Greatest Bastardization of the Constitution

ObamaCare: The Latest and Greatest Bastardization of the Constitution

By William Sullivan
One of the great illusions progressives cling to is the notion that the majority of Americans do not really oppose ObamaCare.  Interspersed among the majority of Americans against ObamaCare is that minority of Americans who advocate a strict single-payer system and therefore don't think the bill goes "far enough."  Once you account for them, it's not really a majority of Americans against the bill -- just a bit of finagled data that conservatives use as political fodder.

Let's first state the obvious.  If you are for single-payer healthcare, you probably support ObamaCare.  President Obama is on record advocating single-payer, and this health care bill is the "foot in the door" to single-payer that Democrats have sought for so long.

In reality, there are three types of people who actually do support ObamaCare: those who support single-payer, those who ignorantly deny that it is an effort to institute single-payer, and those who are oblivious to the implications of single-payer altogether, but stand to benefit from its implementation.  That's it.

But the obvious popular opposition to ObamaCare is a thorn in the progressives' side.  Ever the devotees to democracy, they believe that if they can just somehow convey that the majority of the people really want ObamaCare, it somehow justifies its implementation and overrules those loud voices of dissent.

But ObamaCare is wrong not because the majority of Americans oppose it, and to think otherwise is to miss the point entirely.  It's wrong because of something much more fundamental.

The legislation is a disgusting and tyrannical seizure of liberty from private business and the American individual.  There is no other way to describe it.  It is the coerced extraction of wealth from one to be bestowed upon another.  ObamaCare is, by design, to be financed by private insurance companies, government subsidies, and more generally, the young, the healthy, and the "well-off" so that the old, the unhealthy, and the less well-off can have it so much cheaper, or in some cases, for free. 

Advocates of ObamaCare, of course, have no problem with this.  Take Alex Ruthrauf over at Wonkette, who argues that, sure, facts definitively show that there will be "roughly $621 billion" spent in the next ten years on ObamaCare, but it won't be "you, me, and the two other members of our typical family" paying for it "out of pocket."  Greedy insurance companies will.  Oh, and government subsidies will pay for a bunch, too.  And yeah, yeah, it'll be paid for by people who are young, healthy, and well-off "for now," but you've got to remember that one day they may be on the receiving end of all these great benefits that they are forced to finance today. 

Such a marvelous disconnect from reality might be charmingly naïve, if not for the fact that it represents a mindset that is so disturbingly widespread.  This bears repeating: those greedy insurance companies get their money from American individuals and families, and alas, there is no government subsidy tree sprouting billions in the White House backyard.  Chris Conover at Forbes writes:

[W]e can be pretty certain that insurance companies (especially if they are greedy!) are unlikely to be paying any tab without turning around and passing the cost along to (gasp!) American families.  Similarly, Uncle Sam has nowhere else but American families to keep replenishing the coffers.  In short, American families manifestly WILL be absorbing every single penny of the $621B in added health spending created by ObamaCare and it is intellectually disingenuous (and certainly no contribution to informed debate) to suggest otherwise.

So here are the facts: you and I, and the two other members of your typical family, will be financing a new entitlement -- health care -- for millions of Americans.  We have earned our money, which is our property, and we are being forced to surrender it, contributing to a slush fund which will finance others' welfare. 

This conclusion will raise eyebrows for some.  One might ask, "Well, what's the difference between that and Social Security?" 

Well, nothing.  Social Security's enactment was an affront to our constitutional rights as well.  FDR, being sick of the Supreme Court striking down much of his New Deal legislation, threatened to pack the Court with six judges of his choosing to ensure that his vision was fulfilled.  In fear of FDR's scheme, the Court had an apparent shift in position to uphold Social Security -- the "switch in time that saved nine."

What has always fascinated me is the difference between the majority and dissenting opinions in the rulings on Social Security, particularly Steward Machine Co. v. Davis, which ruled on the unemployment insurance component of the Social Security Act.  In this case, it was the dissenting opinion that broadly invoked the Constitution and the distribution of power, leased upward from the citizen to the state, then to the federal government.  Justice McReynolds writes:

Can it be controverted that the great mass of the business of Government -- that involved in social relations, the internal arrangements of the body politic, the mental and moral culture of men, the development of local resources of wealth, the punishment of crimes in general, the preservation of order, the relief of the needy or otherwise unfortunate members of society -- did in practice remain with the States; that none of these objects of local concern are by the Constitution expressly or impliedly prohibited to the States, and that none of them are by any express language of the Constitution transferred to the United States?  Can it be claimed that any of these functions of local administration and legislation are vested in the Federal Government by any implication?  I have never found anything in the Constitution which is susceptible of such a construction.

On the other hand, what was Justice Cardozo's majority argument for the legality of upholding the unemployment insurance mandate?  Little more than an appeal to the gods of progress.  Seriously.  The majority opinion is essentially a long diatribe about how regulatory taxes don't have to be used for explicit purposes -- that they can also be used for...well, any secondary purpose.  Furthermore, he writes that "it is now settled by decision. The conception of spending power advocated by Hamilton ... has prevailed over that of Madison."  Yes, that would be James Madison, widely known as the "Father of the Constitution," and the man most associated with its composition.  This conclusion was, of course, reached not solely based on interpretation of the Constitution, but based on more recent judicial precedent and government practices.  Cardozo goes on by saying that it is "too late today for the argument to be heard with tolerance that in a crisis so extreme the use of moneys of the nation is a use for any purpose [other] than a promotion of the general welfare."

Sound familiar?  Of course it does. 

There is little we can do about Social Security now, beyond minor reforms.  Most Americans have invested if they've ever held a job, some are vested and collecting their expected returns, still others are collecting well beyond what they ever put in, and all the while politicians continually raid the Social Security piggybank.  It's a staple of American life, however unconstitutional its genesis.

But it is because Social Security was passed, because Medicare was later implemented, because the welfare state has been ever-expanding, that progressives today think there is no harm, and that, indeed, it is their moral duty to facilitate the federal government's maintenance of the poor via wealth redistribution.  They actually believe that taking money from those who have more and giving it to those who have less is the proper role of our federal government.  This has been the role of a great many monarchs and dictators and socialist legislatures throughout history, but one thing is beyond dispute: our founders never dreamed that this would be the role of the American government.  For if the federal government has the right to tax for any purpose, what purpose does any other limitation upon the federal government's power in the Constitution have?

Yet generations of progressives have bastardized the Constitution to suit their own ideological agenda, and as such, many Americans have forgotten the very core principles upon which our nation was founded.

What we are seeing today is a late reaction to a century in which progressives thoroughly corrupted our purest ideals of individualism and liberty and transformed government's role -- without amending the Constitution to allow the government to usurp the power it seized.  This power was stolen from the States by executive intimidation, judicial activism, and a blind devotion to wrongful "precedent."  Is it really possible that Barack Obama and Harry Reid are surprised by the vehement opposition to this latest, and perhaps greatest, government-instituted subversion of our liberty? 

