The In-Your-Face Socialist Quote of the Day

Democrat Max Baucus on the "healthcare" "reform" "bill":

"Too often, much of late, the last couple three years, the mal-distribution of income in American is gone up way too much, the wealthy are getting way, way too wealthy and the middle income class is left behind," he said. "Wages have not kept up with increased income of the highest income in America. This legislation will have the effect of addressing that mal-distribution of income in America."

So...we are going to take away those in the middle class' ability to choose their own health insurance providers (oh yes, this is what will happen), punish the "rich" who employ the majority of Americans, do nothing to promote competition in the insurance industry between companies, do nothing to reign in the litigating leeches in the law profession, and monopolize all decision-making about health in a body that can't even run a five-billion dollar weatherization program (as Mark Levin has pointed out)?  What could go wrong?

The Most Nonsensical Paragraph in the History of Economic... Err... Reporting

From Blomberg, oops, Bloomberg:

Companies are still hesitant to add workers until they see sustained sales gains and are convinced the economic recovery has taken hold. Economists surveyed by Bloomberg News anticipate the government’s report April 2 will show payrolls increased by 184,000, in part due to temporary hiring by the federal government to conduct the 2010 census and because of better weather compared with February. 

And I will be hesitant to purchase my second estate in Lyons until I am convinced that I am next Saturday's lucky Powerball winner.

The Best Short Series on the Radical Left

David Horowitz' Alinsky, Beck, Satan and Me (in four parts) is one of the best short series on the hard left I have ever read. It may not be persuasive to those who are lucky enough not to have seen the serious radical left up close and personal, but I would urge people not to eject from the post out of sheer disbelief that people would intentionally seek to destroy a once great country, such as the one conservatives seek to restore.

The implication of his series of posts? Conservatives fight with a prostrate sense of moral outrage, radicals fight with all the mischief, deception, and chaos that they can possibly unleash. Radicals truly believe that you've got to go through hell before you get to heaven. Conservatives believe that heaven, if there is a heaven, is reserved for those who respect the sanctity of the human conscience and who take the moral imperative of "compassion" seriously.

From the first in the short series:

Glenn Beck will be on vacation this week but when he returns on the 24th he has invited me to come to New York to talk to him on camera about Saul Alinsky, the strategy guru of the Obama era. For the the Hillary-Soros generation of johnny-come-lately radicals and their ACORN footsoldiers, Alinksy is their Sun-Tzu and his book Rules for Radicals is the field manual for their struggle. I thought while I'm refreshing my acquaintance with this destructive fellow and re-reading his text, I would share my thoughts with you, serially over the next week.

For this first post, let's just focus on the dedication of the book - to Satan:

"Lest we forget, an over-the-shoulder acknowledgment to the very first radical:" (Pause there for second. Now continue): "from all our legends, mythology, and history(and who is to know where mythology leaves off and history begins - or which is which), the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom - Lucifer."

[Continued]

Notes on Ideological Subversion

The following are some notes derived from KGB defector Yuri Bezmenov's description of the subversion of the United States from a country founded in freedom and capitalism to one heading in the direction of dependence, coercion, and socialism.

Categories, Demoralization, Results

IDEAS
1. Religion: Politicize, Commercialize, Entertainment. Leads to: Death Wish.
2. Education: Permissiveness, Relativism. Leads to: Ignorance.
3. Media: Monopolize, Manipulate, Discredit, Non-Issues. Leads to: Uninformed Myopia.
4. Culture. False Heroes and Role Models. Leads to: Addictive Fads, Mass Psychology.

STRUCTURE
1. Law & Order: Legislative, Not Moral. Leads to: Mistrust "Justice."
2. Social Relations: Rights not Obligations. Leads to: Less Individual Responsibility.
3. Security: Intel, Police, Military. Leads to: Defenselessness.
4. Internal Politics: Party Antagonisms. Leads to: Disunity.

LIFE
1. Family, Society: Break up. Leads to: No Loyalty (to State).
2. Health: Sports, Medicare [HC Bill]. Junk Food. Leads to: Enfeebled Masses.
3. Race: Lower the Uppers, Bible?, Genetics. Leads to: Hatred, Division.
4. Population: De-land, Urbanize, [Green Movement, Abortion]. Leads to: Alienation.
5. Labor: Unions vs Society [See NLRB]. Leads to: Victimization.

Bloggers: Building Our Own Matrix

This guy is about 95% right on what he says. Nix the socialist ideas (people need to provide for themselves) and you've got an interesting point of view on the bottom-up pressure bubbling up in this nation, indeed this world, against the state.

To clarify, we don't need violence, we need to enhance the matrix of spontaneous self-generated information known as the interwebs, sensitive to reporting, context, knowledge and theory-building, which acts as a citizens' early warning system against human rights abusers and would-be oppressors.

How to Answer the U.S. Census

Take the time to watch this video on how to answer the U.S. Census. Or else.

P.S. There is some ChristopherWalkeny goodness awaiting those who see the vid.

Thaddeus McCotter's Defiant Speech on Healthcare Bill

CBO: Debt Will Claim Nine-Tenths of All Wealth Production by 2020!

The Washington Times:

President Obama's fiscal 2011 budget will generate nearly $10 trillion in cumulative budget deficits over the next 10 years, $1.2 trillion more than the administration projected, and raise the federal debt to 90 percent of the nation's economic output by 2020, the Congressional Budget Office reported Thursday.

In its 2011 budget, which the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) released Feb. 1, the administration projected a 10-year deficit total of $8.53 trillion. After looking it over, CBO said in its final analysis, released Thursday, that the president's budget would generate a combined $9.75 trillion in deficits over the next decade.

"An additional $1.2 trillion in debt dumped on [GDP] to our children makes a huge difference," said Brian Riedl, a budget analyst at the conservative Heritage Foundation. "That represents an additional debt of $10,000 per household above and beyond the federal debt they are already carrying."

The federal public debt, which was $6.3 trillion ($56,000 per household) when Mr. Obama entered office amid an economic crisis, totals $8.2 trillion ($72,000 per household) today, and it's headed toward $20.3 trillion (more than $170,000 per household) in 2020, according to CBO's deficit estimates.

That figure would equal 90 percent of the estimated gross domestic product in 2020, up from 40 percent at the end of fiscal 2008. By comparison, America's debt-to-GDP ratio peaked at 109 percent at the end of World War II, while the ratio for economically troubled Greece hit 115 percent last year.

[Continued]

Oh those compassionate liberals are on the path to crushing more wealth than we can create, and clearing the road to debt slavery.  Whether that slavery is to be ruled over by oligarchs or an idealized mutual enslavement to the mob is irrelevant.  You lefties need to wake up - you are not building a utopia, you are trashing society, bankrupting the economy, and ushering in a dictatorship!

Harry Reid Votes Against Healthcare Bill - Twice

Harry Reid, in his usual state of mental turpor, cast a vote against the Senate reconciliation bill, twice, before changing his vote to "yes." Reid then proclaimed the bill a new "Bill of Rights."

This is a revelatory statement.

The Democrats have by fiat declared the old Bill of Rights obsolete, to be replaced by a social welfare state encompassing the entire people, passed by the legislative branch in violation of its delegated Constitutional powers, signed by the Executive Branch with legislative amendment by Executive Order, in violation of its delegated Constitutional powers, and apparently to be tacitly rubber-stamped by a Judicial Branch with the implicit authority to adjudicate Constitutional questions.

The Constitutionally authorized process for altering the Constitution, including the Bill of Rights, is by Amendment. The Amendment process entails passage by TWO-THIRDS OF BOTH HOUSES and ratification by THREE-FOURTHS of all state legislatures.

There is no way this healthcare bill, unauthorized by Article I, Section 8 of delegated powers to the Congress, passes the litmus test clearly provided by the Constitution on how the federal government makes law. If the Judicial Branch does not draw a line of demarcation on this bill, that it is unconstitutional and violates our civil liberties, legitimate government in the United States is dead.

Life Down, Property Down, Liberty to Go

In the name of "equality," Ed Schultz of GE-owned MSNBC is urging the Democrats to shut down talk radio. His line: "If we're going to be socialists, let's be socialists across the board." Whoah, we stupid "teabaggers" didn't see that one coming.

