Slack for Black - Over

With Obama's election victory, America showed that it could, in fact, elect our first black President. This was an historic victory and to my mind says something about American culture, particularly non-blacks who voted in droves to see to it that America got beyond a harped-on racial divide.

Stop-Change-Start

Since the 60's and 70s, although the Jim Crow laws were banished and blacks were fully free men, new laws were passed which gave preference to blacks in the name of diversity. This was an attempt by some people who felt guilty for America's past to redeem themselves. What it did, since it was an example of injustice in reverse, was exact payment from blacks and whites. Blacks enrolled wholesale in the idea that racism, and their consequent being less than, was still a powerful determinant of their plight and that was by virtue of whites being white. This was all supposed to be unconscious on whites part and their existence as such was evidence of this subconscious racism.

This unleashed thugs such as Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, morally supported and apologized for by many others, who extorted millions from corporations in order to prove that they were redeeming themselves from this non-objective, original-sin version of racism.

Thus this notion spread through the culture creating a sub-conscious unearned guilt among many whites. (I'm sure it created sub-conscious unearned guilt in many blacks too; those who didn't want nor expect to be excepted from reality.) How it manifested itself was for whites to cut blacks slack rather than have them meet the standards that work for a particular industry or job. What this meant for whites is "Don't call blacks to account or you will be seen as racist." With stories on TV, in the newspapers and on the Internet, it was like a rainstorm. No one chooses a rainstorm, he just gets wet. He puts up with this and goes on about his business. Nevertheless, unless he specifically, consciously negates what he hears, he gets wet.

Since Obama's inauguration, he has taken bold action - the primary one being to spend the taxpayers' money long into the future and to convert the freedom of individuals and businesses to extensions of and property of the state. ("Of course you own your life. We just tell you what to do with it." Doesn't that have a familiar ring to it? Don't you blacks recognize this refrain?) Thus his actions are stripping the power of every citizen, including blacks, to live the life he wants to live by using his property and resources to fashion his life.

Last week on a particularly bad news day when Obama was acting the buffoon to the max taking still worse actions in terms of the economic principles that any idiot can see don't work when he looks at them from the actions he has to take in his very own life, I had had enough.

First of all, I do not agree with Obama's agenda, rushing everything without debate, unwilling to hear legitimate differences about his plans; and doing much under the cover of extraneous issues and people bashing. I consider him incredibly arrogant, dictatorial and imperial, and don't like him one bit. His actions tell me he is intending to drive America off a cliff. He violates the values I hold dear on every level - political and method of behaving. So, get that.

In the wake of that, I went to the grocery. I bought a single item and I wanted to handle the payment for that in a particular way. I told the black cashier what I wanted to do. She understood what I explained to her and agreed to it. I wanted to keep the cash in my wallet, so I wanted to use the amount I had in my debit account first and then add only what I had to add from my cash to keep my account solvent.

So, I looked at the amount she tallied and gave her some cash. She subtracted that and when I looked at the amount still owed, I realized I needed to give her some more cash. So I did.

She turned around to put the cash in the register and ring up a lower amount to come from the debit account. At that point I executed the debit transaction.

Whoops! She had not tallied the additional cash I gave her and so the debit overdrew my account. I blew up. Pissed to the max.

"What happened? Didn't you ring up the rest of the cash?"

She just looked at me. "No."

"Why?"

"I apologize."

In a loud voice, loud enough to be heard plainly in a circle with a 20 foot radius, I said, "You cost me 35 dollars."

"I apologize," she said.

I said, "Apologize hell! I'm going to the manager and have it taken out your pay check." With that I picked up my stuff and "harrumphed" over to the manager.

While all of this was going on, I expected the 3 or 4 people standing in line to start screaming "racist" at the top of their lungs. I wasn't sure what would happen and definitely was concerned about what I may have unleashed.

I told the manager what happened. I told her I yelled at the cashier, intending by shouting to rearrange her molecules because she didn't do what she said she would do. Calming down, I told her that I was thinking I may be able to correct the situation if I went to the bank and deposited some money. She said she would talk to the cashier about the matter and I told the manager that if I was unable to recover from the error, I would be back to submit my bill.

This ended my cutting slack for black. Whatever guilt I had unconsciously taken living in America was over.

That evening I had great energy. Truly, this was a breakthrough.

I wasn't fully happy with my public display however. It's not my usual way of behaving and I am sure I will apply other ways to accomplish the same end in future circumstances. I didn't lay a finger on the cashier which I was in no way tempted to do. You got to begin somewhere and so I did.

Last night I went to the grocery again. I noticed I was there differently. I was looking around at the blacks who work there and, specifically, I was looking at them as to whether they were doing their jobs and exhibiting competence. A new awareness was present.

Obama has caused this - probably unwittingly. His job is way bigger than the color of his skin. And, it is by the criteria of his position as President that he is now being judged - just as any other President would be. And that is exactly the criteria by which anyone should be judged insofar as we deal with people on a daily basis. There are other contexts for judging people for sure, but in the public context - when people are working, taking care of customers and doing their jobs, it is by the standard of what that job requires and implies that we should call them to account.

So be it. This is freedom for all people. Racism has never been nor will ever be anything other than treating a person according to the color of his skin rather than by his conduct and his character. If Obama's Presidency is ending the scourge of a racism that one never consciously embraced nor acted upon, then this is a very good thing.


"There is no escape from justice, nothing can be unearned and unpaid for in the universe, neither in matter nor in spirit – and if the guilty do not pay, then the innocent have to pay it." -Hank Rearden, Atlas Shrugged

Obama's Moral Drivel

At his appearance on Jay Leno (By the way, wasn't Leno a complete ass or what? The most exciting day in his whole life? I hate to see people prostrating themselves before anyone. Whatever that was, it wasn't a statement of admiration) Obama said he wants to take the country back to the moral values that built this country.

Since when does stealing people blind represent a value that builds anything? Since when does saying one thing and doing another represent a value that builds anything? Since when does smiling and acting coy before the doting millions represent a value that builds anything? Since when does throwing the minister that you adored for 20 years under the bus represent a value that builds anything? Since when does sealing the records of one's past represent a value that builds anything? Since when does hiring a right-hand man who openly disrespects the outgoing President represent a value that builds anything? Since when does hiring or attempting to hire people who have not paid their taxes and not stand out as law abiding, upstanding citizens building anything? Since when does a man who does not know the difference between what America has always stood for, even though she has made mistakes and corrected many of them, and the depravity of dictators and authoritarian societies represents a value that builds anything?

The gap between reality and fantasy is so great with Obama, if you actually listen to and think about what he says, that it is mind-boggling.

Only on one premise does any of this make sense. He knows exactly what he is intending for America and all the lying and deceit is meant to keep the unthinking, hope-filled people off guard and those who would gladly live off whatever he can take and hand to them mollified. He is intending to take America down and deliver it without power to the wolves of the world. He will call that international cooperation. He is wrong.

Obama is, in my estimation, the most evil of all the men in the world at this point in time. The scope and effect of his evil is staggering to contemplate - and not just us, but the whole world. Believe me, the people who he claims he is out to help will get trampled in the coming rush to escape his clutches.

Anyone who buys this kind of drivel or who doesn't buy it but won't speak out against it deserves the coming results. Above all, collectivist societies are not good societies. Preying on others is raised to an art form as one group devours another. You think people are negative now, this is only the beginning as the cooperation and integration caused by freedom devolve to grabbing the means to force another to whatever one thinks is the solution. I love the outrage that people are expressing, but there isn't a one that is screaming, "LET THE PEOPLE GO FREE." No, they all have their form of the chains we should wear and they all want to use the gun of government to cause that.

And believe me, they do not know the answer. No one knows the particular answer. The best one can do is know the philosophical answer - that freedom for people to use their minds, which is the basic means of survival and which they are going to do even with the chains they are wearing, produces the only moral and good result. It must since for man to live, he must be moral and choose life. He has to by nature and he has no choice in this matter except that if he doesn't, he will make it harder to live and eventually will cause his own death.

Obama says he wants to stop the blaming. Bull! He is so full of shit. Blaming, and manipulation, will be raised to a new art form of human expression. It won't be fun. Notice how Obama himself uses it by having his minions working overtime finding new people to blame, people that are not even involved in causing the errors he is making and people who distract his followers from those real causes.

All of his talk is aimed at one thing. Whatever you can see and think you know, he wants to obliterate. He is working overtime to rob you of sight. The blind, the weak, the helpless are the one's he talks about as worthy of his work. He wants you blind, weak and helpless so that you will think he is doing a good thing. This is Obama's evil.

What is a seeing man to do? Extricate yourself from him. Pronounce moral judgement against him in an effort to keep your sight. You have to keep your own mind functioning and it takes a hefty effort to do so. Expend the effort. Do the work. Take care of yourself, the end and ultimate purpose of your life. Do not get entangled in his trap of beguiling talk and style. He's smooth. He's playing the role.

