American Revolution

Why Do We Vote? Making Choices

2012-01-30T08:00:00.000-08:00

When we go into the voting booth, what are we doing? We are making a choice, usually between what we consider the lesser of two evils. Or perhaps we are enthusiastic about our choice. But how do we make that choice, how do we make decisions? The usual understanding is that we weigh the options, we consider the evidence and then we choose what we consider to be the best choice. Obviously, the "weight" each individual gives to certain evidence is very subjective. Some will give a lot of weight to character, other to speaking ability, others to empty promises. Opponents will attack a candidate on any one of these fronts in an effort to tilt the decision making process in their favor.

This view of decision making has pervaded our society, including science. Consider the debate over global warming. The evidence and even the data keep changing; e-mails that demonstrate fraud, sensors in the wrong places, and we add to that our subjective experience-do we think its getting colder or warmer-and we have a difficult time deciding which option is best. In fact, our subjective experience, if we let it have sway, would lead us astray more often than not. After all, our experience says that it is the sun that moves, not us, and from our perspective, the earth looks rather flat. As a civilization, we have developed better explanations for the movement of the sun and the geometry of the earth and while they fly in the face of our immediate experience, they work.

The fact is that our choices are the end of the decision making process, not its totality. When we choose an option, we are choosing an explanation. In a sense, we are not weighing evidence but are trying to explain it. Yes, it looks like the sun moves around the earth but that is not the best explanation for its movement. We may think the cookie monster takes larger and larger chunks out of the moon but that is not the best explanation for the phases of the moon. We could try to justify our cookie monster theory buy we would be trying to justify our evidence, not explain it through the process of conjecture and criticism. Good explanations, like a great musical composition or mathematical formula, are very difficult to vary without destroying their viability.

Once a good explanation has been discovered, it cannot be watered down or compromised with bad ones. It would make no sense to say the cookie monster is responsible for the waning of the moon but not its waxing. One cannot construct a building with reinforced concrete holding up the second floor and relying on fairies to hold up the first. This is just as true in politics as it is in science. Everyone talks about the need for compromise which is merely mixing in bad explanations with good ones. Or of continuing bad explanations and their associated policies because we can’t simply stop the bad and embrace the good. This makes no sense, it is irrational. Why would one continue to drink poison knowing it is poison and knowing that it will kill you? Yet we do it every day in our government. We know that our fiscal policy leads to destruction, it is no different than Europe’s. Yet while we see the results before our very eyes we continue to raise the debt ceiling and spend and print more money. It is irrational to think our end will be any different if we follow the same path.

But our politicians are rather deft at convincing us the irrational is rational. Rationality, backed up by our experience, informs us that we cannot continually spend more than we take in yet the politicians convince us we can. Rationality, backed by human nature and experience tells us that if you remove the incentive for being productive by taking their money and flushing it down the toilet of the government bureaucracy, the productive will become less so. Rationality tells us that the more of something there is, the less valuable it will be yet the Federal Reserve continues to print billions and billions of fiat dollars.

How can this continue? It continues because after several generations of Americans having gone through government school systems, many have lost the ability to think logically. Explanations are no longer based on logic and arrived at through conjecture and criticism. Today, many of our most important explanations are based on politics. Explanations are arrived at through government funding, selective data and sometimes, outright lies. Global warming is just one example. The assumption that is is necessary and moral to steal from one individual to give housing, food or health care to someone else is another. They have elevated irrational notions of fairness and equality of outcome above justice and equality under the law. They lie about our economic condition. Its the equivalent of the politicians telling us that the waning moon is caused by the cookie monster. Yet too many Americans fall for it.

We have allowed our politicians to convince us that the options they give us are all there is and they exist independently of facts, evidence and explanations. That is why our choices in the ballot box appear so drab. They both operate under the same assumption, that government exists to rule over you. Once a government program exists, even if it is an abject failure, it will never go away. There will be attempts to "fix" it but it never occurs to the politicians and bureaucrats that the government solution itself is a bad explanation, something government should not be involved in. That is because the more areas government is involved in, the more power they accumulate and once power is co-opted, it is never relinquished. That is why whether the Democrats or Republicans are in power, government grows more, spends more and takes more. The politicians of both parties will tell you anything, lying is endemic, but things will never change. The Republicans are supposed to be the party of small government and have stated they would eliminate, for example, the Department of Education, since the Reagan years. Yet the Department of Education grew even when Republicans had complete control in the Bush years. The Democrats say they are for the working guy but every anti business policy they enact shrinks the middle class and grows the ranks of the poor. All the while money and power flow to them to be distributed among themselves and their friends.

So what will you do with your vote? Will you continue to play the irrational game the politicians of the two parties have set up, limiting yourself to the irrational options they give you? Will you breathe a deep sigh of frustration as you check the boxes knowing that by selecting either a Democrat or a Republican you will have chosen to continue on the current path, resigning yourself to the continued loss of your money and freedom? Will you choose to add ever heavier chains to your growing bondage? Or will you break free of the lie of false choices thrust upon you by the powers that be and cast your vote for liberty, for reasserting your God-given rights, for breaking the cycle of theft and destruction? Such a vote is never wasted, every one is a cry for freedom and no such exclamation is ever for naught. Every stand against tyranny, every movement toward freedom, began with one man or one woman standing against the tide, against seemingly insurmountable odds, against entrenched powers, inspiring others to do the same, showing that anything is possible. So who are you?

Our Greatest Loss

2012-01-15T13:57:00.000-08:00

There is a great unease among the American people, and perhaps even among other segments of the world’s population. It goes beyond the economic difficulties we are experiencing, the increasingly dangerous nature of the world, accelerating moral decay, political ineptitude and a host of other problems our 24/7 news cycle bombards us with on a daily basis. A word from the 70’s has come back to describe it; "malaise." I believe it is an emotional response to a very dangerous philosophical shift in the West in general, and America most recently. It is not an exaggeration to say that if this trend is not reversed, civilization as we have come to know it will end. The "Dark Ages" will return and condemn our posterity to intellectual and physical poverty.

I know that sounds alarmist but I hope that if you stick with me to the end of this piece, I will have justified my dire warning. This "malaise" is a result of the replacement of optimism with pessimism, not as general outlooks on life but as philosophical ideals. The Dark Ages ended with the Renaissance and most importantly, the Enlightenment. The accompanying philosophical change has brought us the advances in all areas we currently enjoy. Optimism, as a philosophical concept, is the principle that all evils are caused by insufficient knowledge (David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity). "Evils" are problems and every problem can be solved with sufficient knowledge. These problems can be moral, physical, political, economic, biological, it doesn’t matter. The philosophy of optimism includes two other important ideals. First, that there will always be problems. Even as one problem is solved, others will arise to take its place, sometimes as a direct result of the solution. Second, as I mentioned previously, problems are solvable, all problems have solutions even if they are inconceivable to us at the present. This means that this process of solving problems and the associated quest for knowledge is an infinite quest, it is a never ending process. Optimism results in the belief that societies and civilizations will advance and even though unforeseen problems will arise as a result, things will be better in the future.

Allow me to illustrate how "evil" results from lack of knowledge. Disease, for example, is often caused by lack of knowledge. In the past, knowledge of basic hygiene would have prevented many plagues. Today, knowledge of viruses and bacteria, DNA and genes, have made many of the diseases that have killed millions in the past mere footnotes in history. The diseases of today have cures that only await the expansion of our knowledge and technology to discover. What about natural disasters? In 1906 San Francisco was flattened by an earthquake. Since then, knowledge and technology has given us earthquake-resistant buildings the size of which the turn of the century San Franciscan couldn’t have even imagined. In the future, such knowledge and the accompanying technology will continue to advance and enable people to live safely under the most extreme geologic or weather conditions. These are only two examples, there are many more. The human mind has an infinite capacity for progress if it is left free to roam.

Pessimism, on the other hand, is defined by fear. It is the fear that at any moment catastrophe will overtake us. It is fear that further advancement will create problems that will make catastrophe inevitable. It is defined by the belief that this is as good as it gets, the life you have is the best there can be. Societies ruled by pessimism are autocratic, most of the people are poor and conformity is the rule. They do not advance or grow, they exist only to conserve the status quo and any new ideas conceived in such societies are directed toward more efficiently enforcing conformity and maintaining their current state. Most civilizations in history have existed under the pessimistic principle.

There is only one way to make progress in a society and that is through the process of conjecture and criticism. They must go together for conjecture without criticism is simply fanciful speculation and absolute rulers with the means to implement such ideas without the criticism necessary to prove or disprove their veracity are dangerous and often result in the deaths of many. Whether it was the Catholic Church’s speculations about heath, hygiene and the cause of the black plague resulting in the deaths of millions and the murder of thousands of Jews or the Soviet Union’s five year plans that led to widespread starvation and industrial stagnation, conjecture without criticism is often disastrous. Criticism without conjecture is simply useless bickering over inconsequential things and throughout history, such small mindedness has killed just as many through pointless wars.

The thing that conjecture and criticism have in common and makes them such potent agents for problem solving and the accompanying progress is freedom. Conjecture is freedom of thought and must be coupled with the ability to share those thoughts without fear of physical reprisal. In order to advance, individuals in society need to be able to share ideas without the fear of being burned at the stake, whisked away in the middle of the night or sent to a reeducation camp. In order to weed out the fanciful from the practical, criticism is necessary and requires the same freedom of thought and speech that conjecture does.

So far, the United States has been the best example of Enlightenment values and their results in the history of the world. By combining the freedom to think and believe, the ability to enjoy the fruits of the implementation of those ideas, a social system we call capitalism, and a minimalist government that forced individual and community responsibility, we advanced faster and farther than any society in the history of mankind. Knowledge, and its accompanying technology, has grown exponentially in the last three hundred years and in most cases, America was leading. Until today, each generation believed the next would be better off because problems would be solved and our capacity for advancement was unlimited.

The freedom we have enjoyed is based on the objective truth of natural rights, articulated most eloquently in the Declaration of Independence. (For why natural rights are objective rights, see pp. 33-56 of Leave Me Alone, A Patriot’s Plan for Restoring Pride and Prosperity in America by yours truly; www.leavemealonenow.com) "We are endowed by our Creator with certain Unalienable rights, among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness." Our right to life, to our own existence, and the liberty to act to maintain our lives are the most basic rights. The pursuit of happiness is crucial to our discussion here because it is in contrast to the utopian vision of pessimism. That may seem counterintuitive, to link a utopian ideal with pessimism. Here is why. Optimism understands knowledge and progress to be infinite, we exist on a continuum that has no end. Therefore, each individual must come to terms with the world as it exists in his lifetime, striking a balance between being content with current circumstances and striving to improve them. This will mean something different for each man or woman. Happiness is an individually subjective concept.

In contrast, the utopian ideal states that all problems have been solved, there is no new knowledge to be discovered and therefore everyone will conform to whatever the utopian ideal is for that society. The society that exists is the best there is, there is no improvement and any more steps taken can only be steps backward. Everything in pessimistic societies is designed to preserve the status quo. Who decides what constitutes the best society, the end of progress, the attainment of the goal? Someone does, usually someone with unlimited political power. Leaders in utopian/pessimistic societies educate, indoctrinate or prohibit their populations from criticizing their most important ideas. What they consider foundational ideas, whether religious, philosophical or practical, are not open to speculation, those areas are not available for inquiry for they believe absolute truth in those areas has already been found. If problems result, it is not because the ideas and traditions are faulty, it is the people and their implementation. Think about the Soviet Union and how the system was beyond question regardless of how many millions starved or consider the liberal idea that it is not the failed program or the ideals behind them that are the problem, it is just that we have not done or spent enough yet. Pessimistic societies are led from the top down and whoever is on top and the system they espouse is beyond criticism, they are infallible. The problems are never with them, it is always their own people or others which is why pessimistic societies kill their citizens and go to war with their neighbors.

If you have wondered why Islamic states, dictators and the communists hate America, this is why. As their societies stagnate and their people wallow in poverty and oppression, America is progressing, growing, becoming more wealthy and powerful and its people, healthier and wealthier, our example is anathema to the belief in all these other societies that they have obtained some utopian ideal. The Communists built walls to keep their people from knowing there was something better out there and committed themselves to destroying the capitalist pigs. Muslims, wondering why even with enormous oil wealth their societies remain backward and their people "poor and oppressed" have decided that the way of the West and its associated progress is the tool of Satan and any failings in Islam are caused by lack of purity and devotion on their part. Revelation is complete with Mohammed, no further progress is possible or necessary and therefore any deviation is evil and a suitable object of derision and violence. Pessimistic societies must eliminate optimistic societies because the existence of optimistic states threatens the very foundation of their societies and their leader’s reason for maintaining power.

The embrace of "top down" solutions is one of the reasons the French Revolution was so different from the American one. Americans, because of the distance from England, were accustomed to acting independently and had a distrust of top-down solutions. The French were used to an absolute monarchy and proceeded with the belief that top down solutions with the "right" people in charge would create the best society. If anyone disagreed, if anyone failed to conform or questioned the wisdom of the "enlightened" ones, it was off with their heads. Communism operates under the same delusion, that the road to happiness can be dictated from on high and hundreds of millions of people have died as a result. Happiness is an individual phenomenon and attempts to force it on another will make no one happy and necessarily destroys their other natural rights. After all, if your non-conformity is a barrier to the collective happiness, you need to be eliminated for the good of the many, and the security of the "top" and their ideals, for they vastly outweigh the happiness of the few, or the one.

Now, let us return to the beginning. How is it we are in danger of returning to the Dark Ages, losing our optimism, condemned to exist in a pessimistic world? The pressures on the optimism embodied in the western enlightenment in general and America in particular, have accelerated exponentially in the last fifty years. Communism, European style socialist democracy and Islam are all ascending pessimistic philosophies that are attempting to squeeze the life out of Enlightenment optimism. Such pessimism in the form of top down utopianism (communism) has been infiltrating American government for one hundred years and is now nakedly obvious with the advent of the Obama administration.

There is a two pronged pessimistic approach endemic to our government that is now becoming pervasive within our society. The first is the top down utopian approach. The assumption among all the politicians and bureaucrats at all levels of government in our country is that they know how to best order society, and by extension, your individual life. Too many citizens have also accepted the idea that the government is run by experts who know what is best. This idea is antithetical to natural rights and the resulting avalanche of legislation and regulation has put fear in the minds of citizens who are often unsure as to which behaviors and actions are acceptable and which are not. When even light bulbs and toilets, medical treatment and basic financial transactions become illegal or so stringently monitored and controlled as they are today, it should be obvious our basic freedoms are long gone. This is to say nothing of the exorbitant amount of money stolen and spent in pursuit of the utopian dream of equalizing outcomes for all in the pursuit of universal happiness. The only ones happy in such a system are the politicians, bureaucrats and their friends who are looting the system.

The second attack on optimism is the "war on success." This began with the progressive income tax, a central tenant of communism, which increases the penalty for success as success increases. Add to that the class warfare standardized by Franklin Roosevelt and practiced by Democrats, and some Republicans, ever since and you have a social stigmatism and financial burden placed on success that are the complete opposite of the original American vision.

Now consider the attacks on the central tenets of optimism. Progress is a result of conjecture and criticism. In order for that process to work to advance society, there must be freedom of thought and speech, freedom from fear of reprisal. Political correctness has been limiting this for decades. We now have an administration monitoring speech and collecting information on average citizens on the internet and other places, using regulation to harass and appropriating the legal justification to hold without charge or trial individuals it deems a threat. We are well on the way to stifling dissent the way Hitler or Stalin found expedient. Add to that the fact we now have a generation or two indoctrinated through a government educational system designed to advance government acceptable modes of thought and speech, and we have an ever growing segment of society unable to think critically or outside certain clearly defined boundaries. I fact, I would say that a large segment of America’s population have lost the ability to think critically about government and their solutions. Too many of our fellow citizens blindly accept the idea that a government solution, regardless of its feasibility, cost or track record of failure, is the only solution.

While it is horrible that a minority are persecuted for conjecture and criticism beyond the bounds of politically correct discussion, every individual who has been brainwashed to the point where it does not even occur to them to go beyond those bounds is an unfathomable loss and another nail in the coffin of a free society. A fearful mind may still operate underground or find the courage to speak out regardless of consequences. But a mind drugged and/or limited in its ability to think is a mind whose unlimited potential has been destroyed. Just as abortion may kill the next great inventor or doctor who will solve our most pressing problems, so a mind put in a drug induced or politically correct straightjacket is a mind to whom some solutions will never occur that otherwise might have. That is an unrecoverable loss.

If the government is putting problem solving in the straight jacket of political correctness by moving to become the sole distributor of resources for the problems it deems worthy of attention (the carrot) and punishes those who operate outside those bounds through regulation and taxation (the stick) our progress and technological advancement will slow. If creativity is limited and ambition destroyed by eliminating rewards, we will stagnate. When the vast majority lose the ability to "think outside the box" and even conceive of critical thinking, we will become mindless slaves to the powers that remain. If fact, our situation, and the world’s, will be worse than that of the Soviet Union for there will not be an optimistic society left to steal from.
At that point, we will be taught to expect no better. In fact, this is already happening. Consider that eight to ten percent unemployment is now the "new normal" just as double digit unemployment is "normal" European socialist democracies. We are being encouraged to acquiesce to the government’s theft of twenty-five percent of our national wealth, up from the twenty percent that was the previous exorbitant norm. Too many have accepted government dependency, which is making your fellow your slave, as a way of life. We are expected to tolerate stagnant growth, a declining standard of living and a rude, violent society. This should be completely unacceptable to every one of us as inheritors of the Enlightenment and custodians of the American ideal.

A majority of Americans no longer believe succeeding generations will be better off. That demonstrates how deeply pessimism has taken hold of us. However, a majority also believe that America is going in the wrong direction, which demonstrates how deeply optimism is imbedded in our collective psyche. It is not too late for us, we can still turn things around. Optimism is not blind, will will reap what we have sown, but there are solutions to even our most pressing problems. They will not, however, come from government. The state is the biggest problem we have and cutting it down to the size envisioned by the founders so we will once again be able to exercise our freedom to create, solve problems and yes, reap the rewards of our success, is our greatest challenge today.

In 1979 amidst the malaise, double digit inflation and high interest rates, a stagnant economy and a seemingly unstoppable communist expansion, Ronald Reagan was able to convince us that our best days were ahead, that individual freedom was the solution and faith in the progress of mankind was not misplaced. More than anything else, recapturing a philosophy of optimism and putting it into practice in our own lives will save our society. If we lose our optimism it will not be long before the moochers and looters destroy our civilization and we wake up in the new Dark Ages. Optimism is our greatest asset and would surely be our greatest loss if we allow pessimism to win

Buying Just a Little More Time

2011-12-01T12:50:00.000-08:00

Yesterday the markets were up on the fabulous news that the Federal Reserve and other central banks were wading into the European sovereign debt crisis. Everyone was happy, the Dow was up four hundred points, everyone exhaled and figured that the time this effort will buy will be enough. Wishful thinking.

In addition to other techniques, we are engaging in what is called a currency swap. I say "we" because you and I are on the hook for this bailout, a bailout that will make TARP look like peanuts. Yes, you and I, our present and future earnings, are being used to bail out European unions, European pension funds, European bureaucrats, European cradle to grave welfare, to ensure that European workers can receive months of vacation time, years of unemployment and that all those Muslim immigrants don’t have to bothered with work while they plan the downfall of western civilization. How do you feel about that?

In a currency swap, the Fed sends dollars over to the European Cental bank (ECB) and the ECB sends an equivalent amount of Euros to the Fed. In the future, they agree to swap the currencies back at the same rate, regardless of what they may be worth. This can be the next day or three months from now. The ECB then loans these dollars to the troubled banks in Europe to improve their balance sheets. Why is this necessary? Why can’t the ECB do what the Fed did with our banks, simply print the money and distribute it? Because no one thinks the Euro is going to be worth anything in a week or a month or a year. That is why they want dollars, the supposed safe haven asset, the reserve currency of the world. So we are going to trade something that is worth a lot for something whose value is falling rapidly.

Look at it this way. You have a friend who is a chronic drunk driver. He has smashed his car several times and it barely runs, it will probably die at any time. He comes to you and asks to borrow your brand new Mercedes and will give you his practically totaled car as collateral, assuring you he will return your expensive car and take his back in three months. Would you do it? Especially if you knew that he was going to loan that car to a bunch of his drunken friends to do with as they pleased? You’d have to be nuts.

Yet that is what we are doing. The EU banking system was set up to fail and it needs systemic reorganization to become viable again. When the Euro was set up, the new European Union wanted to encourage sovereign debt markets so they adjusted the banking rules so that sovereign debt didn’t count as a risk based asset on a bank’s balance sheets. This was also the case in regard to other triple-A rated assets like US mortgages. This means that the banks didn’t need to set aside any reserves to cover any potential losses. This resulted in two mounting problems. First, banks could load up on sovereign debt and leverage it to loan even more money. The second was that countries could find ready buyers for their debt so they could borrow considerably more than the market and common sense would have thought prudent. Since everyone thought the countries would always pay, the system worked until someone didn’t. That someone was Greece.

When Greece got into trouble and its bonds were downgraded, all those banks that were holding Greek debt found their balance sheets drop precipitously. If Greek debt was downgraded by fifty percent, the banks lost fifty percent of a supposedly safe asset and since that debt was highly leveraged, many became insolvent. If little Greece is followed by Italy or Spain, there is not enough money to bail them out. The only way all this sovereign debt by all these bankrupt countries is going to be worth anything is if they cut spending; they already have pretty well maxed out their taxes and have shrinking or stagnant economies. Doing that, they risk the wrath of their populations. At the least, they will be voted out if they stop the gravy train. At worst, the citizens burn the whole place down. Unfortunately, if they do nothing, the banks collapse, the citizens lose everything, the Euro becomes worthless and they burn it down anyway. In the last few days, Britan has warned its citizens about this very possibility.

The collapse of the European Union would be horrible for Europe and bad for the rest of the world. However, it would not be the end of the world. These countries will survive, they will revert to their own currencies again, people will go back to work, life will get back to normal eventually. It would be the fitting consequence of a failed idea. Statists cannot abide such failure, however. A failed idea is just one over which they have not exercised enough control and on which they have not spent enough money. But the EU is not Solyndra or even Social Security. It is failure on a scale unheard of in modern history. We can’t let that happen now, can we? So since 2008 the Fed has spent or lent over seven trillion dollars on insolvent banks in Europe and around the world. Now we are trading dollars for worthless Euros in the hope that our dollar will not be destroyed by European irresponsibility that has shown no signs of abating. That is our money, they will be our losses, it is our children and grandchildren who will need to work to make it all up on top of everything else we’ve done.

So why are we engaging is this huge bailout? They will tell you that if Europe fails, it will negatively impact us because of trade and markets and other claptrap. While that is true to some degree, that is not the reason. European banks receive about a third of their capital from US money market funds which purchase sovereign debt, among other things. MF Global’s failure was a direct result of this investment, aside from the theft. US banks and money markets stand to lose billions and billions of dollars as Greek bonds and others are devalued. Therefore, what we have here is another bailout of Wall Street. They made bad choices-who would ever think that the bonds issued by a country that owes considerably more that its GDP, a GDP that has been falling by around 8% are a safe investment-and we, the taxpayers, are bailing them out.

The sovereign bond market around the world is only being held up by buying on behalf of central banks, the Fed being the biggest. European countries are broke and can’t afford to pay back debt at rapidly rising rates. The market knows this and even Germany has not been able to sell all its bonds. No one thinks we are going to get our fiscal house in order which is why the Fed’s been buying more than half our bonds, 70% under QE2. The only way all these western countries, including ours, are financing their exorbitant spending is through he creation of more and more money from nothing (counterfeiting) by their central banks. So where does all this lead?

What if these insolvent, irresponsible European banks lose the dollars the ECB gives them? What if all these bank execs see the writing on the wall and simply take the money and run? What if it is invested in more sovereign debt that turns out to be worthless? With what will the ECB pay back the Fed? Is the Fed simply going to write it off? Does it even matter? Does it seem to anyone but me that these central bankers in their ivory towers with no oversight or accountability are simply playing a game. Dollars, Euros, Yen, Pesos, none of it’s real. Its just paper or a number on a computer screen. Is the Fed simply sending a bunch of numbers to the ECB expecting the numbers to be returned whether there is anything real attached to them or not? When the Fed buys trillions of dollars in US treasuries, is it simply putting numbers into a computer with nothing backing them up? Of course. The Fed doesn’t have unlimited assets, but it has the ability to counterfeit at will. The only thing that keeps all this working is our perception that there is actually something real behind all the ones and zeros, that there is a trillion of something somewhere. It is hard to believe that we still accept that someone actually keeps track of all these trillions of dollars and Euros and yen and whatever. It isn’t real. Someday soon the balance will tip and everyone will see the emperor has no clothes.

Leave It to the Professionals

2011-11-09T08:16:00.000-08:00

The big news over the last two weeks has been the allegations of sexual harassment leveled against Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain. It has pushed all the other real news off the front page. Unemployment, the European debt crisis, scandals like Fast and Furious that actually got people killed, the unconstitutional super committee's lack of progress, president Obama’s stated intent to exercise dictatorial powers and a hundred other things that actually have facts behind them have been pushed into the background Instead, we are focusing on allegations behind which facts are vague or non-existent and the whole discussion has devolved into criticism about how the Cain campaign is handling or mishandling the scandal, whether racism is involved in the perceived witch-hunt and how it will impact the other Republican hopefuls.

Amidst all the chatter, I head a quote that really got my attention. It was from David Brooks. He stated, in defense of political "elitists" that "running for office is for professionals" as is the business of governing. Obviously this was a criticism not only of Herman Cain’s handling of the scandal but the very existence of his candidacy. In the mind of Mr. Brooks and his elitist sympathizers, Herman Cain and others like him, men and women not groomed by the right colleges and the right mentors, people who have not been immersed in the government culture, who do not speak in government approved ways and haven’t been taught how to approach problems with the government mindset have no business trying to break into the club or, God forbid, actually attempting to govern!

Unfortunately, this attitude is very pervasive, not only among the ruling class where one would expect it, but among the populace as well. Government has become so large and complicated that the general assumption is that one needs special knowledge provided by certain institutions and organizations in order to effectively manage the beast. It is this attitude that creates the chasm between the ruling class and the ruled. Government is mysterious and scary and it takes a "special" person to govern. The rest of us are to remain in awe of our wise and benevolent government and the people who make it work.

This is not how America was meant to be. While there is no doubt most of the founders had an idea about what type of person should govern, those ideas were very different from those among the ruling class today. A "leading citizen" in the early period of our history was a man who had established his reputation in his community or state through a successful career in the private sector and as a servant to his fellows. His grasp of the issues and challenges were born of experience and contact with his neighbors. Because the scope of government activity was so limited, the problems and solutions were usually clear and concise. If he was chosen by his peers for service in the state, he was not expected to make a career of it. They were expected to be short term custodians of the liberties of the people they served.

How far we have strayed. Today we are governed by career politicians and a multitude of highly paid bureaucrats. We look at the negative situation we find ourselves in and lament the waste and corruption endemic to a government that overregulates and overtaxes. We have become alarmed at the loss of our freedom and the burdens our government has placed on our lives and our posterity. We are discouraged when our elected leaders fail to make common sense changes to reverse couses of action any thinking person can see are absurd. It is as if we have suddenly awakened and wonder how we have come so far along the road to tyranny and ruin.

The real problem is that government is constantly attempting to do things government is, by definition, ill equipped to accomplish. Therefore, to justify weilding the force of government in a multitude of places where it does not belong and excuse the theft of the average citizen’s liberty and wealth, several things must happen. First, the people involved, elected and bureaucratic, need to develop a certain mindset. They must convince themselves that their ability to solve the problems of others exceeds that of the average person. Whether that results from grooming that is part of a family heritage, a certain educational path, an apprenticeship under those who have already achieved high position or simply an over-inflated sense of self, such an individual believes they are better equipped to make the decisions that affect the lives of the majority than the individuals in that majority themselves.

Second, because of the inherent inefficiency and immorality of taking free choices from individuals and appropriating them to the ruling class, government must somehow come to inspire awe. Since it cannot achieve this through effectiveness, it does it through size and complexity. A long descending spiral of laws, rules, regulations and taxes results, making government hopelessly complicated, huge and intrusive. The first attempt to solve a problem through redistribution or regulation creates two or three new problems requiring more regulation, redistribution and bureaucrats, creating more problems requiring even more regulations, redistribution and bureaucrats and on and on and on. Government is a perpetual motion machine that grows exponentially over time and requires more and more specification-i.e. experts and lawyers, to even begin to understand it. These "wise" people don’t actually know how to solve problems because a government solution is the greatest of oxymorons, they merely have an understanding of the arcane system of rules and regulation and know how to use them to benefit themselves and their friends.

Finally, government, policy and politics become incomprehensible to the average person. No longer is politics about ideas, ideals or philosophical approaches to the proper scope of government activity but specific, "technocratic" and often incomprehensible applications of government power to every area of life. Attempting to solve all the problems of the human condition by forcing individuals to conform to the vision of a few elitists, destroying their liberty and stealing the fruits of their labor, is a fool’s errand and horribly immoral. It benefits the few at the expense of the many. By convincing the majority that government is the answer to any question simply enables government to perpetually grow because they are always creating more problems requiring ever more solutions. Politicians can run on these self created problems and once the government bureaucracy that continually creates these problems and requires so much of our liberty and treasure grows large enough, the politicians can run against it even though their "solutions" will only create even more problems to "solve." This is the world Mr. Brook’s elitists have created.

Herman Cain and others like him are the stakes in the hand of lady liberty, ready to be driven into the heart of the beast that is our intrusive, oppressive, criminal government. They boldly assert that government by the experts is not what was intended in the American experiment and only leads to tyranny. They loudly claim that government is not the solution to the multitude of our problems, free individuals making individual decisions about their own lives generate much better solutions. Only by rejecting our current paradigm of government as the ultimate solution for all problems and eliminating the grip the two party elite have on power will we recapture the ideal of the citizen servant and find true freedom from the tyranny of the professionals.

Berie and Big Government

2011-11-02T08:24:00.000-07:00

Bernie Madoff has been back in the news lately. According to his wife, when their fortunes turned for the worse, they attempted to kill themselves. In case the most infamous Wall Street name in recent history doesn’t ring an immediate bell, he is the man who developed a billion dollar ponzi scheme that defrauded clients from little old ladies who put their life saving in his care to non-profits who tried to expand their balance sheets to do more good work. He was a con-man, a cheat, and he took advantage of people’s trusting and sometimes greedy nature to make a lot of money at their expense. He is in jail for life and the “investors” have gotten back pennies on the dollar.

What did Bernie really do that has made his name so infamous, that made him a worthy target of the ire of America? He convinced people to voluntarily part with their own money on false pretenses with false promises, promises that were impossible to fulfill, so he could take that money and use it to enrich himself and his friends. It was theft, pure and simple. Instead of a gun, Bernie used lies and half-truths. Instead of a knife, deceit and greed. In his wake, he left people destitute, destroyed their faith in their fellows, bankrupted worthy organizations, and besmirched the reputation of a whole sector of the American economy. In case you haven’t noticed, there are a bunch of ignorant, smelly and sometimes violent protestors camped out on Wall Street and in cities around the country that think the whole world of investing and capitalism is crooked and every wealthy individual got that way by swindling the rest of us.

While Madoff's swindle got a lot of media attention, it only involved a few thousand people and a few billion dollars. I don’t know anyone directly affected by his crime and you probably don’t either. It didn’t bring us to the supposed edge of economic collapse like Lehman Brothers. It didn’t start a tsunami of foreclosures that affected hundreds of thousands of people like the sub-prime mortgage debacle. It didn’t put millions of people out of work. It was simply one more swindle in a long history of swindles.

There is a swindle going on right now, however, that does affect you, does put people out of work, is putting the economy at great risk, is stealing your money and enriching the few at the expense of the many based on lies and deceit. This is the great con of the Federal Government. It is based on the lie that government is a wise and benevolent entity that exists to equitably distribute the nation’s resources and direct the lives of the people for their benefit. What makes this fraud so egregious is not simply its scope, which encompasses a fifteen trillion dollar economy and three hundred million people, but the fact that your participation is not voluntary. In fact, this wise and benevolent government has developed an effective system of brainwashing known as the public schools that have convinced most people that government is the answer to all problems. But not all the people. If the appeals to “fairness” and “social justice” don’t work, and we can’t be scared into feeling good about our “contribution” through doomsday warnings about global warming, mass unemployment or homelessness, the gun of the government will be put to our heads to force us to relinquish our hard earned money to support the scam with the threat of confiscation, financial ruin and imprisonment.

Is it fair to compare what our Federal Government does to Bernie Madoff’s fraud? Not really, what the Federal Government does is so much worse. Ponzi schemes? The government perpetrates the largest ponzi scheme in the history of the world. We call it Social Security. While the early participants received generous benefits for small investments, as the number of contributors have declined, instead of simply losing their money, which may yet happen, they are forced to contribute ever higher amounts to support those who currently benefit. It is a ponzi scheme whose collapse is forestalled by ever larger involuntary contributions by the latecomers.

Of course, the voracious appetite of the government cannot be satiated simply through forced contributions. To cover the growing gap between spending and income, they borrow. And borrow. And borrow. And borrow. Bernie may be broke and have nothing to pass down to his children except an infamous name but his children and grandchildren are not on the hook for repaying his fraud. Not so the Federal Government. Today’s free spenders from both parties will be gone when the bill comes due for future generations. Future generations of Americans have been condemned to involuntary servitude, forced to pay back trillions of dollars to the Chinese and Saudis by the greedy politicians and bureaucrats of today. Nothing is more immoral.

When the numbers of people contributing to Bernie’s racket fell below the level needed to sustain it, it collapsed and those who came in late lost their money. No so the Federal Government. In addition to confiscating more money from the rest of us and borrowing from future generations, it has another method of maintaining its malevolent work. It can simply print money. Ah, if Bernie had just used a printing press he could have kept it up indefinitely. Oh yeah, that’s illegal; its called counterfeiting and it is so because it destroys the value of, and confidence in, the currency. Is it any different when the Federal Government does it through the Federal Reserve bank? No, we are destroying the value of our currency and our standard of living. The fact that our buying power and real wages continue to go down is a direct result of this hidden theft. The very real possibility of hyperinflation and the total collapse of the currency and economy are also directly tied to this fraud.

If Bernie was a mobster and a thug in addition to a cheat, he could have forced people to “contribute” to his growing power and punish those who didn’t pay the required protection money. The Federal Government, operated as a thugocracy under this current administration, does have that power. As Gibson Guitar found out, not contributing to the right party will result in armed goons breaking into your business, endless lawsuits designed to harass and intimidate, limitless regulations selectively applied for the sole purpose of putting one out of business to serve as a warning to others. This works for individuals as well as businesses.

Bernie used his ill gotten gains to live the life of the rich and famous. The benefits of working with and for the Federal Government are similar. The average annual salary and benefits for a federal worker is over $123,000, a salary and benefits we pay through our tax dollars, and those salaries are rapidly increasing. While the politicians and bureaucrats live the high life on our dime, partying at seminars and training sessions in Las Vegas, going on fact finding missions to Tahiti and dolling out billions of dollars to friends and relatives, how are the serfs who pay for this living? Seventy five percent of us make less than $50,000, forty seven percent of us, less than $25,000; salaries that are going down in real terms. Almost half of us are making less than a fifth of our “public servants.” And when we fail at our jobs or do something illegal, our income goes to zero or we go to jail. Bureaucrats who lose millions like those at Fannie Mae are paid millions when they leave. Gun runners at the ATF are promoted. Tax cheats are given cabinet positions. The standard of justice for the rulers and the ruled has never been so different in America.

The politicians and bureaucrats are not the only beneficiaries of the fraud. Just as Bernie spread the wealth around to his friends, so does the Federal Government. The rewards of the “protection money” paid to campaigns can amount to millions and even billions of dollars. Business like Solyndra and General Electric enrich themselves at our expense. Grants are dolled out to those who support the party line. Homes, health care and cash are the rewards of the poor voters who consistently put these con men and women in office even if what they receive is a pittance compared to the “in” crowd. Its all about the money, your money and my money, and using it in ways we would never even consider. Would you choose to invest in a company with a faulty business model, pay the living expenses of a man who lives in a crib and wears a diaper or train Chinese prostitutes to drink responsibly? No? Ah...but you and I do and we are not given a choice.

Bernie is in jail for the rest of his life. We name roads and buildings for the thieves in Washington DC. We expect so little we don’t even care when another robber is caught and released, or even promoted. The Federal Government, our Federal Government, is looting our country, stealing the wealth of its citizens and their progeny and destroying the best economic and governmental system ever conceived by man. It is doing so by perpetuating the lie that if government just had enough money and power life would be better for all of us. It is a lie. It is a failure. It is immoral. It is evil. Bernie may get the bad press but compared to the Federal Government of the United States of America, he looks almost angelic.

Monopoly Money

2011-09-21T10:33:00.000-07:00

In case you haven’t heard, the hundreds of billions of dollars we have printed and borrowed to bail out our own banks and businesses that are “too big to fail” has now reached a whole new level of insanity. Our freshly printed dollars are now leaving our own shores to bail out the banks of Europe and their investments in the failed welfare states of Europe. Yes, “Helicopter Ben” Bernanke is now working with European central banks to infuse liquidity and prop up European banks that are heavily invested in bonds from Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain, affectionately known in the investment community as the “PIIGS.” No doubt pig slop is worth more than bonds from these bankrupt countries.

So without any input from you or I or our elected representatives, the gods at the Fed are going to send hundred of billions or trillions of our dollars to Europe in an attempt to forestall the inevitable collapse of their failed socialism, an experiment made possible by our military welfare. Our dollars are going to ensure the generous pension checks, free health care and the salaries of all those bureaucrats necessary to keep their nanny states running and the eternal adolescents from rioting. And we can’t forget the generous welfare benefits given to a those Muslim immigrants so that instead of working they can sit around and plan jihad against the self-loathing and deteriorating European states and culture. With all our own economic problems and mountains of debt, is this really where our money should be going?

