The American Thinker: Trevor Thomas & Neal Boortz: 'Libertarianism & Moral Government'

Source:American Thinker is a right-wing populist publication.

"While substituting for Sean Hannity recently, Neal Boortz went into another of his "libertarian" rants against "social" conservatives. Taking note of the recent flak involving Phil Robertson of "Duck Dynasty," while pleading that the fate of the republic may depend upon Republicans retaking the U.S. Senate, Boortz forebodingly predicted that Republicans would fail in this task because, "they [Republicans] simply cannot resist the urge, the impulse to get into this social conservatism."

Long known for his disdain of the "social" (I prefer "moral") issues, like many others, Boortz masquerades as libertarian while in reality being nothing more than a liberal on the moral issues of our time.

Contrary to what self-described libertarians such as Boortz and John Stossel would have us believe, if conservatives simply shut up about issues like abortion and marriage and focus on things like debt and fiscal responsibility, there's no guarantee when it comes to election time. It is a long-held myth, typically perpetuated by self-described liberals in the mainstream media but also by self-described libertarians, that whenever the moral issues are prominent in elections, conservatives lose. As I have noted before, Jeffrey Bell in his book The Case for Polarized Politics helps dispel this myth.

"Social issues were nonexistent in the period 1932 to 1964," notes Bell. "The Republican Party won two presidential elections out of nine, and they had the Congress for all of four years in that entire period. . . . When social issues came into the mix -- I would date it from the 1968 election . . . the Republican Party won seven out of 11 presidential elections."

Bell concludes, as have many others, that American social conservatism began in response to the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Thus, it is unsurprising that all of the most significant "social" issues in America today are sexual issues. Abortion, homosexuality, marriage, contraception, and the like, are not hot political topics merely because they relate to people's personal lives. They are hot political topics because they reside deep within the moral realm of our culture.

Whether liberals or libertarians care to admit it, somebody's morality is going to govern us. Libertarians would do well to examine America's history before ranting about the morality of today's [Christian] conservatives. Like our founders, most conservatives today understand well that religion (especially Christianity) is an indispensible tenet of liberty.

America's "Schoolmaster" Noah Webster bore this out in his 1832 History of the United States when he wrote that "our citizens should early understand that the genuine source of correct republican principles is the Bible, particularly the New Testament or the Christian religion." Webster rightly concluded that, "The religion which has introduced civil liberty is the religion of Christ and His apostles... to this we owe our free Constitutions of Government." 

Additionally, and again contrary to popular myth and what pundits like Mr. Boortz would have us believe, Christian conservatives aren't the aggressors in the so-called "culture wars." It has been liberals with the aid of those like-minded in our courts and our media who have forced their moral views on our culture. Whether it's abortion, the environment, public displays of religion, marriage, or other issues, liberals have taken the view of what is typically a small minority and imposed their will on the country.

In more ways than one, the results have been disastrous and (speaking of debt) expensive. As an example, consider the environment and the myth of man-made global warming. Starting out with a small minority, through judicial fiat and a relentless media campaign, liberals began preaching that through the use of fossil fuels, human beings were warming the globe and that (of course) drastic political measures needed to be taken to "save the planet."

Though most Americans do not consider global warming a significant issue for our government, decades of propaganda have taken a toll on our nation. For too long, conservatives didn't do enough to combat the tactics of liberals on this issue, and today far too many Americans believe the lie that the actions of humans are warming the planet. So much so that the last Republican-elected president, George W. Bush, signed a significant piece of legislation that was premised on the notion of man-made global warming. 

After signing the Energy Independence and Security Act, President Bush declared, "Today... We make a major step toward reducing our dependence on oil, confronting global climate change, expanding production of renewable fuels and giving future generations a nation that is stronger, cleaner and more secure."

According to the New York Times, then Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi echoed Bush's sentiments by describing "the bill as groundbreaking because it would reduce oil imports, cut production of the gases that scientists blame for global warming and significantly increase the efficiency of the nation's auto fleet." 

Boortz would do well to note that this is what happens when conservatives acquiesce to the positions of liberals. We get conservatives at the highest level parroting liberalspeak and the government spending billions of dollars on a problem that doesn't exist -- even telling us what light bulbs we can use. However, this is nothing compared to the slaughter of tens of millions of children in the womb or the legal redefinition of the institution upon which our republic rests.

