Liberty

Liberty

Is liberty dying in the Good Ole USA?  If it is, here’s what to look for for various reasons why it might be: 

First of all, Gimmeites who are numbering close to having monopolistic  control of the electorate are falling for the false promises of phony politicians who are telling them that they want to give them all kinds of goodies totally free of charge and only because it’s out of the goodness of their hearts.  Where do the Gimmeites think the government is getting the money to pay for all these “free” perks?  The famous French historian of the nineteenth century, Alexis de Tocqueville, said, “Republics endure till people discover that they were being bribed with their own money.” 

How much better off was this country when it had a President like John Kennedy who encouraged people to be self-reliant and producers rather than takers.   And I’m not talking about his brother Ted right now. He was more in the camp of the present occupant of the White House who is doing everything he can to build a cult of dependents.   When Congress wanted to require people on unemployment insurance to show that they were looking for work, President Obama squelched that.  Independent people who want nothin’ for nothin’ can’t be subjugated – dependency people can  

Consider the breakdown of the family.  As the family goes, so goes the nation.  Moral decay has been part of the formula that brought about the fall of every republic that ever came into being.  The Republic of the United States is on a path toward not being an exception.  Check out the article in the Washington Times that this link leads to:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/dec/25/fathers-disappear-from-households-across-america/?page=all

Now for the bunker-buster that would be a major step toward ending law guided by the Constitution:  Globalists led by Hillary Clinton and strongly supported by our new Secretary of State, John Kerry are promoting the idea of turning a big portion of the sovereignty of the

U. S. over to United Nations control by way of forming international treaties such as The Law of the Sea and gun control treaties.  If they succeed in getting these treaties ratified by the Senate the laws will supersede United States law and the populace will find itself under the dictatorial rule of the UN.  Who’s to be thrilled to see that happening?  Certainly not the citizenry of the country.  It could be the dream of someone who envisions him/herself being the head of a one-world dictatorial government.  The Constitutional Republic that was given to us by the Founding Fathers for the people and to be ruled by the people may not be perfect but it’s hardly likely that there’d be many of us willing to give it up for some other ruling process.  There’s no consolation in knowing that the Senate Democrats – or are they Socialists? – don’t have the 66% of the votes needed for ratification.  We don’t know how many air head RINOs there are in the Senate that might go along with the Democrats that support the proposed treaty.

The link below leads to an article regarding the arms treaty:

http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/inhofe-block-un-arms/2013/04/02/id/497530?s=al&promo_code=1301F-1

The Law of the Sea Treaty:  These are some of the provisions that would be incorporated in the treaty that the United Nations is proposing:

·        Would grant the U. N. the power to levy direct taxes on American corporations to the tune of billions of dollars.

·       Would grant them the power to transfer money and technology to Third World nations as part of a Global Welfare Scheme.

·       Would prevent our Navy from stopping ships on the high seas that we suspect are carrying terrorists or weapons of mass destruction without first getting permission from the U. N.

·       Would enable the U. N. to create a Court stacked with judges hostile to the U. S. to enforce its decisions.  

The UNaffordable Health Care Law:

Was the health care law enacted for the good of the people; or was it to get control of them?  Health care administered by the government is a giant step in that direction. 

Eighty five percent of the populace was perfectly content with its health care plans.  And of the fifteen percent that didn’t have health insurance only a fraction of that portion did not have it because of their very difficult financial situation.  Part of that fifteen percent were people well enough off not to need health insurance and could choose whether or not to have it.  Does a multi-billionaire need health insurance?  Another part of that fifteen percent were healthy young adults who could choose not to pay for insurance that they may never need and take the chance that whatever health care costs arose would still be less than the costs of ten or twelve years they would pay insurance premiums.  It’s called the freedom to make your own choices.

