Does capitalism and the free market make you selfish? Dennis Prager answers this question and challenges what for many has become conventional wisdom.
The Welfare State and the Selfish Society (Prager University)
Leftism
Freedom vs. the Secular Seminary
by Christopher Chantrill –
Little did I know, when contrasting conservative freedom and liberal liberation, that a poster-girl for liberation was presenting herself at the Altar of the Victim, the remarkable Sandra Fluke, the toast of our Democratic friends. For Ms. Fluke’s belief system suggests to her that she cannot have access to her sexuality unless a big institution provides her contraception. Moreover, since she is a law student with a degree in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Cornell, she is evidently well into a professional career in liberation activism.
Conservatives scratch our heads at the activist university and its characteristic products like Ms. Fluke. But we are fools. The university has seldom been an institution of higher learning devoted to science and disinterested scholarship. More often it has been a seminary. When young Fred Vincy, son of a Middlemarch merchant, went off to the University of Cambridge in around 1830, it was to study to be a priest in the state Church of England. [Read more…]
Socialism without Guns
by Larrey Anderson –
As their economic orgy fades to its inevitable end, the people of Greece find themselves in a country that resembles more of a debtor’s prison than a representative democracy. The Greeks have sold their freedom for a mess of pottage. If the United States is not careful, we could soon find ourselves in a very similar situation.
Unlike the former Soviet Union, there was no violent Marxist “revolution” in Greece. Freedom was taken from the country’s citizens without a single shot being fired. The Greeks squandered their freedom by electing, time and again, politicians who promised an unsustainable socialist utopia. The Greeks committed political suicide by creating socialism without guns. [Read more…]
The American Left and the Erosion of Public Discourse
by Steve McCann –
Much has been made of the precipitous decline in the level of discourse in the United States. Many attribute this to the coarsening of the language and the ever-widening gulf between the various factions in the political spectrum. However, these factors are a symptom of a current underlying and foundational dilemma: the inability of not only the general public, but nearly all of the so-called societal leaders and opinion-makers to generate an original thought, as well as a stubborn refusal to use reason and logic when confronted with irrefutable facts and arguments.
These traits can be explained, insofar as the general public is concerned, as the consequence of their subjection for the past forty years to a woeful and deliberately incomplete education bordering on indoctrination. However, this factor does not fully explain many of the so-called best and brightest falling into the same abyss and being unable to coherently expound on an original thought or concept. While this is true for a few on the conservative side of the political spectrum, it is overwhelmingly the case among those who self-identify as liberals or progressives. [Read more…]
What Kids Now Learn in College
Save your money. Here’s a list of the lessons they’ll be taught.
As high school seniors throughout America will be receiving acceptance letters to colleges within the next month, it would be nice for parents to meditate on what they are getting for the $20–$50,000 they will pay each year.
The United States is no better than any other country, and in many areas worse than many. On the world stage, America is an imperialist country, and domestically it mistreats its minorities and neglects its poor, while discriminating against non-whites.
There is no better and no worse in literature and the arts. The reason universities in the past taught Shakespeare, Michelangelo, and Bach rather than, let us say, Guatemalan poets, Sri Lankan musicians, and Native American storytellers was “Eurocentrism.”
God is at best a non-issue, and at worst, a foolish and dangerous belief.
Christianity is largely a history of inquisitions, crusades, oppression, and anti-intellectualism. Islam, on the other hand, is “a religion of peace.” [Read more…]
The Problem With Intellectuals (and Karl Marx)
by Richard F. Miniter –
Isn’t long past time that conservatives take a pitchfork in one hand and a flaming torch in the other, and then, after mustering up the like-minded, simply burn Frankenstein’s castle down? Especially since as far back as 1942 George Orwell pointed out just how combustible the Left-Wing Liberal edifice really is?
