[T]he American Project [is] not about maximizing national wealth nor international dominance. The American Project (I love that phrase) consists of the continuing effort, begun with the founding, to demonstrate that human beings can be left free as individuals and families to live their lives as they see fit, coming together voluntarily to solve their joint problems. The polity based on that idea led to a civic culture that was seen as exceptional by all the world. That culture was so widely shared among Americans that it amounted to a civil religion. To be an American was to be different from other nationalities, in ways that Americans treasured. That culture is unraveling.

I don’t think The American Project, our civil religion, is unraveling.  It’s being unraveled.

Churches, book clubs, little league baseball teams, small businesses, and neighborhoods are held together by powerful bonds, and you can’t pull them apart.  No matter how hard you tug, they’re clung to each other like two fabrics held together by a zipper.  Ever try to undo a zipper by pulling on the fabric from either side of the zipper?  Sometimes, the zipper is even stronger than the fabric.  But, beware.  We know that can you divide those fabrics from one another with a gentle, light pull on the zipper, one easy zip, zip, zip at a time.  Take away community, take away fellowship, and it’s every man for himself.

After I [re]posted my video comments on Barack Obama’s 2010 State of the Union, a friend asked if I had noticed how similar that speech was to the one the President made in 2012.

I replied that all of Obama’s speeches sound alike, since that’s how megalomaniacs talk.  That’s also how one talks when he’s trying to unzip the fabric of America, trying with every move to undo The American Project.  There is nothing new to state control of everything, so we should stop waiting for Mr. Obamaa to advocate for it with original words and formulas.  He and his cronies know they are doing nothing new, and they know it has never worked before, so those criticisms are made in vain.  See, they are convinced, they are positive – just like their predecessors Stalin, Lenin, Castro, Pol Pot and Chavez – that state control has failed in the past simply because it has never been done right.

Remember, in a 2008 election speech, when Obama said “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.”

It’s never been done by them.  That’s what he meant.  Head leftie talking to the lefties.  WE will get it right this time.

And they know where the zippers are.

None of Santorum, Romney or Gingrich can beat Obama on his turf.  Can’t come close.  None of them have a better answer than Obama to “how big should government be?”  ’Bigger’ implies free candy for everyone [without having to acknowledge that someone has to pay the bill].  ’Smaller’ entails (1) fighting over who will have something taken away from him,  and (2) having to explain that the money that has been paying for it was taken [from the rich].  Sounds mean and gets complicated.

I suggest that the GOP’s only chance is to change the question to “How free should Americans be; how much freedom should there be for every single American?”  Then, any one of the three lead candidates (plus Ron Paul) wins in a 58.8-41.2% (approximately) landslide.  See, the left can’t answer that question without a reference to what the government will LET people do.  When they stumble around that answer, any half-decent Republican can enthusiastically say that free men are good men who do good things, without being compelled to do so by government orders, regulations, taxes and programs.  That message wins.  That message lets Americans know that we’re trusted by the messenger.  We vote for that guy.

How do we know?  Take Ronald Reagan, for example.  He knew that a smaller government is the result of freedom, not the other way around.  Free men grant their government only the absolute minimum level of power, only enough to protect their inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and not one iota more.  The government can’t give us more freedoms, it can only take or infringe on those with which our Creator endowed us.  So, when RWR spoke of the greatness of this nation, we know the subject was the people and the form of limited-powers government we [supposedly] enjoy, thanks to our Constitution.  On the other hand, when Barack Obama mentions the greatness of this country, we know he’s thinking about the benevolent things that can be done by the gargantuan government monstrosity he controls from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Wherein lies the difference between the Republican who can beat Obama and the next John McCain?  In the answer to this question:  Do you love our form of government or do you love our government?

First, a question:  Is an 8.3% unemployment rate good news for Barack Obama and the American economy?

Depends on who you count?

Below I’ve shown figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics for December 2010 & 2011 and January 2012.

The politicians and the press report (most with celebratory glee) that the “Unemployment Rate” has gone down from 9.4% in December 2010 to 8.3% in January 2012, and we’re told how good that is for the economy and, in turn, President Obama’s re-election prospects.  Let’s look more closely.

That metric – The Unemployment Rate – is calculated as the number of “Unemployed” people divided by the “Civilian Labor Force.”  The problem is that “Unemployed” does not include people who are “Not in the Labor Force*” a figure that was 2,598,000* larger in January 2012 than in December 2010.  If we include those people, the “Actual” unemployment rate works out to be 9.9%, not 8.3%.  See, as the population grows – even if 75% of Catholics use contraception! – so grows the Labor Force.  Unless those people show up to be counted (by either applying for unemployment benefits or being on someone’s payroll) in the “Participation Rate” they get deleted from the math and, voila, the Unemployment Rate goes down!

