We seem to forget…

March 4, 2012 Leave a comment

We seem to forget…

 What goes around does come around.

 To become an American is to be given a gift of liberty.  Use the gift wisely. There are many today who have been born American and don’t realize what they have. There are many today who do not have Truth to guide their lives.  They have only feelings and sincerity as their moral guides.

 As a citizen of the United States you deserve nothing more than life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Anything else becomes a demand that grows government and government in turn robs people of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. A large government places people under the tyranny of its control first by controlling those you want controlled (unions, environmentalists, animal rights groups, etc. want others to be controlled) and then by controlling you.  Government in the “demand” process becomes a slave owner.  The Democrat party platform is the best example of a group seeking large government to corral people for “their own good.”

Voting for a Democrat means that you support the party platform:  abortion, casinos and gambling as revenue streams, higher taxes (you are the direct revenue stream for political favoritism ala Obama style politics), less return on your money, less control of your life, more government intrusion, government-run health care, European bailouts and bankrupt states (Greece, California, Illinois, etc.), political cronyism ala Chicago style politics, the Greek riots, government controlling others (while pretending that government will never control you), laziness, handouts, the perversion of marriage, more joblessness, more food stamps doled out, more crap at your expense. If you vote for a Democrat you deserve all the consequences. You still need to be spoon fed.

 We avoid pain, suffering and difficulty at all costs even though to overcome these onerous things make us feel alive and gives us character.  No amount of material possessions owned can do the same for us.

 You can’t take it with you and even though class warfare proponents such as Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, Mao and yes, Barack Obama, say that you can have it all at another’s expense.

 “A good name is more desirable than great riches.  A good name should be esteemed more than silver and gold.”  (The Book of Proverbs)

 A generous man will himself be blessed. It is better to give than to receive. (Jesus)

 “A sluggard does not plow in season; so at harvest time he looks but finds nothing.”  (The Book of Proverbs) How many kids spend their time in pursuit of a useless degree and find out they cannot support either themselves or give to others who are needy.  This is not government’s fault.  It is their doing, is it not? (see Occupy Wall Street protestors).  You reap what you sow and what you don’t sow.

You cannot give what you do not have.  Making others give what they have does not fulfill the requirement of you giving to others even if you call it you call it a fancy name – wealth redistribution (“social gospel” for the lazy)

 Truth will come to you during your life.  Act on it while you can.

 Self-pity is a drag on your soul.  Unload it at the next trash bin.

 Holding a grudge against someone will destroy the person holding the grudge.  Destroy it before it destroys you – forgive.

 We are forgiven as we forgive others (Jesus).

 “There is a path which seems right to a man but the end thereof is the way of death.” (The Book of Proverbs)

 “The fool says to himself “There is no God.”” (The book of Psalms)

 “The fear of the Lord leads to life.”  (The Book of Proverbs)

 “He who finds a wife finds what is good and receives favor from the Lord.”  (The Book of Proverbs)

              “So God created man in His own image…male and female He created them…God saw all that He made and it was very good.” (Genesis chapter 1)

(Note that homosexuality came after the fall of man and is a perversion of the good that had been made.  You should know that those who claim to be “Gay and Proud” will not enter the Kingdom of Heaven, they will not return to the garden.)

 Life is short, especially for the aborted.

 Women’s rights do not include destruction of a fetus – a child.  Murderers, also, do not enter the Kingdom of Heaven. (If you have had an abortion, repent and turn to seek God’s mercy.)

Women’s rights already include free contraception:  It is a woman’s right and freedom to keep her legs together and to say “No” to sex at any time and at any place. Do be fooled by the Democrats desire to supply you with so-called “free” contraception. And, the Democrats are more concerned with population control and controlling who is born (quality of life) and how many people are born (they don’t want the planet overrun with people who will use up its natural resources.)

 In a God-breathed marriage women desire love, men desire respect.

We will all give an account of our lives before our Creator.  There is a heaven and there is a hell.  Heaven is to be within the dancing embrace of the Trinity throughout eternity.  Hell is to be alone forever, constantly thirsty for the living water, constantly in agony as you remember your life.

 Like it or not you have free will.  Blaming God for your life only makes you a bad rendition of a human.  Rejecting your personal responsibility shows your self-indulgent pride. Sadly, there are many who wash their hands absolving themselves of responsibility.  They deflect accountability by asking “What is truth?”

 “Before his downfall a man’s heart is proud, but humility comes before honor.”  (The Book of Proverbs)

 The Bible contains the words of God and the factual history of Jesus: 

“But these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.” (The Gospel of John)

Filed under Christian character, Christianity, Human Interest, Life As I See It Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Minimum Wage Or The Price We Pay For Stupid

February 4, 2012 Leave a comment

I have noticed a definite pattern emerging ever since before the 2008 election of BHO:  many voters have given up thinking and have decided to vote for the popular shills of humanism, otherwise known as the educated elite.

 BHO, the POTUS, is surrounded by Harvard grads, each of whom has been steeped in liberal mores taught by educators who have risen to the level of their incompetence (the Peter Principle).  I like what Tomas Sowell, economist, said about these professors:

 “Too often what are called “educated” people are simply people who have been sheltered from reality for years in ivy-covered buildings.  Those whose whole careers have been spent in ivy-covered buildings, insulated by tenure, can remain adolescents on into their golden retirement years.”[1]

And, Walter E. Williams:

“People who denounce the free market and voluntary exchange, and are for control and coercion, believe they have more intelligence and superior wisdom to the masses. What’s more, they believe they’ve been ordained to forcibly impose that wisdom on the rest of us. Of course, they have what they consider good reasons for doing so, but every tyrant that has ever existed has had what he believed were good reasons for restricting the liberty of others.”

