a guy to design castles, get someone from the church.  And nobody lived very long.  A cut turned into gangrene, small pox killed 1/3 of it’s victims, women died often in childbirth.  So kings had a problem with succession and heirs.  1/3 died without a filial heir.  That caused a war of succession among claimants, often generations later as well.  Marriages were arranged for alliances, so a French king’s daughter at age 2 might be pledged to a dashing crown prince from England, age 18. But by the time she was marriageable, he may have had a dozen mistresses and be a drunken old coot with war wounds.  Or a king’s queen might be put away for her affair to a rival for the throne, never to see her children, who in turn grow up loathing their father (George II, mid-1700s). 

            All that baloney about the romance of being a princess that young girls adore never happened.  A queen had to be the manager of warring dukes.  She’d be expected to marry quickly, with good political alliance, to provide an heir. A contender to the throne was sure to challenge, since women weren’t warriors. (Men have about 3X the muscular mass of women and when it comes to swinging swords and jousting, have unchallenged ability.) Thusthe beloved Elizabeth I, was beset by Protestants vs. Catholics, suitors from all over Europe, challenges to her status, parliament’s funding, decided never to marry but to marry England instead. But within the girl was the heart of an emperor. She brought England to tears on the eve of the Armada’s invasion and again when she opened Parliament the last year of her life, “Although God hath raised me high, yet this I count the glory of my crown, that I have reigned with your loves…though you have had many mightier and wiser princes sitting in this seat, yet you have never had, nor shall have, any that love you better.”

            Kings got warriors from feudal dukes but money and supplies were problems. They had to get it from Parliament who could tax. Kings did fees. King John was an ass, and the dukes ganged up on him to get concessions in Magna Carta.  John signed but got the pope to nullify.  But then he suddenly died and his boy heir, Henry III, had a power vacuum and the Magna Carta was re-instated   It provided for an advisory council (“Parliament” from the French word for talk, parlez).  These barons, every time there was a weak king of a tyrant, would make limits and demands and the Parliament became a unique feature of England. Eventually the Magna Carta rights were deemed apply to all English, not just the nobles.  (3 classes in middle ages—nobles, clergy, and commoners.  Nobles thought themselves literally superior to the subhuman common people.  This began to change about 1500.)

            Edward III 1327-77, had a legitimate claim to the French throne and started a war to win it.  But the Black Death and his long reign that outlived his sons, threw a rock into the cogwheels.  A dearth of people developed and survivor guilt caused a religious revival of Christian principles.  The grandsons of Ed divided into factions and it led to civil war, War of Roses. When a guy took the throne, he would kill the families of rivals.  Who gets their land?  King does.  This led to more abuse when Henry VIII took over monastic lands after declaring Protestant. Parliament passed a law against Bills of Attainder—you can’t just pass a law against one person or family with the designs on killing them and taking their land. It’s evil.  Bottom line: If a king wants money or powers he has to ask for it.  Chaos of English successions caused Parliaments to assert themselves.  Then Henry VIII not only muddled the succession, but brought on religious strife pertaining to it.  Parliament, trying to get control of the army in 1640 ran afoul of Charles I, the pretty boy who chased good-looking Catholic women from the Continent.  That was the other problem with kings.  They had a limited stock of acceptable girls.  And Parliament went to war against Charles, defeated him, and sent his French wife back to France in exile.  Her boys were raised Catholic.  After the Interregnum, when Parliament unsuccessfully ruled, they invited Charles II to be king, but he was AINO, Anglican In Name Only, and believed in divine right of kings like the French. His brother, James II was far worse.  In 1688, English went shopping for a new King and Queen—William and Mary. 

            This all occurred in early American colonial times, before 1700.  One rationale of the English was that the king James II had violated the “social contract” with the people, an idea of John Locke.  Locke’s ideas didn’t have much popularity in England but they caught on with the clergy in America, who, after the religious revival of Great Awakening, 1740-42, became big spokesmen of communities.  Thus 19 of the 56 people who signed the Declaration were pastors. And the English originally mistook the colonial revolt for a bunch of radical Presbyterian ministers.

            Meanwhile after William and Mary and then Queen Anne, the throne was filled by a German prince, George I, because he was the only available Protestant heir.  He spoke no English and left Parliament to do most business. He caught his wife having an affair and banished her to a castle, never to see her children again. Thus his son, George II loathed his father.  The ideal of the Americans was that a leader should be moral, communicative, and a servant of people, is much a reaction to the dysfunctional Georges. George II, because of his lonely childhood could never have close relationships, and became a macho soldier with many mistresses. Same deal with his son Frederick. How would Americans see this, people who had come here dearly wanting to worship as they saw fit?  And George II kept getting into wars.  Eventually, the Seven Years War led to such broken finances that for the first time, the British treasury began to tax all people, not just nobles, and colonists, who, by Act weren’t supposed to be. George III continued taxation and Parliament passed a number of martial law acts that killed freedom in the colonies.  In 1773, a Philadelphia printer named Benjamin Franklin reprinted Two Treatises on Government by John Locke and it ignited the colonists.

            Oh, did I mention that when Scotland and England united, 1707, English gentry bought up and bankrupted Scots and turned their land into sheep ranches for the blooming wool trade—thereby exiling Scots to Ireland and America? That kings liked Catholicism and Anglicanism because they could appoint bishops as a power grab.  Or that lack of free land in England led many to emigrate? (And they came up with a term “American Dream”, meaning the Lockean right to have a relationship with God, own land, and do as you saw fit.)