Month: October 2026

Small white dog looking at the camera from behind some leaves

Big Dog, Little Dog

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October 25, 2026

By Stephen Stofka

Last week I looked at the persistent controversies within generations alive at the same time. This week, I want to explore the continuing tension between government institutions and the individuals who are subject to the jurisdiction of those institutions. Are we living in a nation of liberal principles or a dog park where the big dog, government, intimidates the little dogs?

Private Property

When the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, residents of Russia were introduced to private property for the first time in 500 years. Just as the feudal system was weakening in the late 15th century, Ivan the Great had consolidated the Principality of Russia. Before then, many peasants were used to moving every three years in a system of slash and burn agriculture. The introduction of a feudal system enabled large estate owners to tie their workers to the land they owned. By the time of the American Declaration of Independence, the Russian feudal system had evolved into a system of near slavery. As the American Civil War erupted in 1861, Czar Alexander II emancipated the privately owned serfs of Russia (Source).

Why do nations permit individuals to own property? The majority of wealth held by Americans is in their home equity. Governments could lease those homes out to families and retain the implied wealth. In an agricultural society, the feudal lords used their serfs to farm the land. In our urban society, local governments farm people, not land. Wait, what?

This is a weekly exploration, an unraveling of thought threads so I am going to follow this one. Homeowners work for a variety of employers and earn income. Local governments get more in taxes per acre of land if people rather than crops live on the land. Taxing people is more lucrative than taxing crops. At the end of this essay, I have included the math on owning a home.

We may point to the 5th Amendment as an acknowledgment of the supremacy of private property but the 5th Amendment prohibits governments only from taking an individual’s property without just compensation. A government’s right to someone property is still supreme.

Cultivated Minds

Farming people requires more government investment per acre, similar to hydroponic farming. Crowding more people into an acre of land, requires more thorough weed control and cultivation. For weed control, governments use vaccines and other public health measures to check the spread of communicable diseases. The chief cultivation measure is public education.

As I noted two weeks ago, almost half of people lived on farms near the turn of the century. In 1900, only 10% of children attended high school. By 1930, only 25% lived on farms (Source). In those three decades, the percentage of children attending high school jumped from 10% to 50%. By 1940, it was almost 75% (Source). A continuing source of friction and resentment between parents and government is the idea of compulsory education. Parents, particularly those with a Biblical view of authority, regard the parents as the supreme authority over their children’s upbringing, not the government.

Education plays a role similar to fertilizer, weed control and cultivation. How so? A better educated workforce earns more income and can pay higher taxes. Public education socializes children at an early age and helps create a shared culture. This helps reduce violence among families from different cultural backgrounds who are tightly packed into dense urban areas. This

In 2025, the USDA estimated that fertilizer costs were about 40 – 45% of total costs for wheat and corn farmers (Source). The largest share of property taxes funds the local school district (Source – Power Schools). In my Colorado county, 49% of the tax is dedicated to various school funds.

In any community there are individuals who do not like to be “farmed.” Government institutions and programs try to standardize us the way that carrots, each of which is unique, is shaped, cut and polished to a standard baby-cut 2” length (Source).

Private schools can provide more rigorous educational standards or a learning culture that parents feel is more nourishing for their children. Naturally, they want their private choice to be funded with public dollars. If a state spent $10,000 per child on K-12 education, then a parent could apply a voucher for that amount to a private school. Currently, two-thirds of states have some form of school voucher but few have a truly universal voucher program that allows any family to fund a private school choice with public funds (Source).

Conclusion

In some respects governments act like feudal lords. A core tenet of liberal theory, first clearly articulated by the 17th century philosopher John Locke, is that people have natural rights. In a democracy or republic, government institutions are formed with the direct or indirect will of the people. Therefore, those institutions would also have natural rights. Big dog v. little dog and the big dog wins.

Next week I want to explore a fundamental libertarian belief that the scope of legitimate government power is very limited. In more than four decades, the Libertarian Party barely attracts any voter support. Is it an overly idealistic philosophy that rests more on attitude than consistent workable principles?

