Archive for the ‘Socialism’ Category
The Biggest Threat to Freedom
Complacency! Surely it’s the biggest threat to freedom in America. While closet communists and Marxists boldly go about neutering the U.S. Constitution, far too many Americans have become so self-absorbed, so distracted by entertainment and amusement that an over-reaching and over bearing government can easily dictate the terms to which citizens must comply.
Posted in Is Fighting for Smaller Government Racist?
| When the NAACP allowed itself to be used by the Democratic party to try and smear a grass roots movement for smaller government as racist, the resulting controversy shone a light on more than just racism by individuals associated with the NAACP, but with the organization’s inability to delink class warfare from racism. If there is one thing that both the white media elites at Jornolist and the NAACP leadership agreed on, it’s that fighting for smaller government is racist. |
Has the Time Come to Replace the Federal Government?
After Clinton appointed Judge Susan Bolton ruled Wednesday that—for all intents and purposes—Arizona does not have the right to protect itself or its citizens from invading drug cartels and the illegal foreign hordes that are bleeding it dry of its resources, it should have become apparent to even the dimmest that We-the-People no longer exist. We are now living under a tyranny developed, directed, implemented and enforced by the Marxists in power.
Labor Union Perspective
By Thomas E. Brewton
As the proposed trade agreement with Colombia reveals, labor unions are organizations of self-centered greed, which disingenuously cloak themselves with pretense of God, country, and mom's apple pie.
President Bush, by calling for Congressional approval of the trade agreement with Colombia, is compelling liberal-progressives to choose between the high-flown, one-world internationalism to which they give lip service and kow-towing to organized labor.
Columnist Robert D. Novak described it this way in his April 4th article:
President Bush will send Congress a trade agreement next week forcing Democrats to make an unpleasant choice. Will they do the bidding of organized labor and reject a pact negotiated more than a year and a half ago with the country's strongest ally and best customer in South America?
…But to forget about a vote this year, as Pelosi wants, …would humiliate Colombian President Álvaro Uribe, a free-trader and a bulwark against the spreading influence in Latin America of Venezuela's leftist strongman, President Hugo Chávez.
Our liberal-progressive school system instructs callow youth that labor unions are agents of good and right. The facts are quite different.
The president of the United Auto Workers union has implicitly acknowledged the stark truth: industrial unions are killing American manufacturing jobs. Unions’ salvation, he says, must come from ukases promulgated by the commissars of a new socialistic, Democratic administration.
In a June 13, 2006, article by Jefrey McCracken, the Wall Street Journal reported:
United Auto Workers President Ron Gettelfinger, acknowledging that his union confronts the toughest challenges in its 71-year history, told delegates to the UAW’s leadership convention that solutions to problems such as rising health-care costs or the rash of auto suppliers filing bankruptcy-law protection must come largely through the political process.
Union leaders expect a Democrat-socialist to win the presidency, and they expect a payoff via protectionist legislation that will reduce business profits, throwing non-union workers out of jobs and augmenting inflation, to the cost of the vast majority of citizens who are non-union members of the labor force.
Senator Obama and the Transformation of Human Nature
By Thomas E. Brewton
Believing apparently that specifics are not necessary, Senator Obama promises us that his election will bring us all together in one happy family via a miraculous transformation of society and its citizens.
Earthly perfection of human nature and human society, here and now, is what Senator Obama is promising us. This is his implicit message when tells us that he can, as President, bring us all together and move us beyond strife, aggression, and wars.
One thing we can state categorically in that regard is that what Senator Obama promises is emphatically, irreconcilably opposed to the Judeo-Christian foundations of Western Civilization. Parenthetically, the Senator's secular and socialistic mind-set may explain in part why he saw no problem with the unchristian hatred preached by his minister, the Rev. Wright.
Senator Obama is not necessarily painting himself as the Second Messiah who will personally effect the transformation. Rather, as a good socialist-progressive-liberal, he expects that structural changes in the political state will do the necessary work.
Such structural changes will include higher taxes, especially on capital gains which fuel business innovation and more efficient production, massive increases in Federal welfare-state spending programs, and crushing inflation, along with extensive increases in regulation of personal and business conduct (including stronger affirmative-action measures).
As the German Empire's Iron Chancellor Otto von Bismarck told the Reichstag in the 1880s, he was instituting the world's first welfare state in order to gain total control over the German people. Those who are dependent upon the political state for their benefits, he observed, can be herded like cattle.
In contrast, in the Old Testament, King Solomon tells us:
The words of the Teacher, son of David, king in Jerusalem:
"Meaningless! Meaningless!" says the Teacher. "Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless." What does man gain from all his labor at which he toils under the sun? (Ecclesiastes 1:1-3)
I, the Teacher, was king over Israel in Jerusalem. I devoted myself to study and to explore by wisdom all that is done under heaven. What a heavy burden God has laid on men! I have seen all the things that are done under the sun; all of them are meaningless, a chasing after the wind. (Ecclesiastes 1:12-14)
Tricky Ahnuld: Schwarzenegger Mimics Hero Nixon
by Daniel Clark
At the 2004 Republican National Convention, Arnold Schwarzenegger told how he first became involved in American politics when he came to this country in 1968. It started when he was watching coverage of the presidential race between Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey.
"I heard Humphrey saying things that sounded like socialism, which is what I had just left," he said. "But then I heard Nixon speak. He was talking about free enterprise, getting government off your back, lowering taxes and strengthening the military. Listening to Nixon speak sounded more like a breath of fresh air. I said to my friend, "What party is he?" My friend said, "He's a Republican." I said, "Then I am a Republican."
… But a funny thing happened on the way to Sacramento. It seems that Schwarzenegger, like Nixon, has "grown" — which is how the media condescendingly describe it when a politician becomes more liberal over the years. By this measure, he has become more massive than ever, since announcing his latest proposals on health care and global warming.
