On the December 17, 2010 edition of the O’Reilly Factor, Bill had a debate with two ladies of the liberal persuasion.  One of them was Dr. Caroline Heldman, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Occidental College.  Asked what the government owes its citizens, Dr. Heldman responded, “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” Let me stop there before continuing the quote.  Those are our founding ideals as stated in the Declaration of Independence.  It followed from the Founders’ belief that “all men are created equal, and that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.” 

Okay, so the good professor takes these venerable words from one of our founding documents and proceeds to bastardize them into her progressive world view.  To continue her quote, “Life would be health care, the pursuit of happiness would mean that everyone who sought gainful employment would get it, and certainly higher education and a poverty safety net, especially for home makers who are taking care of children at home.”  Really?  Is that what the Founders meant with their carefully chosen words?  This is from an individual in a position to teach students politics?  Let’s try again.

Life

Life meant just that.  Everyone has a right to live.  Government should protect that right, from foreign powers who desire to take our lives and subjugate us.  We have a right to live.  It does not mean universal health care.  If it did, why didn’t the Founders mention it?  Was health and longevity such that no one cared about it at the time?  No.  Your health was your responsibility, not your right.  You have a responsibility to take care of yourself, not to engage in risky behavior such as eating too much, or drinking too much, not taking precautions to keep illness from your door.  You also have a responsibility to put away some funds should you need to call upon a physician.  Just as you put away funds for food, clothing, and shelter.  If you  need a professional like a lawyer, accountant, or doctor, you should be prepared to pay for those things. 

Liberty

The professor glosses over this point in her details and it is easy to see why.  She believes in just the opposite.  By Liberty our Founders meant free from government interference.  We should be left alone to live our lives as we choose without thousands of bureaucrats telling us we have to wear a bicycle helmet, buckle our seat belts, buy a low-flush toilet, use compact fluorescent light bulbs, use a low-flow showerhead, and on and on.  Leave us alone and we’ll take responsibility for our lives and we’ll do just fine.

The Pursuit of Happiness

According to Dr. Heldman, the Pursuit of Happiness would be that anyone seeking gainful employment would get it.  She doesn’t say exactly what she means by seeking.  Is that looking in the want ads?  And if you seek, you will get.  Who is going to guarantee that?  That was a rhetorical question.  I am sure that Dr. Heldman  wants the government to do that.  Of course, it would include higher education and a poverty safety net, especially for homemakers who are taking care of children at home.  It doesn’t sound like much of an effort has to be put out, for the goodies to come pouring in.  What was that passage from the Bible, “Seek and ye shall find?”  Dr. Heldman wants to go one better, “Seek and ye shall get.”  Benjamin Franklin had a better explanation for the Pursuit of Happiness, “The U.S. Constitution doesn’t guarantee happiness, only the pursuit of it. You have to catch up with it yourself.”  Got it?  Pursuit is a far more active than seek.

 Pursuit, noun, the act of chasing after somebody or something in order to catch, attack, or overtake that person or thing.

Seek, verb, to try to find a person, thing, or place.

Chasing versus “try to find”, which do you think would take more effort?

Paying the Piper

When Bill O’Reilly challenged the professor that we can’t afford to give out all these things she quickly disagreed.  O’Reilly tried to pin her down to how much of his personal wealth she would take to make this happen, and as progressives are quick to do these days she couldn’t come up with a set amount.  You see, they will take as much as it takes.  When Bill asked if she would require 50%, she was okay with that amount.  If she needs more later, she’ll be back. 

Where does the government get its money?  Right, it gets it almost entirely from its citizens.  Even corporate income taxes are ultimately paid by individuals as the taxes are built into the price of the goods and services we buy.  So what Dr. Heldman is saying is we have to take money from citizens so we can give money to citizens.  Let’s be blunt.  What she wants is not Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness as intended by the Founders, she wants wealth redistribution popularized by Karl Marx, “from each according to his ability (the successful), to each according to his need (the seekers).”