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Photo by Alvan Nee on Unsplash

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Homeowner Math:  Consider a $500,000 home with a $400,000 mortgage and an annual property tax bill of $3000. In the first ten years of that mortgage, the amount of the mortgage payment that is applied to principal is less than the annual property tax bill.

Over decades, the annual price appreciation of homes has been about 4% so that a home’s price doubles in about 18 years. Let’s call it 20 years to make the math a bit easier. After 20 years, the value of that $500,000 home will have doubled to $1 million. The homeowner still owes $222K on the mortgage after paying $600K over that time, so the net equity is $778K.

Let’s say the homeowner has made $78K in improvements to make the math easier. If the house sold for $1 million after fees, the capital gain would be $700K. If the owners are a couple, they would have a $500K exclusion and a taxable gain of $200. Let’s say the capital gains tax rate is 15%, or $30000.

In those twenty years, the homeowner has paid the original $100K down, $600K in mortgage payments, $78K in improvements, $90K in property taxes and $30K in income taxes for a total of almost $900K. They have received the use of the house for 20 years and have netted $100K. However, that $100K is worth only $50K in buying power. Was the homeowner truly the landlord?

Persistent Controversies

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October 18, 2026

By Stephen Stofka

Last week I looked at the changing sensibilities between generations. This week I want to explore the separate sensibilities within a generation or proximate generations. The culture and living environments are roughly similar, yet there are persistent ideological controversies that do not remain settled.

Different Lives

In the 1920s urban residents had electricity, some form of central heating, refrigeration, and a telephone or access to one. They had their feet firmly planted in the 20th century. The McFarland Historical Society, located in a suburb of the capital Madison, Wisconsin features an urban 1920s Kitchen (Source – McFarland Historical Society).

Most rural folks had few, if any, of these conveniences. My great uncle, living in a farm community outside of Dallas, Texas, wrote in his autobiography of getting electricity to his home. He removed the gas engine out of the washing machine and installed an electric motor. No longer having to worry about fumes, he installed the washing machine inside the house. The family still filled up the machine with buckets of water from a hand pump.

Many city people enjoyed paved roads. On a trip across Texas, my uncle and his friend pulled a cow on a trailer behind their car. When they got stuck on a dirt road, they hitched up the cow who pulled them to firmer ground.

Life is punctuated by a series of problems to be solved. Rural folks relied on their wits, their family, friends, and neighbors solve daily problems. Oops, let’s not forget the cow and other farm animals. Solutions were local. In rural communities where the laws were few, people relied on norms of behavior.

Those who lived in the city depended on centralized systems. A family’s safety was entrusted to strangers, city leaders and bureaucrats who managed the water, sewer, gas and electrical systems. People from the countryside found themselves burdened with unfamiliar laws and regulations. City living tested the limits of individual freedom and autonomy.

Individual Autonomy

As people moved out of farms and in close proximity with other people, the risk of getting communicable diseases skyrocketed. Public schooling gathered together children of similar ages with immature immune systems. In the 19th century, schools began requiring smallpox vaccinations for school children. As more schools required vaccinations there were several court challenges. In 1922, the Supreme Court issued the second of two decisions affirming that states had the constitutional authority to make such requirements (Source).

What was the extent of in loco parentis? Centuries earlier, English common law had established this principle, that parents delegated their duties of care, authority and discipline to schools. In past centuries, the schools were private and attendance was voluntary. When states passed laws mandating school attendance, parents no longer had a choice in delegating their authority to schools. Law professor Susan Stuart has argued that the principle in loco parentis should be “put out of its misery (Source – pdf). What is the boundary of authority between the state or local jurisdiction and the family? Judicial opinions do not resolve these contentious issues.

Today, childhood vaccines expose children to weakened pathogens that cause these killing diseases. A child’s immune system learns the biological signatures of these viruses and bacteria and is able to mount a defense when encountering the real pathogen. In a very small percentage of children, their immune system overreacts to the weakened pathogen and provokes long term consequences. Is the vaccine or the genetic code of the child’s immune system at fault? We are a nation of lawyers practiced at playing the blame game.

