The original Tea Party was about throwing tea into the Boston harbor in protest of taxation without representation. The goal of that protest was accomplished when the British government gave in. Today, we must conduct a similar Tea Party by protesting the present government’s efforts to tax us without our voices being heard.
Regardless of the political strategies we use, as we approach the 2010 election, our short-term goal must focus on exerting the peoples' responsibility to be the final check against government tyranny. Short-range strategies for the Tea Parties can involve a number of approaches. For instance, we can merely let the Democrats and Republicans fight it out for our support. By refusing to give either party our support until they start advocating Tea Party principles we can move them more quickly into promoting our views in government.
But in considering a long-term strategy, we must recognize that it took decades for the progressives to obtain the control they have today. Their main source of power is the universities and our public educational system where they have been indocrinating our children for over a century. To stop the advance toward a virtual communist dictatorship, we must launch a long-term educational strategy that will bring a new philosophical movement dedicated to freedom, capitalism and the Constitution. We must end the era of progressivism.
Why is Education Important?
The progressives have been running our educational system for decades. In this climate, the idea of citizenship has been joined with the philosophy of self-sacrifice; with the principles and ideas of the Founders totally ignored and/or denigrated. The anti-capitalism of the writers of our textbooks, not to mention their philosophical influences from such thinkers as Hume, Kant and Dewey have served to create a citizenry that is barely able to mount an opposition to the progressive agenda. The progressives have "un-educated" our children and the door is now open for dictatorship. This situation must be corrected.
In order to educate, we need more competent voices for freedom and we need time. We must buy that time by stopping the advance of progressive ideas politically; then implementing a strategy that will ensure the establishment of proper ideas that support freedom. Because the universities and educational establishment are dominated by pragmatists and progressives, it will take time to undo the damage they have done and to begin the philosophical movement that can sweep them out of the universities. As a starting point, we must seek four major goals for education:
1. Educate voting age individuals through discussion of the issues on philosophic grounds – show them that there is a different and credible "other" view that they should consider.
2. Educate our school age youth by teaching them that today's educators don’t always teach the truth and that there is another credible view which they have a responsibility, as aware citizens, to discover.
3. Challenge the Universities in the Universities. This is a long-term approach but it should be waged by our getting university degrees and challenging the monopoly of the left in the universities. We must challenge the idea of tenure, the growth of pseudo-science and the corruption in our peer-review processes.
4. Challenge the ideas taught in the Universities. This, at the present time, must be waged wherever it can such as the media, the Internet, word-of-mouth and more. Later, we must take on progressive thinkers directly in the universities by offering a credible alternative to students.
We can start by educating ourselves about the Founding Fathers, the principles they espoused and why. We can study the history of the Enlightenment and how the ideas that influenced the Founders came about. We must ask the questions about how our rights are defined and discover their philosophical sources; and we must debate among ourselves about that source. This debate strengthens our voices and makes us better presenters of the ideas espoused by the Founders.
We can work with other organizations and individuals seeking to bring a better understanding about freedom and capitalism to the universities. We can work to ensure that science and not pseudo-science is advanced in the technical professions and we can exert the political pressure necessary to open the universities to alternative political persuasions.
We should also educate ourselves about the false arguments of progressives. This so-called “educated” group of progressives thinks that it is superior in intellect to the Tea Party protesters, most of whom merely work for a living. In fact, progressives are quite uneducated in the sense that all of their fundamental ideas are false and harm society. For decades, they have refused to question their own most profound premises and this has caused the economic harm (and the destruction of individual rights) being done today by their proposals. It is progressives ideas that must be challenged by a group of people who know what works: capitalism, and what makes it possible: freedom.
More than this, we must recognize that there is only one way to propagate correct ideas and that is by appealing to reason. Reason is man's means of survival. Reason looks at facts and brings about certainty...and it is certainty and moral conviction that will win the day. We must learn, beyond a doubt, why unalienable rights are unalienable.
It is our responsibility to be right about what we propose for this nation. It is our task to educate our children on why individual rights are superior to the rights-destroying ideas offered by progressives.
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
Wednesday, January 6, 2010
Ocean
If the world releases swelling bombs,
if the world succumbs to whining qualms
about how man should live.
If our nation turns to stone
and rules the freedoms we have sown.
If a Hitler walks the land
and says, "I am peaceful man."
If these things of which I say
come about some cloudy day,
I will have to go,
and shrug my shoulders on my way.
And I'm sure the things I write
will be buried by the trite
who think they know what's best for man,
who think they have the power and
whose heads you'll find among the sand
of an ocean full of lies.
copyright 2010 by Robert Villegas, Jr.
if the world succumbs to whining qualms
about how man should live.
If our nation turns to stone
and rules the freedoms we have sown.
If a Hitler walks the land
and says, "I am peaceful man."
If these things of which I say
come about some cloudy day,
I will have to go,
and shrug my shoulders on my way.
And I'm sure the things I write
will be buried by the trite
who think they know what's best for man,
who think they have the power and
whose heads you'll find among the sand
of an ocean full of lies.
copyright 2010 by Robert Villegas, Jr.
Sunday, January 3, 2010
Obama versus Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand once famously said through her character Ellsworth Toohey: “It is always safe to denounce the rich.”(1) In my view, this is true because our culture has a bias against the wealthy individual. This hatred of the rich, in my view, is as evil, vicious and as illegal as racism.
This hatred was implicitly put forward by Barack Obama in 2008.
“We reward people a lot for being rich, for being famous, for being cute, for being thin… one of the values I think we need to instill in our country, in our children, is a sense of ‘usefulness’, in other words, are we useful, are we making other peoples’ lives a little bit better?”(2)
I think this quote reveals more than just how Obama thinks we treat the rich. It reveals a bias both about how he sees the rich and what he sees as moral. He believes that social service is a much more important value than self-interest; that moral living involves sacrifice for others while running a business for profit involves theft and evil acts.
The truth is that, in our economy, we decidedly do not reward people for being rich. Because of progressive taxation and other onerous punishments, people who are good at earning money (by means of making other peoples’ lives a lot better) are effectively tied to a whipping post. We certainly don’t wait for them to be rich and then reward them. In fact, the truth is exactly the opposite, when they become rich, we punish them, denigrate them and make their lives harder.
Is it possible that Obama has never understood the difference between hard work and a life of serving others? Has he spent too much time living off of donations rather than from production? Or has he spent too much time writing grant requests for shady real estate developers rather than developing a solid view of what it means to actually earn a living?
I found another example of this attitude when I listened to Obama’s speech at the Democratic National Convention in 2004.
“…For alongside our famous individualism, there’s another ingredient in the American saga.
A belief that we are connected as one people. If there’s a child on the south side of Chicago who can’t read, that matters to me, even if it’s not my child. If there’s a senior citizen somewhere who can’t pay for her prescription and has to choose between medicine and the rent...that makes my life poorer, even if it’s not my grandmother. If there’s an Arab American family being rounded up without benefit of an attorney or due process...that threatens my civil liberties. It’s that fundamental belief — I am my brother’s keeper, I am my sisters’ keeper — that makes this country work. It’s what allows us to pursue our individual dreams, yet still come together as a single American family. “E pluribus unum.” Out of many, one.”(3)
That Obama called individualism "famous" is the point where the mask drops. For a progressive, individualism is an uncomfortable, dirty idea. It smells of egoism and "can do" rugged selfishness and self-alienation...Obama would feel so uncomfortable around people like that. So he calls it "famous”. Is individualism good? Well, it stands along side another ingredient, the self-sacrifice that “really” makes this country work. You see, you must acknowledge individualism’s "famousness" in order to pander to and fool the yokels into believing that progressives are really just good ole Americans living the American dream. Of course, they understand the value of individualism. E pluribus unum.
Don't be fooled; Obama’s vision of the American dream is at the expense of hard-working Americans. Why should you pay for the reading program of a child on the south side of Chicago when your child has a reading disability - and you have to pay for the remedial program? Why should your employer pay for those prescription drugs when the result is that he lays you off? Don't tell an over-taxed individual that we are connected as one; he will tell you that all this sacrificing is killing him and making him work two or three jobs. Don't tell him that it is the strength of our nation that he works unselfishly when he comes home tired and sore in order not to go on food stamps while Obama builds his stash. When will Obama tell him that he has been "useful" enough and it is time for him to stop sacrificing? When will it finally solve all of our problems? Never?
The truth is that Obama's re-distribution of money is a lie; the money really goes to the "chosen" few; not to the poor, but to those who use the poor as a prop. Obama, as he has now famously made evident, serves those professional parasites who make a living by shaking down businesses and skimming profits from competitors. Don’t expect the honest rich to be included among that “unum”. You have to pay to play.
Progressives like Obama will acknowledge the roots of our nation, sing praises to the power of self-reliance and hard work, call it famous because it is famous to others, not to them. They will, instead, talk more enthusiastically about the freedom to "sacrifice" and the right to "give to others" in a true "bait and switch." Imagine what they would be saying if the ideas of freedom and rugged individualism had never been "famous." I'm sure they'd be talking about the "famous" idea of "to each according to his need, from each according to his ability."
Michelle Obama says:
“[S]omeone is going to have to give up a piece of their pie so that someone else can have more.”
Now after a full year of the Obama administration; a full year where he has brought forward his views of the rich, we can see that the “individualism” brought forward by the Tea Parties is the last thing the progressives want and the one thing they must prevent. So they will use the language of freedom and patriotism as cover so they can cleverly replace that freedom with a morass of social responsibility and the coercive imposition of sacrifice. That they are uncomfortable with the language of freedom shows how radical they have always been. They are unfit to lead because they have no connection to the practical aspects of leadership and the difficulty of running a profitable business. It is easy for an inexperienced person to attack what he/she doesn't understand (just ask your kids). Instead the unwise, unworldly Obamas, who are so intelligent that they don't even know that Marx has been resoundingly refuted, have been given a platform on the world stage, and insist that we accept their vision of what makes our country work: an oligarchic elite that rules a slave labor camp.
The truth is that none of Obama’s tactics, economic policies or even his alleged hope for a better future, can make the American dream possible. Obama creates nothing, produces nothing and can only use the power of government to manipulate business enterprises into doing the very things that will destroy them: pursing social goals rather than profits.
Politicians like Obama believe the Constitution is flawed because it does not contradict its entire purpose by establishing a mechanism for income redistribution. This view makes Obama an entirely new form of technocrat. He believes it is the role of government to fight against selfishness by redistributing income from the “rich” to his buddies. His rationalization is that government action is the hand of the "general will" and that once they, progressive politicians, gain the levers of power, they will fix that “flaw” in the Constitution. The technocracy, in the name of democratic socialism, becomes the fascist state.
Western culture took a wrong turn when the ancient Greeks established democracy. This, including the practice of voting into exile the most prominent men, created a form of tyranny which today we call the tyranny of the majority. In response, the Founding Fathers of our country identified unalienable rights for individuals that the government could not violate. The very concept of a “right” was intended to keep the majority from imposing cruel and tyrannical treatment upon any individual, even if that individual was rich.