In my estimation the American voter, though often degreed, has become less educated and intellectually apathetic. This voter has become a stage-one thinker – someone who finds some humanist value in a policy, votes for the person promoting it and doesn’t want to think any further about it, believing that they have done their good deed for the day.  Yet, the policy does not operate in isolation and, typically, havoc and damage control ensues when the policy is implemented. Our nation is left ever more crippled.  The Minimum Wage Law (MWL) is one prime example of this stage one thinking implemented and voted for by people who let others do their thinking.

Thomas Sowell in his excellent book the Thomas Sowell Reader, a compendium of his many newspaper articles and essays, wrote an article titled Minimum Wage Laws. Here are some of his thoughts from that article to ponder deeply before the next election:

 “By the simplest and most basic economics, a price artificially raised tends to cause more to be supplied and less to be demanded than when process are left to be determined by supply and demand in a free market.”[2]

 “The unemployed are made idle by wage rates artificially set above the level of their productivity.  Those who are idled in their youth are of course delayed in acquiring the job skills and experience which could make them more productive – therefore higher earner – later on.”[3]

 “Although most industrial societies have minimum wage laws, not all do.  Switzerland and Hong Kong have been among the exceptions – and both have had very low unemployment rates.”[4]

 “Higher costs for a given quantity and quality of labor tend to produce less employment, just as higher prices for other things tend to produce fewer sales. Moreover, higher costs in the form of mandated benefits have the same economic effect as higher costs in the form of minimum wage laws.  The explicit minimum wage rate understates the labor costs imposed by European governments, which also mandates various employer contributions to pension plans and health benefits, among other things.  Europe’s unemployment rates shot up when such government-mandated benefits to be for by employers grew sharply during the 1980 and 1990s.”[5]

 Average hourly compensation in Europe of manufacturing employees in the European Union countries in general is higher than in the United States or Japan.  So is unemployment.”[6]

 “Labor unions also benefit from minimum wage laws, are among the strongest proponents of such laws, even though their members typically make much more than minimum wage rate.”[7]

 “Just as businesses seek to have government impose tariffs on imported goods that compete with their products, so labor unions use minimum wage laws as tariffs to force up the price of non-union labor that competes with their members for jobs.”[8]

 “…when all is said and done, most empirical studies indicate that minimum wage laws reduce employment in general, and especially the employment of younger less skilled, and minority workers.”[9] (emphasis mine)

Thomas Sowell’s article is chock full of empirical information and common sense economics.  I could continue to quote many of his insightful words.  I’ll provide one more series of quotes about minorities and the implementation of MWLs the past century:

 “Again, it is necessary to note how price is a factor even in racial discrimination…It was only after a series of minimum wage escalations began that black male teenage unemployment not only skyrocketed but became more than double the unemployment rates among white male teenagers.”[10] (emphasis mine)

 Stage-one voting creates unemployment.  Obama, the educated One, Jesse Jackson and the Congressional Black Caucus should know the facts.   But in ignoring the economic data they choose “navel-gazing, hand-wringing or self-dramatization” to preach a Liberal Utopia that will never arrive on this earth. MWLs produce the opposite effect, in fact!

 Don’t ignore the data. Read. Understand. Think beyond stage-one.  Uncle Sam needs You more than ever.

Again, Thomas Sowell:

 “People who cannot be bothered to learn both sides of the issues should not bother to vote.”[11]

 

[1] Thomas Sowell, The Thomas Sowell Reader, p. 401

[2] Ibid., p. 108

[3] Ibid., p. 108

[4] Ibid., p. 109

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid., p.110

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid., p.111

[10] Ibid., p. 115 & 117

[11] Ibid., p.397

Note:  Mitt Romney has come out in favor of auto-increasing the MWL.  I am voting Newt Gingrich in the Illinois GOP primary.

Update:  In a 02/07/2012 RCP article regarding Mitt Romney’s faux conservatism, Thomas Sowell said:

“Nor are such consequences of minimum wage laws peculiar to blacks or to the United States. In Western European countries whose social policies liberals consider more “advanced” than our own, including more generous minimum wage laws and other employer-mandated benefits, it has been common in even prosperous years for unemployment rates among young people to be 20 percent or higher.

The economic reason is not complicated. When you set minimum wage levels higher than many inexperienced young people are worth, they don’t get hired. It is not rocket science.

Milton Friedman explained all this, half a century ago, in his popular little book for non-economists, “Capitalism and Freedom.” So have many other people. If a presidential candidate who calls himself “conservative” has still not heard of these facts, that simply shows that you can call yourself anything you want to. “

Thoughts from Uncle Miltie:

Filed under 2012 election, Economics, Liberalism, Political Commentary, Politics, Progressivism Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Just Say “No”

January 27, 2012 Leave a comment

Obama and the Dems want to bring everyone down to the same “bottom-feeder” level called “fair”.  In lieu of a good record to extol, Obama’s campaign plea is take more money from the so-called 1% and then to redistribute the money according to some vague notion of fairness to the 99%.  Obama is not about wealth creation.  Obama is about wealth redistribution.  Obama doesn’t want to make the pie bigger.  Obama wants to slice the pie into smaller slices. Obama and the Dems don’t create wealth, they syphon off wealth by all manner of taxation.  The Dems also build casinos or as I call them, shell games, to gain revenue money from the fools who happily play their life away hoping to “Win the Future”  (a Obama campaign mantra).  And with no money yet in hand Obama, the snake-oil salesman he is, makes financial promises to his base (e.g., college kids, unions, banks, etc.) and does so without regard for the taxpayer who would foot the bill.

