Crossroads For America

There are, ultimately, two forms of government.

In one form, the government is a creation of the people, answerable to the people, and in all ways subservient to the people.

In the other way, the government is the master, and the people are its slaves.

There’s really no other way to look at this.

Our Founding Fathers chose the first way. And throughout our history, we have been more than pleasantly surprised with the results. See, when people are free to pursue their dreams, hopes, and passions, when they are free to choose for themselves how they will spend their time, resources, talents, and money, wonderful things happen. We see inventions that make our lives easier and puts ever increasingly abundant and healthy food on our table for less money. We see medical inventions that prolong the life of man and cure leprosy, the plague, and almost every imaginable disease. We see charitable works as doctors volunteer their time, training and equipment to hold free medical clinics, and hospitals provide care for the poor, penniless, outcast, and forgotten. These are the fruits of liberty, where government is answerable to the people and people are in charge.

This system isn’t perfect. It requires intelligence, hard work, and responsibility. If you aren’t careful with your freedom, you can easily allow yourself to become entangled in all sorts of traps. If you don’t work hard, you will forever be a beggar, or perhaps worse. If you don’t take responsibility for your own life, you will never find happiness and joy that comes from responsible living. In a way, the free society allows nature’s consequences to bear on those who are not willing to make the right choices. Nature is a harsh teacher, but an effective one, and the message of intelligence, hard work, and responsibility is learned very quickly on an empty stomach.

The other system of government is the way of all the rest of the earth. Since time immemorial, except for rare and short-lived exceptions, humankind has found themselves enslaved to one master or another. Instead of being free to pursue what they would like to pursue, they are left with barely enough time and resources to provide for themselves, let alone their family. Absolute poverty, with no relief in sight, is the order of the day. The only way up in such a society is to stick your hand out, or to bow your head to the ground in front of your masters and plead in the most pathetic way possible for perhaps a spare moment or a spare piece of bread. Of course, why should those in power care what you have to ask for? What have you to offer them? You are a burden, worse than a cow since you can’t be eaten. You are shunned, mocked, scorned, and cast out of your own land.

In between, there are degrees. Today, we are walking the line, as a people, as we ask for government to sieze one quarter of our economy only to give it back to us in their own name. We ask them to save us, save us! But all they are doing is tightening the chains of poverty around our own necks. Are we docile sheep, ready to follow the flock even though it leads to the shearers or the slaughterhouse?

I still believe Americans are more than sheep, more than slaves. We value our liberty, when push comes to shove. Pretty soon, we will be feeling the taxes on our backs, and it will only get worse since Obama’s tax increases will never raise as much revenue as he has hoped. Every dollar he hands out in his name was a dollar stolen from our own back pockets, and yet he thinks we will be grateful for it, especially when he and his buddies skim more than half off the top for their own purposes.

I believe America will, soon, throw off the chains of oppression that Barack Obama have brought upon us. I believe that the better part of our souls will wake up and see what has become of that once great, proud nation that now is no better than a European state. I pray that when we realize, as a people, what we have done, that we will turn back to our roots, our liberty, and our freedom, and exert our authority over government once again.

The Audacity of Stupidity

Just who does President Obama think he is?

Does he really think he–or anyone he can possibly hire–is smarter than the collective wisdom of millions of investors, millions of workers, millions of account managers, and so forth? In other words, does he really think a handful of people stuffed up in a Washington D.C. bureaucracy can really do a better job than regular old Joe’s across America?

It’s absurd to think he is as smart as we wish he were.

Conservatives understand that they–nor any other group of people–are smart enough to tell anyone else what they should do with their lives. Instead, it’s better to leave people with as much freedom as possible so that they can decide what is right for their situations. Yes, we teach morals and values and principles, but we don’t pretend to know how to organize the medical industry, or the banking industry, or any other industry.

That’s the bottom line.