Conservatives and libertarians, like our founders, reject the notion that we are subjects of a centralized government.  We are rising up in resentment, and not simply because we know that we are in the majority.  We are rising up in resentment against a central government which disregards our foundational contract.  We are demanding that health care decisions be left to individuals and the states, because the federal government has absolutely no constitutional right to demand that all Americans adhere to the uniform health care regulations and redistributive measures set by the edicts of an obviously corrupt central government in Washington.

I Will Not Comply

By Matthew May
Like most members of the Congress that passed it and, undoubtedly, the president of the United States who signed it, I have not read the entirety of the ill-named Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.  Yet there is one aspect concerning that legislation of which I am certain: I will not comply.

I will not comply because I am a free citizen of the United States, not a subject of its government.  I consider non-compliance with this monstrosity and the tens of thousands of pages of regulations that are to be enforced by an unelected bureaucracy, and that have left a gigantic carbon footprint on our environment and the United States Constitution, a duty.

Non-compliance is my executive order, and that order reads in part that I do not recognize any government's claim on my action or inaction in the marketplace, nor upon any personal information I am unwilling to divulge.

I will not submit to a cabal who read George Orwell's 1984 not as a terrifying warning, but as an instruction manual.  Nor will I submit to the dictates of those who attempt to trample the right of free speech of others in the halls of government who are warning us about the looming tyranny.  I refer to those sons of liberty who, as Camus wrote, "are not all legitimate or to be admired. Those who applaud it only when it justifies their privileges and shout nothing but censorship when it threatens them are not on our side."

If (when) the IRS or HHS or any other such entity attempts to extort a tax or fee of any kind for not participating in mandated commerce, they will be met with resistance.  I will not pay any such tax or fee.

I live in Massachusetts, where, once upon a time, a spirit of resistance and independence animated much of the citizenry.  But many here have devolved from the shot heard round the world to sheltering in place.  Not I -- nor many of my fellow Bay Staters, who are outnumbered but undaunted.

Refusing to comply with the dictates of an illegitimate law that is selectively enforced, and from which the privileged few are exempted, is not, in the annals of American history, brave or difficult.  Those who refuse to comply are not barefoot in the snows of Valley Forge, crying out in agony at Gettysburg, or rushing the cockpit of Flight 93.  While there will be consequences to civil disobedience in defiance of oppression, any difficulties can be and will be overcome.

We are, however, drawing a line that the forces of repression, socialism, and tyranny must not cross.  Some might even color the line red.  Yet unlike a certain other, this red line is immovable.  I yield nothing on the plane of freedom.  I will not take any small step that is, in actuality, one giant leap backward to the darkness we thought we had vanquished.

Who is with me?

I Vote Democrat Because...

 by N. Martinez

► I vote Democrat because I think it's better to pay billions of dollars to people who hate us rather than drill for our own oil, because it might upset some endangered beetle or gopher.
► I vote Democrat because I believe it is okay if liberal activist judges rewrite the Constitution to suit some fringe kooks, who would otherwise never get their agenda past the voters.
► I vote Democrat because I believe that corporate America should not be allowed to make profits for themselves or their shareholders. They need to break even and give the rest to the federal government for redistribution.
► I vote Democrat because I'm not concerned about millions of babies being aborted, so long as we keep all of the murderers on death row alive.
► I vote Democrat because I believe it's okay if my Nobel Peace Prize winning President uses drones to assassinate people, as long as we don't use torture.
► I vote Democrat because I believe people, who can't accurately tell us if it will rain on Friday, can predict the polar ice caps will melt away in ten years if I don't start driving a Chevy Volt.
► I vote Democrat because Freedom of Speech is not as important as preventing people from being offended.
► I vote Democrat because I believe the oil companies' profit of 3% on a gallon of gas is obscene, but the federal government taxing that same gallon of gas at 15%isn't obscene.
► I vote Democrat because I believe a moment of silent prayer at the beginning of the school day constitutes government indoctrination and an intrusion on parental authority ..... but sex education, condom distribution and multiculturalism are all values-neutral.
► I vote Democrat because I agonize over threats to the natural environment from CO2, acid rain and toxic waste ..... but I am totally oblivious of the threats to our social environment from pornography, promiscuity and family dissolution.
► I vote Democrat because I believe lazy, uneducated stoners should have just as big a say in running our country as entrepreneurs who risk everything and work 70 hours per week.
► I vote Democrat because I don't like guns ..... so no one else should be allowed to own one.
► I vote Democrat because I see absolutely no correlation between welfare and the rise of illegitimacy.
► I vote Democrat because I see absolutely no correlation between judicial leniency and surging crime rates.
► I vote Democrat because I believe marriage is obsolete, except for homosexuals.
► I vote Democrat because I think AIDS is spread by insufficient funding.
► I vote Democrat because I think "fairness" is far more important than freedom.
► I vote Democrat because I think an "equal outcome" is far more important than equal opportunity.
And lastly, I vote Democrat because I'm convinced that government programs are the solution to the human condition, NOT freedom....

