Tag Archives: Centralized

Mark Steyn argues that big government means less liberty

ECM sent this New Criterion article by Mark Steyn, Canada’s National Treasure, along with Ezra Levant, and Stephen Harper.

Have you heard about Paul A. Rahe’s new book entitled “Soft Despotism, Democracy’s Drift”? I heard an interview with the author on Milt Rosenberg’s radio show, and the podcast is here. But I also found this book review by Mark Steyn, which seems to be popular in the blogosphere. It’s a long read, but you will find it stimulating – especially the citations of Alexis de Toqueville. Prescient.

Excerpt:

…the consequence of funding the metastasization of government through the confiscation of the fruits of the citizen’s labor is the remorseless shriveling of liberty.Is it, as Mark Levin’s caller said, “inevitable”? No, not quite. But it seems like the way to bet. When President Bush used to promote the notion of democracy in the Muslim world, there was a line he liked to fall back on: “Freedom is the desire of every human heart.” Are you quite sure? It’s doubtful whether that’s actually the case in Gaza and Waziristan, but we know for absolute certain that it’s not in Paris and Stockholm, London and Toronto, Buffalo and New Orleans. The story of the Western world since 1945 is that, invited to choose between freedom and government “security,” large numbers of people vote to dump freedom every time—the freedom to make their own decisions about health care, education, property rights, and eventually (as we already see in Europe, Canada, American campuses, and the disgusting U.N. Human Rights Council) what you’re permitted to say and think.

If you think you can run a Christian life in a welfare state run by secular socialists, think again. Their goals and values are not your goals and values, and they will force their goals and values on you, and on your children.

And ECM also send me this article by Mark Steyn in the National Review, regarding single-payer health care.

Excerpt:

When President Obama tells you he’s “reforming” health care to “control costs,” the point to remember is that the only way to “control costs” in health care is to have less of it. In a government system, the doctor, the nurse, the janitor, and the Assistant Deputy Associate Director of Cost-Control System Management all have to be paid every Friday, so the sole means of “controlling costs” is to restrict the patient’s access to treatment. In the Province of Quebec, patients with severe incontinence — i.e., they’re in the bathroom twelve times a night — wait three years for a simple 30-minute procedure. True, Quebeckers have a year or two on Americans in the life-expectancy hit parade, but, if you’re making twelve trips a night to the john 365 times a year for three years, in terms of life-spent-outside-the-bathroom expectancy, an uninsured Vermonter may actually come out ahead.

In Canada, you can deliver babies yourself while you wait. (H/T ECM)

And the same thing happens in the UK.

What are the real goals of environmentalist radicals?

UPDATE: Welcome visitors from In Haught Pursuit! Thanks for the link!

Today I’ve been listening to the audio book version of Christopher C. Horner’s “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming and Environmentalism”. And I thought that I would share with you some quotations from the environmentalist radicals to shed some light on their real motivations.

In the audio book, Horner is tracing the evolution of the modern environmentalist movement back to two failed groups: 1) people who predicted overpopulation and 2) people who advocated for communism. Both of these groups failed, but their aims (mass murder) live on in the abortion and environmentalist movements. Let’s take a look at the real views of environmentalists.

Economist Walter Williams puts it this way:

The authors of the study don’t quite reach a conclusion that I’ve reached about environmental activists, whose agenda calls for private property confiscation and control over the lives of ordinary citizens. Back in the 60s and 70s, America’s leftists called themselves socialists and communists. They were the people who paraded around college campuses singing praises of support to tyrants like Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro and Pol Pot. Today, the communist system and its promises have been revealed as both a miserable failure and a system of unprecedented brutality. Thus, communism and socialism have become an embarrassment, so environmentalism is the name for an old agenda.

Here is an article by Mr. Horner from the National Review to help us with some actual quotations by environmentalists.

1. Radical environmentalists hate capitalism because it helps the poor.

“Giving society cheap, abundant energy… would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun,” says green godfather Paul Ehrlich. Oh, the horrors of subjecting millions to affordable heating, lighting and cooling, transportation, and other freedoms.

the greens [affirmed] their agenda at the August World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg… Among their projects: impeding technology that increases agricultural abundance, even the shipment of food to famine-stricken countries like Zimbabwe; lamenting the pernicious influence of indoor plumbing; and complaining that the poor shouldn’t want (or get) such comforts as electricity because there are larger, Gaia-centric considerations at play.