If you think Washington D.C. knows more than your stock broker, or your doctor, or your grocery store, or your gas station, or whatever, then go ahead and write them and ask what you should do each day. Otherwise, demand that they get the heck out of your way and let you live your life in the best way you know how.

The Repression Begins

I don’t know how familiar you are with the modus operandi of fascist and tyrannical governments. Let me draw your attention to how they slaughter their political opponents.

The first step is to dehumanize the intended victims. They are no longer humans. They are no longer citizens. They are “republicans”, “the rich”, or “the military”.

The next step is to demonize them. “The military slaughters babies in cold blood as part of their normal day-to-day routine in Iraq.” “The rich abuse the poor for their own gain, kicking widowed mothers out into the street with a grin of satisfaction.” “The republicans are working to overturn elections by fixing them with electronic voting machines and challenging elections they lost in court.”

Getting the people angry isn’t enough to slaughter your opponents. What you have to do next is invent a pretext for doing very bad things to them. The most common accusations is that they are rebelling, or really, plotting a rebellion against the people and the legitimate government of the people.

Once you get the people believing they are rebels, then it’s pretty easy to round them up and kill them on trumped up charges. After all, you can’t have people who want to overthrow the government running around, can you?

The first two steps–dehumanization and demonization–have already happened and is happening at a frenzied pace today. No one considers that the “rich” may have families or sick grandmothers or charity causes they attend to. No one imagines that they take three months out of their year to go down to poverty-stricken countries and sacrifice their health, time, talent, and money to try and help the people there get on their own feet. Or that the “republicans” are really a group of people who desperately want to make this country a better place and are sacrificing their energy and effort and sacred time to do the same. Or that the military volunteered out of the compassion of their hearts to stand in between the bad guy’s guns and the American people. No, you can’t discuss these things today.

But the third step, the step where you accuse your policial enemies of rebellion, hasn’t happened, at least not in my memory. That is, until today February 25, 2009. (link)

I don’t know how long it will be until I am rounded up and put into prison because I am an American who loves his country and demands that the constitution be followed. I don’t know how long it will be before President Obama issues an executive order that his political opponents should be exterminated for the sake of the country. All I know is that in free democratic societies that mistakenly elect socialist presidents, these things really happen.

Of course, if such a thing did happen, I am sure the American people wouldn’t take it lying down, at least not the military nor the republicans and the rich. The rich will flee, the republicans will arm up, and the military, well, let’s hope they take their oath to defend the constitution seriously.

The Harm of Liberals: Disappearing Retirement Accounts

The Dow lost another 88 points today. There appears to be no bottom. As Jim Geraghty says, we have only 88 days left of Dow to lose at this rate. That puts the Dow at 0 on May 25, 2009.

This is one of the biggest harms of liberal policies. Barack Obama and his administration is taking pride in the fact that investors and traders and brokers are cowering in fear of his policies. He doesn’t mind that every law and budget he intends to pass will make it less and less profitable to stick your money in the market.

This hurts the rich, of course, since they lose untold fortunes of wealth. But the rich are the rich. Their money isn’t all tied up in the market. They diversify, they have other assets that are secure. If the market goes to 0, they can still live a decent life because they are going to have things that are valuable.

But the middle class and the lower class don’t have that luxury. Whatever money they save is a pittance compared to the vast fortunes the rich amass. They rely on appreciation in the market for their retirement accounts to fill up. If they don’t see regular growth, they will never have enough money to stop working. They can’t stick their assets in the cooler or diversify it between high-return high-risk and low-return low-risk.

To those who are retiring soon, this stock market crash is especially devastating. Their assets have halved in value, or more. That means they are missing more money than they put in originally. What are they going to do? They can’t be expected to work until they die, can they?

The stock market has been the great wealth creator in the 20th century. This is how people moved from the lower and middle classes to the wealthy class. This is how they got enough to survive and much more to spare. But thanks to liberal policies, that tool is no longer there.

