Does America Need Ayn Rand or Jesus? - FoxNews.com

Does America Need Ayn Rand or Jesus? - FoxNews.com:

"Ayn Rand is everywhere and her political opponents are growing nervous.

Rand of course is a champion of individual rights, including property rights, and an advocate of laissez-faire capitalism. Walk through any Tea Party gathering and you’ll see signs such as “Who is John Galt?,” “Rand was right” and “Read Atlas Shrugged.” Paul Ryan says of her, accurately in my view, that “Ayn Rand more than anyone else did a fantastic job of explaining the morality of capitalism, the morality of individualism.”"

Why Does Business Support Both Political Parties?

I was recently asked by a friend to explain why men such as Jeffrey Immelt and other large corporations in the United States such as Goldman Sachs financially support both Democrats and Republicans, even as one party would seem to have the voters believe it supports businessmen and the other that it wishes to destroy them by taxing and regulating businessmen out of existence?

The facts my friend cites are not in dispute, and reflect the great depth of corruption in our current crony capitalist hybrid mixed economy.  One could understand why a corporation might support Republicans, but why would Goldman Sachs support the liberal and socialist program of the Democrats, a program whose seeming goal would lead only to its destruction?

The facts demonstrate the insight made by many who run our largest industries that:  1) the US government is a legalized criminal organization seeking "bribes" in the form of political contributions in exchange for certain "protections" from government regulatory, anti-trust, and taxing thuggery, and, 2) both major political parties are completely and irredeemably corrupt so the smart move is always to support both in case one or the other is able for the moment to delude enough voters to support its candidates.

It is true, not all businesses, not even all large businesses necessarily subscribe to this view of our government, but whether or not it represents their conscious views, it nonetheless offers a good theory why such businesses financially support politicians otherwise dedicated to their apparent destruction.  After all, when was the last time you heard a socialist, a Democrat, or even a Republican for that matter, defend businessmen?

Ayn Rand had some interesting things to say in a lecture given in 1962:

"Businessmen [her italics] are the one group that distinguishes capitalism and the American way of life from the totalitarian statism that is swallowing the rest of the world.  All the other social groups--workers, farmers, professional men, scientists, soldiers--exist under dictatorship, even though they exist in chains, in terror, in misery, and in progressive self-destruction.  But there is no such group as businessmen under a dictatorship.  Their place is taken by armed thugs:  by bureaucrats and commissars.  businessmen are the symbol of a free society--the symbol of America.  If and when they perish, civilization will perish.  But if you wish to fight for freedom, you must begin by fighting for its unrewarded, unrecognized, unacknowledged, yet best representatives--the American businessman."

Much has happened since 1962 when Ayn Rand said those words, and while Soviet communism has imploded and Red China has permitted a great deal of economic freedom for its citizens, we are now seeing on an unprecedented scale the slow, seemingly inexorable slide in the United States to a situation where leading businessmen such as Jeffrey Immelt of GE have now definitely moved into that twilight zone where the shift to the Dark Side becomes inevitable. 

 

Immelt is part businessman but now he is more of a commissar, a government thug pretending he is the CEO of a private corporation.  Immelt is not kept in corporate power because he has worked for the interests of the corporation--its stock has declined the entire period of his leadership--but because of his willingness to do the bidding of the federal government, in the present case, of President Barack Obama and the President's liberal allies on Capital Hill, all of whom are not necessarily liberal or Democrats.

Such men as Immelt have conceded the moral high ground to the socialists--that the good consists in sacrificing one's self, one's interests, for the "higher" good of society, whose voice is given expression by whichever gang of thugs is able to seize political power in the society at a given time.  Immelt and the others like him in the twilight are perfectly willing to play the game the socialists and liberals have invented and have become the willing milch cows of the corporate welfare state that we now have.

The socialist Democrats do not want to destroy businessmen, they want schmoos--businessmen who take delight in being devoured by the state.  Ultimately the schmoo is eaten alive, but the process can take quite a while and socialists have never been too concerned about the future anyway so long as they are able feed on the living body today.  They demonstrably have no problem mortgaging the future of the country, either, in order to continue feeding their social welfare programs, incidentally keeping themselves in power.

