SodaHead - Freedomwatcher's Blog

Healthcare Reform is Economic Malpractice

2009-11-09T20:17:56Z

+5 raves

This is from "Texas Straight Talk" By: Ron Paul Healthcare Reform is Economic Malpractice As Washington continues debating healthcare reform the rest of the country is primarily concerned about jobs and the economy. It is still uncertain what policies will be implemented, but I am certain about one thing: It will only further devastate our economy and our dollar. The leadership has come up with a proposal they are confident will be what they consider fiscally responsible, only to have it scored as nearly twice as expensive by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. Estimates of past healthcare spending programs have been off by as much as 100 percent so there is no telling what the actual cost will be. The past century should have taught us one thing: that government intervention is expensive. Government programs lend themselves so easily to waste, fraud and abuse. Combine that with overall inefficiency and it all adds up to a hefty price tag for the taxpayer, with not much leftover for actual services. An outright takeover of an entire sector of the economy, especially one as important as healthcare, is something that we just cannot afford for the government to do right now. Not to mention the fact that it is completely unconstitutional. But Washington insists on torturing the numbers and tinkering around the edges rather than facing this truth. If healthcare reform does indeed pass, we should not be under the illusion that it will be free. The money to pay for it will have to come from somewhere. They say they will get the money from cutting waste, fraud and abuse, but all of that is seemingly intrinsic to government programs. Since they want to expand the government’s reach we have to assume we will be trading waste, fraud and abuse for waste, fraud and abuse with a bigger budget. The powers that be have insisted the money won’t come from higher taxes, it won’t come from rationing of care, and it won’t come from higher premiums. This can only then put more pressure on the Fed to print the money out of thin air. We already have a weakening dollar. They are accelerating everything that weakened it in the past. Adding this new, monumental pressure could very well be the straw that will break the dollar’s back. Foreign creditors are already nervous about continuing to invest in the US because of our skyrocketing debt. The explosion of debt that is certain to accompany the enactment of this national health care bill can only add to that nervousness. Ironically, enactment of the health care bill could help the cause of liberty by hastening the day when Congress is forced by economic circumstances to stop increasing the welfare-warfare state and return to the Constitution. There are many problems with our current healthcare system, to be sure. There are many tragic stories to be told. However, we need to look at the root of our problems in order to address them properly. More government intervention and bureaucracy injected into healthcare will take a flawed system and make immeasurably worse. Posted by Ron Paul (11-09-2009, 11:27 AM) filed under Healthcare, Monetary Policy

The End of Statism (after its rise)

2009-10-29T19:18:02Z

Freedomwatcher

+11 raves

This is a newsletter from DownsizeDC.org, a great petition site, I urge any of you who are fed up with the rise of Socialism to join. You can so here. http://www.downsizedc.org/page/newsletter Quotes of the Day: "The State is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." -- Frederic Bastiat, French economist of the 19th Century "How did I go bankrupt? Two ways. Slowly, and then all of a sudden." -- paraphrased from "The Sun Also Rises" by Ernest Hemingway "May you live in interesting times." -- a proverbial Chinese curse Subject: The End of Statism (after its rise) President Bush and the Republican Congress expanded government more than any administration in history. They also laid the basic foundations for a future police state. Now, President Obama and the Democratic Congress have . . . • Retained, and in some cases expanded, all the Bush-era policies -- the wars, the PATRIOT Act, warrantless spying, REAL ID, imprisonment without due process, extraordinary rendition, etc. • Begun to extend the already existing foundations for a future socialist state with things like direct government ownership of businesses, the health care bill, cap and trade, and a host of other measures big and small Put the Bush and Obama policies together, sprinkle in a couple more terrorist attacks, and one or two more state-caused financial calamities, and you have a recipe for . . . • The destruction of American liberty • The blossoming of a Leviathan State Read the signs . . . We are living through a Statist revolution. Statism is a mindset that prefers coercion to cooperation. Statists love the State because they are blind to its fundamental nature . . . • The State is a monopoly that you cannot easily fire, replace, or even control • Everything the State does relies on coercion If you decide that . . . • You don't want to pay for, or be subject to, the new health care plan, or that . . . • You prefer to buy and sell using gold and silver instead of Federal Reserve Notes, or that . . . • You want to do, or not do, a host of other things that the politicians either require or prohibit, • Then eventually a policeman will come to your door and threaten you with a gun, to make you submit People who advocate expansive State action are really saying, "I think you should be threatened with, or actually suffer violence, if you don't fund my pet schemes, or live the way I think you should." Such people would never go door to door pointing a gun at their neighbors, but the second-hand mechanism of the State allows them to hide their eyes from the violence implicit in what they profess. Our government was founded to limit this kind of coercion. The American State was given two main functions . . . • To punish coercion committed by one citizen against another • To deter coercion by foreign States Beyond that, nearly the entire Constitution is devoted to prohibiting State violence. This was the purpose of the divisions of power, the checks and balances, and the Bill of Rights. But now those protections lie in tatters. Everyone is trying to use the State to live at the expense of everyone else, or to micro-manage their neighbors. Our traditional culture of individual liberty, personal responsibility, and peaceful, non-violent cooperation, is slowly dying. We are nearing a point where it may even die completely, suddenly, when we least expect it. As a result . . . We live under the Chinese curse of interesting times. But we urge you to resist despair. We are even prepared to predict . . . The End of Statism Our reason is simple. Statism doesn't work. The violence at its heart always . . . • Destroys more than it creates • Multiplies its victims, who become increasingly deperate enough to resist Our purpose is to recruit and organize that resistance into an army. It's . . . • Why we do • What we do • The way we do it We know that successful resistance will come slowly, before it comes suddenly. Victory will take time, but the time's going to pass anyway, so why not use it wisely? This is why . . . We reject all "get powerful quick" schemes as inherently unworkable. We know that societies and movements evolve slowly more often than they leap. History is littered with causes that failed because they couldn't wait to succeed. We neither need, nor expect, overnight success. Do you? What we need instead is constant and consistent progress. And for that we need you, and for you to need us. Remember where we're going. We're building toward the day when we can . . . • Reach everyone, everywhere, every day, with the case for freedom and against Statism • Build a big parade -- a movement -- in front of which opportunistic politicians will want to march. They'll claim we're following them, and we'll let them think that! • Deploy a huge army to exert relentless, resistance-numbing pressure on Congress, to make them submit And remember how we're going to get there . . . • Slowly and steadily, but also surely • One person at a time • One dollar at a time • One simple action at a time • With each small step building toward the next larger step The end of the month is here. We did more this month than we did last month. Now we need your financial support to do even more in November. Please . . . • Start a monthly credit card pledge • Or make a one-time donation • You can do so here Your support is our progress. Perry Willis Communications Director DownsizeDC.org, Inc.

Eleven States Declare Sovereignty Over Obama’s Action

2009-03-04T16:44:13Z

Freedomwatcher

+11 raves

Eleven States Declare Sovereignty Over Obama’s Action http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?print=yes&id;=30807 by A.W.R. Hawkins (more by this author) Posted 02/23/2009 ET Updated 02/24/2009 ET State governors -- looking down the gun barrel of long-term spending forced on them by the Obama “stimulus” plan -- are saying they will refuse to take the money. This is a Constitutional confrontation between the federal government and the states unlike any in our time. In the first five weeks of his presidency, Barack Obama has acted so rashly that at least 11 states have decided that his brand of “hope” equates to an intolerable expansion of the federal government’s authority over the states. These states -- "Washington, New Hampshire, Arizona, Montana, Michigan, Missouri, Oklahoma, [Minnesota]...Georgia," South Carolina, and Texas -- "have all introduced bills and resolutions" reminding Obama that the 10th Amendment protects the rights of the states, which are the rights of the people, by limting the power of the federal government. These resolutions call on Obama to “cease and desist” from his reckless government expansion and also indicate that federal laws and regulations implemented in violation of the 10th Amendment can be nullified by the states. When the Constitution was being ratified during the 1780s, the 10th Amendment was understood to be the linchpin that held the entire Bill of Rights together. The amendment states: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." The use of the 10th Amendment in conjunction with nullification garnered much attention in 1828, when the federal government passed a tariff that southerners believed affected them disproportionately. When the 1828 tariff was complemented by another in 1832, Vice President John C. Calhoun resigned the Vice Presidency to lead his home state of South Carolina in pursuit of an “ordinance of nullification,” which was no less a declaration of the sovereignty of each individual state within the union than the declarations now being made. Calhoun was simply exercising what he recognized to be his state’s right to defend liberty within its borders by rejecting the dictates of an overbearing central government. While his efforts culminated in a tense affair referred to as the “nullification crisis,” which witnessed everything from threats of a federal invasion of South Carolina to an ongoing and near union-rending debate over national power vs. state’s rights, they also succeeded in turning back the tariffs that had been passed in spite of the Constitutional limits on federal power. This time around, in 2009, appeals to the 10th Amendment are not based on tariffs but on unfettered government expansion in Obama’s “stimulus bill,” federal mandates on abortion that violate state laws, and infringements on the 1st and 2nd Amendments, among other things. For example, Family Security Matters reports that Missouri’s “House Concurrent Resolution 0004 (2009) reasserts its sovereignty based on Barack Obama’s stated intention to sign into law a federal ‘Freedom of Choice Act’, [because] the federal Freedom of Choice Act would nullify any federal or state law ‘enacted, adopted, or implemented before, on, or after the date of [its] enactment’ and would effectively prevent the State of Missouri from enacting similar protective measures in the future.” The resolution in Montana grew out of concerns over coming attacks on the 2nd Amendment, thus its preface describes it as, “An Act Exempting From Federal Regulation Under The Commerce Clause Of The Constitution Of The United States A Firearm, A Firearm Accessory, Or Ammunition Manufactured And Retained In Montana.” New Hampshire’s resolution actually references certain federal actions that would be nullified within that state were they pushed by Obama’s administration, according to americandaily.com. Among these are “Any act regarding religion; further limitations on freedom of political speech; or further limitations on freedom of the press, [and any] further infringements on the right to keep and bear arms including prohibitions of type or quantity of arms or ammunition. Regardless of the specific reason behind each of the resolutions in the 11 states, all of them direct the federal government to “cease and desist” in its reckless violation of state’s rights. In this way, South Carolina’s resolution is typical of the others issued to date: “The General Assembly of the State of South Carolina, by this resolution, claims for the State of South Carolina sovereignty under the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States over all powers not otherwise enumerated and granted to the federal government by the United States Constitution… Be it…resolved that this resolution serves as notice and demand to the federal government, as South Carolina's agent, to cease and desist immediately all mandates…beyond the scope of the federal government's constitutionally delegated powers.” What these state assemblies and congresses have hit upon here is key to our entire conservative interpretation of the Constitution, for these states understand that the Constitution limits the federal government, not the people. Or to put it another way, it guarantees the freedom of the people by limiting the government. Every conservative should relish the call for the federal government to “cease and desist all mandates that are beyond the scope of [its] constitutionally delegated powers.” In this way, we honor the Constitution that enumerates a number of our liberties yet also guarantees us other liberties that are neither enumerated nor denied in the document. Liberals don’t respect the Constitution, and liberals in Congress don’t hesitate to propose legislation that would clearly violate it. The current push to give Washington, D.C. a voting representative in the House of Representatives is a good example; even liberal Prof. Jonathan Turley told a Congressional hearing that this bill is patently unconstitutional. But they press on with it. Our Constitutional system of checks and balances is always thought of as enabling two of the three branches of the federal government to keep the third within its constitutional bounds. But there is a fourth check, the states, which also have a Constitutional function. It is to them this burden now falls. The states can choose between allowing the federal government to impose untenable conditions on them if they accept the stimulus money, or to reject it. These eleven states have the right to reject the stimulus plan. And they must. There is no other option. For this federal expansion will not stop unless we stand in its way with courage in our hearts and the Constitution in our hands.

