Are You Going to the Tea Party?

There is a grassroots conservative movement organizing "tax day tea parties" around the nation for this upcoming April 15th. If you are an advocate of the free-market system and want to protest the out of control government spending, then make sure you attend your local TEA PARTY. Click here to see the official Tax Day Tea Party website and find out what's happening in your town on April 15th.

Spread the word to friends and family and join thousands on April 15th to let your voice be heard!

(For those of you who slept through history class, the "tea party" reference alludes to the original Boston Tea Party of 1773, an historic event marking the road to the American Revolution in which Bostonian colonists dumped British tea into the Boston Harbor as a protest against unlawful taxation.)

Sneaky Despotism

This is an excerpt from Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America... so telling and so timely. (Thanks to Hannah for the passage):

It seems that if despotism came to be established in the democratic nations of our day, it would have other characteristics: it would be more extensive and milder, and it would degrade men without tormenting them.

When I think of the small passions of men of our day, the softness of their mores, the extent of their enlightenment, the purity of their religion, the mildness of their morality, their laborious and steady habits, the restraint that almost all preserve in vice as in virtue, I do not fear that in their chiefs they will find tyrants, but rather schoolmasters.

I want to imagine with what new features despotism could be produced in the world: I see an innumerable crowd of like and equal men who revolve on themselves without repose, procuring the small and vulgar pleasures with which they fill their souls.

Above these an immense tutelary power is elevated, which alone takes charge of assuring their enjoyments and watching over their fate. It is absolute, detailed, regular, far-seeing, and mild. It would resemble paternal power if, like that, it had for its object to prepare men for manhood; but on the contrary, it seeks only to keep them fixed irrevocably in childhood; it likes citizens to enjoy themselves provided that they think only of enjoying themselves. It willingly works for their happiness; but it wants to be the unique agent and sole arbiter of that; it provides for their security, foresees and secures their needs, facilitates their pleasures, conducts their principal affairs, directs their industry, regulates their estates, divides their inheritances; can it not take away from them entirely the trouble of thinking and the pain of living?

So it is that every day it renders the employment of free will less useful and more rare; it confines the action of the will in a smaller space and little by little steals the very use of it from each citizen. .

Thus, after taking each individual by turns in its powerful hands and kneading him as it likes, the sovereign extends its arms over society as a whole; it covers its surface with a network of small, complicated, painstaking, uniform rules through which the most original minds and the most vigorous souls cannot clear a way to surpass the crowd; it does not break wills but it softens them, bends them, and directs them; it rarely forces one to act, but it constantly opposes itself to one's acting; it does not destroy, it prevents things from being born; it does not tyrannize, it hinders, compromises, enervates, extinguishes, dazes, and finally reduces each nation to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals of which government is the shepherd..

I have always believed that this sort of regulated, mild, and peaceful servitude, whose picture I have just painted, could be combined better than one imagines with some of the external forms of freedom, and that it would not be impossible for it to be established in the very shadow of the sovereignty of the people.

--Alexis de Tocqueville

From Democracy in America, volume two, part four, chapter six: "What Kind of Despotism Democratic Nations Have to Fear" (translated by Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop)

Are we awake, America... Or are we "procuring the small and vulgar pleasures with which [we] fill [our] souls"?

Communism 101

Every so often I take my son to "story time" at the library. It's for kids under 3... basically babies. Every week we sing "The More We Get Together":

The more we get together
together
together
The more we get together
the happier we'll be

For my books are your books
And your books are my books

The more we get together the happier we'll be

Now I'm all for sharing. But I'm also all for private property. Something about this song irks me. I call it Commie 101.

A Picture Worth 1000 Words

The caption says: "The Mall after Obama's followers listened to him talk about the new era of personal responsibility."

(Thanks again Aunt Sandy!)

Tidbits...

Congratulations to Michael Steele who recently won the race for the new RNC chairman. He's black. He's in charge of the Republican Party. (Is that some kind of oxymoron?) I like him. A step in the right direction?... I think so. What do you think?

I still can't get over Obama's Treasury Secretary pick, Timothy Geithner. Supposedly some type of financial genius who couldn't even figure out his own taxes on Turbo Tax... And now he's in charge of the IRS... and your tax dollars. Go figure!

Came across this article in the Lexington Herald-Leader (my hometown paper)... thanks to my Aunt Sandy. :) The journalist is making some benign points about education, but ends her piece with this statement: "Parents and teachers should hang Obama's words in the classrooms of every high school in the land. At-risk students should feel a sense of obligation to and a sense of belonging to something much bigger than the drama of being a teen-ager." Good. Let's take down the 10 Commandments. Let's remove prayer and any mention of God. And instead let's put up Obama's words. Let's all pay homage to him.

