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Totalitarianism in Nationalized Health

Posted by Robin Phillips on Friday, September 04, 2009 9:49:23 AM

When Sarah Palin suggested that Obama’s health care plan will give bureaucrats the right to decide who lives and dies, she raised a legitimate concern. After all, a health care system that is limited by meager financial resources must ultimately decide who gets to benefit from it and who doesn’t.
 
However, the debate over life and death issues has obscured a more fundamental concern. The system will not only have to make decisions over who is allowed to die, but the government will be faced with the God-like responsibility of telling the rest of us how to live.
 
At least, that is the precedent that has been set by those countries already providing national health care, particularly the United Kingdom. If the example of Britain teaches us anything it is that when there is a direct link between the physical health of a populace and the nation’s fiscal integrity (which there obviously is when government promises to pick up the tab on everyone’s medical expenses), the state cannot help but develop an inordinate interest in keeping its citizens healthy.
 
In short, a government that promises to provide health care for its citizens begins to take a deep interest in the minutia of their personal lives. At first, this manifests itself in mildly intrusive ways, such as the UK’s campaign to get citizens to exercise while waiting for the bus. But it quickly accelerates into a full-scale policing of individual health.
 
Consider that British parents are routinely threatened with having their children removed if they are too fat, while the “health and safety” cult increasingly restricts the range of legitimate activities Brits may or may not perform. Any behavior that might lead to disease or injury – from tree climbing to eating shellfish – becomes a matter, not merely of private health, but of public “health and safety.” The reason these things are a concern is because preventative action is seen as the most effective way to reduce the costs of an over-stretched health care system.
 
Because every aspect of our lives can, in a general and indirect sense, be connected to our health, universal healthcare quickly becomes a blueprint for government to micromanage the minutia of our personal lives. In the end a state that has an economic interest in keeping its citizens healthy is a state that begins to be deeply interested in matters that ought to remain none of its business.
 
If President Obama succeeds in bringing in his health care plan, America will go down a similar road, leading to an institutionalized hysteria about health, lifestyle and all the social and intellectual decisions we make which may affect the health of ourselves and others. In the end, there is literally nothing that will fall outside the concern of a government that has taken upon itself the mantel of public health. Even the books we let our children read and the movies we let them watch become the concern of the health-conscious state. (Let’s not forget that in 2004 Hillary Clinton urged us to think about children’s entertainment “from a public health perspective.” She suggested that, “exposing our children to so much of this unchecked media is a kind of contagion,” a “silent epidemic” that threatens “long-term public health damage to many, many children and therefore to society.”)
 
A government that provides nationalized health care also cannot help but change the way we view each other. There is a very real sense in which we all begin to compete for the limited resources that government has promised to provide. This can easily change how we think of each other. Consider that the funds being allocated to treat your lung cancer and heart disease are funds not available for my grandfather’s surgery. Therefore, the person who puts cigarettes and red meat into his mouth is not merely unhealthy: he is being selfish. He is a parasite, acting against the common good since every meal and every cigarette unnecessarily sets him up to draw on resources that might otherwise be allocated to someone more worthy. My health and your health cease to be private matters, because the limits of economics ensure that all of our health is related in a web of connecting implications. The end result is what Faith Fitzgerald, professor at the University of California at Davis Medical Center, suggested in The New England Journal of Medicine when he wrote that

"Both health care providers and the commonweal now have a vested interest in certain forms of behavior, previously considered a person's private business, if the behavior impairs a person's 'health.' Certain failures of self-care have become, in a sense, crimes against society, because society has to pay for their consequences."

Eventually, the demand for responsible “self-care” will extend beyond the matters most of us associate with “health.” The template for this has already been set when The World Health Organization defined “health” as “a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.” It is hard to imagine any area of physical and even intellectual life that would fall outside the scope of this broad definition of health. In the end, we reach a state of affairs that was anticipated by Robert Meenan, professor at the University of California School of Medicine in San Francisco, when he noted in 1976 that, “virtually all aspects of life style could be said to have an effect on the health or well-being of society, and the decision reached that personal health choices should be closely regulated.” (Italics mine).
 
At best, universal health care invites citizens to be meddlesome and deeply interested in the lives of their neighbors. At worst, it speeds up the progression from utopian ideals to totalitarian policy, culminating in the type of Mussolinian totalitarianism where everything is inside the state and nothing outside. I have argued elsewhere that there is historic precedent for expecting the later result. By giving government the responsibility to provide for our health, we are handing the state authority over our health and, by extension, our very lives. We are asking the state to function like as a meddlesome mother (a tendency I cover in my latest book).
 
So what could be worse than Sarah Palin’s fears of a “death panel” making decisions about who has access to life-saving treatment and who is left to die? I’ll tell you what could be worse: a state that has become a de facto “life panel” – making decisions, under the auspice of “public health” , on how we can and cannot live our lives.
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Social Engineering and the Dark Side of American Liberalism

Posted by Robin Phillips on Tuesday, April 28, 2009 7:28:46 PM
To an outsider, the Fernald school in Waltham Massachusetts looked like any other educational institution. During the school’s hay day in the 1920’s and 30’s, few passers-by would have guessed the dark secret lurking behind the brick walls – a secret penetrating to the heart of American liberalism.
  
Fernald was no ordinary school. Set up in 1848 with funds from the Massachusetts State Legislature, the institution was designed for the incarceration of “feeble-minded” children. Throughout the early 1900s, hundreds of thousands of low-intelligence (though not necessarily retarded) children were warehoused at Fernald in unspeakable conditions. Treated like animals and denied any affection, these “human weeds” were considered genetically inferior from the rest of society.
  
In his book The State Boys Rebellion, Michael D'Antonio shows that one of the purposes behind the Fernald school was to prevent these “idiots” from reproducing and diluting the gene pool. Margaret Sanger, icon of the American left and founder of Planned Parenthood, put it even more succinctly: “The undeniably feeble-minded should, indeed, not only be discouraged but prevented from propagating their kind.”
 
It was not until the 1960s that the school began releasing their children to live in the outside world.
 
Eugenics: The Dark Secret of the American Left
 
The ideology behind Fernald was supplied by the American Eugenics movement. It was customary for American liberals of the 1920s and 30s to identify human beings as either hereditarily valuable or inferior. Taking Darwin’s theory of natural selection and applying it to human society, they typically classed Jews, Gypsies, Blacks, Native Americans and those of low-IQ as harmful to the human gene pool. (In THIS article I have further explored the connection betwen Darwinism and Eugenics.)
 
“People were told, we can be rid of all disease, we can lower the crime rate, we can increase the wealth of our nation, if we only keep certain people from having babies,” said Michael D'Antonio.
 
In his New York Times bestseller Liberal Fascism, Jonah Goldberg shows that before Hitler gave eugenics a bad name, almost all the leading progressive intellectuals of the early 20th century interpreted Darwin’s theory as a writ to “interfere” with human natural selection. Indeed, when the National Socialist sterilized over 50,000 “unfit” Germans, a former advisor to Teddy Roosevelt exclaimed, “The Germans are beating us at our own game.”
 
Although contemporary left-wingers have tried to hush it up, it is a fact of history that the National Academy of Sciences, the American Medical Association, the National Research Council, Planned Parenthood and the pre-1960's Democratic Party, all supported the right of the US government to engage in Eugenic selection, while thirty states adopted legislation aimed at compulsory sterilization of certain individuals or classes. Conservatives, orthodox Roman Catholics and radical libertarians, on the other hand, were routinely ridiculed for their opposition to such policies.
 
The underlining premise behind the American eugenics movement was the view that irresponsible individualism in breeding would act as a cancer on the human gene pool, harming posterity. Government held the future of the human race in its reigns and could improve the evolutionary direction of the nation – and indeed the world - through strategic intervention.
 
Government as Savior of the Human Race
 
The Fernald school is no longer operating and by the 1960’s all the states had cancelled their sterilization laws. After Hitler gave the politics of race hygiene a bad name, American and British “progressives” stopped defending government’s right to direct the gene pool.
 
