Here in California, the hands-free cell phone law went into effect July 1. (By the way, does anyone know whether there was an actual increase in traffic accidents after cell phones became popular?) This morning, I heard a story that said that 1,800 fires and dozens of injuries resulted from fireworks last year. Of course, in most communities around where I live, most fireworks are already illegal. Yet, I also heard a story this morning that in California alone 50 people died last year from boating accidents, but I’ve not heard a call for a ban on pleasure boating. And, a few days ago I heard about the latest of the frequent fatal accidents at amusement parks, but I haven’t heard any calls to ban amusement parks.

A few questions: How do does our government select which forms of entertainment to protect us from? What is next on the nanny state agenda? I suppose the next logical step is banning cigarette smoking by drivers. Hard to picture a hands-free cigarette. But what else? And why is the government in the business of protecting us from our own (and, I suppose, each other’s) stupidity?

This issue has deeper ramifications than one might think. Perhaps the biggest cause of the decline of American civilization in the last 50 years is that we’ve gotten very soft. We don’t have the stomach for a serious, protracted war. When challenged economically, we don’t step our game up a notch, we run for the cover of protectionist legislation (conservatives are especially guilty of this one). We use social promotion and grades-free systems to protect our children from their own failures. We teach unearned self-esteem, rather than stressing the need to actually accomplish anything to earn self-esteem. We ban running, active and competitive play on the playground.

At all levels, we excuse failure. It’s the parent’s fault. It’s society’s fault. It’s the government’s fault. It’s the fault of stuff that happened to our great great great grandparents 150 years ago. It’s the UN’s fault. It’s the EU’s fault. It’s OPEC’s fault. It’s the fault of all those other nations who engage in “unfair” trade practices. It’s everybody’s fault but our own personal fault.

We’ve gotten so soft, in fact, that we expect the government to protect us from ourselves and to give us everything we need, whether we’ve earned it or not (think the push for universal health care, for example). We think safety, security and even comfort are inalienable rights.

At bottom, all of the various threads I’ve pointed to are attacks on personal responsibility, and there do not appear to be any limits placed on the attackers. This cannot be healthy, can it? If we decide government is responsible for everything and no one is responsible for himself or herself how will our society survive? In a nanny state, we all become children. And no society of children can long survive. Does this make sense? And what, if anything, can we do to prevent the increasing infantization of the American public?

[Discuss This Topic With Don Quixote at Bookworm Room]

| Trackback URL | Comments (No Comments)

It is no secret among thinking people that the Democratic Party is a socialist group. Most of them mask their Socialistic or Communistic tendencies but they are moving closer and closer to everything being run by the government and redistribution of all wealth except for the wealth of the ruling class. They will remain rich and try to control our lives. Barack Hussein Obama is a Socialist. He believes in class warfare and he believes it is up to government to take money from the wealthy and give it to the poor. He is a regular liberal Robin Hood.

The Democrats have moved in this direction for quite some time and they are often aided by Republicans who have some strange desire to pander to the left rather than espousing good conservative principles. They give tax “rebates” to people who paid no taxes. They take money in the form of taxes and spread it out across the country in the form of earmarks. They push for universal health care which means the taxpayers will pay for everyone’s health care (and their own since they will not qualify for gubmint health care). They have Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security a program whose name tells you it is socialist. They do all these a little at a time and they will eventually take over our lives and we will still be wondering what hit us.

Stop the ACLU has a video up and it show how brazen the left in America is getting. The clip features Rep. Maurice Hinchey (D-NY), member of the House Appropriations Committee, stating that if there are more refineries built in this country then the government should own them. Think about that for a minute. How can the government own anything? The people of this country pay the taxes that the government spends so if they start building refineries the taxpayers will own them.

That is the first point but more importantly, what business does the government have owning a refinery or anything else? With private companies owning them there are stock holders and an expectation of making money, which by the way is not obscene or record. They are at 10% and that is reasonable for any business. If oil companies have problems then they must spend company money to correct them. Whose money will the government spend if their refineries have problems? You guessed it, yours. And since they are Congress they can keep taking as much of your money as they want. You can bet that they will not be selling stock and if they did it would all go to members of Congress.

