Meanwhile in Germany

Free speech in full retreat:

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Memorial Day

 Honor those who have served and died in defense of our freedoms.

How Freedom Dies: Orwellian dystopia

This is not without an abundance of truth, despite Orwell's disdain for capitalism and admiration for collectivism and socialism.

Let's Go Brandon's misdirection

The Let's Go Brandon administration keeps ringing alarm bells on Russia's 'imminent invasion' of the Ukraine.  Why? And also, why?

Why is he warning us instead of warning Russia not to do so? And why is he so worried about freedom in the Ukraine when freedom next door in Canada is being trampled?

Does he have actual intel? His previous 'intel' indicate that February 16th was the day of a Russian invasion. It's possible that there will be an invasion.  It's also possible there won't be. Either way, the Let's Go Brandon's handling of the situation has been beyond fathomable, and entirely inept. No one, not even Let's Go Brandon could be this clueless on how to deal with this situation. So one can only surmise that this 'response' has been deliberate.  Either he's preparing the West to do nothing about a Russian invasion of the Ukraine, or he's preparing for a war with Russia (perhaps as a distraction from everything else that is going on in America), or else he desperately doesn't want to have to deal with a peaceful protest in Canada gaining traction there let alone anywhere else.  Or perhaps it's some combination of the above.  In any case, it's yet more bumbling and not actual leadership coming out of Washington.  And it's no surprise.

This is getting ridiculous

 The war on liberty is getting really, really evil.

How to Red Pill someone; a step by step guide

The one thing even leftists tend to support is democracy.  Of course their twisted definition of democracy equates to mob rule.  I don't know if they still teach that the Constitution was established in the way that it was to prevent majority tyranny.  The separation of powers between Executive, Legislative and Judicial was designed to prevent a concentration of power. The extremely high hurdle required to create Constitutional amendments was designed to prevent mob rule.  The structure of the Congress and Senate was designed to slow legislation.  The Bill of Rights, the first 10 amendments to the Constitution) was designed to limit government power.  All of these things were designed to ensure liberty and individual freedom.

But freedom is not what leftists want.  They want a democracy, and specifically a democracy in which everyone thinks the same way they do - no diversity of thought allowed. So freedom is actually anathema to their twisted version of democracy.

Set aside their twisted perceptions.  Set aside to that the United States is technically a representative republic and no a democracy per se, in fact no country is truly a pure democracy. If you even disregard those things, there are some undeniable deductive reasoning results that may be able to persuade leftists to reconsider their positions.

Here's an approach to having a red pill conversation with a progressive socialist.  It begins with a series of questions and answers.  These are designed to draw out the thought processes of a person from within, rather than lecturing to them.  Self-realized thoughts are going to resonate far better than a lecture.

1.  Do you think freedom is important? The typical answer to this is yes, or yes - within reason.  Those are acceptable answers.  If someone says no to this, that's a different, and probably impossible conversation.  Nevertheless, it is still important to ask why because perhaps that view can still be altered.  That's a conversation for another time, for now let's assume they agree that at least some level of freedom is important.

2.  How is freedom achieved? Typically democracy is part of the answer because it means you get to have a say in how society works. Some might reply with answers like revolution but then you must probe further and ask how it is maintained. This makes the conversation easier to steer towards democracy. No one would reasonably argue that dictatorships or monarchies or similarly structured governments can provide freedom because they are structured to centralize power.  If you do that you strip away individual choice. Removal of choice is removal of freedom.

3. If they do mention democracy, then ask if democracy is granted by government or by corporations, as if they were monarchs, or whether governments are only put in place (via democracy) to establish and maintain a societal structure that protects freedom. If they argue that governments grant democracy, ask (i) why governments and not corporations and  (ii) if they are granting it to you is it not a privilege rather than a right? (iii) if it is granted cannot it not also be taken away (iv) if it can be taken away, are you truly free?

4. If you have gotten this far you have effectively established that the person you are talking with values freedom, which requires some level of democracy, and that democracy is not granted by a government.  Next comes the red pill portion. Ask this: If a government creates a law that restricts your rights, does that reduce your freedom?  This is a tough one, because some laws make sense - do not murder, do not steal for example.  If they answer yes, move on, but if they hesitate or hedge, grant that laws such as those that disallow murder or theft are necessary. You do not want to delve to far into a side conversation about reasonable restrictions, or 'your rights end where mine begin'.  That is tangential. Instead provide an example; if the government or corporation restricts your ability to state your opinion openly, have they reduced your rights and therefore freedom?  There is no way to argue out of that. Ultimately most reasonable people will agree.  And remember, many people who support socialists and big government are reasonable people, they are simply misinformed.  These people are the low hanging fruit of red pilling. These are the people who are less difficult to red pill, and when you need numbers desperately, that's who you need to go after.

