I just read Obama’s election night speech because a recent PJTV show reminds us of a remarkable passage:

What makes America exceptional are the bonds that hold together the most diverse nation on Earth, the belief that our destiny is shared — (cheers, applause) — that this country only works when we accept certain obligations to one another and to future generations, so that the freedom which so many Americans have fought for and died for come with responsibilities as well as rights, and among those are love and charity and duty and patriotism. That’s what makes America great. (Cheers, applause.)

This is one of Obama’s many explicit statements of collectivism. He doesn’t hide his collectivism; it’s out there for anyone to think about and judge.

He is saying that because Americans have rights, they also have the responsibilities to love, be charitable, be duteous and be patriotic. Because America protects its citizens’ rights, they owe the state. The individual must sacrifice to the collective. It’s only fair!

So all those people who came to America from Cuba, China and the rest of the world to escape collectivism did so… to be bound by more collectivism. Sure, they did.

Obama calls these collective responsibilities “bonds.” Bonds are chains. Perhaps the word “bonds” can have a legitimate metaphorical meaning in one’s personal life. You could say there is a bond between man and wife, or between parent and child — but even those bonds can be broken if an individual so wishes. Between the individual and the state, however, bonds can only mean chains put on the individual by the state.

As I said, Obama puts his beliefs out there for anyone to judge. He knows he can do this, just as he gets away with all his lies, because America is no longer a nation of people who can think independently. 12 years of public education, four or more years of college, and a culture of political correctness forge a nation of conformists, not thinkers. The mainstream media now function as the propaganda arm of the Democrat Party.

As Ayn Rand said, today’s absurdities become tomorrow’s bromides. Obama states his collectivism clearly. Tomorrow his statements will be business as usual. The day after tomorrow the state will begin passing laws that forge the bonds of love, charity, duty and patriotism — for our own good. Those who shirk their responsibilities as a citizen will be thrown in jail.

Look for a law demanding two years of mandatory “service” from young people to the state in the next four years. Obama has mentioned it several times that I know of. He wants it. He equates sacrifice to the collective with the highest moral ideals. I believe he is waiting for the next crisis to test the idea. Perhaps we should be thankful that he is still careful enough to wait for a crisis. Hey, I’ll take any silver lining!

And Obama’s policies, both foreign and domestic, make future crises certain.

My blogging has diminished during the Obama years. To the two or three of you out there reading this, I’m sorry. One of the keys to being a successful blogger is to do it every day. Feed the monster, as Stephen Green says. I will never be a successful blogger.

Part of the reason is that it’s just too depressing. The naked cynicism of the left gets me down — which is precisely what they want. Perhaps if blogging were more than a hobby I would find the courage to persist, to fight every day. There are other reasons, such as those 1,000 words a day that I hear calling right now.

I don’t expect my political blogging to pick up in 2013. I do expect to finish the fantasy/adventure novel I’m writing. If I can’t find a publisher, I’ll have to publish it myself. I’ll let you know when there is news to report.

Okay — kitchen is clean, blog is written. As they say at Writing Excuses, you’re out of excuses, now write.

How could we get it so wrong? Was our thinking the triumph of hope over experience?

Here was my thinking: Obama was campaigning to shore up his base. Romney already had his base — where else would they go? — and was campaigning to win moderates and independents. Therefore, Romney would get more votes. Moreover, the polls are all wrong due to liberal bias and the Bradley Effect, in which a small percentage of those polled lie that they will vote for a black man because they do not want to be thought of as racist.

This entire line of thinking turned out to be wrong. The polls were right. The Democrat base was energized and turned out on election day. Most astonishing, Romney did not have his base. Romney got 3,000,000 fewer votes than McCain in 2008 and 7,000,000 fewer than Bush in 2004. If he had just won what McCain got, he would have defeated Obama.

So what happened?

1. American voters have changed for the worse. This is the most depressing conclusion from the election. This thing should not have been close. Obama is the worst president of my lifetime, if not all time. His big government policies have kept unemployment around 8%. His foreign policy is to appease an enemy he pretends does not exist. Obama should have been demolished the way Mondale was in 1984 or McGovern was in 1972.

The American sense of life, an emotional vestige of our 18th and 19th century individualist heritage, is dying. The New Leftist culture, indoctrinated through government schooling, is reforming the American character around collectivism. The Democrats finish off the process by expanding the welfare state. Americans receiving food stamps, welfare, Medicaid, etc. will vote to stay on the gravy train. (This makes the Democrat attack on Romney’s 47% remark particularly hypocritical. Romney was essentially saying that the Democrat strategy of buying votes through handouts is working.)

2. Democrats wanted it more. To the left, power is not just politics, it’s metaphysics. It is the reason they exist. They understood that they had a lot to lose if Romney won. Obamacare would have been repealed, Romney would have repealed Obama’s executive orders, the czars would have been fired, and Democrats would have lost control of the vast array of alphabet agencies through which they plan to fundamentally transform America by bureaucratic fiat.