So Immelt and gang--the heads of Goldman Sachs for intance--understand the new rules and since they have already conceded they have no right to exist, that they have no rights as individual and exist merely on the sufferance of government, on "society's" need for their productive abilities, they will be permitted to keep some of their earnings, and, indeed, will be permitted to keep more of their earnings to induce other businessmen not willing to make schmoos of themselves, to alter their views and willingly surrender their interests and productivity to the service of state without a fight.

The picture is gruesome, a farce of unimaginable proportions.

And there is only one way to end it:  by rejecting the moral premise of the entire system that the good consists in the sacrifice of self to the interests of the collective.  It consists in the recognition and insight that the true good of everyone can never be advanced through the sacrifice of the individual, that society is, first and foremost, a collection of individuals, and that individuals have the moral right to exist, which means:  they have the right to the products of their own labor, intelligence, and talent.

How to Get Gaddafi - Newsweek

Why should the United States intervene into the affairs of Libya when both sides to the conflict may be equally bad, or even as the case unfolds, the so-called "rebels" may actually be worse than the tyranny under challenge?

Is it to the interests of the United States to have Al Qaeda run Libya rather than the Colonel?  The choice strikes me as not terribly dissimilar than the question during the thirties, do we support Stalin or do we support Hitler?  In that conflict we ultimately chose to ally with Stalin, as unsavory as that prospect was, on the proposition that the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

Such a calculus in the present case would seem to argue in favor of supporting the dictator, or, at minimum, of not supporting the rebels, since we know Qaddafi is a coward and can be brought to heel; such cannot be said of Al Qaeda.  It may be that Obama's dithering and Hamlet-like indisposition to exert leadership may actually serve our national self-interest, just as Bush's otherwise admirable assertiveness lead us into the Second Iraq War and its questionable results, its enormous cost in treasure, and the profound divisions in our own country with the further weakening of national self-regard internal division always encourages.

It may be that the rebels will fail without our material support.  But do we want them to succeed?  How do we advance our national self-interest by supporting them?  Are they champions of individual rights?  Do they support religious freedom?  Are they in favor of free speech, limited government, some form of democracy in which the rights of women, queer folk and other despised minorities are respected, or, at the minimum, where such minorities are not automatically consigned to cultural slavery, torture, or even death?  In brief, do the rebels promise a decent, civilized government, or merely promise the triumph of Sharia Law?

 

The reality is that very few revolutions, good or bad, succeed without some foreign assistance. Lenin had German money; Mao had Soviet arms. Revolutions that don't get some help from outside aren't so much inorganic as unsuccessful. Indeed, they generally don't go down in history as revolutions at all. More than one revolt has been brutally crushed by an Arab dictator—think of the Marsh Arabs' fate at the hands of Saddam Hussein. Such events tend to be remembered as massacres. We must hope that someone gives President Obama a history lesson before thousands of Libyans share their fate. It will be tragic indeed if America concludes from the experience of overthrowing murderous tyrannies in Afghanistan and Iraq that the correct policy is to turn a blind eye to murder in Libya. That, remember, was the policy pursued by the last Democrat to occupy the White House, in Rwanda as well as, for much too long, in Bosnia.

http://www.newsweek.com/2011/03/13/how-to-get-gaddafi.html

Capitalism Magazine - Shutdown

As usual, right on the money:

The current Congress faces the same risk. While it's important to cut programs and prove you're willing to do so, fiscal discipline is not the overriding purpose. Nancy Pelosi and fellow liberals are already arguing back that cutting government programs will result in the loss of jobs.
In some cases, this may actually be true, since government programs do require jobs and pay salaries. What's the Republican reply to this? It should be: "So what? Government has stolen that money from the private, productive sector. Instead of creating productive jobs in productive businesses that people want, government is taxing people to create jobs for political cronies and pressure groups."
If your sense of purpose stems from the value of individual rights, capitalism and limited government, you can make this argument. If your central purpose is nothing more than "fiscal discipline" and balancing the budget, you cannot.

Capitalism Magazine - Shutdown

Capitalism Magazine - Court Endorses "Thought Crime"

It is not for nothing that when the Obama administration proposes taking over the Internet, or when courts uphold the idea of “hate speech” or endorses the regulation of speech in schools and businesses and even in government itself, no one thinks it is Aldous “Huxleyian” or Thomas “Hobbesian.” It is immediately dubbed “Orwellian." In terms of totalitarian methods and ends, Orwell literally wrote the book.