After all, it isn’t as if we haven’t tried reasoned argument, but it’s dismissed by the Left-Wing Liberal, often with vicious personal attacks. Evidence of the idiocy or unintended consequences of left-wing laws, regulations, and redistributions haven’t mattered at all either. Neither have appeals to tradition, the Constitution, the concept of individual responsibility or rights. It’s true that the left received a bloody nose in 1946, 1994, and 2010, while the Reagan years covered his aggressively pro-American foreign policy in glory, but ever since that long-ago Supreme Court wilted under FDR’s animosity, government has continued to metastasize, individual rights have continued to shrink, and this once-magnificent Republic has continued to lose ever more substance and color.
So all in all, what choice do we have other than to go after the one individual whose horrible vulnerability Orwell pointed out? The one individual upon whom the entire Left-Wing Liberal movement depends, and must depend for its galvanic power — the liberal intellectual? [Read more…]
Global Warming – The Great Delusion
by Matt Patterson –
In 1841 a Scottish journalist named Charles Mackay published a study of mass hysteria titled “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.”
Mackay analyzed a wide variety of popular pathologies in his entertaining tome, including financial panics, medical quackery, alchemy, and witch crazes. He wanted to know why so many people choose to believe so much that is false and potentially deadly. His answer:
“We go out of our course to make ourselves uncomfortable; the cup of life is not bitter enough to our palate, and we distill superfluous poison to put into it, or conjure up hideous things to frighten ourselves at, which would never exist if we did not make them.”
I could not help but think of global warming as I was re-reading Mackay’s words. He would have recognized it as kin to his own numerous and insidious subjects—superstition masked as science; Western guilt over having conquered the world manifesting itself as hatred for the technologies that made it possible; apocalyptic yearning in the guise of political enlightenment. [Read more…]
Suicidal-in-Chief Obama Destroying America’s Nuclear Defenses
by Bill Gertz –
Lowest level of strategic review would leave Pentagon with fewer warheads than China
President Obama has ordered the Pentagon to consider cutting U.S. strategic nuclear forces to as low as 300 deployed warheads—below the number believed to be in China’s arsenal and far fewer than current Russian strategic warhead stocks.
Pentagon and military planners were asked to develop three force levels for the U.S. arsenal of deployed strategic nuclear warheads: a force of 1,100 to 1,000 warheads; a second scenario of between 700 and 800 warheads; and the lowest level of between 300 and 400 warheads.
A congressional official said no president in the past ever told the Pentagon to conduct a review based on specific numbers of warheads.
“In the past, the way it worked was, ‘tell me what the world is like and then tell me what the force should be,’” the official said. “That is not happening in this review.” [Read more…]
The ‘Progressive’ Legacy
Whatever the vision or rhetoric of the Progressive era, its practice was a never-ending expansion of the arbitrary powers of the federal government. The problems they created so discredited Progressives that they started calling themselves “liberals” — and after they discredited themselves again, they went back to calling themselves “Progressives,” now that people no longer remembered how Progressives had discredited themselves before.
Barack Obama’s rhetoric of “change” is in fact a restoration of discredited ideas that originated a hundred years ago.
…
Although Barack Obama is the first black President of the United States, he is by no means unique, except for his complexion. He follows in the footsteps of other presidents with a similar vision, the vision at the heart of the Progressive movement that flourished a hundred years ago. [Read more…]
Obama’s Bogus Jobs Data, 1.2 Million Less Jobs
The Washington Times –
The White House hyped the news Friday that January payrolls had risen by 243,000. The hitch is the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) also dropped 1.2 million from the calculated workforce. Somehow this net loss of a million workers in a single month was transformed into an improvement in the unemployment rate. As the old saying goes, figures don’t lie, but liars can figure.
“Job growth was widespread,” the BLS reported, but most Americans sense that something isn’t quite right with the numbers. The most important change was the deep decline in the workforce. While the overall population jumped an 1.6 million in January, the workforce declined a record-setting 1.2 million. This figure represents those who out of sheer frustration or for other reasons have dropped out of what the government defines as the active labor pool. They are worse than simply unemployed; they are both jobless and hopeless. [Read more…]