Nevertheless, the ideological coordinates behind these abuses remain as intact as ever within the minds of American left, although they have found a myriad of different expressions.
 
Consider, for example, the widespread assumption that the state has the vocation to act as a supra steward of the human race. In January, James Hansen of NASA (known as the “father” of the global warming movement), told the Guardian that Obama “has only four years to save the world.” Hansen painted a chilling picture of the apocalyptic future awaiting us if government failed to assert drastic measures like the “carbon tax.”
 
It is not hard to see the continuity Hansen’s remarks have with the eugenics politics of the last century. In both cases, the underlying premise is that the state holds the future of the human race in its reigns, and unless significant freedom is surrendered over to them, irresponsible individualism will destroy our chances – or our children’s chances - on this planet.
 
Such scare tactics are not limited to the issue of climate change any more than they are limited to the Western side of the Atlantic. Earlier this year Jonathan Porritt, chairman of the UK’s Sustainable Development Commission, said that couples with more than two children were placing an “irresponsible’ burden on the environment.” To his credit, he didn’t say that government should step in and decrease the surplus population, but he did warn of what would happen if drastic measures were not taken: the UK must cut its population from its current 61 million to 30 million, or British society will be unsustainable.

"The Greater Good"
 
One of the ideological foundation stones behind the 20th century eugenics movement was a utilitarian outlook which elevated pragmatism above principle. If a policy - such as the isolation or forced sterilization of the unfit – was believed to be for the “greater good”, it didn’t matter if actual harm was committed to specific individuals along the way. And as the example of Fernald so clearly illustrates, it is the weak and helpless members of society who are always first to be sacrificed on the altar of “the greater good.”
 
The American left has not departed from this basic utilitarian criterion. Consider the justification liberals are constantly giving for using taxpayer money on embryonic stem cell research (which involves the destruction of humans at the embryonic stage). They tell us that such research is justified because it can save lives. In other words, the end justifies the means when the end is the greater good of the human race. We see this same callous utilitarianism in the other ethical debates over killing innocent human beings: whether the killing of innocent humans occurs at the embryonic stage (certain forms of stem cell research), the foetal stage (abortion) or the elderly stage (euthanasia), these practices are defended by an appeal to the greater good either of society or (in the case of euthanasia) of the individual who elects to kill himself. As with the social Darwinism of the 20th century, the casualties of this utilitarian approach are inevitably the weakest and helpless members of society.
 
Decreasing the Surplus Population
 
The 20th century eugenics movement was closely linked to the social theories of men like of Sir Francis Galton and Thomas Malthus (pictured below), who believed the poor were draining the world’s recourses.
 
One of Malthus’s solutions was to reduce the surplus population by introducing policies specifically designed to bring death to large numbers of poor people. For example, Malthus encouraged poor people to move near swamps, because he knew that they would catch diseases there and begin dying off.
 
Not a lot has changed since the time of Malthus, although our lawmakers are careful not to present their policies in neo-Malthusian terms, even if their ideas are underpinned with the same network of operating assumptions.
 
In this regard it should not be overlooked that President Obama’s original stimulus package proposed subsidizing family-planning services and contraception. If it was hard to see how contraception for low-income families can help stimulate the economy, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi helped us out on ABC’s This Week program: “The states are in terrible fiscal budget crises now and...contraception...will reduce costs to the states and to the federal government.” Pelosi and Obama were obviously aware of the 2007 study by the Congressional Budget Office which found that the federal government could save an estimated $200 million over five years if states gave free contraceptives to poor women.
 
Following the public outcry, Democrats removed subsidized contraception from the stimulus package, but the underlying philosophy remains the same: human life is essentially an economic equation. Once that premise is accepted, it follows that society can be improved by reducing the population among certain classes of people. No where is this more plainly evident than in Planned Parenthood, which was championed by leftist White supremacists like Margaret Sanger as a means of keeping down the infestation of black babies. In 1939, Sanger created the “Negro Project” aimed at bringing birth control to American blacks and reducing their surplus population. Even now, Planned Parenthood makes no secret of the fact that its “core clients” are “young women, low-income women, and women of color” and makes a particular point of setting up clinics in minority and poor neighbourhoods.
 
Aware of the eugenicist pedigree behind the abortion movement, many black activists (including Jesse Jackson before he decided to seek the Democratic nomination), opposed abortion on grounds that it amounted to genocide against the black race.
 
It would be going beyond the facts to suggest that the contemporary abortion movement still harbours sinister ambitions about decreasing the black population. While the liberals of the early 20th century saw genetics, and therefore race, as central to the future of the human race, liberals of the early 21st century see economics as central to the future of the human race. Thus their aim is no longer to reduce the quantity of black births, but to decrease the amount of poor babies. However, given that blacks are among the poorer segments of American society, the end result is pretty much the same. While blacks make up little more than 12% of the American population, they have 37% of the abortions. This is one of the reasons that many African Americans still oppose abortion on the grounds that it is the number one killer of African Americans today (see the Black Genocide blog).
 
Racism and Social Engineering
 
Although the American left no longer advocate eugenics, forced sterilization and race-directed abortion as a means to achieving racial utopia, ethnicity remains just as central in the minds of liberal social planners. This can be seen in the numerous affirmative action programs which mandate positive discrimination against whites. The increasing and well-documented privileges which now accompany being an ethnic minority are so manifold in American society that some law professors have even proposed making “racial fraud” (pretending to be black when you are not) a crime. As Jonah Goldberg points out in Liberal Fascism,
 
“In the 1960s, when the civil rights movement still relied on the classically liberal formulation of judging people by the content of their character, enlightened liberals denounced the “one-drop” rule which said that if you had a single drop of “black” blood you were black, a standard transparently similar to National Socialist notions of who counted as a Jew. Now, according to the left, if you have one drop of black blood, you should be counted as black for the purposes of positive discrimination.”
 
The backdrop to this “positive” discrimination, as well as “identity politics” and many forms of feminism is the view that human society can and should be organized in terms of competing groups. It is the view proclaimed so shrilly by Obama’s former church: racial consciousness, not the colour-blind state of classical conservatism, must be at the heart of government policy.
 
This brings us full circle to the social Darwinism of the 20th century. Contemporary liberals, like their leftist predecessors, have no scruples using the state as an engine to organize and dispense privileges on the basis of race, though social engineering has replaced the discredited science of eugenics. And like their leftist forefathers who built Fernald, this is underpinned by the ideology that government has a mandate, not merely to maintain law and order, but to proactively operate as the steward of the human race. To achieve this, contemporary liberals are just as happy as their early 20th century counterparts to follow the utilitarian principle that harm to innocent human beings can be justified by an appeal to “the greater good.”
 
Fernald may no longer be standing, but the philosophy behind it is as alive and well as ever.
 
(This article has been cross-posted with Robin's Readings and Reflections).
 

Robin Phillips runs Robin Phillips Consultancy, a consultancy firm for investors in the FOREX marketplace. He also works as a researcher and political journalist for the UK pressure group Christian Voice and is a regular contributor to the Kuyper Foundation’s quarterly Journal Christianity and Society. He is the author of The Decent Drapery of Life: a study in sexual morality and gender (Lulu, 2008) and has appeared on national television to debate social issues. He lives with his wife and family in Post Falls, Idaho, where he operates a blog titled Robin’s Readings and Reflections. To join Robin's mailing list, send a blank email to phillips7440 (at sign) roadrunner.com with “Blog Me” in the subject heading.

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Spend, Spend, Spend: Obama's Solution to the Economic Crisis

Posted by Robin Phillips on Tuesday, March 31, 2009 3:33:05 PM
I had hoped that after Obama was sworn in as President the hype would settle down, reality would set in and the public would begin to realize that this man, for all his pretensions, is really only a man.
 
It turns out that my hope was naive. If a routine trip to our local shops is anything to go by, Obama has already achieved the kind of mythic significance that has normally been reserved for assassinated presidents.

