We Want to Govern Ourselves

Barack Obama and the Democrats:  Too Extreme for America


Thank you President Obama and Speaker Pelosi for showing us what unwashed socialism looks like.  We experienced the Cass Sunstein buggering nudgery, The Van Jones enviro-ripoff and the Plouffian palaver, and we don't like it.  We have spit you out like a wasted wad of gum.  It tasted sweet at first, but now it's just bitter, rubbery goo... 

Had this pointy-headed band of collectivists not shamelessly ripped off the moderate mask that hid their true colors, we would still be arguing over just how much more government money and intervention we need.

Instead they are a spent force, ideologically, intellectually, morally, electorially.  Obama's "enemies" have punished him.  Harry Reid survives, but Obama and the Pelosicrats are discredited, dyspeptic, dishonored, just plain dissed....  

¡Viva La Reconquista!
We are now the insurrectionists, my fellow libertarians and conservatives, clamoring to tear it all down, man!  Give us back our incandescent lighbulbs!

To the socialists of all parties
-- F.A Hayek, The Road To Serfdom

Don't get too smug, Republican politicians.  We remember what happened last time, and we've got our eye on you.  We don't love Republicans, we love liberty.  We don't hate Democrats, we hate statism!


A Free People Aspire to Self-Governance
This vote was not just a crushing defeat for liberal democrats. It was anti-statist fusillade aimed at the blundering bureaucratic dreadnought that both parties have used to attack the frontiers of freedom.

• 61% of voters believed cutting spending would create more jobs than the president's plan
• 53% want to repeal the health care bill

Here’s the money quote:

Elected politicians also should leave their ideological baggage behind because voters don't want to be governed from the left, the right, or even the center. They want someone in Washington who understands that the American people want to govern themselves  (WSJ Online - Scott Rasmussen)

Do we still know how to govern ourselves?  Will the Republicans give us a chance to find out?

Don't let the crown sit too easily upon your heads, GOP!  The tea parties have just begun to fight.

Vote Democrat or Vote Liberty--You Can't Do Both

Hayek famously dedicated his book, "The Road to Serfdom" to "Socialists of all parties," and Republicans have earned every bit of criticism they get.  They have eagerly participated in the horrible progressive experiment of the last 100 years.  They say they've changed, and I'm willing to give them one more chance.  With the Democrats, we are guaranteed to continue our death spiral.

100 Years of Progressive Statism is Enough!

Let’s consider, say, the year 1880. Here was a society in whichpeople were free to keep everything they earned, because there wasno income tax. They were also free to decide what to do with theirown money—spend it, save it, invest it, donate it, or whatever. 

People were generally free to engage in occupations and professionswithout a license or permit. There were few federal economicregulations and regulatory agencies. 

No Social Security, Medicare,Medicaid, welfare, bailouts, or so-called stimulus plans. No IRS.No Departments of Education, Energy, Agriculture, Commerce, andLabor. No EPA and OSHA. No Federal Reserve. No drug laws. 

Fewsystems of public schooling. No immigration controls. No federalminimum-wage laws or price controls. A monetary system based ongold and silver coins rather than paper money. No slavery. No CIA.No FBI. No torture or cruel or unusual punishments. No renditions.No overseas military empire. No military-industrial complex.  (Reason - Up from Serfdom)

We have made great strides since the 1880's, but government has grown into a leviathan, trampling the First, Second, Fourth, Ninth and Tenth Amendment in the process, while stretching out the Commerce and General Welfare clauses into a penumbra so large they block the sun.

The federal government doesn't care more about your state than you and your fellow residents do.

The federal government does not care more about your kids, their education, their souls and their futures than you do.

No government can order your life better than you.  No government cares more about your life, liberty, family and property than you, and no police force is in a better position to defend them from immediate attack than you are.

It's the Statism, Stupid!

