The New Clarion

For about 80 yrs now the government has been trying to be everything to everyone, trying to provide everyone with their daily bread and failing miserably. Why?
Because the government has nothing to offer. All it has is its monopoly on physical force. All it can do is stand over the productive members of society with the club of physical force and compel obedience. Case in point: An editorial in today’s New York Times champions the new House health care bill saying in part:

“The bill requires employers, except for small businesses, to offer health coverage to their workers and pay a substantial share of the premiums or face a big penalty. That would be a useful prod to make insurance more available and affordable to employees.” (bold mine)

No Senator, Congressman, judge or member of the executive branch is going to insure anyone. All they can do is point a gun at the insurance companies, doctors and other health care professionals and decree ‘sacrifice or else.’ Then point another gun at the heads of citizens and decree ‘accept these sacrificial offerings or else.’

It is really sad to see an establishment of professional intellectuals like the Times advocating the government initiate force against citizens. It’s even sadder that professional organizations like the AMA and the ANA (American Nurses Assoc.) are willing to go along with the sacrifice of its members. But as long as people think sacrifice itself, for any reason, is virtuous, the destruction of medicine and our society will continue. It is trade not sacrifice that is virtuous. Trade represents voluntary relationships. Sacrifice requires force because it is contrary to human nature. Sacrifice is not the giving up of a value for some desired result. The loss of the value is the desired result.

You may have seen the quote from a recent speech by the Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), Rocco Landesman:

 . . . Barack Obama is the most powerful writer since Julius Caesar.

Coming from someone whose own position of influence and power is dependent on Obama, it is hardly surprising that he is licking the boots of the President.  He justifies the statement by noting that the US is the most powerful country on the planet, and Obama is a writer; ergo, he’s the most powerful writer.  He followed that statement with the cashing in:

 That has to be good for American artists.

In other words, with the proper amount of adoration and flattery directed his way, President Obama is likely to steal more money from the American public and transfer it to shameless artists than any previous President. 

The motto or theme of the new Chairman of the NEA is “art works.”  Landesman explained that the theme has three meanings. First, artists produce works of art, or “art works.”  Second:

 . . . art works on and within people to change – that word again – and inspire them, it addresses the need we all have to create, to imagine, to aspire to something more, to become, if only for a few moments, more than we’ve been. It is the most hopeful of human activities. And one of the most essential.

And finally:

art works because arts jobs are real jobs. The 5.7 million people who have full-time arts-related jobs in this country are a part of the real economy. They pay taxes and spend money. Obviously. But we’re going to be making a point beyond that. Any discussion of policy for coming out of this recession, any plan that addresses economic growth and urban and neighborhood revitalization has to include the arts.

The first meaning of “art works” is a straightforward fact.  It does not, however, have any bearing on forced public funding of the arts.  Every profession produces something.  Most of them are not shameless enough to beg for public assistance, however.

The second meaning of “art works” is also true.  As Objectivists, we know the inspirational value of great art.  But again, what has that to do with forced public assistance?  If an artist produces an art work individuals value, they will pay for it voluntarily.  Otherwise not.  His statement that art is “the most hopeful of human activities” is at best unfortunate, and at worst, simply wrong.  Hope connotes a passive desire for something, rather than an active pursuit of it.  Hope never accomplishes anything. Hope is the stock in trade of characters like Dickens’ Mr. Micawber, who:

 . . . is famous for frequently asserting his faith that “something will turn up.” His name has become synonymous with someone who lives in hopeful expectation.

That President Obama titled one of his books The Audacity of Hope is characteristic of the Liberal mind.  Rather than encouraging people to go out and earn their own keep, pursue their own goals, be dependent on no one, expect no unearned favors, that title encourages the belief that others will give you what you want, all you have to do is hope.  To anyone who takes responsibility for his own life and goals, hope is not a value.  It’s an excuse to rely on others. 

The third meaning of “art works” is the heart of the appeal.  Landesman wants us to believe that this particular redistribution of wealth will help the economy.  This is what one would expect from any socialist.  He wants us to tax and spend our way out of the recession.  And he expects us to be impressed that these subsidized artists will pay taxes on their stolen money.  I’m only impressed at the audacity of these crooks.