So the progressives pervert the ideals of our Founders and redefine them according to the beliefs of Marx, and as long as their definition contains the words life, liberty and happiness (or two out of three) they claim to be upholding the ideals on which this great country was founded.  If the good Dr. believes what she believes, that’s fine.  Just be honest enough to say it.  She doesn’t believe in liberty she believes in wealth redistribution and instead of personal responsibility she believes in the responsibility of the collective.  Then we can have an honest debate.

Until then, I say to the government: Give not, take not.

That’s my opinion; I’d like to know yours.  Please comment below.

In today’s rant titled, “The Angry Rich and Taxes,” Paul Krugman continues to amaze how the man won a Nobel Prize for economics.  I know, I know, it was for his work on international trade.  I keep telling myself, but it just seems so strange that when he wanders into other areas he seems so lost.  But then again, he was a paid advisor to Enron.

After his introductory riff he gets down to business, “The rage of the rich has been building ever since Mr. Obama took office. At first, however, it was largely confined to Wall Street.”  Ever since Mr. Obama took office and primarily from Wall Street?  Wall Street spent tremendous amounts of money to get Obama elected over John McCain and Krugman is trying to tell us that they were upset with him from the day he took office?  Here are the numbers:

1. Goldman Sachs associates gave $764,700 more to Obama than McCain
2. Citigroup associates gave $379,239 more to Obama than McCain
3. JP Morgan associates gave $467,025 more to Obama than McCain
4. UBS associates gave $350,726 more to Obama than McCain
5. Morgan Stanley gave $241,429 more to Obama than McCain

Who is crazier, Krugman or all those folks on Wall Street, who we are told are devilishly clever, who spent a fortune to elect a man they hated the day he won?

Krugman continues, “And among the undeniably rich, a belligerent sense of entitlement has taken hold: it’s their money, and they have the right to keep it.”  I almost forgot, that the money was really yours, Paul, yours and President Obama’s and, how does it go, oh, yeah “to each according to his needs.”  My apologies to Karl Marx if I didn’t get that exactly right.  So whatever stipend you decide it is permissible for the most productive members of our society to live on, let us know so we can stop complaining about the socialist march to a worker’s paradise, like Cuba.

“The spectacle of high-income Americans, the world’s luckiest people, wallowing in self-pity and self-righteousness would be funny, except for one thing: they may well get their way. Never mind the $700 billion price tag for extending the high-end tax breaks: virtually all Republicans and some Democrats are rushing to the aid of the oppressed affluent.”

As Samuel Goldwyn said, “The harder I work, the luckier I get.”  We are indeed a lucky nation, but that is not by accident, it is because the Founding Fathers put in place a government that was limited and restrained.  Mr. Krugman wants to drain the luck out of America by replacing it with unbridled government that consumes all it can grasp and then reach for more.  Here’s a bulletin for you Mr. Krugman, there is no $700 billion price tag for extending the tax breaks you oppose.  Not extending them is a $700 billion tax increase on an economy that should have been roaring back months ago if you and your ilk would get your collective boots off the economy’s neck.  It is not the government’s $700 billion that will be paid to those taxpayers, it is those taxpayer’s hard earned money that the you and Obama want to steal to waste on programs that don’t work now and more that won’t work in the future.  Stop the spending.

Here is the reality for Mr. Krugman.  In a 2007 article, Stephen Moore wrote, “The Congressional Budget Office reports that, since the 2003 tax cuts, federal revenues have grown by $745 billion—the largest real increase in history over such a short time period. Individual and corporate income tax receipts have jumped by 30 percent in the two years since the tax cuts.” How is that possible, Uncle Paul, we cut tax rates and tax revenue grew faster than ever? Say it ain’t so, Uncle Paul!  Let’s look at it another way. According to the Tax Foundation:

So how does this add up?  Everyone (isn’t that such an American concept?) got a tax cut under Bush, across the board.  Revenues flowed into the Treasury at a record pace.  The rich shouldered a larger share of the tax load and the lowest earners shouldered less.  That sounds to me like win-win-win, and it’s so American.  But now Obama, and his acolytes like Mr. Krugman want to burden their fragile recovery with $700 billion in additional taxes. 

