In his new book, No, They Can’t: Why Government Fails — But Individuals Succeed, John Stossel has zeroed in on an interesting theory about what causes people to believe they need government to be involved in so many areas of their lives. He believes that the notion that government can do things better than individuals is “intuitive.”
But what, exactly, is intuition? One dictionary defines it as “Direct perception of truth … independent of any reasoning process.” That definition, however, invites another question: What is “truth?”
Some years ago, Time magazine ran a cover story about greed that stated, “Nature is a zero-sum game, after all. Every buffalo you kill for your family is one less for somebody else’s; every acre of land you occupy elbows out somebody else.”
Ignorant, left-wing college profs have been teaching this kind of gibberish to malleable-minded college kids for centuries, while at the same time shameless and ignorant politicians have been brainwashing the parents of those same children. Sadly, this kind of Marxist rhetoric is precisely what deters the underprivileged from doing the very things they need to do to lift themselves up.
Bill Ayers’ recent speech at the University of Oregon lit up the Internet as though he were a world-renowned statesman, igniting predictable responses from both the right and the left.
After reading as much as I could find about Ayers’ speech on the Internet, and listening to the brief video clip that most everyone has viewed by now, my reaction might surprise some readers. Brace yourself: I believe that a majority of what Bill Ayers said is true. It is his solutions with which I take issue.
The two most poisonous words in the English language are rights and entitlements. They mean essentially the same thing, and both are subjectively created in the minds of collectivist dreamers.
Though the notion of rights/entitlements has been around since the founding, and has been heating up at an accelerating pace since FDR first introduced Americans to the welfare state, it is Barack Obama whom historians will credit with bringing the issue into the debate arena.
“The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground,” said Thomas Jefferson.
Throughout my life, I have watched this phenomenon play out. Much like a stock-market chart, you may see an occasional upward blip toward liberty, but the general trendline is downward — toward bigger, more intrusive, more controlling government and less individual liberty.
I have purposely avoided writing about the Trayvon Martin case, for two reasons. First, because, as tragic as the death of a teenager is, it’s not a national news story. It was manufactured into such by the same old race baiters who make a living by stirring up racial hatred.
When I say race baiters, I’m talking about those who relentlessly work at keeping alive the racial divisions created by Democrats and their Jim Crow laws of yesteryear. It starts at the top with the Racist-in-Chief and goes all the way to the bottom — and I do mean the bottom — to intellectual dwarf Al Sharpton.
Longtime readers will recall that I began warning about Barack Obama’s dictatorial ambitions before he even won the 2008 presidential election. Now, finally, more people are beginning to take this possibility as a serious threat.
Obama’s recent contention that it would be “unprecedented” for the Supreme Court to overrule congressional legislation had dictatorship written all over it. It was, quite obviously, an ignorant slip on his part.
If MittMan fulfills his destiny as the inevitable Republican presidential nominee, which it now appears he will, one of the issues that would help him pull off his born-again conservative image is if he would take on outlaw unions in an aggressive fashion. MittMan likes to stick with winning issues, and given that only 7 percent of wage and salary workers in the private sector are unionized, taking on unions is a pretty safe way to look tough and conservative.
In rereading Barry Goldwater’s classic, Conscience of a Conservative, I was once again reminded of how convoluted the arguments over trade unions have become. It is a clear violation of property rights when a union not only can force itself on a business owner, but force everyone who comes to work for that employer to become a member.
As the Supreme Court’s review of the constitutionality of Obamacare plays out, I’m probably one of the few people who is not biting his nails over the outcome. In fact, I’m dismayed that a majority of Americans are actually taking this media-hyped event so seriously.
First of all, as Thomas Woods has often pointed out, the whole idea of an arm of the federal government ruling in a case where states are suing that same federal government is perverse. Let us not be naïve. The Supreme Court, Congress, and the Executive Branch are all part of the same team. It’s true that the Court may occasionally rule against the government, but, nevertheless, there is an inherent conflict of interest.
Obama in Wonderland(officially titled The Road We’ve Traveled), the world’s first sixteen-minute political ad, would have pleased Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s infamous propaganda minister. Like the ruling party in George Orwell’s 1984, this super-slick Hollywood production rewrites history with an alarming arrogance.