Of course, the Obama administration doesn’t engage in any activity for altruistic reasons. It does so either for ideological reasons or to help or pay back supporters. In this case, one of the companies which will experience devastating losses if European banks and countries start defaulting is Obama’s favorite American company, General Electric. GE’s balance sheet looks much like America’s, way too much debt and not enough cash. It has a lot of exposure to credit cards and mortgages in Europe and losses of tens of billions in those markets will put it on the verge of bankruptcy. Of course it won’t fail, we the people have generously guaranteed its debt through 2012 and another bailout would not be hard to get. The only reason Jeff and Co. can run GE like this is because they know they have friends in high places and they are only interested in getting the highest compensation they can while they can as their business model dooms an American icon. Its the Solyndra model writ large.

It is important to understand that there is no real wealth available to bail these banks out. Europe is broke. Now that we have joined the European economic club of anemic growth, we don’t have trillions of dollars in wealth lying around either. That means only one thing. The money for these bailouts is brand new off the printing presses. To understand why this is not only horrible economically but just plain immoral, I have reprinted the following excerpt from the Fed section of “Leave Me Alone; A Patriot’s Plan for Restoring Pride and Prosperity in America” available at www.leavemealonenow.webs.com

"There is a very simple reason why we intuitively know we are being screwed by this system, a system that benefits those at the top, or the insiders, and leaves the rest of us holding a bag of excrement. To understand why this wholesale printing of money benefits the government and their friends in the banking industry and hurts the rest of us, we need to look at it honestly for what it is-legalized counterfeiting. Counterfeiting is illegal for you and I and for good reason. It erodes confidence in, and the value of, the currency. Remember one of the primary premises of this work, what is wrong/bad/immoral for the individual is wrong/bad/immoral for the government. When the government, through the Fed, prints money, the effects are the same. The currency loses value and eventually, people lose confidence in it.

The question is, who benefits from counterfeiting? Obviously, the counterfeiter does because he goes out and exchanges his fake money for goods and services at their current value, based on the amount of money in circulation. Think of it in a closed neighborhood. In that neighborhood there was one million dollars in circulation and all goods and services were based on that amount of money. The counterfeiter prints another million. He goes out and spends it all, buying a new house, a car and whatever else he wants. He buys everything at current prices based on the one million dollars in circulation. However, he has now doubled the money supply which means money becomes cheaper and goods become twice as expensive. Each time that fake money changes hands, it loses buying power and the average people in the neighborhood suffer from inflation. The crook got his stuff when the currency had twice as much value but everyone else had their purchasing power cut in half.

Now elevate it to the national level. The Fed prints two trillion dollars and trades it for treasuries so the Federal Government now has an extra two trillion dollars to spend. Who gets that money first? Obviously, anyone who works in government receives that money before anyone else. After that, it goes out to all those who have lobbied for and received government contracts and benefits. It goes to bailouts to those whose friendship with Washington has “merited” them such treatment. The banks receive that money as deposits that they use to lend to their friends and clients. They all get to spend that “new” money at current values. However, as that money makes its way through the system, as those union workers and contractors spend it and banks loan it, money becomes cheaper because there is more of it. The rest of us who receive it last find our dollars buy less than they did last year, last month or even last week. It is redistribution of income from the middle class and the poor to the rich and connected.

Of course, the way all that happens in practice is not so simple. Tim Geithner doesn’t walk over to the Fed and hand Ben Bernanke a suitcase full of treasuries and leave with a suitcase fill of freshly printed hundred dollar bills. The Federal Reserve buys and sells treasures on the open market through a broker, or a series of brokers like Goldman Sachs, not from the treasury directly. These brokers compete with one another under the New York Fed through an auction process, keeping the whole process neatly confined among the Wall Street elite.

The fact is this, wherever power is concentrated, corruption is rampant. The bigger the government, the more corruption. With the amount of money flying around and out of Washington, a process only made possible by the Fed, corruption is precipitated on an unheard of scale where billions of dollars are paid out to those with the best paid lobbyists and more intimate connections. It is a system that is based on an immoral premise, counterfeiting, and therefore it breeds immorality. The only way we are going to even begin to change Washington is to eliminate the very foundation for this perverse and wicked edifice."

“Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the capitalist system to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis for society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.” John Maynard Keynes

President Obama's America

2011-09-12T11:35:00.000-07:00

All you really needed to know about President Obama’s understanding of America was found in one of the introductory lines of his "jobs" speech. Obama’s America is one in which "everyone gets a fair shake and does their fair share." This is nothing more than slang for the core principle of communism as explained by Karl Marx; "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need." Obama’s vision is Marx’s vision and everything in this speech is explained by this statement.

To bring about the communist ideal where private property is abolished and everyone is made "equal", an all powerful government needs to be established to equitably redistribute the property the greedy capitalists have stolen from the poor working man. Obama repeated his call for a war on the successful, vowing to take even more from those who actually create wealth and prosperity. He brought up his favorite billionaire, Warren Buffet, again. He said even Warren agrees that he doesn’t pay enough taxes and that Warren said that government should take more of his money. Warren should shut up. If he wants to "contribute" more, no one’s stopping him. He should put his money where his mouth is instead of shielding as much of his income and wealth as he can from taxes and fighting the IRS to keep from paying the taxes he already owes. But Warren is a prime example for Obama’s belief that all rich people are really stingy, cruel, immoral people who are incapable of compassion and therefore must have it forcibly extracted from them. If poor Warren, who has so much more than he needs, won’t give even when he says he should, then it is obvious that the only way the rich are going to help those "less fortunate" is if the government shows up with a gun and takes it.

In Obama’s understanding of America, we became a great nation because of government and only government intervention and expansion can make us great again. It was when we abandoned the "rigid idea of what government could and could not do" , i.e. the Constitution, and passed the great "entitlement" programs that America became a nation worthy of greatness. It is obvious that our form of government as described in the Constitution is an impediment to Obama’s communist vision. For Obama, government should be able to confiscate, redistribute, regulate and control without restraint. To that end he must work to bring down the structure of government that exists within the constraints of the Constitution and replace it with an autocratic form much more conducive to implementing his vision. He has already shown himself to be more dictatorial than any other president. He rules by fiat whenever he can get away with it. He ignores the rules or makes them up as he goes along. If congress can’t or won’t act, it is his prerogative to do so.

But to really achieve his goal, he must collapse the current system. This explains his push for a larger and larger payroll tax reduction. No statist ever wants to reduce taxes but this has been a theme in the Obama administration for a while. Why? Because all the spending and borrowing is meant to collapse the system. We all know Social Security is a Ponzi scheme we have been forced to contribute to and is, therefore, by definition, unsustainable. The dates for its demise under the current structure vary but there is no question that if Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid continue as they are, they will break the bank, a bank that is already broke. Obamacare is accelerating that day for the heath care side of the equation. If we suddenly cut in half the amount of money we are contributing to the Social Security "trust fund", will it not break sooner? The crisis these bankrupt entitlements create will be just the excuse a statist will need to step in and take even more wealth and control; and the majority of Americans will ask for it. We want our "free" health care and our pensions and if we are convinced after many years of liberal indoctrination that Obama is right, the Constitution is an impediment to our happiness, we will allow the autocrats to ignore or scrap it and accept whatever keeps the goodies flowing.
In Obama’s America we are not allowed to be on our own, or write our own rules. No, we must take care of each other and government exists to make sure we do. Without this bill children will not be educated, roads will not be repaired, veterans will not get jobs, teen-agers will spend their summers playing video games and America will never out build or out innovate the rest of the world. If government doesn’t spend a half trillion dollars, America is finished. Of course he never said where that money was coming from, only that it was "paid for." By whom? The rich? If you confiscated all the wealth of the rich, it would fund the government for a period of weeks, at most. Savings elsewhere? Laughable. This president and even the Republicans in congress haven't shown any ability to cut anything substantial from a federal budget for which "bloated" seems an inadequate description anymore and suddenly they are going to come up with a half trillion dollars of savings this year? No, we will all pay, we and our children and grandchildren and great grandchildren through debt and inflation. All to ensure jobs for government employees and union members.

President Obama, your vision of America is most un-American. America is not a place where everyone gets a fair shake and does their fair share. Life is not fair. The circumstances of everyone’s birth are different and very unequal. Some are born poor, others rich. Some are born on the mean streets of the inner city, others on expansive farms. Some have parents that spoil them, other have parents that neglect them. In most places in the world and throughout history, birth determines opportunity. Once a serf, slave or peasant, always a serf, slave or peasant. That is "unfair" and unjust. America was the first to reject this idea. Every man is equal in his capacity for success and in America, no matter what a man’s previous circumstances were, he had the opportunity to try to make what he could of himself. He owned what he acquired through his hard work, no one else could claim it. Some accumulated more than others because they were smarter or harder working or even "luckier" but the whole world benefited from the innovations and wealth produced by truly free men.

President Obama, government did not make America successful. America was successful because its government took little and did little. America did not become compassionate because of government. America was, and is, the most compassionate nation on earth because of our religious heritage. If, as you said in your conclusion, you really want to see America great once again, cure her ills, and restore hope and prosperity to all her people, you need not spend another dime. Just give us opportunity. Opportunity to succeed and keep the fruits of our success. Let us work without a government bureaucrat looking over our shoulder with his hand in our pocket. Freedom, not coercion, is the key to peace and prosperity. Until we have people in government who actually believe that and have the courage to act on it, we are condemned to continue our decline with this president leading the way.

Are We This Pathetic?

2011-07-14T09:37:00.000-07:00

President Obama has now tried to jump start negotiations over the debt ceiling by stating that he could not guarantee government checks for Social Security, veterans benefits, and military pay, to name a few, will go out on time in August if the debt ceiling is not raised. Obviously, this is a scare tactic to get all those government dependents across the land, a majority of us unfortunately, to pressure their congressmen to agree to something. Raising current taxes or reducing future benefits, it doesn’t matter to most people, as long as that government money is in the account on the first of the month. Whether the threat is real or not, the fact is there are a lot of people across the land for whom even the threat of not receiving their government benefits on time raises the specter of real privation.

How sad. How absolutely pathetic. How did the wealthiest nation in the history of mankind fall to the point where the majority of its citizens depend on a pitiful allowance consisting of money stolen from others or borrowed from future generations? How did we come to the point where the ineptitude of our national leaders can impact whether or not we can buy groceries next week? How did we allow ourselves to become so dependent on our masters in Washington that when they so mismanage their financial affairs as to bring us to bankruptcy, the serfs on the land will be reduced to absolute poverty?

Liberty, that antiquated idea that this country was founded upon, is the idea that each man will make choices about his life and he will either benefit from the results or suffer for them. He and he alone. His prosperity or poverty is based only on his decisions and hard work. Your prosperity or poverty should be based only on your decisions and hard work. It should not be based on what happens in Washington, things you have no control over. Our destiny, our ability to meet our basic needs, and our ability to secure our future, should reside within ourselves, our hearts and minds.

Oh, how far the mighty have fallen. Strong, independent American men and women who once viewed obstacles as challenges and whose hard work and persistence built a nation out of the wilderness have been reduced to sniveling beggars who grovel before their masters in Washington, begging them to continue their idiocy just a little longer so they can have their bowls filled with poisonous gruel.

Where are you standing? If the checks stop coming in August will you quickly slide into homelessness and hunger? Does your entire life depend on receiving stolen and borrowed money from the government? It doesn’t matter if the president was lying about the ability to pay benefits or not. The question is whether or not your survival depends on the goodwill of Washington and its ability to continue its financial insanity. We will all suffer when that insanity comes to its logical conclusion whether in August or the next month or year. However, the more independent and better prepared you are, the better position you will be not only to weather the storm but provide a beacon of liberty to show your neighbors the way forward.

"They are obscure, unorganized, inarticulate, each one rubbing along as best they can. They need to be encouraged and braced up, because when everything has gone completely to the dogs, they are the ones who will come back and build a new society, and meanwhile your preaching will reassure them and keep them hanging on. Your job is to take care of the Remnant." Albert Jay Nock

Barak Obama Suicide Bomber

2011-07-08T07:33:00.000-07:00

As the debate over the debt ceiling heats up, each side is looking for an advantage. Except for a few principled holdouts, it would appear that both sides want to raise the ceiling, again, and are using it as a huge bargaining chip. The Republicans are trying to hold the line on taxes, or "revenue enhancements", and get major spending cuts. We shall see whether they hold fast, the last several months of capitulation don’t hold much promise. The Democrats want to keep every program and increase spending and taxes, particularly on the "rich." It is clear that President Obama wants to tax and spend, his recent speeches have made that abundantly clear. The question is, what is the end game?

Several years ago I postulated that the Democrats would use economic crisis to remove the Republicans from contention in politics for another generation. Their ability to demonize Republicans, particularly "conservative" Republicans, has been very successful over the years. If a "compromise" is reached, which is the most likely outcome, we will borrow even more and demonstrate to the world that we have no intention of reigning in our spending and balancing our budget. The compromise will probably take the following form. The Democrats will agree to a few trillion in cuts over the next ten years, meaning we’ll only borrow an additional twelve trillion dollars instead of sixteen trillion from our children and grandchildren. The Republicans will agree to some revenue enhancements like closing loopholes. Remember, a "loophole" is a legal way to keep more of your money so read that "tax increase". This will anger the TEA party, conservatives and libertarians among the Republican party who will either actively abandon them and go elsewhere or simply give up and stop supporting them. This will ensure Democrat victory in the near term and as the economy continues to falter under the greater debt and tax load, more dependents will be created-read "Democrat voters."

That is one possibility. What if a deal is not reached? What if on August 3rd we find ourselves unable to borrow the forty cents on every dollar we are currently spending? All of a sudden our government will be forced to live on the two hundred billion dollars that come in every month in taxes and no more. In the face of the fact that we have taken on obligations we cannot pay for, we will suddenly find ourselves in the position of having to choose priorities. If it were your household, you would be choosing between car and house payments, food, the cable and cell phone bills, the utilities. It is assumed that our first priority will be to pay the interest on our outstanding debt and redeeming bonds that come due in order to maintain our fiscal health and credit rating. Beyond that President Obama will have the discretion to choose which bills get paid. If the end game is to put the Republicans far in the back of the bus, as the President puts it, he will spend or not spend to his and the Democrat’s political advantage. He will slow or reduce welfare and social security payments, reduce Medicare reimbursements and panic the largest constituencies while blaming the Republicans and the rich who won’t contribute their fair share. The pressure won’t have to be applied long before the debt ceiling will be raised and the Democrats will get everything they want. More spending, more taxes and a new tactic for fear mongering. If you elect those mean Republicans, they won’t raise the debt ceiling next time and your benefits will go away. If the accumulation of power is the end, this is certainly an effective means.

However, what if the accumulation of power is not the goal? As I have been listening to all the talk from both sides, a crazy and very frightening thought hit me. What if the Democrats, and specifically the president, refuse to compromise specifically so the president can wield the discretionary power over what is funded and what is not. Not so they can use it for political advantage but to bring about the total collapse of the United States economy and with it, the United States itself. I know, it sounds crazy and I only suggest it as the remotest of possibilities. But think about this. Since President Obama has been elected he has done everything he can to make our financial position untenable. He has doubled the national debt, an amazing feat all by itself. He has hamstrung the economy through taxes and regulation. He has put through massive entitlements we can’t pay for. In the face of overwhelming evidence that nothing he has done works and has, in fact, made our economic situation worse, he wants to do more of the same. He wants to spend more, regulate more and borrow more.

That is not all, however. Consider all the evidence that he despises this country, its ideals and our republican system of government. He has placed socialists and outright communists in his cabinet or the ambiguous "czar" positions. He coddles and befriends brutal dictators and alienates our staunch allies. He apologizes for American exceptionalism at every opportunity. He bullies congress, the supreme court and major corporations to get his way. He is more than sympathetic to Muslim terrorists. He has demonstrated vindictiveness to those who don’t support him. His ideas are out of touch with reality and every time he tries to support them in a speech, he lies and lies and lies about everything. He was brought up by people who hated America, found a pastor in Chicago that hates America, married a woman that hates America. It is obvious he holds in contempt everything that made this country great. His words and deeds demonstrate his desire to see America lose its unique status as the leading force for liberty and good in the world because he doesn’t value liberty or believe America has done anything good.

What if, for Barak Obama and some other radical members of the Democrat party, the accumulation of political power is secondary to the destruction of the United States? If the debt ceiling is not raised and the President instructs the Treasury not to make interest payments on August 4th, our credit rating immediately falls below Greece’s. We will no longer have the option of borrowing because few will buy our junk bonds. The dollar will collapse. Our economy will be destroyed, we will no longer be able to afford much of our military or our social programs. In one fell swoop, we will go from the first first world nation to a third world nation. Such a crisis will give him the greatest opportunity of them all to seize even more power.
That is ridiculous, why would the President do that? It would be political suicide. Yes, it would. But what if Barak Obama is the most successful suicide bomber of them all? A political suicide bomber. A man who reached the highest office in the world for the sole purpose of ensuring our demise as a nation. A man who reached this office out of nowhere with no qualifications and no experience. A man who easily defeated the Clinton machine, the most effective political machine in recent history. A man who has demonstrated total incompetence in office while at the same time attempting to force an unrealistic ideology upon us all. He spends most of his time on vacation or on the golf course, swooping into the office at opportune times to cause more havoc. On top of all that he has professed adherence to, and demonstrated sympathy for, a religious ideology that desires our annihilation. As president of the United States, the keeper of the American legacy, and leader of the free world he is an abject failure. As a destructive agent of our enemies, he has had much success. If he finds himself wielding this kind of power, he could do more damage than any bomb ever could.

Is Barak Obama waiting for the opportunity to completely destroy our nation? I don’t know. It seems like fantastic speculation, the stuff of conspiratorial fiction. But be honest, would it surprise you if it was true? The circumstantial evidence is rather compelling. Is it outside the realm of possibility that Marxist ideologues who plan for generations have manipulated this man into office and steered us into this financial corner for this very purpose? Is going into the oval office like going into the bombmaker's lair? It looks that way. President Obama does not use C4, wires and cell phones to destroy things, he uses taxes, regulations and the Fed. While I don’t think we should borrow another dime as a country, we are placing the detonator in Barak Obama’s hands on August 2nd if no agreement or stipulations for dealing with our finances under the current cap are in place before hand. That is a power no man should have but our slide into collectivism and away from our founding principles has made it possible. That slide ends in disaster one way or another. Whether that end comes in the first week of August depends on whether President Obama is after power for himself and the Democrat party or if he is the most dangerous suicide bomber in history.

The Perfect Storm

2011-06-27T12:42:00.001-07:00

Several months ago I wrote an article entitled "Three Months to Live?" about the end of the Fed's "Quantitative Easing II" ending on June 30. That time is upon us. Where do we stand? Here are the facts.

In nine months the Federal Reserve has bought $600 billion worth of treasuries issues following $1.75 trillion in "QE I" from March 2009 to March 2010. It is this printing that has kept the economy going at all the last two years and created the illusion of normalcy for most. Now that printing is supposedly going to stop. The first question is "who is going to buy them?" We are running a deficit of around $1.5 trillion a year and right now the Fed is buying up 70% of that debt. If the Fed stops buying, who’s going to lend us over a trillion dollars a year? Where is the government going to get the money required for its insatiable spending? The debt ceiling may be immaterial if no one buys any more of our debt. We’ll deal with that in a minute. What happens when the printing presses cool down for a moment? It’s speculation because no one’s ever done this much printing. We could see a short term rally in the dollar and a drop in commodity prices, including precious metals. People will think that prices will stop going up and start "hoarding" dollars (also refered to as saving) and Bernanke’s greatest fear, deflation, may rear its ugly head. Economic activity will slow even more. Then chairman Bernanke will crank up the presses again with "QE III". When that happens, it will send a clear message to our creditors that they will never get the full value of their money back, that all debts will be repaid in devalued dollars. When "QE III" begins it will be the final nail in the coffin for the dollar.

Several months ago the debt ceiling was background noise. It has now moved front and center. Since the financial crisis of 2008, a crisis caused by government, we have nearly doubled our national debt. In his first, and hopefully only, term, president Obama will likely add $6,000,000,000,000 to the debt. It is expected that deficits will run between $1.5 and $2 trillion for the foreseeable future. Government spending at all levels now accounts for 45% of the economy and the same percentage of people now receive direct payments from the government-welfare, unemployment, social security, etc. That is unsustainable, we cannot afford that and it is why we have had to borrow so much from the federal to the municipal levels of government. Two things are possible with the debt ceiling. It will be raised, perhaps with some concessions to reduce spending over the next ten years, a meaningless gesture. A few trillion over ten years does nothing to reduce a $1.5 trillion deficit now. Any rise in the debt ceiling will demonstrate to the world that we are not serious about addressing our fiscal mess, causing confidence in our bonds and currency to collapse. Ratings agencies, who usually downgrade an entity after its collapse, are already talking about lowering the credit rating of the US. The other, albeit remote, possibility is that it will not be raised. If that happens we will pay our interest and cuts, drastic cuts, will be made elsewhere. If we are borrowing 40 cents of every dollar we spend, we will have to reduce spending by 40%. The Obama administration will make those cuts in areas that will be most advantageous to him and his party. When the Social Security checks stop coming and Medicare reimbursements are suspended, the people will cry out for more debt even if it represents the country’s last gasp of normalcy before it all comes crashing down.

Regardless of what happens with the debt ceiling, our debt level is unsustainable for another reason. 61% of all marketable treasury debt will mature within four years. That means that the treasury must either repay or refinance one trillion a year in addition to financing the $1.5 trillion deficit. That means the treasury must borrow or refinance ten trillion dollars over the next four years! Do you see that there is no way out of this mess? Our insatiable desire as a people for entitlements has put us on this path that will either end in default and collapse or hyperinflation and collapse.
The failure of socialism in the United States is only one of the most obvious that will affect the world this summer. The crisis in European socialism will lead to actual defaults and the end of the Euro. Greece is the most obvious problem but Portugal, Italy, Spain and Ireland are on the brink as well. In 2009 Greece’s deficit was 14% of GDP. The same year Ireland’s was the same and it’s debt was 90% of its GDP. Portugal’s deficit was 9.3% of GDP. Either the EU will do what Bernanke is doing and crank up the printing presses for the Euro with more bailouts or these nations will start defaulting. Neither way ends well for them, or for us. Its just like dominos.

As these three things culminate this summer, we are ill equipped to handle the fallout. We are in a depression although for the moment it is hidden. Housing, real unemployment, and economic activity are all comparable to the levels found in the Great Depression. We just don’t see it because the bread lines and tent cities aren’t obvious-everyone gets a check from the government. Food stamps are just a credit card away, there is 99 weeks of unemployment, and a plethora of other government programs exist to keep the poor and unemployed invisible to most, including the media. That all is dependent on the government maintaining its ability to borrow and print dollars effectively. When that comes to an end, the unrest in Greece will look like a picnic compared to what will happen here.

Our government isn’t the only entity in debt here in America. If you add up all of America’s debt; federal, state, municipal, as well as private debt; mortgages, student loans and other credit, we are talking about a number greater than $56 trillion. This does not include the unfunded liabilities of our "entitlements" which total over $100 trillion more. To service this debt at the low interest rates we currently enjoy we must pay $3.6 trillion a year. Those interest rates will go up. Add our tax burden to our debt burden and we are flushing almost five trillion dollars down the toilet every year, money that could be used to grow our economy. That is unsustainable and we will never grow our way out of our financial difficulties with more of the same. Yet this is all our government knows. Helicopter Ben Bernanke admitted in his most recent press conference he has no idea why his efforts haven’t put the economy on more secure footing. He reiterated the President’s loss for an explanation, repeating Obama’s frustration at the mysterious "head winds" buffeting the economy. Could it be those "head winds" are the result of the President and the Fed chairman turning a massive wind turbine against the ship of our nation!? The contrary winds of regulation, taxes, entitlements, anti-business and energy policy, and money printing? Could that be it? I don’t have a Harvard education but I do believe those may be major contributing factors.

The sad fact is that we will have to go through a very difficult time. We have put off the day of reckoning for far too long and now we must pay a very steep price. The question is, what will we, the American people, do about it? It is we who have sold our future for a little government candy now. We have traded our dignity and humanity for government largess we cannot afford. We have exchanged our precious liberty for an illusory safety and soon we may have neither. When all we know is in ruins, when the checks no longer come, when the looters have nothing to give the moochers, what will we, the American people, do? Will we plead in humble supplication before our masters in government, the very ones who have brought us to our sorry state, willingly holding out our wrists for the chains that accompany false promises of deliverance? Or will we stand up on our own two feet as Americans, brave and free men and women for whom liberty, family, community and capitalism are the values most dear? Can you muster the fortitude to be that kind of person? Do you have the ability and courage to convince your neighbors that freedom is better than slavery, that capitalism is better than socialism, that government is the problem and not the solution? If those of us who love freedom do not show the courage, foresight and intelligence needed in these dark times to raise the torch of liberty, we will condemn our posterity to a life of slavery and misery. How will your children and grandchildren remember you?

First, They Came for the Jews...

2011-06-01T08:12:00.001-07:00

President Obama dropped a rhetorical bomb on Israel last week when he proclaimed his support for a “peace plan” that was based of their pre-1967 borders. Israel, her friends and enemies both know those borders are indefensible, that a plan that begins there ends with the Israelis drowning in the Med. It makes no sense strategically. It makes as much sense historically as it does Mexico's claim to the southwest. Those issues, while important, are superficial. The president’s proposal may say more about us than it does about our relationship with Israel.

One of the ways we judge the morality of societies is by observing how they treat the powerless among them. Does the society persecute or kill them, or does it protect them, recognizing their equality and value, their rights to life, liberty, property and the pursuit of happiness? In the history of the world, no group, no minority, has been so oppressed, so persecuted, so subject to irrational hatred than the Jewish people. They have been exploited, enslaved and subject to repeated attempts at extermination from Ramsees to Hitler. In the face of the unimaginable death and destruction wrought by total world war in the forties, the majority of the nations in the world took serious stock of humanity's moral compass in the face of such an abuse of technology and progress. Western nations in particular, having experienced the slow, halting progress toward freedom and the recognition of human rights and staring long and hard at the results of the deviation from that march to freedom into totalitarianism, took several actions in response. One of these was the creation of the United Nations, a lofty goal that has turned into an abysmal failure, an institution that more often supports tyranny than opposes it, but that is another story. Immediately following the conclusion of World War II, in a moment of moral clarity, the world understood its need to compensate for its failure to protect the powerless from one of their own, the modern European social state of Germany. Its response was to recognize the right of the Jewish people for self determination in their own land, the land of their ancestors, the land of Israel.

For several decades prior, particularly due to the tireless efforts of Theodore Hertzl who built the Zionist movement practically single-handedly, Jews had been moving to the British protectorate known as Palestine, slowly turning a barren land fertile once again. In anticipation of “independence day” the trickle of immigration became a stream became a river became a flood. Of course, the Arab Muslims that lived there and those surrounding the new nation believed that any land conquered for Mohammed was perpetually theirs and immediately attacked this idea, the settlers and, when independence was declared, the new nation itself. Partition wasn’t, and never has been, good enough. The so called “Palestinian problem” was created at this moment when their Arab brethren encouraged them to flee so they wouldn’t be caught up in the death and destruction the mighty Muslim nations would rain down upon the Jews. It didn’t quite work out that way. With little help from the outside and against incredible odds, Israel earned the right of self determination.

Surrounded by nations populated by millions of people taught by their religion that the annihilation of the Jews is a sacred duty, Israel has survived and thrived. Even comprehensive and coordinated military attacks in 1956, 1967, and 1973 along with the constant level of violence directed against them by terrorists, have not defeated them or crushed their spirit. In the midst of a region dominated by tyranny, prejudice and barbarism, Israel has developed a society of respect for individual rights, liberty and equality. It is the only place in the Middle east where Jew and Arab and Muslim and Christian live together in peace and prosperity. Even under the constant pressure entailed in their very survival, Israel has sought and attained a society that encompasses the best ideals of humanity.

They have done this with the support and friendship of the United States from the beginning. They have been among our best friends and staunchest allies because we share with Israel, more than any other nation, the idea of the melting pot, of unity among diversity, of ideals and ideas providing cohesion among individuals of different races, religions and creeds. They are the proof that freedom and equality work, that they will produce happiness and prosperity no matter where they are implemented. Israel is a thorn in the side of all the surrounding Muslim nations whose values are the complete opposite and, aside from the beneficiaries of oil wealth, whose people live under oppression in poverty. They are a stick in the eye to nations where minorities are oppressed and persecuted. They inspire the jealousy of the anti-Semites around the world. Except for the last, the nations of the world react to Israel the same way they react to America, for the same reasons. While not perfect by any means, both Israel and the United States have demonstrated the superiority of liberty and equality as the basis for social and governmental systems like no other nations in modern history.

Because of its size, Israel is a much easier target than the “hyperpower” that is the United States, at least for the moment. We have supported Israel, we have had Israel’s back since her independence. Thus, we have given them confidence and their enemies pause for decades. Now that has turned on a dime with the advent of Barak Obama. With one speech, he has sided with Israel’s enemies and proposed a plan of action that can only lead to her destruction. As President, he is speaking on behalf of all of us. He is saying that we no longer view Israel as a kindred spirit, that our common values are no longer important, that justice and right are no longer considerations in solving the “problem” of Israel, the Palestinians and the surrounding counties, only pursuing solutions that will stop the fighting. Unfortunately, the only thing that will stop the shooting in the eyes of Israel’s enemies is the annihilation of the Jews. The Palestinians and their Muslim supporters have never been interested in peace, land for peace does not work, a two state solution will not end the conflict. Invasion and war have not worked so isolation and incremental encroachment coupled with violence have been the tactics of Israel’s enemies. All of a sudden the president of the United States, the greatest impediment to their progress in the past, has come out in support of a plan that encompasses more than they could have ever expected in the near future.

Whether this antagonism to Israel is a result of president’s Muslim sympathies, an anti-Semitic environment or contempt for her values is beside the point just as evangelical or humanitarian support for Israel is secondary to the real issue. Israel is the “canary in the coal mine,” the Jews are the bellwether for humanity. For all its historical anti-Semitism, a result of the distortion of the Jewish sect that became Christendom, western civilization is based on Moses. Respect for individual life which is the basis for individual rights, the principles of justice and morality, the subjection of temporal authority to higher principles, protection of the powerless, all our best ideals originated with the Law of Moses, the law of the Jews. Our founding fathers quoted the Bible, particularity the “Old Testament” more often than any other source, it is the ten commandments and not the law of Hammurabi that adorns our courtroom walls where the ACLU has not forced their removal. Israel and the United States are based on the same principles, on the same sources, on the same ideals.

If we turn our back on Israel we are demonstrating contempt for our own values. Where the principles of Moses are rejected, tyranny results. Persecution of the people responsible for these principles is merely the beginning. First they came for the Jews, and I said nothing, for I was not a Jew. Then they came for the libertarians, survivalists and TEA partiers and still I said nothing for I was not part of those groups. Then they came for the conservatives and the “rich” and still I said nothing. Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak on my behalf. America and Israel have embodied the principles of Moses and demonstrated their value and effectiveness to the world. More than anything else, this is the basis for our mutual friendship. If we abandon that friendship and embrace the totalitarian, the oppressor, the terrorist, we are not merely abandoning one nation in favor of another as part of some grand geo-political strategy. We are turning away from the values and ideals that have made us the great nation we are. If we stop supporting those who value freedom and equality, we are demonstrating the fact that we have ceased to value freedom and equality. It is not just a matter of supporting Jews but the ideals and values Israel embodies.

The President, through his words and actions, has demonstrated that he has, indeed, turned his back on those values. He is no longer worthy of being called the leader of the free world for he doesn’t believe in or support freedom. He speaks and acts, however, as our representative. Does he represent us? Do the American people as a whole still value liberty and equality? Do you? Is the president’s attitude an aberration or a symptom? If the former, we must loudly raise our voices in support of Israel and demonstrate our displeasure in the President's actions. If it is the latter, we are in a lot more trouble than we realize. It is one thing for an individual who holds our founding principles in contempt to con the people and ascend to the heights of power. It is another thing entirely if the majority of us have begun to agree. If we no longer support Israel and she falls, we will not be able to console ourselves that America still remains as a beacon of freedom in the world. If Israel is forced to stand alone, she will be the last free nation. By our rejection of her we will have proclaimed our embrace of the totalitarian and despot, we will have shown we are joining the rising tide of tyranny through our neglect or outright hostility. If the Jew and the law and principles his ancestors blessed the world with have no friends, liberty has no friends. The enslavement and death of the Jew is vanguard of tyranny. The fall of Israel, not that of the United States, will herald the beginning of a new dark age.

Obligations

2011-04-23T06:57:00.001-07:00

For the past several weeks and for the next several months, there will be wrangling in Washington about the budget. We all know the mess we’re in. The fact that Standard and Poors downgraded their outlook for the United States to negative is proof that we have gone way too far in debt. The fact that the last deal the Republicans made cut less than one hundred million dollars in real terms over the next six months, coupled with the speech the president gave, demonstrated to all that the Republicans either don’t have the guts or desire to stop the president from his plan to continue to spend in ways beyond reckless.

In this debate on the budget, several terms are always thrown around, the conversation is always pretty much the same. Both sides say cuts need to be made. Democrats want to cut defense, Republicans want to axe NPR. The new twist this time around is that both sides are giving lip service to restructuring entitlements. Certainly congressman Ryan it to be commended for his attempt to reform that third rail of politics, the third rail that is breaking the collective bank. However, both sides still believe that the programs are essential to our country and society. Both sides talk about our "obligations" to our seniors, the poor, the sick and whomever else they desire to give someone else’s hard earned money to. This is the language of the collectivists. If we ever question whether it is right to take more of our money, if we the people ever entertain the thought that maybe we have given enough, we are reminded of our "obligations" to provide for the old, the poor and of course, the children. Certainly the only proper way to ensure this provision is through government and government bureaucracy. It is only the wise oligarchs who have degrees from Harvard who can justly ensure that we give our "fair share" and that it is applied properly in the fulfillment of our obligations. Are we really "obligated" to take care of everyone else? Does everyone else have a right to our property, the fruits of our labor? It is time we understood what exactly our "obligations" are before we allow the politicians to continue to use this idea to shame us into their scheme of redistribution.

What is an obligation? Webster’s Dictionary defines it this way. An obligation is the "binding power of a promise or legal contract, indebtedness for a favor or kindness, a duty." Something that is obligatory is "binding either legally or morally, it is compulsory." The sense we get from the definition is that an obligation is either the result of a contract between two parties or as a result of the action of one party that was enough of a benefit to another to place some sense of reciprocal action upon them. The first is easy to understand. When we enter into a contract or make a promise, it is our moral duty-obligation-to fulfill it. You can look at the morality of this two ways. If you are religious, it is God who has laid down the moral code; you shall not lie-not do what you have promised, or you can recognize that without people keeping their promises there is no way society can function; language becomes meaningless because the words are disconnected from any action in the real world and we will be reduced to each against everyone. Either way, adhering to the terms of our contract or our promise is imperative in a functioning society.

I would propose that there are two kinds of obligations, positive and negative. I define positive obligations are as those in which we must act to fulfill morally or legally. These obligations are rightful claims on our wealth or person because of promises we have made voluntarily through contract or relationship for which society has the right to expect our compliance. If we do not fulfill these obligations, society or the state has the right to punish us. If we fail to fulfill the terms of a contract, we can be sued or prosecuted for fraud. If we are known to lie, society can shun us or otherwise demonstrate its displeasure.

Under that part of the definition, are the politicians right? Do I have an obligation to allow them to take the fruits of my labor and give it to another just because they are old, sick, poor or whatever? As I sit in Maryland, do I have an obligation to pay the pension of a senior citizen living in Arizona, the emergency room bill of a poor person in Chicago, or for a hot meal for the homeless guy in Dallas, none of whom I have ever met or will ever meet? Have I entered into a legal contract with any one of them, have I made promises to them for which the power of the state can be utilized to force my performance? No, of course not. It is, in reality, an absurd notion. My property cannot be legally obligated to three hundred million of my fellows, or morally, to the six billion other people in the world. I would quickly be reduced to the very state of the ones to whom I am supposedly obligated, or worse. How can I be obligated to support another individual just because they have reached a certain age and chose not to save for their own twilight years? How can I be obligated to pick up the pieces for a teen age mother who made bad choices? How can I be obligated to pay for the medical care of the obese man who had no self control? Under what sense of justice, fairness and morality can I be forced to pay for the bad choices other people have made, or even their bad luck?

This, of course, is the collectivist ideal, steal from those who produce and give it to those who do not until all are equally poor and miserable. The problem is, when you confiscate everything from the producers to give to those who have made bad choices or are just lazy, the moochers, the producer will stop producing because they gain no benefit from their efforts. The incentive for productive activity ceases, which is destructive to any society. When that happens, there is nothing for the looters to give the moochers. The moochers, who know nothing of productive activity by definition, find themselves in very dire straights when the money affording them their free ride is no longer coming in. The will be like abandoned children who have no idea how to provide for themselves. The looters will become more and brutal in their desire to extract their lifeblood from anyone they think has anything, reducing both the producers and the moochers to slavery and in so doing, finding themselves impoverished as well. There is no way enforcing obligations that do not exist can lead to a just and moral society. In fact, inventing obligations for the sole purpose of stealing the property of another is immoral on its face.

