This is your future. That was my wretched thought on behalf of Canadians as I watched Thursday’s Project Samossa news conference.
Samossa was the major national security investigation that erupted this week in counterterrorism raids and the arrest of four Muslim-Canadians. The government’s charges against three of them imply a wealth of evidence that will shock the conscience of Canadians.
These charges and limited revelations suggest that we could be front-row witnesses to the most vile of manifestations of the Islamist jihad in this country. The allegation is that people living among us and enjoying the immense privileges of Canadian citizenship, are siding with enemy forces aiming to kill and maim our boys and girls serving in Afghanistan — and maybe residents of Ottawa and other Canadian centres, too.
[…]To understand this in the context of Islamic radicalism is to account properly for the main sources of Canada’s escalating extremism. These sources are immigration and refugee influxes, and the homegrown extremist phenomenon.
Liberal politicians long ago turned immigration and refugee streams into vote-importing mechanisms. Conservatives continue to do so at the expense of Canadians’ safety and tens of billions in net per annum immigration costs, plus attendant and overwhelming security costs. So pronounced is the pathology that not even a terrible recession could prevent Immigration Minister Jason Kenney from hiking immigration and refugee levels from what were already roughly the highest per capita in the world. These levels are too great to allow for reliable vetting in a world where war and ideological struggles rage, and we are a target.
The cause of all of these problems is the left-wing political parties (Liberals, NDP and Bloc Quebecois). These left-wing parties hope to import “refugees” and unskilled immigrants and give them the right to vote as full citizens, thus ensuring a fresh supply of votes for socialism.
Consider this recent article from Ezra Levant showing 71% of Tamil “refugees” from Sri Lanka return to Sri Lanka for vacations. Muslims immigrate to Canada and then claim welfare for up to four of their wives. Liberal MP Ruby Dhalla is attempting to buy votes by reducing the residency requirement from 10 years to 3 years for Old Age Security OR Guaranteed Income Supplement money. That means that an immigrant can bring a non-working relative aged 62 into Canada and then let them stay there for 3 years and then they will be eligible for a full pension funded by other working Canadians.
One of the things that makes it tough to figure out how much has to be charged for insurance is that people behave differently when they are insured from the way they behave when they are not insured.
In other words, if one person out of 10,000 has his car set on fire, and it costs an average of $10,000 to restore the car to its previous condition, then it might seem as if charging one dollar to all 10,000 people would be enough to cover the cost of paying $10,000 to the one person whose car that will need to be repaired. But the joker in this deal is that people whose cars are insured may not be as cautious as other people are about what kinds of neighborhoods they park their car in.
[…]Although “moral hazard” is an insurance term, it applies to other government policies besides insurance. International studies show that people in countries with more generous and long-lasting unemployment compensation spend less time looking for jobs. In the United States, where unemployment compensation is less generous than in Western Europe, unemployed Americans spend more hours looking for work than do unemployed Europeans in countries with more generous unemployment compensation.
People change their behavior in other ways when the government pays with the taxpayers’ money. After welfare became more readily available in the 1960s, unwed motherhood skyrocketed. The country is still paying the price for that– of which the money is the least of it. Children raised by single mothers on welfare have far higher rates of crime, welfare and other social pathology.
San Francisco has been one of the most generous cities in the country when it comes to subsidizing the homeless. Should we be surprised that homelessness is a big problem in San Francisco?
[…]We also hear a lot of talk about “the uninsured,” for whose benefit we are to drastically change the whole medical-care system. But income data show that many of those uninsured people have incomes from which they could easily afford insurance. But they can live it up instead, because the government has mandated that hospital emergency rooms treat everyone.
Much has been made of the fact that families making less than $250,000 a year will not see their taxes raised. Of course they won’t see it, because what they see could affect how they vote.
But when huge tax increases are put on electric utility companies, the public will see their electricity bills go up. When huge taxes are put on other businesses as well, they will see the prices of the things those businesses sell go up.
If you are not in that “rich” category, you will not see your own taxes go up. But you will be paying someone else’s higher taxes, unless of course you can do without electricity and other products of heavily taxed businesses. If you don’t see this, so much the better for the Obama administration politically.
This country has been changed in a more profound way by corrupting its fundamental values. The Obama administration has begun bribing people with the promise of getting their medical care and other benefits paid for by other people, so long as those other people can be called “the rich.” Incidentally, most of those who are called “the rich” are nowhere close to being rich.
[…]There was a time when most Americans would have resented the suggestion that they wanted someone else to pay their bills. But now, envy and resentment have been cultivated to the point where even people who contribute nothing to society feel that they have a right to a “fair share” of what others have produced.