3. Republicans didn’t want it more. For this I blame two things. First, Romney campaigned as a moderate. He gave the base no reason to vote for him other than “I’m not Obama.” That’s not enough. And his campaign bought the conventional wisdom that Romney had to be a “nice guy” to overcome Democrat smears about Republicans. (Maybe they’re right.)

Second, Republican pragmatists cannot think in principle. These are the people who become Republican because they were born in a country club, not because they read Ludwig von Mises. They view the Tea Party with suspicion and figure it doesn’t really matter that much who is president. Pass the white wine and brie, darling.

4. Lots of other reasons, such as the power of the incumbancy, media liberal bias, Obama’s superior campaign tactics and the failure of Romney’s ORCA thing. It turns out Obama is actually competent at campaigning, as opposed to governing. Romney, for all his supposed business acumen, ran a lousy campaign.

That’s my take on what happened. How bad the consequences will be, we don’t know yet, but I suspect the American people bought themselves a whole lot of sorrow on November 6, 2012.

Barack Obama’s speech at the 2012 Democrat National Convention was the work of a man who is written out. He has nothing new to say; he lacks even the energy to make it look like he’s trying. But that didn’t stop him from going on for 37 empty minutes. Stalin and Castro were famous for droning on for hours before a (literally) captive audience. I believe Obama and Clinton would do the same if they could. Standing before a large, adoring audience must be the peak experience for a collectivist.

Obama’s speech was shockingly banal. Charles Krauthammer called it, ‘One of the emptiest I’ve ever heard on a national stage.’ Is this the best his speechwriting staff could come up with? How bad a tin ear must Obama have to say, “I’m the President”? As Stephen Green wrote,

That is the smallest line I have heard a President say in 32 years of listening to presidents speak.

Scott Holleran sees it in a more sinister light.

If the left criticizes Romney, the rich and Republicans for being callous plutocrats looking down upon the little people, and they do, there is no better example that it’s Obama, the New Left and Democrats that hold America and Americans in contempt and seek to command them shut up, kneel and obey government control. It was the ultimate appeal to authority: the power-lusting Nothing Man might as well have said “I’m the dictator.”

When a man is under pressure, you see the real man. I believe this election is showing us what Thomas Sowell calls Obama’s “confident ignorance.” Obama has lived in the leftist bubble all his life. He thinks altruism-statism-collectivism is moral, and nothing in reality can dent his ideology. Michael Barone thinks Obama should have pivoted to the center as Clinton did after the 1994 election; the President has shown he stays true to the left. If he were a Republican, he would be denounced as a radical or an extremist, but to the mainstream media Democrats can never be extreme. Dick Morris says this strategy is a loser.

I think Obama actually believes Keynesian economics work. Of course, all his life among leftists he had never been exposed to Ludwig von Mises or Henry Hazlitt or Fredric Bastiat or other economists that make my spirit soar when I read them because they are rational and brilliant. (Seriously, if you think economics is “the dismal science,” you have been reading the wrong economists.) In reality the stimulus package made things worse, as did the spectre of ObamaCare and Cap and Trade, among the hordes of regulations coming out of the federal government. Reality has been slapping Obama in the face since day one of his presidency, and it has got him down — but he won’t change his beliefs; indeed, that is the one thing he cannot allow himself to do. If he questions his ideology, then his entire universe will shatter, and his self-esteem with it. There are reports the man gets more excited about cards, bowling and golf than policy matters. I would not be surprised if deep down he wanted to lose in November so he could climb back in the liberal bubble and evade the consequences of his disastrous ideas in the real world.

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Clinton’s speech was the more exciting of the two because he is more a romanticist — of himself. The prospect of penning dithyrambs to himself gets Clinton’s blood moving faster than an intern in kneepads. In a speech that was supposed to be about nominating Obama, Clinton glorified himself over and over, and managed to remind the audience that Obama is cool on the outside and has failed to deliver on the economy. Clinton sneakily even brought up the birther issue. While mocking Romney/Ryan, Clinton said:

They looked good, they sounded good. They convinced me…(LAUGHTER)… that they all love their families and their children, and we’re grateful they’ve been born in America, and all –really, I’m not being — they did.

Why would we be grateful they were “born in America”? What does that have to do with anything? I don’t think it’s a mistake that there’s a lot of nonsense out there about Obama’s birthplace. More important, there is uneasiness about Obama’s allegience to American values, the subject of a movie currently in theatres, 2016: Obama’s America. In 2008 the Obama campaign called the Clintons racist; you think Bill has forgotten that? You think he is above mentioning that Romney and Ryan were born in America just to plant seeds of doubt in voters’ minds about Obama?

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One political party is full of ignorant, mean-spirited bigots. Everybody know it’s the Republicans, right? Wrong. The Democrats really are ignorant, mean-spirited bigots. Watch this video.

And watch this for radicalism and economic idiocy.

