Archive for May 2009

Coming To Terms With Abortion

Sunday, May 31, 2009

With a Supreme Court vacancy, and a nomination battle under way, one of the most painful topics in American culture is once again in the spotlight: abortion. Looming at the intersection of individual liberty and the nation’s moral conscience, turning upon questions that mark the boundary between science and faith, heated in the crucible of a tyrannical exercise of raw judicial power made in the name of freedom, the abortion debate is a bleeding wound the American political system will never allow to heal. I’ve mentioned it in passing, during my brief time writing for the Green Room… but, like everyone else who makes a serious attempt to study and comment upon American life, I realized I needed to address it directly, and fully.

I’ve never been personally involved in the decision to abort a child. Most people haven’t, since there are roughly 1.2 million of the procedures performed each year, and over 300 million people live in the United States. Like many people of my generation, I also don’t have any children – there are only about 4 million live births in the United States each year. Compare 1.2 million abortions to 4 million live births annually, and you can see the dimensions of the abortion question. Compare either of those totals to the overall population, and you can see that quite a few of the people passionately assuming the pro-life or pro-choice stances don’t have any direct personal experience in the matter… a point I’ll return to in a moment.

My first experience with public debate was a speech class I took in college, during which I was assigned the pro-choice side of the abortion debate. I gave a very good speech, and was almost unanimously held to have crushed my debating opponent. I thought it was entirely a question of “a woman’s right to choose,” a decision in which no one but the woman had any legitimate influence. I was eighteen years old at the time.

Over the years, I came to realize that on the subject of abortion, half of America is eighteen years old.

It takes a certain maturity to understand that, in the vast majority of those 1.2 million annual abortions, the woman was not forced to conceive the child she’s choosing to eliminate. She had choices to make long before she headed for the abortion clinic. When the consequence of those choices became a viable human child, the issue became one of responsibility, more than choice. I understood that completely, on the day when I first held my infant niece. Maybe you have to hold a baby to understand it. Not enough of us get to hold babies, these days.

Recent polls show that a majority of Americans have come to consider themselves “pro-life,” but this is a matter of degree. You can add the poll numbers up a different way, and conclude that over sixty percent of Americans favor keeping abortion legal in some form or another. I don’t believe we would ever arrive at a national consensus that it should be eliminated completely. Speaking for myself, I always felt it should be available in the cases of rape, where the woman was made pregnant against her will; incest, where the woman was either forced to conceive, or is by definition mentally and emotionally incapable of being a mother, especially to a child all but guaranteed to have severe genetic defects; and the life of the mother. I would be awed and humbled to stand in the presence of a woman who insisted on carrying her child to term, even knowing it would probably cost her life, but I can’t agree that she should be compelled to do so. The conflicting opinions of the American people on the topic of abortion come, in part, from the difference between medically necessary, extreme cases, and the far greater number of abortions performed for the convenience of the mother – or the father. You can’t come up with a solid majority for outlawing abortion entirely, but a lot of people are growing uncomfortable with abortion on demand.

Much of the soft support for abortion comes from the essential immaturity of the electorate, who follow the path of least resistance when discussing an issue they’d rather not think about, and which probably doesn’t affect them personally. Abortion is part of a culture that works to prolong the adolescence of men and women until well into their forties. Having a baby is such a drag. It forces people to grow up and take responsibility for their actions. It compels carefree and hedonistic couples to confront the massive reality of their obligations to each other, and the life they have created. For many young mothers and would-be fathers, abortion is not a procedure designed to remove an unwanted fetus – it’s a procedure to restore a life of casual sex and self-indulgence, which went up in smoke when that home pregnancy test kit turned the wrong color. Young men who have never been involved in conception or abortion themselves find it easy to dismiss the entire issue by talking about “a woman’s right to choose,” which simultaneously allows them to sound enlightened, particularly in the campus environment many of them inhabit… and lets them off the hook for doing any serious thinking, or defending a morally serious but difficult position. When you force those young men to confront the question of whether elective abortions are wrong – rather than asking who should make the final decision about having one – the poll numbers shift. Saying you’re “pro-choice” is the quick and easy way for teenagers, of all ages, to sound fashionably liberal and dodge the more telling question, which is: what would you choose?

Of course, the abortion debate is horrendously deformed by Roe vs. Wade, an exercise of raw judicial power that short-circuited the national discussion, and left the pro-life side feeling marginalized and helpless. The absolute supremacy of “the right to privacy” inescapably reduces the value of life, for no one would argue that someone’s right to privacy allows them to murder a six-year old in the seclusion of their own home. Since no one would argue that privacy trumps life, the target of absolutely legalized abortion must not be alive. Further, Roe asserted that privacy trumps the potential of life, and since it does not exclusively address abortions directed at forced or life-threatening pregnancies, it ultimately asserts that convenience trumps the potential of life. The mother’s right to be free of the consequences of her actions takes absolutely priority over whatever the child would have done with his or her life. The consequences that flow from this judicial assertion, and the cultural influence of the immensely wealthy nationwide abortion industry it enabled, are profound and deep. Life, sex, and death are the only social forces more powerful than money. We are quick to denounce the unquenchable thirst for money as “greed,” but silent in the face of a reckless hunger for sex and death.

In the Sixties, it became fashionable for people to say it’s wrong to bring children into the terrible, spoiled world we inhabit. Those who oppose abortion on demand often say that each terminated pregnancy might have resulted in the next Michaelangelo, George Washington, or Jesus. The difference between those viewpoints is defined by faith in the possibility of excellence, and redemption, in each human life. One of the reasons I was eventually ready to identify myself as “pro-life” is that I think the world is better with more people in it. It’s not that any newborn child might be the savior of mankind… it’s that all of them are. If you think the world stinks, do something to make it better, and bring children into the world to help you. The good guys need reinforcements. The paralyzing fear of a dark future is a despicable, cowardly reason to deny the next generation their shot at making it brighter.

If we had the maturity, as a nation, to accept the burden of weighing freedom of choice against the right to life, we would strike down Roe vs. Wade and return the decision to the states. I have no doubt that many – perhaps even most – states would vote to keep abortion legal, many more would take action to restrict the availability of elective abortions, and a few would vote to outlaw the procedure completely. The people who passionately believe that abortion is murder would be free to move to states that have declared it illegal, where they would not be forced to watch as their tax money is used to support something they consider obscene. The people who desperately desire an abortion, and believe they have the right to make that choice, would face nothing worse than the inconvenience of traveling to a state where they can have the procedure. We are better off having a robust argument about abortion, than being mired in a bitter, vindictive squabble about whether we’re allowed to argue.

