Civil Society: The Moral Argument for Limiting Government

By JOSEPH G. LEHMAN
Editor's note: This essay was originally published in The Heritage Foundation's October 2009 booklet "Indivisible: Social and Economic Foundations of American Liberty."

Moral imperatives usually trump economic arguments. The charitable impulse to help the needy arises from a moral imperative. Those two facts help explain why it's extremely difficult to fix, scale back or replace government social programs even when they are indisputably inefficient, unaffordable or even downright harmful to those they are intended to help. This endlessly frustrates fiscal conservatives who want to solve these budget-busting problems.

But, unlike their social-conservative brethren, fiscal conservatives are more accustomed to making economic arguments than moral arguments. Instead, we should be making the moral case for downsizing the welfare state and letting civil society have some room to breathe. Welfare is not just a fiscal issue. It is a decidedly moral one as well.

Fiscal and social conservatives alike generally agree on three broad goals for programs intended to help people beset by poverty, addiction, homelessness and other special hardships. Those goals are to improve the programs' success rates, reduce their cost and make their recipients less dependent on government. Let's look at the moral case for such reforms.

Movement From Personal Outreach to Government Services

To get some perspective, we first have to look at the history of aid in America. The contemporary term "social services" helps tell the story, because the term was not used in the Colonial and Founding eras. In those days, the closest analogue would have been "charity." Virtually all charity was funded and administered privately, apart from government. It was typical for charities to operate with explicit religious motivations and goals. Religious and nonreligious charities tended to extend aid coupled with close monitoring, accountability and relationships between recipients and givers. Providing charity was a virtuous act that could be individual or corporate. Helping the needy per se was not considered a public service of government, but rather the job of voluntary institutions in what we would now call "civil society."

Two things occurred in the evolution from "charity" to "social services." First, the nature of some charities changed in response to ideological and societal trends in the second half of the 1800s. Charities arose that dispensed aid while de-emphasizing spiritual matters and religious motivations. Many made few demands of recipients or required little follow-up with them. Recipients naturally gravitated to charities that offered the most aid with the least strings attached. This paved the way for the second change.

Government's involvement in aid programs was legitimized, in part, by the trend to separate material aid from spiritual aid and accountability. Government had to remain officially nonsectarian. Government grew to assume more and more of what had once been the near-exclusive province of churches, families and religious and nonreligious aid societies. Aid became part of the public policy and political agendas, and eventually became divorced from the private moral and religious contexts that had nurtured it.

But this didn't happen immediately. By 1919, the term "social service" had begun to take hold as a nonreligious umbrella term covering different kinds of private charity as well as government's growing role. Still, the term didn't so much redefine "charity" as re-contextualize it. Charity was still private, but it was now merely one way to help needy people. Government added "social services" to its growing list of functions. This didn't necessarily expand society's capacity for charitable work, however, since private charities began to understand their role, at least in part, by what the government was not doing.

Counterproductive Government Programs

Government social programs multiplied, and spending grew dramatically with great popular and political support, particularly in the 1930s and 1960s. The new aid philosophy, dominated by government, tended to crowd out charities that connected aid to spiritual matters, accountability and personal relationships.

But persistent poverty and a growing underclass invited skepticism. In his 1984 book "Losing Ground," Charles Murray persuasively demonstrated the perverse incentives of government welfare programs. They hurt many people who needed help the most. Marvin Olasky, in 1992, chronicled two centuries of poverty-fighting in his book "The Tragedy of American Compassion." He concluded that government programs could not match the success of private programs that employ spiritual and relational components. In 1995, Robert Rector and William Lauber estimated the cumulative cost of the three-decade "War on Poverty" at $5.4 trillion, which was more than the U.S. spent fighting World War II.

In 1996, Congress and President Bill Clinton seemed to respond to Murray's (and others') findings by placing work requirements and time limits on welfare recipients. This victory was a step in the right direction, but only a step.

The positive shift in welfare policy showed the power of moral arguments. We can further harness moral arguments to shift welfare policy even closer to the ideal where private charity, greatly expanded, reduces poverty so much that little justification remains for government social programs.

It's a tall order, but not an unknown ideal. As Olasky documented, it's an ideal to which we were once much closer. To move toward it, conservatives must consider moral arguments anew.

This means fiscal conservatives, especially, must embrace the legitimacy of moral arguments and use them. Moral arguments, not merely economic ones, have produced the major changes in social service policies. The moral argument for welfare reform does not focus so much on how much is spent, how much is saved or how efficient a policy is. Rather, it seeks to answer this question: What policy will, in the long run, best help those in need?