The Founders also, undoubtedly knew about the dangerous views of Jean-Jacques Rousseau who fostered a concept called the “General Will.” He proposed that the General Will was an expression of reason in the group. Although he tried to derive the General Will from the “Sovereignty” of the individual in nature, he assumed that the General Will would always be right. The Founders knew better. They realized that, although Rousseau tried to restrict the "General Will" to "mere" principles, his ideas would lead to the tyranny of the majority and to a destruction of man's natural rights. Rousseau's view of the "General Will" is collectivism – and collectivism always leads to sacrifice of the individual. Once collectivism takes hold, the view of the collectivist leader allows no dissent.
The concept of the "General Will" had the effect of establishing self-sacrifice as a moral ideal and paved the way for the very same tyrannical majority rule for which we still criticize the Greeks. It meant that government could violate the rights of individuals if the majority decided to do so. It started our decline from a free constitutional republic where the government was forbidden to violate individual rights onto the slippery slope of ever widening government power, government forced altruism, government programs, progressive taxation and the resulting economic chaos.
Certainly the Founding Fathers, in the Bill of Rights, wanted to prevent a majority from imposing its will upon the individual. This was not a flaw or an over-sight in the Constitution as Obama contends. It was an intentional consideration (strange that a Constitutional scholar educated at Harvard does not know this). And I submit that a civil society would not consider it right for the majority to impose its will on any individual. Further, a proper society would never accept the idea that the “collective good” which cannot even be defined is, by any stretch of the imagination, a proper goal. Indeed, if there is such thing as a collective good, it cannot be achieved by the subjugation, enslavement or taxation of a minority. In a proper society, if a free man does not want to pay taxes, it is his right to dissent and refuse to participate. If the majority voted that he must pay taxes, that act is a violation of his rights, regardless of what Michelle Obama says. You cannot justify it by invoking the “common good” or saying “we won”.
Contrary to Rousseau, there is no dynamic, mystical or practical principle that can validly assert that a group can only do what is right. In fact, history has shown the opposite to be the case. Collectivist societies have been among our most brutal societies and it can be said that only collectivism leads to brutality. Majorities throughout history have done some of the most abominable things.
If a group of people wants to pay taxes and send money to the government, only those individuals who choose to do so should participate. Those who do not are free to do as they please. No argument about the “need” of the group should be more important than the right of an individual to voluntary association and participation.
The government violates individual rights when it forcibly takes money from one citizen and gives it to another. It is an immoral act. Our government was not intended to be one that redistributed income. Further, the proper functions of government do not require a massive bureaucracy and can be financed by means of use charges and voluntary contributions. Even if we had to fight a major war, the finances for the army would mostly be furnished through the voluntary contributions of the people whose rights are being defended.
To make my final point, I’d like to finish the quote in the first paragraph above by Ayn Rand. She put into Ellsworth Toohey’s mouth the following:
“It is always safe to denounce the rich. Everyone will help you, the rich first.”
And this, unfortunately, is also true. Everywhere, the rich express guilt for being rich and many even give their wealth away in huge quantities rather than investing it in thriving businesses. Until the rich become proud of being rich, until they know that they represent “The Fountainhead” of all that is good about man, until they fight against the confiscation of their property, people like Barack Obama will receive Nobel Prizes and total freedom to loot their production. Until they stop voting for and paying for their own enemies, they will be the problem in our society today.
The answer to Barack Obama and his redistributing friends is also provided by Ayn Rand. Francisco says to industrialist Hank Rearden (and to you) in her novel "Atlas Shrugged":
"You, who would not submit to the hardships of nature, but set out to conquer it and placed it in the service of your joy and your comfort—to what have you submitted at the hands of men? You, who know from your work that one bears punishment only for being wrong—what have you been willing to bear and for what reason? All your life, you have heard yourself denounced, not for your faults, but for your greatest virtues. You have been hated, not for your mistakes, but for your achievements. You have been scorned for all those qualities of character which are your highest pride. You have been called selfish for the courage of acting on your own judgment and bearing sole responsibility for your own life. You have been called arrogant for your independent mind. You have been called cruel for your unyielding integrity. You have been called antisocial for the vision that made you venture upon undiscovered roads. You have been called ruthless for the strength and self-discipline of your drive to your purpose. You have been called greedy for the magnificence of your power to create wealth. You, who've expended an inconceivable flow of energy, have been called a parasite. You, who've created abundance where there had been nothing but wastelands and helpless, starving men before you, have been called a robber. You, who've kept them all alive, have been called an exploiter. You, the purest and most moral man among them, have been sneered at as a 'vulgar materialist.' Have you stopped to ask them: by what right?—by what code?—by what standard? No, you have borne it all and kept silent. You bowed to their code and you never upheld your own. You knew what exacting morality was needed to produce a single metal nail, but you let them brand you as immoral. You knew that man needs the strictest code of values to deal with nature, but you thought that you needed no such code to deal with men. You left the deadliest weapon in the hands of your enemies, a weapon you never suspected or understood. Their moral code is their weapon. Ask yourself how deeply and in how many terrible ways you have accepted it. Ask yourself what it is that a code of moral values does to a man's life, and why he can't exist without it, and what happens to him if he accepts the wrong standard, by which the evil is the good. Shall I tell you why you're drawn to me, even though you think you ought to damn me? It's because I'm the first man who has given you what the whole world owes you and what you should have demanded of all men before you dealt with them: a moral sanction."(4)
People like Barack Obama take it for granted that the government has a mandate to establish collectivism. We should identify them for what they are; thieves who use force against individuals. The most moral people in our society are those who produce the products and services that make our lives easier and more comfortable. They save us thousands of hours of labor, increase our ability to enjoy our lives and make us all wealthy in the process. It is time they knew it and stood up for themselves. No one else will do it.
Certainly, Obama hates the rich. If they aren't useful to him, “they just don’t get it.” What is it they don’t get? They don’t get that sacrifice of their profits is Obama's goal. He says we "reward" the rich but he never says they deserve their rewards. He just wants them to be useful and concerned with the whole – which would destroy their ability to provide a better life for their employees and customers.
Obama wants businesspeople to be his draft animals, happy and content that after finishing the back breaking work of being useful to others, they'll receive enough grain to eat…maybe. In Obama’s world, there can never be enough sacrifice. How much can the rich take before they say “enough”?
(1) The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand
(2) Barack Obama, campaign speech
(3) Barack Obama, speech to Democratic National Convention, Boston, 2004
(4) Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand
This hatred was implicitly put forward by Barack Obama in 2008.
“We reward people a lot for being rich, for being famous, for being cute, for being thin… one of the values I think we need to instill in our country, in our children, is a sense of ‘usefulness’, in other words, are we useful, are we making other peoples’ lives a little bit better?”(2)
I think this quote reveals more than just how Obama thinks we treat the rich. It reveals a bias both about how he sees the rich and what he sees as moral. He believes that social service is a much more important value than self-interest; that moral living involves sacrifice for others while running a business for profit involves theft and evil acts.
The truth is that, in our economy, we decidedly do not reward people for being rich. Because of progressive taxation and other onerous punishments, people who are good at earning money (by means of making other peoples’ lives a lot better) are effectively tied to a whipping post. We certainly don’t wait for them to be rich and then reward them. In fact, the truth is exactly the opposite, when they become rich, we punish them, denigrate them and make their lives harder.
Is it possible that Obama has never understood the difference between hard work and a life of serving others? Has he spent too much time living off of donations rather than from production? Or has he spent too much time writing grant requests for shady real estate developers rather than developing a solid view of what it means to actually earn a living?
I found another example of this attitude when I listened to Obama’s speech at the Democratic National Convention in 2004.
“…For alongside our famous individualism, there’s another ingredient in the American saga.
A belief that we are connected as one people. If there’s a child on the south side of Chicago who can’t read, that matters to me, even if it’s not my child. If there’s a senior citizen somewhere who can’t pay for her prescription and has to choose between medicine and the rent...that makes my life poorer, even if it’s not my grandmother. If there’s an Arab American family being rounded up without benefit of an attorney or due process...that threatens my civil liberties. It’s that fundamental belief — I am my brother’s keeper, I am my sisters’ keeper — that makes this country work. It’s what allows us to pursue our individual dreams, yet still come together as a single American family. “E pluribus unum.” Out of many, one.”(3)
That Obama called individualism "famous" is the point where the mask drops. For a progressive, individualism is an uncomfortable, dirty idea. It smells of egoism and "can do" rugged selfishness and self-alienation...Obama would feel so uncomfortable around people like that. So he calls it "famous”. Is individualism good? Well, it stands along side another ingredient, the self-sacrifice that “really” makes this country work. You see, you must acknowledge individualism’s "famousness" in order to pander to and fool the yokels into believing that progressives are really just good ole Americans living the American dream. Of course, they understand the value of individualism. E pluribus unum.
Don't be fooled; Obama’s vision of the American dream is at the expense of hard-working Americans. Why should you pay for the reading program of a child on the south side of Chicago when your child has a reading disability - and you have to pay for the remedial program? Why should your employer pay for those prescription drugs when the result is that he lays you off? Don't tell an over-taxed individual that we are connected as one; he will tell you that all this sacrificing is killing him and making him work two or three jobs. Don't tell him that it is the strength of our nation that he works unselfishly when he comes home tired and sore in order not to go on food stamps while Obama builds his stash. When will Obama tell him that he has been "useful" enough and it is time for him to stop sacrificing? When will it finally solve all of our problems? Never?
The truth is that Obama's re-distribution of money is a lie; the money really goes to the "chosen" few; not to the poor, but to those who use the poor as a prop. Obama, as he has now famously made evident, serves those professional parasites who make a living by shaking down businesses and skimming profits from competitors. Don’t expect the honest rich to be included among that “unum”. You have to pay to play.
Progressives like Obama will acknowledge the roots of our nation, sing praises to the power of self-reliance and hard work, call it famous because it is famous to others, not to them. They will, instead, talk more enthusiastically about the freedom to "sacrifice" and the right to "give to others" in a true "bait and switch." Imagine what they would be saying if the ideas of freedom and rugged individualism had never been "famous." I'm sure they'd be talking about the "famous" idea of "to each according to his need, from each according to his ability."
Michelle Obama says:
“[S]omeone is going to have to give up a piece of their pie so that someone else can have more.”
Now after a full year of the Obama administration; a full year where he has brought forward his views of the rich, we can see that the “individualism” brought forward by the Tea Parties is the last thing the progressives want and the one thing they must prevent. So they will use the language of freedom and patriotism as cover so they can cleverly replace that freedom with a morass of social responsibility and the coercive imposition of sacrifice. That they are uncomfortable with the language of freedom shows how radical they have always been. They are unfit to lead because they have no connection to the practical aspects of leadership and the difficulty of running a profitable business. It is easy for an inexperienced person to attack what he/she doesn't understand (just ask your kids). Instead the unwise, unworldly Obamas, who are so intelligent that they don't even know that Marx has been resoundingly refuted, have been given a platform on the world stage, and insist that we accept their vision of what makes our country work: an oligarchic elite that rules a slave labor camp.
