As the Greek crisis unfolds in Europe, the latest chapter involves a potential bailout from the IMF — about 17% of whose total funds come from this country. This prompted my recall of the following quote (with one word updated):
What are all those people counting on? If a [Greek] factory goes bankrupt, the equalizers will find another factory to loot. If that other factory starts crumbling, it will get a loan from the bank. If the bank has no money, it will get a loan from the government. If the government has no money, it will get a loan from a foreign government. If no foreign government has any money, all of them will get a loan from the United States.
What they don’t know—and neither does this country—is that the United States is broke.
–Ayn Rand, “Egalitarianism and Inflation”, June 1974
That one led to this one, echoing the same theme:
What were they thinking now, the champions of need and the lechers of pity?—she wondered. What were they counting on? Those who had once simpered: “I don’t want to destroy the rich, I only want to seize a little of their surplus to help the poor, just a little, they’ll never miss it!”—then, later, had snapped: “The tycoons can stand being squeezed, they’ve amassed enough to last them for three generations”—then, later, had yelled: “Why should the people suffer while businessmen have reserves to last a year?”—now were screaming: “Why should we starve while some people have reserves to last a week?” What were they counting on?—she wondered.
The Saturday, 5/3/10 Detroit News has an editorial on the new finance regulation bill offered by the congressional Democrats. Evidently the bill restores some of the regulations on businesses that the Supreme Court just struck down while exempting unions from the same disclosure requirements. I have to shake my head at the Orwellian (or should I say Atlas Shruggedian) title of the bill:”Democracy Is Strengthened by Casting Light on Spending on Elections bill” aka DISCLOSE. [Read more →]
We’re not, we’re not trying to push financial reform because we begrudge success that’s fairly earned. I mean, I do think at a certain point you’ve made enough money. But, you know, part of the American way is, you know, you can just keep on making it if you’re providing a good product or providing good service. We don’t want people to stop, ah, fulfilling the core responsibilities of the financial system to help grow our economy.
(To make money is to produce wealth. Can one produce too much wealth? Can one be too healthy or too good?)
Obama’s ideal businessman would think something like, “I’ve made enough money, and it’s embarrassing to make more because all the leftist elitists sneer at me, but darn it, I must continue to produce to fulfill my responsibility to grow the economy.”
In Obama’s universe making money is a necessary evil. Americans must submit themselves to this dirty task so that the state will have enough wealth to redistribute. Those who produce wealth are not only used to support the poor, but they are sneered at for producing so much wealth in the first place.
With such a concept of the American way, it’s no wonder Obama is in a hurry to fundamentally transform it.
Living here is a privilege, not a right that every human being on earth is born with.
This is the end-of-road for conservative anti-immigrationists: the selective degradation of the liberty to live in a particular place from a right to a “privilege”. As a hostile commenter put it sarcastically (albeit a tad illiterately) at LegalInsurrection:
“Nothing says freedom from government interfernce like “show me your papers.”. Of course, limited government only applies to people who are real americans,not to mexicans.”
Let us examine the conservatives’ trip down the anti-immigration road, and see how it ended there — and what it means for conservatism’s purported fealty to Americanism.
When moral issues are at stake, it is important to evoke powerful facts of reality showing why a particular moral stand is valid. This is because most environmentalists believe &/or argue that the facts are with them, however poorly they understand those facts.
It is counter-productive to proselytize for a large carbon footprint, except perhaps as a humorous opening.
No matter how much one insists on his moral right to a large carbon footprint, he will only appear to be an irrationally selfish, moral, curmudgeon, blind to the ‘science’ of Global Warming, & to the long term future of humanity.
“….wicked plants consumed CO2, polluting the Earth’s atmosphere
with a deadly oxidizing compound,
today known as oxygen.”
I am sure that many readers of The New Clarion understand that mankind has a moral and political Right to exploit the Earth, but those Rights, and the positive values they engender are quite abstract.
Should one seek to convince others, one must begin with compelling concretes before going to the abstract; it is those facts that prepare an audience to be inclined to listen to abstractions. Thus from fact, moral value can be invoked.
Here are four facts that I find serve two terrific purposes.
First, these facts are clearly significant, and contradict environmentalists claims. Second, because these facts are not well known, they surprise one’s audience, perhaps challenging their belief that they had enough information to support the AGWers :
“Did you know that plants are so starved for CO2 that two plant groups have evolved new ways of capturing it? (My favorite)
“Did you know that CO2 levels were 100x higher when the dinosaurs lived?
“Did you know that if CO2 levels were just doubled, most plants would double their growth, producing twice as much fruit, vegetables and grains? Food would be half as expensive.”
“Did you know that the rocks of the World’s mountain ranges contain billions of tonnes of CO2, all captured from the atmosphere eons ago?”
Never begin by *saying* you want to produce CO2 to “warm the planet.” Do that, and you immediately surrender to the environmentalist position that human activity affects global climate. It doesn’t.
It will be up to each of you to make sure that the young people, African-Americans, Latinos, and women who powered our victory in 2008 stand together once again.
I think it’s more than just electoral demographics that makes Obama think in terms of pressure groups. The Democrats want people to think of themselves as members of multicultural collectives, not as individuals. The message is: if you’re a minority or a woman, the Democrats will take care of you.
Individual rights are not an issue in welfare state politics. Instead society is a war of pressure groups. If you’re not rich, you’d better vote Democrat to get your fair share of the pie.
