Month: February 2016

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Government Bias Corrupts

A recent link from Dennis Prager’s, Prager University Instagram account spawned some thoughts that are worth sharing.

In this 10 second teaser, Prager paints government as the rain cloud which provides the water for the land and crops. This quick graphic also shows roots springing up. The implication is that these roots are weeds, or the corrupt entanglements of crony-capitalism, rather than beneficial crops. [See complete video here]

Like the water cycle in our natural world, the rain water coming from Prager’s government cloud originates elsewhere. The question to be asked is, where does this bounty originate?

  • Does it come from only the richest reservoirs?
  • Does it originate from only the largest lakes and salty oceans?
  • Does it evaporate from our yards, lawns and tea-cups?

The rampant socialism flooding through Washington, DC and our state capital (Salem, OR) promotes the idea that only the wealthy will pay the burden. Yet, we all know that while large lakes release enormous volumes of water vapor they also have the capacity to capture equally large volumes of the returning rain.

By comparison your tea-cup doesn’t have much capacity.

The most insidious part of this equation is that while government pretends neutrality, it is always biased. Government is always biased because it is made, “of the people, by the people and for the people.” People are biased–you and I, your senator, your representative, your governor and your president.

This is part of our humanness. We each have our own likes, dislikes, dreams and preferences. We have been gifted with our own natural tendencies, inclinations, skill-sets and wholesome individuality. This is not a bad thing.

This conforms nicely with our Founders love of individual liberty and natural law. They wrote extensively about everyone deserving fair and equal treatment under the law. Their era was filled with robust discussions regarding methods for ensuring equality through public participation and constitutional limits on power and authority.

Our constitutionally federated republic was designed to set people free and to constrain excessive government control.

Without Constitutional constraints on government, we face the naked possibility that “might makes right”.  We can witness this across the US, at every level of municipal, county, state and federal government. The most obvious examples surface in legislation for healthcare, minimum wage, solar and wind energy subsidies, climate change and education.

Former US congressman and budget director for the Reagan administration, David Stockman, insists that economic controls are nothing but a malignant cancer resulting from statist ideology and shameless pursuits for political power.

In Oregon, our raincloud has been loaded with highly combustible energy policies, restrictive gun-control measures and minimum wage boondoggles. Unfortunately, Oregonians will be paying the price for this destructive rain.

How can I make this claim?

It’s easy, follow the money. Look at whose cups are getting filled.

For example, with the minimum-wage, Democrats claim that higher prices and low wages are the two things crushing those earning minimum wage salaries. Do they think raising the minimum wage will lower prices? If prices do rise (to cover the increases in wages) will the poor be exempt from the new higher cost of a burger and fries? Does this solve the cost-of-living conundrum? How many low-wage earners will lose their jobs as businesses strive to control costs?

Additionally, for all the media time spent on social justice and wage-inequality, this legislation makes wage inequality the “Law of the Land.” The progressive voting block, centered in Portland, gets enormous wage increases compared to those elsewhere in the state. Why? What happened to the supposed concern for “equal pay for equal work?”

Portlanders, in the Governor’s “Showpiece” Tier will race to a mandated minimum hourly wage of $12.00, by 2018. While the “Peripheral” Oregon Tier will not receive that wage until 2020, and the poor folks on the “Frontier” won’t arrive in Nirvana until 2021.

This is not humanitarian equality, this is nothing but pandering and vote-seeking. Government gets the bounty while the lowest person on the totem-pole gets sacked.

Stockman documents in his book, The Triumph of Politics, “Public policy [is] not a high-minded nor even ideological endeavor, but simply a potpourri of private interests parading in governmental dress.”

Government cannot accomplish what it claims without 1) gathering resources, 2) feeding itself first (with 60% of the resources gathered), and 3), designating a special-interest group for the remainder. Yet, just like the rainfall, the moisture must come from somewhere.

These policies will not help Oregonians. These are gross misrepresentations masked in humanitarian language and masquerading as some glorious fount of governmental blessing.

“The fundamental source of all your errors, sophisms and false reasonings is a total ignorance of the natural rights of mankind. Were you once to become acquainted with these, you could never entertain a thought, that all men are not, by nature, entitled to [equality.]” —Alexander Hamilton, 1775

Recommended Books…

 
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Politically Mandated Punishments

The idea of government in America had a glorious beginning. America’s foundational concept was that men, by right, ought to be free. Self-governance was the goal. Centralized forms of government should be pre-determined and limited. The original 13 colonies developed a compact to serve certain, specified national interests.