5. Therefore if a government is too empowered to do whatever it wants on a whim, are your freedoms at greater risk? Put another way, if government, even in a democracy can reduce your freedom, and corporations can do so too, how do you ensure that a democracy does not, over time, decay into a totalitarian dictatorship?   Is it reasonable to put restrictions on government the way we do on business?  This may devolve into a side conversation. You may need to point out that government can be corrupted just like businesses can be, because ultimately they consist of people, and people can become greedy for money or power. That is not to say most will, but it is possible.  They only way to ensure it does not happen is to put in safeguards to protect us from government, so that government will continue to protect us from rule breakers fairly and impartially.

6. If you want to put limits on how the government can limit you then you need to demand adherence to the original intent of the Constitution, which was designed to put limits on government power and to enable and empower individuals.  It was not meant to empower groups, just individuals.  Why? Because groups are just another way that individual liberty can be reduced. That's not to say groups are bad, just as corporations or governments are not inherently bad, as long as they do not have too much power.

That's it, if someone comes away from a conversation agreeing with the above points, you have red-pilled them. But that is the fundamental minimum threshold for a red pill awakening. It's just the beginning.  But you want to go further though, don't you?  If so, try this as an add-on to the conversation:

7. What does freedom give us? Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness means something.  What?  It means you can pursue your own goals.  It means you have opportunities open to you.  The key word is opportunities.  Freedom means opportunities. Without freedom, opportunity cannot exist.

8.  Opportunity unleashes creativity that can lead to invention and innovation.  Invention and innovation benefit all of society because invention is driven by societal needs. But this can only happen if there is incentive to do so. That incentive can be personal fulfilment or it can be economic in nature (personal wealth).  Wealth is a primary incentive for a large portion of the population, therefore to maximize wealth, shouldn't we make it possible for people to benefit from their invention and innovation?  The only route to doing so is capitalism. But fair capitalism, not one where the most powerful (big business and government) manipulate the rules so that only they can benefit and prevent others from having the same opportunity.

Try it on someone you know who you think you might be able to awaken.  Let me know in the comments if you have any success.

China's Communist Party tightens it's grip

 In an effort to choke liberty into non-existence, the CCP continues to strangle freedom of the press, such as it is, in Hong Kong.

How the Boomers screwed the West (Part 1)

The Baby Boom generation messed up, badly.  They've taken the promise of America, and The West in general, and wasted it.  Perhaps it wasn't entirely their fault - after all, they were raised by The Greatest Generation (the one that lived through the Great Depression and World War II) and they have to shoulder some of the responsibility for not raising their children to the level that was required by a sustainable society. Unfortunately, that degradation of parenting only worsened in subsequent generations.

The purpose of this series is not to lambaste Boomers but to learn from their mistakes in the hope that someone, or many someones, who sees this is inspired to improve things for future generations.

In the first part of this series we take a look at what created the baby boom generation.  My take from what I have read is that having suffered through two catastrophes of WWII and the Great Depression, and then being thrust into a boom era (particularly in America) where things were getting better and better economically at a rapid clip, they wanted to ensure that their children wanted for nothing.  It's a logical outcome - why would you want your children to suffer the same hardships you suffered?  You hear it so often, even in polling - do you think your children will be better off than you?  It's part of the psyche of the West - the zeitgeist if you will.  But what they seemingly failed to understand was that the struggle created the appreciation of the success.  Being handed everything leads to no personal will to strive, it leads instead to a selfish, entitled hedonistic belief system.   Not only were the Boomers self absorbed, they felt entitled to personal freedom but held little or no accompanying sense of personal responsibility.

The roots of those traits can be traced to their upbringing.

How to go from freedom to chains

Some holiday food for thought from 1965 courtesy of Paul Harvey.

Klavan, Whittle on Christianity

Bill Whittle and Andrew Klavan discuss the unique attribute of Christianity among religions that enables freedom and prosperity:

Iran's losing proposition - don't let youth be "Happy"

By now you've probably heard that Iran has jailed everyone in the video below - 6 young Iranians who danced to the Pharrell Williams song Happy.