The first thing you see in this vulgar, vile, vitriol-filled video is the Obama family walking on stage to greet a huge crowd of tearful, cheering, flag-waving Stepford wives, husbands, and children. The melodrama of it all rivals New York City’s 1951 ticker-tape parade for General Douglas MacArthur.
There’s an old saying, sometimes attributed to Newt Gingrich, that “They can lie louder, but we can tell the truth longer.” I’d like to believe that, but after years of watching the Lying Left in action, I’m not so sure about it.
Based on how they’ve ramped up their game since the Obamaviks arrived in Washington back in 2009, I’m convinced that the Lying Left possesses the audacity, the shamelessness, and the relentlessness required to tell the most outrageous and vile lies every bit as long as those of us who love liberty can tell the truth.
In Senator Jim DeMint’s new book, Now or Never, he boldly states, “The differences between the Democratic and Republican Parties are irreconcilable: there can be no compromise between collectivism and freedom.” How refreshing that someone in the U.S. Senate has the courage to speak the truth.
I totally concur with Senator DeMint’s position. The vast majority of Democrats are not interested in truth. They are not interested in logic. They are not interested in helping others. And they certainly are not interested in upholding and defending the Constitution.
One of the current questions in an endless barrage of moral dilemmas that politicians are constantly debating is whether we should send food to North Korea in exchange for its promise to shut down its nuclear program. And it’s not particularly comforting to know that a twenty-eight-year-old kid, Kim Jung-un (affectionately referred to by his barber as “Chublet II”), is now ostensibly running things.
The Korean War was the first in what has become a long string of losing U.S. wars. Harry Truman’s decision to stop General Douglas MacArthur from finishing the job in Korea has resulted in nearly six decades of slavery for North Koreans.
Our old friend, “pain at the pump,” is with us once again, and this time it promises to be far more painful than the last time around. “Pain at the pump” is a nice little catchphrase, but I’ve never been able to figure out why people pick on gas. After all, isn’t it just as painful to pay $250,000 for a house that used to cost $8,000? Or $30,000 for a car that once cost $2,000? And what about the skyrocketing prices of such basic foods as milk, bread, and eggs?
The fact is that the price of gasoline is relative. Relative to what Americans have been used to paying, $4.00-$5.00 a gallon sounds like a lot. And $6.00-$7.00 a gallon — which is almost certain to come — is going to sound like a lot more. But relative to what countries such as the UK, France, and the Netherlands have been paying for years, these prices are no big deal.
In my recent interview with J.C. Watts, he took issue with Mitt Romney’s controversial comment, “I’m not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there. If it needs repair, I’ll fix it.”
Romney’s supporters claim that the media has used this quote out of context, but Watts doesn’t see it that way. “I didn’t take what he said out of context,” the ex-congressman told me, “I took it in context. What he [Romney] was saying was, ‘Let’s keep people trapped in poverty, and if we need to give them a few more food stamps … we’ll do that.’”
Otherwise dependable conservatives appear to be losing their minds in their zeal to vanquish the media-created first family from the White House. Ann Coulter, a one-time paragon of hard-core conservatism, has confirmed a growing suspicion that she possesses a latent liberal streak. By endorsing and singing the praises of Mitt-the-Flip, her open affection for left-wing nasties like Joy Behar and Bill Maher no longer appear to be anomalies.
Not one to leave bad enough alone, Coulter did a spin piece last week on Romney’s Obamacare model titled “Three Cheers for Romneycare,” which ended with, “Romney is the most electable candidate not only because it will be nearly impossible for the media to demonize this self-made Mormon square, devoted to his wife and church, but precisely because he is the most conservative candidate.”
Seems like we’ve been here before … many, many times. Whitney Houston’s tragic death is the latest in a long string of drug- and alcohol-related celebrity deaths, going back to Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin in 1970, Jim Morrison in 1971, Elvis in 1977, Andy Gibb and John Belushi in the eighties, and, of course, Michael Jackson in 2009. And these are just a few of the names that come quickly to mind.
When a show-business icon dies prematurely, we tend to focus on his/her death rather than the life that led to that death. In the case of Whitney Houston, her travails were in the news so much over the years that even I — not a frequent showbiz reader — was aware of them. Anyone who watched the evening news couldn’t help but know about her bouts with drugs and alcohol, and, perhaps even worse, her fifteen-year marriage to a man who physically abused her.