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Conservatives are giddy about the disasters of the DNC. The convention started with a creepy hymn to collectivism

They took God and Jerusalem out of the platform, then put it back in even though there was no two-thirds quorum, and the audience booed. As an atheist, booing God is fine with me, but I wonder if Democrats understand they must win the votes of the American people. And why at this point would Jewish people vote Democrat? The left has become anti-semitic.

Rush Limbaugh said he was physically ill before the DNC began, and was “180 degrees better” after watching Obama’s speech.

This picture is telling. Obama does not look happy. Does he know something we don’t know? Well, he did say that if he didn’t turn the economy around in three years he would be a one-termer.

“10:17: The speech ends, and there’s a flurry of confetti. No balloons, because an indoor presentation hadn’t been planned. Obama steps forward and waves. There’s a closeup of his face and I think I see his lip curl with a bit of disgust, and I call rewind and ask Meade to interpret the face and he says: resignation. Subjectively, we think we see in his face that he knows he’s going to lose. Michelle and Malia and Sasha come out, looking perfectly glossy and pretty, and then there’s Biden and Jill and Mrs. Robinson and various other relatives, milling around, waving a bit, and then the long view of the stage shows they’ve clumped toward the rear wall. Why are they huddling there? The shots of the crowd show some ecstatic delegates — all women — and many stolid/dispirited faces — male and female. At one point there’s a hitch in the Bruce Springsteen music — a silent gap — but then it plays again. And now they’re gone.” — Ann Althouse

I understand that the Obama campaign and their Democrat PAC’s have spent, according to one number I read, $120 million attacking Mitt Romney. (Obama has outspent Romney three to one so far, but that does not stop him from whining because Romney now has more money.) I understand that the American people, in our dumbed-down age, are susceptible to such an idiotic argument as Romney is mean because he ran a company that, in the course of restructuring businesses, fired people. (And that attack is the Democrats at their most intellectual. When you descend below that, you get nonsense about Romney being mean to his dog. Seriously. This is what the left has become.)

I get all this, but I still wonder why they had to devote so much precious airtime to “humanizing” Mitt Romney. And I laugh at right-wing pundits joyously proclaiming, “He’s human! He’s human!” Great. So glad the GOP didn’t nominate an alien from space. Can you imagine Goldwater succeeding in today’s milquetoast Republican Party?

Listening to speech after speech I wondered, “Is this the best the Republicans can do?” They would not have needed to “humanize” their man if they had been capable of mounting a self-confident, morally certain intellectual defense of capitalism and individualism. Something on the lines of Howard Roark’s courtroom speech, for instance. No, the speeches read as if they were written by Alvah Scarrett rather than Roark.

But I’m no political pro. Doubtless, the Republican brains knew what they were doing. I suppose they know that trying mount an intellectual argument for today’s booboisie is a fool’s errand. How much more effective it is, in this Age of Oprah, to tell a sob story about Mitt and a dying 14-year old boy. I admit, in contrast to the narcissist Obama, whose greatest achievement is writing two books about himself, these stories of Romney’s altruism are powerful. Romney comes off as a man with deep values that he takes seriously. If Romney is no Howard Roark, Obama very much a Peter Keating, more interested in impressing people than actually doing anything.

Romney should win in November. With the economy as bad as it is, in the worst recovery since the Great Depression, the election should not even be close. The Tea Party formed spontaneously because the American people were shocked by the Democrats’ power grabs in the first two years of Obama’s presidency. This election should be a landslide on the order of 1972, 1980 and 1984. If it is not, take it as a sign of America’s cultural decline. Take it as a sign that the Democrats have changed the sense of life of the American people. And be afraid.

Since it should be a landslide for Romney, he should get enough votes to overcome Democrat voter fraud. I fear that the statist-collectivist Democrats now agree with, and secretly admire, Joseph Stalin, who said it doesn’t matter who casts the votes, but who counts them.

What worries me is the day after the election. What do the Republicans do then? What will be their mandate? Having campaigned as a bleeding-heart altruist, how can Romney make any significant cuts in government? The Republicans are now the party of Medicare, which has something like $40 trillion in unfunded liabilities. It’s impossible to pay that off. Medicare needs to be phased out. How can Romney/Ryan begin this critical project when they have campaigned as Medicare’s saviors? Having promised to replace ObamaCare, how can Romney move toward freedom in medicine?

Is this what it takes to win nowadays? Must the Republicans become welfare statists to gain power?

What price victory?

Let’s be clear up front: Ryan is not the perfect candidate. He has HUGE problems. He is a religious conservative, an enemy of abortion, and has voted for such statist power grabs as the prescription medicine bill and TARP. In other words, he is a Republican. He is most certainly NOT an Objectivist, although the left seems to think it will help them to pin that label on him.

Contrary to many of the political race-horse pros, I think the Ryan pick was a brilliant strategic move. Obama and his PAC’s have spent hundreds of millions of dollars attempting to “define” (smear) Romney’s character. Think of the nonsense the media has obsessed over in the last few months: Romney is a bully; Romney is mean to dogs; Romney is a wimp; Romney is rich and out of touch; Romney won’t disclose his taxes; Romney killed Joe Soptic’s wife. In one day all of that effort was was destroyed. This election will not be about Romney’s character, but about ideas. This election will give voters a clear choice — do you want more government or less?