The Fence

2009-02-26T13:57:21Z

Freedomwatcher

+9 raves

The Fence Do you ever feel as if you are one of the few people who can actually see what's going on? Have you ever carried on a conversation with an American who thinks they're in a democracy, the government deserves their taxes, they live in a free country, and policemen are their friend? Have you attempted to live your life as a responsible, sovereign individual, only to be ridiculed by a high school graduate who can't spell sovereign and doesn't know what it means? Have you at least had a taste of freedom or an insatiable inner knowing of what it should be? Do you feel alone, surrounded by a herd that is contentedly grazing right up to the gates of slaughter? Who are these huddling, witless masses of humanity and why won't they look around themselves and see the obvious? The easy answer is: the fence. Many of us who see what's going on around us have learned how to live outside the fence, at least part of the time. Some have become rather adept at living on both sides of the fence. And a few sovereign souls have chosen the path of living completely free of any enclosure. But the present-day “fence” is all encompassing, from horizon to horizon, with cross-fences at every juncture, and corrals, round pens and loading chutes for complete herd management. And the herd of humanity is well managed. So well managed, that they either look dumb-founded whenever you mention what it's like on the other side of the fence, or they get angry. “How dare you tell us we don't need all those taxes, laws, or the government to protect us! What do you mean there are all kinds of wild herbs growing free outside the fence that heal and nourish; that they taste better than hay and grain and make veterinarians obsolete? You must be crazy to think you can live free and be responsible for yourself,” say the angry ones in the herd. Understanding the fence can help freedom-lovers live amongst the clueless without succumbing to their fate. Perhaps, on a good day, we might even inspire one of the herd to look up and begin the process of putting the clues together. And that might eventually lead to another individual who can both understand and spell sovereign. Where does the fence begin? Born unable to walk, control our bowels, or utter much more than a cry, we begin the adventure of life very moldable. You might think of it as being in a marsupial condition without the benefit of a pouch. A parent or parents must dedicate considerable effort or the newly formed member of humanity won't survive. The considerable effort required to raise up a young human has a trade benefit: The parent has the opportunity to mould the future of humanity. And that's no small responsibility. After the first few years of parenting, comes the transitional phase. Except for young humans with parents who choose home-schooling or private education, the public side of the fence begins with the government indoctrination day-camps we call public school. The opportunity and responsibility for molding the future of humanity, begun by the parents, is gradually taken over by government and it's commercial cousins. In Latin, it's called In Loco Parentis: In the place of the parent. Parents who do not find alternatives to the status quo become replaced by public educators, TV, video games, commercials, music producers, legislators and policemen. It begins and ends in the mind. Horses are a good example. Countless times, I have stretched electric fence ribbon around new pasture. A horse who has experienced the momentary zap of 10,000 volts a few times, learns to stay away from the fence. Eventually you can turn off the fence and they will stay within its boundaries. The memory of the shock, and the sight of the fence are enough to keep most horses in. Some become so docile that just tying a single rope chest high will keep them in. They like the fence. The fence was built in the horse's minds. If we want to be free, we first need to remove the fence from our minds, like those errant*, free-thinking horses who touch a whisker to the electric fence to see if it's on, and then walk on through whenever they don't feel a little zap. The best laid fence The best laid fence is one that isn't seen and gives benefits instead barbed wire cuts. You can get more out of a horse by the things you do for it and with it, than by the things you do to it. Sometimes you need barbed wire or 10,000 volts, but feed, grain and a friendly talking to are more likely to produce the desired result. In the good old days, when ranches had plenty of room between them, the fence was the barn. The horses and cattle enjoyed some free range, but they knew where home was. Food and security kept them “in.” They could forage “out” for the day, but they would be “in” at night and during winter. Now-a-days, things are more crowded. The animals on the farm never leave the fence. Each farm is fenced where it buts up against another, jurisdiction to jurisdiction, so-to-speak. Like a government that keeps on growing, when does a farmer ever take down a fence, once it's been put up? And with all that seemingly green pasture, what creature would want to take the fence down? People aren't much different. Government and its allies in commerce know this. The fence around you is well made and designed to make you like it. And it's about making a trade -- trading your freedom, rights and responsibilities for the security, convenience and comfort of the fence. The media fence Media is the great fence maker of our times. It creates the borders in our mind. The well-honed science of media has created a fence so tight, that most people can't see the other side. That's why they think the pasture inside the fence looks so green. They've never been allowed to see any other pasture, and they are constantly reminded how green it is. In the one sided fence of media, people never really get to say what they want. But media tells the politicians what the people say they want, while politicians tell the media what the people say they want -- more laws and regulations to protect us from the outlaws outside the fence -- and a tax cut. And what is the result? More outlaws are created inside the fence by more laws and regulations, which require more taxes. The fallacies of the fence Do policemen prevent crime when the majority of “crimes“ have no victim and weren't a crime until the police arrived? Do judges promote justice with controlled juries, bar regulated attorneys, self-adopted court rules and judicially controlled, self-disciplining review agencies? Do we really have a Constitution and Bill of Rights anymore, when almost everything government does is against the Constitution and people are routinely imprisoned for exercising their rights? When we live inside the fence, we live at the permission of the government. Everything from travel, to our homes, water, food, health, finances, even the air we breathe is regulated. Can regulations make us safe from bureaucrats? Do we “make money” when money, by definition, can only be a coin and a “one dollar Federal Reserve Note” is issued by a private bank, which isn't federal, doesn't really have “reserves,” and isn't a note because it can't be redeemed? And it isn't a “dollar” because a dollar is 371.25 grains of silver, not paper. For the errant freedom lover with eyes to see and ears to hear, almost everything inside the fence can be shown to be false, a fraud and corrupted. For the tamed herd, it's all green fields, as far as the blinded eye can see. It all depends on which side of the fence you're on. The fence chewers This leads us to an interesting phenomena. One would think that leading the herd to real freedom would be very popular in a land known for its freedom. But quite the opposite is true. We errant folks are often ridiculed and demonized by the herd for our notions of freedom, and especially by the managers of the herd -- the media. The herd doesn't like fence chewers. Most people are quite happy to live in their illusions. We have to remember, it was all green and growing for them until we came along and made it look like charred grass. They thought they owned a house, but if the government can take it for taxes, who owns it? It used to be their car, until we showed them how the government stole the title when they registered it. They thought they were successfully running a business, until we enlightened them about how many regulations prevent their options for success. And when we told them they worked over half the year just to pay their taxes, their illusionary green field went up in smoke. That's why the herd doesn't like anyone who chews holes in the fence. It means they would have to face things the way they really are. It would require them to become responsibile. There would be no more semi-free rides on the back of the welfare nanny-state. The sovereign's fence What would a free state, outside the fence of government look like? No more collective herd management in a common enclosure. Each sovereign would be free to choose how much fence they want to put up on their own place. The common ground would be free range and the fence would only contain government. Government's only duties will be to build roads, deliver mail, defend our borders, mint coins, and register patents on our ingenuity. A sovereign people would be free to engage in commerce with substance. A 371.25-grain silver dollar today, will still be a 371.25-grain silver dollar tomorrow. No more imaginary wealth. What you own, will remain your own, until you choose otherwise. Property would be held in allodium, untaxed. Imagine a government that provides a bona fide, accountable, judicial forum to resolve conflicts between sovereign citizens and only passed “laws the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.” With almost no taxes, we can afford to privately educate our children and contribute to any charities we choose. “Welfare,” would be how well we fare from our own responsible, sovereign efforts, outside the fence. To make this a reality, each of us needs to free our minds from our former keeper's programming and learn to live outside the fence. Be an example, even if it means you have to eat a little barbed wire. If we each chew our part, it'll be free range for everyone -- whether they like it or not.

IS THIS A GREAT BARNYARD OR WHAT?

2009-02-20T19:26:48Z

Freedomwatcher

+8 raves

Here is an easier way to understand the political scene... back to basic childhood tales. The little red hen asked "Who will help me plant my wheat to bake some bread? "Not I," said the cow. "Not I," said the duck. "Not I," said the pig. "Not I," said the goose. "Then I will do it by myself," said the little red hen, and so she did. She planted her crop, and the wheat grew very tall and ripened into golden grain. "Who will help me reap my wheat?" asked the little red hen. "Not I," said the duck.. "Out of my classification," said the pig. "I'd lose my seniority," said the cow. "I'd lose my unemployment compensation," said the goose. "Then I will do it by myself," said the little red hen, and so she did. At last it came time to bake the bread. "Who will help me bake the bread?" asked the little red hen. "That would be overtime for me," said the cow. "I'd lose my welfare benefits," said the duck. "I'm a dropout and never learned how," said the pig. "If I'm to be the only helper, that's discrimination," said the goose. "Then I will do it by myself," said the little red hen. She baked five loaves and held them up for all of her neighbors to see. They wanted some and, in fact, demanded a share. But the little red hen said, "No, I shall eat all five loaves." "Excess profits!" cried the cow. (Nancy Pelosi) "Capitalist leech!" screamed the duck. (Barbara Boxer) "I demand equal rights!" yelled the goose. (Jesse Jackson) The pig just grunted in disdain. (Ted Kennedy) And they all painted 'Unfair!' picket signs and marched around and around the little red hen, shouting obscenities. Then the farmer (Obama) came. He said to the little red hen, "You must not be so greedy." "But I earned the bread," said the little red hen. "Exactly," said Barack the farmer. "That is what makes our free enterprise system so wonderful. Anyone in the barnyard can earn as much as he wants. But under our modern government regulations, the productive workers must divide the fruits of their labor with those who are lazy and idle." And they all lived happily ever after, including the little red hen, who smiled and clucked, "I am grateful, for now I truly understand." But her neighbors became quite disappointed in her. She never again baked bread because she joined the 'party' and got her bread free. And all the Democrats smiled. 'Fairness' had been established. Individual initiative had died, but nobody noticed; perhaps no one cared...so long as there was free bread that 'the rich' were paying for. THE END IS THIS A GREAT BARNYARD OR WHAT?

Have you seen these Executive Orders?

2009-01-31T21:52:22Z

Freedomwatcher

+23 raves

Please look these up and see if they are summarized correctly.. just google them. EXECUTIVE ORDER 10990 - allows the government to take over all modes of transportation and control of highways and seaports. EXECUTIVE ORDER 10995 - allows the government to seize and control the communication media. EXECUTIVE ORDER 10997 - allows the government to take over all electrical power, gas, petroleum, fuels and minerals. EXECUTIVE ORDER 10998 - allows the government to seize all means of transportation, including personal cars, trucks or vehicles of any kind and total control over all highways, seaports, and waterways. EXECUTIVE ORDER 10999 - allows the government to take over all food resources and farms. EXECUTIVE ORDER 11000 - allows the government to mobilize civilians into work brigades under government supervision. EXECUTIVE ORDER 11001 - allows the government to take over all health, education and welfare functions. EXECUTIVE ORDER 11002 - designates the Postmaster General to operate a national registration of all persons. EXECUTIVE ORDER 11003 - allows the government to take over all airports and aircraft, including commercial aircraft. EXECUTIVE ORDER 11004 - allows the Housing and Finance Authority to relocate communities, build new housing with public funds, designate areas to be abandoned, and establish new locations for populations. EXECUTIVE ORDER 11005 - allows the government to take over railroads, inland waterways and public storage facilities. EXECUTIVE ORDER 11051 - specifies the responsibility of the Office of Emergency Planning and gives authorization to put all Executive Orders into effect in times of increased international tensions and economic or financial crisis. EXECUTIVE ORDER 11310 – grants authority to the Department of Justice to enforce the plans set out in Executive Orders, to institute industrial support, to establish judicial and legislative liaison, to control all aliens, to operate penal and correctional institutions, and to advise and assist the President. EXECUTIVE ORDER 11049 - assigns emergency preparedness function to federal departments and agencies, consolidating 21 operative Executive Orders issued over a fifteen year period. EXECUTIVE ORDER 11921 - allows the Federal Emergency Preparedness Agency to develop plans to establish control over the mechanisms of production and distribution, of energy sources, wages, salaries, credit and the flow of money in U.S. financial institution in any undefined national emergency. It also provides that when a state of emergency is declared by the President, Congress cannot review the action for six months. The Federal Emergency Management Agency has broad powers in every aspect of the nation. General Frank Salzedo, chief of FEMA's Civil Security Division stated in a 1983 conference that he saw FEMA's role as a "new frontier in the protection of individual and governmental leaders from assassination, and of civil and military installations from sabotage and/or attack, as well as prevention of dissident groups from gaining access to U.S. opinion, or a global audience in times of crisis." FEMA's powers were consolidated by President Carter. National Security Act of 1947 - allows for the strategic relocation of industries, services, government and other essential economic activities, and to rationalize the requirements for manpower, resources and production facilities. 1950 Defense Production Act - gives the President sweeping powers over all aspects of the economy. Act of August 29, 1916 - authorizes the Secretary of the Army, in time of war, to take possession of any transportation system for transporting troops, material, or any other purpose related to the emergency. International Emergency Economic Powers Act - enables the President to seize the property of a foreign country or national. These powers were transferred to FEMA in a sweeping consolidation in 1979.