What about the "obligations" we enter into by virtue of our citizenship? Does the Constitution legally obligate us to one another? No, not at all. The constitution is a contract between "we the people" and our government. The constitution is primarily a document that limits the power of government over us, recognizing the natural rights that we have and severely restricting the government in its authority over us. It says nothing about our obligations to one another nor can those obligations be "invented" from the document because the tenth amendment is clear. "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
Let us look at the other part of the definition, the "indebtedness for a kindness"? Has the aforementioned senior citizen, poor person or sick individual done any "kindness" to me, much less one which would morally require my positive response? Of course not. How could they, I’ve never even met them. If there is no relationship there can be no obligation and even within a relationship, obligations are strictly defined because they are legal constructs. There are only a few relationships that in any way rise to the above standard and those are family relationships. I would propose that children have an obligation to their parents to the extent that their parents showed them "kindness" in their provision under the age of majority. I believe parents are obligated to their children because they voluntarily brought the obligation to provide for that child until the age of majority upon themselves. If someone actually performs a "kindness" that would require a response, saving your life, for instance, not out of a legal obligation that is part of a job like a doctor or fireman but at risk to their own, then a moral obligation could be imposed. Beyond that, there are no positive obligations beyond those we voluntarily and legally enter into with people we actually have a relationship with. There is no such thing in a just society as an entitlement, a claim on the wealth or person of another by virtue of their circumstances.

Finally, there is the favorite argument of many statists here in America. It goes something like this. You were fortunate enough to be born in the United States, a winner of "life’s lottery." Because of our wonderful system, you have been able to make a success of yourself, you have accumulated wealth. Therefore, it is just and right, it is your "duty" to "give back" some of that wealth to those "less fortunate." First, let’s forget this idea that that those who have wealth got it because they were "fortunate" or "lucky." With the exception of the miniscule number of people like the Kennedy’s who inherit wealth, wealth that was, at some point, the result of someone’s hard work, the vast majority of people who are "rich" are so because they worked hard. Luck has nothing to do with it. That being the case, what is it they are to "give back"? What have they "taken"? If an individual comes up with a good idea and convinces a lot of people to freely purchase the results of that idea, how can anyone claim they have "taken" anything? If I agree to trade a widget I made to you for ten dollars, once that exchange is made, our obligations are fulfilled. I delivered the widget and you delivered the money. The end. I am under no obligation to "give back" a portion of that ten dollars to you or anyone else.

Second, the people to whom this wealth is supposed to be given have also won "life’s lottery" and been born in the United States. They have the same opportunity to use the wonderful system we have to make something of themselves. If they choose to make bad choices, why should those who have taken advantage of the opportunities of the system be forced to pay those who do not. Staying out of the relatively cushy poverty found in the United States is rather simple. Anyone who does four things in life is very unlikely to be poor. Graduate from high school (education others are forced to provide under threat of confiscation of their property), don’t have children before graduation, stay off drugs and out of jail. That’s it. If a person chooses not to take advantage of our system of freedom, another should not be forced to support them.

Before you write me off as completely heartless, let me say that charity is an essential part of a good society. There are some who actually can’t take care of themselves through no fault of their own, those with genetic diseases for example. The fact is, because of our Judeo-Christian heritage, Americans are the most generous people on earth. Even after the government confiscates so much of our money to force their idea of charity upon us, we still give more to others than any other people. It is Americans that give to fund medical research or to help victims of natural disasters. It is Americans who run food drives and whatever-a-thons and put cans at convenience stores to collect change for sick children. Whether we do it for religious reasons, personal reasons or just because we innately know its the right thing to do, we give-voluntarily. It is hard to be a cheerful giver with a gun in your back. Charity should be private and voluntary. If we have extra, should we give? Yes we should; but "should" is very different than "must."

What about negative obligations? These are obligations we have to not do something, actions we must refrain from doing. By virtue of our participation in society there are negative obligations we are all bound by. We are legally and morally bound not to do things that would harm the life of our fellows, restrict their liberty or steal their property. The fulfillment of these obligations require nothing from us but our restraint. I do not have to pay money to not do something. I do not have to use some portion of my wealth to refrain from negative behavior. I do not have to pay to fulfill my negative obligations, neither society or the state can have any claim on my person or wealth in the performance of negative obligations.

That being said, there are only two legitimate functions of government, the state, in the area of obligations. The first is the aforementioned enforcement of contracts or the persecution of fraud. The second is to prosecute those who negatively impact the life, liberty or property of another through violence or theft. That’s it. We have no obligations to strangers, fellow citizens, mother earth or anyone else. No longer can we allow these politicians to use that word to guilt us into giving them more of what belongs to no one but us.

Capitulation and Betrayal

2011-04-12T17:24:00.000-07:00

After months of wrangling over continuing resolutions and the threat of a government shutdown, which is a farce all by itself, the ruling class got together and put together their budget deal, a deal their heralded as a significant reduction in spending. All the news organizations were saying what a great victory it was for Speaker Boehner and the new Republican majority in the house, a majority that only exists because of the TEA party. Even the president had been crowing about its significance in reducing federal spending. The amount of this hatchet job to the Federal budget? $38 billion for the next six months. That, my fellow patriots, is an insult to all of us who understand the dire straights we’re in. That means we will cut a little more than $3 billion a month. Consider that we are borrowing between one and two hundred billion dollars a month and cutting that monthly deficit by three billion is insignificant. $38 billion is only a third of the budget of the worthless department of education. There are stupid earmark projects that cost more that $38 billion. Back when the Republicans said they were going to cut one hundred billion dollars, I derided that amount as insignificant in the face of a $1.5 trillion deficit. This is like deciding to forgo your Starbucks coffee now and then while continuing to run up thousands of dollars in credit card debt every month. It is a worthless gesture. Consider even Congressman Ryan’s budget. He says he is going to cut the budget by $6 trillion over the next ten years. That sounds like a lot but at our current pace we are going to borrow $15 trillion in those same ten years. That means under this dramatic plan of draconian cuts, ten years from now our children will have a $23 trillion dollar debt instead of a $29 trillion dollar debt. Certainly I give credit to congressman Ryan for making a credible attempt and taking on entitlements in creative ways but this is not going to cut it. We are in real, serious trouble.. As we approach the third anniversary of the first TEA party demonstration, I am reminded of the words I spoke on April 15, 2009. I stated that we "stand on the edge of the abyss" as a country. As I, and we, have learned, our situation was worse than we thought and rapidly becoming catastrophic. We need $6 trillion in cuts over three years and a complete overhaul in entitlements just to put us back on the edge. We need significant and drastic action, real drastic action, not what counts for "drastic" and "extreme" by Washington standards. We are not going to get it, not now, not with the next budget, not ever with the ruling class still deeply entrenched. One hundred billion dollars in cuts was insignificant and the Republicans gave away two thirds of that. If they could not resist the pressure from the Democrats for this miniscule amount, what makes you think that the results of the next budget fight is going to be any different? Paul Ryan's six trillion will become two or one or less and even those cuts will probably be applied in years nine and ten, doing nothing to rescue our absurd financial situation. It is obvious that the Republicans are not serious enough to go to the mat and shut things down for the good of our, and our children's future. The reality is this. The budget "fights" between the Democrats and Republicans are like watching the WWF. Its all fake, its good for show and the winners have been predetermined. The few TEA party Republicans who actually were elected and believed they could do something significant went in like wide eyed children believing the show was real and now realize that the ruling class of both parties have no intention of cutting the money that gives them their power, even though everyone knows that the whole house of cards will fall and its consequences catastrophic for all. Our politicians have been playing Russian roulette for years, hoping that the bullet will find someone else’s head but the odds against them are growing every day. That all sounds hopeless and it certainly is discouraging. However, the TEA party has had a significant impact in its short two years. In 2009 a lot of people finally woke up. Most Americans remained oblivious to the fact that our country had been moving deeper and deeper into socialism for decades. The huge lurch to totalitarianism precipitated by President Obama and Speaker Pelosi finally opened our eyes. Realizing that something huge needed to be done and done now, we used the tools we had at hand. We organized marches and demonstrations not seen since the sixties to ensure that our voices were heard. We realized we were not alone and by joining together with others all over this great land of ours, we gained in the confidence that comes from numbers. We worked within the system with the tools we had at hand which means we worked to elect Republicans. After all, the Democrats were the ones pushing the destructive agenda. There is no doubt we elected some good men and women. But while we thought the tool we were putting in place was a sledge hammer, it has turned out to be a scalpel, and a dull one at that. It is time that we realized what is going on. The ruling class, Democrats and Republicans alike, are not going to make significant cuts in their power. The two parties are deeply entrenched in their domain and the show they put on for the rest of us is only to keep us placated while they reduce us to poverty and servitude. As long as we play the game, putting one in charge and then another, we reward this behavior and nothing will change. I understand the need to grab onto the nearest weapon when you feel like you life is in danger. That weapon may not be the most effective however. It is time to soberly consider how we are going to take back our country from the ruling class. For decades party loyalty has been eroding and the number of registered independents and third party adherents has grown. It is time that we stop giving our support to those who continually betray us. We must stop supporting either major party. If we are going to change the direction of our country we must break the stranglehold the two parties have on it. Are there good men and women in each party? Sure. However, there was a telling interview with congressman Ron Paul a few weeks ago. When asked how many congresspeople were as serious about changing the financial state of the country as he was, he said about a dozen. That means the other 523 have to go. We must start working for and voting for the man or woman who has the courage and integrity to do the hard things to turn our country around. Few of them will be from the major parties because the vast majority of them come up through the "system." We need to find people who have come up through our "system", men and women who have consistently supported freedom, those who understand the precarious situation we are in and have creative ideas for solving it and returning freedom to ‘we the people.’ I know that the conventional wisdom says that voting for a third party or independent is like throwing your vote away. I say it is time we stopped throwing our freedom away by voting for two equally villainous, wretched and unacceptable choices. We must begin to prepare for the next election now. We are two years wiser and more organized. The first thing we need to do is stop supporting those without real courage to make real changes. No more money to Democrats or Republicans, put it aside to support a real liberty candidate. No more volunteering for either party. Continue to put pressure on your representatives, we’re stuck with them for now but we need to look at them just as we did the statists from two years ago, not as sympathetic allies. We need to continue to connect with each other and talk to our neighbors. Over the next six months, we need to find and develop real, independent TEA party candidates. They may be Libertarian, Constitutional or independent but we need to know them and trust them. We need to be willing to get behind them with our money and our time. Many of us worked on campaigns the last time around, we know what needs to be done. Will we win? This time around, in most cases, probably not. But if we manage even a handful of wins, it will prove to the nation that a third party/independent can win and provide momentum for the next election. People will stop thinking they are "throwing their vote away" and see non major party candidates as viable alternatives. We, as TEA party adherents, have the opportunity to make that happen. From nothing, the Republican party emerged in the 1850’s and elected a president in less than a decade. As more and more people in this country become disgusted with the current party structure and acutely experience the negative consequences of their stranglehold on power, the opportunity is ripe for the emergence of men and women who actually represent the people and the founding principles of this nation. The time is now, it needs to be now and to make it now we need to make it happen. So as we get together on the third anniversary of our mass April 15 protests, look around for the next congressman, state representative or city councilwoman and be willing to get behind them as though your lives and the lives of your children depended on it....after all, it does.

A Most Dangerous Man

2011-03-30T10:16:00.000-07:00

"The time to guard against corruption and tyranny is before they have gotten ahold of us. It is better to keep the wolf out of the fold, than to trust drawing his teeth and talons after he shall have entered." Thomas Jefferson As one crisis after another has spread across the globe, particularly in the Middle East, many people are scratching their heads and wondering exactly what drives President Obama’s decisions in foreign policy. Its obvious he has lost interest in it now that it has become much more than an apology tour. It is Secretary Clinton, who was a ghost for the first year and half of the Obama reign, who is now the face of American foreign policy in the absence of the president. She jets around the world, she hold news conferences, she makes statements, while he enjoys spring break in Rio, goes golfing and hosts Motown parties in the White House. However detached he may appear, Barack Hussein Obama is still the president and he is still the one that drives American policy. It would appear that our decisions are made "on the fly" and place a glaring spotlight on his complete lack of experience. While that may be partly true, and while it may often be more reasonable to ascribe bad decisions to stupidity rather than malice, in the case of this White House and this president, I don’t think that we can cut them even that much slack. It is my belief that this president has two primary motives for every one of his actions and if we understand these motives, what he does makes a lot more sense. Most past presidents were not hard to figure out. George W. Bush was motivated by his born again Christian faith and his belief that America should not only lead the world but should spread "democracy" by whatever means necessary. This explains why he would go to war so quickly and why he would preside over such a large expansion of domestic government programs. "Compassionate conservatism" embodied both concepts. Clinton just liked being president and he wanted everyone to like him as president. That is why his policies were pragmatic or poll driven. He wanted to do what was popular. Was he an ideological leftist, sure, but that took a back seat to popularity. He had no qualms about dropping "Hillarycare" or eventually signing welfare reform. He had no interest in getting us into long, drawn out, unpopular wars which is why he conducted war from thirty thousand feet and cut and run when it looked tough. Clinton enjoyed the perks of the presidency, sometimes a bit too much, but the "popularity president" explains much of what he does. President Obama also has motives for being president. There is no question that, like Clinton, he loves the perks. But unlike Clinton, we get the feeling that Obama uses the perks like a stick in our eye, as if he thinks we have denied him what was owed and now he is flaunting his new found status as our overlord. The constant vacations, the air force one flyby of the Statue of Liberty, his arrogance in press conferences all seem to stem from this idea. But that is a side-show to the main event. There are two things that motivate Barack Obama and while we may dismiss the talk show jock who proclaims "we have elected the enemy," there is no question that Barack Obama has embarked on a course of action that is severely detrimental to the health, and yes, honor, of our nation. The question is why? Two reasons. First, he divides the world into two camps-the haves and have nots, the oppressed and oppressor, the good and the evil. While traditionally we have viewed ourselves as the guys in the white hats, to Barack Obama, we definitely wear black. This explains many of his actions toward our traditional allies like Great Britain. If there was ever an oppressor, great Britain and its colonial heritage fit the bill for Obama. In fact, with England, it is personal. It was the policies of Winston Churchhill that led to the imprisonment of his Marxist father in Africa. He has a deep seated hatred of previously colonial nations and his actions toward our traditional allies demonstrate this bias. His division of the world is also based on his Marxist ideology. He believes in the redistribution of wealth not just from Joe the Plumber to the welfare queen but from the "haves" to the "have nots" of the world. That is why we will shut down American drilling in the Gulf of Mexico but grant drilling privileges to Brazil, which happens to be led by a fellow Marxist, a twofer for Obama. We will never move toward energy independence under Obama because by sending our dollars abroad we are facilitating a huge wealth transfer. The second motivation is one which will, no doubt, put me in the camp with the tin foil hatters and conspiracy theorists. But if we accept the fact that we could elect an anti-American communist it should not be a stretch to say that we could have elected a Muslim radical as well. Yes, I said it, president Obama is a Muslim. Just as his Marxism was hidden in plain sight during his campaign and has become obvious in his policies, so his Islam was, and is, obvious if you look. In two interviews before the election he had a "Freudian slip" in which he referred to "My Muslim Faith," the one with George Stephanopolis being the most memorable. His early years were spent in Indonesia, the largest Muslim country in the world and one in which radical Islam has more than a toehold. He went to a Madrassa where he was taught Islam, a fundamentally anti-Semitic, anti-western ideology, a perfect complement to his anti-colonial Marxism. This motivation will explain his actions in the Middle East. If the stated policy is to encourage "democracy", his actions are inconsistent at best. Why ignore the Iranian protesters, who may be the only pro-American group in the region, and throw support behind the Egyptian protesters? Two reasons. First, Iran is already anti-western and virulently anti-Israel, no need to support regime change there. Egypt under Mubarak, however, was nominally an ally of the United States and had maintained peace with Israel for over thirty years. That was a regime that could go, no problem. In fact, his policy in the Middle East is best explained by his support for radical Islam represented by the Muslim Brotherhood and other fundamentalist groups. That is why he has no problem pulling the plug on "secular" Arab leaders like Mubarak or Assad of Syria. So the "Obama Doctrine" is to basically ignore nations undergoing transformations from one anti-Semitic, anti-Western regime to another and support the transformation from secular, nominally pro-western, pro-Israel regimes to jihadist ones. The reason Obama has been so inconsistent on Libya is because while it falls into the former category, Khaddafy is a friend of his pastor, Jeremiah Wright, and a major supply of oil for the European nations that pressure us through the United Nations. He would rather stay out of it but was compelled to intervene by outside forces and is trying to make the best of it. This "doctrine" is very bad for two reasons. One, although I don’t think we need to be supporting brutal dictators, particularly with taxpayer money, I don’t think we should be encouraging their ouster if they are likely to be replaced by radical Muslims who are going to be open in their support for anti-western terrorism. An Assad or Mubarak or even a Khaddafy may not like the West or America and may quietly support terrorism but their over-riding priority is maintaining their own power and they know, as Khaddafi found out in the Reagan years, they can go too far and put their very lives in danger. If, however, a group like the Muslim Brotherhood or the Revolutionary Party in Iran take power, their rhetoric will escalate in their religious fervor and they may not care about what they do. Martyrdom, after all, is their highest goal. On a national level, that is a thousand times worse than an Al Qaeda, as we have seen with Iran. Nations run by people who strap bombs to the chests of children have no concept of Mutually Assured Destruction. There is no negotiation with such regimes, none of the traditional means of applying pressure will provide deterrence. Killing the infidels, even if it means their own destruction, is an acceptable exchange for them. While the ascendency of radical Islam to positions of power in several nations in the Middle East will certainly be a concern for our security and well being, the real threat is to the nation of Israel, whose very existence is put at risk. There has not been a major war between Israel and her neighbors since 1973. Between the peace with Egypt and a practical truce with her other neighbors, the situation has been one of relative peace, Palestinian suicide bombers excepted. If, however, the secular leaders of Egypt, Syria and even Jordan are replaced by radicals who join with Hamas in Gaza in the belief that waging jihad against Israel is the highest religious duty, Israel’s position becomes much less secure. Add to that our apparently official policy of backing off our support for Israel in favor of the very radicals that desire her destruction and Israel’s very existence is threatened. If Israel can no longer count on us and her enemies know that, they will be emboldened like never before. I don’t think most people understand the ramifications of what the President is doing. His Marxism is leading to the weakening of America. He is accelerating the transfer of our wealth to other nations through his energy policy, impoverishing the citizens whose best interests he is supposed to represent. But he thinks we, as Americans, deserve to lose what be believes are our "ill gotten gains." Domestically, he is doing this three ways. First, through the energy policy mentioned above. Second, by placing us under loads and loads of debt by expanding government and rewarding his friends through the internal transfer of wealth. Finally, by destroying the dollar he is exasperating out trade deficit and undermining the very foundation of our economy. In foreign policy his anti-colonial, anti-Semitic ideology supported by his "Muslim faith" is making changes in the world that will have ramifications long after he is gone. He is supporting the ascent of radical, jihadist Islam across the Middle East and North Africa. Not just as a small cadre of terrorist groups within those nation states but as rulers of nation states themselves! Do we know what the world will look like when Taliban like governments rule nations from Iran to Morocco? If jihad is a threat when supported primarily by two nations, Saudi Arabia and Iran, imagine the mortal threat it will be when actively supported by the entire region. Outside the Middle East he is supporting the ascension of China, a repressive, communist regime. He is destroying our relations with our traditional allies, allies like Great Britain and Israel who share our fundamental values. Finally, he is subverting our very sovereignty as a nation to international organizations like the United Nations. What makes such destructive policy catastrophic is the fact that the things he is doing cannot, in most cases, be reversed. Sure, we could repeal Obamacare and save some money in the future but the treasuries have been sold, the money is gone, the debt accumulated. If the dollar is destroyed, it is gone and even if it isn’t destroyed, it will take years to recover any of its value. Once domestic energy production is eliminated through regulation and tax policy, it will take years to get that back even if those regulations and policies are eliminated. We have seen this in the Gulf of Mexico. Once the moratorium of drilling was enacted, the drilling rigs moved elsewhere, companies are not going to wait around and lose money in the hopes that two or six years from now a more amenable administration will take power. Once the Muslim Brotherhood or some other group of Muslim radicals-Al Qaeda in Libya perhaps-is in control of some country, that’s it. We have condemned an entire nation to an oppression likely to be much worse that what was there before. We will have placed the nation of Israel, the only nation in the region where a liberal democracy protects the rights of its people, where beheadings and stonings don’t happen, where Jew and Arab live together, in a position where they and their enemies know they no longer have our support, a situation as grave as they faced in 1948. If we allow Israel to be destroyed, there is no going back. The flow of wealth and technology we have transferred to China cannot be reversed. This is a direct result of the fact that we have placed entirely too much power in the hands of one man. Historians call this the development of the "imperial presidency" and it has been going on for over a century. Over time, the executive branch through its growing bureaucracy, the rise of the power of the Federal Reserve, an assumption of police powers through one crisis after another, has become, for all intents and purposes, an elected dictatorship. We may hope that the person we choose to lead our nation and, in may respects, the world, respects our history, institutions and traditions of freedom and limited government. Today we have a man in that office who sees our history as one set of oppressions after another, holds our traditions in contempt and believes in using the levers of power to destroy cherished institutions. For over two hundred years this great nation has been the example of what free men can accomplish. For the last hundred we have been in a position to lead the world, economically and militarily. We have not been perfect and sometimes made mistakes but the world was a better place because America led. We are starting to get a taste of what the world would look like when America no longer leads, its not pretty. Presently we choose not to but in the future we may not be able to. The question is this. Will historians look back on the Obama presidency as a great transformative event, one that saw the decline of America and the genesis of a new Dark Age? It has become obvious that it is no longer simply our nation that is at risk. This generation of "we the people" have a burden at this time, in this moment, that will have ramifications for the world; not just for years but decades, perhaps centuries. We can no longer use the slow, timid approach, attempting to right the ship through incremental measures. We need bold action, bold policies. We need our representatives to shut down Obama’s ability to destroy by taking back their power, our power. We are supposed to have a government with checks and balances. It is time we used them. And if the weak-kneed Republicans won’t, "we the people" must. "There are extraordinary situations which require extraordinary interposition. An exasperated people who feel they possess power are not easily restrained within limits strictly regular." Thomas Jefferson

Who's in Charge?

2011-03-25T08:35:00.000-07:00

This week we, the United States, committed ourselves to another war. We began enforcing a ‘no fly’ zone in an effort to help the rebellion, led primarily by terrorists, against a brutal dictator. And why have we decided to become engaged in this conflict? Because the United Nations said so.

Once upon a time we were a sovereign nation who would only commit blood and treasure when it was in our best interest. We adhered to a law, called the constitution, that said that only the representatives of the people, the congress, could make that commitment, and it could only be paid for if that body approved and could convince the people to buy bonds or pay taxes to support it. Not any more. Now we have a president who has no clue what to do until the United Nations, an unelected, anti-American body, tells him that it would be a good idea to put our brave men and women in harm’s way and expend billions of dollars of the Fed’s freshly printed dollars. Really? When did "we the people" choose to give up our national sovereignty and allow the United Nations determine where and how our military and tax dollars are used? I don’t remember that vote, do you?

There are two things wrong with our latest "intervention" that concern me. One is the above mentioned subservience to the United Nations. That is an organization we should have pulled out of a long time ago. In fact, it was set up in a way to put us at a disadvantage in any attempt gain support for any action we may believe is in our best interest. It is a waste of our money and everyone else’s. It is corrupt from top to bottom, it is comprised primarily of dictators and thugs and even our supposed ‘friends’ only vote with us half the time. It puts countries like Libya and Iran on the Human Rights Council and its blue helmeted soldiers often engage in the same atrocious activities they are supposed to prevent. We may complain about the stupidity and corruption in our government but the UN takes it to a whole new level. Knowing that most nations see the UN simply as a tool to bleed us of billions of dollars, humiliate us and keep us from acting in our best interests through supposed ‘international' condemnation, the last governmental body we should be taking direction from is the United Nations. I’d withdrawal from that worthless organization, pull the plug on all funding, give them six months to move out of New York and use that building for something useful, rent it out to some greedy capitalists, perhaps.

The second problem is our policy of engaging in military action in an attempt to ‘fix’ problems in nations where no national security interest, much less a threat, can be determined. Is Khaddafy an evil guy? Yes. Has he killed American citizens? Yes. Is that why we are going into Libya now? No. When we found out Khaddafy was training terrorists and actually killing Americans, that was the time to engage in military action. Ronald Reagan should have bombed that country until Khaddafy and his terrorists were annihilated and then left. We should have done the same to the Taliban in Afghanistan for their involvement in 9/11. That is a compelling national security interest. We should let it be known that no nation and no two-bit dictator can target Americans anywhere in the world with impunity. Now the world knows that we will do nothing unless the UN lets us! Iran, Saudi Arabia, Libya, Syria, any country that is so inclined can provide material support for terrorist activities without fear of serious repercussions. That puts a target on the chest of every American in the world, including you as you sit at your computer here at home.
That being said, what America needs is decisive leadership and freedom of action. That requires a strong, independent America, something we have not had for decades. I am not talking about our military capability which is unequaled in the world, by far. I am talking about the fact that our actions on the international stage are held hostage by our financial and energy dependence. Why is the Middle East a national security interest? Because we get so much oil from them. What if we were energy independent? What if we didn’t need a drop of oil from any nation in the Middle East? There would be no need for any military presence in the region other than a carrier group in the Indian Ocean to protect our shipping, provide emergency natural disaster relief or provide quick strike capability if we find ourselves threatened or attacked by some weasel. There certainly would be no need to intervene in a civil war, no matter how brutal, under the guise of maintaining our oil supply. We would stop our funding of terrorists by funneling hundreds of billions of dollars in the coffers of their supporters like those in Saudi Arabia. We would also stop funding the buildup of the Chinese military through the interest we pay them. We could finally return to the foreign policy of our founders who believed it improper to meddle in the internal affairs of other nations.

It is our dependence that requires our military intervention all over the world. We feel obligated to act in the interests of those to whom we owe money and the politicians need to keep the oil flowing because if it stops, prices skyrocket, people get upset, and they don’t get reelected. Until we get a handle on our financial situation and start developing our own vast resources, we are going to be at the mercy of events in the world rather than shaping them. We should be providing leadership in the world but that leadership should rarely be military in nature. Our leadership should be based on the benefits of our friendship, benefits not based on military alliances but on trade. We should be using our tariffs to reward nations that embrace our values of freedom and civility and demonstrate support and friendship to us and withhold our trade from regimes that do not meet basic standards of human rights and freedom. A strong and independent America would not have been funneling billions of dollars into Egypt to support Hosni Mubarak. A strong and independent America would not be putting up with the absurd trade relation we have with China. A strong and independent America would not need to buy anything, including oil, from nations that fund terrorism. Unfortunately, we are not strong and independent; we are broke, liable to our lenders, subject to those who provide our basic resources and terrified that at some point someone will ask too much of us and force us to actually make some hard decisions. As long as this situation exists, we will be like a reed blown in the wind, hostage to others, subject to the whims of the United Nations and we will spill the blood of our brave men and women and expend our hard earned treasure to prop up a situation that is unsustainable by definition. Who’s in charge? Everyone but us.

Are the Union Protesters...Us?

2011-02-28T06:05:00.001-08:00

For two weeks now we have been watching the events in Wisconsin, the battle between the new Republican Governor Scott Walker and the public employee union. I’m sure you have heard the facts. Governor Walker wants to eliminate collective bargaining rights for everything except salaries and to have the workers pay a small portion of their health care and pension costs. He is doing this because Wisconsin is facing a huge budget deficit. Like most states, they have spent too much and part of that spending has been on what can only be described as gold-plated salary and benefit packages for public sector employees. Most of us, the ones whose hard earned money is forcibly extracted from us to pay for this union tribute can only dream of making 20 to 40% more money and having someone else pay for our health care and retirement. Support for these union whiners is low among the average taxpayer because we know we’re being fleeced.

Before you allow your indignation at the injustice of it all get you too hot under the collar, there is something we all need to consider. Are we any different? Sure, we are all upset because we think the unions and the government workers are milking the system for their own benefit but aren’t we doing the same thing? We don’t think we can afford to pay for the high salary and benefit packages for this specific group and they are upset because they have become accustomed to receiving them, they think they’re "entitled." What would our reaction be if someone suggested that the things we think we are "entitled" to from our government were cut or eliminated? I dare say that many of the same people protesting big government may take to the streets to protect the piece of the pie they think is theirs.

Consider the idea of the government pension. A government employee puts in his or her thirty or forty years of service (or even twenty in some cases) and then they retire and the taxpayer has to continue to pay them for not working for the rest of their lives! Their contribution to this system is token at best. Great deal if you can get it, right? You already do! Its called Social Security. You work until you’re sixty-five, (a bit longer than the government employee is required to but they’re special) you pay in a set amount, (again a bit more than a government employee) and then you collect taxpayer money for the rest of your life for doing nothing. Hold on a minute, you say, I paid into that, I’m just getting back what I paid in. No, you’re not. If you were, there would be no worry about Social Security going "broke" because there would be a big pot of money somewhere and in that pot would be an account with your name on it and you would get back what you paid in with a little interest. If you lived longer than your money, too bad. But no matter how long you live, the checks keep coming. Who do you think makes up the difference? Current working people.

Let me give you an example. The first person to collect social security was Ida Fuller who received her first check in 1940. She had paid in the grand total of $24.75. Her first monthly check was for $22.54! She lived to be one hundred years old, collecting $22,888 in benefits. Who paid that additional $22,886? Other people who had their hard earned money confiscated from them to support Ida for thirty-five years so she could sit in her rocking chair on the front porch. A government employee pension is just forcing one citizen to support another for the rest of his life just because he is a member of a certain class; i.e. government employees. Social Security is a government pension that forces one citizen to support another for the rest of his life just because he is a member of a certain class; i.e. old people. Forcibly confiscating money from one citizen to give it to another for any reason is morally reprehensible, yet we seem to think it is alright in some cases but not others.

TEA partiers rose up en masse last year to protest ObamaCare, but how many called for an end of all government involvement in health care? Yes, I’m talking about Medicare and Medicaid. ObamaCare, as we all know, is the first step, a giant one, toward single payer, government controlled health care. What is Medicare/Medicaid? Single payer, government controlled health care. The only difference is that Medicare and Medicaid are limited to specific groups. Sound familiar? Just as our money is confiscated from all of us to pay for the health care of a specific group; i.e. government workers, so our money is confiscated from all of us to pay for the health care of a specific group; i.e. old people and the poor. The difference is one of scope and degree, not substance. If it is acceptable for government to take money from one person to pay for another's health care for any reason, why can’t the argument be made, more consistently, that we should all have our money taken from us, put into a big pot, and used to pay for everyone’s health care; under the watchful eyes of government bean counters, of course. Socialism is all a slippery slope. Once it is acceptable to take from one to give to another for any reason, the fairest system and most consistent argument is in favor of taking from everyone according to their ability and giving to everyone according to their need.

Do you see the point? We are no different than the union protesters. The unions collude with the Democrats to extract more and more money from other people to get their benefits. What are we doing? We are colluding with politicians of both parties to extract money from other people for our benefit. In our case, we expect the government to take money from people higher on the economic ladder than we are. That is, of course, not enough. So we borrow money from our children and grandchildren. Even that is not enough. So we allow the Federal Reserve to print the remainder, putting the entire nation at risk of an economic catastrophe. As long as we get ours now, we won’t worry about tomorrow. It is immoral and irresponsible. For states that can’t print money, tomorrow has arrived and those receiving benefits are upset that it happened on their watch. Tomorrow is just about here for the Federal Government as well. We are all just a bunch of addicts, always expecting the pusher to be there with the goods. What happens when the goods are no longer there? Will we take to the streets, bellicose and irascible in our withdrawal like the government unions in Wisconsin or the people of Greece? Or will we come to the rational conclusion that the system we have perpetuated for almost one hundred years is immoral and unsustainable and return to the idea that each man in responsible for himself and his charity toward those less fortunate than himself should not be coerced. That is a moral and sustainable society. That is America.

Democracy in Egypt

2011-02-13T18:09:00.000-08:00

Everyone is ecstatic that a brutal dictator has fallen in Egypt. The word you hear over and over again is "Democracy!" "Democracy!" "Democracy!" All is going to be sunshine and roses from now on. Sorry, I don’t buy it. 2011 in Egypt is not 1776 America. There may be some Egyptians that have a concept of self rule that includes a respect for natural rights but they are not a majority, not by a long shot. Most Egyptians are fine with killing people who commit adultery or abandon Islam. That men and women should be separated. (I’m sure the burka can’t be far behind) They think cutting off the hands of thieves is appropriate and honor killings are moral. These are not tolerant people who have an innate sense of justice, fairness or proportion. When the democracy, or mob rule, of Egypt results in a fundamentalist Islamic regime as it did in Iran or, more recently, as a result of the "democratic" process in Gaza, I, for one, will not be surprised. But according to what the Obama administration has been saying, they will be.
The fact is this. Islam is a brutal political and religious ideology that is the antithesis of a tolerant, moral society that respects the natural rights of men and women, their lives, their liberties, their property and their ability to pursue happiness as they see fit. Any nation in which Islam is the majority religion and allows a purely democratic process will subjugate its people through the implementation of sharia law and the people will accept it. Islam means "submission" for a reason. Islam teaches people to be slaves and believes that it is right and proper to use force in the application of its ideology. For fourteen hundred years the people of the Middle East have be cultured to accept the brutality of Islam as God’s will and two weeks of protest by a few "westernized" Arabs is not going to change that. Democracy only works if a respect for natural rights is given greater authority than that of a majority vote.

It is time we opened our eyes and moved beyond political correctness and multiculturalism. Not all societies are equal, some are better than others. Can we really equate a society that appoints women to positions of power, secretary of state for example, and one that forces women to cover themselves head to toe and stones them if they are seen in public with a man who’s not a relative? Can we equate a society that is squeamish about the death penalty for the most heinous crimes, believing that putting criminals "to sleep" may be cruel and unusual punishment with a society that beheads people with dull knives and cuts the hands off of thieves? Can we equate a society where economic freedom and the freedom of travel is exercised by all to a society in which women aren’t even allowed to drive or go to school? Can we really equate a society that coddles its children too much to one that believes it is acceptable to strap bombs on them and blow them up? Western societies may not be perfect but if I had my choice, I’d much rather live in one of them than under the sanguine system of sharia. My guess is, you would too.

So after three weeks of our current administration muddling along, sending conflicting messages and generally showing the total ineptness in foreign policy that has been their hallmark, what should our relationship be with Islamic nations? Since the end of World War I we have made one bad decision after another in relation to middle eastern nations and have painted ourselves into a corner. We have allowed ourselves two obvious choices in our current world. We can support a despot who may be "secular" to a degree, and who allows us to buy some friendship. That does nothing but create resentment toward us, a nation that is supposed to be standing for liberty and human rights. The other option is to keep our hands off and let the people decide, even if it results in terrorist, anti-American organizations like Hamas or the Muslim Brotherhood taking control, creating even more rogue nations that aid and abet criminals and murderers. This is because we don’t understand the Islamic world or the Islamic religion. Islam is not like Christianity or Judaism, its god is not like YHVH or Jesus. The god of Islam believes that it is just fine to spread his "way" at the point of a sword and it has been that way since the beginning with Mohammed. The god of Islam does not love all people, infidels are not worthy of respect or even life. The god of Islam does not allow for freedom of action, conscience or variation, or so his followers appear to believe through their barbaric repression of any such activity.

If we are looking for equivalency, then Islam is closest to communism. It is a malevolent political ideology that brings misery, slavery, destruction and death wherever it establishes itself. I believe our policy toward Islam should be one of containment, just like we did with communism in the last century. Islamists need to be marginalized and the only way that is going to happen is if we stop buying the only resource that gives them power, oil. Islamic countries, without the help of western technology, would produce nothing of value just as communist countries produce nothing of value. If the "infidels" pulled out of Islamic countries, in a few years they wouldn’t even be able to get their oil out of the ground. If we developed our own resources, we could be independent of their oil and the wealth they use to spread their ideology and terrorism would dry up. This would give us the freedom of action we need to support uprisings like the one in Iran recently, in which the people involved actually have a rudimentary understanding of liberty and natural rights. We need to support efforts, particularly in Europe, to maintain historical western culture, efforts they are finally beginning to make as they have awakened to the threat. At home, we must get over our imposed cultural sensitivity, political correctness and our fascination with multiculturalism and take Muslim leadership at its word when it says that it wants America sharia compliant and that the flag of Islam will fly over the White House. We should take that threat no less seriously than Khruschev’s threat to "bury" us. That means severe restriction on travel from Islamic countries, the deportation of any imam that preaches anti-western hate, the removal of Islamic organizations from prisons and the prohibition of Muslims from our military.

Harsh, yes. But it is time we took a longer view of history. The communists understood this. Major military confrontation was unlikely to yield positive results so infiltration was the preferred method. Unfortunately, they have been very successful. By practically taking over education and media in this country communists/progressives/statists have done more to advance their cause and accomplish the weakening of our society, economy and military effectiveness than anything the old Soviet Union was able to do. But it took generations to accomplish. A larger and larger portion of the American population is finally opening their eyes to this destructive threat. In Europe, it has taken thirty or forty years for Islam to gain the power it has by abusing free institutions and exploiting the self-loathing encouraged in western countries by the multiculturalists. Most Muslims in Europe don’t believe in assimilation and by Europe’s accommodation of this lack of a desire to incorporate, succeeding generations of Muslims have become even more radical and fundamental than their parents. Now there are large enclaves of Islamic radicals all over Europe with their own sharia courts, their loud and violent protests are tolerated, and their ability to abuse free societies makes them much more effective terrorists.

Several European countries are starting to awaken. They have seen the threat to their culture and their way of life, they have seen that their extreme tolerance has excused Muslim intolerance to a degree that they are now living in fear. No one who lives in fear can live free. An individual or nation whose action is dictated by the reaction of the "Arab street"or the threat of terrorism has already become a slave of Islam, an infidel whose usefulness at the moment is the only thing that precludes his death. However, just as Europe is moving in the opposite direction we are fiscally, so we, particularly under the current administration, are becoming more accommodating toward Islamic extremism, not less. When the head of national intelligence doesn’t have the wherewithal to understand the violent nature of the Muslim Brotherhood, we are in trouble. When we refuse to question radicals in our military like the Fort Hood murderer for fear of being labeled racist or intolerant, we are in deep trouble. When we refuse to profile at airports because CAIR might issue a negative press release, it puts us all in danger. When we tolerate Islamic leaders that preach hate and the violent overthrow of our own government in the name of free speech and tolerance, we are signing our own death warrant.