Once upon a time, when I was an eighteen-year-old student, I made a young lady cry because she thought her faith in the sanctity of life was no match for my debating skills. Now it’s twenty-five years later, and I can only hope that somehow, she reads this and realizes she won that debate, after all. Too many people who call themselves “pro-choice” view their objective as scoring victories against sanctimonious pro-lifers, and savoring their tears. The true losers in this debate did their weeping in private, after they realized something can be perfectly legal but horribly wrong… and sought to reverse a “mistake” that might have grown into someone beautiful, only to discover their second judgment was final, and would never grow into anyone at all.

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Stupid Waterboarding Stunts

Saturday, May 30, 2009

Radio personality Mancow Muller became the latest celebrity to have himself waterboarded, then race to the airwaves to tell the world what an awful and inhuman experience it was. Apparently he didn’t do the waterboarding procedure correctly, which reminds me of one of my favorite exchanges from “Mystery Science Theater 3000,” during their riff on a Japanese space opera called “Fugitive Alien:”

Evil Alien Stormtrooper: A little torture will wipe that smile off your face.

Hero: Not if you do it right!

The celebrity consensus appears to be that waterboarding is a terrible experience, and is therefore never justified under any circumstances – no matter what information captured terrorists might possess, or how many innocent lives are at stake. Have any celebrities volunteered to take a hit from a 50-caliber sniper rifle? That looks extremely unpleasant, too. You can find videos of it all over the Internet. The U.S. Military takes out Taliban forces in Afghanistan with such weapons on a fairly regular basis. Maybe we could put a stop to that brutality by having Keith Olbermann volunteer to get blasted into hamburger on live T.V. It would raise awareness about the awful brutality American troops display towards the innocent, peace-loving boys from the Taliban, and it’s the only way Olbermann’s show will ever get decent ratings.

You know what else looks really painful? Getting caught in a grenade blast. I’ll bet anyone who ever lived through that experience would gladly trade it for a few minutes with a wet towel on their face. Our soldiers probably tossed hundreds of pineapples while they were clearing al-Qaeda vermin… er, “activists” from their nests in Iraq. I’m waiting for a celebrity to lie down on a live grenade to more fully understand the experience. Maybe then we can start taking these implements of pain and dismemberment away from American troops, before their morals are irreparably compromised.

Come to think of it, there really isn’t any painless, utterly humane way to defeat vicious enemies in combat. Even the perfect head shots that ended the career of the Somali pirates who took Captain Phillips hostage must have put some serious chum in the water. Even if I had the marksmanship skills to pull off such a shot, I’m not sure I could do it. I don’t know if I could toss a grenade into a roomful of people, either. I’m hoping to get through the rest of my life without finding out, and I’m far from alone in hoping that. Not many of us have the courage, dedication, and self-sacrifice to undergo the military or police training to deal out death quickly and efficiently. We pass that responsibility along to the fighting men and women who have volunteered to accept it. They, in turn, train hard to develop the skills they need to win battles quickly, with minimal loss of life and collateral damage. The United States military, and the other Western armed forces, have dedicated themselves to standards of professionalism and mercy that far outstrip the rest of the world, and all the armies of previous history.

In the war against terrorism, upholding these standards requires timely intelligence. There is still debate about the value of intelligence gleaned from coercive interrogation techniques, but the preponderance of the evidence suggests that valuable intelligence has been gained this way. It would be nice if President Obama, who never misses an opportunity to tout the transparency of his administration, would release the CIA memos that could go a long way toward settling that part of the argument. In any event, it seems unlikely that crucial intelligence about impending terror attacks could be gained in any other way, especially since the Left has spent the last eight years having hysterical fits about keeping suspected terrorists under surveillance. If we can’t tap their communications or interrogate them, what should we use? Shape-shifting liquid metal robots? Telepaths?

Counter-terrorism efforts must involve military and law-enforcement power, delivered with absolute precision, to capture or eliminate terrorists who hide in civilian populations, without inflicting collateral damage. Americans currently enjoy the protection of a volunteer military force of unparalleled professionalism and skill, which is willing to do the messy, dangerous work of battling her deadly enemies. If the war against Islamic fascism continues to escalate, we may reach a time when we need more than a volunteer military. We might return to the first hours of the War on Terror, when it was fought in the aisles of commercial airliners, by men and women who only thought they were volunteering to visit relatives or attend business meetings. Let’s cut out the idiotic celebrity stunts and let the soldiers and spooks do their jobs… or, one day, we may all need to become soldiers. And if some news anchor or radio jock does feel the need to dramatically criticize intelligence gathering or combat techniques, I suggest they try subjecting themselves to the methods used by the enemy for a change. That would really drive up the ratings.

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The Power Of The Collective

Friday, May 29, 2009

Much of the early opposition to Sonia Sotomayor, Obama’s first Supreme Court nominee, has focused on her racialist statements concerning the superior judicial wisdom of Latin women. Sotomayor is a member of The National Council of La Raza, a Hispanic solidarity organization whose name means “The Race.” La Raza is often confused with MEChA, a more openly and aggressively racist organization that advocates Hispanic racial supremacy and the reconquest of the southwestern United States by Hispanics. As recently as 2006, in response to a challenge from Georgia congressman Charlie Norwood, La Raza formally denounced MEChA and its agenda. We can take them at their word and accept the NCLR’s assurances that it is entirely concerned with benevolent community outreach programs, and still marvel that someone belonging to an organization called “The National Council of The Race” is allowed to get anywhere near the Supreme Court. We most assuredly would not be debating the merits of appointing a white woman named Sonia Stephens, who belonged to a similar organization with a similar name, dedicated to “community outreach” for poor people of Anglo-Saxon descent. If her name was Sonia Sotomacher and her organization was dedicated to the advancement of German-Americans, the president who nominated her would have been impeached by now.

The president who nominated Sotomayor gained his office despite a twenty-year membership in a viciously racist church. If Jeremiah Wright had been white, and spewed comparable venom blaming all the problems of white Americans on black people, his young protege Barry O’Bama would be an obscure fringe figure from the Chicago political underground, angrily spinning conspiracy theories to explain his crushing defeat in the state senate primaries.

Are Barack Obama and Sonia Sotomayor racists? No, but they are both proponents, and products, of collective power. Collective organizations are always the dominant forces in statist countries, such as America has become. Anyone who doubts this need only look at the way the American auto industry has been twisted into an incomprehensible mess for the benefit of a powerful workers’ union, which relies upon money seized from taxpayers to artificially sustain a business model that should have collapsed when business managers capitulated to unreasonable union demands.