When a longtime reader sends me a well-meaning but anti-liberty, anti-free-market e-mail, it makes me question my own writing skills because it means that even though he may thank me for what I’ve taught him over the years, his words make it clear that he doesn’t really understand what I’m saying.
Such was the case with an e-mail I recently received from a long-time reader that read, in part:
Most men speak of their mothers as angels, and in that regard I guess I’m not unique. Some would probably argue that my mother was not unique either, that she was merely one of millions of moms from the greatest generation.
Modern-day feminists would have been horrified by Mom’s lifestyle. Her day-to-day world consisted primarily of cooking, shopping, keeping her home running smoothly, and, above all, taking care of her children. I think she just assumed that these were the most important things in every woman’s life.
On Hannity last week, the king of vulgarity, Jerry Springer, kept hammering home a puzzling point — that Barack Obama needs additional stimulus money so the government can hire more people. After all, he said, “the private sector can’t employ everyone.”
Now that’s one I’ve never heard before. The private sector can’t employ everyone, therefore the government needs to take more money from working people and “create” jobs for people who aren’t working? Springer’s comment was, of course, code for more redistribution of wealth.
Every time you think the media is about to run out of ideas for transforming a nonstory into a spectacular news event, they manage to come up with yet another gem. That said, forgive me for adding my two cents worth to the Bain Capital brouhaha.
Those who know Newt Gingrich best have long predicated he would implode, even after he shot to the top of the polls, which he managed to do by cleverly playing the role of the calm, intellectual, peacemaking elderly statesman who was above the fray. So Gingrich’s angry obsession with taking down MittMan, even if it means destroying his own chances of winning the Republican nomination, is not surprising.
The Iowa caucuses spotlighted everything that’s wrong with politics in this country … everything that’s wrong with a republic devolving into a democracy … everything that’s wrong with entitlement-driven America.
Media cheerleaders valiantly tried to create a Super Bowl-like atmosphere around the Republican presidential candidates’ first test in Iowa, but I was so turned off that I watched very little of the coverage on election night. I make it a practice not to see bad movies more than once, and this was a very bad political movie I had seen many times over the years.
It’s been quite humorous watching Dick Morris switch modes — from dismissing Ron Paul as a nut and a crackpot to hysterically warning people how dangerous he is. In one of his recent lunch videos, Morris ranted nonstop about Paul, going so far as to say, “He is the most radical, liberal candidate running.” Then, on The O’Reilly Factor, Morris said, “I think that he is absolutely the most liberal, radical, left-wing person to run for president in the United States in the last fifty years.”
Strange, because I’ve known Ron Paul for more than thirty years, and I see him as one of the purist conservatives in Washington — and certainly the most conservative person in the current field of Republican candidates. I’m talking about true conservatism, which Ronald Reagan accurately described when he said, “The very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism.”
If there’s one thing that bothers me this time of the year, it’s seeing ex-servicemen in wheelchairs or sporting titanium arms and legs on television. If peaceful, rational humanoids from another galaxy landed in the U.S., I have to believe they would be appalled. I can just hear them asking, “Who sent all these healthy young men and women off to be maimed and killed?” And, “Did the people who sent them lead the charge into battle?”
Many argue that having the lives of thousands of young adults destroyed — or lost — is the price of preserving our freedom. And during World War II, when America was a very different nation, most people had no trouble buying into that proposition. But in today’s corrupt, semi-socialist America, the biggest threat to our freedom comes not from abroad, but from the criminal class in Washington — and, unfortunately, no one is talking about invading the nation’s capital.
The most predictable governing body on the planet, the United States Congress, is once again doing some of its sleaziest sleight-of-hand work at year’s end, with the comfort of knowing that we lowly proletarians are focused on holiday festivities. The average American is totally confused about the flurry of year-end legislation and political posturing coming out of the nation’s capital, and with good reason: Politicians work hard at creating confusion.
Now, let’s see if I understand this. The Dems want to “cut taxes” by extending a “tax holiday” on some of the money workers pay into the Social Security retirement “fund.” Could it be that Democrats aren’t as liberal as some of us have believed them to be? After all, they can’t be so bad if they actually favor a tax cut.
