Big Gov vs. Private Enterprise:
For what concerns should Big Gov, collectivist, governmental solutions be brought to bear, rather than individualistic, private, or free enterprise solutions? How and to what extent? How should various concerns be promoted, protected, measured, or regulated? At what governmental level?
HOW BEST SHOULD ROLES FOR FEDERAL, STATE, CITY, CHARITY, RELIGIOUS, FAMILY, AND INDIVIDUAL ORIENTED TRADITIONS AND INSTITUTIONS BE MIXED AND BALANCED, WITH RESPECT TO:
Preemption of lower levels of governmental regulation
Kinds of consumption, sales, vice, and wealth taxes and record keeping
Population, demographics, immigration assimilation, visas
Defense; military; police; fire; security; prisons; law enforcement
Public vice, obscenity, disorderliness, drunkenness
Respect for family values, self defense, bearing arms, familial obligations
Involvement of religious, spiritual, charitable institutions
Education; assimilative indoctrination
Safeguarding minors; wards of state; state chaperones and probation supervisors
Food, shelter, clothing
Health care; quarantines; hospitals; mental hospitals
Drug regulations, addiction rehabilitation
Lending; usury; bankruptcy
Corporate regulation, taxation, liability exposure limits, international protections
Work, labor, and safety codes and standards
Electrical codes and national building standards
Electrical, water, and trash utilities
News and media broadcasting; frequency allocations
Travel, roads, waterways, air lanes
Common motor, air, ship carriers and taxi franchises
Natural Catastrophes
Species, habitat, and environmental preservation, pollution
National independence; Energy development
Foreign alliances, combinations, relations; preemptive wars; treaties; trade; trade taxes
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How can middle class energy, merit, and freedom of conscience best be protected and encouraged, without exposing our society, environment, and progeny to undue danger?
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Derelict Statist (Dem, Lib, Prog, Socie, Commie): One who would be liberated from social mores and familial obligations, while expecting economic entitlement to equality of results from the collective, in exchange for mouthing surrender to political correctness. Derelict Statists hope counter-aggressors will be tolerant.
American Conservative: One who would be humble in respect of social traditions, familial sensibilities, and charitable impulses, while expecting economic entitlement to equal right to pursue opportunity, demanding robust freedom of speech and enterprise to engage in such pursuit. American Conservatives require counter-aggressors to be tolerant.
Americans desire that their leaders should have assimilated and learned how to appreciate American values. Unfortunately, we now have a President who never did that. Still, we remain jealous to preserve our self-evident, God-given rights to freedom of expression. We deem it important that those who aspire to lead us should seek to maximize our common opportunities for free communication and exchange of authentic concerns and empathies.
We want no part of any system that would stifle that freedom, out of some b.s. notion of some misguided, fascist elitist’s or prophet’s claiming to have received word, either from Science or God, about how we must be controlled right down to the nitty gritty of our every permissible thought.
We insist upon a system of checks and balances sturdy enough to help defend us against such fascists. Any society that chooses to do likewise would need to design its own system in a way that would fit its traditional sensibilities. This entails intuition, insight, inspiration, and art, more than it entails conceited fiats by governing elites or prophets who claim to know best how God or the science is settled. No matter how perky they may be. I doubt our founders would be happy -- either with Obama or Couric. For keeping us within limits for which our system is designed, I suspect Palin would be far superior to either Couric or Obama.
A.T. --- Re: "open-jawed wonder that he [Obama] has pondered the legal implications of Einstein's theory of relativity "
Consider that neither Einstein nor anyone else has grasped the holy grail of science: the grand unifying theory of everything. In part, perhaps that is because some features (like consciousness?) are simply irreducible to materialistic explanation. I suspect a derivative, i.e., "Will," is similarly irreducible. No implication, but a suspicion: The grand, Big Gov schemes of hubristic Obamafascists for regulating everything (because "they know best") are grounded on nothing more than balderdash. Obama's synapses may have "pondered," but they shorted a few flashes of insight. Katie's perky grin may sucker gold from fools, but it only adds fools gold on top of balderdash.
We have Statists among us who are willing to sell out America. We have jihadis who are willing to buy. It would be interesting to see some investigative journalist uncover who is being paid by whom to prevent America from developing her own energy resources. The Islamic enemies of Conservers of American Liberty are the paying friends of Collectivists who want Comprehensive Bills of Entitlement. In effect, our politicians have Americans paying for their own subjugation. This is just so ... so ... so Progressive! (Squeal!)
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Events shout the obvious: America is teetering. Why is this beyond obvious? Consider our situation versus our priorities. Islamofascists are about to acquire nukes. America is producing hardly any durable goods. We are floating on our own currency. And we are using it to enrich those who want to replace us. In this maw, we now adopt these priorities: Gay marriage; gays in our military; sexualizing our children; arranging citizenship for millions of illegals; multi-culti tolerance of jihadis bent on replacing us; converting to unrealistic green energy sources; putting our own vast resources off limits; and stifling American initiative. We are circling a black hole, towards which our youth want only to run faster.
We may yet reverse this. But we have got to turn away from the hell hole towards which we are draining. We need to restore respect for decent values. Now.
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Decent civilization cannot flourish absent mediums for exchange of empathies. The basic medium is the family. When that is devalued, the devaluation of government will necessarily follow, like effluent circling a drain. When decent rearing of children can no longer be entrusted in main to parents, a society’s rearing of its children can certainly not be entrusted to the State which is comprised to govern such parents. When it takes a commune to discount parents in order to raise children, the parents will already have been polluted, the children will be near hopelessness, the State will become a sewer. And children will see it as their place to re-educate their parents ... by first neutering their influence.