Why America is Exceptionally Exceptional

By James Lewis

Well, our "leaders" have now resorted to personal name-calling, Obama twisting Putin's tail about looking lazy, and Putin catcalling right back by warning Obama about "people who think they are exceptional." I think Putin was talking about Our Hero, who has suffered all his life from being told he was exceptional, so that now he can't get rid of that mental tic.
Putin is perfectly right about Obama, of course.
The other grandstanding show-off on the international scene is... you guessed it.
Still, our patriotic media have chosen to spin Putin's words as a critique of American exceptionalism. So let me take on that piece of fluff.
All nations are exceptional, but America is exceptionally exceptional. Yes, Russia is exceptional, and all Russians constantly complain about their exceptionalism over a vodka at the kitchen table. It's a national ritual. It's the reason why Russian music is so sad. All of Russian literature is a litany of moaning about the tragic suffering of Mother Russia, the backwardness of the peasants, and why the English got to have an industrial revolution while Russia ... (etc., etc.).
Well, all kids are exceptional, but our own kids are exceptionally exceptional.
Good historians have started to remind us about the facts on American exceptionalism again, after living in absurd denial during the reign of PC. In case you haven't read Niall Ferguson, Paul Johnson or Victor Davis Hanson on the topic of American history lately, may I remind all the Obamaphiles and Putineers of the facts?
America is exceptionally exceptional, and not just because we happened to be here. Other countries make it to the XX league off and on, but we've been lucky enough to be XX for two whole centuries.
Nobody else has come close to two hundred years of constitutional government, so far. We wish they would hurry up already.
So let's look at the facts -- why the USA is doubly exceptional -- now that Vladimir Putin has chosen to raise that question.
(Plus... if you really want to annoy a liberal you could always send this along. It's basic history, which means it's bound to be news to them.
And thanks for asking us about American exceptionalism, Vlad! But please don't assassinate any more journalists in Moscow, would ya? Appreciate it, guy. You can join the League of Democracies as soon as you stop killing your election opponents. Don't forget!)
OK. The reason we lucked out as an exceptionally exceptional nation is that we are the only "designer nation" that took off at the height of the European Enlightenment of the 18th century. Yes, there are the Aussies and Canucks and Kiwis; there is India and Japan, both successful electoral systems. There is Europe always swinging into autocracy and out of it, back and forth. Even today the EU is back to bureaucratic tyranny.
But let's agree that Russia today is quite a bit X-ier than the Soviet Union was.
Spasiba Bogu! (Thank you, God!)
So let's give them all an "X+" for trying.
Most other nations, even our best buddies, haven't quite earned an XX, for reasons I will explain.
Our founders were Enlightenment thinkers; but they differed from political philosophers like Voltaire, John Locke and Edmund Burke because they could actually try out their ideas in the real world. There was never a Thomas Jefferson in Europe, even though there were many Enlightenment thinkers -- because they were never allowed to scratch out the past and make a whole new start. Washington, Jefferson, Madison were Enlightenment philosophers who were blessed with a lot of practical experience, and based on that, after goofing up with the Articles of Confederation in 1781, they ended up with the U.S. Constitution in 1787. Which had one great flaw, as we all know, the concession to the Southern slaveholding states. That got fixed later, at the cost of 600,000 dead in the Civil War.
And here we are, 226 years later, after the Marxian left has tried repeatedly to drive bloody lances through the Constitution. It needs some major repairs, but most of it is still afloat.
In Europe, the Enlightenment was cut down by the bloodbath of the French Revolution, and then by Napoleon, the Man on the White Horse, who brought stability after anarchy -- using the sword, of course. The Napoleonic Wars killed more people than any war until 1914.
Napoleon was followed by two whole centuries of Franco-German wars of revenge. We call the last two World War I and World War II.
In other words, in Europe liberty was killed in the crib. In America the year 1776 brought the Declaration of Independence, straight out of British and American political philosophy. In Europe, the year 1792 brought the French Revolution, a bloody object lesson to Edmund Burke and the American founders. The French showed the world how not to establish a republican democracy.
Alexis De Toqueville came from France to write Democracy in America after his family was decimated in the Revolution. That was the biggest question for Toqueville, who did not spare us his criticisms. Toqueville was obsessed with the question: Why does democracy work in America and not in France? That is why he is still so important today. Vladimir Putin might consider making Democracy in America his bedtime reading. (Obama might try it, too).
Europe had great and humane thinkers, but building a democratic republic on the bloodsoaked soil of monarchy is very, very difficult. Europe is still falling back today. They never quite got it going. The Soviet Union crumbled because centralized control of a giant country and its economy simply fails. Today, the European Union is trying exactly the same foolishness again, and yes, it is failing. Obama is trying it here by taking over all of medicine, he thinks. But it will start crashing soon, in parts, and then the control freaks will be stuck again.
The ruling class hangs on regardless of their culpable errors.
Here are the big milestones:
United States:

American Declaration of Independence: 1776.

U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights 1787.

Anti-Slavery Amendment: 1865.

Civil Rights Laws: 1960s.

That's the trajectory of liberty in America.
Here is Europe's over the same time.

Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations: 1776 (Foundation of liberty)

French Revolution: 1892 -- a bloody setback.

Napoleon: A worse setback.

French Counter-revolution: More of the same. The Bourbons.

Marx and Engels -- 1848 to the present. (Worse and worse)

Prussian war of revenge on France: 1870 (Ditto)

Franco-German revenge war: World War I: 1914-1918 (Ditto)

Another Franco-German revenge war: World War II: 1939-1945 (Ditto)

Rise and Fall of the Soviet Union: 1917-1991 (Ditto)

European Union tries to stop all the wars of revenge by bureaucratic one-party rule: 1953-2013. (Tyranny without the bloodshed, so far.)

Europe has never stopped running autocracies. The European Union tells the world that it has a "democracy deficit" -- meaning that the voters have no say on the most important issues of the day. The EU is a regression, a fall-back from national European democracies, where the electorate actually had a say.
After centuries of democracy, the Netherlands is now back to a ruling aristocracy run by EU bureaucrats. One of the great historical sources of democratic government is underwater again. The heroic Ayaan Hirsi Ali was famously hounded out of the Netherlands when she criticized the takeover by radical Islamists over there.
Today Europe is in huge trouble, and Obama wants us to be just like them.
Our power elites are looking to Marxoid Europe rather than to America for their ideas. Obama never really understood the fundamental wisdom that all power corrupts. Good intentions are just another way to flaunt your moral superiority, the way all the liberals love to do. Don't even talk about good intentions if you can't understand Madison, Jefferson, Hamilton, and the rest.
Marxism is an ancient utopian totalitarianism in metrosexual drag. That stuff goes back to the first empires in human history. The Pharoahs ran a kind of utopian tyranny. Wherever we can see a "pyramid culture" from Mexico to Egypt and Cambodia -- there is always some utopian thug being worshipped by the peasants laboring the soil. The Aztecs ran their meat-grinding empire by conquering neighboring peoples, taking their children, and sacrificing them by the hundreds on pyramids, to make sure the sun would rise the next day. Then they had to conquer more Indian tribes for the meat grinder when they ran out of victims. Chichen-Itza not a glorious tourist destination. It was a kind of Auschwitz for the Native Americans who were sacrificed there.
The lust to control other people is as ancient as the love of liberty. Humans all carry the seeds of control freakery and love of freedom, and if you don't have a revered law that keeps grandiose thugs from suckering the masses, you're doomed to become a tyrant or a slave.
Obama was never a "professor of Constitutional law." He was a community agitator who taught "Critical Constitution" part time. (The word "critical" means "Marxist" in academic jargon, just like the word "feminist" means Marxist. Most incomprehensible academic words mean "Marxist.")
And for those who have been told that Karl Marx was a lovely guy, here is his famous definition of how to make a revolution:
In 1848, Karl Marx wrote: "... there is only one means to shorten, simplify and concentrate the murderous death throes of the old society and the bloody birth pangs of the new, only one means -- revolutionary terrorism..."
This is "the most popular philosopher in Britain today," according to the BBC, which is in love with Karl Marx, when it isn't covering up for chronic pedophiles.
The love of Karl is all over the campuses today, and in all the big editorial offices of our glorious media.
So, yes, Constitutional America is exceptionally exceptional.
So far.
Let's keep it that way.

