All:

I'm moving to a new blog of my own here: http://therionorteline.com/.

Before anybody says, "where did the name come from", here's the story:

The Rio Norte Line was a railroad in Atlas Shrugged. It was the key productive asset for the Taggart Transcontinental Railway and had fallen into disrepair. The protagonist, Dagny Taggart, sought to repair the line, realizing that the foundation must be solid for any enterprise to be successful. Her efforts to save this key asset were frustrated from many fronts ranging from personal to political but eventually she found a way to do it. In the long term, the “looters” milked the line for short term gain, and when faced with disaster, instead of addressing the foundations, sought to plaster over it with political solutions including restrictions of others, expropriation of their revenues and political favoritism.

Been great here at Townhall.com but the new blog expands what I can do with it and it also has new features for the readers. These posts will stay up indefinitely, I'll migrate some, some I won't, but there is a link at the new back to the old.

Hope you will follow along...

Mike

 

Sign, Sign, everywhere a sign,
Blocking out the scenery, breaking my mind.
Do this, don't do that, can't you read the sign?

-          Lyrics from Signs, © 1970 Five Man Electrical Band

What about language...rhetoric? How does it add or detract to the political climate? In light of the Tucson shooting on January 11^th, our recent discourse has been alternately called “toxic” and a “climate of hate”…but is it? How is today different from the Bush years when we heard various cries that President Bush was a war criminal, Cheney was the devil, “Bush lied/People Died” was a standard idiom, Cindy Sheehan was a staple at the anti-war rallies where Bush being symbolically burned in effigy and derogatory signs abounded.

I’m sure nobody but Republicans remember quotes from people like Alec Baldwin (who sits on the board of People for the American Way and is a strong PETA supporter) like this from the Conan O’Brien Show in December of 1998 - Baldwin said, "if we were in another country... we would stone Henry Hyde to death and we would go to their homes and kill their wives and their children. We would kill their families, for what they're doing to this country."

It is easy to forget (because it never carried the furor that comments from the right do) how, in a 1995 broadcast NPR anchor, Nina Totenberg told the host of PBS’s Inside Washington that if there was “retributive justice” in the world the (admittedly loathsome) Jesse Helms would “get AIDS from a transfusion, or one of his grandchildren will get it.” Totenberg is still NPR’s legal affairs correspondent.

Republicans of that time coined the term “political hate speech” and were vilified for it – and rightly so because of the possibilities that restrictions have of infringement on First Amendment rights. What were we told during the Bush years when we complained about the acidic nature of the discourse?

Glenn Reynolds wrote in the August 7, 2009 Washington Examiner:

"Protest  is patriotic!"  "Dissent is the highest form of patriotism!"

 

These battle-cries were heard often, in a simpler America of long ago -- that is, before last November.  Back then, protests -- even if they were organized by the usual leftist apparatchik-groups like ANSWER or ACORN -- were seen - at least in the media - as proof of popular discontent.

 

When handfuls of Code Pink ladies disrupted congressional hearings or speeches by Bush administration officials, it was taken as evidence that the administration's policies were unpopular, and that the thinking parts of the populace were rising up in true democratic fashion.

Even disruptive tactics aimed at blocking President Bush's Social Security reform program were merely seen as evidence of boisterous high spirits and robust, wide-open debate.  On May 23, 2005, the Savannah Morning News reported:

“By now, Jack Kingston is used to shouted questions, interruptions and boos.  Republican congressmen expect such responses these days when they meet with constituents about President Bush's proposal to overhaul Social Security.

 

“Tinkering with the system is always controversial. To make Bush's plan even more so -- political foes are sending people to Social Security forums armed with hostile questions.

By now, Kingston, a Savannah lawmaker and part of the GOP House leadership, has held 10 such sessions and plans at least seven more.”

On March 16, USA Today reported that Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum "was among dozens of members of Congress who ran gantlets of demonstrators and shouted over hecklers at Social Security events last month. Many who showed up to protest were alerted by e-mails and bused in by anti-Bush organizations such as MoveOn.org and USAction, a liberal advocacy group. They came with prepared questions and instructions on how to confront lawmakers."

This was just good, boisterous politics: "Robust, wide-open debate." But when it happens to Democrats, it's something different:  A threat to democracy, a sign of incipient fascism, and an opportunity to set up a (possibly illegal) White House "snitch line" where people are encouraged to report "fishy" statements to the authorities.

The bolded paragraph pretty much sums up our current situation. The media and the American Left’s reaction to it fit that description like a glove. What about the anti-war protesters? Closing GITMO? Cindy Sheehan? Win Without War? Code Pink? Aren’t the same “illegal” wars still ongoing? Haven’t more soldiers died in Afghanistan in the two years of Obama than in the eight years of Bush? The answer is yes – 630 US soldiers gave their lives from 2001-2007, 830 have died from 2008 – 2011 (data from icasualties.org at http://icasualties.org/oef/). If dissent is truly patriotic and the wars were evil under Bush, are they not still evil under Obama?

You know the answer. You have seen the signs. It never was about the wars. The American Left, the hard core Establishment Democrats, used the anti-war protestors like a two dollar mule and shot them in the head when they weren’t needed to carry the load anymore. The same goes for the Gay lobby, the NAACP and just about every Democratic constituency. These folks are the battered political wives of the left, they get used and beaten yet they keep coming back. It is almost pathological.

It is really no different today than it was 10 years ago. There is just a lot of selective memory, political amnesia and rationalization going around in Democratic circles right now. I can just hear the 5 people at the local Coffee Party meeting now: Lib #1, “You know, we wanted to kill Bush, too. Lib #2, “Sure, Cheney should still be shot, the b*stard.” Lib #3, “…and Rumsfeld should be castrated and hanged.” Lib #4, “Yeah, we’re not even like those nasty, ignorant right wingers at all because Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld really are evil and deserve to die. Come to think of it Bachmann and Backwoods Barbie (Palin), too, they are awful.” Lib #5, “There is no need for the kind of talk, which those two women in particular keep spouting all the time…Those two ladies are very dangerous and not what we need in a decent, civilized society.”

Lest the reader doubt me, the quote for Lib #5 is an actual quote excerpted from a comment by one of our favorites, annola, on the Panama City News Herald comment page on January 16, 2011.

It’s not unique to Democrats, would that it were. We saw the conservative movement co-opted after the 1994 elections by the Establishment Republicans and we are seeing the same effort today with the Tea Party Movement. Maybe it is just that the Establishments Democrats have far more practice from being in charge for so many more years, but the Establishment Elephants are catching on fast.

It is all about propaganda…Orwellian Newspeak. We are now living in the world George Orwell wrote about in his book, 1984. Wikipedia describes the book here:

Nineteen Eighty-Four (sometimes written 1984) is a 1949 dystopian novel by George Orwell about an oligarchic, collectivist society. Life in the Oceanian province of Airstrip One is a world of perpetual war, pervasive government surveillance, and incessant public mind control. The individual is always subordinated to the state, and it is in part this philosophy which allows the Party to manipulate and control humanity. In the Ministry of Truth, protagonist Winston Smith is a civil servant responsible for perpetuating the Party's propaganda by revising historical records to render the Party omniscient and always correct, yet his meager existence disillusions him to the point of seeking rebellion against Big Brother, eventually leading to his arrest, torture, and reconversion.