After destroying America’s financial future his first term with bailouts to his cronies and the passing of Obamacare, Obama now seeks a second term to continue the pillaging process.  Obama is hell-bent on wiping the American slate clean with a rag he calls “Hope” and then spray painting his own perverse ideological graffiti, “Change”, on the walls of history. For Obama and his posse the U.S. Constitution is just another authority to hold in contempt. This is Obama as Ludicrous, a political class gangsta member from Chicago with the same old denigrating street  rap – “I’m for me and my crew. The rest can go to f___ themselves.

Think about this.  Do you really want someone defining fairness?  Do you really want someone to pick and chose who wins and who loses?  Do you really think that government will stop private property encroachment (taxes) with the 1%? Once you give government the rights to your pocketbook (healthcare included) you lose complete control of it regardless of your democratic representation.

 Now for social gospel junkies, this type of ideology is nowhere near Christianity – robbing Peter to pay Paul.  For the voter, this socialist ideology is nothing other than giving him a false hope of security wrapped in yesterday’s newspaper. It certainly smells like day-old fish.

 True conservatives like myself want everyone to have an opportunity to succeed, to rise up to a new level called “personal success.”  Think about this:  if your money is being taxed away to feed a socialist’s irrational vision than you have less money to provide for your family, less money to build a successful business, less money for charity. Government becomes the focus of your life – not God, family, friends or the needy.

 A vote for Obama will bring you and your family down to a new low and will suck the life out of our nation.  His re-election would move our country from constitutionalism to despotism. If you vote for that you deserve it.

This next presidential election we must not put our votes out to the “hope and change” pasture. We must think and choose wisely.  Just say “No” to the stupor inducing drug called socialism and its street-corner salesman Obama.

When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle. Edmund Burke, Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (1770)

illionoiswithnewt_TheNewtGingrichRecord

Filed under Life As I See It, Political Commentary, Politics Tagged with , , , , , ,

European Vacation Part III

January 7, 2012 Leave a comment

I have an answer for those who would like to see America become like Europe:  take a slow boat to Europe.

 If you are young and hold a useless degree (liberal arts, gender studies, “identity” studies, African-American studies, etc) and are jobless in spite of Obama’s Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 than take your worthless piece of paper and flee to the cafes of Paris or Rome.  Spend your Recovery summers and winters, springs and autumns in Europe.  Become one of Europe’s intellectual elites. Better yet, become the vagabond that you have always dreamed of becoming– just you, nature and Kumbaya.  Become the insipid whiner who decries American liberty for having too much opportunity and too much choice and not enough government programs making choices for you.

 If you are seeking European style health care then the perfect answer for you would be to relocate yourself and your citizenship to a European country.  After all, America, having paid for the defense of Europe during WWII to the tune of 80 plus billion dollars and with thousands of American lives, allowed European nations to turn their swords into plowshares, their guns into socialized medicine. America effectively paid for the implementation of Germany’s health care system. And, doesn’t America still have a military base in Germany protecting German interests as well as American interests, freeing up German defense dollars for healthcare?

 Socialist Europe is held up as a model of “just behavior”; but the Left forgets that for seventy-five years America defended Europe from the Communist threat, and bore the cost, which would have bankrupted Europe, and which, in the event, bankrupted Communism.  The Left looks at the peace of Europe since World War II and forgets that it was not only ensured, but created by American military strength and determination (and funded by the Marshall plan, which is to say, by a surplus of American industrial wealth.) And now the Left has elected a President who thinks it good to go to Europe and apologize for our “arrogance”, who proclaims the benefits of appeasement both at home and around the world.[1]

 Coming out of a decisive victory made possible by America, the Marshall plan funneled huge amounts of money into the rebuilding of European nations devastated by the Third Reich. America paid a steep price to free Europe from her enemies. Europe responded by turning inward and to pampering herself with socialized health care.  The facts now reveal, though, that under European style socialized health care you will get a small bang for your Euro in Europe, unless of course you are really looking for legalized drugs.

 And, if you are looking for top-down centralized government and the chance to really all-out criticize and complain about America then Europe is the place for you. Over there, in the Elysian Fields where there is “blessed” life after life in your despised America, you can rail against the Yanks for being so greedy, so selfish, so uncaring, so hard-working and so American.  Forget about WWII. Forget about the fact that America is the most charitable nation on earth (a common good interventionism) and a strong defender of liberty against totalitarianism. And forget, too, that millions of people left their homelands for the chance at American prosperity and for the freedoms of speech, religion and choice.

I believe the incredible wealth of this country will allow it to survive quite awhile on its hundred years of production and upon its natural resources and historic culture of productivity.