For example, at our supermarket you can buy Barack and Michelle trading cards (the political equivalent of American baseball cards). Not to be beat, our local craft store is selling Obama wall posters and calendars. And finally, the toy stores are selling Obama action figures, complete with a hand gun and lightsaber.
 
Amid all the Obama hysteria, far less attention is being given to his actual policies. I will leave the reader to judge whether the policies pursued during the Presidents’ first months in office have done justice to his reputation as a guru of wisdom and sagacity.
 
Stimulating Times
.
Obama took the oath of office at a critical time in American history. Following years of oppressive taxes and careless spending under Bush, America is now facing the worst economic downturn since the great depression. From the very beginning of his administration, Obama’s applied himself to the economic crisis with a vengeance. Following a Keynesian approach to economics, his solution can be summarized in three words: spend, spend, spend.
 
Obama’s spending plans culminated in what Charles Colson has called ‘one of the biggest grab-bag boondoggles in American history’, namely the $800 billion ‘stimulus package.’ Known now as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, it aims to revitalize America by pumping unprecedented amounts of tax-payers dollars into the national economy.
 
Ever since the plan was enacted on February 17, it has been possible to track where all the new money is going through the government’s website www.recovery.gov/. The results are interesting.
 
It seems that everyone is getting a piece of the pie. For starters, Government employees will be receiving pay rises in April, while the 12.5 million workers receiving unemployment benefits will also start seeing a boost in their weekly payments. Those whose employment was involuntarily terminated during the period between Sept. 1, 2008, and Dec. 31, 2009 will qualify for the 65 percent health care premium subsidy. The Social Security Administration's website has promised a one-time payment of $250 to the 55 million Social Security and other supplemental income beneficiaries.
 
That is not all. Obama is sending $200 million for a clean-burning power plant in Mattoon, Ill, $500 million to the National Institutes of Health offices in Maryland, $750 million to the National Computer Center in Maryland, $275 million to flood prevention, $200 million to public computer centres at community colleges and libraries, $650 million to the public in the form of digital TV converter-box coupons, $8 billion to an investment fund for building high-speed rail, $1 billion to administrative costs and construction of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration office buildings, over $2.2 million to Virginia for programs providing meals to low-income seniors.
 
I wish I could say that the spending spree stopped there. $100 million has been set aside for constructing U.S. Marshals office buildings, $1.3 billion for NASA, $300 million for hybrid and electric cars for the federal government (including golf carts for federal workers).
 
Red Ink As Far As The Eye Can See
 
Obama’s $800 billion ‘stimulus package’ is just the first stage and doesn’t even include the $3 trillion-plus budget that he will be bringing forward in a few months. Nor does it include the $15 billion a year that he has promised over the next ten years for children's healthcare, computerized health records, educational reforms and developing resources for solar and wind power.
 
Altogether Obama is proposing to spend a staggering $3.6 trillion in the 2010 fiscal year, making previous irresponsible deficits look like child's play. (In reality, it will probably be a lot higher. Even as I write, headlines have broken that the President’s climate plan alone could cost as much at $2 trillion, nearly three times the White House's initial estimate.)
 
Few people are asking where all the new money is actually going to come from. To Obama, the answer is straight-forward: simply increase taxes on the wealthiest 2% of Americans.
 
There is a slight problem, however. According to IRS figures for 2006 (the most recent year for which sufficient tax data is available), even if the government confiscated 100% of the taxable income of all Americans earning over $500,000, Congress would only get an extra $1.3 trillion in revenue. That’s less than half the 2006 federal budget and only a quarter of what Congress will have to fork out in fiscal 2010 under Obama’s spending proposals. And this doesn’t take into effect the collateral impact that burdensome taxation will have on the businesses government plunders and the jobs those businesses might otherwise have been able to create. It also doesn’t take into account that 2006 was a good year for the economy, whereas this year the economy shrunk by 6.2% in the 4th quarter and continues in a state of meltdown. That means that Congress will have significantly less revenue in their coffers than they had in 2006.
 
The cold reality is that Obama’s spending plan will have to be financed almost entirely by debt. Indeed, under his $3.6 trillion budget proposal, deficit spending for 2009 will increase to 12.7% of the Gross Domestic Product. That is twice as large a share of the economy as any deficit has run since World War II. By 2019 this pattern will have brought the federal deficit to 82% of the overall economy, according to analysts with the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.
 
Now consider that America’s resources are stretched almost to breaking point, that the nation is already crippled with unpayable debt, and that the influx of new money is poising the nation for serious hyperinflation. When we factor in these considerations we have to question the sanity of a spending policy that gives us red ink as far as the eye can see. We also have to ask: even if all that money was available in Uncle Sam’s coffers, why not give it back to Americans in the form of tax cuts in order to re-stimulate business and investment?
 
The Necessity of Bankruptcy

Frank Borman once noted that, “Capitalism without bankruptcy is like Christianity without hell.” In economics, as in religion, if people have the possibility of reward but not the potential for loss, then there is little incentive for prudence and discretion. As I have noted previously, this explains what happened to America during the period known as the ‘Great Depression.’
 
The economic crisis of the 1930s did not occur out of the blue, nor was it caused by a series of runs on the bank. Rather, it was caused by government intervening to cushion the consequences of imprudent investments, very similar to the way Obama is now trying to use the stimulus package to dampen the results of the foolish financial policies pursued in government and the private sector.
 
Leading up to the Great Depression, the American economy had experienced massive growth but much of that growth was illusory, propelled by investment in companies exceeding their actual profits. Because many companies had a value higher than their earnings (in some cases no earnings at all), people began to grasp that their shares weren’t worth as much as they paid. The banks realized this too, and so they began to call loans. Now naturally when banks begin to call bad loans, this creates losses. But this is not a bad thing. In a free market, both loss and growth are necessary components for stability, since bad business practices are then allowed to suffer their natural consequences. However, instead of letting things to take their natural course, the government stepped in to try to doctor up the economy. From 1923-29, the American money supply was increased 61 times by the Federal Reserve, not dissimilar to the unprecedented amounts of debt money Obama is now pumping into the national economy. This amplified inflation which accelerated the boom market, perpetuating the illusory sense of prosperity. Naturally the new money supply encouraged more imprudent investments.
 
Things could only be put off for so long and in February of 29 the stock market ceased to expand, causing Wall Street to collapse. President Herbert Hoover responded by doctoring the market again. In ‘31 he launched the greatest peace-time deficit spending program in history to try to prop up the economy. All he achieved was simply to perpetuate the vicious cycle for longer.
 
During America’s recent economic boom, the Federal Reserve deliberately kept interest rates low in order to encourage investments. As in the 1920’s, this distorted the market because it allowed entrepreneurs to engage in malinvestments - investments which failed to take into account actual resource availability. America is now facing the necessary fall-out of such foolishness, and that is a good thing. However, instead of allowing the consequences of imprudence to play out, Obama is following the example of Hoover (right) in trying to artificially prop up the market. Through his Public-Private Investment Program, government will help purchase as much as $1 trillion in toxic assets on banks' books. By thus removing the consequences of bad business practices, he is setting a terrible precedent.
 
In Government We Trust
 
If unchecked in fulfilling his promises, Obama will push government spending to approximately 40% of the Gross Domestic Product, up from about 33% in 2000. This would put the size of the US government within reach of Europe, where government spending currently eats up 46% of the GDP.
 
Now here’s the crunch: when Government reaches those kinds of colossal proportions, people begin to think of themselves, and God, differently.
 
Recently political scientists at the University of Washington studied 33 countries around the world and discovered an inverse relationship between state welfare spending and religiosity. Countries with larger welfare states had markedly lower levels of religious attendance with a greater number of citizens not subscribing to any religious affiliation. As the report notes, “Countries with higher levels of per capita welfare have a proclivity for less religious participation and tend to have higher percentages of non-religious individuals.”
 