Collectives focus the political energies of their membership, becoming much more powerful and influential than disorganized majorities. This is one reason why massive social upheavals, such as gay marriage, proceed despite majority opposition to them. The proponents of gay marriage are well-organized, well-funded, media savvy, and politically connected. The opponents are a large, disorganized group of average people reading the newspaper and shaking their heads at the absurdity of two men getting married.

The formation of political collectives is natural and inevitable – the right of free association, and the effectiveness of such organizations, guarantees it. The elected representatives of a republic will always be ready to listen to someone who represents a large group of voters, particularly if they have money to donate to political campaigns. The problem is that when the state swells in size and exerts control over all aspects of the economy and culture, these political organizations become disproportionately powerful, and those who don’t belong to such organizations find themselves overpowered and marginalized. In the socialist America of 2009, the entire economy has been restructured to benefit specific interest groups. If you want to buy an American-made car in 2011, your choices will be determined by environmentalists and auto workers’ unions, more than by consumer demand. The mortgage industry was turned into a suicide bomb because powerful interest groups made the government over-ride the influence of the markets. Meaningful educational reform is forever blocked by the teachers’ unions, which are much more influential, and brimming with political cash, than the much larger group of parents with children trapped in lousy public schools.

The state will always be more responsive to collectives with agendas that further the growth of state power. The teachers’ unions didn’t have to twist Jimmy Carter’s arm to get the Department of Education. Barack Obama doesn’t exactly look somber, humbled, or regretful as he takes over financial institutions and auto companies. Labor unions in general have gone from being collective bargaining associations that protected members from exploitation by rapacious businesses, to effectively becoming arms of the centralized state. In a practical sense, when you’re talking to the head of the United Auto Workers or National Education Association, you’re talking to a government official.

As the state grows larger, it increasingly becomes responsive only to large collectives, which increasingly require even more state power to accomplish their agendas. Because the Left understands this, it has always taken great pains to write the rules of American political culture to invalidate groups that oppose its agenda. ACORN and La Raza are noble community organizations, but groups the Left doesn’t like are sinister “special interests.” Virtually any collective organization with a conservative or libertarian agenda is swiftly discredited by declaring it hateful, racist, or fascist. There’s a good reason the Left got so hysterical about the Moral Majority in the Eighties, or becomes so agitated about organized religion in general.

The problem for Americans posed by the increased power of political collectives is that all such organizations are, by necessity, coercive. Big Labor wouldn’t have any power unless it could extract funds from its members and take their obedience to its agenda for granted. Nobody would pay attention to a union if half of its members could actively oppose its policies, or withhold their financial support from it. No one would pay attention to a minority association that could only claim to speak for some members of the minority. That’s why groups such as the National Organization for Women or NAACP use cultural power to aggressively marginalize dissenting members of the sex or race groups they claim to speak for. There’s nothing black liberal activists hate more than a successful black conservative – just ask Clarence Thomas. The last thing any collective can afford is for its members to start thinking they don’t need it any more. Near-absolute obedience to the agenda of the leadership is required to produce effective political power, so collectives always resort to draconian means to suppress dissent.

It will be increasingly difficult for Americans who don’t belong to collective organizations to enjoy cultural freedom or economic success, as a titanic government asserts the moral right to legislate its preferences in these areas, driven by the powerful interest groups that control the state. The power of the free market comes from vast numbers of free people making production and consumption choices in their own interest, producing an energy and vitality that dreary, plodding state-run economies can never hope to match. The economy of a free nation should be a race between millions of competitors surging forward, not a handful of clumsy, blinkered giants battling to control a rapidly shrinking arena. It’s not good for harmony, prosperity, or liberty that Sonia Sotomayor proudly belongs to the type of organization that Sonia Sotomacher would be required to be ashamed of.

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Government and the Marriage Business

Thursday, May 28, 2009

Pepperdine law professor Douglas Kmiec’s suggestion that marriage should be replaced with neutral “civil licenses” has already drawn agreement from Ed, and a disagreeing post from Pundette, in which she quotes Robert George’s defense of traditional marriage as an essential component of a healthy society. Having written extensively in defense of marriage myself, I wanted to add my own thoughts on the idea of “getting government out of the marriage business.”

I wrote earlier that I believe society has a critical interest in promoting opposite-sex marriage. It provides the best environment for raising children, it celebrates the ideal relationship between women and men, and it creates nuclear families that supply the building blocks of authority for a democracy, in which authority is supposed to flow upward, from family to community to state to nation. There is also a strong economic argument for the traditional family, which accumulates lasting wealth in a unique fashion. Even a low-income family can provide significant economic benefits to its members: making sacrifices to put children through school, fostering an attitude of reliance on self and family instead of the state, building social networks that can benefit every member of the family, and gathering property and other assets that can be passed down between generations. Hillary Clinton’s famous book on child-rearing had it exactly backwards – it doesn’t take a village to raise a child in America, but it takes strong families to build a decent village. A backbone of solid marriages and families gives a society the strength to accommodate the people who never become married, or never have children. We’re not going to get above the replacement birth rate of 2.1 without a significant number of families that have three or more children. You’re just not going to get there with artificial insemination, and you sure don’t want to get there with a horde of children raised outside of marriage. The first reel of “Logan’s Run” was not a blueprint for a happy society.

The idea of getting government out of marriage has a certain libertarian appeal, but we’re nowhere near the overall state of libertarian social and economic freedom that would make this a winning argument. Why should marriage be the only aspect of society the federal government isn’t deeply involved in? Besides, the assertion that following Doug Kmiec’s suggestion would “get government out of the marriage business” is mistaken. Erasing marriage as an official concept, and replacing them with legalistic “civil unions,” would not reduce the involvement of our massive centralized government, any more than it has been able to keep its nose out of legalistic civil contracts between automobile companies, their bondholders, and their labor unions. Changing the language surrounding the relationship between men, women, and children will not make divorces any less messy or painful. No aspect of society has ever been improved by making it less exalted. You can devalue marriage by declaring it to be equivalent to same-sex relationships, polygamous associations, and lifelong buddies who decide to enter a “civil union” to enjoy its tax advantages… but none of these things will improve marriages.

Ed writes that “the advent of no-fault divorce, in which one party can abrogate the marriage contract without penalty or consideration of the other party, has completely destroyed the notion that the government plays a role in protecting the integrity and well-being of the family.” I can’t imagine how anyone sees that as a reason to make things worse. The no-fault divorce revolution Ed references occurred less than fifty years ago. Are we supposed to accept that a mistake made in the 60s and 70s has produced an immutable new social order that can never be changed or improved? Did the awful social devastation of the last fifty years really invalidate the accumulated wisdom and tradition of the previous two thousand years? Somehow “progressive” social theories always seem to mean “everything is doomed to get worse, and all we can do is try to manage the decline efficiently.” If a review of social trends over the last half-century leads you to believe no-fault divorce was bad for women and children, just wait until you see what non-existent marriage does to them.