This is pretty simple to follow. Once the government gets control over the money supply, the housing, the places of employment, and over the life and death of the citizenry, you know that the politicians will abuse the government's power. Critics who speak the truth about their oppressors in the government must be silenced. This is why life, property, and liberty are inextricably linked. They are all banded together in the philosophy of freedom.

Americans may find this out too late, I'm afraid, so please keep getting the word out before the left really tries to shut us up. It is only a matter of time, because the nemesis of all socialist demagogues are the truth and reality.

Well, if Communist Cuba Approves of It...

I'm going to have to rethink my position on "healthcare" "reform" in light of forty-five year Cuban dictator Fidel Castro's praise of Obama for "accomplishing" in one year what it took the country 234 years since its founding to...errrr..."accomplish":

(AP - HAVANA BRANCH) It perhaps was not the endorsement President Barack Obama and the Democrats in Congress were looking for. [See here; here; here, here, here; here, here, here; here,  and here]

Cuban revolutionary leader Fidel Castro on Thursday declared passage of American health care reform "a miracle" and a major victory for Obama's presidency, but couldn't help chide the United States for taking so long to enact what communist Cuba achieved decades ago.

"We consider health reform to have been an important battle and a success of his (Obama's) government," Castro wrote in an essay published in state media, adding that it would strengthen the president's hand against lobbyists and "mercenaries."

But the Cuban leader also used the lengthy piece to criticize the American president for his lack of leadership on climate change and immigration reform, and for his decision to send more troops to Afghanistan, among many other things.

And he said it was remarkable that the most powerful country on earth took more than two centuries from its founding to approve something as basic as health benefits for all.

[Continued]

Fidel makes a good point. Why not give up our status as free citizens and become wards of the state? After all, the government just has to "deem" healthcare for all, and by Obama, it's done. No worries at all about everyone flooding the healthcare system to get "free" goods and services that magically appear from out of nowhere. No, in Obama's Udopia, everything is mystically done by government decree. We don't have to do it, the government does. Now has anyone seen my healthcare? I think I left it by the unicorn stables...

H.L. Mencken on Democracy

Democracy is also a form of religion. It is the worship of jackals by jackasses.

Democracy it the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.

Democracy defines the truth as any thing believed by at least 51 men in every 100, It is thus firmly committed to the doctrines that one bath a week is enough, that "I seen" is the past tense of "I see", and that Friday is an unlucky day.

Three proofs that the Creator is a humorist: democracy, hay fever, any fat woman.

The agents of argumentation under a free democracy, in the order of their potency: whiskey, beer, cigars, tears.

Democracy is the theory that two thieves will steal less than one, and three less than two, and four less than three, and so on ad infinitum.

At the bottom of Puritanism one finds envy of the fellow who is having a better time in the world, and hence hatred of him. At the bottom of democracy one finds the same thing. This is why all Puritans are democrats and all democrats are Puritans.

(A Little Book in C Major by H.L. Mencken, fully available online for free)

And There You Have It...

If there were any lingering doubt about the grave differences between the left and right in this country, let me dispel those for you.

The latest Fox News poll finds that 79 percent of voters think it’s possible the economy could collapse, including large majorities of Democrats (72 percent), Republicans (84 percent) and independents (80 percent).

And yet, somehow, the Democrats cannot resist themselves from expanding the size and scope of government at a breathtaking rate. Very curious, isn't it? One might say that some Democrats could give a damn less if the economy collapses.  Others might say that some are actively rooting for it.

Just 18 percent think the economy is “so big and strong it could never collapse.”

Moreover, 78 percent of voters believe the federal government is “larger and more costly” than it has ever been before, and by nearly three-to-one more voters think the national debt (65 percent) is a greater potential threat to the country’s future than terrorism (23 percent)…

It's fantastic that people are coming to this conclusion about seven years too late.

Three in 10 American voters (30 percent) say they are comfortable with the size and role of the federal government right now, while 65 percent say the government has become too big and “is restricting American freedoms.”

This is important to understand. It is difficult enough getting state-indoctrinated drones to believe what is going on right in front of their faces. It is nearly impossible to get people who are unable to think objectively and to exercise judgment to believe that something is a dire threat, when everything - in the news and entertainment media, at their college, at their government-subsidized workplace - suggests that all is hunky-dory. In other words, as long as some left-leaning liberals and soft socialists are face down in the mud eating dirt in a gulag or starving to death, they will never be frightened of the expanding power of the state, which seems to them like a giant "compassionate" welfare-check dispensing machine.

Sizable majorities of Republicans (84 percent) and independents (74 percent) think the government is too big, while just over half of Democrats (51 percent) are okay with the size of government.

This implies that nearly half of sll Democrats believe that the size of government is just fine, though seventy-two percent think the economy could collapse!

So let's disabuse ourselves of the myth that Democrats are misguided, well-intentioned people. They are delusional basketcases who are an eternal threat not only to the republic itself, but to our very lives and the lives of our children and grandchildren.

The Rule of Fools

Under the festive surface, of course, envy remains: the proletarian is still a democrat. The fact shows itself grimly whenever the supply of panem et circenses falls off sharply and the harsh realities make themselves felt. All the revolutions in history have been started by hungry city mobs. The fact is, indeed, so plain that it has attracted the notice even of historians, and some of them deduce from it the doctrine that city life breeds a love of liberty. It may be so, but certainly that love is not visible in the lower orders. I can think of no city revolution that actually had liberty for its object, in any rational sense. The ideas of freedom that prevail in the world to-day were first formulated by country gentlemen, aided and abetted by poets and philosophers, with occasional help from an eccentric king. One of the most valid of them — that of free speech — was actually given its first support in law by the most absolute monarch of modern times, to wit, Frederick the Great. When the city mob fights, it is not for liberty but for ham and cabbage. When it wins, its first act is to destroy every form of freedom that is not directed wholly to that end. And its second is to butcher all professional libertarians. If Thomas Jefferson had been living in Paris in 1793, he would have made an even narrower escape from the guillotine than Thomas Paine made.

The fact is that liberty, in any true sense, is a concept that lies quite beyond the reach of the inferior man’s mind, He can imagine, and even esteem, in his way, certain false forms of liberty — for example, the right to choose between two political mountebanks, and to yell for the more obviously dishonest — but the reality is incomprehensible to him. And no wonder, for genuine liberty demands of its votaries a quality he lacks completely, and that is courage. The man who loves it must be willing to fight for it; blood, said Jefferson, is its natural manure. More, he must be able to endure it — an even more arduous business. Liberty means self-reliance, it means resolution, it means enterprise, it means the capacity for doing without. The free man is one who has won a small and precarious territory from the great mob of his inferiors, and is prepared and ready to defend it and make it support him. All around him are enemies, and where he stands there is no friend. He can hope for little help from other men of his own kind, for they have battles of their own to fight. He has made of himself a sort of god in his little world, and he must face the responsibilities of a god, and the dreadful loneliness. Has Homo boobiens any talent for this magnificent self-reliance? He has the same talent for it that he has for writing symphonies in the manner of Ludwig van Beethoven, no less and no more. That is to say, he has no talent whatsoever, nor even any understanding that such a talent exists. Liberty is unfathomable to him. He can no more comprehend it than he can comprehend honour. What he mistakes for it, nine times out of ten, is simply the banal right to empty hallelujahs upon his oppressors. He is an ox whose last proud, defiant gesture is to lick the butcher behind the ear.

(from H.L. Mencken's Notes on Democracy (available online in Google Books), a brilliant critique of democratic idiocy)

Despotism: The "Easy" Way Out

After what has been said, one would imagine that human nature should perpetually rise up against despotism. But notwithstanding the love of liberty, so natural to mankind, notwithstanding their innate detestation of force and violence, most nations are subject to this very government. This is easily accounted for. To form a moderate government, it is necessary to combine the several powers; to regulate, temper, and set them in motion; to give, as it were, ballast to one, in order to enable it to counterpoise the other. This is a masterpiece of legislation; rarely produced by hazard, and seldom attained by prudence. On the contrary, a despotic government offers itself, as it were, at first sight; it is uniform throughout; and as passions only are requisite to establish it, this is what every capacity may reach.

Baron de Montesquieu

Democracy: A Form of Kleptocracy

Every election is a sort of advance auction of stolen goods. 

H.L. Mencken 

Universal ASSurance

The U.S. House of Misrepresentatives passed the most glorious reform in the history of the world, ensuring that tens of millions of uninsured Americans will get insured up their ass - just like they've been bailed out up the same place. 