The truth is that none of Obama’s tactics, economic policies or even his alleged hope for a better future, can make the American dream possible. Obama creates nothing, produces nothing and can only use the power of government to manipulate business enterprises into doing the very things that will destroy them: pursing social goals rather than profits.
Politicians like Obama believe the Constitution is flawed because it does not contradict its entire purpose by establishing a mechanism for income redistribution. This view makes Obama an entirely new form of technocrat. He believes it is the role of government to fight against selfishness by redistributing income from the “rich” to his buddies. His rationalization is that government action is the hand of the "general will" and that once they, progressive politicians, gain the levers of power, they will fix that “flaw” in the Constitution. The technocracy, in the name of democratic socialism, becomes the fascist state.
Western culture took a wrong turn when the ancient Greeks established democracy. This, including the practice of voting into exile the most prominent men, created a form of tyranny which today we call the tyranny of the majority. In response, the Founding Fathers of our country identified unalienable rights for individuals that the government could not violate. The very concept of a “right” was intended to keep the majority from imposing cruel and tyrannical treatment upon any individual, even if that individual was rich.
The Founders also, undoubtedly knew about the dangerous views of Jean-Jacques Rousseau who fostered a concept called the “General Will.” He proposed that the General Will was an expression of reason in the group. Although he tried to derive the General Will from the “Sovereignty” of the individual in nature, he assumed that the General Will would always be right. The Founders knew better. They realized that, although Rousseau tried to restrict the "General Will" to "mere" principles, his ideas would lead to the tyranny of the majority and to a destruction of man's natural rights. Rousseau's view of the "General Will" is collectivism – and collectivism always leads to sacrifice of the individual. Once collectivism takes hold, the view of the collectivist leader allows no dissent.
The concept of the "General Will" had the effect of establishing self-sacrifice as a moral ideal and paved the way for the very same tyrannical majority rule for which we still criticize the Greeks. It meant that government could violate the rights of individuals if the majority decided to do so. It started our decline from a free constitutional republic where the government was forbidden to violate individual rights onto the slippery slope of ever widening government power, government forced altruism, government programs, progressive taxation and the resulting economic chaos.
Certainly the Founding Fathers, in the Bill of Rights, wanted to prevent a majority from imposing its will upon the individual. This was not a flaw or an over-sight in the Constitution as Obama contends. It was an intentional consideration (strange that a Constitutional scholar educated at Harvard does not know this). And I submit that a civil society would not consider it right for the majority to impose its will on any individual. Further, a proper society would never accept the idea that the “collective good” which cannot even be defined is, by any stretch of the imagination, a proper goal. Indeed, if there is such thing as a collective good, it cannot be achieved by the subjugation, enslavement or taxation of a minority. In a proper society, if a free man does not want to pay taxes, it is his right to dissent and refuse to participate. If the majority voted that he must pay taxes, that act is a violation of his rights, regardless of what Michelle Obama says. You cannot justify it by invoking the “common good” or saying “we won”.
Contrary to Rousseau, there is no dynamic, mystical or practical principle that can validly assert that a group can only do what is right. In fact, history has shown the opposite to be the case. Collectivist societies have been among our most brutal societies and it can be said that only collectivism leads to brutality. Majorities throughout history have done some of the most abominable things.
If a group of people wants to pay taxes and send money to the government, only those individuals who choose to do so should participate. Those who do not are free to do as they please. No argument about the “need” of the group should be more important than the right of an individual to voluntary association and participation.
The government violates individual rights when it forcibly takes money from one citizen and gives it to another. It is an immoral act. Our government was not intended to be one that redistributed income. Further, the proper functions of government do not require a massive bureaucracy and can be financed by means of use charges and voluntary contributions. Even if we had to fight a major war, the finances for the army would mostly be furnished through the voluntary contributions of the people whose rights are being defended.
To make my final point, I’d like to finish the quote in the first paragraph above by Ayn Rand. She put into Ellsworth Toohey’s mouth the following:
“It is always safe to denounce the rich. Everyone will help you, the rich first.”
And this, unfortunately, is also true. Everywhere, the rich express guilt for being rich and many even give their wealth away in huge quantities rather than investing it in thriving businesses. Until the rich become proud of being rich, until they know that they represent “The Fountainhead” of all that is good about man, until they fight against the confiscation of their property, people like Barack Obama will receive Nobel Prizes and total freedom to loot their production. Until they stop voting for and paying for their own enemies, they will be the problem in our society today.
The answer to Barack Obama and his redistributing friends is also provided by Ayn Rand. Francisco says to industrialist Hank Rearden (and to you) in her novel "Atlas Shrugged":
"You, who would not submit to the hardships of nature, but set out to conquer it and placed it in the service of your joy and your comfort—to what have you submitted at the hands of men? You, who know from your work that one bears punishment only for being wrong—what have you been willing to bear and for what reason? All your life, you have heard yourself denounced, not for your faults, but for your greatest virtues. You have been hated, not for your mistakes, but for your achievements. You have been scorned for all those qualities of character which are your highest pride. You have been called selfish for the courage of acting on your own judgment and bearing sole responsibility for your own life. You have been called arrogant for your independent mind. You have been called cruel for your unyielding integrity. You have been called antisocial for the vision that made you venture upon undiscovered roads. You have been called ruthless for the strength and self-discipline of your drive to your purpose. You have been called greedy for the magnificence of your power to create wealth. You, who've expended an inconceivable flow of energy, have been called a parasite. You, who've created abundance where there had been nothing but wastelands and helpless, starving men before you, have been called a robber. You, who've kept them all alive, have been called an exploiter. You, the purest and most moral man among them, have been sneered at as a 'vulgar materialist.' Have you stopped to ask them: by what right?—by what code?—by what standard? No, you have borne it all and kept silent. You bowed to their code and you never upheld your own. You knew what exacting morality was needed to produce a single metal nail, but you let them brand you as immoral. You knew that man needs the strictest code of values to deal with nature, but you thought that you needed no such code to deal with men. You left the deadliest weapon in the hands of your enemies, a weapon you never suspected or understood. Their moral code is their weapon. Ask yourself how deeply and in how many terrible ways you have accepted it. Ask yourself what it is that a code of moral values does to a man's life, and why he can't exist without it, and what happens to him if he accepts the wrong standard, by which the evil is the good. Shall I tell you why you're drawn to me, even though you think you ought to damn me? It's because I'm the first man who has given you what the whole world owes you and what you should have demanded of all men before you dealt with them: a moral sanction."(4)
People like Barack Obama take it for granted that the government has a mandate to establish collectivism. We should identify them for what they are; thieves who use force against individuals. The most moral people in our society are those who produce the products and services that make our lives easier and more comfortable. They save us thousands of hours of labor, increase our ability to enjoy our lives and make us all wealthy in the process. It is time they knew it and stood up for themselves. No one else will do it.
Certainly, Obama hates the rich. If they aren't useful to him, “they just don’t get it.” What is it they don’t get? They don’t get that sacrifice of their profits is Obama's goal. He says we "reward" the rich but he never says they deserve their rewards. He just wants them to be useful and concerned with the whole – which would destroy their ability to provide a better life for their employees and customers.
Obama wants businesspeople to be his draft animals, happy and content that after finishing the back breaking work of being useful to others, they'll receive enough grain to eat…maybe. In Obama’s world, there can never be enough sacrifice. How much can the rich take before they say “enough”?
(1) The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand
(2) Barack Obama, campaign speech
(3) Barack Obama, speech to Democratic National Convention, Boston, 2004
(4) Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand
Monday, December 21, 2009
White Bird
This song has been haunting me today. Do you remember it?
White bird,
in a golden cage,
on a winter's day,
in the rain.
White bird,
in a golden cage,
alone.
The leaves blow,
Across the long black road.
To the darkened skies,
in its rage
But the white bird just sits in her cage,
unknown.
White bird must fly
Or she will die
White bird,
dreams of the aspen trees,
with their dying leaves,
turning gold.
But the white bird just sits in her cage,
growing old.
White bird must fly or she will die.
White bird must fly or she will die.
The sunsets come, the sunsets go.
The clouds roll by,and the earth turns old.
And the young bird's eyes do always glow.
She must fly,
She must fly,
She must fly.
White bird,
In a golden cage,
On a winter's day, in the rain.
White bird,
In a golden cage alone.
White bird must fly or she will die.
White bird must fly or she will die.
White bird must fly or she will die.
Here's how I interpret it: There are two kinds of enslavement; real slavery of the gun and whip represented by the cage and mental slavery the bird has imposed upon herself because she's afraid to do what is in her nature; to fly.
The white bird yearns for freedom; yet she stays because the cage of her mind prevents her from flying, not the real cage. She will die when the coming dark storm engulfs her little cage. She will be too old and too weak to fight for her life by then.
You can trade the tyranny of guns for the tyranny of God but you're still living in a cage. This bird does not realize that the door to her cage is open and she holds the key to freedom locked tightly in her mind.
White bird,
in a golden cage,
on a winter's day,
in the rain.
White bird,
in a golden cage,
alone.
The leaves blow,
Across the long black road.
To the darkened skies,
in its rage
But the white bird just sits in her cage,
unknown.
White bird must fly
Or she will die
White bird,
dreams of the aspen trees,
with their dying leaves,
turning gold.
But the white bird just sits in her cage,
growing old.
White bird must fly or she will die.
White bird must fly or she will die.
The sunsets come, the sunsets go.
The clouds roll by,and the earth turns old.
And the young bird's eyes do always glow.
She must fly,
She must fly,
She must fly.
White bird,
In a golden cage,
On a winter's day, in the rain.
White bird,
In a golden cage alone.
White bird must fly or she will die.
White bird must fly or she will die.
White bird must fly or she will die.
Here's how I interpret it: There are two kinds of enslavement; real slavery of the gun and whip represented by the cage and mental slavery the bird has imposed upon herself because she's afraid to do what is in her nature; to fly.
The white bird yearns for freedom; yet she stays because the cage of her mind prevents her from flying, not the real cage. She will die when the coming dark storm engulfs her little cage. She will be too old and too weak to fight for her life by then.
You can trade the tyranny of guns for the tyranny of God but you're still living in a cage. This bird does not realize that the door to her cage is open and she holds the key to freedom locked tightly in her mind.
Saturday, December 12, 2009
Are you Qualified to Vote?
It is my conviction that voting in a free society is a solemn responsibility. Having the maturity and thoughtfulness that enables you to make a correct voting decision is a high standard that everyone should seek. If you are not able to vote with the utmost of your intelligence, your vote would invalidate the vote of a person who has given due diligence to his choice. More than this, you might be contributing to the election of a charlatan or thief.
