Back to Basics

Trail meekly and close enough behind, and you may get dumped upon.  The Obama administration attacks domestic political targets with whatever scurrilous tactics can be employed.  In the foreign policy arena, it’s a different matter.

Read Jonathan S. Tobin’s post on the Commentary Magazine website:
The Russians Are Happy with John Kerry
Quote:

But the main result of all this schmoozing is the stark fact that the bottom line here is that the United States has buckled under to Moscow:

Mikhail V. Margelov, chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the upper chamber of the Russian Parliament, said that Russia’s position on Syria had been consistent and that Mr. Kerry had finally accepted it

.

John Kerry isn’t the first American to be taken to the cleaners by the Russians, but it’s doubtful that any of his predecessors were fleeced so effortlessly.

Obama’s continual speechifying contrasts unfavorably with the style of Thomas Jefferson, who is claimed by the Democrat/Socialist Party as its founder.

Obama has spent more time (and taxpayers’ money) traveling about the country making campaign-style, fund-raising speeches during his four-plus years in office than any other president in history.

Only on a few occasions has he deigned to invite senior Republican legislators to meetings at the White House.  When Republicans expressed objections to some of the president’s policies, he curtly dismissed their concerns by declaring, “I won.”

When his recent speechifying tour failed to arouse public opinion in support of his proposed expansion of gun control, the president bitterly chastised Democrat/Socialists and Republicans alike in a press conference speech.

Thomas Jefferson, who famously observed that the best government is the one that governs the least (in contrast to liberal-progressive collectivism), approached matters very differently.

Jon Meacham, in his Pulitzer Prize wining biography, Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power, wrote:

“From his time spent in the Confederation Congress and presiding over the Senate for four years as vice president, Jefferson appreciated how to handle lawmakers…a president’s attentions meant the world to politicians and to ordinary people alike.  For all his low-key republican symbolism, Jefferson understood that access to the president himself could make all the difference in statecraft – hence his dinners with lawmakers and his willingness to receive callers…

“The president had to be able to trust lawmakers with insights and opinions that he might not offer to a broader audience, creating a sense of intimacy and common purpose.  Making speeches at other politicians – or appearing to be only making speeches at them – was not the best way to enlist their allegiance or their aid, nor to govern well.”

Mike Adams’s distillation of liberal-progressive, secular religion on college campuses.

Quote:

…the main problem in higher education is not that we don’t teach religion at the university. The problem is that we teach false religion.

We teach kids that they may define the unborn as property if it will facilitate their sexual lifestyle or their economic well-being.

We teach kids that both their conduct and idea of right and wrong are determine by society and culture respectively.

We teach kids that man has the capacity to construct a utopian society so long as he is freed from the constraining idea that he is broken by sin and separation from God.

All of this is dangerous because it amounts to self-worship. That is dangerous because it requires a rejection of God, not just a rejection of tradition. Somewhere in the process, the idea of inalienable rights gets lost. Rights suddenly come from man. And that means man can take them away. These ideas have consequences.

Thomas Sowell reminds us that, “Virtually nothing that is being proposed in current gun control legislation is likely to reduce murder rates.”

If the same “logic” employed by people opposed to the 2nd Amendment were applied to the terrorist slaughter at the Boston Marathon, President Obama would be leading a crusade to impose feckless regulations requiring background checks and police registries for people buying components of bombs.

Regardless of proposed and enacted tightening of gun control regulations, criminals or mentally unbalanced killers will have no difficulty in stealing or illegally buying firearms, as they now and always have done; terrorists or crazies determined to murder and maim with bombs will not be stopped by laws or regulations expressing the sympathies and good intentions of citizens and politicians.

In 1984, his novel about left-wing collectivist tyranny under Big Brother, George Orwell coined the term Newspeak to designate the government’s use of words and phrases to mean whatever the government wanted words to mean.  The aim was to keep Big Brother’s subjects confused and afraid to do or say anything on their own.  As in Thomas Hobbes’s “Leviathan,” the sole source of power was to be the sovereign’s sword, and the principle of political order was continual fear of sudden and violent death.

Robert Curry explains how the Democrat/Socialist Party uses Newspeak.

Liberalism
by Robert Curry

In the United States “liberal” means today a set of ideas and political postulates that in every regard are the opposite of all that liberalism meant to the preceding generations.  The American self-styled liberal aims at government omnipotence, is a resolute foe of free enterprise, and advocates all-round planning by the authorities…Every measure aiming at confiscating some of the assets of those who own more than the average or at restricting the rights of the owners of property is considered as liberal and progressive.
Ludwig von Mises, Liberalism

The term “liberal” comes from the Latin “liber” meaning “free.”  Liberalism originally referred to the philosophy of liberty, that is, the philosophy of the American Founders and their tradition, the great tradition which inspired the Founders and which they did so much to define and advance.

In fact, if Freidrich Hayek is correct, the introduction of the term in its original sense has a very close historical link to the Founders.  Hayek traces the introduction of the term “liberal” to its use by Adam Smith.  Hayek points to such characteristic passages as this one in The Wealth of Nations of 1776 where Smith wrote of “allowing every man to pursue his own interest his own way, upon the liberal plan of equality, liberty, and justice.”

