Tag Archives: Capitalism

Commentary

Which political party should Christians vote for?

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Mary sent me this disturbing story from Citizen Link, which shows how secular leftist special interests want to restrict religious liberty.

Excerpt:

A “who’s who” of Leftist, humanist, abortion and gay organizations submitted a stern letter to President Obama on Tuesday, demanding that he rescind part of the 2002 Executive Order protecting religious hiring rights.

More specifically, the coalition wants Obama to prohibit contractors who do business with the government from using religious-based hiring criteria.

The letter, signed by 52 organizations, comes days before the 70thanniversary of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Executive Order that barred discrimination by federal contractors. His directive was then codified into law in Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibited employers from hiring and firing based on religious beliefs. In 1972, it was slightly amended to exempt churches and religious associations.

The timing of the letter also coincides with the federal government’s stepped-up efforts to codify into law special protections for gay, lesbian, bi-sexual and transgender people.

Bruce Hausknecht, judicial analyst for CitizenLink, noted the biased news coverage of the weighty issue. “The liberal news media has given Americans the impression that faith-based charitable groups are pushing to rescind these protections,” Hausknecht said. “Not true. A closer look at the list of cosigners reveals the true motive: to silence people of faith and push them out of the public square.”

Cosigners include: American Civil Liberties Union, Americans for the Separation of Church and State, Catholics for Choice, Center for American Progress Action Fund, Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders, National Education Association, National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, National Organization for Women, People for the American Way, Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice and the Transgender Law Center.

When you elect a Democrat, you’re electing someone who wants to use the power of the state to marginalize and censor Christianity. In fact, if you read classical works on economics like “The Road to Serfdom”, you’ll learn that socialism necessarily leads to the destruction of all other liberties, including religious liberty. That is because the bigger that a secular government becomes, the less they are willing to allow individuals to make their own decisions based on their own personal morality and religion. Obama is one of the worst offenders in this regard – we have never had a more pro-abortion and pro-same-sex marriage President. We have never had a President who was more allied with pro-abortion lobbyists and pro-gay-rights lobbyists. And he is also in favor of paying welfare to women who freely choose to raise children without fathers. This man is anti-life, anti-family and anti-marriage. No Christian could vote for such a man.

Should Christians vote for Democrats who want to “tax the rich”?

Let’s make it clear, because a lot of Christians don’t understand this. In order for you to exercise your freedom as a Christian, you need to have money. With money, you can afford charity, private Christian schools, Bibles, apologetics books, marriages, children, homeschooling, and so forth. How do you get that money? You work for it. And how do you make it grow? You invest it.

Now let’s see how the secular left and their agenda of redistribution at wealth hurts that plan.

  1. They get you fired, like Frank Turek was fired by Cisco Systems, because you are a Christian
  2. They tax your income and give it to anti-Christian groups, like Planned Parenthood
  3. They tax your investments to fund public schools which undermine Christian truth claims (evolution) and Christian morality (sex education)
  4. They confiscate money from your employer and redistribute it to government workers and unions, which makes it harder for you to stay employed
  5. They restrict your choices for educating your children, by sending more money to public schools and legislating against private schools and homeschooling
  6. They take over health care, forcing you to subsidize secular leftist causes like abortions, sex changes, in vitro fertilization, etc.
  7. They take over health care, forcing Christian doctors and nurses to perform procedures that violate their consciences
  8. They halt military spending and pro-democracy initiatives, and coddle captured terrorists, encouraging terrorist attacks, like 9/11
  9. They spend enormous amounts of money, increasing government dependence and discouraging families from having children

And so forth. Basically, the more you vote for free market conservatism, the more small businesses there will be. The more small businesses there are, the better your chance of finding an employer who will not discriminate against your Christian faith. (Contrary to popular beliefs, conservatives DO NOT like big corporations – because they are almost ALWAYS liberal, seeking to use the government to block younger companies from challenging them with better quality and lower prices). The more employers there are to choose from, the more likely you can find a higher salary. The higher your salary, the more you have to spend on charity, as well as your family and your community. The more money you make in investments, the more you can buy apologetics books and sponsor apologetics web sites and conferences and debates. The more the government stays out of the free market, the more choice you have to buy goods and services that are in line with your Christian values – e.g. – SCHOOL CHOICE. The more the government stays out of health care, the less you will pay for health care since you don’t need coverage for abortions, sex changes, in vitro fertilization, etc. The less government regulates business, the less opportunity there will be for these secular leftist special interest groups to lobby government to discriminate against Christians.

Commentary

Is Obama right to say that technology destroys jobs?

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From the Wall Street Journal, a rebuttal to the community organizer’s latest episode of economic illiteracy.

Excerpt:

Today, a couple of workers can manage an egg-laying operation of almost a million chickens laying 240,000,000 eggs a year. How can two people pick up those eggs or feed those chickens or keep them healthy with medication? They can’t. The hen house does the work—it’s really smart. The two workers keep an eye on a highly mechanized, computerized process that would have been unimaginable 50 years ago.

But should we call this progress? In a sense it sounds like a deal with the devil. Replace workers with machines in the name of lower costs. Profits rise. Repeat. It’s a wonder unemployment is only 9.1%. Shouldn’t the economy put people ahead of profits?

Well, it does. The savings from higher productivity don’t just go to the owners of the textile factory or the mega hen house who now have lower costs of doing business. Lower costs don’t always mean higher profits. Or not for long. Those lower costs lead to lower prices as businesses compete with each other to appeal to consumers.

The result is a higher standard of living for consumers. The average worker has to work fewer and fewer hours to earn enough money to buy a dozen eggs or a pair of shoes or a flat-screen TV or a new car that’s safer and gets better mileage than the cars of yesteryear. That higher standard of living comes from technology. It isn’t just the rich who get cheaper TVs and cars, plus the convenience of using an ATM at midnight.

Somehow, new jobs get created to replace the old ones. Despite losing millions of jobs to technology and to trade, even in a recession we have more total jobs than we did when the steel and auto and telephone and food industries had a lot more workers and a lot fewer machines.

Why do new jobs get created? When it gets cheaper to make food and clothing, there are more resources and people available to create new products that didn’t exist before. Fifty years ago, the computer industry was tiny. It was able to expand because we no longer had to have so many workers connecting telephone calls. So many job descriptions exist today that didn’t even exist 15 or 20 years ago. That’s only possible when technology makes workers more productive.

This is discussed more in Jay Richards’ book “Money, Greed and God“, which is an excellent little introduction to economics meant for Christians. The chapter you want is on “The Materialist Myth”, which is the idea that wealth is only ever shuffled around, and never created.

Commentary

George Will says that Ted Cruz is the candidate to rally around

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Republican Senate candidate Ted Cruz
Republican Senate candidate Ted Cruz

Kay Bailey Hutchinson has retired from the Senate, and George Will thinks that Republican candidate Ted Cruz is the man to replace her.

Excerpt:

For a conservative Texan seeking national office, it could hardly get better than this: In a recent 48-hour span, Ted Cruz, a candidate for next year’s Republican Senate nomination for the seat being vacated by Republican Kay Bailey Hutchison, was endorsed by the Club for Growth PAC, FreedomWorks PAC, talk-radio host Mark Levin and Erick Erickson of RedState.com.

For conservatives seeking reinforcements for Washington’s too-limited number of limited-government constitutionalists, it can hardly get better than this: Before he earned a Harvard law degree magna cum laude (and helped found the Harvard Latino Law Review) and clerked for Chief Justice William Rehnquist, Cruz’s senior thesis at Princeton — his thesis adviser was professor Robert George, one of contemporary conservatism’s intellectual pinups — was on the Constitution’s Ninth and 10th amendments. Then as now, Cruz argued that these amendments, properly construed, would buttress the principle that powers not enumerated are not possessed by the federal government.

Robbie George??? Robbie George??? Holy snouts! That guy is one of the top academic pro-lifers. Every Christian apologist knows about Robbie George. It’s the law! Well, it isn’t. But it should be!

I continue:

At age 14, Cruz’s father fought with rebels (including Fidel Castro) against Cuba’s dictator, Fulgencio Batista. Captured and tortured, at 18 he escaped to America with $100 sewn in his underwear. He graduated from the University of Texas and met his wife — like him, a mathematician — with whom he founded a small business processing seismic data for the oil industry.

By the time Ted Cruz was 13, he was winning speech contests sponsored by a Houston free-enterprise group that gave contestants assigned readings by Frederic Bastiat, Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises. In his early teens he traveled around Texas and out of state giving speeches. At Princeton, he finished first in the 1992 U.S. National Debate Championship and North American Debate Championship.

As Texas’s solicitor general from 2003 to 2008, Cruz submitted 70 briefs to the U.S. Supreme Court, and he has, so far, argued nine cases there. He favors school choice and personal investment accounts for a portion of individuals’ Social Security taxes. He supports the latter idea with a bow to the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who said such accounts enable the doorman to build wealth the way the people in the penthouse do.

Regarding immigration, Cruz, 40, demands secure borders and opposes amnesty for illegal immigrants but echoes Ronald Reagan’s praise of legal immigrants as “Americans by choice,” people who are “crazy enough” to risk everything in the fundamentally entrepreneurial act of immigrating.

He is a hard-core Republican. He has Republican experiences: legal immigrant, fought communism, studied something that required actual work, founded a small business, etc. This is the prototypical Republican!

You can find out more about him on his positions page. I was interested in his stance on social issues, in particular.

Excerpt:

Ted Cruz has fought to protect innocent human life. He played a leading role in several important cases, including defense of the partial-birth abortion ban, parental consent laws, and prohibiting state funds from going to abortion. These cases have all been part of the ongoing effort to ensure that every child in America  receives the protection and respect he or she deserves.

  • Authored an amicus brief for 13 states, successfully defending the federal Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act. The ban was upheld 5-4 before the U.S. Supreme Court;
  • Authored an amicus brief for 18 states, successfully defending the New Hampshire parental notification law. The law was upheld 9-0 before the U.S. Supreme Court [note: this brief was awarded the Best Brief Award from the National Association of Attorneys General for U.S. Supreme Court briefs written in 2005-06];
  • Successfully defended Texas’s Rider 8, which prohibits state funds for groups that provide abortions, winning unanimously before the Fifth Circuit court of appeals.

Ted Cruz has worked hard in defense of traditional marriage, including his intervention in a case protecting Texas marriage laws. In addition, he has fought on the federal level to defend marriage between one man and one woman as the fundamental building block of society.

  • When a Beaumont state court granted a divorce to two homosexual men who had gotten a civil union in Vermont, Cruz, under the leadership of Attorney General Greg Abbott, intervened in defense of the marriage laws of the State of Texas, which successfully led to the court judgment being vacated;
  • Worked with Attorney General Abbott to send a letter to Congress in support of the federal Defense of Marriage Act.

He has lots of nice actions related to lots of conservative policies on that page. What a resume! Energy production, voter fraud prevention, border security, legal firearm ownership – you name it, this guy has been fighting for conservative principles. Like Michele Bachmann, (and unlike RINO Mitt Romney), he has actually tried to do pro-life and pro-marriage things. We don’t just have to take his word for it, he has the actions to prove his words. Just look at the list of issues on his page!

It’s so funny, because on that page, he says this: “You say you believe in these principles. Show me. When have you fought for conservative principles and what have you accomplished?” This is exactly the question we should be asking of any political candidate. Show. Me. The. Record.