"The Left Is Running Out of Utopias"

The Democratic lawmakers who have gone on the lam in Wisconsin and Indiana—and who knows where else next—are exhibiting a literal fight-or-flight response, the reaction of an animal facing a threat to its very existence.

Why? Because it is a threat to their existence. The battle of Wisconsin is about the viability of the Democratic Party, and more: it is about the viability of the basic social ideal of the left.

It is a matter of survival for Democrats in an immediate, practical sense. As Michael Barone explains, the government employees' unions are a mechanism for siphoning taxpayer dollars into the campaigns of Democratic politicians.

But there is something deeper here than just favor-selling and vote-buying. There is something that almost amounts to a twisted idealism in the Democrats' crusade. They are fighting, not just to preserve their special privileges, but to preserve a social ideal. Or rather, they are fighting to maintain the illusion that their ideal system is benevolent and sustainable.

Unionized public-sector employment is the distilled essence of the left's moral ideal. No one has to worry about making a profit. Generous health-care and retirement benefits are provided to everyone by the government. Comfortable pay is mandated by legislative fiat. The work rules are militantly egalitarian: pay, promotion, and job security are almost totally independent of actual job performance. And because everyone works for the government, they never have to worry that their employer will go out of business.

In short, public employment is an idealized socialist economy in miniature, including its political aspect: the grateful recipients of government largesse provide money and organizational support to re-elect the politicians who shower them with all of these benefits.

Put it all together, and you have the Democrats' version of utopia. In the larger American culture of Tea Parties, bond vigilantes, and rugged individualists, Democrats feel they are constantly on the defensive. But within the little subculture of unionized government employees, all is right with the world, and everything seems to work the way it is supposed to.

This cozy little world has been described as a system that grants special privileges to a few, which is particularly rankling in the current stagnant economy, when private sector workers acutely feel the difference. But I think this misses the point. The point is that this is how the left thinkseveryone should live and work. It is their version of a model society.

Every political movement needs models. It needs a real-world example to demonstrate how its ideal works and that it works.

And there's the rub. The left is running low on utopias...READ at TIADaily.com (The Intellectual Activist by Rob Tracinski).

Could The Dem Machine Steal the Election From Scott Brown?

Scott Brown must win in Massachusetts to slow the Obama machine down to preserve our country. http://www.tiadaily.com/.

...And in an extraordinary reversal, a new poll shows the race tilting toward a landslide for Brown, who is winning overwhelmingly among Republican and Independents, and who is even getting the votes of as many as 20% of Massachusetts Democrats.

How is he getting the Democrats? Listen to actor John Ratzenberger—famous as Cliff Claven in the Boston-set TV show "Cheers"—at a rally for Brown talking about about the difference between the old blue-collar Democrats and the new party establishment.

This isn't the Democratic party of our fathers and grandfathers. This is the party of Woodstock hippies. I was at Woodstock—I built the stage. And when everything fell apart, and people were fighting for peanut-butter sandwiches, it was the National Guard who came in and saved the same people who were protesting them. So when Hillary Clinton a few years ago wanted to build a Woodstock memorial, I said it should be a statue of a National Guardsman feeding a crying hippie.

It's worth mentioning in this context—and I'm sure Ratzenberger did so—that Scott Brown has served 20 years in the National Guard...

...The more it looks like Brown might actually win, the more nervous we get that the Democrats, in their panic, will try to steal the vote with the kind of dishonest recount that reversed a close vote in 2008's Minnesota Senate race, or at least get it close enough to be able to tie up the election in court... WWW.Tiadaily.com (The Intellectual Activist).

Throw The Bums Out

Sylvia Bokor has an written a very interesting article on how the liberals and conservatives of both the Republican and Democratic party are one and the same. Americans must wake up and realize that we are already a socialist lite country...now with Obama we will become socialist heavy. If we value our liberties and our the American Way of Life let's throw these rotten politicians out of office and vote in only people who hold freedom of the individual as their highest value. Sylvia Bokor titles here article "America At A Crossroads". We certainly are there with this administration. We either choose government control over our lives or freedom. Which shall it be America? We need a George Washington now!

Today's political mix includes liberal and conservative Republicans, and liberal and conservative Democrats. The Republican and Democrat tags no longer accurately identify political doctrine. The designations liberal and conservative have also changed from their original meaning.

Today's liberalism is a perversion of Classical Liberalism, which stressed the essential goodness and rationality of man and his ability to recognize and solve problems, all of which led to systematic improvement in man's life, exemplified by the Enlightenment.

The corruption began in 1848. Karl Marx and Friedich Engels, ignoring the vast improvements the Enlightenment made possible, argued that the state should advance the welfare of individuals. Since the state has no income except by taxing those who produce, those who produce were sentenced to provide for those who did not, violating the rights of producers.The corruption spread in the 1930s when Roosevelt signed into law the minimum wage, progressive taxation, Social Security and established Fannie Mae to provide low-interest mortgages. Classical Liberalism was dead. Liberalism and the welfare state became one: Socialism.