Thank you, liberals, for crushing the retirement accounts of America’s middle and lower class. Thank you, liberals, for forcing our elderly to keep working despite the hard work and wise financial decisions they’ve made over the years.

Making Liberals Feel Bad About Liberalism

Listening to Rush today on the way to volunteering at Highline Community College, I heard Rush comment that he knows how to make liberals conservatives, and he was going to tell us what we need to do. I always give Rush the benefit of a doubt, and so I turned my ear to listen closely.

His point was simply this: Liberals are liberal because they want to feel good about themselves and what they stand for. It feels nice to say, “I want to help the poor, the sick, the criminal, the outcast, etc!” Liberals don’t see, however, what effect their politics has on the poor, the sick, the criminal, the outcast, and so on. Instead, the party masters make double sure that they never see any of the negative consequences of liberalism. They are, after all, rubes, manipulated by those who simply want power for power’s sake.

So how do you fight against that? Well, you make liberals feel bad about being liberal. You point out to them the natural consequence of liberalism with real examples of real suffering. You connect it to their politics and their votes and their choices. The ideal would be something like, “This little girl died because she couldn’t get medical care because Barack Obama created a system where there were simply no doctors or money to help her.” In other words, “You voted for Barack Obama, he deprived her of medical care, she died. YOU killed the girl because your voted for Obama.”

It’s actually quite easy to do this for any tragedy. Natural tragedies are bad, but humans, especially conservatives, pitch in and help. So the disasters become really great things with humanity on display in its best colors. That is, as long as people are free to do so, they will. But when government comes in and takes money away from the rich and tells doctors who they’re going to see and what kind of medicine they can proscribe, why, that’s when the problems really start.

Conservatives are all about feeling good about themselves as well. It’s just that we don’t buy all the crap shovelled across the airwaves every day on the old-stream media. We listen to Barack Obama promising to halve the deficit but triple spending and we realize, at the very moment he says those words, that he is lying. See, we think. We use that thing in between our ears to see that our compassions actually arrive at the intended recipient. We understand that there are evil people out there and they are trying to take away our freedoms because they are evil, and we don’t want to allow them to do that.

Conservatives can easily carry this message, since we are the group that goes out and gets things done. For instance, I went to Highline today to lecture and demonstrate all about Web Services. That’s real benefit that is going to help those students make wise choices as they plan out their future websites and build web applications and services. That’s something that I created out of thin air since they wouldn’t have gotten that instruction otherwise. I didn’t need government to tell me to go tell those students about Web Services. It’s in my very nature to help. It’s in the very nature of all conservatives to help. In fact, our jobs are just a means to an end. We work to make money so that we can feed, clothe, and shelter our kids, and then when that’s done, we naturally draw out and try to help the guys around us find the money to feed, clothe, and shelter their kids. We don’t need government to tell us to do that because we simply do that on our own.

I want to solicit real-life stories of how liberalism has injured, killed, or impoverished people. Look for examples of how the government got in the way and made people who would normally help run away for fear. At the same time, share examples of real heart-warming help and assistance where government played no role at all, and indeed, never could.

Free America!

I think back to that terrible flop of an environmental movie, Free Willie. In it, some school kids desperately try to free Willie, an Orca (aka Killer Whale). They end up stealing the whale and releasing it in the wild. It was supposed to be some emotional victory, but it really seemed hollow since Willie was likely to end up slaughtering countless thousands of salmon over the next week as they came up the river to spawn. Sorry, I don’t have much personal sympathy for Killer Whales.

At least, not as much sympathy as I have for real, living, breathing human beings. We are creatures of extraordinary potential. We are, in so many ways, the purpose of creation. And we are, as God demands, to be the target of our benevolence, second only to God himself.

My solution for solving the economic crisis and all of our country’s ills is simply this:

Free America.

Free the American worker from the oppressive income tax, Social Security tax, Medicare tax, employment tax, and the anti-liberty open ballots for unionization. Make America a right-to-work state, where unions bully companies and individual people to keep them from doing things they would do naturally for each other.