The argument in favor of separating government from marriage is made as if the central government was not already legislating morality in hundreds of different ways. Much of the titanic super-state is justified on moral grounds, or because its activities are supposed to be good for society. What’s the point of pumping trillions of dollars into economic “stimulus” and rescuing companies that are ‘too big to fail” if we simultaneously withdraw the respect and legal approval of the state for the one thing most likely to keep children from living in poverty? When we have seen Barack Obama out of office, and passed whatever laws are necessary to ensure the president of the United States is never again allowed to manage an auto company, force banks to accept government funds, appoint Supreme Court justices on the basis of their racial wisdom, or use “progressive” taxation to “spread the wealth around” in the name of social justice, then we might have a more reasonable discussion about whether government should be involved in marriage. For the time being, anyone who wants to beat the defenders of marriage with the libertarianism or federalism clubs is going to find themselves holding a wet noodle instead of a cudgel.

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All Is Lost

Tuesday, May 26, 2009

Sonia Sotomayor is guaranteed confirmation as a Supreme Court justice. There’s nothing that can be done to stop it. It’s political suicide to even argue about it. Her judicial history and racialist beliefs are irrelevant. Republican appointees to the Court are clobbered with thousands of man-hours of opposition research, and subjected to the kind of intensive questioning that causes progressives to burst into tears when it’s directed at captive terrorists. Democrats fell all over each other racing to the microphones to declare the nomination of mild-mannered Sam Alito to be the most divisive event in American history since the Confederacy attacked Fort Sumter. John Kerry was staggering around Washington barking “right wing” like a robot parrot in need of a software patch. Nobody in the Democrat Party waited to hear a single word from Alito before denouncing him as a white-sheeted avatar of extreme right-wing evil, and his confirmation hearings played out like the latest installment in the “Saw” franchise. (Hey, anyone remember Arlen Specter grilling Alito on the terrifying menace of the “unitary executive?” Ah, those bygone days of 2006, when liberals fretted about the executive having too much discretionary power…) But we can’t so much as raise an objection to Sonia Sotomayor. Liberals of the correct race and gender are the new ruling class, as absolute in their power as any of the later French kings, born with a divine right to rule without question. Every hour Republicans delay in confirming Sotomayor will probably cost them a hundred thousand votes in our increasingly meaningless elections. In fact, if they don’t physically pick her up, carry her into the Supreme Court chamber, and drop her into David Souter’s chair by sunset tomorrow, we can probably skip the 2010 elections altogether.

One of the reasons Sotomayor is a shoe-in is because she’s absolutely devoted to the legal travesty known as Roe vs. Wade. Although the majority of Americans now identify themselves as pro-life, no outspokenly pro-life justice would ever be nominated by Obama, and no such justice nominated by a Republican president could ever be confirmed, no matter how female and wise and Latin she was. The 52% of voters who put Obama in the White House gave him an irresistible mandate to destroy the economy and culture of the United States and rebuild it as he sees fit, but the 51% of Americans who oppose the Roe vs. Wade regime of abortion on demand are an irrelevant minority who should just shut up and shuffle quietly back into their churches. As President Obama explained to the students at Notre Dame in his commencement address, the proper course of action for pro-lifers is to submit to the authority of the pro-choice minority and humbly ask if there’s anything they can do to make themselves useful, provided they keep a lid on all that uncomfortable “baby-killer” talk. Notre Dame apparently agrees with this attitude, since they bestowed honors on a man who is not only completely comfortable with a gigantic number of abortions, but even has nuanced thoughts about outright infanticide.

Gay marriage is coming. There’s nothing you can do about it. If you believe in the traditional definition of marriage as the union of a man and a woman, you ought to write those beliefs on the back of a twenty-dollar bill, because then they’ll be worth something. If you publicly object to gay marriage, you’ll be mercilessly destroyed. If your state votes overwhelmingly against gay marriage, like California, the will of the voters will be promptly overturned by a handful of robed philosopher-kings in the judiciary… and if the electoral triumph of those who defend marriage is reinstated, as with California, further challenges will be filed by high-powered legal dream teams. This will continue until the lawyers find a clause, sub-paragraph, penumbra, or emanation that can be used to put the majority of Americans on their knees, in submission to the will of a tiny, politically favored percentage of the population. While the legal challenges continue, the voters of California will be made to face endless gay-marriage referendums, backed by lavishly financed campaigns crackling with Hollywood star power, until they make the “right” decision… at which point the issue will be declared settled for all eternity, and even discussing the idea of another vote will be considered a hate crime.

Socialized medicine is right around the corner. There’s nothing you can do about it. If you don’t want to throw away the technological advances made by American medicine in exchange for the dull, deadly malaise of “free” medicine – whose current victims flee to America for treatment if they have the resources and a lick of common sense – you’re doomed. Democrats want nationalized medicine like Gollum wants his precious ring, because they see it as a perpetual incumbent-protection program that will finally allow them to accuse their political opponents of wanting to kill the voters by arguing in favor of free markets… ushering in a Soviet future where running for office as a Republican will automatically make you an accessory to murder. Democrats have the votes to get what they want. It’s a done deal. If you’re feeling sick, you might want to get in line at your local Department of Motor Vehicles office now, and wait for the first team of government doctors to show up.

Conservatism is dead. People don’t want to hear all that talk about freedom and capitalism any more. Government can do everything, and give it all to you for free. An obscure senator from Illinois with no private-sector experience and a shady political past is better qualified to run banks, auto companies, car dealerships, insurance firms – and, soon, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, and the Internet – than all of the executives, entrepreneurs, and investors in America combined. If the Republican Party nominates Sarah Palin, Bobby Jindal, Mitt Romney, Mark Sanford, or anyone else except Colin Powell, there’s really no point in having an election in 2012 – it would just distract the Lightworker from his important work of rebuilding America, and waste money that could be better used to subsidize favored Democrat constituencies that didn’t get their fill of pork after the last trillion-dollar giveaway. If the Republicans do run Colin Powell, the re-election of Obama is still a foregone conclusion, but at least the 2012 campaign would serve a useful purpose – namely, giving Powell plenty of media access to remind voters how incredibly special Barack Hussein Obama is.

