Thoughts From A Conservative Mom

Posts Tagged ‘Statism’

Numerous opinion polls show that after the November elections, the Republican Party will have regained enough seats in the House to take back the majority position and the Speakership. Results for the Senate are less amenable to forecast, but even so, gains up to and including a remote chance for a majority are possible there as well.

It is necessary to remind Republicans of one salient fact about this predicted shift in political strength as a result of the 2010 midterm elections, and it is a fact that can be expressed in just a few words:

You may have a majority, but you do not have a mandate to govern in any way that you choose.

Read more at American Thinker

Memo to Republicans: It’s Big Government, Stupid!

Midterms Not Just Toxic for Democrats

Glenn Beck is driving the Left and the Right crazy. Beck co-opted the Martin Luther King, Jr. “I Have a Dream” celebration and turned it into a near religious revival. This drove Al Sharpton up the wall. His counter event was a non-event. Many on the Right are condemning the efforts of Beck because he’s a Mormon. 

So where are the evangelical pastors and churches doing what Beck is trying to do?  You can’t beat something with nothing. So what’s your plan besides telling people not to get involved in politics and “moralizing” is not the gospel?  Is it possible that there is a moral dimension to the Christian life?  Of course there is, and those who say otherwise are diluting the gospel and putting us in danger. I’ve addressed this issue ad nauseum.  See my book Myths Lies and Half-Truths if you want to know my thoughts on this issue.  Beck is an indictment on evangelicals similar to the way women politicians are an indictment on weak-willed male politicians who helped to get us into this political mess.

Read more at American Vision

Glenn Beck makes history: Washington rally shows power of conservatism in America

Activism or Awareness? A False Choice

The Not-so Mormon Soteriology of Glenn Beck

Economist Richard Vedder on Why College Costs So Much

View on YouTube

Imagine that you have a product whose price tag for decades rises faster than inflation. But people keep buying it because they’re told that it will make them wealthier in the long run. Then, suddenly, they find it doesn’t. Prices fall sharply, bankruptcies ensue, great institutions disappear.

Sound like the housing market? Yes, but it also sounds like what Glenn Reynolds, creator of instapundit.com, writing in The Washington Examiner, has called “the higher education bubble.”

Government-subsidized loans have injected money into higher education, as they did into housing, causing prices to balloon. But at some point people figure out they’re not getting their money’s worth, and the bubble bursts.

Some think this would be a good thing. My American Enterprise Institute colleague Charles Murray has called for the abolition of college for almost all students. Save it for genuine scholars, he says, and let others qualify for jobs by standardized national tests, as accountants already do.

“Is our students learning?” George W. Bush once asked, and the evidence for colleges points to no. The National Center for Education Statistics found that most college graduates are below proficiency in verbal and quantitative literacy. University of California scholars Philip Babcock and Mindy Marks report that students these days study an average of 14 hours a week, down from 24 hours in 1961.

The American Council of Alumni and Trustees concluded, after a survey of 714 colleges and universities, “by and large, higher education has abandoned a coherent content-rich general education curriculum.”

They aren’t taught the basics of literature, history or science. ACTA reports that most schools don’t require a foreign language, hardly any require economics, American history and government “are badly neglected,” and schools “have much to do” on math and science.

Read more at Townhall.com

Professors and Pharisees

Bias and Bigotry in Academia

The High Cost of College and What it Does to Your Children

Economics is a subject that dominates public life and important policy discussions these days, but most people who rely on what they’ve learned of it in the schools are entering the intellectual battle unarmed.

Economics courses in high school are few and far between and often deal with little more than “consumer” issues: how to balance a checkbook, how to find the best deals in the market, or how to borrow money at the lowest interest rate. Those are all useful things to know, but the mental tools and essential principles needed to analyze and evaluate the paramount issues of the day are too often missing.