Proving his inability to learn from experience, Landesman has this to say:                    

I know firsthand that great art can come from the unlikeliest of places. A few years ago, I visited Eric, Oklahoma, where a museum was being dedicated to one of my idols, the great country music songwriter and singer, Roger Miller. He wrote the music for my first show, “Big River.” While driving the 140 miles from Oklahoma city to Eric, you pass the hometowns of Sheb Wooley, one of the creators of rock and roll, the songwriter Jimmy Webb, and Garth Brooks. What is in the water there? There are certainly no music conservatories, probably precious few music teachers, no colleges, no arts centers, nothing. Just an inexplicable concentration of genius.

 Somehow, these artists sprang up and made a living for themselves without public money!  Therefore, we need public money for artists? 

What was in the water there, Mr. Landesman?  Individualism.

To Canadians’ great shame, it was Canada’s province of Saskatchewan that initiated socialist politics in N. America, under Tommy Douglas.

Douglas brought to N. America, the unoriginal, yet winning, political trick…

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If America ever declines to the point that we’re a dictatorship — and I think it is still a matter of if, not when — it will come about mostly because of two classes of people: the ignorant and the cowardly.

The ignorant are those whose minds have been destroyed by government schools. After 12 years of learning to conform to the group, they can’t think independently. When the state raises a boogie man such as global warming before their eyes, they cannot judge the science. The ignorant respond, “Yes, save us from the boogie man! Control our lives if you must, but make us secure.”

The cowardly are those who should know better, but again, the urge to conform shuts them up. Another name for the cowardly is moderates. Their fear of “extremism” keeps Leviathan afloat.

(Interesting that both the ignorant and the cowardly lack the virtue of independence. Maybe Ayn Rand knew something when she made independence central to The Fountainhead. If the state can make people conform, then its job is done. It doesn’t have to prove anything, it just gives marching orders.)

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Are we not men?  Or are we herbivorous sheep?  Do we have rights, or don’t we?  Are we sovereign, independent souls with our own goals and pleasures, or are we slaves of the state?  The British Climate Chief – yes, such a bureacratic position exists – feels that we should all give up meat, and he’s willing to force us to see things his way, too. 

In an interview with The Times, Lord Stern of Brentford said: “Meat is a wasteful use of water [whose water?] and creates a lot of greenhouse gases. It puts enormous pressure on the world’s resources [the "world" has no say in the matter. Resources are property, only the property owner has the right to decide what to do with his resources.] . A vegetarian diet is better [Better for whom, and by what standard?].”

Lord Stern does think people’s attitude toward meat-eating will change when they realize it is contributing to the impending possibility of “runaway climate change.”  But, just in case they don’t change, he has another plan:

Lord Stern, the author of the influential 2006 Stern Review on the cost of tackling global warming, said that a successful deal at the Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December would lead to soaring costs for meat and other foods that generate large quantities of greenhouse gases. [Emphasis added.]

Why is it that environmentalist “solutions” are always totalitarian in practice?    Why can they not “live and let live”?  Clearly, environmentalism does not acknowledge the existence of rights, property or otherwise.  They paint themselves as defenders of the planet, or of man’s future (by preserving the planet for his future use), and people altruistically acquiese.  To save the planet, man must sacrifice his property rights.  And his right to the pursuit of happiness, if that includes eating meat, or driving an SUV, or logging, or whaling, or any of the other environmentalist sacred cows.  And his right to liberty, if he violates any of their commandments. 

As for their claim to be preserving the Earth for future people’s enjoyment or use, it is patently false.  Tomorrow never comes.  Future generations will have to sacrifice their property rights to still more distant generations, ad infinitum.

Two points, to start.

1. My father’s heart arrhythmias have settled, and his sodium levels have been managed through intravenous fluids and fluid intake restriction.  Though he could barely walk, he was deemed strong enough, to no longer be eligible for a hospital bed.  Indeed, if he chose to stay, three doors from my mother, he would be charged $750 per day!

2. Now, my mother’s TSH (Thyroid Stimulating Hormone) levels are unusually high, due to a benign pituitary tumor, causing her thyroid to be dysfunctional.  As a result, she has sudden blackouts due to rapid blood pressure drops (syncope), and must stay in bed.  Her dramatic collapses to the floor —unconscious, eyes open & staring— are terribly distressing.  So far, her falls have been caught every time but one, which fortunately only caused minor bruising.   According to her condition, she can still stay in a hospital bed, for ‘free‘.