The Decline and Fall of American Conservatism

2009-01-31T03:33:21Z

Freedomwatcher

+6 raves

I know this is a really long article, but I found it to be very good. I am interested in other peoples' opinions from all political affiliations. The Decline and Fall of American Conservatism C. Bradley Thompson http://www.theobjectivestandard.com/issues/2006-fall/decline-... In 1994, American voters elected Republican majorities in both the House of Representatives and the Senate for the first time in forty years. This ascent to power gave Newt Gingrich and his colleagues the opportunity to launch their “Republican Revolution” with its signature “Contract with America” platform. The election was said to mark the end of an era—the era of big government liberalism that had dominated American political life since the New Deal. After struggling for almost half a century to gain political power, the conservative movement finally seemed to have reached the political promised land. In theory, the “Republican Revolution” proposed to “relimit” the powers of the federal government and to restore some of the basic principles and institutions of free-market economy. The preamble to the “Contract with America” pledged to the American people that the GOP would put an end to “government that is too big, too intrusive, and too easy with the public’s money.”1 The political goals of the Gingrich “revolutionaries” were not revolutionary in any meaningful sense, but they did promise to begin some necessary reforms. As a rule, the Gingrich Congress preferred less to more government controls. In practice, the Republicans began to whittle away at the welfare state. Their first post-election budget proposed to eliminate three cabinet agencies (the Departments of Commerce, Education, and Energy) and more than 200 federal programs. Within a year, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives had reduced federal spending by almost $14 billion.2 Such early successes led even Bill Clinton to declare in his 1996 State of the Union address that the “era of big government is over.”3 A Republican Congress passed and Clinton signed far-reaching welfare reform legislation that promised to end “welfare as we know it.”4 By the end of the 1990s, America’s political fault line appeared to have moved considerably to the Right for the first time since the early 20th century. The advocates of limited government faced an historic opportunity to begin the process of dismantling the welfare state and deregulating the economy. So how goes the Republican Revolution twelve years later? What is the state of the American political Right in 2006? Judging by electoral results and political appearances, the Right is flourishing. For the first time since before the New Deal, the Republican Party controls all three branches of the federal government. There is a Republican in the White House surrounded by conservatives; Republicans control the House of Representatives and the Senate; and seven out of nine justices on the Supreme Court are appointees of Republican presidents. Republican grand strategist Karl Rove and several conservative pundits say that prospects look good for the GOP to become America’s “permanent majority.” It is not just Republicans but conservative Republicans who are driving this train. As William Rusher, co-founder of the modern conservative movement, reports, the “conservative movement has come to dominate the Republican Party totally.”5 In other words, the Republican Party has finally purged itself of the moderate, non-ideological, country-club, Rockefeller Republicans that once dominated the party in the 1950s and ’60s. The conservative moment—the moment when conservative Republicans become America’s ruling class—has arrived. For over forty years, ever since the Goldwater election debacle in 1964, conservatives have methodically pursued ideological control over the GOP. Now that they do control the Republican Party and all three branches of the federal government, what exactly have conservatives bequeathed to America? Here are some hard facts. Government spending has increased faster under George Bush and his Republican Congress than it did under Bill Clinton, and more people work for the federal government today than at any time since the end of the Cold War. During Bush’s first term, total government spending skyrocketed from $1.86 trillion to $2.48 trillion, an increase of 33 percent (almost $23,000 per household, the highest level since World War II). The federal budget grew by $616.4 billion during Bush’s first term in office. If post 9/11 defense spending is taken off the table, domestic spending has ballooned by 23 percent since Bush took office. When Bill Clinton left office in 2000, federal spending equaled 18.5 percent of the gross domestic product, but by the end of the first Bush administration, government outlays had increased to 20.3 percent of the GDP. The annualized growth rate of non-defense and non-homeland-security outlays has more than doubled from 2.1 percent under Clinton to 4.8 percent under Bush.6 Increased spending inevitably means increased taxes. Thus, despite President Bush’s much vaunted tax cuts, Americans actually pay more in taxes today than they did during Bill Clinton’s last year in office. The 2006 annual report from Americans for Tax Reform, titled “Cost of Government Day,” sums up rather nicely the intrusive role played by Republican government in the lives of ordinary Americans. The report says that Americans had to work 86.5 days just to pay their federal taxes, as compared to 78.5 days in 2000 under Bill Clinton. In other words, the average American has worked 10.2 percent more for the federal government under George Bush than under Bill Clinton. When state and local taxes (controlled in the majority of places by Republicans) are added to federal taxes, Americans worked for the government eight hours a day, five days a week, from January 1 until July 12, meaning they worked full-time for the government for more than half the year. As Tom Feeney, a congressional Republican put it: “I remember growing up and reading in some school textbooks that if more than half your paycheck went to the government, then you were living in a socialist society.”7 Just so, Mr. Feeney. Two generations ago, conservatives denounced the growth of government and called for a revolution to roll back the Leviathan State created by Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal. In 1994, conservatives, with their Republican Revolution, rode into power on just such a platform of limited government. Yet today, the conservative intellectual movement and the Bush administration are engaged in a very different kind of revolution—a revolution for big-government conservatism. What happened to the idea of limited-government conservatism? Have the conservatives been corrupted by power, or is there something in their basic philosophy that has led them to embrace big government? Why have conservatives moved to the port-side of liberalism? To answer these questions and to understand the split personality of the conservative movement, we must examine the various ideologies that now dominate it. To set some context, however, let us first recall the basic ideals that have traditionally been regarded as the gold standard of true conservatism: the ideals associated with Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign, which, in turn, point to the principles of America’s Founding Fathers. In The Conscience of a Conservative, regarded by many as the political Talmud of conservatism, Goldwater explicated the principles of conservative government. He wrote that the “ancient and tested truths that guided our Republic through its early days will do equally well for us.” The challenge of conservatism, he continued, is “to demonstrate the bearing of a proven philosophy on the problems of our own time.” He defined the Founders’ “proven philosophy” in the following terms: “The legitimate functions of government are actually conducive to freedom. Maintaining internal order, keeping foreign foes at bay, administering justice, removing obstacles to the free interchange of goods—the exercise of these powers makes it possible for men to follow their chosen pursuits with maximum freedom.”8 Enabling men “to follow their chosen pursuits with maximum freedom”—this is the proper purpose of government; this is the ideal that American conservatives have long claimed to be conserving or restoring; and this is the ideal that animated the American Founding. As Thomas Jefferson eloquently summarized in his First Inaugural address: “A wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government.” The Founding Fathers created a free society grounded on the moral sovereignty of the individual. They recognized that the only legitimate function of government is to protect each individual’s right to act on his own judgment—so long as he does not violate the rights of others. Accordingly, the Founders established a government limited to the protection of individual rights—that is: limited to making and enforcing objective (i.e., rights-respecting) laws, to resolving civil disputes, to protecting private property, and to enforcing contracts. While this is the ideal that defined the American Founding—and the ideal to which Goldwater conservatives have long claimed allegiance—it is not the ideal to which today’s conservatives subscribe. To what ideals do today’s conservatives subscribe? What are their political goals? In recent years, the conservative intellectual and political movement has become strained and divided. Political analysts now speak of the great conservative “crack-up.” At the heart of the ideological wars now engulfing the movement are two putatively conflicting philosophies: a moral philosophy called “compassionate conservatism” and a philosophy of governance known as “neoconservatism.” To understand the state of the conservative movement and where it is headed, one must understand the nature of these two conservatisms, what they have in common, and how they shape today’s Republican Party. Compassionate Conservatism Compassionate conservatism came to prominence during the 1999 Republican primaries and the 2000 Presidential campaign when George W. Bush ran as a compassionate conservative. At the time, most traditional conservatives cynically assumed that Bush was using the moniker as a catchy electioneering phrase, a clever rhetorical strategy to capture the vote of America’s so-called “soccer moms,” the marginally liberal, college-educated, suburban women who twice helped to elect Bill Clinton. What few traditional conservatives understood at the time was that candidate Bush actually meant what he said, that this new creed gave expression to his previously unarticulated core philosophy—one shared by many other politicians and voters. Compassionate conservatism, rather than simply being a slick vote-getting slogan, is a political philosophy—one that George Bush genuinely embraces and that has formed the policies of his administration. Although some conservatives in 1999 openly mocked the idea of compassionate conservatism, eventually most came around to supporting it—in part because they saw that it helped to elect Bush in 2000 and then reelect him in 2004—but, more importantly, because compassionate conservatism brought to the surface principles that traditional conservatives had silently followed for decades. What is this philosophy? What are its principles and goals? The guiding moral principle of compassionate conservatism is the idea that we, by way of our government, have a “duty” to serve the needs of the poor, the homeless, the sick, and the aged—hence “compassionate,” which means desiring to relieve the pain and suffering of others. Its advocates seek to uphold this moral principle through “free-market mechanisms”—hence “conservatism.” Myron Magnet, a leading theorist of compassionate conservatism, describes it as representing an “epochal paradigm shift” in American political thinking. It amounts, he writes, “to a sweeping rejection of liberal orthodoxy about how to help the poor.”9 Why reject the liberal orthodoxy on this count? Because, says Magnet, “liberal prescriptions, good intentions notwithstanding, have in fact made the lot of the poor worse over the last 35 years.”10 As such statements reveal, compassionate conservatism fully accepts the liberal notion that we have a “duty” to help the poor—compassionate conservatives simply disagree with liberals as to how to help them. Compassionate conservatives decry the liberal welfare state for causing the “worst-off” to be “more mired in dependency, illegitimacy, drug use, school failure and crime than they were when the experiment began.”11 The problem, according to the Bush Administration, is that government bureaucrats are incapable of promoting the long-term success of the poor, that “lasting and profound change in a human life comes most often when care is offered on a personal level by families and by those with a stake in the community, who are motivated by a burden of the heart to improve the lives of those around them.”12 The compassionate conservative solution, however, is not for the Federal government to abolish welfare and leave it to “those with a stake in the community” to help those about whom they care. Instead, their solution, as described by Bush advisor Stephen Goldsmith, is for the Federal government to outsource the administration of welfare: Although [compassionate conservatives] acknowledge the role of government in helping those who need assistance, they do not believe that government itself needs to deliver those services. Small, local civic associations and religious organizations have the detailed knowledge and flexibility necessary to administer the proper combination of loving compassion and rigorous discipline appropriate for each citizen.13 Such a policy serves only to redirect taxpayer dollars from government welfare agencies to private religious and civic organizations. The net effect is the same: The wealth of Americans is forcibly taken and redistributed to serve “compassionate” purposes. Lest you think compassionate conservatives feel any sense of shame about trampling the traditional Goldwater conservative belief that wealth redistribution is a violation of rights, think again. At compassionate conservatism’s core, says Myron Magnet, “is concern for the poor—not a traditional Republican preoccupation—and an explicit belief that government has a responsibility for poor Americans.”14 During the 2000 election campaign, candidate Bush occasionally mouthed support for a market economy, but he saved his true enthusiasm for the notion that the poor and downtrodden deserve not only our compassion but our “love” and “charity,” as well. Michael Knox Beran, another leading theorist of compassionate conservatism, praises George W. Bush for his “unashamed use of the 'L’ word” and for being driven “by a belief in the redemptive power of love.”15 Compassionate conservatism substitutes, at least superficially, Christian love for liberal pity as the motive for expanding and perpetuating the welfare state. Stephen Goldsmith, writing for The Wall Street Journal’s series “American Conservatism,” further explains the political meaning of compassionate conservatism. It “takes us back to the future by acknowledging the huge growth of the state while articulating a better way for government to help those whom prosperity has left behind”; it “endorses government help for seniors who need prescription drugs and for parents of needy school children”; and it “provide[s] people with a wide variety of choices as to how they can best put government assistance to use.”16 The foregoing is a sample of the theory behind this movement as articulated by its contemporary theorists. But who is ultimately responsible for this trend among conservatives? What are compassionate conservatism’s deepest philosophic roots? The new politics of compassion, though designed rhetorically to rely on and appeal to traditional Christian virtues (e.g., mercy, love, and charity), was most inspired by the moral writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau—the Prophet of Compassion. It was this Frenchman’s glorification of compassion first in his Discourse on Inequality, and then in Emile, that first elevated a minor sentiment into a major virtue.17 For Rousseau and his intellectual descendents, compassion—the desire to relieve the pain and suffering of others—is a pre- or sub- rational sentiment that serves man as an automatic, immediate, and infallible moral guide. It is a strictly perceptual-level phenomenon of seeing and feeling the pain and suffering of others, of being overwhelmed by a catastrophic sense of shame and guilt, and of then reacting on one’s range-of-the-moment feelings. According to this sentimental ideology, needs-as-claims are the fundamental human reality; “intuitions” or “feelings” are the way to know, evaluate, and judge such facts; and compassion is the virtue of feeling and acting accordingly. Rousseau’s elevation of compassion to the center of ethical discourse launched a moral revolution in the West that has slowly percolated into the manners and mores of American life.18 Thanks to Rousseau, compassion is the moral leitmotif of American culture. The delivery method adopted by today’s pushers of compassion is to harp day and night on those who fail and suffer; the goal is to induce in Americans en masse an arrested, perceptual-level mentality, a mentality that processes all moral and political matters emotionally and then acts accordingly. Americans are inundated on a daily basis—whether via the Oprah Winfrey Show, CNN, Fox News, or the New York Times—with maudlin scenes and stories of human misery. They are encouraged to put their failures on display and to exercise compassion at every turn. Ours is the Age of Compassion. Rousseau’s ghost now oversees a nation of social workers. The moral ideal to which our culture aspires is the moist eyes of the wet nurse. To lack compassion in this new world is to be morally deprived if not morally depraved. The Oprahization of American culture has made compassion the standard by which we judge whether men are good or bad, and so Americans today feel compelled to constantly display their sensitivity and to show that their “heart is in the right place.” The so-called “love” advocated by the proponents of compassion is not