Libertarians like Boortz can moan and groan about the moral positions of "social" conservatives all they want, but it doesn't change the facts. All law is rooted in some morality; thus somebody's morality is going to "determine the fate of this republic." Libertarians need to decide with whom it's easier to live: those who share the morality of the vast majority of our founders, who gave us the greatest document for self governance ever created by men; or those who seek fundamentally to change this republic into something that conservatives and libertarians both will lament."

From the American Thinker   

Mr. Conservative Barry Goldwater: I want big government out of our wallets, bedrooms, boardrooms, and classrooms.” That’s my idea of a Conservative.

Of course Conservatives believe in tradition, conserving, rule of the law, etc. But that’s not the same thing as believing in your religious and cultural values so much, that you want the national government, or any other level of government, using government force to force everyone else to live you way of life. It just means that individuals should be free to live their own lives, short of hurting any innocent person with what they’re doing with their own freedom.

You can also see this post at FreeState Now, on Blogger. 

You can also see this post at FreeState Now, on WordPress.

American Thinker: John W. Howard: 'Liberalism & its Discontents'

Source:The American Thinker is a right-wing populist publication.

“Last month’s solemn 50th year remembrance of the assassination of John F. Kennedy and its confluence with an event of eventual monumental insignificance provides a useful context in which to contemplate the current state of national politics. The one reminds us of a political impulse that was at one time predominant and the other places in stark relief the ideological project that replaced it.

We use labels as a handy mechanism for describing complex concepts. “Liberalism”, as a political term, did not come into broad currency in the United States until the after the First World War. It described a proto-ideology that envisioned a muscular central government reimagined as an engine for social organization in contrast to the benign protector of liberty envisioned by the Founders. In ignoring the assumptions of the Founding, it was not particularly out of character for politics at the time. Other than pro forma invocations of the pantheon of Founding heroes, no one really made much reference to Founding principles in political discourse. They did not have to, of course, since the basic governmental paradigm remained largely intact even in light of the eclipse of state prerogative in the wake of the Civil War.

Though they sought to move on from first principles, they did so, they thought, as an accommodation to modernity, not as a rejection of the idea of America. They thought of liberalism as progress; as an improvement on basic concepts, as a part of an evolutionary continuum of ideas rooted in American tradition. They were, largely, patriotic. They believed in Founding ideals. Though many demonstrated a disquieting receptiveness to foreign ideas, they were, at root, still nationalists who believed in a greater America.

Liberalism became not so much a movement as an overwhelming theoretical assumption and its reach extended far from the politics with which it started, to all corners of society, from literature to music to education to social mores. By the 1950s, it was, quite simply, the predominant philosophical presupposition of American life. It was the more predominant for the absence of any organized countervailing ideological force.

When a component of the liberal zeitgeist, the very real undercurrent of seditious leftism, demonstrated too clear a sympathy to foreign authoritarian impulses — a purer form of the fundamental leftist philosophical doctrine out which liberalism evolved — mainstream American liberals wrote hardcore leftists out of the movement and adopted a vigorous anti-Communism. Many became ardent Cold Warriors. John Kennedy ran for president arguing that a missile gap made the nation vulnerable to Soviet adventurism. Far from running on the notion of diverting defense dollars to social programs, he argued for increases in military spending and a more vigorous foreign policy to contain Communist expansion.

President Kennedy did not say “Ich bin ein Berliner” to suggest appeasement but as a statement of solidarity between Americans and free Germans against Communist tyranny. He did not face down the Soviet Union in the Cuban Missile Crisis because he believed Communism to be an alternate political lifestyle that should be understood instead of defeated. He did not go into Vietnam expecting to contain North Vietnam. He went there intending to defeat it. He had been shaped by the transformative experience of World War II and the self-confidence and triumphalism that informed American politics in its wake.

These, among many other Kennedy Administration initiatives, are why a revisionist cottage industry has lately emerged that suggests that Kennedy was actually a conservative. He wasn’t, of course, but liberals of that tradition were not hard wired to leftist ideology. They still believed in the idea of American freedom and individualistic self-definition. They believed in the heroic. They celebrated individual initiative and accomplishment and their twins, self-discipline and responsibility. They continued to celebrate fundamental American values and to identify with traditional American heroes. They believed in an America worth fighting for.

