I hate to sound like a cynic; even more, I hate having my cynicism proved prescient. I am suspicious when the ‘lady doth protest too much.’ For example, today when I walked into the office where my kids were playing Wizard 101 online and chatting, my eldest ran up and started hugging me and telling me how much he loved me. Him being sweet but nine, and therefore not commonly so affectionate; this mom went straight to his chat log to see what he didn’t want me to notice. Praise God it was just him inviting everyone to ‘The Ice Palace’ to see him and some little girl get ‘married’. He was embarrassed. Phew!

Unfortunately, the bait and switch played by the used car salesmen in D.C. was not so sweet and innocent. I was fuming at the hearings on TV yesterday. Every time some puffed up hypocrite invoked the name of “My Constituents” or “The Taxpayers” I think I got a little taste of what Jesus feels when the Westboro loonies curse fallen heroes in His name. The whole time these two-bit shysters were railing on behalf of the people of this nation, attacking Liddy who is working for a single dollar to clean up someone else’s mess, I’m thinking two things, “How dare you act like you are doing this for the PEOPLE!” and “What do you NOT want us to see you sneaky bastards?”

Well today the word is out. The Fed went to work at 4 p.m. yesterday and the echo chamber of the media decrying $165 million in contractually obligated bonus payments was so loud you couldn’t hear the printing presses churning out one TRILLION fresh dollars. This is money from thin air; an unprecedented influx of cash into an economy that is shrinking, not growing. I said to my sister, “I guess China isn’t buying our debt anymore.” “I guess we’re buying our own,” she replied.

It made me think of an old episode of Married with Children. Peg gets into one of those Mary Kay style businesses but she’s a lazy bum. She doesn’t go out and stir up new business. She just buys everything herself and she thinks she’s going to make money that way. Tragically, this appears to be the mentality of our leadership. 

You cannot print your way out of debt. You can only print your way into a Carter economy. In very, very simple terms, all of the cash we have in circulation is really only worth the amount of genuine wealth accumulated by all of the personal holdings in the nation; all of the physical stuff we have. If you double the amount of money in circulation without doubling the amount of stuff in the economy, the value, or buying power of the money was just cut in half. It doesn’t happen overnight of course. It takes time for the excess cash to place an impossible demand on products which then become artificially scarce causing shortages of particular items. Shortages drive increased prices in order to allocate the scarce supplies to those willing to pay the most for them. Wages rarely rise as quickly as prices, which makes the buying power of your income decline. If you earn a dollar an hour and each dollar can buy two packs of gum, but now there are people left and right who are willing to pay two dollars for the same two packs of gum, you can only buy half what you could before with the same hourly income.

I find it incomprehensible that a man as intelligent as Barack Obama obviously is could possibly believe this is an effective response to a faltering economy. In fact, everything he has proposed is anathema to building wealth. He promises to make it more expensive to employ in an environment of burgeoning unemployment. He promises to insure 78 million additional people through government largesse while admitting that the insurance we currently provide is bankrupting us. He promises to cut the national debt in half while tripling it and enacting policies proven time and again to reduce the tax revenue of the national coffers. He promises a better energy policy and more affordable living standards, while crushing the energy market with a two trillion dollar cap and trade scheme, the cost of which will fall on anyone who drives a car or heats a home.

So if he isn’t stupid, what explains these foolhardy endeavors? Could it be that while we are suffering under ballooning energy costs, deteriorating health care and sky-rocketing inflation, this ideologue will use our desperation to institute changes to our way of life that will make the past couple of months look conservative by comparison? 

I am coming closer and closer to the conviction that Rahm Emanuel was understating things when he said “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” The policy of this Administration seems to really be, “Never let a good crisis end.”

For the past four years I have practiced as an Independent Petroleum Landman. For those of you who do not know what that is, I am employed by “Big Oil” through brokers to do research on who owns the rights to minerals in areas of interest for domestic oil or gas production. We make great money when exploration is up. When it is down we live on savings. Unlike the unionized GM workers, we have no health benefits, no disability insurance, no paid days off, no sick leave, no Family Leave Act, no unemployment insurance, no employer contribution to our tax burden. Most devastatingly, we have no Washington Elites crying the blues for us when our business takes a downturn thanks to the utter mismanagement and atrocious interference of the federal government.

While unionized GM workers are threatened with job loss due to their own penchant for ever higher compensation and ever lower productivity, we are threatened with job loss due to third party constraints and a propagandized demonization of the people who provide our daily bread. No one is on the news slandering the people who sell milk for $3.55 a gallon, despite the fact that producing milk requires hooking a placid bovine teat into a sucker machine. Ironically when gas, the production of which requires literally billions of dollars in capital risk, hits that price it is some atrocity perpetrated on the common man. 

While the Congress throws money at a failing car company that has proven its inability to provide a product for which people are willing to pay a profitable price; while Obama shows off the solar panel company (co-owned by all whopping fifty-some employees) he will be slathering with federal largesse, thousands of people like my husband and I are wishing we could just go back to work providing a product the nation already uses for a company capable of making a profit; a company that has never taken a bailout. 

Am I asking for the government to favor me? No. I am asking the government to get the hell out of the business of dictating to the people by controlling the market. Now I know when someone hears you say “the market” they see it as something so impersonal. Really it is the most personal of all the methods of allocating the resources of our country. What is the market but everyone in the nation deciding personally whether they, for example, want a house covered in solar panels or a gas line?  I am not asking for favorable treatment of my industry, I am asking the government to not use my money, and that of thousands of citizens in my industry, to set up an unfair advantage against us. Stop banning drilling in wastelands. Stop taxing the gas we supply into the stratosphere. Stop dumping our money into a competitor’s trade that has spent four decades proving how untenable it is in an open market.

One of the great problems with government interference in the marketplace is that is promotes unpredictability. When I entered this business with my husband, we knew that gas and heating oil were things the country needed. We knew that the companies we chose to work for would be necessary for a long time to come, especially if anyone ever wised up and let us produce all of our energy here on U.S. soil rather than importing from terrorism sponsor nations. We knew that the U.S. has far more reserves than we could use up even in the next century. We understood that even if reserves in our local area started to dry up we would know within the petroleum industry far in advance and could make adjustments to a new career with plenty of time to spare.

What we could not predict, of course, was a regime so hostile to wealth creation and in particular “Big Oil.” On the free market of course, our job is as valuable a commodity as ever. In the market that has been artificially restrained by the social-engineering junta now controlling D.C. we are useless. 

Senator Vitter of our neighbor-state, Louisiana, has proposed a zero-cost stimulus. Instead of throwing billions and trillions of taxpayer dollars at industries that are failing, just let a successful industry be unfettered. Let “Big Oil” go about its business providing an essential product at a reasonable price while it employs hundreds of thousands of Americans who do not want a handout, we just want to work.

I never write for personal gain, but this once I am asking anyone who is willing, to call Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Senator Vitter and your own Representatives. Tell them you support this bill which will cost the taxpayers nothing, put hundreds of thousands of people back to work, and make your heat, gas and pretty much everything you buy that requires transportation or energy cheaper.

