Some Hard Facts

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Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher

There are things that a lot of people don’t know, that they ought to know. Ignorance may be bliss, but its fees can be quite high.

Government has no money of its own. It only has what it can extract from the people by fees and taxes. As Margaret Thatcher famously said, the problem with socialism is that you run out of other people’s money. And just printing more of it doesn’t solve that problem, but only makes it worse by cheapening the currency.

The United States is, by law, a republic, not a “democracy.” In fact, the problem isn’t not enough people voting, but too many people voting. One is tempted to raise the voting age to 50. Adopting new public policies in hopes of making America “more democratic” only leads to policies derived from ignorance.

Fomenting racial discord, as a means of acquiring and keeping a political advantage, in the long run hurts everybody. Trust me: this is not how you build a stronger and more stable country. But it does seem to be a good way of opening the door for tyranny.

There is no such thing as “transgender.” There is male and female, nothing else. Making like there are several dozen “genders” can only lead to laws and policies based on a denial of reality. It has to stop.

It is not possible for any government to control everything that people do, or don’t do. If morality and conscience are not in play, the government will fail. Trying to manage everything is a good way to wind up managing nothing.

Just try getting any Democrat to admit to even one of these.

 

A Parable of Forced Equality

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New York wants to abolish programs and schools for gifted and talented students. There is a parable from the ancient world which seems to tell us why.

This story was told by both Herodotus, a Greek, and Livy, a Roman who lived some centuries after Herodotus. But I don’t think Livy lifted the story from Herodotus. Both presented it as a historical event, but it has much more the feel of a well-known parable.

The tyrant who ruled a certain city had one son to succeed him; but the young man didn’t know how he ought to go about being an effective tyrant. He asked his father, “How do you govern the city? How have you managed to stay in power for so many years?”

“I’ll teach you; it’s quite simple,” said the father.

Taking his son to a poppy field outside the city, the tyrant said, “Watch.” And with his cane he proceeded to knock the heads off all the poppies around them.

“This is how you rule the city,” he explained. “Even as I have cut all these poppies down so that none is higher than another, so have I maintained my power: by cutting down any man who rises to a certain height above the others, so that none is any greater than another, but all are equal; all are weak. I am the only one who towers over all. There is no one else whom they can turn to for a leader.”

You can see this sort of “diversity” has a very ancient pedigree. Tyrants have been cutting people down for thousands of years.

Fallen human nature hasn’t changed.

Rushdoony on Socialism

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Dead, but still a threat to freedom

R.J. Rushdoony’s essay on “Socialism as a Perpetual Civil War” was published as a Chalcedon blog post in 2009. Actually it was written quite a few years before that: but its insights are right on target today.

https://chalcedon.edu/blog/socialism-as-a-perpetual-civil-war

Rushdoony points out that socialism has its own “infallibility concept” which explains away its multitudinous and incessant failure. It destroys wealth and inhibits wealth’s creation. When anything goes wrong, it finds a scapegoat. When an epidemic struck Red China in 1967, the government threatened to purge the doctors who had “ignored Mao’s health policies”–as if medical doctors knew less about health than some crazy old mass murderer.

It’s looking more and more like we’re headed for a showdown between Christ’s Kingdom and humanist man’s impoverished socialist pipe dream.

And that’s a fight we’d better win.

Words to Fail By

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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, confronted by a fact

The continuing self-satire that is Far Left Crazy Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has left us with a quote that will be enshrined forever in the hall of idiocy.

Facts don’t matter, Cortez said in a 60 Minutes interview earlier this month–as long as you’re “morally right” (https://hotair.com/archives/2019/01/07/aoc-facts-dont-matter-youre-morally-right/). The exact wording:

“I think there’s [sic] a lot of people more concerned about being precisely, factually, and semantically correct than being morally right.”

Facts are hate speech, anyway. They get in the way of liberalism. Away with facts! We don’t need no stinkin’ facts! Not if we’re morally right.

And how do we know we’re morally right, if we have no facts at our disposal?

“Shut up!” he explained. Libs are always right!

That a civilized country of more than 300 million people would ever consent to be governed by the likes of this–

Words fail me.