Moreover, even a cursory examination of textbooks used in high school economics courses reveals a dismal level of understanding or outright bias by the text authors themselves. Students are sometimes reading, for instance, that citizens are under-taxed, that government spending creates new wealth, and that politicians are better long-term planners than private entrepreneurs. It is not uncommon for texts to portray free market competition and private property in a suspicious light while presenting government intervention with little or no critical scrutiny. It therefore may actually be a blessing rather than a curse that so few students are exposed to what passes these days in the schools as “economics.”

When people have little or no economic understanding, they embrace the “quick fix” and support impractical “pie-in-the-sky” solutions to problems. They may think that whatever the government gives must really be “free,” and that all it has to do to foster prosperity is to command it.

Economically illiterate people are easy prey for currency cranks who argue that manufacturing more money will make us wealthier. They may even think that trade is a bad thing, that if we shut the borders to the flow of goods our living standards will rise. They will be not only unable to identify economic snake oil, but also untrained to detect its harmful consequences.

Read more at the Center for Individual and Economic Liberty

Reality Economics

The Keynesian Fraud

Never before has government spent so much and intervened so directly in credit allocation to spur growth, yet the results have been mediocre at best. In return for adding nearly $3 trillion in federal debt in two years, we still have 14.9 million unemployed. What happened?

The explanations from the White House and liberal economists boil down to three: The stimulus was too small, Republicans blocked better policies, and this recession is different because it began in a financial meltdown. Only the third point has some merit, and for a different reason than the White House claims.

On a too-small stimulus, this isn’t what Democrats or most Keynesian economists told us at the time. Even Paul Krugman, who now denies intellectual paternity for this economy, wrote on November 14, 2008 that “My own back-of-the-envelope calculations say that the package should be huge, on the order of $600 billion.” The White House raised him by 33% two months later, but now we’re told that wasn’t enough.

Given that the stimulus program was so poorly structured and so overtly politicized, how do we know that, say, $500 billion more would have made a difference even on Keynesian terms? The money for government spending has to come from somewhere, which means from the private economy. Our guess is that by ensuring even higher debt and implying higher taxes, a bigger spending stimulus would have done even more harm.

Stimulus godfather Mark Zandi and CBO have produced studies claiming that the stimulus saved millions of jobs and thus prevented an even deeper recession. But these are essentially plug-and-play economic models that multiply the amount of dollars spent by the assumed impact on jobs based on previous studies, and, voila, the jobless rate would have been higher without such spending. In the real world, the economy lost 2.51 million jobs.

As for blaming the Republicans, with only 40 and then 41 Senators they couldn’t stop so much as a swinging door. The GOP couldn’t even block the recent $10 billion teachers union bailout. The only major Obama priorities that haven’t passed—cap and tax and union card check—were blocked by a handful of Democrats who finally said “no mas.” No Administration since LBJ’s in 1965 has passed so much of its agenda in one Congress—which is precisely the problem.

Read more at the Wall Street Journal

The Obama Tax and Spend Hikes

The Audacity of Failure

Keynes vs. Hayek: The Great Debate Continues

The Keynesian Fraud

Keynesians need a recovery group called “Control Freaks Anonymous”.

As a culture, we like our reality on television, but seem to oppose it in economics.

For more than two years now, and even longer depending on your dating scheme, the federal government has waged war on the reality of the incredible Fed-fueled bubble that developed in housing with spillover effects on the rest of economic life.

That bubble had to explode to restore some sanity to the economic environment. There is no getting around that. The policies were all about trying to paper over what we did not want to deal with as facts. But the facts won’t go away.

Already the government has done everything in its power to override market signals, at the same time it is attempting to make market signals operate in a way that conforms to political priorities. The problem is that you can’t do both. You have to either defer to the market or abolish it.
The same is true with unemployment rates, which are stubbornly high. Now, what does it tell you when there is a surplus of workers relative to the number of job opportunities? It means that in some sectors, jobs are selling at too high a price. There are fixes for this. You can lower the minimum wage, reducing the cost of hiring, or workers can lower their reservation wage.

As it stands, Washington is doing nothing to encourage any of these fixes, so of course unemployment remains very high. Many young people have actually removed themselves from the market by going back to school to avoid paying their student loans. The state universities are glad to take their money.