So when I first read of U.S. District Court Judge Gladys Kessler’s recent ruling on Obamacare, in which she states, among other things, that “mental activity” can be treated as “commerce,” even if that activity does not lead to observable, demonstrable action, and that no distinction can be made between the actions of one’s mind and physical actions, I immediately recalled a statement in Orwell’s novel Nineteen-Eighty Four:

Thoughtcrime does not entail death: thoughtcrime IS death.*

Capitalism Magazine - Court Endorses "Thought Crime"

Capitalism Magazine - Senator Rand Paul’s Morality and the Welfare State

A recent article about Senator Rand Paul in abcnews.com unintentionally reveals a lot about why the GOP has failed to make the proper case against the welfare state and in favor of constitutionally limited government.

In the article, we see some admirable stances from Sen. Paul, such as wanting to cut $500 Billion in spending (as opposed to the mere $50 Billion that the GOP has proposed), wanting to shut down the Department of Energy, the Department of Education and ending all foreign aid. But the same man advocating all these also goes on to say:

"As a Christian, we are our brothers' keepers and we do have a moral obligation to take care of them."[1]

Sen. Paul is championing economic freedom while at the same time championing the morality that prevents it from existing. If one holds the philosophy that "we are our brothers' keeper," which means our life must be devoted to serving others, than the natural political expression of this would be the welfare state. The welfare state ties us all to each other, forcing each man to be each other’s "keeper." That maxim represents the morality that gave birth to the welfare state.

Capitalism Magazine - Senator Rand Paul’s Morality and the Welfare State

Capitalism Magazine - The Moral Crime of the "Religious Right"

The religious right insists that the American decay comes from abandoning the Christian principles of a "Christian country." Principles have been abandoned, but they were the principles of the Revolution. America fought tyranny in order to shape a country where men lived their lives for their own sake, not at the expense of others. What is needed is a proper understanding of individual rights, which Madison artfully articulated and fully comprehended.

At a time when America is working to rejuvenate itself, why haven't Madison's "Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments" been injected into the national discussion? Especially when it comes to the proper role of government. Surely someone like Glenn Beck, with his profound respect for history and the founding of America, would have stumbled across such a profound document. For the religious right, the only principles that matter are those that God and Jesus Christ have laid forth. Glenn Beck violates Madison's rule of adulterating principles when he argues that the only way to save the country is to mix reason with faith.

Mixing reason with faith is about as healthy and productive as consuming a drug cocktail with marijuana and cocaine. Building a belief system with contradicting principles is the farthest thing from a belief system. It is a method for making a human being defenseless against tyrants and incapable of recognizing reality.

Capitalism Magazine - The Moral Crime of the "Religious Right"

Capitalism Magazine - ObamaCare: Gone Today, Here Tomorrow

ObamaCare needs to be voided, but for the right reasons. It needs to be voided because people's minds and bodies belong to themselves, not to the state. There is no "health care system" which belongs to "us" -- meaning politicians and other power-hungry monsters in Washington DC. My health care does not belong to my neighbor, and his does not belong to me. Boundaries, people! We're each free and responsible for purchasing and securing our own medical care, and we all have an equal right to be free to do so on an open, unregulated market. Without such a free market, by the way, there will be no innovation or competence -- and therefore no medical care much worth having.

With "friends" like Judge Roger Vinson, advocates of capitalism and individual rights don't need enemies. It's a shame, because we already have so many of them. The biggest losers in all this are anybody who is, or who one day may be, a patient undergoing medical care.

Capitalism Magazine - ObamaCare: Gone Today, Here Tomorrow

We Stand FIRM: Ryan At The Summit

I've been making precisely this point for years:

The GOP needs to more explicitly challenge the moral argument for ObamaCare, rather than concentrating on secondary issues such as costs.

They need to make the argument that government-run "universal health care" is morally wrong and that free-market health care is morally right.

Americans are very moral people and they passionately want to "do the right thing". So if they accept the premise that it's supposedly right for the government to (somehow) make sure that everyone has guaranteed health care, but gosh this particular way just happens to be too expensive, then the statists will eventually win by proposing some plan that doesn't look too costly.

Whatever statist plan is eventually adopted will inevitably either cost more than originally promised or lead to rationing (or likely both). But sooner or later, Americans will buy into such a plan -- if they think that it is "the right thing to do".