As the predominant political philosophy, liberalism controlled all levers of government. Democrats held the presidency and 2/3 majorities in both houses of Congress throughout much of the 1960s and again in the 1970s.

The fact of overwhelming liberal political power is why ’60s radicals reserved their greatest disdain for liberals, not conservatives. First, of course, after Barry Goldwater’s landslide defeat in 1964, conservatism went into eclipse and presented no viable opposition to the radical project. Second, it was liberals who transacted a muscular foreign policy, undertook a foreign war and steadfastly opposed Communism and Soviet expansion.

But 1968 marked the decline and eventual disappearance of the liberalism that, until then, animated the Democratic Party and dominated American life. After the radical Chicago riots and the children’s revolt represented by Eugene McCarthy’s abortive presidential candidacy, intellectually exhausted Democratic Party liberals implemented party reforms that allowed its seizure by radical organizers. The devolution of party power from power brokers with a grounding in American traditionalism to street radicals and narrow interest groups warped more by grievance than a notion of a greater good rooted in Americanism, marked a fundamental intellectual shift and the eclipse of liberalism as an energetic force in American politics. The nomination of George McGovern for president in 1972 only confirmed what everyone knew by then: Liberalism had been replaced by unalloyed leftism as the predominant ideology of the Democratic Party. And there it has remained, except for a short detour toward the center during the Clinton years.

The difference between liberalism and the leftism that replaced it is that the latter is less moored to American notions of liberty and individualism than to an authoritarian European redistributionist tradition that celebrates the primacy of the collective over the rights of the individual. That is why it is so foreign to American sensibilities. It is foreign and it is unrooted in any strain of traditional Americanism. It rejects the assumption of individualist achievement embracing, rather, government as the instrument of a “justice” that contemplates taking from those who do to give to those who do not.

Its very terminology rejects the basic assumption of American freedom: the power of the individual to transform society and his consequent entitlement to the fruits of his labor. The term “redistribution” suggests that there has been some sort of initial overarching random societal distribution of wealth that improperly conferred prosperity on some and not others. Individuals do not earn – and therefore have the right to retain — what they derive from their labor. It is given and can therefore be taken by a “just” society that “redistributes” it in accordance with the whim of a government dedicated not to the protection of its citizens but to the shaping of a society. That is why the term is so abhorrent, assuming, as it does, something that is fundamentally and transparently false.

The rise of conservatism required a label with which to identify its adversary. “Liberal” was chosen because it was a term citizens understood and had been freely adopted by those who stood in contrast to conservative intellectual aspirations. It also avoided inevitable vilificationand blithe dismissal as “McCarthyism”. But it was not quite right. By the time Ronald Reagan managed to discredit the term and the philosophy that accompanied it, liberalism was largely exhausted and had been replaced by a more pernicious leftism. Today’s “progressives”, as they now describe themselves, are not the liberals of old, like John Kennedy, who wanted to implement programs he thought would improve the nation but were compatible with national principles. Modern progressivism is much more dangerous because it has as its project not improvement but destruction and rebuilding in its own ideal image. It does not want to improve on the American project but to replace it with a pernicious utopianism and they are not fastidious in how they do it. European leftists have never had moral constrains in their manner of political warfare.

Progressives reject the common assumptions that bound liberals and conservatives as Americans even in their rhetoric.They are unbounded by a traditional decency that used to inform American political discourse. They have no sense of a unified American project informed by American tradition. Theirs is the moral sense of the original Soviet project. Nothing is beneath them.

Which brings us to the incident of monumental insignificance that occurred during the remembrance of a liberal hero but which illustrated, as little else could, the difference between liberals and their bastard progeny, the new American progressive that is now the mainstream of the modern Democratic Party. I refer, of course, to intellectual pygmy Martin Bashir, a man of such limited moral gifts that he descended to revolting scatological references in an attack on Sarah Palin. Can one imagine John Kennedy or Walter Lippman or James Reston ever reduced to such vile babble? Never.

It was not so much that Bashir said it. Little is beneath him so little is expected. But that no one on the left could be roused to condemnation illustrates the impact of a corrosive leftism that has left its adherents desensitized to notions of common decency.