The implications of this study are clear: as government grows, people’s reliance on God seems to diminish. This has already proved to be the case in Europe, in particularly in the Scandinavian countries where the Nanny state provides cradle-to-the-grave care for all its citizens.
Under Obama America seems to be headed towards Scandinavian-style socialism. As it becomes increasingly difficult to say no to government funds, everything from health care to energy to all the nation’s primary industries could become semi-nationalized. Indeed, this has already occurred with education and is in the process of happening with the financial and auto industries, thanks to government bailouts.
 
The state-dependency invoked by this kind of semi-socialism naturally orients citizens to think paternally of the state, as I argued in my post "Why I did Not Vote For Obama." However, unlike a responsible human parent, the paternal state thrives on dependency and is inescapably parasitic on the very persons whom it turns into parasites. This should not be a hard point to grasp, seeing that the government can only give away what it first takes from someone else (even deficit spending and arbitrary money-printing are essentially processes of confiscation, since the inflation these processes spawn removes value from the currency already held by the populace). The net result is that both the state and its dependents march symbiotically to destruction.
 
How does this destruction play out in practice? Again, you only have to look at the Scandinavian countries to see. W. Bradford Wilcox observes that “many Scandinavians, especially young adults who have grown up taking the welfare state for granted, are markedly less likely to attend to the social, material, and emotional needs of family and friends than earlier generations. As a consequence, social solidarity is down and social pathology—from drinking to crime—is up. In Wolfe’s words, ‘High tax rates in Scandinavia encourage governmental responsibility for others; they do not, however, necessarily inspire a personal sense of altruism and a feeling of moral unity toward others with whom one’s fate is always linked.’”
 
Wilcox goes on to note that even if Obama’s audacious spending agenda provides short-term relief to the economic and social challenges that now beset the American people, in the long run the ‘Obama revolution’ is likely to erode both the religious and the civic fibre of America.
 
 
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SPLC Labels Christian Organizations 'Hate Groups'

Posted by Robin Phillips on Tuesday, March 31, 2009 1:44:03 PM
Founded in 1971 as a civil rights law firm, the Southern Poverty Law Center has become recognized as America’s foremost authority on ‘hate groups.’ Its history has included high profile legal victories against racist groups such as Ku Klux Klan and the White Aryan Resistance. The organization also works closely with the police, conducting training seminars for law enforcement agencies to enable them to better understand how to identify and tackle the threat of hate groups.

The SPLC can also boast for being one of the nation’s top fund-raising machines. Between 2000 and 2003, SPLC contributions and interest totalled more than $127,000,000.

In recent years the SPLC has lost its focus, having run out of legitimate racist threats with which to scare their donor base into contributing. Indeed, FBI data that was collected by state and local law-enforcement agencies show a dramatic decrease in the number of hate crimes. In 1995, hate crimes totaled 7,974. In 2007, 12 years later, that number dropped by 4%, despite the fact that the US population rose 16% during that period.

While hate crimes are waning, at least according to the FBI, the SPLC tells a different story. Indeed, according to the SPLC’s latest Intelligence Report, there has been more than a 50% increase since 2000.

The law centre has supplemented the decline in actual hate groups by targeting Christian organizations and labelling them as such.

A NEW KIND OF “HATE GROUP”

For the last two years, Abiding Truth Ministries, has been included in the SPLC’s annual list of “hate groups.” When asked by reporters why a pro-family Christian ministry would be classed as a “hate group” alongside neo-Nazi organizations, spokesmen for the SPLC answered that it is because the President of Abiding Truth Ministries, Dr. Scott Lively, is also the co-author of The Pink Swastika: Homosexuality in the Nazi Party. This book is a well researched and factual analysis of the relationship between homosexuality and German fascism.

Working on the assumption that public disapproval of homosexuality leads inescapably to violence against homosexuals, the SPLC has been steadily adding other Christian ministries to their blacklist, including American Vision, the Chalcedon Foundation, Watchmen on the Walls, to name a few. In their criticisms of such ministries, it is not uncommon for the centre to make inflammatory and factual inaccurate claims, without any evidence or documentation.

Mimicking the smear campaigns that the pro-homosexual media has been waging against conservative Christians, the SPLC has also targeted specific individuals. For example, they went after Chief Justice Roy Moore because he refused to remove the Ten Commandment monument from the court house in Montgomery, Alabama. They have also criticized Pastor Douglas Wilson, a popular Christian speaker and writer on family issues, who has made no secret of his opposition to homosexual practice.

In their criticism of such individuals and groups, it is rare for the SPLC to give documented evidence to support their claims, relying instead on the power of emotion and false associations. For example, when Satender Singh was murdered in Sacramento, SPLC published an article linking the organization Watchmen on the Walls to the murder (the association was based on the fact that both the alleged perpetrator and the founder of Watchmen on the Walls are both Russian).

Even the Ludwig von Mises Institute, a highly respected forum of secular scholars promoting free market ideas in the Austrian tradition, met with the ire of the SPLC in summer 2003, when their Intelligence Report included it among “An array of right-wing foundations and think tanks support efforts to make bigoted and discredited ideas respectable.”

While the SPLC has been working over-time to portray the entire “Christian Right” as a network of dangerous “hate groups”, they have simultaneously attempted to preserve their status as an independent, non-partisan arbiter of the facts.SPLC thus forms a helpful case study for the tendency of American organizations known for tolerance to turn virulent in their attacks against Christians while still flying the banner of neutrality.

“Ultimately,” observed Gary DeMar, “the tactic is to strike fear in middle-America so the checks start rolling in. Most communities don’t see skinheads or even KKKers, but they do see D. James Kennedy on television, hear James Dobson on the radio, and listen to Gary DeMar at homeschool conventions. Hate has gone mainstream, the SPLC warns, so you better send a donation before these guys come and get you!...The SPLC is a fund raising industry designed to silence Christians. There’s not much money in fighting real hate groups now that only a few of the real haters are still around.”

DOUBLE STANDARD

While the SPLC purports to cover “hate” of all kinds, their website curiously omits any mention of the recent spate of hate-based attacks against Christians launched by the homosexual lobby in California.

In the vicious aftermath of Proposition 8 – a law that would prevent residents of California being forced to recognize same-sex marriage – homosexual blogs called for violence against Christians, some even issuing death threats and describing the types of weapons they would use in the murders. Many Christians received threats in the mail, while homosexual activists engaged in attacks specifically targeted against African Americans who voted overwhelmingly in favour of traditional marriage. Racist graffiti was found in the Los Angeles area, where swastikas, racial slurs and "Go Back To Africa" were spray-painted on sidewalks, houses and cars.

Such racist attacks were conveniently overlooked by the SPLC, even though they claim on their website that “The SPLC legal department fights all forms of discrimination...”

The SPLC also conspicuously omitted to mention the occasion when furious homosexual rioters invaded a church service, flinging propaganda and condoms around the sanctuary and then engaging in sexual exhibitionism at the pulpit.

The SPLC is also failing to comment on the persecution against Christians which the homosexual lobby is perpetrating even as I write. Their latest stunt is to use public records to identify and then harass supporters of traditional marriage. Online maps have been made available which give the names and location of all who donated to the Prop. 8 campaign, leading to numerous Christians losing their jobs and having their businesses boycotted. For example, a hostess at a Los Angeles Mexican restaurant was targeted for her $100 contribution in support of the measure. She was forced out of her job. A Sacramento theatre director and the director of the Los Angeles Film Festival were also forced out of their jobs because of contributing to the Prop. 8 campaign. Fearing boycotts, many employers are now having to release staff who donated to the Prop. 8 campaign.

Being a pawn of the homosexual lobby, it is not surprising that the SPLC has been curiously silent in these cases where actual hate really does exist.

To top it all, when Mark Potok of the SPLC was asked about a series of arson attacks against 10 churches in Alabama, he told the Los Angeles Times that he didn’t “see any evidence that these fires are hate crimes. Anti-Christian crimes are exceedingly rare in the South.”

CHANGING THE WAY WE THINK

The SPLC’s smear campaign against Christian organizations isn’t just one more outbreak in the growing hostility against those who believe in the Bible. Nor is the problem merely that the SPLC has a double standard (i.e., imagining that disapproval of same-sex sex equals hate and violence against homosexuals, while turning a blind eye to the actual violence arising from the ‘gay’ community). The real concern should be that the SPLC are attempting to change how Americans think about homosexuality and homosexuals.