As literary political fiction, Nineteen Eighty-Four is a classic novel of the social science fiction subgenre. Since its publication in 1949, many of its terms and concepts, such as Big Brother, doublethink, thoughtcrime, Newspeak, and Memory hole, have become contemporary vernacular. In addition, the novel popularized the adjective Orwellian, which refers to lies, surveillance, or manipulation of the past in the service of a totalitarian agenda.

How to stop it?

Learn to recognize propaganda and realize that you are going to have to put some effort into finding the truth. The Internet is a great tool but it is perhaps the scariest and most Orwellian creation around today. Searches can and are directed, some information gets blocked and if our government, or any government for that matter, gains total control of it, they will control the world by controlling information.

I would highly recommend starting by reading 1984. Learn yourself and teach your children to think critically, to weigh evidence, to value experiment and empirical outcomes, then you can build citizens who are not only not prone to hysteria and delusions, but are naturally resistant to propaganda. To be skeptical is a vital survival skill that all too many people (on both the political right and left) lack.

There is an old saying that you can't argue someone out of a position they were never argued into. In other words, many people hold opinions based not on facts and evidence, but on emotional grounds that have nothing to do with evidence. It is so similar to religious belief that it really makes no sense to separate the two. Pick any leftist "ism" today, and it bears most of the hallmarks of religious belief (without the saving grace of obedience to a higher power).

 Another idiom -sometimes attributed to Reagan - that goes something like, "It's not so much that the Left knows so much; it's that they know so much that isn't so." The American Left/Liberals love to change and recontextualize history to fit their own purposes (see Orwell’s 1984), the best way to counter this is to have the facts on your side. If you argue on emotion rather than facts, all you're doing is adding noise rather than information. We see this all the time on the comment pages and the forums of the News Herald.

There was perhaps one of the most ill informed statements made that I have read in a letter to the editor in the News Herald by Martha Claussen, it was this: “Our newspapers are in serious trouble with cutbacks in staff (reporters gone). Clearly, it is difficult to be an informed citizen today.” It is NOT difficult to be informed; there are more opportunities for information intake today than they have ever been. The difference is today, the individual has to put some effort into it to truly be informed.

The days of having your news managed and handed to you from one point of view are over. Start by learning to separate the wheat from the chaff. Follow this simple dictum – if it smells like crap, it probably is crap.

Thanks to Monty over at the Ace of Spades HQ for the inspiration to write this (http://ace.mu.nu/).

 

Along with debates about the repeal of the Patient Protections and Affordable Health Care Act of 2010 (Obamacare) and the recent Congressional dust-up over the retention of the Bush tax rates; there has been a significant amount of discussion about the concepts of “selfishness” and “fairness”. These are items that are clearly open to debate and are fair discussion points in light of our current political and economic conditions.

Conservatives have been accused of:

1.       Being “selfish” due to opposition of the PPAHCA because, let’s face it, anyone who opposes paying for someone else to be healthy is just uncaring, right?

2.       And as far as taxes, how many times have we heard that “the rich can afford to pay more” and that “rich” people should have to pay their “fair” share. If they don’t agree to foot the bill, they are just selfish (see #1 above).

Moral vs. Legal

Selfishness and fairness are not legal concepts, there is no enshrinement of a manmade law that says being selfish is illegal, neither is there one that dictates that everything must be fair. The absence of law is that that these are moral concepts, not legal ones.  In natural law, there is no such concept as “fairness” – the cougar is stronger than the rabbit, the success of the food chain and the survival of the cougar depends on it. The cougar also does not know how to be “selfish”, it eats when it is hungry and as much as it is able to catch…but animals are not burdened with morality or a soul. The realizations of both “selfishness” and “fairness” are human constructs and are based on an individual and societal point of view and an established value system, a value system that is typically based on religious beliefs. We seek to create these concepts as a matter of social interaction and civilization, essentially to protect society from the barbarity and savagery of natural law.

Author’s note: In this instance, I am not defining “religious beliefs” as adherence to a specific spiritual dogma (i.e. Christianity, Islam, Hindu, Buddhist, etc), rather in the sense that religion can be defined as a set of beliefs concerning the cause, nature, and purpose of life and the universe. These belief systems tend to derive morality, ethics, religious laws or a preferred lifestyle from their ideas about the cosmos and human nature and our role in it. Secularists and atheists may not believe in God or other deities and they will say that logic is their guide – then by definition, logic then becomes their “religion”.

Secularists in our modern political arena proudly trumpet the clarion call of “separation of church and state” yet seek to inject moral concepts like “selfishness” and “fairness” as a matter of legalistic fiat.

I find a remarkable intellectual inconsistency in that secularists argue creationism/intelligent design must be ignored in favor of evolution while trying to eliminate via legislation the very basis of evolution, that being natural selection or “survival of the fittest”.

It is my opinion that the Founders saw that two systems, one moral and one legal, were necessary for the maintenance of the American experiment in freedom and that they expressly constrained government through the Constitution from encroaching on the province of the moral. I believe that the wisdom of the Founders included the recognition that morality could not be legislated because it rested on the character and the belief system of the individual and to regulate morality would be an unacceptable breach of individual freedom.

Author’s note: to my friends on the right who believe that Christianity should be an express component of our government: I am a Christian; I grew up in the Methodist faith and later in life became a Southern Baptist. While my life is informed by this and guided by God, I cannot find (in my own reading and understanding) a specific admonition to include a specific religiosity. I do strongly believe that both the Declaration and the Constitution were greatly influenced by Judeo-Christian tradition and that there are many enduring Judeo-Christian ethics enshrined in these documents. It is also clear to me that they contemplated that just governance requires the existence of a moral society in parallel and that no government can overcome the consequences of an immoral society.

While there is an undeniable bias toward the exclusion of Christianity from the public sphere (several years ago, I would have used the term “religion” instead of Christianity, but we now see the active protection of Islam and its tenets under the guise of “diversity”, “tolerance” and “multiculturalism”), these concepts have a greater root in Judeo-Christian tradition than in the legalism of man.

It seems counter-intuitive but I believe that the evidence of a Judeo-Christian influence exists in the very absence of a specific reference to the majority Judeo-Christian religions of the day.

I also believe that the Founders were very wary of the dangers of a monarchy or a legalistic government made up of Philistines and these documents were written to protect INDIVIDUAL freedoms. They realized that legalism is a response to an immoral society and it only begets more legalism. Their minimalist approach to government is a tacit recognition that when one makes a law, then they often must make more to control the consequences of that law, and on and on. Legalism is the reason for the massive government agencies and the promulgation of endless rules and regulations. Attempts to codify morality are futile. Due to the infinite number of interactions and unique challenges in our individual lives, there can never be a law or rule for every situation and eventually, a legalistic society is crushed under the weight of all the laws made in that attempt.