The incident will, of course, be shortly forgotten, and that is as it should be. But it is far past time to acknowledge that the proud liberalism of the past is no longer a vibrant force in American politics and that the progressivism that replaced it is truly anathema to the American project.”   

From The American Thinker   

You can also see this post at FreeState Now, on WordPress.

The American Thinker: J.R. Dunn: 'Barack Obama vs. Liberalism'

Source:The American Thinker is a right-wing populist publication.

“The conservative attitude toward Obama has largely been a mirror image of that of the left. To liberals, Obama is the ideal vision of Liberal Man — the Lightbringer, the new FDR in a darker shade,who will right all wrongs, set the U.S. firmly on a progressive path, and give out lots of free stuff (from “Obama’s stash,” as one admirer put it.)

Conservatives see the exact opposite: a demonic figure, the community organizer from Hell, a combination of Caligula, Lenin, Mao, and Blofeld, a Muslim-communist- progressive Antichrist with a perfect and implacable plan to destroy the U.S. and the Western world as a whole.

Events of the past few months have belied both the liberal and conservative visions. If Obama is the Antichrist, he’s a kind of goofy, inept, comical Antichrist at best. And as for the Lightbringer, events speak for themselves. Plainly, Obama is worst enemy liberalism has ever had.

Take a look at his record. Any aspect of his record, from any angle excepting only his media boosters. Finance, the economy, employment, energy, healthcare, foreign relations…in each case, Obama has taken the liberal agenda and smashed it against the nearest brick wall. He has, furthermore, left no plausible way of repairing or recovering the fragments.

If he is a demon, Obama is Goethe’s Mephistopheles, who “wills forever evil, and does forever good.”

We can begin anywhere. Why not renewables? Obama had a master plan for the country’s energy resources, derived directly from the agenda of the greens as expressed through the work of John Holdren (his “science czar”) and the Ehrlichs: abandon fossil fuels completely in favor of renewable power on a nationwide basis. If that causes misery and economic dislocation, that’s fine — no price is too high to pay for a “sustainable” future. Obama set this plan in motion though the shutdown of the coal industry (as he’d promised in his first presidential campaign) by the EPA as the first step toward banning fossil fuels. And at the same time….

Well, at the same time, the administration tossed billions of dollars into renewable energy, concentrating on that green daydream, solar power. The aim appears to have been (we can’t be certain since no one’s willing to discuss it at this point) to bootstrap the solar power industry using government subsidies so that it would slide into place as coal vanished.

Instead, administration largesse led to a series of bankruptcies that will appall and terrify business students for generations to come. Solyndra, EPV, Sunfilm, Evergreen, Abound, Solar Millennium — the names have already attained the status of legend. There has been no full accounting of the money they wasted (and no serious investigation scheduled either). The renewables catastrophe followed the standard blueprint for any given Obama scheme: no planning, no vetting, lack of due diligence, improper disbursement of funds, lack of accounting, incompetent management, and, following the collapse, a complete denial of responsibility from all concerned, both corporate and governmental. Not a single Obama-era renewable company can demonstrate any prospects whatsoever. As a legacy, several plants have been left so polluted that they cannot be sold or utilized and will require millions in cleanup costs.

To ice the cake, at the same time, fracking, pioneered by oil magnate George P. Mitchell, blazed across the country like a wildfire, transforming the United States in five years from an energy beggar to the leading producer in the world. It also, not to put too fine a point on it, attained most of the goals that Obama claimed for renewables: lowering dependence on foreign sources, slashing prices, and cutting levels of CO2.

Electric cars, another Obama obsession, have followed a similar trajectory. The introduction of mass-market electrics, which was to transform the country… right around now, as a matter of fact, has been nearly as complete a washout. Bankruptcies have occurred or are imminent among both car manufacturers (Fisker), and battery suppliers (A123). The basic objections to electrics — range, battery life, dependability, and expense — have never been overcome. While a few Leafs and Volts can be seen whirring back and forth, national impact has been minimal. The latest news involves the Incredible Exploding Car, Elon Musk’s contribution, the Tesla. It seems that a Tesla running over deadly road obstacles such as gum wrappers can suffer catastrophic damage causing the car to burst into flames. This has happened a few times over just the last couple months. You could toss “dangerous debris” of the type that crippled Teslas (rocks and broken tow hitches) at the undercarriage of any internal combustion vehicle then get in and drive across the country without a second thought. Let’s hope Musk is better at rockets.