I submit this is a disaster for the Democrats. When ideology prevails, the left loses. Look at the landslides of 1972 and 1984 and Contract with America in 1994.

Ryan credits Ayn Rand with inspiring him to enter politics. He used to give copies of Atlas Shrugged to staffers. This is all to the good, and is why he is one of the better Republicans. But this year he has made an effort to disavow Rand. Yaron Brook said today he is suspicious of the timing. He thinks Ryan made it clear he is not an Objectivist because the Romney team was vetting him, and Romney wanted to clear up this troubling association with the atheist Rand. An atheist has no chance of gaining power in today’s Republican Party.

Despite the many problems with Romney/Ryan, I intend to vote for them in November. Obama’s first term has been a four-year, vulgar display of statist power. Obama must go. I don’t think freedom in America can survive a second Obama term. He has shown he cares nothing about the will of the people, the legislative process or the rule of law. What power grabs he cannot push through Congress, he will declare by executive order like a dictator. And not having to worry about reelection, he will be unrestrained to do whatever he wants. For the sake of all that is good, including your money and your liberty, this man must be defeated.

The moment Obama is defeated, I will begin watching Romney/Ryan carefully. Nothing statist or collectivist that they do will be ignored. By 2016 I fully expect to loathe them as much as I loathed Bush. This is better than the enormities we would suffer with Obama II.

I could be wrong, but I don’t think this election will even be close. Romney/Ryan vs. Obama/Biden is the Chess Club vs. the Choom Gang.

UPDATE: Slight revision. Changed Choom Club to Choom Gang, the correct name of Obama’s high school gang of stoners.

Yesterday the court upheld Obamacare as a tax increase, and sure enough, Congress has the power to levy taxes. It’s right there in the Constitution; you can see for yourself.

You can’t expect the Supreme Court to save America from continuing down the road to serfdom. Not only is our culture moving that way, but the Court would have to rule against its own precedents such as Wickard v. Filburn, which stretched the Commerce Clause to cover any economic activity that affects interstate commerce. It would take five remarkable Justices to defy the rest of government, academia, the media and the nihilist postmodern philosophy or our culture — and apparently, the Court has only four such men.

The idea of being limited by the words of an 18th century document makes people like Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi laugh. To them providing for the general welfare means whatever the state thinks is good for you. And their intentions are good; all they want to do is give us all free health care. Any further argument is just politics and legalistic quibbling.

Do you think the word “fascism” is hyperbolic? The “tax” in Obamacare will be payments to health insurance companies. If fascism is the form of socialism in which private property is kept nominally in private ownership but dictated by the state, then Obamacare is something Mussolini would have loved.

I believe the Affordable Care Act has been deceptive from the beginning. The purpose of Obamacare is to create a mess. What will happen when insurance companies must cover people with pre-existing conditions? They will lose money, and then they will go to the government for subsidies in order to remain in business. Eventually, the statists will argue that health care would be cheaper to the taxpayers if the federal government eliminated the middle man and managed it on the European model. (Yes, that model that is now in economic crisis.)

I think they will succeed. If there is one thing I am confident our government can create, it’s a mess. You must remember, Obama does not work on the old model — that of getting practical results and spreading prosperity. He doesn’t care if his policies work. He only wants the strong to sacrifice to the weak and the individual to sacrifice to the collective. To leftists this is good and all else is evil, even if evil is more practical.

The Supreme Court cannot save freedom in America. Can anyone? Is there any hope? We need cultural change, which means the spread of reason, individualism and free market economics, which means the philosophy of Ayn Rand. A nation gets the government it deserves.

Following his Twitter feed was a daily lesson in the frothing madness of the left. Breitbart always retweeted the insulting, hate-filled tweets he got; he was happy to let his enemies reveal themselves with their own vituperation. They are a seething, juvenile, mean-spirited lot, and not terribly clever, either.

(I gave up following Twitter because every week or so my password would not work and I would have to change it — most exasperating. Maybe my computer has a virus or something.)

Courage is important in our age. The increasingly totalitarian left depends on conformity of thought. This does not mean persuading those who disagree with them, but shutting them up. And the best way to shut someone up is make him afraid to speak his mind. Smears, intimidation and character assassination are the methods of the left. (How many people in Hollywood , publishing, government or academia remain silent because they know that speaking out is career suicide? How many women, minorities and gays toe the PC line because stepping over it means shocking decent people more than profanity did in the Victorian age?)

The main purpose of government schooling now is to mold young Americans into docile conformists. Political correctness is leftist thought control: these things you are permitted to say — those other things, no decent person must say. Independence is the virtue above all others that the left cannot abide.