I believe that this realization by the Founders is the most significant aspect of our unique system of government.

There will be those who say that fairness is enshrined in the Constitution. My argument would be that fairness is provided for, not specifically mandated or defined. The Constitution speaks of fairness and equal treatment with respect to governance, not societal fairness. The words “fair” or “fairness” are not present in the text of the U.S. Constitution. Even in the Declaration of Independence, you will find the express concept that “all men are created equal”, not “equality is guaranteed for life”.

Relevance to the charges levied against conservatives

It can be argued that the nexus of legality and morality exists in the creation, maintenance and expansion of the welfare state.

Conservatives oppose the welfare state because we see it as an impediment on individual freedoms, not from the aspect of taking from one who earns to give to another but for the soul wrenching, independence robbing effect that it has on the people caught up in it.

“Progressives” see the former as conservatives refusing to share our relative bounty (because they think that we benefit disproportionally from the American experiment); therefore we are “selfish”. In the latter, because we want to maintain freedom for the least fortunate of us, we want them to be free of government dependency and achieve anything that they have the ability to; we are enemies of “fairness” because we believe in equal opportunity, not equal outcomes.

Is the Welfare State Moral?

If the nexus of legality and morality truly exists in the creation, maintenance and expansion of the welfare state, then we must ask this question.

For me, it comes down to my moral code. It comes down to the Biblical admonitions of the 8^th and 10^th Commandments, those being: “Thou shalt not steal” and “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his donkey, nor any thing that is thy neighbor's.”

In an article for the American Spectator back in October of 2008, Robert Stacy McCain summed it up thusly:

“Whereas transactions in a market economy are voluntary and peaceful, the actions of government are essentially coercive, backed with the threat of violence to those who disobey. What government does, it does "at the point of the bayonet," so to speak. Therefore, the fearsome power of government ought to be constrained to limited and specific purposes -- defending the life, liberty and property of citizens.

When government begins to meddle in the economy, picking winners and losers, using appropriations and fiscal policy to transfer money from one group of citizens to another, it divides society into two classes, taxpayers and tax consumers, punishing the former in order to reward the latter.

Such a policy is not merely misguided, it is immoral -- indeed, it is sinful, and by displaying the spectacle of government engaging daily in legalized theft, the welfare state tends to corrupt the morals of its citizens.”

As for the 10^th Commandment, I can relate this to tax policy.

I know that this is a shopworn and tiring batch of statistics but this information is highly relevant to the discussion of “fairness”.

Using data from the IRS from 2008, we find that:

·         The top 1%, those making $380,354 or greater paid 38.02% of all income taxes

·         The top 5%, those making $159,619 or greater paid 58.72% of all income taxes

·         The top 10%, those making $113,799 or greater paid 69.94% of all income taxes

·         The top 25%, those making $67,280 or greater paid 86.34% of all income taxes

·         The top 50%, those making $33,048 or greater paid 97.30% of all income taxes

·         The bottom 50%, those making $33,048 or less paid 2.7% of all income taxes

One of the greatest dangers to our Republic (and any other democratically based society for that matter) is something that Alexis de Tocqueville and others have termed “tyranny of the majority”. There is no clearer illustration of that tyranny than in a “progressive” tax structure. In the above tabulation, it is simple math to divine that only 25% of tax filers pay 86% of all income taxes, 75% pay only 14% and the bottom 47% pay no tax (and in fact, receive transfer payments in the form of the Earned Income Credit even though they paid nothing).

Since one person equals one vote, yet support of the outcomes of those votes rests disproportionally on taxpayers, is this not tantamount to taxation without representation? Does this not mean that the votes of the lower 75% count more than the votes of the upper 25%? If the lower 75% vote in favor of something that they know that they won’t pay for (especially the 47% who bear no burden for the cost of the federal government), can that not be defined as “covetous” and a violation of the 10^th Commandment?

I believe that this illustrates the basic immorality of the welfare state, how it is wrong for government to take money that one man has worked for and give it to someone who hasn't earned it. Breaking one Commandment to honor another does not validate the action. The adherence to a moral code is an exercise in mutual exclusivity, not relativism.

The Bottom Line

I catch a lot of grief from my opponents about “seeing a commie under every rock” because of my insistence that we must resist Marxism and other forms of communism and take a lot of flak for calling policies and people socialist and Marxist but even if it is Marxism is presented incrementally and "branded" as something else, it is still Marxism. I happen to believe that the greatest danger to a Republic, the tyranny of the majority, leads to the elimination of individual freedom and a descent into a Marxist/Communist society – the end of America in everything except name.

I have been on a bit of an anti-Marxist tear lately simply because I see elements of socialist/Marxist/communist policies being accepted under the guise of being “progressive and evolutionary”, part of “modern society”, being features of “other industrialized countries” or some other emotional appeal – and all without critical examination. Right or wrong, left or right, we all should have a better understanding of policy other than "because someone said so".

Who can argue with the propositions that:

·         No person should die for lack of access to health care

·         No person should go broke because of the cost of health care

·         We should help those less fortunate and protect the defenseless

·         We should oppose fraud and corporate financial misconduct

Reasonable people can't...

Caring for our fellow man and promoting a healthy society does not demand that we slice off pieces of our liberty as payment for it. Words mean things but actions speak louder than any words. Look at not only what is said but what is done.

Freedom, prosperity, security and just, effective government are not mutually exclusive concepts.

In this season of giving, of peace and goodwill toward men and unity, it seems incongruent to focus on the things that pull us apart. I think that, if we ever are to come together, we must understand these things that separate us. Too many times we try to put Band-Aid on a gushing wound rather than stitch it up.

Over the recent days I have been considering why the vitriol and division exists and I have tried to deduce the core of the ideological argument that separates us. At a macro level, he most common canards are that American conservatives are for corporations, want to recognize and honor our Judeo-Christian roots, free enterprise and against big government, American “progressives” think corporations are only slightly less evil than Richard Cheney, deny our Judeo-Christian history and want to eliminate it from public life, want the government to “manage” the economy to mandate “equality” and in turn, support enlarging government.

How are we to reduce this complex argument to something that can be resolved?

It has been my experience that the only way that problems with many variables and inputs can be solved is to break them down to the smallest, manageable units possible while stripping away the symptoms and side issues. The United States currently has an estimated population of roughly 311 million (per the “population clock” on www.census.gov). While all political parties allege that they represent “the people” and politicians routinely abuse the phase “it is what the American people want”, how is it even possible to distill the hopes, desires and needs of 311 million people into one law or a single policy? With 311 million distinct individuals, how can it be rational to believe that an all-encompassing government can address the grievances of one person or one group without infringing on another individual or group?

The answer is that it isn’t possible to do either. The basic unit of our country isn’t a business, a corporation, an agency or any group – it is the individual. A distinct and independent entity with a set of skills, capabilities and intellect that is unique from every other individual in this country. This has been clear since the days of the Founders when this was written in the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

The real battle is about preservation of the rights of the individual versus the desires of the collective.