How Best to Help Those in Need

When people believed more money was the key to helping people more, the policy they supported was to involve government and its vast funding apparatus. Decades later, when Murray and others showed that the resulting programs were harming those they were supposed to help, the programs were modified by adding some of what Murray said was missing. Economic arguments were made for all these changes, but those only augmented the moral imperative of how best to help needy people.

The lesson is that moral arguments ultimately matter more than economic ones, at least in public policy debates. Durable policy changes don't appear out of nowhere. Most of the time, they arise from political changes that, in turn, flow from social movements. Social movements in America have been driven mainly by moral ideas framed in terms of how to help people, not merely by cold logic, hard economic data and the bottom line. It was principally moral convictions and arguments that drove the social movements behind abolition, civil rights, women's suffrage, prohibition, labor unions and environmental activism. These social movements all produced major changes in public policy.

The contemporary political Left may be more successful at framing its policy goals in terms of how to help people, but the political Right has its own successes to build on. School choice probably would not have progressed in the last two decades without compelling moral arguments for permitting parents to choose the safest and best schools for their children. Economic analyses were necessary, but they would not have been sufficient.

Government's Proper DomainAnother moral issue concerns the nature of government itself and the morality of using government to accomplish certain ends, such as reducing poverty. The sanctioned use of force is what distinguishes government from all other institutions. For some functions, force, whether direct or indirect, may be necessary — even morally imperative. But the issue is complicated in liberal democracies, where the use of force is rarely overt. As a result, it's easy to opt for the coercive power of the state without quite realizing it. Whether or not we intend it, however, every tax, expenditure, regulation, police action and mandate is ultimately backed by the legal use of force. When people do not comply, they are either forced to comply or met with the threat of force. And the use of force always has moral implications.

Different societies extend aid to needy people in different ways. The driving force behind aid in a society can locate that society on a spectrum that runs between two poles: compulsion and voluntarism. Near the compulsion pole lie societies in which the state compels citizens to help others through taxes and other means. Near the voluntary pole lie societies characterized by citizens who help one another without being forced.

Societies near the compulsion pole require expansive governments powerful enough to force people to do what they might otherwise not do. Societies near the voluntary pole have more limited governments. Put another way, in some societies, the government constrains its people. In others, the people constrain their government.

All governments employ force, but at one end of the spectrum, the force primarily restrains people from unjustly harming others. At the other end, the force routinely compels people to do what might be virtuous if it were voluntary. Somewhere along the spectrum, a government ceases to be limited.

The distinction is not merely academic. It has practical consequences. As we've seen in the case of welfare, for instance, when certain forms of "help" are taken over by government, they become less helpful. They can even become harmful. The problem is rooted in using the state to deliver charity in the first place. Charity is an exercise of private virtue. And virtue requires freedom.

Therefore, it's impossible to force someone to be charitable.

If something can be accomplished voluntarily rather than coercively, surely we ought to prefer voluntarism. And with regard to "social services," we have every reason to argue that these can not only be performed, but be performed better, by voluntary charities. The moral burden of proof should lie squarely on those who seek to replace voluntarism with redistributive coercion.

Of course, moral arguments are grounded in some moral vision, some notion of ultimate truth, but not everyone agrees on the source of ultimate truth. Some do not believe in God and others conceive of God differently. One brief essay is not the place to settle ultimate questions, but perhaps we can affirm principles upon which all can stand.

Social movements draw their power from moral conviction. Fiscal conservatives must not leave it to social conservatives alone to advance moral arguments. Those who sought abolition and civil rights for political or economic reasons were successful because they worked in league with those who advocated those goals on moral and often explicitly religious grounds.

Effecting durable change in public policy by means of economic analysis alone is like bringing a knife to a gun fight. Uniting with a new focus on moral suasion and a better articulation of the moral implications of government force is what will win the day.

Nevada Senate candidate Sharron Angle wants to do something extreme. She wants to abolish the Department of Education (DOE). Is she crazy?

Absolutely not. Abolishing the monstrous department with a proposed 2011 budget of $77.8 Billion (yes, that was Billion), employs 4,800 people and garners little-to-no academic results year after year is far from crazy. It is common sense.

National Review writer Mona Charen wrote an article this week on the exemplary success of our astute iGeneration (I should copyright that...). She explains how well the billions of tax dollars are helping to further the academic development of the youth:

"All of this spending has done nothing to improve American education. Between 1973 and 2004, a period in which federal spending on education more than quadrupled, mathematics scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress rose just 1 percent for American 17-year-olds. Between 1971 and 2004, reading scores remained completely flat.