The whole barracks was in the state of filth and chaos to which the militia reduced every building they occupied and which seems to be one of the by-products of revolution.  (George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia)

Everybody to the right of national embarrassment Jimmy Carter has been smeared and declared out of bounds by propagandists in the media and the craven clot of liberals who eagerly await their daily marching orders.

The left must trash everything in order to advance their twisted progressive agenda

All conservative thinking is a thought crime.

All conservative and libertarian speech emanating from the tea parties is hate speech.

Recent gun rallies produced no violence, but the fevered left insists against all evidence that we are irresponsible and murderous.

Liberal Agitprop:  Have you heard the one about the powerful woman, the homosexual and the black man?


Pelosi and a diverse gang of liberal democrats marched through a tea party crowd in DC, trying their damnedest to provoke a hateful outburst.  A powerful woman, a gay chairman and a black man, oh my!  All they were missing was a Muslim Mufti and and a she-male in a leather thong.

"The banjo playing morons can't resist this bait!" they imagined.

Despite the plethora of cameras trained on this left-wing agitprop, no evidence of hate or racism was produced.  A skittles bowl of patriotic Americans show up at tea parties, but we're still called racist.  The conservative bastion known as the US Military continues to be the nation's preeminent showpiece of racial, gender and cultural egalitarianism, but it is scorned by much of the left.

Meanwhile, angry diaper rash ranters like Randi Rhodes, Keith Olbermann, and Ed Schultz are held up as heroes by the left... 

This is not left versus right.  It is Liberty versus Tyranny
Their aim is to protect and defend a collapsing statist model.  It has steamrollered our liberties for over 100 years and now has us on the brink of bankruptcy.  The collapse is not just financial.  The State suffers an  intellectual and moral rot as well.

Watchdogs or Horndogs? Where's the real greed? A race to the bottom...

Progressives say more government is the remedy.  Oh really?  You mean like the SEC watchdogs who were really porn-surfing horndogs?  How about the government unions angrily demanding more money when 10% of the country is unemployed?  A teacher's union that has driven our kids' academic performance to third-world toilet status?  That kind of government? 
 
Danger!  People are waking up and talking about the constitution!

Have you noticed something?  We talk about the constitution, the founders, first principles.

The statists and their patsies on the left talk about racism, hate, and what morons we are.

See the difference?  We want a debate.  They smear us to avoid the debate because they cannot win.  They don't have the intellectual firepower.  They have deconstructionism, angry grievances, Plouffian propaganda, and Sunstein's buggerish nudgery. 

We have The Founding Fathers, natural law, free market capitalism and the US Constitution on our side.  It's no contest.  No wonder they smear and scream.  They cannot win the debate, so they try to shut it down.  Like all bullies who hijack the state to impose their will on the masses, at their core they are cowards.

They have reduced themselves and everything they've touched to a state of filth and chaos.  It's a natural by-product of the progressive revolution.

Freedom

You hear that word bandied about a lot lately, from left and right, and from the founding fathers to Mel Gibson in his final scene in Braveheart... FREEEEDOMMMM!

... We want our Big Macs and Cardiac Catheterization too...

Negative Liberty

Many "freedoms" are documented in our Constitution, specifically in The Bill of Rights: freedom of religion,speech, the press, assembly, petition, the right to bear arms, freedom from unreasonable search and seizure. These "freedoms" are clearly documented limitations on the ability of government to interfere with the individual; they are political freedoms protecting the sovereignty of the individual from coercion by the state. The freedoms in the Constitution are termed "negative liberties" or the freedom from restraint. These freedoms are somewhat unique in that once they are possessed they are generally retained at little to no cost. Defending them may have significant cost, but the freedom of religion in and of itself costs us practically nothing.