Lawmakers hailed the action as a rebirth of the magnificent Soviet healthcare system, which provided universal healthcare insurance at all GULAG forced-labor camps and class enemy extermination facilities. The bill was also presented as a renaissance of the sound Nazi spirit of social solidarity and collective responsibility.

“It’s a victory for the American people,” Obama told reporters at the White House. “We are one step closer to building a paradise on Earth. Believe me, folks, if ya'll keep voting for me, in 10 years money will grow on trees and in 20 years you all will become demigods and acquire supernatural powers. People will be able to levitate, read thoughts and engage in psychokinesis."

The bill will also provide many indigent bureaucrats with jobs, helping them buy limousines and swimming pools for their poor families, marking a victory for government officials' inalienable social rights.

Throwing Down the Gauntlet to the New Left

We conservatives and American patriots have proceeded with Reason and cold analysis to disabuse leftists of the lies, false promises, and sheer hubris of progressivism.

The human wreckage and sustained poverty of the welfare state was apparently not evidence enough to dissuade the left of the falsehoods and vain pretensions that form the scaffolding of their worldview.

We have warned them that their empowerment of a privileged class of opportunistic politicians rests on no more foundation than a naive faith in the presumed continued good intentions of their anointed elites.

Yet they have ignored the history of the world that shows that the rise of a state that is unrestrained in its ability to do good is also unrestrained in its ability to do harm.

With nothing more than contempt of the animating principle of capitalism that one must put into the system what one intends to take out, the left has foregone any appreciation of a fundamental understanding of market economics, which implies that a sound currency is the measure and the restraint of the utilization of scarce resources, whose demand is justly measured by the individuals who seek to employ them.

Through their besmirching of profits, they have attacked all that is demonstrated to be successful and useful to individuals, as they themselves measure it, and insinuate that profit is an end in itself, instead of a means to be employed for reinvestment, future productivity, and the reproduction of wealth through capital's further circulation throughout the economy.

In their desire to tear down a nation that they see as the standard-bearer of injustice and exploitation, the left has erected a state whose lifeblood is the productive capacity of the individual, to be wantonly extracted and redistributed among non-productive parasites, while empowering exploitative patrons who use the tacit threat of violence to maintain control.

The New Left now has what they have so desperately sought for nearly a century, control over the life, liberty, and property of every individual in the United States.

The government that is now synonymous with socialism now controls the health care system, half the mortgage and banking industry, the student loan industry, half the car industry, the energy industry, and has their grasping hands in nearly every aspect of the economy.

The left will now raise massive taxes, and will engage in other financial schemes such as excessive regulations and fines. Their intention is no less than to crush the economic system that provides the individual with freedom.

It is now self-evident for every American subject retaining basic judgment that the economic system we have is not free market capitalism with private property and the rule of law.

The culmination of the New Left's century-long ruse spells the end of Critical Theory - the left now clearly controls the American economy.

What the left has used against the American people will now be revisited upon them with instantaneous, multiplied force; no nation that has experienced true freedom and prosperity will suffer lightly the foolishness of the left's infinite scheming and unlimited capacity for interference.

What we have today is the birth of a new Critical Theory; criticism being the most potent weapon that the left has utilized in its war on the mind of man and in defiance of material reality and reason.

How much more so will the left's main tool of destruction, unending and unyielding criticism with no more than a sketchy proffering of alternatives, have value when targeted against the left's quixotic utopian pipe-dreams than against the most successful economic system yet devised in the history of mankind?

We will have the benefit of having known, lived, and breathed the alternative. The duplicitous words of the left will now ring hollow, as they will not be able to obliterate the American dream and its potency from our memory.

There is no more "truth to power." The left is the power. All the utopian nonsense, the lies, the hollow promises, there is only one demand: Deliver or else.

Back in USSR

The thugs have passed the bill. The checks and balances have delayed America's collapse but they cannot stop it unless an intellectual rebirth takes place. The constitution and the Bill of Rights are just tools. It is good to have them at your disposal but when these tools fall into the wrong hands or when there's no one around who can use them, they no longer impede the onslaught of tyranny. 

Quote of the Day

The government is good at one thing. It knows how to break your legs, and then hand you a crutch and say, "See if it weren't for the government, you wouldn't be able to walk."

Harry Browne

My Sentiments Exactly

Our forefathers made one mistake. What they should have fought for was representation without taxation.

Fletcher Knebel

So Obama is Not a Socialist? Rrreeeeeealllllllyyyyy???

Dr. Thomas Sowell: The Great Depression and Obamanomics

Is Government-Run Healthcare Constitutional?

Dispelling the Nationalist Myths of Our Republic's Founding

Thomas DiLorenzo pursues a thesis I have often contemplated myself but was unable to fully sketch out; in my view, that the nation was sabotaged from the very beginning through such government acts as the chartering of the First and Second Banks of the United States, the passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts, the crushing of the Whiskey and Shay's Rebellion, and ultimately, the demolition of state's rights following The War Between the States. Thomas DiLorenzo outlines the trajectory to where we are at today in his characteristically unorthodox scholarly fashion, setting the stage for the disastrous progressivism of the Wilson administration, the Keynesianism of FDR, the abysmal failures of The Great Society, all the way to the zenith of unabashed statism rampant in the Obama administration today.

Doomed From the Start?

by Thomas J. DiLorenzo, LewRockwell.com

After spending a lifetime in politics John C. Calhoun (U.S. Senator, Vice President of the United States, Secretary of War) wrote his brilliant treatise, A Disquisition on Government, which was published posthumously shortly after his death in 1850. In it Calhoun warned that it is an error to believe that a written constitution alone is “sufficient, of itself, without the aid of any organism except such as is necessary to separate its several departments, and render them independent of each other to counteract the tendency of the numerical majority to oppression and abuse of power” (p. 26). The separation of powers is fine as far as it goes, in other words, but it would never be a sufficient defense against governmental tyranny, said Calhoun.

Moreover, it is a “great mistake,” Calhoun wrote, to suppose that “the mere insertion of provisions to restrict and limit the powers of the government, without investing those for whose protection they are inserted, with the means of enforcing their observance, will be sufficient to prevent the major and dominant party from abusing its powers” (emphasis added). The party “in possession of the government” will always be opposed to any and all restrictions on its powers. They “will have no need of these restrictions” and “would come, in time, to regard these limitations as unnecessary and improper restraints and endeavor to elude them . . .”

The “part in favor of the restrictions” (i.e., strict constructionists) would inevitably be overpowered. It is sheer folly, Calhoun argued, to suppose that “the party in possession of the ballot box and the physical force of the country, could be successfully resisted by an appeal to reason, truth, justice, or the obligations imposed by the constitution” (emphasis added). He predicted that “the restrictions [of government power in the Constitution] would ultimately be annulled, and the government be converted into one of unlimited powers.” He was right, of course.

This is a classic statement of the Jeffersonian states’ rights position. The people of the free, independent and sovereign states must be empowered with the rights of nullification and secession, and a concurrent majority with veto power over unconstitutional federal laws, if their constitutional liberties are to have any chance of protection, Calhoun believed. The federal government itself can never, ever be trusted to limit its own powers.

How did Calhoun come to such conclusions? One answer to this question is that he was a serious student of politics, history, and political philosophy for his entire life, and understood the nature of government as much as anyone else alive during his time. He also witnessed first hand or quickly learned about the machinations of the sworn enemies of limited constitutional government in America: men such as Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, John Marshall, Joseph Story and Daniel Webster.

The Founding Fathers of Constitutional Subversion

America’s first constitution, the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union, did a much better job of limiting the tyrannical proclivities of government than the U.S. Constitution ever did, and it did so while permitting enough governmental power to field an army that defeated the British Empire. The limits on government that the Articles contained outraged the advocates of unlimited governmental powers, such as Alexander Hamilton, which is why the “Perpetual Union” that was created by the Articles was abolished as all the states peacefully seceded from that union

The constitutional convention was Hamilton’s idea as much as anyone’s. Upon arriving at the convention Hamilton laid out the plan of his fellow nationalists: a permanent president or king, who would appoint all governors, who would have veto power over all state legislation. This monopoly government would then impose on the entire nation a British-style mercantilist empire without Great Britain, complete with massive corporate welfare subsidies, a large public debt, protectionist tariffs, and a central bank modeled after the Bank of England that would inflate the currency to finance the empire.

