They Stole Our Future, But They Cannot Break Our Will

They Stole Our Future, But They Cannot Break Our Will
Listen to this remarkable speech by Bill Whittle. With men like this, America still stands a chance to repel socialism and the altruism that accompanies that system of government. Americans are a can do people with a spirit like no other ever in the history of mankind. We will not be sacrificed at the alter of altruism by the left or the right.

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Altruism: The Justification For All Rights-Violating Laws & Institutions

Craig Biddle at The Objective Standard (Fall 2009) wrote a great article called "The Creed of Sacrifice vs The Land of Liberty". I have pulled out the number of ways government abuses our freedom from his article, followed by the first few paragraphs of his essay. You can read the whole essay at the link below.

1. The Federal Reserve prints fiat money which debases our savings
2. This fiat money finances welfare programs, bails out banks, rescues bankrupt car companies
3. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) violates taxpayers rights by forcing us to insure the bank deposits of strangers.
4. Social Security violates the rights of younger Americans who have to fund retirees.
5. National Labor Relations Act violates the rights of businessmen like automakers by forcing them to "contract" with labor unions...
6. Medicare and Medicaid violate the rights of taxpaying Americans by forcing them to fund the care of the aged and "destitute".
7. The Community Reinvestment Act violates the rights of bankers by forcing them to provide loans to people whom they regard as too risky for business.
8. The Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) violates the right of taxpayers by forcing them to purchase bad debt from failing financial institutions.
9. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) violates the rights of Americans by expanding the extent to which they are forced to fund welfare programs, unemployment benefits, gov run education, and the health care of others.
10. Federal, State and municipal government violate our rights in thousands of other ways as well. (From "The Creed of Sacrifice vs. The Land of Liberty - The Objective Standard, Fall 2009, Page 40.

The proper purpose of government, wrote Thomas Jefferson, is to “guarantee to everyone the free exercise of his industry and the fruits acquired by it.”1 The government “shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government.”2

In accordance with this view of the purpose of government, the founders established a republic in which the government was constitutionally limited to the protection of individual rights—the rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness. In this new republic, men were free to think, to produce, and to trade in accordance with their own best judgment; thus, they were free to thrive in accordance with their intelligence, their ability, their initiative. The result was astounding.

Nineteenth-century America was a land of unparalleled innovation and prosperity—and further political achievement. In addition to countless inventions that sprang up—including the steamboat, the cotton gin, vulcanized rubber, the telephone, the incandescent light, the electric power plant, the skyscraper, and the safety elevator—and in addition to the vital industries that arose or were revolutionized—such as the railroad, oil, and steel industries—19th-century America witnessed the end of slavery, which was recognized as a violation of the basic principle of the land.

Between the end of the Civil War and the turn of the century, America came as close to being a fully rights-respecting society as any country has ever come. Men were essentially free to live their own lives, by their own judgment, for their own sake.

Unfortunately, although the Land of Liberty was a great success, it would not and could not last.
The founders established America on the principle of individual rights, but neither they nor the thinkers who followed them identified the deeper philosophic foundation on which this principle depends, namely, the morality of egoism—the idea that being moral consists in pursuing the values on which one’s life and happiness depend. In the absence of this foundation, Americans have embraced philosophical ideas that are contrary to individual rights.

Over the past century, Americans have increasingly accepted the morality of altruism—the notion that being moral consists in self-sacrificially serving others—and they have increasingly applied this morality to the realm of politics. Consequently, our government is no longer committed to “restrain men from injuring one another [and] leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement.” Rather, our government regularly—and increasingly—“take[s] from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned” and redistributes that bread to those who have not earned it. CONTINUE READING AT The Objective Standard

Learn How We Got To This Financial Meltdown

Richard Salsman writing for The Objective Standard's Spring 2009 edition explains how we arrived at this economic abyss. And you probably won't believe the answer - but think about it and look back on history and you will see the truth. And President Bush helped this mess by giving it a big push. Here is an excerpt to wet your curiosity but go to the article itself it's free and accessible at www.theobjectivestandard.com.

...The above interpretations ignore the plain fact that America today does not enjoy a free-market system—let alone a free-market financial sector—nor has it enjoyed one for most of the past century. Only through a profound misunderstanding of what constitutes a free-market system could anyone honestly blame capitalism for the financial crisis. For decades the American politico-economic system has been a mixed system—a combination of some freedom of choice and action offset by large (and growing) coercive interventions. It was precisely these coercive elements—the regulation, taxation, and subsidization—that caused today’s financial crisis. Washington’s recent and massive interventions did not follow from free-market “failure”; they followed from the market distortions caused by prior government intervention in the economy. Government interventions have both instigated and aggravated the latest financial crisis.

By surveying the government interventions that caused the latest turmoil and wealth destruction in housing and banking, this article will demonstrate that the current financial crisis was caused not by a return to free markets or pro-capitalist policies in the past decade, but by a tragic progression toward socialism. More importantly, it will demonstrate that altruism—the notion that being moral consists in sacrificing oneself for the needs of others—is the basis for this government intervention, and thus the root cause of the crisis.

Of course, in order to recognize that capitalism is innocent of the latest charges against it, we must bear in mind what capitalism is. Capitalism is the social system of individual rights, including property rights, in which all property is privately owned.11 Capitalism upholds the rule of law and equality before the law, forbids government favors to any person or group (including businesses), entails the complete separation of state and economics, and thus leaves each individual free to act on his own judgment for his own sake. With that in mind, let us consider the relevant facts surrounding the financial crisis.

...Perhaps no single U.S. government intervention has destroyed more capital or wasted more taxpayer funds in recent years than the establishment of “Fannie Mae,” “Freddie Mac,” and “Ginnie Mae”—“government-sponsored enterprises” (GSEs) that for years have been used by politicians to secure campaign funds and votes by promoting artificially cheap home mortgages and “the American dream of home ownership.” The quaint, disarming nicknames for the GSEs actually stand for the Federal National Mortgage Association, the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation, and the Government National Mortgage Association. Read more if you want to know the history and reason for why we are where we are today.

Failed Policies Caused by Altruism

With politicians always trying to scheme how they can help the poor by increasing more aid to this group or that group, health care for children, etc. etc. the one thing they never do is think about the consequences of their policies over the long term and how individuals will react to handouts from the public trough.

The Wall Street Journal has an interesting article about how we are recovering from moral bankruptcy. The article by BY PETER WEHNER AND YUVAL LEVIN states "Since 1960, there had been a more than 500% increase in violent crime; a more than 400% increase in out-of-wedlock births; almost a tripling in the percentage of children on welfare; a tripling of the teenage suicide rate; a doubling of the divorce rate; and a decline of more than 70 points in SAT scores."

"But the past 15 years has seen a turn for the better in all of the above statistics.
The most striking element of the overall picture continues to be the extraordinary turnaround in nearly every area apart from the family. The progress we have witnessed over the last 15 years is impressive, undeniable, and beyond what most people thought possible. There was, it is fair to say, essentially no one in the early 1990s who predicted it. How, then, did it happen?

"Obviously, no single explanation will suffice. Instead, long-overdue changes in government policy appear to have combined with a more or less simultaneous shift in public attitudes, with each sustaining and feeding the other. We may begin with the change in policy, for if the past 15 years demonstrate anything, it is the enduring power of policy, properly understood, to influence culture.

"The 1996 welfare-reform bill was the most dramatic and successful social innovation in decades, reversing 60 years of federal policy that had long since grown not just useless but positively counterproductive. In effect, the new law ended the legal entitlement to federally funded welfare benefits, imposing a five-year time limit on the receipt of such benefits and requiring a large percentage of current recipients to seek and obtain work.

"When the bill was passed, there were dire predictions, mostly emanating from liberals, of an explosion of poverty and hunger. They were just as quickly refuted. State welfare rolls plummeted--and poverty, instead of rising, decreased. Welfare reform sent a message in bright neon lights: Higher expectations will yield better results. Rather than giving up on the poor, the new policy assumed that the able-bodied were capable of working, expected them to work, and was rooted in a confident belief that, materially and otherwise, they would be better off for it. In each of these particulars, the policy makers proved correct. If, as the historian Gertrude Himmelfarb wrote in the 1990s, our old social policy had "succeeded in 'demoralizing' . . . society itself," the new policy proved to be profoundly re-moralizing.

"Crime rates, too, benefited from something of a policy revolution over the course of the '90s... " (Read the full article here).

Ultimately, of course, government policies are the result of the philosophical ideas held by a culture. And until we don't discard the tired idea of altruism in favor of a philosophy of individualism and the principle of laissez faire in economics we will always be searching in the dark for the right policies to enact. This hit and miss approach causes a lot of heartache and loss of treasure.