Po$itive Liberty

Lately on the left you have been hearing a lot about freedom and rights; freedom from poverty (housing, clothing, transportation, possessions?), freedom from illness (right to medical care), freedom from starvation (right to food). These freedoms are termed "positive liberties", and generally involve power. The power to achieve self-realization or the ability to fulfill one's potential. Positive liberty is often described as the ability or entitlement to achieve one's ends, while negative liberty is described as the freedom from being forcibly prevented from achieving those ends. Positive liberties generally come at a significant monetary cost to society at large, in that the group must pay for the individual.

The distinction between positive and negative liberty is perhaps the clearest distinction between social liberals on the left and classical liberals on the right. The minimalist government established by our founding fathers was one of negative liberty. Government was seen as a necessary evil and established within a framework of checks and balances designed to enforce its restrictions and limit its actions. The governments of FDR's New Deal and Johnson's Great Society were ones of positive liberty, a paternalistic government whose main objective was in taking care of its members.

The Freedom to Fail

As stated previously, negative liberties come with little monetary cost, they do however have a cost. The primary cost of negative liberty is tightly bound to the freedom it provides, and that is the freedom to fail. Negative liberty is a liberty of non-interference, you can, to steal from the Army, "Be all that you can be", but the flip side of that coin is you can be an abject and miserable failure as well. You can choose not to purchase medical insurance, you can take that money and invest it or spend it, but if you contract cancer or heart disease you will suffer the consequences of your freedom of action. If you used the money to buy a boat, or frittered it away on entertainment, you are going to die. If you had to spend it on food, that is also part of the consequences of the freedom to fail.

We seem to have become a very, very risk averse nation... or more precisely, consequence averse. We want the freedom to do whatever we want, but we want the safety net that prevents us from dying of AIDS in a culvert due to the choices that we have made; we want our Big Macs and our cardiac catheterization too. We also tend not to want to sacrifice the luxury SUV in order to pay for the medical insurance of the seven kids we've had.

What are you willing to pay?

We seem to be trending more and more towards positive liberties, but the price of positive liberty is our negative liberties, the freedom of interference in our lives by the state. Isaiah Berlin noted in "Two Concepts of Liberty" that the danger of the pursuit of positive liberty was the danger that a paternalistic state can force upon its people a certain way of life, because the state deems that way to be the rationale course of action and is what the people should desire, whether they desire it or not.

There is a lot of paternalistic state being bandied about lately, from the government mandating that you purchase health insurance to the government proposing to regulate the amount of salt that is allowed to be in your food. Is it that far a stretch to the government regulating the number of calories allowed to be in your meal? What with the "nationwide obesity epidemic"? Each positive liberty comes at the cost of the erosion of our negative liberties, comes with the cost of more and more government interference in every aspect of our lives.

Grow Up!

Paternalism is hard to argue against, each paternalistic action in and of itself is predominately good, is made with ostensibly the best of intentions. Your parents after all were, or should have been, paternalistic: "Don't touch that, it's hot", "don't eat all those jellybeans, you'll get sick", "don't stay out past ten, you won't be able to get up for school in the morning". Unless you are a sociopath you are socially, culturally, and biologically conditioned to be paternalistic. The problem is we are also conditioned to resist that paternalism at a certain point, we grow up, we rebel against mommy and daddy and their rules, move out, and make our own way in the world.

So you need to think, and ask yourself, what kind of parents do you want? Do you want parents that respect your growth and maturation, that give you the freedom to be yourself, that give you the freedom to make bad choices, fail, and learn from them? Or do you want mommy telling you to put your coat on when you go outside when you are 42? Or telling you not to put so much salt on your food at your 20th wedding anniversary?

What kind of government do you really want? Think about it!

The Sons of Liberty

As long as we are resurrecting flags of the Revolutionary War such as the Gadsen (Don't Tread On Me) Flag, the flag pictured above is the flag of "The Sons of Liberty" also known as the rebellious stripes flag and is believed to have been created by Samuel Adams in 1767 for the Stamp Act Rebellion. It is considered by some to be the first flag of the American Revolution.

~Finntann~