The American Spectator : Letter to a Liberal Friend

Letter to a Liberal Friend

By Green Lantern on 9.8.11 @ 6:09AM

I went to one of those prestigious Eastern colleges that turn out the bureaucrats who populate President Obama's administration so I have an unusual perspective on his supporters. I know these people very well, yet I can't figure out their motivation.

As class secretary, I spend quite a bit of time gathering news for the Alumni Notes. When I call to chat, nearly all my former classmates are staunchly liberal, enraged at the Tea Party and alarmed at the possibility that President Obama may not be re-elected. This is kind of strange. Forty years ago, many of these people were football jocks or party animals who had very little concern for politics. Yet they have someone "matured" into staunch liberals. All this was summed up by one alumnus who wrote in the class notes a few years ago, "I continue to prosper while moving rapidly toward the angry left."

One of the classmates I contacted this year is a Washington tort lawyer. He told me how he recently represented an entrepreneur who got a permit from the Department of Interior to develop a coal mine in Tennessee, spent $3 million developing infrastructure, and was then told by the bureaucrats that they had changed their mind -- the mine was too close to a national forest.

"I won a $300 million settlement before a federal administrative judge, working on contingency," he said. "But when it went up to the appeals level, the three-judge panel threw it out. They said the government can do anything it wants. It makes me sick."

"Isn't that the sort of thing the Tea Party is complaining about?" I asked.

"Tea Party!" He was astounded. "You're not one of those Tea Party people, are you? They're all crazy."

Another class member is now a prominent professor at the University of Wisconsin. I asked him what it was like in Madison during last summer's demonstrations and he said, "Heck, I was in them. We've got an absolutely insane governor in this state, Governor Walker. The man is crazy. He wants to gut the entire system. We were out there to stop him."

In the next breath was telling me about his second home in the Caribbean. "We have a little compound down there," he said. "We got hit by a hurricane ten years ago and I had to go down to rebuild the place. There are only about 100 people on the island so we all helped each other out."

Somehow the incongruity of an affluent college professor with a hideaway home in the Caribbean who is also a member of the oppressed working masses who must demonstrate against an insane governor who is foolish enough to be upset because his state is going bankrupt did not register in his head.

I've had several conversations with liberals lately and they have one simple explanation for the President's current troubles -- "racism." "What's really going on is these Tea Party people can't stand the idea of being ruled by a black man, don't you think that's it?" Nine percent unemployment, 20 million people out of work, a 27-year-high in unemployment among African-Americans -- if George Bush were President, he would be being charged with racism.

So I've composed a letter to my liberal friends who are beginning to realize that Obama may be a one-term President. We've seen this before -- Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush both tripped over the economy and failed to get re-elected. Nobody argued it was because Carter was a Southern Baptist or Bush was Skull-and-Bones. So why should it be hard to fathom that 43rd President might face the same experience?

The American Spectator : Letter to a Liberal Friend

Stop the Lying - Jim Lacey - National Review Online

Stop the Lying - Jim Lacey - National Review Online:

From the comments:

"How do you think we got all of this excessive regulation in the first place? The stories that Upton Sinclair published in the early 20th century was a bunch of lies, by his own admission. This led to increased regulation on the part of government.

The Tennessee Valley Authority was meant to promote access to electricity for rural folk, but in reality was a naked power grab by the government to increase regulation over the utilities.

The Cuyahoga River fire was put out before there was ever an Environmental Protection Agency, but we still got one.

Remember when the ozone was under assault by chloroflourocarbons? Yeah, me neither, but no one ever talks about that anymore. However, we still have a Clean Air Act the benefits of which are always dubious.

Everyone knows that Fannie and Freddie was at the center of the housing mess, but was curiously neglected as the Congress decided to ensure that greedy bankers don't take advantage of consumers 'again' (just like all the other times we've had a recession) with Dodd-Frank.

And don't even get me started on Obamacare.

In order for the government to grab more power, it must always position itself as the virtuous entity amongst a sea of rot, i.e., the rest of us. That itself is a lie."

American Thinker: Donald Trump Scores an Important Victory... Over the Media

Gail Collins, the New York Times's most reliably uninteresting liberal attack dog, questioned Trump's sanity just for raising the birth certificate issue. But would she say the same about famed black Vanderbilt University Law Professor and Obama supporter Carol Swain? Swain has said "I think that by not releasing it [the full birth certificate], it makes people much more passionately opposed to the president. Moreover, for a president who was elected on the basis of his personal background, it is troubling that Obama himself would want to withhold such basic information."

The media's curiosity about the background of those running for national office seemed to know no bounds when it came to George W. Bush's service in the Texas Air National Guard or the sexual behavior of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin's daughter. But during and since the 2008 campaign a virtual wall of silence has been constructed around Obama.