Notice how the above bolded portions indicate the rules of socialized medicine that determine the care of the patient.  Sure, Dad could stay in hospital, but the cost is obscene, and the price is clearly set so as to drive patients out.  Only under altruism would such ‘logic’, such treatment, be seen as appropriate, because it serves others in the system.  In a private system the same choice would not be so starkly enforced,  Patients in a free market would have a multitude of choices that are not available in the government system.

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Ron Bloom, Obama’s manufacturing czar, produced this remarkable quote:

“Generally speaking, we get the joke. We know that the free market is nonsense. We know that the whole point is to game the system … we know that this is largely about power. That this is an adults only, no limit game. We kind of agree with Mao that political power comes largely from the barrel of a gun. And we get it that if you want a friend you should get a dog.”

Can you believe the cynicism?

A politician who can say that is capable of anything. Every sentence in that quote can be used to rationalize violating individual rights.

In response to my post, My Father and Socialized Medicine, comments made by Greg Paulhus deserve a full post in response.  They are typical of arguments for socialized medicine, that in final analysis do not stand.

My Dad’s situation may not be entirely ‘routine’, as Paulhus suggests, but his inappropriate care, is no less disgusting for being so readily accepted, and is no less a function of  ‘the system’.  There are many other such occurrences.  Paulhus’s uncle’s experience may be a ‘majority’ example, but that kind of success can be found in any large scale operation.

That is, “Lemon” cars exist, but smart shoppers still look for the vehicle make and model that is least likely to result in their buying a lemon.  By his ‘majority’ argument Paulhus (unthinkingly) presumes it is okay to sacrifice My father to the system, since His uncle is doing fine.  Would he care to  have them switch places, and give his uncle the ‘lemon’… it is, after all, the same “fantastic” system?

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Victor Davis Hanson has written an interesting piece on being a cultural drop-out. He does not follow contemporary pop culture or journalism. Though in some respects I’m not as consistently opposed to the new, I could identify with his position, and I’ll bet many readers of this blog could, too.

Today’s culture is the result of the New Leftist cultural revolution of the 1960′s and 70′s. This revolution is an enormous success precisely because most people don’t understand that it happened. Young people take the culture they were born into as a metaphysical fact like the air we breath.

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Ron Pisaturo goes to the video tape on Anita Dunn, the White House Communications Director who idolizes Chairman Mao.

Mark Steyn analyzes in style.

By now I shouldn’t be shocked by anything that comes out of this White House, but I’m stunned that they think they can pass off Dunn’s glowing words about Mao as a joke. How stupid do they think we are? Check out the video tape again. (Here is a link to a shorter clip if you don’t want to sit through the longer clip Pisaturo links to.) They’re throwing the joke excuse out there as a reed their supporters can grasp to evade the truth coming from their enemies. Any reed, however slender, is better than letting the hated enemy score one against the left.

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Lord Monckton warns the USA against signing the UN Climate Change treaty. The treaty sounds to me like a mechanism designed to transfer US wealth and sovereignty to the rest of the world. It is based on bad science, but that hardly matters to the statists. They’re willing to evade the truth for their political ends.

Lord Monckton hopes the American people can stop President Obama from signing this disastrous treaty. I don’t see how anyone can stop him. This treaty is the perfect expression of everything Obama stands for: egalitarianism, altruism, statism, and bringing America to its knees before the rest of the world. No, his administration would dismiss any effort to stop this treaty as the work of the racist, unenlightened, knuckle-dragging, neanderthal right. Our only hope is that the Senate will not ratify the treaty, as they refused to do with the Kyoto Treaty.

The battle in the Senate might be one of the big political stories in 2010, an election year.

The totalitarian left is fascinating to watch — in a car wreck kind of way. One gazes at the twisted metal and broken glass of the left and wonders if he’ll see any dead bodies amid what was once a shiny, functioning machine.