Certainly, no one should keep a free citizen from voting. But there are some reasons why you should voluntarily refrain from participating in the vote. These have to do with whether you are able to make the right voting decision, whether you have the intellectual honesty necessary. This has to do with your ability to think through the issues in any election with a proper philosophical orientation that makes a correct voting decision possible. It has to do with whether you are intellectually independent and self-confident enough to be dispassionate about issues that directly affect your life and the lives of your fellow citizens. I have identified four reasons that, if they apply to you, should convince you that you should not vote.
Reason #1. You may not be qualified to vote if you have never held a steady job.
Employed people generally have an interest in a strong economy and want governmental policies and laws that enable both businesses and employees to function well. This is because government has the power to restrict business activity through high taxes, burdensome regulations and government grants. Contrary to the opinion of many, it makes a difference whether a business is free or shackled by government regulations. If we vote into power people who seek to control rather than liberate, we could be asking for rough times.
What does it mean to “participate in a productive job?” It means living a moral life, using your thinking and skills to create values that other people want to buy. When you take a job, you must develop a sense of discipline in your life; you must build your life around the requirements of working. You must plan your life across a number of years. In short, it means that you accept the responsibility of providing for yourself. This affects your voting decisions and gives you a strong stake in voting for the right people who will help you reach your long-term goals.
If you are enjoying the benefits of having your own income, home and appliances, even a car, you would have an entirely different approach to voting than if you have never taken responsibility for your own support. If a candidate offered programs that dole out money to unproductive people, a person who had never held a steady job might vote differently than a self-sufficient voter. The irresponsible person might vote for a politician who wants to re-distribute wealth from the producers to the non-producers. This would be a moral travesty.
Reason #2. You may not be qualified to vote if you are on government relief
Government relief does an interesting thing to many of those who are its beneficiaries. It often encourages them to be satisfied with having their needs met by government. It establishes the idea in the minds of the beneficiaries that it is the duty of all other citizens to provide for their well being. Certainly, government does a lot to create this illusion and that is because it wants the votes of those beneficiaries. Although some people believe this idea is unquestionable, I think most people know that getting something that you haven't earned is immoral. Further, this premise encourages the growth of government and is antithetical to the principles of a free society.
A social progressive would disagree with me about whether you should vote because his/her political ideal is a society where the more able will provide the funds to support the less able. The people who would benefit from welfare programs are the very people from whom the social progressive would seek support. In my view, this is precisely why the person getting government relief is not qualified to vote. What gives any person the right to demand that another person should be forced to supply his support? His vote to receive government support invalidates the vote of the person who has lived his life earning his keep.
If you advocate such force, what is the difference between you and a thief? Doesn't the thief think he is justified in taking someone’s money? Does not the thief think that people are "suckers" who do not deserve the money he steals from them? Morally, there is no difference between a thief and an advocate of income redistribution. Both forms of redistribution are a violation of the right to the pursuit of happiness. And the productive person has to work harder because his time and energy have been expropriated (it takes time and energy to make money)…while the person who receives the money will generally squander it.
Money earned by the productive individual would not exist were it not for the choice (to work). And since the person who receives the money from government as a beneficiary did not choose to work, that fact makes the redistribution of money a crime. No point of altruism, no exploitation theory and no right can be mustered that gives anyone the right to take something from one person and give it to another. One thing is certain: the best way to ensure that production stops and society descends into group warfare is to make living impossible for the talented and educated. If you want to understand why our economy is in the dumps, this is the reason: there is too much redistribution going on.
Progressives never say they want to stop production or punish success. But their policies are not only immoral (as is theft) but impractical. You cannot expect the victim to continue to allow theft of his property. Eventually, he will tire of working hard for others when he realizes that the entire social welfare scheme is a fraud and a lie. He may join the Tea Parties. In other cases, he will do what is his right and protect his property against the marauders of government by being less productive until the marauders are removed from power.
Whether redistribution takes place through volunteerism/work camps (which is a scheme for stealing the energy of people – a form of concentration camps), higher taxes (which is overt theft of the property of the able), the Fairness Doctrine (which is a way of destroying freedom of speech and stealing from people their right to think), to Foreign Policy (which is a plan to loot the American economy for the sake of the developing world) to providing grants to local community organizers such as ACORN (which is an effort to loot the treasury by community organizers and corrupt real estate developers – See Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and Valerie Jarrett), you can be sure that there will be no end to the looting and no end to the propaganda that promotes sacrifice. You can be sure that it won’t be long before we are totally bankrupt.
As Ayn Rand says, “It stands to reason that where there's sacrifice, there's someone collecting sacrificial offerings. Where there's service, there's someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice, speaks of slaves and masters. And intends to be the master.”[1]
Reason #3. You may not be qualified to vote if you are in college or a college graduate.
You may not be qualified to vote if you have been influenced heavily by the prevailing philosophies taught in our nation’s colleges and universities. Higher education today is supposed to be an open forum for ideas. Its goal at one time (a very long time ago) was to teach the student to think critically, to be open to new ideas and learn how to evaluate ideas in an unbiased manner. This is not the goal today. If you went to college to get a good education, you have been cheated. Let’s look at some of the influences.
Hume/Kant Axis
David Hume and Immanuel Kant are two philosophers who have had devastating influence on the ability of our young people to think. Their ideas have poisoned the inductive process and have turned thinking and philosophical inquiry into an undertaking that rejects virtually every valid concept known to man. Concepts such as reason, truth and knowledge have been turned into their opposites and the result has been the establishment of a secular nihilist foundation upon which virtually any anti-man concept can be built.
You may think that ideas do not matter; that action is more important than thought and that it is useless to spend time on subjects like philosophy because, you think, they have no application to life. That point of view is exactly the point of view of David Hume. In denying the value of philosophy, you have accepted Hume’s philosophy.
The key question regarding Hume and Kant's influence is that their ideas amount, in practice, a destruction of your ability to evaluate reality. These philosophies leave you without a method for understanding reality. They leave you to depend only upon your emotions when making moral decisions...including political decisions. And because pragmatism defaults to altruism, all political decisions are based on socialist and progressive schemes of government that enslave you to the collective. Literally, the entire Hume/Kant culture is mired in altruism to such an extent that many people have no problem using government coercion to attack a myriad of “social” problems. If you accept this blindness, you are not qualified to vote.
Marx/Rousseau Axis
Jean Jacques Rousseau was a philosopher who coined the term “social contract.” This view of government essentially justified majority rule, democracy, where the minority was charged with accepting any laws or restrictions that the majority decided to impose. Rousseau founded his preferred government upon the idea that there was an implicit contract to accept majority rule. He also held that the will of the majority was somehow infallible and must be accepted as opposed to mere self-interest. Rousseau is very popular among progressives today because his ideas justify forcing the minority (that is often rich and ripe for exploitation) to accept high taxes and expropriation by the government. As the Obama administration is eager to tell us: "We won."
Karl Marx is the champion of communism and socialism. Through his development of a mystical “historical process,” Marx invented a political philosophy that was attractive to many who hoped for the legalized nationalization and looting of the products, machines and factories created by capitalists. They thought they could expropriate the machines and factories from the owners and still retain production and wealth. It was a fool's errand; the exact opposite happened; production was always destroyed.
Marx’s critique of capitalism is considered by many to be accurate. However, it is based on a faulty view of both humanity and the workings of the market system. Marxists are determinists who think that men are molded by the economic class and that the market system is a zero/sum game that always involves someone winning and someone losing. Yet, capitalism is based on the idea that man, when he engages in free trade uses his reasoning capacity and his ability to choose moral action. On the other hand, Marx thought that capitalists were vicious predators seeking to exploit the workers when in fact they were traders who significantly benefited the lives of those who bought their products. Capitalist trade is not a zero/sum game but a win/win as well as a constantly improving system that helped people live better and longer lives.
Today, Marxist ideas are taught with little debate and they infest our students with the idea that capitalism is full of evil exploiters and that America is an imperialist country. If you are a Marxist, you are not qualified to vote...pure and simple. This includes many people in the Obama administration who now have the power to run (ruin) capitalism.
The current economic crisis (September 2008) is an excellent example of how Marxist socialism is a failed system. Contrary to the advocates of dictatorship, this crisis is a failure of socialism, not capitalism. The basic principle of socialism, according to Karl Marx is from each according to his ability to each according to his need; and the Community Reinvestment act fostered by Bill Clinton required that banks issue risky loans to people who did not quality for them. This was a form of redistribution of the money of the banks to the crooks at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac who were all Democratic Party operatives. Even Barack Obama was involved.
Reason #4. You are not qualified to vote if you still think that Barack Obama can make things better.
Obama is a nihilist whose only goal is to destroy this nation. He cannot help himself because he was raised by a communist mother, influenced by a communist father and mentored by communists and terrorists all his life. Consider: failed stimulus programs, failed jobs policies, failed foreign policy, failed monetary policy, failed oil policy, failed tax policy, failed educational policy, failed green energy policy and his constant calls for Americans to sacrifice. If you have not done the study necessary to know how and why all of these policies are failing, if you have not learned that a nation cannot indefinitely spend more money than it takes in...and know why it is wrong to engage in deficit spending...then you have no idea how to be a citizen and you should not vote. Leave the voting to the adults and you'll be much better off and you'll feel a lot better about it.
Conclusion
Of course, ours is an age of skepticism and all concepts including freedom and individual rights are under attack by people who don’t hold any principles: the progresive left and right. The conceptual corruption created by skeptics and mystics in our society has made discussion about a proper society into a naïve activity. If people argue that the principle of property rights should be inviolable, many will shrug as if the rights advocate is stupid to think in such a pedestrian way. Social planners are busy trying to decide how best to allocate other peoples’ money for the sake of social goals while society plunges deeper into the depths. People on the dole accept the money given to them by the government and in return they buy into the socialist myth that such redistribution is good for the economy. As they see things getting worse, they don't even know that their very own parasitism is causing it.
How did we turn our nation over to these simplistic morons who don't even know that individual rights are the only means to a just society? They think they are too smart, and too hip, to care that we have lost the fundamental basis of proper society and they think that anyone who disagrees with them is stupid or seeking to help the rich.
But I don't want you to refrain from voting. I would prefer you educate yourself about the issues and stop listening to the talking heads who only confuse you. Open a book and get all sides on the issues, especially the issues about which the media is not telling you. There is plenty of alternative media out there. The truth is out there and it is not just about Democrat vs. Republican. It is really about right and wrong and it takes effort to learn how to think so that you can make an informed choice.
When the leaders and intellectuals in a society are corrupted by skepticism, one cannot blame the people for not knowing better. How could the average person know what makes up a proper society when his teachers don’t explain to them what is a proper society? When sacrifice is the guiding principle and when most people think that plunder is the only practical way to run a society, can you blame people for voting for the most consistent and corrupt graduates of our universities? It has happened before that the people have taken things into their own hands when they felt it was necessary. Yet, I fear that we are probably going to have another "fixed" election; fixed by the universities.