But if Americans can be persuaded that government-guaranteed health is fundamentally wrong on moral grounds, then they'll reject all proposed variants regardless of the specific financial details.

With respect to moral and/or philosophical arguments, Republican sometimes say things that sound promising, such as Ryan's "We don't think the government should be in control of all of this. We want people to be in control."

But they never consistently defend the underlying principle of individual rights, the concept that individual rights are essential to human life in a social context, or the morality of a limited government which leaves honest men free to peacefully pursue their lives and their self-interest.

Hence, the Republicans leave themselves constantly vulnerable to statists claiming that there is a "moral imperative" to implement some new entitlement program, whether it be guaranteed health care, a jobs program, or a Medicare drug benefit. The most they can do is object to the costs of a particular program (or to some other specific implementation details) -- but not to the worthiness of the underlying goal.

In other words, the Republicans often argue that socialized medicine is impractical (or the closely related "it's too expensive"), but they rarely if ever argue that it's immoral.

We Stand FIRM: Ryan At The Summit

Capitalism Magazine - The Hypocrisy Underlying Obama's Speech

Desperate Americans, even some "conservatives," look to Obama during a time of crisis to distract us from the disastrous course we have been on for years, a course which Obama has accelerated at full throttle. They made Obama's speech a litmus test. They fooled themselves into thinking that if Obama didn't use the speech to blast Rush Limbaugh or other opponents, then he must be a good guy after all.
People this naive deserve what they get. What they're going to get in the coming months is more socialism, more taxation, more Big Government and more censorship of people who disagree than this nation has ever seen.
If Obama's opponents in Congress allow this unrelated tragedy to become an excuse for what liberals do best -- promoting raw emotionalism over reason and facts -- then they deserve to lose the ground they worked so hard to gain. Here’s hoping we get back to reality … and soon.

Capitalism Magazine - The Hypocrisy Underlying Obama's Speech

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

Capitalism Magazine - Voters To Politicians: I Want My Cake and I Want To Eat It Too

The problem is the ideology of self-sacrifice. Politicians rely on the neurotic guilt of their victims (the producers) to get the loot they want for their constituents. The neurotic guilt of their victims is the result of the ideology of self-sacrifice, the false and destructive view that people must sacrifice themselves for one another, regardless of the consequences to self or others. If Americans were more selfish, in the rational sense, politics and wealth redistribution as we know it would come to an end. America would become a free country, a much more prosperous and stable one than it presently is. They would elect the politicians able and willing to bring this about, rather than the ones they keep electing.
Capitalism Magazine - Voters To Politicians: I Want My Cake and I Want To Eat It Too

Capitalism Magazine - Ideas Have Consequences

Americans have come to realize that it is wrong---morally wrong---for the government to forcibly take the earnings from those who produce values (products and services) and give that money to those who have produced nothing, or are financially irresponsible.


Capitalism Magazine - Ideas Have Consequences

The Republican Pledge to America | www.hillsdale-econ.com

"Instead we have the arbitrary rule of whoever has power. This regime uncertainty, as Robert Higgs has called it, is the primary reason that we have nearly 15 million unemployed and another 8.9 million working part-time who would rather have full-time employment. The most important aspect of The Republican Pledge is that it provides the certainty of limited government that allows the market economy to provide opportunity and an elevated standard of living for all Americans."
The Republican Pledge to America | www.hillsdale-econ.com

American Thinker: The Key to a Real Revolution

In short, Republicans could produce a conservative revolution which achieves, in two short years, everything we have been seeking for the last fifty. All this would require great boldness and vision. But our nation needs just such a revolution. Half-measures and compromises simply prolong our slow death. We need a revolution. We have the means to that revolution within our grasp soon.
American Thinker: The Key to a Real Revolution

Common Fallacies About Capitalism 1

On my Facebook Page I come across misconceptions about capitalism, about corporations, and about business.  From time to time I will quote snippets from such misconceptions and then apply some reason and facts to enable you to make a more accurate judgment and revise your own notions accordingly.  Here are just a few I've recently come across.

I had written:  "As to fear, Americans have considerable justification to fear zero [the Obama Administration] and his thugs in Congress for the simple reason that Congress has been voting away our individual rights in favor of a dictatorship.  This is seen most notably with the recent passage of legislation that socialized the medical industry and deprives everyone of their right to run their lives as they wish."

To which my correspondent claimed:  "The insurance companies have regulations like any industry has."