For the last few weeks we have seen the left attack Rush Limbaugh in the only way it knows how anymore: by lies and character assassination. Whatever you might think of Limbaugh, and I have problems with him, he is not a racist. To stop him from being a part-owner of an NFL team, the left fabricated racist quotes. They didn’t just take questionable remarks out of context; they made up stuff that he never said.

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Obama’s response to his Nobel Prize was the best thing I’ve heard from him. He recognizes that it was awarded too soon & reflects no serious achievement.  Though his speech changes nothing, & is surely politic, he has, at least, put his award in a relatively sensible context (excluding his absurd mention of climate change). Obama sees that he has not earned the prize by the principles Alfred Nobel defined.

In fact Obama sees that his prize only means that he stands for the hope of peace.

This view, of the Far Left Nobel Committee, is as appalling as it is unsurprising.  Does the Nobel Committee see Obama’s wishes as sufficient reason for his award?  Sure, Obama wants peace, but even he knows he has not succeeded in achieving what peace requires.  His wish for that achievement means nothing.

As the expression goes, “if wishes were horses, beggars would ride“.  Does the Nobel Committee hope to give Obama a horse, (more…)

Charles Krauthammer has given a speech that might be one of the most important of the Obama Era. It is called “Decline Is A Choice,” and is printed in full at the Weekly Standard. He argues that Obama is pursuing a path of willful American decline — a decline that is neither necessary nor inevitable, but preferred by the left.

Instead of the unipolar world we were all surprised to find 20 years ago with the fall of communism, Obama wants a world in which the USA is not a superpower, but just one nation among many. It’s an egalitarian vision, in which all nations, good and bad, are equal.

Krauthammer calls the ideology behind Obama’s policy of American decline “the New Liberalism.” I think this is just names New Leftists who are no longer scruffy young protesters, but the middle aged Democrat establishment. It represents the radicalization of the Democrat Party; the Scoop Jackson wing — Democrats who were anti-communist and strong on defense — is now just footnote in modern history.

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I thought it was a joke in The Onion this morning when I read the headline, “Obama Wins 2009 Peace Prize.” For what? He has been in office for nine months and before that was a one-term United States senator. What could he have possibly accomplished so soon that merits such an award?

The answer is: nothing.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu said, “It is an award that speaks to the promise of President Obama’s message of hope.” So, the President got the award for the promise of his message, but no actual accomplishment.

French President Nicholas Sarkozy said that the award confirmed, “America’s return to the hearts of the people of the world.” How is that?

The answer comes from a member of the Nobel committee that awarded the prize, who said, “His diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world’s population.”

A plurality, perhaps even a majority of the world’s population, despises the values that America has stood for, the fundamental value of an individual’s right to his own life, and all that it implies: property rights, the right to the pursuit of happiness… capitalism. The Nobel Committee is acknowledging their fervent wish that Obama will stand for those angry masses, whose values are antithetical to America. And by doing that, America will be “loved” instead of hated.

The Nobel Committee has given this prize to Obama as a moral downpayment, an advance recognition, if you will, of future “accomplishments” they expect him to make.

Let’s hope that Obama does not live up to their wishful thinking.

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I almost did not write this commentary because the Nobel Peace Prize, in fact, merits no respect and its award is therefore hardly noteworthy. It is more of a booby prize than an honest recognition of something good. Among its recent past recipients are Yasser Arafat and Jimmy Carter, a terrorist and the American president who passively acquiesced to terrorism. For the current award, the Nobel Committee apparently passed over a Chinese dissident, among many other honorable and dishonorable nominees. This “prize” has nothing to do with peace, and everything to do with advancing the cause of statism and destroying the values that America stood for. A man of proper integrity would have rejected it.

Benjamin Kerstein has written a fascinating essay on how Obama lost the affection of Israel. He had me from the first line:

For a politician, there is no more dangerous combination of traits than hubris and ineptitude.

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The Federal Reserve recently announced that it would establish rules governing the pay of employees at essentially all bank and financial corporations in the United States. This goes well beyond just targeting CEOs at banks who received federal bailout money last year. According to the New York Times, the proposed rules would apply to 5,000 bank holding companies and state-chartered banks. And it would apply to traders, loan officers and other employees, not just top bank executives.

Ostensibly, the purpose of the rules is to reduce “systemic risk.” Allegedly, by having government regulators determine the pay of bankers, those bankers will no longer have the incentive to make risky loans to individuals and corporations.