But the Change which Obama’s rhetoric referred to preceded and will follow him, accelerated by him and his policies, accepted by a drugged populace and supine press.  It is the unfortunate descent of a productive nation into socialism, which, as I understand it, is robbing Peter to pay Paul.  I don’t think it’s any more complex than that.[2]

 In Europe, give in to your to your passions and to your righteous anger.  Go riot in the French streets about banal differences in French cinema. Find your mojo among the militant Left Euro-Sophists. Stir your Café Americano pensively, smoke your Marlboros and sit around in distressed blue jeans chatting smugly with others of your herd about your almost extinct planet and the need to create a global warming franchise like Al Gore has done.  You have earned it.

  A vagabond status of passive living is so incredibly ‘60s.  Peace and love baby.  Go for it.  Experience the experience. Become one with the world. Find yourself.  COEXIST with yourself in Europe and please leave America to the Americans.

 If you are looking for “Hope” and “Change” look no farther: America’s promise of liberty, opportunity and choice is filled with “Hope”.  To be sure, American hope is born out of character which is born out of perseverance through trial, through hard work and yes, through suffering and not out of European-like nanny state programs which enable sloth, intemperance, envy and even despair.

 “Change” comes when you begin to fully appropriate America’s “Hope.”  “Change,” thus, begins and ends with you, right here, right now.  Or, board the next boat to parts unknown.

[1] David Mamet, The Secret Knowledge: On Dismantling of American Culture (New York:  Penguin Books:  Sentinel, 2011, http://davidmamet.com/) 44.

[2] Ibid, 64

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Course Correction Needed: 2012

December 26, 2011 4 Comments

Currently, we as a nation have as our leader the only un-American President ever to hold the office.  He is un-American not because he is black or because there have been questions about his place of birth.  He is un-American precisely because he wants to transform America into a completely different country ~ effectively, an EU style nation under centralized control. And as such the liberty of the individual will convert to the power of the state and its elite contingent.

Here is what a member of Britain’s Parliament said in a recent book warning Americans about the Europeanization of America:

The alarming thing is that President Obama, the former chair of the Senates’s Europe Committee, seems genuinely to believe that the United States can usefully learn from the European political and social model.  The platform on which he was elected, and the policies he is now implementing, are not a series of initiatives lashed randomly together.  They amount to a sustained project of Europeanization:  state health care, government day care, universal college education, carbon taxes, support for supra-nationalism, bigger government, a softer national policy.

 Of course European leaders are flattered by the mimicry.  But, in their hearts, even they know that pursuing such an agenda leaves a country less prosperous and less free.[1]

In order to accomplish this change Obama regularly uses blatant demagogic rhetoric of the class warfare type to stir up fears.  And, with a sliding scale of European-like moral relativism coupled with the Left’s anthropocentric humanism, he ultimately promotes the worship of man and his material needs – One nation under man and his “fair share” of material goods.

With all the arrogance he can muster and an uncontrained vision of top-down government Obama truly seeks to unsettle Americans from their long-standing moral and religious heritage and move them into the framework of a secular democracy based on nothing more than rational humanism and anthropocentrism. He plays to the fear of inequitable outcomes (materialism) and encourages envy cleverly disguised as egalitarianism.  But consider these telling words from economist Thomas Sowell:

 “Those who want to take our money and gain power over us have discovered the magic formula:  get us envious or angry at others and we will surrender, in installments, not only our money but our freedom.  The most successful dictators of the 20th century ~ Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, Mao – all used this formula, and now class warfare politicians are doing the same.”

  “Envy plus rhetoric equals “social justice.”

Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it. (emphasis mine)

 Nor is economic failure the worst of it.  The millions slaughtered by Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot for political reasons are an even grimmer reality.

Obama daily brines us with acerbic fairness talk hoping to stir up a maelstrom of unrest and radicalism, hoping to push the U.S. into a European model of government where the rule of “Fairness” and “Rights” replaces Truth and Love.  In this madness Obama is helped by the influence of the European George Soros, his money being channeled into progressive media outlets.

Obama dislikes the U.S. because he envies Europe.  He does not want to exalt America’s exceptionlism and its unmatched charity.  Rather, he wants to extol Europe’s elitism and its useless intellectual humanitariansim.  He believes Europe to be superior to America in many ways including societal issues and in the nature of its governance.  He certainly believes Europe to be on the height of societal evolution when in fact Europe is cutting off its own moral foundations at the root.

As a student of radical SDS terrorist Bill Ayers Obama also bows to the 60’s radical’s vision of democratic revolution, but he does so now in a new button-downed guise of “Hope and Change.”  (BTW:  the phrase “separation of church and state” does not appear in the Constitution. The phrase was coined by Bill Ayers in 1975.)

Since the 1960s when the radicalization of democracy began it has continued to undermine all authoritative institutions and even Truth itself. The 60’s radical prostrates himself before pure autonomy and consent, offering nothing of value in exchange. Beyond all this Obama wants to place over America the banner of “One World” ~ “One World Under Man and Materialism

Under such a “One-World” banner Obama would pledge U.S. allegiance to international energy, environmental, economic, judicial and social policies. This banner would replace our own hard won historically, philosophically and religiously birthed constitution with an Eric Holder type of pick and choose demagoguery – a tyranny of the unconstrained vision to which Obama, Holder and Europe fully embrace. It is a banner of an abstracted democracy which encourages people to abandon self-governance and the idea of Truth. Under such a banner “The pressure builds to defer to elite opinion, to the requirements of humanitarianism and egalitarianism, to the moral authority of international law.”[2]

Not just because of the ineptness of his leadership, his lack of statesmanship, his neglect of history, his political cronyism, his scorn of facts or his faux spirituality should Obama be a one term president.  If  Obama were to be elected again America would lose its heart, mind and soul to the nihilism, secularism and parasitism of socialism so characteristic of the European nations today ~ nations floundering under the weight of their own foolishness, lack of self-governance and spiritual neglect.