Insurance companies are heavily regulated by the states.  Their rates are regulated directly and indirectly.  The state controls the market by limiting entry and it controls the product by specifying in detail what the product is.  To take Florida as an example, if you are an insurance company you are not permitted to sell medical insurance in Florida unless the state permits it, and the state will not permit it.  The state further tells the few insurance companies who are permitted to do business exactly what must be covered in the policies they are permitted to sell.  For example, I am not permitted to buy a policy that does not cover maternity benefits or mental health benefits, even though I do not want to pay for those benefits and can have no need for them.

The purpose of such regulation is to force me to subsidize through my excessive premiums the maternity benefits and mental health care benefits the legislature has decided it does not want to pay for directly from taxes.  Essentially the state is "shifting the cost" and indirectly subsidizing favored classes of people at the expense of others. 

So your facts are wrong.  Ordinary companies selling product or services are not required to get a permit to do so from the state, the state does not limit market entry, and the state does not tell the company what it can and cannot sell.  Companies must simply abide by the common laws all citizens must follow, pay any taxes due, which is the state's main concern, and the state will generally leave the company alone.  Customers then benefit by purchasing the product or service, or the company goes bankrupt because people choose not to do business with it.  People are not forced by the state to do business with it, as they are with insurance companies.


Claim:  "Without regulations, Lake Erie would still be dead and the Cayahoga river [sic] in Cleveland would still be burning."

This statement depends on what you mean by "regulations".  The principle of individual rights requires laws, and when a geographical area is without law, it is, quite literally, "lawless."  That was the situation with Lake Erie.  The "regulations" you cite--the Clean Water Act of 1972--essentially prohibited the dumping of nutrient phosphorus.  However, the problem would have been more effectively addressed by laws written to protect private property interests.  When you have a "commons" it is a well-known and understood phenomenon that unless the people who use the resource are permitted to develop informal or even formal rules for its use and disposal you will put into motion incentives that ultimately destroy the resource.

It is clear, for example, that current regulations do nothing to prevent dumping of raw sewage into these waterways and Lake Erie itself from public, not private, sources.  52 communities within the Lake Erie Watershed Basin, ranging from small towns like Avon Lake, to the larger metropolitan cities including Toledo and Cleveland, have 598 combined sewer overflow outfalls, or pipes, that feed into the waterways that lead into Lake Erie, or directly into the Lake itself.  An analysis of 38 of the 52 communities that dump untreated sewage shows that these communities dumped more than 10 billion gallons of sewage into the Lake Erie watershed in 2005 alone.  This is equivalent to more than 3 billion toilets flushing into Lake Erie--a drinking water source for more than 11 million people.  Combined sewage overflows are a major cause of beach advisories, wildlife destruction, and human death problems.

If private property rights were clearly defined in the Lake Erie Watershed Basin, Americans would have recourse to the courts to sue local and state governments to compel behavior from them that respected private property rights in Lake Erie.  But we do not have those protections because people have been mislead to believe that government "regulations" are protecting them.  Government typically does not monitor itself, doesn't sue itself, and, in fact, generally does everything it can to mislead and hide its malfeasance, just as ordinary criminals do.  This is another reason why the state should be separated from the economy as much as possible, i.e. a society based on laissez-faire capitalism, rather than the mixed economy of socialistic and fascistic controls with some freedoms also allowed.


Claim:  "BP didn't follow what scant regulations on drilling and we see the results."

Oil drilling activities are among the most heavily regulated in the country.  The facts are that the United States prohibited safe drilling on land and shallow water by fiat, forcing companies into the far more riskier deep water.  The government even gave oil companies incentives to drill in deep water and the current administration even exempted BP from having to meet its own regulatory standards.  In addition, the US specificially praised BP's platform, the one that blew up.

The outrage does not stop there.  Because of US regulations, BP was insured for only $75 million beyond the cost of any cleanup.  If BP had to get its insurance on the private market, instead of having the government insure its operations, that limit would have been far higher, the premium would have passed on through the chain in the form of higher production cost and the market would have substantially determined whether or not it was economically feasible to take such a risk.