Statistical Virtue
by Thomas E. Brewton
Liberal social justice is based on statistical averages relating to an abstraction called "humanity." Individual morality is not an element in that liberal cosmology.
One of the first legislative acts of the newly ensconced Congressional liberals was increasing the minimum wage. Countless studies have demonstrated that the legal minimum wage is counter-productive. But it sounds good and it can be applied at one shot without the tedious process of arriving at fair wages in individual cases.
The minimum wage is an example of the sound-good, feel-good statistical virtues of liberal-socialist-progressivism. Another is Al Gore's championing the Kyoto Protocols that would eliminate millions of workers' jobs in the Western world to reduce greenhouse gases, a statistical virtue that state-planners hypothesize will prevent the current high-point cycle of sun spot activity from warming the earth.
Democrats Consider the Fascist Option
by Thomas E. Brewton
Democrats, committed to the theory that only the political state can improve people's lives, explore ways to deliver on campaign promises.
David Wessel writes in the November 30 edition of the Wall Street journal here, (if you're an online subscriber):
In campaign rhetoric, Democrats raised expectations they would do more than Republicans to boost wages and living standards of ordinary Americans……Now Democrats have to deliver, or at least look like they're trying.
…….Democrats, [Gene Sperling, a Democratic cabinet-secretary-in-waiting] says, must figure out what government can do to encourage business to create more middle-class jobs in the U.S.
…….[Robert Reich, the former Clinton labor secretary], recites a familiar list: trade policy, industrial policy — government attempts to influence the flow of capital toward promising industries and companies — antitrust, publicly financed research and development, and stronger trade unions.
The sorts of policies advocated by Mr. Reich are what led us to economic and social disaster in the 1930s and again in the 1960s and 70s. Those policies are also essential elements in the economic doctrine of Mussolini's and Hitler's Fascism.
In both Italian Fascism and German National Socialism, the political state had the last word in establishing wages, hours, production volumes, and sale prices of goods. Unlike Soviet Communism, Fascism left property ownership in its original hands, recognizing that regulatory control was sufficient to carry out political and economic policies. Labor unions remained in existence and were strengthened vis a vis industrialists, and farmers were assured higher prices.
In common with the left-wing liberals of the Democratic Party, Fascists believed that private individuals and private business counted for little, if anything, in the creation of jobs and the necessary production of society's goods and services. People's lives and livelihoods were viewed as the creation of the political state, which therefore had the last word in regulating human activity.
Social Contracts
by Thomas E. Brewton
Since the 1930s, most Americans have come to believe in a fairy tale that has no happy ending. Democrats' victories in the recent elections have revived the fairy tale.
Washington Post staff writer Dan Balz, in a November 13, 2006, article explores the unresolved questions and internal debates remaining after the recent congressional elections.
One of those questions, as he sees it, is:
Equally important is the question of which party can adequately address the twin problems of keeping the United States competitive in a global economy and restoring the social contract that has helped provide economic security to workers and that has been shattered as a result of the corporate restructuring that globalization has brought about.
Mr. Balz is working under a false assumption: the expectation that the Federal government controls business, as well as the idea that it is possible to have a "social contract" under which government can effectively provide economic security to workers.
That assumption originates in the religion of socialism, which presumes that councils of intellectual planners, backed by technocratic administrators, are capable of managing businesses better than businessmen. Intellectuals and technocrats theoretically are motivated solely by the common good, not by private greed for profit. Businesses therefore, in theory, will be more efficient and be able to support full employment at all times when under government control.
In practice, this hasn't worked well, a typical example being the collapse of the socialistic EU's technocratically-managed AirBus and the resurgence of Boeing.
The term "social contract" was most famously used by John Locke in 1689 and by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in 1762. Locke's conception, not Rousseau's, was the basis of our War of Independence in 1776.
Locke erected a theoretical framework for a government of inherently limited powers. Even the king is subject to God's higher law of morality, which embraces the natural-law rights of individuals. Individuals, when they entered a social contract to create political society, retained inalienable rights to life, liberty, and private property. Hence our 1776 slogan, "No taxation without representation."
American Ideals and Same-Sex Marriage
By Thomas E. Brewton
Words remain the same, but lose their meaning when twisted to fit ideological aims. One such word is equality.
A New York Times editorial dated October 26, 2006, proclaims, "The New Jersey Supreme Court brought the United States a little closer to the ideal of equality yesterday when it ruled that the state's Constitution requires that committed same-sex couples be accorded the same rights as married heterosexual couples."
The Times editorial implicitly presumes that the "ideal of equality" means entitlement to actual equality in all respects. Same-sex marriage is just the latest in a long list of socialist intellectuals' demands that judicial pronouncement, if not statute law, mandate equality of condition, rather than equality of opportunity.
Of course, even for the Times, equality has limits. There is no thought to equal protection of an infant's right to life, when weighed against the "right" to sexual promiscuity implicit in the pro-choice advocacy of abortion.
Our nation was founded on a completely different understanding of equality. Not until President Lyndon Johnson's full-bore-socialist Great Society did the politicians adopt the New York Times's definition of equality as entitlement, rather than opportunity.
English political traditions brought to North America in the early 17th century remained the founding traditions of the United States in the 18th century, when the Constitution was written. In that framework, equality meant only that everyone was entitled to equal treatment under the law, that the ruler, as well as the ruled, was subject to a higher law of God-given morality.
The Bill of Rights was intended, not to legislate equality, but to safeguard individuals' natural-law political liberties from arbitrary government power. One inescapable consequence of the individuality protected by the Bill of Rights is the absolute impossibility of uniform equality in social station, distinction, and income.