directed toward human virtue but toward human vice. It is not for their achievements that the weak are admired but for their failures. On the one hand, this is an utter inversion of morality; on the other hand, it is the annihilation of morality. To treat compassion as a virtue promotes a kind of moral relativism—a non-judgmental, no-fault morality that takes people just as they are. “Don’t judge people,” its proponents say, “just accept their plight and help them.” Fundamentally speaking, this is an attempt to negate the law of causality—to sever consequences from their causes. Forget about what caused a jobless person to be jobless; just give him a job. Forget about why a person has saved nothing for retirement; just give him some money. Forget about why a person failed to insure his Gulf-coast dwelling; just give him an apartment or a house. Personal responsibility or lack thereof (the cause) is irrelevant to the compassionate. A moral code that upholds compassion as a virtue is the antipode of a morality of justice. It paralyzes one’s ability to evaluate and judge the ideas and actions of individuals; it demands that one suspend moral judgment—that one not discriminate between the suffering caused by elements beyond one’s control and that caused by irrationality, sloth, evasion. The moral relativism promoted by this weepy sentiment naturally leads to political egalitarianism. Rousseau believed that politics—particularly democratic politics—is intimately connected to the people’s moeurs or manners, and that the formation of moeurs likewise turns on the training of the sentiments. By heralding sensitivity to the suffering of others as the height of virtue, Rousseau sought to overcome what he saw as the rational self-interest, the radical individualism, and the economic inequality unleashed by Lockean liberalism. Rousseau’s goal was to ennoble the sentiment of compassion in the hopes of transforming Western man from self-regarding to other-regarding, thereby ushering in a new social-political order. Rousseau’s ideas took hold, and today we have a new politics of compassion that comes in both liberal and conservative forms. In the world of Rousseau and Clinton and Bush, suffering and need represent man’s essential metaphysical condition, and those who suffer less should be sacrificed for the sake of those who suffer more. The redistribution of wealth is, therefore, a central tenet of the politics of compassion. At the heart of compassionate conservatism is the altruist-collectivist code, which holds that man must live in selfless service to the needs of others—which means that rational, productive men must sacrifice (or be sacrificed) for the sake of irrational, unproductive men. Compassionate conservatism accepts the collectivist premise that solving the problems of the poor is the “duty” of society as a whole. Thus neoconservative writer David Brooks, speaking in language that would have warmed Rousseau’s heart, describes compassionate conservatism as: “an across-the-board effort to revive responsible citizenship,” which Brooks defines as “sacrifice for the greater good.”19 Compassion is now regarded as the cardinal virtue in American politics. Political “wisdom” is measured by, and attributed to, those who feel and satisfy the needs of the greatest number of people. “He who feels the most pain, wins,” as it were, and America is suffering because of it. Observe how compassionate conservatism’s moral message empowers the Christian Left. Jim Wallis, editor of the leftist Christian magazine, Sojourners, agrees with President Bush that the purpose of government is to feel people’s pain and satisfy their needs. But Wallis excoriates President Bush’s unprecedentedly high levels of social-welfare spending as niggardly and immoral.20 If compassion is a virtue, Wallis is right. He is also more “moral” than Bush, because he feels more suffering, has more compassion, and demands more sacrifice, greater spending. Wallis and other leaders of the Christian Left have publicly challenged the President to live up to his own values and to show greater compassion. And how have the president and other compassionate conservatives responded to such charges? They have responded in the only way their moral code permits them to respond: by calling for more spending. Once we peel away the sentimental rhetoric and cut through the doublespeak, compassionate conservatism’s moral and political teaching boils down to this: first, that needs—the needs of others—constitute a moral claim on your life; second, that you—you the taxpayer, you the private individual—have a “duty” to support—nay, to love and support—the poor; and finally, that the federal government must coerce your love and compassion by taking your wealth and giving it to “private” organizations that will use it to serve “those whom prosperity has left behind.” How does this theory translate into policy and practice? At the heart of compassionate conservatism’s policy agenda is President Bush’s plan to “revolutionize” the welfare state through his “faith-based initiative.” On the day that the President unveiled his new program to earmark billions of dollars in federal welfare spending for faith-based charities, he described the goal and moral meaning of his proposal: “Government will never be replaced by charities and community groups. Yet when we see social needs in America, my administration will look first to faith-based programs.”21 “We have a responsibility,” Bush later emphasized, “that when somebody hurts, government has got to move.”22 In the president’s faith-based initiatives, we see compassionate conservatism’s two distinctive features: the use of “free-market mechanisms” to achieve welfare-state goals; and the redirection of the welfare state toward conservative, especially religious, goals. Compassionate conservatism’s proponents tout President Bush’s faith-based initiative as an application of free-market principles to welfare. Government-funded welfare is distributed by sub-contracting and out-sourcing the “politics of love” to private middlemen—namely, churches and faith-based charitable organizations. The Bush administration’s program aims to make “funds more accessible to neighborhood and faith-based organizations that administer a mix of love and discipline,” writes Stephen Goldsmith.23 Such “privatization” of the welfare system does give rise to a certain kind of “competition”: Protestants, Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, the Unification Church, Rastafarians, Scientologists, and various other California-style churches compete to offer the most love and the best soup—and with your money. This political competition between churches for taxpayer money is the beau idéal of compassionate conservatism. Churches and charities compete with one another for government funding, and the recipients of this “charity” have the freedom to choose between various government-sponsored and government-regulated denominational soup kitchens. This is what compassionate conservatives mean when they advocate combining “free market” policies with religious programs for the poor. But this is an Orwellian perversion and an utter corruption of free-market principles. There is no such thing as “market competition” between semi-private charities for the favors of government bureaucrats who have the power to arbitrarily give away money that is forcibly taken from other Americans. This is sheer government coercion and forced redistribution of wealth. Worse yet, it is a violation of the separation of church and state. Compassionate conservatism places government in the business of propagating religion. Under Bush’s faith-based initiative, the federal government has been enlisted to do the “Lord’s work.” Liberal and conservative Christians will, henceforth, grab for and use this billion-dollar giveaway to support and spread their particular faith. When Democrats are in power, federal money will go to churches and organizations run by Marxist-orientated (so-called “liberationist”) Christians in order to promote liberal-socialist values; when Republicans are in power, federal money will go to the likes of Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority to promote conservative-socialist values—and both parties will give money to Muslim “charities” in order to demonstrate their religious tolerance. Despite the President’s occasional protestations to the contrary, the faith-based initiative is, in the end, about promoting religion. As the President himself said in support of the initiative: “[W]elfare policy will not solve the deepest problems of the spirit. . . . No government policy can put hope in people’s hearts or a sense of purpose in people’s lives. That is done when someone, some good soul puts an arm around a neighbor and says, 'God loves you, and I love, and you can count on us both.’”24 The goal of the Bush administration’s faith-based initiative is clearly transformative: to change hearts. The White House has recently produced video agitprop that features people discussing how various faith-based charity programs have changed their lives. As a representative example of the content of these videos, one woman testifies, “I’ve learned that God comes first.”25 The purpose of President Bush’s faith-based initiative is to create a religious welfare state—that is: to go beyond the secular welfare state by feeding both the body and the soul—filling the body with soup and filling the soul with religious dogma, faith, otherworldliness, and the morality of self-sacrifice. If secular welfare is bad for the poor, how much worse is welfare that aims to convince them that their reasoning minds are incapable of understanding the important truths; that, all things considered, life and happiness on earth are not important; and that the key to “eternal” prosperity is to sacrifice their values in the name of the Lord? Observe the gargantuan hypocrisy of conservatives who posture as defenders of property rights and helpers of the poor while advocating the violation of property rights to fund programs that poison the poor. If this is compassion, let us have none of it. Compassionate conservatism’s principles and policies are inimical to a free society. It is also worth mentioning that they are inimical to the very Christian “virtue” they purport to uphold: charity. While charity is not, objectively speaking, a virtue, it can be a rational endeavor so long as self-sacrifice is not involved. But genuine charity withers when faux charity is forced. Charity is, by definition, something freely chosen and benevolently given. Charity, properly understood, is what one does voluntarily with one’s own money to help others about whom one cares; it is not what someone else chooses to do with one’s money for others on one’s “behalf.” Charity is not a “duty” to give up the fruits of one’s labor to those whom one would not support of one’s own free will. Charity is the act of reaching into one’s own pocket and giving a dollar to someone of one’s own choosing; it is not the phenomenon of other people or the government reaching into one’s pocket and giving one’s money to someone of their choosing. (The latter is what children properly call stealing.) Forced charity is an oxymoron that destroys the good will and generosity associated with genuine charity. By effectively nationalizing charity, conservatives have damaged the very idea of charity and curtailed the benevolence that makes it possible. Further, as a result of being forced by the government to be “charitable,” taxpaying citizens give less to genuine charities because they recognize that they are paying twice. What are the consequences of compassionate conservatism when applied to the question of foreign aid? In logic, if the labor and wealth of individual Americans should be sacrificed to the “needy,” it follows that the labor and wealth of a prosperous nation like America should be sacrificed to the “needs” and misfortunes of poor nations. On the premises of compassionate conservatism, is it not immoral to neglect the misfortune and suffering of others no matter who or where they are? Where can one draw the line? What would Jesus or Rousseau say? One cannot draw a line—which is why compassionate conservatism also seeks to internationalize American “charity.” Republican senator Rick Santorum, generally regarded as a “right-wing” conservative, puts it plainly: Compassionate conservatism “targets the poor and hurting for help, whether they are across the street or across an ocean.”26 In other words, compassionate conservatism imposes “duties” on individuals and nations that are limitless and without borders. If one child suffers—if there is one person in need anywhere in the world—then you and your fellow countrymen have a moral “duty” to do something about it. This explains the spectacle of President Bush’s former Treasury Secretary, Paul O’Neill, who—after traipsing around rural Africa in a business suit, led by U2 rock star Bono, and receiving daily lectures from African politicians on the moral obligation owed by America to feed the poor of that destitute continent—returned from Africa and lectured America on the “moral imperative” that we give billions of dollars in aid to the poor around the world.27 America, under the tutelage of the compassionate conservatism, does precisely that. Consider further how compassionate conservatism molds America’s foreign-aid policy. For the last several years, French and Mexican presidents Jacques Chirac and Vicente Fox, respectively, have been calling for a world tax to help fight poverty in “developing” nations. The new tax, to be administered by the U.N., is to be imposed on airline travel, currency transfers, and carbon emissions (among other things). Who will bear the largest burden of this world tax? The American people, of course. How has the Bush administration responded to the idea? Immediately after rejecting the idea of a U.N.-administered tax as a violation of U.S. sovereignty, President Bush publicly sanctioned the moral purpose of the tax. He said that “we” Americans are duty-bound to “share our wealth” with poor nations. Then, he promised to tax the American people himself in order to increase U.S. aid to poor nations from $10 billion to $15 billion within three years.28 “Why should Vicente Fox, Jacques Chirac, and Kofi Annan, get the credit for compassionately feeding Africa,” President Bush undoubtedly thought to himself, “when my administration is the most compassionate of all?” Bush supports the moral premise and goals of the world tax; he disagrees only over how the money should be raised and administered. Like the U.N., he wants the American people to sacrifice their wealth to the world’s poor, but he wants his administration to be the model of “morality.” What, in the end, distinguishes the approach of compassionate conservatism to the world’s poor from that of compassionate liberalism? The answer is, fundamentally, nothing. Both insist that another nation’s need creates a moral duty that Americans must accept and fulfill. Like the aging hippies of the New Left, compassionate conservatives reject the idea of basing morality on reason and instead embrace a morality grounded in feelings. They reject the possibility of a morality of self-interest and individual rights, and instead embrace a morality of self-sacrifice and governmental coercion. Despite all their loose rhetoric about applying “free-market” solutions to the plight of the poor, compassionate conservatives accept the moral premise of liberal-socialism: that you have a moral duty—a moral duty that will be enforced by the state—to love and support those who have needs greater than your own. This is the moral premise on which the Bush administration, like every Democratic administration since the New Deal, has promoted the alleged virtue of sacrifice. The ultimate goal of compassionate conservatism—like that of compassionate liberalism—is to make all Americans more compassionate and, therefore, more open to socialist redistribution. By promoting other-regarding over self-regarding virtues, the politics of compassion fosters a “caring” political community—a community that upholds selflessness as its greatest virtue. In order to encourage ever-greater amounts of sacrifice from the American people, President Bush has challenged all Americans to devote at least two years of their lives to volunteer for community service. To that end, he has created the ironically named USA Freedom program to pay “volunteers” for their service, and he has proposed a significant expansion of existing government-service programs, such as the Peace Corps and AmeriCorp programs. Such “voluntary” service requires, of course, the involuntary expropriation of taxpayer wealth so that young Americans can learn that working in a soup kitchen or changing bedpans in a nursing home is somehow nobler than pursuing their own goals or creating wealth. How would compassionate conservatives respond to a Hillary Clinton administration that might call for Americans to sacrifice three or four years of their lives to community service or that might demand a massive tax increase to support the poor? What could they say? What possible moral argument could they offer to oppose political programs that are simply more consistent applications of their own moral principles? There is only one possible “free-market” solution to the problem of poverty that is consistent with individual rights: to abolish the welfare state. But given the moral code of the compassionate conservatives, no steps will be taken toward this goal on their watch. Neoconservatism Compassionate conservatism has exerted an enormous influence on George W. Bush and his administration. But an even more influential philosophy, the reigning ideology of the conservative movement and Republican policy makers, is neoconservatism. Over the last 25 years, neoconservatism has come to dominate the conservative establishment, and, today, it is barely an exaggeration to say that neoconservatism is conservatism. It is widely acknowledged today that the Bush administration has been deeply influenced by neoconservative ideas. Richard Perle, a leading neoconservative foreign-policy expert, states that President Bush “on issue after issue, has reflected the thinking of neoconservatives.” The New York Review of Books ran an article entitled, “The Neocons in Power,” elaborating the ways in which they are, and, during