If we ever hope to solve our issues, this is the level at which we must focus if we are ever to hope to reset our feet on the path to global leadership, economic security and greatness in liberty.

Our modern governmental sensibilities have deviated greatly in the favor of the collective, driven by liberal/”progressive” thought. We have allowed the standard legislative and judicial philosophy to mutate from governing the actions between individuals to restricting the behavior of the individual. Again, an illustration comes from our most important foundational document, the Declaration of Independence, “…That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…” In this simple statement we see the enshrinement of the ideal that the rights of the individual are superior to the collective and that the collective is at the mercy of the individual, not that the individual is subjugated to the desires of the collective.

Where do we go from here? Now that we have set up the conflict as the rights of the individual versus the good of the whole, how can this be resolved?

I can answer that with one word…God.

The greatest mistake that we have made over the past 60 years is to allow the roles of the spiritual to be comingled with the roles of the legal. In my short life, I have seen the following transpire:

•  Societal ills that formerly were the province of churches, aid societies and individual communities are now the requirements of government.
•  Aid that was once given in the spirit of charity and brotherhood is now dispensed with the same lack of emotion and casual disregard of getting a candy bar out of a vending machine.
• Where once aid was not requested until every other avenue was exhausted, it is now seen as an obligatory entitlement regardless of the situation.
•  Where there was once a recognition that welfare/public aid was finite and therefore should not be abused, it is now seen as infinite and in some cases it has become a way of life. This is why we have individuals paying for food with food stamps while talking on a mobile phone. This is why significant populations of the recipients of government payments have multiple TVs, cars, air conditioning, cigarettes and beer but don’t have health insurance or proper nutrition or home environments for their children.
•  There was once a quality of selflessness in the people requesting aid because they were concerned about the welfare of others – a fear that someone might need the help more than they did - and that the receipt of that charity carried the implied obligation to pass that same charity on when your personal condition improves. No more.
• There was once a personal relationship between the givers and the receivers, a social contract between the parties that the aid given would be used as intended and not wasted…and the receiver of that aid felt that responsibility.
• There was once a time that an individual had become ineffective in the management of their own life (even if it was due to circumstances beyond their control) that they felt genuine shame in askance of aid and true gratitude in receipt of same.
• Even in the face of cataclysms like the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl years, there was always optimism that individuals had the promise and ability to change their circumstances. They didn’t sit around waiting for the government to do something for them or to be rescued. Contrast those years with today and the differences in the prelude and aftermath of the Katrina disaster in the cities of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast of Mississippi.

We have allowed the concept of dialectical materialism to creep into the affairs of the public. I have written of this before – “In this fusion of Friedrich Hegel’s dialectic thought with the materialism of Ludwig Andreas von Feuerbach, it states that all things that happen or exist have an explanation in logic and nature. It rejects any possibility that there are any supernatural reasons for anything; essentially it states that there is no God. Marxists defend this position by stating that it is a desire to live strictly by logic but my understanding and opinion is that it is used to remove any possibility of allegiance to anything but the state. Since the state controls all natural things, owns all property, controls all social activities, dialectical materialism leads to the “state” being the alpha and omega, the question and the answer to all. The people must look to the state for everything.”

We have allowed a secular government to take over duties of the spiritual world. We have sacrificed personal connections and the social contract implied for the efficiency, expediency and insulation of a bureaucratic monstrosity, a governmental vending machine paid for by the taxpayer…an emotionless, crushingly dispassionate vending machine that cares only about the delivery of the output and not about eliminating the need for that output.

Such a system is seductive because it promises blameless equality. It is always pitched as one where no one is at fault, people aren’t responsible for their circumstances and even if they are, they shouldn’t be made to feel bad about it. There should be no stigma attached to failure or sloth. There should be no demands placed on the unfortunate and we have no right to expect them to do anything to justify the help that they receive. They shouldn’t be encouraged to take risks because they probably will fail and they will just feel bad about themselves.

Look where this wonderful “progressive” thought has brought us.

• We have a persistent and growing underclass that lives on the public dole.
• We have a shrinking group of taxpayers paying for a larger and larger percentage of the cost.
• Almost every dollar of our income tax goes to transfer payments.
• Our government just enacted a health care “reform” law that is nothing but an entitlement.
• We routinely discriminate as a relief from “discrimination”.
• More and more of our individual choice and freedoms are being restricted, from banning Happy Meals at McDonalds to being forced to buy a product by the federal government.

We have a secular, elitist ruling class who believes that morals are what they legislate, not what is prescribed by God or natural law. We have allowed Christianity to become the “weak man” of religions when it has lasted longer and brought more benefit to mankind than any government that ever existed. We have allowed it to be treated as a shameful, uncouth belief system, something reviled and unserious. We do this even as we watch Islam be protected in de facto and politically correct ways because we are afraid to meet violence with violence in protection of our Holy Faith.

There will come a time when we must render unto God what is His. Our individual choices and values must be determined and informed by our Creator and not a secular government.

The answer is truly self evident. Instead of relying on Marx, FDR, Woodrow Wilson or Barack H. Obama, we do have the answer at hand. When we decide to combine actions based on these words from Exodus, Chapter 20:

1  And God spake all these words, saying,
2  ¶ I am the LORD thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.
3  ¶ Thou shalt have no other gods before me.
4  ¶ Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth:
5  thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me;
6  and showing mercy unto thousands of them that love me, and keep my commandments.
7  ¶ Thou shalt not take the name of the LORD thy God in vain: for the LORD will not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain.
8  ¶ Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy.
9  Six days shalt thou labor, and do all thy work:
10  but the seventh day is the sabbath of the LORD thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates:
11  for in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it.
12  ¶ Honor thy father and thy mother:  that thy days may be long upon the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee.
13  ¶ Thou shalt not kill.
14  ¶ Thou shalt not commit adultery.
15  ¶ Thou shalt not steal.
16  ¶ Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.
17  ¶ Thou shalt not covet  thy neighbor's house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his donkey, nor any thing that is thy neighbor's.

With this:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…”

In this we can discover our blueprint for a renewed America. We actually have always had it. America isn’t lost – America is us. The renewal is ours if we want it.

My wishes for a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year go out to all and may the Peace of Christ be with everyone who reads these words.

 

"Living at risk is jumping off the cliff and building your wings on the way down."

— Ray Bradbury

"Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing."

— Helen Keller

"Life is being on the wire, everything else is just waiting."

— Karl Wallenda

"The dangers of life are infinite, and among them is safety."

— Goethe

"There is a tide in the affairs of men, Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat. And we must take the current when it serves, or lose our ventures."

— William Shakespeare
The Tragedy of Julius Caesar

The former are some of my favorite quotes about taking risk. Recognition of risk as a part of living life is a concept as old as life itself. The philosophy that the greater the risk, the sweeter the reward is a colloquialism that while not a guarantee, is one that is generally accepted to be accurate. Businesses evaluate decisions on a “risk/reward” curve, and risk “premiums” are paid to compensate for the chance of loss.