Pelosi:   202-225-0100

Reid:    202-224-3542

Vitter:  202-224-4623

I very much enjoyed the Texas Tea Party in Ft. Worth to protest the stimulus and wasteful spending. It was wonderful to see people desirous of returning to responsible fiscal policies. Unfortunately, what we need to realize is that there are a million small abuses every day in Washington and we cannot protest them all. Recently I watched a Democratic Congressman defend the earmarks in this latest bill as being acceptable because they are “transparent.” Let me be clear: There is no such thing as transparency in a bill with thousands of pages. Shall we simply quit our jobs and spend day and night reading through the 9,000 earmarks in this bill? The earmarks being one place, incidentally, where bipartisanship really shines. We cannot possibly stop all government abuses by coming at them on a case by case basis. This is like trying to plug a sieve with your fingers. We must take away the very ability of these abuses to arise in the first place, and confiscatory taxation by the federal government is the root of the problem.

So the first front we must attack is the taxation system as it currently stands within the United States. Thirty-nine states have already petitioned for redress of this grievance in the form of overturning the 16th Amendment, which allows for the progressive income tax policy that enslaves us today. I suggest several reforms which could be bound into an amendment to be presented to our sister states outside the control of Congress and without their approval or oversight.

Article V of the Constitution allows States to elect a convention to craft amendments and present them to the other states for ratification. This is specifically designed for the situation at hand: A congress drunk on its own power and unwilling to relent. Only thirty-eight states are needed to amend the Constitution and we are in a situation where thirty-nine agree with us on this most important point.

Secondly, abuse and inefficiency is exacerbated and enabled by the method in which bills are drawn up, including multiple unrelated issues in a single bill. This practice must end. These bills have thousands of office budgets in one document receiving millions, often billions of dollars each and there is not a speck of direction or explanation on how this money is to be spent. For example, among many, many other offices listed in the Agriculture portion of the latest spending bill, I was struck by an appropriation for “The Office of the Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights.” The Office of the Assistant Secretary will receive $871,000.00 for “necessary expenses.” That is just the Assistant Secretary’s Office. The actual Office of Civil Rights will receive $21,551,000.00. And this was not something I cherry-picked. I use it because it was on one of the very first pages of the bill.

Well I have some questions. Why does the Agriculture Department need TWENTY-TWO MILLION DOLLARS in an Office of the Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights? Who is this Assistant Secretary? What necessary expenses does he have that total nearly a million dollars for the office in addition to the twenty-one million the department under him is getting? Do we not have an entire Civil Rights Department in the budget already? What civil rights are we protecting specifically in the field of Agriculture to the tune of twenty-two million dollars every year?

As it stands I will never get an answer. My Congressmen likely do not have an answer. It seems the majority of Washington bureaucrats collude with one another to pass these ludicrous appropriations en masse, having no clue what they are for and not caring, so long as no one gets in the way when it is their turn at the trough.

We can end this waste and unaccountability by requiring the following:

1. Let each office prepare a budget listing exactly how much they need and for what purposes. All expenditures should be clear, including number of employees to be compensated, at what salary, and what purpose they serve.

2. Let each budget be presented to Congress individually. Require Congress to vote up or down on these individual bills. Will this take more time than the old way? Yes. Congress may have to come and vote more than eight hours a week. Might this inspire Congress to cut some useless projects to save time on the floor? We can only hope so. It would also stop our representatives from being able to dodge tough questions about an appropriation they voted for by pointing to a more popular portion of the legislation.

3. Let the bill and the budget be posted online for all to see. Expenditures such as a lump sum given for office supplies should be left online throughout the fiscal year, in the format of a checkbook register. Every time expenditure is made out of that budget the receipt or invoice should be scanned and available online for all to see.

4. At the close of the fiscal year money still available in the budget should be rolled over into the following year's budget. If that money cannot be accounted for the office in question will find it or find a way to live without it.

These alterations in the method of Washington business would effectively castrate the Washington power base. We would see unemployment lines filled with lobbyists. The next greatest accomplishment would be to see unemployment lines filled with IRS agents, and I have a formula for that as well.

No longer should Washington dictate what the ‘General Welfare’ of our citizens is to be. Every Sovereign State should be empowered to determine the extent of involvement she will have with the Federal bureaucracy. Our states have failed us by jumping at the chance to let Uncle Sam feed our hungry and clothe our poor in exchange for our independence. Are there states who will wish to continue feeding at the public trough? Certainly, but no longer should we be forced to provide the slop.

I recommend an Amendment that would allow States to opt out of federal programs they find undesirable, harmful or wasteful. The citizens of those states that opt out of certain programs should not be burdened with taxation for proportion of the federal budget that supports those programs. When the federal budget is proposed, states should be responsible proportionally to both their population and the percentage of federal involvement they desire, in their tax contribution. There are certain very limited areas a state could not opt out of, for example defense spending.

In keeping with state sovereignty, the individual states should collect these taxes in a manner acceptable to their people and turn them over to Uncle Sam, cutting off his ability to reach into the pockets of any one of us.

More importantly, this would rob Washington of its power to damage our prosperity as they are currently doing. We are watching the collapse of our economy exacerbated by fools in D.C. who haven’t the first notion of market forces, or simply do not care. While several states have been flourishing by providing friendly business climates, Washington will undo all of that by imposing nationwide destructive tax policies that will chase capital completely out of the country no matter what the individual states do to make their markets attractive to investors.

The impending universal health care will be the crowning glory of the Left, whose philosophy, apparently, is “If the poor can’t have it, no one can.”

Liberals like to talk of bringing down the ‘costs’ of healthcare, but what they mean is making it cost the consumer less. That is actually bringing down the price and will have absolutely no effect on the cost of providing health care. The cost of health care includes the cost of educating a doctor, of discovering a new cure, of creating a medicine. There is a cost in human capital as well; it takes years for all of these things to be achieved and during those years, people are working at those goals rather than expending their effort elsewhere.

The price of health care, on the other hand, is what a particular procedure, drug or office visit is valued at in order to cover the costs already paid and make it worthwhile to continue providing such a service or product.

Ask yourself this: How much would you have to anticipate earning in ten years, if it meant you would spend all of those years in school and residency, frequently working 18 hours at a stretch, then graduate with $100,000.00 in debt to undertake a job that had you getting up all hours of the night responding to a pager, holding people’s lives in your hands and dreading the day when the first malpractice suit would land on your desk?

If one man invests three million dollars and another just three thousand into the same fund paying 10% returns, the man who risked three million will get a much higher dollar amount for his investment. In the same way, a man who invests years of his life and much personal risk in becoming a brain surgeon will earn a much higher dollar amount than a man who went to a fast food joint and stagnated there. There is a good reason that McDonalds’ cashiers do not drive Porsches.

This is the point in the argument where liberals will shift the focus to the poor beleaguered cashier who, in their tale, will always have dreamed of greatness but been kept down by the ubiquitous demon “Society.” Do not get sidetracked…this is not about him or how sad it is that he is a burger flipper at 35 with six kids and a wife to support. The question is not what to do for burger flippers who wish they made as much as doctors, the question is, “Who will become doctors when they are getting paid like burger flippers?”