the 2004 Democratic presidential primary, Howard Dean charged that “President Bush has been captured by the neoconservatives around him.”29 The neocons are, arguably, the most intellectually active faction of the post-war intellectual Right. They teach at the best universities; they run the wealthiest conservative philanthropic foundations; they control the leading conservative think tanks; they manage the leading conservative journals and magazines; and they have a significant presence in the major media. The neocons have become so influential and so confident of their place in the conservative intellectual establishment that one of their most articulate spokesmen, David Brooks of The New York Times, has declared: “We’re all neoconservatives now.”30 What does this mean for America? To answer that question, we have to answer the following: What are the fundamental moral and political principles of neoconservatism? What does the “neo” mean? And how is neoconservatism transforming the conservative intellectual movement and the Republican Party? In a much-discussed essay entitled “The Neoconservative Persuasion,” Irving Kristol, doyen of the neocons, sums up their agenda: Their aim is to “convert the Republican Party, and American conservatism in general, against their respective wills, into a new kind of conservative politics suitable to governing a modern democracy.”31 Historically, neoconservatives have always had a rather distant and uneasy relationship with traditional conservatives. As with John Stuart Mill, they have viewed conservatives as “the stupid party,” but now they aim to fix that. Kristol’s first task in converting the conservative intellectual movement into a political movement capable of governing America has been to redefine its guiding principles and its relationship to traditional American values. Neoconservatism, Kristol writes, is the first variant of 20th-century conservatism that is “in the 'American grain.’” What an extraordinary claim! The implication, of course, is that traditional conservatism (including Goldwater conservatism)—with its proclaimed attachment to Jeffersonian principles of individual rights, limited government, and economic freedom—is outside the American grain or even un-American. Likewise, neoconservative columnist David Brooks has systematically laid out in the pages of The Weekly Standard and The New York Times what he calls a plan for “creative destruction,” which is his blueprint to purge the GOP of its attachment to what he mockingly dubs the “Leave Us Alone” philosophy of small-government conservatives. “The era of small government is over,” Brooks announces; “reducing the size of government cannot be the governing philosophy for the next generation of conservatives.” He applauds the fact that the conservatives and the Republican Party are “now significantly less anti-state and more pro-community than two years ago.” Conservatives, Brooks is pleased to report, “have become re-reconciled to the idea of some government action.”32 If the Jeffersonian tradition is supposedly outside the “American grain,” what ideas, according to the neoconservatives, are in the American grain? To whom do they turn for inspiration and guidance? At the top of the neocon’s pantheon of American heroes are three individuals who had a major destructive impact on individual rights in America: Herbert Croly, Theodore Roosevelt, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. This is the same Herbert Croly who bragged that his political philosophy was “flagrantly socialistic both in its methods and its objects,” the same TR who said that “every man holds his property subject to the general right of the community to regulate its use to whatever degree the public welfare may require it,” and the same FDR who insisted that all Americans must act “as a trained and loyal army willing to sacrifice for the good of the common discipline.”33 What unites Croly and the Roosevelt cousins is the idea that the individual should be subordinated to a paternalistic state. That the neocons would turn to such a statist triumvirate for inspiration and guidance reveals much about their plan to “reform” the Republican Party. In his Weekly Standard manifesto on the neoconservative persuasion, Kristol further indicated how he and his friends understand the role of the state in American public life: Neocons do not like the concentration of services in the welfare state and are happy to study alternative ways of delivering services. But they are impatient with the Hayekian notion that we are on “the road to serfdom.” Neocons do not feel that kind of alarm or anxiety about the growth of the state in the past century, seeing it as natural, indeed inevitable. Because they tend to be more interested in history than economics or sociology, they know that the 19th-century idea, so neatly propounded by Herbert Spencer in his “The Man Versus the State,” was a historical eccentricity.34 Not only is Kristol not bothered by the growth of the state, he does not believe, as did virtually every thinker on the Right in the early post-World War II period, that the continuing growth of the state leads to serfdom. Former Trotskyists in the 1930s and 40s and then liberals in the 50s and 60s, the neocons have never abandoned their deepest moral commitments (as we shall see), and their cavalier acceptance of, and support for, the growth of the state remains unabated. The real problem with traditional conservatives and Republicans, according to the neocons, is that they are too beholden to that old-fashioned Jeffersonian idea that the government that rules best, rules least. Irving Kristol and David Brooks believe that 19th-century ideas, such as natural rights, individualism, limited government, and laissez-faire capitalism, were historical “eccentricities”—ideas better forgotten than defended. The neocons, therefore, follow their hero Herbert Croly’s admonition to his fellow Progressive socialists that “Reform is both meaningless and powerless unless the Jeffersonian principle of non-interference is abandoned.”35 Not surprisingly, then, the Old Right’s opposition to the New Deal appalls the neocons. Kristol has described the conservatives’ desire of “returning to a 'free enterprise’ system in which government will play the modest role it used to” as representing a dangerously “utopian counter-reformation.” Ironically, what really bothers the neocons about small-government Republicans is that they are too principled, too ideological, and too beholden to an outdated Jeffersonian conception of government. The neocons regard such ideological nostalgia as “doctrinaire” and as fostering “moral self-righteousness.”36 Ultimately, the neocons view any attempted return to a pre-New Deal world as not only impractical and fanciful, but, more importantly, as immoral. At a deeper level, Kristol actually rejects the fundamental principles of a free society. According to Kristol, principles such as individual rights, limited government, and capitalism are neither morally edifying nor practically sustainable. “A society founded solely on 'individual rights’ was,” he wrote, “a society that ultimately deprived men of those virtues which could only exist in a political community which is something other than a 'society.’” Such virtues include: a sense of distributive justice, a fund of shared moral values, and a common vision of the good life sufficiently attractive and powerful to transcend the knowledge that each individual’s life ends only in death. Capitalist society itself—as projected, say, in the writings of John Locke and Adam Smith—was negligent of such virtues.37 The problem with the Founders’ liberalism, according to Kristol, is that it begins with the individual, and a philosophy that begins with the “self” must accommodate and allow for selfishness, choice, and the pursuit of personal happiness. A secular capitalist society—a society that enables its citizens to pursue their self-interest—inevitably degenerates, he argues, into a culture of isolated individuals driven solely by the joyless quest for creature comforts. A free society grounded on the protection of individual rights leads inexorably to an amiable philistinism, an easygoing nihilism and, ultimately, to “infinite emptiness.”38 In other words, according to Kristol and friends, the principles espoused by John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison lead inevitably to the Marquis de Sade, Abby Hoffman, and Jerry Springer. If the growth of the state represented the road to serfdom for Hayek, limiting the state to the protection of individual rights represents the road to nihilism for the neocons. The great political lesson that the neocons have successfully taught other conservatives and their Republican students over the course of the last twenty-five years is to embrace rather than resist the growth of the state. The neocons are committed proponents of what Kristol calls a “conservative welfare state.”39 At first blush, they seem to support the idea of a welfare state rather begrudgingly and pragmatically, as an unfortunate reality of contemporary American politics that conservatives must learn to accept and use in order to remain politically relevant. “I shall, to begin with,” Kristol writes, “assume that the welfare state is with us, for better or worse, and that conservatives should try to make it better rather than worse.” Why fight the tide of history? Or, as neoconservative Ben Wattenberg has written: “I personally think the welfarists have probably gone too far and I am prepared to examine case by case, pragmatically, as Neo-Conservatives are supposed to do, what went wrong and how we ought to rectify it.”40 As we will increasingly see, pragmatism is the neocons’ modus operandi. As a specific instance of the neocon’s pragmatic reasoning, contrast Kristol’s critique of welfare programs such as Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) with his support for expanding Social Security and Medicare. He supports reforming AFDC because it created a culture of dependence and perpetual poverty, which, in turn, led to increased crime, drug use, and gang activity. But Kristol favors expanding Social Security and Medicare on the expedient grounds that senior citizens are a powerful voting bloc and because they are socially “unproblematic,” by which he means that welfare-for-seniors does not lead to the same kind of social pathologies (e.g., teenage pregnancy) that it does for other groups. But Kristol’s seemingly reluctant and realpolitik acceptance of the welfare state as historically inevitable and politically necessary masks what he really thinks, which is that the welfare state is a moral good. Kristol is deeply committed to the moral ends of the welfare state. This is why he not only supports saving and perpetuating most New Deal welfare programs but would also expand the socialist welfare state to include new programs, such as universal medical and child care and increases in social security. In the 1960s, Kristol and his friends embraced the “desired aims” of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs (and apparently they still do), but broke with liberals only over how to satisfy the people’s needs and deliver their rights to welfare.41 Kristol regards the “socialist ideal” not only as “admirable” but also as a “necessary ideal, offering elements that were wanting in capitalist society—elements indispensable for the preservation, not to say perfection, of our humanity.” Kristol praises utopian socialism because it is “community-oriented” rather than “individual-oriented.” He admires socialism’s ideal man for transcending the “vulgar, materialistic, and divisive acquisitiveness that characterized the capitalist type of individual.”42 This comes from the author of Two Cheers for Capitalism, regarded (falsely) by some as one of the most important moral defenses of capitalism written in the twentieth century.43 Presumably Kristol saved his third cheer for the moral ideal espoused by his first ideological love, Leon Trotsky. Likewise, Kristol’s neoconservative colleague, Nathan Glazer, has stated publicly that the differences between socialists and neoconservatives are greatly exaggerated. In fact, he says, they “agree on more and more”: It is very hard for us to define what it is that divides us, in any centrally principled way. We might, depending on which socialists, and which neoconservatives are arguing, disagree about the details or the scope of health insurance plans; or about the level of taxation that should be imposed upon corporations; or how much should be going into social security. . . . But where are the principles that separate us?44 Where, indeed. Neocons agree with the underlying moral principles of the socialists; they disagree merely over the best means to achieve their shared ends. As do all good socialists, neocons hold that welfare should be regarded as a right because it is grounded in people’s “needs”—and, as Kristol explains, for the neocons, “needs” are synonymous with rights: In our urbanized, industrialized, highly mobile society, people need governmental action of some kind if they are to cope with many of their problems: old age, illness, unemployment, etc. They need such assistance; they demand it; they will get it. The only interesting political question is: How will they get it?45 The neocons rhetorically hide their fundamental moral commitments, for example, to satisfy people’s “needs”—in the guise of pragmatism, for example, by insisting that the only meaningful question to ask is “How?” In an essay published several years ago in The Wall Street Journal, Kristol joined many liberals and socialists in characterizing Bill Clinton’s “two years and out” welfare proposal for able-bodied welfare recipients as “cruel,” “unfair,” and “ruthless.” Kristol also described the likelihood that the proposed Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act would actually pass in Congress and then work in practice as a “fantasy.”46 Well, the fantasy became reality, and Clinton’s welfare reform legislation has been a moderate success story. Do not expect such success stories from advocates of a conservative welfare state. How does a conservative welfare state work? And how does it differ from a liberal welfare state? The neocons advocate a strong central government that provides welfare services to all people who need them while, at the same time, giving people choice about how they want those services delivered. That is what makes it “conservative,” they argue. That is how the neocons reconcile Adam Smith and Karl Marx, Hayek and Trotsky. In practice, this means that the coercive force of the state is used to provide for all of the people’s needs—from universal social security to health and child care to education—but the people choose their own “private” social security accounts; they choose their own “private” health and child-care providers; and parents receive vouchers and choose which schools their children will attend. The choices, of course, are not the wide-open choices of a free market; rather, the people are permitted to choose from among a handful of pre-authorized providers. The neocons call this scheme a free-market reform of the welfare state. As economic “supply-siders,” the neocons occasionally support tax cuts—but not because they want to return to taxpayers money that is rightfully theirs. Instead, they advocate lowering the marginal tax rate because it will provide an incentive for people to work harder, earn more money, spur economic growth—and, thereby, generate more tax revenue that will be used to fund the conservative welfare state. Kristol sums up the neoconservative position this way: The basic principle behind a conservative welfare state ought to be a simple one: wherever possible, people should be allowed to keep their own money—rather than having it transferred (via taxes) to the state—on condition that they put it to certain defined uses. . . . Policies such as these have the obvious advantage of reconciling the purposes of the welfare state with the maximum degree of individual independence and the least bureaucratic coercion. They would also have the advantage of being quite popular.”47 In other words, in a neoconservative state, the people are allowed to keep and spend their property only by permission of the state, which is to say that there is no recognition of the principle of property rights. And, in a neoconservative state, wise statesmen can somehow reconcile individualism and collectivism, rights and “duties,” freedom and socialism. Because the neocons believe in the moral propriety of a welfare state, they eagerly advise Republican politicians to relinquish any principled advocacy of individual rights or economic freedom. Indeed, the neocons aim to reinvent the Republican Party by urging it to develop a new “philosophy of governance” or “governing philosophy.” Decoding what the neocons mean by this vague notion of a “governing philosophy”—a phrase frequently repeated in their writings but rarely discussed and never defined—is the key to unlocking the ultimate meaning of their political agenda. Let us proceed to decode it. The problem with the Republican Party hitherto, according to Kristol, is that it has had no vision for how America ought to be governed. A “philosophy of governance” is a philosophy for how to govern. For too long, the GOP has been guided by what Kristol mockingly calls a “businessman’s mentality,” by which he means that, for too long, Republicans have been concerned with such mundane tasks as balancing the budget, lowering taxes, and cutting government spending. According to Kristol, focusing on such pedestrian goals is not how one gets elected, nor is it how one becomes a governing majority. Instead, he urges conservatives and Republicans to act less like political “accountants” and more like political “entrepreneurs.”48 A governing philosophy is ultimately about getting, keeping, and using power in certain ways. When the neocons urge Republicans to think entrepreneurially what they mean is that Republicans should abandon their principles and develop rhetorical strategies and political tactics for getting elected. What GOP strategists need, according to Kristol and company, is a strong “dose of Machiavellian shrewdness,” the characteristics of which are “quick-wittedness, articulateness, a clear sense of one’s ideological agenda and the devious routes