Webster defines risk as:

The possibility of loss or injury: peril, someone or something that creates or suggests a hazard, a: the chance of loss or the perils to the subject matter of an insurance contract; also: the degree of probability of such loss b: a person or thing that is a specified hazard to an insurer c: an insurance hazard from a specified cause or source <war risk>, the chance that an investment (as a stock or commodity) will lose value.

When evaluated on a tactical level, risk is a negative concept – it implies the possibility of loss.

Individuals must deal with risk every minute of every day but where does the individual’s right to accept risk conflict with a government’s responsibility to protect that individual from risk? Does the government even have that responsibility? Is there an inverse relationship between the mitigation of risk and freedom?

What triggered this line of thought was this little tidbit that I saw on December 17^th from the CBS affiliate in Baltimore with the eye catching title of: “Good Samaritans Face Fine After Rescuing Deer From Icy Water”. Find it here at: http://baltimore.cbslocal.com/2010/12/17/good-samaritans-face-fine-after-rescuing-deer-from-icy-water/.

They fought to save a life, and now they say they’ll fight the fine.

It all revolves around the rescue of a deer trapped in icy water Thursday night. Alex DeMetrick (reporter for the local affiliate. Ed.) reports that good deed was rewarded with tickets.

Strangers banded together to pull a deer out of the freezing water of the Patapsco River on Thursday night.

“We seen the deer going under,” said Khalil Abusakran. “It couldn’t maintain.  It was starting to freeze, and it was really getting bad.”

Abusakran brought a raft, and Jim Hart joined him.

“We had oars and shovels to break the ice, for the deer to get out,” Abusakran said.

But in the excited aftermath of the rescue, a natural resources police officer on the scene wrote both men a ticket.

“And he didn’t say anything,” Jim Hart said. “We went in and out of the water numerous times.  He didn’t stop us at all.”

They say they were ticketed for not wearing life vests, although both are over the age for mandatory use of flotation devices.

“No, we didn’t have vests on, but we’re not 16 years old,” Abusakran said. “There were personal floating devices on the boat.”

The ticket itself doesn’t check off any specific violation, just a $90 fine.

They’ll fight it in court, as they fought for the deer.

The two men ticketed say they will fight the citations at the court hearing in Annapolis set for Feb. 18.

These are men who chose to accept the obvious and potential risks and were penalized for it. I think that it is unlikely that this fine will be upheld but it is instructive insight into the lines that we have now drawn. The government representative did nothing to mitigate the risk; he was just there to penalize the individuals for taking it.

One of the hallmarks of modern “progressivism” is the idea that somehow the mere implementation of “progressive” collectivist policies will alleviate risk to some group. Their vision is that a world without risk prevents persecution or oppression of people who won’t accept risk by those who do. Recalling our earlier assertion of risk vs. reward, they believe that the people who accept the greater risk are rewarded disproportionally. “Progressives” believe in “zero sum” games - that one cannot succeed unless they diminish another. When one wins, that win comes at the expense of another – and that isn’t “fair”.

 This concept fits well in the ethos of those who are true believers in “progressivism” as well as those who are simply assuaging guilt of some sort or seek a feeling of self importance or smug superiority over their fellow citizens. In a society that was founded on self reliance, self determination, independence and freedom where opportunities are equal, how do you keep a movement like this alive?

Here’s how - you manufacture some sort of risk, persecution or oppression. You create the concept that there are too many risks for the individual to bear so the government must intervene to “protect” you from complexities that you can’t possibly comprehend, understand or prepare for as an individual…all the while perpetuating those same complexities. You play off social and economic class against each other. You convince the citizenry that there are crises so big that all must sacrifice some of their freedoms and treasure to resolve. You create the concept of something being “too big to fail”.

Totalitarian movements always feature this type of monstrous risk/class envy proposition in order to stay alive. They sell their intrusion into private life and control over the citizens as the removal of risk. They tell you that you aren’t responsible for yourself because you just aren’t capable of understanding. The excuse for the housing crisis isn’t that policies lead to loans to people who didn’t have the capacity to repay them; it was that the evil mortgage companies took advantage of people who didn’t understand the complex paperwork. The reason for investment collapses was that the investor couldn’t possibly understand the intricacies of credit default swaps or derivatives. You can’t possibly plan for your retirement or manage your own eating habits or health.

It is actually pretty demeaning and offensive when you think about it…but people are buying this lie about themselves. It is unbelievable.

Please don’t believe it, don’t buy into this lie that is “too big to fail” – it is the same as a mafia protection racket. If you don’t pay, they will eventually break your kneecaps. Freedom means accepting and defeating the risks of life, not having collective government sand off the rough edges for us. Mark Twain spoke of it thusly:

"Keep away from people who belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great."

Taking a break from the hard rhetoric and sort of off-topic yet very topical - my wife received an email yesterday asking for help - there are over 1,000 kids in Panama City who have not been adopted via the Angel Tree project. Please help by going to JC Penney, KMart or Wal-Mart and pick a child off the tree and help fulfill their Christmas wish.

I ask that those of us that have been blessed this year to share some of those blessings with a child (or multiple children if you can).

Please check it out - no child should be left out at Christmas.

Remember when President Bush was being pilloried by the Democrats and the leftist “civil rights” cabal about “unchecked” executive authority, calling him the unitary executive or the “Imperial President”? Remember the choice words that they had for Karl Rove, Donald Rumsfeld and the President? Here are a few reminders if you don’t:

 

Fascism and communism are not two opposites, but two rival gangs fighting over the same territory . . . both are variants of statism, based on the collectivist principle that man is the rightless slave of the state.

-          Ayn Rand

In The Road to Serfdom ,  written by the Austrian-born economist and philosopher Friedrich von Hayek between 1940–1943, he "warned of the danger of tyranny that inevitably results from government control of economic decision-making through central planning,"and argues that the abandonment of individualism, liberalism, and freedom inevitably leads to socialist or fascist oppression and tyranny and the serfdom of the individual. Significantly, Hayek also challenged the general view among British academics of the period that fascism was a capitalist reaction against socialism, instead arguing that fascism and socialism had common roots in central economic planning and the power of the state over the individual. Essentially, Hayek argues that fascism and socialism were two sides of the same coin, arriving at the same conclusion as Ayn Rand.

Rand also stated that collectivism means the subjugation of the individual to a group—whether to a race, class or state does not matter. Collectivism holds that man must be chained to collective action and collective thought for the sake of what is called “the common good.” Over the past 70 years, the US has flirted with many collectivist ideas, a “progressive “ tax policies, social security and FDR’s New Deal policies and Lyndon Johnson’s expansion of the welfare state with the Great Society programs and now Obama’s Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.  

The common denominator in each of these is that they all failed to alleviate the conditions that they were created for.  “Progressive” tax policies have lead to class warfare and government favoritism where 47% of the population pay no income taxes (and we still are belabored by calls to “soak the rich” from every Democrat), social security mutated from a retirement insurance program to a bankrupt wealth transfer program, FDR’s policies were the basis of the greatest expansion of government power in our history and are now looked upon by some economic historians as actually prolonging the Great Depression rather than ending it, and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society never came close to ending poverty even though we spent billions… and continue to spend today to support programs like Medicare and Medicaid. Obama’s health care “reform” – let’s just say that the jury is out whether it will ever be implemented, fully or partially, but it’s a DNA match to its predecessors.

Webster defines “Americanism” as “a custom, trait, or thing peculiar to the United States of America or its citizens”. It can be argued that a trait common to the United States is American exceptionalism. This refers to the opinion that the United States is, in fact and deed, qualitatively different from other nations. Its exceptionalism stems from its emergence from a revolution, developing a unique American ideology, based on liberty, egalitarianism, individualism, populism and laissez-faire".  Alexis de Tocqueville, gave voice to this idea and in 1831 and promoted this idea in his seminal work, Democracy in America. He well may have been the first writer to describe the United States as "exceptional".

What has American exceptionalism produced? American ingenuity has produced revolutions in agriculture, medicine, pharmacology, taken together, these innovations have saved countless millions of lives around the world. Some examples:

• -          Refrigeration
• -          The electric telegraph
• -          Anesthesia
• -          Assembly line production
• -          The airplane
• -          The bulldozer
• -          Extra-galactic astronomy
• -          Liquid fueled rockets
• -          EEG brain topography
• -          The digital computer
• -          Nylon
• -          The first trans-uranium element
• -          Atomic weapons
• -          The transistor
• -          Super-sonic flight
• -          Video games
• -          Cable television
• -          Radiocarbon dating
• -          The atomic clock
• -          The credit card
• -          The nuclear submarine
• -          The laser
• -          Carbon fiber
• -          The integrated circuit
• -          The weather satellite
• -          The birth control pill
• -          The communications satellite
• -          Kevlar
• -          The Compact Disc (CD)
• -          The jumbo jet
• -          The personal computer
• -          Email
• -          The Heimlich Maneuver
• -          The space shuttle
• -          The Graphical User Interface (GUI)
• -          The Global Positioning System (GPS)
• -          Tivo
• -          We landed on the moon two generations ago (and remain the only nation to have done so)
• -          Mapped the human genome

(list via Bob Ellis at the Dakota Voice: http://www.dakotavoice.com/2010/11/what-conservatives-believe-american-exceptionalism/)

“America is indeed exceptional by any plausible definition of the term and actually has grown increasingly exceptional [over] time.” This is the conclusion reached by the editors of a 2008 volume, Understanding America: The Anatomy of an Exceptional Nation.  Editors Peter H. Schuck and James Q. Wilson have compiled a collection of essays designed to probe Alexis de Tocqueville’s observation that America is “exceptional,” or qualitatively different from other countries. The book, which examines 19 different areas, marshals the best and most current social science evidence to examine America’s unique institutions, culture, and public policies. 

Schuck said that Understanding America casts a new light on American exceptionalism by examining it at a micro level. He identified seven overarching themes that connect the essays: 

1. American culture is different. Its patriotism, individualism, religiosity, and spirit of enterprise make it different. The United States, Schuck said, “is more different from other democracies than they are from one another.” 
2. American constitutionalism is unique in its emphasis on individual rights, decentralization, and suspicion of government authority. 
3. Our uniquely competitive, flexible, and decentralized economy has produced a high standard of living for a long time, even though it now generates greater inequality. 
4. America has been diverse throughout its history. Schuck cited research by historian Jill Lepore, who found that the percentage of non-native English speakers in the United States was actually greater in 1790 than it was in 1990. The thirst for immigration, he said, has transcended economic booms and busts. 
5. The strengths of civil society here make America qualitatively different. No other country, he said, allocates as much responsibility for social policy to the nonprofit sector. 
6. The characterizations of the United States as a welfare-state laggard compared to Europe miss an element of American distinctiveness: its reliance on private entities to provide certain benefits. 
7.  We are exceptional demographically with our relatively high fertility rate. 

Failed policies or unbridled innovation. Energy or malaise? Innovation or erosion? Ever wonder why the revolutions are always in the private sector? Why can a country that can produce the brilliance to map the human genome fail to apply the same brilliance to governance? Could it be that the individual drive is greater than the collectivist pull?

American collectivism or collective Americanism? It is time to choose.

By Michael Snyder at www.dailymarkets.com - powerful stuff...

As you gather around the table with your family this Thanksgiving, ask yourself this question: are you better off today than you were four years ago?  Unfortunately, most Americans are not.  Both political parties have controlled the White House during the last four years – Barack Obama has been in office for nearly two years and before him it was George W. Bush – and yet no matter what politicians we send to Washington D.C. things just seem to keep getting worse.  We buy more than we produce, we spend more than we bring in, we have 18 times as many “problem banks” as we did 4 years ago, the number of Americans on food stamps continues to set a new all-time record every month and we are living in the greatest debt bubble in the history of the world.  But at least the majority of Americans are still prosperous enough to enjoy a happy Thanksgiving inside a warm, comfortable home.  Unfortunately, if things keep going the way they are going, we are going to experience a national economic nightmare that nobody will be thankful for.

If you watch the economic statistics from week to week and month to month, it will seem like sometimes they are getting worse and sometimes they are getting better.  However, once you take a longer-term view of things, exactly what is happening to us starts to come clearly into focus.  The truth is that the United States is in the midst of a long-term economic collapse, and many economic statistics just keep getting worse every single year.

The following are 11 statistics that reveal just how far the U.S. economy has fallen over the past four years….

#1 In November 2006, the “official” U.S. unemployment rate was 4.5 percent.  Today, the “official” U.S. unemployment rate has been at 9.5 percent or greater for more than a year.

#2 At Thanksgiving back in 2006, 26 million Americans were on food stamps.  Today, there are over 42 million Americans on food stamps and that number is climbing rapidly.

#3 According to the U.S. Census Bureau, median household income in the United States fell from $51,726 in 2008 to $50,221 in 2009.  Median household income declined the year before that too.  Meanwhile, prices have continued to rise throughout that period.

#4 At the end of the third quarter in 2006, 47 banks were on the FDIC “problem list”.  At the end of the third quarter in 2010, 860 banks were on the FDIC “problem list”.

Read more at: http://www.dailymarkets.com/economy/2010/11/25/11-statistics-that-reveal-just-how-far-the-u-s-economy-has-fallen-over-the-past-four-years/

via Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit...

 

The liberal contingent in America holds itself up to be the best and brightest, the most compassionate and the rightful rulers of the unwashed masses. They offer universal health care, elimination of economic fluctuation via government regulation over industry (everybody just knows that capitalism and free markets product uncontrolled boom and bust cycles, don’t they?), massive entitlement programs and Keynesian spending under the guise of “promoting the general welfare” and promote the idea that they can legislate with impunity. To them, principles are situational and are for suckers and stodgy old conservatives. They view the Constitution of the United States as a “living document” that can be folded, stapled and mutilated to fit the current fad or flavor of the month, something not to limit and constrain government but to enable it.

They ignore two of the immutable laws of politics:

• Power is finite - political winds change in a representative republic; the political party in power today will not always be in power  and,
• Any government with the power to provide for every whim also has the power to enslave.
  

The Political Amoeba

A rudderless, malleable political system, one not rooted in basic principles, is much like an amoeba. An amoeba moves in a seemingly random pattern, like the movement of particles suspended in a fluid called pedesis (sometimes known as Brownian motion) wandering around the pond devouring everything that looks like food. It feeds by enveloping its food target and then absorbing it. Anything that it perceives as food gets enveloped – a “kill them all and let God sort them out” approach.

The key to understanding malleability as a danger rests on the reliance of the American legal system on precedent and more specifically, the legal principle of stare decisis, a principle by which judges are obliged to respect the precedents established by prior decisions. Reliance of this principle of respect for prior decisions provides for a consistent legal patter, something that is necessary in maintaining a predictable legal system and a stable society. Citizens have the right to expect that behavior that is legal today will not be illegal tomorrow based on the current whim of the judiciary.

The danger with the concept of stare decisis is that when combined with an unstable, malleable view of legal principles, it can make bad law.

Stare Decisis and the Law of Unintended Consequences

One of the most egregious examples is found in the famous (or infamous) case law of Griswold v. Connecticut. From this we have Justice William O. Douglas creating a new “right” out of whole cloth by stating: “Specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights have penumbras [fringe areas], formed by emanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance."

Before Time Magazine became a leftist rag, they had this to say in June of 1965:

After three trips to the Supreme Court in 23 years, Connecticut's archaic (1879) birth-control law was ruled unconstitutional 7 to 2—but in a judicial free-for-all that produced six opinions and a shaky new "right of privacy" concept that is bound to baffle judges for many more years.

All nine Justices denounced the only state law in the U.S. that banned the use of contraceptives by anyone, including married couples. It had been challenged by Yale Gynecologist C. Lee Buxton and Mrs. Estelle Griswold, executive director of the Connecticut Planned Parenthood League, who had been convicted ($100 fines) for dispensing contraceptives at a birth-control clinic in New Haven. "A very bad law," agreed dissenting Justice Hugo Black. "An uncommonly silly law," agreed dissenting Justice Potter Stewart.

The Constitution is utterly mute on the subject (emphasis mine – ed.), but Douglas heard echoes in the Bill of Rights (the first eight amendments): "Specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights have penumbras [fringe areas]," he said, "formed by emanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance." According to Douglas, "zones of privacy" emanate from the First Amendment's "penumbra" right of association, the Third Amendment's prohibition against the quartering of soldiers "in any house" without consent in peacetime, the fourth's guarantee against "unreasonable searches and seizures," and the fifth's privilege against sel-incrimination.

In addition, argued Douglas, the Ninth Amendment implies a right of privacy by providing that "enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." So does the 14th Amendment guarantee of due process of law. Said Douglas: "Would we allow the police to search the sacred precincts of marital bedrooms for tell-tale signs of the use of contraceptives? The very idea is repulsive."

"Shocking Doctrine." All these emanations failed to impress dissenting Justice Stewart, who could find no constitutional infringements whatever in the law. In what conceivable way, asked he, did Connecticut's birth-control law violate the Third Amendment ban against quartering soldiers in private homes? How could a federal court use the Ninth Amendment to take away rights assigned to the people's elected state representatives? "We are not asked in this case to say whether we think this law is unwise, or even asinine," said Stewart. "We are asked to hold that it violates the United States Constitution and that I cannot do.”

Stewart's solution: Let Connecticut citizens persuade their legislature to repeal the law.

From the same Time article:

Justice Black was equally aghast: "I like my privacy as well as the next one, but I am nevertheless compelled to admit that government has a right to invade it unless prohibited by some specific constitutional provision." Finding no such specific covering privacy, Black, who is often accused of scorning "judicial restraint," proceeded to rake his brethren for imposing their subjective feelings on a legislature. Should the court continue this "shocking doctrine," said Black, it will wind up as "a day-today constitutional convention." (emphasis mine – ed.)

Meanwhile, lawyers can now spend years happily fighting over just what else the new right of privacy covers.[i]

How prescient they were back in 1965…The SCOTUS rightly decided to invalidate a bad law but in the process opened a Pandora’s Box of opportunities for government to intrude in areas that never should have been opened to them.

The same issue arises with respect to Article I, Section 8, Clause 3, an enumerated power in the United States Constitution, commonly known as the Commerce Clause. It states that the United States Congress shall have power "To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes". Courts and commentators have tended to discuss each of these three areas of commerce as a separate power granted to Congress.

Dispute exists as to the range of powers granted to Congress by the Commerce Clause. As noted below, the clause is often paired with the final clause of Article I, section 8 (the Necessary and Proper Clause), the combination used to take a broad, expansive perspective of these powers. Many strict constructionists/traditionalists deny that this is the proper application of the Commerce Clause because it refers specifically to "the foregoing Powers."

The Commerce Clause has been long used by government for all sorts of chicanery; however, it was not always so. From our country’s founding through the 1930s, courts ruled that the Commerce Clause actually was a limit on the ability of the Federal government to hinder the freedom of individuals. That changed in 1937 as Congress continued to push FDR’s New Deal legislation, legislation that increased the power of government far beyond what had ever been seen. The SCOTUS of the time enabled this expansion when it bowed to politics and simply abrogated its role of enforcing the Constitution’s limits on federal power.

Since 1937, Congress and the courts have continually expanded government via the Commerce Clause and that has resulted in less freedom for Americans. Now Congress believes everything it passes can affect commerce and therefore falls under its authority under the Commerce Clause. When questioned about the authority of the onerous, overreaching laws they’ve passed — laws like the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 (aka Obamacare), Wall Street reform, bank bailouts,  takeovers of the suto, financial and student loan industry — members of Congress have cited the Commerce Clause of the United States Constitution.

Some well known liberal Democrat quotations among the conservative community are:

Fortney “Pete” Stark (former D- CA 13): “I think that there are very few constitutional limits that would prevent the federal government from rules that could affect your private life. The basis for that would be how would it affect other people.” After the questioner asks what possible constitutional limits there are, then, if Obamacare can pass constitutional muster, Stark replies: “The federal government yes, can do most anything in this country.”[ii]

Nancy Pelosi (former Speaker of the House): When asked where the Constitution authorized Congress to order Americans to buy health insurance--a mandate included in both the House and Senate versions of the health care bill--Pelosi dismissed the question by saying: “Are you serious? Are you serious?”
 
Pelosi's press secretary later responded to written follow-up questions from CNSNews.com by emailing CNSNews.com a press release on the “Constitutionality of Health Insurance Reform,” that argues that Congress derives the authority to mandate that people purchase health insurance from its constitutional power to regulate interstate commerce.[iii]

Remember the amoeba?

Building the Prison

Liberals like to claim that this “malleability” of the founding principles is necessary to promote “freedom” in changing times and there is no possible way that the Founders could have ever looked forward 200 years as had the foresight to imagine the wonders and complexity of today. Quite the opposite, remember the two laws that were presented at the beginning?