Yet, it is the job of the intellectuals and philosophers to properly educate the people and today’s crop has failed miserably – otherwise we would not be arguing about absurd notions like income re-distribution and media bias. We would not be thinking that we can spend our way into prosperity or that robbing Peter to pay Paul is actually going to be ok with Peter.
A careful reading of the Constitution will give you a better understanding of what the Founders intended when they established our country. They sought, fundamentally, to restrict government and avoid tyranny. In practice it meant that every citizen was free to think, speak and act as he saw fit – without the possibility of influence from the government. The sum of man's rights is what we call individual rights. Properly, the government cannot violate the rights enumerated in the Constitution. The government's only mandate is to protect individuals from having their rights violated by anyone including the government. This idea has created what was once the most politically free society in the history of the world - with the consequence that it is also the most affluent society in the history of the world. When people are free to make their own decisions about their lives and property they most often make the correct decisions and the result is a society where people are safe, trusted and successful.
We owe it to ourselves to ensure that we do not make a “light” or “frivolous” decision when we vote for important offices. The people who created our society and set its foundations studied philosophy, politics and world history for many years; they debated political and philosophical issues for hours and even fought against a deadly British army for the right to live free of government coercion. It is incumbent on any American of voting age to ensure that he/she has the correct intellectual foundation that is necessary for making a rational choice about the people who will hold power in our country. If you have not made that effort to understand the issues, you should not vote. If you think that theft can be made moral by pulling a lever behind some curtains, you should not vote.
[1] The Soul of the Collectivist, For the New Intellectual, Ayn Rand
Certainly, no one should keep a free citizen from voting. But there are some reasons why you should voluntarily refrain from participating in the vote. These have to do with whether you are able to make the right voting decision, whether you have the intellectual honesty necessary. This has to do with your ability to think through the issues in any election with a proper philosophical orientation that makes a correct voting decision possible. It has to do with whether you are intellectually independent and self-confident enough to be dispassionate about issues that directly affect your life and the lives of your fellow citizens. I have identified four reasons that, if they apply to you, should convince you that you should not vote.
Reason #1. You may not be qualified to vote if you have never held a steady job.
Employed people generally have an interest in a strong economy and want governmental policies and laws that enable both businesses and employees to function well. This is because government has the power to restrict business activity through high taxes, burdensome regulations and government grants. Contrary to the opinion of many, it makes a difference whether a business is free or shackled by government regulations. If we vote into power people who seek to control rather than liberate, we could be asking for rough times.
What does it mean to “participate in a productive job?” It means living a moral life, using your thinking and skills to create values that other people want to buy. When you take a job, you must develop a sense of discipline in your life; you must build your life around the requirements of working. You must plan your life across a number of years. In short, it means that you accept the responsibility of providing for yourself. This affects your voting decisions and gives you a strong stake in voting for the right people who will help you reach your long-term goals.
If you are enjoying the benefits of having your own income, home and appliances, even a car, you would have an entirely different approach to voting than if you have never taken responsibility for your own support. If a candidate offered programs that dole out money to unproductive people, a person who had never held a steady job might vote differently than a self-sufficient voter. The irresponsible person might vote for a politician who wants to re-distribute wealth from the producers to the non-producers. This would be a moral travesty.
Reason #2. You may not be qualified to vote if you are on government relief
Government relief does an interesting thing to many of those who are its beneficiaries. It often encourages them to be satisfied with having their needs met by government. It establishes the idea in the minds of the beneficiaries that it is the duty of all other citizens to provide for their well being. Certainly, government does a lot to create this illusion and that is because it wants the votes of those beneficiaries. Although some people believe this idea is unquestionable, I think most people know that getting something that you haven't earned is immoral. Further, this premise encourages the growth of government and is antithetical to the principles of a free society.
A social progressive would disagree with me about whether you should vote because his/her political ideal is a society where the more able will provide the funds to support the less able. The people who would benefit from welfare programs are the very people from whom the social progressive would seek support. In my view, this is precisely why the person getting government relief is not qualified to vote. What gives any person the right to demand that another person should be forced to supply his support? His vote to receive government support invalidates the vote of the person who has lived his life earning his keep.
If you advocate such force, what is the difference between you and a thief? Doesn't the thief think he is justified in taking someone’s money? Does not the thief think that people are "suckers" who do not deserve the money he steals from them? Morally, there is no difference between a thief and an advocate of income redistribution. Both forms of redistribution are a violation of the right to the pursuit of happiness. And the productive person has to work harder because his time and energy have been expropriated (it takes time and energy to make money)…while the person who receives the money will generally squander it.
Money earned by the productive individual would not exist were it not for the choice (to work). And since the person who receives the money from government as a beneficiary did not choose to work, that fact makes the redistribution of money a crime. No point of altruism, no exploitation theory and no right can be mustered that gives anyone the right to take something from one person and give it to another. One thing is certain: the best way to ensure that production stops and society descends into group warfare is to make living impossible for the talented and educated. If you want to understand why our economy is in the dumps, this is the reason: there is too much redistribution going on.
Progressives never say they want to stop production or punish success. But their policies are not only immoral (as is theft) but impractical. You cannot expect the victim to continue to allow theft of his property. Eventually, he will tire of working hard for others when he realizes that the entire social welfare scheme is a fraud and a lie. He may join the Tea Parties. In other cases, he will do what is his right and protect his property against the marauders of government by being less productive until the marauders are removed from power.
Whether redistribution takes place through volunteerism/work camps (which is a scheme for stealing the energy of people – a form of concentration camps), higher taxes (which is overt theft of the property of the able), the Fairness Doctrine (which is a way of destroying freedom of speech and stealing from people their right to think), to Foreign Policy (which is a plan to loot the American economy for the sake of the developing world) to providing grants to local community organizers such as ACORN (which is an effort to loot the treasury by community organizers and corrupt real estate developers – See Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and Valerie Jarrett), you can be sure that there will be no end to the looting and no end to the propaganda that promotes sacrifice. You can be sure that it won’t be long before we are totally bankrupt.
As Ayn Rand says, “It stands to reason that where there's sacrifice, there's someone collecting sacrificial offerings. Where there's service, there's someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice, speaks of slaves and masters. And intends to be the master.”[1]
Reason #3. You may not be qualified to vote if you are in college or a college graduate.
You may not be qualified to vote if you have been influenced heavily by the prevailing philosophies taught in our nation’s colleges and universities. Higher education today is supposed to be an open forum for ideas. Its goal at one time (a very long time ago) was to teach the student to think critically, to be open to new ideas and learn how to evaluate ideas in an unbiased manner. This is not the goal today. If you went to college to get a good education, you have been cheated. Let’s look at some of the influences.
Hume/Kant Axis
David Hume and Immanuel Kant are two philosophers who have had devastating influence on the ability of our young people to think. Their ideas have poisoned the inductive process and have turned thinking and philosophical inquiry into an undertaking that rejects virtually every valid concept known to man. Concepts such as reason, truth and knowledge have been turned into their opposites and the result has been the establishment of a secular nihilist foundation upon which virtually any anti-man concept can be built.
You may think that ideas do not matter; that action is more important than thought and that it is useless to spend time on subjects like philosophy because, you think, they have no application to life. That point of view is exactly the point of view of David Hume. In denying the value of philosophy, you have accepted Hume’s philosophy.
The key question regarding Hume and Kant's influence is that their ideas amount, in practice, a destruction of your ability to evaluate reality. These philosophies leave you without a method for understanding reality. They leave you to depend only upon your emotions when making moral decisions...including political decisions. And because pragmatism defaults to altruism, all political decisions are based on socialist and progressive schemes of government that enslave you to the collective. Literally, the entire Hume/Kant culture is mired in altruism to such an extent that many people have no problem using government coercion to attack a myriad of “social” problems. If you accept this blindness, you are not qualified to vote.
Marx/Rousseau Axis
Jean Jacques Rousseau was a philosopher who coined the term “social contract.” This view of government essentially justified majority rule, democracy, where the minority was charged with accepting any laws or restrictions that the majority decided to impose. Rousseau founded his preferred government upon the idea that there was an implicit contract to accept majority rule. He also held that the will of the majority was somehow infallible and must be accepted as opposed to mere self-interest. Rousseau is very popular among progressives today because his ideas justify forcing the minority (that is often rich and ripe for exploitation) to accept high taxes and expropriation by the government. As the Obama administration is eager to tell us: "We won."
Karl Marx is the champion of communism and socialism. Through his development of a mystical “historical process,” Marx invented a political philosophy that was attractive to many who hoped for the legalized nationalization and looting of the products, machines and factories created by capitalists. They thought they could expropriate the machines and factories from the owners and still retain production and wealth. It was a fool's errand; the exact opposite happened; production was always destroyed.
Marx’s critique of capitalism is considered by many to be accurate. However, it is based on a faulty view of both humanity and the workings of the market system. Marxists are determinists who think that men are molded by the economic class and that the market system is a zero/sum game that always involves someone winning and someone losing. Yet, capitalism is based on the idea that man, when he engages in free trade uses his reasoning capacity and his ability to choose moral action. On the other hand, Marx thought that capitalists were vicious predators seeking to exploit the workers when in fact they were traders who significantly benefited the lives of those who bought their products. Capitalist trade is not a zero/sum game but a win/win as well as a constantly improving system that helped people live better and longer lives.
Today, Marxist ideas are taught with little debate and they infest our students with the idea that capitalism is full of evil exploiters and that America is an imperialist country. If you are a Marxist, you are not qualified to vote...pure and simple. This includes many people in the Obama administration who now have the power to run (ruin) capitalism.
The current economic crisis (September 2008) is an excellent example of how Marxist socialism is a failed system. Contrary to the advocates of dictatorship, this crisis is a failure of socialism, not capitalism. The basic principle of socialism, according to Karl Marx is from each according to his ability to each according to his need; and the Community Reinvestment act fostered by Bill Clinton required that banks issue risky loans to people who did not quality for them. This was a form of redistribution of the money of the banks to the crooks at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac who were all Democratic Party operatives. Even Barack Obama was involved.
Reason #4. You are not qualified to vote if you still think that Barack Obama can make things better.
Obama is a nihilist whose only goal is to destroy this nation. He cannot help himself because he was raised by a communist mother, influenced by a communist father and mentored by communists and terrorists all his life. Consider: failed stimulus programs, failed jobs policies, failed foreign policy, failed monetary policy, failed oil policy, failed tax policy, failed educational policy, failed green energy policy and his constant calls for Americans to sacrifice. If you have not done the study necessary to know how and why all of these policies are failing, if you have not learned that a nation cannot indefinitely spend more money than it takes in...and know why it is wrong to engage in deficit spending...then you have no idea how to be a citizen and you should not vote. Leave the voting to the adults and you'll be much better off and you'll feel a lot better about it.
