THINKING OUTSIDE THE BOX
By: Charles Ormsby – December 2009
It’s the holiday season and we should all be full of cheerfulness and goodwill towards our fellow citizens. Let’s raise a glass to our political foes and wish them well. Now is the time to put our political differences aside, embrace one another, and celebrate the joy of our shared existence as citizens of the earth.
Bah, humbug!
Bar them from our table, our hearths, and our homes. Rewarding bad behavior only encourages more of the same and we’ve had more than enough of that from liberals.
At first this may seem to be a particularly inappropriate emotion at a time when we should seek to find common ground and heal old wounds.
Heck, just because two people disagree about some political issue, there is no need for animosity. Right?
Aren’t both sides just as worthy? Even if one side has a better answer to society’s ills and the other side’s position is flawed, aren’t both positions held in good faith? And, therefore, shouldn’t each side be respectful of the other’s opinion?
No, no and no. No, on all counts.
The political debate between free market libertarians/conservatives and socialists, regressives, and authoritarians (collectively referred to inappropriately as liberals) is not a debate between two equally righteous political philosophies.
One philosophy has an ethical foundation that respects individual rights and recognizes that these rights cannot survive, indeed cannot exist, without property rights. It encourages voluntary charitable giving to those facing misfortune, but understands that societal respect for property rights has the practical consequence of encouraging productive activity and fostering prosperity.
The other philosophy, while publically professing concern for the welfare of mankind (and the poor in particular), privately detests individual rights and seeks to destroy them by imposing laws that can only be described as totalitarian. In this philosophy there are no property rights; only claims of “societal needs” and the desire of its proponents to control the lives and products of their fellow citizens.
For decades, the political waters have been muddied by the all-too-common, clueless Republicans who supported the liberal/regressive agenda and the occasional, but all-too-rare, Democrats who questioned the erosion of our individual rights by the welfare state. Now the mud is finally settling and the ethical basis of the political debate is becoming clear.
We are engaged in a high-stakes war between two fundamentally opposing and incompatible philosophies:
One based on moral principles and compatible with man’s nature as a rational being, and the other based on force, fraud and theft and designed to serve tyrants and thieves.
One that has the practical effect of encouraging prosperity and ever-improving standards of living, while the other breeds poverty, dependence, and despotism.
Tyrants and thieves have no place at the table of honest and honorable men. Their philosophy is inherently evil and it is routinely advanced based on lies and purposeful distortions.
Every week brings more examples of the moral depravity of liberals. Here are just two from our once respected Senate:
Complex, legislative proposals – typified by the 2000 page Senate healthcare bill – are brought to a vote without time to be read or for the public to digest them and weigh in on their merits. The bill’s provisions are crafted in secret and disclosed just hours before votes are scheduled. Only loud public protests offer any relief.
Critical votes are bought by targeting tax dollars to a legislator’s district (This now-common practice is worse than bribery, since bribes are usually not paid with stolen money). Most recently, Louisiana Democrat Senator Landrieu’s recent vote, the needed 60th vote to bring the Democrat healthcare monstrosity to the Senate floor, was bought with $300 million of OUR money. Such boldface bribery was so ugly that it was written into the bill in very obscure language, specifically designed to hide it from the public. Once it was discovered, the congresswoman admitted her pride in selling her vote when she responded to criticism by stating: “I will correct something. It’s not $100 million, it’s $300 million, and I’m proud of it and will keep fighting for it.”
The moral decay fostered by the liberal agenda is also evident in the once-trustworthy, scientific community as was illustrated recently when climate conspirators, bent on supporting government control of energy usage, were caught rigging their data to support the concept of global warming and that it is caused by human activity (go to climatedepot.com to read the lurid details that involve not just the purposeful distortion of data, but also a conspiracy to discredit those, described as skeptics, who do not concur with conclusions touted by the climate alarmists).
As an aside, we should reflect on the impact on scientific objectivity of our federal government having a stake in the outcome of scientific research. If the government takes control of healthcare and, as a result, the fiscal realities of healthcare costs are transferred from the private sector to the government, will we be able to trust the scientific data that the government will adjust to satisfy its political/fiscal agenda?
Just witness the recent mammogram and pap-smear controversies. The issue is less the merits of these particular recommendations than it is the unavoidable loss of scientific objectivity in the decades to come. All of medical science will be influenced by politics and debated as political issues. Will we decide on medical truths via opinion polls and at the ballot box or in objective scientific laboratories? If the government takes control of healthcare, all of medical science will be subject to political influence and will not be worthy of our trust. Our life expectancy will surely suffer.
Obama and his leftist supporters have given us a valuable holiday gift: They have clarified the core issues of our political debate and they have made the moral basis of our political choices more evident.
The political war now being waged isn’t being fought by two sides having equal moral standing. A philosophy that requires and actively supports the destruction of human liberty is not the ethical equivalent of a philosophy that seeks to protect individual rights and strictly limit the ability of government to thwart those rights.
Thieves, liars and would-be tyrants must be recognized as such and treated accordingly.
Merry Christmas and Happy Chanukah to all … well, at least to those of good will and honest intentions.