I am Not My Brother’s Keeper

Barack Obama is running around, trying to use religion to turn American taxpayers into slaves of socialism. One of his arguments is that “I am my brother’s keeper”, which he claims is based on the Bible.

This is absurd, of course, because the Bible says no such thing.

But it’s also absurd because forced charity is never found in the Bible. Only voluntary charity is sanctioned.

Let’s go back to the “brother’s keeper” bit. This phrase comes from a conversation between God and Cain, who recently murdered his brother Abel in the first murder in biblical history. God asks Cain, “Where is Abel?” Cain replies, “How should I know? Am I my brother’s keeper?” (Of course, the King James Version puts it slightly differently.)

Let’s ponder for a moment what Cain was saying. Cain, a child of the devil, wasn’t being flippant. He was, however, making a logical point. “I do not own Abel. Abel is not my slave. I am not his God. He is wholly independent from me. In fact, you, God, are in charge of Abel and you, of all people, should know where he is.”

Of course, God did know where Abel was, and what Cain did, and punished Cain for murdering his brother. Since God was Cain’s keeper, along with Abel’s, he had a responsibility to do so.

Now, nowhere in the Bible does God command us to be our brother’s keeper. Instead, we are charged to love our neighbor as we love ourselves. In fact, this is the second great commandment, superseded only by the ultimate commandment to love God.

If you claim a biblical foundation for your charity, then you have to do three things:

1. First, love God. Worship Him and nothing else. Put Him before all else in your life, before human reasoning and science, before your family and career. All your thoughts and prayers should be directed to Him. All your trust should be in Him.
2. Second, love yourself. Yes, after God, you should be loving yourself. That means you take care of yourself. Note that you are made after the image of God, and God loves you, so if you love God, you should love those that God loves.
3. Third, love your neighbor as you love yourself. That is, do for your neighbor the things you do for yourself.

Herein, the principle of the Golden Rule, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” is manifest.

Now, capitalism and our form of government is based almost entirely on the two great commandments. We simplify the concepts by talking about things called rights. The big rights are the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. These rights flow from the Christian and Jewish beliefs in a loving God who commands his children to love Him and love each other. By acknowledging people’s rights as God-given, we are loving our neighbors and loving our God. And that’s what capitalism and conservatism is all about: admitting that we are all equal and entitled to equal rights, and among those rights are not any rights that would destroy the rights of others, such as taking from one person to give to another.

And that’s why our government is limited. We don’t want government to intrude into our lives and dictate what we should and shouldn’t do. We do, however, like government to organize us into a military to protect our country from our enemies. And we like government to organize us so that we don’t go around murdering and robbing from each other, but instead trading and working for each other voluntarily. We also like government to respect the boundaries the people have set for it.

Now, going from the above to a universal health-care entitlement is impossible. See, you can’t give things to people unless you have it to begin with. Since government has nothing it hasn’t taken by force or fraud, it cannot give medical care to anyone. It has to either enslave doctors and nurses to the state, or enslave the people to the state to hire doctors and nurses, or some combination of the two. It has to take, and the taking is wherein our beef lies.

If you want to keep the two great commandments, then here’s what you can do. First, get insanely wealthy. Second, spend all of your excess wealth on those who truly need it. In between, advocate that others do the same.

What happens to those who cannot afford health care? They are left to beg for it. And if we do not give them what they cannot obtain for themselves, they do not get it. This is no different than a hungry mother begging for food for her starving children in a country without any food at all. There is simply no food to give, no food to be eaten, and quite simply, this shortage means someone has to suffer.

That’s what’s happening in our world today. We have health care, but we only have so much. The only way we know of creating more is to motivate people to get trained in medicine and work as hard at it as they can. And the only thing that motivates them is money, since money is the thing that allows us to distribute all the things we produce in accordance to the productivity of people’s behavior. So those who need health care the most pay for it, while those who can’t afford it or don’t value it go without. This is no different for any other industry, be it education or food, or cars and books. If you want more of something, make it cheaper or find more money to spend on it.

Rather than focusing on how the government can take and distribute, Barack Obama should be thinking of how the government can reduce the cost of government and increase the benefit of government. Not the benefits paid out to the poor, but the economic benefits of having just laws and a just enforcements system that encourages proper and beneficial behavior.

It’s not Socialism

Rush is right, once again.

Obama isn’t espousing socialism, and he is not a socialist. See, socialism is when government owns the means of production. He isn’t trying to buy out the rest of the country or take over the property of the private sector.

There is another word to describe his policies and what he is doing. That is simply this:

FASCISM.