Changing the way we think has long been a concern of the homosexual lobby. In their book After the Ball: How America Will Conquer Its Fear and Hatred of Gays in the ‘90s, Kirk and Madsen, themselves influential exponents of the homosexual rights movement, revealed their master plan for orienting Western consciousness in favour of the homosexuality agenda. They do not hesitate to call their strategy “unabashed propaganda, firmly grounded in long-established principles of psychology and advertising.” Just as Hitler sought to bring the Aryan race to power by first presenting it as the victims of European Jewry, so Kirk and Madsen sought to bring homosexuals to power by first presenting themselves as victims.

Elsewhere in the same book, Kirk and Madsen wrote, “We mean conversion of the average American’s emotions, mind, and will, through a planned psychological attack, in the form of propaganda fed to the nation via the media.” This propaganda hinged on orienting the public to view homosexuals as a victim minority – a project which the emergence of AIDS seemed to make possible. “As cynical as it may seem,” the authors explained, “AIDS gives us a chance, however brief, to establish ourselves as a victimized minority legitimately deserving of America’s special protection and care. At the same time, it generates mass hysteria of precisely the sort that has brought about public stonings and leper colonies since the Dark Ages and before….How can we maximize the sympathy and minimize the fear? How, given the horrid hand that AIDS has dealt us, can we best play it?”

The SPLC are carrying on the project begun by Kirk and Madsen in re-conditioning how Americans think of the homosexual agenda. By presenting the homosexual cause as a ‘civil rights’ issue in a long pedigree that has also included women suffrage and the black vote, the SPLC are creating the subtle impression that homosexuals are an oppressed class. By juxtaposing ministries like Abiding Truth Ministries and American Vision alongside the Ku Klux Klan and the White Aryan Resistance, they are contributing to the impression that a Biblical view of marriage is the moral equivalent to racism, with the corollary that homosexuals are a victimized minority legitimately deserving special legal protection.

What that legal protection will look if the SPLC get their way is that the criticism of homosexual sex could become a criminal act.
 
 
Robin Phillips runs Robin Phillips Consultancy, a consultancy firm for investors in the FOREX marketplace. He also works as a researcher and political journalist for the UK pressure group Christian Voice and is a regular contributor to the Kuyper Foundation’s quarterly Journal Christianity and Society. He is the author of The Decent Drapery of Life: a study in sexual morality and gender (Lulu, 2008) and has appeared on national television to debate social issues. He lives with his wife and family in Post Falls, Idaho, where he operates a blog titled Robin’s Readings and Reflections.
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The Bill of Rights

Posted by Robin Phillips on Tuesday, March 17, 2009 4:56:36 PM
It is normally taken for granted that the Bill of Rights should apply at both the national and the state level. Barack Obama said as much in one of his election debate, with reference to the abortion issue and the right of privacy.

Maybe that is correct. Our courts have certainly decided to apply the Bill of Rights in this way. But surely everyone can agree that in its original context the Bill of Rights only applied on the federal/national level and not the state level.

Well, not quite everyone.

Once I was asked to teach the Constitution and the Bill of Rights to some 12th grade students. In the curriculum I was writing I intended to make it clear that originally the Bill of Rights applied only on the federal level. This was a very important point for a strong anti-federalist like myself. I was preparing to tell the students that the Bill of Rights was originally not a guarantee of individual freedoms at all but a limitation of federal authority.

Two of my supervisors took exception to this and asked me to expunge it from my curriculum. While they granted that I may be correct in the case of the 1st and 10th amendment, they suggested that with regard to the others, it is far from certain that they were originally only intended as a limitation of national authority. They therefore asked me to take a neutral position and teach both sides. I was happy to do that. However, I soon encountered a problem. I couldn’t find any sources which argued that the Bill of Rights was originally intended to apply at the state level. How could I teach both sides if all the sources were unanimous that the Bill of Rights originally did NOT apply on the state level? I picked up a public school civics textbook, titled Government By the People, hoping that it would give me another perspective.
 
“Note” the book read, “that the Bill of Rights literally applies only to the national government, not state governments. Why not the states? The framers were confident that states could control their own state officials, and most state constitutions already had bills of rights. It was the new and distant central government the people feared.” Hmm, I thought, I’m not finding anything on the “other side.” I soon struck on an idea: I would try to internet. Almost any opinion – never mind how erroneous – can be supported somewhere on the internet. I started with Wikipedia, which is usually pretty good at giving two sides to every question. I read the following in their entry on the Bill of Rights: “Originally, the Bill of Rights applied only to the federal government and not to the several state governments. Parts of the amendments initially proposed by Madison that would have limited state governments (‘No state shall violate the equal rights of conscience, or the freedom of the press, or the trial by jury in criminal cases.’) were not approved by Congress, and therefore the Bill of Rights did not appear to apply to the powers of state governments. Thus, states had established state churches up until the 1820s, and Southern states, beginning in the 1830s, could ban abolitionist literature. In the 1833 case Barron v. Baltimore, the Supreme Court specifically ruled that the Bill of Rights provided 'security against the apprehended encroachments of the general government—not against those of local governments.'"
 
Next I turned to a number of other websites, and they were all unanimous. At a website that my supervisor had referred me to (http://www.usconstitution.net/) I read that, “The Bill of Rights was understood, at its ratification, to be a bar on the actions of the federal government. Many people today find this to be an incredible fact. The fact is, prior to incorporation, discussed below, the Bill of Rights did not apply to the states.”
 
Oh dear, I thought, I’m not getting anywhere at finding sources for “the other side.” So I wrote to a lawyer friend who had been trained under liberal law professors. He wrote back and said it was “silly to try” to find any sources maintaining that the Bill of Rights originally applied to the states. “I learned this stuff from confirmed liberal law professors who certainly would have included such sources had they been available” he said. So I emailed one of my supervisors to see if he had any sources to offer. Unfortunately he did not because his argument was philosophical rather than historical. He told me that from a philosophical standpoint, if the specific rights given in the Bill of Rights are based on the more general rights to life, liberty, and happiness which in turn are considered to be God-given and inalienable, then what gives the state government the authority to infringe on that when the Federal government cannot?
Okay, I thought, but if that proves anything it is that the Bill of Rights ought to apply at the state level, not that it originally did. I then struck on a new course. I would find out exactly when the Bill of Rights changed to become something that was applicable on the state level. That would remove the issue beyond any controversy by making it a factual judicial question instead of a hermeneutical question about authorial intent.
 
The results of this research was very interesting, and my supervisors accepted it, even though I still had to write into my curriculum that “there has also been debate about whether the Bill of Rights originally applied to state governments or just federal government.” Following is a chart of what I discovered. What is interesting is that in every case, the incorporation of the Bill of Rights into state law came comparably late in the history of our republic.
 
Public use and just compensation for the taking of private property by the government (Bill of Rights Amendment 5). Incorporated into state law in 1897
 
Freedom of speech (Bill of Rights Amendment 1). Incorporated into state law in 1925

Freedom of the press (Bill of Rights Amendment 1). Incorporated into state law in 1931
 
Fair trial (Bill of Rights Amendment 6). Incorporated into state law in 1932
 
Freedom of religion (Bill of Rights Amendment 1). Incorporated into state law in 1934
 
Freedom of assembly (Bill of Rights Amendment 1). Incorporated into state law in 1937.
 
Free exercise of religion (Bill of Rights Amendment 1). Incorporated into state law in 1940.
 
Separation of religion and government (Bill of Rights Amendment 1). Incorporated into state law in 1947.
 
Right to a public trial (Bill of Rights Amendment 6). Incorporated into state law in 1948.
 
Right against unreasonable searches and seizures (Bill of Rights Amendment 4). Incorporated into state law in 1949
 
Freedom of association (Bill of Rights Amendment 1). Incorporated into state law in 1958.

Exclusionary rule (Bill of Rights Amendment 4). Incorporated into state law in 1961.