Comparing educational achievement with per-pupil spending among states also calls into question the value of increasing expenditures. While high-spending Massachusetts had the nation’s highest proficiency scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, low-spending Idaho did very well, too. South Dakota ranks 42nd in per-pupil expenditures but eighth in math performance and ninth in reading. The District of Columbia, meanwhile, with the nation’s highest per-pupil expenditures ($15,511 in 2007), scores dead last in achievement."

So for those thick-headed politicians out there let me make it really easy: more spending does not produce greater academic results. No, really, it doesn't.

What would improve the quality of our educational system? Returning to the classical, patriotic, principled education that previous generations learned. Those generations that established American governance, abolished slavery, defended liberty through two world wars, survived the Great Depression, and ushered America into the greatest industrialization the world has ever seen.

I have a few places we can start.

Remove the negative connotations in history textbooks of words like capitalism, U.S. military, patriotism, and founding fathers. Include negative connotations when teaching about Karl Marx, Hugo Chavez, socialism, and progressives. Remove chapters that discuss Oprah Winfrey and Survivor, and replace with chapters that teach the unabashed principles of George Washington and Ronald Reagan.

In math, get rid of word problems that ask students to come up with the percentage of Arctic ice that will melt if the global temperature continues to increase one-tenth of a degree over the next 50 years. In science, remove the pictures of polar bears sitting on a 4x4 chunk of floating ice and pelicans covered in oil with a caption that includes the word "capitalism" from the classroom walls.

In composition, stop asking students to write about the greatness of China's culture and the lessons Americans can learn from their enlightened society. And finally, at recess, allow the children to hang from the monkey bars, run with a shoelace partially untied, and return the real dodge balls and get rid of the foam balls that cannot fly against the slightest of breezes.

These are humorous examples, but sadly, they are also true. Our American education system continues to fail our children. Abraham Lincoln said it best: “The philosophy of the school room in one generation is the philosophy of the government in the next.” How can we expect to change the path this country is traveling down if we do not change the way the next generation is learning? Education is more than learning, it is discipleship.

The Distance Between the President and the People is Beginning to be Revealed

by DOROTHY RABINOWITZ, Opinion Column of The Wall Street Journal: June 9, 2010

The deepening notes of disenchantment with Barack Obama now issuing from commentators across the political spectrum were predictable. So, too, were the charges from some of the president's earliest enthusiasts about his failure to reflect a powerful sense of urgency about the oil spill.

There should have been nothing puzzling about his response to anyone who has paid even modest critical attention to Mr. Obama's pronouncements. For it was clear from the first that this president—single-minded, ever-visible, confident in his program for a reformed America saved from darkness by his arrival—was wanting in certain qualities citizens have until now taken for granted in their presidents. Namely, a tone and presence that said: This is the Americans' leader, a man of them, for them, the nation's voice and champion. Mr. Obama wasn't lacking in concern about the oil spill. What he lacked was that voice—and for good reason.

Those qualities to be expected in a president were never about rhetoric; Mr. Obama had proved himself a dab hand at that on the campaign trail. They were a matter of identification with the nation and to all that binds its people together in pride and allegiance. These are feelings held deep in American hearts, unvoiced mostly, but unmistakably there and not only on the Fourth of July.

A great part of America now understands that this president's sense of identification lies elsewhere, and is in profound ways unlike theirs. He is hard put to sound convincingly like the leader of the nation, because he is, at heart and by instinct, the voice mainly of his ideological class. He is the alien in the White House, a matter having nothing to do with delusions about his birthplace cherished by the demented fringe.

Far greater strangeness has since flowed steadily from Washington. The president's appointees, transmitters of policy, go forth with singular passion week after week, delivering the latest inversion of reality. Their work is not easy, focused as it is on a current prime preoccupation of this White House—that is, finding ways to avoid any public mention of the indisputable Islamist identity of the enemy at war with us. No small trick that, but their efforts go forward in public spectacles matchless in their absurdity—unnerving in what they confirm about our current guardians of law and national security.

Consider the hapless Eric Holder, America's attorney general, confronting the question put to him by Rep. Lamar Smith (R., Texas) of the House Judicary Committee on May 13.

Did Mr. Holder think that in the last three terrorist attempts on this soil, one of them successful (Maj. Nidal Hasan's murder of 13 soldiers at Fort Hood, preceded by his shout of "Allahu Akbar!"), that radical Islam might have played any role at all? Mr. Holder seemed puzzled by the question. "People have different reasons" he finally answered—a response he repeated three times. He didn't want "to say anything negative about any religion."