The idea of the government taking over private industry is Socialist and it would put us more in line with Hugo Chavez of Venezuela. In the same clip at STACLU there is a woman on Fox discussing how she thinks this is a great idea. She is an obvious idiot and should have one of those protective helmets on when she is out and about. The problem is, there are many more just like her out there and a whole lot of them are called Congressional Democrats. This is not some slip up either. Remember when they had the oil execs in for their regular grilling. One of the less than intelligent members said that she wanted to nationalize oil. In other worlds, she wanted the government to take it over.

The government is an entity that works for the people and it is designed to represent the people. We are supposed to be left alone to pursue what we want in life. That is what freedom is all about. If government starts taking over private industry, we have lost our freedom and we will be a Socialist nation. The government’s quest is not limited to oil. They want to take over health care. Remember all the fuss about Walter Reed and Army medical care? You know all the news reports about troops not getting the care they need? Their care is run by the government. The same Democrats who went on TV describing the horrors at Walter Reed want to give you that very same government run system.

What will happen next? Will they decide pills cost too much and take over the pharmaceutical industry? Will they then spend billions in taxpayer dollars to make drugs to give away? Remember, if government screws up it taxes you more to get the money it needs. If private industry screws up it must answer to stock holders and consumers.

This whole debate started because Republicans are pushing to resume drilling for oil on our own property. Democrats oppose that. They have opposed it for decades and that is why we are in this predicament. They always use the same excuse; we need to get off our dependence on oil and it will take 10 years to get any oil from the new drilling. They said that over 10 years ago and Bill Clinton vetoed drilling in ANWR. Guess what, it has been a little more than 10 years so we would be getting oil right now when we need it. As for alternative energy, sure that would be great but there are no new technologies that will be ready any sooner than the oil in ANWR. Alternate choices are decades away. Why don’t we use our oil while they start building new technologies?

It is a certainty that we need to drill our own oil. The Democrats are absolutely wrong when they say it will make no difference. It will have a huge impact and have little impact on the environment. What we absolutely do not need is the government taking over oil companies or building refineries. The government is inefficient and does not run anything well. This would be setting up a system that would be rife with corruption and it would make all the members of Congress richer than they are.

The government could not organize a birthday party. It could not lead a group of people out of a burning building and the government would lose money and have corruption, fraud and waste if they were selling air, a product guaranteed to have customers.

We need to demand that they allow drilling on our property (what happened to state’s rights?) and we need to make sure they are never allowed to take over any business.

The next revolution may well be on the way. I would prefer we overthrow the government by voting them all out and replacing them. However, it might be wise to stock up on ammo (as if any good conservative needed to be told that).

Additional source:
Fox

[Discuss this topic with the Big Dog...]

| Trackback URL | Comments (No Comments)

In America, we think of historical Europe as a place were voiceless mastered were ruled by high-handed aristocrats. We assume that those days are over, wiped away by war, revolution, and the simple passage of time. The European Union, however, periodically provides timely reminders that Europe is still ruled by high-handed authoritarian figures who ignore the masses, ostensibly for the latters’ “own good.” As it happens, this new aristocracy isn’t one of blood, though; it’s a political class made up of well-attired Leftists:

European Union countries agreed in Lisbon to approve the union’s new constitution Wednesday, and today Denmark’s parliament is expected to do the same, reports Politiken newspaper.

The news was released via the Liberal Party’s newsletter and indicated a majority of political parties are ready to ratify the treaty for Denmark. There was no press release or conference held for the move, which will effectively put an end to any possibility for a referendum.

Many experts had previously expressed their belief that a majority of Danes might vote against the treaty if a referendum were held. Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen, a staunch supporter of the EU treaty, will now be spared any difficulties from such an occurrence.

The original treaty was recalled for revision three years ago, after referenda in the Netherlands and France voted against ratification. But experts also say that Denmark’s current move to ratify the treaty without a public vote goes against tradition and poses a democratic problem.

‘Politicians with the “yea” parties have an obligation to put the treaty debate up for discussion,’ said Marlene Wind, head of the University of Copenhagen’s Centre for European Politics. ‘They haven’t done that, and now their failure to get the EU issue on the agenda almost looks like a scandal.’

And if you wonder why I accuse these new tyrants of being Leftists, look at who is defending this move that will destroy individual freedoms around Europe:

Michael Aastrup Jensen, the Liberal Party’s EU spokesperson, denied that the treaty was slipped in behind the public’s back.