The US government socialized the risk to BP for political reasons.  Such events happen when you have a mixed economy.  The solution is not more "regulations" but getting the government out of the the private sector so that it can provide the one thing it is qualified to provide the market:  clear liability laws that protect the people whose lives and property are being put in jeopardy.  We can't abolish risk, but we can insure against accidents.  When the government encourages risky behavior, rewards corporations for engaging in risky behavior, and then socializes the risk for risky behavior to further encourage it, how can the government be absolved of any responsibility?


Claim:  "The insurance companies are just leaches off the medical needs. It is not in any way single payer nor are these companies restricted. Hell, they wrote this health bill which sucks because it doesn't include an individual's right to bypass the insurance monsters who love to drop sick people and refuse to insure those with pre existing conditions."

You are misinformed.  As Adam Smith used to say, the tailor does not make you a new suit of clothes because he wants to see you well turned out; he turns you out in the best suit of clothes because he wants to feed his family and otherwise provide for his own economic needs.

Insurance companies are owned by stockholders, just ordinary people, looking to make some money by providing a service, a service that most people appreciate.

When government interfers with the private market, it initiates the use of physical force to compel people to behave in ways that oppose their own rational self-interests, and thereby corrupts the relationships between buyers and sellers, making them hostile.

People trade values voluntarily for mutual advantage, by definition, for otherwise they would not trade.  When government forces sellers to sell what they don't want to sell, and forces buyers to buy what they do not want to buy, government creates hostility, bad feeling, injustice, and sets up incentives for buyers and sellers to game the system in order to get what they want.

The fault lies not with the buyers and sellers, but with the government for intervening in the private economic activities of citizens.


Claim:  "Pray tell what individual rights have been removed since Bush/Obama?"

Perhaps you will accept just one example, since there is not enough time or space to list them all here.  The recently passed legislation that socializes the medical industry will have the effect of abridging the right of the people to seek medical care and to provide medical care as they wish.  Doctors will be forced to provide services and patients will be forced to accept services neither of them wants in precisely the way that they want them.  The government in this legislation establishes bureaus that will decide on what services doctors may provide and what services patients may receive, independently of the wishes of the doctor or patient.

The abridgment of individual rights, of course, occurs in some measure to some degree any time the government intervenes into the free market.  The medical industry was very heavily regulated prior to the rise of the Regime, a situation that created the manifold number of difficulties and injustices the new law pretends to resolve.  However, government intervention always creates many new problems that then require more government intervention, ad infinitum, until government comes to manage every aspect of life and no freedom remains for the individual.

Most everything the critics said of the new law, and denied by its supporters, is coming true as the regulations are put into place or proposed.


Claim:  "That bad memory lives on in the financial disaster we all are living thru [sic]. We and our government let billionaires play games with OUR money and homes. Capitalism sucks."

Your facts are wrong.  The system we currently have is very different from a capitalistic system.  Under capitalism, people have rights and the government does not have the legal power to abridge people's rights.

For example, in a free society (i.e. a capitalistic society) government would not have the power to force a citizen to pay the debt incurred by other citizens, as the current Regime has done in regard to the so-called "bailout".


Claim:  "AND your definition of socialism is not accurate. You describe communism."

Socialism commonly means government ownership and control of the means of production, i.e. all property.  Fascism commonly means government control of the means of production, but technical "ownership" remains in the hands of private citizens.  Communism commonly means government ownership and control of the means of production.

Socialism and communism mean the same thing.  The term "communism" has come to be associated historically with Marxism-Leninism, and the sorts of totalitarian governments that arouse under those politicians who identified as such.  However, there is really little to justify saying one is, in any particular, different in kind from the other.  For example, liberals greatly admire Fidel Castro and the murderous thug Che Guevara, and both these infamous sociopaths considered themselves socialists.  Liberals never tire, for example, in extolling the manifold virtues of the Cuban health care system, or the wonders of its education system.

The Tea Party & Illegal Immigration

Those wishing to defend the premise that the only legitimate function of government is the protection of individual rights may defend laws against illegal immigration on very simple, straight-forward national security grounds.

Does the man next door to your apartment have an indefeasible right to keep a nuclear weapon on the premises? Some might argue he has; I would argue for a rule of reason and common sense. Clearly we have a right to keep ourselves safe from a potential terrorist, and a man with a nuclear bomb is not likely to be acting from the self-defense motive of a man keeping a Sig-Sauer 9 mm at the ready.

