Progressive Bigots

While I can’t understand everything that’s happening in the world, I pay attention and try to at least form working hypotheses to explain things. Hypotheses, by definition, are subject to modification as evidence accumulates. At no time should evidence be ignored. It should always be held up against ideas to see if it fits our basic understandings. If it doesn’t, we have to re-shape them - our understandings, not the conflicting evidence.

If you insist you’re right about your view even when a preponderance of evidence points in another direction, you’re a bigot - a word habitually misunderstood. Bigot, according to the World English Dictionary, means “a person who is intolerant of any ideas other than his or her own…” If we look around us with clear eyes, who would best fit that definition? Those who continue saying and doing the same things in the face of overwhelming contrary evidence. People calling themselves progressives were in complete control of the Congress for four years after 2006, and half of Congress since 2010. They’ve controlled the White House for the past six years, and how are they doing? Looking at just two areas we can see they’re screwing up badly. Our economy continues to flounder, and foreign policy is a disaster.

Historical accounts of the Harding and Coolidge Administrations indicate that leaving the economy alone is best. World War II and its Cold War aftermath teach us that actively carrying a big stick works best in foreign affairs. So-called progressive beliefs, however, are opposite for each situation. They increase economic regulation while simultaneously cutting America’s influence in world affairs.

Harding and Coolidge

Progressives firmly believe that expanding government by spending enormous sums of government money - and regulating nearly every aspect of the economy - are the ways to stimulate economic growth. When Hoover and Roosevelt tried out their own “shovel ready” projects like the Hoover Dam and the CCCs of the New Deal, as well as FDR’s hyper-regulatory policies in the National Recovery Administration, they together prolonged the Depression for more than a decade. Obama has gotten a similar result with the weakest economic “recovery” since the Depression - in spite of borrowing and spending trillions, and raising the national debt from $10 trillion to $17 trillion! Undeterred by those debacles, progressives like Paul Krugman insist that we’re still floundering only because we didn’t borrow and spend enough! Evidently he considers taking over 17% of the US economy with Obamacare to be small potatoes.

In the area of foreign policy, President Obama believes that shrinking our military and its activities abroad is the way to go. He firmly believes that most of the world’s problems stem from previous US administrations using America’s enormous economic and military strength to influence world affairs. He started by assuring the world that he was not Bush, and that because his father was Muslim and he was such a nice guy, things would be different. He would both pull back and cut back the US military, and the world would be better off. There simply isn’t any more than that to his foreign policy. To say that it’s been disastrous would be an understatement. Our allies have stopped trusting us and our enemies have stopped fearing us. From Russians to Radical Muslims, the world’s bad guys are having a field day.

When the Harding/Coolidge Administration took office in 1921, it inherited an economic situation much worse than Obama/Biden did in 2009. It was a Depression we don’t hear much about because it didn’t last long. Richard K Vedder and Lowell E. Gallaway, writing in their book Out of Work: Unemployment and Government in Twentieth-Century America claim: “By far the most important business cycle development of the first three decades of the twentieth century was the very sharp economic downturn of 1920 and 1921.” GNP was down 24% and unemployment was in double digits. Rather than expand government intervention the way Hoover, Roosevelt and Obama did, Harding cut it back. He cut taxes and regulation before he died suddenly in 1923, then Coolidge continued those policies when he took over. He was the last president to post a budget surplus in every year of his administration - and the economy soared.

The evidence against excessive government control of America’s economy is voluminous, but do progressives pay it any mind? Obviously not. The Pax Britannia in which England controlled the seas lasted centuries while the world prospered. The Pax Americana has lasted about seventy years, but it’s fraying rapidly under Obama. Will it survive? Not as long as the progressive bigots remain in power. They'll continue doing what they always do and America will go under. We’ll see what the November election brings.

Drowning In Government

The underground economy operates smoothly because government isn’t involved. How many of you have hired the kid next door to mow your lawn? You need a baby sitter? That works the same way and we don’t need government to regulate it, right? Most of us have friends and relatives who work “under the table” and, increasingly, small businesses that remain “on the books” struggle to compete with them.

Government would control and tax the smallest transactions if it could, and it’s trying to. It’s regulating yard sales and lemonade stands in several places. It will regulate every penny we earn and spend if it doesn’t collapse first - and its collapse is inevitable if we stay on the path we’re on. feds tried last year to prohibit children from using power equipment on private land for compensation, so it could conceivably prohibit the kid next door from using your lawn mower. Government licenses day care centers in many places and would control all baby sitters if we let it. Government has been too big for too long and growth is accelerating.

The more government tries to micromanage, the more legitimate business shrinks and the underground economy grows. It’s estimated to account for $2 trillion per year in the United States and $10 trillion worldwide. Democrats in power continue to grow government, but it’s not just them: it grew more under George W. Bush’s administration than it did under President Clinton’s. President Obama, however, has made them both look like pikers. He’s taken over 20% of the economy and bragged that he’ll bring down the level of the oceans even if it means regulating emissions from your lawn mower. His carbon-regulating “Cap And Trade” bill didn’t make it through the Congress, but he’s issuing executive fiats to implement provisions of it anyway. Will he stop the ocean from rising? Of course not, but he’s wreaking havoc on our economy with his ever-increasing regulations. That’s what socialists do.