But it is a con so big that it is beyond belief and that is why people believe it. To believe the opposite seems petty, small and divisive and well, "What do I know anyway." Believe me you know what you know. Stand on that and don't look back. 2 + 2 does equal 4!

Obama's Perfidy

Tonight, Obama was out of Washington DC where his Administration has plunged the city into a mob mentality where Congressmen have called for heads and passed a law violating the purpose of law - namely to apply equally to all people. His government is out of control and the country is getting angry - very angry.

Tonight, Obama appeared on Jay Leno's show. He schmoozed with Jay and the audience. He spoke with great confidence of things he knows little about like finances and electric cars. He threw in stories of his daughters to provide the warm fuzzy feeling needed to bathe the uncritical masses - who cheered wildly.

It's clear to me that this man's confidence relies on one thing: he has America conned. The poll approval he enjoyed after the election and inauguration is falling faster than Bush or Clinton. When those percentages fall below 40% and keep sinking, we are going to see a different Obama. Then it will be anger and imperiousness, which is already present, alternating with trying desparately to get his groove back or the blues.

A man who clings to his teleprompter like a binky is not someone speaking from fundamental conviction. He knows that won't sell. (Hint: His fundamental conviction is something like Rev. Wright's and Bill Ayers'.)

He said he wants to get back to the morality which made this country great. And that's right after a month of stealing you and your children blind of untold trillions at the point of gun. What are we supposed to believe that morality is? Honest production or unlimited theft?

There in one thing Obama is not: Moral. That's the last thing on his agenda. Fred Barnes of the magazine, The Standard, wrote: "Doing the opposite. Obama insists he's not in favor of big government, then proposes a 10-year budget with vast amounts of new spending and a vastly expanded role for government. He denounces distractions that keep everyone from focusing on significant issues, but his White House aides cause a huge controversy by calling Rush Limbaugh the leader of the Republican Party. He promises bipartisanship but doesn't practice it. He's against earmarks but refuses to call on Congress to strip them from the 'omnibus' spending bill. He's the enemy of 'business as usual' in Washington, but the way he conducts his presidency is business as usual. He's for making 'tough choices,' but doesn't make many. He's for 'fiscal responsibility' but...well, you get the drift."

Tonight he talked about wanting to get rid of the climate of blame in Washington while his staff works overtime blaming Limbaugh, Bush, Cheney and 6 or 7 others for his problems and being divisive. Do as I say, not as I do.

We now know that whatever Obama says, it's not that.

His affable presence with Leno so starkly clashed with the reality he has created in Washington and the country it is astonishing and defies description. I could only wonder if he is insane.

How can a man be this duplicitous, this callous, this utterly cruel? How?

I'll tell you how. Obama is working to transform the United States from a country based on the principles of political freedom to one based on the principles of slavery - slavery to the government. That's the only consistent thing going on.

His actions make sense in one way. He creates diversions and crises, all the while smooth talkin' us, and while we and the news outlets are preoccupied with those diversions and crises, he slips laws through Congress just like the bailout bill and the budget - no time to read them, no debate and costly as hell. This is what's up for healthcare and energy.

Start "reading" the strategy in the background and see how the foreground camouflages that. When you are sufficiently worked up, make a sign and join a Tea Party. Grow this thing until he breaks out the tanks. Like MLK was able to accomplish, we will then be able to witness who this man really is.

The Root of the Matter

RATIONAL SELF-INTEREST or SELF-SACRIFICE,

TO BE or NOT TO BE,

that is the question.

This morning, thanks to the Wall Street Journal, Yaron Brook, president and executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute, presented this editorial below.

Never has the difference between two philosophies been so apparent in the United States to discerning observers as it is today given that Obama's actions always kill off the individual in favor of the group. I've repeatedly spoken against Obama philosophically as well as against his imperious ruler style.

I find him so offensive because he rolls over vast swaths of people on the one hand and favors others on the other. He makes no pretense of this. A president of all the people, he is not. To have him speaking for our country alternates between disgust and terror. I feel like I'm on a drunken "joy ride" with an extremely reckless driver.

Further, he doesn't care about human nature. He doesn't even see it. There is no universality in man. He thinks that this is not an issue in his "us vs. them" world. He's going to elevate the "us" and vanquish the "them."

The clash of these two opposing philsophies, particularly ethics, is going to continue. But this is THE battle - the real deal - and either we are going to resolve it FOR all human life in society or AGAINST all human life in society. All of life is entwined and actually it is an all or nothing undertaking.

IS RAND RELEVANT?

By YARON BROOK

Ayn Rand died more than a quarter of a century ago, yet her name appears regularly in discussions of our current economic turmoil. Pundits including Rush Limbaugh and Rick Santelli urge listeners to read her books, and her magnum opus, "Atlas Shrugged," is selling at a faster rate today than at any time during its 51-year history.

There's a reason. In "Atlas," Rand tells the story of the U.S. economy crumbling under the weight of crushing government interventions and regulations. Meanwhile, blaming greed and the free market, Washington responds with more controls that only deepen the crisis. Sound familiar?

The novel's eerily prophetic nature is no coincidence. "If you understand the dominant philosophy of a society," Rand wrote elsewhere in "Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal," "you can predict its course." Economic crises and runaway government power grabs don't just happen by themselves; they are the product of the philosophical ideas prevalent in a society -- particularly its dominant moral ideas.

Why do we accept the budget-busting costs of a welfare state? Because it implements the moral ideal of self-sacrifice to the needy. Why do so few protest the endless regulatory burdens placed on businessmen? Because businessmen are pursuing their self-interest, which we have been taught is dangerous and immoral. Why did the government go on a crusade to promote "affordable housing," which meant forcing banks to make loans to unqualified home buyers? Because we believe people need to be homeowners, whether or not they can afford to pay for houses.

The message is always the same: "Selfishness is evil; sacrifice for the needs of others is good." But Rand said this message is wrong -- selfishness, rather than being evil, is a virtue. By this she did not mean exploiting others à la Bernie Madoff. Selfishness -- that is, concern with one's genuine, long-range interest -- she wrote, required a man to think, to produce, and to prosper by trading with others voluntarily to mutual benefit.

Rand also noted that only an ethic of rational selfishness can justify the pursuit of profit that is the basis of capitalism -- and that so long as self-interest is tainted by moral suspicion, the profit motive will continue to take the rap for every imaginable (or imagined) social ill and economic disaster. Just look how our present crisis has been attributed to the free market instead of government intervention -- and how proposed solutions inevitably involve yet more government intervention to rein in the pursuit of self-interest.

Rand offered us a way out -- to fight for a morality of rational self-interest, and for capitalism, the system which is its expression. And that is the source of her relevance today.

The Heart of Obama

Here is an article by Daniel Henninger that appears in the Wall Street Journal this morning. It gets to the heart of Obama's purpose and THE MAJOR REASON I stand four-square against him as President of the United States. What the article below does not pursue are the wider implications of Obama's policy and direction. Obama's campaign is not just a campaign against wealth, it is a campaign against success - each and every success. Why?

Obama is not distinguishing between those who earned their money honestly, providing a valued product that people want. If he were to do so, his attack would be against the crooked wealthy and uphold the social principle that no man has the right to initiate force or fraud against another. No. His attack is against success without qualification, period!

What does success depend on? It depends on the abilities one has to produce products of widely seen value - value so great that many, many people want to buy what has been produced. Production is not just the production of a material product. It is also, and in fact, depends upon intellectual productions including ideas and art.

All production from the making of a bowl of soup to an airplane depends upon man's basic means of survival - his mind. It depends upon being able to excell in math or history or medicine or surgery or building or reading (even remembering what your mother said) in any of a thousand pursuits. Beyond that, great financial success depends on grasping how to get those products out to many people. Thus it depends on marketing and salesmanship and negotiations of all kinds. The really successful are good at many things or they understand and apply the principles which attract to their organizations those who have those talents.

All of the standard of living we enjoy is dependent upon this. Obama is attacking all of this - your children's success in school, your success in cooking a meal, success of any kind.

It doesn't look like that especially if you are blinded by Obamamania or envy. However, if I say "Men are stupid," I have included myself. If I say "Men are greedy," I have included myself. If I say "Men are evil," I have included myself. If I say "The world sucks," I have included my world. In other words anything we say is also part and parcel of the larger concept and thereby applies to me, my friends, my family, my work associates. If I think my cat is devious and say "Cats are devious," I apply it to all cats. If I say at home, "Money is the root of all evil," then I am telling my children to not earn money unless you want to be evil.