When the left accepted the premise that the end justifies the means, they crossed a line. They are now the totalitarian left. This ain’t your father’s Democrat Party. These people are radicalized, and they mean war. Words are no longer tools of rational communication; they are weapons to be used in the political struggle.

With the left so far down the road to serfdom, good men need courage above all. Andrew Breitbart had it. We lost a brave fighter for freedom.

Now, a state is a large political entity with all types of people in it. There are people who work hard and pay their taxes in every state. There are parasites in every state. So Ms. Robinson is pitting two collectives against one another in ways that have little meaning. A state might have two Republican Senators merely because they got 51% of the vote. Moreover, being Republican hardly means you stand for limited government, much less the laissez-faire capitalism advocated by Ayn Rand.

But let’s play along with Ms. Robinson, however little this exercise has to do with reality. She has a list of ways blue states could go Galt against the red states. Let’s see what happens when a liberal stops helping parasitical right-wingers.

First off, dear Red Staters: If your town’s economy depends on a nearby dam, canal, harbor, airport, military base, interstate highway, national park or monument, or prison, just STFU. Because you are, in every way possible, a parasite, living off something the rest of us paid to build.

Wait. I don’t think Ms. Robinson understands Atlas Shrugged. John Galt withdrew the sanction of the victim. That means he stopped sacrificing to the parasites. It doesn’t mean the parasites must STFU. They have the freedom to say what they want. John Galt does not care what they say.

As for the list of infrastrucure items, the military bases and prisons are proper government functions; the rest should be privatized. But this is probably the kind of talk Ms. Robinson wants to STFU.

Second: If you are a homeowner who takes a mortgage interest deduction — which is how the rest of us subsidize your house, and with it your status in the middle-class — we don’t want to hear another word from you about how you made it all on your own. And that goes for those of you who got your education via the GI Bill, or took out an SBA loan, or went to well-funded public schools back when such things existed. You are what you are because we believed in you, and invested in you. And we’re deeply insulted that you refuse to even acknowledge that fact.

Again, liberals going Galt means right-wingers have to shut up? You’re “deeply insulted” because the right is not grateful for all they have gotten, whether they wanted it or not, from the welfare state, so you demand they shut up?

How about we get the government out of the economy and let everyone say whatever the hell he wants?

Third: Don’t come crawling to us to support those kids you couldn’t afford to have, but refused to allow contraception or abortions or actual fact-based sex education to prevent. It’s just that simple. Our blue-state babies are better off in every way that matters because we plan our families. A failure to plan on your part does not create an obligation on ours. Your policies force women to have kids, even when they’re patently not ready to have them. Now (as you’re so fond of telling women who find themselves unhappily pregnant), you get to live with the consequences of those choices.

So you want to end welfare, WIC, and myriad other programs for families? Fine with me. Somehow I think your emotions of fear and loathing for the benighted right are getting the better of you and you don’t really mean it.

Fourth: Don’t ask us to pay to educate your kids if you’re not willing to have us teach them what we know about the world. We believe in free, comprehensive, rigorous and reality-based public education because it’s done more than any other government service to make us rich, powerful and successful; and we want the same for you.

Let’s have freedom in education. That way, if you want us to conform to your methods of eduction, you must persuade us. You can’t use the government to force your educational ideal on us. Oh, and if we’re to have a rational discussion about education, it means we don’t STFU. You’ll have to listen to us, too. Perhaps you’ll learn something.

We realize some of you aren’t too keen on public schools. It’s great that you want to take on more personal responsibility for educating your own kids. Just be warned: if you don’t teach them real science and real history — including evolution, climate change and the actual contents of the US Constitution — we’re probably not going to hire them. So we hope you’re also ready to take responsibility for that, too, which will probably mean supporting your grown kids in your basement until you die.

So the blue staters will only hire people who have gone to government schools? Okay. Good luck with that.

Fifth: Between federal water reclamation projects and farm subsidies, we are paying you zillions of dollars to grow stuff we’d actually rather not eat. Don’t look now, but those of us in blue cities and states are moving away from your petrochemical-saturated GMO-bred CAFO-grown industrial “food” products as fast as we possibly can. There aren’t enough organic and community-supported farms to feed all of us yet — but we have taken responsibility for this, and are working hard on the problem. You can either get on this train, or holler at it while it flattens you. What you cannot do is yell at us because we don’t want to eat what you choose to grow.

Notice, too, that the only reason we’re having to subsidize you in the first place is that the all-holy free market does not bless you with profits on this crap. In your own book, that makes you a capital-L Loser. In ours, we’ll settle for “parasite.”

You think farms must be subsidized because the free market failed? Have you ever read a good economist? Read Mises. In the meantime, let’s end the Department of Agriculture, and get rid of the vast library of regulations that add billions to the price of farming, and let’s see what happens.

Sixth: We are so over your bigotry. Again: we know from our own long experience that including women, gays and minorities makes us not only culturally richer; it also makes us more economically productive as well. And the recent economic meltdown has shown us that monocultures run exclusively by rich white men tend to stagnate into breeding pools for all kinds of social and financial parasites, who then come forward to prey on those least able to resist — like you.