Free the American family from oppressive tax policies and a suppressed economy that keeps both parents working just to keep a roof on their heads and clothes on their backs.

Free the American business from harsh regulations designed to stifle innovation, production, and trade. Government can set the standards for trade, but let businesses decide what’s best for their business, and stop allowing bureaucrats in Washington D.C. to act as floor supervisor.

Free the American doctor by freeing up the practice of American medicine and reforming the legal system so winning a malpractice suit isn’t as easy as finding a bunch of uneducated rubes who fall for every sob story no matter how plausible. At the very least, limit the amount of money you can win in a malpractice suit!

Free the American industry by stopping this talk of carbon credits. Simply have them clean up their real messes or tax them appropriately for the messes they can’t clean up. Let them set the prices for their goods so that it already contains the cost of cleanup.

Free the American social worker by getting government out of the social work business. Let charities and churches lead in the endeavor to save the American poor from themselves.

Free the American economy by drastically cutting the size of government and lowering the tax rate so that we have the lowest tax rates in the world. The world will literally rush into our country, along with all of their capital, if we created a business environment more friendly than anywhere else.

Free the American political environment by embracing the principles of the constitution and refusing to pay any attention to the failed philosophies of tyranny, despotism, communism, socialism, and so forth.

Free America and you’ll see how quickly we can clean up the mess that government made.

Prediction: Markets Collapse Even Further Tomorrow

I’m predicting that the markets will collapse even further tomorrow. If not the worst since Obama has made his mark known on national politicis, it will still be significant. Of course, nowadays, the Dow drops several percentage points and the Old media seems to not notice.

Summary of Obama’s Speech Tonight

I think President Obama has made clear several things tonight.

I’ve seen the Great Depression, and I fully intend to do whatever Hoover and Roosevelt did to get us there.

I’m popular, so screw the constitution! The people like me, I can do whatever I want. Besides, having laws that people like me have to follow is so 19th Century.

If you’re rich, it must be because you were stealing money. If not from the poor people, you were stealing it from the government. We’re going to tax you into oblivion. If you haven’t already bought a home in Ireland or Hong Kong, then you were stupid for waiting so long to do so. In fact, if you haven’t already moved out, you are pretty dumb for a rich guy.

If you run a small business that is struggling, screw you. If you outsource employees, then you might as well move your entire operation overseas. Because if you don’t, I am going to crush you. I’ll crush you regardless, but I’ll double-crush you if you decide that trading with foreign countries is in America’s best interest.

Unless, of course, you were a business run by democrats. In which case, we are going to bleed the American worker dry trying to make sure you can keep your retirement package. There is no bill big enough that I will ever veto it, as long as the bill will send money straight from American’s pockets to my buddies in Washington D.C. This is the hope and change that America wanted and voted for, and I intend to deliver it.

Republicans better watch out. I’m going to sound more Reaganesque than them. If they try to pull any of that Milton Friedman crap on me, I’m going to wag my finger and point out how popular I am. And then I will crush them. See, I am so popular, that even Jesus looks like a second-rate city council member compared to me. You can’t stop Obama, so don’t even bother trying. By the way, this is what I call “bipartisanship”. Republicans sit over there and look stupid while I tell the world how they refuse to cooperate with my plans to socialize the rest of America.

Mama government is going to make sure everyone gets rationed medical care, whether they want to or not. That means if you are Canadian, you can no longer sneak across the border to get cancer treatment. You’ll have to die before you can get treatment just like the Britains do. And Americans, too, pretty soon. Forget whether government-run medical care is even a good thing, because I’m going to do it no matter the cost to the American people.

When your grandchildren grow up an realize that the US used to be, hands down, the leader in medical care and research, they are going to turn to you and ask, “What happened?” And you’re going to say, “Obama.” And that’s going to send a chill down their spine, because by that time, Obama will be synonymous with all that is evil in government.