Human beings who indulge a compartmentalized mind make a psychological error which results in an intellectual mistake, actually a MORAL mistake, that the values they seek are not connected to wider values. If a man cannot succeed then why be good at math? Or production? Or marketing? Or networking? Why be good at anything? In Obama's world it won't matter because you will be punished if you succeed.

Now the truth is, The Obama Principle cannot be practiced. If you were to attempt it, you would have to screw up you evening meal, turn every social interaction into a bummer, add 2+2 and get something other than 4, miss every basketball shot and screw up driving your car from point A to point B.

Since it cannot be practiced and one live at all, what does it do? To the extent one likes Obama and his programs and doesn't consciously reject him/them, he lives within them and, by osmosis, takes on guilt for his successes. And this is the big bonanza of the Obama Administration. If a person accept an unearned guilt, once he does, Obama has him by the you-know-what. Now he can play him like a fiddle. He is attacking him at his root and he will have diminished his self-esteem.

Is there any possiblity that this is an error in Obama's thinking and he has no vicious intent? Whatever I could say positive about Obama, this is not such a thing. Why? From his teenage years onward, he has dwelt in the halls of revenge - the erroneous philosophy of Karl Marx. Add to this the maliciousness of Alinsky and later the Broward-Piven strategy, and it all adds up to what we are seeing. Listening to the 20-year hatred of Reverend Wright is no mistake in Obama's life. Perhaps in the 30s when it was thought that Marxism could work, it would have been possible to forgive him this. But this is not the 30s and millions of lives, probably nearing a hundred million, have been starved and slaughtered due to precisely this idea.

This is exactly how evil he is. I see no evidence for him playing you and me any other way. Further I don't care how smooth he is, how calm he is in the middle of a crisis, how physically attractive he is, the man is pure poison given his position. There is no hope for Obama nor his policies unless he has a transformational moment. It ain't gonna happen.

Obama is the interstate highway back to the Dark Ages and the morality of duty. Duty means to follow a moral law because you cannot relate to it. It means to follow it whether there is any pleasure or benefit in it for you or not. In fact, you are unable to prove that you are moral under this injunction unless you get no pleasure or positive result from it. This is the spiritual dead end of human being. It is the adoption of failure because it is failure. It is adoption within yourself of the bad, the corrupt, the immoral, the unhappy, the weak, the handicapped, the losers, the beggars and the depraved because they are that. It is to hold up the opposite of achievement, happiness, love, joy, success, wealth, winning, strength and skill as the moral ideal. It is the worship of death.

I won't stand for this because I cannot - without immediately committing spiritual, and ultimately physical, suicide.

America is asleep. Wake up!!


• MARCH 12, 2009
The Obama Rosetta Stone
• By DANIEL HENNINGER


Barack Obama has written two famous, widely read books of autobiography -- "Dreams from My Father" and "The Audacity of Hope." Let me introduce his third, a book that will touch everyone's life: "A New Era of Responsibility: Renewing America's Promise. The President's Budget and Fiscal Preview" (Government Printing Office, 141 pages, $26; free on the Web). This is the U.S. budget for laymen, and it's a must read.

Turn immediately to page 11. There sits a chart called Figure 9. This is the Rosetta Stone to the presidential mind of Barack Obama. Memorize Figure 9, and you will never be confused. Not happy, perhaps, but not confused.

One finds many charts in a federal budget, most attributed to such deep mines of data as the Census Bureau or the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The one on page 11 is attributed to "Piketty and Saez."

Either you know instantly what "Piketty and Saez" means, or you don't. If you do, you spent the past two years working to get Barack Obama into the White House. If you don't, their posse has a six-week head start on you.

Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, French economists, are rock stars of the intellectual left. Their specialty is "earnings inequality" and "wealth concentration."

Messrs. Piketty and Saez have produced the most politically potent squiggle along an axis since Arthur Laffer drew his famous curve on a napkin in the mid-1970s. Laffer's was an economic argument for lowering tax rates for everyone. Piketty-Saez is a moral argument for raising taxes on the rich.

As described in Mr. Obama's budget, these two economists have shown that by the end of 2004, the top 1% of taxpayers "took home" more than 22% of total national income. This trend, Fig. 9 notes, began during the Reagan presidency, skyrocketed through the Clinton years, dipped after George Bush beat Al Gore, then marched upward. Widening its own definition of money-grubbers, the budget says the top 10% of households "held" 70% of total wealth.

Alan Reynolds of the Cato Institute criticized the Piketty-Saez study on these pages in October 2007. Whatever its merits, their "Top 1%" chart has become a totemic obsession in progressive policy circles.

Turn to page five of Mr. Obama's federal budget, and one may read these commentaries on the top 1% datum:

"While middle-class families have been playing by the rules, living up to their responsibilities as neighbors and citizens, those at the commanding heights of our economy have not."

"Prudent investments in education, clean energy, health care and infrastructure were sacrificed for huge tax cuts for the wealthy and well-connected."

"There's nothing wrong with making money, but there is something wrong when we allow the playing field to be tilted so far in the favor of so few. . . . It's a legacy of irresponsibility, and it is our duty to change it."

Mr. Obama made clear in the campaign his intention to raise taxes on this income class by letting the Bush tax cuts expire. What is becoming clearer as his presidency unfolds is that something deeper is underway here than merely using higher taxes to fund his policy goals in health, education and energy.

The "top 1%" isn't just going to pay for these policies. Many of them would assent to that. The rancorous language used to describe these taxpayers makes it clear that as a matter of public policy they will be made to "pay for" the fact of their wealth -- no matter how many of them worked honestly and honorably to produce it. No Democratic president in 60 years has been this explicit.

Complaints have emerged recently, on the right and left, that the $787 billion stimulus bill will produce less growth and jobs than planned because too much of it goes to social programs and transfer payments, or "weak" Keynesian stimulus. The administration's Romer-Bernstein study on the stimulus estimated by the end of next year it would increase jobs by 3.6 million and GDP by 3.7%.

One of the first technical examinations of the Romer-Bernstein projections has been released by Hoover Institution economists John Cogan and John Taylor, and German economists Tobias Cwik and Volker Wieland. They conclude that the growth and jobs stimulus will be only one-sixth what the administration predicts. In part, this is because people anticipate that the spending burst will have to be financed by higher taxes and so will spend less than anticipated.

New York's Mike Bloomberg, mayor of an economically damaged city, has noted the pointlessness of raising taxes on the rich when their wealth is plummeting, or of eliminating the charitable deduction for people who have less to give anyway.

True but irrelevant. Mayor Bloomberg should read the Obama budget chapter, "Inheriting a Legacy of Misplaced Priorities." The economy as most people understand it was a second-order concern of the stimulus strategy. The primary goal is a massive re-flowing of "wealth" from the top toward the bottom, to stop the moral failure they see in the budget's "Top One Percent of Earners" chart.

The White House says its goal is simple "fairness." That may be, as they understand fairness. But Figure 9 makes it clear that for the top earners, there will be blood. This presidency is going to be an act of retribution. In the words of the third book from Mr. Obama, "it is our duty to change it."

If you care to, write to henninger@wsj.com

The Unseen Coming Tsunami

No comment. Gold looks good!

Uncle Sam's Plantation

One of the most frustrating things about the election - in talking to blacks and liberals - is that they could not see that Obama wanted to put them and the rest of us on his plantation with him as the master. For over twenty years he had schooled himself in, associated with people of very specific ideas and placed in practice where he could Marxist/socialist practices. In case after case, he sought to increase citizen dependency on the government - in the name of the greater good, fairness and equal opportunity.

No one I know who voted for Obama tried to find out about Obama. He is an extremely consistent man in working for his ideas and to this day the liberals and Obama voters I know will not question the ideas that fuel him. He said in his campaign what he wanted to do and most people didn't believe him since he promised on both sides of the fence depending on who he was talking to. They who gave him a pass thought he would be a pragmatist and switch back and forth to please the wider public. This has not been the case.

Back to the issue? Do they that voted for him really want slavery? That's what we are getting - in spades - and in bold, very fast moves on his part. This is nothing short of a coup d'etat and it is not the first one that was accomplished by a democracy.

A friend found this article and sent it to me. It is written by Star Parker, a female African-American syndicated columnist. In researching her a bit, I can already see that I am not in complete agreement with her political ideas. But on this issue, she gets it and explains it in direct terms - a benefit for us all. SCB

Back on Uncle Sam's plantation

Star Parker - Syndicated Columnist - 2/9/2009 8:00:00 AM

Six years ago I wrote a book called Uncle Sam's Plantation. I wrote the book to tell my own story of what I saw living inside the welfare state and my own transformation out of it.

I said in that book that indeed there are two Americas -- a poor America on socialism and a wealthy America on capitalism.