The best that can be said about the Tesla is that Musk largely paid for it himself, without the billions from Obama’s stash thrown to the rest of the industry. It’s unlikely that much investment money will be spent on electrics in the near future, particularly since we have access to cheap natural-gas powered vehicles if we need them.

Which brings us to ObamaCare. Now, if you can picture the Titanic, packed with black plague victims, exploding over Lakehurst, NJ, you have a reasonable picture of the enormity and impact of ObamaCare, a fiasco that will cause more damage than any other government-sponsored operation since the heyday of the Marxist dictatorships in the mid-20th century. While the collectivization of the 1930s and the Great Leap Forward (1958-1962) certainly caused more human suffering, ObamaCare is unique in that it is occurring in a Western democracy, supposedly secure from such government-fomented catastrophes. Literally hundreds of millions of lives are being disrupted by this program. Untold thousands will die prematurely. Tens of thousands will be crippled or dogged by easily-treated disorders. Millions will suffer serious economic stress. It is not impossible that another recession will wrack the country. And there is no way to stop it. Obama’s “fix” is mere theater. The avalanche is still headed downhill, the American populace (most of them, as we know, Obama voters) staring at it wide-eyed. I intend to watch from the top of my secure stone tower with interest and sympathy. But Obama won’t be around. He has a golf date.

The outline is simple: Obama has a vision. In Ozymandias mode, he declares that his vision must be made manifest. His staff, the Executive Branch, the Democratic Party, and no small number of citizens race about to make it so. Treasury pulls a few billion from the eighth dimension. One of Valerie Jarrett’s relatives is dragged out to run the thing. Anybody who actually knows anything at all about the industry or specialty in question is carefully winnowed out. The media rhapsodizes, establishment Republicans nudge each other and whisper, “You know, there’s a fortune in lobbying for this deal….”

Then it comes crashing down. The media falls dead silent. Jay Carney stares off into space biting his lip. Obama glumly tees off. A week later it starts all over again.

That’s the pattern, one that could not have established itself without a complete lack of honesty, historical knowledge, common sense, or professional pride among anyone concerned. A sensible Democrat would have long ago pulled Obama aside and straightened him out — but the last one of those (Daniel P. Moynihan) ascended to abide with Al Smith years ago. All that’s left are the hacks, the crooks, and the ideologues, who think that the Obama wheel will continue turning forever.

ObamaCare was put into effect just as its models in the UK, Canada, and Australia were in the midst of collapse, and several years after Sweden began desperately privatizing its national healthcare program in order to stave off the same kind of disaster. It is a system that cannot be repaired, cannot operate without the cooperation of people who have already been cheated, and cannot be replaced.

We could go on, but instead we’ll turn to foreign policy.

One of the great desires of the liberal elite of our time is perfect communion with radical Muslims. This yearning for oneness with butchers is in no way a new trait. In previous decades, it was the criminal class in the United States, various political misfits of the Black Panther/Weatherman variety, and the leadership or cadres of the Communist totalitarian states overseas — Fidel, Mao, the Viet Cong, and so on. Liberalism long ago ceased being able to exist on its own terms and instead adapts practices, ideas, and goals from some of the most repellent ideologies in human history. Today it’s radical Islam, which liberals take as being identical to Islam as a whole. We’re supposed to “learn to live with” people who shoot schoolgirls, burn off the features of young women with acid, torture and behead people whose crimes amount to questioning passages of the Koran, and murder thousands of innocents of other creeds and backgrounds for no other reason than sheer spite. We are simply to accept this and learn to sing “Kumbaya” in Arabic or Farsi, with compelling new lyrics about murdering kaffirs and driving the Jews into the sea.

So Jihadi villains disappear from films. School textbooks, carefully cleansed of any mention of Christianity, suddenly feature lengthy, detailed accounts of the “contributions” of Islam to the West. Newspapers begin placing PBUH after the name of Mohammed. Marvel Comics comes up with a Muslim superhero. It’s surprising that nobody has turned Salman Rushdie over for the reward.