Hamilton did not get his way, of course, thanks to the Jeffersonians. When the Constitution was finally ratified, creating a federal instead of a national or monopolistic, monarchical government, Hamilton denounced the document as “a frail and worthless fabric.” He and his Federalist/nationalist colleagues immediately went to work destroying the limits on government contained in the Constitution. He invented the notion of “implied powers” of the Constitution, which allowed him and his political heirs to argue that the Constitution is not a set of limitations on governmental powers, as Jefferson believed it was, but rather a potential stamp of approval on anything the government ever wanted to do as long as it is “properly” interpreted by clever, statist lawyers like Alexander Hamilton or John Marshall. Hamilton “set out to remold the Constitution into an instrument of national supremacy,” wrote Clinton Rossiter in Alexander Hamilton and the Constitution.

One of the first subversive things Hamilton did was to rewrite the history of the American founding by saying in a public speech on June 29 1787, that the states were merely “artificial beings” and were never sovereign. The “nation,” not the states, was sovereign, he said. And he said this while the constitutional convention was busy crafting Article 7 of the Constitution, which holds that the Constitution would become the law of the land only when nine of the thirteen free and independent states ratified it. The states were to ratify the Constitution because, as everyone knew, they were sovereign and were delegating a few express powers to the central government for their mutual benefit.

It was Hamilton who first invented the expansive interpretations of the General Welfare and Commerce Clauses of the Constitution, which have been used for generations to grant totalitarian powers to the central state. He literally set the template for the destruction of constitutional liberty in America the moment it became apparent at the constitutional convention that he and his fellow nationalists would not get their way and create a “monarchy bottomed on corruption,” as Thomas Jefferson described the Hamiltonian system.

Hamilton’s devoted disciple, John Marshall, was appointed chief justice of the United States in 1801 and served in that post for more than three decades. His career was a crusade to rewrite the Constitution so that it would become a nationalist document that destroyed states’ rights and most other limitations on the powers of the centralized state. He essentially declared in Marbury vs. Madison that he, John Marshall, would be the arbiter of constitutionality via “judicial review.” The Jeffersonians, meanwhile, had always warned that if they day ever came when the federal government became the sole arbiter of the limits of its own powers, it would soon declare that there were, in fact, no limits on its powers. This of course is what the anti-Jeffersonians wanted – and what has happened.

In the case of Martin v. Hunter’s Lessee Marshall invented out of thin air the notion that the federal government had the “right” to veto state court decisions. Marshall also made up the theory that the so-called Supremacy Clause of the Constitution makes the federal government “supreme” in all matters. This is false: The federal government is only “supreme” with regard to those powers that were expressly delegated to it by the free and independent states, in Article 1, Section 8.

Marshall also repeated Hamilton’s bogus theory of the American founding, claiming that the “nation” somehow created the states. He amazingly argued that the federal government was somehow created by “the whole people” and not the citizens of the states through state political conventions, as was actually the case. In the name of “the people,” Marshall said, the federal government claimed the right to “legitimately control all individuals or governments within the American territory” (Edward S. Corwin, John Marshall and the Constitution, p. 131).

All of the Hamilton/Marshall nonsense about the founders having created a monopolistic, monarchical government and having abolished states rights or federalism was repeated for decades by the likes of Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story and Daniel Webster. Story was “the most Hamiltonian of judges,” wrote Clinton Rossiter. His famous book, Commentaries on the Constitution, published in 1833, could have been entitled “Commentaries on Alexander Hamilton’s Commentaries on the Constitution,” says Rossiter. He “construed the powers of Congress liberally,” i.e., meaning there were virtually no limits to such powers; and “upheld the supremacy of the nation,” i.e., of monopolistic, monarchical, and unconstitutional government. Stories Commentaries provided a political roadmap for “the legal profession’s elite or at least among the part of it educated in the North during the middle years of the nineteenth century,” wrote Rossiter.

Story’s “famous” Commentaries are filled with phony history and illogic. On the Articles of Confederation, he wrote that “It is heresy to maintain, that a party to a compact has a right to revoke that compact.” But of course the Articles were revoked!

Secession of a single state would mean “dissolution of the government,” Story wrote. Nonsense. After eleven Southern states seceded in 1860–61 the U.S. government proceeded to field the largest and best-equipped army in the history of the world up to that point. It was hardly “dissolved.”

In a classic of doubletalk, Story admitted that “The original compact of society . . . in no instance . . . has ever been formally expressed at the first institution of a state.” That is, there was never any agreement by the citizens of any state to always and forever be obedient to those who would enforce what they proclaim to be “the general will.” Nevertheless, said Story, “every part should pay obedience to the will of the whole.” And who is to define “the will of the whole”? Why, nationalist Supreme Court justices like Joseph Story and John Marshall, of course.

Story admitted that social contract theories of “voluntary” state formation were mere theoretical fantasies. He also held the rather creepy and totalitarian, if not barbarian view that “The majority must have a right to accomplish that object by the means, which they deem adequate for the end . . . . The will of the majority of the people is absolute and sovereign, limited only by its means and power to make its will effectual.”

What Story is saying here is not that there should be a national plebescite on all policy issues that can express the “will of the majority.” No, as with Hamilton he adopted the French Jacobin philosophy that such a “will” was possessed in the minds of the ruling class, and that that class (the Storys, Hamiltons, Marshalls, etc.) somehow possessed “absolute” power as long as it has the military means to “make its will effectual.” Here we have the theoretical basis for Abe Lincoln’s waging of total war on his own citizens.

Contrary to the political truths expressed by Calhoun which have all proven to be true, by the way Story expressed the elementary-schoolish view that the appropriate response to governmental oppression should be only via “the proper tribunals constituted by the government” which would supposedly “appeal to the good sense, and integrity, and justice of the majority of the people.” Trust the politicians and lifetime-appointed federal judges to enforce their view of “justice,” in other words. That hasn’t really worked out during the succeeding 170 years.

Story also repeated John Marshall’s fable that the Supremacy Clause created a monopolistic government in Washington, D.C. and effectively abolished states’ rights, along with the equally ridiculous myth that the Constitution was magically ratified by “the whole people” (presumably not counting women, who could not vote, or slaves and free blacks).

Another famous and influential subverter of the Constitution was Daniel Webster, who repeated many of these same nationalist fables during his famous U.S. Senate debate with South Carolina’s Robert Hayne in January of 1830. This is a debate that Hayne clearly won according to their congressional colleagues, and the media of the day, although nationalist historians (a.k.a., distorians) have claimed otherwise.

The first Big Lie that Webster told was that “the Constitution of the United States confers on the government itself . . . the power of deciding ultimately and conclusively upon the extent of its own authority.” No, it does not. John Marshall may have wished that it did when he invented judicial review, but the document itself says no such thing. As Senator John Taylor once said, “The Constitution never could have designed to destroy [liberty], by investing five or six men, installed for life, with a power of regulating the constitutional rights of all political departments.”

Webster then presented a totally false scenario: “One of two things is true: either the laws of the Union are beyond the discretion and beyond the control of the States; or else we have no constitution of general government . . .” Huh? All the laws? Are the people to have no say whatsoever about laws they believe are clearly constitutional? Apparently so, said Daniel Webster.

The a-historical fairy tale about the Constitution being somehow ratified by “the whole people” was repeated over and over by Webster. His strategy was apparently to convince his audience not by historical facts but by repetition and bluster. “The Constitution creates a popular government, erected by the people . . . it is not a creature of the state governments,” he bellowed. Anyone who has ever read Article 7 of the U.S. Constitution knows that this is utterly false.

In fine French Jacobin fashion, Webster asked, “Who shall interpret their [the peoples’] will? Why “the government itself,” he said. Not through popular votes, mind you, but through the orders, mandates, and dictates of “the government itself.” The people themselves were to have nothing to do with “interpreting” their own “will.”

Article 3, Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution clearly defines treason under the constitution: “Treason against the United States shall consist in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.” Thus, treason means levying war against “them,” the sovereign states. This is why Lincoln’s invasion of the Southern states was the very definition of treasonous behavior under the Constitution. Had the North lost the war, he could have been justifiably hanged.

Webster attempted to re-define treason under the Constitution by claiming that “To resist by force the execution of a [federal] law, generally, is treason.” Thus, if the federal government were to invade a sovereign state to enforce one of its laws, a clearly treasonous act under the plain language of the Constitution, resistance to the invasion is what constitutes treason according to Webster. He defined treason, in other words, to mean exactly the opposite of what it actually means in the Constitution.

