November 2012: How will your vote change America?

American values are that government exists to protect our right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Self-government is the best way to achieve this protection, since the governed are the stakeholders.

When our rights are protected by government, it is up to us to decide how we exercise them.

Modern history is full of examples that show what happens when well-meaning people support politicians and movement leaders who proclaim that government should provide for our life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. See Rose Wilder Lane, The Discovery of Freedom. When our rights are provided for, they are no longer rights because then it is up to government (the guys with the guns) to decide how we exercise them.

The history of the American people is that of forming voluntary associations, both to define problems and to organize solutions. The key words are voluntary associations. This was observed and recorded by Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America.

When we look to government to define the problems and organize the solutions, the activity is no longer an act of voluntary association, but rather, it is an act of coercion. de Tocqueville also makes this point.

When government defines a problem and organizes a solution, the entire process becomes a point of law, and therefore, a process initiated and implemented by the full force of the police state.

More Americans are waking up to the fact that they have given up too much ground to government in the name of doing good. They have followed politicians and movement leaders down the garden path.

The election of November 2012 is an important step in the process of restoring government that exists to protect - not provide for - our right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. How you vote matters.

Read the Declaration of Independence

It's time for new, Conservative Leadership in Washington

On May 8, Indiana Republicans will choose between Dick Lugar and Richard Mourdock for US Senate.



During the campaign, Dick Lugar chose the low ground of a negative, smear campaign against Mourdock.

But Mourdock campaigned on principles. Those principles include: 

• small government is a better government for the people
• you know what to do with your money better than government
• free markets keep people free
• our national security depends upon preserving our national strength 

These are clearly stated Republican Party principles, and Richard Mourdock speaks passionately about them.

Hoosiers: When was the last time you heard Dick Lugar speak passionately about anything besides getting Federal funding for some project that supposedly "benefits Hoosiers"?

Some people think we "hire these guys to go represent us in Washington DC."  These are the people who think Congressmen are lobbyists who are there to grab Federal money for special interests.

Other people think "we elect representatives to Washington." These are the people who think Congressmen are  elected by their peers to represent them in a Federal legislature.

On that level, the difference between Lugar and Mourdock could not be clearer.

What is a White Hispanic?

Who decides if one is white, black, Hispanic, or whatever, and who determines racial pedigree?

We have monetized and politicized race. Everybody now understands to self-select the race that gets them the most money and the most benefits.

His own birth certificate state that Obama is half Caucasian, but Barak Obama self-selected "black" as his race.
The selection of one's race is useful on many levels. In November 2007, millions of people voted for Obama solely because of his race.

The professional agitators and media have labeled George Zimmerman a white Hispanic.

If  George Zimmerman is a white Hispanic then Barak Obama is really a white African.

The problem here is identity politics and the useful idiots who buy into it.

Relationship of morality and taxation

"But when the duty on salt was strictly and cruelly enforced, making it penal to pick up rough dirty lumps containing small quantities that might be trhrown out with the ashes of the brine-houses on the highroads; when the price of this necessary was so increased by the tax upon it as to make it an expensive, sometimes an unattainable, luxury to the working man, government did more to demoralize the popular sense of rectitude and uprightness, than heaps of sermons could undo. And the same, though small in measure, was the consequence of many other taxes. It may seem curious to trace up the popular standard of truth to taxation; but I do not think the idea would be so very far-fetched."
 ---"The Specksioneer", from "Sylvia's Lovers" by Elizabeth Gaskell, in Great Stories of the Sea  & Ships, edited by N.C. Wyeth, 1940, page 121

State-run health insurance is essentially a Ponzi Scheme: the first ones in are the winners; the last ones in are the losers.

The handwriting is already on the wall in California for the Pre-Existing Condition Insurance Plan (PCIP), which is the transitional program designed to carry us forward to January 2014, when health insurnce will be available to all, regardless of the risk to the insurer (which will ultimately be the US Taxpayer.)

According to recent reports of what is actually happening with the PCIP in California:

"California was expecting to have about 23,000 residents in its PCIP program by February 2011, and it was expecting those enrollees’ claim costs to average about $1,100 per member per month. As of the end of October 2011, the program had received about 8,500 applications and enrolled about 6,000 people. The program ended the month with 5,300 enrollees, up from 513 enrollees a year earlier. The enrollees have been averaging claim costs of $3,100 per member per month, officials say. The high cost means that, unless more funding surfaces, the program can afford to serve only about 6,800 enrollees at a time, not 23,000, officials say."

So it has come down to this: unless more funding "surfaces," or . . .

"He remembered theoretical conversations he had often had with the doctor on the subject of euthanasia: arguments with the doctor who was quite unmoved by the story of the Nazi elimination of old people and incurables. The doctor had once said, 'It's what any State medical service has sooner or later got to face. If you are going to be kept alive in institutions run by and paid for by the State, you must accept the State's right to economize when necessary.'" --Graham Greene, The Ministry of Fear (1943), p. 176.