Fast forward to November 2012 – election month.  Let’s assume population growth equal to that from Dec ’10 to Dec ’12 and let’s assume a Participation Rate equal to the average over the same period – 63.85%.  If we also assume an additional 3,500,000 people are employed by then (i.e. the number of jobs created is double the population growth) the Unemployment Rate will be reported as 6.8% – calculated as (Labor Force – Employed)/Labor Force or (155,765-145,137)/155,765 – while the Actual rate will be 8.7% because an additional 1,507,000 people are “Not in the Labor Force” (88,204,000 less 86,697,000).  The bottom table shows the same projected statistics under more likely job growth scenarios.  In every case, the way the Bureau of Labor Statistics counts “People” the unemployment rate is understated by about 2 percentage points, or about 25%.

Do you want to venture a guess how many people the Obama Administration will make disappear between now and November?

* Not in Labor Force – Total Population less Civilian Labor Force.  They stop being counted, they just disappear.

A friend puts it in his words HERE

WHO COUNTS?

Hungry - They Don't Count

]]> http://athirdvoice.wordpress.com/2012/02/05/8-3-unemployment-a-new-online-game-playing-numbers-with-friends/feed/ 0 athirdvoice Slide1 line1 child http://athirdvoice.wordpress.com/2012/02/03/tyranny-and-rubbers/ http://athirdvoice.wordpress.com/2012/02/03/tyranny-and-rubbers/#comments Fri, 03 Feb 2012 17:16:19 +0000 Third Voice http://athirdvoice.wordpress.com/?p=929 ]]> How does anyone but a tyrant equate liberty with one’s ‘right’ to make someone else pay for his contraception?

The ObamaCare law requires ALL insurance policies to cover (‘for free’) the insured’s costs of contraception.  Or, put another way, all Americans now have a right to subsidized, meaningless, inconsequential casual sex.  (Why wasn’t this guy president when I was 16?)  And, if you’re Catholic, you will pay for your fellow parishioners’ promiscuity because, well, it’s the law, damn it!

See, the Catholic Church has asked for a special dispensation (no, not from the Pope – they’re going over his head, straight to Barack Obama) from the Secretary of Human Services’ commandment that says “Thou shalt provide ‘free’ birth control to your employees.”  I think it has something to do with the arcane, ancient religious beliefs to which they cling (along with their guns) in desperation and protest over current economic difficulties.  Turns out that those self-righteous and preachy Catholic priests have been telling their flock that sex and procreation have something to do with each other, and those same extremist, uh, clerics believe that having one without regard to the other is sinful.  How quaint.

Here’s something else that’s almost as quaint.  “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof . . .”  Those pesky Catholics have the nerve to think that forcing them to pay for other people’s ‘right’ to fornicate without fear of pregnancy impedes their right to freely exercise their religion.  (I think it impedes their right to be free PERIOD – an appeal to freedom of religion is their belt to my suspenders, but . . . another day.)  What a nutty interpretation of liberty they’ve developed!  Don’t those Catholics know that liberty really means conformity and obedience to any law that 50.000001% of the people might support?

In addressing this topic, the editors of The New York Times (Editorial HERE) reveal the tyrannical tendencies of their political ilk.

He [Mitt Romney] was promising to defend the Roman Catholic Church’s “religious liberty” to deprive its tens of thousands of employees and university students of their own liberty

In the view of the New York Times, a person is denied his liberty if he is denied the power to force someone else to pay for his rubbers.

How do you define liberty?

Afterthought – The left’s definition of ‘liberty’ has been re-affirmed.  The Susan Komen Foundation, a charitable entity which gets its money from voluntary contributions, has the liberty to (1) only succumb to political pressure that comes from the left and (2) give grants to anyone they wish as long as the recipient is Planned Parenthood.  Isn’t it interesting how the left sprung to the defense of the number 1 abortion provider in the country but has mostly ignored, even supported, the Obama administration’s smack down of the Catholic Church.

See Political Diary – February 1

Mr. Gigot and every campaign strategist in America is looking at Florida primary exit polls to see who voted for whom and why.  That kind of slicing, dicing and analyzing the electorate is the genesis of every political and economic problem we face.  Mitt Romney, armed with this information, will buy votes from various constituencies with campaign promises and then, if elected, proceed to spend his time in office paying off promises with government largess, i.e. running for re-election.

