Free Enterprise and Fiscal Sanity Aren’t Social Darwinism

Free Enterprise Economic Freedom by Jay W. Richards –
On Tuesday, President Obama denounced Representative Paul Ryan’s budget proposal, which would modestly reduce the rate of growth in the federal budget. Ryan’s plan is a “radical vision,” says the president, which amounts to “thinly veiled Social Darwinism.” Understandably, Ryan has called the comments “surreal,” since the Wisconsin Republican seeks to reform entitlements such as Medicare in order to save them. That doesn’t sound like Social Darwinism.

In fact, “Social Darwinism” is an old left-wing catch phrase used to disparage free enterprise. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes reportedly said that one good catch phrase can stop thinking for fifty years. This one certainly has. [Read more…]

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Why Don’t “Progressives” Debate Conservatives?

Dennis Prager
Dennis Prager
by Dennis Prager –
Apparently, many liberals were disappointed in the administration’s performance before the Supreme Court. They felt that the government’s lawyer, Solicitor General Donald Verrilli, did not respond effectively to the challenges of some of the conservative justices.

The editor of Commentary, John Podhoretz, offered an explanation on his magazine’s blog. “American liberals,” he wrote, “know their own language, but they don’t know the language of their ideological and partisan opposite numbers. … Conservatives speak liberal, but for liberals in the United States, conservatism might as well be Esperanto.”

I have argued this point for many years. In my book to be published later this month (“Still the Best Hope: Why the World Needs American Values to Triumph”), I argue that the left is a victim of its own brainwash. How could they not be? All they hear, see and read from childhood on, from elementary school through graduate school, on TV and in the movies, are leftist ideas. [Read more…]

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Are the “Less Fortunate” Less Fortunate?

Dennis Prager
Dennis Prager

by Dennis Prager –
In his front-page-of-the-business-section “Economic Scene” column in The New York Times last week, Eduardo Porter wrote, “The United States does less than other rich countries to transfer income from the affluent to the less fortunate.”

Think about that sentence for a moment. It ends oddly. Logic dictates that it should have said, “transfer income from the affluent to the less affluent,” not the less fortunate.

But for Porter, as for the left generally, those who are not affluent are not merely “less affluent,” they are “less fortunate.”

Why is this? Why is the leftist division almost always between the “affluent” and the “less fortunate” or between the “more fortunate” and the “less fortunate”?

To understand the left, one must understand that in its view the greatest evil is material inequality. The left is more troubled by economic inequality than by evil, as humanity has generally understood the term. [Read more…]

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The Terrible Truth Told by Obama’s Open Mic Slip

Obama Fraud Liar Traitor Hates America by Christian Whiton –
President Obama just gave the world a glimpse into his future foreign policy plans this week, should he win a second term. On tap for Obama II: more faith in our adversaries, more betrayal of our traditional allies and more unilateral indulgence in nuclear abolition fantasies.

Monday, President Obama told Russian President Medvedev that “This is my last election. After my election, I have more flexibility.” Medvedev responded that he would dutifully report that tidbit to Vladimir Putin back in the Kremlin. The men apparently did not realize their discussion was being caught by a live microphone.

Given that the two were talking about missile defense, the implication was clear enough. In order to please Russia, President Obama will use a second term to weaken further the peaceful, purely defensive systems that can defend the U.S. and our allies from missile attacks. [Read more…]

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‘Social Issues’ Are Really Moral Issues

Social Issues Moral Issues by Trevor Thomas –
One of the greatest deceptions perpetuated by the mainstream media concerning the American political scene is the idea that whenever the “social issues” are prominent in election debate, conservatives lose.  James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal recently wrote about an upcoming book by Jeffrey Bell — The Case for Polarized Politics — that helps dispel this myth.

“Social issues were nonexistent in the period 1932 to 1964,” notes Bell.  “The Republican Party won two presidential elections out of nine, and they had the Congress for all of four years in that entire period. … When social issues came into the mix — I would date it from the 1968 election … the Republican Party won seven out of 11 presidential elections.” [Read more…]

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Freedom vs. the Secular Seminary

Freedom vs. the Secular Seminaryby 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…]

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Obama Miserable Failure: 4 Million Lose Health Coverage Under Obamacare

Obama Miserable Failure
Yet more evidence is coming out that government socialist “solutions” never work as intended and always make an existing problem much worse. Two different news stories highlight the real consequences of the destructive and misguided ObamaCare regulations (known as the “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act”). Rather than helping, the ObamaCare rules are wreaking havoc on companies, individuals, and medical institutions, spreading more misery to all of America.

Instead of reducing costs and helping people, it’s dramatically raising costs (estimates have doubled to $1.76 TRILLION) and hurting Americans (4 Million will lose coverage), while gradually destroying our world-class health care system which America has created based on ethical capitalism, competition, and free-market principles. Conservatives warned this was going to happen and this is exactly what we’re witnessing.

Of course, these objective (non-partisan) facts and clear results before us will not deter the liberals, leftists, and progressives who cannot be bothered with reality. The left will continue to support the suicidal socialized medicine model that has been a failure throughout history. [Read more…]

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Fixing the Moral Deficit, Biblical Principles for Debt Reduction

Chuck Colson
Chuck Colson
by Chuck Colson –
Thirty-five years ago, my friend Ron Sider published Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger, a very influential book at the time. While I haven’t always agreed with Ron, in fact, we’re poles apart politically, I have no doubt of his integrity, his wisdom and his desire to bring biblical truth to all aspects of life.

That’s why so I’m happy that Ron has turned his attention to one of the most pressing issues of our time: our national debt.

His new book, Fixing the Moral Deficit, is the result of his reflections on the issue. As the title suggests, for Ron, the ballooning national debt isn’t simply a matter of accounting. According to him, there are three “crises” operating here: the first is the deficit crisis, the result of government spending more than it collects in taxes; the second is a poverty crisis, in which the bottom 20 percent become poorer, while the top twenty percent get wealthier.

Together, he says, these add up to a third crisis—which he calls the “justice crisis”–in which we “put current expenditures on our grandchildren’s credit cards,” which Sider calls “flatly immoral.” Amen. [Read more…]

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American Exceptionalism Under Assault

American Exceptionalism Under Assaultby Emil W. Henry, Jr. –
The Obama presidency has turned the American Social Contract on its head.

In this election cycle, one noticeable phenomenon is how the Republican presidential candidates are emphasizing our country’s founding principles — liberty and freedom — more than in any campaign in the modern political era. Each speaks often of the Declaration of Independence. Citing articles of the Constitution is commonplace.

The president’s record of evoking such themes stands in stark contrast. In his State of the Union address, for example, our president made only one perfunctory reference to the Constitution and then went on to misquote it. [Read more…]

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The ‘Fairness’ Fraud

Thomas Sowell
Thomas Sowell

by Thomas Sowell –
During a recent Fox News Channel debate about the Obama administration’s tax policies, Democrat Bob Beckel raised the issue of “fairness.”

He pointed out that a child born to a poor woman in the Bronx enters the world with far worse prospects than a child born to an affluent couple in Connecticut.

No one can deny that. The relevant question, however, is: How does allowing politicians to take more money in taxes from successful people, to squander in ways that will improve their own reelection prospects, make anything more “fair” for others?

Even if additional tax revenue all went to poor single mothers — which it will not — the multiple problems of children raised by poor single mothers would not be cured by throwing money at them. Indeed, the skyrocketing of unwed motherhood began when government welfare programs began throwing money at teenage girls who got pregnant.[Read more…]

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