The New Clarion

As a historian, it irritates me when people cite historical evidence after a superficial Internet search (or, worse yet, treat Wikipedia as a primary source). Matthew Yglesias—I know, I know, I may as well be reading Krugman—today argues that opposition to mass transit stems at its root from jingoism. This is a familiar refrain and fallback position for the left when they can detect no traces of racism. To support his notion that publicly-funded mass transit is American, he looks to our history in an attempt to showcase his straw men’s hypocrisy.

He discovers that the biggest subways are in non-European cities and that most of the prominent rapid transit systems are domestic. A commenter helpfully added further support:

Here’s a postcard from live free or die New Hampshire, circa 1877. And, oh no — Socialism!

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Joe Romm may think this is the worst Super Bowl commercial {via} ever, but I have to disagree:

I believe that Audi intended it as a caricature: the only difference is that there is not yet an actual police force dedicated to environmental law enforcement at such a visible level. The absurd, petty laws from the commercial actually exist and the intrusiveness of the movement is incredible. (Looks like I’m not the only one that’s noticed the parallels.)

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In my darker moments, when my view of the future dims at the latest “hell in a hand basket” news story, I worry about the sort of a world my children will grow up into. We strive to foster in them an abiding sense of curiosity and wonder about the world. We raise them as independent, ambitious little girls and boy. But all around us we see parents who coddle their children, turning them into wilting violets or, alternatively, domineering masters of their households. By all accounts, my kids should have an incredible advantage in whatever they choose to do with their lives. Knowing themselves and letting reality be their guide, the world should be open to whatever they dare to dream.

Then I read something like this story out of San Diego and I feel like I am setting them up for a life of strife, struggle, and obstacles. There will always be some petty bureaucrat or administrator who will try to stub out their spirit when they show some spark or initiative. This little boy, who committed a “crime” but without “criminal intent,” had to surrender his innocent science project to a bomb squad while he and his fellow students were first put in lockdown and then evacuated. I’m sure he won’t make that “mistake” again.

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Here’s a lighter take on Climategate:

The release of previously-sequestered emails, documents, and program code offered confirmation of what many anthropogenic global warming (AGW) skeptics always suspected: the politicization of climate science had utterly corrupted the findings. Those findings, viz. that global warming was taking place and that man’s actions had brought it about, formed the basis for broad international agreements like the Kyoto Protocol and the Bali Accord. The upcoming Copenhagen conference was intended to be the venue where the “alarms” were finally answered and the developed world was going to commence the sacrifices necessary to atone for their development.

But the emails from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in England have cast unavoidable doubts as to the legitimacy of the long-heralded consensus that had found the science to be “settled.” World leaders, when they weren’t feigning ignorance of the controversy, began to backpedal from commitments due to the groundswell of grassroots outrage.
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This is the “public option” that statists and those in government want you to see:

This is the “public option” as it really is:

With two children in public-school Kindergarten, I was very concerned about Tuesday’s speech by President Obama to all public school students from pre-Kindergarten to sixth grade. It wasn’t so much that I thought my two girls would become Obamatons—my concern was more along the lines of the precedent being established.

Any speech suitable for delivery to such a wide range of ages is likely to be little more than rah-rah cheerleading about staying in school. [UPDATE: That is exactly what it turned out to be.] But this sort of thing always starts out innocuously; next thing you know kids are writing out pledges to Obama that they’ll stay in school and there’s a weekly address to them. The whole thing reeks of the “cult of personality” that has encircled Obama since he announced his candidacy. I guarantee that he would not exercise subsequent restraint, it’s just not in his nature.

But the left rightly points out that Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush made such a speech once each and there wasn’t a groundswell of opposition. Leaving aside the fact that most parents of school-age children now were school-age children themselves back then (a salient point that they conveniently ignore), they see only one possible explanation for the current backlash: the president’s race.

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Below is a lighthearted parody that cracked me up:

“The babies born in hospital corridors: Bed shortage forces 4,000 mothers to give birth in lifts, offices and hospital toilets”:

Tory health spokesman Andrew Lansley, who obtained the figures, said Labour had cut maternity beds by 2,340, or 22 per cent, since 1997. At the same time birth rates have been rising sharply – up 20 per cent in some areas.

“Man collapses with ruptured appendix… three weeks after NHS doctors ‘took it out’”:

“However, we would like to apologise if Mr Wattson felt dissatisfied with the care he received at Great Western Hospital.”

Paul Krugman, hack and Nobel Prize (debased) winner, recently said:

In Britain, the government itself runs the hospitals and employs the doctors. We’ve all heard scare stories about how that works in practice; these stories are false. (emphasis mine)

The thing that I fear most about our turn to fascist medicine is not that these horror stories will come hear (though I do fear that plenty), but that the individual mandate will leave me and my family nowhere to turn to avoid this living hell.