And who can forget the exhortations on jihad by John Brennan, Mr. Obama's chief adviser on counterterrorism? Mr. Brennan has in the past charged that Americans lack sensitivity to the Muslim world, and that we have particularly failed to credit its peace-loving disposition. In a May 26 speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Mr. Brennan held forth fervently, if not quite comprehensibly, on who our enemy was not: "Our enemy is not terrorism because terrorism is just a tactic. Our enemy is not terror because terror is a state of mind, and as Americans we refuse to live in fear."

He went on to announce, sternly, that we do not refer to our enemies as Islamists or jihadists because jihad is a holy struggle, a legitimate tenet of Islam. How then might we be permitted to describe our enemies? One hint comes from another of Mr. Brennan's pronouncements in that speech: That "violent extremists are victims of political, economic and social forces."

Yes, that would work. Consider the news bulletins we could have read: "Police have arrested Faisal Shahzad, victim of political, economic and social forces living in Connecticut, for efforts to set off a car bomb explosion in Times Square." Plotters in Afghanistan and Yemen, preparing for their next attempt at mass murder in America, could only have listened in wonderment. They must have marvelled in particular on learning that this was the chief counterterrorism adviser to the president of the United States.

Long after Mr. Obama leaves office, it will be this parade of explicators, laboring mightily to sell each new piece of official reality revisionism—Janet Napolitano and her immortal "man-caused disasters'' among them—that will stand most memorably as the face of this administration. It is a White House that has focused consistently on the sensitivities of the world community—as it is euphemistically known—a body of which the president of the United States frequently appears to view himself as a representative at large.

It is what has caused this president and his counterterrorist brain trust to deem it acceptable to insult Americans with nonsensical evasions concerning the enemy we face. It is this focus that caused Mr. Holder to insist on holding the trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in lower Manhattan, despite the rage this decision induced in New Yorkers, and later to insist if not there, then elsewhere in New York. This was all to be a dazzling exhibition for that world community—proof of Mr. Obama's moral reclamation program and that America had been delivered from the darkness of the Bush years.

It was why this administration tapped officials like Michael Posner, assistant secretary of state for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor. Among his better known contributions to political discourse was a 2005 address in which he compared the treatment of Muslim-Americans in the United States after 9/11 with the plight of the Japanese-Americans interned in camps after Pearl Harbor. During a human-rights conference held in China this May, Mr. Posner cited the new Arizona immigration law by way of assuring the Chinese, those exemplary guardians of freedom, that the United States too had its problems with discrimination.

So there we were: America and China, in the same boat on human rights, two buddies struggling for reform. For this view of reality, which brought withering criticism in Congress and calls for his resignation, Mr. Posner has been roundly embraced in the State Department as a superbly effective representative.

It is no surprise that Mr. Posner—like numerous of his kind—has found a natural home in this administration. His is a sensibility and political disposition with which Mr. Obama is at home. The beliefs and attitudes that this president has internalized are to be found everywhere—in the salons of the left the world over—and, above all, in the academic establishment, stuffed with tenured radicals and their political progeny. The places where it is held as revealed truth that the United States is now, and has been throughout its history, the chief engine of injustice and oppression in the world.

They are attitudes to be found everywhere, but never before in a president of the United States. Mr. Obama may not hold all, or the more extreme, of these views. But there can be no doubt by now of the influences that have shaped him. They account for his grand apology tour through the capitals of Europe and to the Muslim world, during which he decried America's moral failures—her arrogance, insensitivity. They were the words of a man to whom reasons for American guilt came naturally. Americans were shocked by this behavior in their newly elected president. But he was telling them something from those lecterns in foreign lands—something about his distant relation to the country he was about to lead.

The truth about that distance is now sinking in, which is all to the good. A country governed by leaders too principled to speak the name of its mortal enemy needs every infusion of reality it can get.

Ms. Rabinowitz is a member of the Journal's editorial board.

Copyright 2009 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

"The Edifice Falls" by the Heritage Foundation

In lieu of penning my own blog post this week, I am taking the easy way out and posting an eloquent short piece written by Mike Gonzalez of the Heritage Foundation. Enjoy.

Having failed to convince the country that we should reorder one-sixth of our economy (health care) in one fell swoop, liberals in the Administration and Congress are now doubling down and moving on to the next big thing. This time it’s the transformation of everything, through climate legislation. One could almost stand agape, admiring the boldness of the overreach, were not so much prosperity at stake.