I talked about government programs like Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), Job Opportunities and Basic Skills Training (JOBS), Emergency Assistance to Needy Families with Children (EANF), Section 8 Housing, and Food Stamps.

A vast sea of perhaps well-intentioned government programs, all initially set into motion in the 1960s, that were going to lift the nation's poor out of poverty.

A benevolent Uncle Sam welcomed mostly poor black Americans onto the government plantation. Those who accepted the invitation switched mind sets from "How do I take care of myself?" to "What do I have to do to stay on the plantation?"

Instead of solving economic problems, government welfare socialism created monstrous moral and spiritual problems -- the kind of problems that are inevitable when individuals turn responsibility for their lives over to others.

The legacy of American socialism is our blighted inner cities, dysfunctional inner city schools, and broken black families.

Through God's grace, I found my way out. It was then that I understood what freedom meant and how great this country is.

I had the privilege of working on welfare reform in 1996, passed by a Republican Congress and signed 50 percent.

I thought we were on the road to moving socialism out of our poor black communities and replacing it with wealth-producing American capitalism.

But, incredibly, we are going in the opposite direction.

Instead of poor America on socialism becoming more like rich American on capitalism, rich America on capitalism is becoming like poor America on socialism.

Uncle Sam has welcomed our banks onto the plantation and they have said, "Thank you, Suh."

Now, instead of thinking about what creative things need to be done to serve customers . . . they are thinking about what they have to tell Massah in order to get their cash.

There is some kind of irony that this is all happening under our first black president on the 200th anniversary of the birthday of Abraham Lincoln.

Worse, socialism seems to be the element of our new young president. And maybe even more troubling, our corporate executives seem happy to move onto the plantation.

In an op-ed on the opinion page of the Washington Post, Mr. Obama is clear that the goal of his trillion dollar spending plan is much more than short term economic stimulus.

"This plan is more than a prescription for short-term spending -- it's a strategy for America 's long-term growth and opportunity in areas such as renewable energy, healthcare, and education."

Perhaps more incredibly, Obama seems to think that government taking over an economy is a new idea. Or that massive growth in government can take place "with unprecedented transparency and accountability."

Yes, sir, we heard it from Jimmy Carter when he created the Department of Energy, the Synfuels Corporation, and the Department of Education

Or how about the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 -- The War on Poverty -- which President Johnson said "...does not merely expand old programs or improve what is already being done. It charts a new course. It strikes at the causes, not just the consequences of poverty."

Trillions of dollars later, black poverty is the same. But black families are not, with triple the incidence of single-parent homes and out-of-wedlock births.

It's not complicated. Americans can accept Barack Obama's invitation to move onto the plantation. Or they can choose personal responsibility and freedom.

Does anyone really need to think about what the choice should be?

What is Greed?

Milton Friedman is eloquent in his argument for the selfish interests of individual human beings.




(See my comments on this video below.)

Is it not time to give up accepting any guilt for acting out of your hunger to produce results and be successful? Those that lay this on anyone are attempting to saddle you with unearned guilt. Say NO!

(For an analysis of the craziness of limiting CEO salaries, read this by Thomas Sowell, a black man, by the way. The battle we find ourselves in is not racial. It is a battle of ideas. Specifically, moral ideas. The right to own yourself - egoism; or the right of the state or God to own you on their big plantation - altruism, the doctrine that requires self-sacrifice. Another term for it is "other-ism" and it means that you give up what is important for you in order to please or prove that you are not a selfish jerk.)

If a man initiates or threatens to initiate force against another then he is guilty of a crime. Punish him accordingly. That is the remedy, not some murky guilt trip that requires that a man's life - his reputation, his character and his achievements - be destroyed so that some small-minded, envy-ridden, revenge-bent man can feel good about himself. This behavior is rampant in our society right now and for no good purpose except power over other people and the hatred of the good because it is good. It is despicable and should be called out wherever you find it. Go here to get how a society destroys itself when envy is king.

Obama is playing the us vs. them strategy full tilt. It doesn't work, so now he finds himself in a battle over petty things. Notice that he has to attack Bush as if the buck stopped with Bush, not himself; or his attack on Rush Limbaugh; or his attack on CEO's salaries. As time goes on, whatever good he could accomplish will be used up and and his political capital squandered to fight this battle. He won't emerge a great man. Universal principles work as they do whether anyone wants them to or not. Either a man gets right with them or he doesn't. Either way, the consequences follow.

The same strategy has been used by all the dictators. For the Soviets it was the bourgeoise, for Hitler it was big business and the Jews, for Obama it is CEOs and capitalists. They never use words which denote or connote all the people that they are in charge of governing. Thus, they do not act in terms of the unchanging universal principles which from his nature govern a man's life. Rather, they act from some future point, an end, and feel that is sufficient to justify any means necessary. It is the "divine harmony" of the ultimate Soviet State, or the perfection and dominance of the Aryan man and the country that is in charge of his perfection, or the egalitarian ideal that all men shall possess the same existential opportunities and that the government shall redistribute the means to those opportunities at the point of a gun. Some think Obama is a pragmatist lurching from one direction to another. I've never thought that. Reading his history displays a man remarkably single-minded from an early age. Further he chose this direction out of hatred.

When you can look in your child's or grandchild's eyes and tell them that you spent most of what they will ever earn and that life will be hard, then maybe you can disavow yourself of the current regime's ideas and actions.

I am reminded of this, the existential reality of all us vs. them strategies:

First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out--
because I was not a communist;

Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out--
because I was not a socialist;

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out--
because I was not a trade unionist;

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out--
because I was not a Jew;

Then they came for me--
and there was no one left to speak out for me.


(I do have to say for clarity that Friedman is distinguishing a phenomenon known as psychological egoism, not rational egoism. The value here is that he is pointing to the beneficiary of moral action - the person himself - rather than whether the action was rationally moral. The rational moral means that the action is judged by a rational standard, the nature and requirements of a human life which comes in the form of individuals. There are many irrational standards which he doesn't address.

The value of the video is that he is pointing out that there is no thinking around the subject of greed. I have never seen an objective definition of it. My position is that is nothing more than a "hunger" for a specific result. If that "hunger" causes a person to violate people's rights, then he is in trouble. Otherwise go for it Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, Warren Buffet, and Bill Gates!

Psychological egoism is the error that everyone by nature is egoistic. This is false because man is not given any way to be nor know which actions he needs to take. He must choose and he can choose actions which sell himself and his values out or he can choose actions which achieve his values. This fact and the fact that life must be maintained in existence is why morality is necessary.

Further, he suggests that a President picks his men for their political clout. Without unpacking that one, a President picks his men for the values he perceives that gives him political clout. For example, I think Obama picked Rahm Emanual because he is a ruthless exactor in the political game Obama plays - namely politics of spin and personal destruction for the purpose of political control of his enemies for the ultimate purpose of maintaining his hold on the unthinking masses. Another president could pick a man for his character, integrity and his ability to inspire people.)

(This picture of Rahm thumbing his nose at Bush at the inauguration ended my possible admiration for him.)

The Two Moralities - My letter to Glenn Beck

Dear Glenn Beck,

I watched your show this afternoon and thought it was interesting that you juxtaposed your words next to Obama's words and they were practically the same words. Yet, they meant two entirely different things.

What is going on here? Of course two different philosophies are underneath the same words. Marxist thinkers and activists, such as Alinsky in the 30s and later Cloward and Piven in the 60s in their Strategy for Change through Orchestrated Crisis advocate using the morality of the middle class to bring it down and socialize it under dictatorial control. This change to socialism is what is transpiring in our country at this time with Obama as moral and political leader.

The morality that allows this to happen is the morality of altruism - that we somehow have an obligation to take care of our brother - that society is not whole until the rich have sacrificed for the poor, the able have sacrificed for the unable, and the strong have sacrificed for the weak. It isn't sufficient for a person to give a person a helping hand when he sees value in doing so. He must do so because he doesn't want to do so. This is why we hear so much moral sanctimony in every Obama speech. He has the charisma of a revival preacher.

What is the error here and what can we do about it? The error is that a man must sacrifice himself for another man - that he must be a sacrificial animal rather than a man. No man can even properly be a human being in the full meaning of the term unless he seeks and obtains the values that give his life what he needs - his material needs, his spiritual needs and his happiness. To not allow him to do that is an evil of the first sort. And yet, this is what Obama is asking. Well, actually, he is not asking for it; he is forcing it - at the point of a gun, the final authority the government has to achieve its edicts.

The real battle is a moral battle. The battle of sacrifice as a way of life vs. rational self-interest, i.e., egoism, as a way of life. This is the battle we have to fight lest we lose our country down the sewer of all altruist societies and political systems.

Further, the sacrifice of which I am speaking has been invoked in the name of God and a life in the hereafter, and in the name of society and the greater good. Both have to be fought. Although the Founders of the United States of America may have been Christian, or more properly deists, there achievement was not in the name of God nor a tribute to God. It was in the name of man and it is to man that the United States is a tribute.

