Tag Archives: Statism

News

MUST-READ: Sweden jails parents for spanking and seizes their children

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From Life Site News. (H/T Mary)

Full article:

A Swedish district court has sentenced a couple to nine months each in prison and fined them the equivalent of US $10,650 after they admitted to spanking three of their four children as a normal part of their parenting methods. Corporal punishment of children by parents was made illegal in Sweden in 1979, an early step in what a U.S. parental rights lawyer called the nearly total take-over of parenting by the state in Sweden.

Court documents, quoted by Sveriges Television, said that the parents, who have not been named in the press, “explained that they had used, what they themselves described as spanking, physical punishment as part of their methods for raising the children.”

There is no indication of abuse by the parents in the released documents, with the court noting that the parents “had a loving and caring relationship with their children.”

Nevertheless, the parents have been sent to prison and fined 25,000 kronor for each of the “affected children.” The children have been remanded to state-sponsored foster care since early this summer, and Mike Donnelly, Director of International Relations for the US-based Home School Legal Defence Association (HSLDA), told LifeSiteNews.com that it is “extremely unlikely” that the children will ever be returned to their family home.

Donnelly said that the case is typical of the stories of many families with traditional values in Sweden: “In the area of family rights in Sweden things really aren’t going well there.”

While the HSLDA does not hold an official position on the use of corporal punishment, Donnelly said it is clearly up to parents to determine whether corporal punishment is an appropriate form of discipline.

“Parenting has been outsourced, or simply directly taken over by the state in Sweden,” Donnelly said. “And these parents have been jailed for doing what in America would be perfectly normal.”

Ninety percent of Swedish children are in publicly funded day care from extremely early ages, as young as a year or 18 months, he said. It is the position of the state that parents are overruled by the state in areas of child rearing, he said.

Donnelly said, however, that the best interests of the child are not the state’s highest priority: “So lets take these kids who have had a loving and caring relationship with their parents and send them to foster care, and throw their parents into jail for nine months.”

Donnelly cited the now notorious case of Domenic Johansson, the boy who was snatched by state officials because his parents were homeschooling him, an act that is also illegal in Sweden.

“The bottom line is, don’t go to Sweden. Don’t move there, if you want to have a normal family.”

Well, what do we learn from this story?

Sweden is the most secular country on the planet. They think that the world is an accident and that there is no way that people ought to be – since there is no Designer to hold us accountable to any objective standard of morality. Also, there is no such thing as human rights, such as the right to parent your children as you see fit. The state determines what counts as a right. And you don’t have any rights to your children – they belong to the state. If there is no God, then there is no objective morality, and thus parents have any authority to tell children how they ought to be, or to make moral judgments against them.

Given the  amount of regulation of the family by the state in Sweden, it makes no sense at all to start a family there. But other countries seem to want to follow along where Sweden is leading. Anyone who votes Democrat in the United States (or Liberal/NDP in Canada, or Labor/Liberal Democrat in the UK, or Labor/Green in Australia, etc.) is moving us towards where Sweden is now. Canada’s Liberal party actually has tried to pass a national day care system, and Hillary Clinton favors taxpayer-funded pre-Kindergarden. There is just something in the worldview of the secular left that wants to control the lives of others – a fascistic impulse that has no respect for the privacy of the family.

I should probably mention the word feminism, here. Sweden is also the most feminist country in the world, with laws requiring that boards of directors be 40% female. They do not want women to marry, they do not want women raising children. That is the state’s job, in Sweden. And most of the women in Sweden voted for it. They would rather have the state raise their children than raise the children themselves. They would rather have the state take 60% of their husband’s income and spend it on socialized day care than spend that money on their own family. Then they have the nerve to complain that men don’t want to make commitments. It’s ridiculous. The very laws that feminists vote for are the laws that destroy marriage, family and parenting. No one in his right mind should marry a feminist*.

(*Third-wave feminist)

Videos

Obama administration hands out 111 waivers from Obamacare

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This video is 2 minutes long. (H/T Wes Widner of Reason to Stand)

ECM sent me this article for those who cannot see the video.

Excerpt:

111 companies and organizations were granted waivers by Obama’s Dept. of Health and Human Services so that they could get out of having to comply with Obamacare and unions were particularly well rewarded by the HHS with these waivers.

Interestingly, there was no great announcement of these waivers issued to the press. The HHS buried the waiver announcement six layers deep on its webpage and posted them on Friday when they imagined no one would notice. It’s a typical Friday evening document dump so common when an administration wants to avoid the prying eyes of the people. So much for the “most transparent administration in history,” eh?

One thing is sure about these waivers. Obama rewarded his union pals quite well.

[…]Interestingly enough, Obama has waived the onerous Obamacare rules for quite a few healthcare providers, too. One wonders how good Obamacare could be if the rules are waived for actual healthcare providers?

That article has the full list of the 111 special interest groups who got waivers from Obamacare. The rest of the corporations who did not get waivers will just have to lose jobs, I guess. I guess those are the ones that didn’t support Obamacare.

Remember how unions were pushing for Obamacare? Well they got waivers from it, too.

Neil Simpson has a list of UNIONS that got exemptions:

  1. Service Employees Benefit Fund
  2. UFCW Allied Trade Health & Welfare Trust
  3. IBEW No.915
  4. Asbestos Workers Local 53 Welfare Fund
  5. Plumbers & Pipefitters Local 123 Welfare Fund
  6. UFCW Local 227
  7. UFCW Maximus Local 455
  8. Local 25 SEIU
  9. UFCW Local 1262
  10. Local 802 Musicians Health Fund
  11. Greater Metropolitan Hotel
  12. Local 17 Hospitality Benefit Fund
  13. I.U.P.A.T.
  14. Transport Workers
  15. UFT Welfare Fund
  16. UABT

That’s the list of KNOWN unions.

