The price of a little socialism

If you still believe it's possible to have a limited amount of socialism without destroying freedom in the United States, check this out:

Fidelity Investments Chairman Edward C. "Ned" Johnson III criticized the Obama administration's "New Deal II" and the "make-work projects" the government plans to fund.

In his annual letter to shareholders, Johnson warned that too much government involvement in the economy might "further sicken the patient." He said Fidelity will beef up its governmental-affairs unit; that's a euphemism for hiring high-powered lobbyists to protect the company from the government's sledgehammer.

In the course of reporting this story, the Boston Herald called a few people for comments on Mr. Johnson's comments.

"Daniel Mitchell, a senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute," reporter Jay Fitzerald wrote, "said Johnson’s remarks were on the 'right path,' though he said they might be 'kind of risky' if they anger government policymakers."

Did you catch that?

In the United States of America, it might be "risky" to anger government policymakers with public criticism of government policy.

Why might it be risky?

Because the government is taking control of private companies. If government officials get angry, they can destroy the companies and the net worth of the people who own them or work for them. The First Amendment is all well and good, but if you're smart, the thinking goes, you'll watch what you say.

Now you know what it's like to live in Iraq. Or China. Or Venezuela. Or Russia.

When the government controls your financial survival, your rights aren't worth the parchment they're printed on.

Private property is the foundation of freedom. In a free country, the government's power is limited, and its proper role is to protect private property, not seize it for the 'common good.'

If President Obama gets everything he's seeking from the Congress, Americans will have "smart meters" in their homes that tell the government how much electricity they're using and when. Doctors will use computers to report their procedures and outcomes to the government so bureaucrats can decide which treatments will be permitted and which will be deemed "wasteful." Productive companies will be forced to pay fees for running their engines and unproductive companies will be subsidized for making PowerPoint presentations about cars powered by cow poop.

It's not funny.

Collectivism is the opposite of freedom.

We can only have one at the expense of the other.

Which one do you want?

Maybe you should speak up. While you still can.

U.S. Capitol Switchboard: 202-224-3121
The White House: 202-456-1414

Copyright 2009

Editor's note: You might be interested in the 2004 essay, "A Plan to Get Out of Iraq: Blackstone's Fundamental Rights and the Power of Property" as well as "Defending Capitalism," both at www.SusanShelley.com. You might also be interested in the 2007 post, "Barack Obama explains socialism."

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China's man at Commerce

On September 2, 1998, the Seattle Weekly reported this about President Obama's latest nominee to head the U.S. Department of Commerce:

If congressional investigators really wanted to know about Gary Locke's campaign finances that evening, they were asking the wrong guy: Gary Locke. "I don't recall . . . I don't remember," the governor repeatedly answered, unable to recollect some of the now-most-important places and faces from his 1996 gubernatorial campaign fund-raising efforts. As he explained to the six attorneys gathered around him: "I wouldn't know virtually 80 percent of the people who contributed to the campaign." That, apparently, is one of the perils of running for governor in the state of Washington and raising funds partly in New York, DC, and California: You meet, and forget, lots of strangers. This even more so for Locke, who has become one of the country's leading Asian-American politicians, a possible vice presidential candidate, and a cash magnet for a constituency that ranges far beyond Washington state.

"I don't know," "I don't recall," "I wouldn't know," "Not that I know of." Those were the answers Gary Locke gave when he was asked about his contacts with Charlie Trie, Pauline Kanchanalak, John Huang, Ted Sioeng and others who donated large sums to his 1996 campaign, illegally.

Lucky for Gary Locke, his contacts in China didn't forget him.

After he left the governor's mansion, he was able to make a nice living helping American businesses get in touch with China's top officials, and helping Chinese contacts do business in the United States.

Former Governor Locke helped Boeing, he helped Microsoft, and he helped "multiple Chinese clients seeking to establish presences in Washington state, though he wouldn’t name them," according to a 2006 story in the Seattle Times, reported this week in Politico.

The congressional committee investigating illegal fundraising from Chinese donors was not able to find evidence that Gary Locke knowingly accepted illegal contributions. But Governor Locke told a Seattle Times reporter in 1998, "I'm not about to go around asking every single person who contributes . . . 'Are you a U.S. citizen?' . . . 'Was this check reimbursed?'"

Ignorance is bliss. And 'hope.' And 'change.'


Copyright 2009

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Barack Obama, angry colonial

After the September 11th attacks in 2001, the British government made several somber and symbolic gestures to demonstrate that Great Britain stands in unbreakable alliance with the United States of America.

Queen Elizabeth ordered the playing of the U.S. national anthem during the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace, an unprecedented event.