The “public option” is bad and will tend to crowd out private insurance, especially if Wal-Mart puts millions on the rolls in one fell swoop. It’s terrible and a wanton violation of individual rights both in the service side and the expropriation end. But our health care system has “survived” Medicare, Medicaid, and the countless regulations that they have imposed.

I have great insurance presently. If I am forced to participate in the government health care system, my family’s quality of life will demonstrably suffer. And should bad things happen, my safety net of trusted doctors, advanced hospitals, and reasonable out-of-pocket expenses will evaporate. This is a life-or-death issue for me.

We Arizonans had a chance last election to create a state’s rights trial balloon that could have potentially nullified the whole endeavor. It was narrowly defeated and thankfully the state legislature has put it up for another statewide referendum in 2010.

A far better challenge to these infringements on our freedoms would be the Ninth Amendment but I’ll take what I can get. I just hope that 2010 is not too late.

I just finished listening to The Fountainhead on audiobook and a lot of the opinions expressed by the execrable characters rang hollow to my ears. Maybe it’s the people I deal with or the blogs I read, but I just don’t hear people saying things so explicitly—the altruism and collectivism I encounter is subtle.

Then I read this article about the reaction to the Whole Foods CEO’s recent editorial in The Wall Street Journal about establishing a free(r) market in health care. The following quotes could have come from straight from the Council of American Grocers:

Christine Taylor, a 34-year-old New Jersey shopper, vowed never to step foot in another Whole Foods again.

“I will no longer be shopping at Whole Foods,” Taylor told ABCNews.com. “I think a CEO should take care that if he speaks about politics, that his beliefs reflect at least the majority of his clients.”

And:

A commenter on the Whole Foods forum, identified only by his handle, “PracticePreach,” wrote, “It is an absolute slap in the face to the millions of progressive-minded consumers that have made [Whole Foods] what it is today.”

“You should know who butters your hearth-baked bread, John,” wrote the commenter. “Last time I checked it wasn’t the insurance industry conservatives who made you a millionaire a hundred times over.”

In these parasites’ view, Whole Foods was running a sale: buy organic produce and get John Mackey’s soul free. While sympathetic to his position and plight, I am not entirely sure what Mackey was expecting the reaction to be since his business caters primarily to leftist, environmentalist types with a predilection for government action and a general hostility to business. His customers gave him the means to a prominent pulpit but only inasmuch as he will spout their beliefs. They simply will not tolerate heterodoxy and he will lose business over this.

(If we start seeing buttons reading “We Don’t Buy Whole Foods” or discover that his CFO has stealthily been hiring socialists for key positions within the company, I’ll know that Mackey’s capitulation is near.)

As a historian, I am all too familiar with the dangers of placing too much stock in contemporaneous sources. Present events and actions attract the most attention, leading to a myopic search for explanation. Causation is best determined from afar since the historian has a diverse group of hypotheses from which to choose and can evaluate subsequent events for corroboration. But one cannot fully discount contemporary analysis; it offers up a rich source for facts and, uncommonly, spot-on assessments. With this trepidation, I cautiously read Thomas Woods Jr.’s 2009 book Meltdown: A Free-Market Look at Why the Stock Market Collapsed, the Economy Tanked, and Government Bailouts Will Make Things Worse. Woods, an Austrian economist with the Ludwig von Mises Institute, sought to present an alternative to the previous and current administrations’ indictment of the free market on the charge of causing the present economic predicament.

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I could write a paean to America today. I could discuss the exceptional nature of the United States in a world fraught with tyranny and force or lament the unheeded wisdom of the Founding Fathers in this trying time. Those are the things that politicians around the country will be doing today, co-opting the occasion in the verbal equivalent of a flag lapel pin.

But I won’t. To me, the Fourth of July is like Valentine’s Day or New Year’s Day: a day when everyone celebrates something they should be doing year-round but aren’t. Reserving your energies and efforts to honor your values for a single day every year is actually a moral travesty. America is the greatest nation on earth and has been since its inception 233 years ago.

We here at The New Clarion love America. And we show that love (almost) daily when we chronicle and expose the distance we as a nation have strayed from where we ought to be. It is right and just to be patriotic for the United States and there’s no reason to limit it to just one day a year.

A senior EPA scientist was rebuffed after trying to distribute a report expressing doubts about a pending global warming policy. He was told that it would not be released since it might jeopardize the policy, the Competitive Enterprise Institute has discovered. The author took the EPA to task for relying on outdated research and for relying on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It was a last-minute attempt to inject some caution into the incautious process by which the EPA was going to officially declare carbon dioxide a pollutant. After an online blizzard of indignation curiously absent from the media, he was relieved of all climate-related duties and advised to get an attorney.

A polar bear expert was told that he wasn’t welcome at a meeting of the Polar Bear Specialist Group because he has argued repeatedly that polar bear populations are actually increasing. The chairman of the group explicitly stated that his views “counter to human-induced climate change are extremely unhelpful.” He had obtained funds to travel to the meeting but the members of the group voted down his attendance in spite of his unassailable expertise.