The latest attempt to force the U.S. economy to turn away from readily available, affordable fuels and leaving it to the tender mercies of untried, experimental and expensive technologies is a bipartisan effort by Sens. John Kerry (D-MA), Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Joseph Lieberman (I-CT). A legislative package from them, according to The Washington Post on Saturday, would individually cap how much traditional energy the main pillars of the American economy would be able to use. This would of course cripple our economy and threaten our prosperity. Any doubts about how broad and deep this effort is are dispelled by reading the following paragraph in the Post:

"According to several sources familiar with the process, the lawmakers are looking at cutting the nation’s greenhouse gas output by targeting, in separate ways, three major sources of emissions: electric utilities, transportation and industry."

The reason the Senators could not act through their preferred vehicle, a “cap-and-trade” scheme that would put an across-the-economy ceiling on the use of traditional sources of fuel such as coal, oil and natural gas—above which companies using these fuels would have to pay for extra rights—is that the whole edifice of global warming is now falling apart.
It is collapsing with such rapidity that it is worth pausing from time to time to take stock.
The foundations of such edifice rest on a single assumption. This hypothesis—one that drove many people, even some reasonable ones, to contemplate upending the world as we know it — is that that traditional fuels will have cataclysmic consequences on the environment because they emit gases that make the world too hot.

The authority to turn this assumption into fact rested largely on a U.N. document - the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2007 report - which declared climate change “unequivocal” and its man-made origin “very likely.” The purpose of the IPCC report was to turn hypothesis into fact.

The reason Sens. Kerry, Graham and Lieberman had to turn away from cap-and-trade, and target industries individually, is that the idea of an iron-clad scientific consensus is now being revealed to be a bit, shall we say, exaggerated. The IPCC’s turning of hypothesis into fact now looks less like the scientific process and more like the magician you paid $50 an hour to pull flowers out of hats at your daughter’s birthday.

The first scales began to come off the global warming edifice in November, when emails from the University of East Anglia in the UK revealed how scientists at that key global research center had tried to suppress the opinion of peers who dissented from their view and hid evidence that countered the theory of man-made global warming.

Then the U.N.’s Copenhagen summit that was supposed to produce a global agreement to replace the expiring Kyoto Protocol fell apart in December, with the key countries refusing to hobble their own economies for the sake of science that was less and less there.

Then, last month it started to become clear that the 2007 IPCC report was more hollow than hallowed. Its claims that half the Netherlands is below sea level was off by a factor of two. Ditto for the outlandish fear-mongering that the glaciers of the Himalayas would melt by 2035. The IPCC was forced to admit that, actually, its projections were that that would happen by 2350. Oops!

Then last Friday, the news pages of The Wall Street Journal published yet one more devastating story on the IPCC and its hapless chairman, Rajendra Pachauri. The front page story detailed how inconclusive science, political pressure and shoddy administration all led to the Cassandra-like pronouncements of the IPCC report. Imagine that: politicians putting pressure on scientists to come up with theories that would vastly add to their regulatory and taxing powers.

Things have gotten so desperate that Al Gore himself had to come out of seclusion and pen a piece for The New York Times. On Saturday he implored readers that all these cascading events didn’t amount to a hill of beans. The article was vintage Gore. Let’s say it was not restrained. Here’s Gore on what will happen if we fail to act now:

"Our grandchildren would one day look back on us as a criminal generation that had selfishly and blithely ignored clear warnings that their fate was in our hands."

The former Vice President and failed presidential candidate was so exercised he even took a jab at FOX, apparently blaming it for the troubles global warming is experiencing: “Some news media organizations now present showmen masquerading as political thinkers who package hatred and divisiveness as entertainment.”

Alas for Gore, Pachauri, et al., the climate alarums are working less and less not because of FOX, but because the alarmists overreached. Even an embarrassed U.N. was forced to announce Saturday that an independent board of scientists will be appointed to review the workings of the IPCC.

Unfortunately, climategate and IPCCgate have not put a dent on the Obama Administration’s plan to (mis)use the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate CO2, and thereby the companies that power our nation. Its Administrator Lisa Jackson was out in front of Congress last week again repeating the same shibboleths on a scientific consensus on global warming. This should make us all wonder if stopping global warming really was ever the end game.
As for Sens. Kerry, Graham and Lieberman, their reaction is to slap carbon controls on individual sectors of the economy separately, instead of setting a national target through cap-and-trade. The foundations for doing cap-and-trade have been torn asunder. Our research shows that cap-and-trade would be a $1.9 trillion tax on businesses over eight years, more expensive than the Vietnam War, Hurricane Katrina or the New Deal. But taxing the different pillars of our economy individually would be just as economically suicidal.