I have a very simple message for you both. It’s the spending, stupid!

“What follows is for those who want to change the world from what it is to what they believe it should be. The Prince was written by Machiavelli for the Haves on how to hold power. Rules for Radicals is written for the Have-Nots on how to take it away.”

So reads the opening paragraph of Saul Alinsky’s book, “Rules for Radicals.”  Barack Obama is a follower of Saul Alinsky taking his first job out of Columbia as a community organizer in Chicago and tutored by a man named Mike Kruglik.  Kruglig described Obama this way:

“He was a natural, the undisputed master of agitation, who could engage a room full of recruiting targets in a rapid-fire Socratic dialogue, nudging them to admit that they were not living up to their own standards. As with the panhandler, he could be aggressive and confrontational. With probing, sometimes personal questions, he would pinpoint the source of pain in their lives, tearing down their egos just enough before dangling a carrot of hope that they could make things better.” — “Obama’s Alinsky Jujitsu,” American Thinker, January 8, 2008 

Democrats Facing Threats After Passage of Health Care Reform

While wading through a crowd of protesters carrying a massive gavel, Nancy Pelosi was joined by several prominent black Democrats.  A racial epithet was called out from the crowd evoking a reaction from Pelosi’s companions.  The cameras caught the reaction, but not the provocateur.  Neither the police or any news organization caught the individual, but the “main stream media” immediately started linking Tea Party protesters with racism.

In the following days, CNN and others reported threats to Democrats who voted for the health care bill, including a graphic voicemail to Bart Stupak; an anonymous fax picturing a noose was sent to a black Democratic Congressman James Clyburn; Democratic Congresswoman Louise Slaughter reports a brick being thrown through the window of her district office in Niagara Falls, NY.  Very troubling indeed.

Having walked down Pennsylvania Avenue with thousands of Tea Party protesters last year, I can say they were the most orderly, principled, polite, helpful gathering of people you could imagine.  Naturally the “main stream media” reported nothing of this demonstration other than a sign or two that linked this administration to the Nazis.  So was I surprised to see this vitriol suddenly sprout up?  While I could understand the frustration with this arrogant Congress and President ignore the overwhelming will of the people, I still couldn’t grasp them going that far.

When I heard about the broken window in Congresswoman Slaughter’s district office, I thought of other protests with broken glass.  Protesters smashing windows in Seattle at a meeting of the World Trade Organization in 1999.  The G20 summit in Scotland in 2009 had protesters smashing windows.  These violent protesters represent the left, not the right. Hmmm…

Last night in Ottawa, the police cancelled a speech by Ann Coulter at the University of Ottawa, because the threat of violence became too great:

After Tuesday night, the hatred incited by Francois’ letter is no longer theoretical. The police called off my speech when the auditorium was surrounded by thousands of rioting liberals—screaming, blocking the entrance, throwing tables, demanding that my books be burned, and finally setting off the fire alarm.  

Ms. Coulter received a letter, before her speech, from the provost of the University that she could potentially be criminally liable for hate speech in Canada.  Who else spoke at the University without such admonishment?  How about Communist Angela Davis?  Hmmm…

Rules for Radicals

So what are Saul Alinsky’s instructions to radicals?  Here he outlines the purpose:

In this book we are concerned with how to create mass organizations to seize power and give it to the people; to realize the democratic dream of equality, justice, peace…. “Better to die on your feet than to live on your knees.’ This means revolution.” p.3                               

“Radicals must be resilient, adaptable to shifting political circumstances, and sensitive enough to the process of action and reaction to avoid being trapped by their own tactics and forced to travel a road not of their choosing.” p.6

“A Marxist begins with his prime truth that all evils are caused by the exploitation of the proletariat by the capitalists. From this he logically proceeds to the revolution to end capitalism, then into the third stage of reorganization into a new social order of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and finally the last stage — the political paradise of communism.” p.10

“An organizer working in and for an open society is in an ideological dilemma to begin with, he does not have a fixed truth — truth to him is relative and changing; everything to him is relative and changing…. To the extent that he is free from the shackles of dogma, he can respond to the realities of the widely different situations….”