We must look to intent to decide questions of this sort. All abstract propositions become conditional propositions when applied to matters of fact. Some facts are these: that illegal immigration into the USA permits terrorists into the country. It therefore follows a rational country needs an ordered procedure to determine such questions as whether to permit a foreign national from crossing our national borders. By what principle would one argue that he had a "right" to enter the United States?

Therefore I see no rational, factual, or moral basis for the belief that the US is violating that man's rights. Until we know who the man is, what his background is, what his beliefs are--indeed, everything about him--we have no moral obligation to permit his entry into our country. The first order of business for the federal government is the protection of our individual rights from threats or potential threats created by those who wish to make war on the US. Until we can determine whether he is an enemy of the US, he has no right to be here.

On that basis I am completely with the Tea Party people and others who oppose illegal immigration. That our immigration laws may need reform is another conversation. I think it is to our interest to have guest worker programs, on the principle that we do honor individual rights of those who wish only to trade values on a non-coercive basis, but that is an important condition and one that is not met by Mexicans crossing our borders at night in the desert, murdering, kidnapping, or otherwise endangering the lives of Americans.

It is true there is a collectivist premise in the thinking of those who oppose illegal immigration on the grounds that illegals are abusing the welfare system we have established in this country. Actually, they have a point. Illegals are abusing the welfare system, in the sense they are obtaining benefits at the expense of taxpayers. But then so are those Americans who avail themselves of those same benefits.

What is overlooked in this argument is that the primary abuse is of the taxpayers. But their emotional hostility is completely understandable as the present American regime has just enacted legislation that will vastly intensify the abuse by indirectly extending taxpayer-funded benefits to millions of illegals. The Regime understands its actions will further divide Americans and wishes to exploit such divisions for partisan advantage, as has been demonstrated in its cynical--and shamefully ignorant--handling of the recent law passed in Arizona to protect its citizens from threats to their lives and property.

Americans, by and large, do not oppose legal immigration, nor do they oppose a rational, liberal immigration policy, but the laws as imperfect as they may be should be followed, they should be enforced by constituted authority and at present and for many years have not been enforced. Presently the people of Arizona are facing a catastrophe. We already have parts of California becoming a wasteland of socialist and open-borders sentiment, such as the school district of Los Angeles, electing to teach the students in public schools that Arizona's laws are the moral equivalent of Nazi Germany's concentration camps and urging an economic boycott of the state and of the people.

We are in serious trouble when we have political districts in our own country thinking and talking as if they were citizens of another country, and one that clearly has an interest in solving the problems of its own socialist economy by encouraging its people to "migrate" to the US illegally and then to lecture us on our responsibility to protect the individual rights of Mexicans!

I have a further point to make. Our culture has been so degraded--intellectually, morally, culturally--that intelligent political discourse is all but made impossible both by the lack of intellectual ammunition on the Right and the militantly anti-intellectual political tactics of the Left. It is true that Illegal Immigration may become a hugely symbolic issue that will "carry the emotional freight" of the public's gut-level antagonism to the Regime's heavy-handed collectivism on many fronts. Illegal immigration, tax increases, irrational spending--these are issues Americans can all understand and relate to, and therefore, it is to be expected in such an emotionally toxic political environment that nativist sentiments will also become part of the mix, as I am also certain racism will too.

But such sentiments must not be allowed to dominate the discourse and the political campaigns, for the Left will attempt to make these legitimate issues seem to be nothing but illegitimate racist and nativist anger. They are already following this tactic, as we have seen in the campaign the Left has conducted against Arizona. Expect much more of that sort of thing.

The tactic, however, is a lie and a cheat, and if we can keep the focus on protection of individual rights, and the right of the American people to be secure in their lives and property from those who would make war on us, then we should be able to defeat the Left.

I have not mentioned the recent oil catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico. Probably the biggest issue now will be the Regime's gross incompetence. If I believed in God I would definitely find the guiding hand of providence in these events, and while the pain in the short term is very great, I am tempted to believe that the election of Obama will prove to be America's Great Secular Awakening to both the evil and the inherent incompetence of Big Government.

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.

Will Republicans Support Obama Care Lite?

According to W. James Antle, III, of the American Spectator :

[Senator John] Cornyn [of Texas] initially unfurled the "repeal and replace" banner, only to quickly make an exception for the "non-controversial stuff," such as the ban on preexisting conditions which is unfortunately exactly what necessitates the "controversial stuff" like the individual mandate.

