Politics & Culture Blog

 
“We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force.”   -Ayn Rand

• Tea Party
• Patriot
• Government debt
• Government spending
• Taxes
• Criticize how the country is being run
• Make America a better place to live
• Educating on the constitution and bill of rights 
   

• Prior to July 2011: the IRS used keywords for screening.
• July, 2011 – January 2012: “organizations involved with political, lobbying, or advocacy.”
• After January 2012: it was changed again to “political action type organizations involved in limiting/expanding government, educating on the constitution and bill of rights, social economic reform/movement”

Since our founding, we have long understood that our liberty is at risk and recognize that now more than ever people need the intellectual ammunition to defend their lives, liberty, and property. 
 

May 10, 1013 — Several days ago Amanda Berry escaped from a house of horrors where she’d been held as a kidnapped sex slave since 2003, along with two other women and her daughter, who was born of one of the rapes she suffered. The details of this shocking crime disgust all decent people and the monster responsible should be punished to the fullest extent of the law.

But a bit of that disgust should be saved for a tormentor of Amanda’s mother, Louwana Miller. I mean the self-styled “psychic” Silvia Browne.

The year after her daughter went missing, this desperate mom appeared on the Montel Williams TV show, where the  psychic Browne told her, concerning Amanda, “She’s not alive, honey.” Louwana reluctantly accepted the psychic’s word. She gave up hope. Her health suffered and she died a year later, never knowing her daughter was alive.

Psychics, at best, are self-deluded, addled-brained individuals who, in their unfocused minds, believe they have special powers, but who don’t have the mental or moral power to question their own delusions. At worst, they’re vile exploiters who bilk money from the fears and suffering of the emotionally vulnerable.

Browne is a particularly disgusting example of such a creature. As a media hog she has been able to abuse far more victims than your average hole-in-the-wall tarot card or palm reader. In 2001 she was challenged on a TV show to take the James Randi Educational Foundation test, which offers a $1 million prize to anyone who can show, under proper observing conditions, evidence of any paranormal, supernatural, or occult powers. She agreed to do it but has dodged the challenge for a decade. Is this because she doesn’t need the money, having amassed a fortune from the gullible? No, it’s because she’s a fraud!

And if she were anything but a moral midget she would acknowledge that her life has been one of harming others, and she would spend the rest of it exposing and debunking others like herself. But she is unapologetic about her “Amanda’s dead” declaration, arguing “I have been more right than wrong.”

In a rational culture, psychics would be as rare at flat-Earth advocates. Sadly, psychics and their kind are still around; indeed, some of the more foolish police actually use psychics in hunts for missing persons.

You my readers here probably don’t need to be told not to visit psychics. But you might do a little consciousness-raising. Next time you’re in the company of others and walk past a psychic business or see a psychic ad on TV, remind them of Amanda’s mother and Silvia Browne. Remind them that lies kill hope and spread misery.
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Hudgins is director of advocacy and a senior scholar at The Atlas Society.

For further reading:

*Edward Hudgins, “Is Miss Cleo a Criminal? She’s Certainly a Fraud!” March 2002.

*Edward Hudgins, “Scientology, Seizures, and Science.” January 13, 2009. 

*Edward Hudgins, “After The Apocalypse, Try Reason!” May 27, 2011.

 April 8, 2013 -- A criticism of the late, great Margaret Thatcher, prime minister of Great Britain from 1979 to 1990, echoes the digs at her political friend and ally Ronald Reagan: that she was an uncaring, dogmatic political ideologue. In 1986, The Sunday Times wrote “The Queen reportedly … believes that Mrs. Thatcher's Conservative Party Government lacks compassion and should be more caring toward less privileged members of society.”

Open-ended and unfocused compassion should not guide public policy; rather, governments should guide policies by whether they protect an individual's rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness.

But let’s consider for a minute how Thatcher’s goals and policies stack up against more “compassionate” politicians, conservative or otherwise.

Thatcher understood that Britain’s economy in the late 1970s was stagnating because of socialist redistribution of wealth and heavy-handed regulations placed on  enterprises. Unions , backed by government, could extort from employers unsustainably high wages and benefits and demand crippling work workplace rules. Thatcher privatized industries like air travel, telephone, gas, and electric. She cut the top tax rate on earned income from over 80 percent down to 40 percent. She tamed the unions. And government revenues actually went up as the economy grew, while the national debt as a percentage of GDP went down.  In the 1980s Britain’s economy grew and strengthened.

Now look at the results of the more “caring,” dogmatic socialist policies in Greece. That country is bankrupt. The production of wealth has been so penalized by government that there is little wealth left to redistribute. People demonstrate in the streets about government austerity, but what’s the alternative? Do like the government of Cyprus and steal what money people still have deposited in banks?

Is it really “compassionate” to expropriate other peoples’ money, to penalize producers, to tell the recipients of state-stolen goods that they are entitled to such redistribution, and then blame the expropriated wealth creators for the misery that ensues?

Thatcher observed in a 1976 interview that “Socialist governments traditionally do make a financial mess. They always run out of other people's money.” Thatcher’s goal was to restore individual liberty to the citizens of her country. It turns out that this is one of the most compassionate things one can do—if economic opportunity and prosperity are one’s goals.

So here’s to Margaret Thatcher, who helped return to her people some of the liberties they had lost, who stood against Soviet tyranny, and who made the world a better place in the process!
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Hudgins is director of advocacy and a senior scholar at The Atlas Society.

For further reading:

*Edward Hudgins, “Brits Escalate Global War on Producers.” January 8, 2012. 

*Edward Hudgins, “Obama’s Grab-Bag Socialism.” April 4, 2009.

Francis I, the newly installed Pope, has called on Catholics to protect all humanity, “especially the poorest, the weakest, the least important, those whom Matthew lists in the final judgment on love: the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the naked, the sick and those in prison.”  

If the Pope really wants to see a world in which all people can prosper, he needs to understand that the route to that goal is not government redistribution of wealth or even private charity. It is free markets.

Cry for Argentina

Consider his native country of Argentina. In the early twentieth century it was one of the top ten in GDP and per capita income, giving rise to the saying “Rich as an Argentine.” It had first-world infrastructure—rail transport, electricity—thanks mainly to British capital, and a world-class agricultural sector, with its beef especially prized. Argentina was really a European country that just happened to be in South America.

But things went south with a military dictatorship in the 1930s followed by the accession to power of the demagogue Juan Peron in 1945. He modeled the country’s economy after the “corporatism” pioneered by his recently-executed hero Benito Mussolini.  Government had a heavy hand in managing the various sectors of the economy. When he was driven from power by another military coup, his country’s economy was in shambles. But in the following decades, the government never allowed true free markets to operate and the country went back and forth between unstable democracy and military juntas.

So as the then-Archbishop Jorge Bergoglio of Buenos Aires, the now-new Pope was wrong to complain concerning his country that “the social-economic crisis and the resulting poverty has its causes in policies inspired by forms of neo-liberalism that  considers earnings and market laws as absolute parameters, to the detriment of the dignity of persons and peoples.”  In fact, the Heritage Foundation’s latest Index of Economic Freedom gave Argentina only a score of 46.7 out of 100, ranking it as the 160^th freest economy. Argentines don’t enjoy economic liberty, “neo” or otherwise but, rather, suffer under statism.

Perusing Peru

If Pope Francis seeks economic salvation for the world, he might peruse The Other Path, the revolutionary 1987 book by Peruvian economist Hernando DeSoto. That author documented how in his own country the poor were kept in their place by government regulations that restricted economic freedom in order to protect corrupt vested interests. For example, DeSoto and his researchers found that it would take a poor Peruvian 289 days to get permission from the government to set up a small business with two sewing machines. To secure a piece of abandoned land would take nearly seven years. 

Because of heavy-handed regulations, the poor in Peru—and in most other less developed countries—simply operate in the “informal sector” or “black market.” Some 90 percent of the bus and public transportation in Lima was performed outside the law. Retail markets were mostly informal. So was housing construction.

But while the informal sector affords the poor an opportunity to literally survive, it does not allow them to fully flourish. This is because their property and contracts are not protected by the law. So if Pope Francis wants to see the wealth-creating capacities of individuals unleashed, he should speak up loud and clear for private property rights in free markets.  He might also read DeSoto’s follow-up book The Mystery of Capital, published in 2000, which details the legal structures needed to protect property. 

Moral challenge 

In his desire to help the poor, Pope Francis must face a moral challenge at the heart of his theology. Like his predecessors, this Pope is concerned about “materialism” and speaks of self-sacrifice as the highest virtue. But are not better material conditions just what he wants for the poor? But is it not “selfish” for the poor to desire such conditions and to seek them through their own honest efforts?

Religions have always been at best confused on these goals. Perhaps deists two centuries ago might have argued that the “pursuit of happiness” was instilled in us by God and should be our highest goal as individuals. But that’s hardly what the Supreme Pontiff of the Catholic Church is proposing.

Pope Francis will have to wrestle with these theological conundrums. But if he’s serious about seeing a world in which all can prosper, he needs to understand that individuals acting in their own self-interest, dealing with their fellows based on mutual consent, is the way to such earthly salvation.
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Hudgins is director of advocacy and a senior scholar at The Atlas Society.

For further reading: 

*Edward Hudgins, “Make Trade, Not War.”

*Edward Hudgins, “Why Africa Needs Economic Freedom.” February 16, 2008.

*Edward Hudgins, “Secular Spirituality." December 2006.

The world is thankfully rid of Hugo Chávez, the president and strongman demagogue of Venezuela. But it is not rid of the problems he exploited—and often created—nor of the morally shameless individuals who pimped for him in the United States.

Class hatred

After a failed military coup in 1992, Chávez came to power through election in 1999 intending to transform his country into a socialist regime. He wanted to be the next Fidel Castro.

His first weapon of choice was demagoguery. Venezuela had a democratic tradition, however imperfect. And democracies have been prone to demagogues since the first ones whipped up angry mobs in ancient Athens. The tyrants of North Korea, by contrast, are not demagogues since the people are thoroughly under the heel of the government.

Chávez fanned the flames of class hatred, appealing to envy, naming as villains the “rich” and the bourgeoisie who he proposed to loot in the name of the poor. Of course, Venezuela, like most Latin American regimes, does not have true free markets that allow individuals to prosper only by producing goods and services with which to trade with their fellows. Rather, most Latin American countries are to some degree “corporatist,” meaning that politically-connected individuals, businesses, labor unions, or government elites prosper by getting special favors from government. So Chávez offered himself as the thug at the top doling out the goodies.

Limiting liberty

Yet there was a difference between Chávez and other such strongmen. He worked to limit further what liberty people in his country did have. When he came to power his country had an Index of Economic Freedom score of 56.1 out of 100. By 2013 its score had plummeted to 36.1. It is now ranked 174th out of 177 countries in economic liberty, the next to the worst in the Western Hemisphere, just above Cuba.

And, predictably, the economy began to suffer as a result. His policies have led to shortages of electricity and water and thus a surplus of misery for the Venezuelan people. Price controls led to shortages of food and other goods. And despite having one of the largest oil reserves in the world, Venezuela's oil production has fallen by about a quarter since Chávez came to power. 

Of course, many Venezuelans weren’t buying this. So Chávez reacted to the thousands who opposed him, who marched in the streets, and who went on strike with typical strongman tactics—with intimidation, demagoguery, and even bullets. He had the country’s largest independent television station shut down for opposing him and for failing to broadcast his political propaganda. He worked to eliminate the two-term limit so he could remain in office as long as he could rig himself into reelection.

In the end Chávez didn’t help the poor but he certainly helped himself. After his death it was revealed that Chávez had a fortune, certainly stolen or extorted from Venezuelans.

American-hating nut

Chávez also needed external enemies as a focus of hatred. Following in Castro’s jackboot-steps his target was America. He welcomed America’s enemies to his country—most notably Iran’s Islamist leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad—, praised terrorists, and formed alliances with such types against the United States. He made deals to purchase military equipment from the Russians.