Law 1: Power is finite - political winds change in a representative republic; the political party in power today will not always be in power. I have shown where conditional or situational interpretations of law and policy create both intended and unintended consequences. The incremental leftist lurch of the US government for the last 60 or 70 years has guaranteed that both sets of consequences will tilt in favor of liberalism. The federal bureaucracy and the inception of unions in public/government employment guarantee this liberal slant. Unions vote and give to Democrats by overwhelming margins and the bureaucracy moves to secure its own growth existence and by definition, will support the party that supports bigger government – the Democrats.

What if it isn’t always that way?

The American Left always likes to use Nazism to beat conservatives about the head and shoulders but it is a prime example of how political winds can change in a very short period of time.

Nazi Germany arose in the wake of the national shame, embarrassment, anger, and resentment resulting from the Treaty of Versailles (1919). Many voters, seeking an outlet for their frustrations, and an expression for their repudiation of parliamentary democracy, which appeared incapable of keeping a government in power for more than a few months, began supporting far right-wing and far left-wing political parties, opting for political extremists such as the Nazi Party, (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, NSDAP, National Socialist German Workers' Party).

The Nazis promised strong, authoritarian government in lieu of effete parliamentary republicanism, civil peace, radical economic policy (including full employment), restored national pride (principally by repudiating the Versailles Treaty), and racial cleansing, partly implemented via the active suppression of Jews and Marxists, all in name of national unity and solidarity, rather than the partisan divisions of democracy, and the social class divisiveness of Marxism.

The Nazi Party claimed that through the Treaty, the Weimar Republic’s liberal democracy, the traitorous “November criminals” had surrendered Germany's national pride, by the inspiration and conniving of the Jews, whose goal was national subversion and the poisoning of the German blood.

From 1925 to the 1930s, the German government evolved from a democracy to a de facto conservative–nationalist authoritarian state under war hero-President Paul von Hindenburg, who disliked the liberal democracy of the Weimar Republic, and wanted to make Germany into an authoritarian state. In the federal election of 1928, when the economy had improved after the hyperinflation of the 1922–23 periods, the Nazis won only 12 seats. Two years later, in the federal election of 1930, months after the US stock market crash, the Nazi Party won 107 seats, progressing from ninth-rated splinter group to second-largest parliamentary party in the Reichstag. After the federal election of 1932, the Nazis were the largest party in the Reichstag, holding 230 seats.[iv]

In 4 short years, Germany transformed from a liberal (in the classical sense of liberalism) democracy to an autocratic Nazi abomination. I’m sure that there were Jewish Germans who supported the themes of civil peace, full employment and restored national pride. I’m sure that they never imagined in their worst nightmares that only 4 years into the future, they would be stripped of their rights as citizens and sent to the ovens in the camps at Auschwitz and Dachau.

Law 2: Any government with the power to provide for every whim also has the power to enslave.

The pillars of Marxism and communism promise equality and security as long as citizens cede total allegiance to the state. This also entails complete and total subjugation of individual freedom and self determination to the will of the government in exchange for some sort of mythical utopia where we will live in bliss together. The problem with this is that government is never a dispassionate entity, governments are made of people and people are fallible and often corrupt. One of the examples of a government’s power to enslave can be seen in China during Mao’s rule.

Mao Zedong, founder of the People's Republic of China, qualifies as the greatest mass murderer in world history, an expert who had unprecedented access to official Communist Party archives said yesterday.

Speaking at The Independent Woodstock Literary Festival, Frank Dikötter, a Hong Kong-based historian, said he found that during the time that Mao was enforcing the Great Leap Forward in 1958, in an effort to catch up with the economy of the Western world, he was responsible for overseeing "one of the worst catastrophes the world has ever known".

Mr. Dikötter, who has been studying Chinese rural history from 1958 to 1962, when the nation was facing a famine, compared the systematic torture, brutality, starvation and killing of Chinese peasants to the Second World War in its magnitude. At least 45 million people were worked, starved or beaten to death in China over these four years; the worldwide death toll of the Second World War was 55 million.

Mr. Dikötter is the only author to have delved into the Chinese archives since they were reopened four years ago. He argued that this devastating period of history – which has until now remained hidden – has international resonance. "It ranks alongside the gulags and the Holocaust as one of the three greatest events of the 20th century.... It was like [the Cambodian communist dictator] Pol Pot's genocide multiplied 20 times over," he said.

Between 1958 and 1962, a war raged between the peasants and the state; it was a period when a third of all homes in China were destroyed to produce fertilizer and when the nation descended into famine and starvation, Mr. Dikötter said.

His book, Mao's Great Famine; The Story of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, reveals that while this is a part of history that has been "quite forgotten" in the official memory of the People's Republic of China, there was a "staggering degree of violence" that was, remarkably, carefully catalogued in Public Security Bureau reports, which featured among the provincial archives he studied. In them, he found that the members of the rural farming communities were seen by the Party merely as "digits", or a faceless workforce. For those who committed any acts of disobedience, however minor, the punishments were huge.

State retribution for tiny thefts, such as stealing a potato, even by a child, would include being tied up and thrown into a pond; parents were forced to bury their children alive or were doused in excrement and urine, others were set alight, or had a nose or ear cut off. One record shows how a man was branded with hot metal. People were forced to work naked in the middle of winter; 80 per cent of all the villagers in one region of a quarter of a million Chinese were banned from the official canteen because they were too old or ill to be effective workers, so were deliberately starved to death. [v]

Any government with the power to provide for every whim also has the power to enslave. Vesting more and more power and resources in a centralized government is building, brick by brick and law by law, a prison of our own design.

But luckily, even amoebas respond to stimuli…

Removing the Bars and Restraining the Beast

The founding document of our Republic contains 4,543 words, the Declaration has 1,458. If you figure an average of 500 words to an 8.5 X 11 page, that's 9 pages for the former and 3 for the latter. The key foundational documents for creation and governance of the Republic of the United States total 12 pages. Compare that to a total of 2,409 pages/184,672 words for the health care "reform" bill.

It is instructive that it takes more pages of documents to file a 1040 long form tax return than to establish a government. If this doesn't illustrate the intent of the Founder's for limited government and how far we have deviated, nothing will.

We have the power to change. Modern American liberalism bears no resemblance to the classical liberalism of 50 years ago or the current definition in Western Europe of today. Its seductive siren call is based on socialist/Marxist/communist beliefs that are being “soft sold” to pliable minds conditioned by 60 years of nanny state intrusiveness to believe that a little socialism is a harmless thing – that America has always been a little socialist and it is the government’s responsibility to take care of unpleasant or difficult life situation…to provide for our every need. Socialism is like a creeping terminal disease, it starts as the death of a single cell and eventually metastasizes to consume and kill the entire body.

We must reject this idea. The people of this country must get back to the ideas that this nation was founded upon. We must trust ourselves and elect representatives who believe the same. Clear and constrained legal concepts must be applied because, as Thomas Jefferson said, “The government is best which governs least”. Simplicity, combined with constrained government yields more freedom.

With the birth of every new agency, czar, law and regulation, a little liberty dies.

We must stop building the prison of our own design.