Food Security Junk Science

By Sierra Rayne

With the release of the USDA's latest report on household food security in the United States, we get another example of junk science, government largesse, and a social engineering Trojan horse.
The report claims that 14.5 percent of American households "were food insecure at least some time during the year [2012], including 5.7 percent with very low food security -- meaning that the food intake of one or more household members was reduced and their eating patterns were disrupted at times during the year because the household lacked money and other resources for food."
Apparently, "children were food insecure at times during the year in 10.0 percent of households with children. These 3.9 million households were unable at times during the year to provide adequate, nutritious food for their children."
Where does this data come from? Unaudited voluntary population surveys. This means the underlying data cannot be verified and may be subject to significant bias. Indeed, the problematic unscientific subjective nature of the questions and responses is clear from the following description of the USDA's methods:

"The food security survey asked one adult respondent in each household a series of questions about experiences and behaviors of household members that indicate food insecurity, such as being unable to afford balanced meals, cutting the size of meals because of too little money for food, or being hungry because of too little money for food. The food security status of the household was assigned based on the number of food-insecure conditions reported."

Of 54,000 requested participants, "43,942 households completed the food security supplement; the remainder was unable or unwilling to do so." This is a response rate of 81%, good for a voluntary survey. But the problem lies as much with the bias in the responses as it does with the response bias introduced from those not completing the survey.
Here are the basic survey questions (eight additional questions were asked if the household had children):

1. 'We worried whether our food would run out before we got money to buy more.' Was that often, sometimes, or never true for you in the last 12 months?
2. 'The food that we bought just didn't last and we didn't have money to get more.' Was that often, sometimes, or never true for you in the last 12 months?
3. 'We couldn't afford to eat balanced meals.' Was that often, sometimes, or never true for you in the last 12 months?
4. In the last 12 months, did you or other adults in the household ever cut the size of your meals or skip meals because there wasn't enough money for food?
5. (If yes to question 4) How often did this happen -- almost every month, some months but not every month, or in only 1 or 2 months?
6. In the last 12 months, did you ever eat less than you felt you should because there wasn't enough money for food?
7. In the last 12 months, were you ever hungry, but didn't eat, because there wasn't enough money for food?
8. In the last 12 months, did you lose weight because there wasn't enough money for food?
9. In the last 12 months did you or other adults in your household ever not eat for a whole day because there wasn't enough money for food?
10. (If yes to question 9) How often did this happen -- almost every month, some months but not every month, or in only 1 or 2 months?

Garbage in, garbage out.
Take question 1. "We worried whether our food would run out before we got money to buy more"? And how do we define worrying? Some people are chronically worried about things they shouldn't be. Others don't worry enough. How do we prove whether someone was indeed worried? There is no way of obtaining solid data that can be rationally used to construct coherent public policy when you ask your survey recipients such vague and indeterminate questions as whether or not they worry.
What about question 3? And what exactly is a balanced meal? My definition of a balanced meal may be different from yours, and what about people who have no idea (or the wrong idea) about what a properly balanced meal should look like? Moving on to question 6: "did you ever eat less than you felt you should because there wasn't enough money for food"? Now we're asking individuals about their feelings? And somehow this is supposed to be scientific data that the USDA subsequently attempts to apply rigorous statistical tests to?
We could dissect all the questions in this manner (they all have fatal flaws).
Based on responses, households "are classified as food insecure if they report three or more food-insecure conditions." Why three? What is the scientific basis behind this apparently arbitrary decision? and which three conditions doesn't matter, so long as we sum to three? So we ask fundamentally flawed subjective, voluntary, and unverifiable questions, and then apply subjective criteria to interpret the meaning of the likely junk data? Sounds like a recipe for scientific disaster.
The political motivations surrounding food security become evident when we note that "food insecurity was strongly associated with income. For example, 40.9 percent of households with incomes below the official poverty line were food insecure, compared with 6.8 percent of those with incomes above 185 percent of the poverty line."
Herein lies the key. Survey recipients know that their answers will be used to formulate public policies. Thus, low-income individuals will feel the psychological pull to indicate they have greater food insecurity than they actually do in an attempt to shift public policy in favor of their receiving additional financial assistance from various government programs. High income individuals will not feel this pull as strongly, since they will recognize that any additional government programs will not be a net benefit to them -- but rather a cost.
In other words, low-income households receive more in government services than they pay in taxes, which is why they are more likely to favor enhanced or more government programs, and thereby more likely to skew public polling data in an attempt to achieve these objectives. These types of surveys are like asking employees the following question: "do you make enough money?" Who would answer no?
If you are thinking this emphasis on food security is probably part of a government plan to justify and increase reliance on domestic food and nutrition assistance programs, you're probably right. Watch the government manufacture a socio-economic problem, and then watch the same government propose various programs to solve the "problem." Marketing 101.
The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP; formerly the Food Stamp Program) is now being administered to 46 million individuals (15% of the entire U.S. population) at an annual cost of $78 billion and rising. This single "nutrition assistance program" already consumes 2.2% of the entire federal government expenditures! The Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) program averages 9 million participants per month, for a total 2012 appropriation of over $6.6 billion. Add to this the National School Lunch Program (NSLP; serving about 32 million children per day with annual expenditures of greater than $11 billion), and these three programs (SNAP, WIC, and NSLP) consume almost 3% of the federal budget.
Of course, the school lunch program is using taxpayer dollars so wisely, such as debating whether ketchup and pizza are vegetables. Exhibit A as to why we need less government intervention in our lives. And with obesity rates at frighteningly high levels, especially among the poor, it appears we have too much food security, not too little.
According to the USDA, "an estimated 51.8 percent of households that received SNAP benefits were food insecure, as were 47.3 percent of households that received free or reduced-cost school lunches, and 39.5 percent of those that received WIC benefits," and "about 59 percent of food-insecure households reported receiving assistance from one or more of the three largest Federal food and nutrition assistance programs." So do we think these households -- relying on these programs -- are likely going to answer surveys indicating they actually do have food security, thereby undermining the rationale for the government programs they benefit from? I thought not.
Overall, self-reporting of whether or not financial and/or food needs/desires are being met is inherently unreliable, and as such, all conclusions based on this data are equally unreliable. If one household lives in housing that is beyond their financial means, drives automobiles that are too expensive for their income class, spends too much on entertainment, and makes poor food choices, etc., that could lead to food insecurity. But in such cases, the problem is not structural food insecurity, it is wasteful and incorrectly prioritized spending within the household.
The USDA study does not appear to address these fatal flaws at all. In order to ensure reliable data, the study would have needed to rigorously audit the full financial situation of each household, and then make a determination of whether or not food insecurity exists by comparing the results to a set of objectively constructed and transparent criteria. The first requirement is effectively impossible for any large sample size (since the audit would need proof of actual household spending patterns, not simply what people claim they spend their money on). The second requirement would be deeply contentious -- what would be the objective criteria and who would determine them, and how?