Oops! The presidential pretender went and did it again. A lot of red ink has passed over the socialist dam since he unthinkingly told Joe the Plumber that he wants to “spread the wealth around.”
Or since he told Charlie Gibson that “It’s a matter of fairness” when Gibson repeatedly asked him to explain why he would want to raise the capital-gains tax when the historical evidence proves that higher capital-gains taxes actually decreasegovernment revenues.
Even after three years of thugocratic government, there are still many conservatives and libertarians who cannot bring themselves to believe that Barack Obama is anything more than a “big-spending liberal” who is simply misguided. True, some have finally thrown in the towel and sparingly use words like socialist and socialism to describe Obama and his policies, but terms like communism and dictatorship are uttered only by those whom the establishment considers to be extremists.
Much to my fascination, most conservative media pundits continue to scratch their heads and insist that “Barack Obama is just in over his head” when talking about his “failed policies.” The idea that he is actually trying to destroy the last vestiges of the free market and freedom in America is such a radical thought that their mainstream minds will not allow them to even consider it.
The shopping mantra for American consumaholics this year is, “We know the future is hopeless, but we’re not going to allow the bad economy to ruin our holiday season.” If you doubt their determination to let the good times roll, just ask the crazed shoppers who were pepper-sprayed on Black Friday at a Los Angeles Walmart by a woman who wasn’t about to miss out on one of the most sought after necessities of life — the new Xbox.
Of course, those who were merely pepper-sprayed got off easy. Being at a Target, Best Buy, Walmart, or Kohl’s store last weekend made Kandahar seem like a safe haven. During the three-day Thanksgiving shopping marathon, some consumaholics were punched, elbowed, stabbed, and even shot. You have to admire the brave men and women who put themselves in harm’s way to get their fair share of discounted playthings that they desperately needed to keep their gray matter anesthetized.
The past couple of months, I’ve taken to biting my nails again, something I haven’t done since I was a teenager. In fact, the media have had me on the verge of a nervous breakdown with their coverage of the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction (“Super Committee”).
I can’t tell you how stressed I’ve been thinking about the gut-wrenching task these hardworking, upstanding men and women have been facing. The thought of them having to find a way to cut spending by $1.2 trillion by November 23 or face automatic, across-the-board spending cuts has caused my anxiety level to go through the roof.
The Penn State scandal is so disturbing that it’s hard to even write about it. When I first heard Joe Paterno had been fired, I thought perhaps it was an overreaction on the part of Penn State’s board of trustees. But as I read about some of the gory details of the case, I quickly realized I was wrong. As it turns out, Joe Paterno is a split legal hair away from being guilty of covering up a heinous crime spree that staggers the moral imagination of the average American.
As we all know by now, in 2002, assistant football coach Mike McQueary, then a graduate assistant at Penn State, allegedly saw defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky sodomizing a ten-year-old boy in the locker-room shower. To his credit, he immediately reported the incident to Coach Paterno.
As the election season revs up, bull-slinging, the favorite sport of the criminal class east of the Potomac, is in full bloom. Some of the best zingers we’ve been treated to lately include:
Che Obama, at the G-20 in France, saying, with a straight face: “I have to tell you, the least of my concerns at the moment is the politics of a year from now.” Sure, Barry.
Nancy Pelosi, at a recent press briefing, saying, with a straight face: “If President Obama and the House congressional Democrats had not acted, we would be at 15 percent unemployment.” Sure, Nancy.
Joe Biden saying, with a straight face, that if Obama’s $447 billion “jobs bill” (i.e., stimulus package) is not passed, there won’t be enough police to prevent rapes and robberies. Sure, Joe.
I’m willing to bet that when Obama was growing up, he was jealous of anyone on the playground who had more marbles than he had. He became obsessed with taking their marbles (or as he called it, “redistributing” them). And I’ll bet he was good at it. So good that nobody wanted to play with him. I imagine him sitting alone in his room, dreaming of someday running the country, making all the rules and taking marbles away from everyone.
Rick May 21, 9:24 PM on Was Saving GM Worker’s Job Fair?If he hadn't bailed them out, our country's unemployment insurance system would have been overloaded...