The most dangerous corruption is a corruption of a nation’s soul. That is what this administration is doing.
Republicans prefer private voluntary charity as the best way to provide a safety net. Just because people on the left give less to charity than people on the right, it doesn’t mean that no one one gives to charity. Europe has the highest taxes, and they give the least in charity. Why not LOWER taxes for people who want to give MORE in charity? When government hands out money, it encourages people to be more dependent. But when a person in trouble has to go to a neighbor or a charity in their own community, it sends the right message – “this should be temporary – don’t let this become a habit”. It’s not GOOD for someone to depend on the government. People need to work in order to be happy.
Having the government take over the role of provider in the home is an insult to men. It’s not government’s job to replace men. They ought to stay right out of it. Leave money in the pockets of the working man so he can save for a rainy day himself. If you subsidize a behavior, you get more of it. If you tax a behavior, you get less of it. It makes no sense to subsidize irresponsible lifestyle choices and tax productive and moral lifestyle choices. You don’t want to make the rescue from bad decisions an anonymous and automatic affair. You want people to worry, so that they won’t want to make risky and irresponsible choices. Everybody goes through though times, but we shouldn’t make it normal. People ought to know that it’s not normal.
You may want to read about how government dependence makes people less happy than having a job. Don’t make people depend on government by taxing businesses and investment. We need more companies hiring – not less. And that means letting the profit motive provide an incentive for entrepreneurs to engage in more risk-taking and enterprise.
While elite feminists did assume previously male occupations, many more women have entered the workforce in professionalized versions of traditional homemaker roles. This has transformed childrearing and other domestic tasks from private family matters into public, communal, and taxable activities, necessarily expanding the size and power of the state and leading to the creation of vast bureaucracies to oversee public education and social services.
These are precisely the professions now being expanded by the Obama administration’s massive stimulus expenditures. The effect is to amplify the intrusion of the state into the home—indeed, the displacement of the home by the state. For as feminists point out, the feminine functions were traditionally private. Professionalizing feminine roles has therefore meant institutionalizing in government bureaucracies responsibilities that were once characteristic of private life. The politicization of children and the usurpation of parental rights under the guise of child protection are the clearest manifestations of this.
Fathers have been marginalized, and their lives are ever more directly administered by the state. They are not simply “absent,” as Rosin writes—they are increasingly likely to be under the control of the judicial and penal systems. Rosin’s article provides a telling example of a particularly state-feminist form of punishment now meted out to men: therapy.
None of the 30 or so men sitting in a classroom at a downtown Kansas City school have come for voluntary adult enrichment. Having failed to pay their child support, they were given the choice by a judge to go to jail or attend a weekly class on fathering…. This week’s lesson…involve[d] writing a letter to a hypothetical estranged 14-year-old daughter named Crystal, whose father left her…
What is clear from Rosin’s account is that the therapy, like the penal system, has been designed less to punish the alleged crime than to psychologically recondition men.
The class leader
grew up watching Bill Cosby living behind his metaphorical “white picket fence.” “Well, that check bounced a long time ago,” he says. … He continues, reading from a worksheet. What are the four kinds of paternal authority? Moral, emotional, social, and physical. “But you ain’t none of those in that house. All you are is a paycheck, and now you ain’t even that. And if you try to exercise your authority, she’ll call 911. … You’re supposed to be the authority, and she says, ‘Get out of the house, b*tch.’ She’s calling you ‘b*tch’!” … “What is our role? Everyone’s telling us we’re supposed to be the head of a nuclear family, so you feel like you got robbed.” … He writes on the board: $85,000. “This is her salary.” Then: $12,000. “This is your salary. … Who’s the man now?” A murmur rises. “That’s right. She’s the man.”
This is not law enforcement. It is government indoctrination.
So you’re basically looking at the marginalization and criminalization of men in their traditional role through things like no-fault divorce, divorce courts, welfare for single mothers, and biased domestic violence laws. Honestly, do women understand what incentives this creates for men who are contemplating a traditional marriage and traditional roles of husbands and fathers? I guess not.
You really need to read the whole article. I normally would never link to the paleo-con American Conservative (which I mostly disagree with) but Stephen Baskerville rocks. I make his book “Taken Into Custody” required reading for anyone who wants to marry me, because that book destroys the notion of divorce better than any other book. It makes divorce unthinkable just like Francis J. Beckwith’s “Defending Life” makes abortion unthinkable. I get excited when I learn something that makes it more rational for me to do the right thing – and Baskerville will do that for you.
WINTERY KNIGHT 