Walter Williams on the American Idea

Posted by Tom Sawyer.

It is no coincidence that I am often re-posting columns and embedding videos produced by Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams. I do so because these two men consistently prove themselves to be among the best and most relevant thinkers on the right. Here, again, Walter Williams gets to the heart of the problem with the Obama administration, this Congress, and our thinking about them. At issue is the Constitution. At stake is the Constitution. At stake is the Republic itself.

And now, Walter Williams:

Americans are harder workers, more philanthropic, individualistic, self-reliant, anti-government than people in most other countries. We’ve turned what was an 18th-century Third World nation into the freest and most prosperous nation in mankind’s entire history. Throughout our history, United States has been a magnet for immigrants around the world. What accounts for what some have called American exceptionalism?

We Americans, as human beings, are no different from any other people, including Germans, Russians, Chinese, Africans and other people who have produced tyrannical regimes such as those of Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Idi Amin. As such we are just as capable of committing acts of gross evil that have been a part of mankind throughout his history. We’ve not been a perfect nation but we’ve never approached the level of hideousness seen in other nations. That’s despite the fact that our population consists of people who have for centuries been trying to slaughter one another in their home countries, whether it’s between the French and Germans, English and Irish, Japanese and Chinese, or Palestinians and Jews, Igbos and the Hausa of Nigeria. Thrown into the American mosaic are religions that have been in conflict for centuries such as Catholic and Protestant, and Christian and Muslim. The question is: Why is the United States an exception and will it remain so?

At the heart of the American idea is the deep distrust and suspicion the founders of our nation had for government, distrust and suspicion not shared as much by today’s Americans. Some of the founders’ distrust is seen in our Constitution’s language such as Congress shall not: abridge, infringe, deny, disparage, violate and deny. If the founders did not believe Congress would abuse our God-given rights, they would not have provided those protections. After all, one would not expect to find a Bill of Rights in Heaven; it would be an affront to God. Other founder distrust for government is found in the Constitution’s separation of powers, checks and balances and the several anti-majoritarian provisions such as the Electoral College and the requirement that three-quarters of state legislatures ratify changes in the Constitution.

The three branches of our federal government are no longer bound by the Constitution as the framers envisioned and what is worse is American ignorance and acceptance of such rogue behavior. Look at the current debate over government involvement in health, business bailouts and stimulus packages. The debate centers around questions as whether such involvement is a good idea or a bad idea and whether one program is more costly than another. Those questions are entirely irrelevant to what should be debated, namely: Is such government involvement in our lives permissible under the U.S. Constitution?

That question is not part of the debate. The American people, along with our elected representatives, whether they’re Republicans or Democrats, care less about what is and what is not permissible under our Constitution. They think Congress has the right to do anything upon which they can secure a majority vote, whether they have the constitutional or moral authority to do so or not. What Congress does have is the brute force to enforce compliance with their unconstitutional acts. You say, "What do you mean, Williams?" Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution grants Congress the power to tax and spend for the enumerated activities therein. Every American is duty bound to pay his share. Congress has neither constitution nor moral authority to take the earnings of one American for the benefit of another American. What do you think will happen to you if don’t comply, say with Congress' demand that part of your earnings be taken to bail out a failing business? You’ll see all the brute force that you want to see and if you resist too much, death is not off the table.

We are losing what’s made our country great. Instead of moving toward greater liberty, we’re moving toward greater government control of our lives.

Abortion and Science

Posted by James Spurgeon.

I cited the following quotation in my last post on this topic:

"If the unborn are not human, no justification for elective abortion is necessary. But if the unborn are human, no justification for elective abortion is adequate."--Gregory Koukl, Precious Unborn Human Persons, p. 7

As I posited previously, the entire abortion question centers on this question: The unborn, what is it?

To answer that question I am going to go to more than one source of authority. The first one I will cite is "science." What has the medical and scientific community had to say on this question?

Before answering that question let me say that, of course, science is not infallible. Science is a method of inquiry, not a source of authority. It only becomes authoritative when its methods prove something to be true. However, in this case, since (a) the scientific community is virtually unanimous on this question, (b) to the secularist scientific opinion takes the place of religion as the source of authority on nearly every matter, and (c) this is a scientific question, then I do think it is proper to cite the opinion of the scientific community on this matter.