A Nation of Laws

Americans have long prided themselves on the tradition that we are a nation of laws. What exactly are those laws? The Supreme Court is the final arbiter of legal interpretation but a court decision does not resolve a contentious issue. Roger Taney was the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court who issued the Dred Scott decision, aiming to settle the question of slavery for all time. Negro slaves were not citizens and had no federal constitutional protections (Source). Justice John McLean issued a strong dissent, insisting that birthright citizenship applied to all, black or white (Foner, 2019, p. 14).

Dred Scott did settle an issue. People in the northern states realized that a civil war, long threatened but delayed by compromise for several decades, was inevitable. Earlier this year, the Supreme Court rejected an argument from the Trump administration that birthright citizenship did not apply to all. Some issues stay unresolved, waiting to rise to the surface when circumstances allow.

Boundaries

A common theme in persistent controversies is the difficulty of drawing a boundary line between individual liberty and autonomy, and government authority. The courts try to find a balance between competing concerns but no court decision can establish a balance that satisfies most people in the country. Here are just a few persistent controversies out of the many that have long endured in our society.

Abortion

On the issue of abortion, a woman has a right to bodily autonomy but the state has an obligation to protect human life. There is a clash of certainties. Those who are against abortion profess a certainty in an eternal authority that determines the start of a human life. Those who are pro-choice carry the certainty that no one is entitled to impose their religious beliefs on others.

Gun Ownership

Many people understand this issue as a conflict between the government’s duty to safeguard public safety and an individual’s right to self-defense. Authorities or a jury must judge whether a threat warranted the use of a firearm to commit injury or death. What is the balance between individual autonomy and government authority?

Capital Punishment

Is capital punishment inherently a cruel and unusual punishment prohibited by the Eighth Amendment? What is the extent of a state’s authority? Does a state have the moral authority to execute prisoners who no longer pose a threat to public safety?

Euthanasia

Before the 1970s, there was little relief for the dying. They spent their last days in a hospital with tubes sticking out of them. Hospital personnel knew the end was inevitable but they were legally bound to treat and stabilize all their patients, whether dying or not. Conventional medical practice did not make the comfort of a dying patient – called palliative care – a priority. Medical personnel may have felt compassion for their dying patients but were subject to the same scrutiny of care as with their other patients. Last week I wrote about my grandfather and how he had started working at six years old in a farming community. Needing round the clock care, he spent his last days in an institution, kept alive while dying.

In 1969, psychiatrist Elisabeth Kubler-Ross published On Death and Dying, making the public aware of the emotional and physical burden of conventional medical care on those who were terminally ill and their families. In 1974, Florence Wald helped found Connecticut Hospice, the first of its kind in America (Source). In 1982, Congress and President Reagan added hospice to the list of Medicare benefits as a temporary program, then made the benefit permanent in 1986. A study involving more than 600 hospice doctors conducted in 2012 revealed that there is a minority of people that still misconstrue common palliative care as euthanasia (Source). Neither laws nor court decisions change minds or perceptions.

Next week

Many persistent controversies involve clashes between individuals and government. We guard our autonomy and freedom against the authority and greater capacity of a government institution, the Leviathan of law and order. Next week I want to explore this topic further. How do we imbue government institutions with enough capacity to protect civil order while protecting the rights and freedoms of the citizens who live within the bounds of that civil authority. Hope to see you next week!

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Photo by Chris Sabor on Unsplash

Foner, E. (2019). The second founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction remade the Constitution. W. W. Norton & Company.

Hughes, R. (1987). The fatal shore: The epic of Australia’s founding. Alfred A. Knopf.

Changing Sensibilities

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October 11, 2026

By Stephen Stofka

Last week I explored the burden that we pass to succeeding generations. I discussed slavery and the underlying racial bias that is a continuing burden in America. This week I want to explore our changing perceptions of error, our changing values and sensibilities.

