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

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

American Thinker: Judge Vinson Also Smacks Down Crony Capitalists

Judge Vinson's individual mandate ruling is seen -- properly -- as a defeat for ObamaCare and a win for individual freedom. And it is all of that, of course.

But there's more. Perhaps almost as pleasing as the affirmation of individual freedom and the dismissal of a government run-society is the smack-down Judge Vinson's ruling gave to the concept of "crony capitalism." And that may be just as important in the long run.

After all, no government-run society is even possible without corporatists and crony capitalists eager to jump into the sack with the statists who will design laws to force unwilling customers to those corporations. This is something the statists will do under threat of sending IRS and other bureaucrats to harass every unwilling business or individual. You do remember that it was sixteen thousand new IRS agents -- not sixteen thousand new doctors -- that ObamaCare has plans to employ, don't you?

Gee, you think maybe ObamaCare was about control and not health care?

American Thinker: Judge Vinson Also Smacks Down Crony Capitalists

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 : Caplan's Constitution

"Far from being an obstacle to solving our economic problems, fidelity to the Constitution would have prevented many of them. If the federal government operated within constitutional constraints, we would not stand on the brink of national bankruptcy. Our currency would not be debased. The federal government would not be inflating real estate or investment bubbles. Taxes would be much lower yet there would not be deficits as far as the eye can see."
The American Spectator : Caplan's Constitution

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

American Thinker: Will of the People

Governments throughout America, particularly the federal government, are broken and making a huge mess of things. Though significantly changing this equation is a long haul, no doubt, next week's elections will prove monumental -- the biggest test to date for the rebels who seek to have their voices heard.
American Thinker: Will of the People

There’s No Avoiding ‘Repeal and Replace’ - James C. Capretta - National Review Online

But Washington’s newcomers must not lose sight of the big enchilada on the government-reform menu: the repeal and replacement of Obamacare.
Because the hard truth is that the proponents of a supersized welfare state believe they have already won the fight. Their vision is now the law, with the government on course to control the flow of resources in the entire health sector. Even if every other idea to downsize the government is enacted, Obamacare as passed has us on the road to unlimited government — with America’s middle class increasingly dependent on the benefits they receive from elected political leaders.

There’s No Avoiding ‘Repeal and Replace’ - James C. Capretta - National Review Online

Two Wars and We Don't Feel a Draft - Reason Magazine

"Where is it written in the Constitution, in what article or section is it contained, that you may take children from their parents, and parents from their children, and compel them to fight the battles of any war in which the folly or wickedness of government may engage it?" he demanded. That was the end of that idea, until the Civil War.
Two Wars and We Don't Feel a Draft - Reason Magazine

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

Obamacare Suit Can Proceed - By Robert Alt - The Corner - National Review Online

When Speaker Pelosi was asked by a reporter, “Where specifically does the Constitution grant Congress the authority to enact an individual health-insurance mandate?” she responded, “Are you serious? Are you serious?” By contrast, when the judge today considered whether the states had made a significant enough claim that Congress lacked the constitutional authority to enact the mandate, he found that it was “not even a close call.”

Obamacare Suit Can Proceed - By Robert Alt - The Corner - National Review Online

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

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

Where Do Individual Rights Come From?

Mark Levin's new "conservative manifesto," Liberty and Tyranny, has become a big best-seller as Americans have sought intellectual ammunition to oppose the Administration's attempt, in President Obama's own words, to "transform America."

Exactly what he wished to change, Mr. Obama never made perfectly clear in his many campaign speeches.  And while some Americans may still be a little confused about what this President intends to do, a look at the latest poll of likely voters suggests a majority of Americans have nonetheless concluded that the Obama Administration poses an existential threat to their right to make their own judgment about what doctor they wish to see, what sort of health care they want, how they wish to run their lives.

There is a reason why Tea Party protesters held up signs reading, "Leave Us Alone."

Americans understand, in short, that President Obama believes government should control the people, even if doing so means forcing upon them laws they oppose by large margins.  The President should be given credit of a sort for his moral, if not his rhetorical, consistency.

For implicit in Mr. Obama's political ideology is a theory of ethics widely applauded by today's intellectual, academic, and media elites, namely, the belief that rights are a gift of society.  Thus Obama's political system subordinates an individual's "right" only to that freedom of action "society" decides he should exercise.

