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Money in Politics

Again campaign finance issues are being bandied about.   The solutions forwarded are all of the kind that proposes some new method of corralling the horses after they're out of the barn.   This is typical of horse thieves who hope to nudge the corrective process to favor their own thieving ways, but put the clamp on the competition rustlers.   This means, how can we write legislation to shut up the opposition and prevent financial support from going to our competition in the political arena.   This means, a directed attack on free speech.    The solution is much more simple.  If you really truly want to stop money from influencing the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government, then separate, as much as humanly possible, the government from economics.   Money in politics is buying MUCH MUCH more money for those choosing to "invest" this way. The 'earmarks,' and all the rest are simply paybacks for bribe money. We must stop government from b

Self Interest

The disingenuous or mentally lazy immediately suggest that self interest means just whacking everyone else over the head and taking their stuff. That is one absurd extreme. Just a consideration of my personal interest in the division of labor shows how asinine that view is. Once you agree that your life is your own, meaning your time, your thought, your effort, and the products thereof, then you are done with the political or governmental question. The government, group, tribe, nation, state, whatever, does NOT have any right to the products of your life effort. That leaves the second question. Morally, what ought you do for the total stranger in need. It is easy to see the rightful self interest in helping a friend or family member return to his/her own self sufficiency. Of course, there too, enabling them to become dependent moochers is NOT helping them. So you have to be careful in discerning what effect your 'help' is having, in every case. So. The stranger in nee

Evil of the Left

Evil: To kill,, and blame life. They undermine freedom with oppressive policies, then blame 'too much freedom' for societal ills. They undermine the cultivation of intellect in schools by teaching social conformity, then blame the now blind self interest for economic woes. They insist on politics of pull serving economic interests willing to buy success at a bargain, then blame free self interest for lack of upward mobility. They tell us 'the good' is others, and search vainly for their children's self esteem. They tell us that our group consciousness is primary, that there is value wherever we all 'say' there is value, then debase the currency and blame hunger on greed. They maim the intellect, cultivate resentment and guilt by altruism, poison self esteem by demanding social conformity, steal life effort in the name of charity, and claim it is ALL for the 'common good (tm)' ---- and then, THEN, they stare in shocked, speechless, vapid, cognitive

Carter Inflation? You ain't seen nuthin'

The facts, from a Peter Schiff article: "The last few years have proven that there is no line Washington will not cross in order to keep bubbles from popping. Just 10 years ago many of the analysts now crowing about the perfect conditions would have been appalled by policies that have been implemented to create them. The Fed has held interest rates at zero for five consecutive years, it has purchased trillions of dollars of Treasury and mortgage-backed securities, and the Federal government has stimulated the economy through four consecutive trillion-dollar annual deficits. While these moves may once have been looked on as something shocking…now anything goes." "When President Obama took office at the end of 2008, the national debt was about $10 trillion. Just five years later it has surpassed a staggering $17.5 trillion. This raw increase is roughly equivalent to all the Federal debt accumulated from the birth of our republic to 2004!" "Janet Yellen may

Altruism

My life is my own.  Liberals, collectivists, statists, tell us that the criterion of moral goodness is to live for others.  And yet liberals statistically give the very least of their own money to others.    Some conservatives, some capitalists, tell us that capitalism, individual rights to life and property, are 'good' because, though selfish (bad), the process of honoring individual rights in economics serves the good of the greatest number of people.  Again, the individual life is held up as a *means* to everybody else.  Again, the moral good is that a man lives for everyone else. Well, stop it. Stop telling me that 'the good' means any action in which I disregard my own life.  It is in valuing true values TO SELF, and supporting them, and therefore self, with the productive force of one's own life that is moral. If you are unable or unwilling to see how another man's life is of value to yourself, do all of humanity (including yourself) a favor and DON

Olympic Tax

A senator has forwarded a bill that would exempt the olympians from taxes on their meritorious oppression of the differently abled competitors.  I mean, their winning prizes. This is strange coming from Washington. If sacrificing is good, why would we want to prevent the Olympians from 'giving' even MORE to their country?   Those tax dollars go (at about 20 cents on the dollar) to welfare recipients.  Surely we aren't so cruel as to think those coddled athletes need their fancy gifts more than a welfare recipient needs his or her food stamps?   Now, taxation money is going to pay the bills of every soul that walks through hospital doors.   We don't think that healthy, probably rich, athletes should selfishly keep their Olympic money without handing over their fair share to help save peoples lives do we? Our post office provides a crucial service with our tax money.  They even, helpfully, let everyone know about that letter and package carrying service using o

