Awaken

One man awake,
Awakens another.
The second awakens
His next door brother.
The three awake can rouse a town
By turning
the whole place
Upside down

The many awake
Can cause such a fuss
It finally awakens the rest of us.
One man up,
With dawn in his eyes
Surely then
Multiplies

by Lawrence Tribble in the latter 1700s.

We are in America's third great awakening. The first begun by the Declaration of Independence led to the Revolutionary War. The second begun by the seceding Confederate States led to the freeing of the slaves and the securing of our union once again. The third begun by Ayn Rand's novel, Atlas Shrugged, is leading us to realize that we need to secure our identify as a nation of free men. This awakening is the shift from the collective to the individual as the ultimate source of moral authority and good in the world.

The Biggest Job Killer

Here is a John Stossel column from the Washington Times. There is no doubt that government is the most toxic agent in our society. Nothing else is even close.

Government is the biggest job killer

By: John Stossel | 10/13/11 8:05 PM

President Obama says government will have to build the nation out of the economic trough.

"We're the country that built the intercontinental railroad," Obama says. "So how can we now sit back and let China build the best railroads?"

Ironic that he mentions the Chinese. Progressives used to complain that to build the railroad, bosses abused Chinese workers -- called them "coolies" and treated them badly. Now this is big success?

I guess Obama doesn't know that the Transcontinental Railroad was a Solyndra-like Big Government scandal. The railroad didn't make economic sense at the time, so the government subsidized construction and gave the companies huge quantities of the best land on the continent.

As we should expect, without market discipline -- profit and loss -- contractors ripped off the taxpayers. After all, if you get paid by the amount of track you lay, you'll lay more track than necessary.

Credit Mobilier, the first rail construction company, made enormous profits by overcharging for its work. To keep the subsidies flowing, it made big contributions to congressmen.

Where have we heard that recently?

The transcontinental railroad lost tons of money. The government never covered its costs, and most rail lines that used the tracks went bankrupt or continued to be subsidized by taxpayers.

The Union Pacific and Northern Pacific -- all those rail lines we learned about in history class -- milked the taxpayer and then went broke.

One line worked. The Great Northern never went bankrupt. It was the railroad that got no subsidies.

We need infrastructure, but the beauty of leaving most of these things to the private sector -- without subsidies, bailouts and other privileges -- is that they would have to be justified by the profit-and-loss test.

In a truly free market, when private companies make bad choices, investors lose their own money. This tends to make them careful.

By contrast, when government loses money, it just spends more and raises your taxes, or borrows more, or inflates. Building giant government projects is no way to create jobs.

When government spends on infrastructure, it takes money away from projects that consumers might think are more important.

When government isn't killing jobs by sucking money out of the private sector, it kills jobs by smothering the private sector with regulation. I talked to Peter Schiff about all this.

Schiff is a good authority because he was one of the few people to warn of the housing bust. Now he's had a run-in with the federal government over job creation.

Schiff, who operates a brokerage firm with 150 employees, recently complained to Congress that "regulations are running up the cost of doing business, and a lot of companies never even get started because they can't overcome that regulatory hurdle."

Schiff claims he would have hired a thousand more people but for regulations.

"I had a huge plan to expand. I wanted to open up a lot of offices. I had some capital to do it. I had investors lined up. My business was doing really well. But unfortunately, because of the regulations in the security industry, I was not able to hire."

So if he wants to hire an analyst, he can't just hire him? "I had to get permission to publish their research, which I didn't get for years. And so I can't pay analysts if I can't sell their research.

People don't appreciate the number of regulations entrepreneurs face. Schiff pays 10 people just to try to figure out if his company is obeying the rules.

"You can't just act very quickly, because everything has to be done through this maze of compliance. Even my brokers ... find out that maybe 20 percent, 30 percent of their day is involved in compliance-related activity, activity that is inhibiting their productivity. ... All around the country, people are complying with regulations instead of producing, instead of investing and growing the economy. They're trying to survive the regulations."

This is no way to create jobs or wealth. Keynesian pundits and politicians can't understand why businesses sit on cash rather than invest and hire unemployed workers. It's really no mystery. Government is in the way.

Examiner Columnist John Stossel is nationally syndicated by Creators Syndicate. Read more at the Washington Examiner:

(The idea of regulating a man assumes he wakes up criminal. In other words, it assumes, since the criminal political class do not operate by these standards, that we are their slaves. America's founding attempted to end this. That experiment has failed. Now we have to end slavery once and for all by getting our government established on a rational basis of the nature of man and separating Economy and State. The politicians can never have unilateral access to the property of the citizens. SCB)

Politicians, the New Criminal Class

We are coming to a new realization in America: Politicians comprise the new Criminal Class. They decide everything about our lives from what we shall eat, how we use our property and how we shall spend our time. Apparently, all they care about is how to loot us for their purposes. Their rhetoric is the con's front which always proves to be a lie in the end. Even Michelle who advocates the right foods, takes every opportunity to stuff her face with French fries.

Apparently they take glee in impoverishing and disenfranchising their own people. Every success of theirs and their cronies is at our expense (Solyndra, e.g.) and they show no remorse for their heinous acts. They cultivate an alternate universe, oblivious to citizen violation and pain, much, most?, of which is because of them.

The idiots now are those who think they will now or ever could benefit from this criminal activity. All of these are now accessories to the crimes. They provide the complicity required to keep them in existence. When you see someone who argues for the politicians and holds out the hope that one of them will somehow save us from this scourge, you are talking to a person who can justify criminal actions.

