Leftism

Big Business Is Not Conservative

October 24, 2012October 29, 2012 by Orthodox Editors

by Dennis Prager –
Big business has often been at ideological odds with conservatism.

For example, many big businesses did business with the Soviet Union. A well-known example was Occidental Petroleum’s Armand Hammer — a major donor to the Republican Party, no less — who did business whenever possible with Soviet dictators. And Pepsi-Cola began selling its product in the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War.

How is one to explain the lack of conservative principles among big businessmen? There are two things at work here.

One is an absence of thought.

Whenever I read about multi-millionaire and billionaire businessmen advocating and financially supporting left-wing causes, I am reinforced in my belief that most businessmen are proficient at one thing: making money. [Read more…]

Freedom To Succeed by Thomas Peterffy

October 21, 2012October 29, 2012 by Orthodox Editors

Freedom to Succeed by Thomas Peterffy –
I grew up in a socialist country, and I have seen what that does to people. There is no hope, no freedom, no pride in achievement. The nation became poorer and poorer, and that’s what I see happening here. As a young boy I was fantasizing about one day going to America, making a success of myself, the American dream.

America’s wealth comes from the efforts of people striving for success. Take away their incentive with bad-mouthing success and you take away the wealth that helps us take care of the needy. [Read more…]

The Alienator-in-Chief

October 16, 2012October 18, 2012 by Orthodox Editors

Obama Alienator-in-Chief by J.T. Hatter –
It is impossible to be the leader of any large enterprise and not alienate someone, but Barack Obama has managed to alienate virtually everyone who has had anything to do with him. Who has Barack Hussein Obama not alienated in the last four years?

Barack Obama has alienated Great Britain, our closest military ally, both with insults and official actions. He betrayed the Brits by failing to support them over the Falklands and by revealing their nuclear military secrets to the Russians. Obama has singlehandedly destroyed our “special relationship” with the UK.

The United States had been Israel’s staunchest ally since the founding of that nation in 1948. No more. Obama sides with the Palestinians and openly supports the Muslim Brotherhood. He sent two and a half billion dollars to the new Muslim Brotherhood government in Egypt just this year. Obama has repeatedly snubbed and insulted Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and has vetoed a preemptive attack on Iran to halt their clandestine nuclear weapons program. The Israelis no longer trust the Americans. Who can blame them? [Read more…]

Leftism, The World’s Most Dynamic Religion

October 14, 2012October 15, 2012 by Orthodox Editors

by Dennis Prager –
For at least the last hundred years, the world’s most dynamic religion has been neither Christianity nor Islam.

It has been leftism.

Most people do not recognize what is probably the single most important fact of modern life. One reason is that leftism is overwhelmingly secular (more than merely secular: It is inherently opposed to all traditional religions), and therefore people do not regard it as a religion. Another is that leftism so convincingly portrays itself as solely the product of reason, intellect, and science that it has not been seen as the dogma-based ideology that it is. Therefore the vast majority of the people who affirm leftist beliefs think of their views as the only way to properly think about life. [Read more…]

C.S. Lewis and Materialism

October 1, 2012October 15, 2012 by Orthodox Editors

C.S. Lewis and Materialism by John G. West –
“You say the materialist universe is ‘ugly,’” wrote C. S. Lewis to a young skeptic in 1950. “…If you are really a product of the materialistic universe, how is it you don’t feel at home there?”

Nearly half-a-century later, Lewis’s question still resonates. Modern society continues to operate largely on the materialistic premises of such thinkers as Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud. Yet few today feel at home in the materialist universe where God does not exist, where ideas do not matter, and where every human behavior is reduced to non-rational causes.

C. S. Lewis spent much of his life debunking the sterility of materialist thinking; and his insights are as relevant now as when they were first offered, because our culture remains dominated by four of materialism’s most deadly legacies.

(1) Rejection of Reason and Truth
Materialism’s first deadly legacy is the rejection of reason and objective truth. Nineteenth-century materialists depicted our thoughts as the irrational products of environment or heredity or brain chemistry. [Read more…]

The Left’s War on Profit

September 28, 2012October 2, 2012 by Orthodox Editors

Democrats Communists War on Profit by John Hayward –
A good deal of the Obama campaign is dedicated to the proposition that “profit” is evil. The quintessential Marxist formulation holds that capitalist profit is the theft of surplus labor value from workers. Obama sometimes modifies Marx to portray excessive profit as theft, while fair and reasonable profits are acceptable.

Of course, he’s the one who gets to decide what constitutes a reasonable profit margin – an entirely arbitrary decision that changes based on the nature of the industry in question, and how it intersects with political agendas. You’ll never see a chart that would bind the Left to a commitment that this industry can make 40 percent profit, while that industry is “greedy” if it shoots for more than 35 percent. [Read more…]

‘God,’ ‘Jerusalem,’ and the DNC

September 26, 2012October 1, 2012 by Orthodox Editors

by Dennis Prager –
The most important event at either national convention was the “vote” taken by the Democratic delegates on a last-minute resolution to reinsert the words “God” and “Jerusalem” into the Democratic-party platform.

Regarding God: Since Karl Marx, the aim of the Left, everywhere on earth, has been a godless society. And the Democratic party has evolved over the last half century from a liberal party into a leftist one. So much so that it is now indistinguishable from any of the leftist parties in Western Europe.

Yes, Franklin D. Roosevelt was a left-wing president — as concerned the size of the state and its role in the economy. That is of great importance, of course. But an ever-expanding state is only half of the Left’s agenda. A thoroughly secular society is the other half. And in that regard, Franklin Roosevelt was no man of the Left. [Read more…]

Fallacy Of Redistribution Has Grave Economic Impact

September 21, 2012October 1, 2012 by Orthodox Editors

by Thomas Sowell –
The recently discovered tape on which Barack Obama said back in 1998 that he believes in redistribution is not really news. He said the same thing to Joe the Plumber four years ago.

But the tape’s surfacing may serve a useful purpose if it gets people to thinking about the consequences of redistribution.

Those who talk glibly about redistribution often act as if people are just inert objects that can be placed here and there, like pieces on a chess board, to carry out some grand design.

But if human beings have their own responses to government policies, then we cannot blithely assume that government policies will have the effect intended. [Read more…]

The Tedium of Leftism

September 12, 2012September 17, 2012 by Orthodox Editors

Leftists Socialists communists democrats by Bruce Walker –
Leftism is not an ideology. No sane person thinks “soaking the rich” or “investing tax dollars” achieves any particular objective. The creation of predefined bogeymen is an ancient and unsavory strategy for seizing and then holding power — the Jewish people can testify to that grim fact — and there is nothing more to it than that. Leftist leaders today are simply the barbarian warlords of centuries ago who promised to steal and to share the spoils of what others have worked to produce.

Marxism is only one of several contemporary mantras dreamed up to let party bosses rob and loot. [Read more…]

Government Entitlements Are Corrupting Us

September 3, 2012September 10, 2012 by Orthodox Editors

Government Entitlements Are Corrupting Us by Nicholas Eberstadt –
The American republic has endured for well over two centuries, but over the past 50 years, the apparatus of American governance has undergone a radical transformation. In some basic respects—its scale, its preoccupations, even many of its purposes—the U.S. government today would be scarcely recognizable to Franklin D. Roosevelt, much less to Abraham Lincoln or Thomas Jefferson.

What is monumentally new about the American state today is the vast empire of entitlement payments that it protects, manages and finances. Within living memory, the federal government has become an entitlements machine. As a day-to-day operation, it devotes more attention and resources to the public transfer of money, goods and services to individual citizens than to any other objective, spending more than for all other ends combined. [Read more…]