I’m going to fix Social Security and Medicare, by the way. Not that I had a choice to, but that it’s actually broken right now and we’re not going to be able to spend all that money on pork if we have to bail out Social Security. (The Chinese, after all, can only take so much money from the American worker to buy government debt to fund my socialism.) So I’m going to do the only reasonable thing and follow President Bush’s plan but I’ll call it something else. I’m still thinking of ways to screw the American people and take their money, so I don’t have many details yet. As soon as I can figure out how to take everyone’s money and get away with not paying out Social Security benefits, then you’ll see the details of my plan.

At least republican governor Bobby Jindal from Louisiana had some words of hope. His message was that it is the American people, not government, that make America great. As long as we keep government far away from its people, we will recover and do the impossible. But if we let government take over, there is no way the American people can be free to do what they need to to fix the economy.

I think the history books have already been written on President Obama. He is, by far, the worst disaster of a president this country had ever seen. You have to go back in the history books to the 1800′s to find presidents as bad as he is right now. It’s clear from his speech that he doesn’t realize how bad his administration is or how much worse it can get.

About a year and a half from now, the American people are going to be demanding change. Already Obama has 50% higher than average disapproval rating for modern presidents. People are finding out what he is doing with our grandchildren’s money and it isn’t sitting well, especially because the money is simply wasted.

I’m done with socialism and everything related to it. If you are a politician that believes that government can do anything right, I am going to call you out on your idiocy.

Hitting a Nerve

To socialists, the rich are the work animals on the farm. They are expected to continue to toil day-in and day-out, put their own capital at risk, and profit no matter what kind of environment they are put in. Those profits are to be seized along with their assets and put to “good use”, or to do that which the rich would never use them for, such as rewarding bad behavior and punishing the rich with stupid regulations designed simply to make life hard for the rich.

When the rich decide to stop working so hard, socialists begin to see the fallacy of their plan. Or maybe it’s when they see tax revenues dry up. If not then, then perhaps when they realize they have no more money to borrow and every dollar they print hurts those whom they are trying to help.

This is America, and in America, socialism isn’t tolerated. It’s high time we threw off the structures of socialism everywhere we find them, from the smallest to the greatest governments in our land.

Socialism is present in many forms. The first form is in progressive taxes. Progressive taxes, as opposed to regressive taxes, are taxes that put a greater burden on the rich than on the poor. If we want to end socialism, we have to ban progressive taxes. We should adopt, exclusively, regressive taxes that put a huge strain on the poor. This is the way we will keep taxes low. If the government intends to raise tax revenues by raising tax revenues, they will crush the poor class to powder and the poor will revolt and demand lower taxes.

The common retort to “Soak the rich” is going to be “Soak your head in a bucket” or “Let’s soak you!“

The second form of socialism is the government handout. It’s time we ended any and all handouts in whatever form they take. The substance of the handout is money or services given in exchange for nothing. You might call this “charity”, but it is nothing of the sort. Charity is when one man helps another out of the pure love of Christ within their hearts. Governments and even corporations are cold, heartless bureaucracies incapable of anything but the appearance of love. They should have no part in handing out cash since their motives are always less than charitable.

We end the handouts by banning all the social work that local, state, and the federal governments are involved in. No longer will there be food stamps or welfare checks or unemployment insurance or child health subsidies. This is because these programs are not charity, but an evil system designed to enslave people to the government by getting them addicted to handouts and encouraging them to live a life of dependence on the government.

I would even go so far as to banning free police and fire services. If you want the policeman or fireman to protect your house for you, you are going to have to buy police insurance or fireman insurance from private contractors, the same way you would buy flood or life insurance. Here, too, we cannot have a people who first turn to their government for anything. In fact, the American way has always been to take responsibility for your own security and keeping your own neighborhood peaceful. The modern policeman with weak, incapable citizens is an invention of the 1940′s and wholly un-American.