Fascism is when the state controls the means of production, while others own it and pretend to be in control of what they own. A perfect example of this is when Obama’s pay czar oversees what the salaries of the top performers on Wall Street are, or when he decides that it’s time for the CEO of GM to be replaced.

In that regard, I would appreciate it if we no longer associated Obama with Stalin and Lenin. No, a much more apt comparison is Mussolini and the most famous fascist of all, Hitler.

God Smiteth

God has finally decided to remove the stain that was Sen. Edward Kennedy.

To understand why I say this, let’s consider two facts of his life.

One, Edward Kennedy was as corrupt as they come. He left his girlfriend, one of thousands, to die while he swam to safety. He wholly committed himself to alcohol and debauchery. The long list of females he has  abused will never be complete. His methods of abuse are beyond description. He used his power and authority to cover his crimes and sins. Senator Edward Kennedy is the definition of corruption, and the reason why we have a constitution: because people like him should never have power over anything.

Two, Edward Kennedy devoted his life to, as Rush says, taking money from hard-working Americans and giving it to Americans who don’t work. In other words, punishing the hard-workers and rewarding the lazy. All of his programs were failures of the worst sort. Would Edward Kennedy donate a single red penny to help the poor he pretends to champion? No, but he will volunteer all of yours for the same cause. Much like Barack Obama who says we need to be our brother’s keepers, and yet allows his own flesh and blood to suffer in squalor, Edward Kennedy is the worst sort of hypocrite.

Is there anything virtuous or worthy or heroic in Kennedy’s life? No, none. He was an enemy to virtue and an enemy to freedom. May he wear the traitor’s cloak for all eternity. At least Benedict Arnold didn’t abuse his power to cover his sin.

If Socialism is so Great, Why Force It?

If socialism is such a wonderful thing, then why do we need to threaten people to get them to participate? Shouldn’t they just do it on their own?

I imagine someone out there willing to make the argument that people are too stupid to think collectively, and that only by forcing them to do what is right will they ever come to the right answer.

Such a person would have to be stupid to think such a thing.

After all, people will happily aggregate their efforts when everyone benefits. Look at all the international corporations out there with millions of employees. How many of those people are forced to work there against their will?

The bottom line is that socialism doesn’t work. The people who are asked to put in the most get the least out of it. Only government can force them to participate.

Socialism, in its Purest Form, is Evil

Socialism, in its purest form, is evil. It is bred by evil. It grows up to evil. Partial socialism is evil. More socialism is more evil.

This is the type of Satan-worshipping, misanthropic, beat-people-to-a-bloody-pulp evil. This is the kind of evil that even those who refuse to admit to morality will admit is evil.

I can prove it to you, and it’s actually quite simple.

At the heart of socialism is the idea of taking from someone what they earned through their own hard work and fortune, and giving it to someone else who does not work nor enjoys good fortune.

This is evil for three reasons.

One, it punished success. If success is good, then this is evil. If it is good to get a nice job, to earn a lot of money doing things people want done, to distribute food to the poor and medical care to the sick, then this is evil.

Two, it rewards failure. If failure is bad, then this is evil. It is bad to lose your job, bad to be poor, bad to live without clean water and good food, and bad to not have medical care.

This is different than remedying evil. Without socialism, people will build hospitals and clinics for the poor where they can receive treatment at low or no cost. However, these people that receive the treatment are not winning life’s jackpot. They understand, clearly, that what they are receiving was produced by someone else and is given freely, without constraint, out of the compassion of their hearts. They also understand that they must do all they can to free themselves from their own poverty, because no one wants to live life as a leech.

With socialism, the poor, sick, and needy now demand and receive, at no cost to them, the fruits of others labor, handed over not out of compassion but fear.

Finally, it is slavery. Socialism puts people in control of other people, enforced by the point of a gun. If you believe slavery is evil, that it is sick and wrong to believe that one person should own another, that one person should be able to tell another what they can and can’t do with their free time (outside of “don’t do bad things to other people”), then this is evil. That’s because socialism turns the government into slavemasters and the people into slaves.

If you believe good is evil, then you will have no problem punishing success.

If you believe evil is good, then you will have no problem rewarding failure.

If you believe that slavery is good, then you will have no problem being the slavemaster or the slave.

If you believe that good is good, and evil is evil, and slavery is evil, then you will whole-heartedly refuse socialism.

“I have kept my oath. Do you ever intend to keep yours?”

That’s what a retired marine said to Rep. Baird today. The oath he is referring to is the oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States from all enemies, foreign and domestic.

