Limits

 

Camelot

It's true! It's true! The crown has made it clear
The climate must be perfect all the year
A law was made a distant moon ago here:
July and August cannot be too hot
And there's a legal limit to the snow here
In Camelot

Are God’s limits your limits?

The alliance, and the mistake they make, between no-tax conservatives and social conservatives can be explained by mathematics.  No-tax conservatives are opposed to any group. They are what mathematicians would call User Optimalists.  That means they are opposed to “communists” who are by definition believers in a group. Social conservatives are not opposed to a group, a system, after all they believe in God who is a group, as long as that group agrees with them.  They are what mathematicians would call System Optimalists. They are opposed to Communists because Communists are atheists, and they are not. After all the father of modern Communism, Karl Marx, said that religion is the opiate of the people. In fairness, Robespierre and the other French Revolutionaries were anticlerical because, historically, organized religion has supported the ruling class, so Karl Marx was by no means the first to confuse anti-clericalism with atheism.

It is possible to believe in a group and thus support taxes for the group,  and still believe in God.  This all stems from the belief that God is everywhere, therefore where God is not must be zero. And also that God is without, has zero, error. A mathematician would state both of these as 0±0.  This is decidedly NOT the mean, µ, of the group has no error, ε, which a mathematician would state as µ±ε. While 0±0 is true if either µ=0 or ε=0, it is not limited to only these values.  God’s mean, µ, is zero BECAUSE 0=µ-µ.  God’s error is zero because limit n→∞  ε=σ/√n =0, NOT because God’s Standard Deviation, σ, is zero. 

The problem is that  the square of a Standard Deviation, σ², for example God's of π²/36, can be observed even if God can not.  For example in my field of traffic engineering, σ² might be the observable Free Flow Speed.  At the same time traffic engineers can observe the capacity of a road, but the arrival volume of the road can exceed the capacity of the road and can NOT be observed. This only requires that the mean is NOT half of the observable capacity, it only acknowledges that the arrival volume can not be observed.  The mean, which is half of the total value of sample, can exceed what can be observed.  But if you can’t observe the mean, that does not mean that the mean must be zero. 

No-tax conservatives observe and concede that σ²≠0 but insist that the mean must be zero.  Social conservatives concede that the mean is not zero, but that σ=0.  No-tax conservatives believe that they are privileged, not lucky,  that there is no value in being unlucky and that there is no value in helping anyone who is unlucky, where luck is defined by both µ and σ.  Social conservatives, will help the unlucky in their own group and believe that the only groups that should be helped are those who believe like them, have a σ=0, the difference between the other group and their group.  The alliance between these positions requires social conservatives to support behavior that is µ=0 even if they believe it is not, and no-tax conservatives to support behavior that is σ=0, even if they know that it is not.

The fact that Republicans have this alliance goes back to its beginnings in the 1850s, when no-tax Whigs who were anti-slavery and anti-immigrant Know-Nothings who were anti-slavery were welcomed into the Republican party.  Dixiecrats, who were pro-slavery and  eventually pro-Jim Crow, were part of the Democratic Party until LBJ, and Nixon’s Southern Strategy. Anti-slavery was eventually replaced by the abortion issue, which no-tax conservatives have no intention of supporting but will support social conservatives who do support it.  And that is why single-issue politics are so dangerous. They lead to dangerous alliances. Democrats observe that there is a group, and act like its mean is God’s mean even if God’s mean is unobservable. But once upon a time the fiscally conservative but social liberals, e.g Mark Twain who was a Mugwump Republican or Nelson Rockefeller who was responsible for the eponymous last name attributed to Everett Dirksen, Howard Baker, Gerald Ford and others as Rockefeller Republicans, believe that there is a group, and act like its mean is God’s mean even if God’s mean is unobservable.  They would be like Adam Kinzinger, George Conway or Rick Wilson and drummed out of the current Republican Party as RINOs .  They act like moderate Democrats in believing that u≠0 and σ≠0 is consistent with 0±0 for God.  Being a communist only means that you don’t believe in a ruling class, not that you don’t believe in God. The Evangelical Protestants have rejoiced in the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade even though they do not agree with most other things with the mostly Roman Catholic Supreme Court justices who actually overturned this case.

To be very nerdy, the best strategy is a Nash Equilibrium which mathematically is to act like your group variance is 5/6 * σ²  AND µ>0.  Moderate Democrats and Moderate Republicans unite! You may not know what the unobservable is, but you know it exists and you know your limits.