The advice conservatism receives from its enemies reminds me of the cordial, eminently reasonable request for surrender sent to General McAuliffe, under siege by the Nazis at Bastogne. The Germans pointed out that all was lost, resistance was futile, the Americans had bravely done their duty and could retire from the field with honor… there was no point in making anyone suffer further for an impossible victory. General McAuliffe’s answer was one word, and it’s the same answer conservatives should offer anyone who seriously believes the battle for America’s morality, liberty, and prosperity is over:

NUTS.

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Or Else… What?

Tuesday, May 26, 2009

In the movie Lakeview Terrace, Samuel Jackson plays Abel Turner, a sociopathic cop who terrorizes the young, politically progressive inter-racial couple who move in next door to him. The couple tries dealing with the increasingly belligerent Turner by trying to befriend him, politely asking him to stop bothering them, attempting to appease him, and ignoring him. When none of this works, and they finally try standing their ground and demanding he back off, he dismisses their angry demands with a mocking question: “Or else what?” When polite, civilized people get angry and make implied threats, the cynical and street-wise Turner calls their bluff, and they invariably back down.

I’ll bet Lakeview Terrace is one of Kim Jong Il’s favorite movies.

The thuggish intransigence of dictators like Kim Jong Il, Mahmoud Amadinejad, and the late Saddam Hussein demonstrate the basic weakness of the United Nations, by calling its bluff and revealing its inability to deal with nations that refuse to submit to its edicts voluntarily. It’s surprising that anyone finds this surprising – not just in the case of repeat offenders like North Korea and Iran, but in general. The United Nations is fatally flawed as a concept, because it was designed by people who don’t understand democracy.

“Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other,” said John Adams in an often-quoted address to the Massachusetts militia. Adams touched on an essential truth about democracy in general: it only works when its participants agree to respect its basic principles. The U.S. Constitution is meant to set out rules that constrain the behavior of even the highest levels of government – no matter how powerful, popular, or well-intentioned a president, congressman, or government official might be, he must respect the Constitutional limits on his power. He cannot violate these rules, or change the Constitution without the consent of the entire nation, expressed through the very difficult process of a Constitutional Convention. Of course, modern American government is riddled with Constitutional violations, but even the radical extremist who currently occupies the Oval Office makes a pretense of respecting Constitutional authority – in fact, he advertises himself as a credentialed expert in Constitutional law. Many of America’s current problems can be directly traced to the days when our grandfathers first began to see the Constitution as an obstacle to be maneuvered around, instead of a set of guiding principles to be embraced.

The citizens of a democracy must be required to accept its authority before they can participate, or the entire enterprise is corrupt and doomed to failure. We do not allow felons or non-citizens to vote for this reason, and we require a minimum voting age to ensure the citizen is able to give informed consent to the authority of the nation, and accept the responsibility of voting for its leadership. Many times during the latter half of the twentieth century, and during the years following the 9/11 attacks, we have grappled with the painful issue of how a free country handles sedition and treason, because we instinctively understand that it would be fatal to allow any republic to be dominated by people who wish to destroy it.

The fatal flaw of the United Nations is that it does not impose this type of constitutional requirement on its membership. It was conceived as a kind of global Congress, where virtually every nation could have a seat at the table, in the hope that providing such an international council would avoid war. Because its requirements for membership are so minimal, however, it is inevitably dominated by its most aggressive and lawless elements. In order to sustain the fantasy of an environment where Iran, North Korea, or a host of other rogue states are fit to sit at a council table with America, Britain, or Australia, the U.N. must devalue the latter, because it certainly cannot elevate the former. The only way to pretend Belgium is equal to Zimbabwe is to devalue Belgium.

Because the United Nations does not require its member states to meet the basic tests of legitimacy that would ensure they embrace its basic principles, the rogue states will always view those principles as obstacles to work around… or weapons to turn against the law-abiding. Granting the veneer of legitimacy to lawless states gives them a huge advantage, as they cheerfully slash and burn their way through the spiderweb of rules and resolutions which lawful nations regard as chains of iron. Even as liberal Western democracies agonize over compliance with the finest details of elaborate trade agreements, rogue states push forward with illegal nuclear weapons.

Dictators are happy to pocket the benefits of belonging to a prestigious global agency that insists on granting them the same moral legitimacy as Switzerland, while making no absolute demands of them in return. North Korea is an international deadbeat whose cable TV and magazine subscriptions never get canceled, no matter how many urgent “final notices” pile up in their mailboxes. In a world full of earnest liberal nations trying to obey the speed limits, wear their seat belts, and use their turn signals properly, Iran is driving like a maniac with its headlights off and the pedal pushed to the floor. It doesn’t faze them much when the other drivers hand them home-made speeding tickets covered with smiley faces, then nervously look the other way while Iran tears them up and tosses them onto the pile of old shredded tickets in the back seat.

The United Nations is hopelessly corrupt and endlessly impotent to assert authority over any state that isn’t masochistic enough to pretend its words carry any weight. It can never be reformed, because it was built on mistaken assumptions. It should be replaced by a world body with serious standards of membership, and serious benefits for states that make the effort to qualify. The global parliament should be an august institution that accepts only free nations as members, because only such nations have reached the age of civilizational maturity necessary to give informed consent to its authority. We are a century past the point where any civilized person should pretend that a civilized nation can govern itself through any method except free and fair elections, or subject its citizens to violations of basic human rights. Allowing a dictatorship to drop one of its functionaries into a seat at the same table as nations which bled and burned for freedom and liberty is an insult to the citizens of those nations, and the captive subjects of the dictatorship. A world body will never be credible until it demands the best of its member states, instead of settling for the worst. Until then, we’ll just keep watching reruns of the same tired old script, in which the United Nations issues its polite and progressive requests for good behavior, and the Abel Turners of the world answer with a predatory grin: “Or else what?“

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Memorial Day: One Nation, One Moment

Sunday, May 24, 2009

Memorial Day began as a commemoration of the Union soldiers who died during the Civil War. It has since become a day to honor all those who have given their lives to defend the United States of America. The spirits of our soldiers form an unbroken line of courage and fidelity, from the Minutemen who faced a red-coated army of professional troops, ten times their number, at Lexington and Concord… to the men and women who chased a shadowy horde of murderers into the mountains of Afghanistan and the streets of Baghdad. The American soldier never loses heart, even when clad in rags and freezing to death at Valley Forge, or watching from the Middle East as half of America quivers and wilts behind them, and political leaders speak of offering their surrender as cards in an electoral poker game. If I said that America doesn’t deserve the men and women who serve in her military, every veteran reading this would demand I take it back, so I won’t say it. Instead, let me talk about what they deserve… those who will spend Memorial Day wearing uniforms woven from two centuries of the courageous refusal to allow the defense of freedom to be someone else’s responsibility.