And he was a paranoid nut. The late Christopher Hitchens visited Chávez, along with Chávez acolyte Sean Penn, and reported that Chávez: 

essentially doubted the existence of al-Qaida, let alone reports of its attacks on the enemy to the north. "I don't know anything about Osama Bin Laden that doesn't come to me through the filter of the West and its propaganda." To this, Penn replied that surely Bin Laden had provided quite a number of his very own broadcasts and videos. I was again impressed by the way that Chávez rejected this proffered lucid-interval lifeline. All of this so-called evidence, too, was a mere product of imperialist television. After all, "there is film of the Americans landing on the moon," he scoffed. "Does that mean the moon shot really happened? In the film, the Yanqui flag is flying straight out. So, is there wind on the moon?" As Chávez beamed with triumph at this logic, an awkwardness descended on my comrades, and on the conversation.

Pimping for the dictator

As disgusting as Chávez ‘s legacy is, perhaps more disgusting is the support he has received from America’s homegrown America-haters. The aforementioned actor Sean Penn made himself a personal friend of Venezuela’s top thug. And professional America-hating filmmakers Michael Moore had only good things to say about Hugo. Of course, one might note that few take moral mutants like Moore and Penn seriously.

More loathsome is Joseph Kennedy Jr., the son of the late senator Robert Kennedy and nephew of JFK. Since 2006 he has been pimping for Chávez in TV commercials for the oil company Citgo. We see poor Americans complaining about the high costs of heating their homes and fears of freezing or going hungry. Kennedy then announces heating oil discounts for such folks “from our friends in Venezuela at Citgo.” And in the latest version of the commercial, broadcast the week before Chávez’s death, Kennedy thanks Chávez by name.

Citgo is owned by Venezuela’s government-owned oil company, PVSA. In the past it has operated to some extent above politics, with Americans holding many top executive positions. But because of opposition within PVSA to his communist policies, Chávez replaced the company’s leaders with his own cronies. PVSA's revenues as well as its leadership fueled Chávez and his authoritarian regime, and the company is collapsing due to his depredations. 

After Chávez’s death, American flags at the Houston headquarters of Citgo flew at half mast.

It is good that Chávez is gone. But freedom-loving Venezuelans still have quite a fight ahead of them. And here in America we must recognize that the elements we saw in Chávez can also be seen in the current occupant of the White House. Eternal vigilance is indeed the price of freedom.

On March 1st,  $85 billion in sequester federal budget cuts are scheduled to "kick in" and President Obama is trying as hard as ever to paint the most catastrophic picture possible of the consequences,  never mind the fact that Obama proposed this sequestration in 2011.

Obama claims “border patrol agencies will see their hours reduced. FBI agents will be furloughed, federal prosecutors will have to close cases and lest suspects go … [there will be] more delays at airports across the country, thousands of teachers and educators will be laid off, hundreds of thousands of Americans will lose access to primary care.”

But is any part of that even true?

Mitch McConnell (R-KY) doubts Obama will let this happen, pointing out that “the president won’t cut funds to first responders when just last year Washington handed out an estimated $115 billion in payments to individuals who weren’t even eligible to receive them, or at a time when eleven different government agencies are funding 90 different green energy programs.” With these being just of few of many examples of incredible waste, it's hard to argue that there isn't money available to fund critical government services.

But it gets worse! Not only is there money that could be spent more efficiently, but thanks to built-in increases in both discretionary and nondiscretionary spending, even with the planned sequestration, the national debt will still grow by between $7 trillion and $9 trillion in the next decade—and  that's under the rosy assumption that our benevolent rulers don't create even more spending mammoths like Obamacare, Medicare Part D, or  another full-blown war.

You might be asking, "How can the debt get that much bigger? I thought spending was being cut?" If so, you're probably better at math than D.C.'s big spenders. The $85 billion in “cuts” isn't actually a cut at all. It's a slowdown in projected spending.

Only in Washington, D.C. could the idea of slowing the rate of spending growth by an amount that would fund our current government for only one week be decried as a harbinger of criminals being set loose on the streets, planes falling out of the sky, education falling apart, and the sick being left untreated—many of which occur right now thanks to the failures of government.