‘All of us in parliament agreed that this was the most talked about treaty ever,’ he said. ‘We’ve had hearings, written blogs and debated it on our homepages, and there’s been over 500 formal parliamentary questions put to the government about it. So I’m not buying the claim that this has been done in silence.’

Note how talking about it is, in Jensen’s mind, just as good as actually letting the little people vote on the damned thing.

If you’d like more information about the new European aristocracy, one as cavalier of the “little people’s” rights as the old one, and one that is every bit as damaging, you should read three books:

Mark Steyn’s America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It

Bruce Bawer’s While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within

Melanie Phillips’ Londonistan

And while I’m on the subject of Europe, a word about Poland, a country that continues to distinguish itself in the post-War era with a social conscience that other countries should envy and would do well to copy.  In today’s Warsaw Voice, there is a moving article about the April 15 ceremonies honoring the uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto, an act of staggering courage that the Polish President Lech Kaczyński beautifully describes:

“World War II witnessed a lot of heroic deeds,” Kaczyński said. “But the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising stands out even amongst heroic deeds. The ghetto insurgents weren’t fighting for victory but for honor. They resolved to fight in what was a hopeless situation. Living conditions in the ghetto are best summed up by the fact that 100,000 of the initial 450,000 people sent here died from hunger, disease and German oppression within a year,” the president said, referring to the Nazis cramming 450,000 people into an area of less than four square kilometers in the spring of 1941.  (Emphasis mine.)

A speech such as this one constantly reminds us that Europe, like all countries, manages to encompass the best of man and the worst of man.  I can only up that in the upcoming and inevitable culture war between Europe and the radical Islamists the European elitists have invited in, a humane, but strong, Europe emerges, one that is willing to fight honorably the the continuation of a civilized, pluralistic Western culture, rather than the dark side of Europe, one that gleefully slaughters those it classifies as lesser and different.

[Discuss this topic with Bookworm...]

| Trackback URL | Comments (No Comments)

I’ve been watching the silliness that is Berkeley and heard one of the Code Pink gals talking about the “right” to housing, the “right” to health care, etc. I think her point was that we shouldn’t be spending money defending our country when we could be spending it providing services to people.

This whole “rights” mantra has never made sense to me. What the gal was actually saying is that if I have a need for health care, shelter, whatever, and can’t pay for it, I have a “right” to get what I need and a “right” to use the power of government to steal (forcibly take) your money from you to pay for it. How have we managed to get to the point that using government as a Robin Hood, stealing from the middle class and giving to the poor, has become acceptable? Everyone argues about whether government provided shelter, health care, whatever, is a good idea, but no one anymore even argues that the whole idea of using the power of government to steal from one group of people and give to another group is, simply, wrong.

Am I a complete dinosaur here or has America completely lost it’s moral compass?

[Discuss this with Don Quixote over at Bookworm Room...]

| Trackback URL | Comments (No Comments)

The progressives of the Victorian era would be proud, but the old fashioned liberals are rolling in their graves:

Independent schools are to be made to open their doors to more children from poor homes under guidelines announced to stop them being run as “exclusive clubs”.

Schools failing to meet the regulations could have bank accounts frozen, trustees suspended, buildings seized or even be closed down under a range of sanctions.

In the new guidance from the Charity Commission, schools are told they should consider charging lower fees so more families are able to afford places.

Schools with higher charges have been informed they should ensure money is set aside to provide free or subsidised places for poor pupils. They should also consider sharing facilities and expert teachers with local state schools.

The recommendations, which come in a landmark document, are designed to ensure independent schools justify their charitable status by meeting a “public benefit” test and hold on to £100 million-a-year tax-breaks.

Schools may be subjected to “random” spot checks and inspections to ensure they comply.

Education experts say some may have to increase class sizes, ditch A-level courses or cut teachers’ perks to fund more free places.

Under Labour’s 2006 Charities Act, organisations including independent schools, hospitals and religious groups no longer have an automatic right to call themselves charities.

According to the guidance, they must prove “people in poverty” benefit from their services - even if they cannot afford fees.

“At the extreme, charities should not be seen as ‘exclusive clubs’ that only a few can join, since the ‘public’ benefit from that is very limited,” says the document.

Now they pass the cui bono publico test, of course, but at what cost?