Tomorrow, April 22nd is Exploit the Earth Day. This year I plan to celebrate it, weather permitting, by burning some scrap wood in my burner. This will of course release valuable carbon dioxide into the atmosphere thus warming our planet. You see warming the Earth will make growing seasons longer and this will benefit almost all living organisms including us humans. [Read more →]
By way of the Detroit Free Press, today’s leap of faith is this gem of logic from Iran: promiscuous women are the cause of earthquakes. Proof that religion places reason in the seat of justifying faith in dogma. A look at reality however does hint at a solution to the quakes:
“Some experts have even suggested Iran should move its capital to a less seismically active location. Tehran straddles scores of fault lines, including one more than 50 miles long, though it has not suffered a major quake since 1830.”
Nevertheless:
“Minister of Welfare and Social Security Sadeq Mahsooli said prayers and pleas for forgiveness were the best “formulas to repel earthquakes.”"
On 4/15 I received an email from my Michigan Senator Carl Levin announcing that hearings on the banking crisis had just started. Sen Levin is the chair of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Naturally, the financial industry is presumed guilty and must now prove their innocence or somehow explain away their evil behavior. [Read more →]
To hear the Left tell it, Christians are the ones who threaten us. One way to spot the worst of them is to look out for the ones spouting eschatology. That’s the part of Bible study involving prophecy, often involving those types who walk around intoning “Repent! The End is Near!”
I mean, obviously, someone who thinks the world is going to end any time now must be crazy.
Well, at least Leftists can still walk around claiming to be the vanguard of society against racism, yes? I mean, if it weren’t for the Left, nobody would ever have detected all those racists hiding among the Tea Party and the Republican Party.
Well, okay, they may be cultish and more than a bit racist, but you don’t see them taking the final, easy way out for those who lose the intellectual debate — threatening violence. At least the remain the side of peace.
I remember reading a few years ago that the food packets we dropped on Afghanistan were, because of political correctness, made entirely vegetarian. The Afghans were not consulted in the preparation of these rations, and it turned out they wouldn’t touch the stuff. The food that our military delivered at some risk and considerable cost was fed to the Afghans’ animals.
I don’t know if this story is true, but it strikes me as symbolic of the New Leftist welfare state. We have an altruist government forcing on people what no one seems to want, but the state gives anyway because it makes them feel morally noble. Oh, yes — it also gives them the power to rule our lives, but they are not motivated by greed, so they are certain they can do better with our lives than we can.
In a recent interview Obama mused on the label of Socialist that many apply to him.
“I do think that everybody has a responsibility, Democrats or Republicans, to tone down some of this rhetoric. And the truth is some of these comments when you actually ask, well, this is based on what? This notion that ‘Obama’s a Socialist,’ for example. Nobody can really (he chuckled) give you a good answer — much less when they, you know, make…”
“They would say mandating that people have to buy (health) insurance or something like that,” Smith pointed out.
“Yeah,” Mr. Obama said, “the — the sort of plan proposed by current — Republican nominee Mitt Romney, yeah. So it – it — it doesn’t make too much sense.
So, instead of defining Socialism and explaining how his political philosophy is different from it, he simply resorts to the answer an 8 year old would give: He does it too!
This is the brilliant intellectual idolized by the Left.
There’s a huge, full-court press on right now to paint the Tea Party movement as being just the usual “right-wing extremism“. Even Obama is doing his bit to feed this meme. It’s sufficiently pervasive that even my non-political friends are noticing it — and some of its participants are hyperventilating so fast that they are literally seeing things that aren’t there.
Talk radio host and Detroit News columnist Frank Beckmann had an oped on Wed. 3/24 “Dem’s health care claims lack real proof” which testifies to the kind of education they received. While Mr. Beckmann makes his point well, my point is that they don’t need proof, at least not empirical proof. [Read more →]
The reality of what it means to live in an America fundamentally transformed by leftist fools has not even begun to sink in, and we get this from Rep. Dingell:
Let me remind you this [Americans allegedly dying because of lack of universal health care] has been going on for years. We are bringing it to a halt. The harsh fact of the matter is when you’re going to pass legislation that will cover 300 [million] American people in different ways it takes a long time to do the necessary administrative steps that have to be taken to put the legislation together to control the people.
Doubtless the closest statist to you will explain that Dingell did not mean “contol the people” in a bad way. His intentions are good. He just wants to help. And to help 300 million people, well, you can’t just let them run around doing what they want. Control. It’s good for you. Bend over and take it.
At the signing ceremony the ever amusing Joe Biden said to the Godfather, “This is a big f***kin’ deal.”
Did you expect more dignity from the Democrats at what is, by their own statements, an historic event? Instead of Cicero they sound like Al Capone in Cicero, Illinois.
But why shouldn’t they talk like gangsters? They went to the mattresses to seize control of one-sixth of the economy. They now have the power to make offers the American people can’t refuse. It is a big f***kin’ deal.
Health care reform was such a success that Daily Kos is already looking forward to the next big reform.
Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner will be speaking this afternoon about financial reform at the American Enterprise Institute, not exactly a place brimful of folks who give smiles to reforms that involve the government unless it’s reducing its oversight role. Over the weekend, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke made some rumblings about the need to do something about firms that are “too big to fail,” calling their existence “pernicious” and an “insidious” barrier to competition. And starting at 5 p.m., Senator Dodd will lead the executive committee of the Senate Banking Committee in the first round of marking up the 1336-page Restoring American Financial Stability Act of 2010. (Summary here.)