Universal Healthcare is coming, however they want to play semantics. The newest stealth move is to say we will provide a government competitor. What is the point of a government competitor if it is not cheaper for people to use? If it is cheaper then it will eventually bankrupt the private sector. 

What about the payments? I have worked for a physician who routinely abandoned efforts to seek reimbursement from Medicaid, so it is no great bargain for a physician to be on the government’s “Preferred Provider” list. At what point will the government pass legislation requiring all doctors to accept this lousy insurance plan?

For consumers it is not much better. When I myself was a Medicaid patient during a pregnancy in 2002, I was recommended to a kidney specialist because my blood tests showed a possible adrenal tumor. The only specialist in the tri-state area I could go to with my government plan was a nightmare. The offices were furnished with ancient gynecological exam tables and the walls looked like they had last been painted in the seventies. The air in the place reeked of the mildew I could see all around the vents in the walls. He looked at my chart, took my blood pressure and announced I had to “have the baby as soon as possible.” I was 20 weeks pregnant. He informed me that with my condition I would need surgery that could not be performed while I was pregnant and so the baby needed to be born within the next week or two.

Back at home I contacted my OB-GYN who assured me this was not so. I continued the pregnancy to term and delivered a beautiful, healthy little boy. It turned out my hormone levels were off due to a pituitary disturbance. A low-carb diet eradicated all symptoms and I have lived seven years without surgery for the tumors that were not even there.

This is the quality of physician you can expect to see when we all have Uncle Sam’s health insurance, and the costs of becoming a quality physician are not worth the price that may be charged.

The move to make health care ‘more affordable’ is just a nice way of saying ‘control prices.’ Does anyone have the foggiest notion of how well that worked with gasoline? You know: long lines, shorter business hours, alternate days you could fill ‘er up?

Who will invest $800 million to develop a new medicine when they cannot make a buck on it? The very greed of capitalists has allowed the astounding and accelerating improvement of the health of all Americans over the past century. There was a time when the richest man alive could not get an antibiotic. Now anyone can get one for four dollars at Wal-Mart.

Universal health care will not mean that the poor will get treatment as good as the rich get. It will mean that even the rich cannot have the quality of care possible today. It will also mean that the poor, who under a free market would see prices for expensive procedures fall over time until even they could afford it, will never have it either.

More and more, the rhetoric of the far Left is leading me to believe that is good enough for them. They are collectivists at heart, and what is important is that no one be better off than anyone else. Well Bravo! There will be no “Health Care Gap” when we are all dying together.

One of my favorite comic lines is from the movie “The Ref,” when Dennis Leary, who has taken hostage an outspokenly dysfunctional family, loses his temper and says, “You know what this family needs? A mute.”

I couldn't help recalling that line this morning.

Yes, this mess began on Bush’s watch. He should have pushed harder on Fannie and Freddie when the Democrats in F&F’s pockets swore they were just fine. Nevertheless, as Bob Beckel is fond of growling the Republicans lost. The progressing failure of the economy cannot be blamed on Bush, especially with such a strong negative correlation between Obama opening his mouth and the level of the DOW. 

When the market had a 300 point rally November 4, 2008, CNN Money assured us that the market hates uncertainty and as it was now obvious that Obama would win, the market was recovering its stability. They also repoted:

“…stocks will likely get a boost regardless of who wins, analysts say.”

Then Obama actually won and the DOW tanked by 486 points and CNN Money printed this:

“Investors were taking a classic "buy the rumor, sell the news" response to President-elect Barack Obama's victory over John McCain, said Bill Stone, chief investment strategist at PNC Financial Services Group.”

Classic? If dumping stocks at the news of who the President is, is a “Classic” move then why were “analysts” saying the day before that stocks would get a boost?

An hour and a half before Obama was inaugurated Alexandra Twin of CNN Money was quoting Terry L. Morris, senior equity manager at National Penn Investor Trust as saying that Obama would get a few weeks honeymoon. At the close of the market, when the stocks had the most severe drop in Inauguration history, Alexandra Twin herself was saying that Obama was good for the market.

We saw a plunge of 382 points when the Senate passed the stimulus and another of 288 points when the President signed it. After Obama, this weekend announced his Mortgage rehab plan and Robert Gibbs refused to rule out nationalization of the country’s banks the Dow dropped 250 points on this past Monday. Bernanke came out and assured the public that they never thought of nationalization, which is a patent lie, but the market rallied with DOW back up 236 points.

Unfortunately, never one to miss an opportunity to trash the very foundation of American safety, prosperity and health, Obama proceeded to spend his address to the Congress bashing rich people and businesses and promising to end the recession without their help. Except for the extra taxes they will pay of course, to fund the Democrats pet projects. That help Obama needs.

In response, the DOW was down nearly 180 points within two hours of the opening bell. 

Apparently, just being optimistic about fixing the problem is not (sorry Bill Clinton) enough. The people who invest billions in our market are not so stupid that they are betting on rhetoric. They are waiting to hear something, anything that might make America an attractive investment again. Everything Obama has offered: heavy regulation, higher taxes, environmental handcuffs, government directed production, abandonment of our viable natural resources and the classic demonization of the productive – err “rich” – has sent investors running.

Yes, what this administration needs is a mute.

So NeoBama plans to revamp the miracle of the loaves and fishes as he defies a century of negative correlation between higher taxes on business and actual revenues to the government. His sense of timing is akin to a modern-day shrink offering to drill a hole in your head to release the vapors causing your depression. Over twenty countries, whose previously high taxes and socialistic policies had left their populous unemployed and poverty-stricken have, since witnessing the unprecedented fiscal success of the Reagan tax cuts, opted to cast off the patently absurd practice of ‘progressive’ taxation resulting in millions of their citizens rising from destitution into prosperity. Flat taxes between 10 and 30 percent have made these countries irresistible to businesses and as the Big Board at Wall Street shows, business capital is fleeing the impending punitive tax rates of the United States to friendlier climes.

Politicians on the Left care little for facts or realities, since they sound so uninspiring. Far better for their voting base to promise fantastic results that will never materialize, and then blame someone else for the failure. NeoBama and his silver tongue were custom made for such an endeavor. This is why it goes completely unnoticed by the general public when he tells Charlie Gibson that he does not care if raising tax rates will mean the government gets less money from taxes. He will do it anyway for the “purposes of fairness.” 

Make no mistake: As his response to Gibson demonstrates, this ideologue is perfectly aware that he cannot cut the deficit in half by raising business taxes. He simply does not care. He wishes to redistribute the wealth of our nation even if that means we will all be poorer. The promise to cut the deficit in half is simply the excuse du jour for confiscating an ever higher percentage of the earnings of others. 

As Ann Coulter has pointed out, to the Left it is as if history never happened. They never learn from the experiences of the past. Boris Yeltsin walked into a Houston grocery store and was rendered speechless by the abundance of items available for any person to come and purchase, yet the Left is endlessly crusading to destroy the free market and make life more ‘fair’. Will it be fair enough when we are all living on whatever the government dole can pay us because there are no jobs left in our tax-strangled economy? Will it be fair enough when we all need to wait in line for three days to get a loaf of bread? This experiment has been tried and tried and tried and it has failed miserably everywhere. Regardless, just at the time when the rest of the world is lowering taxes and freeing their markets, leading like night into day to incredible growth and prosperity, we are regressing thanks to fact-phobic liberals.

