Tuesday, May 18, 2010

Polarization May Be Our Best Hope - Mona Charen - National Review Online

The advent of the Obama administration, with its pell-mell rush to transform us into Greece, is transforming the Republican party as well. Grassroots activists are reasserting the virtues of limited government, personal responsibility, and public accountability. Our best hope is that tea-party principles will prevail. Those are the very principles that can save us from Europe’s fate.

Polarization May Be Our Best Hope - Mona Charen - National Review Online

A Libertarian Rebel - Reason Magazine

Whatever one may think of Scott's newest incarnation of the Robin Hood legend, it is more than a little troubling to see alleged liberals speak of liberty and individual rights in a tone of sarcastic dismissal. This is especially ironic since the Robin Hood of myth and folklore probably has much more in common with the "libertarian rebel" played by Russell Crowe than with the medieval socialist of the "rob from the rich, give to the poor" cliché. At heart, the noble-outlaw legend that has captured the human imagination for centuries is about freedom, not wealth redistribution—and this is reflected in many previous screen versions of the Robin Hood story.
A Libertarian Rebel - Reason Magazine

American Thinker: Computer Gamers: Conservatives in Waiting

Most successful video games are designed around themes that are practically heresy to the Left. Stories involving patriotism, the pursuit of liberty, individualism, heroism, capitalism, strategic/analytical thought, and collaboration are staples of a rewarding in-game experience. Games that do not include at least one of these themes would be nearly unplayable.

If the liberals running video game companies made games based solely on their ideological beliefs, GameStop would be nothing more than a vast bargain bin of failed games. Consumers do not want to play games where their character is an elder statesman preparing a 2,000-page piece of legislation. Nor do we, as gamers, want to play as a low-level bureaucrat tasked with delivering an EPA analysis on a proposed wind farm before time expires.
American Thinker: Computer Gamers: Conservatives in Waiting

American Thinker: Citizens or Subjects: Keynesian Economics

Keynesian economic enthusiasts are quick to shift blame for the disasters of government economic involvement we see today in the European Union and the U.S. Yet the consequences have become so obvious, the impact so far-reaching, that the correlation can no longer be spun away. Greece is insolvent, soon to be followed by Spain, Portugal, and perhaps Italy, which in concert may well bring down the euro. Germany is in the unenviable position of having to bail out the outrageously profligate Greece with hardworking German citizens' tax euros, all while realizing full well that it will not make one iota of difference in the long run. We see a productive and responsible nation following the laggard and fool to economic ruin, enabling a spend-aholic in its addiction.
American Thinker: Citizens or Subjects: Keynesian Economics

American Thinker: Cannibalizing Capital

What converts these worthless plants and minerals into paintings, furniture, and jewelry? What made it possible for our artist, our jeweler, and our craftsman to make a living out of processed plants and minerals? Hint: It's not government.

These artists may not have heard about the 10,000 homes being destroyed and the economic nihilism that inspired the project. These artists just do what they do, taking a few dollars' worth of raw materials and transforming them into goods worth ten, twenty, thirty times as much, all because of their ingenuity, their creativity, and the rewards dispensed by the invisible hand of a free market.

It happens every hour of every day, as manufacturers literally create wealth by creating valuable goods seemingly out of thin air.

American Thinker: Cannibalizing Capital

Sunday, May 16, 2010

American Thinker: Why Conservatives Love the Founders

History is full of Obamas, and the people who idolized such power-hungry self-glorifying narcissists. The Founders understood human history in their very bones, because they read history from the Bible to the Roman Empire, Europe's bloody and tyrannical history, and the Americas. If you want to understand Obama, just look at any idolized hero in Latin America: Chavez, Fidel, Bolivar, Juan Peron. Look at European monarchs. Look at Napoleon.
American Thinker: Why Conservatives Love the Founders

Hands Off My Medicare - Are Tea Partiers "Closet" Socialists?

Hands Off My Medicare - Are Tea Partiers "Closet" Socialists?

Gregory Parkinson, a far-left gay guy who specializes in labelling opinions with which he disagrees as "lacking in reality" or "ignoring facts" claims on FaceBook that Tea Partiers are closet "socialists" because a sign was seen among the protesters against socializing the medical profession last summer with the message "Hand Off My Medicare."  He never offers extended analysis; indeed, he offers no analysis whatever, just his blunt assertions, on the premise that reasonable and rational people will, naturally, accept whatever he has to say for no better reason than his blunt assertion:

"I admire facts and reason", [he quotes from a prior post of mine] leaves out "from a far distance, and have yet to welcome any into my personal worldview."


I am totally loving the rest of this, about how only if you objected to a program do you have the "moral right" to take the money. That "reasoning" gives us the "hands off my medicare, you socialist!" teabaggers as well.

Let's take a look at Parkinson's slur to see if there is any substance to it.

The phrase "hands off my medicare" clearly implies "possession." 

One fact Parkinson conveniently ignores is the government's political promise, made by generations of Democrat politicians, that the Social Security Program (and Medicare has been represented by them as part of the Social Security Program) is *not* a form of wealth redistribution, is *not* a form of "welfare" or the "dole" but should be thought of as something like a government pension program, in which the worker and the employer each contribute to a "fund" from which retired workers can "withdraw" their "earned" benefits.

The Tea Partiers holding up the signs to which Parkinson refers may have been doing either one of two things.

Their signs could actually be referring to "Medicare" in the exact same sense in which Democrat politicians refer to "Medicare," that is, as a "fund" or "lock box" into which workers' and employers' social security tax dollars have been flowing for decades, and they do not now agree that Congress should summarily and arbitrarily use the funds in the "lock box" for programs not originally contemplated and already "earmarked" as a benefit, and to which they are making a moral claim. 