Conclusion
Of course, ours is an age of skepticism and all concepts including freedom and individual rights are under attack by people who don’t hold any principles: the progresive left and right. The conceptual corruption created by skeptics and mystics in our society has made discussion about a proper society into a naïve activity. If people argue that the principle of property rights should be inviolable, many will shrug as if the rights advocate is stupid to think in such a pedestrian way. Social planners are busy trying to decide how best to allocate other peoples’ money for the sake of social goals while society plunges deeper into the depths. People on the dole accept the money given to them by the government and in return they buy into the socialist myth that such redistribution is good for the economy. As they see things getting worse, they don't even know that their very own parasitism is causing it.
How did we turn our nation over to these simplistic morons who don't even know that individual rights are the only means to a just society? They think they are too smart, and too hip, to care that we have lost the fundamental basis of proper society and they think that anyone who disagrees with them is stupid or seeking to help the rich.
But I don't want you to refrain from voting. I would prefer you educate yourself about the issues and stop listening to the talking heads who only confuse you. Open a book and get all sides on the issues, especially the issues about which the media is not telling you. There is plenty of alternative media out there. The truth is out there and it is not just about Democrat vs. Republican. It is really about right and wrong and it takes effort to learn how to think so that you can make an informed choice.
When the leaders and intellectuals in a society are corrupted by skepticism, one cannot blame the people for not knowing better. How could the average person know what makes up a proper society when his teachers don’t explain to them what is a proper society? When sacrifice is the guiding principle and when most people think that plunder is the only practical way to run a society, can you blame people for voting for the most consistent and corrupt graduates of our universities? It has happened before that the people have taken things into their own hands when they felt it was necessary. Yet, I fear that we are probably going to have another "fixed" election; fixed by the universities.
Yet, it is the job of the intellectuals and philosophers to properly educate the people and today’s crop has failed miserably – otherwise we would not be arguing about absurd notions like income re-distribution and media bias. We would not be thinking that we can spend our way into prosperity or that robbing Peter to pay Paul is actually going to be ok with Peter.
A careful reading of the Constitution will give you a better understanding of what the Founders intended when they established our country. They sought, fundamentally, to restrict government and avoid tyranny. In practice it meant that every citizen was free to think, speak and act as he saw fit – without the possibility of influence from the government. The sum of man's rights is what we call individual rights. Properly, the government cannot violate the rights enumerated in the Constitution. The government's only mandate is to protect individuals from having their rights violated by anyone including the government. This idea has created what was once the most politically free society in the history of the world - with the consequence that it is also the most affluent society in the history of the world. When people are free to make their own decisions about their lives and property they most often make the correct decisions and the result is a society where people are safe, trusted and successful.
We owe it to ourselves to ensure that we do not make a “light” or “frivolous” decision when we vote for important offices. The people who created our society and set its foundations studied philosophy, politics and world history for many years; they debated political and philosophical issues for hours and even fought against a deadly British army for the right to live free of government coercion. It is incumbent on any American of voting age to ensure that he/she has the correct intellectual foundation that is necessary for making a rational choice about the people who will hold power in our country. If you have not made that effort to understand the issues, you should not vote. If you think that theft can be made moral by pulling a lever behind some curtains, you should not vote.
[1] The Soul of the Collectivist, For the New Intellectual, Ayn Rand
Friday, December 11, 2009
Richard Behney for Senate
I think that a viable political strategy for 2010 is, at the very least, to do what we can to gridlock the next Congress. Elect out as many of the candidates we can in each local area and make sure that no one party dominates on the Hill. Elect in alternative candidates where those candidates are consistently free market and individual rights advocates, especially those that came out of the Tea Parties. On a national level, Tea Partiers, who we know number in the millions, should donate money to the campaigns of a few "Tea Party Candidates" for Congress and Senate so they have the ability to make strong challenges to the incumbents. I urge all Tea Party protesters all over the country to donate to Richard Behney's Senate run in Indiana against Evan Bayh. This can be a highly visible campaign, covered by the media and especially Fox News, that would set the basis for the formation of a third party going forward. There is still a lot of education that needs to take place and this national support of a Tea Party candidate during this election cycle could help in that effort.
I am re-printing this email that I received from Richard Behney for Senate Headquarters. I urge you to help in any way you can...if only it means forwarding this to everyone you know. I've met Richard and I believe he would be an outstanding Senator from Indiana. Anyone who reads this from the media, please help get the word out that a Tea Party leader is taking on the establishment. You can contact him through his website.
"I am Richard Behney, Founder of the Indianapolis Tea Party and Republican Candidate for the United States Senate challenging Blue-Dog Democrat, Evan Bayh. Many from our Hoosier Tea Parties and 9.12 groups asked me to step forward to take our voice inside the Capitol. I’ve accepted the challenge, and am willing to stand in the gap. Now its up to you!
You need to understand, the GOP does not support this campaign financially. In fact, they actually work towards silencing our grassroots voice (look no further than NY-23 for evidence of that). Let me be straight with you…this fight will not continue unless YOU, the Tea Partiers, 9.12ers, and other freedom-loving Americans, are prepared to step up now and put your money where your passion is.
This is DO or DIE.
Consider this an urgent CALL TO LIBERTY – we must raise funds for our campaign to continue. Beginning now through December 16th, the anniversary of the original Boston Tea Party, we must raise $100,000 to sustain this campaign or forfeit our voice.
I urge you to go to www.richardbehney.com to make your $20, $50, $100 or more donation today! You and I both know our individual rights and liberties are worth far more than $20, $50, or $100. They are priceless.
Your donation will make a difference.
FREEDOM!
Richard Behney"
I am re-printing this email that I received from Richard Behney for Senate Headquarters. I urge you to help in any way you can...if only it means forwarding this to everyone you know. I've met Richard and I believe he would be an outstanding Senator from Indiana. Anyone who reads this from the media, please help get the word out that a Tea Party leader is taking on the establishment. You can contact him through his website.
"I am Richard Behney, Founder of the Indianapolis Tea Party and Republican Candidate for the United States Senate challenging Blue-Dog Democrat, Evan Bayh. Many from our Hoosier Tea Parties and 9.12 groups asked me to step forward to take our voice inside the Capitol. I’ve accepted the challenge, and am willing to stand in the gap. Now its up to you!
You need to understand, the GOP does not support this campaign financially. In fact, they actually work towards silencing our grassroots voice (look no further than NY-23 for evidence of that). Let me be straight with you…this fight will not continue unless YOU, the Tea Partiers, 9.12ers, and other freedom-loving Americans, are prepared to step up now and put your money where your passion is.
This is DO or DIE.
Consider this an urgent CALL TO LIBERTY – we must raise funds for our campaign to continue. Beginning now through December 16th, the anniversary of the original Boston Tea Party, we must raise $100,000 to sustain this campaign or forfeit our voice.
I urge you to go to www.richardbehney.com to make your $20, $50, $100 or more donation today! You and I both know our individual rights and liberties are worth far more than $20, $50, or $100. They are priceless.
Your donation will make a difference.
FREEDOM!
Richard Behney"
Wednesday, December 9, 2009
Why Obama will Fail
If the sight of a starving child makes you angry; if you want to do away with poverty and create a better, fairer, more affluent society; you must think long and hard. You must do a serious, dispassionate study of history, as I have done. Like me, you must study economics, logic, philosophy and the principles of a Constitutional Republic. You must read the Founding Fathers and learn how they thought and why. And you must learn about the people responsible for poverty and how they get away with it; how they exploit people and steal their life blood; you must learn about the history of dictatorship, fascism, communism, radical leftists in America and how they hope to bring European communism (dictatorship) to the world. Then if you have done a proper job of learning, you will conclude, as I have done, that the best and only way to solve the problem of poverty is to establish full unregulated capitalism. You must protest the atrocities fostered by progressivism. You must fight for Liberty.
The progressives in the Obama administration claim to be part of an honorable tradition in American politics. Unlike their political enemies, they claim to represent a more enlightened philosophy, one that wants to make things better for Americans. They see economic injustice and want to fix it; they want to make capitalism more inclusive and fair. Yet, during their long history, American progressives have had associations with eugenics, socialism, communism, the labor movement and even fascism.
The reason for these associations is simple. Progressives agree, in principle, with the premises of these philosophies. They grew up together. Although today there are some “honest” liberals who still adhere to Constitutional protections, such as the right of a woman to her body, there is one basic premise that all progressives of all varieties agree upon; and it is this premise that makes them all wrong.
This premise is the need of progressives to use coercion to re-distribute wealth. This is true of every progressive scheme.
1. What does it mean in practice to re-distribute wealth and
2. Whose rights are violated in order for progressive schemes to work?
Few people realize that progressive interference with capitalism always causes unintended consequences that are often worse than the intended benefits of wealth re-distribution. Let’s give a couple of examples.
Let’s assume that the government imposes a tax on your small business skating rink. The government makes a case that people who skate have more broken ankles and make a stronger demand on hospitals. So in order to help hospitals take care of broken ankles it imposes a tax of 10% on people who go to your skating rink. For you this requires that you raise your prices by 10% to cover the tax. In order to ensure that they eat as well as they have eaten in the past, your customers decide to go to the skating rink less often. This also means that you, the business owner, must now pay employees to collect the tax and remit the money to the government while also dealing with the loss of skaters. You may go out of business or reduce the number of employees that you can afford to hire.
Or let’s assume that the government thinks an industry might have some characters who are harming consumers and in order to correct that behavior it imposes regulations and reporting procedures that your business has to provide to the government. Not only could you be jailed for not complying with the reporting requirements but you could also be fined or jailed if the government determines that you have cheated the consumer in some way. First of all, you have to live with the possibility that the reporting you do to the government might be misinterpreted in some way or that the government official who evaluates your reports might be in the pay of your competitor and that he will find something that he can interpret as being wrong. You might, in order to stay in business, have to pay a bribe and go to jail if your payoff is discovered. Because of the regulations imposed on you, it becomes difficult to do business honestly which defeats the supposed purpose of the regulation.
Then you also have to hire additional people to fill out forms and reports for the government, auditors to look at everything you do to determine if you are doing something wrong that should be corrected. These new employees add to your overhead costs and require that you cut other productive employees in order to pay these employees who don’t help you serve the consumer. So your ability to serve the consumer, the very reason for the reporting requirements, may be hurt. This might cause you to lose customers to your larger competitor who can afford to fulfill the compliance requirements. If you are a small business, you may not be able to stay in business with these new costs. In fact, this was the result of the Sarbannes Oxley Act signed into law by the Bush administration.
You could write a book chronicling every government intervention into the economy and the damage done by each of them and you would still not convince a progressive that government intervention never improves things. You would not even be able to convince a majority of CEOs of major corporations of the same thing. Yet it is their rights as well as the rights of every individual in our society that are violated by these intrusions. More than this their lives are damaged as well.