Article 1, Section 8 limits, explicitly and purposefully, the power of the federal government to a few very specific things. We have, long ago, exceeded those limits.

What we need is not to drift even further from the constitution into a state run by an emperor and a senate who have no limits and where the people are allowed to do only what they allow them to do. What we need is to restore those limits the way they were written.

President Barack Obama is the enemy of freedom because he doesn’t feel limited by the Constitution. He is the enemy of America because he tramples on the limits of that sacred document. He is also an enemy to the Constitution, and as such, anyone who has sworn an oath to protect that sacred document has sworn an oath to stop Obama.

(Hat tip: Gateway Pundit)

Retail Revenue and Government Corruption

I work in retail. That means the business I work for makes money by buying stuff and selling it at a higher price to people.

In order to make more money, retail companies focus on revenue. Yes, profit is important, and vital, but revenue is how you get profit. If a retail company does billions of dollars in revenue, and makes a 1-2% margin on that, then that is hundreds of millions in profit. If the same company did hundreds of billions in revenue, then it would make tens of billions in profit.

When analyzing a market, it’s vitally important to figure out how much money there is. For instance, we won’t go into the selling pork to Kosher Jews market because there’s simply very little money there. If we managed to some how sell it at all, it would only be a few hundred dollars worth, with profits of a few dollars. Pointless. So we completely avoid that market.

But selling toys near Christmas? Selling groceries and deoderant? Selling shoes and microwave ovens? These are markets where hundreds of millions, and sometimes much, much more is sold in revenue. Capture a good chunk of these markets, and you make millions upon millions in profits.

The same is true in government. If there is a government with a limited budget, then, surprise, surprise, there are no lobbyists. Lobbyists don’t show up at some unknown county of population 50. Why? Because even if you taxed those people to death, you’d probably make only tens of thousands of dollars. And out of that money, you could probably only transfer a small percent to your pocket.

But if you have a government with millions or hundreds of millions of people, all who can be taxed to the tune of billions and trillions of dollars, why, belly up! A small percent of that is enough to set you for life.

The solution to this problem is rather simple. All we have to do, as a people, is limit the size of government.

Imagine a federal government that took Articl 1, Section 8 seriously. Imagine a federal government that had a cap on taxing and spending, a cap set so low that there was barely enough money to fund the military and federal courts. Would you have international lobbyists clamoring to get a piece of that action?

No, or at least, there would be far fewer doing so.

We, the people, have ultimate control over our governments. If we demand that they limit spending and taxes and thus limit the size of the government, they will do it.

However, we must ensure that we are not “on the take” ourselves. We must severe our finances from the government’s finances. That is, if our livelihood depends on the government growing each year, we are part of the problem, not the solution.

In a very short time, probably 2 years, Social Security will go bankrupt. Medicare is already bankrupt. The problem is that we cannot sustain the level of spending because no one in the entire world is willing to loan us the money. We have long ago left the point where we can fund government operations on taxes alone, so once people stop loaning us money, we will be forced to dramatically cut spending.

You may have experienced this in your personal finances, or someone close to you has experienced it. You live the good life until your income drops or you are spending more than you earn. Then the banks and credit card companies offer to help you make ends meet until your earning can match your spending. But eventually, they stop loaning your money and start demanding you pay back what you promised. You are forced to stop spending because you no longer have the power to buy.

My point is that if you depend on government spending for your livelihood, whether that is Medicare and Social Security, or a government job, or a job funded by government spending, you will eventually be cut off. So rather than wait for that crash to come, it’s better to cross the line, leave the government business, and demand that government dramatically cut spending and taxes to the point where lobbyists disappear.

One of the best side-effects of having government dramatically cut is that the private industry blossoms and is soon outpacing all of the most positive outlooks.

The Ultimate Powers

“I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power.” –Thomas Jefferson, letter to William Charles Jarvis, 1820

Let me translate to even plainer English.

The ultimate power of government is in the people. When the government violates the constitution, the people are supposed to hold the government accountable. When the people become stupid, the solution is not more government but to educate the people.

Wise words for today.

They Don’t Want to Fix It

There are very practical, very positive solutions to the medical problems we face as a nation today. Let me list some of them.

(1) Keep malpractice lawsuits capped so that lawyers can’t get rich quick from exploiting the misfortune of others. Several million dollars to pay for a life ruined is more than enough, especially because several million dollars means a life free from financial worries. This has to happen at the state level, except for cases that cross state lines which have to be addressed by congress.