Obama embodies this in pure form. He is culturally Islamic (no way he couldn’t be, having spent his formative years in an Islamic country, Indonesia). Religiously he is a nullity, an empty secular of the type that infests the current elite. His leaning toward Islam has been expressed variously in claims that Islam forms an “important part” of American culture and that Islam has made endless “historical contributions” to the United States.

He has also made covert efforts to provide the Islamic world with what, in his ignorance and lack of insight, he believes it wants: to turn its people and governments en masse over to whatever Jihadi outfit is available. As a result, we have seen Libya descend into chaos, with an American ambassador and members of his staff paying the ultimate price, and Egypt, the leading Arab power and a firm ally of the United States, almost overturned on behalf of the Muslim Brotherhood. In Syria, the United States has found itself supporting “rebels” who tear out living hearts and eat them.

The administration is even now negotiating a treaty with Iran that will make the efforts of the British appeasers of Hitler in the 1930s look like the first wave to hit the Normandy beaches. The details of this effort remain vague — not surprising, since one of the architects is John Kerry — but the first version was spineless enough to appall the French, crippling the sanctions regime while giving the Mullahs carte blanche to complete their efforts to obtain nuclear weapons. In other words, peace in our time.

The Obama record being what it is, it will be somewhat surprising if Iran doesn’t slide into the Indian Ocean five minutes after a treaty is signed. Any Middle Eastern leader can tell you that cooperation with Obama is the mark of doom. So it will go with Iran. At a minimum, we will see large-scale warfare in the Middle East, and perhaps even a nuclear conflict (though not WW III, as some of the more hysterical legacy media commentators have predicted — it’s impossible to picture either Russia or China going to the mattresses over a Shi’ite theocracy). There will be some odd developments — how about an Israeli-Sunni coalition against Iran? — before the region at last shakes down into a new status quo. The price will be millions of dead and untold human misery. Obama’s responsibility for this will be direct and total.

Finally, Obama has also destroyed what has stood as the last hope of liberalism since the New Deal. Once the liberals have blown things up, they turn to the GOP, much as a four-year-old turns to Daddy, to fix it and make it work. So Eisenhower acted as conservator of the New Deal and Nixon savior of the Great Society. Obama, with his conniving, his insults, and his rampant ego, has ruined that. While there are plenty of Republicans who would come to his aid for a handful of magic beans — McCain, Graham, Ayotte, and Rubio, to mention only a few — they can’t. Not today, not in the second decade of the new millennium. They can’t because the party rank and file is infuriated, the tea parties are out for blood, and the barbarians, led by Ted Cruz, are within the gates.

This will stand as Obama’s great contribution: acting as modern liberalism’s executioner. Liberalism has been running on fumes for decades. Based on ideology and wish-fulfillment daydreams, it was connected to reality by the thinnest of gossamer threads. Now even those connections are gone, severed by Barack Obama. So what do its adherents do now? Fade away? Become even more weirdly cultic than before? Or switch to the vicious brutishness of their foreign models? Thanks to Obama, we’re going to find out.” 

From The American Thinker   

You can also see this post at FreeState Now, on WordPress.

American Thinker: Sierra Rayne: 'Big Government & Lower Economic Growth'

 

Source:American Thinker right-wing populist publication.

"Between 1800 and 1916, total government expenditures in the United States generally ranged between 2% and 3% of GDP.  There were higher peaks for the War of 1812 (5.1%) and the Civil War (13.8%), but in both cases pre-war government spending levels were re-established within about a decade after the end of the conflict.  Even after WWI, the wartime peak of government spending (24.2% of GDP) declined rapidly to a slightly higher than historical spending base (3%) by the mid-1920s. 

And then in 1930, it began: the long, unrelenting rise in government expenditures up to the current levels of >40% of GDP.  Nearly half of the entire American economy has been effectively nationalized.  As recently as the early 1950s, government expenditures as a percentage of GDP were more than threefold lower than at present.  The effect of the Korean War is barely noticeable in this climb.  WWII saw a rapid mobilization/demobilization of the government-based economy, but the pre-1930 low levels of government spending were never to return.