As the person who uploaded this particular iteration of the video on youtube (it's not the original posting of the video) noted:

About a month ago, 6 Iranian boys and girls (in this video) danced to the famous song by Pharrell Williams called "Happy" on the rooftops of Tehran and uploaded their video on the YouTube. It was widely distributed in the social media. The police decided to track them down and arrest them and make them repent in front of the camera. It then showed this capture on the national TV channels as a bunch of deceived Iranian youth who regretted their deed. In the past 35 years, Islamic Republic has managed to steal freedom and happiness from the Iranian youth and replace it with a culture full of mourning and sorrow. We, too, are human. We, too, have the right to be happy and live happily and learn how to be happy.

What the video points out is two different things that must be remembered.

(1)  Iranian people are like anyone else - individuals, interested in the pursuit of happiness, capable of being happy and eager to do so.  Sometimes people outside of the country forget that fact and that there is a diversity of opinion in Iran.

(2) Those in power in Iran who are suppressing individuality, freedom and the pursuit of happiness through any path other than the one they prescribe (a strict religious adherence with no room for interpretation) are on the wrong side of history.  By stifling your own people you can hold onto power for a time, with increasingly white knuckles.  But the longer you deny people fundamental freedoms the harder it becomes to do so.  The Soviet Union managed to do so for seven decades.  Other countries are seeking to beat that mark.  But you cannot suppress an entire people forever.

At least that has been the case in human history.  Perhaps some day some regime may come along that manages to keep humanity downtrodden indefinitely.  But that time has not come and with the advent of social media, it is even less likely.  

In fact, it is even less likely in Iran.  There is already a diversity of opinion in Iran that undercuts the monolithic government view of the world.  With each rhetoric-fueled suppression, the awareness of something not being right will grow.  And with each instance of defiance, or even self-expression, the justification for a more aggressive crackdown will create a more brutal government response and in turn drive more awareness of the injustice and consequently, more resistance to it.

Iran is not about to erupt into democracy.  They tried that a few years ago and the results, without any international support, were catastrophic.  But you simply cannot suppress ideas with brutality.  If Iran's leadership were so confident in the rightness of their own ideology, they would not feel the need to do so.

Thought for the day - freedom

People take their freedom for granted and they assume the freedom they have today is the same as it was yesterday.  When regulation piles upon regulation and people ignore it they are in the same predicament as a frog in a pot of water that is slowly being brought to a boil.  They don't notice what is happening until it becomes too late.

I saw this image on Facebook today and it captures the thought quite well.

Yes, laws are needed, but too many laws are a more insidious danger than too few.

Privacy versus Security is the wrong debate

I'll make this relatively short.  President Obama said a while back that he welcomes the debate about how much investigative power and leeway the government has to combat terrorism.  On the face of it, that debate makes sense and in fact it is an important debate that goes all the way back to Ben Franklin's quote "They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." That's a great quote but using it in this contexts overlooks one aspect of the situation that is a glaring problem.

An outsider's view of America.

Tomorrow morning I'll be travelling to beautiful North Carolina.  I'll be in Cary for two days on a business trip.  I've been to Cary once before and I found it quite enjoyable.  Being in the United States is a great feeling.  Sometimes I get the feeling that a lot of Americans (not all, but many) take their nation, their freedom and their opportunity for granted.  Every time I visit anywhere in the United States I'm struck by the greatness of the country.

Clarification of yesterday's comment

Now that I am officially infuriated with Islamic intolerance and hypocrisy I should take a moment to make sure people understand that I do not share those traits.

Yesterday I blogged about the murderous overreaction to the Koran burning pastor. Afghanistan is the same country that blew up Buddhist statues in 2001 in an act of national religious intolerance. Both intolerant actions were wrong. While I don't recall murderous Buddhist rampages, I still say what the pastor did was wrong. I would not disrespect a religion like that.

Memorial Day - A time to reflect

If freedom does not require your blood, it requires you honor those who sacrifice on your behalf.

Free Speech Denied In Miami by... Muslims

According to Human Events,

In an outrageous denial of free speech rights, Miami-Dade Transit last week forced the removal of a “Leaving Islam” ad campaign on Miami buses because the ads might be “offensive to Islam.”