A good indicator of future business conditions is commercial and industrial loans. They continue to fall as if off a cliff. How does the Fed deal with this? By keeping rates as low as possible on the short end, so that way banks have nothing to gain by lending and consumers have nothing to gain by saving. Not smart.

Meanwhile long-term rates are being held down by the existence of a too-big-to-fail doctrine for mortgage-holding companies like the nationalized Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. In a real market, there is no telling where rates would be, but they would be high enough to compensate for risk. When there is no risk, or that risk is socialized, you see the absurd scenario of falling rates during the largest mortgage crisis in American history.

A major difference between now and the 1930s relates to the standard of living of consumers themselves. Everyone is still shopping, still living high on the hog, still going out to eat, still spending lavishly. But how and why? The answer is consumer credit, which is down but not nearly in proportion to the fall in economic prospects.

Such opportunities didn’t exist in the 1930s. People had to live within their means. Today we can all just go on fooling ourselves for as long as possible.

Do we even want to raise the ghastly subject of government finance? Let’s not go there.

Suffice it to say that the entire system today is shot through with artifice that just can’t last. What are we to do about it? The present course is going to drive us further and further into disaster. The only real answer was stated by Ludwig von Mises in 1931, in an essay in the book “The Causes of the Economic Crisis”.

Read more at Lew Rockwell

The Great Depression According to Milton Friedman: Government Failed, Not Capitalism

The United States faces overwhelming fiscal problems. Our current level of government spending and future entitlement obligations are simply unsustainable. However, as concerning as these fiscal matters are, the biggest problem America faces has nothing to do with economics, but rather psychology.

The strength of a nation reflects the character of its citizens. While America was once considered a nation of individuals fiercely independent and self-reliant, her citizens are moving closer to a state of dependence, characterized by irresponsibility and ambivalence. This change has been instigated by the politics of collectivism and the growth of the social welfare state.

F.A. Hayek, the famous Austrian-born economist and political philosopher, warned of the dangers of excessive government.

The most important change which extensive government control produces is a psychological change, an alteration in the character of the people.

To understand how this alteration occurs, one must first understand the psychological concept known as locus of control. In 1954, American psychologist Julian Rotter introduced the concept that describes how individuals could be divided into two basic groups, which represent two ends of a continuum (Figure 1): internals believe that their locus of control is within themselves, and externals believe that they are under the control of outside forces.

According to Lee Harris, author of The Next American Civil War:

[Internals] believe that they are the masters of their own destiny; they tend to be high-achievers, optimistic about their ability to improve their lot, and to discard bad habits. They believe in willpower and positive thinking. They are determined to control their own lives, for better or worse. [Externals] look on themselves as victims of circumstances, the playthings of fate. If they go to bed drunk, light up a cigarette, and burn their house down, they explain the disaster as another instance of their bad luck, and not their poor judgment, much less their bad habits.

Read more at American Thinker

Why the Left Despises Personal Responsibility

Paul Ryan: 70% of Americans Becoming Dependent on Government

Tax Day or Payday? How the Tax Code Is Expanding Government and Dependency

The Fall of Rome and Modern Parallels

To Reform Government, Reform the Culture

The Alinskyites are getting desperate for anything they can use to smear the opposition, even when they have to invent it!   Multiple “party crashers” have already been exposed as imposters at previous events.   Now they’ll be videotaping their antics and trying to pass them off as “evidence”.

A new website sponsored by the NAACP and left-leaning media operations is seeking videographers and bloggers who will search out “racism” and “extremism” among Tea Partiers.

Teapartytracker.org will feature tweets, interviews with people at rallies, blog entries and a picture of a t-shirt they say someone spotted at a rally that reads “Blacks own slaves in Mauitania, Sudan, Niger & Haiti.”

The site, sponsored by the NAACP, Think Progress, New Left Media and Media Matters for America, will monitor “racism and other forms of extremism within the Tea Party movement. We call on the Tea Party to repudiate extremists among their ranks and join in civil dialogue with all Americans.”