The incredible arrogance of the people Thomas Sowell has so aptly labeled “The Anointed” is inexplicable outside of narcissistic personality disorder. They are so consumed with their own certainty in themselves and their vision that they will impose it on others no matter the consequences. If the unwashed masses cannot see that the liberal vision is what is best for them, then like little children we shall be forced to eat our veggies anyway. 

NeoBama lies and says we can have our cake and eat it too.  Pretends he believes he can raise taxes and make more money for the Treasury. Make business less profitable in the United States and create jobs. Destroy the incentives to employ and lower unemployment. The truth is, he will confiscate the wealth of this great nation, then destroy that wealth in whatever pet projects the Anointed believe are best for the ‘herd’. He will have our cake and eat it too.

Common sense is in short supply when it comes to economics these days. When conservatives advocate laissez-faire economics, liberals accuse us of “being for big business.” Somehow, when you check out the lineup of panhandlers in Washington it becomes patently obvious that Big Business is no fan of Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’.

In the very year of our nation’s birth, Smith, a Scottish economist, first published “An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.” An enormous undertaking, it was celebrated for its comprehensive comparisons of the various economic practices in current and previous societies and most importantly the widely disparate results of those policies for everyone from kings to serfs.

While Smith only used the phrase once, the ‘invisible hand’ of market forces has become an easily recognizable concept for most anyone familiar with capitalism. The idea is that a free and open market will allow competition for profits. Without any third party constraints imposed, competitors seeking only to enrich themselves will necessarily enrich the entire society and therefore each member of the society. This generally happens because it has been observed that people buy more at a lower price, but may be willing to pay a higher price for a better product. That gives merchants in competition with one another very limited options in enriching themselves. They can convince customers to purchase from them by offering something as good as their competition at a lower price or they can offer a greater value to the customer. Either way the customer wins. Laissez-faire, which literally means, “to leave be” is used to describe a system in which the market regulates itself, allowing prices to become lower and products available to more and more people as Smith’s invisible hand pressures competitors whose very greed for profits causes them to better serve their customers.

When looked at in individual terms, it is easy to dismiss this concept. I can certainly deny that the fast food joint down the street is working hard to please me. However, when examining as Smith did entire nations and the results of their economic policies, the invisible hand becomes the undeniable hand. 

In 1936 there were only 200 televisions operating worldwide, and the richest man on the planet could not go to a Blockbuster and rent a VHS tape. Cars were a luxury item. The rich sweat all summer long with no air conditioning. Dishes were washed by hand and no one could nuke a Hot Pocket.

In the United States in 2006 eighty percent of the poor had air conditioned homes. Three-quarters owned a car and over thirty percent owned two. Ninety-seven percent had a color television while over half owned two or more. Seventy-eight percent had a VCR or DVD player. Eighty-nine percent owned a microwave and more than a third had dishwashers.

Fifty years ago, the first commercial quality VCR was priced at $50,000.00. Thirteen years ago, the first DVD player was marketed and today, you can buy one for just $50.00. The question that matters is why are they cheaper? Have the businesses that market these technologies simply become less greedy? Has the government ordered them to make DVD players affordable for poor people? Or have they lowered their prices to take advantage of a larger market than that which can afford a $50,000.00 toy?

The invisible hand has been responsible for the greatest increase in overall wealth of any society in history. The people of our country living in poverty have homes that rival those of middle class Parisians. The hand of government has been responsible for making a simple recession into the Great Depression, turning the land of the roaring twenties into a third-world joke. The hand of government treated us to gas shortages, long lines and unnecessary consumption due to artificially low prices. The hand of government is responsible for spending millions of dollars it confiscated from its people to encourage other people to live in unsafe hurricane-prone regions. Now the hand of government will crush our economy with excessive debt, trade protectionism, artificially high prices, unnecessary bureaucracy, fascist regulations of the business community, and the utter destruction of the free market.

Did the Community Reinvestment Act help by encouraging, even legislating bad loans? Yes. Did Bush and Paulson help by bailing out the first failing banks? Yes. Has this new round of stimulus added to the melee? Absolutely. Nevertheless, the real issue is not what government intervention would be best. The issue is whether there should be any intervention at all. Those who decry the failure of the free market do not recognize that we have not had a genuinely free market for years, and that returns us to the big businessmen, hats in hands, begging for a handout at the public trough.

Every economy, Socialist, Communist, Capitalist deals with the same problem: How to best ration limited resources that have alternative uses. Centrally planned economies operate under the belief that a small cohort of people can best decide where those resources are most valuable to the entire society. Free markets operate under the assumption that resources will be directed to where they are most needed based on the millions of independent decisions made by customers and merchants as they search for the best deal for both sides of a transaction. If big business really loved the free market, they would celebrate the collapse of their own failing corporations as the market does its job and signals that they are not worth the prices they are asking the people to pay. Instead, they ask the government to coerce us into paying prices we elect not to in the free market by confiscating our income and giving it to these corporate welfare queens. 

We the people can only vote every so many years for a politician. We can vote every day with our wallets. The votes of the people have told Ford and GM to lower their prices or make a more worthwhile product. They have refused. Maybe they cannot because of union labor costs, but it should be the decision of individual citizens whether they are willing to buy a car or not. Now GM cannot break down your door, hold a gun to your head and force you to give them some money to offset their cost of doing business. They can however, get the government to commit the same robbery legally through the tax code. Big Business does not like the free market. They like government bureaucrats to tie down the invisible hand with regulations that effectively monopolize the market for them. There are 75,000 pages of regulations for business in this country now. What little upstart can compete with that burden around their necks? None – and that is just the way Big Business likes it. 

All the way back at the turn of the century, when Upton Sinclair, a socialist, published “The Jungle,” Big Business saw the benefit of government regulation.  The popular myth that Sinclair dealt a blow to business with his largely false diatribe against the meatpacking industry has prevailed in spite of the historical record. This record shows that the largest of the meat-packers encouraged Congress to pass regulations that they were confident would stifle the ability of smaller companies to compete against them. Sinclair himself bemoaned the results, as he too recognized the boon to Big Business.  

The fact is that monopolies in a free market have been notoriously unsuccessful. It takes only one innovative person to provide a substitute for a high priced item and break the hold of a monopoly. Even when there was only one Aluminum manufacturer in the entire U.S., the prices stayed reasonable to prevent consumers from switching to other metals or even wood. Only the government can easily maintain a monopoly as only the government can legally force you to support an undesirable product, whether by legislating away competition or by confiscating your money to ‘subsidize’ the products a business cannot convince you to buy in a fair and free market.

Incidentally, Adam Smith himself was no fan of Big Business. Thomas Sowell offers an A to any student who can find a single favorable comment about businessmen in “Wealth of Nations.” No student has ever claimed this prize. Adam Smith recognized that businessmen were motivated by greed, but he also saw that very self-interest at work in improving the lives of others. This nation is at a turning point and the question we need to ask ourselves is, “What do we want more?” Do we want to punish the rich for their success, cutting off our nose to spite our face, or do we want the rich to continue enriching all of society as they have done for two hundred years?