The military deserves our respect. They are not helpless children, stumbling blindly through the back alleys of Iraq and waiting to be murdered. They are not fools, tricked into signing their lives away, then sent to die in an imperial war for oil. They are not victims, trapped in a quagmire and waiting for politicians to rescue them. Today’s Army rifleman is the son of the men who rode from the sky into the hills of Ia Drang, and spent the night watching hundreds of enemy soldiers quietly circle around them. Today’s Air Force pilot is the grandson of the men who avenged Pearl Harbor in the skies over Midway Island. Today’s Marine officer carries a ceremonial Mameluke sword, an honor bestowed on the Corps by an Ottoman viceroy after the first time they fought against barbarians in the Middle East, two hundred and five years ago. There is a reason presidents offer congratulations to the graduates of military academies, rather than condolences. Every civilian leader in the United States should look himself in the mirror before he gives a press conference to declare American victory impossible, or speaks of soldiers as if they were his children on the floor of the Senate, and remind himself that his determination and fighting spirit will break long before theirs does. The current President should consider the character of our fighting men and women, before using a Naval Academy commencement address to insinuate that his predecessor made fools of them.

The military deserves our trust. The American soldier is not a bloodthirsty killing machine. No fighting force in the history of the human race has showed greater restraint or concern for civilian casualties. The world is filled with low and treacherous men who are alive today because American troops allowed them to keep their lives, when every rule of war – including the vaunted Geneva Conventions – said they deserved nothing but a swift death. The halls of Congress are filled with low and treacherous men who accuse American troops of murder and atrocities without a shred of proof, and then lack the dignity and honor to resign when their accusations are shown to be hollow lies.

The military deserves our understanding, as we ask them to fight a complex war against vicious and cowardly enemies who regard atrocities as mission objectives. If the animals who orchestrated the 9/11 attacks would send their forces into the open field to do battle against the American military, this war would be settled in an hour… but every Ranger taking fire from Taliban snipers, every medic fighting to save the victims of a suicide bombing, and every technician racing to disable an Improvised Explosive Device knows that hour will never come. The defense of civilians, against a stealthy enemy who specializes in targeting them, requires intelligence – and if the military is to protect those civilians, instead of avenging their deaths, this intelligence must be gathered before the attacks take place. Our fighting men and women deserve better than to watch a faithless, slow-witted political hack throw sand in the eyes of America’s counter-terrorism team, as she digs a hole to hide in. The leaders of our dominant political party should spend more time closing ranks with our nation’s defenders, and less time closing ranks with each other.

The military deserves our support. There is so much we can do to help them, and remind them that no matter what lonely places they must walk in, hundreds of millions of American civilians walk proudly beside them. My lady and I are faithful contributors to the Adopt A U.S. Soldier program. We’ve seen one man safely home after a tour of duty in Iraq, and now we’re doing what we can to help another on duty in Afghanistan. This weekend, you’ll be surrounded by a lot of comforts and luxuries you take for granted. Adopt A U.S. Soldier can put you in touch with some folks who won’t take any of that stuff for granted.

There’s something else you can put at the service of the soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines serving you: your voice. They can’t speak in their own defense, because they have a code of conduct that forbids it. They follow a noble tradition of military loyalty to civilian authority, stretching back to the great general who won freedom for his fellow Americans… then refused to let them surrender that freedom to him, by making him king. The military relies upon us to answer insults and slander directed at them. They need us to stand against sleazy attempts to disenfranchise them, when they cast their votes from overseas. Every politician who would build a career by declaring our soldiers to be criminals, and appointing themselves as prosecutors… everyone who supports the terrorist enemy by staging shameful circus routines outside V.A. Hospitals… every fool that can’t tell the difference between Minutemen and al-Qaeda butchers… every talking head who vandalizes the military’s honor, by comparing them to vermin who believe the road to victory is paved with the blood and bones of women and children… should find themselves confronted by a united America that stands ready to battle domestic enemies, while their brothers and sisters in uniform handle the foreign ones.

On Memorial Day, we remember those who gave their lives at Bunker Hill, Gettysburg, Bastogne, Chosin, Hamburger Hill, and other fields of honor throughout our history. We honor those who fought the first battles against the current enemy, including the brave men who died in Operation Eagle Claw in 1980, trying to rescue the hostages taken by Iran. These soldiers suffered and died to build a legacy of valor, gallantry, and compassion that our enemies can barely comprehend. It is no accident that the greatest fighting force the world has ever known declares their primary mission to be the protection of innocent life. They do not fight to conquer territory, or turn captive nations into vassals, or steal precious resources from their rightful owners… and they will always prevail over those who view war as a means to those ends. A resolution of Congress established a national moment of remembrance at three o’clock on the afternoon of Memorial Day. The White House Commission on Remembrance speaks of it as “One Nation, One Moment.” Let us observe that moment of silence together, in union with the living under arms and those who rest beneath the colors of America… then raise your voice, and add it to the arsenal of freedom.

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A Radical Proposal For Real Stimulus

Thursday, May 21, 2009

The Dow dropped another 150 points on Thursday, leaving it at 8292.13. It bounces around a bit, but it seems to be stuck around 600 points below where it was on the day Barack Obama was elected President. It peaked at 14908.08 in October 2007. Unemployment stands at 8.6%, after hanging around four to five percent during most of President Bush’s term. When nothing came of its multi-billion dollar “stimulus” plans and bailouts, the government started pouring good money after bad, just recently announcing it will throw another $7.5 billion at General Motors Acceptance Corporation, on top of the $5 billion it has already spent. Uncle Sam is also converting $884 million in loans to GMAC into equity, which means you, the taxpayer, are being forced to buy 35% interest in a disintegrating financial company, whose stock you wouldn’t normally purchase without getting drunk first. There are about 128 million taxpayers in the United States, so your share works out to a little over a hundred bucks taken out of your wallet and paid to GMAC since December. An already shaky auto industry is about to get walloped by new federally-mandated fuel efficiency increases, which is likely to depress new car sales as upper-income buyers cling to big, comfortable vehicles they won’t be able to purchase any more. And California has turned into a malignant tumor that will suck billions out of productive states with sane government, as the inevitable federal bailouts begin.