Ban against cruel and unusual punishment (Bill of Rights Amendment 8). Incorporated into state law in 1962.
 
Right to counsel in felony cases (Bill of Rights Amendment 6). Incorporated into state law in 1963.

Right against self-incrimination (Bill of Rights Amendment 5). Incorporated into state law in 1964.
 
Right to confront witness (Bill of Rights Amendment 6). Incorporated into state law in 1965.
 
Right to privacy (Bill of Rights Amendments 1,3,4,5,9). Incorporated into state law in 1965.
 
Right to impartial jury (Bill of Rights Amendment 6). Incorporated into state law in 1966.
 
Right to a speedy trial and to compulsory process for obtaining witnesses (Bill of Rights Amendment 6). Incorporated into state law in 1967
 
Right to jury trial in nonpetty cases (Bill of Rights Amendment 6). Incorporated into state law in 1968.
 
Right against double jeopardy (Bill of Rights Amendment 5). Incorporated into state law in 1969.
 
 
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Control Through Crisis

Posted by Robin Phillips on Wednesday, January 28, 2009 7:48:29 PM
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." Benjamin Franklin
 
Classical Greece and Rome had a tradition of appointing a dictator during times of crisis. After the crisis finished, the dictator stepped down and government returned to normal, usually to some form republic or oligarchy.
 
Following this tradition, modern leaders frequently appeal to times of real or alleged 'crisis' to persuade the populace to entrust them with powers that would normally be distributed. Obama and his team is no exception.
 
The economic crisis facing the country is "an opportunity to do things you could not do before." So said Rahm Emanuel, the new White House chief of staff under Barack Obama. The comment was made to business leaders assembled by the Wall Street Journal in November of last year. In the conversation, which is available on Youtube, Emanuel went on to say, "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before."
 
Control Through Crises
 
Though Emanuel did not specify what “things” he was referring to, it is not hard to guess. It has been a hallmark of American liberalism to use disasters (whether economic, military, environmental or domestic) as a means for increased government control. Knowing that most citizens value security over freedom, and are only too happy to sacrifice the latter if it can increase the former, lawmakers with totalitarian aspirations have never hesitated to greet crises as wonderful opportunities.
 
In his book Liberal Fascism, Jonah Goldberg chronicles the most significant liberal administrations in modern American history, showing that it was through national calamities – real or imagined – that Americans were persuaded piecemeal to surrender their liberties. In this monument of historical research, Goldberg relates how a long line of Presidents progressively scared the American public into accepting the bloated power of the executive branch as the only alternative to various crises. Barack Obama is well versed in these scare same tactics. On the first of the month, the (then)President-elect warned an audience at George Mason University of the dire consequences that would occur if Congress failed to adopt his stimulus package. Like his statist forefathers, Obama waves the magic wand of government as the only solution. As he put it, “only government can provide the short-term boost necessary to lift us from a recession this deep and severe.” Ignoring other credible solutions to the economic downturn - such as returning to the gold standard or abolishing the federal reserve system that caused the recession in the first place - Obama wants Americans to believe that the only answer is to trust officialdom with control of our finances.
 
Following a Keynesian approach to economics, in which governments are encouraged to spend their way out of financial difficulties, Obama’s “stimulus package” entails the largest US budget deficit since World War II and could add nearly US$1 trillion to the $10.64 trillion national debt over the next two years. But more worringly, it would introduce unprecedented levels of government control by greatly nationalizing the economy and bringing America one step closer toward socialism. For Americans who value security over liberty, this is a small price to pray.
 
Obama: America's Bismarck?

Alexandr Solzhenitsyn once remarked that “If we don’t know our own history then we simply have to endure all of the same mistakes and all of the same sacrifices and all of the same absurdities over again times ten.” History shows that the beneficent state which increases its power in order to offer “security” to its citizens, morphs naturally into a malignant state which preys on the rights of its citizens. For example, when Hitler came to power in Germany, it was in the wake of Otto von Bismarck having first oriented the German people to “gradually...value security over political freedom and cause[ing] them to see in the State, however conservative, a benefactor and a protector.” (William Lawrence Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich).
 
Between 1883 and 1889 Bismarck put through a program for social security far beyond anything known in other countries at the time. It included a compulsory insurance for workers to help them in old age, sickness, accident and incapacity. This was organized by the State but financed by employers and employees, who were thereby forced to surrender a significant portion of their economic liberty. Had Bismarck never oriented the Germans to value security over freedom, it is doubtful that Hitler would ever have gained such widespread acceptance. Hitler himself remarked in Mein Kampf: “I studied Bismarck's socialist legislation in its intention, struggle and success.” The principle behind Bismarck legislation was simple: remove people’s freedoms under the guise of being cared for. I am not suggesting that Obama is a Hitler. However, he may be the American version of Heir Bismarck, creating the infrastructure for a totalitarian state by elevating security above liberty in his “care” of the American people. (Interestingly, when Mussolini first coined the word “Totalitarianism,” it was not a pejorative slur but a positive term to refer to a humane society in which everyone was taken care of and looked after by a state. Naturally, such a state had to encompass all of life within its grasp.) For Obama, care is also the primary vocation of government. As he put it in his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention,
 
“Government should...protect us from harm and provide every child a decent education; keep our water clean and our toys safe; invest in new schools and new roads and new science and technology.... Our government should work for us... That’s the promise of America...the fundamental belief that I am my brother’s keeper; I am my sister’s keeper.”
 
The utopian fervour with which Obama views the state was reaffirmed in his speech in Chicago on November 5, 2008. He told the story of American history, from its inception to its growth into civic maturity in a “new dawn of American leadership” – a process that climaxes in his own utopian announcement: “Our union can be perfected.”
 
Given his utopian aspirations, the economic crisis is indeed a wonderful opportunity that the Obama’s administration would hate to see go to waste. It is only at such times that people are willing to surrender substantive portions of liberty – in this case economic liberty – in exchange for the promise of security. Richard Weaver warned of this in 1962 when he said, “The past shows unvaryingly that when a people’s freedom disappears, it goes not with a bang, but in silence amid the comfort of being cared for. That is the dire peril in the present trend toward statism. If freedom is not found accompanied by a willingness to resist, and to reject favours, rather than to give up what is intangible but precarious, it will not long be found at all.”

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Thought Control in the Land of the Free, by Robin Phillips

Posted by Robin Phillips on Tuesday, January 06, 2009 5:37:09 PM

When the “peat bog soldiers” were sent by the Nazi’s to work until they died, they took consolation in singing a song titled, “Die Gedanken sind frei” (“Thoughts Are Free”). The idea expressed in the title of this piece - that thought remains the outpost of human liberty – gave a measure of comfort to the prisoners who had been deprived of every other human freedom. At least they could defy their captors in this one remaining quarter: they still exercised control over their minds.

In his dysutopian classic 1984, George Orwell imagined a society in which even this final liberty had been taken away. Using omnipresent surveillance technology, Orwell’s thought police root out and punish those who engage in unapproved thinking.

For years, Orwell’s predictions seemed to bare little relevance to the free world of the West. While communist nations routinely used the Leninist notion of "false consciousness” to brainwash and control the minds of its citizens, the Western world has consistently stood as a hedge against such methods by putting a premium on intellectual freedom. As the oft-quoted maxim (falsely attributed to Voltaire) puts it, “I may disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

In recent years, however, Western society has experienced a paradigm shift, as new legislation and jurisprudence has begun increasingly to focus not merely on actions, but also on thoughts. I first became aware of this tendency when Dr. N. T. Wright, the Bishop of Durham, addressed the House of Lords on 9 February, 2006. In his address, the Bishop listed a number of recent cases, noting that “since the crimes in question have to do, not with actions but with ideas and beliefs, what we are seeing is thought crime.” He went on: “My Lords, I did not think I would see such a thing in this country in my lifetime…. The word for such a state of affairs is ‘tyranny’: sudden moral climate change, enforced by thought police.”