Political correctness will be the rope with which we hang ourselves, and it will not be the merciful sort of hanging where we drop from a significant height, quickly breaking our neck. No, it will be more akin to sticking our head through the noose, looping it over a tree branch then walking at a leisurely pace down a gently sloping hill until we are slowly choked to death. It is already getting hard to breathe.

Political correctness has altered the way we function to our societal detriment. We have colleges that ration the number of slots available to non-minority students, filling the other slots with minorities whether or not they are qualified by normal standards to attend the institution. As described by Law professors Vikram Amar and Richard Sander in the L.A. Times, this appears to be potentially detrimental to those very minorities who enter a school with substandard qualifications:

Data from across the country suggest to some researchers that when law students attend schools where their credentials (including LSAT scores and college grades) are much lower than the median at the school, they actually learn less, are less likely to graduate and are nearly twice as likely to fail the bar exam than they would have been had they gone to less elite schools. This is known as the "mismatch effect."

So it is not good for the minorities being pushed into an academic climate they are unprepared for, it is not good for those who were prepared but couldn’t attend because they were discriminated against based on their sex, race, ethnicity;  we can assume it is not good for the American consumers who will settle for less capable doctors, lawyers, dentists, and so on. Who is it good for? Only those who feel good about themselves for instituting such a politically correct and culturally sensitive program.

On some of those campuses, free speech is a thing of the past. Speech Codes include punishment for such nebulous offenses as “demeaning epithets” which could be construed to apply to any damn thing some feminazi gets het up over. Ahmadinejad can speak freely but be careful no guy calls the wrong girl ‘Honey’. 

Thanks to the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (gosh it sounds so good doesn’t it?), employers who use their private capital to open a privately owned business will be forced to hire people who may be disadvantageous to their business. Therefore, when granny opens a Christian bookstore and a cross-dresser applies she will have to hire him regardless of whether there are other less controversial candidates who are equally qualified for the job. If she does not she will risk having to prove in court at great expense that she did not discriminate based on his proclivity to wear fake breasts and too much eyeliner. Would anyone force a black business owner to hire someone who wears a hood and pointy white hate to work? Of course not and that is as it should be. The problem is the rules for some but not for others. In an effort to establish some cosmic sense of equal results, we will discriminate in favor of the perceived underdog, without acknowledging that by definition that requires discriminating against the perceived oppressor. Where is the equal protection under the law?

Well it disappears in the face of ‘hate crimes’ legislation. Now we are to believe that a gay man beaten up by someone who does not believe homosexuality is a proper life choice is somehow more injured than if he were beaten up by his gay lover, a statistically far more frequent occurrence. This requires punitive action to be measured according to one’s beliefs and is thereby criminalizing thought to some degree. Suddenly, you are entitled to equal protection under the law unless you hold opinions that are unpopular with the PC Brigade. 

All of these progressions have served to stifle open and honest debate and, in the case of campus speech codes, have probably lowered the marriage and birth rates of college students who cannot figure out how to hit on a girl without risking a letter of censure. 

Yes, it is getting hard to breathe. 

Still, we keep strolling down that hill as the noose tightens and here we find ourselves with our faces turning purple as we attempt to deal considerately with those who have vowed to destroy us. Yes, I am speaking of the Islamists. We keep hearing that only a small handful of Muslims are radicalized, and I am sure that is true. I would like to point out that only a small percentage of Germans were gassing Jews.

When you have over a billion Muslims in the world only a small percentage need to be radicalized to wreak tremendous havoc. Furthermore, what exactly constitutes radical? Is a radical one who is willing to detonate himself in a shopping mall? What about those who simply support the practice? Why must we go to youtube to see images of Muslim rallies right here in the U.S. led by screaming Imams saying that the 9/11 terrorists were heroes? To see people claiming to be Hamas rallying in Minnesota and shouting down the Muslim Congressman Keith Ellison as he attempts a moderate plea for peace in the Middle East? Why is this not front-page news when people with these very beliefs slaughtered thousands of our fellow citizens less than a decade ago?

Of course, the answer is Political Correctness. Brigit Gabrielle, survivor of the Islamist genocide of Christians in Lebanon rhetorically asked, “Where are the moderate Muslims?” She demanded to know why here, in the United States, the one place they could express their outrage at the hijacking of their peaceful religion, they were not pouring into the streets to demonstrate that outrage. Well I ask, “Why should they?” We downplay the seriousness of the threat. We scoff at the idea that it could happen here even after it did. We bend over backwards to ensure that every child knows Islam is a religion of peace. In California, grade schools instituted an “Islamic Immersion Week” including prayer mats, Muslim garb, Muslim names and a jihad dice game. We would not dare demand that the moderate Muslims stand up and be counted, for in our little PC fantasy a changed dialogue means an altered reality. 

Well someone needs to inform the fifteen percent of U.S. Muslims under 30 who support suicide bombings that Islam is a religion of peace before we escape this PC noose by way of having our head sawed off.  

When The Anointed One spoke at a town hall meeting on Tuesday some of the crowd reacted as though he had performed the miracle of the loaves and fishes. One man wept with joy and praised God for some apparent intervention in allowing the new Messiah to take time out of his day and grace them with his nearness. Anyone who thought Sarah Palin’s belonging to a charismatic church was weird ought to get a load of this guy. I expected that at any moment he would collapse to the floor in ecstasy, but he remained upright long enough to petition the Great One to pull a better benefits package for part-time McDonalds workers out of the magical government basket. Can I just say:

Oh.  My.  God.

Another woman present was hoping that the Messiah could get her a house and NeoBama generously offered to get her the phone number of some government bureaucracy that specializes in seeing whether people qualify for help. She also was overcome and cried tears of relief and gratitude.

Then some Republican just gave her a house.

Representative Nick Thompson’s wife, Chene, offered Henrietta Hughes the home she had bought after law school but was no longer using. Interestingly, the headlines all note that Hughes was given a home after appealing to Obama. You have to delve into the article to find out it was some other compassionate person who helped her and then you have to google to find out the party affiliation of the Rep whose wife was so generous.

This is the difference between small government conservatives and big government liberals in a nutshell. Small government conservatives want the charitable impulses of humanity to thrive without the stifling effects of Robin Hood liberals. Liberal Elitists want to establish boards and committees and departments to be staffed with all of their incredibly clever elitist cohorts to sit around and devise ways to help everyone in the world. While they are planning, churches are actually feeding the poor. When Obamassiah offered a phone number, Chene Thompson offered a gift.

Look, it is only commonsense that says money that citizens use to directly and actively help others is going to be more efficient than money that is cycled through a bureaucracy first. More importantly, the federal government is lousy at everything they do. They have no profit incentive to perform well. They have no ability to distinguish the needy from the lazy. If only one in a hundred of those who received welfare payments in 2005 were truly capable of working, that is 20,000 people the government helped to be a failure. If every one of those received just $500 a month in aid (food stamps, cash, Medicaid), we are talking $120 million thrown away. 

Okay, so $120 million is nothing to our big spenders in Washington. What about the enabling effect on the lives of these individuals? Let us look at another recent news item: Nadya Suleman, the mother of fourteen who is on welfare and has had three sets of twins through IVF; three of her twins are receiving state funded disability treatments, and now she has octuplets implanted. 