A Moral Nation

It is said that our people must be moral for the country to survive. Our decline has to do with the sinfulness of man and the decline of American morality. We hear these things all the time. Here is the issue at the very bottom of this mess: The fundamental right that each individual has to his life, the protection of which (and its derivatives) was THE idea at which our government was aimed at protecting from the force of other men and the force of the government, the fruit of which was the prosperity of the American experiment --- that right, of Man to live AS man - to be unchained in his attempts to secure his survival AS man --- that right can not be set on top of a Morality of altruism. If you mix a keen political passion for individual right to life (and thus produced property) with the ethics of self-sacrifice, you get, from the first, the glories and achievements but, from the second, the absurdities, and contradictions, and obscenities of America's history down t

Atlas

Evil Kant

Kant is evil because his epistemology divorced man's mind from an objective reality.   Kant could have said anything at all on ethics and politics, the damage was already done.  Since man had no 'real' objective apprehension of reality, it was laughable to proceed to prescriptive aspects of philosophy.  His disciples, and those influenced by him, certainly fleshed this out into the destructive subjectivism and relativism that were and are the supports of collectivism.   Kant's fairly juvenile reformulations of the ubiquitous golden rule are quite harmless and quite forgotten to the modern collectivist because they floated away, weightless, when Kant's metaphysics and epistemology severed man's mind from an objective assessment of 'what is', and therefore from any rational force in prescribing what man 'ought do.'

Equal Opportunity

False Position:  The government should provide equal opportunity for all citizens. Opportunity per se is too ambiguous (and it is meant to be by those you use it). It is right for the government to protect each individual from forcible breach of their right to life and the obtained trade value of their effort (property). The government has a true role in securing equal protection for each individual under the law. This would be seen as the government's rightful involvement in protecting individuals from forcible interference with 'opportunity' that the individuals would have otherwise secured for themselves by expenditure of their own time, thought, and effort. The provision of 'equal' opportunities for all however, as contrasted with the protection of individuals from forcible theft of their property, is absolute nonsense.   As do all these concocted 'economic rights,' government forcibly providing 'opportunity' in the sense of distributing

GIVING BACK

Wrong headed liberal or collectivist ideology is frighteningly pervasive, often in forms in which it is unlikely the people involved are even aware of their infection.  Well I've had it.  I'm pointing at it, every time, and making a fuss. As I was watching the latest professional golf tournament, I counted at least a dozen instances in which the announcers used a phrase with subtle, skewed implications. In reference to several PGA professionals' impressive charity work, the announcers referred to the activity as "giving back." As a paraphrase, they would say, "It really is impressive, Jim, how David Toms has taken the time and made the effort to give back." Or, "you can really see that these guys think that 'giving back' is really important."  Or, "My goodness it's good to see these guys giving so much back to these communities, Bob."   It is not sufficiently tempting to simply write this off as benign happenstanc
Great article on property taxes below.  Create a value.  Trade that value converting your thought time and effort into currency. Trade the currency for a durable good - land.  Watch as your local municipality steals a chunk of your thought time and effort over and over every year at ever higher rates --- you are RENTING and thought you had made a trade purchase. They will nibble away until all that you originally created is theirs'. http://www.americanthinker.com/2014/01/m-property_taxes_pave_the_road_to_serfdom.html

Death in the name of Life

Money = marker for someone's TIME, thought, effort = someone's Life spent When this is taken by force (tax, bonds, $ printing, franchising by govt, etc) -- life is stolen. Remember our founding words: ....with the right to Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.   For the past 100 years, and ever more rapidly in the past forty, our governments have been actively ignoring that primary function ---   They *should* be protecting EVERY individual's right to life, which they do by honoring and protecting every INDIVIDUAL's right to the product of their time, thought, and effort -- the value they produce that others are willing to trade for -- represented by the trade marker - money.      Instead they have been forcibly and with great inventiveness been stealing the lives of every individual that produces a value to trade.   IT IS OBSCENE.   It is horrifically sad, as this was the first country that started with the idea that each individual's life was to be gua