This has important implications for the country. Questions about Obama's family and his relationship to Islam, for example, and hence his world view, remain subjects of speculation. Former CIA officer Larry Johnson, for example, believes that the full birth record from the State of Hawaii was probably amended in 1968 to show Obama was adopted by his step father, the Indonesian Muslim Lolo Soetoro, that he became formally known for a time as "Barry Soetoro," and may even have his religion listed as Muslim. This would completely change what Obama has said about his past and represent a public fraud of a very significant magnitude.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/04/donald_trump_scores_an_importa.html

Capitalism Magazine - The Tea Party vs. The Conservatives

"According to serious economists (such as Thomas Sowell), the primary cause of the bank meltdown was the fact that mortgages were handed out to people who could not afford houses. As people who never should have been granted loans in the first place piled up debt, the entire mortgage industry imploded. This is because the federally managed mortgage industry mandated that more people get mortgages. Politicians in both parties, including George W. Bush, liked to see those home ownership numbers increase because it made them feel like they were creating a vibrant economy. In reality, the collapse of the financial industry which "required" TARP was due to government intervention in the economy."
Capitalism Magazine - The Tea Party vs. The Conservatives

The American Spectator : Opposing Obama

I thought the article was pretty insightful about Obama. I just have to laugh, however, in reading so many of the comments that simply ignore the role of George W. Bush in advancing the cause of Leviathan. Granted, Quinn brings up Clinton, but his focus in on Obama. Yet on and on, the comments spew their disdain and hatred for Clinton, a president, who, with a conservative Republican Congress, gave us some of the best, most limited government we've had for decades.

George Bush wanted to transform the world by using Leviathan to advance "freedom" not understanding how self-contradictory and inconsistent it is to create a Leviathan in order to transform the world. Thus we got the Second Iraq War.

GWB created the TSA. He's the president who passed the bank bailouts. He's the president who increased spending and vastly expanded the scope and power of the federal government.
Yet one hears not a peep of criticism. Bush was not a conservative. Advancing the unholy alliance between religion and conservatism, Bush demonstrated that philosophies of government have a moral foundation and when that foundation is based on the religious morality of altruism, of the view of man that claims his life has worth only when sacrificed for the benefit of others, then what do you expect?

Obama simply takes Bush and the religious at their word. He argues that we are all our brother's keeper. That's what altruism boils down to in practice, and that is what the Left believes. Everyone should take care of everyone else.

If you wish to advance the cause of true conservatism, i.e. limited government, protection of individual rights, then religion must not be allowed to corrupt the conservative message and the conservative goal of limiting government to the protection of individual rights, as stated in our Declaration of Independence.

Altruism is fundamentally incompatible with capitalism and with any governing philosophy whose goal is the protection of individual rights. Such a philosophy must be based on the moral premise that man has a right to live his life for his own sake, and not for the sake of others. He is an end in himself, morally, and not merely a means to the satisfaction of other men's desires, goals and purposes, no matter how "noble."

The American Spectator : Opposing Obama

Paul Krugman: Professor Ahab - Stephen Spruiell - National Review Online

Krugman’s claim that the stimulus should have been bigger is consistent with his view that for every macroeconomic problem there is a correct answer that it is within the power of one man to calculate. Not only is such a claim unfalsifiable, but our experience with fiscal stimulus indicates that this particular form of voodoo economics simply steals demand from the future and leaves us worse off in the long run. Krugman urges us to ignore that history: He argues that real fiscal stimulus has been tried only once in recent memory, when massive government borrowing during World War II pulled America out of the Depression. But there are many competing explanations for the post-war boom — too many to allow us to gamble our prosperity on a World War II–sized stimulus on the chance that the Keynesian view is right this time.
Paul Krugman: Professor Ahab - Stephen Spruiell - National Review Online

The American Spectator : Obama's New Teacher

The reality is that for all the small government rhetoric, Republicans and conservatives alike have supported expansive federal education policy when it suits them. It was the Reagan Administration that nurtured the modern school reform movement in 1983 with the publication of A Nation at Risk, which called for improving (and standardizing) curricula and academic standards. Obama's own reform efforts are a continuation of those of his predecessor, George W. Bush, who, with the help of then-education committee chairman John Boehner, passed No Child. Another pet project of conservative reformers, the now-shuttered D.C. Opportunity school voucher program, was established by the then Republican-controlled Congress in 2003 (admittedly, at the behest of residents frustrated with the woeful school district).
The American Spectator : Obama's New Teacher

Freer Is Better - Reason Magazine

The 2010 Index of Economic Freedom lowers the ranking of the United States to eighth out of 179 nations—behind Canada! A year ago, it ranked sixth, ahead of Canada.
Don't say it's Barack Obama's fault. Half the data used in the index is from George W. Bush's final six months in office. This is a bipartisan problem.

Freer Is Better - Reason Magazine

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.