What John Adams Foretold Has Come True

By W.A. Beatty
John Adams, in 1787, said:

Property is surely a right of mankind as really as liberty. ... but the time would not be long before courage and enterprise would come, and pretexts be invented by degrees, ... in sharing it equally with its present possessors. Debts would be abolished first; taxes laid heavy on the rich, and not at all on the others; and at last a downright equal division of every thing be demanded, and voted. What would be the consequence of this? The idle, the vicious, the intemperate, would ... sell and spend all their share, and then demand a new division of those who purchased from them. ... anarchy and tyranny commence.

The entire Adams passage is well worth the time it takes to read and understand it.  I want to examine (in no particular order) some of Adams's thoughts and see how he foretold, over 200 years ago, the situation in which we live today.

1. "[T]axes laid heavy on the rich, and not at all on the others[.]"  Let's begin with an easy one -- taxation.  According to Dr. Walter E. Williams, "[r]oughly 47 percent of Americans pay no federal income tax."  Of the approximately 53 percent who do pay income tax, the following table illustrates Adams' point, that "taxes are laid heavy on the rich."

Income	Percent Taxes Paid
Top 1%	36.73%
Top 5%	58.66%
Top 10%	70.47%
Top 25%	87.30%
Top 50%	97.75%
Bottom 50%	2.25%

Source: National Taxpayers Union

Remember, the above chart applies only to income tax payers, omitting those who don't pay income tax at all but still vote.  To try to justify this gross tax inequity, Dear Leader Barack Hussein Obama introduced the concept of "fairness" -- that the rich should pay their fair share of taxes.  But (and there's always a "but" when Obama is involved) the "rich" pay much more than their fair share when it comes to income tax.  Those "non-rich" (let's say the bottom 50 percent of taxpayers) paid, in 2009 (the most recent year for which data is available), 2.25 percent of all income taxes paid.

2. "[B]ut the time would not be long before courage and enterprise would come, and pretexts be invented by degrees[.]"  Obama, in July 2012, said, "If you've got a business -- you didn't build that.  Somebody else made that happen."  Obama implied that business owners' success came from the government due to government-funded infrastructure and projects.  Obama continually takes all credit away from business owners and gives it to the government.

To further support Adams, look at what Obama did in 2012.  An article in Human Events lists ten things Obama has said about enterprise in an attempt to exploit class warfare.  Among them were demonizing businesses, attacking capitalism, and promoting the Occupy Wall Street movement.

3. "[I]n sharing it equally ..." Candidate Obama, in October 2008, said to Joe Wurzelbacher, "... I think when you spread the wealth around, it's good for everybody."  Obama's plan, then and now, was/is to redistribute wealth (private property) according to his definitions.  His plan is to "take from those it deems rich, and give to those it deems poor."  Or, as Karl Marx said in 1875, "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs."  We all know how well Marx's idea worked/continue to work out.

Obama's latest effort to "spread the wealth around"?  He wants the government to define what is "reasonable" for retirement, and to tax all above that amount.  Americans currently have about $17.5 trillion in savings, about $4.4 trillion of it in IRAs.  Obama believes that income tax deductions for retirement savings are lost government revenues.  His 2013 budget estimated that retirement tax deductions taken will be, in the next five years, $429 billion in "lost" tax revenue.  There is not another pool of wealth able to finance the annual deficit that Obama insists on running

What's next?  Confiscation!  "The Obama administration is reportedly moving on plans to nationalize private 401k and IRA retirement accounts, and replace them with government sponsored annuities (aka Treasury bonds that the Treasury currently can't sell to anyone but the Fed)."  Obama has begun a plan to nationalize (aka confiscate) private pensions and to eliminate private retirement accounts, including IRAs and 401k plans.

Think it can't happen here?  Think again!  In a recent hearing sponsored by the Treasury and Labor Departments, Rebecca Davis, a representative of the very liberal Pension Rights Center, said that "... the government needs to get involved because 401k plans and IRAs are unfair to poor people. She demanded the Obama administration set up a 'government-sponsored program administered by the PBGC [the government's Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation].' She proclaimed that even 'private annuities are problematic.'"  There's that "unfair" argument again.

And there's precedent for confiscation.  Poland, in an attempt to delay an impending government debt crisis, "confiscated half of their nation's private pension funds without compensation" and shifted them into ZUS, Poland's state pension vehicle.  As Louis Scatigna says, "[b]y shifting some assets from the private funds into ZUS, the government can book those assets on the state balance sheet to offset public debt, giving it more scope to borrow and spend."  Sound familiar?

In an interview broadcast Sunday, September 15, 2013, Obama, referring to his powers to fight income inequality, said, "I think the president can stop it."  He then went on to blame Republicans for blocking his efforts to spread the wealth around, saying, "There's no serious economist out there that would suggest that if you took the Republican agenda ... that that would reverse some of these trends of inequality."  Obama made his remarks in response to a report that says that more than 20 percent of income went to the top 1 percent of income earners.  But not one word could I find where he addressed work or capital risk inequality.

4. "Debts would be abolished first[.]"  Obama has proposed that billions of dollars in student loans be forgiven over the next ten years.  On August 23, 2013, in Scranton, PA, Obama said, "Just because someone borrowed a bunch of money doesn't mean they have to pay it back."  He actually said that!  All $900 billion in federal student loans will be "forgiven" on November 1, 2013, according to Obama's plan.  Student loan debt is provided by the federal government, and the revenue loss will add significantly to the deficit.

In an article entitled "Want Economic Growth? Forgive and Restructure Debt for American Working Families," Steve Clemmons says, "It's private debt that matters most" when it comes to predicting economic crises.  Clemmons concludes the article with "... finding a way to restructure and write down [aka forgive] debt held by financiers and banks is the fastest and most effective way to bolster healthy economic growth."  So, in the name of economic growth, debt should be forgiven, but nowhere in his article could I find Clemmons's discussion of the consequences of debt forgiveness.  Predicting an economic crisis is one thing; the results from avoidance is another.

5. "... equal division of every thing be demanded ..."  Does the term 'socialist' apply to Obama?  To answer that question, we turn to Kyle Smith's New York Post article, which says "... Obama finally let slip that he is a socialist."  Smith cites a New York Times article that says Obama wants to "Go Bulworth."  "Obama himself, the Times explained, has been 'longingly' telling his inner circle that what he'd really like to do is what Sen. Jay Bulworth, played [ironically] by Warren Beatty in his 1998 movie 'Bulworth,' did: to go public as an unabashed, angry and admitted socialist."  As Smith says, "[i]n confessing his dreams of 'going Bulworth,' Obama confirmed that what he thinks and what he says out loud are two different things."

It's true that John Adams, our second president, was a great thinker.  All we have to do is examine what he said and wrote.  It's too bad that today's public education is so dumbed down that most graduates can't even read, much less understand, what he left us.  And it's too bad that Adams's thoughts are not spread by the MSM so that those who cannot read can at least hear what he said.