America needs an American President. We need a president who will guide us, a republic established by spiritual and philosophic men and women of great insight, of great learning and of great depth of character.  The founders were people of self-governance committed to the best possible outcomes available to every man.  What we have now is a one-dimensional populist autobiographer whose main devotions are to himself and to golf.

“Barack Obama also is the deep thinker who ponders great things.  And the thing that Barack Obama seems to ponder most is his own greatness.  He doesn’t write biographies, he writes only autobiographies.  He gives speeches which he declares to be historic.  He recognizes his place in history long before he has created history.  This nation is but a stage upon which Barack Obama creates his life story, and it’s all about him.” William A. Jacobson,  A Harvard Trial Lawyer for McCain

America does not need the snarkiness and hubris of light-weight Obama. We certainly do not want or need a president who cut his ideological “teeth” on the teachings of people like 60s radical Bill Ayers and “God Damn America” Jeremiah Wright. We do not need a freshman senator from Illinois to vote “Present” during our times of national crisis.

The pilgrims left Europe in order to embrace freedom of religion ~ a freedom from a centralized religion. In the process they, along with Truth-honoring statesmen helped to form an American Republic derivative of and dependent on Truth.  Obama’s presidency is now piloting our ship away from the shores of vested Truth and back towards Europe. There the vacuum of moral relativism with its detestation of Truth will suck the U.S. down into its sink-hole.

God Save America from Obama.

[1] Daniel Hannan, The New Road to Serfdom: A letter of Warning to America (New York:  Broadside Books, 2010), 76

[2]  Daniel J. Mahoney, The Conservative Foundations of a Liberal Order  (ISI Books, 2010) 21

Filed under 2012 election, essay, Life As I See It, Political Commentary, Politics, short piece, Writing Tagged with , , , , , , ,

Have it Their Way: Obamacare

December 10, 2011 Leave a comment

Recently, in my reading of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Philosophy: Everything Is Fire, a book included in the Blackwell Philosophy and Pop Culture Series, I came across the term “McDonaldlization”.

This term, coined by sociologist George Ritzer in his 1993 book The McDonalization of Society, defines how Ritzer sees the dehumanizing affects on society through the use of a fast-food restaurant’s operation methodology in many of our businesses and our institutions.  He tells us that the scientific methods affecting us are efficiency, calculability, predictability (standardization), control and irrational rationality.

“Most specifically, irrationality means that rational systems are unreasonable systems. By that I mean that they deny the basic humanity, the human reason, of the people who work within or are served by them.” (Ritzer 1994:154)

As a process characteristic of doing business, whether as providing a service or a good to someone, McDonaldlization makes sense. But it only makes sense up until the point the customer is served and satisfied by such process.  If the customer is not satisfied the process would need to adapt in order to satisfy the customer or the provider would likely lose his customer.  Within a free market business scenario both the provider and the receiver have choices and they are free to make them. Certainly it is no secret that many people eat at McDonalds or drink Starbucks coffee, receiving the products and service of these companies which embrace process characteristics described above. Others do not seek those products and services. They are free to choose otherwise.

With the Obamacare bureaucratic healthcare franchise coming to a town near you, you the patient will no longer have a choice.  Medical providers will no longer have a choice.  Both the provider and the patient must now provide and receive respectively what is calculated, predictable, rational and efficient. All of this process will be controlled by the Federal Government.  You are being told a lie that things won’t change regarding your health care under Obamacare.  They will change dramatically under this newly created centrally planned institution. You should know that Central Planning Officer (CPO), the health-care computer, will not let you “have it your way.”

In another article in the afore-mentioned book titled Kicking the Hornet’s Nest:  The Hidden “Section” in Every Institution the writer describes how man-made institutions tend to become corrupt to maintain and protect its own power under the banner of providing a benefit to others. Institutions “trumpet rationality” (scientific management), “boast stability” (inertia to change or to adaptation for individual needs) and “pronounce power” (we need power to protect you) and yet as we look at our U.S. Congress we see that “Institutions cannot simply be swept clean of their corrupt elements; rather, they tend toward corruption in their very being.  The injustice of the institution appears necessary for the maintenance of the institution.”  Institutions do not care about democracy. They do not care about your vote.

Institutions tend to serve those in power. When this happens you will be subjugated to the rationality of the institution for the protection of the institution. And, the institution will protect itself. Rationality has nothing to do with how you the patient feels. You will then know the irrational rationality of the institution. Do you understand this?

Now, do you also understand that Obamacare is a loss of choice?  Do you understand it is loss of liberty and, more importantly, of human dignity? Do you understand that you will now become codified just like medical diagnoses and services are now codified? Do you understand Obamacare is a loss of privacy?  And, of protection?

There are people right now who want all of your medical records on tap so as they say “to make things run more efficiently for the doctor/patient relationship.” We are headed to the McDonaldlization of health care via the institution of Obamacare.  Wait till the Obamacare franchise hits town. You will be Big Mac’d in thirty seconds or less.

Filed under Economics, essay, Health Care, Life As I See It, Non-fiction, Philosophy, Political Commentary, Politics, Short Piece, Writing Tagged with , , , , , , , , , ,

Occupy Thanksgiving

November 24, 2011 Leave a comment

Words you will never see on a OWS or union protest placard:  “THANK YOU”.