“Divide and conquer” originated as a war-time strategy to be deployed by an army against its mortal enemy.  Now it’s a campaign plan that pits power-seekers against their mortal enemy, namely free men and women.  Yes, the voters are the enemies whom politicians work over-time to divide and conquer.  We, the people, gave exclusively to the government the power to use force to compel certain behavior, and now the people find themselves enslaved, having sold their lives and freedoms to the welfare distributors and the tax loop-hole writers, who retain their power largely because they have on their side the tax man, wielding a whip.

When the government attempts to choose a loser to pay for a politician’s promises of food, education and health care, the founders meant for it to meet an immovable object, that loser’s unalienable rights.  The government is supposed to be immobilized.  Instead, it runs around that road-block by either (a) allocating the pain of loss to a certain demographic group that votes ‘the wrong way’ so their objection can be ignored or, more often, (b) hiding behind a government-invented ‘right’ thereby arrogating to politicians the unConstitutional power to decide which ‘right’ is more sacred – Dr. Jack’s freedom from servitude or Jill’s ‘free’ visit to his office.  And the winner is invariably the bigger voting block.

The government constitutionally cannot arbitrate between the rights of Jack and Jill.  Remember that important word, unalienable, and note that there are no caveats.  If it appears that a conflict between a respective constitutional right of Jack and Jill is at issue, two things are true – (1) at least one of them is claiming something that is not a “right” that is protected by government powers granted by WE in the Constitution and (2) the government cannot, or constitutionally speaking, shall not, intervene.  The government, according to the Constitution can neither take any of Mitt Romney’s money to pay Jill’s doctor bill nor ask Dr. Jack to waive his fee.

Until and unless that lesson is made clear to our politicians and is used to repeal most of the federal laws adopted over the last 100 years or so, we are not living in the republic our founders intended to have given us.

More than any other nation, the United States was founded on broad themes of morality rooted in a specific religious perspective. We call this the Judeo-Christian ethos, and within it resides a ringing endorsement of capitalism as a moral endeavor.

Regarding mankind, no theme is more salient in the Bible than the morality of personal responsibility, for it is through this that man cultivates the inner development leading to his own growth, good citizenship and happiness. The entitlement/welfare state is a paradigm that undermines that noble goal.

and the piece closes with:

God begins the Ten Commandments with “I am the Lord your God” and concludes with “Thou shalt not envy your neighbor, not for his wife, nor his house, nor for any of his holdings.” Envy is corrosive to the individual and to those societies that embrace it. Nations that throw over capitalism for socialism have made an immoral choice.

In an earlier post (God is a Capitalist) I made the point that when the government takes from one man for the sake of another, the government has done something immoral.  In doing so, the government has exercised a power it does not rightly possess, since it derives its power from the people and none of us has that power to delegate to the government.  Often, stating this position is followed by “so, you conservatives would let the poor starve and the elderly die homeless and hungry!”  For the record, it’s not true that conservatives want the poor to remain poor.  Instead, it is true that conservatives believe that federal government programs are the wrong approach to providing a safety net.  Self-reliance (with a local community designed and maintained safety net) is more powerful and effective than welfare as an anti-poverty weapon.  (See Welfare vs. Self Reliance)

Only people who don’t realize that Gordon Gekko was a fictional character believe that ‘the rich’ yearn for and aspire to a world in which they stand atop a pile of gold, overlooking a landscape littered with corpses of starved men and women.  Those people who think that is the goal of “the rich” should buy guns and take care of those evil men they think occupy corporate board rooms – how can they in good conscious let those bastards continue their crimes against humanity.  Rich-haters, have the courage of your convictions and put an end to the theft that you claim is the essence of business.

Neither I nor, by my reading, Mr. Spero are making the point that the Bible is dispositive about questions of economic policy.  Rather, the point is that the Bible does NOT say what liberals suggest about society’s responsibility of taking care of the poor (or other ‘social policy’ issues) through government programs.  The Bible is about men and women as individuals possessed of a free will and vested with personal responsibility.  There are no Ten Commandments or a Sermon on the Mount for politicians, and there are no recommendations about voting in elections.  The Bible speaks only to individuals, not to any group or power center.

I posit that the Bible teaches a Randian, egoist morality.  To wit: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”  ”Love thy neighbor as thyself.”  The highest moral standard we’re instructed to employ in our dealings with others is the way we treat ourselves.  That in no way can be read to give license to harm or cheat others as a means to our ends.  That would be suicidal, no?  Instead it tells us we’re all free, responsible for ourselves and have a duty to ourselves to care for others, lest we find ourselves alone, living without the benefit of the acts of other free men, living without Lipitor, FedEx and the iPhone; living without fresh meat in the fridge and ice cream in the freezer.

The Bible’s teachings, taken as a whole, tell us that only by mutually agreeable, voluntary acts by and among free men and women is progress possible in human endeavor.  Does that sound more like capitalism or socialism?