necessary for its enactment.”49 The neocons’ message to traditional conservatives and Republicans is, in effect: “Grow up! Get over your ideological hang-ups. Be clever. Develop an agenda that will get you elected and keep you in power.” Once in power, says Kristol, the GOP must learn how to “shape” rather than balance or cut the budget, which means: shape it in politically advantageous ways (i.e., in ways that buy votes). If compassionate conservatism injected love into the hardened arteries of Republican politics, then neoconservatism infused blood-thinning cynicism into the Republican blood stream. Neoconservatism is a political philosophy concerned with, above all else, power. Like socialists, neocons want political power to create a certain kind of society—a virtuous society guided by the right purposes—purposes that they are very reluctant to share with the general public. They also believe that if government is in the hands of the wise and good, it ought not to be limited too much by constitutional rules and boundaries. The neocons are much more concerned about “who rules” than they are about the limits of political rule. The most remarkable issue about the neocons’ notion of a “governing philosophy” is that it is a strategy for governing without philosophy. The neocons unabashedly describe themselves as pragmatists; they eschew principles in favor of a mode of thinking—and they scorn thinking about what is moral in favor of thinking about what “works.” For over twenty-five years, they have fought an ideological war against ideology. The neocons urge Republicans to drop their limited-government principles and to consider only the immediate problems of the present, unconnected to all other problems, and without reference to principles. According to Irving Kristol, “there are moments when it is wrong to do the right thing.” This is Kristol's “First Law” of politics: There are occasions where circumstances trump principles. Statesmanship consists not in being loyal to one’s avowed principles (that’s easy), but in recognizing the occasions when one’s principles are being trumped by circumstances. . . . The . . . creative statesman, one who possesses some political imagination, will see such occasions as possible opportunities for renewed political self-definition.50 In other words, Kristol’s advice to Republicans is: Stop taking your principles so seriously (as if that were ever a problem). The successful statesman, he argues, is chameleon-like in his ability to redefine his principles in the light of changing circumstances. Don’t concern yourselves with principles; concern yourselves with acquiring and keeping power. As pragmatists, the neocons begin with the here-and-now and the expediencies of the moment. They regard political reality as a state of constant flux; they eschew thinking of political issues in terms of black and white; they advise Republicans (and Democrats, for that matter) to be moderate, flexible, prudent. Kristol, for instance, advises that it is both desirable and possible to figure out a workable “amalgam of the prevailing 'Left’ and 'Right’ viewpoints,”51 which means a harmonious mixture or “golden mean” between capitalism and socialism. The neocons have a dyspeptic reaction to arguments grounded in moral principles, particularly arguments either for capitalism or against the welfare state. They cynically declare that the “age of ideology” is over, by which they mean that the self-righteous moralism of the Old Right and the New Left must be abandoned so that they can get on with the business of managing more efficiently the practical and inevitable realities of the modern welfare state. At the heart of the neocons’ “governing philosophy” is a pragmatic method for gaining and keeping power. They urge Republicans to “think politically,” which means to assess and “confront the reality” of their immediate political situation and to “adapt” to changing political realities “in a self-preserving way.”52 By adaptation, the neocons are referring to the process of adjusting to the principles and policies of those who currently hold power or who threaten your power. “Thinking politically” means compromising with liberals, particularly when liberals claim the moral high ground on issues that concern the alleged “needs” of the people, such as child or health care. It means that Republicans should co-opt the liberal message in order to expand their political base and to form a permanent ruling majority. As William Kristol has written: “A minority party becomes a majority party by absorbing elements of the other party.”53 In other words, the way to defeat liberalism is to become a liberal. What specific advice have the neocons offered to Republicans in this regard? Here are the kinds of tactics the neocons have recommended (these might sound familiar): If liberals launch a national campaign for socialized medicine, Republicans should steal the issue from the Democrats and advocate a system of universal health care but one that allows people to choose their own doctor or HMO. If liberals commence a public campaign against the profits of “big business” or the salaries of their executives, Republicans should neutralize liberal pretensions by encouraging “greedy” and “profiteering” corporate executives to voluntarily donate their profits to charities. If radical environmentalists launch a public relations campaign against global warming, Republicans should encourage American companies to hire environmentalists as advisors. If feminists propose to nationalize pre-school child care, Republicans should go along but insist that parents be given vouchers to send their children to the day-care facility of their choice. This is what it means to “think politically.” The neocons’ pragmatic rationale for this wholesale capitulation is that “If it’s going to happen, why not take the credit?” If we’re going to have a new form of socialism, why shouldn’t Republicans claim victory for having put it into practice? The problem with Republicans, according to Kristol, is that the “merits of pre-emptive spending seem destined to remain forever incomprehensible to the conservative cast of mind.”54 The “art of government,” writes Kristol, is to translate the “liberal or radical impulse into enduring institutions,” which means that socialist ends will be achieved with conservative means.55 This is the neocon methodology. Their advice to the Republican Party is to compromise and accept the moral ends of liberal-socialism, but with the caveat that conservatives can do a better job of doling out the goods and services. Observe who is being asked to compromise what here. Conservatives are being asked to compromise their principles. Liberals are being asked to compromise only the way in which welfare is delivered. Moral appeasement of this sort serves only to embolden the Left, a lesson that conservatives seem constitutionally unable to learn. They fail to grasp that compromising one principle inevitably leads to hundreds of compromises in practice. In this relationship, liberalism will always have the upper hand and will always dictate the future. Having abandoned principles, neoconservatives can offer no principled opposition to the creation of new welfare programs in the future. Of course, they would see this as a problem only if they opposed welfare programs, which they do not. According to Kristol, the “idea of a welfare state is in itself perfectly consistent with a conservative political philosophy—as Bismarck knew, a hundred years ago.”56 In addition to TR and FDR, the neocons add Bismarck to their list of statesman-like heroes. The neocons’ new Republican Party seeks to restore not a Jeffersonian model of government, but rather the Prussian welfare state. This, according to the neocons, is what it means to be “in the 'American grain.’” This is their contribution to “the stupid party” and to American life. Ideas Have Consequences Given the moral premises and methodologies of compassionate conservatism and neoconservatism, and given their prevalence today, it comes as no surprise that a Republican-dominated government has ushered in a new era of big government. Let us now take a closer look at just how big our government has become since Republicans took control of the federal government. The most damning indictment of Republican profligacy can be seen in the Republicans’ abuse of non-entitlement spending. Discretionary spending at the federal level has increased by 49 percent since President Bush was sworn in to office. But lest we think that President Bush is the only big spender in the GOP, let us not forget that discretionary spending has exploded since the Republicans took over Congress in 1995. Between 1995 and 2005, the number of congressional “pork barrel” projects added to Republican congressional budgets increased from 1,439 (costing $10 billion) to 13,997 (costing $27.3 billion), a staggering tenfold increase. By the end of President Bush’s first term, every single domestic agency of the federal government (with the exception of the Environmental Protection Agency) experienced inflation-adjusted budget increases.57 Since it took control of both the White House and Capitol Hill, the Republican Party has presided over the biggest explosion in federal spending and the greatest extension of the welfare state since Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society programs of the 1960s. As shocking as these numbers are, they do not tell the whole story. More important than the amount of money spent is what the money is being spent on. Consider some of the particular programs that the Bush administration and Congressional Republicans have supported over the last five years. Take for example the “No Child Left Behind Act,” which Ted Kennedy virtually wrote for President Bush and which represents the greatest expansion of the federal government in education since the creation of the Department of Education in 1979. As a result of this one Act, federal education spending has grown by 100 percent since Bush took office. This is all the more remarkable given that just several years earlier the Gingrich “revolutionaries” of 1994 promised to abolish the Department of Education. Under George Bush and the Republicans, the welfare state that Bill Clinton began to dismantle has been given a second life. The Bush administration and their Republican allies in Congress have, for instance, offered a tax “refund” to 6.5 million low-income people who do not pay taxes, passed a $180 billion farm subsidy bill (welfare for farmers), supported tariffs on steel imports (welfare for the American steel industry), and extended the American welfare state to Africa by offering the people of that continent $15 billion in AIDS relief. Then, of course, there’s President Bush’s signature welfare program administered by the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. The amount of money that the Bush administration has taken (or proposes to take) from American taxpayers for redistribution to the irresponsible and unproductive is utterly staggering: $50 million to fund mentors for children of criminals in jail, $240 million for promoting healthy marriages and responsible fatherhood, $206 million for an abstinence-only program, $75 million for the Prisoner Re-entry Initiative, $150 million for a drug-addiction program, $1.4 billion to house the homeless, $149 million to the Compassion Capital Fund (for the perpetually “needy”). Even more ominous, the Bush administration enthusiastically signed into law a multi-billion dollar prescription drug bill, which represents the largest expansion of the federal government in over thirty years. Conservative estimates put the cost of this Medicare drug benefit at more than $724 billion over the next decade, and as much as $2 trillion ten years beyond that. Of course, as with all entitlement programs, ballooning costs are expected in subsequent decades.58 Worse yet, if history is any guide, we can expect the federal government to assume ever-greater controls over the entire health-care industry in at least two ways. First, it will quietly invoke additional pricing and regulatory controls over the nation’s pharmaceutical industry, further inhibiting the creation of new life-enhancing and life-saving drugs. Second, it will assume greater control over the private prescription drug insurance industry, putting many such companies out of business when people stop buying something they can now get for “free.” The Republicans’ prescription drug entitlement program applies the same moral premises that under girds Medicare: that people have a “right” to health care—a right that trumps the rights of taxpayers, doctors, and drug producers—a right that will be protected and administered by the government. The GOP plan is particularly distressing in that it claims to reform the system by applying free-market principles to a corrupt and inefficient Medicare program. Like the faith-based initiative, the GOP prescription drug plan uses ostensibly “private” middlemen (i.e., semi-private insurance companies) to administer a brand new welfare program. Republicans defended this new program as an example of how “private ownership,” “choice,” and “competition” can reform the social insurance programs of the Left. The Republican position was captured by Newt Gingrich in a story in The New York Times: “'Choice creates competition, and competition drives down price,’ Mr. Gingrich said, in a pithy statement of the philosophy that inspires most of the Republican proposals.”59 Only a Republican could view the expansion of a government program as a free-market reform. Democrats, not surprisingly, lambasted the bill as an attempt by Republicans to “privatize” Medicare. Of course, as the tentacles of government regulators quietly and slowly strangle the private health-care and insurance industries, and as the “privatized” system begins to collapse (as it surely will), liberals will blame the system’s failure on the “free-market” reforms and then demand ever-greater command and controls over the health-care system. In 1995, Republicans raised the alarm and then defeated Clinton’s plan to socialize the health-care system. Ten years later, Republicans launched a variation on Clinton’s plan by partially socializing drug benefits for seniors. This is a classic model of the Republican approach to welfare. The Republican position on government spending comes down to this: We can spend the government’s money more prudently than Democrats. Whereas the liberal welfare state created a culture of dependence, perpetual poverty, and various forms of deviant social behavior, our welfare state will foster virtue and the public good. There was a time when the likes of a prescription drug entitlement would have been regarded as inherently unconservative. Times have changed. Writes George F. Will: A “prescription drug entitlement is not inherently unconservative, unless the welfare state itself is—and it isn’t.”60 While some conservatives, such as those at the Heritage Foundation, have denounced the Drug Benefit program, they have done so only on the grounds that it costs too much, that it is too restrictive, and that it does not give senior citizens enough “choice.” What conservative intellectuals do not, will not, and cannot make is a moral argument against such a program. And without a moral argument, all their other arguments are feckless. Apparently recognizing this, William F. Buckley tells conservatives that they must accustom themselves to the fact “that certain fights we have waged are, quite simply, lost.” Conservatives, he says, must learn to “make prudent accommodations” to the welfare state.61 And so they have. Bush’s neoconservative defenders go beyond Buckley’s “prudent” accommodations to the welfare state; they openly support its moral ends. For neocons such as David Brooks, George Bush “hasn’t abandoned conservatism”; instead, he’s “modernized, ennobled, and saved it.”62 Every time Democrats and liberals launch a moral counterattack against the “mean-spiritedness” of even the most modest conservative reforms, Republicans cower, turn, then flee and surrender the moral high ground. When faced with the charge repeated time and again that they represent big business, the rich, and the “greedy”—and that their “cold-hearted” policies hurt poor women, children, and the elderly—Republican resolve collapses. The process typically works like this. Day one: Republicans denounce, with nervous indignation, the growth of welfare and regulations. Day two: They concede that people in need have a right to government assistance. Day three: They propose to save particular welfare programs through pragmatic reform. Day four: They shake hands with their Democratic partners and declare that a new era of bipartisanship and consensus has finally arrived. What the mandarins of the conservative establishment do not and cannot understand, given their philosophy, is that conservatives—to the extent that they ever had any interest in defending individual rights and limited government—lost the fight because they never engaged the enemy with the only kind of weapon that could win: a moral argument against the claim that those in “need” have a moral claim on one’s life, liberty, and property. More importantly, mainstream conservatives have never made a philosophic argument for individual rights, limited government, and capitalism on explicitly moral grounds. Ultimately, they are embarrassed by, and have always worked very hard to hide, the fact that capitalism can only be justified if each and every man has a moral right to live and work for his own sake and not as a sacrificial beast of burden to the “needs” of society. It is true that the GOP and its intellectual allies in the conservative movement have employed the rhetoric of rights, but there has never been any philosophic substance to their arguments. Once one peels away the folksy rhetoric, the hollow bromides, and the patriotic slogans, the conservative position comes down to this: The free-enterprise system is good because it “works” better than any other system, because it produces more wealth that can be subsequently “shared” with the less fortunate. Not even Goldwater conservatives can offer an alternative to the welfare state, because they too accept its moral premises. Why? Why do all conservatives accept the moral premises of the liberals? The answer, in a word, is religion. Kansas Senator