Read more at Fox News

According to Discover The Networks, all of the groups are “Secondary” or “Indirect” Affiliates of the George Soros Network

The Crashers: They came, they saw, they failed

The Obama administration is “taking the first steps to confiscate retirement dollars,” according to Dr. Jerome Corsi who predicts that the end result will be retirees with 401(k) plans holding near-worthless government debt “that will be paid off in a devalued currency worth…pennies on the dollar.”

All of this is being promoted by the idea that individual citizens aren’t saving enough for their retirement, and that consequently government has to “do something.” Rep. Jim McDermott (D-Wash., above photo), Chairman of the House Ways and Mean’s Committee’ Subcommittee on Income Security and Family Support, is confused about whose money is in those 401(k) plans: the individual contributor, or the government. He said that “since the savings rate isn’t going up for the investment [Congress is making] of $80 billion [in 401(k) tax savings], we have to start to think about whether or not we want to continue to invest that $80 billion for a policy that’s not generating what we now say it should.”

The worldview of Rep. McDermott is revealing, and brings clarity to the point of view of many in the Washington establishment that the $4.5 trillion currently invested in 401(k) plans and other private pension plans that enjoy tax breaks actually belong to the government, and that when Congress loses $80 billion that would otherwise flow to Washington due to those tax breaks, it’s an “investment” that must “generate what we say it should”, or else it must be replaced with something else that works better.

The real “story behind the story” was revealed by Joe Wolverton here when he said,

…since the day of his inauguration, Barack Obama and his congressional co-conspirators have consistently and unapologetically set out to systematically nationalize the economy of the United States: first the banks; then the insurance companies; then the auto industry; then healthcare; and now the piece de resistance, the private savings accounts of millions of middle-class Americans.

But, thanks to the SEIU and their program “Retirement USA,” it’s all dressed up to look like a good deal for unsuspecting owners of retirement plans.

Read more at the Constitutionalist Today

Obama’s Pension Grab

Class Warfare’s Next Target: 401(k) Savings

This is a fantastic documentary!  I highly recommend that you get a copy and show it to your church, small group, and friends, whether believers or not!

View on YouTube – Part 1

View on YouTube – Part 2

View on YouTube – Part 3

View on YouTube – Part 4

View on YouTube – Part 5

Can Christians be Capitalists?

The 5 Big Lies About American Business: Combating Smears Against the Free Market Economy

Money, Greed, and GodThe Ugly Side of “Social Justice” Theology

Evangelical Left Twists the Gospel in ‘Social Justice’ Fervor

Barack Obama’s Marxist Spiritual Advisor

Is Socialism Biblical?

The Base Metal of Christian Socialism

TRUE Social Justice: Transforming Lives In Need

THIS is the kind of frightening ignorance we have to rescue our country from, and the reason why some are arguing that we’ll never get government off our backs until we bring back the culture of personal responsibility.   

If I didn’t know any better, I’d say this was a prank call.  But sadly, it wasn’t.  Wow!  I don’t know whether to laugh or cry!

View on YouTube

Healthcare or a Hummer? Life’s Tough Choices

Voter: Obama Is Going To Pay For My Gas And Mortgage!

Back on Uncle Sam’s Plantation

Something for nothing? Think again

Walter Williams: Good Intentions

To reform the culture, take back our children’s education from the socialist indoctrinators! 

Can all of America’s political problems be solved by returning to constitutional, limited government? The answer given by many conservatives and libertarians is a resounding yes. Reading the Founding Fathers, the answer would generate a more complex answer.

In the Federalist Papers, the authors dedicate considerable space to history’s failed experiments in self-government. John Adams wrote in 1798, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

What Adams suggests is the people’s character impacts our government’s character. The early generations of Americans were independent-minded folks. Help for those in need came from the church, the family, or the community. Citizens expected only a few limited functions to be performed by the state.

In 21st century America, we expect the government to provide Social Security retirement and disability, unemployment insurance, Medicare, Medicaid, student loans, and Pell Grants. Parents expect their children to have a free public education through thirteen years of school.