Diversity isn’t just an idealistic fetish for us: we do it because we think it makes us richer on every front that matters. If “parasite” is just another word for “people who willfully make bad choices that keep them poor and ignorant,” then your prejudices by definition make you parasites. And we are not, therefore, obliged to deal with you.

Fine. Deal with whomever you want. That’s the whole point of freedom. But let’s get rid of OSHA and all the other multiculti regulations and let everyone choose to deal with whomever he wants. Some will choose unfairly. It sucks, but that’s the way freedom works.

And finally: If you want to pretend global warming isn’t happening, you do not get to come whining to us when you get hit with droughts or floods. We’re not going to send FEMA to bail you out. We’re not going to build canals to give you our water. We’re not going to fund your levees. If you’re so sure God will provide, go ask him to keep your reservoirs full and your cities dry. Because we resign.

Great. Let’s dismantle FEMA now. Or are you just making promises you don’t really mean?

Thus ends Ms. Robinson’s agenda, but she’s not done. She has five demands that red staters must meet before she’ll call it over.

1. Stop taking more money from the federal government pot than you put into it. If you believe in paying your own freight, then do it. If you can’t, that’s fine — we’ll go back to helping you out — but , because you’re simply not entitled to it.

How does one stop taking federal money when one has no say in it? But when you write “you have to let go of that producerist superiority crap,” this demand is really about shutting up people who disagree with you.

2. Admit that we were right. Admit that nobody in America ever makes it on their own, and that we are all in this together, and that there’s such a thing as the common wealth and the common good. Admit that regulation is necessary to keep the unprincipled strong from preying on the weak. Admit that there has never in history ever been any such thing as a free market: markets are created by governments, and need to be overseen by them. And finally: admit that your conservative leaders got us into this economic mess, and don’t know squat about how to get us out of it.

Again, you are demanding ideological conformity. Going Galt seems to mean to you shutting up people with different ideas.

3. Join the reality-based world. Accept that America’s prosperity utterly depends on how well-educated its kids are, especially on topics like science and history. Accept that evolution happened, and that climate change is happening now. Embrace nuance. Learn something about how to assess evidence and think rationally, without a pre-determined conclusion. Remember that God only helps those who’ve gained the real-world skills to help themselves.

You believe in God? I don’t, but that’s okay. You can think what you want. I agree with you on evolution, disagree with you on climate change, and laugh at your demands that I conform to your thinking.

4. Admit that we love our country every bit as much as you do — and that, given our much greater success at creating strong families, productive 21st-century industries and excellent places to live, we might actually know more that you do about how to make it work better in the future.

I don’t care what you love. I care that your collectivist vision for America will destroy it, despite your love for it. Government intervention is the road to serfdom.

5. Last but by no means least: Knock off the hate-mongering, threats and name-calling. Your heroine, Ms. Rand, predicted rightly that parasites invariably despise the producers they feed on; you should be embarrassed that your own behavior bears her out so clearly. And, just once, say thank you to us for all the contributions we’ve made (or, at least, tried to make) toward your well-being. We don’t ask for much, but a little gratitude now and then wouldn’t hurt.

Who is hate-mongering? All I hear from the left is lies, smears and character assassination. All wealth is produced by individuals in what remains of the free market in our mixed economy. The government just steals the wealth and redistributes it. Are we to thank you for holding a gun to the producers in our name? Is that the kind of gratitude you want? You’re like a mafia boss saying to a store owner, “You know, you oughtta thank us for protecting you.”

“The State is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.” — Frederic Bastiat

2. A great idea.

3. The Taranto Principle.

4. The Obama administration plumbs new depths in divisiveness using the First Lady as an attack dog.

5. The last time I posted about EMP, the idea was debunked in comments. But if it is really impossible, a lot of people have not heard the news.

6. Alexander Marriott shows how to detect fake internet quotes.

2. President Robespierre.

3. The solutions are out there.

4. Obama’s political skills are lacking.

5. Why does Peter Schiff even bother trying to reason with these people?

6. California’s economic suicide. I’m seriously think it’s time to move…

We get an awful lot of spam comments here. They make me laugh because they are written as if english were a spammer’s second language, or maybe third.

“I am learning good informations from your prolific writings. I love this blog!”

“This is being so deep! I must tell all the peoples about your blog!”

Gotta love it.

UPDATE: Got this one today, October 22, 2011:

I am really satisfied with this posting that you have given us. This is really a stupendous work done by you. Thank you and looking for more posts

Unlike the Tea Party, which was a spontaneous reaction to the Democrats’ frightening power grabs, OWS (or the Flea Party) is a calculated movement orchestrated by the leadership on the left. An ad in Craig’s List offered people between $350-$650 a week to protest. Behind the ads is the Working Families Party, which is tied to ACORN. The money for the “Occupied Wall Street Journal” comes from George Soros, among others.

So there is something happening here. But what exactly? Here is my explanation, as informed by my understanding of Austrian economics.