The final form of socialism is the politician who promises anything less than complete and totally equitable treatment under the law. We can never write a law that will make crooked politicians straight. If you admit that the War on Drugs is a lost cause, then you should definitely admit that the War on Political Corruption is even more of a lost cause. We should immediately free up political speech, allowing people to freely speak, publish, or broadcast their message with money from any source. If the rich want to “buy” elections by informing the voting public, so be it. It’s just as easy for the other rich to compete in the market of ideas. Government should have no role in determining who is corrupt and who is not. That is for the people to decide.

We have already made great strides in punishing socialism with initiatives such as Prop 13 in California that limit taxes and spending. We need to go further and end the practice of the progressive tax, the government (or even corporate) handout, and limited political speech. As a people, we can demand that our governments change since we are the authors and finishers of the governments around us. Let us do it.

The Light at the End of the Tunnel

As stocks and securities tumble farther down than we imagined possible, it’s helpful to understand why this is happening and how we can not only stop the tumble but bring back our 401k’s and other investment accounts.

Let’s start with an understanding of what securities like stocks and bonds really are and why people are willing to pay money for them. At the core of the securities market, there is a contract that will give the bearer some money depending on certain conditions. This is the heart of it all. The security is worth, at its heart, whatever the expected payout is times whatever the expected probability of actually collecting the money is.

You can see from that simple definition how the word “expect” comes in to play. Securities are not about the here-and-now as much as the soon-to-be. The only way the here-and-now enter into it is only how much influence that has on the soon-to-be.

In other words, if our economy was in the dumpers today, but tomorrow, something changed that realigned everybody’s expectations, then all of these securities would magically appreciate in value, perhaps quite substantially. If they appreciate enough, then the banks are liquid again and they can get back to their core business. The markets will thaw, companies will start hiring because they can get loans and investments, and the factories will start producing again in expectation of future sales.

What happened last year was the combination of many things. At the heart, I believe, was a perception that Obama would win the presidency and he would preside in an anti-business way. That was what led to the downward spiral starting early in 2008. When he secured the nomination, that was another time when securities took a hit. When he actually won on 11/4, the securities markets took another significant hit. Every time he got up to speak about his plans, the markets took even more of a hit. When he was inaugurated, the markets took yet another hit. Every time his jaw moves, or anyone in his administration, it causes the securities to falter and fail.

Why?

Because we don’t expect in the soon-to-be to have a successful business environment where people will be encouraged to work hard and make money.

The way to reverse this is simple. All he has to do is send a clear signal that he will be pro-business. All he has to do is cut the capital gains tax to 0, the payroll taxes to 0, any employment tax to 0, and at the same time, shut down all of the government programs that pay people not to work. On top of that, he should send a clear signal that he will crack down on corruption in any form in the highest places, and appoint officials that are experienced and known for their wise decisions throughout their career.

But of course, you and I, regardless of your politics, know that Obama simply can’t change his stripes. When he comes out and says he won’t nationalize the banks, we know he really will. When he says he wants fiscal discipline and a balanced budget, we know he is merely spreading BS over the political spectrum. We know this because he has broken his word so many times, even before he was elected, and in so many ways that the man is simply a liar and everyone understands that.

At this point, I don’t think anything Obama can say or do will change the expectations in the marketplace. He has already shown himself to be a leftist of the worst kind, and such a leopard cannot change his spots.

My proposal to the Obama administration is to have Biden resign as VP. Then have congress appoint a VP who can actually inspire confidence in our markets, even if they are a democrat. Once the VP is in place, then Obama can step aside and let him (or her) lead the country back to prosperity. All other possible scenarios spell doom.

Our only hope for the future remains in 2010, when perhaps fiscally conservative Republicans and Democrats can seize control of the House and insist on a sane budget. Barring that, perhaps 2012 will usher in a new government that would put forward sane policies and refrain from blatantly lying about what they intend to do. Either way, we’re looking at 2-4 years before we can see the expectations in the marketplace to shift.