These two recent episodes are but the latest in a long series of denying dissent by the proponents of anthropogenic global warming (AGW). Spend any time online researching global warming and you’ll quickly discover countless more examples of earnest dissenters citing a laundry list of reasons to doubt only to be derided as “deniers” and shouted down until they leave. The pattern plays out time and again. What the EPA scientist, the polar bear researcher, and these online denizens fail to realize is that the truth is utterly irrelevant to AGW advocates.

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As a proud owner of a MINI Cooper, I was aghast to see MINI calling for a “Let’s Not Motor Day”. We had an Earth Hour where we’re supposed to turn off the lights and we’ve had a Buy Nothing Day. But those were put on by anti-consumer types; this “Let’s Not Motor Day” is akin to GE suggesting Earth Hour or Macy’s recommending Buy Nothing Day. It is disgusting to see a company selling a great product ashamed of it.

This is a blatant example of what Ayn Rand called “the sanction of the victim,” one of her most powerful insights into the modern businessman. In the name of making peace with their detractors, modern corporations will support and further their ends. Here MINI USA is seeking to curry favor with those who regard automobiles as a blight on the Earth, those who would have us confined to the range of our legs. Sadly, MINI is not alone in its complicity—examples abound of industries trumpeting their “greenness” even though it is directly contrary to their interests.

MINI requests that you make a pledge of how many miles you won’t motor on June 5th. Luckily, they don’t do a particularly good job of validating input so I was able to pledge -10 miles. It’s a small thing, to be sure, but at least I’ve registered a protest. They don’t have my sanction.

I think one of the best concretizations of the true nature of environmentalism that I’ve found is this Wondermark comic:

Earth Day (and the movement that goes with it) isn’t so much about bringing humanity up to the level of the Jetsons or Star Trek as it is of reducing our presence back to the Flintstones.

In general, I don’t put any stock in what an actor says about politics. The following video with Janeane Garofalo {via} is nothing I haven’t read in the leftist blogospere; what makes it unique is having it all in one place and making Keith Olbermann seem cool-headed in comparison:

I enjoy these things because it reminds me how impotent and ignorant our opponents are. (Warning: there’s some vulgar innuendo, naturally.)

I had not planned on attending the Tea Party at the Capitol in Phoenix, Arizona because of conflicting dinner plans. Mere hours before the event, those plans fell through so I had to put something together as quickly as possible. I printed out Myrhaf’s excellent analysis and made 100 copies to pass out. If I had had time, I would have brought a table and handed out the cases of literature I got from the Ayn Rand Institute when I ran a campus club a decade ago.

I don’t know what I was expecting but I wasn’t prepared for the sight of thousands of people waving signs and listening to passionate defenses of liberty and freedom. For a few moments, it was heady times. It reminded me of the only other time I took part in a public political event: volunteering for the Steve Forbes primary run in 1996.

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A recent poll by the Rasmussen Reports indicates that support for “capitalism” has dropped to 53% of those surveyed. Given the pillorying the “free market” has endured by President Obama, I am honestly surprised that that many Americans would admit to believing in capitalism.

The problem with this survey is that most Americans haven’t the faintest notion of what “capitalism” means. When Obama can say “I strongly believe in a free-market system” and no one disputes that, I think it’s safe to say that the definition of capitalism has become too inclusive.

Capitalism is the political system that protects the individual’s rights to life, liberty, and property. That definition is sufficient to distinguish it from all the other political systems that ever were or ever will be. Capitalism is not “the political system that has markets” or “the political system where lots of industries are private” or the tautologous “the political system of the United States.” European socialism fits many of those descriptions, and that’s what the leftists are counting on.

Words and definitions are important. We defenders of freedom have let “liberalism” and “progressive” slip out of our grasp, but we must not let them take “capitalism.” It gives statists the guise of respectability, of being descended from a tradition of freedom, individualism, and independence that made this country great. They know that and they use it at every opportunity. We must call them on it.

[UPDATE: Added definition paragraph as an obvious oversight.]

Watch this video (sorry, but I can’t embed) and read this transcript. Really makes you appreciate Daniel Hannan even more, doesn’t it?

I predicted last year that outrage over executive pay wouldn’t stop at the top:

Whether or not executives are worth their pay is not a social issue; making it one puts all contracts in peril.

Sure enough, within four months of that blog entry, there is a proposal in Congress to extend retroactive government control over pay to all employees of companies that accept government money and President Obama has fired General Motors’ CEO.

Further, the president has told a group of bankers that he summoned to the White House that his administration is “the only thing between you and the pitchforks.” He also rejected several attending CEOs’ desire to return the TARP money that has enabled the federal government to exercise unprecedented prerogative.

It is growing exceedingly hard to remain optimistic in these troubling times. With the amount of chaos and expansion that have taken place in his first two-and-a-half months in office, the two years until the next set of Congressional elections seems like an eternity. Luckily, we have the power of the blogosphere to spread the word about his fascist interventions—at least, for now.