We are only free to the degree we, as a society, value that freedom. If we expect to remain free we cannot continue to tolerate violent ideologies that would reduce us to slavery. If a Soviet army had attempted to invade to impose their ideology upon us by force, would we have opened the gates and surrendered? Of course not. We would have used every means at our disposal to repel them and preserve our liberty. Fifty years ago we understood the titanic struggle we were engaged in. Whether it was a communist with a gun or one with a book, a communist was a communist and every one of them had the same goal, the destruction of America and the subjugation of the world under communist rule. Islam is no different. Whether a Muslim appears with a bomb, a gun or a Koran, his goal is the same. The destruction of western culture and the imposition of sharia law on the world. There may be a few Muslims who appreciate the freedom of the West, who just want to pray five times a day, fast during Ramadan, give to charity, have no aim beyond living according to the dictates of their conscience and don’t believe in using force and violence to advance their beliefs. However, the majority of the Muslims in the world fall into two other categories. There are the minority who are willing, in the present, to use violence to achieve the spread of Islam in the world, following the savage example of their "esteemed" founder, Mohammed. Then there are the majority who, while not currently taking up arms, provide moral support to those who do and if they should ever find themselves in a situation in which they are the majority or Islam has become the de facto political ideology of the land in which they live would heartily embrace the malicious imposition of sharia and the violent subjugation of infidels.

There may be such a thing as a peaceful and moderate Muslim but there is no such a thing as peaceful and moderate Islam, and there has not been since its inception. There is only one way that is going to change and it is going to take a long time, generations, in fact. There must be a growing number of individuals in Islamic countries that learn to appreciate the value of life and liberty, of freedom of conscience, of fundamental natural human rights. Just as Christianity evolved out of the brutality of the Inquisition (although Christianity was not founded as a violent political ideology), Islam must undergo a fundamental change. I believe some of the protesters in Egypt and those in Iran a few years ago have undergone this transformation but they are far from a majority. Even so, they need to be supported. If we ever expect a stable and peaceful world, the desire to coexist cannot be one sided. Freedom of conscience and action and a respect for the life and liberty of your fellow man must be the rule for all. The threat of those who do not appreciate those values to those that do must be taken very seriously. Freedom for ourselves and our posterity is worth fighting for and it is time we realized we are, in reality, in a war for world domination. That is the objective of Islam and they have been pursuing it for fourteen hundred years. They came close to defeating the West once, catching them unprepared. With hundreds of billions of petrodollars at their disposal, they are making a concentrated effort once again. The question is, will we join with those in Europe who have finally realized the grave nature of the struggle and engage in not just a military struggle but in the battle of ideas in which we believe in and support the value of freedom and liberty for all men and women? Or will we continue to deny reality until it, quite literally, blows up in our face?

Coercion and Evil

2011-02-09T05:50:00.000-08:00

Coercion and evil are two things most of us believe are negative, things that should not be part of our lives as free individuals. Yet the insidious nature of the corruption of the American experiment has allowed us to turn a blind eye to our oppression, compelling us to focus on insignificant choices in entertainment and distraction while the chains that bind us grow thicker and heavier. Our nation was founded on the premise that the individual; his life, liberty and property, was supreme, that a man was the master of his fate unencumbered by the advantages or disadvantages of birth, that the fruits of his labor belonged to himself alone, that his freedom of action was limited only by the prohibition of violating the natural rights of another. The Constitution was a compact of individuals, "We the people." In our constitutional republic the individual is sovereign and is the source of all government authority, he is supreme even over the constitution itself, subject only to the natural law of the Creator. The Constitution defines the authority voluntarily relinquished to public servants who are constrained by the law. The legal authority of the government to use physical force to compel obedience or punish wrongdoing is strictly limited to specifically defined areas and can only be utilized after due process.

Today that ideal is upside down. We have allowed the system to be turned on its head so the individual is now at the bottom; a serf, a subject, a slave to a system in which an elite cartel of interests utilize the power of government to consolidate and expand their power and wealth. We, our children and our grandchildren exist to serve the needs of the state as opposed to the state existing only to serve our specifically defined wishes. Through "public" education and media the ruling class has convinced us that democracy exists. However, if our choices consist only of two parties which, despite their rhetoric, pursuing the same basic goals and policies, serve only to enslave us to an ever expanding government and whose real power has diminished as that of the ever expanding bureaucracy has grown, can we really say we live in a system substantially different than that of the one party autocratic rule we have been taught to deride around the world?

Coercion is defined as the use of force to compel or restrain. It is the use of force, or the threat to use force, to make us do something we would not freely choose to do. When a mugger accosts you on the street with a gun, he is threatening to use deadly force to compel you to give him something valuable, the products of your labor, that you otherwise would not relinquish. That is an example of coercion we can all understand. A thief stealing your property or even your life is wrong, no one questions that. Yet when the government uses the threat of force, fine or imprisonment, to coerce us to relinquish our property for purposes not in our contract or to give it to someone else, we meekly submit to the injustice. When the government uses the threat of force through an army of bureaucrats in its multitude of agencies to target businesses who create products or provide services they don’t approve of or are politically incorrect at the moment, we accept it as the government working in our best interest even as it eliminates our freedom to choose what we believe is best for us. When the government approves dangerous drugs or withholds experimental treatments from desperate people, no one protests. When the government threatens parents with fines or imprisonment if they don’t send their children to the government indoctrination centers we call public schools and hold the power over our very homes if we refuse to pay for such a horrendous failure of a system, we timidly surrender. When, through the draft or "selective service," the government asserts a claim on our very lives, we hardly whimper. Certainly the government does not yet have the resources to prosecute every minor infraction but by selectively targeting those who dare to raise their heads above the herd, they can keep the rest of us living in fear. In other countries where a small group uses force to target highly visible people or organizations in order to bring about a political result or shape public opinion we call it terrorism. Yet individuals and business in this country live in fear of the IRS, the EPA, the FDA, OSHA and a host of other government agencies and their supporters and we accept it as normal!

Evil is "having bad natural qualities", something that causes harm, sorrow, distress or calamity. At what point did we stop looking at government as did Thomas Paine? "Government, even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one." Or George Washington who said, "Government is not reason, it is not eloquence, it is force; like fire a troublesome servant and a fearfulsome master. Never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action." Yet it is before the altar of government we kneel in supplication. Through our inattention and inaction we have allowed it to become irresponsible and intolerable. We have forgotten who we are as free men and women. We have ceased to be the informed and educated people we once were. We have allowed ourselves to be bought off with other people’s money. We have deluded ourselves into believing we can use government for our own benefit. We have become isolated and distracted. We have been conditioned to tolerate the gravest injustices and the theft of our property, our lives and our souls. The greater the evil has grown, the more blind we have become and the more difficult it is to confront.

Confront it we must, if we and our posterity are to live free of oppression and tyranny. Our national government, though its unbridled quest for power, has spent too much to buy us off and whose oppression of those who cannot be bought off is becoming all to obvious. It has caused harm, sorrow and distress to our culture, our families and to the very fabric of our lives. Calamity is soon to follow. It is time to wake up and recognize the power of the individual. It is time we rose up and declared our sovereignty in the face of oppression. It is time we stopped playing the game of the tyrants and enforced the original rules. Our time is now. No less than the time of the revolution, "the times that tried men’s souls" when the enemies of freedom seemed overwhelming, today is the day when true patriots must be willing to pledge their lives, fortunes and sacred honor, to make the sacrifices necessary so the next generation can enjoy the fruits of liberty, free from the terrorism of our current oppressors.

A Most Contentious Congress?

2011-01-26T16:39:00.001-08:00

Ever since the tragic events is Tucson, there has been constant chattering debate over our political discourse. There have been complaints about the war imagery, inflammatory statements and heated rhetoric. This culminated in the mixed seating among congresspeople at the State of the Union. While politicians and pundits on both sides accuse and apologize for our poisoned political discourse, they have forgetten two things. First, the majority of Americans are not tuned in to it, aren’t aware of it and don’t care. While the TEA party movement has brought a lot of people into the circle of political interest, most Americans still know more about American Idol and the Super Bowl than they do about the issues politicians squabble about. Second, it has been a lot worse in the past.

The problem with our current political discourse is not its language. Analogies, metaphors, and colorful expressions have always been used to articulate the passions of people who want a say in how they are governed. That is to be expected as long as people have a say. The more disconnected or powerless people feel, the louder they feel they need to be. People want to be heard because government is the only entity that can can legally use force to ensure compliance and people want to be assured that power is used responsibly and in accord with their ideals. Whether they are TEA party people in America or protesters in Egypt or Tunisia, the heart of man yearns for liberty and justice and will only accommodate oppression for so long.

The problem today is the content, not the language. What is it that politicians argue about? Let’s look at a few examples brought up in the State of the Union address. The first and most obvious is health care. Not the first thing he mentioned but presented none the less. What is the argument? On one side is the president and the Democrats who pushed the "reform" package through congress over Republican objections that it was a government take over of the American health care system. On the other side the Democrats argued that Republicans don’t care about the sick and dying. So what are politicians discussing? Whether the health care bill should be reformed or replaced. Both parties assume that the government will be involved in health care, that it should be involved in health care and that the American people are not intelligent enough to make their own health care decisions. So both sides will squabble over the specifics of taxes, spending and regulation. Few will ask the question, "Why should the government be involved in health care at all?"

The reason for this is because the slippery slope goes both ways and "conservative" Republicans are scared to death of it. What I mean is this. If the question becomes, "Why is the government involved in health care at all" then not only does the legitimacy of ObamaCare come into question but so does Medicare. We all know what happens when the pillars of our welfare state; Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, are questioned. Those who so much as hint at even the slightest changes are accused of the most heinous intentions and callous crimes. The problem is that because hardly any politicians, and the Americans who elect them, question the appropriateness of government involvement in health care, the debate is over the form that involvement takes and not over why government should insert itself at all. By not raising the issue, the moral high ground is conceded to the statists because once the premise of government involvement in an issue is accepted, no good argument can be advanced for limiting its expansion or its proliferation into other areas. Once Medicare is accepted, Medicaid and ObamaCare are logical expansions of the premise that it is the government’s responsibility to ensure citizens have access to health care. Once the idea that government should provide for the elderly poor through Social Security, why shouldn’t government be involved in meeting the needs of the rest of the poor? Once government decides it is proper to protect you from businesses and corporations, some of whom may have put out inferior products, then why wouldn’t it be proper for it to regulate every transaction and contract in the interest of our safety?

We have conceded so much because we are afraid of engaging in the most important debate. The TEA party is a start and there are those who are beginning to ask the hard questions and debate the crucial issues. Those debates are slowly making their way into our political discourse beyond the kitchen table, Libertarian circles and survivalists and that is a good thing. The growing emphasis on the natural rights enshrined in our Constitution even within congress is a positive step. What we need to do is finally resolve the schizophrenia we, the American people, have developed over the last century. On the one hand we love liberty and freedom and know that government involvement in any area is a recipe for inefficiency, incompetence and a myriad of negative intended and unintended consequences. On the other hand we are addicted to government largess and continually to vote for politicians who promise, and deliver, more of the same. Is that not what the whole State of the Union speech was about? Government "investments" in Internet access, high speed rail, "clean" energy, education and health care, to name a few. Why should the government ensure Internet access or high speed rail service? Why should government determine what kind of energy we use or what kind of education our children receive? Why should government force us into investment, retirement or health care decisions? It is the belief that it should be that has led us to the financial and cultural disaster we find ourselves in.

It is time to move the debate from how the government should involve itself in all these issues to why the government should be involved at all. The facts, logic and common sense are all on the side of those who believe that government involvement in almost everything has been, and continues to be, an exhorbitantly expensive disaster. It is time we start to make the case for absolute economic freedom, where every man and woman can pursue their dreams in complete liberty as long as they don’t negatively impact the natural rights of their fellows. It is time we argue against the morally reprehensible idea that our production and the wealth our hard work has allowed us to acquire belongs to anyone else and it is the government’s job to forcibly confiscate the results of our hard work and give it to another for any reason. It is time to reject the idea that we, the American people, the most generous in the history of the world, need to have our charity forced. It is time to forward the idea that free men and women in society, and not government, will come up with the best solutions for social and economic problems. It is time to expect our politicians to move beyond gimmicks, like where they sit or what ribbon they wear, and stand up for our natural rights, develop constructive ideas for dismantling the creature on the Potomac and fulfill the president’s stated vision of an America that once again moves to the front of the line in the world.

Constitutional Reverence

2011-01-13T13:24:00.001-08:00

With the swearing in of the new congress, an interesting controversy has arisen. Speaker Boehner and the new Republican majority in the house not only read the Constitution of the United States, the document every congressman, president, soldier and federal employee swears to uphold and defend, but they want to cite it as justification for any law they pass. Many Democrats and liberals/statists have decried this as a stunt, a fetish, unnecessary and foolish. To a statist any impediment, real or imagined, that stands in the way of increasing government power and control is anathema, kryptonite or, even better, the wooden stake in the heart of the totalitarian monster.

As always, there are two extremes. On the Democrat, statist side, the Constitution is an antiquated document that is simply ignored. Who can forget ex-speaker Pelosi’s reply when asked for the constitutional justification for the health care bill; "are you kidding?" To a totalitarian, there are no practical limits to government’s power, constitution or no constitution. To them, it is occasionally a tool to justify a libertine agenda, a twisted cover for the restriction of liberty, or an antique full of politically incorrect ideas whose time has past. On the other side are the Republicans and conservatives who hold the Constitution to be divinely inspired, the greatest organization of government ever to be implemented on earth. Of course, conservatives in government who believe that the Constitution should be adhered to according to its plain meaning and original intent rarely, if ever, go on record as opposing the more popular social programs like Medicare and Social Security that are the heart and soul of the redistibutionist program that conditioned the American people to accept the forcible extraction of their wealth and limits on their freedom necessary for our massive government expansion. It was just such a government that the framers of the Constitution feared and sought to prevent.

The Constitution fits neither of these extremes. It is the law of the land, not to be ignored or abused, but it is not divinely inspired, etched in stone, whose form and composition can never be surpassed. The truth is that the constitution was the best means the framers could come up with to implement the ends eloquently stated in the Declaration of Independence. As such, it was a document of compromises necessary for the times, the two major conflicting goals of which were first, to preserve the libertarian ideals for which the revolution was fought and second, to form a government strong enough to forge a nation out of thirteen very different states. I would also remind you that some very intelligent and committed patriots, Patrick Henry and George Mason among them, were passionately opposed to the adoption of the Constitution because they saw how its ambiguities and powers could be misused in the hands of those who did not share their absolute commitment to the people’s liberty.

The conversation we, as a nation, are having about the Constitution is a very promising step but we cannot become fixated by it nor use it in the way the statists have to simply give cover to an agenda that may not meet with the approval of Washington or Jefferson either. The fact is the Constitution, because it is a means to an end, will only have value for our liberty to the extent those to whom its implementation is entrusted value those original revolutionary ends. We have seen the violence that can be done to the constitution by those who do not hold our original principles of liberty and private property in high esteem. Finding a constitutional justification for Medicare or the EPA is no different than finding justification for homosexuality in the Bible. It is not there. One can go through all kind of verbal gymnastics and rationalizations but in either case, an honest evaluation of the history, intent and the plain language of either document will show that not only is either outside the tenor of the writ but contrary to their plain language. While those who try to justify their statism by cloaking it in the Constitution are rightly condemned by those who value it, politicians and officials who decry such "unconstitutional" encroachments of government power are no better when they demonstrate their dishonesty and inconsistency through their support of popular but equally unconstitutional programs. Popularity or longevity are not and cannot be the test for constitutionality.

The conversation we really need to have is over the ideals we will apply through the constitution. What do we believe about the role of government and the nature of man? What do we mean by terms like freedom, liberty, tyranny and totalitarianism? What is the difference between societal duty and government enforcement? How are rights and responsibilities to our fellow man protected and discharged? It is only when we understand who we are that we will become the men and women we were created to be and find our rightful place in society and the world.

The only thing that will restore our liberty under a limited government is if the people who are entrusted with our government truly believe "that all men are created equal and are endowed by by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men..." A man or woman in congress who was committed to that would never vote to take the hard earned property of one man and give it to another. A president who believed it would never enforce a law that interfered with the ability of one man to contract for a good or service with another. A judge who believed it would never allow an individual to force his morality on the majority just because he found himself offended. A government that operated according to the principle that its only role was to protect basic God-given rights would not be involved in ninety five percent of what our present government is involved in. A government that seeks only to protect and not to provide will require very little of its citizen’s liberty or wealth. It is when the men and women in our government believe in and apply these original revolutionary ideals through the Constitution that we will once again be a beacon of true freedom for all the nations of the world.

The Right to Profile

2010-12-03T04:40:00.000-08:00

As we bemoan the many ills of our society today, one of the ones often mentioned is that of our general cultural decline. Mores and values that were the norm fifty or one hundred years ago are almost non-existent, taboo behaviors of past eras are now not only accepted but granted privileged status. This is important because it is common history, values and experience that provide cohesion for a people, society and culture. Today everyone recognizes how divided we are and that is due, in large part, to the disintegration of the things that have historically provided our national "glue".

We must first identify what provided that cohesion in the past. Our nation was founded on several principles, some of which were in conflict and provided a dynamic tension that forced us to engage in constant cultural debate. The men who settled Jamestown did so primarily because they were seeking fortune. The were the rugged individualists who set out for a new land for the unlimited opportunity it offered, opportunities that were non-existent in the stratified society of England. On the other hand were the "pilgrims" who settled Massachusetts. They came for religious, and by extension, intellectual, freedom. They had come to the conclusion that the church of England was not providing the best way to interact with God and they devised their own. It requires a certain mindset to swim against a well established tide and just as carving a home out of the wilderness requires courage and perseverance, so does that ability to create a whole new theology and form of worship within a dominant culture. Particularly where that culture not only has the societal norms that enforce conformity, but the legal ones as well.

On the American continent there was a dynamic cultural environment on a scale that would have been impossible in Europe. There were religious societies founded on intellectual and religious freedom of conscience that wanted to enforce conformity. There were unbridled capitalists who saw a duty to help the poor. It was the rugged individualist working within a community essential to everyone's success. All of them had the shared experience of carving out a new home in the wilderness of America.

So what were the things that held us together in the past? Regardless of sect, the basics of the Christian religion provided the framework for this wilderness society. The basic belief in God and his judgement, the duty of charity, the basic morality provided by the Ten Commandments and the teachings of Jesus established the rules under which society operated. Self government, individually and corporately, was made necessary by the distance form England as well as England's policy of "benign neglect". The duty of every man pulling his own weight, an essential characteristic in a frontier setting, as well as the right of every man to the products of that labor. The key to understand here is that these were societal mores and values created by shared experiences and strongly held beliefs. Nearly every man understood the basics of his duty in society, they knew certain behaviors were expected or prohibited. There was a rudimentary legal framework in the fledgling colonies, but it was societal expectation coupled with an absolute freedom of association that reinforced the cultural mores.

So what happened? Very simply, government happened. A totalitarian view of government in which the informal mores and values created by the shared experiences of the greater society were replaced by laws and regulations created by a small group of men with personal political and social agendas.

"Some writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is patron, the last is punisher." Thomas Paine

Society develops through the free associations of men at liberty to pursue their happiness. Every man as an individual has the right to choose with whom he will be friends with, live with, do business with and which groups he chooses to join. Because the majority of the citizens shared a national experience and, yes, a shared religion, the culture was relatively homogenous at a fundamental level and developed slowly over time as circumstances changed. If an individual or a small group chose to reject the mores of the culture, the people of the culture had the ultimate right of every society; ostracism, the ability to use the freedom of association to not associate with an individual or member of a group with which the free man does not agree or approve of. The person subject to being ostracized has two choices. He can leave the community and go somewhere else. Roger Williams founded Rhode Island when he was kicked out of the Massachusetts colony. The Mormons went to Utah. The other choice is to abandon the beliefs or behavior that caused the ostracism. Either way, the dominate society keeps its mores and values intact, no government action required.
Our society’s loss of mores, values and cohesion can be directly tied to the loss of its ability to ostracize which is, in fact, the loss of our freedom to freely associate, a very fundamental freedom indeed. This is due to the fact that we have replaced informal societal application of norms with government administration. Instead of the vast majority of the citizens choosing the composition of their society, a small group of government bureaucrats, legislators and/or judges does. For example, lets take the hot button of homosexuality. In times past, society kept any such behavior underground where it would not influence the larger society. How intolerant. Did that violate the rights of someone who engaged in such behavior? Only if it became violent.

"All men are born free and independent, and have certain natural, essential and unalienable rights, among which may be reckoned the right of enjoying and defending their lives and liberties; that of acquiring, possessing and protecting property; in fine, that of seeking and obtaining their safety and happiness." John Adams

The only way I, as an individual, can violate your rights is through physical assault that threatens your life, false imprisonment that restricts your liberty or fraud or theft which deprives you of your property. I can only violate your rights by actually taking specific action. I cannot violate your rights by refraining from action, physical or commercial. Regardless of what people say today, it does not violate the rights of a homosexual, or any other individual in any other group or class, if I choose not to enter into a contract with him or her. The freedom to freely contract (or not) for the disposition of personal property is a most fundamental right, an extension of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. I don’t have to rent my apartment to Adam and Steve if I don’t agree with their behavior or lifestyle. I don’t have to sell products to them, I don’t have to hire them, I don’t have to let them into my private club or association, I don’t have to live next to them or stand next to them on the bus. That is my choice, an exercise of my freedom just as it is an exercise of theirs to engage is a particular lifestyle. If the larger society eventually finds such "neanderthal" attitudes offensive, I will be the one ostracized and I will have the choice of changing my beliefs and behavior or leaving.

Those choices have been taken out of our hands now. Previously deviant behavior now constitutes a legally protected class. If society attempts to disassociate from individuals whose behavior it finds offensive or destructive, individuals or groups can be held legally liable and subject to the full force and power of the state to take away their money or freedom. The state now chooses our associations and with whom we do business. Now if I have a room for rent in my home, I must rent it to the homosexual couple even though I fear for the well being and safety of my children. My church must fill its youth pastor opening with a transvestite. I can’t refuse to sell munitions to the Yemeni Muslim immigrant. If I try, I will be accused of discrimination, the great four letter word of our generation. We must define discrimination for it has become a used and abused word in our politically correct environment. Our foundational documents states that all men are created equal. Therefore "discrimination" based on human factors like race or sex are contrary to our highest ideals. Discrimination based on chosen behavior, however, is normal. We base impressions on an individual’s expressions or dress. Those impressions often determine whether or not we choose to voluntarily associate with someone. If we see an individual dressed as a gang-banger approach us, we may become alarmed. If the Muslim on the plane beings shouting "Allah Akabar", we may become even more alarmed. Discrimination is part of our makeup and is necessary for our survival as individuals and as a society. However, now the government decides where and when we can discriminate. For example, we can have a congressional black caucus but a white caucus is unacceptable. We can have black history month but not white history month. We can abolish Christian expression in the public arena and support Muslim ones. Homosexuality can be taught in government schools but not abstinence. We can eliminate highly qualified individuals for jobs based on race or sex and promote lesser qualified individuals based on race or sex. Our ability to exercise discrimination based on our experience has been replaced by a distant government’s discrimination based on very different criteria. If we as individuals in society are prohibited from exercising discernment, the cohesion that exists due to shared values will disintegrate.

The worst part about all of this is that we have replaced the values and ideals of our Judeo-Christian heritage which provided the foundation of our society for hundreds of years with the ultimate value of tolerance enforced with the machinery of government. If the highest value in our country is tolerance of anything and everything then there is no social cohesion, there is no society because the ability of society to function and adapt is irreparably compromised. If every person can decide on a whim his behavior and action irregardless of its destructive consequences for himself or the society as a whole and those beliefs or behaviors are protected and supported by law, there is no society, there are simply three hundred million individuals doing their own thing and going their own way. Society is based on common mores and values arrived at through common experience over generations. Government is based on rules and laws that can change at the drop of a hat. Society is based on voluntary cooperation that fosters community, honesty and respect. Government is based on segregation in which the primary and essential relationships an individual has are with government. This makes the individual isolated and powerless in the face of ever changing rules he has little or no control over. A country based on government has no consistency and consistency is essential for the exercise of freedom based on property rights. A country based on government in which tolerance of everything except criticism of that government is a country that has sowed the seeds of its own destruction because a government that has that much power will either be overthrown or descend into the absolute depths of totalitarian horror.

Freedom of association, including the freedom to discriminate and even profile, is a liberty essential for our safety and prosperity as individuals and as a society. We have the right to engage in actions that promote our self-interest as long as those actions do not harm or defraud others. The government has no right to force anyone to act contrary to their self interest, particularly in the area of association and contract. The right to dispose, or not dispose, of property we have justly acquired is fundamental to a free society and it is all the individuals in a society freely doing so that actually establishes not only a prosperous society but all the other healthy mores and values whose deterioration we have lately lamented.

www.patricksamuels.com

Groping for Answers

2010-11-18T06:21:00.000-08:00

The news of the week are the new procedures implemented at airports around the country in the name of security. Once again we are closing the barn door after the horses are gone and refusing to consider the fact that it is a broken latch that keeps letting them out. First there was 9/11 so the list of prohibited objects in an airport grew immensely. Then there was the shoe bomber so we all have to take off our shoes. Then there was the underwear bomber so now we have to endure the hands of TSA employees in places only our wives or husbands should see. There have already been terrorists who placed explosives in various body cavities, and drug smugglers have been doing that for years. Are we going to have to endure full body cavity searches next?

Our security procedures are a strange mix of political correctness and a total disregard for our rights to be secure in our persons. Political correctness because we are afraid of offending the terrorists who want to kill us, the overwhelming majority of whom are young, middle eastern men from specific countries. They are not toddlers, senior citizens or nuns. Disregard for our rights because no one should be subject to such intimate and invasive procedures just because they want to travel. 99.99% of airline travellers are not terrorists and those 99.99% should not be treated as potential terrorists or criminals just because they want to fly to see grandma over the holidays. Certainly we have the choice as to whether or not we want to fly but it should be our free choice to enter into a private contract with an airline to provide us a service and the government should not require we check our rights or our dignity at the door when we enter into that contract.

There are simple solutions to this problem and they involve getting the government out of the airline security business. That’s right, the government should not be involved in airline security at all. Here is the solution. Let every airline run its own security. Some will say that the airlines will not do a good job but here is where you are wrong. The purpose of an airline is to provide a service, in this case getting people from point A to point B, for a profit. If an airline is lax in its security or maintenance or the ability to provide reliable service, it will gain a reputation for not getting people to their destination in a safe and timely manner. Therefore, they have a vested interest in making sure their planes are safe and well maintained or they will go out of business, and if they are negligent, to jail.

The airlines will go about this in various ways. Some may follow the TSA’s example and provide security with invasive searches and scanners that radiate people. My guess is that these airlines will find fewer passengers once there are choices available to the traveling public. Some may employ bomb sniffing dogs or require prior background checks. Some may employ ex-military personnel like El Al in Israel. Some will reinforce their cockpits or hire sky marshals to ride on every flight. Some may choose to profile. All of these are valid security techniques that incur a wide range of costs. The point is that by allowing each airline to experiment with what works, there will be an equilibrium reached between security and fare that will meet the needs of a variety of passengers. Paying ex-military personnel will be more expensive than having everyone walk naked in front of some minimum wage employee but some may choose the indignity to save money. That choice, however, should be ours.

Choice is the key. Not the choice made for us by some government bureaucrat motivated by political correctness and a complete disregard for our rights but the choice to enter into a private contract. In this case the contract the passenger makes with an airline to utilize its service for a set price. Before we enter into that contract we will be made aware of the security measures that airline takes and if we are dissatisfied with them we should be free to make our contract with another carrier. Will the occasional terrorist slip through the cracks in some airlines that choose the wrong security procedures? Probably at some point but that will be no different than what we have now. After all the shoe bomber, the underwear bomber and the mail bombers all found holes in our current procedures and it was only their ineptitude and the actions of the passengers that prevented catastrophes. Ultimately, that is the key. We voluntarily take the risk when we fly and therefore we are ultimately responsible for our own security. If we see something suspicious, we must act. If a terrorist wants to try something on a plane, we have the right to defend ourselves and our government should not punish us for doing so. For all its attempts to protect us, the fact is that the government can’t. It can’t be everywhere, know everything and properly utilize the tools necessary to prevent every criminal or terrorist act on a plane, or in our neighborhoods. Nor do we want it to try because any attempt to do so will result in a police state where our God-given rights are completely disregarded. We cannot trade liberty for security. It is up to us, as individuals and as a society, to stand together against lawlessness, being willing and able to defend ourselves, our families and our society against those who have no respect for life, liberty, property or our pursuit of happiness.

2010-11-10T07:20:00.000-08:00

The day after the election the Federal Reserve announced it was going to engage in "Quantitative easing" to the tune of $600 billion dollars over the next eight months. Commodities have already reacted to this, with gold, oil and other raw materials rising rapidly. We are to expect inflation after supposedly going through an extended period without it. If we go though a time of even double digit inflation, we should consider ourselves very fortunate. If it were a different time in our history, perhaps that is what we could expect. We have, however, put ourselves into a very precarious position with our debt and liabilities. What I would like to give you is a short history lesson because nations have gone through this before and the causes are easy to determine.

Our more recent example is Chile which went through a hyperinflationary period in the early seventies. In 1970 Salvador Allende was elected. Allende was a hard core socialist and brought together other socialists, communists and hard leftists to begin implementing changes (transforming) Chile into a socialist workers paradise. Even though we have apparently rejected President Obama’s socialist/communist agenda, he and his leftist czars will still wield a lot of power and it is unlikely any of the damage he has done will be repealed.

Allende took the land from "the rich" and gave it to the workers. We have been redistributing wealth for years but President Obama and the Democrat congress doubled down on this, constantly demonizing the "rich". Allende nationalized companies and mines. While we certainly protest against the nationalization of the industries that have taken place, in America nationalization isn’t really necessary. Industries and companies can be controlled just as easily through regulation and tax policy, both of which are moving out of the hands of elected officials and into the bureaucracy, a bureaucracy controlled by the executive branch which is run by leftists, socialists and in some cases, admitted communists.

Allende chose who would run and work in these industries, rewarding his friends and punishing his "enemies." Enemies, sounds familiar... The purpose of this was to have control over production and distribution. Like which cars or light bulbs are produced or what restaurants are allowed to serve? Again, regulation and law accomplishes the same thing here. Next were the wage and price controls. We haven’t seen overt price controls yet but there has been a lot of noise for controlling wages, particularly for the "evil rich". Allende put these controls in place to placate the workers. We could look at it as a payoff to the unions.

Needless to say, all this government intervention distorting the free market caused the economy to tank. Companies couldn't make money because their prices were fixed and high wages were dictated by the government. They went bankrupt and were taken over by the government which made them even less productive. In order to pay the workers the government printing presses heated up and hyperinflation arrived on the scene. When the currency became worthless and there were no goods to buy, ration cards were distributed with political considerations and not need being the first criteria.

While hyperinflation will not be caused by paying union workers gobs of fiat currency in this country, the reason for the printing is irrelevant. The consequences are always the same. I recounted the history of Chile because the election of a hard core leftist and the rapid implementation of socialist policies preceded the economic circumstances that made the wholesale printing of money attractive to the ruling powers, just as it has here.
The other example I would like to cite is the Weimar Republic of Germany, the classic hyperinflationary example. I would like to state several causes of note. The first was that Germany was severely weakened after the Treaty of Versailles and reparations payments were a severe drag on the economy. We have not experienced a military defeat but we have experienced a severe economic downturn. We don’t have reparations but we do have a growing amount of interest on our debt, high domestic spending to alleviate personal suffering and social welfare obligations that are bankrupting us.

In the early years of the Weimar Republic, a lot of foreign investment came into Germany from those who wanted to profit from the rebuilding. When Germany was unable to make reparations payments in 1922, France took over the Ruhr Valley for the iron and coal, German workers went on strike and the economy took a further hit. It is only a matter of time before interest rates rise and we become unable to either make our interest payments or meet the demands of our entitlement system, or both. It is also an interesting parallel to consider Germany’s loss of the resources of the Ruhr valley and this administration’s policy of denying access to our own raw materials, particularly energy.

In response to the economic "crisis", the German government began printing money. Foreign investors pulled out at this point, cutting their losses, and things went into freefall. In early 1923 hyperinflation was in full swing with prices rising astronomically and the nation was effectively shut down due to the currency collapse.

I do hope is was noteworthy to consider that the printing of money was a response to a negative economic situation brought about by bad government policy, socialism in Chile and losing a war in Germany. I also hope you have seen that we have combined the worst of both of these situations along with a few other negatives of our own thrown in, like the fact that our currency is the reserve currency and its collapse will have consequences far beyond the German mark or the Chilean escudo which has forestalled its collapse up to this point. The laws of economics will not be denied forever, however.

I believe hyperinflation is inevitable, I have been talking about it for over a year, and that we need to prepare for it. I hope I will be proven wrong but we have been building toward this point for a long time and I think we have already sailed off the cliff, we are just waiting to hit the bottom of the ravine. The question for all of us is what will arise in America after the horrible two or three years that are coming. In Chile, Allende’s reign came to an end after three years, the military overthrew him and ended his socialist dream in Chile. Now Chile has a good and prosperous economy and a relatively free society, a happy ending. We all know what happened in Germany, they chose Hitler and the nightmare became infinitely worse. If we think government is the solution, there will always be men like Hitler who will take advantage of that. If we believe that government is the problem and the cause of our misery, we will stand up as free people and demand the return of our rights and liberties. Ten years from now our choice will be obvious. Are you ready to ensure we make the right one?

The Beginning of the End

2010-11-10T07:18:00.000-08:00

Last week’s elections were historic, there is no question about that. Voters were fed up with our lurch into socialism and with the rise of the TEA party movement, questions of government spending, control and intrusion were finally being discussed openly and honestly. Many people became involved in politics for the first time, recognizing that politics affects everything in our daily lives and if we ever want to regain some control over our lives (i.e. our liberty) politics can no longer be ignored or left up to the "political class." All this represents a good trend.
TEA partiers and conservatives who pinned their hopes on Republicans are likely to be very disappointed, however. There are two reasons for this. The first is that the new TEA party/conservative Republicans represent a small minority of the total number of Republicans in office, at all levels of government. Because of this, it will be very difficult for them to resist the pressure the establishment has on "public servants". The "system" has been in place for a long time and the beneficiaries of that system are not about to let these upstarts disassemble it. Even if they have the character to resist the pressure to conform, the radical steps necessary to save us from catastrophe will never move beyond their sparse numbers and may be beyond the imaginations of most of them.

What am I talking about? Here are some necessary steps for starters. Ending the Federal Reserve and pegging the dollar to gold. Ending all entitlement programs, a particularly difficult pill to swallow for Republicans who have been demonized for phantom proposals to do so in the past. Remove all the tax and regulatory impediments to businesses so we can return manufacturing to the United States. Eliminate public sector unions and approximately eighty percent of government jobs. Bring the military home from the vast number of places it is around the world and slim it down to a size that will ensure a devastating defense, not a costly and ineffective offense, or even less unsuccessful nation building. Can you see even one of those things happening the in next two years, or even four years with a Republican president and congress? I certainly don’t.

The problem is that we have already reached the point of no return and we have reached that point with the complicity of both major political parties. Allow me to explain. We are all familiar with the exploding federal debt which has reached around fourteen trillion dollars, greater than the entire Gross Domestic Product of the country. Then there are the annual deficits which add to that debt which were high under President Bush and have exploded under President Obama. All that is bad. However, because of the way our government fiddles with the numbers and has changed it’s reporting and accounting, this picture is rosy compared to the reality of our situation.

Businesses, when they make reports, must include their future liabilities on their balance sheet. If they only report profits and loans but do not include pensions or health care liabilities, we would say they are fudging the books to make them look better than they are. In fact, it would be dishonest and illegal. The government, however, does just that. Future entitlement liabilities, Social Security and Medicare in particularly, are not included in the deficit projections or in the current and future debt numbers. Allow me to give you those actual numbers. If we used the real, inclusive numbers, in 2008 the deficit was $5.1 trillion, not $455 billion and in 2009 the real shortfall was $8.8 trillion, not $1.4 trillion. Again, this includes the present cash based value of Social Security and Medicare liabilities.

That is a lot of money, more than we can actually conceive of. We know that government spending is out of control, we complain about it all the time. The fact is that we cannot bring the deficit under control without eliminating entitlement spending, something that is not going to happen until the system actually collapses. For example, if we taxed everyone, every business and every corporation in the county at 100%, something the president’s father suggested, we would still be running a deficit. If we stopped spending on everything except Social Security and Medicare, we would still run a deficit. These entitlements are like a bomb that has been ticking for a long time and now we are about to see it blow up in our face.

What will that mean? An economic situation that will make this one look like the "good ‘ol days." A collapse of the dollar which would bring most economic activity to a screeching halt. This will result in a complete realignment of our political and social structure in the next few years. The major political parties will finally receive the blame they are due for putting us in this situation although the apathy and complicity of the American people cannot be ignored. We do have the power of the vote although the stranglehold of the two party system on our country has mitigated against those of us who do not participate in either of those parties having a seat at the table. As someone who ran as a libertarian in the last election, I have seen this first hand.
There will be one of two results of this catastrophe. The first is that the establishment works with other establishment types around the world and they bring about a new world order, not the spooky kind of the conspiracy theorists but like the global realignment of power and structure that occurred after both World Wars. The United States, which has been moving toward a powerful executive-style government at all levels, may see the president, particularly this president, use the "crisis" to take complete control of the country, relegating the congress and judiciary to irrelevance as in Venezuela or the former Soviet Union.