Suppose this woman had to go to a local charity when she got pregnant the first time. Think they might have made her feel a little shame? Maybe been a bit judgmental as they helped her out? After having to ask for personally for hand-outs while looking the giver in the eye, maybe Nadya would have thought twice before the second implantation. Would she feel stigmatized? I certainly hope so. Stigma plays an important role in curbing stupid, reckless and selfish behavior.

Hilary Clinton loves to talk about the ‘Village’ and its role in raising children, but the trend of Liberal Elites has been to set themselves up as the central planners of the village. Hence, we have people expecting the leader of the free world to attend to their job dissatisfaction rather than tending to their own personal failure to advance beyond part time McDonalds work after four years. This is no village. All of America cannot be a village any more than the Pacific can be a puddle, and it is Hilary and those like her who have destroyed the villages we once had.

We need to cast off the chains of this centralized, socialistic, liberal control orgy and reclaim the individual fortitude that made these United States great. For we are the United States of America. Many solitary and sovereign states with an agreement to stand with one another for common defense and furtherance of the pursuit of our liberties. Our founders recognized that maintaining decentralized power would allow each state to best cater to the desires and needs of its own constituency and most importantly, that tyranny waged in one state could be brought into check by the states around it. By contrast, tyranny waged by the federal government is tyranny suffered by all and inescapable within the confines of our nation.

The conservative approach to charity is a microcosm of this ideal. We recognize that those closest to the source of a need can best cater to the particular requirements of that need in order to abolish it, unlike checks from some faceless bureaucracy, which makes no judgment calls. They cannot say whether this person needs counseling or rehab. They do not know whether the recipient is a deadbeat or in genuine trouble, and they rob those around the needy of both their money and their charitable impulses by shackling them to big brother’s version of benevolence.

The generosity of Mrs. Thompson in the face of President Obama’s promise of a bureaucratic solution was a perfect display of the differences between the small government and big government philosophies. Ask Henrietta Hughes which one is more effective.

Fairness and Censorship have become completely fluid concepts with the advent of liberal patronage. When a liberal says they will make something ‘fair’ they generally mean they will abridge the freedom of one group in order to facilitate the oppression of another. When a liberal says someone is being ‘censored’ it generally means that they have been forbidden to put their smut in plain view of other people’s children. Consider this quote from the website Freedom Forum, which advocates freedom of speech:

In a national campaign launched this summer, a group called Morality in Media is targeting sex-saturated magazines menacing children and adults alike in grocery store checkout lines. No, not Playboy and Penthouse, but Cosmopolitan, Redbook, Marie Claire, Glamour and Mademoiselle. Morality in Media wants the stores either to drop the magazines or put them in plain brown wrappers. One mother said, "Magazine covers sometimes force parents to confront issues that children aren't yet ready for." Nor are the parents.

No. Not Playboy, but Cosmopolitan and its ilk, which no longer offer just makeup tips but such glaring headlines as “Be a Sex Genius! These Brilliantly Naughty Bed Tricks will Double His Pleasure…and Yours!” as well as “Little Mouth Moves that Make Sex Hotter,” both headlines featured on the cover of the April 2008 issue of Cosmopolitan. Nor is this an aberration. Not a month goes by that Cosmo (in my opinion the worst offender) does not have at least one major headline advertising sexual pursuits right on the cover. Even when a vendor puts these magazines into a “U” shaped blocker the headlines can usually be seen. 

Now is it censorship to ask that these magazines not be displayed where a minor will be necessarily exposed to them? I have asked that our local stores either cover the headlines or move the magazines to the magazine aisle. The magazine aisle is a place I can voluntarily avoid when I bring my children to the store. The checkout line is not. 

If it is censorship to require sexually explicit writing be placed forty feet away, where a parent can reasonably avoid it, where does censorship end? In Barnes v. Glen Theatre, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld nude dancing as a form of free speech falling under the rubric of “protected expressive conduct.” Well by the logic that labels moving magazines out of the checkout ‘censorship’, is it not also censorship to require that these dancers remain in adults-only bars? Why should the outdated Victorian sensibilities of some parents who are uncomfortable with their own sexuality impede the freedom of other, more enlightened Wal-Mart shoppers to be entertained by nude dancers in the checkout lanes?

The irony is that the liberal elite are constantly warning that we will go down the slippery slope, as if moving Cosmo to the magazine aisle will result in public flogging for women who show their ankles a generation hence. Meanwhile, “free speech” has metamorphosed from the right to protest the war on a college campus to the Folsom Street Fair where gay men can openly copulate in a public street while onlookers cheer them. Oh, and they can bring the kids.

It is not ‘banning’ to move something elsewhere. Similarly, the outrage over Sarah Palin supposedly questioning a librarian about particular books was used to label her a ‘book-banner’. A library holds a limited number of books. If a particular community would rather the space in their library be taken up with something other than Mein Kampf it should be the community’s choice. Anyone who wants to read Mein Kampf can surely get it on the internet.

The hypocrisy of the liberal elite and their purposely fluid understanding of censorship is best observed in the context of the wall between Church and State which has transformed from the federal government being forbidden to establish a national religion to five-year-olds being forbidden to pray at snack time in the public school lunch room. Not only are crude descriptions of fornication free speech, but they are required to be stocked in the checkout line or the First Amendment is under attack. However, when a little girl in California held hands with two of her classmates and recited this prayer: “God is great; God is good, thank you God for my food” a teacher reprimanded her and sent her to the school administration. Her parents were informed in writing that their little girl is not allowed to pray aloud in school or with others. Afterward the school bragged in the media about their actions. A lawsuit against the school vindicated the girl’s right to pray, but not to hold hands with her friends when she did it.

Fairness as well has taken on some convoluted usage when emitting from the mouths of our liberal friends. In the name of “fairness,” they have proposed hate crime laws that necessarily criminalize opinion, the removal of the secret ballot measure during the potential unionization of a workplace, the favoring of individuals of one sex or race even in the instance of superior performance of individuals of alternate sex or race in college admissions and employment, the abdication of one’s earnings in order that Congress may dictate the amount and disbursement of our charity, control of the programming of broadcasters over the radio and internet if those broadcasters offer opinions antithetical to the elite’s version of reality, and the list goes on and on. 

Americans need to get their heads out of the sand and start paying attention to the actions of our legislators. We need to stop just tuning in for a few weeks before an election to see who has the best speeches. We need to know what is the true intent behind promises of fairness and accusations of censorship because the words liberals speak often bear little resemblance to the results they are seeking.

 

I am angry with executives receiving golden parachutes and bonus pay that is supported by the compulsory donations of the American people. The problem is, the only reasonable way to prevent this would have been to not bail out failing banks and corporations. With every pandering populist word President Obama spoke at his press conference today capitalism, which has provided a standard of living for the American povertous as high as the European middle class, ceded more and more ground to the European Socialism that has created long-term double-digit unemployment and a stagnation of financial mobility.