If Obamacare is so great, then why do all the Democrat special interest groups have to get exemptions from it? Could it be that Obamacare is a job-killing nightmare that not even Democrats want to be bound by?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96Uu_tI0hTw&feature=share
News

The best book on government is Mark Levin’s “Liberty and Tyranny”

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Here’s an excellent review of Liberty and Tyranny in the American Spectator. (H/T Ensign Taiga)

Excerpt:

It’s the book that changed America.

And it isn’t often that a book — any book, even a popular, bestselling book like Mark Levin’s Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto — can be said to have changed the course of American politics and history. The phenomenon is rare, extremely rare, usually taking both the country and even the author by surprise.

Yet Levin’s book has done just that, saluted by Minnesota Republican Congresswoman Michele Bachmann in an exclusive talk with The American Spectator as “providing [the] intellectual balance and foundation” of the Tea Party movement. A movement that stands triumphant this week in the wake of the conservative landslide that Levin himself believes can revitalize the conservative cause that Ronald Reagan once led to the White House.

The results of the 2010 revolt against the Obama Era are staggering. The success of the Tea Party; the defeat of over 60 of Nancy Pelosi’s House Democrats; the election of a half dozen U.S. senators, ten governors and almost 700 state legislators. What startles even more is that one campaign after another focused on the issues Levin featured in his book — the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States, statism, the dangers of a powerful central government.

Campaigns “motivated and inspired” specifically, says Bachmann, by Levin’s Liberty and Tyranny.

[…]Liberty and Tyranny‘s red, white, and blue flag-and-flame cover bearing Levin’s bearded visage was waved aloft at Tea Party rallies. Bachmann marvels that “it’s difficult to educate a nation” but says Tea Partiers made a point to “take copies of the book to town hall meetings” to grill House and Senate members on their knowledge of the Constitution they had taken an oath to obey. The book’s cover itself appeared in poster form. One memorable photo captured former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin at a rally seated next to a soldier, the Levin book clearly visible in her lap. While the Palin photo was both real and un-staged, there was the inevitable humorous photo shopping. North Korea’s Communist dictator Kim Jong Il — aka “The Great Leader” — was pictured brandishing a copy of the book written by the man his friends and fans call “The Great One.” Another Liberty and Tyranny fan went to work mocking Obama’s famous 2008 campaign poster, replacing Obama’s image with an iconic rendering of Levin, the caption changed from “Hope and Change” to read simply: “The Great One.”

Why do people trust Levin so much?

LEVIN IS, FAMOUSLY, a considerable talk radio star, ranked number four in the nation with eight and a half million listeners. He is as well the longtime head of the conservative Landmark Legal Foundation. A former Reagan aide, Justice Department lawyer (serving as chief of staff to Reagan attorney general Edwin Meese III, among other positions in the government) and conservative activist who began his march on liberalism as a precocious 13-year old, Levin is no recent entry into discussions of law, politics, or conservative principles. His friend Rush Limbaugh calls him “F. Lee Levin” in humorous reference to the great trial lawyer, but the humor alludes to Levin’s significant legal abilities that doubtless played a role in his ability to write a book that has stirred such consequence.

Skipping 12th grade to move on to Temple University, Levin graduated — at 19 — Phi Beta Kappa and Magna Cum Laude, with membership in the university’s political science and history honor societies. By 22 he was already a lawyer, having graduated from Temple Law School — finding time along the way to get elected at 19 to his local suburban school board, making him the youngest elected school board member in the history of the state.

Says Bachmann simply: “Mark Levin is an intellectual powerhouse.”

How popular was the the book and what caused people to buy it?

Clearly, as with Paine, Stowe and Goldwater before him, Levin had struck a very American nerve. While the book manifested all the usual best seller symptoms (it was #1 on the New York Times list for three months, #1 on Amazon for all books for several months as well as #2 for all of 2009 on the Amazon hardcover non-fiction list etc.), there was obviously something else going on.

A very, very big something else.

IT’S REASONABLE TO ASK after all of this — why all the fuss over a book that defends the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence? What is it that drives over 1.2 million books to sell like glasses of cold lemonade in the Sahara Desert? What kind of book gets over 2,000 reviews on Amazon, the book rated with five stars by all but a handful of readers? What kind of book sends Americans into the streets waving copies as if they’d uncovered the Holy Grail?

Congresswoman Bachmann thinks she knows the answer. The book, she says simply, was a “gift to our nation.”

In a manner that Levin could not possibly have foreseen, his arguments defending individual freedoms and liberty from what Alexis de Tocqueville called “soft tyranny” — the supremacy of the state suddenly took on a vivid, personal meaning for Americans. As the new Obama administration and its allies on Capitol Hill began rapidly expanding the size and scope of the federal government almost exponentially, jamming a government takeover of health care through a Congress besieged by constituents shouting — sometimes literally — not to do this, millions of Americans were provoked from stunned amazement to outrage. On top of a staggering so-called stimulus plan that cost almost $1 trillion plus government takeovers and bailouts of everything from car companies to financial institutions, the realization dawned on many Americans that Levin was right: the long march of collectivism had suddenly turned into a sprint.

Here’s a video showing how popular the book was:

Really highly recommended, along with the Politically Incorrect Guide to Capitalism by Robert Murphy and Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell.