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News

Who has the better economy? Canada or the USA?

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Hans Bader at the Competitive Enterprise Institute reports:

1.2 million Americans have lost their jobs since the $800 billion stimulus package was signed into law.

The stimulus package has directly destroyed tens of thousands of jobs. A provision in the stimulus package that blocked 97 Mexican truckers from U.S. roads “caused Mexico to retaliate with tariffs on 90 goods affecting $2.4 billion in U.S. trade,” destroying 40,000 American jobs.

It also ignited a trade war with Canada. In response to vague “buy American” provisions in the stimulus package, “A number of Ontario towns, with a collective population of nearly 500,000, retaliated with measures effectively barring U.S. companies from their municipal contracts — the first shot in a larger campaign that could shut U.S. companies out of billions of dollars worth of Canadian projects.”

Yet, Obama had the audacity to claim that only passing the stimulus package would save us from “irreversible decline” and economic ““disaster”.

Obama’s policies echo those of Herbert Hoover, who helped spawn the Great Depression through his protectionism and tax increases.

Remember how Democrats used to complain about Bush and his “tax cuts for the rich”? Yeah, it’s strange how only people who pay taxes (59% of the public) can actually get tax cuts, isn’t it. But Obama has an even better idea: “tax hikes for the poor”.

The Washington Post reports on Obama’s new car tax: (H/T Heritage Foundation, Michelle Malkin, Stop the ACLU, Gateway Pundit)

A senior administration official said the new standards would raise the cost of an average car by $1,300, $600 of which could be attributed to the rules being announced today.

This is not to mention the electricity tax (cap and trade), the cigarette tax, taxing employee health care plans, and the rising cost of living caused by protectionism.

On the other hand, let’s take a look at Canada in relation to the United States, courtesy of the Cato Institute. (H/T Heritage Foundation)

The Cato Institute writes:

Spending: Spending by all levels of the Canadian government peaked at 53 percent of the country’s GDP in the early 1990s, then plunged to 40 percent in 2008. U.S. government spending has risen, reaching 39 percent of GDP in 2008. And with the stimulus package, that number is likely to jump even higher.

Government spending as % of GDP
Government spending as % of GDP

Debt: The Canadian government cut its debt from 71 percent of GDP in 1995 to 32 percent in 2008. Under President Obama’s budget plan, U.S. federal public debt will jump from 41 percent of GDP in 2008 to more than 60 percent next year.

Federal debt as % of GDP
Federal debt as % of GDP

Deficits: Canada has balanced its budget every year since 1998 — not by raising taxes, but by cutting spending. The United States balanced its budget for four years in the late 1990s, but now deficits are so large that it’s difficult to imagine that ever happening again.

Surplus / Deficit as % of GDP
Surplus / Deficit as % of GDP

Corporate Taxes: Canada has cut the corporate tax rate from 28 percent to just 15 percent, and most provinces have trimmed corporate taxes as well. The U.S. federalstate rate stands at about 40 percent, and the Obama administration is planning to increase corporate taxes.

Corporate tax rates
Corporate tax rates

It’s important to note that the Liberal party in Canada is socially progressive, but moderate on fiscal issues. Of course, now that the Conservatives have been running things, it’s gotten even better. It would be great if they could win a majority. The biggest problem in Canada right now is the fascist Human Rights Commissions, but there are candidates from the Conservative Party who intend to abolish the HRCs in BC and Ontario.

Polemics

Is morality rational, on atheism?

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UPDATE: Welcome readers from the the Western Experience! Thanks for the link, Jason!

Last week, I posted a list of 13 questions that Christians could use to get discussions going with their atheist friends. We got 10 responses to the questions. Yesterday, we took a look at the minimal requirements for robust, prescriptive morality. Today, we’ll evaluate atheism, as represented by the 10 respondents to the survey, to see whether the minimal requirements are rationally grounded by atheism.

1) Objective moral values: NOT GROUNDED

All ten respondents stated that moral values have no mind-independent existence. In other words, they are purely subjective. Eight of the respondents thought that each person should decide for themselves what is moral for them, and 2 thought that each person should act in accordance with the arbitrary social conventions of the culture where they lived. Those standards change over time and in different places, of course. They are arbitrary.

2) Objective moral duties: NOT GROUNDED

All ten respondents said that there was no such thing as objective moral values, and so there can be no objective moral duties either. Most people said that their own preferences were the source of subjective moral values. But a duty owed to oneself can be canceled when things get difficult. The best attempt was the social contract answer, but this fails because the social contract is arbitrary. There is no reason to limit your happiness because of an arbitrary social contract, so long as you can escape the social consequences of disobedience.

3) Moral accountability: NOT GROUNDED

Nine respondents did not believe in God. The one who did believe said that God did not care about our actions. Therefore, there is no accountability for the decisions we make. So long as we can avoid the consequences for violating the arbitrary fashions of the time and place where we live, nothing will happen to us if we put our happiness above the needs of our feelings of “empathy” for others.

4) Free will: NOT GROUNDED

All ten respondents were materialists, and therefore did not believe in minds or souls independent of the material that makes up the body. Therefore, everything that humans do is fully determined by the genetic programming and the sensory inputs. To expect moral choices or moral responsibility on atheism is like expecting the same from a computer. Physical systems don’t have free will. There is no “ought to do” for lumps of matter that are not designed by anyone for any specific purpose.