Just a few years ago, if someone would have told me that a member of Ron Paul’s family would have been invited to speak to an audience of over 200 at The Heritage Foundation on “Restoring the Founders’ vision of foreign policy,” I’m almost certain I wouldn’t have believed it. But at 11 AM this morning, that is exactly what Rand Paul did.

Since being elected to the US Senate from Kentucky in 2010’s Tea Party takeover of the GOP, Sen. Paul has lead the charge for a return of common sense in American foreign policy. Whether suggesting that sending F-16’s, tanks, and other sophisticated weaponry to nations like Egypt who may use them against America or our allies isn’t a very good way to spend money we don’t even have, or that our military “could be somewhere, some of the time and do so while respecting our Constitution and the legal powers of Congress and the Presidency,” Paul is nothing if not reasonable.

In his speech today, Paul condemned neo-conservative tendencies to get involved in foreign military entanglements that have nothing to do with American interests and sacrifice American resources, while also erroneously wrapping themselves in the “mantle” of Ronald Reagan. However, Paul was equally successful in maintaining a strong anti-isolationist and Reaganesque position arguing for a return to the humble foreign policy encouraged by the Founders—a platform that George W. Bush was elected on in 2000.

Continuing his walk across the foreign policy tightrope he’s raised between two extremes, Paul stated that “foreign policy is uniquely an arena where we should base decisions on the landscape of the world as it is . . . not as we wish it to be. I see the world as it is. I am a realist, not a neoconservative, nor an isolationist.”

Paul went on to draw comparisons between today’s threat of radical Islam and the Cold War Era’s threat of an expanding support of communism and proposed the former be understood as the latter was saying “radical Islam, like communism is an ideology with far reach and will require a firm and patient opposition.”

“Reagan’s foreign policy was much closer to what I am advocating than what we have today,” he said. “The former Chairman of the American Conservative Union David Keene noted that Reagan’s policy was much less interventionist than the presidents of both parties who came right before him and after him.”

If Sen. Paul does make a presidential bid in 2016, you had better believe the GOP will resume its quest to find a candidate who can fill Ronald Reagan’s shoe—it’s beginning to look like Rand Paul might be a good place for them to both begin and end their search.

I am a critic of subsidies for green technologies. I don't think it is at all certain how efficient technologies like solar and wind power will ever become. I certainly disagree with President Obama's view that we must all be forced to subsidize his favored environmentalist projects.

So it was that a representative of Solar City visited my home recently. Solar City has an innovative business model that makes solar installation like signing up for an alternative energy supplier (with a monthly bill rather than having to finance a major building project oneself).

Progressives: Are they for Progress?  Webinar by Will Thomas

In his second inaugural address, President Obama said, “What makes us exceptional, what makes us America is our allegiance to an idea articulated in a declaration made more than two centuries ago. ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, and [sic] among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.’”

So far, so good: these words of President Obama’s, which remind us of the words on which our country was founded, are good words. But the purpose of words is to convey meaning, and the purpose of the words he quoted is to affirm meaningful principles. If we want to be faithful to the words of the Declaration, we must honor their meaning—and to do that, we must remember their meaning.

But other words in the president’s address suggest he does not understand what the Declaration of Independence really means.

The Declaration of Independence stands for the right of individuals to live their own lives and pursue their own happiness. To government, it assigns a specific role: “to secure these rights.” And it calls for unity only for a single purpose: to make sure we have a government that will secure everyone’s individual rights. For that is the only “this” we are all in together: if the government has contempt for anyone’s rights, we cannot be confident that it will respect ours.

But President Obama called on us to come together as a nation for a broader range of purposes, such as technological innovation, road-building, elder care, and science education, in which he wants to enlist the nation.

Some, perhaps all, of those are good values to pursue. (Far be it from me to speak ill of technological advancement!) But when a president chooses the projects of a nation, he supersedes and suppresses the projects of the individual citizens of that nation. Then instead of identifying and pursuing their own ambitions, young people are driven to the careers in which the president wants them to serve; instead of pursuing their own happiness, they become servants of an alleged “greater good.”