[Discuss this article with Bookworm over at Bookworm Room...]

| Trackback URL | Comments (No Comments)

California is proposing that residents add a radio FM controlled receiver enabling the government access in an effort to control thermostats, refrigerators, pool pumps, computers, etc…. If passed, California politicians said that building permits would be denied for any contractor who refuses to comply with the new law.

WND reports:

Add thermostats to the list of private property the government would like to regulate as the state of California looks to require that residents install remotely monitored temperature controls in their homes next year.

The government is seeking to limit rolling blackouts and free up electric and natural gas resources by mandating that every new heating and cooling system include a “non-removable” FM receiver. The thermostat is also capable of controlling other appliances in the house, such as electric water heaters, refrigerators, pool pumps, computers and lights in response to signals from utility companies. If contractors and residents refuse to comply with the mandate, their building permits will be denied.

The proposal, set to be considered by the commission Jan. 30, requires each thermostat to be equipped with a radio communication device to send “price signals” and automatically adjust temperature up or down 4 degrees for cooling and heating, as California’s public and private utility organizations deem necessary.

Claudia Chandler, assistant executive director for the California Energy Commission, told WND the new systems would be highly beneficial to residents.

“From the Energy Commission’s perspective, all we’re doing is ensuring that this new technology is included in new homes instead of the older programmable technology,” she said.

The Programmable Communication Thermostat, or PCT, will allow power authorities to control home temperatures while denying consumers ability to override settings during “emergency events.” Nowhere in the proposal does it clarify what type of situation would qualify as an “emergency,” but Chandler offered her own explanation: “An emergency is when the utilities need to implement rolling blackouts and drop load in order to be able to meet their supplies because the integrity of the grid is being jeopardized.”

If Californians are stupid enough to buy into this crap then I propose that they all get on one large barge in the middle of the pacific ocean and pull the plug. Either that or send these nanny state advocates on a one way trip to Venezuela, Cuba, China, or North Korea (take your pick) where their ideas would be more in line with that of those governments. We don’t need people so obviously ignorant that they would let the government decide how warm their houses need to be and actually hand over the keys.

This is the nanny state x 100 and is yet one more reason we need to get people like Claudia Chandler and her cohorts out of power.

| Trackback URL | Comments (No Comments)

You all remember the Aesop’s fable about the Ant and Grasshopper, don’t you? That’s the one where the Ant works hard all year, while the Grasshopper just dances around. When winter comes, the Ant is comfortable in his warm, well-stocked home, while the Grasshopper is miserable and hungry. Or maybe you know the story of the Little Red Hen. She keeps asking for help as she plants her seeds, waters her wheat stalks, harvests the wheat, and bakes her bread loaf. To each request for help, her lazy farm companions say “no.” Then, when her bread is finally baked, they ask her to feed them, to which she replies “no.” These are both old stories. Aesop’s fable is probably about 6,500 years old, while the Little Red Hen story is at least a hundred years old and probably much more. The stories are blatantly moralistic: if you work hard, you will be fed and sheltered; if you don’t, you won’t.

We all know, of course, that life is not fair and that hard work will not always provide you with life’s necessities. Bad things happen: lost jobs, war, illness, drought, economic disasters, and other things over which even the hardest working individual has no control. And I believe that those of us who are in a more comfortable position have a moral obligation to take care of those who are victims of things over which they have no control. BUT (you knew there was going to be a “but” here, didn’t you?)….

But, lately I feel as if we, the hard working middle class, are being asked to take care of people, not who are victims of ill-fortune, but who are victims of their own bad choices. Right now, this issue is playing out on the macro field, with the S-CHIP debate. Or, more specifically, with the discovery that the boy whom the Democrats chose as the spokesman for imposing S-CHIP costs on working Americans is, in fact, from a middle class family whose father is following his employment bliss (that is, he has made the choice not to get a steady job) and who decided not to get insurance, even though he could afford it. That is, Dad made the choice but we, the American taxpayers, are being asked to pay for the consequences of his bad decision making.

I understand that it’s not the child’s fault that his parents make lousy decisions. But really, if we’re being asked to pay because the Dad is a dunderhead, maybe we should get more control over the situation. We have to assume that this Dad will make more and more choices that negatively affect his children and for which we, the taxpayers, then have to pay. (I think we can make this assumption because Dad is not apologetic about and has not learned from his choices. He’s instead using them to suck up wealth from people who, apparently foolishly, opted to work hard and be self-reliant.) Since he who pays the piper calls the tune, maybe we should take these children and put them in a home where the parents have proven track records of good choices? Eh. You’re right. I don’t think anyone is going to go for that. But really and truly, I don’t want to be called upon to pay for bad choices, without any ability to force those same people into making good choices that will cost me less.