Then there is the elementary-schoolish faith in democracy as the only necessary defense against governmental tyranny: “Trust in the efficacy of frequent elections,” “trust in the judicial power.” Well, we tried that for decades and decades, Daniel, and it didn’t work.

All of these false histories and logical fallacies were repeated by other nationalist politicians for decades. This includes Abraham Lincoln, who probably lifted his famous line in The Gettysburg Address from this statement by Webster during his debate with Hayne: “It is, Sir, the people’s Constitution, the people’s government, made for the people, made by the people, and answerable to the people. The people of the United States have declared that this Constitution shall be the supreme law.” Of course, they did not.

As Lord Pete Bauer once said in commenting on the rhetoric of communism, whenever one hears of “the people’s republic” the “peoples’ government,” etc., it is a sure bet that the people have nothing whatsoever to do with, or control over that government.

Hamilton, Marshall, Webster, Story, and other nationalists kept up their rhetorical fog-horning for decades, trying to convince Americans that the founding fathers did, after all, adopt Hamilton’s plan of a dictatorial executive that abolished states rights and was devoted to building a mercantilist empire in America that would rival the British empire. But their rhetoric had little or no success during their lifetimes.

New Englanders plotted to secede for a decade after Thomas Jefferson was elected president in 1800; all states, North and South, made use of the Jeffersonian, states’ rights doctrine of nullification to oppose the Fugitive Slave Act, protectionist tariffs, the antics of the Bank of the United States, and other issues up until the 1860s. There was a secession movement in the Mid-Atlantic states in the 1850s, and in 1861 the majority of Northern newspaper editorialists were in support of peaceful secession (see Northern Editorials on Secession by Howard Perkins).

The false, nationalist theory of the American founding was repeated by Abraham Lincoln in his first inaugural address (and praised decades later by Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf, wherein Hitler mad his case for abolishing states’ rights and centralizing all political power in Germany). In the same speech Lincoln threatened “invasion” and “bloodshed” (his words) in any state that failed to collect the newly-doubled federal tariff tax. He then followed through with his threat.

The only group of Americans to ever seriously challenge this false nationalist theory, Southern secessionists, were mass murdered by the hundreds of thousands, including some 50,000 civilians according to James McPherson; their cities and towns were bombed and burned to the ground, tens of millions of dollars of private property was plundered by the U.S. Army; Southern women, white and black, were raped; and total war was waged on the civilian population. This is what finally cemented into place the false, Hamiltonian/nationalist theory of the American founding, for the victors always get to write the history in war. Government of the people, by the people, for the people, is “limited only” by the state’s “power to make its will effectual,” as Joseph Story proclaimed. The technology of mass murder in the hands of the state finally made this will “effectual” in the first half of the 1860s. Americans have been mis-educated and misinformed about their own political history ever since. It is this mis-education, this false theory of history, that serves to prop up the Hamiltonian empire that Americans now slave under.

Thomas J. DiLorenzo [send him mail] is professor of economics at Loyola College in Maryland and the author of "The Real Lincoln; Lincoln Unmasked: What You’re Not Supposed To Know about Dishonest Abe" and "How Capitalism Saved America." His latest book is "Hamilton’s Curse: How Jefferson’s Archenemy Betrayed the American Revolution – And What It Means for America Today."

Public Education and Public Options: A Record of Government Failure, Lies, and Broken Promises

(More) government provided health care would do for the American medical system did what public schools and public funding of universities did for education: Lead to cost overruns and deteriorating quality of service.

Increases in government control and funding of health care and education are in the latest version of the "health care reform" legislation. Unfortunately, the passage and implementation of this particular legislation would lead to a worsening of the problems in both the educational and medical systems, and will only exacerbate the problems in cost and quality.

Let us first get a snapshot of public education to examine the government's track record. To summarize, public education is an abject failure in this country by any objective standard.
1. Failing to compete internationally: Academic Failure - International Test Scores - Poor TIMSS Results
2. Centers of public indoctrination: Table of Contents - John Taylor Gatto
3. Dumbs kids down: John Stossel's 'Stupid in America' - ABC News
4. College education standards declining: U.S. slipping in education rankings - UPI.com
5. Massive official and unofficial cost overruns for public schools: They Spend WHAT? The Real Cost of Public Schools | Adam B. Schaeffer | Cato Institute: Policy Analysis
6. Public universities gouge the American taxpayer (this is not what the liberal writers claim, but their "narrative" is pretty laughable): College Costs, Student Aid Continue to Rise - washingtonpost.com

Overall, education is not a public good it is nearly a government monopoly, and will become closer to becoming so under the "health care reform" legislation under consideration. For the same reason that monopolies in the private sector are bad, those in the public sector are bad; they promote inefficiency and inferior goods and services. This is a simple fact, and if one side cannot even acknowledge it, then the conversation is truly dead. When "public goods" are underwritten by the coercive power of the state, a sign that what is being offered, at least the way it is being offered, is not really a "public good" at all.

When a "public good" becomes taken over by the state, it becomes a tool of the state. This is not a controversial statement. Either by looking out across the world and taking a serious, hard look at what happens when states take over economy and society, or by looking historically, it is never a good sign when the government gets monopoly control. But I guess some people prefer a world without choice, and the same can be said of health care.

A few brief words on that. The government is already a huge insurer of health care in the form of Medicare, Medicaid, and the VA. This means there is not only a public option, there are public options - in addition to mandated emergency room coverage for those unable to pay. Massive debt, kneecapping doctors with price ceilings, and inefficient, deplorable service by the majority of participants' standards are but a few criticisms one can lodge at the government's public options. Many of these complaints can easily be found elsewhere for the intellectually curious.

I can anticipate a few objections to the "abysmal state" of American health care among its proponents and the need for "reform now."

1. Lying with statistics about U.S. infant mortality rate: We're Number Two?
2. The "46 million", wait, 30 million figure is overinflated: Obama: I used to say 47 million uninsured. Now, it's 30 million. | Washington Examiner
3. Most Americans have health care. See the U.S. Census Bureau statistics: CNSNews.com - White House Claim of 46 Million Uninsured 'Americans' Includes Almost 10 Million Foreigners

"According to “Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States,” a Census Bureau report published in August 2008, there were 45.6 million persons in the United States who did not have health insurance in 2007, the latest year for which figures are available. However, the report states that 9.7 million of these uninsured persons were not U.S. citizens. [...]

Of the 299 million people in the United States in 2007, 253.4 million had health insurance. The vast majority of those—202 million—had private health insurance, according to the Census Bureau."

4. Eight in ten say they are happy with their health care: Poll: Health care costs too expensive, Americans say - CNN.com

5. Most people say unhappy with cost (one could say this about nearly anything, by the way). So here are some proven ways to lower costs, which are in the Republican health care proposals: CNSNews.com - Republicans Have Offered Three Alternative Health Care Reform Bills

6. Public mandates health care in Massachusetts is a disaster: CATO - Lessons from the Fall of Romneycare

[See also this line from Justice Louis Brandeis, a favorite of the left, who happens to be wrong here: "(A) single courageous State may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory, and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.”]

7. U.S. health plans have a history of cost overruns

"In 1965, the House Ways and Means Committee estimated that the hospital insurance program of Medicare - the federal health care program for the elderly and disabled - would cost $9 billion by 1990. The actual cost that year was $67 billion.

In 1967, the House Ways and Means Committee said the entire Medicare program would cost $12 billion in 1990. The actual cost in 1990 was $98 billion.

In 1987, Congress projected that Medicaid - the joint federal-state health care program for the poor - would make special relief payments to hospitals of less than $1 billion in 1992. Actual cost: $17 billion. "

This is all leaving aside that it is blatantly obvious that the government cannot constitutionally force you to purchase a good or service. But doesn't the government already do that? With the NEA, numerous museums and homages to statists and their promoters, and other frivolous wastes of hard-earned taxpayer money? I guess in some people's world, this "status quo" is all they know, and comes with the absolute moral sanction of precedent. Let me resolve this moral dilemma for the left. People do not have a "right" to anything that compels another human being to serve them. That should be clear enough for even the most oblique of thinkers to comprehend.

