The New Clarion

I took a look at the new Republican Pledge to America and I don’t like it at all. In the first paragraph of the introduction is this sentence: “America is the belief that any man or woman can – given economic, political, and religious liberty – advance themselves, their families, and the common good.” Right off the bat is the influence of collectivism-common good. Since only individuals exist, and since the good of individuals is the only good to exist, anytime the common good is said to be in addition to the good of individuals, it means that the good of some individuals can (and will be) sacrificed to other individuals. This is not a founding principle of our nation. (more…)

The pieces on the internet about a possible electromagnetic pulse attack read like science fiction. It’s TEOTWAWKI stuff (The End Of The World As We Know It). These doomsday scenarios raise questions that I’ll get to later.

The attack would be a nuclear missile that exploded not on a city but in the atmosphere above the USA. It would cause an electromagnetic pulse that knocked out everything electronic, with micro chips being also vulnerable, in the line of sight of the explosion.

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Ideas have consequences. It’s a catch phrase that has been repeated so much on the right that it is something of a bromide. And yet, the premise of this statement is little held in our pragmatist age.

Look at the $787 stimulus bill that the Democrats, under the sway of the dead economist John Maynard Keynes, passed into law. We were told unemployment would go down; it went up. Does Keynes get the blame?

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I spend a lot of time attacking conservatism on this blog, and for good reason; conservatives claim to be the defenders of America against the Left, and this claim is ultimately untenable and fraudulent for many reasons.  It is, however, very plausible for various reasons, primarily the conservatives’ professed opposition to the Left, and to the consequent migration of pro-Americans to the side they have been led to believe is theirs — and so exposing conservatisms’ anti-American essence is much more urgent.

What often gets lost in all this, largely due to the utter implausibility thereof,  is that the Left in America also makes these claims on occasion.  Since their followers have been almost completely weaned away from the knowledge of what Americanism actually is, it is usually not necessary for them to do so.  Such efforts are without exception laughably weak, plainly meant for internal consumption as a means for modern “liberals” to reassure themselves and each other that they are still, somehow, “liberals” in the grand American meaning of the term.  That these efforts are so fleeting illustrates how insubstantial are the last remaining links of the modern American Left to its victim, the hollowed-out shell of what was once liberalism.

I offer as a case in point, the following article by Michael Lind, which attempts to deflect the ever-accurate charge that American “liberalism” has been on an anti-American road since FDR by the incredibly thin means of attacking the charge as “Straussian”.  Below is the fisking I posted in his comments. Passages in italics are Lind’s, and items in [] are corrections I added here that are not in the original comment, with the exception of the “[citation needed]” references to Wikipedia.

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Back in July, Marcus Cole at PileusBlog penned a wonderful post, describing the importance of the individual right to bear arms in connection with the freedom of blacks to take up arms in self-defense amid recurrent failure of government to do its job of defending them (to the point of aiding, abetting and even mandating racism itself).

The best part, however, is how Cole proceeds from this point to challenge the liberal-conservative assault on the open-ended nature of individual rights.  This is the principle that individuals act by right (i.e. they are free to act as they please except for certain things prohibited by law) while governments act by permission (i.e. government cannot do anything except what is permitted to them by law).

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1962:

“Greatness is achieved by the productive effort of a man’s mind in the pursuit of clearly defined, rational goals.  But a delusion of grandeur can be served only by the switching, undefinable chimera of a public monument — which is presented as a munificent gift to the victims whose forced labor or extorted money had paid for it — which is dedicated to the service of all and none, owned by all and none, gaped at by all and enjoyed by none.”

“Rome fell, bankrupted by statist controls and taxation, while its emperors were building coliseums.  Louis XIV of France taxed his people into a state of indigence, while he built the palace of Versailles for his contemporary monarchs to envy and for modern tourists to visit.  The marble-lined Moscow subway, built by the unpaid “volunteer” labor of Russian workers, including women, is a public monument, and so is the Czarist-like luxury of the champagne-and-caviar receptions at the Soviet embassies, which is needed — while the people stand in line for food rations — “to maintain the prestige of the Soviet Union.”

–Ayn Rand, “The Monument Builders”, from The Virtue of Selfishness

2010:

“But the pols couldn’t resist soaking the Meadowlands. They siphoned track proceeds into the state budget; repeatedly refinanced the NJSEA’s bonds, pushing repayment dates far into the future; and relied on the authority’s good credit rating to launch other building schemes, including a costly but unsuccessful aquarium in Camden. Today, 35 years after its first bonds, the NJSEA is $830 million in hock.”

Are you ready for the latest stench to arise from the Obama swamp? The “Science Czar” wants to “use” the free market to “de-develop” the United States.

What?

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I don’t listen to Hugh Hewitt a lot lately, but I did today because I suspected that he had supported Mike Castle as the most electable candidate in Delaware — according to Hewitt’s very conventional wisdom — and I wondered what he would say the day after Christine O’Donnell had beat his man.

My suspicion was right. The first caller accused Hugh of being behind the curve on O’Donnell. It hit a nerve and Hugh lost his temper, saying that no one could challenge his conservatism. It was an odd thing to say, as no one was challenging Hewitt’s conservatism. Hugh used his lawyerly tricks, shutting the caller up by shouting a question at him — then when the caller tried to answer him, Hugh hung up on him. Republican pragmatists are unnerved by the principles of the Tea Party Movement.

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The Tea Party candidates are riding a wave of voters energized and angry at big government. Joe Miller and Christine O’Donnell, among other new Republican politicians, have beaten candidates supported by the Republican establishment to win Republican primaries.

I applaud this trend. As long as I have been watching American politics I’ve been disgusted by the GOP’s way of electing moderates because they can win. Principled candidates have been called “extremists” and therefore unelectable. Instead the establishment backed the pragmatist — no matter how much a watered down welfare statist he was. These moderates have marched hand in hand with the Democrats down the road to serfdom.

It looks like the American people, at least the Republican voters, have had enough of moderation. They want politicians who will oppose the explosion of big government we’ve seen under Obama-Reid-Pelosi, and to be fair, under George W. Bush. The people are out in front of the Republican establishment here, but that’s a good thing: bringing the politicians along with people is easier than changing the masses.

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A fantastic post by Gus Van Horn on the topic of anti-Objectivist screeds discusses what I have long known about 99% of Objectivism’s and Ayn Rand’s critics:

And that — the attempt to prevent Rand’s ideas from getting a fair hearing — is the common thread that has run through all the misconceptions, smears, and outright lies about Rand and her ideas that I’ve encountered ever since. You can draw your own conclusions about why so many of her ideological opponents elect to use such tactics.

Well, Gus, I will indeed draw those conclusions, to wit:  what her critics expect, is that if her ideas get a fair hearing, their ideas will lose.

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What happens when the Nanny State thinks it knows how to run your life better than you know? In California cops tasered a man who was no threat to anyone else — in his own living room, for his own supposed good.

If someone wants to destroy his own life, the state has no business stopping him. This intervention by police and their use of tasers to take an old man down is outrageous. What’s next, people being arrested because they don’t go in for their yearly check-up?