Elsewhere I have written about Britain’s recent volley of new laws with thought-crime implications, and this is not the place to repeat it. Suffice to say, I hoped that by moving to America I would encounter an environment of more intellectual freedom. Surely, in the “land of the free”, incorrect thoughts would be debated rather than criminalized. As it turned out, this hope was naïve. Many prominent Americans seem even more intent than their British counterparts in turning Orwell’s predictions into a blueprint rather than a warning.
 
When I first arrived in America in the summer of 2007, everyone was talking about new “hate crime” legislation that was being considered in congress. What interested me was that under the offence of “hate crime”, not only what we do, but the thoughts and motives behind it, can also be publishable. Thus, if the thought behind an act of violence can be showed to involve certain types of hate, the crime is considered doubly bad. This can be seen in the comment of Representative Barbara Cubin (R-Wyoming) when she said, "We will not stand for the arbitrary killing of other people due to any hateful act of intolerance." Similarly, Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan said, "Angelinos have no tolerance for crimes motivated by hatred or bias of any kind." [emphasis added in both] Commenting on this trend to penalize, not just the crime, but the state of mind behind it, Gregory Koukl observed that

“Until recently, the law has been completely uninterested in penalizing motive. Whether one was driven to commit a crime by greed, malice, love, or hate was irrelevant. Only the conduct mattered. As far as the law was concerned, one could believe as he wished. He could like or dislike according to his whim. He could love or hate as he pleased.

Hate crime legislation changes all that. Now motive as well as conduct can be punished.”

Thankfully the hate crime legislation did not pass. However, many states already have measures which use the concept of “hate crime” to criminalize government-disapproved cognitive states. For example, throughout the California public school system, Christian students are routinely given special “diversity training” to force them to think politically correct thoughts about homosexuality. Once content to merely address the problems of “homophobic bullying” in schools, the gay lobby is now going after students who even think that homosexuality is a sin. The de facto criminalization of certain thought has also found expression as a mechanism for short-circuiting debate within the American media. On issues such as intelligent design, global warming, homosexual rights, abstinence education and a host of other questions, American liberals allow for only one correct viewpoint. In a final swipe of McCarthyism, those who dissent from the grinding uniformity demanded by the liberal establishment are treated, not as mistaken, but as bad. Thus, journalists who dissent from the climate change hysteria do not require refutation but stand in need of therapy, since any other interpretation to global warming automatically puts one on the same level as delusional flat-earthers. Lawmakers who dissent from the standard line on homosexual and abortion rights are castigated, not merely as mistaken, but as the modern equivalents of the Spanish Inquisition. Scientists who conduct research using an intelligent design model are not simply making a blunder, but are the self-delusional descendents of the 17th century churchmen who refused to look through Galileo’s telescope. Through these and similar ad hominem devices, the sages of our age are effectively becoming a new priestcraft, insulated against critique within the institutions they permeate.
 
Even in American universities, which have traditionally been havens of intellectual freedom, thought control techniques have become rife. Almost all American universities now have some form of moral and political re-education built into freshman orientation and residential programming. In his article, ‘Thought Reform 101: The Orwellian implications of today's college orientation’ (published by Reason Magazine in 2000), Alan Kors shows that many of these programs are explicitly racist, separating students by skin colour and focusing on racial differences rather than commonalities. Using psychological techniques of group programming to induce thought control, these programs apply guilt-concepts to reverse the cognitive operations in students’ minds. In one case that was documented in The New York Times, freshmen at Columbia University were given the chance to rid themselves of “their own social and personal beliefs…” Students who fail to go along with these thought-control processes are demonized, castigated and manipulated through guilt.
 
Now that freedom of thought rather than merely speech is an issue, perhaps the familiar quotation needs updating. “I may disapprove of what you think, but I will defend to the death your right to think it.” It would seem that in America, even this basic human right is now under attack.
 
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The Government Bailout and What's Wrong With It, by Robin Phillips

Posted by Robin Phillips on Monday, January 05, 2009 12:00:00 AM
In the 1930s America experienced an economic crisis, which has come to be known as the ‘Great Depression.’ This crisis did not occur out of the blue, nor was it caused by a series of runs on the bank.

It was caused by government intervening to cushion the consequences of imprudent investments.

Leading up to the Great Depression, the American economy had experienced massive growth. Much of this growth was illusory, propelled by investment in companies exceeding their actual profits. Because many companies had a value higher than their earnings (in some cases no earnings at all), people began to grasp that their shares weren’t worth as much as they paid. The banks realized this too, and so they began to call loans.
 
Now naturally when banks begin to call bad loans, this creates losses. But this is not a bad thing. In a free market, loss as well as growth are necessary components for stability, since bad business practices are then allowed to suffer their natural consequences. However, instead of letting things to take their natural course, the government stepped in to try to fix things. From 1923-29, the American money supply was increased 61 times by the Federal Reserve. This amplified inflation which accelerated the boom market, perpetuating the illusory sense of prosperity. Naturally the new money supply encouraged more imprudent investments.
 
Things could only be put off for so long and in February of 29 the stock market ceased to expand, causing Wall Street to collapse.
 
President Herbert Hoover (picture on left) responded by doctoring the market again. In ‘31 he launched the greatest peace-time deficit spending program in history to try to prop up the economy. Because money has to come from somewhere, it was the tax payer who had to foot the bill. Thus, in ‘32 Hoover launched the largest peace-time tax hike in America’s history. To pay their taxes, people had to remove massive amounts of money from the banks, which increased the burden the financial institutions were already under, creating a vicious cycle.
 
Alexander Solzhenitsyn once remarked that “If we don’t know our own history then we simply have to endure all of the same mistakes and all of the same sacrifices and all of the same absurdities over again times ten.” Nowhere is the truth of Solzhenitsyn’s words more evident than in America today, which is like a replay of the events of the Hoover administration.
 
During America’s recent economic boom, the Federal Reserve deliberately kept interest rates low in order to encourage investments. As in the 1920’s, this distorted the market because it allowed entrepreneurs to engage in malinvestments - investments which failed to take into account actual resource availability.
 
The artificial sense of prosperity led to many Americans to invest in homes they could not afford. Gambling on the idea that house prices would keep rising indefinitely, they counted on selling or re-financing their homes before the bill came due. Banks allowed this to occur by giving out sub-prime mortgages. (A ‘sub-prime’ mortgage is a type of loan granted to individuals with poor credit histories.) As can be expected, when the house market levelled out, many simply had no way of paying. As a consequence, currently 9% of all Americans with mortgages are either behind on their payments or in foreclosure.
 
The nature of politics in America has also contributed to the financial crisis. It is candidates who promise the most ‘goodies’ who get elected and voters rarely ask, “Where is the money for that going to come from?” When unforeseen expenses, like the war in Iraq or hurricane Katrina, are added to the cost of all the entitlements, pensions and programs government has already committed to pay, there is only one place for the money to come from: debt.
 
Given the irresponsible pattern of spending and investment from both the public and private sector, it should come as no surprise to find the American economy going belly up. The question is: will the United States learn from the stock market crash of ‘29 and allow bad investments to suffer their natural consequences, or will government try to artificially prop up the economy? It is the later course that our government has decided to pursue. By removing the consequences of bad business practices, we are setting a terrible precedent. The Bush administration, as well as president-elect, Barack Obama, would attempt to cure the problem by the very means which brought it about. If the market had been allowed to be truly free rather than being doctored with by the Federal Reserve, then interest rates would have reflected reality and discouraged malinvestment. It is perhaps asking too much to expect the government to have learned its lesson and be willing to finally take a “hands-off” approach to the economy, whatever the short-term consequences might be.
 
Not all members of government have been so blind. Congressmen Ron Paul (pictured left) has argued that what is needed is the liquidation rather than the purchasing of toxic debt. Commenting on the proposed bailout, the Texas representative said: “It's the same destructive strategy that government tried during the Great Depression: prop up prices at all costs. The Depression went on for over a decade. On the other hand, when liquidation was allowed to occur in the equally devastating downturn of 1921, the economy recovered within less than a year…. By doing more of the same, we will only continue and intensify the distortions in our economy – all the capital misallocation, all the malinvestment – and prevent the market's attempt to re-establish rational pricing of houses and other assets.” 
  