The main interest of that federal compact was to secure individual rights. The rights of the individual are foundational, eternal and set the stage for our nation’s premiere document–The Declaration of Independence.

These rights are self-evident endowments from our Creator. They carry enormous weight because all men are created equal. Five unalienable rights are identified:

  • Life,
  • Liberty
  • the Pursuit of Happiness
  • the Right of the People to alter or to abolish a faulty or failed system, and
  • the Right to institute new Government, laying its foundation… in such form, as to …most likely effect their Safety and Happiness.

Our founders weren’t suggesting that governments should be done and undone like disposable diapers. They were aware that mankind is, “more disposed to suffer… than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.”

Yet, this is where we find ourselves. We are suffering under the weight of the modern Leviathan, 1)  because we have slowly become accustom to government controls and 2)  because many people profit from the corruption pulsating throughout the system.

Our original American designs have been transmogrified from institutions that were engineered to secure our rights and ensure our freedoms. Now they have become organizations that demand our strictest obedience and compliance with what is acceptable to the so-called “majority.”

This follows the same technique that was used by Lenin in the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. At the time, in Russia, there were many factions seeking government power and control. One group was the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party, which was a Marxist organization. It was a small party and it was split amongst two competing subgroups: the Mensheviks (“minority”) and the Bolsheviks (“majority”).

The Bolsheviks actually represented the “minority” because they were the smaller of the two factions. They successfully acquired the name “majority” after an internal party-wide campaign to acquire the name.

The Bolsheviks represented the small faction led by Lenin. Lenin successfully used this “minority” to organize his violent and revolutionary opposition to the czarist government. They propagandized, campaigned and used violence to spawn factions among the populace and they created enormous divisions across regional boundaries.

Across our nation we can witness, daily, these same destructive tendencies that fomented the minority sponsored Bolshevik revolution. In America, we can see the echo of these progressive redefinitions, where ideas shed their traditional meaning to correspond to the latest populist ideology.

Ten years before the Bolshevik revolution, American author, J. Allen Smith wrote his own progressive redefinition as follows, “True liberty consists not in divesting the government of effective power, but in making it an instrument for the…prompt enforcement of public opinion.”

This redefinition is nothing more than an attempt at spit and polish on the arbitrary chains stemming from some arm of bureaucratic control.

Look at recent events in Oregon.  Have these people been heard, treated fairly, set free or shackled?

  • the occupiers of the Malhuer Wildlife Refuge, Harney Co.
  • the $400,000 fine and re-sentencing of Dwight and Steve Hammond, Harney Co.
  • the $135,000 fine against Sweet Cakes by Melissa, Multnomah Co.
  • the firing of Harmony Daws, from Sparkling Palaces, for being elected as president of a pro-life group, Multnomah Co.
  • the harassment of Jessica Morton after false charges were made and her innocence proven, Josephine Co.
  • the killing of LaVoy Finicum, Grant Co.

Shackles are shackles and the bigger the government, the bigger the problem.

President Woodrow Wilson was a big government guy. During his presidency he felt that businesses had gotten the upper-hand and that more government interference was needed as a legitimate check. He knew big industrialists who were, “afraid of somebody, are afraid of something. They know that there is a power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive, that they had better not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it…” This accurately describes the fear that most Americans have of their own government.

Wilson continues in his progressive double-speak and identifies what he helped to successfully engineer:

“We have been dreading all along the time when the combined power of high finance would be [combined with] the power of the government….We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated, governments in the civilized world–-no longer a government of free opinion, no longer a government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a government by the opinion and duress of small groups of dominant men.” – — President Wilson, 1913  [edit added]

Political power means leveraging the government machinery for purposes of control. Political control allows for politically mandated punishments but this has nothing to do with justice. This is why we have not seen any mainstream media outrage at the $135,000 fine levied against Sweet Cakes by Melissa. After all, it was “legally” assessed by an official bureaucrat. This means bureaucrats throughout the system “possess far more power over people than could be justified by any social contract–unless people are presumed to have implicitly contracted for their own destruction.”*

* Bovard, James, Freedom In Chains: The Rise of the State and the Demise of the Citizen, (St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1999) p. 211

 

Recommended Books…