Sen. Kerry told the Post last week about his legislative effort, “What people need to understand about this bill is this really is a jobs bill, an economic transformation for America, an energy independence bill and a health/pollution-reduction bill that has enormous benefits for the country,” Kerry said. Notice he said nothing about global warming or climate change, the reason we were supposed to take this long walk off a short pier. Notice also he didn’t say it was about handing the political class the reins of the private economy. Kerry, Graham and Lieberman want electric power to be first on the economic chopping block. Previous analysis of similarly severe carbon cuts project electricity prices will rise over 70 percent, even after adjusting for inflation. Not only is this a nightmare for household utility bills, the higher cost will hit consumers over and over since businesses must pass on their higher costs as well.

Direct link with hyperlinks:
http://blog.heritage.org/2010/03/01/morning-bell-the-edifice-falls-2/?utm_source=Newsletter&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=Morning%2BBell

37 Years of Abortion

January 22nd, 2010 marked the 37th year since the United States Supreme Court decision roe vs. wade. In those 37 years, approximately 50 million children have been killed. To put that into perspective, in all the wars in American history combined, from the Revolution to the War on Terror, approximately 910,000 people have lost their lives. We lose more children to abortion each day than all the lives lost in all the tragedies on September 11, 2001 combined.

What is astounding is the sticking power of the pro-choice groupies who claim they support a "women's right to choose." This is their chosen mantra of a 37-year genocide? About 1 in 5, or 20 percent, of our nation's youth had their lives end before it even began. African Americans account for 1.3 million abortions each year (which is 37% of all abortions performed yearly, even though African Americans make up 12% of our population. Latinos, 15% of our population, account for 22% of abortions).

But don't bother pro-choicers with those statistics. A women's right to choose is clearly more valuable than a child's opportunity to live. A woman can carry on with her life, making choices every single day and pursue those dreams she desires, but a child that is aborted will never get the opportunity. Her own child.

A friend of mine told me that when she got pregnant at the age of 17, the doctor presented her with the option of having an abortion. "Just think of all that you'll miss out on," he said. "You won't get to hang out with your friends and go to parties if you have a baby to take care of." Even though she felt scared about motherhood at her age, she looked at the doctor in his eyes and calmly responded, "So you want me to kill this baby so I can go to some parties?"

Approximately 98 percent of all abortions are done out of convenience rather than health issues.

On day 18 after conception, a baby has a heartbeat.

At 6 weeks following conception, a baby's brain waves can be measured.

At 8 weeks after conception, the stomach, liver, and kidneys of the baby are functioning and fingerprints have formed.

At 9 weeks, the unborn child can feel pain.

700,000 abortions are performed each year in America after 9 weeks into the pregnancy. That is after the baby has a heartbeat, has brain activity, has a functioning stomach, liver and kidneys, and after the baby can feel pain. But still, pro-choice activists spout that the mother's right to choose whether she wants the responsibility of caring for a child is more valuable than that life itself.

Ayn Rand, the Russian-American novelist of the 1957 Atlas Shrugged once said "A man who takes it upon himself to prescribe how others should dispose of their own lives - and who seeks to condemn them by law, i.e., by force, to the drudgery of an unchosen, lifelong servitude (which, more often than not, is beyond their economic means or capacity) - such a man has no right to pose as a defender of rights. A man with so little concern or respect for the rights of the individual, cannot and will not be a champion of freedom or of capitalism."

Rand likens parenthood to lifelong servitude thrust upon an individual by force. She admits that outlawing abortion is in direct opposition to our inalienable right to life. But again, the focus is placed on the life which is seen. The life which is unseen has no right to exist nor any defender to give him an opportunity to exist.

Leonard Peikoff, an American Objectivist philosopher and former professor has said this regarding pro-life advocates: "Responsible parenthood involves decades devoted to the child's proper nurture. To sentence a woman to bear a child against her will is an unspeakable violation of her rights: her right to liberty (to the functions of her body), her right to the pursuit of happiness, and, sometimes, her right to life itself, even as a serf. Such a sentence represents the sacrifice of the actual to the potential, of a real human being to a piece of protoplasm, which has no life in the human sense of the term. It is sheer perversion of language for people who demand this sacrifice to call themselves 'right-to-lifers.'"

This idea of equating mothers to slaves is truly disturbing. Peikoff even equates motherhood to a type of death sentence in which she can no longer pursue a life of happiness or fulfillment. I don't know how or why this theory has any validity. It seems to me one way to impact this world and influence an entire generation is to give life and raise an entire generation.