Everything is relative and changing.  Doesn’t that sound like the left’s view of a “living and breathing” Constitution?  The Constitution is not what the Founding Fathers intended when the wrote it, but what the words mean in today’s context.  In other words, there really is no Constitution, because the Constitution means whatever you say it means today.

“The tenth rule… is you do what you can with what you have and clothe it with moral garments.… It involves sifting the multiple factors which combine in creating the circumstances at any given time… Who, and how many will support the action?… If weapons are needed, then are appropriated weapons available? Availability of means determines whether you will be underground or above ground; whether you will move quickly or slowly…” p.36

Clothe it with moral garments.  Did the Democrats argue the merits of health care or did they continually fall back to stories of, for example, “a woman who had to wear her dead sister’s dentures,” said Louise Slaughter.  Or, they said that when people were asked about the details of ObamaCare, the public overwhelmingly supported it, so they are not opposed to the whole package.  Really?  I’m sure that if you picked through the programs of Hitler, Stalin, Castro, and Mao you could get similar reactions: lower unemployment, self-respect, prosperity, etc., but the full package doesn’t work, it’s a lie.

Rules for Radicals: Tactics

9. “The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.”

Can you say racism?  How many times has this trump card been played?  The epithet hurled from the crowd immediately sparked cries of racism and the “main stream media” tied them to the Tea Party protesters.

13. Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.  In conflict tactics there are certain rules that [should be regarded] as universalities. One is that the opposition must be singled out as the target and ‘frozen.’…

The Democrats squeaked through an ugly health care bill.  The next hurdle is to get this far behind them and try to salvage the 2010 election before they are thrown from office.  Recent polls show a significant uptick in Obama’s approval, but it is all coming from Democrats.  Republicans haven’t budget and Independents are even worse.  Hmmm… what do Democrats do now?  Read Rule 13.

Pick the target: The Tea Party protesters are the most energized potent force in politics today.  They must be stopped.  Freeze it:  Have some left wing radicals, maybe some SEIU members mingle among the Tea Party protesters and shout the racial epithets and melt away.    Pelosi’s parade route was known among the Democrats.  They staged it to look like a Civil Rights march from the 1960s.  They knew the media would be there and they could see, once on site, where to stand to be heard by Pelosi & co., but not be caught on camera.  The lap dog media would immediately launch into grave concerns of the Tea Party turning ugly, “as we knew they would.”  Freeze them.

Personalize it.  What is more personal than racism?  How do you defend against a charge of racism?  Polarize it:  Paint the Tea Party as a bunch of hateful, racist, violent rednecks with guns and fair minded people will not want to associate with them.  They will drift away from the Tea Party and in the absence of another group to organize them, they hope these folks will become dejected and not turn out in November, and Nancy Pelosi can dodge a bullet and tighten her grip on the Speaker’s gavel.

Battle Back

The executive branch is responsible for enforcing the laws.  Press them to find out who did these things.  Put forth the theory that it is the left trying to discredit the Tea Party people.  After all, which is the more plausible explanation, radicals being radicals or law abiding citizens becoming crazed and dangerous?  Make them disprove the case.

This appears more dangerous and grave every day.  It’s eight months to November.  Stay vigilant and don’t let up.

The Obama Administration probably wishes they didn’t spend $18 million to build a website that is making a mockery of their vaunted stimulus package that if not passed might result in an economic calamity from which we might never recover.  Well, here is a random sampling of six beneficiaries of stimulus money:

• Maine — Fish River Rural Health: $491,222. Jobs created — zero
• New Jersey — Southern Regional High School Board of Education: $119,622. Jobs created — zero
• Michigan — West Branch Rose City Area School District: $879,258. Jobs created — zero
• Georgia — Georgia Crisis Family Center: $16,425.  Jobs created — zero
• Minnesota — Regents of the University of Minnesota: $294,200.  Jobs created — zero
• Texas — Port Aransas Independent School District: $143,241. Jobs created — zero

Enough already, I think you get the picture.  Lest you think my sampling was biased you  can play along.  Go to the website, pick a dot at random and see for yourself.  The media seem to be starting to wake up and do their job.  ABC News reported on data from non-existent Congressional Districts.  The New York Times reported on a $1,000 grant that created 50 jobs and upon further investigation found out the $1,000 went to purchase a lawn mower.  But don’t worry, President Obama put that pit bull Joe Biden in charge of making sure the money was spent carefully.  President Obama: \”Nobody Messes with Joe\”  Joe Biden, call your office.