Big-government efforts to control water levels historically have been hugely expensive and disastrously ineffective. Consider the Mississippi River: The federal government has been building levees and dikes to control flooding for more than a century, but observers point out that those efforts are making things worse. A 2011 article by Richard Maybury called “The River Is Socialist” states:

I’ll never forget the first time I drove along the river’s banks. I had to look up at the passing ships because in some places, the bed of the river is so high, it’s above the surrounding land. It can be kept confined to its channel only by dikes. If the dikes were not there, the river would flow out across the surrounding land and destroy everything. Year after year, decade after decade, the bed of the river rises, and the government responds by raising the dikes. What causes the bed to rise? The dikes. . . . when a river is confined to its channel, it has no place to dump its silt except in the channel. This raises the bottom of the river, until the river overtops the dikes. Did the politicians admit that building dikes was a bonehead idea? Absolutely not. They said, these worsening floods are a huge problem, but give us more money and power… and we will build the dikes even higher. And so it has gone for more than a century. The dikes are raised, which lifts the bed of the river, causing more flooding, plus more demands for higher dikes. All the while, the cities on the floodplains grow larger.

Some geologists believe the great Mississippi floods of 1927 and 1993 wouldn’t have been nearly so bad had government not been “fixing” things. More and more development goes on behind the dikes because the feds subsidize flood insurance. No private insurer would write those policies because they’d lose money and no one would build on floodplain if the feds didn’t provide insurance. Private banks wouldn’t give mortgages either, and who pays for the dikes and the insurance? All American taxpayers, including those of us who live on high ground.

Now consider all the big-government “fixing” of the subprime mortgage market by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac over the past few decades. It has resulted in millions being underwater on their mortgages. Private banks would never lend to these sub-prime borrowers, but government insures their mortgages. It’s the root of our economic mess and President Obama is still at it - guaranteeing sub-prime mortgages - even those already under water, and printing money to do it. In the Mississippi floodplain, people have been underwater both literally and figuratively  because of “help” from government. As government continues to “fix” everything large and small, America drowns in debt.

We’d all be better off if government stopped helping us so much.

The Tragic Vision

Violence. Avoid it whenever possible but be prepared to use it. Why? Because there will always be others to use it against us. That’s the conservative view. I’m a conservative too, and that’s our view of how humans interact. The human race can improve, but it will always be imperfect.

If you’re a secular conservative, you know there will always be sociopaths, and you should be prepared for encounters with them. If you’re a believer, you know there will always be evil this side of heaven, and we should be prepared when we meet it. Both the secular and the theist views are based on something we conservatives call “The Tragic Vision.” It’s the concept first coined by economist Thomas Sowell that there are no ultimate solutions to problems in the human condition, only trade-offs. This contrasts the liberal view that a utopia is attainable, that we can perfect both ourselves as individuals and the societal human condition as well - and government is the vehicle to attain that perfection. The conservative refrain is: “Human nature being what it is . . .” whereas the liberal refrain is: “If only . . .”

Which brings us to the newly-renewed gun control debate. Conservatives believe that “Human nature being what it is . . . we need armed guards in schools.” Conversely, liberals believe “If only . . . we could ban guns altogether our schools would be safe.” The conservative looks at what happened at that Connecticut school and thinks what Wayne Lapierre said: “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” A liberal looks at Connecticut and thinks what John Lennon said: “Imagine all the people living life in peace.”
Liberal elitist David Gregory used his “Meet The Press” show to ridicule Wayne Lapierre’s NRA for it’s support of semiautomatic rifles and putting armed guards in schools. That’s fine for Gregory who put his own children into a private school with eleven armed guards. Last Sunday President Obama - who sends his kids to the same school - went on Gregory’s show threatening to restrict access to guns for the rest of us ordinary Americans. He said he’s fully behind Senator Dianne Feinstein’s bill to renew and assault weapons ban.

President Obama, Senator Feinstein, and Attorney General Eric Holder all want to disarm Americans, and they’re exploiting the Connecticut school shooting to re-invigorate that long-time liberal dream. Knowing this, millions of ordinary Americans are frantically buying guns at an unprecedented rate. Obama’s election in 2008 and especially his reelection in 2012 have spurred gun sales, but the torrid anti-gun rhetoric since Newtown has really done it. bigtime. There’s a domestic arms race underway.

Not only are citizens arming themselves, but so are domestic government agencies- seemingly against a potential domestic uprising. I don’t know how else to account for it. Not only does the IRS need to hire 15,000 new agents to enforce Obamacare, but according to an article in “Business Insider,” it’s buying shotguns for its investigators. It’s one thing for the IRS and Homeland Security Departments to buy ammo, but the Department of Education? The EPA? DHHS? What do they need thousands of rounds of hollow point bullets for? They’re all stocking up. It makes one wonder what the heck is going on.

Eric Holder at Columbia

Remember Senator Obama when he was campaigning for president in affluent Marin County back in 2008? He talked disdainfully about ordinary Americans bitterly clinging to their guns and religion. AG Eric Holder of the “Fast and Furious” assault weapon scandal said in the 1990s: “We have to be repetitive about this [in our schools]. We need to do this every day of the week, and just really brainwash people into thinking about guns in a vastly different way.” When pushing her first assault rifle ban around the same time, Senator Feinstein said she would favor confiscating weapons from Americans if she could only get the votes. It’s scary to contemplate what might happen if the Obama Administration tried anything like that in its second term. That’s what the British tried to do in Lexington back in 1775.

Lexington

Anti-gun liberals like Feinstein are always careful to give a nod to hunters, as if Americans only want their guns to hunt deer, but they misunderstand. Most Americans I know want their guns for two other more compelling purposes than hunting: to protect themselves against criminals and to protect themselves against their own government, should that become necessary. Handguns usually suffice against criminals, but assault rifles would be needed against government.

It’s not just about deer hunting, Senator Feinstein. It’s about liberty and freedom.