The Freedom Defense Initiative, the new organization I have begun with bestselling author and Jihad Watch director Robert Spencer, and the group Stop Islamization of America started the ad campaign as a defense of religious freedom.

Our ad asked, “Fatwa on your head? Is your family or community threatening you? Leaving Islam? Got questions? Get answers! RefugefromIslam.com.”

It was the first time anyone offered public help to people threatened under Islam’s death penalty for apostasy.

The religion of peace through intimidation.  It's hard not to come across as an Islamophobe while clearly pointing out a problem, but things like this need to be pointed out.  If intolerance is tolerated only in certain quarters, as many liberals would have it, then society is guaranteed to fail.  The continuation of this type of one-sided intolerance is a dangerous trajectory for America.

Egalitarianism has to stem from freedom, not stand in place of it.

You simply cannot force sellers to sell and buyers to buy. That is not freedom. It is not liberty. It is state control, and it is un-American. A 2000+ page bill that would mandate both of those thing violates the Constitution in so many ways. Not to mention, every sane insurance company executive would, in order to contain costs, opt out of selling health insurance and focus exclusively on other areas of insurance where mandates don't exist. Where would that leave buyers who had to get health insurance or face federal financial penalties? They no longer have an option - they'd have to pay the penalties. Gee, that sounds like nothing more than a tax grab at that point.

Unless of course that the next step in mandating coverage would be that every insurance company MUST offer health insurance. How long can an industry survive when it's being told it has to sell a big product at a loss? Un-American.

What's worse, is that it would create some serious perversions of the system that ironically resemble some of the other dilemmas the country faces. For example, would insurance companies find some way to deal with the mandated insurance that resembles Cap and Trade? In other words, would companies look to Trade customer plans in order for everyone to be in a position to seem to be offering health insurance? Perhaps the penalties to the companies could be swapped so that the burden gets passed around year to year.

Or maybe it's more like trading toxic assets in some convoluted version of a credit default swap. Customers with pre-existing conditions would be the toxic liability that gets traded around to minimize the risk. A musical chairs of cost containment, where companies would hope to not be the one holding the liability when the music stops. That's morbid.

In the end, forcing people to do things is antithetical to liberty. Spreading the wealth is antithetical to capitalism. State run industry is antithetical to the American Way. Even with something the government manages to get right, the military, the production of the equipment is outsourced.

People deserve the freedom to choose. It's a founding principle of the country which supersedes an imagined right to health care, and subsequently an imagined right to food and shelter. If in the end, a person is not responsible for their own well being, they are not truly free. As a country America has to decide, and decide now, if liberty really is all that important and worth keeping. Hey, it's what got you this far, and I'd argue it's a core concept not worth jettisoning to be more 'egalitarian'. Egalitarianism has to stem from freedom, not stand in place of it.

This is not just a debate about the cost of health care, it's a debate about liberty, and possible usurpers of it in the name of some fictitious social justice. It might seem scary for the poor to operate without a safety net, but there are nets aplenty. And those safety nets symbolize a nanny state. At some point the Democrats need to let go and assume that the vast majority of the American public can take care of themselves. Parents typically don't let children live at home until age 50. Why? Because they know the kids can grow into self sufficient lives. There will always be those who need help. The vast majority of them will always get help - through government or charity.

The problem with leveling the playing field, truly leveling it, is that it means there are no hills left to climb. That in turn means there are no challenges to face and no incentive to strive to achieve anything. That is both the beginning of stagnation as a nation, and the end of a reason to be as an individual. Survival isn't really living, it's a postponement of dying.

Congratulations America & Lessons from Apollo

40 years ago today 3 Americans landed on the moon, with the help of an army of scientists and engineers. It represents an achievement that must be commended by friend and foe alike. As a friend of the United States I would like to add my voice of congratulations to the country, NASA and the astronauts involved for such a remarkable achievement. It was, and remains, a remarkable feat. It is arguably the epitome of human endeavor to date, and perhaps also the pinnacle of the golden age of America.

BUT...

It cannot go unnoticed as ironic that Walter Cronkite, the iconic broadcaster of his day, and verbal chronologer of the historic event, died the weekend before the 40th anniversary of that event (which is today, if you didn't already know). If the irony is lost on you, let me explain.

If America reached the height of its pre-eminence during the Apollo program, it has since lost much of its status during the subsequent decades. Cronkite's death is simply a personification of the end of America's golden age. That is not to say further golden ages are not possible, but rather that this one is quite definitely done.