The other possibility is this. We the people will build on what began as the TEA party and restore the individual liberty which was the bedrock of the American Experiment. Once the system collapses, we need to rebuild the vision of our founders upon the ashes. There is only one way that happens. First, we need to say "NO" to government solutions when they are offered because we need to recognize that government caused the problem and is the problem. Second, we need to rebuild the family and community ties that have been weakened or destroyed through government policy and cultural degradation. Finally, we need to rekindle that innovative, hard working American spirit that the socialism we have embraced has suppressed. We need to relearn self reliance as opposed to government reliance, community safety nets as opposed to government safety nets, cooperation with our neighbors as opposed to political division.

The second possibility is only viable if we prepare now. The establishment has contingency plans to implement their will in the case of a crisis. Most of us have just woken up and we need a crash course. We need to recognize the extent of the problem and prepare our families first. We also need to demonstrate our leadership in our communities. If we fulfill our role as the "watchman on the wall" to the extent that people recognize our foresight and the ability to provide solutions, we will put ourselves into a position to provide the leadership necessary to steer our country back to liberty and resist tyranny. Time is short, The Fed has already begun monetizing our debt, the last act of a desperate central bank before hyperinflation. Our time to prepare may now be measured in months instead of decades. But our future and that of our children remains in our hands. We need to roll up our sleeves and work even harder now.

Making Government Irrelevant

2010-09-04T06:47:00.000-07:00

One of the great causes of division in America is the fact that everything, and I mean everything, has become a political issue. Any problem, any complaint, any issue that someone has is now thrown into the political sphere. Consider some of the big news on "the hill" this week. Rodger Clemens, a baseball player, is being prosecuted for lying to congress. What did he allegedly lie about? State secrets, embezzlement, fraud, treason? No. It was whether or not he ever used "performance enhancing" substances. Not to excuse his alleged lying but why was he ever before congress in the first place?! What authority does the government have to regulate A GAME!

We the people, unfortunately, have come to believe that it is right and proper to use the power of government to solve all our problems and meet all our needs. Every time one American citizen says "there ought to be a law" to fix some complaint or offense and another one says "government ought to..." to meet some need or want, our government is happy to intervene and in the process take more or our freedom and more of our money. Did you ever stop and wonder why we have all the special interest groups and lobbyists we love to complain about? It is because each one of them represents some group of citizens, small or large, that want to use the power of government for their own ends. In this game there are winners and losers and the animosity between the two increases as the stakes get higher and government becomes larger and more powerful. For every citizen that wants the government to do something, there is another citizen that must pay for it and give up some bit of freedom to accommodate this new government activity. That other citizen must now "lobby" on his own behalf, playing the game for his own protection. The government becomes no more than a legalized criminal enterprise, granting arbitrary favors and demanding payment for protection.

When we play this game, however, we never know when the power of government may be turned against us. That is why elections are so contentious. We feel the need to elect people who will protect the privileged status or benefits we have lobbied for and if the "opposition" gets elected, we think we are in danger of losing that status or those benefits. The dirty little secret is that the politicians are doing nothing but playing each of us against the other in order to increase their own power. They scare us exactly along those lines, that some group will lose this or that privilege or that government will adopt some policy destructive to our values or new found "rights". This scheme goes back to FDR who was the first politician on the national stage to adopt this strategy and it has been used ever since by both major parties. It is a game plan in which "we the people" ultimately lose because every time an individual or group succeeds in getting a piece of the government pie, we all lose more money and more liberty while government grows larger and becomes farther removed from its only legitimate purpose.

With the ascendancy of Barak Obama to the presidency, the mask has come off and this process of remaking our understanding of the purpose of government has reached its logical conclusion. President Obama’s only experience in life outside of government was as a community organizer. What does a community organizer do? He or she organizes the citizens of a community to more effectively lobby the government so they can receive some benefit. Now that they are in charge they have discarded the rhetoric of freedom and responsibility that has historically at least served as a veneer for self serving politicians and unabashedly proclaim that government can do anything, meet any need and solve any problem. If "we the people" would just shut up and let the experts in government take care of us, we would realize an American Utopia where everyone is equally healthy, wealthy and wise.

Think about the attitude of the people who desire to be "public servants" as election day approaches. Why do 99.9% of people go into government, either as elected politicians or unelected bureaucrats? One of two reasons. First, there are the selfish ones who want to receive personal benefits from fleecing "we the people". The elected ones want the prestige and the ability to use the power of government to enrich themselves and their friends. The appointed or hired ones want to receive pay an average of 20% more than similar jobs in the private sector, generous health benefits, pensions in which the taxpayers pay their salaries for the rest of their lives and the security of knowing that their job does not depend on their efficiency, value or success but on the ability of the politicians to wring enough money out of the rest of us to ensure their perpetual employment, with raises. Then there are the people who go into "public service" because they truly believe that government is the answer and that all problems should be solved by forcing people to pay for and conform to their vision of how people should behave and society should be organized. The only substantial difference between the con artists and "true believers" in our government and those of Stalin’s Russia or Hitler’s Germany are the penalties for non-conformity. We may be fined, jailed or litigated to death instead of being put in the gulag, concentration camp or shot outright. As our government becomes more and more totalitarian our real freedom becomes a distant memory squashed under the heel, not of a jack booted storm trooper, but the expensive wingtips of a highly paid bureaucrat.

The purpose of government, as defined in the Declaration of Independence, is to protect our God-given rights, among them being our right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The only legitimate reason government has for using force against any citizen is if that citizen has violated the rights of his fellow. It does not have the legitimate right to extort money from one citizen to give it to another. It does not have the legitimate right to regulate the behavior of one citizen because it may offend another. It does not have the right to grant privileged status to one citizen and reduce the status of another. A government that was limited to the protection of our rights run by people who believed that was the only purpose of government would not be involved in most of the things that divide us so deeply. It would not be using the money it forcibly extracts from us for things we don’t approve of. It would not be surrounded by lobbyists circling like jackals to rip a larger piece of flesh from the taxpayer. It would be a government irrelevant to the daily lives of its citizens, staying out of their pockets and activities, allowing them to peruse their dreams, only interfering to call an actual penalty when necessary. It would be a government that would once again unshackle the indomitable human spirit which has yet to meet a problem that time and determination exercised in a free environment in which the rewards belong solely to the one who expended the effort cannot solve.

There is only one way that is going to happen and that is if we make it happen. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are just pieces of paper with wonderful ideas that only have worth when people of flesh and blood believe in their words and principles and act upon them. Only when people in government believe that their only task is to protect our rights will our rights be protected. Only when "we the people" believe that government exists only to protect our rights will we put people in government who will not use the power of government against us. Only when "we the people" stop expecting government to solve our problems, meet our needs and grant our wishes will we get the government the founders envisioned, the government best for us. We get the government we want. If we want a government that meets our every need, we will live as beggars and slaves. If we want a government irrelevant to our daily lives we need to start learning to live without it and elect people who will deconstruct it.

Religious Tolerance and the Ground Zero Mosque

2010-08-23T04:28:00.000-07:00

The controversy of the day is the construction of a mosque in the shadow of the "ground zero" site. The talk shows are afire with all the reasons why it should not be built. Is it insensitive on the part of Muslims-certainly. Is it an exercise of freedom of religion and private property rights to build it-yes. Does it make most of us angry-oh yeah. But why? Why do seventy percent of us oppose the construction of this mosque? Is it fair to "profile" all Muslims for the actions of a few? Why are we reluctant to believe the statements of its organizers who assure us that the Muslim center is meant to be a bridge between the Muslim community and all Americans, a vehicle for healing and peace?

As a "radical" libertarian, it would seem impossible to come to the conclusion that the mosque should not be built even on the "sacred" site itself. After all, if the only purpose of government is to protect our rights to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness and private property, how can we legitimately use the power of government to prevent this free exercise of religious expression? If it was a church, cathedral, synagogue, Hindu temple, Shinto shrine or Buddhist monastery, it would be nigh impossible. But it is not; it is a mosque, the symbol and center of the Muslim community, the focal point for the followers of the prophet Mohammed.

The crucial issue at hand is the fundamental nature of Islam and that is where we must go to make our case. The first thing we need to do is eliminate all the talk of religion and religious expression. That is irrelevant and we need to move our argument elsewhere. Listening to some commentators, they make a big deal about how Islam is an all encompassing way of life as opposed to...what? Christianity? Does not Christianity have ritual, symbols, a calendar of festivals? Do you not hear your preacher exhort you to live a "holy life", making every decision in accordance with the teachings of Jesus? What about Judaism with its 613 commandments, the Mishnah and the teachings of the rabbis that deal with the most arcane and seemingly insignificant areas of life. The Amish and some communities of orthodox Jews live lives just as separate and are just as devoted to their way of life as are Muslims, radical or otherwise.

But Muslims want to take over the world. Oh? And Christians do not want to convert every soul to their religion? Isn’t Judaism to be a "light to all nations"? No, the argument cannot be made there either. Discussing this as a religious issue in the common parlance will get us nowhere. We must ask the more fundamental questions. What is the purpose of religion? It is to give the individual a connection with the divine and a context in which to apply the product of that connection in the everyday world. Because religion is such an transcendent individual experience, it is explained through symbol and analogy and these evolve into religious expressions and for the "unsophisticated", superstition. Because of the ecstatic nature of religious experiences, people who have had them desire to share them. If the individual’s experience is profound and powerful enough, they may start a new "religion."

This is where history comes in. Judaism began with Abraham, Christianity with Jesus, Buddhism with Siddharta Gautama. To become part of Judaism, in the days of Abraham and in the present, one has to be born into the clan or voluntarily convert. Jesus preached voluntary repentance as did his followers and if one wants to be a Christian today, one has to voluntarily convert. Buddhism is a voluntary commitment to seek enlightenment. In contrast to the origins of all these other major religions, Islam began as a political system. By that I mean that from the beginning Islam used physical force to convert and enforce its edicts. That is the fundamental difference between religion and politics. Religion uses persuasion to influence belief and behavior, politics uses physical force. Within our social system, religion is a matter of conscience, people involved in religion employ the power of persuasion to influence behavior and belief. Politics, on the other hand, is concerned with the proper application of force, the power of the state, to influence behavior and ideas. For a libertarian, the use of state power to "positively" influence behavior rather than "negatively" employ it to protect personal and property rights, is where all governments become tyrannical. Islam began with the assumption that it is proper, that it is "God’s will", to use force to make others believe and behave in certain ways and that makes it a political system and it needs to be treated as such. There is not freedom of conscience in an Islamic system. In an Islamic state on cannot choose certain personal behaviors or beliefs. A woman in a bikini would be stoned in Iran or Saudi Arabia. Men without beards were killed by the Taliban in Afghanistan. Converting to another religion is also punishable by death. Women and children are mere property to be bartered with, abused and discarded. While some may decry the desires of the "religious right" to use the power of the state to impose morality, I know of no preachers who advocate the death penalty for the violation of a dress code, promiscuous behavior or conversion.

Using the power of the state to enforce moral behavior that does not violate the rights of others is a bad idea and in direct contradiction to the founding principles of this country. That is what freedom of conscience is all about. If one chooses to be part of a religion, one can voluntarily accept restrictions on behavior but that religion does not have the right to force you to do so or punish you with fines, imprisonment or death for violations. When religion becomes entwined with the state, using the power of the state to enforce its edicts, it always ends badly. The inquisition and witch hunts are two examples of Christianity getting away from its roots and experimenting with political power. However, the roots of Christianity and the other major religions were not political so such things are the exception and not the rule. Because Islam began as a political ideology, its abuses are the rule rather than the exception. Even in places like America and Europe where Islam does not have control of the power of the state, its war against rival ideologies is apparent. Outright attacks are part of that. Honor killings are another. The murder of filmmakers and cartoonists. The desire to enforce sharia law in their communities is another even though such enforcement is in direct contradiction with constitutional law and our founding principles. Are there some Muslims in America that have made the ideological leap and view Islam as a religion and not as a political ideology? Yes, but they are the exception. Those few have, in reality, abandoned Islam as conceived by its founder and are making it something else and that takes courage and persistence. Until the majority of Muslims make that leap and stop cheering every successful terrorist attack, they must be viewed as members of a violent and destructive political group and not as part of the larger religious community.

Because of this, the construction of the mosque is not a "freedom of religion" issue because we are not dealing with a religion, we are dealing with a political ideology. Most Americans perceive Islam as a religion because in the United States, it does not have real political power although in our politically correct culture, they do have an inordinate amount of influence. It is perceived as a religion because we find common themes with Muslims-prayer, worship, morality. But beneath the veneer is a political ideology that desires to enslave as it has in just about every country where it has become dominant. If we as Americans refuse to accept and understand that truth, actual acts of violence will escalate in accordance with the rhetoric we already hear from most Imams. Islam must be treated not on par with Christianity or Judaism or Buddhism but as we once understood Communism or Fascism-ideologies incompatible with our founding principles and therefore direct threats to the country, our freedom and our way of life.

As Americans, we have the right of self preservation, individually and communally. We have a country based on certain principles and ideals and we enjoy their fruits. We do not have to tolerate an ideology that is in direct opposition to those ideals and has not hesitated to use violence to advance its cause. This is more than a national security issue, it is about preserving our basic freedoms for our posterity. We do not have to let the politically correct crowd’s view of constitutional liberty transform our founding document into a suicide pact. We have a right to our country and Muslims have plenty of other places in the world in which to live. Harsh words for some but we are talking about self preservation here. Immigration from Muslim countries should be stopped immediately. Imams or other Muslims who are not US citizens should be deported immediately if their rhetoric or behavior in any way advocates violence. There should be a moratorium on any mosque or "community center" construction. They certainly shouldn’t be allowed to build a monument to their greatest attack as of yet in New York. Sound ridiculous? Would we not do the same if some neo-nazi group started building "community centers" where they advocated the violent overthrow of the government? Didn’t we round up Germans, Japanese and Italians, most of whom were good Americans and posed no threat, when their counties went to war against us? When are we going to realize that Islam is at war with the west just as the communists of the Soviet Union were? Their war was mostly "cold" just as ours is, but the primary front is not only in a distant country like Vietnam or Iraq but in our own cities and towns. No one doubted the intentions of the communists to "bury us" and the rhetoric of most Muslim leaders is no less vehement in advocating our destruction. We are, after all, the Great Satan.

So why do so many on the "left" support the "right" of the Muslims to build the mosque? Because ideologically, there is no difference between liberals/progressives and Muslims. They both believe in using the power of the state to enforce their ideas of how every human being should live and believe. One wraps itself in the cloak of religion, the other in environmentalism or fairness or social justice. The result is the same. Those who are under such systems are slaves, under the threat of the whip or the sword of their masters, freedom a distant memory, fear a constant companion. If liberty is to survive, if future generations are going to enjoy the vision our founders had for the country, we must jealously and unapologetically guard what freedom remains and stop retreating under the onslaught of political correctness or under misconstrued arguments for religious tolerance. It is time to advance the cause of freedom before it disappears forever from our blessed land.

A New Label

2010-08-13T02:55:00.000-07:00

I am not a joiner. I don’t like to be pegged by group labels because there have been very few groups with whom I share enough in common that I have felt comfortable being a part of, or even associated with. In politics, labels become very important because politics is all about language and ideas. One can be labeled as part of a certain political party, Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, Constitutional, Green. Once you are part of that party, everything that party does and believes, good and bad, becomes attached to you. I have a fellow tea party friend who decided to run as a Democrat because he believes, as I do, in Thomas Jefferson’s ideals. People he meets, however, assume he is a proponent of redistributive socialism, gay marriage and gun control. Regardless of his personal beliefs, people make assumptions about him based on his label. Republicans are the party of the rich and support big business over the working man. Libertarians just want to legalize drugs. Political parties become identified with certain issues and policies, often as a result of their opponent’s efforts, and an individual shares in that identification by joining that group. The growth of those identifying themselves as independents, rejecting the perceived baggage of established parties, is indicative of how fewer and fewer of the American people feel represented by the two major parties.

In addition to party labels, there are ideological labels; liberal, conservative, progressive, libertarian. While often identified with political parties, there are conservative democrats and liberal or progressive republicans. Then there are the even broader labels of left, right and center or moderate. All of these labels are almost always associated with policy issues. Those issues can be general-bigger or smaller government, or specific-gun control, prayer in schools. While I certainly have opinions on policy issues, I disagree with the assumption that underlies all of these positions for ninety-nine percent of the people and an even higher percentage among the political class. Every one of them assumes that in our representative republic, all issues can or should be the concern of government. Liberals and Conservatives may disagree on gay marriage but each accepts the government's authority to make a decision on it. Democrats and Republicans may disagree on the role of government in education but they both agree that government should have a role. The left and the right disagree on the extent of socialism in our country but neither rejects the government’s social safety net. Each side argues about how government power should be applied in so many areas, not whether or not government power should be applied at all.

That is where the argument needs to be made. What should the role of government be? This is where I have a problem with conservatives. I have been a proud participant in the tea party movement and most tea party people identify themselves with conservatism. This is the question I pose to them. What are you trying to conserve? Conservatives say they want smaller government-how small should it be? Do we go back to Reagan, Johnson, FDR, Lincoln, Jackson or Washington or the Articles of Confederation? Are we willing to live without the EPA, Medicare, Social Security, the Federal Reserve? Where along the spectrum of socialism do you stop? Do we reject Obamacare but keep Medicare? Do we repeal the recent financial overhaul but keep the FDIC? How much regulation is too much, how high a tax is too high, how big a government is too big?

For me, it all comes down to this. Once we accept the idea that government should solve some problem, it is hard then to argue against the application of government to some other problem. If government provides health care for some, why not all? If it provides housing for some, why not all? If it provides food for some, why not all? If it protects bank deposits, why not mortgages? If it can tell you what drugs are acceptable, why not what food you eat? If it has the right to take some of your money, why not all of it? The idea that government exists to solve problems and meet needs leads the people, us, into servitude. When the government solves a problem the people must conform to the solution and pay for it. When the government meets a need the recipient must comply with the government’s requirements and someone else needs to pay for it. The more problems the government tries to solve, the less freedom the people have and the more expensive it becomes.

The purpose of government is not to solve problems. Individuals solve problems. All the great innovations and inventions in history have been the product of the mind of some individual man applied to a problem. The wheel, cooking over a fire, musical instruments, medical advances, cast iron stoves, light bulbs, radios, televisions, automobiles, airplanes, computers and cell phones were not the product of government programs but the imagination and genius of men. The only time government improves technology is through the destructive act of war. Government destroys, it does not create. Government consumes, it does not produce. Government restricts, it does not free. If everything was controlled by government, as it was in the Soviet Union, choices would be limited, expensive and of poor quality. Every individual is unique, with different wants, tastes and needs. No government bureaucrat is wise enough to come up with a product or service that meets those divergent wants, needs and desires. The free market is designed to create products to conform to individual needs. When a government solution is created, the individual is forced to conform to the product.

So what is the purpose of government? Allow me to quote our foundational document which states it so eloquently. "We hold these truths to be self evident, that all me are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed." Government exists only to secure the fundamental rights of every man and woman who chooses to consent to its authority for their protection. The only just powers a government has are derived from this principle function. Every man has a right to exist-his life, to the products of the effort he makes to sustain his life, the liberty required to make that effort and the right to pursue that which makes him happy as an individual as long as that pursuit does not violate the fundamental rights of another. The only way a man’s rights can be violated is through physical coercion, force. He must be forced to give up his life, his liberty, the products of his labor or the dictates of his conscience. Any person or any institution that coerces a man to give up any of these things on pain of death or imprisonment is criminal. That criminal can be an individual in a dark alley, a gang or a legal mob, i.e. government.

The genius of the American Experiment as it was originally conceived was that government was no longer supposed to be a legal mob. Government had specific and limited powers designed for the purpose of protecting individual rights. Individuals were to be protected from other citizens, their government and foreign powers. Otherwise men were to be free to pursue their dreams as they saw fit, entering freely into associations and contracts, secure in their property and the fruits of their labor. It was as close to capitalism as any nation has come, capitalism being defined so ably by Ayn Rand as "a social system based on the recognition of individual rights, including property rights, in which all property is privately owned." It is a system in which each man’s life and the products of his labor are his own, in which his only limitations are the ones he places on himself, where all associations are voluntary and, by extension, honesty and morality are required.

As soon as the power of government is used for anything other than the protection of rights, no rights are protected. As soon as the coercive power of government is used to solve a problem or meet a need, the life of every citizen becomes subject to the claims of others through the vehicle of government. No longer is your life and the products of your labor yours, they belong to everyone. Anyone can make a claim of need through the government and the government can take the property of one and give it to another. It is a conflict of absolutes. There cannot be a mix of capitalism and collectivism or socialism. That is the problem with conservatives. Any conservative who accepts the premise that government can run any social program or meet some individual need or solve some problem accepts the premise of the collectivist that it is right to take the fruits of one person’s labor and give it to someone else, that our property ultimately does not belong to us and that the value of our life resides only in our ability to contribute to the whole. The reason that our country continues its march into totalitarianism is because conservatives only desire to slow the train, or maybe back it up a bit, on a collectivist track. You cannot win the argument against Obamacare if you accept the collectivist premise upon which Medicare is based. Both are consistent within collectivism and the most consistent argument will win. The arguments cannot be between degrees of socialism but between slavery and freedom, capitalism and collectivism, liberty and totalitarianism. If we are going to save our country for ourselves and our children we must come to the point where no degree of slavery or totalitarianism is acceptable.

We now return to labels. If I see conservatives as lacking, do not want to be identified with modern liberals or progressives and believe libertarians often lack the courage of their convictions or the ability to articulate them, with what are we left? What is it we want to do? Conservatives want to conserve some current or past social or political state. Liberals are identified with a word whose meaning they have hijacked and twisted to mean the opposite of its original meaning. Progressives want progress toward total state control. What do I want? I want to restore the principles upon which our nation was conceived, those contained in the Declaration of Independence. I want a government that protects my rights and my property and otherwise leaves me alone. I don’t want my charity to be forced, I don’t want to be provided for, I don’t want to be forced into a regulatory bubble that protects me from all risk, I don’t want my money confiscated to support a class that somehow feels entitled, I want to live as an adult, as a citizen, not as a subject or dependent child. I want to go back to the time in our country’s history when a man stood or fell on his own and when he fell he relied on himself and, if necessary, the voluntary assistance of his family and friends to stand again. I want to see a restoration of the principles and ideals that made this country the wealthiest, freest, most innovative, and moral the world has ever seen. With that as the goal, I believe the proper label would be "Restorationist."

Abolishing Slavery

2010-07-30T03:35:00.000-07:00

There is no question that my favorite founding father is Thomas Jefferson. The man was absolutely brilliant. His ideas on very limited government, absolute personal freedom, the necessity of morality, his low view of politicians and many other things comprise the essence of the American Experiment. Was he always consistent? No. Certainly the Louisiana Purchase was far beyond the bounds of executive power as he understood it. The most glaring inconsistency, however, was one he shared with several other early patriots-he was a slave owner.

The idea that "all men are created equal" and the institution of slavery are incompatible. Jefferson, along with several other slave owning patriots, believed it was wrong and should be abolished. Yet he never freed his own slaves. I am not going to excuse his actions but I have recently come to understand them in a new way. The key to comprehending it is to view it as an institution whose benefits were such that those who profited from it could not conceive of life without it. While there were those who thought the black man inferior, perhaps little more than a beast of burden, most knew better; Jefferson certainly did. To them, slaves were two things. They were an economic necessity and a "perk" of wealth.

Slaves performed two basic functions. There were the "house slaves" who did the cooking and the cleaning and all the other things around the plantation that made life so easy for the owners. I’m sure it was real nice to have someone else do all the "dirty work" Then there were the slaves who worked the fields. Tobacco and cotton are very labor intensive crops and represented much of the wealth of the "New World." If workers actually had to be paid to work, the planters didn’t believe they could turn as great a profit. The success of the plantation was the success of the colony and later the state and country. Morally, many believed it wrong but the benefits outweighed the practical application of those personal beliefs.

Before we condemn their hypocrisy, we must remember that those in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. A working definition of slavery is when the results of the labor of the individual belongs to someone else. When a slave worked the fields, the product of that effort went to the plantation owner and the slave received merely an "allowance" to live on. If the slave was freed, however, as an individual he would be able to trade his labor for something of equal value and then dispose of his earnings as he saw fit. That is the essence of economic freedom; the ability acquire and dispose of material property as we see fit after we have traded our skill or labor for something of value. The one who earns it is the one who owns it and it belongs only to him. That is economic liberty and the opposite of slavery.

Our society no longer operates under a system of economic liberty. We live under a system of collectivism in which all property is owned by the society as a whole, the collective, the state. Call it socialism, call it communism, but don’t call it capitalism. Consider all your significant property. You don't own your house even if the mortgage is paid. If you don’t pay your property taxes, your house reverts to the ownership of the state. You merely rent it. You only have use of your car at the behest of the state. If you don’t pay the necessary fees, that car cannot leave the driveway. The paycheck your receive is the property of the state first and after they have "deducted" their portion, your receive your allowance. The harder you work, the smaller, percentage wise, is your allowance. Even your allowance is spent according to the dictates of the "master". He now requires you to buy health insurance and scolds or prohibits you from buying things he deems dangerous or risky. You have little privacy as all medical records and financial transactions are now at his fingertips. We have been fooled into thinking we are free because we have a thousand channels on our televisions and a hundred different cell phone plans; just bread and circuses. How different are we than the black slave working at Jefferson’s Monticello? He lived in a hut not his own, couldn’t travel without permission, ate what he was told, was dependent on his master for any health care and until he died, never received anything close to the value of his labor.

Today, our masters are not the aristocracy, the plantation owners, the rich. In our republic, our masters are the mob and the politicians who manipulate them for power. One of the greatest fears of the founders was democracy because they believed, and rightly so, that the mob would eventually trample the rights of the minority. In one of the great ironies of history, the "rich" are now the slaves of the poor. I’m not talking about the rich like the Kennedys or John Kerry, those who are part of the ruling class. I’m talking about every man or woman who makes a decent living by working hard providing a product or service to their fellow man. They work to provide retirement income for those who are too obtuse or lazy to provide it for themselves. They provide health care for those who can’t or won’t provide it for themselves or make bad decisions about their health. They provide food and shelter for those who will not work or have made lousy choices in life. The product of their hard work is forcibly taken from them for someone else’s benefit, the simple definition of slavery.

Our slavery, just like that of Jefferson’s time, is institutional. Those that benefit from it cannot conceive of living without it. Every person who receives a Social Security check, government health care, food stamps, a housing benefit or is the recipient of any other form of government largess does so because the government has forced someone who works hard to relinquish the fruits of that labor. For those who wonder why slavery wasn’t just abolished in one fell swoop, consider the ramifications of abolishing our own slavery. Those who have become dependent on the labor of others, what would they do if those checks stopped coming in the mail? How would they live? How would their basic needs be met? Are they so different from the plantation owners? This in no way excuses the slavery of Jefferson for any immoral action, once recognized, should be immediately corrected. But for anyone who receives benefits as the result of someone else’s hard work, it certainly puts it in a new light.

Our institution of slavery is also a bit more complicated than it was in Jefferson's time. There were politics involved then, slavery was "legal" and supported by the state just as it is now. However, the slaves and the masters were a rather monolithic groups. Today, the greatest beneficiaries of our system of slavery are those in the political class. To ensure their continually growing power they divide all of us into groups based on race, economic situation, geography, sexual orientation or any other classification they can conceive of and then they spend their time convincing each individual group they deserve the wealth of some other group. By doing so they convince a majority, the mob, that they are worthy of the hard work of others. Of course the political class presents itself as the only ones wise enough to manage such a massive redistribution, cementing their power, ensuring their wealth and becoming the true "masters" of all.

Our problem is the same as it was in Jefferson’s time. It is the master, the beneficiary, who must voluntarily give up the benefits of slavery in order for it to be abolished. That meant that the "masters", men and women who had been brought up to believe that slavery was acceptable and normal, that they the had right to benefit from the uncompensated labor of others, that those who provided for them were somehow inferior, had to reject that paradigm and embrace a new one, not just ideologically but practically. Today, the recipients of the forced labor of others have the same mindset. They "deserve" what they can force from others and the "rich" are morally inferior and should be forced to give up what they have. They need to change their whole way of thinking and they also must figure out how to provide things for themselves. As if that task of "reeducation" weren’t daunting enough, consider the political changes that will be necessary. Politics today is based on redistribution for the acquisition of political power. The whole point of government in the minds of most, rulers and the ruled, is to meet the needs of the citizens. To change that we need politicians who aren’t going to base campaigns on "bringing home the bacon" and an electorate that doesn’t expect it. Just consider the difficulty in changing the mind of one beneficiary and then getting them to actually change their behavior. Now multiply that by the millions necessary to bring about the real political and societal changes that will release the slaves from their bondage. It is a very difficult thing and it took a war to force the masters of Jefferson’s time to give up their privileged position. It is likely some catastrophe will also be necessary to abolish the forced servitude of our time.

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Rule by Consensus

2010-07-09T12:23:00.000-07:00

What determines our morality? How do we determine the right course of action? How do we differentiate right from wrong? In the political sphere, how do we argue against our current rush into socialism? Too often, much too often, we quote polls or election results or statistics. If one major party or another wins an election, especially by a large majority, it becomes a license to act according to their platform or program, no matter how destructive, irrational or wrong. The statists for years have been arguing from polls, getting the ‘feeling’ for what the people want, using the media to steer their desires, stating their case from the standpoint of emotional crisis. They have convinced the majority of the people that a government answer to a problem is the only answer that needs to be explored, the politicians simply need to argue details and emphasis. Every year we slip further and further into the statist nightmare, we lose more and more liberty, the government gets bigger and bigger, exerts greater and greater control and takes more and more money. Few statists are honest about their goals because most people, due to the fact that they have been endowed by their Creator with a rudimentary understanding of the basic rights and liberties that make us human, would never choose slavery given an opportunity to hear a reasoned argument for and against its adoption. Nor do most want to be honest about the logical conclusions of statism, it has always led to the gulag and the death camps because it negates the value of the individual and the individual’s inherent rights. They simply want to be pragmatic, getting the benefits while trying to balance an inherently unbalanced system, hoping to get theirs before everything comes apart. Now that there is a group in charge who are unbalancing the system in order to bring about the final resolution of the conflict between freedom and tyranny in favor of tyranny, people are getting nervous, at the least.
What do we hear from those who rail against the obviously socialist polices and actions of our government, the so-called conservatives? Two thirds of the people want health care repealed. This percentage think we shouldn’t bail out the banks. A certain percentage don’t think we should own General Motors. For those who make such argument, what happens if the majority do want health care, bank bailouts or direct government ownership of industries? Where are their arguments then? The same place as their arguments against Social Security and Medicare. They don’t make them because the majority of the people, while they may complain, don’t want them repealed or abolished. Because of that, arguments based on polls or public opinion or even elections cannot ever be winners for libertarians. The statists have the time to make people comfortable in their slavery, accepting of their chains, and in so doing they move the argument; not over whether or not to have state control of this or that arena but only the degree of control. At best, policy based on public opinion is what we have now, with a hodgepodge of special interest groups vying for an ever larger piece of the pie. At worst, it becomes mob rule in which anything becomes possible and no right or property is respected.
The men who founded this nation did so according to principles, the key one of which was an understanding of the sacrosanct nature of individual rights. Men have a right to their lives as men. Their lives and the production of their lives does not belong to any other man and it certainly does not belong to the state. That is the fundamental argument that needs to be joined today. Not over how to reform a system that has become increasing statist. The reformers will always lose because it only requires another election to reverse any progress made in the defense of liberty. We should not be arguing about what degree of statism we should have but whether the state should be involved in any of the things we currently accept. If we are going to argue against government run health care and be consistent, we cannot accept Medicare and Medicaid as legitimate forms of government intervention. If we try, the most consistent argument will win and the most consistent argument will either be all or nothing. The argument that allows exceptions will lose every time because once the exception is allowed, the premise of government control is accepted and the game is over. The same could be said for any government intervention in the market or our lives that is not directly related to the preservation of our fundamental rights.
It is time that those who stand for liberty stop trying to be “moderate”, accepting a degree of slavery, a degree of respect for rights, a degree of redistribution, a degree of social justice, a degree of security or a degree of brute force. It is time to stand on absolute principles and learn to articulate those principles. After all, the fundamental nature of man yearns to be free, he must be fooled into becoming a slave. For too long so called “conservatives” have cooperated in the deception of the statists to reduce us all to servitude. They have failed to rise up to promote the “extreme” of “absolute” liberty. They have made arguments from fickle popular opinion, faith or even through appeals to history for history's sake and not according to the fundamental nature of man or the moral principles that make liberty and freedom so much better than tyranny. If we do not explain it and live it, freedom will continue to lose.

Socialism Is Selfish

2010-06-18T14:29:00.000-07:00

One of the most often repeated arguments against free market capitalism is that is makes selfish, greedy monsters out of all of us. That a system based on one’s self-interest instead of the interests of the "collective" is evil on its very face. It is almost accepted as a fact that if it wasn’t for government enforcing our charity through the social safety net, poor people would starve, old people would die penniless in the streets, the infirm would be on the street corners begging for spare change and children wouldn’t be educated while a few rich individuals would spend their time rolling around in their money like Scrooge McDuck.

In fact, history has demonstrated the exact opposite. The more the government exercises control over the economy and the people that make it up, the less freedom the people have and the poorer they are. In the 1920’s millions of people were dying of starvation in Communist Russia while America, experiencing a resurgence of freedom after the tyranny of Woodrow Wilson, was prospering like no other place on earth. Before we allowed the government to control the economy through the Federal Reserve and New Deal programs, we never had a recession that lasted more than a few years. Up until the Roosevelt era, the history of the United States was one of prosperity, innovation and upward mobility. Only in America could a bobbin changer or desk clerk amass some of the largest fortunes on earth within their lifetimes. It was these men, acting in their self-interest, attempting to satisfy the self-interest of consumers free from government direction, regulation, taxes and control that created the standard of living we enjoy, a standard of living that is still the envy of the world.

That being the case, why is socialism selfish while a system based in individual self interest is not? The reason is that a system of socialism removes all meaningful interaction and responsibility among individuals within the society. The primary relationship in an individual’s life is with the state, not his or her neighbor or even his or her family. The government takes care of our children. With pre-K and Head Start, we place them in the care of unionized government employees from the time they are three until they are eighteen. The government is now also responsible for their higher education as well. If they choose not to try to make anything of themselves, we are not responsible for them then either. The government confiscates our money through taxes to pay for the basic sustenance of those who are either too lazy to work or have made bad choices that have placed them in poverty. When our neighbor or family member gets sick, the government will now determine their care. Once our parents get old, the government takes care of their needs and medical care until they die. Then the government confiscates their remaining wealth and sticks us with the bill for burying them.
Before government stepped in, people relied on their families and neighbors for all these things. If the government is going to take care of us, what do we need family for? We have seen this play out in Europe. The socialist countries of Europe have extremely low birth rates. Why? Who needs children? They are a pain when they are young and they don’t need them when they are old so why not just remain an eternal adolescent, enjoying whatever the government lets them keep on their extended vacations and abundant weekly leisure time. Not considering the next generation, getting the goodies even at the expense of the future, living only for yourself with no regard for the needs of others is the most selfish lifestyle possible.

Pure capitalism, on the other hand, encourages us to be considerate of others. In a truly free, capitalist society where government stays completely out of the economic and social spheres, confining itself to the role of protector of rights, selfishness results is very negative consequences. If one tried to live as an ‘island’, giving no thought for the needs or wishes of others, you would quickly be reduced to living in a hovel as a hunter gatherer. Why? Because you would not be able to get a job. Employment in such a society requires that your labor meet the needs of an employer who is, in turn, trying to meet the needs of his customers. If you did not care about the needs of the employer you would not have a job very long. Compare the products of communist countries with those of free ones. Workers under communism cannot be fired for lack of efficiency or quality, in free countries they can be. Continuing, if you didn’t care about your neighbors and you fell on hard times, charity would be hard to come by. If you don’t make yourself valuable to others, they find it hard to put any value on you. Consider the value free counties place on individual life as opposed to counties based on the "collective". In a free country, any life lost is a tragedy. In a communist country, twenty million lives lost is a footnote. In a "collective", it is the group that matters and those at the top decide what is best for the group, the individual life is only worth something if it serves the needs of the collective. In a free county, every individual is valued as an individual, every individual has rights simply because they exist as a man or woman and government's only role is to ensure that each individual’s rights are respected by all the other individuals in a society. Finally, if you do not have children or choose to be a bad parent, there will be no one to take care of you when you’re old. The point of all these examples is to show that in a free, capitalist society it is in everyone's self interest to be considerate of the self interest of everyone else. In a socialist society, the opposite is true. As long as the individual maintains good relations with the state, other relationships are superfluous and have little value. This does not apply simply to economics but to our societal relationships as well.

For the last hundred years America has been turning its back on all the things that made us great, embracing the very philosophies that have not only demonstrated their utter failure everywhere they are tried but are the complete antithesis of the system we were founded upon. Today, with our government taking a greater role in controlling our lives and the economic and social systems we inhabit, the family is disintegrating, we have created a permanent and growing underclass, we have seen the devaluation of individual life at both ends, and a stifled economy and for all our efforts we have stuck our great-grandchildren with a bill even they will not be able to pay. So who’s selfish now?

