Liberty is precarious. Take, for instance, Barack Obama's implicit attack on American capitalism, free markets, and private enterprise — the greatest engine of prosperity in human history — as expressed to Joe the Plumber: "When you spread the wealth around, it's good for everybody."
No, it's not. Not a single time. Never. Using government power to allocate "wealth" — by first confiscating it from the producers — has failed every time it's been tried. This socialist doctrine has an unalloyed record of catastrophe: impoverishing every society it has shackled, spreading nothing around but misery, scarcity, and want. Nevertheless, a Rasmussen national survey found that a full 44 percent of American voters (including 69 percent of Democrats) agree with Obama's nonchalant Marxism; tragically, only 42 percent of your fellow countrymen object to his seductive, lethal lie.
Indeed, there can be no greater threat to the American charter than this.
Rep. Barney Frank (D, MA), House Financial Services Committee Chair, is thrilled to usher in a period of "resurgent government activism" similar to FDR'S New Deal, as he told The San Francisco Chronicle on Oct. 19: "This is the end of the era of extreme laissez-faire, of 'Don't tax it, don't regulate it.' That has now been totally evaporated." Barney Frank says: "Poof!"
The Era of Big Government -which was never "over" is back. With a vengeance. According to an Oct. 28 report in The Boston Herald, Rep. Frank told the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce that his priorities are to pass an economic stimulus package (i.e., send checks to people who don't pay income taxes, also known as a "dole") and to "regulate the securitization activities of all U.S. entities." You read that right. If you are a U.S. "entity," you'd better lay low.
Every time I read a news story, I see mention of another organization with regulatory power over Americans. I recently saw a CNBC.com article on FINRA, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority. Now, I will admit that I am not a financial industry aficionado, but I've never heard of this bunch. For all I know it could be the umbrella group for all the other shadow regulatory groups nobody knows about.
We have an infestation of bureaucracies. They're like cockroaches! It doesn't matter whether it's the financial industry, the health industry, the phone industry, the oil industry, the pharmaceutical industry, the toaster industry — I don't care what it is, there's some bureaucracy that's got its mitts on policy, usually under cover of darkness, behind closed doors. Kennedy and his buds are making health care policy on his sickbed. "Do it for Ted" will be the rallying call. These ensnaring bureaucratic webs and the vast liberal encroachments into government agencies and the courts are liberty-destroyers. We're going to be play¬ing defense for 25 years. "I think it's time we ask ourselves," said Ronald Reagan in his profound "Rendezvous With Destiny" speech 44 years ago, "if we still know the freedoms that were intended for us by the Founding Fathers."
Do we? That remains the great question of the age.
Individual liberty, bestowed by our Creator, purchased and protected with American blood and American treasure over many generations, is our birthright — the nation's most precious asset. We cannot survive its erosion, much less, in Barney Frank's terms, its evaporation. Reagan continued:
If we lose freedom here, there is no place to escape to. This is the last stand on earth. And this idea that government is beholden to the people, that it has no other source of power except to sovereign people, is still the newest and most unique idea in all the long history of man's relation to man. This is the issue of this election. Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.
Barack Obama confesses the latter — a notion apparently now embraced by nearly half of the American electorate. The fundamental disagreement is with the Founders.
"The Constitution reflected the enormous blind spot in this culture that carries on to this day," complained Obama, then a law professor and state senator, in a 2001 interview on WBEZ in Chicago. "The Framers had that same blind spot ... the fundamental flaw of this country." He expanded:
The Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth and sort of more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society ... It didn't break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution, at least as it's been interpreted ... that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties. It says what the states can't do to you, it says what the federal government can't do to you, but it doesn't say what the federal government or the state government must do on your behalf.
That is a lie. The Founders explicitly delineated what governments must do "on your behalf": preserve your freedom. Ladies and gentlemen, there is no such thing as negative liberties. Liberty is liberty, and it is only and always robustly positive. But what Obama said next is significant:
"One of the, I think, tragedies of the civil rights movement was because the civil rights movement became so court-focused, I think that there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributive change ... I'm not optimistic about bringing about major redistributive change through the courts. The institution just isn't structured that way ... You start getting into all sorts of separation of powers issues ... The court's just not very good at it and politically it's very hard to legitimize opinions from the court in that regard."