The term “liberal” today means the precise opposite of what it once meant.  Using the original, classical meaning, Mises wrote:

“As the liberal sees it, the task of the state consists solely and exclusively in guaranteeing the protection of life, health, liberty, and private property against violent attacks…Anti-liberal policies have so far expanded the functions of the state as to leave hardly any field of human activity free of government interference.”

The policies Mises refers to here as “anti-liberal” were actually labeled as liberal by their proponents.

So, we have a familiar word with two totally opposite meanings, one meaning having been very nearly completely buried by the other.  How did this confusing state of affairs come about?

It was the result of a political master stroke by that shrewdest of politicians—FDR.

If you measure presidential success simply by the number of times a man is elected to the presidency, then FDR is the most successful American President.  Once elected, FDR was able to hold office until his death.  His claim on the office attests to his astonishing ability to dominate the game of politics.

But to understand the brilliance of his capture for his political purposes the term “liberal,” we need to understand the challenge FDR faced and the opportunity that he seized.

Progressivism

“Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
Lord Acton, 1834-1902

“I cannot imagine power as a thing negative and not positive.”
Woodrow Wilson, 1856-1924
As the noted scholar J.

President Obama called for a higher minimum wage in his State of The Union address.  That sounds good to the great majority of people, who don’t understand even the basics of economics, but it will harm the people whom he intends to help.

Raising the minimum wage always has decreased hiring for entry level jobs.  Labor unions and other maggots feeding in the socialist cesspool strongly support higher minimum wage laws on the assumption that they will push up all wages.

But if businesses can’t make profits with higher wage costs, they will reduce output, which means fewer jobs, or will raise prices, which negates the effect of higher minimum wages.

Read Raise the Minimum Wage and Get Minimum Jobs, posted on the Fiscal Times website.

The president manifestly is an ignoramus with regard to economics, as evidenced by his deficit-spending stimulus programs and other economic interventions that have produced the longest major recession and debauching the dollar since FDR’s Great Depression in the 1930s.

He suffers the same deficiency regarding science.

In his inaugural address, and on many other occasions, Obama cites consensus among climate study fraudsters as more worthy of consideration than the simple, unavoidable fact that there has been no global warming for at least the most recent dozen years.

Nonetheless, Obama continues his pursuit of uneconomic, and often destructive, “green” policies, including bankrupting the coal mining industry.  As the fraudulent “scientists” of global warming admit themselves, global warming has always been nothing more than a panic lever to push us toward a world socialistic government in order to redistribute wealth on a global scale.

Read In Their Own Words: Climate Alarmists Debunk Their ‘Science’ on the Forbes website.

Quote:

IPCC official Ottmar Edenhofer, speaking in November 2010, advised that: “…one has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy.  Instead, climate change policy is about how we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth…”

…subordinating climate science to ideology, however well intentioned, have proven to be incredibly costly.

The U.S. Government Accounting Office (GAO) reports that federal climate spending has increased from $4.6 billion in 2003 to $8.8 billion in 2010 (a total $106.7 billion over that period). This doesn’t include $79 billion more spent for climate change technology research, tax breaks for “green energy”,  foreign aid to help other countries address “climate problems”; another $16.1 billion since 1993 in federal revenue losses due to green energy subsidies; or still another $26 billion earmarked for climate change programs and related activities in the 2009 “Stimulus Bill”.

Virtually all of this is based upon unfounded representations that we are experiencing a known human-caused climate crisis, a claim based upon speculative theories, contrived data and totally unproven modeling predictions. And what redemptive solutions are urgently implored? We must give lots of money to the U.N. to redistribute; abandon fossil fuel use in favor of heavily subsidized but assuredly abundant, “free”, and “renewable” alternatives; and expand federal government growth, regulatory powers, and crony capitalist-enriched political campaign coffers.

Obama still intends to destroy Judeo-Christian faith to clear the way for imposition of the secular religion of socialism.

Read Birth Control Mandate Revised by Default, Not Design on the Fiscal Times website.

Quote:

This new “modification” only applies to the scale of the insult to religious liberty and practice, rather than retreating from it entirely.  HHS continues to impose yet another cost on businesses and insurers at a time when job creation remains stagnant and the economy is contracting.  At the same time, the Obama administration continues to operate on two levels of condescension: presuming to tell business owners what their religious beliefs should be and treating women in the workplace as children who can’t take care of their own birth control needs without a patronizing freebie from their bosses.

The Obama administration may have modified the HHS mandate, but they haven’t modified their arrogance a single whit.

To understand what drives our student radical generation and their progeny, notably Obama, read The Liberal Jihad: The Hundred Year War Against The Constitution.

The Federal Reserve tells us that inflation is under control, but prices paid by businesses for raw materials and machinery are surging.

As Milton Friedman opined (and Paul Volcker, the only Fed chairman ever to reduce inflation, agreed), inflation everywhere and always is a monetary phenomenon.  It is not caused by greedy businessmen increasing prices, as politicians would have you believe whenever gasoline prices spike.  Government itself, through deficit financing and creation of fiat money, is the guilty party when the overall purchasing power of the dollar falls.