Child Labor

My grandfather grew up in a farming community near the end of the 19th century. As a six year old he was expected to work. In Chapter 8 of his 1776 book The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith discusses a contemporary analysis of the economics of child labor. In America, where there was a shortage of labor, he noted that “Labor is so well rewarded that a numerous family of children…is a source of opulence and prosperity to the parents.”

In England, Smith observed that there was an oversupply of labor. Many convicted for petty crimes were banished to Australia as a method of reducing the supply of workers (Hughes, 1987). Large families in Scotland, where wages were low and poverty was acute, struggled to feed and clothe their children. Smith cited the example of one woman with twenty children who was unable to provide her children with the minimum sustenance. The result? Only two survived.

Smith’s analysis? In an environment where laborers must compete fiercely with each other, the level of wages depends more on the character of the employers rather than the skills of workers or seasonal changes in demand for labor. His recommendation? Governments should regulate wages so that parents could provide the basic support for their families. However, he noted how difficult it was to enforce such regulations.

My father was born in New York City and went to a public school when he was five years old. What happened in the decades between my grandfather’s childhood and my father’s childhood? Did people become more enlightened? Did parents realize that education was far more important to a child? People don’t make fundamental changes in their attitudes and sensibilities in the course of three decades. Rather, it was the circumstances that changed. Parents altered their calculations because calculations respond to changing circumstances. Sensibilities within a culture are more rigid because a culture forms by building institutions that resist change.

At the turn that century, the introduction of machinery in agriculture increased labor productivity. In 1890, 43% of workers were employed in agriculture and 42% of people lived on farms. By the 1930s, when my father started school, only 25% of people lived on farms and the percent of people working in agriculture was halved to 21% (Source).

Smith noted that even in a good environment half of all children died by the age of ten. The prevalence of so many dying children, particularly in the working classes, fostered an attitude of reluctant acceptance of personal tragedy. Parents grieved and moved on. That was in 1776, the year the American colonies declared their independence from the British empire. By 1900, in America, that figure was halved (Source – pdf). Public health measures like cleaner drinking water, sanitation and food handling were largely responsible.

Industrialization increased the likelihood of child injury. In factories, children worked around presses and cutting machines that lacked safety guards. In textile mills, they worked closely with gears, belts and moving parts that crushed or amputated their fingers. The mechanization of work in coal mines and on farms exposed children to similar dangers. Some states enacted legislation prohibiting the employment of young children. New York State passed its Factory Act in 1886. In 1916 and 1918, Congress passed two bills restricting child labor but the Supreme Court ruled both as unconstitutional federal regulation of production and commerce (Source). It wasn’t until 1938 that a federal child labor restriction included in the Fair Labor Standards Act withstood Supreme Court scrutiny and became established law.

Did parents and government officials suddenly become concerned about the welfare of their children? Of course not. They had always been concerned. But the changing nature of work and the increased productivity of human labor allowed people to act on their concerns.

Women’s Autonomy

For generations, people thought that a women’s temperament and brain made them ill suited for mathematics and finance. The marketplace was highly competitive and required a tough disposition more suitable for a man’s character. A woman’s place was the support and nurturing of children. She created an environment in the home that protected children, sheltering them from the harsh realities of the marketplace.

In the densely crowded cities of urbanizing America, those “harsh realities” permeated every household. The high child mortality emphasized a woman’s role as caretaker. Children younger than five were particularly vulnerable to infectious diseases like diphtheria, pneumonia, whooping cough and tuberculosis, to name only a few. Children got sick. Mom took care of them. In a large family, older children took on some of that responsibility of caring for their younger siblings. Today, most children are vaccinated to train their immune systems to recognize the viruses and bacteria responsible for those diseases.