History will again repeat itself.  We private property owners have become targets.

Liberals Do the Same Thing...

Liberals Do the Same Thing, Get the Same Result Year After Year, After Year, After...

John Ransom

 

While the withdrawal of Larry Summers from consideration for the top job at the Federal Reserve Bank is good news for those of us who are hoping for some sanity from the Fed, the battle is not over.
“Summers, widely regarded as a brilliant economist and a shrewd and decisive policy-maker,” reports Reuters, “was considered to be the front-runner for the position to replace [current Fed Chair Ben] Bernanke, whose second term expires in January. However, Summers was dogged by controversies including his support for deregulation in the 1990s and comments he made about women's aptitude while president of Harvard.”
So now that Summers is gone, the big question lingers: Will we never exhaust the endless supply of brilliant, shrewd, liberal economists who know how to do only one thing, namely, print more money?
No, probably not.
Because after Larry Summers, then there is Janet Yellen, who now appears the front runner for the top job at the Federal Reserve Bank.
Yellen, like Ben Bernanke—and Larry Summers-- is known to be accommodative when it comes to monetary policy. That means that Yellen, like Bernanke—and Larry Summers-- favors quantitative easing efforts.
Brilliant!
So prepare to keep the printing presses going boys… and girls.
Maybe. Just maybe, not definitely.
Increasingly, I have been getting the impression that even dovish bankers, like Yellen, are looking at the QE printing presses with a more skeptical eye.
This, perhaps more than any single thing, was the reason why Obama favored Summers over Yellen.
Yellen, as Fed Chairman, will do what her cold, brilliant(!) economist, misguided, liberal heart tells her to. Summers on the other hand would bend purely to politics over policy. Summers is more a liberal politician; Yellen is more a liberal banker.
Summers, for example, would continue the quantitative easing program in perpetuity as long as it allowed the White House to say that the recovery is moving along just as they planned, regardless of the risks to the economy.
But I get the sense that there’s a rift between the White House and the bankers, like Yellen, and that in part is the reason why Ben Bernanke, who is also purely a banker-- even if an academic one-- did not get a shot at a third term as Federal Reserve Chairman.
Okay maybe not so much of a rift as a disconnect.
“Strategists have said markets are now pricing in a decision by the Federal Reserve to start scaling back its bond purchases when it concludes a two-day policy meeting Wednesday,” says MarketWatch. “In fact, much of the back-and-forth among financial forecasters in the past week has centered on how much the Fed will reduce initially.”
That the debate centers on how much tapering the Fed will do rather than will-it-or-won’t-it taper is bad news for the White House.
And one only need look at the 10-year Treasury to understand that the market is of one mind on the “end of QE.”
It’s coming whether the White House wants it or not.
The interest rate on the 10-year Treasury has almost doubled since May. This at a time when the Federal Reserve was trying to keep interest rates at zero.
Even the not so free-market in Treasury securities, manipulated by the largest bank in the history of mankind, eventually becomes the victim of reality.
The market, in other words, is telling the Federal Reserve that QE is over… whether they like it or not.
The bankers believe they’ve done all they can with any easing efforts as a substitute for fiscal policy. There’s a record amount of money in our system today thanks to QE. There’s a record amount of inactivity with that money in our system today as well thanks in part to the fig-leaf of QE.
Brilliant!
That inactivity is the result of political decisions that have been postponed from time to time, and obfuscated mostly, and deranged, mangled, and warped.
“Don’t worry about a thing,” says the Obama White House. “They’ll keep printing money.”
The White House wants QE to continue forever because then they don’t have to submit a budget, pass any laws, cut any departments, battle fraud in government programs, or in any wise act as a responsible government. 
The wealth effect of quantitative easing, which seems to infect only the top folks in our society and on Wall Street, will continue papering over any missteps, flaws or fallacies that the liberals want to foist on a trusting public.
As long as the market keeps going up, then all is well for the Obama White House.
But with the withdrawal of the brilliant (!) and shrewd (!) Larry Summers from the race for Fed chairman, we could, once and for all, put an end to the brilliant strategy brought to us by QE of doing the same thing and getting the same result year after, year after, year after, year, after year.
Maybe. Just maybe, not definitely. 
But in that event liberals will then have to think up better ways of producing the worst jobs recovery since the end of the Second World War.
But I have no doubt liberals can accomplish it, because after all, they’re brilliant… year after year after year after year after year.