It is impossible to anticipate the every objection of the strident, petulant left who thinks the world owes them and every creature on the planet something. This is the beauty of being a modern liberal or a neomarxist. You get to criticize "the system" without having to offer alternatives that are proven to work in the real world. The government does not work in the real world in most cases, people do when left to pursue what they perceive to be their self-interests. How do people learn? From their mistakes. Yet when one has government, there are never enough mistakes to "fix," and the problems that remain can always be blamed on "the system" (i.e. "capitalism"), even if it is the government actually creating the mistakes (one might even think sometimes on purpose. See: "Never waste a good crisis"...hmm).

The left is supporting a "health care reform" plan that has little to do with health care or reform, but power-grabbing by the Democrats in Congress and their client-groups. The text of the legislation proves that it will be a freedom-crushing debacle. But isn't that what the modern left's virtue has come to? The acquisition of power for power's sake. If you are on the left, or lean left, at least acquire the temporary good judgment not to support this specific legislation.

The Progressive Ten Commandments

I am the Gouvernment thy God, which brought thee out of the land of Liberty, from the house of self-bondage.

Thou shalt have no other Gouvernments before me; except for Worlde Gouvernment, which thy Gouvernment and some lawyers from Bruxelles presently worketh on.

Thou shalt not maketh thee any graven coin, or any likeness of any thing that retaineth intrinsic value, of any precious metal that is in the earth beneath, or claimeth that money is anything other than the Gouvernment thy God saith it is:

Thou shalt not worketh for thyself alone, nor serveth thyself: for I the Gouvernment thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the Founding Fathers upon their rebellious children unto the thirteenth and fourteenth generation of them that hateth me;

And shewing mercy unto thousands of them that loveth me and keepeth my commandments by not relocating them to thy local FEMA Campe:

Thou shalt not take the name of the Gouvernment thy God in vain: for thy LORD Obama will not hold him guiltless that taketh the Gouvernment's name in vain, for the Gouvernment hateth paperwork.

Keepeth the Earthe Day to sanctify it, as the LORD thy God hath commanded thee. Please recalle ye to separate thy recyclables.

One halfe of thy days thou shalt labour, and do all thy work:

But the second-halfe is that of the Gouvernment thy God's: in it thou shalt work, but not keepeth the earnings for thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, nor thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thine ox, nor thine ass, nor any of thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates; but for that of the Common Goode and especially the Democrat constituents so that they may have rest, lest thou be considered greedy and selfish and the starver of children.

And remember that thou wast once a freeman in the land of Liberty, and that the LORD Obama brought thee out thence through a mighty hand and by a stretched out arm: therefore the Gouvernment thy God commanded thee to keep the Holy Taxe Day as well.

Honour thy Senator and thy Congressman, as the LORD Obama hath commanded thee, tho they be but rubber stamps for the Lord; that thy days may be prolonged, quite literally under thy newly implemented Healthcare planne, and that your medicine may go well with thee, in the land of pleasant idleness which the LORD Obama promiseth to giveth thee. And Also:

Thou shalt not kill. Except for olde people and babies too young to knoweth the difference.

Neither shalt thou commit adultery, which is henceforth redefined under Article IV, Section XII as "taking on the duties and responsibilities of an adult."

Thou shalt steal.

Thou shalt bear false witness against thy neighbour, especially if he disagreeth with any of these commandments, and be sure to turneth in his name to the proper authorities.

Neither shalt thou desire anything, tho one may yet covet thy neighbour's house, his car, his money, his 401K pension plan, his investment portfolio, and verily, even his ass, or anything else that is thy neighbour's, for the Gouvernment thy God intend to seizeth it and parceleth it up into a million pieces to redistribute among the adoring masses.

Blessed be the Lord Obama's name. A man.

The Birth Pangs of Liberty: From Socrates to the Space Shuttle

How brave a thing is freedom of speech, which has made the Athenians so far exceed every other state of Hellas in greatness!
Herodotus, Histories

The word used is isegoria ("equality of speech"), which did not mean the same as the modern concept of free speech but was perhaps the first step towards it. Isegoria meant the equal right to address the ecclesia (the legislative assembly). A closer approximation of the modern usage, though still not exact, is parrhesia. Though the Athenians might not have entirely understood what freedom of speech meant, de facto the scope of that freedom in the city was the greatest ever achieved up to that point anywhere (despite some violations like the trial of Socrates), although compared with later periods it was very restricted. It is this unprecedented liberty of speech (not democracy, which is rather the opposite of free speech!) that elevated Athens to the position of the world's cultural, scientific and philosophical capital. We owe our entire civilization to the fact that, for the first time in history, the human mind, the engine that drives the world, was relatively free to create. This Athenian spirit was espoused by Thomas Jefferson, who (among other Founding Fathers) made free speech one of the fundamental pillars of the American polity: 

I have sworn upon the alter of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.

While providing a "spiritual" foundation for creative achievement, the Athenians failed to create a "material" framework for an advanced industrial society. While the mind was relatively free, the hands were shackled. Property was insecure, and courts were political tools used by the poor to rob the rich (ominous parallels, eh?):

We find in Xenophon's Banquet a very lively description of a republic in which the people abused their equality. Each guest gives in his turn the reason why he is satisfied. "Content I am," says Chamides, "because of my poverty. When I was rich, I was obliged to pay my court to informers, knowing I was more liable to be hurt by them than capable of doing them harm. The republic constantly demanded some new tax of me; and I could not decline paying. Since I have grown poor, I have acquired authority; nobody threatens me; I rather threaten others. I can go or stay where I please. The rich already rise from their seats and give me the way. I am a king, I was before a slave: I paid taxes to the republic, now it maintains me: I am no longer afraid of losing: but I hope to acquire."
Montesquieu, the Spirit of the Laws

For the Athenians, liberty (eleutheria) was a positive, not negative, liberty - freedom to govern, not freedom from government. It was a pernicious concept connected with democratia (the power of the people) and isocratia (equality of power). It is no wonder that the leading Greek philosophers were against such freedom. Seeing the disastrous results of democracy, Plato advocated the other extreme - what we would call a totalitarian government governed by philosopher kings.
The first theoretical glimpse of a truly free society was perhaps the Athenian concept of isonomia - equality before the law. It is said to have been established by Solon but it seems that it was never effectively implemented in practice. This inspired Aristotle's formulation of the rule of law and laid the foundation of Roman constitutionalism. Entrenching the rule of law and the security of private property, Rome moved much farther in the direction of "material" freedom.
Though they might have vaguely glimpsed the nature of free speech, neither the Greeks nor the Romans extended the principle of negative liberty to the entire realm of human activity. This was done by the United Kingdom and the United States in the 18th through 19th centuries. As a result, such an enormous amount of energy was released that it transformed the world faster than ever before and brought an age unbelievably futuristic compared with any previous era. A bizarre ode to capitalism can be found, of all people, in Marx's Communist Manifesto, which somewhat belies its message.

Meantime the markets kept ever growing, the demand ever rising. Even manufacturer no longer sufficed. Thereupon, steam and machinery revolutionised industrial production. The place of manufacture was taken by the giant, Modern Industry; the place of the industrial middle class by industrial millionaires, the leaders of the whole industrial armies, the modern bourgeois.
Modern industry has established the world market, for which the discovery of America paved the way. This market has given an immense development to commerce, to navigation, to communication by land. This development has, in its turn, reacted on the extension of industry; and in proportion as industry, commerce, navigation, railways extended, in the same proportion the bourgeoisie developed, increased its capital, and pushed into the background every class handed down from the Middle Ages. (…)
The bourgeoisie has disclosed how it came to pass that the brutal display of vigour in the Middle Ages, which reactionaries so much admire, found its fitting complement in the most slothful indolence. It has been the first to show what man’s activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former Exoduses of nations and crusades.
The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. (…)
The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere.
The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of Reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. (…) The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.
The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation. (…) The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life. (…) The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground — what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?

A Clash of Revolutions

"Revolution" is a word that conjures up scenes from the American Revolutionary War, the French Revolution, and Russia's Bolshevik Revolution. Young men with tattered banners, bayoneted rifles, and ragged, blood-stained attire come naturally to the American imagination, following the powerful leitmotif of the nation's founding. But before ever a shot rings out in a revolution for the control of political power in a country, if a shot rings out, there must first be a revolution for the hearts and minds of the people.