The mixed economy is a combination of freedom and controls. It is freedom “regulated” by the state, but the controls are not yet dictatorship. All the economic problems in a mixed economy come from the state intervening in the free market. Statist propapaganda is aimed at hiding the state’s role in our problems, and keeping the blame on freedom. They do this by demonizing the rich.

Ludwig von Mises explained why the mixed economy leads to ever greater government control, and eventually to dictatorship. Don Lavoie (PDF) summarizes the Mises Interventionist Thesis:

Attempts to violently manipulate the outcomes of [the market] process lead to reactions that the intervener can neither specifically predict nor effectively prevent. Efforts to make the initial intervention work as designed must take the form of ever-wider and more obtrusive interventions, which are in further conflict with the workings of the market mechanism. In the end the interventionists must either extend their activities to the point where the process has been completely sabotaged or they must abandon their quest to control the market. Any “middle way” between the extremes may, of course, be advocated but would consist in a series of haphazard shocks to the system….

We are in an economic crisis created entirely by state intervention in the economy, through onerous regulations, taxes and misallocation of capital caused by the Federal Reserve. Corporate greed and corruption cannot affect an entire economy; only the government can do that. I believe we are at a pivotal moment: will we begin to repeal the intervention or intervene even more and plunge toward total state control?

Me, I’m not optimistic. The chances are our next president will be Mitt Romney, a Rockefeller Republican. He won’t repeal a damned thing. ObamaCare will be cemented into place and we will continue down the road to serfdom. We might not run to the abyss of dictatorship as fast as the Democrats want, but we’ll get there.

As Mises himself wrote,

It is indeed one of the principal drawbacks of every kind of interventionism that it is so difficult to reverse the process.

With nothing but nihilists on the left and fools on the right, there is little hope.

And that’s what’s happening here.

The EPA is regulating industry to death.

First, check out this video promoting a new book from Encounter.

Second, read about the EPA violating property rights in the name of protecting “wetlands.”

Third, read how the EPA will shut down 28 gigawatts of energy.

Of course, to the MSM anyone who sounds off about these power grabs is a nutty extremist and probably a racist. Nothing to see here, folks, move along.

I would say that if you’re not afraid, you’re either a leftist or you’re not paying attention.

So why don’t these rich leftists start a campaign to get the wealthy to volunteer to give more money to the federal government? They don’t need to wait for the state to confiscate it.

They don’t do it, I believe, because there is something more fundamental than money at stake here. They want state control of the individual. This is not about more or less money in the US treasury, it’s about liberty vs. power.

Should the individual be in control of his own life for his own selfish ends? Or should the state force the individual to sacrifice for the collective?

The smarmy rich liberal feels uncomfortable without chains tying him down. It’s too bad his opposition to freedom will have us all in fetters.

I have a smidgeon of sympathy for the Congresswoman. From a statist politician’s point of view, the question is impossible to answer. If they were honest, they would say 0% — the money should be appropriated by disinterested philosopher-kings who would then redistribute it to each according to his needs.

But statists can never be entirely honest. They know that in America you have to fool the selfish voters in order to attain and keep power. Oh, the contempt for the unwashed masses this must breed in the political elite! 

For me the answer is easy: 100%. All taxation is theft. Funding the government should be voluntary.

Rep. Schakowsky says we tax to fund things we as a nation do together. As an example she cites looking for a cure for cancer. The state takes your money to find a cure for cancer. What could be wrong with that?

You know why I don’t want the state taking my money to find a cure for cancer? Because I want someone to find a cure for cancer. Health is an important value to most people.

To find a cure for cancer we need more wealth creation, and we need to spend our dollars efficiently. This means we need to be free. Freedom creates most wealth and uses it most efficiently.

Anyone who really cared about curing cancer would want to dismantle the welfare-regulatory state and let capitalism create wealth. That wealth would be spent by free individuals according to their values, and certainly some of them would value a cure for cancer. The last thing you would want is for appropriated wealth to be wasted by bureaucrats who would lose their sinecure if cancer went the way of polio.

It looks to me like Rep. Schakowsky does not really care about finding a cure for cancer — not as much as she cares about power. I think she really lusts for control over the benighted masses to whom she must grovel and lie every two years.

World Net Daily leads the campaign to prove Obama is constitutionally ineligible to be president. Their latest post on the issue claims that the White House is in panic mode over Jerome Corsi’s book, Where’s the Birth Certificate?

The White House is not panicking at all. Quite the opposite: they want the birthers front and center in the 2012 presidential race. Not only do the conspiracy theorists distract from Obama’s record in the Oval Office, but they turn off moderates and independents. Without independents Obama has no chance of winning reelection.

Obama is the worst president in my lifetime. He is a far-left, anti-American ideologue. We have a radical in the White House. In his college days he was a serious, revolutionary communist. Since then he has learned from Alinsky to work within the system to “fundamentally change the United States of America.”