At the table this Thanksgiving there will be those who give thanks. There will also be those who pull up to the table demanding more. This latter group will echo Obama’s class warfare rhetoric griping about inequities and fairness.

There are those who do not give thanks. They will be waiting for their demands to be met. They will beg for “this, that or the other thing”, bemoaning their own situation as being intolerable.  For them there is never a thought of thanksgiving even when their most dire needs have been met.  I am reminded of the historical account of Jesus healing the Ten Lepers:

 “As he (Jesus) was going into a village, ten men who had leprosy met him. They stood at a distance and called out in a loud voice, “Jesus, Master, have pity on us!”

 When he saw them, he said, “Go, show yourselves to the priests.” And as they went, they were cleansed.

 One of them, when he saw he was healed, came back, praising God in a loud voice. He threw himself at Jesus’ feet and thanked him—and he was a Samaritan.

 Jesus asked, “Were not all ten cleansed? Where are the other nine? Has no one returned to give praise to God except this foreigner?” Then he said to him, “Rise and go; your faith has made you well.” (emphasis mine)

As this account reveals people will gladly seek benevolence from others but they will often do so out of the understanding that they deserve such gifts or benefits.  This is especially true if government has become the benefactor.  And because our government has deep pockets full of other people’s money these same people may certainly feel that they have “right”  to demand things from the government bureaucrats who have set themselves up as demi-gods of benevolence. These people believe that they “justly” deserve government beneficence because they feel that they are victims of society and also because the politicians they have put in office promised them “hope and change”; “hope and change” outcomes promised in terms of benefits on the barrel head in exchange for their vote.

Our U.S. Constitution provides for the protection of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The 5th Amendment offers protections to our “life, liberty, or property,” noting we cannot be deprived of any of them without due process of law. Our Constitution does not guarantee the end results under that protection.

In effect, you are promised a fence around the rose garden but not the roses themselves. I learned from my Dutch grandfather that roses require sun, rain, good soil, fertilizing, protection from frost and rabbits and substantial pruning. It takes lots of time and energy, lots of individual attention to create an American Beauty rose. Yet, some people don’t want to work that hard or to be so dedicated.  So, they ask the government for the cut roses from someone else’s garden. They do this to make their lives just a little “nicer”, a little “richer”.  But, these cut roses quickly whither and dry up and the same people are back asking for more of them.

Dismissing the U.S. Constitution’s accumulated knowledge, wisdom and Judeo-Christian roots as outmoded and not rational for today’s society, social justice advocates demand equal outcomes.  They do so by demanding that others be deprived at any cost so that others will receive the benefits they so desire.  They do not care about another’s personal property, property such as an accumulated wealth. They care solely about their own accumulated gain. They see inequity not as a summit to climb but as a lot of work and effort that can be easily circumscribed with political action.

These advocates make their demands through willing politicians like Obama, Reid , Pelosi, Barney Frank (MA), Dick Durbin (IL), etc.  These politicians campaign with promises of changing the social landscape to favor their own version of utopian socialism. They usurp the black and white meaning of our U.S. Constitution by “intuitively” reading it so as to give the government the power to mandate social change via taxation, via the commerce clause and via the politician’s own self-interest of encapsulating power via re-election.

Speaking of self-interest, capitalism is a person who out of self-interest seeks to barter or sell a good or a service to another. The ‘other’, thinking he will benefit from the exchange, makes the trade-off. The exchange is made and both parties are happy, satisfying each their own self-interest.

Utopian socialism is a one-way exchange. It is taking from Peter to pay Paul. It is depriving Peter of what he has earned, grown, protected with his life, it is taking his savings and his wealth and then giving it to Paul for no other reason that Paul may need or want the same things. This is what is now being called “social justice” but it is not justice. It does not give Peter what is due him – the right to his property. It does not give Paul what is due him – the right to pursue happiness. This exchange is more accurately described as highway robbery.

These social justice advocates presume that the U.S. Constitution meant for them to have equal outcomes or perhaps even that the Constitution is outdated, archaic and without justice as they see it.  The social justice protestors cry out “Have pity on us, government, give us what we think we need and what we so badly want. You have the means. We gave you the place of authority.”

In 1993, during a lecture titled “The Meaning of “Justice””, Russell Kirk of the Heritage Foundation said:

“In this disordered age, when it seems as if the fountains of the great deep had been broken up, our urgent need is to restore a general understanding of the classical and Christian teaching about justice. Without just men and women, egoism and appetite bring down civilization.  Without strong administration of justice by the state, we all become so many Cains, every man’s hand against every other man’s. The humanitarian fancies himself zealous for the life impulse; in reality, he would surrender us to the death impulse.  The humanitarian’s visions issue from between the delusory gates of ivory; justice issues from between the gates of horn.”

 Today’s OWS protestors plead for pity from others using lawlessness.  They are being urged on to political violence by men who should know better. They also do not seek God for their daily bread. That would require humility on their part.

Just as ten lepers were healed and only one returned to give thanks, nine out of ten of us may likely think that we deserve such a “gift” and just walk away, pleased with ourselves having pled for pity and receiving something in return for our “effort”.  The exclusion of “Thank You” from the placards of men’s lives reveals the lifting up of “MY Rights” and the idolatrous nature behind most dissent and protest. The idea of justice, “to each his own”, is being  replaced with “feed me and then ask of me virtue.”