But the dirty little secret of the tyrant

The Dynamics of Tyranny

By Stella Morabito
Before George Orwell wrote 1984, there was Yevgeny Zamyatin's We. If you're not acquainted with Zamyatin's novel, you will find it an extraordinary study on the dynamics of tyranny.
Zamyatin, a Russian, wrote We around 1921. It was immediately banned by the Soviet censorship board, but was smuggled abroad. For many decades, copies of the book were extremely difficult to find.
Enter George Orwell.
After he heard about the existence of We, Orwell sought out the English translation for years, without success. By 1945 he managed to track down a French translation, which he read and reviewed in the January 4, 1946 issue of the London Tribune. (Warning: Orwell's review contains major spoilers for those who would like to read We as a novel of suspense.)
Orwell compared We to Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and speculated that Huxley's work "must be partly derived" from We (which Huxley later denied.) The two novels along with 1984 seem to form a classic triumvirate of 20th century dystopian literature.
Many of us brood that we're living in an emerging dystopia, similar to 1984. Political correctness generates Orwellian Newspeak. A news anchor trashes the existence of "private" families, claiming all children "belong to" the collective. A president is re-elected through a campaign that promotes with impunity an infographic that brazenly glorifies a policy of government meddling in our lives from womb to tomb. Surveillance and invasions of privacy proliferate. Journalists suppress news rather than report it. We have government by cult figure. Justifications for anxiety abound.
Yet Zamyatin's novel We offers perhaps an even more instructive picture than either 1984 or Brave New World about where we are headed. While 1984 and Brave New World serve as mirrors of today's political surrealism, We functions more as a microscope that magnifies in starker and deeper detail the gestation and inner workings of dystopia.
We occurs some 500 years hence. The world has gone through "the two hundred years war" from which 0.2 percent of the population survived after "the cleansing of thousand-year-old filth." What remains is an environmentally "glistening" earth in which the sky is an ever sterile blue and the "zero-point-two percent has tasted bliss in the ramparts of the One State," their faces "unclouded by the folly of thought."
We describes a society in the midst of being "perfected." Human beings are more equal than ever, overcoming their individualism and their "irrational" resistance to collectivist forces. They experience the "happinesss" of living in synchronicity within the Great Machine of "The One State," due to the generosity of their "Benefactor."
The One State has pondered: What exactly causes individuals to obstruct progress towards the perfect collectivist union? Answer: the human imagination. So its scientists have diligently sought out and identified the imagination's precise location in the brain. They're now able to surgically excise it.
So let's imagine (while we still can) that all citizens must undergo this operation. It's been mandated to promote enduring peace for the whole collective. How would you resist? According to the One State, only the "enemies of happiness" would cling to the survival of their imaginations. The imagination, you see, is a grave disease, as well as a fount of unpredictability that stunts progress for the collective. It also forces upon its victims the "burden of freedom."
Citizens in the novel are called "ciphers" or "unifs" and live thoroughly mechanized lives. No marriage. No "private children." No unauthorized or unrationed sexual activity. Such things were the unenlightened ways of the "the ancients."
"Guardians" -- police and informers -- enforce conformity and the political correctness that breeds compliance and silence. That's the mecahnism propping up the "Green Wall," which stands outside the confines of the One State and separates ciphers from all things not yet controlled and mechanized -- including birds, wildlands, and, of course, those few people with fully intact imaginations who think and act freely.
But all it takes to collapse the Green Wall is the contagion of freely spoken thought.
We's narrator is a mathematician by the name of D-503. He is essential to the government as the builder of "the Integral," a spacecraft with the mission of imposing the One State's way of life on all corners of the universe. Through D-503, Zamyatin names us his "unknown planetary readers of the future," and promises: "We will come to you, to make your life as divinely rational and exact as ours."
But D-503 senses something amiss, because he feels the vestiges of imagination in himself. He describes it as an irritant, like a foreign body in his brain. Among other things, it causes him to fall in love with I-330. She is a hot revolutionary who cracks jokes, drinks alcohol, and smokes -- all are criminal activities. Despite D-503's total allegiance to the One State, he cannot bring himself to turn I-330 in to the authorities. He's thoroughly smitten, which he hates. And yet . . . he loves . . .
D-503 narrates his 40 journal entries mechanically, often meandering into yearnings. He sees people as geometric shapes with specific traits -- all bright teeth or quivering gills or thick lips. This betrays D-503's awareness of the uniqueness of individuals and diverse roots, despite his claim that all ciphers are "identical."
D-503 and I-330 offer two divergent paths for humanity: one childish and one childlike.
When D-503 describes the influence of the Guardians, he feels as a toddler might, yearning to be carried and forever snuggled upon the shoulder of his Benefactor: "How pleasant it [is] to feel someone's vigilant eye lovingly protecting you from the slightest mistake, from the slightest misstep."
I-330 proposes another way, which is to stand on one's own two feet and look at the Truth through a child's eyes, unfiltered and curious. "Children are the only brave philosophers," she states. "And brave philosophers are, inevitably, children. And that's just it -- we must always think like children with their what-happens-nexts."
Indeed, Zamyatin himself warned -- in his essay "On Literature, Revolution, Entropy" -- that societies are forever in the midst of a guessing game about what happens next. The only bulwark against tyranny are people he dubs "heretics," those who can connect the dots and then display the picture to others.
Like children with healthy curiosities, heretics ask questions that are "so absurdly naïve and so frighteningly complex." They "recklessly burst into today from tomorrow," and tend to be exterminated for doing so. But, in the end, Zamyatin insists: "someone must speak heretically today about tomorrow" because "heretics are the only (bitter) remedy against the entropy of human thought."
Herein lies Zamyatin's enduring lesson for each of us: utopian models breed tyranny in which only complete obedience -- in thought, word and deed -- will do. A balance between individual rights and government is never an option in them. The OneState can only be sustained by a never-ending quest to wipe out any inkling of dissent -- usually through a combination of punishment, vilification, and mockery that instills the primal fear of isolation in any potential dissenter . We all know how the guardians of groupthink usher folks away from truth-tellers by employing labels such as "haters" or "tinfoil hats" or "bigots."
But the dirty little secret of the tyrant (a secret we may instinctively know but fear to act upon) is that tyrannies can withstand very little human resistance. Even one person's defiant expression of individuality and childlike truth-telling can create ripple effects that thwart the forces of totalitarianism.
The novel We stands alone as an inimitable tour de force. Such a story with its unique narration could only have been generated by Zamyatin himself, an old Bolshevik, known as an eccentric, who was horrified by the totalitarianism and brutality his Marxist activism had helped produce.
And now Zamyatin eerily haunts us from his grave, bidding us with this summons: Ask! As persistently and loudly as a child, ask this most heretical of questions: "What happens next?"

Putin's Tinkerbell...

Why Millennials Won't Turn 'Conservative'