He has expanded the state at home and groveled before dictators abroad. His methods have been consistently authoritarian; what he can’t get Congress to pass, he threatens to force on America through his czars and bureaucratic agencies. His spending and regulating have brought us the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

On top of his fervent statism, he is inexperienced, incompetent and oddly detached. The only thing to improve during his time in office is Obama’s golf handicap.

Obama is a thorough altruist and egalitarian. He is motivated not to increase prosperity, but to “spread the wealth around.” As Rabbi Aryeh Spero puts it,

As with all references to “responsibility,” domestic or foreign, Obama sees responsibility as a type of sacrifice by the more powerful to those less powerful, be it redistribution of wealth or sacrificing one’s optimal protection when weighed against how it effects those he considers innocent.

Whenever an emotional event such as 9/11 comes along, Obama talks about community service. In his mind profound values and morality are all about sacrifice to the collective. Sacrifice is Obama’s moral ideal, and he is on a mission to improve every American’s soul by giving us all the opportunity to give until it hurts. Uncle Barry knows what is good for you — whether you like it or not.

On every issue and in every aspect, President Obama is the perfect nightmare. It has been said that the only issue of religion in 2012 is that if Obama is reelected, then God help us all.

Now, to the birthers all of this is of secondary importance. What’s really important is that Obama’s father had dual citizenship, and our Founding Fathers considered that enough to make one ineligible to serve as President.

Let me put it this way. Even if the birthers are 100% right, they are wrong to make an issue out of Obama’s birth. They are saying, in effect, that Obama’s statism at home, appeasement abroad and totalitarian tactics are not as important as a technicality. They are as futile as the John Birch Society in the 1960′s, who showed no understanding of abstract, philosophical principles and instead made everything in politics a conspiracy.

It is a crime to downplay Obama’s record for a second. The right needs to make a vigorous, principled argument showing the connection between Obama’s radical ideas and our miserable economy. We can’t waste time on some legal technicality of dubious worth — even if Obama is covering something up. We need to stop pursuing scandals and start attacking his statist record. It’s not the Democrats’ weaknesses and lies that are destroying America, but their proudly held morality.

The most disturbing thing about the birthers is that they adopt leftist methods. Instead of attacking ideas and policies, they make it all about the man. They ignore philosophic principles to focus on the concrete-bound circumstances of Obama’s birth. The dumbing down of America comes to right-wing politics.

This might sound a bit over the top, but I honestly worry that freedom in American will not survive another four years of Obama. We must kill this monster, even if it means electing some bonehead religious conservative. The birthers could help the country they love by just shutting up.

It is currently being laughed off the internet, which is a good sign. The Democrats look like the gang that can’t shoot straight.

Amy Peikoff calls it a case study of how force stops thinking. Victor Davis Hanson notes the similarity to Stasi tactics and to the defunct Journolist.

One Democrat defender says this is just what Clinton did with his “Rapid Response,” and I think that is true. The Democrats still live with the legacy of the 1988 presidential race between Dukakis and Bush. The Republicans demolished Dukakis, who did not respond adequately to attacks. Since then the Democrats have been determined to fight back against all attacks — but they don’t fight the ideas, they delegitimize and intimidate the attackers.

The Democrats are prone to these tone deaf campaigns of intimidation because they are what their base wants. Nothing gets the left so motivated as asking them to attack right-wingers. This is how your raise money on the left. This is the idea behind Media Matters and George Soros’s other operations.

The Democrats don’t ask their base to defend ideas and principles. What ideas to they have? What principles, other than the pursuit of power, do they hold dear? But ask them to attack those evil right-wingers, and you get the juices flowing.

You might remember that during the early years of the Bush 43 presidency, the Democrat base was furious with their legislators because they were not attacking Bush the way the Republicans attacked Clinton. Never mind that Clinton was a walking scandal factory and Bush was by political standards fairly honest; the base wanted blood.

It goes back to morality. The Democrats are altruist-collectivist-statists. It is self-evident to them that they are moral people — and so their opponents must be immoral. The left is good, the right is evil. They would sooner question the law of gravity than this assumption.

Leftists believe that in any conflict with the right their primary task is not to refute ideas, but to reveal their opponents’ wickedness. Ideas actually get in the way because those cunning right-wingers use them to manipulate the minds of unsuspecting Americans. Opponents of ObamaCare were called nazis, KKK, mean-spirited, racists, a mob, and so on. And the substance of the bill? As Nancy Pelosi said, we’ll have to pass it to find out what’s in it. They did not bother with a serious debate of the issues; instead their energy went into demonizing and smearing the right.

Attack Watch is just one more sign that the left is out of ideas. They are an intellectual black hole and a spent force.

A few questions come to mind after reading the letter. Do these thoughts represent Ayn Rand’s mature philosophic thinking? Is it realistic to believe Christianity could resolve its moral contradictions and rid itself of altruism when its metaphysics and epistemology conflict with reality? Does this letter contradict Leonard Peikoff’s recent thinking about religion? Why was this letter not in Letters of Ayn Rand?