Ayn Rand wrote: “The only proper, moral purpose of a government is to protect man's rights, which means: to protect him from physical violence—to protect his right to his own life, to his own liberty, to his own property and to the pursuit of his own happiness. Without property rights, no other rights are possible.”
You would have thought that sooner or later an honest person would have entered the political fray to declare that progressivism is a fraud. You might have even thought that somewhere along the line even a progressive with enough standing in his movement would have recognized that progressivism accomplishes the opposite of its stated goals. But no one has. In the country where free speech still exists, no one has been able to articulate the truth that progressivism is false. Instead progressives continue to cling to a litany of false premises without challenge. How have they advanced their views? They explicitly hold to the following false tenets:
1. Capitalism is theft. This lie has been refuted by many economists. It is based on the labor theory of value which is the idea that the value of a product is dependent only upon the amount of labor expended in creating it (this justifies the coercive protection that the Obama administration extends to SEIU and other labor unions). We now know that there are a variety of other factors that determine the value of any given product, not the least of which is the value placed upon it by the purchaser and the amount of money he is willing to pay for it...regardless of the amount of labor expended on it. We also know that being a capitalist is not exploitation; that it takes tremendous skill and ability to conceive, create and manage a highly productive business…it also takes the genius of those leaders who are able to forge new industries and create massive wealth-producing organizations that benefit consumers and laborers. You have to ask yourself about the low level of knowledge in the administration about sound economic principles or even about history.
2. Capitalism is evil. In order to displace capitalism the progressives use propaganda based on the labor theory of value to assert that capitalists maliciously steal the labor of workers. This view is stolen straight from religion; it was the religions of the world that held this world and anything done in it by selfish profit-seekers to be evil. This included rich people such as merchants, jewelers, bankers, ship owners and anyone who lived to make a profit. Yes, progressives got their main ideas from 2000 years ago.
3. Capitalism is flawed and creates bubbles and distortions. A careful analysis of history shows that it is not capitalism that is responsible for economic depressions but government intervention. In fact, capitalism is nothing more than freely chosen transactions engaged in by people for the sake of their self-interest. These kinds of transactions cannot cause economic downturns because they are mutually beneficial. The only factors that can cause bubbles and other economic distortions are massive interferences in the economy by government.
4. Incrementalism is the progressive tactic of introducing minor changes in the economy when there is not enough political support for major changes. The purpose of incrementalism is to establish the precedent that government has the right to interfere in peoples’ lives and to lay the groundwork for the later expansion of those interferences.
5. The idea that you can improve conditions for “victims” of capitalism establishes a constituency of dependents upon government that will vote for government coercion. The idea that this is the will of the people violates the basis of a Constitutional Republic and establishes the contradiction that enables progressives to wedge their way into social control and totalitarianism.
6. Progressives are perennial liars simply because they must hide from people the nature of what they are doing. In fact, their world is made up of meaningless words, phony images, manipulation of opinion and the idea that perception is reality. They skim over reality like a well-thrown rock skimming over water. They ignore questions like: What justifies taking the money of one person and giving it to another? Is using government to “solve” social problems the constitutional thing to do? What happens to the people whose dollars are taken away? How does that affect their standard of living and is it right for them to suffer so that others may enjoy the luxury of not caring for themselves? Are there better non-coercive ways for people to solve their so-called "social" problems? What gives the government the right to confiscate the hard earned money of citizens? What about all the waste and corruption? How are lost funds going to be recovered and why is no one making an effort to recover them? In order to avoid such questions, progressives just ignore them and talk about the non-existent benefits of their economic manipulations.
7. Progressives lie that the USA is an Imperialist nation. This lie confuses the need of America to defend itself against dictators and other thugs around the world. The truth is that most examples of American “imperialism” are nothing more than a free country defending itself and its economic interests against thugs and robbers. Although some of our Presidents had imperialist policies, by and large, the history of our nation has been decidedly anti-imperialist. We have fought more empires than we have been accused of creating.
8. Progressives portray themselves as “good” stewards of government while their opposition is denigrated as evil and deserving of hatred and ridicule. They offer no reason for this view except that they represent the philosophy of sacrifice which is considered by them to be the most practical way to get things done – and the most moral. In keeping with the view of one of their leaders, they do what they can with what they have and wrap it in moral garments. They take it upon themselves to represent supposed victims in order to acquire the allegiance of those victims and defeat their political opposition. It is a shell game.
9. Sound economic principles are ignored by progressives and this opens the door for corruption and theft, oligarchy and fascism, slush funds and re-distribution, all of which accomplish the opposite of progressive promises. The good cannot be advanced by forcing people to sacrifice.
For decades progressives have been promising to fix problems supposedly created by capitalism. Yet, with all the talk about economics, with all the verbiage about this theory and that, the liberals have not explained the basic economic principles that drive their policies and recommended programs. They have never felt the need to tell us why force imposed on innocent civilians is good for the economy. This is because they have written the history books and whitewashed their own complicity in the destruction of the last century. To hide the fact that they caused most of the problems of this century, they blame capitalism.
What is missing in the arguments of the progressives? What is their basic principle that they never discuss? The progressives’ basic principle is the idea that the government has the duty and the right to coerce people. For progressives – all of them – there is no debate about the idea that progressivism is coercive; that it violates the principles of the Constitution. This principle is never debated because the progressives don’t want us to know that coercion is not just their method of operating, it is the goal of their movement.
How do they get away with this? Many of the progressives have grown up on the idea that all they want is to help people. Many well-meaning people actually believe this. They lose the connection between stated intentions to do good and the reality that coercion never accomplishes good. They use emotive language to talk about how people need to be helped, how the poor are innocent victims of greedy people, how it is good to help our neighbors and how love of humanity is their only motivation. With tears in their eyes, they proclaim freedom for the exploited...while they implement coercive programs that significantly add to the costs of doing business, add to the cost of living and destroy these innocent victims that they claim to represent (when you see the dirty face of a starving child, you can thank a progressive). Then, in an even more tearful scream to the world, they blame capitalism for the destruction that they have brought about. Yet it is capitalism (you and me) that has created more beneficial products, created more employment and done more good in the world than all the progressives put together.
Indeed, the so-called great liberal economists and regulators of the Obama administration continue to talk about an economy as if it were a gadget, a machine that must be primed (inflation) and pumped (taxes) and oiled and fueled (gas) and moved (automobiles), to such an extent that they have failed to mention or realize that the machine is made up of parts--living human parts that suffer whenever an "adjustment" is made to their economic activities. We are feeling this now more than ever. Ask these regulators where their Constitutional authority resides and they will blink and bluster that they represent the will of the people; they won the last election; this gives them the authority to do what they want. Their blindness on this issue has led them to complaining about unemployment but advocating policies that have and will create more unemployment. They claim to represent the “public good” while they create no good. They claim that things will get better if they are allowed to “tweak” capitalism in favor of the victims of capitalism while such tweaks create less economic activity. They blame capitalism in the midst of the oligarchy and fascism they have created. They smile and proclaim a love for the downtrodden, blame Bush for all the problems they caused, then get into limousines that take them to jets purchased by our tax dollars, so they can tell us how they intend to plan our society as if the money they spend is theirs not ours.
In order to have a productive society you need producers. In order to have production you need freedom and property rights. In order to have a civil society you need a government that defends freedom and property rights. Today, the progressives do nothing productive, attack freedom and property rights and impose regulations and laws that restrict economic activity while they claim that their “planning” of our society is a reflection of their yet-to-be-demonstrated intelligence, education and astute abilities; the result of which has been chaos and decline.
Government planning means planning lives, and no life is productive which has no individual incentive. Consider what it means for our future that people who got famous protesting in the streets and universities against capitalism are now in charge of the most productive (capitalist) society in history.
What is the basic contradiction in the Obama administration? What do we need to say to them that will clearly state what they are doing wrong? They need to understand that it is man's basic nature as a rational being that makes economic planning impossible. It is man's ability to be moral (by making the right decisions for his individual life) that they are attacking. No planner can replace his own thinking for the thinking of millions of people as they make hundreds of thousands of decisions every day.
The apathy many people feel about government today comes from government taking an increasingly commanding role in peoples' lives through so-called stimulus programs, deficit spending, health care programs, cap and trade programs, card check and the various other programs that the progressives are forcing down our throats. Don't blame that apathy on people or capitalism; blame it on the Obama administration. If you must blame it on greed, blame it on the greed of progressives who want to control your work, your income and your life.
To the President, I would say that you can't just smile at people and say things are getting better when the people know better. You can't ask small businesses to hire people and plan for the future while you are in the process of brazenly and openly destroying that future. You can't fool the people. Wishing doesn't make it so, Mr. President. Yours is the most immoral administration in history because you are making it impossible for people to make moral decisions.
Mr. Obama, we did not elect you to violate the Constitution; you took the same oath to protect it as past leaders did. You are not doing your job. You are destroying our country. You have looted it under a call to sacrifice...and now you have the audacity to ask for more sacrifice. You even have the audacity to ask for cooperation from us while you do what your radical friends want. Stop smiling, Mr. President because we are not. We want to live while you are killing us.
Government planning does not mean a benevolent judgment based upon the sophisticated opinion of highly skilled economists. It means a gun that backs up a law, regulation, or economic adjustment with which the American citizen will have to comply whether he likes it or not. It was an American who said, "Give me Liberty of give me death." It is time for a modern American to say, "Give me Liberty or you’ll soon be out of a job."
The progressives in the Obama administration claim to be part of an honorable tradition in American politics. Unlike their political enemies, they claim to represent a more enlightened philosophy, one that wants to make things better for Americans. They see economic injustice and want to fix it; they want to make capitalism more inclusive and fair. Yet, during their long history, American progressives have had associations with eugenics, socialism, communism, the labor movement and even fascism.
The reason for these associations is simple. Progressives agree, in principle, with the premises of these philosophies. They grew up together. Although today there are some “honest” liberals who still adhere to Constitutional protections, such as the right of a woman to her body, there is one basic premise that all progressives of all varieties agree upon; and it is this premise that makes them all wrong.
This premise is the need of progressives to use coercion to re-distribute wealth. This is true of every progressive scheme.
1. What does it mean in practice to re-distribute wealth and
2. Whose rights are violated in order for progressive schemes to work?
Few people realize that progressive interference with capitalism always causes unintended consequences that are often worse than the intended benefits of wealth re-distribution. Let’s give a couple of examples.
Let’s assume that the government imposes a tax on your small business skating rink. The government makes a case that people who skate have more broken ankles and make a stronger demand on hospitals. So in order to help hospitals take care of broken ankles it imposes a tax of 10% on people who go to your skating rink. For you this requires that you raise your prices by 10% to cover the tax. In order to ensure that they eat as well as they have eaten in the past, your customers decide to go to the skating rink less often. This also means that you, the business owner, must now pay employees to collect the tax and remit the money to the government while also dealing with the loss of skaters. You may go out of business or reduce the number of employees that you can afford to hire.