And last but not least, some pithy quotes sent in by my good friend Sarah Wheeler. Thanks Sarah!

• "The government is like a baby's alimentary canal, with a happy appetite at one end and no responsibility at the other." - Ronald Reagan
• "The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of the blessings. The inherent blessing of socialism is the equal sharing of misery." - Winston Churchill
• "No man's life, liberty or property is safe while the legislature is in session." - Mark Twain
• "In my many years I have come to a conclusion that one useless man is a shame, two is a law firm and three or more is a Congress." - John Adams
• "Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But then I repeat myself." - Mark Twain
• "A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul." - George Bernard Shaw
• "A liberal is someone who feels a great debt to his fellow man, which debt he proposes to pay off with your money." - G. Gordon Liddy
• "Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys." - P.J. O'Rourke, Civil Libertarian
• "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else." - Frederic Bastiat, French Economist (1801-1850)
• "Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it." - Ronald Reagan (1986)
• "I don't make jokes. I just watch the government and report the facts." - Will Rogers
• "If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what it costs when it's free!" - P.J. O'Rourke
• "In general, the art of government consists of taking as much money as possible from one party of the citizens to give to the other." - Voltaire (1764)
  

The Superbowl Ad that Could've Been...

CatholicVote.com had an amazing ad planned for the Superbowl, but NBC rejected it. Click here to see the ad and read more about it.... trust me, you'll want to see it.

America For Sale

Soooooo... another $819 BILLION of YOUR money is on its way into the hands of some government official to be used for who knows what... (alledgedly $350,000,000 of it to go to STD prevention education and so on and so on). I fear we are moving so far from our roots as a nation that we might not get back. And it's not just the Democrats. Bush opened the door for such "stimulus" plans with his failed attempt just last year.

The new stimulus package passed in the House today by a vote of 244-188. It's now on its way to the Senate.

Sometimes I wonder if lawmakers are deaf or just blinded by their own agendas... Cause there ARE some good ideas out there. Ideas that would not be mere short-term fixes creating more long-term problems, not to mention more dependence on Uncle Sam.

Below is one (a stimulus idea, that is) I came across earlier this week. What do you think? What would your solution look like?

AMERICA FOR SALE

GNP = M x V (where M is Money Supply & V is velocity of money)

"In large part, the $1 trillion stimulus package in discussion in both houses of congress right now is focused on the government’s ability to spend money and spend it as quickly as possible. The majority of our legislators understand, albeit to some small degree, that money has to change hands quickly in order to spur our economy. This is true, but they are going about it all wrong. Bureaucracies are not the nimblest of creatures. Government works projects don’t get launched in the time frame necessary to have a slowing effect on this downward spiral. By the time they begin to have an impact, everyone is pinching dollars even more than before and the net effect is nil.

The only way to reverse this slide is to empower the people at the expense of government. If every other axiom proves false, this one still rings true – Americans can sniff out a bargain. It’s time to put our country up for sale. Everything needs to be incentivized right now. Give a 20% tax credit for new machinery purchases for small businesses – but give an expiration date for this offer. Dole out employment incentives that make it an attractive time for employers to snatch up some of those people standing in unemployment lines. Offer a 4% mortgage rate for owner occupied home purchases made within the next six months – I’d personally jump out and buy. Go a step further and offer a 4.25% rate for investment properties, and I will guarantee you that this will stem the tide of foreclosures and cause property values to begin moving in the positive direction. Instead of propping up the auto industry with $25 billion in aid, give the American consumers $1500 tax rebates when they purchase American automobiles. All of these things will cause growth without creating a long term reliance on government.

The focus should not be on the money supply but rather on the velocity of money. Money has to change hands in order for growth to occur. You can run the printing presses 24/7 and our economy won’t turn around because people and banks are scared and tight-fisted. That’s why it’s possible, and quite probable, that deflation will persist in America even when the printing presses are overheating. We’re in a liquidity trap, and it will stick around a long time if we’re unable to motivate the American public to open up their wallets and spend us out of this mess.

Long term, we’re staring down profound inflationary pressures, raging deficits and a weakening dollar. Let’s not compound those long term problems with fruitless short term programs. More dollars & more debt are necessary at this point in time, but foolish programs that won’t conquer our short term problems will only pump excess money into our economy and exacerbate our long term ones. Only a year ago, we did just that by passing out refund checks. Predictably though, only 1/3 of those checks actually got spent – that’s not much bang for your buck. That’s why incentives are more powerful and much more fruitful - You actually have to spend in order to get the benefit. Right now, we don’t need promises of long term tax breaks or more government jobs. We need to get the heart pumping again, and nothing revs up Americans like a sale!"