Here, for the first time in history, every man had a chance to rise to what he could and ought to be. This is the moral vision that we have to have for ourselves and this country if this battle is going to be won.

The Ayn Rand Factor

TIA Daily • February 24, 2009

The Ideal Hostess for an Ideological Boston Tea Party

by Robert Tracinski

Last week, in his now-famous rallying cry against the Obama administration's march toward socialism, CNBC financial commentator Rick Santelli called for a "Chicago Tea Party" to protest against the rapid expansion of government.

The idea of a Boston Tea Party-inspired tax protest had already been percolating, if you will, and when Santelli gave voice to it, it emerged as a new movement. A group that calls this the "New American Tea Party" has set up a website to coordinate protests across the nation this Friday, including in Washington, DC.

The comparison to the Boston Tea Party is appropriate, because it is a reminder that the American Revolution began with a revolt against taxes—and against a government that was much smaller and less intrusive than the one we have now.

It is also appropriate because it captures the sense that the political class has been acting without our consent. The ever-changing bailout plans have been hatched by the Treasury and the Federal Reserve on their own apparently unlimited authority, backed by a blank check rammed through Congress last year with little debate. Or consider the automakers' bailout, which the Bush administration decreed after Congress had specifically refused to approve it. Or take the stimulus bill, the final version of which was pushed through the House with only ten hours to read through a thousand-page preserve of leftist giveaways and insidious new regulations.

It has been said that freedom is indivisible, and since the beginning of the financial crisis we have seen that in taking away our economic freedom, our leaders in Washington are also increasingly giving unchecked power to unelected bureaucrats and turning Congress into a mere rubber stamp.

A backlash has been brewing against this rapid expansion of government power, and this week's tea party protests are just the beginning. The American people as a whole are still largely giving President Obama the benefit of the doubt, and his approval ratings are still relatively high. But what will happen in a year or so, when it is likely that his interventions in the economy will have made things worse, rather than better? The new administration's policies have already driven the stock market down to levels not seen since 1997, wiping out more than a decade of wealth-creation. What happens in 2010, when the public finds that they're still afraid of losing their jobs, and their personal savings haven't recovered? I think we will see these protests grow and spread.

But we will need more than just a political rebellion against the Obama administration and the Democratic Congress. We will need to engage in an ideological struggle, a battle of ideas. Columnist Monica Crowley named it best early last week when she called for a "21st century Boston Tea Party" and said that we needed a "second American revolution of ideas," "of getting back to the ideals of limited government, of constitutional parameters on government power, of individual liberty, and of the free market."

But such an ideological revolution would need to be more extensive than Crowley realizes, because we have to ask: where is the intellectual ammunition for this battle of ideas going to come from? It is important to remember that a Republican administration started us down this plunge into socialism. President Bush started the bailout frenzy, and John McCain pointedly refused to defend capitalism when Barack Obama tried to make the presidential election into a referendum against free-market economics.

For the right, this taxpayers' rebellion should be seen, not merely as a way to regain some of the political power they have lost, but also as a means for the Republican Party to reform itself and revive its ability to defend the free market after a decade of Bush-style "big-government conservatism." For too long, the right has neglected the case for free markets, and they need to re-learn it. That's the revolution we need most of all.

In praising Rick Santelli, conservative author Roger Kimball asks a very good question: "do we really need to go back to economic kindergarten and relearn" the lessons of the failure of statism and the superiority of capitalism? The answer is that we never learned the fullest, deepest, philosophical reasons for the moral and practical superiority of capitalism.

Fortunately, we know where to find the free-market ideas we need, and this source is already indirectly driving the new taxpayer revolt. It's time to bring it fully out into the open.

Note that in defending his stance against the bailouts, Rick Santelli referred to himself as an "Ayn Rander"—a reference to the great 20th-century novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand, who is most famous for her ideological defense of laissez-faire capitalism. (That's not Santelli's first reference to Rand; TIA Daily reader Bill Sims found an earlier one.) Similar references seem to be lurking behind nearly every expression of resistance to big government. Rush Limbaugh—whose coining of the term "porkulus" helped galvanize the right's resistance to the so-called "stimulus" bill—has frequently recommended Ayn Rand's magnum opus Atlas Shrugged in recent months, as has conservative talk show host Glenn Beck.

In January, Stephen Moore caused a stir by arguing, in the Wall Street Journal, that the current crisis is turning Atlas Shrugged "from fiction to fact." References to Ayn Rand have even popped up at such unlikely sources as Human Events—a magazine for religious conservatives that recently published a surprisingly friendly article referring to the atheist philosopher—and even from the New York Times's safely timid in-house conservative David Brooks, who is the farthest thing from an "Ayn Rander" that you could imagine. And those who are warning that increased government restrictions will cause the nation's most productive workers to withdraw their talents have taken to calling this the "John Galt Effect," a reference to the hero—and the main plotline—of Atlas Shrugged.

It is no coincidence that the strongest resistance to a government takeover of the economy is coming from people influence by Ayn Rand. She has functioned as a stiffener of resolve and as the fountainhead of pro-free-market ideas.

I have written about this at greater length, but Ayn Rand's contribution to the philosophical defense of capitalism can be summed up in one central idea: individualism. Ayn Rand demonstrated that the ultimate source of all wealth—everything from steel mills to microchips—is the individual reasoning mind. Thus, a society that wants to prosper has to ask what is required by its thinkers and producers, the "prime movers" who originate and implement new ideas. And the first requirement of these thinkers is that they be free from coercive interference by bureaucrats, by blowhard legislators, or by federal "czars."

Ayn Rand was an individualist in the fullest sense: she regarded the unfettered individual, not just as a source of wealth, but also as an end in himself with the right to pursue and enjoy his own happiness, without being forced to sacrifice himself for the greater good of the collective. The issue, as she once put it, is not whether or not you give a dime to a beggar. The issue is whether you have a right to exist if you don't—and whether you have to buy your life, one dime at a time, from every moocher who comes along asking for a handout. She gave the clearest and most consistent "no" to that standard of morality, and clearest and most consistent "yes" to the moral rights of the creators and producers.

There has been some recent crowing about how the current financial crisis has discredited Ayn Rand's defense of the free market, as demonstrated by the defection of Alan Greenspan, who has now gone so far as to advocate the nationalization of failing banks. But Greenspan actually rejected Ayn Rand's philosophy decades ago, and he did it during the triumph of free markets in the early years of the Reagan Revolution. In reality, the current financial crisis does not demonstrate the failure of Greenspan's alleged pro-free-market ideas; rather, it demonstrates the failure of his presumption that a talented "maestro" can ensure prosperity by setting himself up as the monetary central planner of the economy.

In fact, the current crisis has vindicated Ayn Rand's warnings. And the policies of the current administration are about to do so yet again and perhaps more fully than ever before, by sacrificing more and more of the nation's productive minds to provide handouts for the beggars.

Far from facing growing rejection, Ayn Rand's ideas are the mostly unnamed fuel giving fire and confidence to people like Rick Santelli. There are many people who have a detailed practical knowledge of the superiority of markets and of the values behind free markets—but they are cowed and neutralized by the conventional altruist morality which signs our lives over to all of those moochers with their hands out. Even if they don't fully accept Ayn Rand ideas, their encounter with her writings gives them the confidence to embrace their suppressed knowledge and act upon it. She gives them the confidence to declare that they have earned their wealth and that they have a right to keep it and enjoy it.

That's the Ayn Rand factor that we are observing now—and we need more of it.

If we're going to have an ideological Boston Tea Party, a rebellion against the whole theory behind state management of our lives and wealth, then Ayn Rand is the ideal philosophical hostess.

(TIA Daily is a daily news analysis from an objectivist viewpoint written and published by Robert Tracinski. Click on link to subscribe. SCB)

The American FORM of Government

This video is a good presentation of context which has one distinguish the American form of government. My post yesterday was not about the form but about the execution. Clearly the avenues for the plunder taking place today were seeds in the Constitution that have now grown and are bearing bitter fruit.

The American Form of Government (This is 10.5 minutes long)

Private Property - Your Life, My Life

We live in a time when government has exceed its powers and no longer protects individual rights. The means to this end is the idea of public property and the regulation of private property. Consequently to strip the government of its power to do anything other than protect individual rights and private property, it can own no property nor have the power to tax. It must exist within the system of privately owned property and it must raise the money it needs by providing the value of protecting individual rights. Just as any man has to earn what he needs to live, so shall the government earn what it needs to exist. It provides a value which is evident to anyone who has use for those values.

It is government control over property that is the achilles heel of a free society and thus to bring the government under the control of the people for whom it is designed to protect, it can have no access to a means whereby it can usurp the rights of individual people.