2. Radical environmentalists favor mass murder of the poor, and not just by abortion and technological regress.

  • “To feed a starving child is to exacerbate the world population problem.” Lamont Cole (as quoted by Elizabeth Whelan in her book Toxic Terror)
  • “This is as good a way to get rid of them as any.” Charles Wursta, Chief Scientist for the Environmental Defense Fund, commenting on the likelihood of millions dying from a global ban on DDT (also quoted in Toxic Terror)
  • “I got the impression that instead of going out to shoot birds, I should go out and shoot the kids who shoot birds.” Paul Watson, founder of Greenpeace (quoted in Access to Energy, vol. 10, no. 4, Dec. 1982)
  • “The right to have children should be a marketable commodity, bought and traded by individuals but absolutely limited by the state.” Kenneth Boulding, originator of the “Spaceship Earth” concept (quoted by William Tucker in Progress and Privilege, 1982)
  • “The only real good technology is no technology at all. Technology is taxation without representation, imposed by our elitist species [man] upon the rest of the natural world.” John Shuttleworth, Friends of the Earth manual writer

And In the Walter Williams article I cited earlier, he adds a couple more:

Then there are statements like those of David Brower, founder of Friends of the Earth, and former executive director of Sierra Club: “While the death of young men in war is unfortunate, it is no more serious than the touching of mountains and wilderness areas by humankind.” David M. Graber, research biologist with the National Park Service wrote, “Human happiness, and certainly human fecundity, are not as important as a wild and healthy planet.” John Davis, editor of Earth First Journal, says, “Human beings, as a species, have no more value than slugs.” Davis also opined, “I suspect that eradicating small pox was wrong. It played an important part in balancing ecosystems.”

These people have an abiding contempt for humankind. They seek to accomplish their agenda with useful idiots in and out of government and make use of what H.L. Mencken warned us about, “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed, and hence clamorous to be led to safety, by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”

Environmentalism is really about controlling others. And when your kids go to public schools to be taught by the left, they are indoctrinated to have these environmentalist beliefs: that humans are bad and that we need to die. The mass murders that emerged from the secular-left are not aberrations – they really do believe in killing hundreds of millions of innocent people with communism, abortion DDT bans, etc.

Round-up of stories on fiscal, social and foreign policy

Gateway Pundit reports that the Democrat government has raised the average wage of government employees by over $2600 during a recession caused by the Democrat’s own policy of forcing private banks via regulation to make risky loans to Democrat special interest groups.

Excerpt from the CBS article:

President Obama’s call last year for “shared sacrifice” doesn’t extend to federal employees, at least based on the details of his administration’s 2010 budget released this week.

At a time when the official unemployment rate is nearing double digits, and 6.35 million people are receiving unemployment benefits, the U.S. government is on a hiring binge.

Executive branch employment — 1.98 million in 2009, excluding the Postal Service and the Defense Department — is set to increase by 15.6 percent for the 2010 fiscal year. Most of that is thanks to the Census Bureau hiring 102,000 temporary workers, but not counting them still yields a net increase of 2 percent in one year.

There’s little belt-tightening in evidence in Washington, D.C.: Counting benefits, the average pay per federal worker will leap from $72,800 in 2008 to $75,419 next year.

So much for communism, the economic system of those who are unable to revise their beliefs in the face of reality and history. I recommend that those who voted for Obama read Robert P. Murphy’s “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Capitalism”, the best economics book for complete beginners. I wonder why American atheistic leftists are still living in the capitalist USA instead of in North Korea or Cuba? Oh, I know: hypocrisy!

And then there is the story of 5 of the 6 wannabe-Jihadists from a Miami terror cell were finally convicted for their part in a plot to attack the Sears Tower in Chicago.

The Jawa Report cites this Chicago Tribune article:

Ringleader Narseal Batiste, 35, was the only one convicted of all four terrorism-related conspiracy counts, including plotting to provide material support to terrorists and conspiring to wage war against the U.S. Batiste, who was on the vast majority of hundreds of FBI audio and video tapes, faces up to 70 years in prison.

Batiste’s right-hand man, 29-year-old Patrick Abraham, was convicted on three counts and faces 50 years behind bars. Convicted on two counts and facing 30 years are 24-year-old Burson Augustin, 25-year-old Rotschild Augustine and 33-year-old Stanley Grant Phanor. Naudimar Herrera, 25, was cleared of all four charges.

Jihad Watch notes some bias in the coverage by AP, where they leave the identity and motives of the attackers to the last few paragraphs.

…Prosecutors Richard Gregorie and Jacqueline Arango focused on the group’s intent as captured on dozens of FBI audio and video recordings. Batiste is repeatedly heard espousing violence against the U.S. government and saying the men should start a “full ground war” that would “kill all the devils.”

“I want to fight some jihad,” Batiste says on one tape.

A key piece of evidence is an FBI video of the entire group pledging an oath of allegiance, or “bayat,” to al-Qaida and Osama bin Laden in a March 16, 2006, ceremony led by an Arabic-speaking FBI informant posing as “Brother Mohammed” from al-Qaida. Testimony also showed the men took photographs and video of possible targets in Miami, including the FBI building, a courthouse complex and a synagogue.

Oooh, but there’s no such thing as media bias! The media is certainly not an arm of the Democrat party that covers their every policy blunder. (H/T Gateway Pundit)

Remember, the media elite has to cover for the Democrats. Who else would give them a bailout of taxpayer money?