It’s hard to see any of the signs of renewed economic growth that Obama keeps hallucinating about in press conferences. It’s time for some real economic stimulus – the fraudulent pork bill shoved down the nation’s throat by Democrats didn’t even pretend to “stimulate” anything until 2010. How do you stimulate an economy? Well, throwing money at favored constituencies doesn’t work – if those constituencies were wealth creators, they wouldn’t need infusions of pork. Bailing out failed business models is merely subsidizing failure. There are two things that would provide immediate stimulus: tax cuts, which spur positive business growth immediately, because quarterly and yearly business plans take upcoming tax rates into consideration, and the creation of new markets for businesses to exploit. Obama’s corporate socialism has the needs of the economy exactly reversed – instead of having government take over failed businesses, we need failed government programs to be released into the private sector, spurring employment and spending on infrastructure. The private sector would love to gain the opportunity to bring its innovation and energy to a previously moribund government-controlled industry, and the taxes formerly collected to fund a bloated and inefficient federal department could flow directly into the pockets of taxpaying citizens, like a jolt of electricity. To rescue our economy, it’s time for some of that out-of-the-box thinking we keep hearing this Administration values. Let’s set partisan considerations aside and do something dramatic.

Mr. President, it’s time to privatize education.

According to the U.S. Department of Education, roughly $553 billion was collected in tax revenue to fund the public school system in 2007. I couldn’t find any 2008 numbers, but of course they’re bound to be even higher. Can you imagine the economic stimulus of dropping a half-trillion dollar market into the private sector? The frenzy of companies forming to compete for the best teachers, build the most attractive educational infrastructure, and market their services to discerning parents would be astonishing.

The tax savings to citizens would be significant. Of course, we would need to provide educational vouchers for lower-income citizens, so some educational taxes would still need to be collected… but the federal government current spends over $9000 per year, on average, to educate each student. It’s much higher than that in some areas, most notably Washington, D.C., which spends a whopping $25,000.00 per student. Does anyone doubt that competitive private schools can do better, especially when the economies of scale for handling seventy million customers kick in? Parochial schools already offer superior education at less than half the average cost of government schools.

American public education is a textbook study of a failed government program. American students lag behind the rest of the developed world in almost every category, and their performance gets worse with every passing year. As far back as the early Eighties, the Education Secretary released a report called A Nation At Risk: The Imperative for Education Reform, which included this infamous statement: “If an unfriendly power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.” Things have gotten a lot worse in the last 25 years, not least because of the tremendous amount of time wasted on foolish political indoctrination, including mandatory training in the official state religion of environmentalism – something that has gotten so out of hand that a “separation of church and state” lawsuit is just itching to be filed. The Obamas obviously had the good sense to keep their daughters far away from the awful public schools of Washington… just like every single liberal Democrat president before them.

The government has proven utterly unable to cope with the most disruptive elements of public education, a dreary litany of horrors that every parent can recite by heart: disruptive students, disconnected parents, violence in the schools, grade inflation, and the crush of immigrant students from families that refuse to assimilate. Hidebound government functionaries can’t conceive of any solutions to these problems, but I’ll bet highly motivated, innovative private entrepreneurs can. Parents who can shop around for the best schools will vote with their feet if private schools don’t measure up. The District of Columbia was filled with parents who desperately pursued an opportunity to escape from the hell created by Congress and the teachers’ unions – until Obama took it away from them.

Much of the cost of public education comes from a bloated, union-heavy bureaucracy, tangled in a cozy relationship with Jimmy Carter’s Department of Education. The teachers’ unions are heavy contributors to the Democrat Party, and they receive value for their money, with tired 60s radicals settled into tenured positions, and a vast army of federal officials and union apparatchiks crushing good teachers who struggle valiantly to provide a decent education in a crazy system. The flaws in government education are grown through every brick of public schools, like a vine that can’t be cleared away without bringing the whole building down. Everyone familiar with the state educational system knows there is no way to reform it – its problems are built in to a system that provides such tremendous opportunities for political indoctrination, has so few mechanisms for dealing with poor teacher performance, and provides huge funds to a union that uses them to buy vast political power.

Have the courage to make a sacrifice for America, Mr. Obama – it’s time for your government, your Party, and Bill Ayers to make do with less for a change. Dissolve the Department of Education, promote a right-to-work law that will shatter the teachers’ union, and begin the privatization of the educational system. It would go a long way toward getting us back to the economic performance and unemployment figures of your predecessor, which so far you have only been able to regard with envy and confusion. It might get us back to a 10,000 Dow… and produce a class of 2010 that understands exactly what that means.

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We Need A Quick Reference Card…

Wednesday, May 20, 2009

According to Joe Klein, a duly credentialed member of the media elite, Charles Krauthammer can’t write about any aspect of modern life with “nuance” because he’s confined to a wheelchair. Of course it’s an outrage, but it’s also confusing. I wonder if the Left would be so kind as to prepare a Quick Reference card, to help us understand the proper meaning of experience, and the value of majority opinion.

How come Charles Krauthammer can’t appreciate the nuances of American life because he’s in a wheelchair, but a guy who never had a job in the private sector is fully qualified to seize control of enormous corporations?

If the “chickenhawk” argument made so passionately by the Left over the past eight years is to be taken seriously, and only people who have served in the military have the experience and moral standing to support military actions, shouldn’t the Commander-in-Chief be required to have served on active duty? And if we aren’t supposed to take such a constantly repeated meme seriously, why should the Left be taken seriously about anything?

If good poll numbers for Obama’s security policy indicate those policies are a success, as maintained by the same Joe Klein, then why did liberals spend years criticizing the even more popular invasion of Iraq in 2002?

If the majority opposition to gay marriage is irrelevant, because allowing the feelings of the majority to influence laws is immoral, then why is winning 51% of the vote supposed to give Barack Obama an unlimited mandate to reshape society in any way he pleases, and hoping for the failure of his policies is unpatriotic?

If equal protection under the law requires us to extend all the benefits of marriage to a same-sex couple, because it’s wrong to deny those benefits on the basis of their sexual orientation, why is it OK for us to tax that same couple at a higher rate because they’re rich?

Why are Barack Obama’s approval ratings supposed to silence all criticism of him, when majority support for the pro-life position on abortion is meaningless?

If government is now permitted to take over private companies that fail and require rescue, can private industry start taking over failed government programs? Quite a few of them are in need of rescuing.

Why is it proper to remove vehicles desired by the majority of consumers from the market, because a tiny minority of elites has decided safety and comfort are less important than fuel efficiency?

If all traditions are automatically bad and have no value to a progressive society, does that include the tradition of paying deference and respect to a President you didn’t vote for?

Why are Americans supposed to feel guilty about being a minority of the global population, but consuming “an unfair share” of the world’s resources, while simultaneously being expected to provide the vast majority of the funding for the United Nations and various relief efforts?

How can credit card companies be evil for assessing unpopular penalties against people who pay their balances late, when the Internal Revenue Service is allowed to level huge fines against everyone who pays their taxes late, other than powerful Democrat politicians?