As there is no such entity as "society," since society is only a number of individual people, this system means, in practice, whichever political gang controls the executive and legislative powers decides what "rights" Americans get to exercise.

"Rights" are a moral concept--the concept that provides a logical transition from the principles guiding an individual's actions to the principles guiding his relationship with others.  The concept of individual rights is the means of subordinating society to moral law.

Since every political system is based on some code of ethics, the key to understanding the scope and nature of such a system lay in the degree to which individual rights are recognized and protected.

Clearly, any system that subordinates the individual to some higher authority, either mystical or social, places that higher authority outside the moral law.  "The Divine Right of Kings" summarizes the political theory of the first; "The Voice of the People is the Voice of God" summarizes the second.  The common characteristic of either code of ethics is the fact that society stands above the moral law, as an omnipotent, sovereign, arbitrary power exercised without restraint and according to the whims of whoever becomes the ruler.

When the "conservative" Mr. Levin offers, in opposition to the social theory of ethics, one founded on mysticism, he does not seem to be aware that his theory does not support the concept of inalienable individual rights, but undermines them at the most fundamental level.

So finally we come to the opening question, "Where do individual rights come from?"

The source of rights is man's nature.

While the Declaration of Independence states that men "are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights," whether one believes that man is the product of a Creator or of nature, the issue of man's origin does not change the fact that he is a being of a specific kind--a rational being--and that he cannot function successfully under coercion.  Individual rights are the necessary condition of his particular mode of survival.

The Declaration laid down the principle that "to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men."  This principle provides the only valid justification for government and defines its only valid purpose:  to protect man's rights by protecting him from physical violence.

The Founding Fathers thus changed the role of government from ruler to servant.

Government protects people from criminals; the Constitution protects people from government.  For about a hundred and fifty years the United States of America came close to achieving a civilized society, one in which physical force was banned from human relationships, in which government, acting as a policeman, used force only in retaliation and only against those who initiated its use.

Unfortunately that is no longer the case.  Everywhere we turn Americans today are fearful of their government, and alarmed by its gross incompetence in protecting them from enemies, foreign and domestic.

Americans fear that the Obama Administration seeks to become their ruler, rather than their servant.

And they have cause to be alarmed.  Very alarmed.

While the rise of the Tea Party movement suggests that radical change may lay in the near future, Americans will be able to reconstitute their government only if they work together. 

That means, above, all, they must get their ideological house in order, understand the principles of limited government, and act boldly and wisely.

Tom Anderson
January 2010

Gay Republicans?

Or, Why Gays Should Hold Their Noses and Vote Republican Anyway

Far be it from me to suggest that gay men and women differ so little in their political views that it makes sense to talk about a specifically “gay” political ideology.

Yet gays do seem to have some common political objectives, mostly having to do with the right to be left alone.

Unfortunately, the desire of gays to live their lives without being discriminated against in employment and to be able to form close personal and sexual relationships in the same manner and with the same legal protections as heterosexuals, outrages the Christian fundamentalists in our midst, causing them to express their hostility to gays politically by supporting Republican politicians who mouth anti-gay slogans at election time, but who, at other times and places, employ gays, have gay friends, and may even engage in homosexual activity themselves, as “closet homosexuals.”

As seen in the recent Foley scandal, some gays seek to “out” closeted gays, arguing that honesty is better than hypocrisy.

I argue that gays do have a common politics, and it is a very old political viewpoint–-the French have a wonderful phrase for it: laissez-faire capitalism.

What the phrase basically means is that the purpose of law should be to secure the rights of the individual against those exercising through law disproportionate economic and political power. It means, simply, “Leave us alone!”

What gives those exercising greater power the right to do so? What gives government the right to deny to gay couples, what is offered to heterosexual couples upon payment of a small legal fee?

Any group in society secures its power to abridge the rights of others by getting laws enacted that are generally justified at the time of their enactment by appeals to “the public interest” or to some similar political abstraction that can be twisted and turned to serve whatever political goals the group has in mind.