There can be no greater contrast in ideology with revolutionary political implications than that of individualism and collectivism. While the overwhelming majority of Americans intuitively take for granted that a moral system of law and politics should value the individual, and the ability for each person to determine one's own life, the collectivists who are prevalent in academia and the halls of government have no such assumption. Individuals are abstracted away by intellectuals and politicians due to a utopian vision, a naked lust for power, or both.

What is not grasped by the soft-minded collectivists in the American public, the social justice zealots, the bumper sticker-brandishing busybodies, the lapel-pinned lecturers of lost causes, and the moralizing malcontents is that the utopians and the power players are inextricably fused, married to one another in a deadly dance of social destruction, now spiraling out of control.

To fully grasp the demoralizing effects of collectivism in its various forms, one must follow the twisted thinking of collectivists as it manifests itself in every sphere of human existence. Since collectivism is an inherently totalitarian ideology that knows no borders, bounds, or barriers, this is not difficult to do. It is no accident that collectivists think that literally every issue is a political one, and one that should be solved by the use of power; if not by coercion, that is, by ridicule or legal harassment, then by allure, whether of easy money, job security, or social status.

When one thinks like a collectivist, no one part of the whole can be "above" the whole. Everything must be leveled, economically, socially and politically. This comes with an important caveat. Since neither human ability nor natural resources are distributed evenly in the world, there must be levelers to constantly intervene to make everything "just." These levelers can be professional brainwashers of the government-controlled "public" schools, who drag the brightest down and elevate those requiring "special needs" ("special" meaning only those with subpar intelligence), or the politicians who feel it is their need to "spread the wealth around." In a capitalist economy, the wealth is spread around, only it requires skilled work that is actually demanded by others to acquire it. In the collectivists' minds, demanded work is exploitation. How one sustains one's own life goes without explanation to the collectivists - it is simply owed to them - by the state, by the "public," by the ethereal "other."

In the collectivist worldview, the applications of "equality" are endless. There can be no competition, economically or otherwise, and by extension, no judgment of inferior or superior. There can be no standards of right and wrong, which is known as nihilism, and by application, cultural and moral relativism. There can be no patriotism, since no nation should think itself "above" another. And no individual should make claims on the herd, lest the herd think the individual is asking for more than his "fair share." Which brings us to healthcare.

In a government-run, that is to say, collectivist healthcare system, one's "fair share" is determined by others, who neither value your life more than you, nor are disposed to give you scarce resources (and growing scarcer) if that means "taking away" from others. What collectivists, with their holistic mindset, don't get is that an economy is created, not distributed. Yet when their point of view is implemented, that is what comes to pass. The economy becomes stagnant, ossified, crystallized by the collectivists' ideological assumptions, which are intrinsically demoralizing as it sucks the creative, productive spirit out of a people. Healthcare is a service provided by some humans, with special abilities and talents, to other humans; it is not a good to be "deemed" by a government to the people, nor can it be a "right." Rights safeguard us from coercion from the government and the mob; but it is easy to see that a collectivist mindset would recognize no such distinction between rights and supposed "entitlements."

The fatal flaw in the collectivists' assumptions, and indeed, collectivists have overrun the schools and universities, news and entertainment media, courts, and government, is that Americans instinctively know that individuals not only comprise the political system, they are above it. Life, and our value of it, is what holds us Americans together. That which does not edify life, and our enjoyment of it, our pursuit of personal, even heroic greatness, is alien to us as a people. The collectivists may say that vision is an illusion, and greedy, selfish, and vain, but it is what animates the spirit of most Americans in their deepest cores. We know that each one of us can aspire to our own standard of greatness, sustain our own lives with our own minds and our own hands, and build a nation that is worth living in, for ourselves and our posterity. That is the spirit of our revolution, and the one that will triumph in our political and ideological war against the collectivists.

Isn't Obama a Gentleman?

I heard it is customary for Marxists to squeeze each other's hands with death grips before swallowing another sector of the economy like boa constrictors.

NEJM Poll Suggests Nearly Half of Physicians Will Quit if Public Option is Passed

The Achilles heel of any socialist system is the demoralization of the workers and the subsequent loss of productivity that comes with it.  From Hot Air:

And you thought wait times were long now. The New England Journal of Medicine, hardly a bastion of conservative thought, polled health-care providers to determine their reaction to ObamaCare, and discovered that it has many doctors looking for the exits. Almost half of all general-practice doctors would feel compelled to leave medicine altogether if it passes:

* 46.3% of primary care physicians (family medicine and internal medicine) feel that the passing of health reform will either force them out of medicine or make them want to leave medicine.

* 36% of physicians would not recommend medicine as a career, regardless of health reform. 27% would recommend medicine as a career but not if health reform passes.

* 62.7% of physicians feel that health reform is needed but should be implemented in a more targeted, gradual way, as opposed to the sweeping overhaul that is in legislation.

Oddly, NEMJ polled heavily on the public option, which has been out of the ObamaCare proposal since mid-December when the Senate finally killed it. The public option is deeply unpopular among physicians, with only 29% in favor of it. Forty-five percent would either retire or quit if it passed, and 71% believe their income would fall with a public option — probably from experience with Medicare and Medicaid.

[Continued]

Daniel Webster on the Danger of Good Intentions

It is hardly too strong to say that the Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions. There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters. - Daniel Webster

Rush: Obama is a Third World President

Of Rule and Religion Summarised

The State of MONARCHIE is the supremest thing vpon earth: For Kings are not onely GODS Lieutenants vpon earth, and sit vpon GODS throne, but euen by GOD himselfe they are called Gods. There bee three principall similitudes that illustrate the state of MONARCHIE: One taken out of the word of GOD; and the two other out of the grounds of Policie and Philosophie. In the Scriptures Kings are called Gods, and so their power after a certaine relation compared to the Diuine power. Kings are also compared to Fathers of families: for a King is trewly Parens patriæ, the politique father of his people. And lastly, Kings are compared to the head of this Microcosme of the body of man.

King James I, Speech to Parliament (1610)

The New Rectal Probe ID Program

Under pressure from the EPA (Enterological Prostrate Administration) the police have begun requisitioning mobile prostrate exam units to be used at make-shi* roadblocks across the nation.

The reasoning behind the new law and bowel enforcement measure is two-fold: To check for underwear bombs and other explosive devices, and to make sure the American people are getting their Recommended Daily Allowance (RDA) of fiber.

The police are authorized to apprehend, detain, and interrogate offenders indefinitely without trial, as well as to forcibly administer bowls of Cracklin Bran Flakes, which was selected as the Emergency Fiber Provider of Choice through an apparently illicit no-bid contract with Kelloggs.

The New York Times will continue to aggressively investigate the Kelloggs no-bid contract, which looks to potentially become a scandal on the level of Watergate.

In other news, was Miley Cyrus an appropriate choice for Special Advisor on Pop Songs and Teenage Promiscuity? The NYT investigates...

The Individual Mind: the Dynamo that Moves the World

All these provisions in the Bill of Rights and the Constitution are of the utmost importance in relation to the flow of energy; the fact which they express accounts for the unparalleled expansion of the United States in territorial extent in the given time, by accounting for the even more extraordinary extension of the field of physical science and mechanical invention. In a hundred and fifty years, men suddenly enlarged and corrected their knowledge of scientific principles which had taken many thousands of years to discover at all -7 and devised means of application which made possible a concurrent increase of population and a rise in the in the past. Nothing of the sort had ever occurred in the world before - history reveals nothing comparable to the United States as a nation. It may be pointed out reasonably that the contributions to scientific knowledge and practical invention did not originate only in the United States. But it was the existence of the United States, and the consequent demonstration and spread of liberty, which made the achievements of science possible in Europe. What happened was that the dynamo of the energy used in human association was located. It is in the individual

And it was withdrawn from political interference by a formal reservation, along with the means and material by dynamo is the mind, the creative intelligence, which our Bill of Rights and the treason clause assert to be free of political control. The material means on which intelligence projects by initiative is private property. Nothing else will serve.

Likewise the structure of government was established on its enduring base, without pinning men down under the foundation. Regional areas were delimited to which the instruments of political action were attached, without confining any person by law to the given area, or confiding the power of wielding such instruments to persons by hereditary rule, or making such power unlimited. The instruments were properly defined as agencies. They pertained to the several states as such. This effect was secured by the method of appointment bodies of the states j that is, their office was attached to the state, being derived from the state - unlike the Roman provincial governors who were appointed by the central authority.