Why couldn’t a debit card system have been setup for the indigent funded by the government and dedicated strictly for the use of having them use it to buy health insurance and leave the rest of “we the people” alone?  Such a program would surely have been less of a burden on the taxpayer and save them from the suffocating burden of taxes and penalties that come with Obamacare.  The large majority who were happy with their insurance were not drawing on funds from the treasury.  This would have kept a very intrusive government out of peoples’ lives and continue to allow them to keep living the blessings of liberty.  But that gets me back to the question I started this segment of this post with: was the law for government administered healthcare enacted for the good of the people or to get control of them?  And how happy are we to be that over seven hundred billion dollars has been taken out of already troubled Medicare to pay for a health care system that’s like a monstrous octopus that’s growing bigger by the day?  Wait till Obamacare is fully implemented in 2014 and businesses go out of business or choose not to expand because it will put them into another expense category; how about wage-earners, including those who voted for President Obama, find themselves cut back to being part-time workers and find their paychecks to be a little leaner.             

With all that I mentioned about threats to our liberty in this post I can’t help ending voicing one last thought and that is that I can’t help

thinking about this Old Testament Psalm:

   But My people would not listen to Me;

        Israel would not submit to Me.

   So I gave them over to their stubborn

        hearts to follow their own devices.

                            Psalm 81:  11-12 

As this nation sinks deeper and deeper into the quagmire of secularism and more and more rejecting God, could it be that He has stepped back and left this country to its own devices as He did with Israel thousands of years ago?  President Reagan made a poignant statement that all thinking people, whether a disciple of his or not, should ponder: “When we cease to be a nation under God, we’ll be a nation gone under.”          

Ever Expanding Obamacare

Ever Expanding Obamacare

Years ago my aunt decided to try her hand at making bread.  The recipe called for including yeast.  Just about when she finished making the dough it began to expand – and expand and expand some more.  We were running all over the house looking for things to put it in.  We even used the dish-pan. 

I was thinking about that bread - which turned out to be the tastiest bread I can ever remember - when the latest news came out regarding Obamacare.  They are now going to recruit navigators; close to about 100,000 of them.  These navigators will be paid for by the taxpayer to the tune of billions of dollars a year.  They’ll be doing the work that brokers in private industry do who are paid by the insurance companies.

Is there any end in sight about where costs for Obamacare will stop expanding?  Brokers who pay their income taxes into the treasury and are run with the efficiency of private industry will now be replaced with navigators who draw from the treasury and the tax-paying public.  Revenue that flowed in will now flow out.  And because the government draws from that bottomless trough fed by the taxpayer, they don’t have to care how inefficiently they run the program.  One interesting last thing – what a wonderful opportunity for political patronage!

The bread was great and easy on the stomach.  Obamacare is on track to give everyone ulcers.      

Fair Share

Fair Share

Don’t you love the way the Bolsheviks make rules for people that they don’t apply to themselves – like Al Gore who wanted to sell a business to Al Jazeera before the capital gains tax was to be raised from 15 to 23 percent on January 1^st.  He’s also a real patriot – nothing like providing a propaganda camp for Al qaeda right within our own borders.     

We hear a lot about “fair share” when it comes to demonizing the job providers.  I’d like to see the same barbs directed at the gimmeites who are content with living off the public dole instead of taking the jobs that are available.  They’ll drag us all into a Socialist Dictatorship with them if it keeps up.  When are they going to accept the jobs that are being offered so they can pay income tax and get off government welfare?  That would be their fair share.  I would not doubt that there are very few among us that don’t know of someone that is collecting unemployment insurance who doesn’t intend to find work until his/her unemployment insurance runs out.  I know two personally. That of course, does not apply to everyone on unemployment insurance.  When I was losing time at work during very dire economic times in the late seventies, I couldn’t wait to get back to work.  

If you don’t think that there are some people that are content with being unemployed and collecting unemployment insurance, check out the article this link leads to in the 8/10/10 issue of the Wall Street Journal.  What’s true then still applies now:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704895004575395491314812452.html

Government Administered Health Care

Government administered health care - or no care at all:

This is an excerpt from Imprimis, a free publication distributed by Hillsdale College in Michigan:

Canadian dependence on the United States is particularly true in health care, the most eminent Canadian idea looming in the American context. That is. public health care in Canada depends on private health care in the U.S. A small news story from last month illustrates this:

A Canadian woman has given birth to extremely rare identical quadruplets. The four girls were born at a U.S. hospital because there was no space available at Canadian neonatal intensive care units. Autumn. Brook, Calissa, and Dahlia are in good condition at Benefice Hospital in Great Falls, Montana. Health officials said they checked every other neonatal intensive care unit in Canada, but none had space. The Jepps, a nurse and a respiratory technician were flown 500 kilometers to the Montana hospital, the closest in the U.S., where the quadruplets were born on Sunday.