Again, I refer you to the website Case For Life. I found the following quotations there.

Scott Klusendorf at Case For Life:

"In its 1859 Report on Criminal Abortion, the American Medical Association (AMA) understood that 'the independent and actual existence of the child before birth as a living being' was a scientific truth. Nothing has changed since that time. For the past 150 years doctors have known that life begins at conception."

Consider also this quotation from a medical textbook published in 1968, five years before the infamous Roe v. Wade decision:

"It is the penetration of the ovum by a spermatozoan and resultant mingling of the nuclear material that each brings to the union that constitutes the culmination of the process of fertilization and marks the initiation of the life of a new individual." (Bradley M. Patten, Human Embryology, 3rd ed., New York: McGraw Hill, 1968, page 43.)

Or this quotation just two years after:

"Every time a sperm cell and ovum unite a new being is created which is alive and will continue to live unless its death is brought about by some specific condition." (E. L. Potter and J. M. Craig, Pathology of the Fetus and the Infant, 3rd ed., Chicago: Year Book Medical Publishers, 1975, page vii.)

Dr. Watson A. Bowes of the University of Colorado Medical School testified before Congress in 1981:

"The beginning of a single human life is from a biological point of view a simple and straightforward matter - the beginning is conception." (Subcommittee on Separation of Powers to Senate Judiciary Committee S-158, Report, 97th Congress, 1st Session, 1981.)

The Senate later concluded:

"Physicians, biologists, and other scientists agree that conception marks the beginning of the life of a human being - a being that is alive and is a member of the human species. There is overwhelming agreement on this point in countless medical, biological, and scientific writings." (Subcommittee on Separation of Powers, Ibid.)

Now, let me quote Scott Klusendorf again:

"Prior to advocating abortion, former Planned Parenthood President Dr. Alan Guttmacher was perplexed that anyone would question these basic scientific facts. 'This all seems so simple and evident that it is difficult to picture a time when it wasn't part of the common knowledge,' he wrote in his book Life in the Making. (A. Guttmacher, Life in the Making: The Story of Human Procreation, New York: Viking Press, 1933, p. 3.)

The science is clear. Life, human life, begins at conception. If this be the case, then abortion is, and always has been, the destruction of a human life.

Lessons From H1N1 Pandemic

Posted by Tom Sawyer.

Dick Morris asks another important question concerning the health care debate in this op-ed piece sent to my inbox this morning.

How can the government pretend that it can manage, overhaul, streamline, and reform the health care system in the United States when it can't even deliver enough flu shots to prevent a pandemic?

We have seen the H1N1 virus coming for over a year. It is no surprise that much of America needs vaccination. It was no secret that the flu season was approaching. But, now that it is upon us, we find ourselves pathetically short of shots.

One year ago, the government told us that we would have hundreds of millions of vaccinations available. Then, over the summer, the prediction was that 40 million would be on hand by the end of October.

Last month, the estimate was scaled back to 28 million. And, as of late last week, only 11.5 million had been delivered, leaving tens of millions vulnerable and, tragically, likely leading to hundreds of preventable deaths. Given the tendency of the virus to strike the young, many of those deaths will be among children.

It should be a fairly simple task to produce and distribute a vaccine - as we do with regular flu shots each and every year. But it was apparently beyond the capacity of the Obama Administration to manage such a routine feat.

If it can't run the epidemiological equivalent of a two-car funeral, how can Obama promise that the government will do an adequate job of managing the nation's health care system? (To say nothing of two car companies and a trove of banks and insurance firms?)

In the debate over health care, the implicit assumption has been that the government can act with competence and timeliness. The discussion has largely centered on what powers to give the government - not on whether it had the ability to wield this new authority. The bill making its way through Congress empowers the federal government to decide on protocols of health care, penalize excessive costs, and moderate reimbursement fees. These are all difficult and delicate tasks and involve decision which must be made promptly and wisely for the system to have a chance of working. Otherwise, endless delays, bottlenecks, and snafus can eventuate. And these failures can have drastic consequences for the health of all Americans.