We are on an express train to financial ruin.  This is not just a financial problem but a national security problem as well.  We won the Cold War, not with weapons, but with our economy.  President Reagan ramped up our military and the teetering Soviet economy could not keep up and communism collapsed.  China is becoming more capitalist every day as we chase the ghost of Karl Marx.  I ask a simple question, “Do you trust this administration to spend your tax dollars wisely?”  Do you believe any administration, Republican, Democrat, Independent, can effectively manage the federal government as it exists today? 

A phrase we often heard in the midst of the financial crisis as justification for bailouts was “too big to fail.”  One response to that was “make them smaller.”  If the federal government is too big to manage and is growing without bound, then we, who are the government of the people, must make the government smaller.  It is a fundamental truth of government that programs once started do not end, they just find other things to do.  Here is a case in point.

When I worked for one of the phone company spin offs after the break up of AT&T, I came across a regulatory agency called the Rural Electrification Administration.  Strange I thought, most of America has electricity, and I am not working for the electric company.  It turns out, that agency was created to help bring electricity to rural America.  Okay, that sounds like a good idea.  However, once its mission was completed, instead of going out of business, it found a new mission: bringing phone service to rural America, and it will go on and on.  One of the key problems is how the mission is defined.  In this example, as long as one farm doesn’t have electricity, the agency will still have a reason to exist.  As long as a log cabin in the woods doesn’t have a phone land line, the agency must soldier on.  As any economist will tell you, the cost of serving each additional rural property, will eventually skyrocket.

If we were to take these functions and drive them down to the state and local level, eventually someone will stand up and say, “We’re done,  it’s not worth the increase in taxes to prolong the life of this agency.”  But ensconced in Washington, it costs more to fight it than let it go on.  But we have reached a tipping point where if we don’t cut the beast down to size, the beast will have us for dinner.  Chinese anyone?

“A surplus became an excuse to transfer wealth to the wealthy” — President Barack Obama, Feb. 24, 2009

There you have the liberal philosophy in a nutshell.  Transfer wealth to the wealthy?  Transfer from whom to the wealthy?  The government?  The context of this question came regarding taking more in taxes from the wealthy to pay for all the new goodies, Obama and Pelosi are handing out, by letting the Bush tax cuts expire.  But what really happens with a tax cut?  It basically means that an individual gets to keep more of their own money that they have earned. After all it is the income tax. So where is the wealth transfer Obama speaks of?  Is President Obama really trying to say that everything we earn belongs to the federal government and that by letting us keep any of it, it is a transfer of wealth from the rightful owner, the government, to the unworthy and greedy individual?  If that’s not straight out of Karl Marx, I don’t know what is.

“Tax cuts alone can’t solve all of our economic problems — especially tax cuts that are targeted to the wealthiest few.”  — Obama, Feb. 24, 2009

This is his other gem.  What tax cuts were targeted to the rich?  The fundamental difference between liberals and conservatives regarding tax policy is the same difference throughout their respective philosophies.  Liberals believe in groups, conservatives believe in individuals.  Perhaps that is why President Obama is so confused.

Conservative tax policy is that a tax cut should apply to all individuals who pay taxes.  By reducing the tax burden there is an incentive to invest and grow the economy.  If you make more you get to keep more.  At the same time, under Bush, many low income people were removed from the tax rolls altogether.