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Islam is like a wolf pack. In effect, it only allows select males to breed, and it expects them to breed often. Meantime, some in the West are trying to transgender men, perhaps hoping someday to allow them to experience birthing implanted babies. In effect, the West has found diversion in plowing wrong fields, even as we sell out the liberty that is our birthright in exchange for the false security of affirmative bills of entitlement. Free and unconventional sex and drugs! Goody! So we trade the moral purposefulness of traditional Judeo-Christian values in exchange for seeking the biggest high. Groovy!
How materialistically rational is that? Then again, I thought Leftists were supposed to be the Bright Darwinians. So it seems a bit odd to need to explain the evolutionary implications … in how we are making way to become overrun with Islamists.
Clearly, using tax revenues to foster green jobs is also paying off Utopian and Marxist opportunists. Yet Obamanots continue to be true-believing, bumfoozled, useful idiots, even as Soronots happily make amoral use of such useful idiots. Not surprisingly, Obama has accomplished little. But what has Soros profited? And where have all the pretty, fainting girls gone?
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As we, in the sum of our perspectives of consciousness, cease to value the preserving of America, in what way should we expect God (or evolution?) will continue in preserving America? What we have is a failure to communicate values to a series of entitlement minded generations. Maybe we need a few more jolts to get our collective attention.
Niche for protection rackets has found diminishing returns. What will follow? Will it be: sustainability, cyclic collapse, or transition? If transition, will it be values-generative or values-degenerative?
America, from founding, has long facilitated ingenuity and production. America has also facilitated protection rackets upon protection rackets: factions, unions, community organizers, wise guys, and bottom-feeding stealie boys. America’s gargantuan capacity for production allowed producers to carry along cultural drag, i.e., extensive predatory protection rackets, often enshrined in law. Cost of doing business.
So protection rackets bred. The business jungle attracted not just lions, but hyenas, leopards, dingoes, and cheetahs. Unsustainable mob and union benefits on top of unsustainable benefits. At long last, producers have relocated elsewhere.
So America remains, holding a bag now laden with predatory consumers. America’s political and business leaders were not visionary or loyal to country, but to short-term profits. Well, what leader could have withstood currents of marketplace predators? Had we more vision, we should have brought unions and bi-political elites under sustainable control.
Had we faith in founding values, we should have become more than a whirling toilet of un-assimilating multi-culti. We should have assimilated respect for Ten Commandments, Golden Rule, Great Commandment, Declaration of Independence, Preamble to Constitution, and Gettysburg Address. America coulda remained contender, instead of bum.
Now, our anti-visionary dunce of a Prez wants to lead us to the cusp of “non-valued, multi-culti values” of entitlement. Our community-organizer-in-chief has climbed the zenith; he now looks around, and is clueless: How we gonna pay for these entitlements?
Answer: We won’t. We have to transition. One path may restore us to most founding values. Another will collapse us, rendering us angry, divided, non-productive serfs, too miserable to reproduce, indentured for the rest of our lives to the East, and overrun with new cultures. New cultures will likely consist of Islamist Jihadists or Catholic Hispanics, in such quantities that a philosophy of group-minded loyalty (individual repression) will prevail. That path will bury human freedom and dignity for a millennium. Thanks be to Rinos and Dinos.
What metaphysics dare secularists not speak? See http://townhall.com/columnists/JonahGoldberg/2005/08/31/the_terror_that_dare_not_speak_its_name.
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Put aside the predominant race of any congregation. Consider: Which tends more to raise spirits, energy, and well being of a congregation: to aspire more to give, or more to beg; to organize to build and do good, or to promote faux-begging for charity by making hold-up demands for reparations from government? Focus people on becoming energized for using their own resources to help others and they will become better able to help themselves.
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From A.T. -- Re: “By century's end, married couples with their own children made up only 24 percent of all households, down from 40 percent just thirty years earlier.”
There's a scene in "Lord of War," where the character played by Nicolas Cage is forced to land on an African dirt road with an illegal cargo of arms. By the time authorities arrive, natives have stripped away all the evidence of arms. Within 24 hours, the plane itself is so stripped down as to resemble a mouse carcass after a day's feasting by ants. Imagine Obama as the Cage character and America as the plane. Our culture of Obamanots is working feverishly to “bring this sucker down.” Libertines like to pretend that how we govern our culture does not, or should not, affect how we govern our economy. Yup. In 50 years of rampant progressivism, we have made fantastic strides for improving lives of minorities. Not. Just keep whistling that the moral health of the culture doesn't affect the viability of the economy.
Are we really “ENTITLED” to meaningful life, or does our existence require hard individual WORK?
Well, awareness of one’s being’ness puts one in constant and continuous angst between one’s appreciation for the beauty of potential and one’s need to become numb to the displacement of such potential. It can be so good to be inspired and awed by the beauty that unfolds all around; it can be so soul numbing to watch all that beauty fade or be consumed. Both awe and numbness define and attack our empathies, from all sides.
So we find signification in our unfolding, evolving civilization and environment. That unfolding dances to the tune and WORK of our conscious feedback. Because we have no choice but to make choices, we are NOT ENTITLED simply to retire or to “leave to God” (or Big Bro or Big Gov) the unfolding path of civilization, evolution, eugenics, or dysgenics. For God acts through consciousness such as our own. Our civilization, environment, and genes will evolve, and if the good feels ENTITLED to retire from the process, the evil will prevail.
Changes in mores and fads can spread at the speed of now. But what mood (good or evil?) shall (or should?) guide each change in memes for inspiring us, concerning whether or how we participate in the designing of our civilization and our own genome? Will we work and participate by designing ourselves to be made (robotically?) numb to our losses, or will we participate to be awed by the potential of our Author? Regardless, we will not retain meaningful peace except insofar as the power-of-love humbly apprehends its necessity to WORK to confront the love-of-power with force and wisdom effective to the purpose.
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