Standing on Principle

2010-06-02T08:53:00.000-07:00

On of the things that irritates people about the political process is that so few of the men or women who are part of it are principled, and even fewer are willing to consistently stand on their principles. First, allow me to define a principle. Webster’s defines it as a “fundamental truth or law, a moral rule.” I will also quote Ayn Rand’s definition, because I find it highly instructive.
“A principle is “a fundamental, primary, or general truth, on which other truths depend.” Thus a principle is an abstraction which subsumes a great number of concretes. It is only by means of principles that one can set one’s long-range goals and evaluate the concrete alternatives of any given moment. It is only principles that enable a man to plan his future and achieve it.” (Capitalism, the Unknown Ideal, p143.)
It is the lack of principles that have led, politically, fiscally and morally, to the situation in which we find ourselves. We have politicians we assume are corrupt and self-serving, debt we cannot repay, citizens who are content to be slaves whining for their basic bread from the hand of the state. Our political discourse consists of petty arguments over how to properly allocate billions or trillions of dollars to special interest groups in order for the politicians to secure their power and re-election. The only principle involved is that of power, gaining it and expanding it. The fiscal and moral health of the country, any consistency of program or policy, is all sacrificed on the altar of power. Power over the individual, the collective, over you and I. The power to determine every decision, the power to mold and shape minds, the power to control everything in society, for their own egomania. They happily sacrifice the freedom and rights of the individual on the altar of “the public good” or the “greater good” or “social justice.” The merrily go about confiscating the wealth of those who produce it for their own aggrandizement and the perpetuation of the perverse system that supports them. They speak the language of “compromise,” “fairness,” and “bi-partisanship,” but they are all lies to hide their true motives and the consistent advancement of their cause at the expense of our liberty.
There can be no compromise with evil. Strong word, you say? Any man or system that proposes to reduce or eliminate my God-given rights to life, liberty and property is evil. Any man who believes it is in his power to grant or abrogate natural rights is evil. Any system that believes it has first rights to the labor of our bodies and minds, that thinks it owns our production and our property, that it has the right to dictate every decision and action, that our liberty is inconsequential to their desire for control is evil. I state that unapologetically. Therefore the struggle of liberty and tyranny, freedom and state control is one of good and evil, the free state of man as God intended versus man as a slave of the state. To “give up essential liberty...for a little temporary security,” as Franklin said, is a false choice for a free people. To give up a natural right, or any portion thereof, reduces our humanity. Any compromise of our freedom is only a green light to the statists to take more.
In “the Anatomy of a Compromise”, Ayn Rand lists three rules about the application of principles.
1. In any conflict between two men (or two groups) who hold the same principles, it is the more consistent one who wins.
2. In any collaboration between two men (or two groups) who hold different basic principles, it is the more evil or irrational one who wins.
3. When opposite basic principles are clearly and openly defined, it works to the advantage of the rational side; when they are not clearly defined, but are hidden and evaded, it works to the advantage of the irrational side.
Let us briefly look at each one of these in turn. In the first, the men involved purport to hold the same principles. However, if they disagree, one of them is inconsistent. For example, if two politicians hold the principle that job creation is important yet one supports government policies that have historically been demonstrated to drag the economy down, he betrays his true motivations and priorities. One of the reasons the Democrat party has been successful in moving the country ever closer to statism is because while both major parties believe in wielding the power of government, the Democrat party has been more consistent in its advancement and application while the Republicans have attempted to give lip service to limited government, while their actions demonstrate their inconsistency. The problem we have in America is that both the political powers hold the same principles-those that support government expansion-and the only way to reverse our progress toward totalitarianism is to change the principles upon which our politicians govern and the principles by which we the citizens expect our politicians to govern.
The second one states that in any collaboration between two different principles, the evil one wins. This is simply articulated by this quote from Atlas Shrugged. “In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit.” The Bible says the same thing, “A little leaven works its way through the whole batch of dough.” Any compromise which betrays a basic principle, any policy that infringes on basic rights, no matter what the supposed “emergency” or “crisis”, is a victory for statism. We cannot save freedom by abandoning freedom. A little poison or a lot of it will still bring about the same result.
Finally, as we enter the debates in what could be the most important election in America’s history, an election that will put people in office who will be in a position to guide us through the most difficult times since our inception as a nation, who may determine the very survival of our nation and our way of life, we need to clearly define the issues. Platitudes, bumper stickers, sound bites and flashy smiles are not going to lead to the restoration of our liberty and the stability of our country. The statists will win if their true motives and the principles by which they govern remain hidden or they are allowed to evade answers to the crucial questions. Only the irrational would willingly vote for someone who said that their goal was to control every aspect of our lives, to confiscate all our wealth, that they believed the state owns our property and our very bodies, that it was only their desire for control that led them into politics in the first place. Yet those who support the status quo of our current government operation govern according to those principles. We need people to run for office who have the courage and the ability to articulate and apply the principles of liberty at all levels of our government. People who will consistently and unapologetically make the argument for the founder’s vision of America, a vision of limited government, individual freedom, God-given rights and laissez-faire economic policy that made us the “shining city on a hill” for so much of our history.
“The spread of evil is the symptom of a vacuum. Whenever evil wins, it is only by default: by the moral failure of those who evade the fact that there can be no compromise on basic principles.” Ayn Rand
Or, put another way, the only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.

How Much Personal Freedom Do You Have?

2010-05-26T08:41:00.001-07:00

Our federal government is currently arguing that as individual citizens we have no “fundamental right” to obtain any food we choose. It is seeking a ruling to establish the precedent that we do not have unlimited choices concerning the food we eat. Specifically, the case is centered around the sale of raw milk. There are many of us that see value in eating food that has not been processed and for some, access to raw milk is one of their more healthy choices. Our wise and all knowing government, however, has decided that it knows our nutritional needs better than we do, that they are the experts, that they have the right to tell us what we can and cannot eat. This is just the latest in a long list of meddling by governments at all levels over what we choose to put into our bodies, going back to Prohibition.

The question is, does the government have the right to determine what you put into your body? Does it have the right to tell you what you eat and drink, what supplements or drugs you take, what forms of exercise or sexual activity you engage in? Laws have been passed that regulate salt, fats and sugar, pressure is being put on food processors to change their recipes to conform to government guidelines, the process of getting drugs approved through the FDA is a long and expensive process that often denies patients access to new treatments until its too late. The First Lady has been thrilled with the new health care bill that gives the government unprecedented power to regulate our behavior as she wages her war on obesity. The congress is now considering legislation that will make some state grants dependent on the body mass index average of its children.

That brings us to the crux of the matter-money. As a libertarian, I don’t believe any government has the right to tell me what I eat or drink, what supplements or drugs I take or any other personal behavior I engage in as long as that behavior does not infringe on another’s rights to life, liberty or property. If I drink alcohol, it is my business unless I get behind the wheel and cause an accident. In that case, alcohol should not be a mitigating factor to decrease my penalty but I should be held responsible for any damage, injury or death I caused. If I eat too much junk food and get fat and develop diabetes or heart disease, I should be the one who pays for my increased medical costs. If I engage in promiscuous or homosexual sex and contract AIDS, I should bear the consequences.

That is not, however, how it works in America. The government has done its best to remove any responsibility for our actions from us and make us victims. Through Medicare and Medicaid and now through Health Care Reform, the government pays for the consequences of our behavior. That means if you take care of your body and make good behavioral choices in your life and I don’t, you will be paying for the consequences of my bad choices. To have your money stolen to pay for my irresponsibility rightly makes you mad and so it should. If it is your money, then you do have the right to regulate my behavior. If we have children, we know that because we provide them food and shelter, we have the right to regulate their behavior. If they begin engaging in behavior that we don’t like, we restrict their freedom. If they break a window playing ball, we take the ball away; confiscation of property. If they don’t eat their vegetables, they don’t get dessert; restriction of access. If they are out causing trouble with their friends, we confine them to quarters; restriction of association. If they cuss us out, we wash their mouth out with soap; restriction of speech. When they move out, however, and support themselves, we no longer have the right to exercise that level of control. If they break something, they pay for it. If they associate with the wrong people we can give them advice but that’s it. Being responsible for your actions, positive or negative, it the mark of a mature adult.

We have redefined our relationship with our government, however. We once interacted with our government as mature citizens. Today, our government interacts with us as subjects and children. It takes money from the productive and responsible and uses it to pay for the consequences of the people who are irresponsible and unproductive. As long as bad behavior is subsidized two things will be true. The irresponsible will not make responsible choices unless they are forced. The second is that the government will continue to assert it right to regulate all our behavior on the grounds that it is paying the bills, even though its with our money. If we choose to interact with our government as children, expecting it to meet our every need, then it will fill the role of parent and will exercise legitimate control as a consequence of that occupation.

The fix to this is simple. Remove the government safety net. For one hundred and fifty years of our history we got by just fine without it. There was no FDA, no welfare checks, no illegal drugs, no government health insurance or Social Security. Somehow, without the government intervening, the American citizen built this country from a few colonies on the eastern seaboard to a world power, economically and militarily. Somehow, hard drinking settlers tamed the west. Without government regulation, we all had food to eat and water to drink and roofs over our heads, and that food and shelter was considerably better than that in the Old World. If you engaged in negative behavior you bore the consequences. If you lost your job you found something else or you depended on your family or neighbors and they determined your “recovery” or the worth of putting their time and money into your life based on your cooperation. If you resorted to crime to support bad habits, justice was swift and harsh. Morality, justice and community were essential in such an environment and that is exactly the way it should be.

Law Abiding Citizen

2010-05-17T12:51:00.001-07:00

Law Abiding Citizen

One of the major differences between a republic and an authoritarian dictatorship is the glue that holds it together. In a dictatorship order is established through fear. In a republic, the social order is held together by a common respect for the law and a mutual appreciation for the system. “Law and Order” has been ingrained in the American psyche since the beginning, and rightly so. Anarchy is the antithesis of the American experience. It is the moral character of the individual citizen and a respect for the law that allows our society to function smoothly without an overwhelming police presence. The reason our system works is because the vast majority of the people are inclined to obey the law, even if they don’t always agree with it.

The major reason for this is because we believe we live in a representative republic. We vote for people who make the laws with our best interests in mind. These leaders are supposed to respect our God given rights and create laws that solve any problems that crop up. Our system was designed to move slowly and deliberately so every law was carefully considered and the likelihood of a bad law being pushed through by a bad legislator or two was minimal. That was the idea. However, our republic now exists in form only and the system works very differently today.

The electoral system is designed to maintain party leadership through gerrymandered districts and the creation of law has been outsourced to lobbyists and special interests. Our legislators, by their own admission, don’t understand or even read the legislation they pass. Most power has passed to the executive branch which interprets and implements the arcane legalese of current legislation. The average citizen is, for all intents and purposes, locked out of this process. Laws come down from on high that, at best, may not have our best interests at heart, and at worst, may be detrimental to our liberty and the health of the country as a whole; but are very good for expanding the power of those in charge.

Consider where we are today. New laws, the rules of the game we are all supposed to respect and abide by, are being pushed by radical communists like Nancy Pelosi and voted on by congressmen who think islands tip over if too many people are put on them. They are written by radical policy groups, interpreted by executive branch bureaucrats and implemented by federal union workers. Does anyone think this is a system that works for us? The original cry of the rebellion was “No Taxation without Representation”. Our government has gone far beyond that. They create programs that create more problems and tear apart the very fabric of our society, rewarding immorality and corruption and punishing the “law abiding citizen”. They spend, borrow and print money in ways that will eventually destroy the economy. They confiscate the wealth of one citizen to give it to another and often that other isn’t even a citizen but a criminal alien. They give rights to terrorists and take them from us. The list could go on.

The question then becomes, are we obligated to dig our own grave? At what point does the system and the laws it produces become so immoral that it is moral to become criminal? Consider the civil rights movement of the sixties. The law says “sit in the back of the bus; drink from this water fountain; go to this diner.” They were all legitimate laws passed by democratically elected representatives. Perhaps the blacks had little or no say but do we really have any more? If we are told to sit in the back of the bus but can see that the bus is heading for a cliff, do we not have the moral duty to disobey the law in order to do the right thing and try to save the bus and everyone on it? At what point does an immoral law, a law that directly attacks our God-given rights and the guarantees to be secure in our person and property under our contract, motivate us to act morally? At what point does the confiscation of our property, the attempts to silence our speech, the removal of our rights to self protection and self determination become too much? How much must they take before we realize we have been raped and beaten and if we do nothing, the death blow will quickly follow?

The only obligation we have to follow the dictates and proclamations of the “gods” on Mt. Washington is the obligation we create in our own minds. We the people as part of the various states entered into a contract with the “national” government and that contract is called the Constitution. It defines the duties and responsibilities of both parties. The federal government has its areas of responsibility and the people and the states has theirs. There has been an egregious breach of that contract by the federal government. Look at it this way. If you and I enter into a business contract in which I promise to deliver some item and you promise to pay a certain price for it and I don’t deliver that item, are you morally or legally obligated to pay for it? Of course not. Yet our federal government has refused to follow the stipulations of the contract and we continue to feel legally and morally obligated to pay. We are not under any moral obligation to recognize the authority of a governments that has invented and stolen its power. Of course the government could force us to obey its edicts and endure the confiscation of our liberty and property. These threats are becoming the primary motivation for the American people to yield to the increasing demands of Washington. No one wants to go pay a fine or go to jail, no one wants the stigma of being a criminal. But isn’t this how totalitarian regimes maintain control? Through intimidation and fear? In a republic, the government fears the people. If Washington can continue to count on our cooperation and support for their tyrannical actions, what do they have to fear? Nothing. Before our government’s despotism takes a very dark turn, we need to muster the courage of the original patriots, willing to risk it all and do what is right and moral, even if its not legal.

A Great Set Up?

2010-05-10T07:56:00.000-07:00

Most people enter politics because they want to win. Sure, they may make a show of “public service” but as the behavior of most politicians demonstrates, they want to acquire and keep power. To do that they need to win. Political parties are established to get their candidates to win and advance the agenda the party believes in. If that party and the candidates within it do not have any guiding moral principles, winning becomes everything and any means are acceptable to that end.

Consider also that the leaders within a party are not as short sighted as most politicians, who cannot see past the next election or even this week’s poll. It is their job to ensure their party continues to win and they do whatever is necessary to ensure their dominance for years, if not decades. It has been clear since the sixties that the Democrat party has been much better at this than the Republican party. Winning is not the final goal, complete destruction of their opponents is. Certainly since the nomination of Judge Bork, the personal vilification of the opposition aided by a media that agrees with most of their worldview, the Democrats have nearly perfected their brand of smash-mouth politics. In their efforts they have lied, accepted intolerable levels of corruption among their own, distorted the very language of politics and have enacted policies that have been by any objective standard miserable failures. Irrespective of these things, they have been electorally successful, particularly on the national level. The Republicans have never come close to the supermajority they enjoyed last year and since the New Deal, have rarely held majorities at all.

I have said these things not to excuse Republicans, whose behavior has been far from angelic, but to propose a scenario in which the Democrat party may establish itself, at least at the national level, as the only party of consequence. Many of us have become educated to the fact that a government solution to a problem is recipe for disaster and that government spending is going to lead to financial Armageddon eventually. We now borrow nearly forty cents out of every dollar we spend. We complain about skyrocketing deficits yet this administration is going to double it again. We know that Medicare is bankrupt and Social Security’s demise has been moved forward by decades, placing the explosion of that financial time bomb within the next ten years. We are aware that the government uses various accounting tricks to make things seem better than they are. Even the financial community itself is starting to follow the lead of David Walker, former comptroller of the US, in warning about the “unsustainable” nature of all this.

Not all politicians are stupid. Some, perhaps, but not all. They may live in a bubble but most of them know what is going on. Sure, some of them may ignore it, others hope it doesn’t happen until they’re gone and a few are doing what they can to warn us. Then there are those who are trying to bring the system down. For them, the trick is to bring it down in a way they don’t get blamed for it. Democrats are very good at this. Chris Dodd and Barny Frank, in collusion with Fannie Mae and ACORN, were largely responsible for the housing collapse but since it happened during President Bush’s tenure, the Republicans got the blame. Ted Kennedy was responsible for creating HMO’s yet it was the Democrats that tied Republicans to those insurers and others, demonizing them to pass Health Care Reform. Those are just two examples and does not include their penchant for creating a crisis where none exists. Again, Republicans have tried to play the game and have created their own set of problems but the Democrats are so much better at it.

By all accounts, the Republicans are going to make great gains in November and in 2012, perhaps they will have the presidency as well. The problem is, the financial situation we have created will require the kind of drastic action anathema to politicians. Our whole political class operates on the principle that is exists to give goodies to the people, “bring home the bacon”, create new “rights” and entitlements. Actual cuts, much less the elimination of whole programs and departments as well as the reductions in benefits that will be necessary to keep us solvent go against all the momentum Washington has built up for eighty years. What happens if in the middle to the end of this decade it all comes apart? If the Democrats filibuster any attempts to cut taxes to help the economy or cut programs or benefits to reduce or eliminate the deficit and fix our broken “entitlements”? The current Democrat leadership has mashed down the accelerator as we approach the cliff. If they bail out and let the Republicans take the wheel knowing there is no chance to avoid a catastrophe, the Republicans will be blamed for the mess just as they were after the 1929 crash. They will be reduced to a small minority for decades and the march to Washington’s totalitarian control will be rapidly completed.

Other than the timing, and I wouldn’t put it past Democrat operatives to provide the catalyst for the catastrophe, you may be saying it won’t happen because we are so much better educated today. Really? Maybe you are because you have put in the effort but even now there are 45% of the people that approve of the president’s job even with all we know. The American people have been trained like Pavlov’s dogs to look to government to solve problems and if there are problems, it must be the party in power’s fault. The vast majority of the people in this country, after going through government schools and with the attention span of a gnat, are not going to think all this through. They are going to have a knee jerk reaction and will be susceptible to a new messiah who may make this president look tame in comparison. Only if we get a hold of our neighbors and somehow convince them that, as Reagan said, government is the problem, not the solution, will we have any hope of thwarting such a devious plan.

Ready for a Fall

2010-05-03T16:55:00.000-07:00

Right before his ascension to the presidency, Barak Obama promised a "fundamental transformation of America". For more than a year he has been very busy making good on that promise. He and his cohorts have been putting the last nails in the coffin of the founder’s vision and have been busy putting the final touches on the Marxist machine they have been enthusiastically selling to us for a long time. We are in a much more dangerous position than many realize. Most believe that if we just change the electoral landscape in November, we can turn the tide and restore a republican form of government. I have news for you. Our republic is gone, murdered by our own hand almost a century ago. We maintain the forms of the constitutional framework-three branches of government, regular elections-but the substance of what has grown on the banks of the Potomac is much more sinister.

The fact is, everything required to impose a system of totalitarianism is in place today, most of it long before our dear leader was elected. The millions of pages of government rules and regulations encompassing every area of our lives have been accumulating for years. Just look at the originally innocuous Social Security Number. With it the government (and anyone else) knows almost everything important about you. All your income, property and even buying habits are available to them. As a non-illegal alien you cannot earn money without it. The fact that the government issues and regulates the use of this number gives it tremendous power if it chooses to use it. That is just one thing, albeit a big thing. Consider all the other rules and regulations created and implemented by two million government employees in a myriad of agencies that encompass every area of life that matters, and many that don’t. If the government decides it doesn’t like you, a visit from the IRS is just a start. They have it within their power to destroy anyone. Any business could be enveloped by a swarm of bureaucrats from OSHA, the EPA and a host of other regulatory agencies who could suddenly decide not to issue permits or file lawsuits for any activity whatsoever. We’ve already seen this type of intimidation in the financial sector. Because congress writes legislation that leaves so much up to the interpretation of the directors (czars) and bureaucrats, we are no longer under the rule of law but that of man. A yes or no from some pencil pushing bureaucrat can make or break the life of any citizen today. To coordinate that effort against the perceived enemies of this government would not take much. The gulag isn’t really necessary anymore. Destruction of the opposition could easily be accomplished with the federal bureaucracy in cooperation with a compliant media.

Over the last two years, the tentacles of control have become even greater and much more open. The fact that much of the banking industry is under indirect and direct government control, its constant threats, intimidation and outright usurpation of private business, its support for union thugs and its openly declared war on free market capitalism are obvious examples. There is the unprecedented ability to spy on the American people. I am not talking about conspiracy theories here. The government’s attempts to read our e-mail, listen in on our conversations, and its ability to follow our movements with cameras and face recognition technology are all current activities. The same technology that has done much to advance our society can easily become the tools of our oppression. Any time we become dependent on a technology and that same technology comes under the regulation and control of the government, it gives the government more power over us. On top of all that is the close cooperation between union gangsters and this administration as well as the president's call for the development of a domestic security force as well funded and powerful as the military and just about all of the pieces are in place.
A strong argument could be made that we have been evolving into an elected dictatorship for some time. Congress has become increasingly irrelevant as they have passed their lawmaking duties off on others. Sure, they still vote but the laws are written by special interests, lobbyists and bureaucrats and are filled with vague and imprecise legalese that even the lawmakers confess to not understanding. Then they are interpreted and implemented by the various agencies of the government as they see fit. Those agencies are all under the control of the executive branch and ultimately, the president. Even if congress occasionally gets some spine, this administration has shown its willingness to implement its agenda via regulation or executive order instead of legislation.

There is only one thing that keeps us from becoming Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia or imperial Rome. The American ideal still living within the hearts and minds of its people and, yes, even some politicians. Ideals like a sense of justice and fair play, everything that comes under the heading of "Judeo-Christian" values, a respect for the "American Dream". There is also still fear on the part of government officials, particularly elected ones, of the people. They fear a backlash if they overreach, not just of losing their jobs but ultimately, of the people exercising their second amendment rights. With health care reform legislation, however, we turned a corner. Washington has increased its power slowly and deliberately for a long time, sometimes going in fits and starts, often under cover of darkness. With health care reform, however, they voted to extend their power over our very lives and health despite persistent protests and polling that showed the vast majority of the people did not want it. The fear of an electoral backlash no longer intimidates them. If they move to make our second amendment rights illegal or impotent, they will, in their minds, have nothing to fear at all. The ice upon which we stand is very thin and melting further every day. It would take very little to plunge us into the cold waters of totalitarian tyranny.

Consider Germany from 1933 to 1939, six short years. Less than a two term president. They had a very bad economy prior to the rise of Hitler. The people were looking to their government to solve the problem. Hitler and the Nazis were democratically elected, even if the election was marred by intimidation and fraud. Hitler used the "crisis" to consolidate his power, particularly the supposed "terrorist attack" on the Reichstag. He soon controlled all supposedly private businesses. Within a few years he was master of Germany. If a government has power concentrated at the top, if it is run primarily through a bureaucracy and the people are conditioned to assume their government is there to solve every one of their problems, a rapid change in leadership and direction is not only possible but likely, particularly in times of crisis. The genius of our original system, with the separated and limited powers of the federal government, was that such rapid changes were impossible. That is why it has taken the statists/progressives decades to get to this point. Now that that original system exists in form only, the likelihood that a silver-tongued megalomaniac can take the reins of power and transform our country is a very real possibly. We are primed for a fall.

Restoring the American Character

2010-04-23T11:31:00.001-07:00

After a year of protest, many are wondering “What’s next?” Many found their tax day protests less well attended than last year and with the passage of Health Care Reform over our vehement and organized resistance, discouragement is a real possibility. This is a function of the narrow focus conservatives as a whole have taken for decades, a focus that determined statists/progressives have been able to overcome with relative ease, until this last year. That focus is on politics and policy. Conservative publications and talk radio have been opposing our socialist creep with passion and eloquence for years yet every year government gets bigger and more intrusive. Every year government takes more of our money and liberty. The only thing that has changed in the last year is that by accelerating their agenda under the Obama administration, the statists have woken many more people up but the focus, for the most part, is the same. We argue policy and play politics, we try to influence increasingly detached and determined politicians, hoping throwing the bums out and putting in a new crop of politicians will solve our problem. How did that work in the eighties with the “Reagan revolution” and the nineties with the “Contract with America”? Is government smaller? Were they any more than a bump in the road to totalitarianism?

We need to attack the root of the problem and that goes far beyond politics. Ultimately, the problem lies with our attitude. We have come to believe that the proper application of government is the solution to any problem. Some have criticized the statists for following a failed model, mocking them for believing that the socialist/communist system would work if it was just done properly by the right people. Yet the Republican party and other conservatives believe if we just “reform” the system, properly applying government, they will restore liberty and reduce government. Tinkering with a microwave won’t make it into a blender. Socialism is socialism and it cannot be ‘reformed’ to restore liberty because a statist system is diametrically opposed to freedom. The only way of restoring liberty is to dismantle the system we have and, in our case, reestablish the constitutionally limited government our founders envisioned.

It is the fact that we have allowed the growth of government, particularly in Washington, that is the cause of almost all our ills. Consider the constant complaining about how “divided” America is. The reason for that division is that the government solutions we want are being applied almost exclusively at the national level, creating a set of winners and losers on every issue nationwide. Abortion, gay marriage, gun rights, spending, health care, just about any social issue you can name is being handled at the national level and that creates anger and feelings of impotence among the losers and arrogant gloating among the winners. The federal government was not designed to handle social problems and our attempts to do so have resulted in the wasteful behemoth that now sits beside the Potomac. The states, and more importantly, the people in their private organizations and religious associations, are much better equipped to handle social ills and they do so without angering half the populace with waste, fraud, corruption and improper application of their tax dollars.

More importantly, the more we either allow or expect the government to do for us, the greater the destruction of our individual and corporate moral character. Socialism is designed to create weak and dependent people, the complete opposite of the characteristics of the people that made this country great. I would define the American character as a mix of rugged individualism, inventiveness, moral strength, compassion, honesty, frugality and a puritan work ethic. These things are required of a free people. Freedom creates these characteristics. Ultimately it comes down to this quote from the Bible. “If a man does not work, he should not eat.” If failure is an option, and I mean real failure where basic necessities like food and shelter are in jeopardy, men and women need to value hard work, they need to be inventive. Occasionally they will be reduced to relying on the generosity of friends and families but that generosity will be controlled by private individuals who will expect a lot form the recipient. If the “safety net” is only provided privately and reduces those who need it to “beggars” the motivation to do whatever is necessary (the jobs Americans just won’t do) to stay out of that position will be strong. In a free society there should be no top or bottom to the ladder of achievement and no government interference with our ascent or descent upon it. That was what took America from a few colonies on the Atlantic seaboard to a world power in a century and a half.

Socialism, looking to the government rather than to ourselves to solve problems, is just the opposite. Socialism destroys good character because it creates dependent, expectant, people. It has made the states and the people beggars and removes them from responsibility for their actions. Consider welfare. If the government forces people to give through taxes to support people who have made bad decisions in life, it destroys the character of the people on both ends. The one who is forced to give resents it because government applies and wastes money in ways that are foolish and destructive. Seeing this, he becomes less inclined toward productive enterprise. The one who receives it becomes comfortable and has no motivation to make correct choices. Family responsibilities, proper child rearing, and any work ethic whatsoever go out the window when the safety net is perceived as a right rather than a privilege and we can see the results of this everywhere.

It is not only the poor that suffer the detrimental effects of socialism. Family units are weakened by the expectations we have of government. Once upon a time the family unit was paramount. It was the family that was the primary caregiver and educator of children and of the aged. With public school and social security we have allowed individuals in the middle to behave selfishly and evade responsibility. Instead of creating value among families and communities, socialist governments remove our responsibilites to each other and appropriates them to itself. Ultimately, this means that society places little value on the people at both ends of the spectrum. The old are warehoused on the public tab until they die and children are not taught to be exceptional but government automatons who will give their loyalty and support to the state until they reach the end of their usefulness. It also destroys neighborhoods and communities because our primary relationships are not with our neighbors but with the government and it is the relationships that affect us most that we spend the most time on.

Short term and long term we need to reverse this trend. This is where the tea parties should broaden their efforts outside of politics and teach people within and without to become what Americans used to be. It is the restoration of the American character that will save this country. It will not be easy because we are swimming against the tide, socialism is all around us. It needs to be done, however, if for no other reason than the safety net is developing some serious holes. There are a number of very real scenarios in which the government will no longer be able to pay the largess we have become used to. Some may happen suddenly-the inability to borrow any more money, hyperinflation, total collapse of the housing and stock markets due to a crisis elsewhere, war with Iran and a reduction in the oil supply-or slowly-the interest on the debt eating up all our money, continued attrition of the tax base. The unfortunate thing is that most of us have lost the skill sets our ancestors took for granted that allow us to meet our basic needs when our all mighty government cannot.

Here are my suggestions for going beyond protests among the tea party adherents and concerned citizens everywhere. Politically we need to be the people of no. No more socialism, no more government solutions. Repealing health care is just the start. No more welfare, Social Security, Medicare, Education, Labor or Energy departments, or any other activity government is currently engaged in that is not in the constitution. Reduce Washington to a sleepy little town that requires a few hundred billion dollars to run. We can do that voluntarily or it will be done for us through economic collapse. Unfortunately I doubt we have the will or the time to do it voluntarily.

We need to develop a comprehensive program among our families, neighbors and communities. We must become the leaders who will be prepared to rise up when the whole thing comes crashing down. Among our families we need to make correct and moral decisions to be able to meet the needs of ourselves and our loved ones. Have things of value other than dollars or bits of information in a computer somewhere. Store food and learn how to provide for yourself. Make sure you have the means to protect yourself from the looters. All of us can do these things now and they are smart actions regardless of what happens.

Then we should become educated in the things that our grandparents and great-grandparents took for granted. Learning to be resourceful and repairing things rather than replacing them constantly in our throw-away society. Knowledge of medicine and first aid beyond band-aids and trips to the emergency room. Learning how to produce our own food. Educating ourselves so we can educate our own children. The creation of contingency plans in case we need to protect ourselves from the looters or the government. The point is to be able to acquire our basic resources locally and make ourselves independent of government and its foolish actions. There is a wealth of knowledge among patriots, particularly those who have been around the block a few times, that needs to be coordinated and disseminated among all of us. This should be done among neighbors and communities, organized at the local level. And it needs to be done on a personal level, face to face, with as little reliance upon impersonal communication as possible. In order to create tightly knit communities, we need to get to know one another and that only happens when we can look one another in the eye.

By emphasizing personal actions at the local level, tea party participants gain a sense of accomplishment, something often missing in the political arena where things happen slowly, elections have to we waited for and, as we have seen, the higher one goes the more insulated politicians are from reality and our voices. Creating independence from government at all levels will, in the short term, prepare us for the time in the near future when governments are no longer able to provide all the things they do today. That is already happening among states and local governments who can’t pull all the financial tricks Washington can. When the Washington ponzi scheme comes apart, states and local government will not be in a position to pick up the slack and we will be on our own whether we like it or not. Long term, by creating a sense of independent pride rather than dependent expectation, those who will rebuild this nation will do so with a great appreciation for the vision of the founders and the essential nature of an American character rooted in liberty and personal responsibility.

Killing the Beast

2010-04-19T08:24:00.000-07:00

The tyrannical enemy we face is indeed formidable. The Federal Government is huge. Looking beyond the few elected members, consider the myriad of agencies staffed by two million government employees. That does not include the armed services, employees of the postal service and other contractors. All these employees are there to create and implement all the rules and regulations we live under, tens of thousands of pages every year. They are also there to spend/waste the trillions of dollars they squeeze out of us every year. Our national government, ruling over a vast empire at home and abroad, is larger, richer and more powerful than any in history. That government is, and has been, bent on imposing its totalitarian will upon every freedom loving person at home and now, every democracy abroad. Its momentum toward this goal has become nearly irresistible.
Many look to our electoral system to tame the beast. In one hundred years we have had fifty congressional elections and twenty five presidential elections. Some of them were even called “revolutions”. Yet every year government grows, more money is collected and spent and our freedoms are confined in an ever shrinking box. Our national vehicle is speeding towards the grand canyon. A slight shift to the right or left is not going to keep us from going over the edge into the chasm of fiscal disaster and absolute tyranny. Gerrymandering and other electoral tricks are designed to maintain the status quo and continuity of leadership within the parties. The occasional seat turnover or even changes in party control do nothing to change our direction. The most they do is make slight adjustments in heading or speed.
Beyond even that, consider the people we elect, even if they promise “change”. Who will we be replacing our current crop with? Most of them will still be career politicians who are in “public service” because they believe, fundamentally, that government is the solution, it just hasn’t been done right. Whether Democrat or Republican, each one believes, with few exceptions, that they have the solution to any problem and that solution is the proper utilization of government. That, however, is the problem. Most politicians, and a majority of the population, have come to accept the idea that the proper solution to any problem is a government solution. Of course too often any government solution creates ten more problems. But to the politicians that doesn’t matter. They increase their power and prestige and such a paradigm brings people, rich and poor alike, to their feet begging for favors. As long as there are millions, billions, and now trillions of our dollars in the hands of our politicians at every level, things will not change. For most men and women in public service, the temptation is simply too great. And for far too many, the utilization of such a system is the fulfillment of their dreams.
“We the People” need to change our thinking about our government. It is not a mischievous puppy that we just need to train properly. It is the many headed hydra bent on eating even the marrow from our bones. Cutting off a head here and there is not going to do any good. They just seem to grow back. Consider welfare reform. It may have curbed some of the abuses and was a turn in the right direction but it needed only a new majority to put it back the way it was. How many times have we heard politicians say they are going to eliminate this or that agency? Have any of them disappeared? No. Its heads continue to grow and multiply every year with every election. The only weapon we have utilized up to this point is a two edged sword; one edge has a “D” and the other has an “R” and it has the consistency of overcooked spaghetti. It would almost seem hopeless, and we don’t have the head of Medusa to turn it to stone.
The beast does have an Achilles' heel, however. The beast feeds upon us, our wealth and our liberty. We stand out in the open, willingly yielding our flesh to its insatiable appetite even while we mouth empty protests. The only chains that hold us before the monster are the ones we voluntarily place on ourselves. Those chains are a misguided loyalty to what the beast once was. Before it was the hydra, the beast that is our government was a relatively docile beast of burden. It was well secured by the chains of the constitution and it served us well for over one hundred years. Then an alien organism from Europe infected our animal and it gradually morphed into the horrific monster that threatens us today. It has broken and discarded its chains and now demands our servitude. It no more resembles its original form as the cute gecko from the Geico commercials resembles a Tyrannosaurs Rex. It may have four extremities, a tail and scales but that is where any similarity ends. We are no longer dealing with a constitutional republic or even a democracy but an authoritarian oligarchy. In our fight against our government we do no disservice to the vision of Adams, Madison, Jefferson or Washington. The beast trampled their vision long ago. I would think they would be rather proud of our efforts to resist the its tyranny.
That understood, how do we kill the beast? How do we exploit its “Achilles' Heel”? Every government requires money to operate. Ours requires trillions of dollars. Right now it devours around a third of everything we produce in this country. It won’t be long until it demands half. New taxes for health care, higher taxes to keep Social Security and Medicare solvent, a Value Added Tax are all coming. And we keep paying. Voluntarily we offer up our flesh and blood to feed the beast. Sure we complain. Sure it hurts because there are a lot of things we would rather do with that sizable chunk of money. Sure it annoys us because we know our money is being used to forge ever tighter chains or simply turned into worthless manure. But we stand there and take it because we think we have no choice, because we are afraid of the beast, because we have been brainwashed into thinking we asked for it so we have no right to refuse. We have every right to refuse. No man or government has the right to demand our involuntary servitude. No man or government has the right to seize our property. No man or government has the right to annihilate our liberty. It is time to finally stand up and say NO. NO, you may no longer take the fruits of my labor. NO, my property is mine and I do not own it simply at your pleasure. NO, my rights and liberties come from God and not you and you may not manipulate them or take them as you wish. It is our refusal as a people that will bring down the beast.
There are two ways to go about this. Keeping with our analogy, we can run or we can hide. If we hide we follow the lead of the characters of Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. Those men and women walked away, refusing to feed the voracious appetite of the looters any longer. Some of us can just walk away, some can sell their businesses and homes and put the proceeds where the government cannot confiscate them and wait until the beast collapses from malnourishment. If the ten percent that pay the vast majority of the taxes stop creating wealth for a while, the end will come quickly. The other way is to “run”. Not really literally. This would be following the path of resistance movements throughout history, including our own revolutionary generation. Create an underground economy and stop cooperating with the government. Do not obey their mandates or collect their taxes. Work on a cash (or gold/silver/barter) basis with your fellow patriots. Starve the beast of our money and cooperation. Riskier perhaps, but it also accomplishes something important that hiding does not. It creates tightly knit and organized communities that will be necessary when the beast succumbs. And it will fall. We are already stretched to the limit and even if we do nothing, the whole system, governmental and economic, is going to collapse. It is “unsustainable”. A good case could be made that our current crop of rulers is trying to hasten that end.
The question becomes, then what? When the government can no longer meet the needs of the looters and we “test the bonds of social cohesion” as Moody’s said, what happens next? The crisis will be messy and difficult for all. At that point there will be those who are going to try to “fundamentally transform” this country, getting rid of the last vestiges of the American ideal and the vision of the founders. If they succeed, they will use the crisis, a crisis they precipitated, to impose an absolute tyranny and our God given rights and liberties will be reduced to a distant memory. We and our children will be consigned to perpetual slavery for there is no great power that will rescue us from that despotic regime. Or we can resist in whatever way is necessary. That takes preparation and coordination. We cannot wait until the last minute, we cannot procrastinate. We must ready ourselves mentally, physically and spiritually for this ultimate contest. If we resist with courage and conviction, putting aside even the fear of death to secure freedom for our children and grandchildren, we could restore the constitutional republic of the founders and see the spectacular rebirth of America as its people rediscover the power of freedom that made this country great.

Financial Solutions

2010-04-01T14:46:00.000-07:00

Last night I attended a meeting with some of our county officials here in the People’s Republic of Maryland. It was in some respects a town hall put on by one of our more courageous county council members. Although originally billed as a forum for the repeal of the county’s revenue cap-read "tax increase" for us-it was more of a work session in which we the people were given the opportunity to offer solutions. How rare it is for government to descend from Mt. Olympus to ask we mere mortals what we think. But desperate times call for even the most unorthodox measures.