Housekeeping was an arduous task. There were no appliances. A British series The 1900 House aired in 1999 and featured a modern day family living in a home stripped of all modern conveniences. Life was particularly difficult for the women who were responsible for food preparation, household and personal care. Bathing was particularly hard on the skin. A bar of soap was made from animal fat, lye and water and contained few, if any, softening ingredients. Want to make your own 19th century soap? Here’s a link (Source).

For centuries, women had been like serfs in the feudal system. They belonged to the home, and in the case of married women, to their husbands. During the 19th century, states gradually permitted women to own a home, but none did when America was founded (Source). In the spring of 1776, John Adams convened with others in Philadelphia as the colonies prepared to declare independence from Britain. His wife, Abigail Adams, wrote him a letter, encouraging him to “remember the ladies” as he and others prepared to form the laws for a new union of colonies. Despite her entreaties, the founders of the new nation did not remember the ladies (Source). Under the Articles of Confederation and later the Constitution, women had neither the right to own a home or vote.

Have sensibilities regarding women’s autonomy changed since that time 250 years ago? The process was gradual and sometimes driven by a change in circumstances but I believe so. Today, most of us denounce or reprove the patriarchal attitudes and moral sensibilities of the founding generation with respect to women’s autonomy. Even when circumstances were essentially the same as in 1776, the states began passing property acts that enabled married women to own a home. That gradual change indicates a movement of underlying sensibilities rather than an adaptive calculation to meet changing circumstances.

Conclusion

Sensibilities change gradually. Calculations produce more rapid shifts in the rules and norms of a society. We often confuse the two when candidates run for office. A candidate may present their values and policy proposals as an enduring feature of who they are. They hope to align their image with the sensibilities and identities of the majority of voters in their district. In actuality, that political package may be mostly calculation. Some candidates are better at camouflaging their intent. Others are not. I think that many voters were lukewarm to Kamala Harris in the 2024 Presidential campaign because her policy stances seemed more driven by convenient calculation rather than a heartfelt conviction.

A Peek at Next Week

This week I’ve discussed how one generation regards the values and policies of a previous generation as an error. Next week, I want to look at that same phenomenon except that it occurs within the same generation. In other words, people growing up at the same time in history have fundamentally different views of what is right and wrong in some areas. There will be some controversial subjects I will explore, so save your overripe tomatoes for next week’s article. Hope to see you then!

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A young woman with a bandage around her eyes faces toward a sunlit window

The Inheritance

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October 4, 2026

By Stephen Stofka

Each generation inherits what it perceives as the mistakes of past generations. Each generation must counter error with error as it tries to resolve those issues. This week I want to explore the well intentioned harm we cause future generations.

Bearing the Burden

Each generation inherits a moral, economic and political burden. For the Boomer Generation, a pressing issue was white discrimination and violence against blacks. In the southern states, black residents suffered lynchings, false accusations of rape and trials before all-white juries. So-called Jim Crow laws made it very difficult if not impossible for black citizens to vote. During the cold war between the Soviet Union and the United States, that discrimination became a liability in the propaganda war and the conduct of foreign policy.

Soviet leaders often used that plainly visible discrimination to win the sympathies of people in the newly independent nations of Africa and Asia. American officials were acutely aware that Soviet propaganda was exploiting race discrimination to ridicule American pretensions to civic freedom and democracy. The Soviet campaign worked. A 1957 survey by the U.S. Information agency found that foreign opinion of U.S. race relations was broadly negative (Source).

Southern Democrats in the Senate routinely blocked any national reforms that would challenge the political hegemony that white citizens enjoyed in the southern states. When the Eisenhower Administration proposed a strong civil rights measure in 1957, southern Democrats weakened the final legislation. That the measure was not defeated entirely was due to the efforts of Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson. He helped craft a compromise to overcome filibustering by Democrats, particularly Strom Thurmond who talked for over 24 hours on the Senate floor (Source).

In 1960, Johnson was on the Presidential ticket with JFK. After the assassination of JFK in 1963, Lyndon Johnson assumed the Presidency and took steps to pass civil rights legislation that JFK had promised but could not deliver. As a former Senate Majority leader and Senator from Texas, Johnson understood southern opposition. He was practiced at the strong-arm political tactics necessary to pass contentious legislation. He employed both is power as President and those tactics to get the 1964 Civil Rights Act passed.