Liberal tax policy, like all of their policies, depends on to which group you belong.  If you are in a group that has a low income, you have to get something, so you get tax money whether or not you pay taxes (aka welfare).  If you are in a group, that has a high income, regardless of how much of the tax burden you are already carrying, not only do you get nothing, you have to pay more.  That’s targeting.  The Bush tax cuts were not targeted they applied across the board.  We’re all Americans, we all get a break.  Even after the Bush tax cuts, the wealthiest Americans carried a larger share of the total tax burden than before the cuts, but that is not enough for the liberals.  They want it all, but they’ll settle for as much as they can get away with.

We Need a Dose of Honesty

The more President Obama speaks, the less honest he is with the American people.  He makes statements like the above that are misleading at best, outright lies at worst.  He does not include the role of government in creating the economic mess we are in, when he speaks of how we got here.  Without addressing the role of government, what they did wrong cannot be fixed, and just like if you ignore a leak in your roof, it’s not going to get better over time.

President Obama promised a new beginning in Washington, but so far he is selling the same old tired ideas, brightly dressed up in his impressive oratory.  It is only he has left the stage and the lights have dimmed that people start scratching their head and wondering, “Did he really say that?”

Ever since Ronald Reagan was president we have heard our friends on the left berate “trickle down economics.”  The idea that a tax break applied uniformly to all taxpayers, was somehow unfair because the dollars saved at the lower income levels were dwarfed by the savings at the upper levels.  They always point to the glass being half empty rather than half full, meaning that they will never talk about how much these same individuals still pay in taxes, after the tax cut.  Barack Obama said in the debates that John McCain wanted to give wealthy individuals a tax break of $700,000.  What he doesn’t say is how much that individual still pays after the break.  If they are saving $700,000 they are probably still paying several million in taxes.

Our country was founded with these words from the Declaration of Independence:

“WE hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness — That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the Consent of the Governed…”

Let’s parse these words in the context of Senator Obama’s tax policies.

All men are created equal .  A tax cut of a constant percentage applied to all taxpayers would treat them equally, providing a benefit proportional to the size of their tax bill.  If their tax bill is $1,000, a 10% tax cut would give them $100.  If their tax bill is $7 million, a 10% tax cut would yield $700,000, which is an enormous difference.  But, the amount of taxes the former would end up paying is $900 and the latter is $6.3 million.  Do you think they would want to swap tax bills under the guise of fairness?  Senator Obama’s unequal plan is to raise taxes at the top and cut them at the bottom.

“Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness” – it’s the Pursuit of Happiness, not Happiness.  It is not government’s role to make you happy.  Government’s role is to allow you to live your life, free from arbitrary or despotic control (Liberty), and free to pursue your happiness, whatever that means to you.  In your pursuit we’ll all be pulling for you, but it is not the collective responsibility of your fellow citizens to deliver it to you on a tasseled pillow.

“Deriving their just powers from the Consent of the Governed” — this points to accountability and it should be the guiding principle behind any program or proposal.  Since the President of the United States is the only office put to a vote of all Americans, the president should ask him/herself, does this program or proposal benefit all of my constituents (i.e., all Americans; the Consent of the Governed)?  If asked, would they consent?  From time to time tough, unpopular decisions will have to be made, but they should be made in the spirit that it benefits the country as a whole.  I believe such consent would be granted on the question, do we need the Armed Forces?  Providing for the national defense is a fundamental Federal responsibility.  Could the same be said of a bridge to nowhere?  How about most tax loopholes?

In Senator Obama’s, now famous, encounter with Joe the Plumber he told Joe, “My attitude is that if the economy’s good for folks from the bottom up, it’s gonna be good for everybody. I think when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.”

So, it’s mean, stupid, evil, and unfair to free up a lot of capital, the lifeblood of the economy, at the top.  But it is a jolly good idea to give relatively small amounts to individuals where it will probably be consumed rather than invested and that the benefits will trickle up to everyone else?

It is contrary to the Declaration of Independence to spread the wealth around, by taking from one individual to give to another.  It was Karl Marx who said, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!”  From Joe the Plumber according to his ability, to someone else according to his needs!

Private giving to help one’s fellow man is perhaps the most noble and honorable thing a person can do.  What is wrong is using government force to steal from one group to give to another.