Sam Brownback, a leading conservative Republican (dubbed recently as “Mr. Compassionate Conservative”), says that his “focus on compassion comes . . . from his Christian faith—specifically from the Second Great Commandment, which is to love your neighbor as yourself.” Is there a conservative in America who would dare challenge Brownbacks’s moral standard? Likewise, Alabama Governor Bob Riley states the general conservative position succinctly: “According to our Christian ethics, we’re supposed to love God, love each other, and help take care of the poor.”63 Would Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh, or even Barry Goldwater denounce Riley’s assertion? Liberalism invokes the altruism of Marx; conservatism invokes the altruism of Jesus; and both camps are indebted to Rousseau for his emphasis on compassion. With respect to individual rights, there is and can be no fundamental difference between a secular-liberal welfare state and a religious-conservative welfare state. It matters not one whit to me whether my earned wealth is forcibly redistributed by a Hillary Clinton or a George Bush government; either way, my money is seized. The political subjugation of the individual in the name of the morality of sacrifice is the essence of both. Compassionate conservatism and neoconservatism have not corrupted the GOP as some conservatives have argued; they have simply exploited and brought to the surface principles that have been at the heart of the conservative intellectual movement from the beginning. Consequently, after decades of an impossible struggle in which conservatives fought liberal government programs while accepting and agreeing with liberal altruism, they have finally and officially given up, abandoned their former half-formed principles, and openly embraced the philosophical roots of the Left. The Bush administration, the Republican Party, and the conservative intelligentsia have now fully and openly embraced liberalism’s two basic principles: altruism and pragmatism. The conservative movement has stepped both its feet into a philosophic sinkhole and is drowning in a miasma of sentimental mush and cynical manipulation. Compassionate conservatism permits Republicans to demonstrate publicly how much they “care” for those in need, while neoconservatism provides them with a philosophy of governance that shows them how to devise (allegedly) more cost-effective welfare programs. The common denominator between compassionate conservatism and neoconservatism is what Fred Barnes calls “big government conservatism,” a philosophy of governance embodied in the person of George W. Bush: First, he’s realistic. He understands why Mr. Reagan failed to reduce the size of the federal government and why Newt Gingrich and the GOP revolutionaries failed as well. The reason: People like big government so long as it’s not a huge drag on the economy. So Mr. Bush abandoned the all-but-hopeless fight that Mr. Reagan and conservatives on Capitol Hill had waged to jettison the Department of Education. Instead, he’s opted to infuse the department with conservative goals. A second trait is a programmatic bent. Big government conservatives prefer to be in favor of things because that puts them on the political offensive. Promoting spending cuts/minimalist government doesn’t do that. Mr. Bush has famously defined himself as a compassionate conservative with a positive agenda. Almost by definition, this makes him a big government conservative. His most ambitious program is his faith-based initiative. It would use government funds to expand social programs run by religious organizations. . . . Another trait is a far more benign view of government than traditional conservatives have. Big government conservatives are favorably disposed toward what neoconservative Irving Kristol has called a “conservative welfare state.” (Neocons tend to be big government conservatives.) This means they support transfer payments that have a neutral or beneficial effect (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid) and oppose those that subsidize bad behavior (welfare).64 Conservative intellectuals and Republican politicians no longer hold their noses and reluctantly accept the welfare state as an unfortunate political reality, as a “necessary evil” about which they can do little but compromise. No: Today’s conservatives and their compassionate leader, George W. Bush, will go down in history as the first Republicans to openly and explicitly advocate a conservative welfare state as a “positive good.” As we have seen, the policies of compassionate conservatives and neoconservatives merge to promote a shared common end: the violation of individual rights for the sake of “general welfare” and for the “needs” of the “less fortunate.” Not only have conservatives and Republicans abandoned any semblance of a principled moral opposition to the welfare state, they now fully embrace it morally and politically. Thus there is no meaningful difference between the Christian sentimentalism of the New Right and the moral relativism of the New Left. They both treat emotions and feelings as their means of knowing what is true and good—and what they “know” to be true and good is that self-sacrifice is moral and self-interest is immoral. Thus there is no meaningful difference between the aims of today’s conservatives and those of today’s liberals. They share the same moral premises and political ends; they differ only marginally in the means they choose to achieve their shared goal: the welfare state. The ultimate meaning of big-government conservatism was captured recently in the Christian Science Monitor, by Patrick Chisholm, who reported that the compassionate- and neo-conservative policies of the Bush administration have served to advance the long-term ideological and political agenda of the redistributionist Left. Chisholm writes: Certain trends have been favoring the left for the past several decades. In the early 1960s, transfer payments (entitlements and welfare) constituted less than a third of the federal government’s budget. Now they constitute almost 60 percent of the budget, or about $1.4 trillion per year. Measured according to this, the US government’s main function now is redistribution: taking money from one segment of the population and giving it to another segment. In a few decades, transfer payments are expected to make up more than 75 percent of federal government spending.65 The redistributionist state that began with the New Deal, and that was radicalized by the Great Society, has now been saved, reborn, and advanced by the Conservative Revolution. As the United States advances toward socialism by a series of gradual, halting steps, it is not the liberals or the socialists but rather the conservatives who bear the greatest guilt for dragging America down the road to statism. When they are out of power, conservatives often claim to stand for private property, limited government, and capitalism (thereby serving as a brake against the ambitions of the Left), but when they are in power they have a proven record of hastening our descent into socialism (which is fueled by the mutual desires of the Left). Conservatives may posture as supporters of individual rights, limited government, and capitalism; but, in reality, they are morally opposed to these values, and their history is one of actively betraying them. A New Moral Code The conservative movement in all its forms has demonstrated repeatedly its unwillingness and inability to defend the political principles of a free society. Its intellectual leaders do not believe in or have the ability to validate philosophically the principles on which this country was founded. If the American principles of limited government and capitalism are to survive and serve our lives and the lives of our loved ones, they must be defended uncompromisingly as moral, just, and true. This means that proponents of these principles must find a philosophic alternative to the conservatives’ stale bromides and folksy speeches. It is not enough to defend limited government on the grounds that it works in practice; one must also defend it on the more fundamental grounds that it is moral in theory. Nor is it enough to show that the regulatory welfare state does not work; one must also show that it is immoral. Arguments from authority or tradition will not do, either. That great men advocated freedom, and that freedom is part and parcel of our heritage, are truths, but they are not arguments. Those who want to defend the American principles of limited government and capitalism must do so on objective philosophical grounds. They need a rational, principled alternative to conservatism. A truly free society is defined by its understanding and protection of individual rights—the right of each individual to act on the judgment of his own mind so long as he does not violate the same rights of others. This, the principle of individual rights, is the touchstone of a free society; this is what must be defended and embraced as an absolute, moral principle. But how is this principle validated philosophically? This is the question that leaves even the Goldwater conservatives stammering in dogmatic assertion. (Other conservatives do not believe in such principles.) In contradistinction to the relativistic Left, Goldwater conservatives claim to stand for absolute and certain moral principles. But if you ask them to defend and prove such principles philosophically, if you ask them to define individual rights objectively, they simply invoke the “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” as self-evident, and, thus, end the conversation. It is radically insufficient to quote the first two paragraphs of the Declaration of Independence or the speeches of Abraham Lincoln as if that constitutes an argument. The principles on which America was founded should be venerated because they are true and right and crucial to human life—not because they are “ours” or because they are old and dear. To stand on principle, to offer a moral argument in support of capitalism, is now considered by conservatives to be impractical and imprudent. But capitalism simply cannot be defended without a moral argument—a moral argument in support of individual rights and against their violation—which means: in support of self-interest and against self-sacrifice. What aspiring advocates of capitalism need is a philosophy that identifies and defends the moral core of individualism—the ethics of rational egoism. Conservatives have always run at a full gallop from having their philosophy identified with a morality of “selfishness.” But self-interest is and always has been, to use Irving Kristol’s language, in “the American grain.” It is the ideal that animates the Declaration of Independence; it is the reason why man’s inalienable rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness matter. Rational egoism holds that each individual should pursue his own welfare or self-interest—and that no one has a right to force anyone to act against his own judgment or to sacrifice himself for the “sake” of others. It is the idea that each individual owns himself and has both a right and a responsibility to pursue his own interests according to his own judgment while respecting the rights of others to do the same. What validates this principle? The same thing that validates all objective moral principles: the fact that man’s life depends on it. Man’s metaphysical condition is that he is a rational, volitional being with no pre-programmed or automatic code of values. It is precisely because man has free will that he requires a moral code—a moral code that will help identify the long-range material and spiritual requirements of his life. Man is a being of self-made soul, which means that he has the power to pursue life-serving goals and happiness or not. He must choose on a daily basis whether to be rational or irrational, hardworking or lazy, independent or dependent, honest or dishonest, just or unjust. It is in man’s self-interest and it is his fundamental right to pursue a life of happiness—which means, to pursue a rewarding career, financial security, recreational activities, travel, art, romance, friendships, and so forth. This is why man needs a consistent, integrated moral code: to guide him in the pursuit of such life-serving goals. The proper moral purpose of every individual’s life is to pursue his life-sustaining, life-enhancing values; the proper moral purpose of government is to protect his right to do so. Rational egoism is the only moral philosophy (and capitalism is the only social system) that recognizes each individual as an end in himself and as the proper beneficiary of his own productive actions. It is the only moral code that entails and supports the principle of individual rights; thus it is the only moral code that can support capitalism. Any attempt to ground capitalism on, or to reconcile it with, a moral teaching that forces men to sacrifice their interests for the alleged sake of others is doomed to failure. Americans must remember what conservatives have forgotten (or never fully understood): that the United States was founded on the idea that individuals have unalienable rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness. These rights are valid only if individuals morally own themselves and are the proper beneficiaries of their own efforts. Each man is a morally sovereign entity. This is why no person is legitimately the master or the slave of another. But this principle, the principle of man’s rights, is the morality of egoism applied to a social-political context. Those who refuse to recognize and embrace egoism refuse to recognize and embrace man’s rights. What the principle of individual rights means, in practice, is that individuals must be free to pursue their own self-interest—which means, free of the one and only thing that can prevent them from doing so: physical force. The principle of individual rights prohibits the initiation of physical force against people, whether by individuals or by governments; it is the moral and legal mechanism by which people live together peacefully. Rights, properly understood, serve as a moral and legal fence that defines boundaries of human action between individuals in their relations with each other and between individuals in their relations with the state. The recognition of individual rights implies three things: first, that each man must accept full responsibility for governing his own life; second, that no man should be coerced into sacrificing his liberty or property in order to satisfy someone else’s needs or wants; and third, that man’s only reciprocal social obligation is a negative obligation—to not violate the rights of others. This is what it means to live in a free and civilized society. For conservatives to argue, as virtually all of them do, that “rights impose obligations”—meaning positive obligations, obligations to provide goods or services to the unproductive—is a blatant contradiction. This notion is the fatal philosophic flaw that has destroyed the concept of individual rights in the minds of Americans. The only “obligation” connected with individual rights is the obligation to respect the rights of others—which means, not to initiate physical force against them. But this is not what conservatives mean by the term. Conservatives use the notion of “obligation” or “duty” as a moral counterbalance to the individualism connected with the idea of rights. For conservatives, the obligations imposed by rights represent the “duties” we owe to others, to “society,” to the “public interest,” to the “common good.” This means that the individual has an obligation to sacrifice, to give up some part of his life, for others. But to say that “rights impose obligations” is the moral equivalent of saying that food requires poison in order to be nutritious. Because of their fear of challenging the morality of self-sacrifice and championing the morality of self-interest, conservatives—more so than liberals—have obliterated the concept of rights in the minds of Americans. Observe how conservatives react when liberals play the poverty guilt card; observe their intellectual disarmament when liberals taunt them about the needs of the downtrodden; observe their “me-too-ing” moral appeasement when liberals laud self-sacrifice as the essence of moral virtue. What conservatives purporting to defend capitalism do not (or will not) recognize is that altruism and individual rights are philosophic opposites that cannot be reconciled. (Their neoconservative and compassionate-conservative brethren recognize it, and choose to reject capitalism.) Capitalism is the only social system that upholds the principle of rights; it is the only system in which individuals are fully free to act on their own best judgment. At the heart of capitalism, then, is the politics of individualism (i.e., the individual free of government coercion, free to pursue his values) and, at the heart of individualism, is egoism. Communists, socialists, fascists, and liberals have always understood the integral relationship between egoism and capitalism. They have always known that by demonizing egoism (the ethics of self-interest), they could discredit capitalism (the politics of self-interest). Conservatives, by running from the former, have abandoned the latter. In the 1950s and 60s, conservatives could be faulted for lacking the courage to morally defend capitalism and for diluting whatever good principles they had with an admixture of bad or contradictory principles. Today’s conservatives, however, have either rejected principles as such, or, as is increasingly the case, have explicitly embraced the moral premises of the Left. Because they refuse to defend capitalism morally, on the basis of egoism, conservatives have compromised and sold-out the rights of the American people. They have ceded the principled high ground to the Left by accepting the moral rationale for the welfare state—altruism and its attendant notion that “need” is a legitimate moral claim. Those who value freedom and capitalism must abandon altruism and the fantasy philosophies that support it (including religion). They must embrace egoism and the factual foundation for individual rights. They must defend capitalism—not only because it works better than any other social system—but also, and more fundamentally, because it is the only moral social system.