Do we really have confidence in government's ability to make these decisions? Does its manifest inability to protect us from the Swine Flu do anything to inspire such confidence?

Not so far!

Thomas Sowell on Barack Obama

Thomas Sowell seems, of late, to be on an anti-Obama roll and we are glad to see someone of his stature standing up and stating the obvious.  Barack Obama is a dangerous ideologue and is taking this country in a dangerous direction.  Let him speak for himself:

Just one year ago, would you have believed that an unelected government official, not even a Cabinet member confirmed by the Senate but simply one of the many "czars" appointed by the President, could arbitrarily cut the pay of executives in private businesses by 50 percent or 90 percent?

Did you think that another "czar" would be talking about restricting talk radio? That there would be plans afloat to subsidize newspapers — that is, to create a situation where some newspapers' survival would depend on the government liking what they publish?

Did you imagine that anyone would even be talking about having a panel of so-called "experts" deciding who could and could not get life-saving medical treatments?

Scary as that is from a medical standpoint, it is also chilling from the standpoint of freedom. If you have a mother who needs a heart operation or a child with some dire medical condition, how free would you feel to speak out against an administration that has the power to make life and death decisions about your loved ones?

Does any of this sound like America?

How about a federal agency giving school children material to enlist them on the side of the president? Merely being assigned to sing his praises in class is apparently not enough.

How much of America would be left if the federal government continued on this path? President Obama has already floated the idea of a national police force, something we have done without for more than two centuries.

We already have local police forces all across the country and military forces for national defense, as well as the FBI for federal crimes and the National Guard for local emergencies. What would be the role of a national police force created by Barack Obama, with all its leaders appointed by him? It would seem more like the brown shirts of dictators than like anything American.

How far the President will go depends of course on how much resistance he meets. But the direction in which he is trying to go tells us more than all his rhetoric or media spin.

Barack Obama has not only said that he is out to "change the United States of America," the people he has been associated with for years have expressed in words and deeds their hostility to the values, the principles and the people of this country.

Jeremiah Wright said it with words: "G0d damn America!" Bill Ayers said it with bombs that he planted. Community activist goons have said it with their contempt for the rights of other people.

Among the people appointed as czars by President Obama have been people who have praised enemy dictators like Mao, who have seen the public schools as places to promote sexual practices contrary to the values of most Americans, to a captive audience of children.

Those who say that the Obama administration should have investigated those people more thoroughly before appointing them are missing the point completely. Why should we assume that Barack Obama didn't know what such people were like, when he has been associating with precisely these kinds of people for decades before he reached the White House?

Nothing is more consistent with his lifelong patterns than putting such people in government — people who reject American values, resent Americans in general and successful Americans in particular, as well as resenting America's influence in the world.

Any miscalculation on his part would be in not thinking that others would discover what these stealth appointees were like. Had it not been for the Fox News Channel, these stealth appointees might have remained unexposed for what they are. Fox News is now high on the administration's enemies list.

Nothing so epitomizes President Obama's own contempt for American values and traditions like trying to ram two bills through Congress in his first year — each bill more than a thousand pages long — too fast for either of them to be read, much less discussed. That he succeeded only the first time says that some people are starting to wake up. Whether enough people will wake up in time to keep America from being dismantled, piece by piece, is another question — and the biggest question for this generation.--Thomas Sowell

Life, Abortion, the Unborn

Posted by James Spurgeon.

The most radically anti-life President in US history now resides in the White House. God help us.

Rather than get into his record, or make the issue about him, I thought I might take the opportunity Tom affords me in posting here to talk about the abortion issue itself.

This is an issue fraught with much difficulty, chiefly because of the emotional element attached to it. Picture an abortion debate in your mind. What do you picture--protesters, placards, people screaming, graphic images? The debate has been framed in terms of women's rights, human rights, states' rights. Is it really something we need to drag up and get into? Is it worth it?

I think so.

Let us start with this cut and paste from Case For Life:

The abortion controversy is not a debate between those who are pro-choice and those who are anti-choice. It's not about privacy or trusting women. To the contrary, the debate turns on one key question.

What is the Unborn?