In all fairness to the Tea Partiers, and against Parkinson, it is difficult to see how anyone might make a superior moral claim to the funds "locked" away in the safe and secure "lockbox" the Democrats have been saying for years actually exists and exists for the benefit of retiring senior workers who have worked hard all their lives, have paid in all those years, and have "undisputed" claim on those tax dollars extracted from them and their employers.

Of course, as politicians of both parties have known for decades, Social Security and its Medicare add-on is nothing but a "Ponzi" scheme to buy the votes of seniors.  It has been well-described as the "third-rail" of American politics--an electrified rail that will execute any politician who dares to touch it.  Bush 43 made a valiant effort to begin the process of transforming the program into a legitimate pension program, but Republicans are not very courageous and ultimately Democrats prevailed in preventing true reform even though Republicans had a majority.

The Democrats knew the program was far too useful to them politically in frightening senior citizens.  For example, liberal Democrat Laughton Chiles, when he ran against conservative Republican Jeb Bush in the 1994 race for Florida governor, ran a telephone campaign where Chiles' supporters made calls to seniors claiming that Jeb Bush was going to take away their social security benefits.  Chiles simply took a page out of LBJ's playbook in that politician's campaign against Barry Goldwater in 1964.

The fact is, the Tea Partiers, as do all Americans, have a moral claim to the taxes that were extracted from them under the threat of physical force and fraud.  They have precisely the same moral claim as do the victims of the Enron scandals, only in the case of Enron, fraud, and not physical force, was used to extract the booty.

What is wrong with holding Congress to the same standards that Congress wants to hold the perpetrators of fraud at Enron, or Wall Street, for that matter?

The argument regarding the right to a benefit only if you opposed the legislation that granted the benefit makes an underlying assumption that Parkinson has conveniently ignored.  The difference can be illustrated as follows. 

If you say that government has the right to steal people's property, which is what the advocates of social security and other forms of wealth re-distribution are claiming, then what we call "rights" do not exist legally in such a society. 

Rights still exist as moral claims, since rights exist wherever people exist, and people's rights are, by the terms of our own Declaration of Independence, "unalienable."  Indeed, the purpose of rights is to subordinate society to moral law, to say there are things which society cannot do to individuals.

In short, if you advocate theft as a social policy, you forfeit your "rights" since you cannot claim for yourself what you would deny others.

On the other hand, if you oppose theft as a social policy based on the moral claim of individual rights, then you can seek to protect your rights without self-contradiction.

In the rare possibility that the Tea Partiers Parkinson has brought in for review were petitioning Congress to increase their benefits or to enable the government to steal more property from Americans in the form of re-distributional tax increases, then certainly such Tea Partiers are guilty, at the very least, of the same crime of hypocrisy that Democrats have been guilty of for decades.

So Parkinson might be right, in which case the Tea Partiers are as morally clueless as he is; on the other hand, they could have simply been protesting government theft.

I'll leave it to the reader to decide which is more probably true.

Friday, May 14, 2010

American Thinker: The Real Reason the Left Loves Illegals

This explains why illegal immigration is so important to the left. It explains why efforts to halt illegal border-crossings, a problem that wouldn't challenge a six-year-old, are executed so halfheartedly and so often left unfinished (see the recent "virtual fence"). It explains the irrational response to Arizona's effort to tighten up existing immigration law (not create new law -- Arizona's statute is no more than a reinforcement of existing federal law). It explains the insistence that any solution to the immigration problem provide for amnesty and citizenship for the millions of illegals already living within our borders. It has nothing to do with compassion, nothing to do with fairness or practicality or any of the other reasons offered by "reform" advocates. As is almost always the case where the American left is involved, what it has to do with is power.


American Thinker: The Real Reason the Left Loves Illegals

Tuesday, May 4, 2010

American Thinker: Declaration of Independence as Law

In order to save the fruit of the American Revolution, the Declaration of Independence must be recognized and enforced as law. Amending our Constitution will also be necessary -- for example, limiting federal taxation and requiring federal spending not to exceed federal revenue. It appears that neither of these changes is likely to emanate from the federal government any time soon. However, "We the People" do not need the federal government to define our sacred human rights or their associated moral laws. According to the Declaration, those truths and laws are self-evident. "We the People" are capable of becoming masters of federal government through the amendment process.

We the people are the rightful masters of both Congress and the courts, not to overthrow the Constitution, but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution.
-
Abraham Lincoln

All American laws which are destructive to an individual's sacred, equal rights to life, liberty, and private property are un-Declarational and must be nullified -- if not by Congress or the Supreme Court, then by states and local government. The concept of "Declarational" law must find its way into the American mind and into all levels of American government.


American Thinker: Declaration of Independence as Law

How Starving Government Still Gets Fat - Reason Magazine

When they began, this approach seemed worth a try. But 30 years later, confirmation is hard to find. Like Reagan, George W. Bush reduced income tax rates. In spite of that, inflation-adjusted federal outlays this year are 60 percent higher than they were the year Bush became president.

How Starving Government Still Gets Fat - Reason Magazine

The American Spectator : The Shattered Template In Arizona

Progressives presented big government to blacks in precisely the same way they presented it to white Southerners: tied tightly together to the idea of racial identity. Thus emerged a whole generation of progressive black politicians who were the mirror image of their white supremacist counterparts: each exploiting the combustible mix of racism and big government.

The American Spectator : The Shattered Template In Arizona

The American Spectator : Shutting Down Free Speech

These heavy-handed actions, as well as worries about the Obama Administration reinstituting the so-called "Fairness Doctrine" for talk radio are small time when one considers what the government is capable of accomplishing if a handful of current proposals are enacted.


The American Spectator : Shutting Down Free Speech