I happen to be very sensitive about this issue because of my own life experience. Years ago, when I was a young, idealistic lawyer whose gay friends were dying left and right from AIDS, I got involved with a free legal service for people suffering from AIDS. My training consisted of attending several hours of lectures about helping these people maximize their Social Security, Medicare and Medical benefits to pay for their expensive treatments and other life needs. I never once put that training into use. I had about 15 referrals over the two years I stuck it out in that program and, without exception, the men who called on my free services were absolute flakes whose only skill was using the system to avoid paying for the messes they made. All had (or probably had) AIDS, but the illness was entirely unrelated to their demands on me. What they wanted me to do was relieve them of their obligations to pay rent or credit card debt. And they didn’t need this help because their disease had rendered them unemployable. All of them worked, and all of them, grasshopper-like, spent their money on drugs, alcohol, clubbing, clothes, trips, etc. Indeed, they spent their income on anything but rent and paying off all the debts they incurred supporting their hedonistic lifestyle. I became incredibly hostile to the whole organization, feeling (rightly, I think) that I was being used, and quit.

Ironically, as I was providing free legal services to these deadbeats, a friend of mine was slowly dying from AIDS and working himself to the bone to keep up with his obligations. He worked when he could hardly walk because of the mushroom shaped tumors bursting out from the bottom of his foot. He worked when he could hardly stand upright because if the giardia ravaging his system. He worked when all his hair fell out. He kept his health insurance alive to the bitter end, with the only government help coming from MediCal augmentations to his insurance. I gladly loaned this man money when he needed it. When he had to sell the little boat on which he lived to pay all of his debts, he insisted on paying me back, even though I tried to refuse the money. At the very end, a friend of his took him in, and he spent his last weeks dying slowly on that friend’s couch. These two men were Ants, and they’ve always lived in my memory, two of the most decent, moral people I’ve ever met.

I appreciate that, once a bureaucracy is in place, it won’t, or can’t, distinguish between ants and grasshoppers. All it will do is means testing. That is, once someone shows up at the bureau’s door and proves he has no money, the inquiry stops. The bureaucracy won’t and can’t take the time to discover whether his money vanished because his employer laid him off (despite his being a good worker) and his kid has a horrible disease, or if his money vanished because he’s an unemployable flake who can’t be bothered to hold down a job, but who still likes living the high life. We pay for them all. But to the extent we do pay for them all, I want to be damn sure that every new government program is carefully crafted to pay for extremely limited services and that it is set up, as much as possible, to help the Ants, while shutting the door on those damn Grasshoppers. S-CHIP, which is casting an ever wider net of those for whom the taxpayers must pay is the antithesis of what an Ant-oriented government program should be.

[Discuss this article with Bookworm over at Bookworm Room...]

| Trackback URL | Comments (No Comments)

I am routinely thankful for my good blog friends, many of whom help me find interesting stuff in the blogosphere that I might otherwise miss. Since this was a busy, busy weekend, and since I have the kids for another few days before school starts, I can assure you that, had Earl not given me the heads up, I would have missed entirely Andrew Anthony’s “The Day Reality Hit Home,” an op-ed in Britain’s ultra Left Guardian (of all places). Here is how the Guardian itself describes Anthony as the introduction to excerpts from his just-published book:

The writer Andrew Anthony was a committed member of the liberal left - until the attacks of 11 September, 2001. A veteran of CND and Nicaraguan solidarity campaigns, he was astonished at the liberal left’s anti-American reaction. And so he began to question other basic assumptions about race, crime and terror - a political journey he charts here, in these exclusive extracts from his compelling new book.

As you can imagine from that introduction, it’s a fascinating article and I urge you to read it. It also, right off the bat, highlighted something I touched upon in my early “Why Fight?” post — which is a question about what we’re defending when we fight. I pointed out in that earlier post Bruce Bawer’s observation that Europeans, for all their high minded socialism, seem obsessively focused on consumerism at the engine driving everything. So many seem incapable of recognizing, let alone fighting for, abstract freedoms. To them, every war is about opening or positioning oneself in a marketplace. And since they’ve come to the conclusion that the marketplace is a shallow and uninteresting thing, they are disdainful of anything associated with it — including causes that Americans describe in high minded terms as fights for liberty.