·         Taxpayers were compelled, with no voice in the matter, to become powerless stockholders in these failing companies

·         Taxpayers became enraged that these failing businesses, taking their money, are buying jets and paying themselves millions of dollars

·         President Obama declares that there will be a $500 thousand cap on bailout recipients’ pay

This last may sound like a great move to the taxpayers who are sick to death of seeing failure rewarded. It feels good to stick it to those who have been sticking it to us. The question though, is not an emotional one. Businesses do not rise and fall on emotion, and intent does not always line up with result.

What President Obama has done is to forbid already struggling businesses to offer a competitive market wage for executives. No one in the league of running these large banks and corporations is going to work for (comparably) peanuts, except maybe the losers who ruined these companies in the first place and have no other offers. So the businesses the taxpayers dumped $700 Billion dollars into to salvage, are going to be stuck with either the same lousy leadership or “leadership” from someone who garners a fraction of what his colleagues do, which says quite a bit about his talents; none of it good.

The solution would have been to let these banks fail. Many people would have lost their jobs and unemployment would have skyrocketed. $700 Billion could have paid thousands of dollars in extended unemployment benefits while more responsible institutions fed on the carcasses of these failures, dividing up their market share and allowing growth to smaller but better run counterparts.

Instead, we see skyrocketing unemployment while the culprits eat up a few hundred Billion bucks of our value and the leadership of the Democratic Party sees this as an opportunity to take advantage of the fear in the public, passing billions in government spending for pet projects that could never pass the smell test in committee. 

When historians spawned from the socialist reeducation camps we call colleges in this country, write the story of the destruction of capitalism and the impoverishment of the American people circa 2009, I trust they will paint a noble and courageous portrait of all this government meddling. As always, when yet another liberal social engineering project results in plummeting standards of living (see the War on Poverty) we will be assured that things would have been even worse were it not for these heroes and their valiant redistribution of the people’s hard earned money.

1. A causes B
2. B causes A
3. Both A and B are caused by C
4. The correllation is coincidental

True conservatives are generally against identity politics. Because we do not believe in picking out particular groups for special treatment, we simply do not engage in actively pursuing a group based on their ethnicity, sex, sexual preference, whatever. We need to recognize though, that a large segment of the population does indeed identify themselves as a group defined partially by these parameters.

I hate pandering. I hate the way that a group in the federal government can hold sway over a segment of the populous by promising them special treatment. I hate the divisiveness this practice causes. The Left promises us in this new administration there will be a new uniting fashion of politics yet they still promote class warfare. Today a new task force was launched to focus on the middle class. We were informed by Obamassiah that there is no conflict between labor unions and business. “Those are the old rules,” he said. So He speaks and makes it so?  Labor unions are committed to getting the most money for the least productivity; businesses to getting the most productivity for the least money. Nope, no conflict there.

This is one reason I am a conservative. I do not believe a politician, however his pectorals glisten (I am talking to you Washington Post), can speak and make it so. If there is conflict to be resolved, it is not between one class and another or one sex and its employers or one race and its oppressors. Conflict happens on an individual scale. Conflict is between one unique individual and the struggles he or she encounters during the course of the adventure we call life. Washington bureaucracy attempts to offer one-size-fits-all solutions to disparate situations involving millions of people these politicians have never met. Better for the individuals to be free to solve their own conflicts.

The Left comes from a position that there is such a thing as too much freedom. Of course, this never applies to mocked up CGI children having sex online for the pleasure of future baby rapists. The pornographers, degenerates and criminals can never have enough rights for some reason. The real danger is the freedom of a single mom to put a sign outside her house offering to do taxes cheap. The Jamaican couple braiding hair without a cosmetology license in D.C. These are the folks exercising too much freedom.

The Left claims they want to help the little guy but every choice they make benefits the behemoths. They keep the poor quiet with some welfare and food stamps and then they regulate every breath you take so that the poor will always be that way. The Left does not follow policies that will make everyone prosper. They follow policies that will allow the government to decide who will prosper and who will not. 

While I abhor identity politics, I also believe the Republican Party has done a deplorable job of recognizing that there are people in this country who do identify themselves strongly as part of a particular group, and that it is not pandering to address to those particular groups the ways in which conservative ideals will benefit them. 

It saddens me that the great hope for blacks in our nation holds the very ideals that will stop the poorest blacks from ever escaping the cycle of poverty that ensnares them. While I cannot help but feel proud for African Americans who rejoice to see Barack Obama and his family in the White House, I also recognize that the very policies he supports are the policies that will make sure the most underprivileged of his racial brethren never have the opportunities he has had. No one ever got rich off welfare. Redistribution of wealth only moves a limited quantity of cash around from one place to another. Persistently high taxes on businesses drive higher prices, reducing the purchasing power of everyone, including the poor. They also drive businesses overseas, robbing the unskilled of job opportunities here at home. The Left likes to play the “Tax the Rich” game, without ever recognizing that eventually there will not be any rich left to support these social programs. 

In contrast, allowing the rich to get richer and invest more money in jobs here at home that must be filled by unskilled workers gives the poor a chance to better themselves. More importantly, it actually creates wealth rather than moving some from here to there. The family income of Joe Shmoe is not lower because Exxon made record profits this year. If Joe happens to be a roughneck, he is glad Exxon made record profits because it means he will probably have a job next year. 

The first woman ever to become a millionaire by her own achievements (and no John Kerry, marrying money is not your own achievement) was Madame C.J. Walker. This first freeborn child in her family was born December 23, 1867 and hailed from a plantation in Delta, Louisiana. At 14 she married and at 20 she was widowed with a young daughter. She worked as a laundress, but eventually began her own line of hair care products for blacks. She died, with over 3,000 employees in her business, at the Italianate mansion she had constructed in Rockefeller’s neighborhood in New York. Tell me if you will what inner city youth faces a greater challenge than this child of slaves who became the first woman white or black to earn a million dollars? Well they do have a greater challenge, but it is not the bogeyman the Left leads you to believe it is.

The fact is that today, Madame C.J. would probably stay a laundress. How could she possibly afford to start a business? Would she have the money on her $1.50 a day laundress wages to pay a CPA to ensure she complied with the tax codes? Who would verify she was in compliance with the 75,000 (yes that is thousand) pages of codes regulating business owners in the country today? In a time when there really was institutionalized racism and there really was an effort to oppress blacks and keep them from prospering, Madame C.J. Walker had the freedom to go around the ‘man’ and put her own God-given talents to work as her own boss. Today, when the KKK is a joke to any thinking person, when there are laws, entitlements, and pandering politicians, the very interference of the government ‘for our own good’ would succeed where racists failed. Madame C.J. would have to settle for Food Stamps.

Genuine conservatives want these regulations to go away. We want the Madame C.J.s of our generation to have a clear path to prosperity, not a front row seat mired in the public dole. Where are the conservatives who will recognize that it is not pandering to express the benefits of your ideals for those people who feel the Republican Party has abandoned them? We do not need to change our beliefs, we need to change the way they are communicated. I believe there is only a very small contingent of citizens who would rather be guaranteed bread and water, than have the possibility of earning lobster dinner. We need to frame the discussion in that way and reach out to those who feel they are marginalized by our beliefs. Real conservatives are not the friend of big business, liberals and the regulatory standards that can only be met by the incredibly wealthy are. God willing the new chair of the RNC will recognize this and more importantly help us to communicate it to those who need to hear.