These quotes, along with the mainstream beliefs of pro-choicers, are nothing more than a sly way to promote an elitist, eugenic view that only those with the most to offer (economically, educationally, or otherwise) have a right to life. Anyone unseen, with an endless amount of potential, the elderly, with an endless amount of wisdom, and the disabled, with an endless amount of purpose should not be given the same rights as Ayn, Leonard, or fill-in-the-blank.

50 million lives have been lost in this country because of abortion- so far. The "pursuit of happiness" should first and foremost protect those who have unlimited amount of happiness to pursue. If we cannot protect the lives of those unseen we can certainly not value the life that is seen.

From the Politico:

"The Obama-Biden Administration will expand make student loans more affordable by limiting a borrower’s payments to 10 percent of his or her income above a basic living allowance. It will also keep the total cost of loan repayment manageable by forgiving all remaining debt after 10 years of payments for those in public service work and 20 years for all others. The monthly payment for a single borrower earning $30,000 who owes $20,000 in loans would be $115 a month, compared with $228 a month under the standard 10-year repayment plan. These steps — which build on the Income-Based Repayment plan implemented last summer — will help with the staggering burden of student loan debt and allow a generation of young adults to enter public service and other careers with historically low pay."

Essentially, what the administration is telling young adults is this: you don't have to pay back what you borrow; let the American taxpayer do that instead. Given our current economic crisis in which millions of average Americans are learning a hard lesson in managing a high debt-to-income ratio, one would think it would be wise to teach college-bound kids that borrowing more than you can afford to pay back is not the way to achieve the American Dream.

Once again the administration has it wrong. Giving hand-outs to people who carry a high debt burden does nothing to teach fiscal responsibility. But trying to explain that to a liberal administration is like trying to teach an infant not to cry. It's in their blood- it's an innate reaction to life. Anything which agitates an infant, he cries. Anything which agitates a liberal, they solve with OPM (other people's money).

The Obama administration wants to make loans more affordable to the college graduate who is living on a $30k yearly income. Our government wants to balance the checkbook of college graduates. This is not the role of government; it is yet another example of the perverted interpretation regarding the scope of power our elected officials should have.

The administration wants to forgive all outstanding debt after 10 years of anyone who goes into "public service." We don't know yet how "public service" is defined, but undoubtedly the members of ACORN, SEIU and the teacher's union are considered "public servants." The government will also waive a carrot in front of the face of any college student taking courses in entrepreneurship. No, don't study that...come over here where the debt is forgiven and the job security is infinite...to where the taxpayer pays for your health insurance and your lavish retirement plan.

This administration wants to prepare young adults for the real world by sheiding them from the real world- on the backs of those living in reality. If more and more young adults "mature" in the mentality that the government is their caretaker and will arrive at their doorstep to slap a band-aid on every elbow scratch, eventually the government will run out of band-aids.

The taxpayer will only stand for so much taxation. America has a strong history of fighting for such a reason. If college students learn American history it may not repeat itself, and it will cost far less than their loan payments.

On Politics and Christianity

Brit Hume, senior political analyst for Fox News and former anchor of Special Report With Brit Hume candidly opened up about the ongoing Tiger Woods scandal while a guest on Fox’s Sunday political talk show.

"The extent to which he can recover seems to me depends on his faith. He is said to be a Buddhist. I don't think that faith offers the kind of forgiveness and redemption that is offered by the Christian faith. My message to Tiger would be, 'Tiger, turn to the Christian faith and you can make a total recovery and be a great example to the world."

It should come as no surprise that speaking the words of Christianity on such a large platform would immediately generate every kind of outrage and vitriol from the American left. After all, the American left has evolved into a secular-humanist cult forcefully pronouncing its belief system on every facet of American life. From schools to media/entertainment outlets to so-called public service positions at every level of American government, generic platitudes of tolerance for all religions and moral relativism have seeped into our culture.

These ostensible practitioners of tolerance and equality are nothing more than wolves in sheep’s clothing. Something my Christian God warned me about many, many years ago. (Did I just write that? You betcha.)

Prestigious commentators such as MSNBC’s David Shuster supported his creed’s Ten Commandments of Tolerance by stating, “This isn’t church, this isn’t some sort of holy setting, this is a political talk show. Doesn’t that minimize the significance of Christianity, when you bring a discussion of Christianity into a conversation about politics? I do think it diminishes the discussion of Christianity … when you have a conversation out-of-the-blue on a political talk show. This wasn’t the ‘700 Club,’ this wasn’t ‘Theocracy Today.’” He further insinuated that the “separation of church and television” was grossly violated by Hume’s out-of-the-blue comments.