By Selwyn Duke

Every so often the wonks of wishful thinking give us an article about how blacks are becoming Republicans, how Hispanics are supposedly a natural GOP constituency, or, as is the subject here today, how the millennial generation is turning "conservative." Perhaps pundits asserting the last thing recall Winston Churchill's observation, "If you're not a liberal at 20, you have no heart; if you're not a conservative at 40, you have no brain." And perhaps they overlook that it's possible to raise a brainless generation.
Don't think, as one might, that this will be a typical analysis sneering at the proverbial "next generation" using the perceived gold standard of one's own. After all, I realize that my generation is the tree the millennial nut fell from. Placing matters in further perspective, it's true that older and younger generations ever slam each other; it's also true that they both are always partially right. Lastly, I'll say that I don't at all consider the WWII FDR voters the "greatest generation," though it makes for a nice narrative. The greatest generation was the one that founded our nation and wondered if we could "keep" its republic, and there has been a consistent, but accelerating, degeneration ever since.
In discussing our latest movement toward idiocracy, my starting point will be a Sept. 4 American Thinker article written by one Chriss Street. In making his case for millennial hope, Mr. Street points out that while 61 percent of millennials voted for Barack Obama in 2012, his approval among them has now sunk to 46 percent. But this is a deceptive statistic. For an approval rating amounts to the judging of a candidate relative to people's ideal personal standard for the presidency, whereas in an election he is judged relative to another specific candidate for the presidency. And if Obama were again running against Mitt Romney -- with all the usual media propaganda -- does anyone really think he'd lose millennials to the governor? No doubt more would stay home, but I suspect the president would enjoy something close to his 2012 support among those who cast votes.
Moreover, millennials may have soured on Obama somewhat, but this reflects cynicism more than conservatism. Of course, that they'd be cynical is no surprise; they've been raised in an unraveling West in which feckless, morally-confused adults in their homes, schools, government, houses of worship and elsewhere have let them down. Nonetheless, cynicism is not traditionalism; in fact, it is a form of naiveté. Believing all people act out of selfish motives, the cynic instinctively paints everyone with the same brush. And such a person can hardly distinguish well among candidates.
Mr. Street also tells us that, "in 2008, 37.4% of incoming freshman women and 30.5% men identified themselves as liberals or leftists, the most in 35 years." The reality, though, is even worse than this indicates. First consider that self-reporting is more about perception than reality. For starters, it always underestimates leftist numbers, as likely a majority of "moderates" are liberals who -- usually because of self-delusion (a leftist bailiwick) and a desire to sound "reasonable" -- don't brand themselves what they really are; bear in mind when pondering this that liberals are generally solipsistic and fancy that they define the center, and also realize that the label "liberal" has been discredited enough so that many won't don it. Yet even more significant here is that it isn't just people's perceptions that shift -- the definitions of "liberal" and "conservative" do, too.
Consider that while a conservative in 1952 America was staunchly anti-communist, a conservative in the Soviet Union at the time was a communist. And "conservatives" in Western Europe are often our liberals' ideological soulmates. This isn't for lack of truth in political advertising. Rather, it's because the only consistent definition of "conservative" is "a desire to maintain the status quo" while "liberal's" only consistent definition involves a desire to change it. This means "conservatism" is always changing: tomorrow's version will reflect today's liberalism's success in altering the status quo. Conservatism is the caboose to liberalism's locomotive (I treat this in-depth here).
This explains a few things. First, it's often pointed out that a healthy plurality in America describes itself as conservative. Is this surprising? All it really means is that many, many people align themselves with the status quo -- and if this weren't the case, the status quo wouldn't be the status quo. Second, some insist that millennials will move toward conservatism, and this is true in that most people become somewhat more traditional with age. Yet it's also true that conservatism will move toward them.
That is to say, as "conservatism" drifts "left," it follows that millennials will "become more conservative" even if they stay in the same place, in that they will be situated more on the post-shift political spectrum's right side; this is just as how a person can become poorer in a definitional sense if the poverty line standard is altered.
That so few recognize this reflects the relativism of our time, where we label ourselves with provisional terms and measure ourselves against other people (it's people who define the political spectrum). If we want to see matters clearly, however, we must define them differently: in absolute terms.
In other words, what do millennials actually believe? Well, never before has an American generation been so tolerant of intolerable sexual practices, so supportive of faux marriage and skeptical of actual marriage, so relativistic and disconnected from Christianity (church attendance is one of the best predictors of voting habits). Never before has an American generation been to their degree socially "liberal."
This brings us to the claim that millennials are, at least, fiscally conservative. Now, not only is convincing evidence of this elusive, but considering it a saving grace is essentially saying that it profits a man to gain the world but lose his soul. Regardless, however, while the social liberalism/fiscal conservatism marriage may exist in particular cases, I suspect that in principle it is an impossibility.
For instance, speaking of principle versus particular, if you ask people, "Do you believe government should balance its budget and be frugal," of course they'll say yes. But if you ask them if they're willing to relinquish their particular piece of the pie (government college aid?), their tune changes. Espousing fiscal responsibility requires only a voice; achieving it requires virtue.
Second, consider the side-effects of social liberalism in modern times. And this should be prefaced by saying that since this explanation warrants a book, my treatment here will necessarily be lacking. But just as an example, social liberalism means loose sexual mores. Loose sexual mores mean a high rate of single motherhood (today it's 42 percent... and rising). And what does this mean? Since the modern West won't let these women twist in the wind, the government will step into the breach and play daddy with handouts and/or mommy with tax-funded daycare. It is unavoidable.
And in point of fact, this cultural decay brings us to the real reason for political drift. It was something about which the Founding Fathers -- as well as great thinkers throughout Christendom's history -- spoke much. Ben Franklin warned, "As nations become more corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters." British philosopher Edmund Burke observed, "It is written in the eternal constitution of things that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters." And John Adams wrote in 1798, "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other."
Question: does "moral and religious" describe us today?
Of course, some will now say, "But why do you think millennials supported Ron Paul? They want liberty!" Sure they do.
So does a tiger in a zoo.
So does a toddler.
Neither, however, can be allowed to roam free in civilization without hurting himself or others. And the less people are civilized growing up, the closer they will be to that infantile or animalistic state -- and the more they have need of cages and masters.
The truth? Government can be no better than the public's virtue, though it can be worse. And this morality-government relationship is evident in voting patterns. Is it a coincidence that every group orthodox Christians label immoral -- those involved in "alternative" sexual deathstyles, criminally inclined inner-city dwellers, effete college professors, grunge-type youths scarred with multiple tattoos and body piercings -- vote left? "What fellowship hath light with darkness?" The darkness hates the light. When people have sins they yearn to rationalize away, the last thing they'll do is support leaders who would uphold, even just through word, a moral standard condemning their passions.
Providing specificity as to how this affects government is another book-worthy topic, so I'll offer just two examples. We've heard about those ruggedly individualistic Americans who'd rather live in poverty in Appalachia than accept government handouts and those spirit-of-entitlement types who protest violently when they don't receive them. And society will always contain both kinds, but the ratio can vary greatly. In a nation characterized by self-sufficiency, honor, and virtue, a redistributionist will find barren ground. But if a spirit of greed, covetousness, and thievery prevails, people will be susceptible to the demagogic appeal, "You've been cheated, but give me power and I'll get you your piece of the pie, comrade!" Or consider lust. If people resolved to be chaste outside of marriage, do you think the abortion movement or taxpayer funded contraception appeal could gain traction?
So how do you make a civilization susceptible to dark demagogues?
Make it love the darkness.
I wouldn't first and foremost spend time on intellectual appeals. As the Soviets once did (as explained by ex-KGB defector Yuri Bezmenov) I'd seek to undermine the morality of the target nation. I'd spread the idea that morality is really "values" and values are relative -- all just a matter of perspective, you see. Once this was accepted and people no longer believed in the rules of morality, it would be as if they ceased believing in the rules of human nutrition: not thinking any food could actually be "bad," they'd be governed only by taste and would try, and could develop an affinity for, anything -- even perhaps poison. Vice corresponds to this on the moral menu.
I'd then get them hooked on their bad moral diet through inundation. Stoke their lust's fires via highly sexualized entertainment, and portray violence as just as casual and cool, so lashing out at others seems the norm. I'd engorge their egos with media messages about how they could determine their own morality so that, as the serpent said, "you will be like God." I'd provide co-ed dorms and a general party atmosphere at universities, creating "occasions of sin" that will ensure the kids have as much as possible they need to justify. And after robbing them of moral judgment and creating a visceral craving for vice, I'd fill their heads full of anti-Western, anti-Christian -- in fact, anti-goodness -- ideas in college classrooms. When I was done with them, they'd not only possess the discernment of a man in the midst of a drug-fueled orgy, their egos would be so bloated they'd consider their ignorance wisdom.
Speaking of wisdom, when conservatives indulge wishful thinking and suppose that millennials will "wake up," they ignore that we actually need a shakeup, something that changes the cultural trajectory on which we've long been (so if an asteroid strikes the Earth, millennials may turn into conservatives -- of course, they instead may turn into cavemen, too). Until then, whatever the keepers of the flame plan had better require the participation of only a zealous minority. For the masses will not wake up when beset by a cultural narcolepsy in which nightmares are fancied nice dreams.