(2) Only allow malpractice suits in front of trained, practicing physicians or scholars. This way, the case can focus on the facts at hand and the jury cannot be manipulated to believe something as silly as the doctor delivering the baby causing diseases that have nothing to do with delivery. “Jury of peers” should mean just that. This reform has to happen at the state level.

(3) Allow people to buy health insurance across state lines, governed by the laws and tax code of the other state. This way, states will be encouraged to write a fair system, fair to the patients, doctors, and insurance companies, and consumers will be allowed to shop in a bigger market. This reform has to happen in congress.

(4) Stop giving tax incentives to employers to bundle health insurance with employment. Individuals, not companies, should negotiate for health coverage. There are two ways to eliminate the tax incentive: Give individuals the same tax benefit that companies have, or eliminate it all together. I don’t mind either way, as long as the total tax burden decreases or remains the same.

(5) Give tax credits to those who donate to help the poor who need medical help. This encourages free people to take care of the poor in our society. Similar tax credits for education and other services have lead to the creation of scholarships and schools designed specifically for the poor. This reform can happen at the state and federal level.

(6) Eliminate the federal rule that demands hospitals must take care of every patient that walks through their doors. This law turns hospitals into plantations where doctors, nurses, donors, and administrators are slaves serving the poor. Rather, hospitals and other medical facilities should be allowed to build up a private, charitable network to take care of the medical needs of the poor in the community.

(7) Eliminate government programs to give “free” or reduced price medical insurance to the poor. By having the government compete with private charity, it eliminates donors (since their money is consumed by taxes) and allows people to ignore the needs of the poor since government will take care of it for them. By keeping government out, individuals will feel an individual responsibility to help the poor and have the material resources to do so. As the argument against socialism goes, if you care so much about the poor, what are you doing about it? And if you say, “paying taxes”, then when we eliminate these programs, you can keep donating that money to your favorite charity.

(8) Eliminate state boards of medicine and stop regulating the medical industry. Allow doctors, nurses, and others to experiment, within the bounds of the law, with medicine, profit off of their successes, and provide the care that patients want to receive. The more red tape we throw up between the patients, their doctors, and the insurance companies, the more expensive and more difficult it gets to provide that care.

Now, given these ideas, all of which have proven successful where tried, in the medical and other industries, why aren’t democrats proposing anything resembling them as part of medical reform?

It’s because they don’t want to fix it.

They simply want to take it over, to add to their list of programs that they have enslaved the people with. What’s even more terrible about this program is that they are enslaving you with your own money. In other words, they take your money with taxes, and then give it back to you as medical care, all the while ensuring that you behave exactly as they wish you to behave, or they will cut the money off.

And if their goal isn’t to take it over, then perhaps they are simply trying to help the spread of socialism by destroying the greatest enemy of socialism in the world: the hard-working and productive American people.

Science Disproves Evolution

New scientific evidence suggests that the more ancient creatures, according to the theories of evolution, are less diverse than the younger creatures. (link)

The most diverse creatures? Birds and mammals. The least? Reptiles, particularly crocodiles and the lizard-like tuatara.

What does it mean? It means that yet another assumption of evolution has been turned on its head. The longer a creature has been around, the less evolving it has done, but the shorter it has been around the more evolving it has done. How can one kind of creature evolve 10,000 times faster than the same creatures it has come from? Either it has been around 10,000 times longer or shorter than we thought, or the creatures do not come from the same stock. 6,000 years times 10,000 is about 60 million years, which is interesting.

As Answers in Genesis points out, any sane scientist would question evolution rather than rush to try and adapt the failed theory to the new evidence. (link) After all, science shouldn’t start with a conclusion and try to make the facts fit.

The scientists at AiG point out that that’s exactly what they do: start with the Bible and look around the world for evidence corroborating it, and that’s what they get criticized for, and rightly so. After all, AiG is less about science and more about religion, pointing out how science doesn’t contradict the Bible as is popularly believed.

Evolutionists who do it while claiming the mantle of science are lying to you. Those evolutionists are motivated by articles of faith, not science, and should be treated as religionists who believe in the theory of evolution, not scientists. Scientists, after all, question and disprove prevailing theories, proposing new ones in their stead.

In fact, a truly honest and objective assessment of the facts would lead most people to believe that creatures were either transplanted or created through some unknown force, and that creatures are gradually becoming more and more degraded over time. This, of course, suggests something closer to the account in the Bible and farther from the story of evolution.

I strongly doubt any evolutionist will attempt to understand the points I make in this article, instead blindly attacking me as unqualified to make such statements. This attack is a logical fallacy called ad hominem, meaning, they are attacking the messenger and not the message. Those who use it tend not to hold the winning side of the argument in science.