Governor Blagojevich is like a fantastic caricature of the entire cabal of life-running, business-meddling, rule-bending Leftists. Caught on tape trading favors for cash, he spends hours delineating his Gandhi-esque sacrifices for the people of the state. The Left really convinces themselves that every pursuit they undertake is for the best and if they benefit politically or financially that is just a bonus. 

The businesses in this country are bleeding jobs like a drive-by victim, and the solution of our resident social engineers is to take another pass and pump a few more rounds at them.  The White House website promises that the minimum wage will be $9.50 per hour by 2011. Just today, Obama signed a bill allowing an extension of the time for an employee to sue their employer for unfair wages. Billions of dollars taken from the taxpayers of the future will be invested into government projects with limitations such as the 2.225 Billion dollars allocated to the Army Corps of Engineers to be used only for projects that were previously funded but were never completed for some reason. Might that reason be that the projects were inefficiently run in the first place? Alternatively, perhaps they were improperly funded in the first place. In either scenario, throwing two and a quarter billion dollars at them seems unwise. The bill is full of ideological outlay including:

2.825 Billion for Broadband access in rural communities

350 Million for salaries to map broadband availability in the country

650 Million for Digital conversion education, outreach, and coupons

300 Million for building science research facilities

400 Million for habitat restoration and migration activities

600 Million for climate research, provided at least 140 million is used for modeling Will the long term unemployed be modeling?)

400 Million to NASA (250 Million must be used for climate research)

18.5 Billion for energy efficiency projects

800 Million to Amtrak

In addition to the nearly twenty-five billion listed above, just about two hundred fifty million is allocated in the very first pages for the oversight of all of these projects. Then every project’s little section in the bill says they can use three percent of the allocated funds for oversight!

The bill itself is six hundred forty-seven pages long. What I have listed here comes from the first 60 pages of the bill. Does any cognizant citizen of this country believe that the people who voted on this read it all? Or that a great deal of thought and calculation went in to the decision of say 800 million for Amtrak versus 350 million for broadband mapping? Where is the research justifying that this money will provide jobs for the jobless? 

Answer:  There is none. Not one expenditure in this bill was broken down and weighed pro versus con to say “This much is what we need to do x and result in y.” A business owner has his own money at stake. If he launches a business venture, he sits down and scrupulously studies the costs and benefits of that venture. These people in Congress are literally pulling numbers out of their hats. 

Let me take a moment to say that I am equally disgusted with the Republican majority during the Bush Administration. They behaved like Leftists themselves and not the fiscal conservatives the base desires. Bush, with his compassionate conservatism allowed the 40% expansion of the federal government, but for the Left to attack him for the economy is the pot calling the kettle black. The Left is looking at this election cycle as a mandate on their policies, blind to the fact that they won because the Right spent like they do. 

What good is it to mandate a minimum wage? The Left will say that every person is entitled to a “living” wage. There are two problems with that philosophy. First, a living wage in Lufkin is different from a living wage in Austin, which is different from a living wage in New York City, et cetera. Second, once a business owner is forced nearly to double the wage he pays each worker he has only three options:

a.       Cut the labor force and add to the unemployment lines

b.      Raise prices to compensate for higher expenditures

c.       Profit less from his business

The first is obviously not a desirable effect of this policy, and if the second choice is taken, how long exactly will the new minimum remain a ‘living’ wage? The Left of course expects all business owners to take option c., but why exactly should he? What capitalist would? The only way to make the minimum wage work out the way its proponents want is to forbid employers to lower wages or fire workers thereby forcing them to profit less. This experiment has already been tried during the descent into what is now known as “The Great Depression.” Sounds like a plan!

What about suing your employer for unfair wages? This is the most ridiculous issue. If you do not like what you are paid, leave. These are not Civil Rights issues. This is not Jim Crow America where the opportunities afforded one race of people are categorically denied others. The ability for a woman to sue because her employer pays someone else more than she for what she may consider the ‘same work’ will do nothing for women as a sex. It will make employers less likely to want to hire a woman. It will make employers less likely to afford women the sort of flexibility many of us happily trade for higher pay. It is yet another Leftist blanket solution for an individualized problem.

The Left comes from an ideological foundation that says government’s job is to engineer happiness and stability for the most people possible. This position is so intolerably arrogant as to be nearly sociopathic. What sort of individual believes they have the solution to the problems of 300 million people, 299,999,900 of whom they know absolutely nothing about on a personal level? There is only one solution, and that is to let people solve their own problems. Get out of their way. Get out of their wallets. Get out of their business transactions.

Every day employers, employees, venture capitalists, stockholders, hairdressers and Hollywood agents make literally billions of small, outcome-oriented, goal-targeted, precision-focused decisions about what is best for them. The Leftists believe that a couple dozen lawmakers can better manage those billions of decisions than the millions of individuals involved. 

What about Federal Regulation of the steps taken by Emergency Room physicians? Would you support ER doctors being told that a gunshot victim must have a certain order of treatment? Say, he must have the bullet removed first, and then the wound closed, then a transfusion? Would you not prefer the doctor who is standing there directly observing the situation have the authority to triage the patient based on the unique conditions that present themselves? Of course. However, when it comes to the economy, triage goes out the window and a one-size-fits-all solution from on high is forthcoming.

The excuse for regulating business is always to protect the little guy. Well who protected those that put their faith in Made-off’s ponzi scheme? Maybe if those people had not been counting on the SEC to do their homework for them they would have covered their own butts and done their homework. Will there always be unscrupulous people in business? Yes. Can we ever legislate risk out of capitalism? No. Nevertheless, we have seen the alternative and it involves breadlines and gulags. It involves idealists who are impressed at how everyone is ‘equally poor together’. Lovely. This is what we will get for the social engineering of the Left: Everyone poor together. Thanks anyway. I will take the chance to be rich against the risk of being poor over the guarantee of government-induced poverty any day of the week and twice on Sunday.

The Federal Government is like the Blob. It keeps eating up more and more and the more it eats the bigger and hungrier it gets. The Journalist Charlie Reese once said, “Powers once assumed are never relinquished, just as bureaucracies, once created, never die.” It is time that our elected officials use their power to kill some of the bureaucracy then relinquish some of their power back to its rightful possessors: The People of the United States.

Just a little rant today. 

Is anyone else out there being spammed by Obama, his wife and David Plouffe? I can’t wait until the first daughters start filling my inbox with invites to their Facebook pages or whatever they do. 

Look, I have never voted Democrat. I have never opted to ‘receive more information’ about change I can believe in. I never attended a Democratic meeting or anything like that but still, I get a call on my cell phone from his campaign and I must have a thousand pleas and updates from everyone but the family dog.

At least when the Republicans send me an email (which they do with about one third the frequency of the first family and their cabal) it has the potential motivation behind it that I have donated to, written to and voted for Republicans. 

This  practice shows that about the same level of internet courtesy is practiced by the H&C (Hope and Change) crew as is practiced by jennyhotcam.viewmenow.freexxxpics. Also, the instinctive recoiling in disgust and irritation is approximately comparable when I receive unsolicited mail from either of these sources. Sorry ‘Jenny’.