Conservatism originally supported limited government and free enterprise. But it also held that political, social and religious institutions represented ageless wisdom and that the source of individual rights were "gifts from God," not man's nature. Rights, therefore, were considered privileges meted out in obedience to God.

The communist victory in Russia disarmed conservatives. They recognized that their own views did not contradict communism. Politically "You are your brother's keeper" was collectivism. Seeking to disassociate themselves from communism, conservative patriotism devolved into "my country right or wrong." By 2008, John McCain solidified this view explicitly with the campaign slogan "Country First," stressing duty and placing the group above the individual: nationalism...(Read the whole article here).

Will Iraq be a Repetition of Vietnam?

Know your history or you will be condemned to repeat it. For those of you who are too young to remember the way the Democrats saw to it that we abandoned Vietnam to the communists in spite of the fact that we won the war on the ground are seeing nothing new with today's cries for leaving Iraq even though we are winning the war on the ground. Arthur Herman in his "Democrats and the Killing Field" in the Wall Street Journal, reminds us of those horrible events and what it meant for the people we were "saving" and other countries that were taken over by brutal dictatorships because they found out America was a paper tiger.

"Most people have never heard of Operation Frequent Wind, which ended on April 30, 1975, 33 years ago. But every American has seen pictures of it: the Marine helicopters evacuating the last U.S. personnel from the embassy in Saigon, hours before communist tanks rolled into the city. Thousands of desperate Vietnamese gathered at the embassy gate and begged to be taken with them. Others committed suicide."

...Actually, the U.S. had won the war in Vietnam on the battlefield, just as the surge has done today in Iraq. Over Easter 1972, South Vietnamese forces, backed by U.S. airpower, crushed the last communist offensive, killing nearly 100,000 North Vietnamese troops.

Because we left too early, Vietnamese were slaughtered after they were "liberated and the new communist regime "ordered somewhere between one- third to one-half of South Vietnam's population to pass through its "re-education" camps"...

"That number does not include the thousands of "boat people" who tried to flee the totalitarian nightmare of communist Vietnam, and perished at sea."

In Cambodia at least 1.5 million innocent Cambodians were "butchered or starved to death in the Khmer Rouge's killing fields and re-education camps..."

This pullout by the United States ushered in the most atrocious take over of various countries by the Marxist-Leninist thugs.

"Marxist-Leninist regimes emerged not only in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, but in Ethiopia and Guinea Bissau (1974), Madagascar, Cape Verde, Mozambique, and Angola (1975), Afghanistan (1978), and Grenada and Nicaragua (1979). Soviet troops were welcomed in Fidel Castro's Cuba for the first time since the 1962 missile crisis. Cuban troops traveled freely to Africa to prop up Marxist regimes there."

"In 1979 the Ayatollah Khomeini was able to establish his brutal theocratic rule over Iran, confident that America, having learned "the lessons of Vietnam," would never intervene."

We are winning not only the war in Iraq but the hearts and minds of most of the people. Now is not the time to quit but to get the job done and finished properly. Democrats should read the history of Vietnam and realize that because of them we lost that war and the world suffered because of that.

The Democrats, Lead by Pelosi, Reject Colombia At Our and the Region's Peril

By all accounts Colombia has made a remarkable transformation primarily by being tough on Narco traffiquers which are the local terrorists. Kidnappings, drug traffiquing and murder is down all due to the remarkable leader in that country, Alvaro Uribe. So how is it that the US congress is incapable of passing the Free Trade Agreement with this country so that tariffs will be lowered on our goods going into Colombia? Craven corruption.

Over at WSJ John Fund has a good column about how important this trade deal is to Colombia, to us and the region as far as a barrier to Chavez' designs on the rest of Latin America.

President Uribe made clear how disappointed he was that the Democratic front-runner had chosen domestic politics over geopolitical stability: "I deplore the fact that Sen. Obama . . . should be unaware of Colombia's efforts," he said in a statement. "I think it is for political calculations that he is making a statement that does not correspond to Colombia's reality."

The simple truth is that the opposition to the trade agreement--from the Democratic presidential contenders to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi--has nothing to do with reality. Rep. Charles Rangel, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, admitted as much recently: "It's not the substance on the ground--it's the politics in the air."

There was another period when raw politics was allowed to trump what many in Congress privately admitted was common sense. In the spring of 1930, as the economic downturn set off by the previous year's stock market crash set in, Congress was debating the Smoot-Hawley tariff bill that sought to raise U.S. import barriers to record levels.

Most of the leading economists of the day opposed Smoot-Hawley. A front-page New York Times headline on May 5, 1930, read: "1,028 Economists Ask Hoover to Veto Pending Tariff Bill." But for entirely selfish and shortsighted reasons, both Congress and President Hoover went along with the protectionist hysteria. As a result, the Great Depression was probably deepened and extended for years.

Today, another no-brainer trade vote is before Congress. The foreign-policy benefits of the agreement are immense and the economic costs are minimal. "This is a test of whether the Democratic Congress is ready to accept the responsibilities of the majority," says Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute.

Everyone plays politics with trade. But there are times when the stakes are too important. The Colombia agreement is another example of when politics must take a back seat for a larger good. We certainly know how Hugo Chavez is rooting for the congressional vote to turn out.

Watch What You Ask For - You might Just Get It: Universal Health Care

It seems to me that too many Americans think that Universal Health Care would be a good thing: but is it? What with the Democratic candidates Obama and Clinton calling for Universal health care let's be sure that we understand what it is they are calling for. An excellent article "Moral Health Care vs Universal Healthcare", by Lin Zinser and Paul Hsieh at The Objective Standard is a great place to start.

"Government-run health care systems do not and cannot work, because they improperly treat health care as a “right.” Health care, like food and clothing, is a need, but not a right. It is a commodity that is created by the intelligent thought, creativity, and hard work of producers, such as doctors, nurses, allied medical professionals, and hospital administrators. When the government treats health care as a right, it necessarily violates the genuine rights of the providers who produce those goods and should be free to offer them for exchange on whatever terms they see fit, not forced to serve people against their own judgment. And it necessarily violates the rights of consumers, who should be free to trade with providers by mutual consent to mutual benefit. As we have seen repeatedly, good doctors cannot and will not continue working under a system that enslaves them.

"A final (and often unacknowledged) consequence of government interference in medicine is that it leads to violations of individual rights in other areas of life, such as violations of the right to free speech and mandates regarding what people may and may not eat. When the government pays our health care bills, in order to save money, it inevitably demands greater control in how we lead our daily lives. Some of the “universal health care” proposals in Colorado, for instance, include “sin taxes” on foods and products deemed unhealthy. And in Great Britain, the government Advertising Standards Authority recently banned television reruns of some 1950s-era commercials featuring the slogan “Go to work on an egg” on the grounds that they were promoting an unhealthy lifestyle. Eggs are, of course, legal in Great Britain, but, says the government: “Eating eggs every day goes against what is now the generally accepted advice of a varied diet. We therefore could not approve the ads for broadcast.”...

"The solution to America’s health care problems is not more government intervention. Government violations of individual rights through government interference in the marketplace are the source of the problems. Government meddling in health insurance has all but eliminated choice, competition, and innovation, and has driven up the cost of health insurance. Government interference in medicine has caused incalculable harm to both patients and doctors, and driven up the cost of health care. Government controls have bred more controls, as politicians and bureaucrats have tried to “solve” the problems created by one set of regulations by imposing another set, and so forth, in a vicious spiral of increased costs, rationing, suffering, and death. Just as a doctor would not attempt to treat a burn victim by exposing him to more heat, so we should not attempt to solve our health care problems through more government intervention.

"The only moral and practical solution to this now-behemoth problem is to acknowledge that government intervention in health care and in health insurance is wrong, and to start in earnest to eliminate all such interference. This is the moral approach to solving the problem because it recognizes that the producers of health care goods and services have an inalienable right to dispose of the fruits of their thought and labor as they see fit, seeking their best interests through free trade in the marketplace. And it is the practical approach to solving the problem because it will lead to high-quality medical care at the prices that make such care possible—the prices on which providers and patients voluntarily agree." (Read the whole article here.)

DEMOCRATS: Lower Taxes and Give Us Economic Freedom!

"Democrats in Congress remain committed to raising taxes on grounds that tax rates don't much matter to economic growth, and in any case they only help the rich. They may be the last public officials on the planet to believe this. In recent weeks alone, some of the unlikeliest political leaders have endorsed tax rate cuts in the name of making their economies better." READ (WSJ Opinion Journal).

A partial list of countries that have cut taxes:

1. Spain reduced the corporate tax from 35 to 30% and personal income tax from 45 to 43%.
2. Eleven former Iron Curtain nations have flat tax rates of 25 % or lower.
3. Bulgaria now has a flat tax of 10%, the lowest rate in the world.
4. Kuwait will slash the corporate income tax on foreign companies from 55 to 15%.
5. It appears that 26 developed nations have "either cut personal or corporate income tax rates since 2005".

America has a corporate tax of 35% "one of the few developed nations left with a rate of more than 30%".

Leaders around the world have learned that to be competitive today and to grow their economy, tax rates have to be slashed. Perhaps one of the most amazing stories of a third world country moving to a first world status is Ireland. Where is the United States on this issue? With a very important presidential election this year the Democrats are still stuck in the 70's, mired in big government socialist ideology.

IT'S TIME FOR AMERICA TO GET WITH THE PROGRAM THAT PRODUCES WEALTH:
LOW TAXES AND ECONOMIC FREEDOM!