This is going to require some new thinking - some entirely new thinking. Never before has such a system existed, but the facts are in on government's that can take people's property or in any way have use and disposal, i.e., regulation of, private property: it doesn't work. By this means, it becomes the master of slaves and places the entire population on its plantation.

It is this unilateral power over property which governments up to this time have had that allow a double standard to exist. With such power, the government lives by a standard that any private individual or group of individuals cannot. An individual cannot steal, the government can. An individual cannot violate another's rights, the government can. An individual cannot pollute his neighbor's property, the government can. An individual cannot lie and cheat his way to power over you, the government can. In other words, because the government can take and control private property, we have unleashed a criminal in our midst. And, this criminal class grows to the point where it must be destroyed lest it destroys the entire fabric of society and ultimately the lives of the people it was created to protect.

We are seeing all of this come to pass at this time. The government is now completely upside down. There is nothing rational about it. It plays deuces wild. There is nothing valuable about it. It has even lost the veneer of value. It has become the apotheosis of lawlessness. It is nothing more than a means for some men to have power over other men and has become a scourge upon the nation.

This process has been ocurring for over a hundred years. Only for the first hundred years was America a free society and a free country. But with the inception of the income tax, the Federal Reserve System, the anti-trust laws and some other such devices, the government became the problem, not the solution. Just as King George became the bane of the new colonies such that they had to declare their independence from the British Crown, we are approaching a repeat of this this scenario.

We are now witnessing a coup d'etat, an overthrow of legal government in a stark and startling way. President Obama has never pretended to have the distinction of individual rights and in fact has professed "positive rights" - meaning the taking of property from those who earned it and distributing it to those who have not. President Obama has appointed his czars to handle various segments of his government thus overriding the cabinet system and its approval by the Senate. He has funded ACORN, his henchmen in the field who can take to the streets at a moment's notice and who can overthrow the democratic process. He used threats of legal problems that could result in TV and radio license removal to cut off any speech that questioned his past during the campaign. He's considering The Fairness Doctrine to throttle the speech of talk radio. He chose immoral people for his advisors and various posts so he can easily control his "compromised" people. He placed critically important legislation in his stimulus package so it doesn't come up for debate. He has used executive order to bypass debate. In other words, the man is a dictator - pure and simple.

Now it is time for us to face this fact and start thinking how we are going to handle such a circumstance. It is upon us.

The United States is different than any other country that preceeded it. It was founded on Individual Rights. That means that each of us has a right to his own life in society - just as he would have were he living on a desert island. And it means that the government has no right to it nor any part of it. So long as we don't use our life to damage that same right of another person, then we are free to live as we see fit.

Whenever the government takes over a business or sticks its hand into a business, it violates an individual's right to HIS life. At that moment, the business is the property of the government not the individual even though the deed and contracts still have the individual's name on it as if he owned it. Use and disposal of property is the sine qua non of ownership. Since the government can tell that business what it should do when and it does so at the point of a gun, it is the final authority when it comes to use and disposal. The government has no business there. There is no right the government has to do that. It has usurped individual rights. And until this lesson is learned loud and clear across this land, this scourge will not end. It will continue until we and our children live in poverty. Such is the progression of a voracious, evil government.

So start thinking about what we are going to have to do. This problem is not going away. It's here to stay until we - all the private individuals - handle it.

Diabolical?

The alarm considering the diabolical nature of the Obama Administration is growing. People are now beginning to distrust Obama's motives. Does he want to take down the United States because he hates what is unique about the United States? It is, after all, the only country on the face of the earth founded on the fact that a human being is the source of value and is unique and individual. No one except the individual can seek to live his life and all human energy is individual human energy which is why the critical formulation in our Constitution is the protection of Individual Rights.

To socialize a nation is to disregard the nature of human being and attempt to annihilate him by recognizing him only as part of a group - racial, gender, sexuality, ethnic, or class. It is without doubt one of the most evil actions any man can advocate or take action to install. This idea is the root of failure of most modern governments and marks the downward direction of a society. Socialism ties up the energy of a person by requiring him to have permission to initiate any of his ideas. The parasites are the only ones who feel empowered. To install this idea over and at the expense of individuals is what I say Obama and his henchmen are up to.

This was apparent to anyone who bothered to investigate Obama during his campaign. I've yet to find a single Obama voter who cared enough about himself or his country to investigate him. Never has such lying and duplicity masqueraded in such an "attractive" form.

The question is increasingly going to become: What now? When?

This article is from Robert Tracinski's TIA Daily. SCB


A Principled Minority

Over the weekend, I got an e-mail from Jack Wakeland pointing out an error in the focus of my commentary on Judd Gregg's withdrawal as Obama's Secretary of Commerce. And it was not just that I incorrectly identified Gregg as a Senator from Connecticut (he's actually from New Hampshire). Here is Jack's comment:

"The story of Senator Judd Gregg is not a story about the incompetence of hot-house leftist Barack Obama.

"It is a story about Judd Gregg's integrity. Senator Gregg naively accepted a nomination to the cabinet by the president of the United States—uncritically accepting the idea that it would be a great honor to serve the top man in American government, because this is America. But after taking one good quick look at the shackles for our incremental enslavement being fashioned in the White House, he recoiled and said 'No!'

"No one quits a cabinet post one week after being nominated. No one quits after making a complex series of state and federal arrangements about who the Democratic governor of New Hampshire will appoint in his place (so as not to seal in more firmly the left's 60-vote steamroller-majority in the Senate). No one quits before hearings for his confirmation can even be scheduled. No one says no to a newly elected president so bluntly and unceremoniously—not without a substantial and very public provocation.

"Whatever faults he has (and I'm sure he has them), in quitting, Senator Judd deserves the best words of praise that can be penned.

"And one of the reasons why Senator Judd quit is the census. The census? That is one subject that should never be the object of partisan debate—not in a republic that has spent the past 80 years decaying towards democracy.

"The story of Rahm Emanuel's attempt—with the obvious approval of President Barack Obama—to take over of the census invites a retelling of the story of Joe Stalin's order that the head of his census bureau be shot for reporting that the population of the Soviet Union had decreased—thus giving evidence of the millions who were murdered in his purges and in his starvation of the Ukraine. It invites a reference to one of Stalin's best-known quotes: 'He who votes decides nothing. He who counts the votes decides everything.'

"The American people have handed the reins of our country over to a bunch of incompetent Chicago patronage hacks. They're deliberately planning to steer the whole nation into a ditch just to get the kickback for awarding the towing contract to their cousins. That is the whole dirty little extent of their idea for 'a change in direction.'"

A few weeks ago, I wrote that TIA Daily would respond to the bleak news of the Obama years by "looking for and highlighting the story of the people who are supporting and defending civilization. That is always more important than any other news, because in the long run, that is the story that actually explains the state of the world." That is why Jack is right that Senator Gregg's integrity is a more important story than the Obama administration's bumbling.

In fact, one of the bright spots of the current situation is the unaccustomed sight of Republican integrity on the issue of big government. A Washington Post analysis describes the battle over the "stimulus" that is just beginning: the battle over who gets the credit or the blame from its results. The most interesting fact from the article: "Rep. Eric Cantor, the House minority whip who led the fight to deny Obama every GOP vote for the plan, is studying Winston Churchill's role leading the Tories in the late 1930s, a principled minority that was eventually catapulted into power over the Labor Party." A "principled minority" that is rewarded by being "catapulted into power"? Sounds like a good plan to me.

I will resist the temptation to ask why the Republicans weren't more principled when they were in the majority, because we should still acknowledge that, even while Bush was still office, it was Republicans who offered the only glimmers of resistance to the bailout frenzy.

Jack points to another example of the new stiffening of the Republican opposition.

"Republican Congressman Tom Price (Chairman of the Republican Study Committee) was so furious with the non-objective vote on the 0.8-trillion-dollar Pelosi-Obey 'stimulus package,' that he couldn't wait for a news conference. So on Friday morning, while the vote was being rushed through, Rep. Price did a little one-minute video on the fact that no congressman or congressional staff member could possibly know what was in the 1073-page document that was to be voted on within 10 hours of its being marked up in the House-Senate Conference Committee. In the video, he shows two of the arbitrary and unaccountable scribbles in the margins of the thick document—one pencils out accountability for one of the thousands of appropriations in the bill and another pencils in the number $150 million in place of the number $100 million that had been typed in ink."

(In a similar vein, TIA Daily reader Ashley King asks a very good question: "I'd like to know when we will see a budget. We are going from one ad hoc monstrosity to the next. So I say again, where is the budget?")