It is also not to say that in the decades afterwards, America did not have occasion to shine, and shine brightly. However, it did not shine again equally as brilliantly as it did on that day.

The intervening years, despite the best efforts of conservatives to counter the decay, have brought forth a plethora of social engineering efforts and an associated amount of mammoth spending. Yet there is still poverty. There is still a declining American manufacturing sector. The problems have not gone away. They have even worsened in some respects. Yet the government asks for more - more power, and more of your money, despite the fact that their solutions have not proved effective.

If you were a doctor and the patient was asking for more medicine but it wasn't curing him, would you give it to him? No. You would try to find a different medicine to use. So why continue to submit your economic freedom to the government in frequent but minuscule (until now) doses that eat away at your liberty? There is no reason to continue.

Except under a tyranny of oppression, ordinary people do not live and die by government edict. Attempts to engineer behavior beyond moral absolutes (e.g. murder is criminal, the penalty is imprisonment or death), are doomed to failure. Even the basic precepts of criminal justice do not deter absolutely everyone. So it is foolhardy to expect that efforts to change beliefs via Congressional legislation would fare anything beyond poorly. Yet the misguided efforts persist. They may persist with the best of intentions, but the road to national hell is paved with good intentions.

The government now owns the lion's share of the American auto industry - directly or through Presidential intimidation or edict. They are planning the same for health care. It does not matter that they cannot change personal opinion by creating new laws - if they control more and more of the economy it does not matter what you believe or do not believe. As long as they control the purse strings, you have no choice but to obey - willingly or not.

What is needed right now is a healthy dose of libertarianism. I'm much more a conservative than a libertarian (generally, not absolutely) but right now the country, i.e. the patient, needs that injection. That's the medicine that will work for the patient. There has been such a creeping power consolidation over the last 40 years (and further back for that matter) that the country needs a jolt back towards economic and social liberty in order to avoid becoming terminal. If creeping government control is the disease, it has now accelerated and become like an aggressive, malignant cancer. If it’s not treated immediately the country may not survive.

Enough doom and gloom. I have every confidence that the American people will deal with this soon by 2010 at the latest but by continued protest in the interim). They will do so with or without the understanding that this creeping tyranny is the very thing the founding fathers of the nation were most concerned with, and rightly so.

The real lesson from the lunar landing is the fact that American ingenuity is not dead. The amazing talents that led to that Herculean effort still exist aplenty in America. Arguably there is more of that intellectual capital at the disposal of the nation (not the government). That talent however, has been dammed, channeled and redirected into less productive efforts. The country is capable of an infinite number of golden ages. Just like the economic boom cycles, innovation need not be a peak once and ebb thereafter story. In fact, while it may not be a continuous boom, there really is now ebb needed - just the hiccups of rapid and slow innovation. That is, if people understand that such a miraculous cycle requires no magical orchestration from some omnipotent Presidential or Congressional adjudicator. It simply needs the liberty that unleashes personal creativity.

There is no other option open - either individual freedom, or congratulatory praise for something that happened 40 years ago.

FOOTNOTE: big government advocates will argue that NASA was an arm of the government that accomplished this feat. NASA was set up in 1958 as an independent agency to achieve a goal as defined by the government, but it did so with relative independence. Unlike the interference the government does as far as the disciple of economics, apparently it generally knew better than to interfere with the scientists and physicists involved in solving the complexities of a mission to the moon. As a result, the effort was successful. Further, the government placed no restrictions on the freedom of its citizenry to becoming physicists. Nor did it place quotas on minority physicists comprising a specified percentage of the NASA employed physicists. The result - NASA went after the best it could get, including for example preeminent rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, who worked for Nazi Germany during WWII. The probability of success of the lunar mission might have been very different if NASA were to be guided by the principles espoused by modern liberals with respect to quotas, affirmative action and the federal government deciding more than they are equipped to make informed decisions on.

Listing President Obama's Priorties

If you had to take all of the Obama agenda items and prioritize them, how do you think they would look? A lot of your answer would depend on how you view the President's motivations, even just from the perspective of a conservative eye. If you view Obama as full of hubris and self-importance the list below would look quite different. However, I personally believe that there is a side of the President that is thinking bigger picture. I think he's thinking about winning a much larger victory and is willing to have a longer term window to achieve it.