Periodic price fluctuations in different goods and services is not inflation, but a result of changes,  or expectation of changes, in supply and demand.  Bad winters in Florida produce higher orange juice prices.  Iranian threats to close the Straits of Hormuz, or shutdowns of refineries in this country for maintenance, cause price changes for petroleum in the futures markets.  Last year’s dry summer, coupled with government mandates for increased ethanol production, pushed up corn prices.  Such price increases will subside as supplies are increased or demand for them is reduced.

Inflation as a monetary phenomenon means that the amount of money is deliberately increased by governments, in our case the United States Treasury working through the Federal Reserve system, faster than the production of useful goods and services.  Prices of whatever individuals or businesses purchase are pushed up, but at different rates in different sectors of the economy.

As far back as there are monetary records, rulers debased the precious metals content of the coinage and continually increased the amount of debased coinage in circulation to finance their collectivization of power without arousing the public with additional taxes.  This coinage debasement was price inflation in the same pattern as today’s manufacture of trillions of dollars by the Fed out of thin air to purchase the Treasury’s debt.

Rulers in earlier centuries inflated the coinage to finance their wars.  Our government debases the dollar to fund its ever-increasing deficit spending on the bloated welfare state.  This is inflation, a hidden tax.

The Fed’s official goal of 2% inflation per year, even if monetary officials can hold CPI increase to that rate, will, over a normal working life of thirty five years, steal half the value of your income and savings.  Your dollar income would have to double just to maintain your starting income’s purchasing power.  Roughly half the value of your retirement savings, if you stashed it in a savings account, will have been confiscated by government-engineered inflation.

Worse, the Fed’s inflationary, easy money policies push business and consumer spending in uneconomic directions.  Without the surge in creation of fiat money, there would have been no dot-com boom and bust, nor the unsustainable housing bubble that triggered our current recession.

After the end of World War I, the Federal Reserve first began its attempts to manipulate prices in the economy.  From 1921 through 2005, the CPI increased 941%.  What cost only a dollar in 1921 would on average cost roughly $1,000 today.

As noted in my recent post about so-called core inflation, price increases in consumer goods other than food and fuel have been more moderate than price increases that businesses must pay for everything from raw materials to machinery and equipment.

While liberal-progressive educators preen themselves about teaching students “to think,” knowledge gained in public schools has declined dangerously since student activist days in the 1960s.  Along with the diminished breadth and depth of subject knowledge has come a reduced ability to reason systematically and to understand the nature of the degradation of society wrought by liberal-progressivism.

Declining educational quality in our public schools is egregious in two aspects: what is taught and shrunken vocabularies.  Today’s textbooks present falsified versions of history, economics, and political science.  Students read too little and thus acquire inadequate vocabularies.  Words are the essential tools of the mind for understanding and analyzing concepts and processes.

E. D. Hirsch, Jr. analyzes the vocabulary problem on the City Journal website.  Read A Wealth of Words: The key to increasing upward mobility is expanding vocabulary.

I haves written extensively in The Liberal Jihad – The Hundred-Year War Against the Constitution about what is taught as opposed to teaching methodology.

If students don’t know the facts of American history and don’t understand the complex political, philosophical, and religious issues that produced that history, it is absolutely impossible for them to form meaningful judgments about the politically-correct, multi-cultural doctrine they are given in the classroom.

Even Derek Bok, a vigorous defender of social-justice touchstones such as affirmative action and multi-cultural, PC education, has been compelled to confront the shortcomings of “learning how to think.” Fomerly president of Harvard University, Mr. Bok was called back to that post after Lawrence Summers was forced out in 2006 for offending feminists.

Mr. Bok wrote: “Many seniors graduate without being able to write well enough to satisfy their employers. Many cannot reason clearly or perform competently in analyzing complex, non-technical problems, even though faculties rank critical thinking as the primary goal of a college education. Few undergraduates receiving a degree are able to speak or read a foreign language. Most have never taken a course in quantitative reasoning or acquired the knowledge needed to be a reasonably informed citizen in a democracy. And those are only some of the problems.”

John Dewey, during the first half of the 20th century, was the single most influential voice in corrupting American education. His philosophical pragmatism used Darwinian evolution as a pseudo-intellectual rationalization that everything is in constant flux, so there could be no such thing as timeless and universal principles of morality. In Dewey’s pragmatism, there are only actions that work or do not work; there is no right or wrong; the end justifies the means.

An earlier version of Dewey’s pragmatic sophistry, according to Thucydides, Plato, and Aristotle, corrupted public morality and led to the political and economic downfall of Periclean Athens in the BC 5th century Peloponnesian War.

Much has been written about the disintegration of American education. Among the many are three that you should make a point to read: Thomas Sowell’s Inside American Education: The Decline, The Deception, The Dogmas; Alan Charles Kors’s and Harvey A. Silverglate’s The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America’s Campuses and Diane Ravitch’s Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms.

Professor Ravitch catalogs the ideologies that began to take over American education around 1910. Professor Sowell describes the effects of those ideologies on present-day school curricula.