This current state of affairs must now drive itself off the cliff, maybe taking liberty with it for 100, 200, 500 years.

If you notice, the thing that has the politician = the criminal is that he can tell you what to do with your property - all of it, from your body to your extra-body possessions. He does so with the threat of taking if from you, even your life itself. He has no right by nature to do this. Even if he has been granted that right in some measure by some people, that does not make it right with what life requires. Man-made documents and agreements are always subject, ultimately, to the laws of reality. It is this fact and the acceptance of this fact that has the politician be a criminal and advocate criminality. He does not check reality to make sure he is true to that and thus true to what life requires. He willfully departs from reality allowing, even encouraging, man to cannibalize man.

For the politician to become, for the first time in history, a man of honor, he will have to give up usurping individual rights. He will have to be a protector of every man's individual rights. No man can be entitled to live off the body and work of another man except by the agreement of that man. The honorable politician protects as a first principle, every human life's right to his life - at, by nature, the expense of no one else.

For this to happen on a consistent basis, there must be the separation of the economy from the state.

The role for a legitimate state is to protect individual rights. That's it. Every activity which it takes on must be for this purpose and must always prove that it is for this purpose. The army protects our borders because it is protecting the citizens-of-this-country's right to live their lives.

Even paying for the government's activities has to be voluntary. In other words, the government provides services - police, courts and a militia to protect the people's individual rights - and their value is such that citizens would want to pay for them. For example, the right to use the government's court would follow from paying a fee whenever you created and registered a contract with the government for future potential adjudication. The same principle of the government earning its money based on the value it offers would apply to every individual-rights-protecting service the government offers.

A lot of people think my position is ridiculous and not within the realm of possibility. "Government is always going to be this way," they say. They are telling me, in so many words, they will put up with a thief living in their house (which he is, you know), so long as they don't have to think about and work out a new system that honors individual rights. My answer? "May you rot in the hell of your own making. For me, I'm not interested."

The ESSENCE of Evil and the ESSENCE of Good

A man has to CREATE to get from a need of his, which is asserted by his life asserting itself (the thing that life does since life is a self-generating, self-sustaining process), to the value that satisfies that need and sustains his life. He can only do this if he chooses to do it. To live, a man must create value.

The antithesis of creating value, the ESSENTIAL GOOD, is to be a VICTIM of the circumstances of one's life. THE ESSENTIAL EVIL, the first evil on which all others depend, as it were, is to cause being a victim and discourage being a creator of value in oneself or another. One can cause being a victim by acting to have a person think he is a victim since if a person thinks he is a victim, then he will act out of that mindset. (Running a guilt trip on oneself or another is an example of this kind of action.)

If someone is downtrodden, be it oneself or another, because life is not going well for them, what there is to do is "get that" but not add mass to it. If the victim story goes nowhere with you, the "victim" will either go elsewhere looking for sympathizers or his mind will shift to creating something.

We are never in both of these places at one time. It is like the picture of the vase and the two faces. You can see one or the other.


Now check out Obama. He dwells in blame. Blame automatically means that he is the victim of some other person's actions - Bush, economic situation, Republicans, Tea Party, big oil, Beck, Limbaugh, typical white people, Jews, people holding on to their money, anyone that is either under the bus or he wants under the bus. He thinks we will have sympathy for him and not hold him responsible. (He's counting on our coming from or adopting a victim mindset. For those of us who don't go there, his blaming demonstrates his powerlessness and if we were to go there, we would adopt powerlessness too.)

Obama loves sob stories. Nothing is more perfect for him than to parade before us a miserable, downtrodden person who finds himself in difficult circumstances to have us commiserate with him, keeping him luxuriating in his "victimhood" and us dwelling in the misery of the situation. Because this is such an anti-human-dignity display, we often feel embarrassed for the person.

It is this support of the worst among us and within us that is putrid about Obama. For him to like you, you have to have the biggest and ugliest warts. You can't have a spine and be responsible. Nothing can add up and produce a real result. See Solyndra and a number of other numbskull projects - like Cash for Clunkers, e.g. How many of his speeches boil down to asking us to hate somebody - the rich, Wall Street, bankers, the Tea Party, Republicans... Who could stand to be around such a person? And, to be this evil, this negative, he can only act arrogantly, otherwise he would realize he is a worm too. Is it no wonder we see this picture of him? Obama is a sick man.


And all of this is why Obama will not be our President come November 2012. If we elect him again, it will be because we are mired in this essential evil ourselves - and I refuse to believe that. Americans, in the main, are too grounded in reality and what life requires, to buy this. We know the government as provider is not the answer to anything. It won't be there to hold our hand. We are not haters. Mostly, we create and trade.

Rather than offer government solutions to everything, which require dependency and maintain us as a victim, whoever runs against Obama needs to encourage creation of value in every way he can. How you do this is to affirm people's values that motivate them to work and create their lives. You safeguard individual rights; you safeguard property; and you safeguard the country that is home to individuals who have the right to their lives.

It ought to be easy to defeat Obama. A society, just as a life, cannot run on being a victim. We are tired of this odor (you can guess what that is). I don't think Americans hate themselves enough to reelect him. And I think plenty of people know that as long as we are creating value, life is good.

Are We Headed for Dictatorship and a Totalitarian State?

It is now time to take action to protect and maintain our political freedom and America, the land of the free and the home of the brave. We are under threat from within. Here are two people giving us information portending an ominous future.