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.

The People's Pottage

The People's Pottage is a book by Garet Garrett, about what the New Deal meant for America. I'm just starting to read it, and if the Forward is any indication, it is going to be an outstanding book. From the Forward:

A time came when the only people who had ever been free began to ask: What is freedom?

Who wrote its articles---the strong or the weak?

Could there be such a thing as unconditional freedom, short of anarchy?

Given the answer to be no, then was freedom an eternal truth or a political formula?

Since it was clear to reason that freedom must be conditioned, as by self-discipline, individual responsibility and many necessary laws of restraint; and since there was never in the world an absolute good, why should people not be free to say they would have less freedom in order to have more of some other good?

What other good?

Security.

What else?

Stability.

And beyond that?

Beyond that the sympathies of we, and all men as brothers, instead of the willful I, as if each man were a sovereign, self-regarding individual?

Well, where there is freedom doubt itself must be free. You shall not be forbidden to interrogate the faith of your fathers. Better that, indeed, than to take it entirely for granted.

So long as doubts such as these were wildish pebbles in the petulant waves that gnaw ceaselessly at any foundation, perhaps only because it is a foundation, no great damage was done. But when they began to be massed as a creed, then they became sharp cutting tools, wickedly set in the jaws of the flood. That was the work of a disaffected intellectual cult, mysteriously rising in the academic world; and from the same source came the violent winds of Marxian propaganda that raised the waves higher and made them angry.

Even so, the damage to the foundations might have been much slower and not beyond simple repair if it had not happened that in 1932 a bund of intellectual revolutionaries, hiding behind the conservative planks of the Democratic party, seized control of government.

After that it was the voice of government saying to the people there had been too much freedom. That was their trouble. Freedom was for the strong. The few had used it to exploit the many. Every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost, boom and bust, depression and unemployment, economic insecurity, want in the midst of plenty, property rights above human rights, taking it always out of the hide of labor in bad times---all of that was what came of rugged individualism, of free prices, free markets, free enterprise and freedom of contract. Let that be the price of freedom, and who would not say it was too dear?

Sounds eerily familiar, doesn't it? The same excuses are being used to sell further curtailments of freedom today, by both parties now.