Gross public debt tells a similar story. Up to the start of WWI, the inter-war public debt minima were between 0% and 3% of GDP. Debt was accumulated in wartime, and eventually paid off. Much like after the Civil War, the WWI debt was being paid off until 1930, when the era of permanent big government began. After that, the debt increased from 16% of GDP up to its current level of >100%. The WWII peak came and went within a couple decades, but the relentless march of big government precluded any chance of returning to the state of effectively zero public debt that had existed less than only a half-century before.

What effect has the era of big government had on economic growth?  To definitively isolate government size effects on economic growth is essentially impossible.  Econometrics, like all other applications of multiple regression techniques in the social and natural sciences, is highly dependent on what dependent variables are chosen in the regression, which are left out, any time lags between variables, and how correlative-causative relationships are interpreted.  But what we can say with certainty is that the era of American big government in the latter half of the 20th century and first part of the 21st century correlates with the lowest period of non-major wartime real per-capita economic growth since 1800.  

You can see the rest of this article at the American Thinker. Or not, completely your choice.

Republicans like to point to the 1980s as their utopia when it comes to economic growth in the American economy. Even though the Federal Government grew under President Ronald Reagan and the Republican Senate that he had for the first 6 years of his presidency, to deal with the Cold War, as well as the so-called War On Drugs, and rising crime in America. 

Mainstream Democrats (meaning center-right and center-left) like to point to the 1990s as their utopia for economic growth in the American economy. Even though the Federal Government shrunk under President Bill Clinton and the one Democratic Congress (House and Senate) that he had his first two years and the 3 Republican Congress's that he had during his last 6 years. The government shrunk, the budget was balanced, because the Cold War ended and America wanted to pay off its budget deficit. to deal with rising inflation and interest rates from the early 1990s. 

It's one think to say that the American economy would be better off with a smaller Federal Government. The question is: how do you get there? 

You don't see any Republicans calling for gutting the defense budget, and eliminating Medicare, Social Security, Unemployment Insurance, Medicaid, etc. Talking points sound cool in partisan debates. But to govern, you have to live and operate in the real world and be able to accept and deal with reality. 

You can also see this post at FreeState Now, on Blogger.   

You can also see this post at FreeState Now, on WordPress.

American Thinker: Jim Yardley: 'A Different View of Paternalism'

Source:American Thinker- right-wing populist publication.

"The word "paternalism" has been bandied about concerning the various pathetic defenses of Barack Obama's now infamous claim that "If you like your health care, you can keep it. Period."

From the American Thinker 

"Paternalism describes the relationship between the Federal Government and tribes.  It is an important concept to understand when critiquing how Indian Affairs is conducted in light of indigenous rights and sovereignty." 

Source:Sovereign Stories- from them.

From Sovereign Stories

There are two forms of paternalism at least as I see it: one that obviously comes from our parents as shocking as that may sound and I believe the only people it should come from. And as annoying as and in some cases positive parental paternalism may sound, our parents at least tend to have our best interests at heart even when they go too far. 

But then there is what I call governmental paternalism whether it comes from governmental laws, or proposals to create new paternalistic laws and they are basically built around the notion even if they are done with the best intentions, that government knows best what the people themselves need for their own good.  

Things like proposals to outlaw homosexual activity or pornography from the Far-Right. To having the Federal Government regulate marriage in the United States. 

Then there are paternalistic proposals from the Far-Left in trying to regulate what people can eat, drink or smoke for our own good. Because paternalists on the Far-Left believe they know best what people should be eating, drinking and smoking.  

And as much as right-wingers especially those right-wingers who may have some governmental paternalistic views when it comes to social issues, like to label the Affordable Care Act as paternalistic, it is not. Because what it does with the minimum health insurance requirement is to say that everyone is required to have enough health insurance to meet their own individual health care needs.

So people in America can’t past their own health care costs on to other people. The Affordable Care Act doesn’t require people to live healthy and take care of themselves. 

What the ACA says is that we are all responsible for our own health care costs at least those of us who can afford our own health insurance. And for those of us who choose to live unhealthy, they can still do that, but they won’t be able to pass the costs of their unhealthy decisions on to other people.

You can also see this post at FreeState Now, on Blogger.

You can also see this post at FreeState Now, on WordPress.