Under this view of government, throughout our lives, we are all asked—or forced—to subordinate the pursuit of our own goals to a national agenda and a “greater good” chosen by some combination of public and elite decision-making no one of us can control. But there is no greater good than the good of individuals, the good that is sacrificed by all such national planning.

The president said a society built to his specifications would ensure that every American’s “effort and determination” would be rewarded—and this would give “real meaning to our creed.” But the Declaration already has a real meaning, and it is not that we must unify behind the president’s goals and be rewarded for contributing to them. It is that we have the right to live our own lives, make our own judgments, and pursue our own happiness—and that the president’s job is not to impose his goals, but to make sure each of us is free to pursue ours.

For further reading:

• The Radical But Conservative Declaration of Independence, by Alexander R. Cohen
• The Declaration and a Revolution Today, by Edward L. Hudgins
• Yes, Mr. President, Ayn Rand Is for Teens—and Everyone Else, by Alexander R. Cohen
• Completing the American Revolution, by David N. Mayer

British Prime Minister David Cameron is urging the leaders of the major industrialized countries to engage in a concerted global war to penalize producers who try to avoid having their earnings stolen by governments.

Of course, this is not how he sees the situation. Cameron argues that in his own country government agents must be “more aggressive and assertive in confronting corporate tax avoidance.” He is concerned that multinationals like Starbucks and Amazon (that operate in the UK but might be headquartered elsewhere) find loopholes that allow them to escape what he argues is his country’s low and fair tax on enterprise. Other countries like France and Germany face similar situations.

Thus Cameron sees the need for an international alliance of governments but not, as with other such ventures, to liberate the world from a Communist, Islamist, or Nazi menace. Rather, this coalition would liberate enterprises from the profits of their productive efforts.

Cameron’s quest is yet another manifestation of the contradictions inherent in collapsing welfare states. Western Europe, with the United States not far behind, is experiencing the same sort of death spiral that occurred in the Communist bloc over two decades ago. State redistribution of wealth from makers to takers and heavy-handed regulation of enterprises have produced economic, social, and political crises that cannot be mitigated by the same policies that caused them to begin with. Welfare states are simply running out of victims as fewer people produce and others flee.

But some countries are friendlier than others toward wealth creators—or at least offer them banking havens for their wealth. Thus, statist politicians must work together across national boundaries to deny sanctuaries to those who refuse to be treated as sacrificial animals.

Yet unless they change their policies, in the end the welfare states will collapse, as have Greece and other countries in Europe that are kept afloat only by massive handouts from a somewhat freer and, thus, still moderately prosperous Germany.

Businesses and individuals are morally right to do whatever they can to protect themselves from governments that seek to seize rather than protect their wealth. And the more the producers can prevent welfare states from robbing them of their fruits of their labor, to sooner these states will collapse, offering at least the opportunity to reconstruct regimes dedicated to protecting the lives, liberty, and property of every individual.
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Hudgins is director of advocacy for The Atlas Society.

For further reading:

*Edward Hudgins, “Atlas Shrugging in Late 2012.” December 14, 2012.

*Edward Hudgins, “Switzerland Attacked!” May 15, 2009.

*Edward Hudgins, “Ragnar Shrugged.” May 24, 2006.

*Edward Hudgins, “Atlas Chased.” August 6, 2004.

As we approach the end of 2012 we continue to see the scenario that Ayn Rand dramatized in Atlas Shrugged playing out in our world. As predatory politicians penalize and vilify the most productive members of our society (who are, on average, the most prosperous, too), those would-be victims flee.

French fail

Starting in France, we see that film legend Gérard Depardieu has taken up residence in a small Belgium town in order to avoid the high taxes imposed by his country’s socialist government. French PM Jean-Marc Ayrault whined that “Those who are seeking exile abroad are not those who are scared of becoming poor.” Rather, these individuals are leaving "because they want to get even richer," he said, adding "We cannot fight poverty if those with the most, and sometimes with a lot, do not show solidarity and a bit of generosity.”