Our county, like most states, counties and municipalities across this great land, is having money problems. They call it a revenue problem. We call it a spending problem. We all know there is waste, fraud and abuse in government at every level. We know it is a rare government entity whose spending and confiscation of our money does not increase faster that the rate of inflation, sometimes much faster. Unlike we serfs in the kingdom, when their income decreases the last thing the gods consider is cutting spending. The reason is this. Most people who work in government don’t have to worry about their jobs. If your government "cuts" jobs, usually that means they just don’t fill vacant positions. That is not true everywhere, of course, some states have actually had to reduce size, but most government workers, regardless of performance, are pretty secure. They get their fancy health care plans and their pensions. They are insulated from the pain a bad economy causes all of us.

Here is my rub. We have forgotten who serves who in this country. The government and its employees are supposed to serve us, we do not exist to serve them and meet their every need. In these times that has become starkly evident. We can no longer afford to fulfill the every whim of our rulers and their minions. It is time they began to live like the rest of us. Do our governments want a quick reduction in expenditures that will also save them truckloads of money later on? With the exception of public safety employees, eliminate government pension contributions and put all government employees on high deductible catastrophic health care plans. Final suggestion, without exception, eliminate all public sector unions. Everyone knows that pension and health care costs are bankrupting many government entities just as Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid are bankrupting the country. It is time that teachers, ditch diggers and pencil pushing bureaucrats live like the rest of us. Be responsible for your own retirement and health care. Worry about your 401K. Make sure your performance justifies your continued employment. There should not be a union and union rules to protect incompetence.

Government exists to serve the people. You don’t hire a housekeeper or a gardener and then pay them more than you receive from your labor or lavish them with benefits that you don’t have. When did it become the rule that public servants are any different? Desperate times.... It is time we rethought not only the role of government but how it is run.

I Violence Never Necessary?

2010-03-29T13:43:00.000-07:00

Is Violence Never Necessary?
Before beginning to address such a controversial topic, let me say that I am not advocating violence. No one wants to get hurt and few are psychopathic enough to enjoy hurting others. However, it is time to consider the topic in a sober manner. In response to the passage of the Health Care Reform Bill, there were reports of threats, name calling and even violence. Whether they were planted or exaggerated, I don’t know. The point is that everyone from both sides came out and condemned even the idea of resorting to violence, even when our most basic liberties are threatened. Glenn Beck spent almost the entire week repeating that we must never resort to violence. Of course those in power repeated the same thing because for all the control they think they have, they are cowards. For them, it is fine to control us at the point of a gun but when the tables are turned, they cry "foul". There is something we need to consider, however. Our protests have fallen on deaf ears. Even if the government changes hands, realistically there is little hope for resurrecting the republic through our normal means. This government now holds absolute power of life and death. If we cannot rely on our protests or our electoral activities to motivate our leaders to respect our rights and liberties, do we just give up? If they win the battle and Health Care Reform remains the law of the land and they push forward with Immigration Reform and Cap and Trade against our will, do we simply conform to the new paradigm of totalitarianism they have created? It is our compliance with their despotism that has made any of this possible. If there is any hope of resurrecting the Republic, we need to stop complying with immoral and unconstitutional laws and exercises of power. That is civil disobedience. But is that where is ends? Consider these two quotes by Thomas Jefferson;
"What country can preserve its liberties if its rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms."
"What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure."
Many of us rightly revere the founders as wise and courageous men. If, however, they did not go beyond protests and civil disobedience, we would still have the Queen of England as the titular head of our country. We must understand government as George Washington did;
"Government is not reason, it is not eloquence, it is force: like fire, a troublesome servant and a fearful master. Never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action."
Ultimately, government is force. Unless that force meets with resistance, it will continue on indefinitely until all people are brought under its totalitarian control. If our leaders are moral men and women, our protests and electoral activities will sway them. That is why Ghandi and Dr. King were successful. Those in authority had a basic respect for life and justice. Did protests and civil disobedience work against Stalin or Hitler or Mao or Che? No. These were godless men with no sense of morality and zero respect for life. Need I remind you that these are the heroes of the progressives, that Mao and Marx provide the ideology for those currently in power? That the murderous Che is celebrated? What happened to the people under the authority of those men? Those who were not killed were reduced to slavery. The Chinese people and those of Cuba remain under totalitarianism. Hitler and the USSR were defeated from the outside. Their people did not rise up. God did not miraculously deliver them. Any protests were crushed with violence. They gave up any means of resistance. Those governments have nothing to fear from the people, therefore the people live in fear.
If we declare unequivocally to our rulers that we will never resist their attempts to reduce us to slavery with force, if we declare that we will be good losers and comply with whatever they do, what is to keep them from doing whatever they want? Are we going to trust them with self restraint? Are you kidding? The Second Amendment is in the constitution for a reason. Allow me to quote;
"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."
The founders understood that tyrants wield their power through the army and/or a national police force. It is at the point of a gun where their will is ultimately enforced. (I remember and Obama czar quoting something like that with appreciation.) Republics, however, are held together by a common morality and respect for the law among the people and their rulers. The founders distrusted a large standing army for this very reason. That is why a state militia, made up of free men who had their own means of self defense, was necessary for the security of a free State, as opposed to the Federal Government. If the federal Government sought to wield illegitimate power over the states and the people, they would be physically unable to because the state would have the "bigger guns". The "National" Guard does not fulfill this role. However, we now find ourselves in a precarious position. Individually, we can defend ourselves if we so choose but an individual is no match for the coercive power of the Federal Government. Such attempts at resistance lead to indiscriminate violence and serve only to embolden those in power and paint resistors as cooks and crazies. If we would resist tyranny we must follow the example of the original patriots whose militia provided the original resistance and who fought the British wherever Washington’s Continental Army was not. That requires planning and preparation. We all know that the shadow government of this administration is carefully plotting our subjugation. If our resistance is haphazard and disorganized at the start, we will be no match for a government machine that already controls so much of our lives.
It is my contention that we will reach the point where we will have to choose between ultimate submission to tyranny or armed resistance. If you think that is absurd, consider for yourself at which point you will stop complying with the wishes of our despotic government. Did you fill out your census form in its entirety? No, good, that was easy. Will you allow them to take a DNA sample for a national ID card? Will you allow them to take your children and place them into the indoctrination centers we know as the public schools so they can learn about the joys of Marxism and homosexuality without the option of home or private school? Will you turn in your guns when they finally require that? How much of your property are you willing to allow them to confiscate? What will you do when some bureaucrat tells you that your disease or condition is not cost effective to treat and you should just take the pain pill and die? When they openly begin censoring the media? When they load you in a truck to take you to a "reeducation" center? At what point do we stop cooperating, moving to civil disobedience, and if they try to force us, to armed resistance? When do we shake off our government indoctrination that violence is always wrong and defend our liberties with a vigor equal to those who desire to take them away?
My rights to life and liberty come from God and I am under no obligation to surrender them to any man or any government for any reason. Any man or government that desires to take those rights by carrot or stick is not worthy of my loyalty or affection. I also have the right to resist any attempt to take my rights by whatever means necessary. I do not have to submit to the confiscation of my property, incarceration or death because some despot decided his will to power superceded my God given rights. I do not have to allow myself to be beaten or intimidated by some union thug or statist supporter. If our leaders understood that "we the people" still had fangs and if backed too far into a corner would use them, however reluctantly, there would be no attempts to impose such tyranny upon us. Now is not the time to lay down our weapon of last resort. Our politics is no longer a game. Government power never has been. It is a matter of life and death, liberty and tyranny. Do we descend into the darkness with merely a whimper and condemn future generations to slavery in the hopes that one day someone will rescue us? Ask the Chinese and the Cubans how that is going. Or do we stand with our founders and tell our rulers that the line has been crossed and that if they do not retreat, our remaining liberty will not be acquired nearly so cheaply or easily.

What To Do Now

2010-03-24T09:26:00.000-07:00

For nearly a year we called, protested, e-mailed, wrote letters and organized. Many of us took to the streets of our town and the nation’s capitol, raising our voices in protest over what we all agreed was an attempt to remake this county in a socialist or Marxist image. We have worked within the system but our work was based on false assumptions. We assumed a fair debate of ideas, we assumed that if we could sway the public against these radical proposals Washington would listen, we assumed we were in a fair fight. All those assumptions were wrong. Ideologues who are bent on “transforming” America think nothing of lying, cheating, bribing, or threatening to get their way. The public to them are sheep to be led, not citizens to be heard. So we lost. And until we understand the fight we will continue to lose.
In the last several blogs I have stated two important things. One, no matter which party is in charge, government is going to grow. Sure, we may have another “Republican Revolution” in November but will they be able to repeal this legislation even if they want to? How many of them voted against it just because it cost too much and not because it is the last and most blatant power grab of an unconstitutional government? Name one major (or even minor) government program that has ever been repealed by either party. Don’t place your hope in Washington. Also, don’t place a lot of faith in all these lawsuits. Most of what the government does is unconstitutional yet it has been consistently upheld. Even the obvious ones like campaign finance reform and our first amendment rights to speech. Finally, how loud will all those states be in their protest when Washington starts tightening the purse strings on the recalcitrant ones. Too many states have put themselves into a dependent position to object too strenuously.
The second important thing is that we must realize that we no longer live in a constitutional republic or even a democracy. If that wasn’t obvious to you on Sunday, then you must be blind. We live in an oligarchy. The current democrat leadership will do whatever they want and do whatever is necessary to get it. Our protests have as much affect on them as do those of the people of Iran on the Mullahs. They don’t care. They have chosen a course and they will continue on that course until it reaches its logical conclusion. That, for us, is the collapse of America, the ashes from which they will build their totalitarian utopia. We are losing because we are playing by outdated rules of a republic long gone. This is not some silly legal dispute with our neighbor, we are fighting the “mob”. I’d say we are bringing a knife to a gun fight but we aren’t even brining that.
Before I go on, consider where we are. We are now subject to a government that will have the power to regulate every aspect of our lives. By acting as the gatekeepers to the entire health care system, they now have the literal power of life and death over us. Crushing taxes demonstrate their total power over our property. By continuing to participate in their system, we are acknowledging our status as slaves. They own us, our bodies, our property, our lives. It is time to stop living as if the contract “We the People” made with the federal government was still valid. That contract has been broken repeatedly by our government for a very long time. In a marriage contract, it is considered broken due to infidelity. The parties may voluntarily choose to continue in that agreement and “work things out” but the aggrieved party is under no obligation to do so. If the infidelity is ongoing, however, the aggrieved party would be mentally deranged to continue. Our government has repeatedly violated our contract and has become more brazen about doing so. We voluntarily stayed within the bounds of the contract because we were dazzled by the baubles were were promised. Now the absolute destruction of our country is at hand and we see where our compromise has brought us. The Federal Government has been exercising illegitimate authority over us and it is time we stopped recognizing it.
The real power lies with us. The government only has the authority we give it. It is we who are forging our own chains. It is we who build the scaffold upon which they will hang us. Why do we continue to participate? While we cannot hide ourselves in some remote valley as they did in “Atlas Shrugged” we can stop cooperating in the “looting”. They exercise their power through technology and by taking over the banks, mortgage lending and other financial institutions, they know all and can control all. Drop out. Deal in cash and precious metals. Put your important assets out of reach. Barter goods and services with your fellow patriots. Be ready to take responsibility for your children and your aging parents. Stock up on food and be prepared to defend yourself and your loved ones. Refuse to cooperate with government intrusion, be it the census, a national ID, or even foolish EPA regulations. If you are ever on a jury in which tax law or some regulation is being prosecuted, vote to acquit. One of the ways the colonists got Britain's attention before the war was by refusing to buy their goods, tea being the most famous. They learned to do thing for themselves and within their communities, without the government. If we refuse to participate, they will become irrelevant.
Our end is upon us. Unlike Greece, we will not have the Germans or the IMF to bail us out. Our credit rating was in trouble before heath care, now it will be in real danger. We are broke and no amount of printing or borrowing is going to get us out of it. Hyperinflation is coming and when the interest on the debt consumes all our money the government checks will stop coming. There will be rioting, cities will burn and people will die because after having relied on the government for so long, they will have no idea how to fend for themselves. Remember New Orleans and Katrina? The LA riots? Now think of it country wide.
What rises from the rubble of our insanity will be up to us. Those in Washington would be more than happy to establish their totalitarian ideology upon us as a result of the crisis. That will only happen if we are still looking to them to save us. If they are already irrelevant in our lives and we have removed ourselves from their power, they will be unable to succeed. Bonaparte, Hitler, Chavez, they all came to power in a crisis because the people were looking outside themselves for a savior. At your local TEA party next month, look around at your fellow patriots. It is our cooperation and community that is the key. It is we who must now stand together, prepare for what is to come and develop communities that will function when our government will not. It is from among us that leaders will arise at the local level with the courage to resist the plans Washington may have. It is we who will recapture the image of America as it was understood by those first patriots who resisted tyranny with their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor.

Courage and the Census

2010-03-15T08:37:00.000-07:00

Courage and the Census

Within the next few weeks, we will all be getting our census forms. Many millions of our tax dollars have been spent on stupid commercials and other advertising to get us to understand the importance of filling them out. The main point of all of them is that if we don’t fill them out, we won’t get our share of government goodies. That is wrong on so many levels but it is indicative of how government, and way to many people, view government-as the repository for everything good we get. The only constitutional reason for the census is to correctly apportion representatives. To do so the government needs to know only how many people live in a particular area. It does not need to know my race, religion, income, number of toilets or any of the other questions it asks beyond “how many people live here.”
What we have in our current census form is an obvious, blatant, unconstitutional government intrusion. Not that there aren’t a multitude of other examples. In another month our taxes are due. But the census is here now, today. A government form asking for information the government has no constitutional authority to ask for. Are you going to give it to them? What are you afraid of? If we do not refuse to cooperate with this intrusion, when will we stand against this government and finally refuse to participate in their incessant push for more power and control? If the vast majority of people in this country decided that the only information they were going to give this government was a head count in their household, what would they do? They can’t throw us all in jail. They could fine us but what if we refused to pay? Again, they can’t throw us all in jail. There are three branches of government that are supposed to check and balance each other to protect our liberty. If they refuse to do so then it is “we the people” who must stand up en mass and say “NO! you may not do that.” “NO! That is unconstitutional.” “NO! My rights do not come from you and you may not take them or my property.” Sure, there are a few million government employees but there are three hundred million of us. We outnumber them and they only have the power we willingly grant to them.
We have stood up and protested, we have marched, we have complained, we have called our representatives, e-mailed, and petitioned but when we lose, we resign ourselves to the new status quo. Why? Why should we let them have their ill gotten gains at the expense of our liberty? Why should we continue to participate in their schemes that continually limit our freedom? Why do we continually allow them to steal our money to finance their totalitarian agenda? It is time we stopped tacitly endorsing their wins by accepting their new rules and regulations. It is time we refused to acknowledge their illegitimate authority. They have neglected, broken and trampled our contract. Why do we still consider ourselves under obligation to defer to their authority? The census is just one more intrusion. Just because they send out the form does not mean we have to fill it out. Just because they vote away a little more freedom does not mean we have to give it to them. When does it stop?
There is a lot more coming down the road. The national ID card is in the news again. This will give the government total control over our lives. If we allow our liberty to be reduced to what the government puts on a card, it is over. Will we stand up then? Will we refuse to get it even though it will mean we may lose our job or be unable to access our bank account? That is a bit harder, isn’t it. But if we can’t refuse an intrusive form from the Department of Commerce, what makes us think we will stand up and refuse to give the FBI or Homeland Security our personal information for an ID card? What about health care? Will we refuse to participate in their system and will there be health care workers who have enough courage to serve the people and not the government? What about when they come to put your approved, government controlled thermostat in your home or they come for your fishing poles or guns?
Every time we let them get away with it, every time they intrude over our objections and we go along with it anyway, they are emboldened. If we all fuss about the census and do it anyway, they will figure the ID card will be easy. If the ID card is easy, then each new restriction it will bring will be even easier. We are desperately holding on to the last vestiges of our freedom. It is time to stop simply trying to defend what is left and go on offense. The census may seem a small thing or it may seem a big thing. Perhaps you’ve never refused to cooperate with the government before. It is time we started because for too long we have been cooperating in our own destruction.

What's Going To Change?

2010-03-10T07:51:00.000-08:00

As many struggle to defend the last vestiges of the freedom entrusted to us by the founding generation, we are looking forward to the possibilities November’s election may bring. A scant eight months away, Republicans in particular are salivating over the prospect of replacing the Democratic majority in congress with their own. Some in the TEA Party movement have fostered alliances with their local or state Republican party in the belief that if they can “turn” the Republican party from “moderate” to “conservative” and that once they are in power they will lower taxes and rein in government. What in the long history of the Republican party gives them the confidence this will happen, I am at a loss to understand.
Consider what has happened in the Federal Government since the time of Franklin Roosevelt. There has been a definite pattern established that continues to this very day. The Democrat party grabs the reins of power. Since the time of Woodrow Wilson, this party has been home to progressives, socialists, communists and their sympathizers. In short, they believe in a government that knows no bounds, a government that intrudes into every area of the lives of the governed, a totalitarian government. Instead of a revolution, which the American people would never tolerate, they have taken their time, educating, brainwashing and deceiving the people to accomplish their agenda.
Big government, socialism, whatever you call it, is anathema to prosperity. The more successful the Democrats/statists were in implementing their agenda, the more the economy suffered. The Great Depression, the Johnson/Nixon recession, the Carter years, and our current recession are all cases in point. Each one, Carter excepted, followed a major government expansion. Americans don’t like anything that interferes with their pursuit of prosperity. “It’s the economy stupid” is always the case. Once the socialists in the Democrat party damage the economic engine enough to cause pain to the majority of the people, the people vote for the other guy figuring they will fix it. That’s when the Republicans get their turn.
The formula for prosperity is rather simple. Keep taxes low, don’t make any sudden policy moves and the American people will adapt to their new circumstances and prosper once again. The twenties followed Woodrow Wilson, the fifties followed FDR, the eighties and nineties followed Johnson/Nixon/Carter. Even John Kennedy cut taxes and created a burst of economic activity before Johnson destroyed it. Once these policies are enacted, prosperity returns, the American people are happy, and money flowes into the treasury. The government, however, never shrinks. Liberty relinquished under the socialists never returns. For all their talk of liberty and “small government”, the Republicans never actually make any serous attempts to dismantle any of the socialist structures the Democrats build. The pattern is so obvious it is almost as if it was planned. The Democrats grow the government until it reaches the point where it makes the people unhappy and results in economic destruction, then the Republicans take power, restore prosperity, and make the people comfortable in their new bonds until the next government expansion. I speak in generalities, of course. As I stated previously, Democrat Kennedy cut taxes and Republican George W. Bush expanded government exponentially, but in general, the pattern holds.
Allow me an analogy. The American people are like a herd of wild mustangs, free to roam the prairie. The Constitution put a fence around them, encompassing hundreds of square miles, mainly to keep predators out. Most in the herd never even saw the fence. Each Democrat/statist administration uproots the fence and encloses a smaller area. This construction annoys the herd and they resent the intrusion. Then the construction stops and the mustangs settle down, accepting their new limitations. A decade or so goes by and then the statists move the fence again. This time the area is too small to provide sufficiently for the whole herd. The statists start providing food and pacify many of the horses. They become accustomed to the new situation even though many are now dependent. Today the fence has become a corral and the current crop of politicians are trying to make it a stall. The important thing is the fence never expands, it always contracts, no matter who is in charge of it.
The majority of the Democrats are trying to eliminate liberty for the people and reduce them to serfdom. The majority of Republicans are simply enablers, although they too are increasingly infected with the statist ideology. It is almost a good cop-bad cop act. No matter what, however, the accused is going to jail. The fact is that we are, and have been for some time, ruled by an oligarchy. Real power in our nation is held by the career bureaucrats and the leaders of the two major parties. All of them are interested in one thing, the expansion and retention of government power. If health care or cap and trade become law, do you really think they will ever be repealed? Changed, perhaps, just as welfare was “reformed” for a while, but never eliminated. Reagan was right. The closest thing to eternal life is a government program. An individual congressman or even a president from either of these parties is not going to change anything, none of them are going to break down the fence. Time is rapidly running out and we don’t have the time to try to reform either major party from the ground up. It has not worked for the last forty years anyway. Once upon a time the Republican party was the new kid on the block and in less than a decade they captured the presidency. If we really want change this November, we need to “throw the bums out”, all of the bums from both parties and replace them with independent individuals who are not interested in perpetuating power and privilege but are willing to break down the fence and restore freedom to the people. If all the angry Americans in the TEA parties and other anti-big government movements really want change, they need to move beyond calling for lower taxes and simple opposition to the current expansion and seek out people to support who will actually dismantle the wall that is strangling our liberty. The Republicans have never demonstrated the courage to actually back up their rhetoric. It is time to look elsewhere.

The Great Lie

2010-02-26T11:40:00.001-08:00

The entire statist economic policy is based on a lie and everything our current government is doing, and has done in recent memory, is based on that lie. Therefore it will not accomplish the goals stated publicly by our politicians. The lie is this. If there is a problem, a government solution is the best solution. If we are in a recession and people are unemployed, the problem is government has not done enough to ensure that everyone has a job. If there are poor people, it is because government has not done enough to help them out of poverty. If cars are accelerating by themselves, it is because government has not had enough regulation and oversight of the car making process. If businesses are not hiring, it is because they are greedy capitalists who are squeezing their current employees and don’t care about the needs of others and therefore government has to force them to hire people or take their profits and give them to those who will. If people are too lazy or stupid to save for their future or take care of themselves in the present, it is government's job to force them to save and make them safe.
Here is an unequivocal statement. Government cannot create wealth, it is impossible. The only thing government can do is create a safe and just environment in which wealth can be created. Here is another true statement. Government cannot solve social problems. Every time it tries it makes them worse. Freedom creates a moral and prosperous environment because in the long run, it is in the best interest of everyone to be fair, honest and responsible in their dealings with one another. This is because in order to provide for myself, I need to convince someone else that what I can produce through my labor or my ideas has enough value that it is worthy of being traded for my necessities. If I try to cheat or steal, it may work once or twice but eventually, no one will want to trade with me and I will starve. If I have alienated my family through base and immoral behavior, I will not have any “safety net” if I hit a rough spot or become too old to produce adequately for my own needs.
Enter government. Someone at some point decides that he will expand the role of government beyond securing safety and justice for the citizens and “help” the less fortunate. Sounds good on the surface. Government looks at some who are successful and decide they have more than they need and government could use that excess to help those who don’t have as much. Government has now changed the whole game. To meet his needs, the citizen no longer has to convince his fellow of the value of his labor or ideas, he only needs to convince government that he is worthy of the value another has produced. Government, which produces no value or wealth in itself, then pulls out the guns and takes from the productive to give it to the less or non-productive. The way to prosperity is no longer hard work, honesty or responsible behavior but doing whatever it takes to convince government of need. The individual’s primary concern is no longer his community or even his family, it becomes his relationship to government. If he is poor, he doesn’t go to friends or family for a little help, he goes to government and feels resentment toward the “rich” whose duty, he believes, is to meet his need. If he’s rich, he resents having his charity forced and feels resentment toward the poor. Voila, class warfare. Choices that once had negative consequences are subsidized. Families and communities break down, public morality vanishes and the whole process creates more “victims” who cry to the government for redress. These principles apply to businesses as well as individuals. Business pay “protection” and use the power of government to crush competition.
The longer this process goes on, the greater the number of victims and the fewer the producers from whom tribute is exacted. Eventually, the victim actually becomes one, a victim of a government that has reduced them to ignorance and serfdom. The victim has been reduced to begging and knows nothing else. What happens when everyone’s a victim? Who pays then? What happens when the amount of money looted from the productive becomes so great production is no longer worth the effort? When the government coffers are empty, to whom will the victim turn? From whom will he get his sustenance? When the mob of immoral looters are no longer being pacified by government plunder, will they not devour the remaining carcass of society in a orgy of mindless rage?
I have written this “lesson” because we are nearing that result. There is talk of a “conservative” revival. I fear that means very different things to different people. To some it means stopping out of control government spending and keeping the government from gaining even more control through any new programs. They are “conserving”, to some degree or another, the status quo. Some want to “conserve” it as it was five years ago, some want to “conserve” it as it was under President Reagan. Then there are those who want “limited” government, which also means different things to different people. Some want to eliminate things like the Department of Education and others the Great Society programs. Personally, I don’t want to “conserve” anything in government that is outside the specific parameters of basic justice and security.
The reason is this. The Bible says that a “little leaven works its way through the whole loaf.” One cannot have a “little” socialism any more than one can be a “little” pregnant. The first time the government decides to give a special favor to one at the expense of another, the first time it becomes acceptable to take the results of the production of one and give it to another, the precedent is set. Once the “victim” class is established for one, for whatever reason, there is no fundamental objection to applying that designation to anyone else. There is no objective standard to define “need” because “need” is defined by the whim of government. What is “poor”, who is “old”, who requires help and who does not? The government has a vested interest in expanding “victim” status to as many as possible because it expands their power and justifies their control. The “victim”, once he accepts his status, desires to use the power of government to steal as much as he can. The only real victim is the one who remains productive despite the fact that he is continually raped by the looters. Of course the final victim is the society itself which eventually collapses in ignorance and want.
If we really want to fix our country, we have to be willing to return to the “extremely” limited government of our founders. We cannot make exceptions for Social Security, education, welfare, health care or any other social program. We cannot eliminate one we do not currently take advantage of and seek to preserve that which we now use. We cannot make exceptions for our current situation at the expense of the future. Is this harsh? Shouldn’t we care about the elderly and the poor? A free society will be charitable, as we demonstrated in the early years of our history and continue to exhibit to the rest of the world. We may even go so far as to say that it is society’s “duty” to help the less fortunate. However, while it may be society’s job, it is not the government’s. What is the difference? Society encourages behavior through various community mores. Government uses force. Charity should never be forced. Competition should never be skewed through the power of government intrusion. Production should never be pillaged on behalf of another. Uncompromised liberty is the only path to a healthy, moral, long-lived nation.

Motion vs Action

2010-02-04T08:36:00.000-08:00

Benjamin Franklin once wrote “Never confuse motion with action.” Over the last two years there has been a lot of motion. Many, like myself, have taken to the streets of their towns, or Washington DC itself, and raised their voices in protest, sometimes controversial protest. Concerned citizens read their congressmen and women the riot act at town hall meetings. Others, myself obviously included, write blogs or create websites to complain, educate or simply have an outlet for creative energy. Is it important to protest? Very much so. Our right to assemble, speak and petition for redress is enshrined in our founding document. Is education crucial? Of course. Our government school system has taught revisionist history and discouraged critical thinking and that must be revived among the American people. Is it alright to complain? Sure, if it leads to news getting out or fresh ideas being considered. Finally, the Internet is a great tool within which we can hear from people whose creativity we would have otherwise been unaware of.
That is all well and good as far as it goes. There is the old saying, “The pen is mightier than the sword.” That is only true insofar as the pen motivates people to real action. So far, amidst the volumes of writing, the multitude of “right wing” talk shows and television programs and the legion of organizations that have sprung up, no real action of consequence has afforded more than a speed bump on the headlong rush to socialism we have embarked on over the last eighty years. Consider more recent history. In 1994 Rush Limbaugh declared himself the “Majority Maker.” With the Republicans in control did government get any smaller? Were any government programs eliminated? Did spending go down? Did government become less intrusive? Did the people’s liberty grow? No, no, no, no and no. Why? Because the Federal Government has a momentum all its own and the election of one party or another is not going to change that. The Democrats want to expand government in their way, the Republicans another. Each usually gets what they want and neither tears down what the other has created. Every program, every special interest, creates a new layer of everlasting bureaucracy that just makes the momentum all the more irresistible.
What have we really been doing in the face of this onslaught on our liberty? We have been trying to defend some small area not yet affected by the bombardment. We are like a fighter in the ring adhering the the rules laid down by the Marquess of Queensberry. We think that if we can just keep our opponent from hitting us in the right eye, we will have won the fight. But while we have been holding up our gloves and protecting that one eye, our opponent long ago shed his gloves for brass knuckles and has been breaking our ribs, knocking out our teeth, hitting us below the belt, kicking us in the shins with steel toed boots and anything else he can think of to bring us down. Now and then we reach out with a gloved hand and touch him, occasionally with enough force to get his attention and cause him to pause. Such a reprieve, however, only lasts a moment while he regroups, perhaps changes tactics, and renews the assault. We have allowed ourselves to be backed up into a corner, reduced to simply reacting to any attempt to hit us in the eye, conceding the fact that we will be continuously battered everywhere else and any area already damaged cannot be restored.
There is no way to win such a fight, and our fight isn’t for money or prestige. This fight is for our and our children’s future. It is the fight for liberty over tyranny. It is the fight over whether we control our destiny or the government determines it for us. It is the fight over whether we will have the freedom to exercise our God-given rights or if we will be condemned to live within the constraints of a totalitarian government. Look at your children or grand-children. Look at them right now. What kind of future do you want for them? Do you want them to live in the socialist utopia of France or the people’s paradise of Cuba? If a terrorist came into your home with a gun to beat your children and rape your wife, would you assault him with words or grab the wiffle bat? No, a real man defends his family any way he can with whatever he has until he prevails or the life finally drains from his body. Yet this government has broken into our homes, stolen our money, enforced its will at the point of a gun, herded our children into indoctrination centers, and forced our wives into slavery to help us pay for the growing multitude of chains with which we are bound. What do we do? We write a blog or a letter to the editor, we start an organization, we lodge a protest, maybe even a loud one. Yet every year the government gets bigger, more money is borrowed and spent, more constraints are placed on our liberty and every few years the same corrupt politicians are returned to office to do it all over again. The chains multiply and our families remain doomed. Isn’t it the height of folly to continue to do the same thing again and again and expect different results?
Let me ask you a few questions;
Has the Federal Government consistently and flagrantly violated its contract (the constitution) with the states and the people for the purposes of increasing its power at the expense of our liberty?
Is the government seeking to impose a system of totalitarian rule in which no activity remains outside their control and subject to rules and regulations that carry severe penalties?
Have the politicians in the Federal Government continuously misused our tax dollars to enrich themselves and their friends and to cement their hold on power?
Have the parties used fraud and intimidation to steal elections to maintain their power?
Has the Federal Government sought to use its various powers to silence opposition in direct contradiction to the Bill of Rights?
Has the Federal Government stolen our money and property and intimidated us through the fraudulent application of the Income Tax?
Has the government purposefully neglected border security in order to create more dependent voters and in so doing, endangered the very lives of its citizens through violence and disease?
Has this government sold our sovereignty to foreign powers and become beholden to their interests at the expense of ours?
Has the Federal Government sought to indoctrinate our children with the aim of producing generation after generation of promiscuous, ignorant government stooges?
Has this government embarked on a path of owning or controlling any and all means of economic production?
Has this government maimed and killed its own citizens in its various ‘wars’ on drugs, terrorism or religion?
Has this government, through word and action, declared war on the moral, religious and free market capitalist principles that have provided the foundation upon which our liberty and prosperity is based?
Has this present administration sought to paint those who oppose their totalitarian Marxist agenda as terrorists in order to take more aggressive action against them?
Has the progressive/Marxist/totalitarian agenda ever been implemented anywhere in the world were it did not result in economic destruction and the imprisonment or death of those who love liberty?
(For a more complete list of government offenses go to http://patricksamuels.com/page9.html for a contemporary Declaration of Independence.)
Did you answer yes to most or all of the questions, excepting the last? If it were the government of another country that sought to silence opposition, steal the property of its citizens, rig elections through fraud, propaganda and intimidation, bring all economic activity under the umbrella of its power, used unwarranted deadly force against its own people and in general disregarded the lives and liberty of its citizens, we would rightly be outraged. If the oppression continued in scope and depth, we may even try to help the poor peasants resist such a regime. The regime is ours and no one is going to help us.
The Federal Government is not going to change. It is not going to get smaller. It is not going to give back one ounce of the power it has appropriated over the years. If congress changes hands in 2010 do you really believe that even one program is going to be eliminated, that any liberty will be returned to the states and the people? If a different president is elected in 2012, is there any hope for more than a slight deceleration in our headlong rush into economic disaster and totalitarian repression? If you think so, is there any past evidence you can present that would support your assertion? The Federal Government is not going to return our freedom or respect our rights out of the goodness of its cold, dead heart. If we want our liberty returned, we need to get out there and take it. We need more than the motion of waving our gloved hands in front of a deadly opponent. It is time to take the gloves off.
What do I have in mind? Perhaps you are motivated by this presentation yet worried about what I may propose once you’ve reached this point. Be assured, I am not advocating violent resistance, we are not there yet. As an individual citizen asserting your sovereignty and God given rights, you have little chance of making a significant impact, although you certainly occupy the moral high ground. As a group within a legal entity, however, power is multiplied exponentially. The legal entity I propose is a state within the union. If the sons and daughters of liberty across this once great nation were to concentrate their time and treasure on one state with the goal of bringing that state under the political control of those who love and understand liberty and the tenth amendment to the Constitution and they were backed by an educated public who also understood the value of freedom and had experienced its benefits, the issue of ultimate sovereignty could be forced. If that state were to refuse federal dollars and control over any area not explicitly stated in the Constitution and implemented a libertarian (with a small “l”) agenda within its borders, I believe it would start a movement among other states who would follow a similar pattern of reasserting their tenth amendment rights. Courage is infectious. Such a state would also provide a stable life raft when the seas of fiscal and regulatory insanity become dangerously chaotic in the near future. In response, the Federal Government will either attempt to use the “persuasion of power” or it will have no choice but to return to the states and the people the sovereignty that rightly belongs to them.
Easy? Of course not. Possible? Yes. But it takes more than talk and motion, it takes action and commitment. It also needs to happen sooner rather than later, before the remainder of our liberty and the resources by which we would resist are stolen by this government. Once that happens, once the United States becomes Europe at best, where will we go to escape the reach of the progressive totalitarians? If the US throws its weight behind all the ridiculous United Nations treaties and taxes, what nation will stand up under he pressure? There is no longer a “New World” in which to start over. Sure, we could go underground or live in the jungles or high in the mountains of some third world country but is that the life you want for your children? Are we really going to allow ourselves to be pushed to the margins of the world? Have we allowed the American spirit to degenerate so far as to convince ourselves to accept servitude or exile as acceptable alternatives in the face of tyranny? Is that who we have become? Is that who you are? If not, what are you really willing to do, how far are you willing to go? If a state were to adopt such an agenda, many of us would be more than willing to pack up and move there. It is easy to travel a road that has already been paved. In 1776 there was no road, there was no trail, there was hardly a deer path that led to liberty. We rightly admire the founders of our nation for their courage, their commitment, their ability to accomplish the unthinkable against overwhelming odds, to pledge their “lives, fortunes and sacred honor” to ensure liberty for themselves and their posterity. These men did more than talk and write, they took concrete action against the tyranny of the great power that was England. They believed that the rewards of liberty for themselves and their children far outweighed the risks, as great as they may have been. “Give me liberty or give me death” was not just a slogan invented by Patrick Henry but the reality of the situation for the original patriots. For us, the trail has already been blazed by these men with their blood and toil and has been followed by millions around the world. But it has become horribly overgrown. It requires only a dedicated group of patriots to open the path once again for the many who would follow.
I ask you, how will history remember this generation? How will your family remember you? Will we be the ones who rose up against a growing tyranny and removed the chains of oppression from ourselves and our children? Will we be the ones who were no longer satisfied with grasping the scraps of liberty allowed by a totalitarian government but pushed back against oppression and advanced the cause of freedom? Will our children be living in a situation of servitude for which they resent us or will we be celebrated among our posterity for removing their shackles? What kind of man or woman are you? Will we join together to act, believing the price we pay is worth it to reestablish freedom for ourselves and our children or will we simply continue to protest until the only voices of opposition heard emanate from the prisons or the grave.
“We must indeed all hang together, or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.” Benjamin Franklin
If such an endeavor on behalf of freedom for this generation and those that succeed us appeals to you, please e-mail me at; psamuels76@yahoo.com with the tag line “liberty”.
“The principles on which we are engaged, of which the charter of our independence is the record, were sanctioned by the laws of our being, and we but obeyed them in pursuing undeviatingly the course they called for. It issued finally in that inestimable state of freedom which alone can ensure to man the enjoyment of his equal rights.” Thomas Jefferson
For those of you for whom such an appeal is foolish or laughable, for whom the principles of liberty sanctioned in our very being have been so dulled by servitude and distraction as to spurn all appeals to reignite them within you, I leave you with this quote from Samuel Adams;
“If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude greater than the animating contest for freedom, go home from us in peace. We seek not your counsel, nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you. May your chains set lightly upon you; and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.”