The bracing effect of standing on principle is beginning to have more appeal to right-leaning intellectuals in the media, as well. The Wall Street Journal has just carried a second article by Judy Shelton advocating a return to the gold standard as the solution to the monetary central planning that helped cause the current financial crisis—and which now threatens to cause runaway inflation.

So all of that is good news. Unfortunately, it is happening in an evil context. Remember the Broken Culture Fallacy. The Republican Party trying to transform itself into a "principled minority" is a bit like the industrious glazier busy at work repairing a window broken by a vandal. It's good that he's repairing the damage—but everyone would have been better off if the vandal hadn't tried to smash everything to pieces in the first place.

Just to make sure that you are appropriately un-reassured, let's take a look at some of the things that were in the "stimulus bill," tucked away in those hundreds of pages that reporters and the public are just now getting around to reading.

We know that the bill authorized the federal government to spend hundreds of billions of dollars of money it doesn't have. But in addition, the Democrats in Congress couldn't resist exploiting the financial panic to add other statist elements. Thus, there is a cap on executive pay for companies that have taken bailout money under the TARP plan:

The pay restrictions resemble those that the Treasury Department announced this month, but are likely to ensnare more executives at many more companies and also to cut more deeply into the bonuses that often account for the bulk of annual pay.

Even the Obama administration thought that this provision "went too far and would cause a brain drain in the financial industry during an acute crisis."

One observer on Wall Street offers an ominous observation:

At some point, you begin to wonder: has the government given up on these companies anyway? Why would the government or White House want to go along with that unless they have come to the conclusion they will have to nationalize these firms anyway?

The flip side of punishing bank executives for the crime of being promoted to high-ranking jobs is to reward workers for losing their jobs. Thus, I have seen several reports indicating that the pseudo-stimulus undermines key provisions of the 1996 welfare reform that encouraged state-level "welfare to work" programs to move millions of people off of dependence on the government dole.

According to an overview in the London Times,

Robert Rector, a prominent welfare researcher who was one of the architects of Clinton's 1996 reform bill, warned last week that Obama's stimulus plan was a "welfare spendathon" that would amount to the largest one-year increase in government handouts in American history.

Douglas Besharov, author of a big study on welfare reform, said the stimulus bill passed by Congress and the Senate in separate votes on Friday would "unravel" most of the 1996 reforms that led to a 65% reduction in welfare caseloads.

Several TIA Daily readers sent me an excellent article detailing how the Democrats loaded into the "stimulus" various provisions for increased government control of medicine. The whole article is worth reading, but here is just one sample:

One new bureaucracy, the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology, will monitor treatments to make sure your doctor is doing what the federal government deems appropriate and cost effective. The goal is to reduce costs and "guide" your doctor's decisions (442, 446). These provisions in the stimulus bill are virtually identical to what Daschle prescribed in his 2008 book, "Critical: What We Can Do About the Health-Care Crisis." According to Daschle, doctors have to give up autonomy and "learn to operate less like solo practitioners."

The bill takes its cue from Daschle in more than one way.

Daschle supported the Clinton administration's health-care overhaul in 1994, and attributed its failure to debate and delay. A year ago, Daschle wrote that the next president should act quickly before critics mount an opposition. "If that means attaching a health-care plan to the federal budget, so be it," he said. "The issue is too important to be stalled by Senate protocol."

If a principled minority rises to oppose this unprincipled government takeover, they will be the heroes of the story of the next few years, because if anyone halts the renewed march toward socialism, it will be them. But let's not forget how grave the dangers are and how great the evil is that they will be struggling to save us from.—RWT

King of Shade

Obama is turning his administration into a Monument to Shade. Shady, compromised, crooked characters populate Obama's entire life and his administration is no exception.

Why should you pay your taxes if two people in his administration didn't think it was important? Why should you not be a racist if his minister didn't think it was important? Why should you not be a terrorist if his friend did not think it was important? Why should you not worry about our government being bought by Arabs if the husband of your Secretary of State didn't think it was important? Why should you be straight when the defenders of Fannie and Freddie aren't worried about their being straight? Why should you be respectful of people if his Chief of Staff thumbs his nose at President Bush at the inaugural? Why should you care about doing anything right if your President doesn't think it is important?

What influence will this have on the country when the head of our government not merely has to deal with it because it pops up once in awhile, but picks and defends shady characters as a signature of his administration?

He will empower every immoral creep - the hustlers, the con men, the moochers - the world over and bring them out of the woodwork and to his and America's doorstep.

Why? They have a champion in the White House.

There will be no sunlight for the next four years.

The Basic Question

This morning while driving I tuned the radio to Neal Boortz, an Atlanta talk show host who bills himself as libertarian. He said that although the liberal has an answer for many things, there is one question he cannot answer.

I post this here. I use "progressive liberal" rather than just "liberal" as there is a difference. Traditionally liberal has meant one who believes in liberty or being liberated - freedom to be oneself and freedom to be politically free. I think today, however, most liberals are progressive liberals who believe that the role of government is to redistribute property in order that all people have the same existential means to live their life. This is a new term for the old fashioned one: socialism.

Boortz: Do you think it is alright if I choose to give a homeless person $10?

Progressive Liberal: Yes.

Boortz: Do you think it is alright if you choose to give a homeless person $10?

Progressive Liberal: Yes.

Boortz: Do you think it is alright if I hold a gun with the shooting end touching your forehead and tell you to give $10 to the homeless person?

Progressive Liberal: Absolutely not!

Boortz: Then why is it alright if I go to Washington and ask the politician to hold that gun to your head to get that $10 for the homeless person?

Progressive Liberal: Hemming and Hawing. No answer.

We know Obama's answer: "It's fair." But is it? Is using force to get what YOU want fair? Is using force to get what a majority wants fair? By what standard?

What's Happening to the American Spirit?

(When I read this article, I got excited. There is a lot wrong with the underpinnings of this man’s viewpoint and yet he is putting his finger on a crucial aspect of the energy and drive, and the resulting creativity of our culture at this point in history. Culturally we are bound to serve others and the government is only able to pass laws forcing us to do so because we accept that that is a proper goal for our society and, therefore, one’s life. When a man has produced goods and services which others have bought because they see the value in them and yet he is asked to “give back”, the underlying assumption is that the voluntary trade of value for value is actually immoral – lying, stealing, merely material, etc. This is a horrendous fallacy and injustice, and anyone who accepts it deserves the guilt he will experience from living his life as he must in order to survive. We live in the era of the New Slavery.

His title is true in one sense and not true in another. The laws bind us to being less powerful in our lives and at the same time, they can never bind us since ultimately we only accept the victim status psychologically if we say so. This distinction is crucial for the future of political freedom from the heavy hand of government force. My comments are in green.)

Wall Street Journal, January 26, 2009

How Modern Law Makes Us Powerless
The real barrier to Barack Obama's 'responsibility' era.

By PHILIP K. HOWARD

Calling for a "new era of responsibility" in his inaugural address, President Barack Obama reminded us that there are no limits to "what free men and women can achieve." Indeed. America achieved greatness as the can-do society. This is, after all, the country of Thomas Paine and barn raisings, of Grange halls and Google. Other countries shared, at least in part, our political freedoms, but America had something different -- a belief in the power of each individual. President Obama's clarion call of self-determination -- "Yes We Can" -- hearkens back to the core of our culture.


Cartoon by David Klein

But there's a threshold problem for our new president. Americans don't feel free (Because objectively they aren’t free) to reach inside themselves and make a difference. ("Make a difference" is one of those unobjective buzzwords that has come to mean "make a difference with other people as a purpose for living one's life." It is true that what one creates and produces can make a difference with other people but it can never be an authentic purpose for one's life. Making a profit means one is making a difference because people traded their money for what you produced.) The growth of litigation and regulation has injected a paralyzing uncertainty into everyday choices. All around us are warnings and legal risks. The modern credo is not "Yes We Can" but "No You Can't." Our sense of powerlessness is pervasive. Those who deal with the public are the most discouraged. Most doctors say they wouldn't advise their children to go into medicine. Government service is seen as a bureaucratic morass, not a noble calling. Make a difference? You can't even show basic human kindness for fear of legal action. Teachers across America are instructed never to put an arm around a crying child.

The idea of freedom as personal power got pushed aside in recent decades by a new idea of freedom -- where the focus is on the rights of whoever might disagree. (Rather than the objective violation of a person’s right to his life and his property, the visible expression of his life.)

Daily life in America has been transformed. Ordinary choices -- by teachers, doctors, officials, managers, even volunteers -- are paralyzed by legal self-consciousness. Did you check the rules? Who will be responsible if there's an accident? A pediatrician in North Carolina noted that "I don't deal with patients the same way any more. You wouldn't want to say something off the cuff that might be used against you."