Herein lies the premise for the entire article, that Republicans will support depriving the stockholders of their investment by permitting this attack on the property rights of insurance companies, essentially making them agents of government, and thereby taking a giant step down the road to a corporate fascist state, in order to preserve such socializing moves as banning preexisting conditions.

We will just have to see, but Antle has not grasped the economics of this issue, nor how a free market solution would solve the problem.

In a free market, individuals would purchase health insurance policies just as they purchase other forms of insurance; and they would have property rights in the policy. The major attraction of such a policy would be that it would cover future medical conditions. People would thus have an economic incentive to purchase such policies in their relative youth, as they do now, for whole life policies and other policies that provide resources for future catastrophes.

Thus the issue of "pre-existing" conditions would not arise in the first place. If you were so unwise as to fail to take advantage of such policies, well, yes, then you would have a problem, but most people can take care of themselves and we certainly wouldn't have the scale of problems we have now with employer-based insurance, which makes no rational sense at all, and only came about as a result of government intervention into the free market in the first place during WWII.

We keep trying to solve problems created by government intervention with more government intervention. Why would anyone think such a procedure could possibly work?

Obama care is just another government intervention proposed and now enacted to correct earlier problems created by government intervention.

The way you solve such problems is to eliminate government intervention.

This article by a "conservative" Republican writing for The American Spectator perfectly illustrates the reason why we need fundamental constitutional reform. We have so-called "conservative intellectuals" such as Antle, who simply do not understand capitalism or free-market economics, who have, apparently, never given serious or sustained thought to how a free society would actually work and resume the social functions that since the ascendancy of Progressivism have been taken over more and more by government, on the assumption that government can do things for people more effectively than they can do for themselves.

Obviously it can't. These so-called "conservatives" may, in fact, be conservative, but they are not libertarians, they do not support limited government, and their vision is not radical in any sense of the word. We need radical--meaning fundamental--reform of government. And there are some of us who will work toward that end, trying to push the TPM and the angry Republicans more toward fundamental reform. I don't think Americans will support Obama Care Lite, which is what, apparently, some of these "conservatives" are preparing themselves to support.

Americans should reject any such compromises and work instead toward real reform and the vision of a genuinely free society. To do this Americans need new intellectual, as well as political, leadership. This current crop of Republicans, so far, certainly hasn't provided the intellectual leadership, and that failure can only lead to a further and deeper slide into statism when they assume political power in November.

Americans need leadership willing to provide the intellectually-based vision of what a free society looks like and examples of how such a society founded on individual rights would actually work. They don't need "me-too" leaders with secondhand ideas and no clue how to lead us out of this wilderness of statism.

Where's the Beef?

"Where's the beef?" asked Walter Mondale of Gary Hart, at the latter's overuse of the phrase "new ideas" during the 1984 Democratic primary campaign for President against Ronald Reagan.

For Palin fans, love conquers all, and the winning ways of their heroine more than qualifies her for President. Truth be told, she is beautiful, but beauty requires proof, at least in our American culture, that the lady has more on the ball than surface appeal.

So the question arises, "Where's the beef?" Can she discuss issues with any great ideological depth? "Common-sense conservative solutions" remains an empty platitude without evidence she has thought widely and deeply about the intellectual foundations of our constitutional republic, about natural rights philosophy, limited government, and the primacy of the individual.

Palin's debut on Fox News gave us the opportunity to see what she's been up to beyond earning some glorious and much needed profit on her best-selling book, Going Rogue, and the view has not been altogether re-assuring.

Does anyone honestly believe they would be making excuses for Ronald Reagan letting Bill O'Reilly interrupt him? Let's get real, people. Wouldn't happen and that's one--just one--of the many reasons we admire Reagan.

Palin is young, very young, and she is unseasoned. The hope has been expressed her gig on Fox would give her that seasoning and the further opportunity to develop the intellectual and rhetorical skills necessary to drop her opponent in a media-driven culture, where perception crystallizes conviction.

The ball is now in her court, she's been given a splendid opportunity, and if she drops the ball, let's not blame others as so many conservatives do at American Thinker.

The future of our country as a free, civilized society may well rest in the play. The fact our future appears to depend on the fortunes of one woman is our fault, not hers. We elected these leaders who now ride us as beasts of burden. Will we throw them off even if Palin disappoints?

Tom Anderson

January 2010