The Greatest Disparity in our society is between those who with contentment give thanks to God and their neighbor and those who, like leeches, demand ever more and more from government and their neighbor.

  It is time to Occupy Thanksgiving without asking for anything in return. And, let us give God what is due Him:

“Give thanks to the LORD, for he is good; his love endures forever.”   Psalm 107:1

Filed under 2011, Christianity, Culture, Economics, essay, Liberalism, Life As I See It, Non-fiction, Political Commentary, Politics, social commentary, Writing Tagged with , , , , , ,

What’s Left? To Be Decided.

November 19, 2011 Leave a comment

Thomas Sowell, in his excellent book A Conflict of Visions:  Ideological Origins of Political Struggles, discusses the two main opposing ways of viewing the political, economic and social landscape.  These views have come down through time to the present dichotomy of visions, namely the Left or Liberal (modern sense) vision and the Right or Conservative vision.  Sowell denotes the two visions: one being the unconstrained vision, the former, and the constrained vision, the latter.

I will try to make this a short post. Here is my brief take on The Unconstrained Vision:

The unconstrained vision relies heavily on surrogate decision makers, men or women of “superior” intelligence and virtue, to make our decisions for us.  The implication of this vision is that the common man does not know what is good for himself and for those around him.  But those with super-rational intelligence and sincerity do.  And because of our lack of “fair and just” decision making, we the people need an over-arching Decider – someone to rein in society.

I recently read what I would call a perfect description of this viewpoint’s totalitarian heavy-handedness, an oppressiveness which is often disguised as omniscient benevolence which hides its use of debilitating control methods:

“…Nurse Ratched is the Decider; under her unblinking gaze, the privileges, rewards, punishments, dosages, and furloughs for the patients are parceled out or denied. Time itself seems to run at whatever speed Nurse Ratched decrees, the clock slowing down to bring everything to a snow-globe standstill to conjure a sense of suspended animation, a zombie twilight.  Sparks of resistance are ruthlessly snuffed.  Waiting in the wings is the Shock Shop, where you go in as a person and are wheeled out as a vegetable after sufficient voltage to the brain…” (source listed below)

If you haven’t noticed by now, we are living in the “zombie twilight” of the Obama Presidency. Obama is our country’s Nurse Ratched.  He is a prime example of the unconstrained vision’s all-powerful omniscient Decider.  He is someone who talks down to people.  And enabled by the main stream media He has become the Chosen One, the chosen articulator of reason and we are his hapless patients waiting for him to put us in our place. Obama certainly believes that we the American people should follow his lead down the road to social justice and fairness. He believes that he knows what is best for us because he also believes that we the people are inept, confused and inferior in intelligence, unenlightened, lazy and worst of all, free to think for ourselves.

It certainly appears from Obama’s messages to the American people that his vision, historically filtered by the teachings of the radical Bill Ayers and “God damn America” Jeremiah Wright, has given him the understanding that he has seen the light while we the people walk in pre-enlightenment medieval darkness. It is with unbridled hubris that he stands above society, a mullah standing in an ivory tower minaret, lecturing us and calling us to pray to the god of one-world socialism and to the jihad of class warfare.

Those with this unconstrained vision see institutions as being at fault for man’s condition and not man himself.  They believe that man is a victim of inept policies and inadequately funded schools, food programs, housing programs, bailouts, etc.  And the free market, where Capitalism operates, is the impersonal culprit who steals fairness away from the victimized society. The unconstrained vision seeks to reign in the free market in order to control the outcomes of supply and demand using price controls, wage controls, unions, rent controls, quotas, the Dodd-Frank Act, ad infinitum.

Controlling the market place and controlling outcomes are what those with the unconstrained vision use to promote social justice and fairness. They want the results of economic, political and social activity to be fair in terms of their rationalistic values.  Yet, they will often, in fact, bypass statistical fact to promote fairness and equality.  In so doing they will often create a domino effect of economic havoc and inequality. This type of Stage One thinking is common for those with the unconstrained vision.  They want “fairness” implemented now at any cost regardless of the many negative repercussions that will be sure to ensue (e.g., Obamacare).

For the Left life is a zero sum game.  If someone gains then someone else must be losing out – there is only so much pie to go around. The Left must “right” this perceived wrong.

The legal system is another thing to be controlled by those with the unconstrained vision.  Instead of black and white laws known to everyone they seek to implement ad hoc reasoning per every legal situation.  Take for example a man who steals and is arrested.  He knows that he will be punished for his crime.  The law clearly states the crime and lists the options for punishment that the judge may impose.  The criminal knows that everyone will be treated the same way in the same situation within the letter of the law. Even though the criminal does not like the situation he still knows that the law applies to everyone and therefore deemed fair by everyone. In fact, he stole knowing the law and the consequences of his actions.

An activist judge with an unconstrained view, on the other hand, will have the same law before him but he will use his own ad hoc articulated reasoning to determine whether the man should be punished.  This judge may decide that the criminal acted badly because of his poor living conditions or because he was having a bad hair day or…and then decide to let him go. The judge would consider this a just outcome. The victim would not, of course, consider this fair.