My life-long friend has a way with words and makes a profound point with a cute story.

2 minute video here.

This does not bode well for anyone.  Remember, the feds took over (outlawed) the private student loan b…usiness a while ago. Soon, strings will be attached to student loans and limits placed on tuition.  Where that leads, most likely, is a two-tiered tuition system. Pay with gov’t loan dollars, your tuition is $X. Pay with your own money, $2X – somebody’s gotta make up the difference; might as well be the “rich.”

Costs will spiral out of control, limits will be placed on education costs, the government will have to step in to ‘solve’ the problem it caused, and “Education?  You should work in a Rick-Santorum-tax-break subsidized manufacturing plant” Panels (No-Soup-For-You! or Death Panels) will be created to determine who gets a shot at President of the Law Review at Harvard and who attends Piedmont Community College (no offense intended).

And then it will be interesting to see Harvard’s and Univ of Texas’s Boards of Regents, mostly staunch BHO supporters, squirm and whine, as they fight to keep their enormous university endowments from being raided by the feds to help bridge the gap.  I can hear the sound bites now:

“Why should that poor, unemployed graduate have to pay off his student loan with his hard earned dollars when you have billions and billions to spare?”

“Why should all that endowment money be invested in hedge funds, off-shore accounts and real estate ventures.  You MUST INVEST it to prepare our kids for the future?!”

They’re blurring the meaning between ‘spend’ and ‘invest’ - the second one doesn’t mean what they think it means.

You’ve been warned.

This has nothing to do with envy.  It has everything to do with math.  It’s what I talked about earlier.  We’ve got to make choices.  Americans understand if I get a tax break I don’t need and a tax break the country can’t afford, then one of two things are going to happen.  Either it’s going to add to our deficit or somebody else is going to have to make up the difference.  [Or the government could spend less money?  Nah, no need to consider that.]

A senior suddenly is going to have to start paying more for their Medicare, or a student is going to have to pay more for their student loan, or a family that’s trying to get by, they’re going to have to do with less.  And that’s not right.  That’s not who we are.  Each of us is only here because somebody somewhere felt a responsibility to each other and to our country and helped to create all this incredible opportunity that we call the United States of America.

I guess he thinks it’s cute to personalize it (and remind us that he makes millions of dollars) but his policy agenda will affect more than Barack and Michelle Obama’s tax return.  Furthermore, I’m not sure, but I think that if the president told the Treasury to stop sending his $400,000 per year salary to him, they’d stop – just think how many people $400,000 of food stamps could feed, Mr. President.

But, here’s the point.  Look at his words.  He plainly, boldly and proudly admits that purpose of increasing taxes on ‘the rich’ is to give their money to other people.  Usually Democrats talk about taking money from the rich to fund a ‘program’ or to fulfill some laudatory objective (to provide relief, fund research or cure a disease).  Now they’re unafraid to be explicit about it.  See the bolded words above which are followed by: “And that’s not right.“

Really?

Then, to top it off, he tells us the big lie that America is only here because of that way of thinking – ‘somebody somewhere felt a responsibility to each other . . .”  If there is any truth in that statement, it is only to the extent that free men and women decided of their own volition to work together for their mutual benefit.  American’s successes, America’s greatness, is not the result of the government acting as the arbiter of the right or fair amount of money one person is allowed to make before he’s informed that, as a matter of law, he must give 30% of the next dollar to the tax-man so the agent of fairness can determine which lucky third person should be rewarded by the gift of someone else’s money.

Frederic Bastiat warned us of legal plunder in 1850. *

But how is this legal plunder to be identified?  Quite simply.  See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong.  See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime.

Then abolish this law without delay, for it is not only an evil itself, but also it is a fertile source for further evils because it invites reprisals.  If such a law — which may be an isolated case — is not abolished immediately, it will spread, multiply, and develop into a system.

Some have accused Mr. Obama and his supporters of begin socialists, and they scream “NO WE’RE NOT!”  Some accuse them of “class warfare” with the same result.  His defenders are correct; this is neither socialism nor class warfare.  It is theft and plunder.  That the crimes are carried out by the government and is ‘legal’ does not make them just or right.  And, it has become a ‘system’ and it perverts the law.  That systematic, sanctioned plunder has pitted Americans against one another just as Bastiat predicted.  It has created two America’s – the looters and the producers, with the government purporting to be the arbiter of fairness between the two.

This cancer must be excised from our lives or our nation will soon collapse under the weight of so-called entitlements, something more accurately called, in Mr. Obama’s words “spreading the wealth” by stealing from one man for the benefit of another.

* See HERE for Frederic Bastiat’s The Law for more on legalized plunder.