Solzhenitsyn (picture on right) was correct: if we don’t know our own history then we simply have to endure all of the same mistakes and all of the same sacrifices and all of the same absurdities over again times ten.
In this case, times billions.
 
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The Freedom of Choice Act and the Gagging of the Constitution, by Robin Phillips

Posted by Robin Phillips on Thursday, January 01, 2009 11:35:59 PM
President-elect, Barack Obama, has many things he is planning to do after he is sworn in as President on 20th January. But there is one thing which he has promised to do first. On July 17, 2007, Senator Obama spoke to the Planned Parenthood Action Fund, saying: “The first thing I’d do as President is sign the Freedom of Choice Act. That’s the first thing I’d do.”

What is the Freedom of Choice Act (FOCA) and why is it so important to Obama?

The FOCA is a ground breaking measure that would eliminate every restriction on abortion throughout America, including the right of states to prohibit partial birth abortions. The FOCA will also do away with state laws on parental involvement, compel taxpayer funding of abortions, force faith-based hospitals and healthcare facilities to perform abortions and prevent states from enacting protections against further measures in the future.

HISTORY OF FOCA

Denise M. Burke, AUL Vice President of Legal Affairs, explains the history of the present version of FOCA:

In late April 2007, Obama along with Senator Hillary Clinton and others, immediately re-introduced the federal Freedom of Choice Act (FOCA), a radical attempt to enshrine abortion-on-demand into American law, to sweep aside existing laws that the majority of Americans support-- such as requirements that licensed physicians perform abortions, fully-informed consent, and parental involvement-- and to prevent states from enacting similar protective measures in the future.

More importantly, FOCA is a cynical attempt to prematurely end the debate over abortion and declare “victory” in the face of mounting evidence that (a) the American public does not support the vast majority of abortions being performed in the U.S. each year and (b) abortion has a substantial negative impact on women....

FOCA would also subject laws regulating or even touching on abortion to judicial review using a “strict scrutiny” framework of analysis. This is the highest standard American courts can apply and is typically reserved for laws impacting such fundamental rights as the right to free speech and the right to vote. Prior to the Supreme Court’s 1992 decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey (which substituted the “undue burden” standard for the more stringent “strict scrutiny” analysis), abortion-related laws (such parental involvement for minors and minimum health and safety standards for abortion clinics) were almost uniformly struck down under “strict scrutiny” analysis. If enacted, FOCA would retroactively be applied to all federal and state abortion-related laws and would result in their invalidation.

OVERTURNING PREVIOUS LAWS

The FOCA will reverse the landmark Gonzales v. Carhart ruling of 2007, in which the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the federal ban on partial-birth abortion. Ever since the ruling, Obama has not been happy. As he has said in 2007:

“I am extremely concerned that this ruling will embolden state legislatures to enact further measures to restrict a woman’s right to choose, and that the conservative Supreme Court justices will look for other opportunities to erode Roe v. Wade, which is established federal law and a matter of equal rights for women.”

How does a ban on partial birth abortion threaten the equal rights of women? Because, according to the FOCA, a prohibition on this barbaric and extremely painful procedure creates a “legal and practical” barrier that hindered “the ability of women to participate in the economic and social life of the Nation.”

That is just the tip of the iceberg. Denise M. Burke points out that among the more than 550 federal and state laws that FOCA would nullify are:

• Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003
• Hyde Amendment (restricting taxpayer funding of abortions)
• Restrictions on abortions performed at military hospitals
• Restrictions on insurance coverage for abortion for federal employees
• Informed consent laws
• Waiting periods
• Parental consent and notification laws
• Health and safety regulations for abortion clinics
• Requirements that licensed physicians perform abortions
• “Delayed enforcement” laws (banning abortion when Roe v. Wade is overturned and/or the authority to restrict abortion is returned to the states)
• Bans on partial-birth abortion
• Bans on abortion after viability. FOCA’s apparent attempt to limit post-viability abortions is illusory. Under FOCA, post-viability abortions are expressly permitted to protect the woman’s “health.” Within the context of abortion, “health” has been interpreted so broadly that FOCA would not actually proscribe any abortion before or after viability.
• Limits on public funding for elective abortions (thus, making American taxpayers fund a procedure that many find morally objectionable)
• Limits on the use of public facilities (such has public hospitals and medical schools at state universities) for abortions
• State and federal legal protections for individual healthcare providers who decline to participate in abortions
• Legal protections for Catholic and other religiously-affiliated hospitals who, while providing care to millions of poor and uninsured Americans, refuse to allow abortions within their facilities

CREATING A NEW ‘RIGHT’

The FOCA elevates abortion to a ‘right’ of the same status as those rights which are enshrined in the Constitution, such as the right to vote and the right to free speech.

The FOCA provides that “[i]t is the policy of the United States that every woman has the fundamental right to choose to bear a child, to terminate a pregnancy prior to fetal viability, or to terminate a pregnancy after fetal viability when necessary to protect the life or health of the woman.” Further, FOCA would specifically invalidate any "statute, ordinance, regulation, administrative order, decision, policy, practice, or other action" of any federal, state, or local government or governmental official (or any person acting under government authority) that would "deny or interfere with a woman's right to choose" abortion, or that would "discriminate against the exercise of the right . . . in the regulation or provision of benefits, facilities, services, or information."

FOCA AND THE CONSTITUTION

Article I, Section 8 of the United States’ Constitution sets forth the powers of congress. It was the intent of those who framed and ratified the constitution that this list be exhaustive. If congress wanted to exercise a power not explicitly mentioned in this list, there was a mechanism for changing the constitution through the amendment process. But as the Constitution stands, the federal government is prohibited from legislating outside its delegated powers.

Just to make sure that this point was understood, the founding fathers added the 10th amendment to the Bill of Rights, specifying that “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” What this means is that although the federal Congress is prevented from acting outside the powers delegated to it in Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution, the individual states are free to do so. Thus, while the constitution lists the powers of the federal Congress with the understanding that they were prohibited from legislating in all other areas, Article I also includes a section listing the powers prohibited to the states, with the understanding that they were free to legislate in all other areas.

The Freedom of Choice Act would violate the constitution on both these fronts. First, it would give Congress broad powers over areas not delegated to it in Article I of the Constitution. For example, it would force states to recognize a “fundamental right to abortion” and prohibit those states from enacting any legislation that would limit or “impede” access to abortion. Second, it would add additional prohibitions to states not specified in Article I of the Constitution.

A ‘LIVING AND BREATHING DOCUMENT’

How can Obama justify such a piece of legislation that is so overtly unconstitutional? For Obama it is quite simple since he views the Constitution as a “living and breathing document” which changes its meaning over the years. As Obama writes on pages 92-93 of his book The Audacity of Hope:

"What the framework of our Constitution can do is organize the way by which we argue about our future. All of its elaborate machinery – its separation of powers and checks and balances and federalist principles and Bill of Rights – are designed to force us into a conversation, a 'deliberative democracy' in which all citizens are required to engage in a process of testing their ideas against an external reality, persuading others of their point of view, and building shifting alliances of consent. Because power in our government is so diffuse, the process of making law in America compels us to entertain the possibility that we are not always right and to sometimes change our minds; it challenges us to examine our motives and our interests constantly, and suggests that both our individual and collective judgments are at once legitimate and highly fallible."
 
In plain English what this amounts to is that the meaning of the Constitution is not fixed but fluid. Melody Barnes, senior domestic policy adviser for the Obama campaign, expressed it more succinctly when she said: “His [Obama’s] view is that our society isn't static and the law isn't static as well. That the Constitution is a living and breathing document and that the law and the justices who interpret it have to understand that...”

Once Obama packs the courts with judges who adopt a similar view of the Constitution, American jurisprudence could become a legal free for all.

In that case, the FOCA may be just the beginning.
 
Also see my article Why I Did Not Vote For Obama
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