A Psychopath Digs in His Heels

2010-01-29T09:16:00.000-08:00

The State of the Union speech the other night was disturbing, to say the least. Consider all that has happened over the last year. It became very apparent early on in President Obama’s term that many of his proposals were anathema to a large segment of the population. Patriots took to the streets and the "Tea Party" movement was born. Still, he pushed on with the spending, the Cap and Trade bill and Health Care Reform. Members of congress were read the riot act during town hall meetings over the summer. Yet opposition to these final blows against our liberty and economic sanity was derided or ignored. Hundreds of thousands marched on Washington in the fall and the president’s party started losing elections. None of it mattered. He and the congressional leadership were determined to push through their agenda no matter what.
Wednesday night it became obvious that there will be no course correction. There will be no "moving to the center" or attempts at "triangulation". To the president and his progressive/Marxist cohorts, the voices of protest may well have never been raised. It has become clear that if we believed that protests, marches or even elections were going to get the attention of this administration, we were wrong. They are dead set on moving ahead. The government takeover of health care is obviously unconstitutional, will destroy innovation, ration care and be an economic disaster. It doesn’t matter because logic, reason or law don’t deter these people. Cap and Trade, again, unconstitutional regulation, will impoverish the average American, ruin businesses and kill our competitive advantage in the world. The president and his congressional cronies don’t care. Full speed ahead. And of course, there’s the spending. Trillions and trillions of dollars of it. He proposed a freeze. Its a trick, part of the game. Last year and this he will increase the spending he proposes to freeze by twenty to fifty percent and then freeze it at that level. Is that a reduction in government spending? Is it going to reduce the burden placed on our children and grandchildren? And the very thing that is driving our headlong rush into economic oblivion, welfare spending, is exempt! This fixes nothing. In fact, it makes it worse because his "spending freeze" locks in those exorbitant spending levels for three years! These three items, Health Care Reform, Cap and Trade and out of control spending, are the things we have protested most loudly about. This is, of course, not to ignore the other targets of his petulance like the banking industry, the energy industry, insurance companies, and even TV pundits. We have tried to argue our point, we have tried to reason. We have been ignored and, based on the presidents words, will continue to be ignored. They are determined to continue marching us along the path to socialism and totalitarianism whether it is constitutional, legal, moral or right. Like FDR, they are using this present economic downturn, a "crisis" they created, to push through this agenda. If they have to destroy the very foundations of this country in liberty and capitalism to do it, they have declared themselves more than willing.
Beyond the bold retrenchment of his positions, which was to be expected from a Marxist ideologue, there were other parts of the speech that revealed one of two things about the president. One possibility is that he is willing to say or do anything to continue pushing his agenda and he thinks we are too stupid to understand what he is doing or he doesn’t care what we think. To push a program designed to suppress liberty, obliterate economic freedom and reduce us to servitude can only be the work of a despot. The other possibility is he is so out of touch with reality as to be psychotic. No matter which one is true, we are in serious trouble.
First, there were parts of the speech that were simply farcical.
"..it is sowing further division among our citizens and further distrust in our government."
Since the days of FDR the Democrat party has carved up the American people into little groups, playing one group against another and cobbling a coalition of special interests together to ensure their election. Has not this president continually pitted Americans against one another? Blacks against whites, bankers against consumers, employers against employees, just to name a few. And why do we distrust the government? Because this president and most members of congress lie to us constantly.
"I know that all of us love this country."
There are a lot of us out here that doubt that because we believe his actions are meant to destroy it.
"All of us are committed to its defense....all of our men and women in uniform -- in Iraq, Afghanistan, and around the world – must know that they have our respect, our gratitude, and our full support"
Oh really? And how does he demonstrate these assertions? By treating terrorists better than citizens? By announcing pull out dates that allow our enemies to bide their time before they move? By attacking the work of our intelligence services and prosecuting soldiers who actually kill the enemy? By restricting military operations with absurd rules of engagement that endanger the lives of our brave men and women and give our enemies unwarranted advantages? By refusing to take any real action against countries that openly threaten us and are very close to acquiring the weapons that could do great harm to us all? By continuing a disastrous open border policy that allows our enemies free access to our heartland?
"...I supported the last administration’s efforts to create the financial rescue program. And when we took the program over, we made it more transparent and accountable."
Does anyone know where this money went?
"We are working with Muslim communities around the world to promote science, education and innovation."
What does this mean? Muslim countries are trying to turn the clock back to the seventh century, what is he talking about?
"For America must always stand on the side of freedom and human dignity."
Except here in the United States, apparently.
"...we are all created equal, that no matter who you are or what you look like, if you abide by the law you should be protected by it; that if you adhere to our common values you should be treated no different than anyone else."
Tell that to the policeman in New Haven.
"Washington may think that saying anything about the other side, no matter how false, is just part of the game."
Perhaps Sarah Palin can comment on the actions of the Obama campaign in this area.
Then there are the parts of the speech that can only be described as psychotic.
"I’m also calling on Congress to continue down the path of earmark reform."
Are you kidding?! The bribery engaged in by his party under his leadership to achieve his socialist goals has been blatant and unprecedented. Do the bribes of the senators form Louisiana or Nebraska ring a bell? Do all the earmarks in the Stimulus bill stimulate a little recall?
"To close that credibility gap we must take action on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue to end the outsized influence of lobbyists; to do our work openly; and to give our people the government they deserve."
If these were the rantings of a nut in a padded room, they might be funny. His administration is populated with lobbyists even though he said he would not hire even one. His bills are written by lobbyists and then discussed behind closed doors. His party reconciles bills in secret, drops them on the congress in the middle of the night and pushes them through before anyone can even read them!
"That’s why – for the first time in history – my Administration posts our White House visitors online."
Only after FOX News fought for a freedom if information act request for months.
"The confirmation of well-qualified public servants should not be held hostage to the pet projects or grudges of a few individual Senators."
Has he forgotten how the senate of which he was a part held up hundreds of judges and other appointees during the Bush administration? The fact that during the Bush years the filibuster rule was applied to these judicial appointees for the first time? Is his memory really so short?
"One year ago, I took office amid two wars, an economy rocked by severe recession, a financial system on the verge of collapse, and a government deeply in debt...By the time I took office, we had a one year deficit of over $1 trillion....we will still face the massive deficit we had when I took office...The problem is, that’s what we did for eight years..."
He continues to blame others for his problems to deflect criticism and dodge responsibility for his own failures.
Finally, there were other parts of the speech that were more than a bit frightening.
"Yesterday, the Senate blocked a bill that would have created this commission (bipartisan fiscal commission). So I will issue an executive order that will allow us to go forward..."
So if he cannot get the congress to do what he wants, he will just do it through fiat. Isn’t that what dictators do?
"Last week, the Supreme Court reversed a century of law to open the floodgates for special interests – including foreign corporations – to spend without limit in our elections. Well I don’t think American elections should be bankrolled by America’s most powerful interests, or worse, by foreign entities. They should be decided by the American people, and that’s why I’m urging Democrats and Republicans to pass a bill that helps to right this wrong."
The Supreme Court finally getting some cahones and standing up for the people’s first amendment rights isn’t to his majesty’s liking? Weren’t the Clinton and Gore campaigns financed by China, a "foreign government"? Prhaps he’s afraid "special interests" other than his union buddies or ACORN might get to have a say? So he calls on the congress to correct it. If they don’t, can we expect another executive order?
"...if the Republican leadership is going to insist that sixty votes in the Senate are required to do any business at all in this town, then the responsibility to govern is now yours as well."
So whose responsibility was it to govern before? His alone? Perhaps his and his czars. So the people whom he told six months ago to "sit down and shut up" are now supposed to partner with him? And how does this square with his assertion that the democrats still have a historic majority and now is the time to use it, not "run for the hills"?
Do you see what what has happened? Do you see what we have done? We have allowed this government to become so large, so powerful, so all pervasive over time and now we have turned it over to a bunch of Marxist psychopaths! Is there any way this ends well for any of us? A final quote from the State of the Union speech. "We don’t quit. I don’t quit." Please quit, Mr. President. Quit shoving your unconstitutional/Marxist/totalitarian/huge government program down our throats. Unfortunately, if he hasn’t listened yet, I don’t think he will. It is time to take a new and different tack in the face of this unprecedented and determined push for tyranny.

The Fallacy of Majority Rule

2010-01-27T09:47:00.000-08:00

The fight over some of the centerpiece issues of President Obama’s agenda has revolved, to a large part, around polls. The proponents of say, health care reform, cite polls that say a majority of Americans support their position. The opponents cite falling polls as an indication that their position has gained traction. Right now, polls show that support for the president and his agenda has fallen and his opponents rejoice. I would like to remind those opponents that roughly half of the American people are still supportive of our first Marxist president. That is not something to be happy about.
The real problem lies in the fact that the fight has become one of popularity and ultimately a fight like that is not one the sons and daughters of liberty are likely to win. Here is why. Popularity resides primarily in the realm of emotion. It can therefore be influenced by propaganda and outright bribery. If the people in power have the media at their disposal to dispense their propaganda and the treasury with which to bribe, they will eventually prevail. We are already very close to that critical mass whereby the majority of Americans do not pay income tax. Will not those who do not have a stake in the system continue to vote for what they see as “free stuff”? Do the propagandists not twist the polls themselves to convince people that their neighbors are supporting more intrusive government? If the criteria for what is right or wrong in government is polls, popularity and even elections, which it has become, our representative republic based on law and individual rights has been replaced by mob rule. The founders had a great fear of this happening and we can see today why those fears were justified.
“There is no maxim in my opinion which is more liable to be misapplied, and which therefore needs elucidation than the current one that the interest of the majority is the political standard of right and wrong. In fact it is only reestablishing under another name and more specious form, force as the measure of right.” James Madison
Perhaps you have noticed that those in power often tout the virtues of our “democracy” when using the polls to support their point. A democracy is a system of government in which each individual has one vote and the law of the land is whatever the majority want. This is not the principle upon which our government is based not what the founders intended. In fact, they had a rather dim view of democracy,
“Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There was never a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.” Benjamin Franklin
“Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security, or the rights of property; and have, in general, been short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.” James Madison
Why has this been the case? Because once the people accept the idea that anything that is good for the majority is good for all they are removed from the anchor of eternal principles and become subject to manipulation and propaganda. Those in power are always ready to jump on an opportunity. As Rahm Emmanuel said, “never let a good crisis go to waste.” Franklin Roosevelt used the crisis of the recession to increase federal power exponentially. Even though it was unprecedented and unconstitutional, the majority of Americans believed that in their present circumstances, it was acceptable to disregard the constitution and the principle of limited government. Once that precedent had been set, government has exploited that attitude. What the Democratic party began doing under FDR and has continued to do to the present day is divide Americans into groups, promising (bribing) each group with some part of the federal pie and bringing in enough groups to develop a majority. That strategy has resulted in the worst of both worlds. We end up with the tyranny of the minority within the majority. Each special interest group gets what it wants regardless of its cost to the treasury and liberty of others. As we see today, such an approach is unsustainable. It bankrupts us economically and morally. Economically, the plethora of special interest programs has created an unsustainable Federal debt and its taxes crush the very spirit of industriousness that made any of it possible. Morally, because it makes beggars and dependents out of too many Americans and creates resentment among the reminder. It is a recipe for disaster and one that may come upon us sooner rather than later.
“He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself” Thomas Paine
Both the founders quoted stated that the end of democracies was violent. This is perhaps the most insidious feature of all. Once we have removed the foundation of immutable law and God-given rights and replaced it with the idea that the majority decides what rights the citizens should have, it is easy to remove the rights of some in the minority. A congressman recently made the statement that the government was granting the “right” to heath care. Government does not have the power to grant rights nor does it have the power to take them away. If, however, the majority believe that it does, and our government education system is designed to reinforce that fallacy, the abridgement of individual rights begins. It has already. Our rights to our property and the fruits of our labor have been gone for decades. Our right to self defense is constantly under attack. Our right to free speech, recent supreme court ruling excepted, is under assault. Our right to freedom of religious expression has been pared down over the years. Others could also be mentioned but the point has been made.
“Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with His wrath?” Thomas Jefferson
The end of all this is the fact that once the government has the power to ignore the rights of some, it has the power to ignore the rights of all. Adolf Hitler took the reigns of power legally in Germany through elections, elections marred by fraud and intimidation. He quickly began ignoring the rights of the “undesirables” . It did not take long until he used a fabricated crisis to accelerate his consolidation of power and remove rights for all. Yet the majority of Germans went along with his plan, there was little opposition, none of it very organized. And it all happened very quickly, in the space of five years.
“What is true of every member of the society, individually, is true of them all collectively; since the rights of the whole can be no more than the sum of the rights of the individuals” Thomas Jefferson
Could it happen here? Oh yeah. We are ripe for such a “legal” takeover. President Obama is already setting up his “shadow government” of czars and has shown his contempt for the constitution, and even the will of the people. The congress of the representatives of the people has become more and more irrelevant as the power of the bureaucracy has asserted itself. The majority of Americans do not understand the value of their rights and are willing to trade them for a crust of bread. The trend of all governments is the consolidation of power and the more of that power that has been consolidated, the more dear a price that must be paid for the reestablishment of liberty.
“Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” Benjamin Franklin
The sons and daughters of liberty must learn to change the rules of the game. On the field of propaganda and bribery, the deck is staked against us and the rules are based on false assumptions. We must have the courage to change the rules and the arguement but we must be consistent. We cannot look at the present system and just convince our neighbors to “stop here”, and accept our current degree of servitude. If that is the case, the power remains in the hands of the government and it will flex its muscles once again in the near future. What we must do is convince our neighbors that the worth of their liberty far exceeds the largess they may receive from the government persecuting their fellows. That the freedom to pursue their dream unhindered by the constricting rules and regulations of a government safety net is worth the risk and is what made this country great. That the value of the individual exercising the rights they have been endowed with by their Creator far surpasses the need of the collective to restrict those rights. That is a fight that can be won because deep in the nature of every human being is the understanding that their rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness belong to them and no other person or government, and the restriction of those rights is wrong. In America that understanding is much closer to the surface than in many other places and it is waiting to be revealed once more.
“Under the law of nature, all men are born free, every one comes into the world with a right to his own person, which includes the liberty of moving and using it at his own will. That is what is called personal liberty, and is given him by the Author of nature, because (it is) necessary for his own sustenance.” Thomas Jefferson

Amerika-Love It Or Leave It

2010-01-22T08:38:00.000-08:00

The rapid pace of change in the United States and our unprecedented access to information and opinion about the changes taking place has prompted many people to ask, “What has happened to the America I knew?” As we enter the second decade of the twenty-first century, there are few left who remember the America that existed before the wholesale embrace of socialism initiated by Franklin Roosevelt. There are some who know who Norman Rockwell was and still dream of that America. More people are beginning to understand the principles upon which this great country was founded and comprehend the distance we have strayed. Most, however, with an attention span abbreviated by the media, a lack of understanding of history and the ability to think deeply reinforced by a woefully inadequate government education system and the complacency engendered by the inherited wealth of our nation, continue to walk around in a stupor, unaware of the destructive path upon which we have embarked. The chains have been added so slowly and with such slick advertising that few are aware of how heavy they have become.

“Lethargy is the forerunner of death to the public liberty”
Thomas Jefferson

Things have changed, however. Our bondage no longer takes place in secret and the speed and arrogant compulsion by which our government is trying to secure the last of our chains has made many finally sit up and take notice. The response has been one of protests, protests that are becoming more organized and widespread. The government leaders trying to lock these last chains in place are doing their best to ignore and discredit the dissidents and convince the remainder that the chains are really for their own good. Who will win? Over the short term, the protesters might. They may win some elections or change a wavering politician’s mind. The long term, however, is in the hands of the government and it is not about to relinquish one scrap of its power. At the end of the Reagan Revolution, government was bigger. Since the Contract With America, it has grown exponentially. What some have finally realized is that both parties want the power that comes with bigger and more intrusive government. One party may blatantly admit it, as Democrat Barny Frank did recently. However, the proof is in their actions, not their words, and the actions of Washington, no mater which party has been in charge, demonstrate their desire to reduce us to servitude.

“As a man is said to have a right to his property, he may be equally said to have a property in his rights. Where an excess of power prevails, property of no sort is duly respected. No man is safe in his opinions, his person, his faculties or his possessions.”
James Madison

What if we don’t want to live as slaves? What if we don’t want the government telling us what we can eat, how cold or hot our home is, what car we can drive, where to put our retirement money, how to meet our health needs, how to educate our children....the list could go on. Once upon a time when the “Hate America Crowd” was on the outside looking in, a red-blooded American could say, “America, love it or leave it!” Now that same “hate America crowd” has molded our government and the country into their own Marxist image and they say to us “Amerika, love it or leave it!” What are we to do? We are conflicted because we know and believe in ideals and values we know are, or have been, American ideals and we believe that our government was instituted to reflect those ideals. In our form of government we think that the representatives we send will protect and enhance our values and ensure the continuity of all that has made this country great. In our minds, the government, the land and the ideals are inseparable. It is a fallacy that has led us to accept our descent into servitude with little protest and will prohibit us from mentally considering avenues of self-preservation not sanctioned by the government. We erroneously believe that we can work within our system to bring about major changes and roll back the socialism we have embraced. The system is not ours anymore, it has not been for some time. The system is run by those in power for the perpetuation of that power. Elections are controlled by the two parties and any candidate that wants to rise to the national, and to a large degree, the state, level, have to play the game. Sure, there are a few exceptions, there are a few “Mr. Smiths” in politics but most of them play the game and perpetuate their power. The way money is raised, the way voting districts are drawn, the way the parties use PACs and the ability of incumbents to use media at taxpayer expense all ensure the historical ninety-plus percent reelection rate of even the most dimwitted and outrageous politicians.

“The trade of governing has always been monopolized by the most ignorant and the most rascally individuals of mankind.”

“Some writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness by positively uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is patron, the last a punisher.”
Thomas Paine

Even if we could elect a few good men and women, most of government is out of their hands anyway. Once upon a time we had a government that had three coequal branches that were all subject to “We the People”. For a time those branches contested for supremacy. Early on it was the executive under President Jackson which could ignore the supreme court and Lincoln’s tyrannical activities during the civil war. In the twentieth century the courts reasserted themselves and for years citizens bemoaned “legislation from the bench”. Now, the power resides in the vast bureaucracy created by the congress and loosely directed from the executive branch. For example, because the congress is not moving quickly enough to pass cap and trade legislation, the Environmental Protection Agency has stated it will implement a similar program with no input form the people’s representatives necessary. If the courts do not believe so called “Net Neutrality” i.e. government control of the Internet, is constitutional, the Federal Communication Commission will declare it a public utility and regulate it anyway. The myriad of government agencies, all of which appear to have eternal life as Reagan said, pump out tens of thousands of pages of rules and regulations we are expected to know and obey on pain of fine or imprisonment. Again, no input from the people’s representatives necessary. We have gone from a government with three equal branches under the direction and authority of “we the people” to a government run from the top down with the executive bureaucracy on top and “we the people” at the bottom. Government no longer exists to serve us-we exist to provide our treasure and toil to the government. It is a situation that has followed a logical and historical progression that has never been reversed. Power, once attained, is never relinquished voluntarily by the government that finds itself with a virtually unlimited ability to impose and control. Historically, there are only three ways such tyranny has come to an end. First, such governments can be destroyed from he outside. Iraq is a recent example. Second, they will collapse under their own weight as the Soviet Union did and we are coming very close to. Or the people will rise up in revolution. This can be violent or non-violent. In India it was primarily non-violent. Our revolution was violent. Both were rebellions against Great Britain and the only difference were the choices Great Britain, not the revolutionaries, made. If the despotic government in power chooses to negotiate, the revolution can proceed along non-violent lines. If, however, the tyrannical power chooses to hold onto its power no matter what and not allow its people even to leave, the people have only two choices. They will submit to being slaves or they will rise up and fight for their freedom using whatever means they have at their disposal.

“Government is not reason, it is not eloquence, it is force. Like fire, a troublesome servant and a fearfulsome master. Never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action”
George Washington

Before any revolution will take hold among the people,however, there needs to be a separation in the minds of the people between the idea of “America” and our current government. America is not our government, America is an idea, it is a set of values and ideals. Most people that live in the United States rarely, if ever, think about what “America” is and what makes it unique among all the nations of the earth. What does it mean to pursue the “American Dream” and how do we define Liberty and Freedom? America was founded on the idea that a national government should interfere in the lives of its citizens at little as possible. “That government governs best that governs least.” Thomas Jefferson. The citizens of America should be free to believe, act, say and become anything they want to as long as those actions do not interfere with the God-given rights of others. Rights; not wishes, desires or sensibilities. Those rights, given to us by God, include the right to life, liberty and the right to pursue that which makes us happy. We have the right to our property and the right to any activity that increases our property that does not infringe on the rights of others to pursue or exercise the same. America embraces the ideals of capitalism and the free market system in which any person can engage in any occupation they choose and they have the right to dispose of the fruits of their labor any way they wish. Americans believe in compassion, we are the most generous people on earth. American civil society is based on Judeo-Christian Biblical principles. The American ideal is one of blind justice in which no man is treated with favoritism. The American vision is one in which there are no distinctions among men based on class, race or religion and a man is free to become anything he desires based on his talent, passion and hard work alone. Americans are entrepreneurial, inventive and have a “can do” spirit and the mentality and wealth those values produced led to most of the inventions that make modern society what it is. Freedom, compassion, justice, liberty, capitalism, inventiveness, virtue and basic morality. These are the historical American ideals, these were the ideals that led to the American Revolution, it was these ideals and values the founders designed our government to protect and enhance. Only to the extent to which our government embraces these values can it be called and “American” government.

“Of liberty I would say, in the whole plentitude of its extent, it is unobstructed action according to our will. But rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add ‘within the limits of the law,’ because law is often but the tyrant’s will, and always so when it violates the right of an individual.”
Thomas Jefferson

Consider now the government we have in Washington, and even those at the state and local level. It is a government that takes our property and the more successful we are, the more it takes. It takes this property to feed itself and its army of bureaucrats first and distributes the reminder to other citizens for their support. The creation of this dependent class, a class that has grown to encompass nearly half of the citizenry, has destroyed the values of inventiveness, capitalism, and entrepreneurial spirit that difficult economic situations stimulate. It eliminates their liberty and freedom and discourages their morality and virtue. Our government believes that our rights are derived from its good graces, not from God, on whom it has made war for a century. Our government has, through law, regulation and outright confiscation, sought to destroy capitalism and the free market system, which it has proclaimed a “failure”. It has created protected classes of people within the citizenry that are given special “rights” and privileges. It has forced our compassion through confiscatory taxation. Justice has become more equal for the wealthy, powerful and politically correct than for the rest of us. Governments at all levels have passed laws regulating even the minute of our behavior. Can a government that acts this way be called an “American” government? Is it not time to revisit the injunction contained in the Declaration of Independence regarding our rights and duty concerning governments that fail to secure our rights? Is such talk and action “un-American”?

“I consider the people who constitute a society or nation as the source of all authority in that nation; as free to transact their common concerns by any agents they think proper; to change these agents individually. or the organization of them in form or function whenever they please; that all acts done by these agents under the authority of the nation are the acts of the nation, are obligatory on them...and can in no wise be annulled or affected by any change in the form of government or the persons administering it.”
Thomas Jefferson

If we accept our “right” and “duty” to “alter or abolish” any government that “evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism” what are we to do? One option many have taken is to make their “government footprint” as small as possible. They earn little so they don’t pay to support the tyrannical system or they legally or illegally withhold their income and property. They do their best to exercise their God-given freedom and rights when they can get away with it. They are like Winston in Orwell’s 1984 sitting in a corner writing in his journal where the camera of Big Brother can’t see him. They do their best to fall between the cracks of our totalitarian state; to one degree or another, go underground. Is that any way to live? Perhaps for the short term, it is an option but is a life between the cracks and hoping not to get caught any life at all? It is still a life dictated by the state. By definition, the cracks are there because the state has allowed them or neglected them. That is not freedom.

“Fear is the foundation of most governments”
John Adams

In the past, there have been revolutionaries who have succumbed to terrorism and indiscriminate violence. Such actions are not consistent with the American values previously enumerated, particularly our morality and virtue and a society and nation founded on such violence is no place to live. There are enough nations in the world that have followed this path. However, we have been conditioned to believe that the use of violence in defense of freedom is never justified. We have made heroes and gods out of Gandhi and Dr. King to the point where non-violent protest is the only acceptable form of protest. Certainly, violence should be a last resort. As our founders said in the Declaration of Independence, men are disposed to suffer and will suffer a long time. But a point will come when the abuse becomes unbearable. They hoped to avoid war and violence but ultimately government is force and it can choose to exercise that force when it believes it is in its best interest; and self preservation is always in a government’s best interest. Negotiations and patience will only go so far. We are under no obligation to negotiate away our God given rights nor must we sit back and wait while tyrants whittle away at them over time. The opposite is true. It is our duty not only as patriots but as human beings to resist any infringement on our rights whether the tyrants be elected or self appointed.

“When the principle that force is right becomes the principle of the nation itself, they would not permit an honest minister, were accident to bring one to power, to relax their system of lawless piracy.”

“No free man shall ever be debarred the use of arms. The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protest themselves against tyranny in government.”
Thomas Jefferson

We have the right and obligation of resistance to tyranny and it is time we started to exercise that right. Violence, of course, should be the last option on our list but it needs to remain an option. There are other options available right now. There is massive tax protest, defunding the voracious monster that is our government. There is always the remote possibility of actually electing people that will have the courage and integrity to dismantle the beast. There is the refusal to obey unconstitutional and immoral laws dictated by the government like the invasive actions of the census or cooperating with unlawful investigations of our fellows who have been labeled “terrorists” by this administration. Such things require the majority of individuals and businesses to become involved. I sincerely hope that we have time to organize such activities. However, we need to consider what happens when the government takes action against dissident activity. What happens when the EPA shows up at your home with a court order to vacate your property because it has been declared a wetland? Do you leave? How far does your resistance go? What about when the local utility appears on your doorstep to install your government approved thermostat that will remotely regulate your energy use? What if child protective services decides that our religious beliefs or our desire to homeschool our children makes us unfit to raise our them and they want to put them in a more politically correct environment? What do we do when some bureaucrat decides our life is not worth spending health care resources on and we should just take the pain pill and die? At what point do we defend our family, our property and our lives against a totalitarian government? When do you stand proudly in your doorway as a free man against the agents of tyranny with your gun and say “No more!” The time is soon coming when we will be confronted with these situations and we had better be prepared beforehand to make our choice to fight for liberty or meekly allow the government to fasten the remaining chains of our servitude.

"The constitutions of most of our States assert that all power is inherent in the people; that they may exercise it by themselves in all cases to which they think themselves competent (as in electing their functionaries executive and legislative,and deciding by a jury of themselves in all judiciary cases in which any fact is involved), or they may act by representatives, freely and equally chosen; that it is their right and duty to be at all times armed; that they are entitled to freedom of person, freedom of religion, freedom of property, and freedom of the press.”
Thomas Jefferson

The time is nearly upon us when our hand will be forced one way or another. Power continues to coalesce in Washington and they are endeavoring to find new and creative ways to impose their will on us. They are also following a path to economic disaster that will bring about an opportunity for unimaginable oppression or the rebirth of freedom. Dark times are coming and the struggle between the forces of tyranny and liberty will come to a head. When everything we know know has been torn down what will be rebuilt? Will we allow the current power brokers to create their Marxist utopia and plunge us into total darkness or will we resist the last desperate efforts of a despotic government and witness the renaissance of the American ideal? Will the sons and daughters of liberty come together and assert their rights loudly and forcefully once again or will we meekly descend into socialist oblivion with only a few isolated voices of protest? It is a choice each individual must make. In ten years will we be living in a despotic nation called “Amerika” or will we be rising from the ashes like the phoenix, lady liberty at the fore to reestablish “America” as the light of freedom to the world it once was.

“The spirit of the times may alter, will alter. Our rulers will become corrupt, our people careless. A single zealot may commence as persecutor, and better men be his victims. It can never be too often repeated that the time for fixing every essential right on a legal basis is while our rulers are honest and ourselves united. From the conclusion of their war for independence, a nation begins going downhill. It will not then be necessary to resort every moment to the people for support. They will be forgotten, therefore, and their rights disregarded. They will forget themselves but in the sole faculty of making money, and will never think of uniting to effect a due respect for their rights. The shackles, therefore, which shall not be knocked off at the conclusion of that war will remain on them long, will be made heavier and heavier, till their rights shall revive or expire in a convulsion.”
Thomas Jefferson

Beware Brown's Victory

2010-01-20T12:44:00.001-08:00

Today, many in America are breathing a collective sigh of relief over the Republican victory in Massachusetts. To many, it was like pulling the emergency brakes on our collective national train before it headed off into the abyss of totalitarian socialism. Some may believe that this victory is a foretaste of what is coming in November when the Republicans will take back the country and pull us away from the edge of the cliff. At the very least, it will put the kabash on much of President Obama’s agenda, specifically the so-called Health Care Reform. I don’t think we should pop the cork on the champagne just yet.
Has it occurred to anyone that the same game being played by the two parties for decades has been played with this election? We know that the people who have the power will do anything to keep it and see it grow. Beginning with TARP and fueled by the Stimulus Bill and fanned by opposition to Health Care Reform and Cap and Trade, opposition to the Marxist Obama/Pelosi/Reid agenda has angered and mobilized the “average” American like never before. They have taken to the streets and marched on Washington. Some are openly calling for a second American Revolution. This makes the people in power very nervous. The engine that is our government is fed by our toil and treasure and is headed toward socialism. The boiler is fed a steady diet of Marxism but President Obama has stoked those fires far beyond the capacity of the people to take it. The boiler was about to explode. The Marxists didn’t want to backtrack and admit they were wrong because their believe they are smarter than the rest of us. If they admitted they were wrong on Health Care, people may begin to wonder if they are wrong on other agenda items. In the middle of this overheated environment, Scott Brown comes out of nowhere to win a seat that had been held by Ted Kennedy for forty years in a state where Republicans are as rare as a tax cut in a Democratic budget. The relief valve has been engaged and the Democrats can save face. They have someone to blame-Republican obstructionists-and the opposition thinks they have been “saved” for the time being.
Isn’t this a little too convenient? For months, this seat was a lock for the Democrats, Brown didn’t have a chance. Then, with two weeks to go, an easy double digit lead evaporated. Brown’s opponent stuck her foot in her mouth so often she nearly choked on her high heels. The Democrats were throwing her under the bus for days before the election. Everyone is calling Brown’s victory a stunning reversal for Obama’s policies. Perhaps even the first battle won in the war to take back our country and restore traditional American values to government. Do we really think that a Republican from a New England state is going to reverse our slide into socialism? Do we think that returning the Republicans to the driver’s seat is going to change anything? Will they not, at best, hold the train in place until the Marxists can take another shot at out total subjugation?
Consider the fact that the Reagan Revolution did not make government any smaller. The Republican Revolution in 1994 led to larger and more intrusive government under George Bush’s “compassionate conservatism” and skyrocketing spending. Can’t we see it is all a game? Every year the government in Washington takes more of our wealth and liberty no matter which party is controlling the train. The arrogance and speed of the Obama administration fueled the fires for liberty like never before. It woke people up from the stupor into which a “benevolent” government had put them. Now we are again in danger of being lulled to sleep by the slow, easy motion of the train, once again becoming oblivious to our collective totalitarian destination. We cannot allow this to happen. The longer we wait to effect the resolution between liberty and tyranny, the more difficult and costly the struggle will become. If we allow our patriotic passions to subside in the mistaken belief that we have averted disaster, the next wave of totalitarian effort may be too great to resist.
“If once the people become inattentive to the public affairs, you and I, and the Congress and Assemblies, Judges and Governors, shall all become wolves. It seems to be the law of our general nature, in spite of individual exceptions.” Thomas Jefferson
The wolves have set about devouring our liberty, and have for a long time. They are prepared to gulp down the last remaining scraps and have paused for only a moment. As for me and my family, we are not satisfied with the few morsels of freedom still conceded by this government. Are you? If not, will you retain your passion? Are you willing to do whatever it takes to drive the wolves away and once again restore America as the land of the free and the home of the brave?

www.patricksamuels.com

A Case For Secession-Introduction

2009-11-16T12:14:00.001-08:00

What I will be sharing with you over the next few weeks may be considered by some, perhaps many, seditious at the least, treasonous at worst. Fortunately we still enjoy freedom of speech in this country and political speech in particular. This will not be the time or place to argue the methods of secession. Should a state currently operating under the contract of the Constitution of the United States find these arguments compelling in the future, or if the national government continues its slide into tyranny and obligates free men to act to preserve their freedom, it is my hope that the attitude of Thomas Jefferson would prevail; “Let them part by all means if it is for their happiness to do so. It is but the elder and the younger son differing. God bless them both, and keep them in the Union if it be for their good, but separate them if better.”
Since the “Civil War”, or the War for Southern Independence, established the preeminent place of the national government over the states, eliminating their ultimate sovereignty and right of self determination guaranteed under the tenth amendment of the Constitution, and the continual implementation of the progressive/statist agenda beginning with the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt, the people of the various states in the union have been “disposed to suffer, while the evils are sufferable...” In recent years, more and more Americans are no longer finding the evils “sufferable”. We are tired of having our money confiscated for “redistributive justice” or wasted on pork barrel projects. We are tired of distant politicians thinking they know better than we how to raise our children, take care of our own health and well being, and spend our own money. We are increasingly worried that the national government will treat our God given rights as merely privileges to be exercised at the whim and direction of those in power. We are continually offended by politicians who treat us with contempt and disdain. We are fearful of the results of out of control spending and debt accumulation. Many of us believe that if we continue along the path we are on, our children and grandchildren with inherit a country that is merely a shadow of its former self. We believe that the greatness of the United States of America rests in the morality and industriousness of its people and the wisdom of a system of government whose chief aim is to secure their liberty. In a world where tyranny and oppression have been the rule rather than the exception, the United States has demonstrated the great things that can be accomplished by a people unencumbered by class, strict religious ideology or oppressive rulers. To see all that made this country the beacon of light to the world that it has been under attack by the very government we entrust with its perpetuation has become insufferable.
To even contemplate secession brings tears to eyes of every patriot who admires the courage of the men who formulated this Union, remembers the sacrifice of those who gave their all to preserve it, and takes pride in the accomplishments such a great nation has given to the world. Many of the original patriots said the same about Great Britain. It was the best system then available in the world but had become increasingly tyrannical, marring all that was good about it. To see the Union dissolve after all these years is a distressing thing to contemplate. Yet free men are under no compulsion to yield their freedom to perpetuate a government that no longer secures their liberty and happiness, no matter what their affection for its history.
There are those who say “This is America, love it or leave it!” Some among the dissent, myself included, have formulated “escape plans” to be implemented when the confiscation of our wealth or restrictions on our liberty become too great. For a small minority, of which we may be, this would be the moral and proper thing to do. However, if the majority of the people in a state or region become dissatisfied with their government, no longer willing to endure the “long train of abuses and usurpations”, finding no reasonable redress for their grievances and envisioning only despotism in the end, then the secession of that state or region becomes reasonable, just and proper. Why should a people who have invested their lives in the soil of their ancestors be expected to pick up and leave because an oppressive government seeks to reduce them to servitude? Do not those who have toiled to reveal the wealth of the land for their own prosperity and that of their progeny have a right to stay on that land without the expectation that they or their children will be brought into bondage? Do we not have the right to stay in an area where our history and culture have developed in conjunction with our geography to make us unique, without subjecting ourselves to the policies of a government that embraces the antitheses of our culture and values?
Most will object to secession with the idea that we still elect our representatives, we just need to put the right people in office, we need to change Washington from the “inside”. Do we really believe that’s possible any longer? Let’s say that in 2010 we “threw the bums out” and there was a historic fifty percent turnover in the house and senate. Would anything really change? Thirty years ago we had the Reagan Revolution. Twenty years ago there was the Contract with America. Where are we today? Did anything change? Is government smaller, did it shrink even a little? Tom Daschle was voted out and replaced by Harry Reid. Wishy-washy Republican leaders are replaced by other wishy-washy Republican leaders whose best plan of action is to give ground slowly and whose worst is to cooperate to give away our freedom. There is a systemic problem in Washington and it is that the two parties are entrenched in power and the radical party leadership calls the shots because they hold the money for everyone’s reelection in their hands. If ignoramuses like Nancy Pelosi, criminals like Charlie Rangle and Chris Dodd and just plain weirdoes like Barny Frank can be reelected time and time again in their gerrymandered districts, the system is broken and there is no hope for real change in Washington. The parties and the huge Washington bureaucracy are holding us hostage and that is not going to change before the economic and moral damage becomes irreparable.
Finally, consider the fact that the liabilities and obligations assumed by our national government are unsustainable and will, in the near future, result in the destruction of our currency and economy. If our ship of state is like the Titanic and some of us can see the iceberg ahead, Obama, Pelosi and Reid have just given the order for full speed ahead. Some may say deliberately, and not just out of ignorance or stupidity. If the national government is going to commit national suicide, are the people of the many states obligated to go down with the ship, particularly if the people in those states have been continually dissatisfied with the policies that brought us to the point of impact? Would it not be a wise course of action to get into a lifeboat now so you are assured a seat when the ship goes down? A state that secedes before the ship strikes the iceberg, develops a sound currency and economy based on free market principles and an efficient private sector utilization of resources will not only survive the catastrophe, but thrive, because it will have recaptured the ideals and values that made this country great.
I have written this introduction and what will follow based on the idea that a single state or a few that make up a region of the country with similar values and culture would choose to leave the union. If a larger number of states would seriously consider this course of action, then we need to ponder the consequences of a constitutional convention. If the many states choose to, in essence, form a new government under a revised contract, restoring freedom and common sense in government, then perhaps this nation can remake itself in the image of its former glory.
Why consider this now? Although this is not the place to consider the history of the secession movement in this country or its legal ramifications, suffice it to say that a country founded on the right of secession has had secession movements throughout its history. Massachusetts was the first and the southern confederation was the last to be taken seriously. The events of the last two years have awakened many people to the deficiencies of their government, while their government has flaunted those deficiencies as if they were a badge of honor. There are those of us who believe that our national government, with its entrenched leadership and bureaucracy, is incapable of relinquishing power. Perhaps the grab for power and control has become too blatant to ignore but it is only the acceleration of a pattern that began with Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. Even if we put a stop to the current attempts at tyranny like health care or cap and trade, it will only be a temporary reprieve. The vast majority of the people in our national government, and many state and local governments as well, believe that they can do a better job of managing everything than the people can. Democrat or Republican, they believe their job is to fix things the government was never meant to fix, many of which are not broken or are broken because they broke it!. Such an attitude will only lead to more tyranny, more absurdity and the absolute ruin of our economic and moral foundations. The ship is steaming full speed ahead for the iceberg. It may be ten yards or ten miles from hitting but it will hit. The laws of economics and the lessons of history make it certain. Will we jump over individually, swimming for safety as best we can? Or will the people of several states rise up and declare their right to liberty and self determination? If the latter is a consideration, the following essays will provide some powerful ammunition to make a case for secession and provide some of the philosophical foundation for building a free state based on the principles that worked so well for so long in the United States.