At present the varied political interests that make up the American electorate are broadly arrayed into “conservatives” and “liberals”. We also have two major political parties: the dominant party, the Republicans, consist of a very broad coalition of interests, and the Democrats, the party “in the wilderness”, seems far less broad, apparently consisting of Neanderthal Leftists, such as those whose views are best represented by The Nation magazine, and other self-styled “progressive” groups each of which seems to have a favored hobby-horse to ride.

What until fairly recently distinguished the two parties was the willingness of the Republicans to champion “limited government.” Ronald Reagan welcomed the Christian Right into his crusade to “get the government off the backs of the American people”, but he never let the Christians rule the roost. While his administration was not particularly helpful to gays with the explosion of HIV-related deaths in the 1980’s, indifference and incomprehension are not the same as hatred and the desire to do injury.

Even today, as the Foley scandal highlights Republican attitudes towards gays, what emerges is more an attitude of opportunism–the desire to play the “gay card” in order to motivate homophobic Christians to vote for Republican candidates–than any outright hatred or desire to inflict injury upon gays.

As much as homophobic Christians might wish to harm gays, the most significant anti-gay legislation since the election of Bill Clinton to the Presidency in 1992 has been the anti-gay Defense of Marriage Act, signed into law by Clinton. The other significant bit of law to harm gay people was the Clinton military policy of “Don’t Ask–-Don’t Tell”. Justified in the name of making it possible for gays to serve honorably in the military, the policy has become a shameful blot upon the military by a civilian government that seeks to keep its anti-gay credentials well burnished for election-day politics, despite the positive harm the policy does to our military–-depriving it of skilled and expensively trained personnel by cashiering gay soldiers and officers–-and to gay self-esteem, by treating gays as second-class citizens, unworthy and unneeded in the defense of the country against foreign enemies.

Any hope that the long-suffering American people might be done with “Big Brother” type government was dashed in the 1988 election of the first Bush Presidency. Reagan rose politically with the first conservative revolution, the taking over of the Republican Party in 1964 with the nomination of Barry Goldwater. “Goldwater Republicans” considered themselves “movement conservatives” and typically believed in a very libertarian-oriented society where government, particularly the federal government, would have its many functions substantially reduced or eliminated.

Why democratic government tends to expand in its functions despite the best efforts of people like Goldwater or Reagan to restrain it, is a conversation for another time. But there is a lesson for gays to heed.

Gays need to look to the history of a party and not just its current crop of politicians to see where specific gay interests are more likely to find political defense.

Are not gays interested in a prosperous economy where their hard work and intelligence are rewarded? Do not gays enjoy keeping most of their earnings for their own use and disposal rather than have increasingly larger portions of their earned income siphoned off to support tax breaks, subsidies, and special legislation for Big Business, otherwise known as Crony Capitalism?

Do not gays have an interest in protecting our borders against illegal immigrants? Are we not interested in preventing further attacks on our cities from Islamo-Fascists? Do we not enjoy tax cuts? Are not our economic interests enhanced by laws that reduce government intervention into the economy?

I don’t like to quote statistics, but isn’t it true that gays have more disposable income than non-gays?

Gays don’t seem to fit the profile generally used to describe the left-wing “nut-cases” that control the Democratic Party at present, for the simple reason that gays want respect and freedom to be left alone. They don’t want what the Democratic Party normally promises: more subsidies, more taxes, more regulation, more intrusion of the Nanny State into every aspect of their lives.

The Republican Party today is up for grabs. George Bush is not a movement conservative. I believe gays should not leave the Party but reclaim it by holding it up to its professed libertarian origins. What will become clear, if the proper arguments are made, is that homophobic Christians in the Party express beliefs difficult to square with limited-government rhetoric. And while there may be more homophobes than gays in the GOP, clearly gays can have a significant impact intellectually by making the arguments that Republicans really can’t ignore.

To some extent, I must confess, either party has some libertarian origins gays could draw upon; but which image is more likely to be gay? A ward of the state, or a businessman? A ward of the state, or a creative artist? A ward of the state, or a leatherman seeking to find his bliss in consensual erotic adventures?

The Republican Party, whether the current crop of politicians understands this or not, is the “natural” home for gays and lesbians. Our nemesis is not the Party, but the homophobes within it who would replace politicians with priests.

Tom Anderson

October 2006