A century long problem was solved, or so many advocates hoped. I have often said that we engage with the world through our errors and this time was no different. The passage of the act began a decades long Southern realignment of political parties. Many Democratic voters in the southern states switched their allegiance to the Republican party. Today, what was a solid blue voting block in the South is solid red (Source).

Prior to the 1964 Civil Rights Act, employment discrimination against Blacks was normalized, particularly in the South. Blacks were given the lowest of manual jobs and were paid lower wages despite similar skills. Through executive orders, both JFK and Johnson introduced affirmative action practices to promote equal opportunity for minority employment among federal contractors and firms working on state and local projects partially funded with federal dollar (Source).

What is equal opportunity? In the mid-60s in New York City, the racial composition of affected firms was supposed to approximate population ratios found in the 1960 census. In 1968, Mayor John Lindsay issued an executive order that required all city contractors to approximate those ratios (Source). Thus began several decades of quotas in hiring and in college admissions. A discrimination problem was countered by another discrimination program.

Weren’t quotas themselves a violation of the 14th Amendment? In several key decisions beginning in 1978, the Supreme Court applied a strict scrutiny standard to race-conscious policies that affected college admissions, ruling that an applicant’s race must be one of several factors. It can not be the deciding factor. The blind use of quotas was unconstitutional. A college or employer might have goals of a more balanced student body or workforce. This presumed that a diversity of backgrounds and experiences would benefit the firm or institution. In 2023, the Court further limited such policies when it ruled that a college applicant’s race was pertinent only to their life experience.

Housing

Throughout the country, the practice of redlining restricted or denied financial services to black residents (Source). For most of the nation’s history, the Democratic Party has been the home of hostile bigotry and prejudice. During the 1930s, under FDR, the federal Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) created residential security maps for hundreds of American cities to guide underwriting risks. Neighborhoods were divided into four categories. Homes in green and blue were considered safe risks. Those in yellow areas signaled a greater degree of vigilance to mortgage underwriters. Home in red areas were seen as not safe. Often the residents were black or newly arrived immigrants. Individual circumstances did not matter. Only the neighborhood you lived in. Those with white skin could move out of the neighborhood as their prospects improved. Those with black skin were imprisoned within invisible barriers that made it difficult or expensive to get loans, or affordable car, home and life insurance.

In 1968, a week after the assassination of civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Johnson signed the Fair Housing Act into law. The term affirmative action was not associated with housing policy, but federal housing agencies were directed to administer their programs in a way that “affirmatively furthers fair housing” (Source). Developers of federally subsidizing housing developments were required to proactively seek a population balance through affirmative marketing (Source – pdf).

Agencies employed several financial tools designed to aid low income minority households without specifically excluding white families. These included tax credits and lower interest rates on their mortgages. But wait, if affordable home loans were only made available to minority families, wasn’t that also discrimination? In a 2015 decision, the Court reiterated the principle that specific racial targets and quotas were unconstitutional.

Once again, government policies have been adopted which correct one error with another. It is interesting that the Fair Housing Act of 1968 introduced some discriminatory policies meant to remedy the sins of earlier federal policies.

Changing Sensibilities

With the passing of generations, sensibilities change. What was acceptable a hundred years ago may offend people of the current generation. Likewise, what is acceptable today might offend the sensibilities of past generations. Civil War battles were an occasion for civilians to picnic on the sidelines, an amusement that might horrify people today. On the other hand, imagine a woman dressed in tee shirt and shorts at that same picnic. Certainly, some of those at the picnic would try to cover her up while soldiers fell on the battlefield. Former Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer has pointed out the folly of so called originalist interpretations of the Constitution. Many particulars, the burdens and amusements of life, change with the passing of generations.

Next week I want to explore these changing perceptions of error in different generations. I hope to see  you next week.

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