Such a policy evades the fundamental cause of that risky behavior, namely government policies that fostered artificially cheap credit and mandated risky loans. The Fed itself is the author of these policies. It flooded the economy with cheap credit and 1% interest rates in 2003-2004, which fed the orgy of subprime borrowing. The Fed also enforced the Community Reinvestment Act that forced bankers to meet quantitative targets of loans to uncreditworthy borrowers. Moreover, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, two government-sponsored enterprises, guaranteed mortgages against default, thus ensuring that bankers would have no incentive to monitor credit risk.

The government’s subsidies, guarantees against default, and promiscuously cheap credit created an atmosphere in which private bankers were rewarded for taking excessive risks, and made to look like suckers if they prudently restrained themselves.

Yet the government blames the bankers for this mess and now wants to control their pay.

Over the past year we have seen Barney Frank (October 2008) call for a moratorium on Wall Street bonuses and President Obama (February 2009) call for limiting the bonuses of CEOs to $500,000. At the time, I warned that when government arrogates such a power to itself, do not assume that it will be confined to a few Wall Street executives. Now we see the Fed claim for itself the power to control the pay of tens of thousands of employees at every banking institution across the land.

Government fostered the financial crisis by violating the rights of private citizens through its reckless policy of subsidy and cheap credit. Now it proposes to “solve” the problem by further violating rights, including the right of employer and employee to voluntarily agree on the terms of employment.

The end game of this dangerous grab for power should be obvious. The government will not stop until it has taken complete control of the commanding heights of the economy. And it has already largely succeeded. With its progressive takeover of banking, government is now assuming control of the most important sector of the economy. The banks are fundamental in economic importance because their lending and capital raising decisions directly affect the growth of all other industries. Now the government, through its control of banking, will decide whether a particular company or industry is to receive credit, and succeed or fail.

Do not doubt that the government will use this power. Recently, for example, the Wall Street Journal reported that former Vice President Al Gore used his influence to steer two $500 million federal loans to cronies planning to make expensive “environmentally friendly” cars. Imagine what Al Gore or others will be able to do when the Fed controls the salaries of thousands of private bankers. To whom will they be able to direct loans, and for what type of quid pro quo?

Statist governments operate under a rule. They always seek to control the commanding heights of the economy. Statists know that if they control the key industry upon which all others depend, they can control all industries. Our government is seizing the commanding heights of our economy right before our eyes.

While most of our posts here at the New Clarion focus on the big wide picture of our culture’s ever-weakening resistance to primitive tyranny, here’s an instance of this “progression’ on the local scale, which nonetheless includes two key elements: an emboldened, overreaching authority, and a cowed, malfunctioning media.

Adventures in Activism: A True Story of Protest, Arrest, and Release

The Greenville News — Corrupt from Core to Top

The next time some conservative invokes state’s rights or some other such variant of “locality of government power” as a check against government power, slap him (or her) with this one.

Via Diana.

The American people have spoken. A large portion of them do not want bigger government, specifically socialized medicine.

So what do the statists conclude from from the mass demonstrations and the town hell meetings? Simple: the problem is that the people found out what they were doing. If only the people had been kept ignorant, there would have been no problem!

Thus the philosopher-kings in Washington, DC, our benevolent masters, are now working on ways to increase government without the people’s understanding of what is going on. They are intent on taking over the lives of all those idiotic American people for their own good. The trail to collectivism must be blazed in darkness and ignorance.

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Michael Medved opined today that the Republicans would have been better off censuring Bill Clinton than impeaching him. Diane Feinstein and Joe Lieberman would have gone along with a censure vote.

Like most Republicans, I supported impeachment at the time. You have to remember the context: for one and a half presidential terms we had heard Bill Clinton lie every day. Every day. The guy could not speak without lying. Even before he was elected in 1992 he had lied repeatedly. “I didn’t inhale” became a national joke. Slick Willy slid his oily way through scandal after scandal — Whitewater, bimbo eruptions, cattle futures, travel office, dubious campaign funding, missile secrets to the Chinese. For six long years Clinton had gone unpunished for his lies and corruption. I yearned for justice. When he lied to the grand jury about having sex, I wanted him hanged.

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