Interestingly enough, that’s the very premise Anthony uses to describe the political and ideological world in which he was operating when 9/11 occurred. After describing his own mid-life malaise, he extended that as a metaphor to look at the pre-9/11 world:

A midlife crisis did indeed ensue after 9/11. In truth it had been brewing for some time. It wasn’t my midlife crisis, however, but that of Western culture at large. No matter what other aims may have motivated this singular act of terrorism, it was beyond question that it was planned as a symbolic, as well as a lethal, attack on ‘the West’, whether the target was militarism (the Pentagon), capitalism (the WTC), or cosmopolitanism (the heterogeneity of the victims). The problem was many in the West were not sure that it was worthy of defence. For some time in the post-Soviet era, as America established its position as the sole superpower, a West-based movement had been growing that rejected the spread of free-market capitalism and the Western values that underpinned the global market. Known as anti-globalisation, it drew attention to the poverty and deprivation that was such a common feature of life in the Third World. But it also posed some stark existential questions about the Western way of life. ‘What was the point?’ the anti-globalisers seemed to be asking, all we do is buy stuff, turn everywhere into a market, and force McDonald’s and Starbucks down other people’s throats. Our culture is nothing but consumption. As the anti-globalist writer Naomi Klein argued a few weeks after 11 September: ‘Part of the disorientation many Americans now face has to do with the inflated and oversimplified place consumerism plays in the American narrative. To buy is to be. To buy is to love. To buy is to vote.’

To Europeans and those on the American Left who look to Europe for intellectual guidance, there is no connection at all between freedom from government interference and the amazing comforts Western living provides. That is, they don’t see that the former is the beneficial soil, and the latter merely the lovely crop that springs from this rich soil. Put another way, although I’m not a person who craves “things” just to have them, I like my comfortable home, my nice car and my clean streets as much as the next person, possibly even more. I never make the mistake, however, of believing that these material trappings are the alpha and omega of America. They are merely symptoms, if you will, of a healthy society; they are not the society itself.

Europeans, however, are different. Keep in mind that, all during the 1960s and 1970s, when they seemed to have such a money rich society, so that they could produce those luxury European items American snobs know and love, and so that they could provide cradle to crave care, these trappings came about, not because they had a free society with a free market, but because America did away with their defense costs by providing a free military for them. England, which was the only European country that did not have American troops all over the place so that, forcing it to fund its own military, could not sustain a healthy socialist economy and a military all at the same time. Fortunately for the Brits, they had the wisdom to elect Maggie Thatcher, who put the brakes on the socialist experiment and revitalized the economy.

What this means is that, in Europe, there is no connection between a healthy marketplace, both economically and in the world of ideas, and a healthy consumer culture. For decades, because of American help, Europeans had, on the one hand, a government run marketplace and stifling ideological conformity, and, on the other hand, the ability to produce and buy massive amounts of consumer goods. I doubt many recognized that it was American help that made the latter possible despite the former. Given their obliviousness to the missing link, it’s no wonder that Europeans see consumer goods as a meaningless offshoot of nothing. If that were the case here, I too might start to look with both disdain and guilt upon my consumer culture. Small wonder that the Europeans, confronted with a whole in their society, do their best to pass off the blame to America, which glories in its consumer culture. If only they could understand that America, unlike Europe, glories in consumerism it earned it through honest capitalism.

When you stop and really think about it, Europe is exactly like the Arab/Muslim world. Because of its submission to Islam, the Arab and Muslim world is a completely stagnant world. Half the population (the XX chromosome side) is prevented from being useful, except as breeding machines. No ideas or inventions come out of the Arab/Muslim world because that involves questioning and questing, ideas incompatible with obedience to Islam. There is no marketplace, especially since usury is understood, not as the charging of exorbitant interesting, but the charging of any interest.* The absence of investment money alone (never mind the fact that intellectual inquiry is actively discouraged) means that there are no reasonable opportunities for small businesses, inventors, innovators, prospective homeowners, etc.