The thrust was against the center, instead of from the center - therefore it countered the weight of the superstructure. On the other hand, the Senator had no political function within the state he represented, hence the office had no intrinsic tendency toward separatism. It took effect only at the center. The stresses were doubly equalized. The several states also preserved their political integrity by keeping to themselves the primary authority to qualify voters in Federal elections.* (…)

The citizens, by the institution of private property, were given resistance against all the agencies of government. Private property is the standing ground of the citizen ; there is no other. As the state had to be a regional area with its representatives, to preserve its basic function, so it was necessary for citizens to have a direct vote for the mass inertia veto - hence the two legislative chambers, the Senate for the States and the House of Representatives for the citizens as individuals. The possibility of legislators using their office for a direct grab from the public funds was forestalled by debarring them from such action in respect of a current term of office.(…)

The House of Representatives, elected by direct vote of the citizens, was enabled to express the property and function of mass, the ultimate veto by negation, being entrusted with the initiative in laying taxation and granting supplies. All supplies were required to be granted only in denominated sums for allotted purposes 5 any such grant must therefore be used up in time and would have to be granted again. If no grant is made, the veto of inertia is in force. It is only necessary to do nothing. (…)

(Isabel Paterson: The God of the Machine)

The United States: An Architectural Masterpiece

Now if the works and thoughts of the men who founded the United States are examined, it is evident that they had a highly developed structural sense, a remarkable feeling for and understanding of form, proportion, perspective. However it came about, they were a nation of architects - and they thought in mathematics as "naturally" as in words. (…) Roger Sherman was responsible for the dual method of representation in the two houses of Congress— by popular vote in the House of Representatives, with congressmen allotted in proportion to population, and by equality of the States in the Senate. His structural sense was sound - he hit on both the regional bases and the mass veto function at once. He knew what would stand steady. To understand why bases cannot be established on popular suffrage, with no property qualification, it is only necessary to try an equivalent with any other physical materials. Let the substance on which the structure must be supported be composed of separate particles of equal size and weight, and each susceptible of movement—obviously nothing can possibly stand on it. A pillar or cornerstone cannot be fixed on a heap of buckshot, or a mound of sand. There must be something solid, self-contained, and immovable. A regional area answers that description, and will sustain a permanent base of political representation. The area must be definitely circumscribed, and the representation must pertain to it, not to the mobile inhabitants, who may wander about and cross the boundaries at will. (…) Thus by using the materials available, in accordance with architectural and mechanical principles, the founders of the United States solved the problem on which the Roman empire had failed. The Constitution of the United States is an architectural and mechanical drawing, in which the design is laid out on its broad general principles. (…) Let the Constitution as it was originally drawn, including the Bill of Rights, be examined strictly on its merits and in the light of performance, as an architectural plan and a mechanical apparatus of an earlier day might be studied by modern architects and engineers. It will be found amazing in its correctness, in respect of the relation of mass and motion, operative through the association of human beings; and the release and application of energy. The Bill of Rights and the treason clause taken together establish the individual as the dynamic factor. The Bill of Rights withdraws entirely from political control both the faculties and the instruments of initiative and enterprise. No law might be passed against freedom of the mind, whether in religion, in speech, or in print 5 nor to restrict interchange of ideas in peaceable assembly; nor to prevent the expression of private opinion from individuals to the government, by petition.
(Isabel Paterson, the God of the Machine)

Isabel Paterson on Democracy

But democracy is a collective term; it describes the aggregate as a whole, and assumes that the right and authority reside in the whole, though derived from the adult condition of the individuals comprised. Then it must be supposed that at an unknown moment by an unknown sanction and for no reason whatever such right and authority was irrevocably transferred from the individuals to a group which is nothing but a numerical sum, or particles merged into mass. The authority then is not in any part, nor is any part of it in any part of the mass.

Thus democracy resolves into pure process, and even the process is fictitious, for individuals cannot actually merge, though a group can exercise the function of mass for a given purpose at a given time, by inaction, a negative. The fictitious process imagined as operating in democracy is of a physical and mathematical and non-moral order, beginning with an arbitrary number delimited by accident of residence or descent. (…)

But the American axiom asserted political equality as a corollary of the inalienable right of every man to liberty. Democracy was inadmissible because it must deny that right and lapse into despotism, as it has always done. It does so abstractly, by its own logical contradiction; and in practice because logic is a statement of sequence. It is not liberty and equality that are incompatible, but liberty and democracy.

The distinction is that between a principle and a process; the confusion arises from an unwarrantable identification of a negative proposition with a positive. It is falsely assumed that when the claim of the few to command the many is refuted, the converse claim of the many to command the individual is proved. This is quite untenable except in strictly materialistic terms; and in those terms, right must be ruled out altogether. Right as a concept is necessarily opposed to force j otherwise the word is meaningless. (…)

But in reason, if one man has no right to command all other men—the expedient of despotism—neither has he any right to command even one other man nor yet have ten men, or a million, the right to command even one other man, for ten times nothing is nothing, and a million times nothing is nothing.

The material objection to democracy is that it has no structure, the practical defect corresponding to the moral defect. Gravity determines the movements of an aggregation of separate particles over a given surface - with every disturbance each particle is subject to the discontinuous hazard of chance - if a number of them move together under the same impulsion, it is as dislocated mass. Active difference of opinion in democracy is either the detachment of a particle or dislocated mass. As Madison said, "it affords no remedy for the evils of faction." Faction is fragmentary mass, the several fragments being thrown into collision by whatever force occasioned the cleavage.

Virginia, Birthplace of Liberty, To Pass Bill To Ban Mandated Purchase of Insurance!

This is how state's rights is supposed to work! Virginia, the birthplace of such men as Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry, appears poised to strike a blow for liberty on behalf of the people and the states by refusing to abide by any mandate issued by the national government for the citizens of Virginia to purchase health insurance. If passed into law by the newly elected governor of Virginia Bob McDonnell, it would be a clarion call to the American people on how to avoid the civil disorder that would inevitably proceed from the Democrats' tyrannical plans to pass a "healthcare reform" bill intended to hijack one-sixth of the U.S. economy.

Robert G. Marshall, who sponsored the Virginia bill, gave this blistering comment in rebuttal to the Democrats' plans:

"Mobsters used to offer ‘protection’ to business owners, so when Congress says that if individuals don’t become customers of businesses that contribute to them, to me that crosses the line. For me, it is hard to distinguish what is going on in Washington, D.C. from criminal activity."

Verification comes from The Washington Post:

The Virginia General Assembly has given final approval to a bill that would make it illegal for the government to require individuals to purchase health insurance, a measure intended to conflict with Democratic efforts to reform health care in Washington. 

Thirty-four other states are weighing similar legislation to block the individual mandate, which is an element of bills that have passed both the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives. But Virginia is the first state to complete legislative action on such a bill.

Such would be the wisest legislation passed by a state in defense of its rights and those of its citizens in recent memory. The last such rebellion against the ever-expanding power of the national government came in 2007, when several states refused through legislation to implement the Real ID program. This precedent in and of itself is important, since such senators as Republican ne'erdowell Lyndsey Graham and the slimiest of the Democrat slime Chuck Schumer are collaborating on a comprehensive "immigration reform" bill that would pave the path to a National ID system.

Of course, the passage of a "healthcare reform" bill would accomplish the same thing as Real ID by implication, as a central database of medical records (ostensibly to be provided by our fascist friends at General Electric and Google) would be at the disposal of government bureaucrats and politicians, and by implication, their corporate pals. The centralization of medical records would inevitably lead to an alarming violation of our privacy rights, as our allies the Brits are finding out.

In any event, the salvo that appears poised to be issued forth from Virginia would be an even stronger message to the national government than Texas Governor Rick Perry's secession talk last year, which after all, was just talk. What the American people need now is more action to prevent not only further usurpation of state's and individual rights, but a reclaiming by states of our rights as free citizens. If the several states mulling a rejection of the Democrats' intentionally ruinous legislation follow Virginia's lead, the long path to restoring Constitutional balance in our nation will finally be off to a productive start.

Update, from the Virginia bill article: "On the same day the Virginia General Assembly passed Marshall’s bill, the Idaho Senate also approved the Idaho Health Freedom Act (HB 391), which deems the individual mandate unconstitutional and permits the state to sue Congress or any other body enforcing such a mandate."

We need to keep the momentum going and urge the state legislatures to pass this legal protection of the American people!