Pro-life advocates contend that elective abortion unjustly takes the life of a defenseless human being. This simplifies the abortion controversy by focusing on just one question: Is the unborn a member of the human family? If so, killing him or her to benefit others is a serious moral wrong. It treats the distinct human being, with his or her own intrinsic worth, as nothing more than a disposable instrument. Conversely, if the unborn are not human, elective abortion requires no more justification than having a tooth pulled. As Gregory Koukl points out, "If the unborn are not human, no justification for elective abortion in necessary. But if the unborn are human, no justification for elective abortion is adequate." (Koukl, Precious Unborn Human Persons, p. 7)

This is not to say that abortion is easy for most women. To the contrary, a decision to have one may be psychologically complex and perhaps even agonizing for some. But the topic today is not psychology, but morality: Can we know what's right even if our emotions are conflicted?

Everyone agrees that abortion kills something that's alive. After all, dead things don't grow! But whether it's right to take the life of any living being depends entirely on the question: What kind of being is it?--Scott Klusendorf

So I ask you. What kind of life is being taken when a pregnancy is terminated? Is it human?

This is, I believe, the crux of the entire abortion debate. If the life is human, then it is innocent, and the taking of innocent life is a monstrous evil.

Consider this an introductory post, something we will delve into more deeply in the future. I will be positing many of the arguments posited by Scott Klusendorf at Case For Life, and will be happy to discuss and defend his viewpoints with all comers.

John Stossel--More Sense Than the Dollar

Posted by Tom Sawyer.

John Stossel has more common sense than all of the city of Washington D.C. combined. Here is a clip from the Fox Business channel that I found over on the Repeal the 17th Amendment Blog.




"America was built by people who said, 'We'll take care of ourselves.'"--John Stossel

White House Thuggery and Taxing the Sick and Handicapped

Posted by Tom Sawyer.

This gem showed up in my email inbox this morning. It is slated, I think, to appear later today at Dick Morris dot com.

Obama Taxes Pacemakers, Heart Valves

by Dick Morris

The more fiscal details of the health care bills emerge, the more appalling they seem. The Senate Finance Committee bill includes a broad provision taxing all manner of medical devices. This tax includes such frivolous luxuries as pacemakers, stents, artificial heart valves, defibrillators, automated wheelchairs, mechanized artificial limbs, replacement hips and knees, surgical gurneys, laparoscopic equipment, and the like.

President Obama is planning to reduce the cost of medical care by taxing it!

The most recent Gallup Poll reflected that 49% of respondents said they believed that the Obamacare plan will increase their health care costs. Only about 20% said it would lower them. It is taxes like these that substantiate this kind of concern.

The origins of this new medical device tax are troubling as well.

The medical device industry had its day at the White House as did the insurance industry, the drug makers, the nurses, and the doctors. In turn, each group heard the White House request that they come up with voluntary cuts in their health care costs and support Obama's proposed changes in return for assurances that Congress would not impose deeper cuts (or, in the case of the doctors, that it would actually rescind cuts already scheduled under current statutes).

But, unlike all these other groups, the medical device industry refused the deal. This posture enraged the tyrants in the White House who vowed to punish the industry with cuts imposed by Congress. The result was a decision by the revenue-hungry Senate Finance Committee to extract billions in funds from the industry.

The legislation does not work like a sales or excise tax. Rather it follows the model of the punitive tobacco settlement imposed on cigarette companies in the 90s. It assesses an industry-wide payment which firms must make in proportion to their market share. It bars the them from passing along the cost of the assessment by charging more for certain basic products, but allows them to raise the price of others to raise the funds for the fee.

So, the result will be that virtually every piece of advanced surgical equipment will be subject to a price increase to meet the levy from Washington. No matter that these devices often make the difference between life and death and that, in effect, taxing them raises the cost of vital treatments. The vengeful White House will have its pound of flesh from the medical device industry for daring to be independent and to refuse to knuckle down to Administration pressure!

This tax, imposed in a spirit of haughty arrogance, falls on totally inappropriate objects. Valves, prosthetic limbs, pacemakers, hearing aids, and such are essential therapies that make life longer, better, and less painful. To tax them makes no sense. Except in the world of sharp elbows and interest group politics that grips this take-no-prisoners and show-no-mercy White House.