It’s only reasonable for companies to be run by their stockholders – we don’t allow random strangers to wander into board meetings and vote to hire or fire company officers. Since the American government is now part or full owner of several corporations, would it not be logical to restrict the vote for President and Congress to only people who pay taxes?

If government officials have unlimited authority to control the private sector, because they won popular elections and speak “for the people,” isn’t it tyrannical to give uneven amounts of power to senators and representatives from individual states? Why should Barney Frank have vast power over the national economy, when only a few hundred thousand people have ever had an opportunity to vote for, or against, him? The new role of government in the economy suggests that all House and Senate elections should be held nationally from now on. If we all own the financial sector now, we should all have a say in selecting the politicians who administer it for us.

If the government can implement programs because a majority of Americans want them, shouldn’t it immediately terminate programs that a majority of Americans don’t want any more?

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Fighting on Fatal Terrain

Wednesday, May 20, 2009

Where, if one fights with intensity he will survive, but if he does not fight with intensity he will perish, it is fatal terrain. If there is no place to go, it is fatal terrain. On fatal terrain, you must do battle.

- Sun Tzu, The Art of War

I thought Michael Steele gave a pretty good speech on Tuesday. He needed to. He’s been the unsteady head of a confused and demoralized party. I believe conservatives should direct their energies toward reforming and directing that party, because as weak, wrong-headed, and frustrating as it can often be, it’s their best vehicle for taking part in the political process and influencing the direction America is taking. I wouldn’t quarrel with most of the criticisms I hear leveled at the Republican Party, and I completely understand the desire to junk it and start over with something more energetic, aggressive, and philosophically sound. I just don’t think there is enough time for us to do that. Several doomsday clocks are ticking down, and the first of them will begin to strike midnight soon. The America that conservatives are dedicated to conserving is fighting on fatal terrain, and we have work to do. I really hope Mr. Steele follows up on that speech.

Today we learned that, in addition to bailing out foreclosed mortgages, we’ll also be on the hook for subsidizing reduced penalties for people with credit card problems. We’re also turning $15 billion in loans to General Motors into a gift. We gave a trillion dollars to various Democrat constituencies in the “stimulus” bill. We poured $700 billion into the Troubled Assets Relief Program, to rescue the banking industry. We’ll blow another trillion on the national health care plan that will supposedly be rammed down our throats at the end of the year. The tidal wave of spending is dizzying. Huge stacks of money are flying in every direction.

The fairy tale sold to the voters over the past year is a lie. Government funding does not appear magically from thin air, or flow painlessly from the gold-plated vaults of billionaires who will never miss it. Washington doesn’t create wealth – it prints money. It doesn’t add any resources to the American economy – it could, by opening up new sources of oil, but that is the last thing Barack Obama and his party are interested in doing. Soon the bills for all this madcap spending are going to come due. So far, much of the Obama agenda has been funded by deficit spending, mandates on businesses, and costs added to various consumer products, such as automobiles. The first wave of massive direct tax increases will be coming next year, but they’ll be presented as taxes on the evil rich. The Democrats will try to hold off the middle class tax bite until after the midterm elections. The Democrat strategy is to rig the system so the voters no longer have meaningful choices to make in 2010, 2012, or beyond.

In the battle between collectivism and liberty, which Americans generally describe as the struggle between liberalism and conservatism, the collectivists have a huge tactical advantage: there are endgame scenarios that allow them to nail down a permanent victory. Liberty has no checkmate moves. The cultural, political, and economic freedom that conservatives are fighting to defend can always be lost again later. No victory in the name of capitalism or individualism will ever be complete and everlasting, because soon enough the next gang of snake-oil salesmen will come along, to tell the populace how they’re shameful for wanting to earn the good life, but virtuous for demanding that government give it to them. It’s interesting how voters can be easily stampeded into adopting massive state programs that can never be reversed, or even meaningfully reduced… but they’re willing to believe that free-market solutions, which can naturally be altered or discontinued at will, are too risky to attempt.

Socialized medicine is one of the most dangerous doomsday scenarios, and it’s right around the corner. On the day we nationalize health care, fifteen percent of our $14 trillion economy passes forever into state control. It will be incredibly difficult to persuade the electorate to vote health care back into the public sector, because the other side will tell them this is tantamount to voting for their own death, and the death of their children and elderly parents. The forces controlling, and profiting, from socialized health care will have an army of hard-core lower-income dependents marching behind them, and their boots will be on the necks of the increasingly destitute middle class of an economically ruined America, terrified of losing their “free” medicine.

The progressive tax system has devolved into something dangerously close to a doomsday scenario. It is a perpetual motion machine for endless tax and spending increases, in which nearly half of the electorate has been removed from the income tax rolls. When Democrats finally manage to deform the system enough to turn tax consumers into an absolute majority, it will be tough to persuade them to adopt a fairer, flatter tax structure that makes them start paying again. What interest does a person who pays nothing have in reforming the system, especially when the only people “suffering” from confiscatory taxation are the evil rich?

In the end, however, the collectivists will face the irony of a final apocalypse that everyone but them could see coming from decades away: their ideas don’t work, and they will crash. The bankruptcy of Social Security will begin a complete systemic collapse, irreversible by any policy that could be implemented by the United States government, as it exists today. Social Security was originally supposed to go bankrupt in the 2040s, but the date has been moving forward with increasing speed. Recessionary economics and irresponsible government spending might have dragged it as close as next year, by some estimates. The American social welfare system will not survive the implosion of Social Security.

Back in the early Nineties, I was astonished to read projections that the taxpayers of the 2020s would be expected to fork over something like seventy percent of their income just to fund the government, and that included lower-income taxpayers. This assumed government spending remained constant, which of course it hasn’t. Current Congressional Budget Office projections for the next ten years assume unemployment settles back down to about 5%, and most of the revenue needed by the government can be siphoned from the upper income brackets. We all know that tax hikes on the rich never produce the kind of revenue liberals assume it will, because the rich find ways to evade the taxes, and ultimately begin moving personal and business assets offshore to escape them, or sheltering their money in ways that don’t benefit the economy. Those taxes trickle down to the middle class awfully fast, when they don’t bring in the revenue Washington thinks it needs. Crushing middle-class tax rates, and commensurate levels of unemployment and reduced GDP, sound much more likely. Who’s going to want to live that way? Why would 95% of the adult population haul itself out to work hard at jobs, then cheerfully hand over seventy percent of their income to the government?

No one should have to live that way. Our mission, as conservatives, is to keep it from ever coming to that. Today we fight on fatal terrain for freedom and capitalism. The comparable terrain for socialists will be fatal for everyone. We have a duty to keep the battlefront from moving there, if we can.

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