Here we stand, facing the worst economy since the Great Depression, and Americans no longer feel free to do anything about it. We have lost the idea, at every level of social life, that people can grab hold of a problem and fix it. Defensiveness has swept across the country like a cold wave. We have become a culture of rule followers, trained to frame every solution in terms of existing law or possible legal risk. The person of responsibility (Responsibility is a function of reaping and experiencing the consequences of one’s actions. Government force erases responsibility. One cannot be responsible for that which he had no choice but to do.) is replaced by the person of caution. When in doubt, don't.

All this law, we're told, is just the price of making sure society is in working order. But society is not working. Disorder disrupts learning all day long in many public schools -- the result in part, studies by NYU Professor Richard Arum found, of the rise of student rights. Health care is like a nervous breakdown in slow motion. Costs are out of control, yet the incentive for doctors is to order whatever tests the insurance will pay for. Taking risks is no longer the badge of courage, but reason enough to get sued.

There's an epidemic of child obesity, but kids aren't allowed to take the normal risks of childhood. Broward County, Fla., has even banned running at recess.

The flaw, and the cure, lie in our conception of freedom. (And that lies in the understanding of man’s nature and the type of consciousness he has.) We think of freedom as political freedom. We're certainly free to live and work where we want, and to pull the lever in the ballot box. But freedom should also include the power of personal conviction and the authority to use your common sense. Analyzing the American character, Alexis de Tocqueville, considered "freedom less necessary in great things than in little ones. . . . Subjection in minor affairs does not drive men to resistance, but it crosses them at every turn, till they are led to sacrifice their own will. Thus their spirit is gradually broken and their character enervated."

This is not an ideological point. Freedom in daily choices is essential for practical reasons (and spiritual reasons) -- necessary for government officials and judges as well as for teachers, doctors and entrepreneurs. The new legal order doesn't honor the individuality of human accomplishment. (The new legal order doesn’t honor the existence of individuals.) People accomplish things by focusing on the goal, and letting their instincts, mainly subconscious, try to get them there. "Amazingly few people," management guru Peter Drucker observed, "know how they get things done." Most things happen, the philosopher Michael Polanyi wrote, through "the usual process of trial and error by which we feel (Really? I don’t think that captures it. He’s missing the mind’s cognitive role in our actions.) our way to success." Thomas Edison put it this way: "Nothing that's any good works by itself. You got to make the damn thing work."

Modern law pulls the rug out from under all those human powers and substitutes instead a debilitating self-consciousness. (Reality consists of what there is to be conscious of and also one’s own consciousness – that tool of survival in the world. The proper processing of information from one’s senses requires focusing out there and also being responsible for one’s mechanism by which one grasps and processes that information.) Teachers lose their authority, Prof. Arum found, because the overhang of law causes "hesitation, doubt and weakening of conviction." Skyrocketing health-care costs are impossible to contain as long as doctors go through the day thinking about how they will defend themselves if a sick person sues.

The overlay of law on daily choices destroys the human instinct (man does not possess instincts. He is a living entity and for man, he must choose to live. Nothing automatically propels him in that direction other than his nature as a living entity has built into mechanisms which indicate to him that he is doing that or not doing that. But what he does about the information he gets from his body – the pleasure or the pain – doesn’t tell him what to do. He has to discover that. Hence no instincts. An instinct is an automatic propensity toward life that works to sustain him. Animals have that, but not man. Man is quite capable of choosing suicide and often does.) needed to get things done. Bureaucracy can't teach. Rules don't make things happen. Accomplishment is personal. Anyone who has felt the pride of a job well done knows this. (This is the experience the unification of the mind and body in performing an Ego Unit. The Ego Unit is a discovery of mine which supports a person to grasp the nature of real accomplishment and consciously engage in that practice if he so chooses.)

How do we restore Americans' freedom in daily choices? Freedom is notoriously malleable towards self-interest. "We all declare for liberty," Abraham Lincoln observed, "but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing."

Freedom, however, is not just a shoving match. Freedom has a formal structure. It has two components:

1) Law sets boundaries that proscribe what we must do or can't do -- you must not steal, you must pay taxes.
2) Those same legal boundaries protect an open field of free choice in all other matters.

The forgotten idea is the second component -- that law must affirmatively define an area free from legal interference. Law must provide "frontiers, not artificially drawn," as philosopher Isaiah Berlin put it, "within which men should be inviolable." (Our Constitution is the document that is the means of carrying out The Declaration of Independence. In that it states that every man has a RIGHT to his life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, i.e. the freedom to be free of other men telling him what to do. This has been done. So what is the REAL problem? What is it that has taken us in the direction away from something that we already know works and releases the creative energy of men? This is the real question which this author does not answer. He keeps his argument at the level of laws and yet those laws are carrying out more fundamental beliefs. What are they?)

This idea has been lost to our age. When advancing the cause of freedom, law today is all proscription and no protection. There are no boundaries, just a moving mudbank comprised of accumulating bureaucracy and whatever claims people unilaterally choose to assert. People wade through law all day long. Any disagreement in the workplace, any accident, any incidental touching of a child, any sick person who gets sicker, any bad grade in school -- you name it. Law has poured into daily life. (This is why I no longer take on architecture in the way I once did. In my lifetime, the building code has gone from a small 5x8 book about an inch thick to a 4’ shelf of 9x12 binders specifying dimensions and layouts and surfaces and construction and everything. One can do nothing without consulting the building code and trying to figure out what is meant. Creative energy is sapped by bureaucratic energy. Working on big buildings thoroughly contained by all these laws and dictums which, by the way, are never finalized in the books since the government interpreters are constantly changing them, is to render oneself a drone for life. That’s not me and I’m not interested. So I shrunk my sphere of operation to small private creative projects that I am stimulated by and yet avoid the bulk of government regulation.)

The solution is not just to start paring back all the law -- that would take 10 lifetimes, like trying to prune the jungle. We need to abandon the idea that freedom is a legal maze, where each daily choice is like picking the right answer on a multiple-choice test. We need to set a new goal for law -- to define an open area of free choice. This requires judges and legislatures to affirmatively assert social norms of what's reasonable and what's not. "The first requirement of a sound body of law," Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote, "is that it should correspond with the actual feelings and demands of the community." (We need to understand that no one has the right to tell us what to do and compel our action and at the same time none of us has the right to infringe the same right of another person. This in practice means the separation of economy and state in the same way that in our past we have separated church and state. This separation is breaking down too.)

The profile of authority structures needed to defend daily freedoms (So what is this concept “daily freedoms?” This kind of thinking is typical of a person who is stopped from thinking by wanting to please people, I say, rather than identifying the nature of things. This is why this article, although capturing the spiritual essence of our New Slavery is poor at identifying what has to be seen differently if things are to change and man is able to live free once again.) is not hard to imagine. Judges would aspire to keep lawsuits reasonable, understanding that what people sue for ends up defining the boundaries of free interaction. Schools would be run by the instincts and values of the humans in charge -- not by bureaucratic micromanagement -- and be held accountable for how they do.

Government officials would have flexibility to meet public goals, also with accountability. Public choices would aspire to balance (balance has nothing to do with the solution of this problem. Rather it has to do with acting from objectively true principles.) for the common good, not, generally, to appease someone's rights.

Reviving the can-do spirit that made America great requires a legal overhaul of historic dimension. (The legal overhaul cannot proceed without moral guidance as to which kinds of actions are consonant with man’s nature and need to be protected by the law. Thus the deeper problem is the re-examination of the dominant moral code and the assumptions about existence and consciousness upon which it depends. I’m of the opinion that the surrender of one’s mind to a higher authority – be it God or Society – must be thrown out lock, stock and barrel. Rather, people have to question all of these underlying structures and see whether they work and why or are they allowing them in their lives for other reasons – such as social acceptance.) We must scrape away decades of accumulated legal sediment and replace it with coherent legal goals and authority mechanisms, designed to affirmatively protect individual freedom in daily choices. "A little rebellion now and then is a good thing," Thomas Jefferson wrote to James Madison, "and as necessary in the political world as storms are in the physical . . . ." The goal is not to change our public goals. (Well there is no such thing as a public goal. In fact there is no such thing as “the public.” “The public” is a collectivist floating abstraction. Anything said in the name of the public is total BS because the public is nothing more than a collection of individuals. So ascribing anything to the public means that the speaker wants his values and the rest be damned. Whoever those other people are at the moment of his speaking do not exist. He may think he speaks for the public, but that is a fat lie too.) The goal is make it possible for free citizens to achieve them.

(In today’s culture, no one with a public voice is speaking for individualism. All leadership, some faster and some slower, is leading us into the slavery of the individual to the collective. In this context, there were no good political candidates this year. The New Enslavement is speeding up)

Mr. Howard, a lawyer, is chair of Common Good (http://www.commongood.org/), and author of the new book "Life Without Lawyers," published this month by W.W. Norton & Co.