There you have Canadian health care in a nutshell. After all, you can't expect a G-7 economy of only 30 million people to be able to offer the same level of neonatal intensive care coverage as a town of 50,000 in remote, rural Montana. And let's face it, there's nothing an expect­ant mom likes more on the day of delivery than 300 miles in a bumpy twin prop over the Rockies. Everyone knows that socialized health care means you wait and wait and wait— six months for an MRI, a year for a hip replacement, and so on. But here is the absolute logical reductio of a government monopoly in health care: the ten month waiting list for the maternitv ward.

Dr. Benjamin Carson

Doctor Benjamin Carson

I wonder how many people there are that might have appreciated as much as I did the talk given by Pediatric Neurosurgeon Doctor Benjamin Carson at the National Prayer Breakfast on Thursday, 2/7/13.  Much of the information he was presenting was what I wrote in some of my Facebook posts.

Doctor Carson was pointing out the importance of what it means for people to be self reliant and the deteriorating affect it has on a republic for the populace to becoming more and more dependent on the government to take care of them - Dr. Benjamin  Carson.  He cited how what is happening in this country today is like what happened to Rome before it failed as a republic and dictatorial rule began.  I pointed out in previous articles that populist tactics by power hungry people seeking public office brought about the demise of every republic that ever came into existence – usually in not much more than about 200 years.  Has the Republic of the United States lived beyond its life expectancy?  Benjamin Franklin, when our Constitution was finalized in 1787, said, “We’ve given you a republic.  Now it’s up to you to keep it.”  Historian Alexis de Tocqueville said, “Republics endure till people discover they were being bribed with their own money.”

Note what the Roman Statesman Marcus Cicero said in 55 BC.  Those words could well be applied to what is happening in the United States today:

"The budget should be balanced, the Treasury should be refilled, public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and the assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed lest Rome becomes bankrupt. People must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance."

 About the time our original 13 states adopted their new constitution, in 1787, Alexander Tyler, a Scottish history professor at the University of Edinburgh, had this to say about the fall of the Athenian Republic some 2,000 years prior:

“A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury.  From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidate that promises the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by dictatorship.  The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations from the beginning of history, has been about 200 years.”

It could be that we’re living in a country with an incurable terminal illness infested with gimmeites.  Independent people can’t be subjugated.  People living in a state of dependency can. 

47% of the populace pay no income taxes and believe they face no consequences for every reckless entitlement this administration wants to bestow on them.  I’m not talking about Social Security, Medicare and a reasonable amount of time to be providing unemployment insurance before it disincentivizes people from looking for work.  These are essential services and the recipients did pay into them to some degree.  But should the Government have had to pay over two million dollars to provide people with cell phones or provide Sandra Fluke with daily supplies of contraceptives?  Where do entitlements end and personal responsibility begin?  Congress wanted to require people who were collecting unemployment insurance to be showing that they’re looking for work.  President Obama squelched that.  There was a time when that was a requirement.

Anyone who thinks that there aren’t some people choosing to collect unemployment insurance rather than finding work should read an interesting article that appeared in the 8/10/10 issue of the Wall Street Journal - Firms struggle to hire.   The paper, appearing never to have been opened, was left on a little round coffee table for two that I sat at in a shop in Frankfurt Airport where I stopped while waiting for my flight back to Newark.  The article I opened up to couldn’t have come into my possession at a more convenient time.  I was just doing a study of how many people there were that anxiously wanted to get back to work and how many were content to just collect UI.  I personally knew of two such people.  One is a friend who is now working.  He didn’t look for work until his insurance ran out.  Another is a friend of a friend - a school teacher who lost her job when her school shut down.  Asked by my friend what she was going to do now, she responded, “Not to worry; I have 99 weeks before I’ll worry about that.”