Despite this completely dead economic and intellectual environment, however, much of the Arab/Muslim is awash in money. Massive of amounts of money. More money than many of us can imagine — and its all courtesy of the West, desperate for the black gold buried in Islam’s sands. It’s a stagnant society with Mercedes cruising the sands. It’s an extreme version of Europe, which boasts a semi-stagnant society with Mercedes, Volvos and Bentleys cruising narrow medieval streets and modern freeways.

The Muslim’s and European’s fundamental inability to understand American capitalism is a big problem for Americans. If those arrayed against us, whether Muslims or Europeans, make no connection between freedom and material prosperity, they are always going to think we’re hypocrites offering false coin when we assure them that we truly believe in freedom, both in and of itself and as a pathway to the pleasures of an active, exciting, responsible and beneficial marketplace.

__________________________

*Some writers contend that in Islam there is a difference between charging ordinary interest and charging usurious interest. While that may be true in theory, the fact is that ordinary Muslims understand the matter as I have described it.

[Discuss this article with Bookworm over at Bookworm Room...]

| Trackback URL | Comments (No Comments)

A recent FT/Harris poll shows that many in the world would like to see rich people taxed more and the government cap the salaries of company executives. The people from the richest countries said that they would like the government to sock it to the rich. Of course, those who are not rich tend to get more in the way of government programs so, of course they want to tax the rich. How on Earth could they survive without the redistribution of income? Studies show they pay far less than they consume and that the rich consume far less than they pay so the only way to even things out is to tax the rich to death. One of the problems though, is that people in government have a funny idea of what constitutes rich and people who are well off but in no way rich get taken to the cleaners by the “shire reeve.”

The idea of redistributing wealth for unnecessary items (and a huge part of what the government spends is unnecessary) is just socialism. Each according to his means and redistribution of property so that everyone is the same. All members of Congress are guilty of wasting taxpayer money, there is no doubt about that. The Democrats however, are the ones who live their lives to tax the wealthy and then pass that money out among the serfs who have become indentured to the left. This has been going on for some time and even limp wristed panty waists like Martin O’Malley of Baltimore are getting in on the act with progressive taxes and other economically disastrous schemes designed to give those who do not know how to manage money more of it to give away.

As if it is not bad enough that those surveyed have been subjected to government stupidity for so long that they think it is good to screw the rich, now they are saying they want the government to decide how private businesses should run. The government does not belong sticking its nose in the business of business. It is up to private companies as to how much they pay their employees including those at the very top who receive a lot of money. I happen to think some of the sums are obscene but it is none of my business unless I hold stock in those companies because the stockholder is who the company answers to. Government should not decide how much a CEO or any other employee gets paid (including the other end with regard to the minimum wage).

I think it is obscene that men get paid millions of dollars to hit, throw, and catch a ball but that is up to the people who own the team to decide. I do not go to any baseball games because I do not want to pay a fortune for entertainment so some spoiled ballplayer can earn more in a year than I will in a lifetime, but that is MY choice. It is not the government’s to tell me what to support or to tell private companies how much they may pay their employees. When the government gets mixed up in telling private businesses how to run, we are one step closer to the Socialism the ACLU and Left would love to see take over this country.

There is a problem in the world and it is not the fact that some people are rich. The problem is that so many people have been enticed to feed at the teat of government that we have entire classes of people who have no ability to take care of themselves and they have no desire or motivation to do so. Europe has been this way for a while as Socialism becomes more and more pronounced and people pay more in taxes to feed the insatiable appetite of those who have become addicted to hand outs from their friendly elected officials.

The US is well on the way there thanks to past Democratic administrations that fostered the environment of welfare and bred classes of people unable to fend for or take care of themselves. Hurricane Katrina brought this ugly truth to light when people stood in knee deep water looking around for the government to come swooping in to save them instead of getting the hell out of the water. People did not have the ability to get out of town because they figured the government would care for them. They were let down when their Mayor felt the same way. He figured he did not have to get people out with the 500 buses because the federal government would swoop in and bring the Greyhound buses he demanded. A total failure of the welfare class by those who allowed it to fester to the boil it is today.

We need fewer taxes and we need government to let business run without interference. This is how an economy will grow and how people can become wealthier. It is time to scrap the government and start fresh, a do over, if you will.

We can change government by getting rid of every incumbent in 2008. Vote them all out of office and start over.

[Discuss this article with the Big Dog...]

| Trackback URL | Comments (No Comments)