A Quote That Should Live in Infamy

Little Green Footballs linked to a website called Change.gov Office of the President-Elect. This is presumably an official website of Barack Obama. The page is titled "America Serves," and begins with this quotation:

"When you choose to serve -- whether it's your nation, your community or simply your neighborhood -- you are connected to that fundamental American ideal that we want life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness not just for ourselves, but for all Americans. That's why it's called the American dream."

http://change.gov/americaserves/

The quote is not attributed to anyone, but my assumption is that it is from the President-Elect, Barack Obama. And I have never seen a more disgraceful statement from an American President in my life. He takes perhaps the most heralded statement of the American political ideal, that man has certain inalienable rights, and among these are the rights to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," and he turns it on its head.

According to this statement, life, liberty, and happiness are no longer inalienable rights, they are simply something we "want." And instead of pursuing our own happiness, we are now to live for "everyone's" happiness. That he calls the American dream. So the Declaration of Independence's statement of unabashed rational self-interest is transformed by Obama into a call to serve others. A complete perversion of the American dream. And if you think I misinterpret this quote, the rest of that webpage will show that I understand it all too well:

The Obama Administration will call on Americans to serve in order to meet the nation’s challenges. President-Elect Obama will expand national service programs like AmeriCorps and Peace Corps and will create a new Classroom Corps to help teachers in underserved schools, as well as a new Health Corps, Clean Energy Corps, and Veterans Corps. Obama will call on citizens of all ages to serve America, by developing a plan to require 50 hours of community service in middle school and high school and 100 hours of community service in college every year. Obama will encourage retiring Americans to serve by improving programs available for individuals over age 55, while at the same time promoting youth programs such as Youth Build and Head Start.

[Emphasis added.]

Here, again, we have the infamous double speak statement of "mandatory voluntarism." Obama wants to require community service of high school students and college students. Note in the original quotation about the American dream, he began with "When you choose to serve . . . " When you are required to serve, choice doesn't enter the equation.

It is Obama's intention to bind all Americans over into involuntary servitude, thus undoing the XIII Amendment to the Constitution, which states:

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

Calling involuntary servitude "voluntary" doesn't make it so. As I stated in my previous blog entry, public education is merely a propaganda arm of the government. And the government is flexing that arm's muscle.



Update: 11-08-08

The Change.Gov website has changed the original statement I quoted yesterday (again, hat tip to Little Green Footballs). Where yesterday it said it would require community service of high school and college students, today it says:

Obama will call on citizens of all ages to serve America, by setting a goal that all middle school and high school students do 50 hours of community service a year and by developing a plan so that all college students who conduct 100 hours of community service receive a universal and fully refundable tax credit ensuring that the first $4,000 of their college education is completely free.

[Emphasis added]

So he has changed from involuntary servitude to paying students for community service. By my calculations, that's $40 per hour, of taxpayers money, to pay students to pick up trash or whatever make work they devise for these students. And of course there will be tremendous peer pressure on all students to participate in such programs. Will teachers grade students who don't participate differently than those who do?

Reason number 10,001 to abolish public education.

The Election

There was no good candidate for President this year, as there hasn't been for many years. Not surprisingly, the candidates get worse with every passing year. There are many causes for this, but the one that sticks out for me is public education.

Public schools are a propaganda arm of the government. They teach the "virtues" of statism, of the welfare state, of political correctness, and of environmentalism, while they demonize capitalism and Western Civilization. Is it any wonder that the products of this so-called education elect statists and environmentalists, and become such candidates themselves?

This gradual decay from freedom to the paternalistic state would be an interesting phenomenon to study in historic archives, or in some other nation. Unfortunately, it is happening here, in the United States, and we have to live through it. We have to watch freedom being tossed overboard, in favor of the all-encompassing state as daddy and mommy, since we poor, helpless children cannot take care of ourselves. We cannot be trusted with freedom. We aren't strong enough, we aren't intelligent enough. We are simply pathetic morons who need to be cared for by our betters.

There have been a few periods of American history with sudden plunges down the road to serfdom. FDR's New Deal, LBJ's Great Society, were two of them. George Bush's addition of prescription coverage to medicare, and his colossal bailout of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the other hundreds of billions he is throwing to private financial institutions, with government strings attached, is a third.

Now we will see what Obama's contribution will be. Having a Democratic majority in both houses of Congress will surely pave the way for further erosions of freedom. Will he inflict socialized medicine on us? We're already more than half way there.

Maybe the Republicans, having been trounced in the elections, will learn to support laissez-faire capitalism, and will obstruct all of Obama's attempts to further undermine American freedom.

But I doubt it. They're too far gone. They don't even know what capitalism is anymore, or individual rights. And they are undercut by their religious morality, which sees altruism as the ideal, and selfishness as evil. No such people can ever support capitalism morally. Until they learn the necessity of the separation of church and state, they will remain hopelessly unable to defend capitalism.

The moral of the story? Public education must be abolished, razed to the ground, the earth underneath it salted, so that it is never allowed to blight the land - and the minds of American children - again.

Coddling Dictators

Barack Obama has said that if he is elected President, he will pay a visit to Cuba to talk with its current ruler, Raul Castro. Castro, of course, is a dictator, just as his brother Fidel was. In any case, it is a shameful idea. As Ayn Rand correctly pointed out long ago (from Galt's speech in Atlas Shrugged):

In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit. In that transfusion of blood which drains the good to feed the evil, the compromiser is the transmitting rubber tube . . .