Translation: "Yeah, the Courts aren't the means to spread the wealth around. The Constitution's usefulness in this regard was unfortunately limited by the Founders. Separation-of-powers claptrap bogs down the mission. The secret of transforming America to my Obama Utopia is community organizations, the fulcrum of the power we can leverage to remake society."
"I'm interested in organizations, not movements," said Obama in 1990, "because movements dissipate and organizations don't." It is easy to gloss over this. But Obama was telegraphing the method that he and his fellow travelers on the left discovered to get around the Constitution and to thwart the profound system of checks and balances bequeathed by the Founders. Barack Obama took ACORN and aimed it straight at the heart of the republic. This was the key to both the corruption of the electoral process via voter fraud and the torpedoing of the American economy through agitation to change our lending institutions into wealth redistribution centers. I am convinced that ACORN has been far, far more lethal than anyone knew.
This attack must be repelled. America must be defended. The freedoms that were intended for us by the Founding Fathers must be preserved.
Meanwhile, unbelievably, the so-called conservative "intelligentsia" is trying to figure out how we, too, can become redistributionists — only smarter and better. We've actually got people on our side trying to remake our Party into one that redistributes wealth, to show we "care." They're ripping the conservative movement, trying to redefine it. "The era of Reagan is over," they proclaim.
The conservative elites are attempting a realignment on the basis of so-called intellect. Some of them actually drifted to Obama, because they believe he "sounds smart." (In between stutters.) These are the people embarrassed by Sarah Palin for her accent and her supposed lack of intellectual prowess. I don't consider myself an intellectual at all; they agree. I'm disqualified, thankfully, because I don't have a degree; I eschewed college to pursue my dreams.
The "conservatism" of these wayward elites and self-styled intellectuals is wander¬ing in the wilderness. They've lost their way. Screw 'em. Right now, right here, we start rebuilding the conservative movement. We have the blueprint already. We saw its success in our own lifetimes, in 1980 and 1994 — full-throated conservatism; works every time it's tried. Limited government. Low taxes. Strong military. Individual liberty. Rugged individualism. American exceptionalism. Preservation of the founding documents and the founding principles. Free markets, free speech, free people. The truth is, there's only one "code word" in our lexicon: freedom.
As Ronaldus Magnus said in 1964, in language that's just as apt today:In this vote-harvesting time, they use terms like the "Great Society," or [that] we must accept a "greater government activity in the affairs of the people" ... Another voice says that the profit motive has become outmoded, it must be replaced by the incentives of the welfare state; or our traditional system of individual freedom is incapable of solving the complex problems of [our] century.
Reagan called freedom's opponents out, by name, and exposed them to withering criticism. Divisive attacks, even:Senator Fulbright has said at Stanford University that the Constitution is outmoded ... And Senator Clark ... defines liberalism as "meeting the material needs of the masses through the full power of centralized government." Well, I for one resent it when a representative of the people refers to you and me — the free man and woman of this country — as "the masses" ... But beyond that, "the full power of centralized government" — this was the very thing the Founding Fathers sought to minimize ... A government can't control the economy without controlling people. And they knew when a government sets out to do that, it must use force and coercion to achieve its purpose ... You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We will preserve tor our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we will sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness.
And once again, it is a time for choosing. I know which choice we'll make, because we're Americans.
In his first inaugural address, in 1798, the essential George Washington observed: "The preservation of the sacred fire of liberty and the destiny of the republican model of government are justly considered ... as deeply, as finally, staked on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people."
It's up to us. The Founders trusted us to preserve liberty's sacred fire. Generations of our countrymen have given all to keep its flame alive. We can do no less.
When you boil it all down, the central issue is freedom. Conservatives believe in the freedom of the individual to choose how he or she lives his or her life; liberals believe that the individual is less capable of making good choices than the elites would make on their behalf. This ideological battle is nothing new, as both Washington's and Reagan's words could have been applied to today's issues. However, the key difference is that liberals now have almost total control over the American government.
This is, indeed, a time for choosing. Do you choose liberalism and socialism, or do you choose conservatism and freedom?
There's my two cents.
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