And I don't think that is entirely at odds with the hubris view. If the President wants to affect a sea change, a dynamic shift in the political culture that moves the country unalterably to the left, does that not make him a historical President? Even more so than a mundane cap-and-trade victory? So by thinking really-big-picture he is in a sense believing he can transcend the smaller victories and have his name written as one of the greatest Presidents of all time. The Muhammad Ali of Presidents if you will.


With that in mind, here's my interpretation of the priorities of this President:


(1) Ensure a dynastic rule of the Democratic party that will last for decades. Obama wants power centralized and held in Democratic hands for years to come. Closer to home he wants power centralized in his hands for years to come - as many as he can get. This requires a myriad of efforts including - staying popular, staying in the limelight, demonizing the Republicans and/or conservatives at every turn, fudging the the census with ACORN and gerrymandering districting efforts, a re-visitation of the Fairness Doctrine, working more and more closely with the complicit press, assigning control of the positions of captains of industry to a hand-picked, loyal few, rewarding those loyal to him (like the UAW), and punishing those opposing him (like IGs), thereby buying or intimidating loyalty, redistributing wealth to loyal voting blocks in order to ensure loyalty. Pretty much every decision can be viewed in the light of whether or not it will help Democrats retain power.



(2) Federalized Health Care - this is sort of an offshoot of the first point oddly enough. It's not about saving money because there are smarter options around than having the government take over. It's not about providing coverage to the uncovered, because there are non-governmental ways to ensure that as well. Governmental solutions run counter to the American way. But not the Chicago way. It's all about control. Health Care is a means to control who gets what health care, and thereby help enforce loyalty. They want to put Republicans in a position to have to cut back on the unsustainable costs so they can point out to the newly coddled class that "the Republicans don't like you - and this proves it." Don't buy the straw man argument that they'll use to say conservatives say the government can't compete so why are they so worried about a market-based government provider. The truth is the government is supposed to be the referee so it can't be a player in the game too or the bias in it's own favor will naturally seep out into it's actions. Ultimately it's a takeover. and takeovers are all about power.


(3) Environmental Reform - whether it's a cap and trade system or a tax, this is about two things - generating government revenue, so they can redistribute wealth in any social engineering way they desire and about, once again - control. The government can push you to behave in certain ways if they control the taxes and rules governing that behavior. They can subsidize behavior they like and penalize behavior they don't like. They can do it at a corporate level too if they want to do so. Are they really that interested in the environment? Are they really convinced Al Gore is right and thousands of dissenting scientists are out-to-lunch? Maybe. It doesn't matter - that's not the Obama motivation. The environmental movement has become the home of many socialists and communists and it's all about more government control.


(4) Hubris-related accomplishments - getting peace in the middle east (at any cost, including abandoning allies like Israel and embracing tyrants like the regime in Iran and ignoring those that won't play ball like North Korea), maybe getting an airport or a highway or 500 schools named after himself, dramatically scaling back on the military which will raise his star with the left quite far. Heck, why not cure cancer? All of these accomplishments would boost his own image. It may or may not be a top priority, but it would seem like it's still part of his thought process.

(5) Bankrupting the economy. This one I'm not sure about. In a perverse way, bankrupting the nation could be an act of hubris. He'd certainly be remembered for it. Conversely, perhaps the President sees the spending as an absolutely essential step to consolidating power. If that's the case, the money is inconsequential, it's a by-product of trying to achieve his objective. Or perhaps he is so far to the left, he secretly wants to see America fail so that he can have it re-built in a more socialist way. If the government collapses and the creditors are left holding the bag, when you start up the People's Republic of America, where can the bill collectors go? Nowhere. And who in the US will complain when they are told they're not going to be held responsible for the debt their government incurred? In fact, they'll argue, no one will be held responsible - voila - we've provided you with a 70 year free lunch (dating back to the Roosevelt days) and all you have to do is swallow this giant red pill.


What fits best with my previous assumptions is that it's all about obtaining and maintaining power. Those of you still enthralled by Obama have to wake up to the reality that the United States is the greatest country in the history of the world for one reason and one reason only: FREEDOM. Capitalism works because it is founded on freedom. Innovation is inspired by freedom. The pursuit of happiness is an option because of freedom. The rights enshrined in the Constitution are not 'negative rights' they are the most positive rights imaginable. Whether I have the Obama motivations right or not you've got to consider this; the actions entailed in the above points are all actions that will lessen your freedom. The question you have to ask yourself is this; Is that what you really want?