Catching Wild Pigs

2008-10-20T16:09:33Z

Freedomwatcher

+18 raves

This was a neat e-mail I recieved and decided to share it with everyone. "A government that governs best is that which governs least." Catching Wild Pigs A chemistry professor in a large college had some exchange students in the class. One day while the class was in the lab the Professor noticed one young man (exchange student) who kept rubbing his back, and stretching as if his back hurt. The professor asked the young man what was the matter. The student told him he had a bullet lodged in his back. He had been shot while fighting communists in his native country who were trying to overthrow his country's government and install a new communist government. In the midst of his story he looked at the professor and asked a strange question. He asked, 'Do you know how to catch wild pigs?' The professor thought it was a joke and asked for the punchline. The young man said this was no joke. 'You catch w ild pigs by finding a suitable place in the woods and putting corn on the ground. The pigs find it and begin to come everyday to eat the free corn. When they are used to coming every day, you put a fence down one side of the place where they are used to coming. When they get used to the fence, they begin to eat the corn again and you put up another side of the fence. They get used to that and start to eat again. You continue until you have all four sides of the fence up with a gate in The last side. The pigs, who are used to the free corn, start to come through the gate to eat, you slam the gate on them and catc h the whole herd. Suddenly the wild pigs have lost their freedom. They run around and around inside the fence, but they are caught. Soon they go back to eating the free corn. They are so used to it that they have forgotten how to forage in the woods for themselves, so they accept their captivity. The young man then told the professor that is exactly what he sees happening to Ame rica. The government keeps pushing us toward socialism and keeps spreading the free corn out in the form of programs such as supplemental income, tax credit for unearned income, tobacco subsidies, dairy subsidies, payments not to plant crops (CRP), welfare, medicine, drugs, etc.. While we continually lose our freedoms -- just a little at a time. One should always remember: There is no such thing as a free lunch! Also, a politician will never provide a service for you cheaper than you can do it yourself. Also, if you see that all of this wonderful government 'help' is a proble m confronting the future of democracy in America , you might want to send this on to your friends. If you think the free ride is essential to your way of life then you will probably delete this email, but God help you when the gate slams shut! In this 'very important' election year, listen closely to what the candidates are promising you !! Just maybe you will be able to tell who is about to slam the gate on America . ”A government big enough to give you everything you want, is big enough to take away everything you have” Thomas Jefferson

Now it's our turn

2008-09-25T15:59:31Z

Freedomwatcher

+11 raves

http://yannone.blogspot.com/ Wednesday, September 24, 2008 Now it's our turn by Mark Yannone While the Federal Reserve and the executive and legislative branches of the United States federal government conspire to relieve you and me of another $700 billion of our income, savings, and other assets, it's incumbent upon us, the people who created and first authorized these monsters, to assert ourselves with corrective action. Elementary economics tells us that as our costs rise above our ability to pay, our expenses must be cut. Here is a starter list of annual expenses that must be reduced to $0.00, and the sooner the better: Most of these federal activities are not permitted by Article 1 Section 8 of the Constitution (hence they are illegal) or they have been declared ineffective by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) or they are both illegal and ineffective. But this is just a hint of a start. A thorough and detailed audit of the federal budget will reveal many, many hundreds of billions of dollars of additional expenses that can and must be eliminated. The benefits of doing so are innumerable, among them these crucial few: Americans will be solvent. Our federal government will be far less criminal. Americans' productivity will soar. Americans will compete successfully in world markets. Our resources will be much better allocated. The world will not have to arm itself against us. American families will be rebuilt. Energy consumption will be greatly reduced. When Americans regain control of their private property, citizens of all nations will benefit, for no one is exempt from the impoverishment and violence imposed by America's corrupt government. Finally, as a special treat for those who object to the elimination of the federal income tax for individuals, I give you attorney Tom Cryer, a prince among America's many, many heroes past and present. Mind you, he stands in a large and growing crowd. Tom Cryer PS: For those not convinced of the need for meaningful, intelligent correction immediately, but certainly not panic, Ron Paul delivered the following message today. September 24, 2008 Dear Friends, Whenever a Great Bipartisan Consensus is announced, and a compliant media assures everyone that the wondrous actions of our wise leaders are being taken for our own good, you can know with absolute certainty that disaster is about to strike. The events of the past week are no exception. The bailout package that is about to be rammed down Congress' throat is not just economically foolish. It is downright sinister. It makes a mockery of our Constitution, which our leaders should never again bother pretending is still in effect. It promises the American people a never-ending nightmare of ever-greater debt liabilities they will have to shoulder. Two weeks ago, financial analyst Jim Rogers said the bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac made America more communist than China! "This is welfare for the rich," he said. "This is socialism for the rich. It's bailing out the financiers, the banks, the Wall Streeters." That describes the current bailout package to a T. And we're being told it's unavoidable. The claim that the market caused all this is so staggeringly foolish that only politicians and the media could pretend to believe it. But that has become the conventional wisdom, with the desired result that those responsible for the credit bubble and its predictable consequences -- predictable, that is, to those who understand sound, Austrian economics -- are being let off the hook. The Federal Reserve system is actually positioning itself as the savior, rather than the culprit, in this mess! The Treasury Secretary is authorized to purchase up to $700 billion in mortgage-related assets at any one time. That means $700 billion is only the very beginning of what will hit us. Financial institutions are "designated as financial agents of the government." This is the New Deal to end all New Deals. Then there's this: "Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency." Translation: the Secretary can buy up whatever junk debt he wants to, burden the American people with it, and be subject to no one in the process. There goes your country. Even some so-called free-market economists are calling all this "sadly necessary." Sad, yes. Necessary? Don't make me laugh. Our one-party system is complicit in yet another crime against the American people. The two major-party candidates for president themselves initially indicated their strong support for bailouts of this kind -- another example of the big choice we're supposedly presented with this November: yes or yes. Now, with a backlash brewing, they're not quite sure what their views are. A sad display, really. Although the present bailout package is almost certainly not the end of the political atrocities we'll witness in connection with the crisis, time is short. Congress may vote as soon as tomorrow. With a Rasmussen poll finding support for the bailout at an anemic seven percent, some members of Congress are afraid to vote for it. Call them! Let them hear from you! Tell them you will never vote for anyone who supports this atrocity. The issue boils down to this: do we care about freedom? Do we care about responsibility and accountability? Do we care that our government and media have been bought and paid for? Do we care that average Americans are about to be looted in order to subsidize the fattest of cats on Wall Street and in government? Do we care? When the chips are down, will we stand up and fight, even if it means standing up against every stripe of fashionable opinion in politics and the media? Times like these have a way of telling us what kind of a people we are and what kind of country we shall be. In liberty, Ron Paul

Republocrat campaign song

2008-09-17T19:36:31Z

Freedomwatcher

+14 raves

LOL!!! I couldn't resist! Funny but truly sad!