Two tactics for dealing with this are popular. The first, the rationalistic approach, tries to challenge people with a debate about numbers and the effectiveness of government solutions. The second, the pragmatic approach, avoids taking on any popular program, other than fleeting attempts to reform Social Security. The last administration chose the latter tactic.

The pragmatic approach fails because the areas most in need of the reform are politically difficult to address. The rationalistic approach fails because it doesn’t address the culture. For example, many elderly Americans rely on Medicaid to take care of their long-term-care expenses once their net worth has dropped to nothing. The key problem here, however, is the culture that considers it acceptable for us to allow our parents to go into poverty so the government can step in.

Conservatives talk about the church and the community returning to its proper role of caring for the poor, but this effort is easier said than done. Pastors complain about the poor viewing churches as welfare agencies. Judging by donation reports, churches would be overwhelmed if they had to take on all the people dependent on the government. We cannot effect a permanent reduction in the size and scope of government, or meaningful government reform, unless we change our culture’s demand for the government to provide our every need.

Conservative icon Phyllis Schlafly identified how cultural issues impact voting with her politically incorrect declaration: “Seventy percent of unmarried women voted for Obama. And this is because, when you kick your husband out, you’ve got to have Big Brother government to be your provider.”

The statement angered liberals and embarrassed some conservatives, but CNN’s 2008 exit poll does show that 74% of unmarried women with children, and 69% of unmarried women without children, voted for Obama. In fairness, however, 68% of unmarried men with children also voted for Obama. And 56% of unmarried men without children voted for Obama; compare that to the 53% of married men who voted for McCain.

The poll also showed those who attended religious services at least weekly voted for McCain, while those who attended less frequently or not at all voted for Obama. A more religious, more marriage-minded America would have voted quite differently.

In the end, the majority of the world has little in common with the libertarian archetypes of Howard Roark or John Galt. We will either have strong families, strong houses of worship, and strong communities, or we will have strong government to take the place of all three.

This isn’t to say government must or can solve our culture’s problems. However, those on the right who think conservative goals for limited government can be achieved through passing economic legislation are spitting in the wind. We will never have a limited government until we have a culture that allows for one.

To change our culture, we must take a more holistic approach to the issues America faces. Even more than conservative candidates and activists, we have a great need for conservative writers, artists, schoolteachers, Boy Scout and American Heritage Girls troop leaders, ministers, and volunteers in organizations that seek to strengthen marriages.

Read more at Pajamas Media

TEA-Party Hypocrisy: How Much Socialism Is Acceptable?

Religion and Morality: Indispensable Supports

Principium Imprimis – First Principles

Charlotte Iserbyt served as Senior Policy Advisor in the Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI), U.S. Department of Education, during the first Reagan Administration, where she first blew the whistle on a major technology initiative which would control curriculum in America’s classrooms. She has written a book called “The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America”, which is now available as a free e-book download.

View on YouTube

The Shocking Origins of Public Education

The 7-Lesson Schoolteacher

Abolish the Unconstitutional Department of Education

Do You Know What Textbooks Your Children Are Really Reading?

How Radical Professors Indoctrinate Students

Want to Teach? Toe the Ideological Line!

Think about it. Out of all the world regimes over the past century, which ones do you think would be most opposed to homeschooling? Nazi Germany, communist Russia, and nations enforcing Islamic Sharia Law first come to mind. And what is the common tie to all of these? Control. Unfortunately, with socialist agendas sweeping the globe, the mindless conformity of youth through indoctrination at government-run schools to the government’s point of view on social, political, and moral issues is a top priority of many nations falsely aspiring for a global community of “tolerance.”

But today, the suppression of parental rights to teach and influence their own children isn’t restricted to overtly fascist regimes. Take a look at Sweden, home of Ikea and Volvos. A couple months ago in June, attorneys with the Alliance Defense Fund and the Home School Legal Defense Association filed Johansson v. Sweden with the European Court of Human Rights so that that the Swedish government will return a seven-year-old homeschooled boy to his parents. Dominic Johansson was forcibly seized by Swedish authorities from his parents in June 2009 after they had boarded a plane in their move to India. The reason? He was homeschooled. No warrant was issued before taking him into state custody, and the family was charged with no crime. Young Dominic was abducted because officials deemed home instruction to be an unsuitable method of raising a child, insisting that the government knows better about how to rear children.