His charming co-anchor, Tamron Hall, felt it necessary to further explain her personal obedience to all-things-tolerant by saying, “[D]o we need to run down the list, just in the past year, of so-called Christian politicians who’ve been accused, or in many case[s] flat-out admit because they were backed up against the wall, that they had affairs and other discretions? I mean, to the heart of what David is saying, if this is just about religion, all are flawed. Isn’t that what the Christian Bible says?”

Like freshly-bloomed lilacs on the first day of spring, I can breathe a sigh of relief knowing that our liberal left still holds a view of Christianity edified by their Harvard professors and Washington D.C. beltway buddies. I smell tolerance in the air. Besides Shuster and Hall’s gross factual misrepresentations, the heart of what they say is an all-too-common philosophy in American society. Christianity must stay out of politics. And since politics encompasses every aspect of our daily lives, Christianity must stay out of our daily lives. Go find a closet, Christ, and lock yourself inside for all eternity.

I think the ACLU needs to make that last statement their new epigram. No reason to be ambiguous with lawsuits against high schools that hold graduation ceremonies inside churches or crosses displayed on public property all in the name of “separation of church and state.” Christianity and the name of Jesus Christ play no role in our spoken society. But feel free to think thoughts of Christianity. Or, wait…

“It takes a religious zealot to strap explosives around his or her waist and, murmuring prayers, blow up a CIA facility in Afghanistan, or take down an airplane over Detroit, or steer a jet into the World Trade Center. Or, for that matter, to treat the world to Crusades and Inquisitions and the kind of faith-based savagery we've seen in places like Belfast, Bosnia, Beirut, and Jerusalem. That is what made Brit's comments so creepy: the self-certainty that ‘my god is better than yours.’ Hume has the right to yak. People get paid to say all sorts of provocative things these days. I have no doubt that some of his best friends are Jewish, or Buddhist, or of a different Christian denomination. I am sure he loves all wogs, in his way. But, jeez, what a stupid thing to think.”

John Aloysius Farrell, the “award-winning Washington reporter” and US News and World Report contributing editor believes that Christian principles are not something to think proudly. Apparently you are in company with terrorists who blow up airplanes and kill thousands of innocent Americans when you believe that your God may be better than someone else’s. Maybe I should subject myself to a full-body scan the next time I want to get on a plane. I could be the next one…

To sum up, Christianity doesn’t play any part in politics, should not be pronounced to another on television, or even in held as an intellectual thought. And if by chance you slip up and spew forth such bigoted beliefs, there is only one resolve: apologize. In the Washington Post, Tom Shales explains this resolution thoroughly. “In a way that many others had spoken of this particular faith, Hume seemed so bolstered by Christianity that he just had to go tell it on the mountain. And the golf course. And Fox news-talk shows. First off, apologize. You gotta. Just say you are a man who is comfortable with his faith, so comfortable that sometimes he gets a wee bit carried away with it.”

I, and many other well-intentioned Americans, have a lot to be sorry for. To think of all the countless times I got a wee bit carried away and professed myself a Christian to anyone, which by the very act diminutives all other religions and surely thrusts judgment upon their souls. So long as our politicians don’t jump to conclusions and characterize the radical Islamists as anything other than poor, lost souls engaging in man-made disasters I suppose all is not yet lost.

David Shuster also said, “ Why go there? Why – I mean, look, we all respect Brit’s view, the faith works for him, it work’s for you, my faith works for me. But why go on a political show and anoint yourself the adviser to a celebrity in trouble and say ‘my faith is the right one, his is a failure for him’?” Along with the Ten Commandments of Tolerance, the American left hold tightly to the golden rule of moral relativism. What’s right for you is right for you and what’s right for me is what’s right for me. We live in a gray world, not a black and white world. Brit Hume can believe in Christianity but that doesn’t mean he has any right to say so. But what is missing is the right side of that equation. If Christians should not be allowed to spread the good news of Jesus Christ as the one and only way, then Buddhists, Muslims, Hindus, Islamists and atheists cannot share their answer to the world’s ails either. But when was the last time a public display of Buddhism or atheism was shunned? I will not wait for an answer.

The problem the left has with Hume’s comments do not stem from a desire to level the playing field of all the world’s religions. It comes from a place of fear. Fear of what they don’t understand, fear of what they don’t want to hear, and fear of our own country’s Christian heritage. And fear that America’s first principles such as freedom of religion, freedom of speech and the right to bear arms actually come from a religion that they so desperately want to deny and silence.

To which I say, good luck. Since you have no faith you wish to speak of, you will need that rabbit's foot. A battle of unprecedented proportions is on the forefront and all hell will break loose.