While the unconstrained vision is all about controlling the political, economic or social landscape for specific outcomes the constrained vision is hands off or laissez-faire in its dealings, seeing man as having sufficient accumulated knowledge and being capable of making prudent trade-offs that would benefit himself and society in the process. Nothing is done in isolation. Benefits abound because for the Right life is not a zero sum game. Everyone can win.  Everyone can have their own pie.

The constrained vision sees man as he really is:  self-motivated. This realistic vision sees man as selfish and greedy but also willing to respect tradition and rules and certainly able to make prudent trade-offs based on knowledge gained from centuries of accumulated knowledge and wisdom, knowledge and wisdom not confined to an omnipotent Decider. One with a constrained vision doesn’t have all the answers. He or she must operate with humilty, tolerance and cooperation in order to support the freedom and liberty within which they seek to live.

 While there is much more to be said here I promised to keep this short. I highly recommend Thomas Sowell’s book, A Conflict of Visions:  Ideological Origins of Political Struggles, as a means to understand the vast differences of the two visions behind the political, economic and social struggles affecting our world today. 

I can see clearly now.

Quote source:  Vanity Fair article, Still Cuckoo After All These Years, by James Wolcott, December 2011 issue.

*****

“The highest manifestation of life consists in this: that a being governs its own actions. A thing which is always subject to the direction of another is somewhat of a dead thing.”  Thomas Aquinas

*****

**An aside into constrained thinking:

Filed under 2012 election, Current Events 2011, Economics, essay, Health Care, Life As I See It, Non-fiction, Political Commentary, Politics, Progressivism, social commentary, Writing Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness for Sale

November 13, 2011 Leave a comment

My pursuit of happiness is being restrained by the Health Care Mandate Law. I now see myself as an indentured slave under the oppressive masters of the Health Care Mandate and the massive debt burden created by our so-called representatives. My children and I are now being shackled to the enormous costs of mandatory health insurance and a gigantic Federal and State tax burden. Government grows at the expense of its people – rich or poor.

Every time activist congressmen and judges stretch the meaning of our very concise U.S. Constitution to fit their unconstrained social agendas it costs the taxpayer money and liberty.  Soon neither will be left.  It is no wonder the Obama-ites want the rich to pay more – most of the American people and small businesses are tapped out.

 For me, happiness is not an expensive health insurance policy written with thousands of pages of small print as a federally mandated law, a law written out of Stage One thinking – without a thought of the damaging repercussions,  a law enacted by representatives who hadn’t even read the bill before passing it (Nancy Pelosi:  “We have to pass the bill to find out what is in it.“).  If you think this is happiness then I also have some insurance that you should buy.

BTW:  It’s all OK, isn’t it?  Just keep using your democracy to vote away your life, liberty and your pursuit of happiness in exchange for stacks of noble-sounding demogogically derived bureaucratically tyrannical securities. In so doing you are choosing dependence over liberty and therefore, loss of choice.

 “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.  It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies.  The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep…his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”  C.S. Lewis

Filed under Current Events 2011, Economics, Health Care, Life As I See It, Political Commentary, Politics Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , ,

Sowell Man Friday

October 28, 2011 Leave a comment

Here are just a few insightful quotes from Thomas Sowell’s new book, The Thomas Sowell Reader.  I highly recommend this down to earth book by Thomas Sowell, economist.  These quotes are to be found in the chapter Random Thoughts.  As you will see, the quotes are apropos for today’s political scene and the profligate Left.

“Many of those people in the so-called “helping professions” are helping people to be irresponsible and dependent on others.”

 “Politics is the art of making your selfish desires seem like the national interest.”

 “People who cannot be bothered to learn both sides of the issues should not bother to vote.”

 “”Funding” is one of the big phony words of our times – used by people too squeamish to say “money” but not too proud to take it, usually from the taxpayers.”

 “Envy plus rhetoric equals “social justice.”

 “The national debt is the ghost of Christmas past.”

 “Historians of the future will have hard time figuring out how so many organized groups of strident jackasses succeeded in leading us around by the nose and morally intimidating the majority into silence.”

 “Those who want to take our money and gain power over us have discovered the magic formula:  get us envious or angry at others and we will surrender, in installments, not only our money but our freedom.  The most successful dictators of the 20th century – Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, Mao – all used this formula, and now class warfare politicians are doing the same.”

 “No matter how much people on the left talk about compassion, they have no compassion for the taxpayers.”

 “Too often what are called “educated” people are simply people who have been sheltered from reality for years in ivy-covered buildings.  Those whose whole careers have been spent in ivy-covered buildings, insulated by tenure, can remain adolescents on into their golden retirement years.”

 “Some ideas sound so plausible that they can fail nine times in a row and still be believed the tenth time.  Other ideas sound so implausible that they can succeed nine times in a row and still not be believed the tenth time.  Government controls in the economy are among the first kinds of ideas and the operations of the free market are among the second kind.”

“Much of what are called “social problems” consists of the fact that intellectuals have theories that do not fit the real world.  From this they concluded that it is the real world which is wrong and needs changing.”

 “Egalitarians create the most dangerous inequality of all – inequality of power.  Allowing politicians to determine what all other human beings will be allowed to earn is one of the most reckless gambles imaginable.”

 “The people I feel sorry for are those who do 90 percent of what it takes to succeed.”

 “Have you ever heard a single hard fact to back up all the sweeping claims for the benefits of “diversity”?

 “A careful definition of words would destroy half the agenda of the political left and the scrutinizing evidence would destroy the other half.”

Filed under Economics, Politics Tagged with , , , , , , , ,

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