5) Ultimate significance: NOT GROUNDED

All ten of the respondents were materialists, so life ends in the grave for them. Scientists have discovered that in the future, the amount of usable energy, such as the heat and light emitted by stars, will run down to zero, the “heat death of the universe”. What this means is that the entire universe will become cold and lifeless at some point. Humans are therefore doomed to extinction no matter how they act.

Conclusion

On atheism, there is no reason for an atheist to constrain his pursuit of happiness. If he does take into account the needs of others because of feelings and emotions (“empathy”), he is acting irrationally. Feelings are not logical arguments. There is no such thing as a “moral” action on atheism, all actions are undertaken for pleasure or personal preference.

In the survey results, none of the ten respondents could oppose slavery on rational grounds, none of the ten respondents could perform self-sacrificial acts on rational grounds, and none of the ten respondents could explain why murder was wrong, on rational grounds. They may have chosen the right alternative, but only based on emotion, not on reason.

As Greg Koukl argues, morality is not rationally grounded on atheism. Now, it is true that atheists act inconsistently in ways that seem to be moral. This is because:

  1. Judeo-Christian morality is still floating around in out Western society, even though it is on the way out due to materialist persecution of public religious expression and the Judeo-Christian theology that grounded morality
  2. Regardless of what materialism says, God made the universe with objective moral values, and humans with free will, so even if people say that morality is relative and that they are machines, they may still act inconsistently to do the right thing, since their views are mistaken, especially if the costs are minimal

But when the heat is really on, they will cave in to their desires. Rational grounding is needed in order to do the right thing when there are consequences for doing the right thing.

Further study

You can get the full story on the requirements for rational morality in a published, peer-reviewed paper written by William Lane Craig here. You can also hear and see him present the paper to an audience of students and faculty at the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2008. The audio is clipped at 67 minutes, the video is the full 84 minutes. There is 45 minutes of Q&A, with many atheist challengers.

The video of this lecture is the best material you can get on this issue, and the Q&A from the hostile audience is vital to the lesson. More debates on atheism and morality can be found on the debate and lecture page.

You can find a post contrasting the morality of an authentic, consistent Christian with an authentic, consistent non-Christian here. A post examining how atheism is responsible for the deaths of 100 million innocent people in the 20th century alone is here. A post analyzing the tiny number of deaths that religion was responsible for is here.

News

Is Obama keeping America safe?

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Let’s see how Obama is performing on national security issues. Most of these links courtesy of Free Canuckistan.

Former FBI agent tells NewsMax that Obama is making another 9/11 “inevitable”. (H/T Infidel Blogger Alliance)

A former FBI agent who recently won a lawsuit defeating FBI attempts to muzzle him tells Newsmax that the agency’s morale may be at its lowest ebb ever, and warns the “chilling” effect of Obama administration policies is making another terrorist attack on the U.S. homeland “inevitable.”

…”I’m not exactly sure where the president is coming from, but all the signals he gives out is that the United States is prepared to talk peace, we’re not going to do anything to upset any of the people that are conducting all these terrorist acts, we’re going to back out of everything we’ve done before, we’re going to apologize for everything we’ve done in the past – what kind of signals does that send?” Vincent asks. “It sends a signal of weakness and: ‘We are not willing to try and stop what you have planned.'”

Yes, this is what happens when the people claim that Bush could have kept us safe without force or surveillance. We already know how Obama’s leftist diplomacy works. We were attacked multiple times during Clinton’s presidency, and Clinton was like Churchill or Thatcher, compared to the Obama.

IBD had this editorial by economist Thomas Sowell regarding Obama’s national security performance:

In 1938, with Hitler preparing to unleash a war in which tens of millions of men, women and children would be slaughtered, the play that was the biggest hit on the Paris stage was a play about French and German reconciliation, and a French pacifist that year dedicated his book to Adolf Hitler.

When historians of the future look back on our era, what will they think of our time? Our media too squeamish to call murderous and sadistic terrorists anything worse than “militants” or “insurgents”? Our president going abroad to denigrate the country that elected him, pandering to feckless allies and outright enemies, and literally bowing to a foreign tyrant ruling a country from which most of the 9/11 terrorists came?

There was a time when American elected Presidents like Reagan and Bush. Those presidents believed in and fought for the cause of liberty. But that time is gone.

ONE of the world’s most courageous women is locked away in a miserable rat-hole in Rangoon. Her “crime”? Demanding freedom for her people.

…Of course, with an “election” coming up next year, Burma’s kooky generals have every reason to keep their country’s most beloved democrat under lock and key — and most of the world sees through the sham. Voices from Congress to the European Union have demanded Suu Kyi’s release.

And the Leader of the Free World? Silence.

What a change from the previous White House, which had two champions of Burmese freedom in President George and, especially, Laura Bush. Their backing of Suu Kyi was part of a much broader campaign for freedom fighters around the world. Bush sent a clear message to those risking everything for their freedom: If you stand up for liberty, the president will stand with you.

Now, that message is muffled. In recent weeks, some of the worst human-rights violators have seized and detained US citizens — from journalists Roxana Saberi in Iran and Laura Ling and Euna Lee in North Korea, to prisoner John William Yettaw in Burma — with nary a word from President Obama in reply.

Not to mention the forced conversion of Christian children in Egypt to Islam, or the actual torture that goes on in North Korea. (H/T Half Done)

God help us all if the President of the United States is more concerned with scoring political points than improving liberty, prosperity and security, at home and abroad. There is a price to pay for the moral decay that results from rejecting objective morality. When threats arise, the secular left blames America and praises the enemies of liberty and prosperity, as Evan Sayet has argued.

UPDATE: The Heritage Foundation linked to a couple more national security stories.