Dominic is now in foster care and attends a government school. Heartbreakingly, his parents are only allowed to see their son for one hour every five weeks. To “justify” their action, Swedish authorities cited the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, and quite shockingly, the White House and some members of Congress have expressed interest in ratifying this authoritarian treaty so that this type of government control could be exercised on our shores.

Despite the proliferating homeschooling movement in the U.S., with between two and four million children now being taught from home, the education and judicial systems have had a hard time leaving the influence of youth to their parents. Case in point: In the Matter of Kurowski and Kurowski, a legal matter that demonstrates how the courts have leaned toward state influence over parental influence when it comes to the education of children. Following a divorce, the father of 10-year-old homeschooled Amanda Kurowski had second thoughts about his former wife homeschooling their daughter, even though she performed well both socially and academically. The father contended that his daughter’s strong Christian beliefs needed to be sifted and challenged in a public school setting, and the lower court agreed in July 2009, issuing an order for her to enroll in a government-run school and discontinue homeschooling.

Now, of course, sometimes divorced parents do not agree on details of how to raise their child. Courts may rightly be called to resolve such disputes. But a judge must exercise the right standards when called upon to break a deadlock. When a dispute between these parents arose over homeschooling, the court looked past traditional arguments and made the chilling observation that Amanda’s “vigorous defense of her religious beliefs to [her] counselor suggests strongly that she has not had the opportunity to seriously consider any other point of view.” In other words, the court was attempting to say that it knows better than a parent when a child is getting too much religious teaching. Such reasoning goes to show that, even in the U.S., it has become a main priority of public schools to challenge and convert students’ thinking to reflect that of the state, rather than those espoused at home.

Read more at Advancing Religious Liberty

Court orders Christian homeschooled girl to attend public school

California Court Rules Homeschooling Illegal

Swedish court refuses to return homeschool boy to family

US grants home schooling German family political asylum

The Shocking Origins of Public Education

Threat to Parents’ Rights a Bigger Issue than Rights of a Child

In April, 2002, Minnesota parents concerned about curriculum content in a freshman class at Big Lake High School were invited to sit in on the class and see the content for themselves. That is, until principal Darrel Easterly found out. Suddenly, the morning of their scheduled visits, several moms learned that they had been banned from the school due to “privacy laws.” Mary Stultz, one of the moms, was stunned. “I was in total shock and spent the morning talking to a lawyer,” Stultz told writer Laura Adelmann at the time.

Another mom called Big Lake Superintendent Bob Lageson, who assured her it “should never happen again.” Yet, within weeks, the local school board was meeting to discuss adopting a policy requiring parents to make an appointment three days in advance of a visit, and granting to the principal wide discretion to prevent parents from entering the building even then.

After an unprecedented public outcry, the school board softened the three day requirement for parents of students to merely “as much advance notice as possible” – but they passed the new restriction. They even granted to the principal authority to detain unauthorized visitors until law enforcement arrives, citing criminal trespass laws.

Today, the current student handbook (pp.7-8) declares that “Big Lake High School does not allow students to bring guests or visitors to classes,” which includes parents. Even more importantly, the events that unfolded in Big Lake have played out numerous other times as well, throughout the country. And the courts have consistently upheld such decisions.

The proposed Parental Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution can halt the erosion of parental rights nation-wide, and restore to parents the right to visit their child and see what is being taught. This will not allow individual parents to shape curriculum for an entire school, but it will allow any parent to remain informed of classroom content, and hopefully to opt their child out of material they find offensive.

Please act to protect the right of concerned parents to monitor their child’s education. Sign the petition and get more information at ParentalRights.org.

Parents of 50 Million U.S. Children Soon to Lose Parental Rights