Have we really gone too far?

Have you heard people talk like this?

"There won't be much left by the next election. At the rate they're destroying the country, I don't see that we have much time . . . "

"The way things are going . . . we're already elected our last POTUS . . . "

Do you think our free society has passed the point of no return?

The American Reader does not think so. As the Reader has said before, had John McCain been elected instead of Obama, we would be heading slowly and steadily in the same direction we are heading right now.

The Tea Party movement would not exist. The conservative movement would still be effectively marginalized by the media and the political parties. The slow and steady course would not have awakened the sleeping opposition.


See: http://americanreader.blogspot.com/2009/07/obama-blitzkrieg-awakens-opposition.html


This crisis of government is the opportunity of your lifetime to reclaim the Constitution, the Congress, the States, and the Presidency for the cause of American Liberty.

People who say "It's over," really don't know what "it" is.

It is our inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.


It will never be over.


The American Reader keeps coming back to Discovery of Freedom, the great work by Rose Wilder Lane:

"Very few Europeans have ever known what liberty is. All the others take it for granted that Authority controls individuals. When they say 'a free country,' they mean a country not conquered by foreigners . . . When they speak of liberties, they mean what an American means when he asks, 'May I take the liberty?' They mean a permission, granted to them, to do a certain act . . . Freedom is not a permission granted by any Authority. Freedom is a fact. Whether or not this fact is known, freedom is in the nature of every living person, as gravitation is in the nature of this planet. Life is energy; liberty is the individual control of human life-energy. It cannot be separated from life. Liberty is inalienable; as I cannot transfer my life to anyone else, I cannot transfer my liberty, my control of my life-energy, to anyone else . . . This fact is not recognized when individuals submit to an Authority that grants them 'freedoms.'" (from Discovery of Freedom, by Rose Wilder Lane http://mises.org/books/discovery.pdf)

Is socialism a dirty word?

In his editorial column this month, National Underwriter Editor-in-Chief Bill Coffin writes:

I take offense at people using “socialist” and “Marxist” like a dirty word, and towards people who are proposing certain kinds of policy in the American political sphere. There is nothing remotely socialist or Marxist about healthcare reform, financial services reform, tax policy, or anything else we’ve seen while the Democrats and Obama have been in power. Their policies are no more socialist or Marxist than Bush’s policies were fascist or Nazi, although during his administration, Bush got plenty of that kind of commentary, too, and it was just as ignorant and as unfair then as it is now.

Coffin is writing to defend a similar editorial viewpoint written by one of his senior editors, Trevor Thomas, entitled “Taxes are Not the Problem.” Coffin also writes:

There is something called Godwin’s Law, which states that on an infinite timeline, any heated discussion on the Internet will inevitably result in one side likening the other side or the other side’s point, to Hitler . . . All one has to do is actually read the Communist Manifesto or Main Kampf to get the difference. But for a depressingly large number of people, that’s too much work.

 
Like Bill Coffin, Rose Wilder Lane also visited the Soviet Union. But she was older than Bill, who was a teenager at the time of his visit, and Lane was, evidently, better educated. When Lane returned from the Soviet Union, she wrote Discovery of Freedom.


In this book Rose Wilder Lane makes the case that that human beings, or human energy, works best under its natural, individual control. She wrote that "in demanding that men in Government be responsible for his welfare, a citizen is demanding control of his affairs by men whose only power is the use of force."

Lane said that "The use of force must progressively destroy all the protections of an American citizen's natural human rights, and eventually - if at last he protests - his life. The men in public office can no more prevent this result of their assuming, or accepting, responsibility for the citizen's welfare, than they can prevent water from seeking its own level."

Bill Coffin and Trevor Thomas don't have a grasp of the relationship between government and the use of force. They don't understand what Marxism or Socialism really are. Do you? Read Thomas Sowell's Marxism to gain a basic knowledge. [ Get it on Amazon.com  Marxism: Philosophy and Economics ] I heartily recommend all of Thomas Sowell's books.

You might also enjoy Alexis de Tocquville's Democracy in America. Read the section “On the use that the Americans make of Associations in Civil Life.”

In contrasting America with Europe, de Tocqueville wrote: “Everywhere at the head of a new undertaking you see government in France and a great lord in England . . .”

He is not talking about voluntary undertakings. He is talking about the fact that behind every undertaking of government, behind every undertaking of a great lord or king, is the ability and the will to use force to compel citizens to comply.

de Tocqueville explains that this is how the Egyptians built the pyramids and how the Romans build the aqueducts. All of the resources of society - human and material - were marshaled by force into a great undertaking.

This is how the Lenin and Stalin built the Soviet Union.

At the end of the day, the reality is that behind the great undertaking of Healthcare Reform is the ability and the will of the Federal Government of the United States of America to use force to compel citizens to obey its decrees.