Or let’s assume that the government thinks an industry might have some characters who are harming consumers and in order to correct that behavior it imposes regulations and reporting procedures that your business has to provide to the government. Not only could you be jailed for not complying with the reporting requirements but you could also be fined or jailed if the government determines that you have cheated the consumer in some way. First of all, you have to live with the possibility that the reporting you do to the government might be misinterpreted in some way or that the government official who evaluates your reports might be in the pay of your competitor and that he will find something that he can interpret as being wrong. You might, in order to stay in business, have to pay a bribe and go to jail if your payoff is discovered. Because of the regulations imposed on you, it becomes difficult to do business honestly which defeats the supposed purpose of the regulation.
Then you also have to hire additional people to fill out forms and reports for the government, auditors to look at everything you do to determine if you are doing something wrong that should be corrected. These new employees add to your overhead costs and require that you cut other productive employees in order to pay these employees who don’t help you serve the consumer. So your ability to serve the consumer, the very reason for the reporting requirements, may be hurt. This might cause you to lose customers to your larger competitor who can afford to fulfill the compliance requirements. If you are a small business, you may not be able to stay in business with these new costs. In fact, this was the result of the Sarbannes Oxley Act signed into law by the Bush administration.
You could write a book chronicling every government intervention into the economy and the damage done by each of them and you would still not convince a progressive that government intervention never improves things. You would not even be able to convince a majority of CEOs of major corporations of the same thing. Yet it is their rights as well as the rights of every individual in our society that are violated by these intrusions. More than this their lives are damaged as well.
Ayn Rand wrote: “The only proper, moral purpose of a government is to protect man's rights, which means: to protect him from physical violence—to protect his right to his own life, to his own liberty, to his own property and to the pursuit of his own happiness. Without property rights, no other rights are possible.”
You would have thought that sooner or later an honest person would have entered the political fray to declare that progressivism is a fraud. You might have even thought that somewhere along the line even a progressive with enough standing in his movement would have recognized that progressivism accomplishes the opposite of its stated goals. But no one has. In the country where free speech still exists, no one has been able to articulate the truth that progressivism is false. Instead progressives continue to cling to a litany of false premises without challenge. How have they advanced their views? They explicitly hold to the following false tenets:
1. Capitalism is theft. This lie has been refuted by many economists. It is based on the labor theory of value which is the idea that the value of a product is dependent only upon the amount of labor expended in creating it (this justifies the coercive protection that the Obama administration extends to SEIU and other labor unions). We now know that there are a variety of other factors that determine the value of any given product, not the least of which is the value placed upon it by the purchaser and the amount of money he is willing to pay for it...regardless of the amount of labor expended on it. We also know that being a capitalist is not exploitation; that it takes tremendous skill and ability to conceive, create and manage a highly productive business…it also takes the genius of those leaders who are able to forge new industries and create massive wealth-producing organizations that benefit consumers and laborers. You have to ask yourself about the low level of knowledge in the administration about sound economic principles or even about history.
2. Capitalism is evil. In order to displace capitalism the progressives use propaganda based on the labor theory of value to assert that capitalists maliciously steal the labor of workers. This view is stolen straight from religion; it was the religions of the world that held this world and anything done in it by selfish profit-seekers to be evil. This included rich people such as merchants, jewelers, bankers, ship owners and anyone who lived to make a profit. Yes, progressives got their main ideas from 2000 years ago.
3. Capitalism is flawed and creates bubbles and distortions. A careful analysis of history shows that it is not capitalism that is responsible for economic depressions but government intervention. In fact, capitalism is nothing more than freely chosen transactions engaged in by people for the sake of their self-interest. These kinds of transactions cannot cause economic downturns because they are mutually beneficial. The only factors that can cause bubbles and other economic distortions are massive interferences in the economy by government.
4. Incrementalism is the progressive tactic of introducing minor changes in the economy when there is not enough political support for major changes. The purpose of incrementalism is to establish the precedent that government has the right to interfere in peoples’ lives and to lay the groundwork for the later expansion of those interferences.
5. The idea that you can improve conditions for “victims” of capitalism establishes a constituency of dependents upon government that will vote for government coercion. The idea that this is the will of the people violates the basis of a Constitutional Republic and establishes the contradiction that enables progressives to wedge their way into social control and totalitarianism.
6. Progressives are perennial liars simply because they must hide from people the nature of what they are doing. In fact, their world is made up of meaningless words, phony images, manipulation of opinion and the idea that perception is reality. They skim over reality like a well-thrown rock skimming over water. They ignore questions like: What justifies taking the money of one person and giving it to another? Is using government to “solve” social problems the constitutional thing to do? What happens to the people whose dollars are taken away? How does that affect their standard of living and is it right for them to suffer so that others may enjoy the luxury of not caring for themselves? Are there better non-coercive ways for people to solve their so-called "social" problems? What gives the government the right to confiscate the hard earned money of citizens? What about all the waste and corruption? How are lost funds going to be recovered and why is no one making an effort to recover them? In order to avoid such questions, progressives just ignore them and talk about the non-existent benefits of their economic manipulations.
7. Progressives lie that the USA is an Imperialist nation. This lie confuses the need of America to defend itself against dictators and other thugs around the world. The truth is that most examples of American “imperialism” are nothing more than a free country defending itself and its economic interests against thugs and robbers. Although some of our Presidents had imperialist policies, by and large, the history of our nation has been decidedly anti-imperialist. We have fought more empires than we have been accused of creating.
8. Progressives portray themselves as “good” stewards of government while their opposition is denigrated as evil and deserving of hatred and ridicule. They offer no reason for this view except that they represent the philosophy of sacrifice which is considered by them to be the most practical way to get things done – and the most moral. In keeping with the view of one of their leaders, they do what they can with what they have and wrap it in moral garments. They take it upon themselves to represent supposed victims in order to acquire the allegiance of those victims and defeat their political opposition. It is a shell game.
9. Sound economic principles are ignored by progressives and this opens the door for corruption and theft, oligarchy and fascism, slush funds and re-distribution, all of which accomplish the opposite of progressive promises. The good cannot be advanced by forcing people to sacrifice.
For decades progressives have been promising to fix problems supposedly created by capitalism. Yet, with all the talk about economics, with all the verbiage about this theory and that, the liberals have not explained the basic economic principles that drive their policies and recommended programs. They have never felt the need to tell us why force imposed on innocent civilians is good for the economy. This is because they have written the history books and whitewashed their own complicity in the destruction of the last century. To hide the fact that they caused most of the problems of this century, they blame capitalism.
What is missing in the arguments of the progressives? What is their basic principle that they never discuss? The progressives’ basic principle is the idea that the government has the duty and the right to coerce people. For progressives – all of them – there is no debate about the idea that progressivism is coercive; that it violates the principles of the Constitution. This principle is never debated because the progressives don’t want us to know that coercion is not just their method of operating, it is the goal of their movement.
How do they get away with this? Many of the progressives have grown up on the idea that all they want is to help people. Many well-meaning people actually believe this. They lose the connection between stated intentions to do good and the reality that coercion never accomplishes good. They use emotive language to talk about how people need to be helped, how the poor are innocent victims of greedy people, how it is good to help our neighbors and how love of humanity is their only motivation. With tears in their eyes, they proclaim freedom for the exploited...while they implement coercive programs that significantly add to the costs of doing business, add to the cost of living and destroy these innocent victims that they claim to represent (when you see the dirty face of a starving child, you can thank a progressive). Then, in an even more tearful scream to the world, they blame capitalism for the destruction that they have brought about. Yet it is capitalism (you and me) that has created more beneficial products, created more employment and done more good in the world than all the progressives put together.
Indeed, the so-called great liberal economists and regulators of the Obama administration continue to talk about an economy as if it were a gadget, a machine that must be primed (inflation) and pumped (taxes) and oiled and fueled (gas) and moved (automobiles), to such an extent that they have failed to mention or realize that the machine is made up of parts--living human parts that suffer whenever an "adjustment" is made to their economic activities. We are feeling this now more than ever. Ask these regulators where their Constitutional authority resides and they will blink and bluster that they represent the will of the people; they won the last election; this gives them the authority to do what they want. Their blindness on this issue has led them to complaining about unemployment but advocating policies that have and will create more unemployment. They claim to represent the “public good” while they create no good. They claim that things will get better if they are allowed to “tweak” capitalism in favor of the victims of capitalism while such tweaks create less economic activity. They blame capitalism in the midst of the oligarchy and fascism they have created. They smile and proclaim a love for the downtrodden, blame Bush for all the problems they caused, then get into limousines that take them to jets purchased by our tax dollars, so they can tell us how they intend to plan our society as if the money they spend is theirs not ours.
In order to have a productive society you need producers. In order to have production you need freedom and property rights. In order to have a civil society you need a government that defends freedom and property rights. Today, the progressives do nothing productive, attack freedom and property rights and impose regulations and laws that restrict economic activity while they claim that their “planning” of our society is a reflection of their yet-to-be-demonstrated intelligence, education and astute abilities; the result of which has been chaos and decline.
Government planning means planning lives, and no life is productive which has no individual incentive. Consider what it means for our future that people who got famous protesting in the streets and universities against capitalism are now in charge of the most productive (capitalist) society in history.
What is the basic contradiction in the Obama administration? What do we need to say to them that will clearly state what they are doing wrong? They need to understand that it is man's basic nature as a rational being that makes economic planning impossible. It is man's ability to be moral (by making the right decisions for his individual life) that they are attacking. No planner can replace his own thinking for the thinking of millions of people as they make hundreds of thousands of decisions every day.
The apathy many people feel about government today comes from government taking an increasingly commanding role in peoples' lives through so-called stimulus programs, deficit spending, health care programs, cap and trade programs, card check and the various other programs that the progressives are forcing down our throats. Don't blame that apathy on people or capitalism; blame it on the Obama administration. If you must blame it on greed, blame it on the greed of progressives who want to control your work, your income and your life.
To the President, I would say that you can't just smile at people and say things are getting better when the people know better. You can't ask small businesses to hire people and plan for the future while you are in the process of brazenly and openly destroying that future. You can't fool the people. Wishing doesn't make it so, Mr. President. Yours is the most immoral administration in history because you are making it impossible for people to make moral decisions.
Mr. Obama, we did not elect you to violate the Constitution; you took the same oath to protect it as past leaders did. You are not doing your job. You are destroying our country. You have looted it under a call to sacrifice...and now you have the audacity to ask for more sacrifice. You even have the audacity to ask for cooperation from us while you do what your radical friends want. Stop smiling, Mr. President because we are not. We want to live while you are killing us.
Government planning does not mean a benevolent judgment based upon the sophisticated opinion of highly skilled economists. It means a gun that backs up a law, regulation, or economic adjustment with which the American citizen will have to comply whether he likes it or not. It was an American who said, "Give me Liberty of give me death." It is time for a modern American to say, "Give me Liberty or you’ll soon be out of a job."
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