Prince Charles wore a full dress military uniform to make a formal visit to the U.S. embassy in Grosvenor Square, where he was first in line to sign a book of condolence.

Prime Minister Tony Blair presented the President of the United States with a bust of Winston Churchill, who was prime minister of Britain during the Second World War, when Nazi Germany bombed London and might have occupied it had the United States not come to Britain's aid.

That's not nothing.

But President Barack Obama treated it like nothing when he moved into the White House and ordered the bust of Winston Churchill removed from the Oval Office and returned to the British embassy.

He could have kept it there out of respect to the British troops who lost their lives fighting alongside U.S. troops in Afghanistan and Iraq.

He could have moved it to another room in the White House.

He could have sent it to the Smithsonian, where its proud display would bear witness that Britain and the United States are inextricably entwined by blood and history.

But he didn't.

He ordered it out of the Oval Office, out of the White House, out of the country. The bronze sculpture, which was on loan from the British government's art collection, is now at the British embassy in Washington. Legally, it is no longer on U.S. soil.

Barack Obama is a careful and thoughtful man, yet this was a gesture that needlessly insulted Great Britain and the British people.

Why did he do it?

The Daily Telegraph of London thought this might be the reason:

"Churchill has less happy connotations for Mr Obama than those American politicians who celebrate his wartime leadership. It was during Churchill's second premiership that Britain suppressed Kenya's Mau Mau rebellion. Among Kenyans allegedly tortured by the colonial regime included one Hussein Onyango Obama, the President's grandfather."

If that's why Churchill's bust was ejected from the United States, the new U.S. president has just revealed a side of himself that he skillfully kept secret during the long presidential campaign: Barack Obama is an angry man.

But he's not angry about racism.

He's angry about colonialism.

This is going to be interesting.

Does Barack Obama believe, deep down, that Europe and Anglo-America owe the Third World the equivalent of damages for pain and suffering?

Is he going to support global warming legislation that amounts to forcible transfer payments from industrialized nations to undeveloped ones?

Is he going to press for taxes that punish financial success out of some deeply held belief that success can only be the result of exploitation, either currently or by earlier generations?

We may learn a lot about President Obama's beliefs by observing his policy on Zimbabwe. If he holds the premise that historical colonialism is the cause of Africa's current problems, he may offer Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe some kind of financial aid or technical assistance. He may believe the U.S. is morally obligated to try to bring the country's devastated economy back to life.

If, on the other hand, President Obama holds the premise that private property is the indispensable foundation of prosperity, he will refuse to assist the regime of President Mugabe, who seized the land owned by white farmers and gave it to other people in the name of fairness.

For a look at how this worked out, read "Atlas Shrugged: Now Playing in Zimbabwe."

The presidency of the United States may be the most powerful office in the world, but it's not powerful enough to destroy the free enterprise system in the mistaken belief that businesses "take" from society and must be forced to "give back," or to force the American people to pay taxes to Third World governments in the name of saving the earth, or to throw aside the special relationship between Britain and the United States.

Barack Obama is never going to get re-elected doing that, and neither are the Democrats in Congress.

The Obama administration may be over already.


Copyright 2009

Editor's note: You might be interested in reading "Defending Capitalism" and other essays at www.SusanShelley.com.

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The run on the banks

There's an old joke about a woman who walks into a kosher butcher shop and asks the butcher for a chicken.

"I want a fresh chicken," she says.

"All the chickens are fresh, Mrs. Goldberg," the butcher tells her.

"No, I want a very fresh chicken" the woman insists. "Let me see what you have."

So the butcher puts a chicken on the counter and the woman looks carefully at it. She turns it over. She feels the joints. She peers into the cavity. She lifts the wings and sniffs underneath them.

"Mrs. Goldberg," the butcher says wearily, "Could you pass such a test?"

That joke was brought to mind by the Treasury Secretary's plan to subject the nation's largest banks to "a comprehensive stress test."

"A key component of the Capital Assistance Program is a forward looking comprehensive 'stress test' that requires an assessment of whether major financial institutions have the capital necessary to continue lending and to absorb the potential losses that could result from a more severe decline in the economy than projected," the Financial Stability Plan Fact Sheet declares. "All banking institutions with assets in excess of $100 billion will be required to participate in the coordinated supervisory review process and comprehensive stress test."

These guys at Treasury could teach al-Qaeda a few things about terrorism.

If you own stock in a financial institution, the Treasury Secretary can wipe you out with the stroke of a pen. Maybe today, maybe tomorrow, whenever he feels like it.

Any bank can be made to look insolvent with a "forward looking" stress test based on hypothetical events.

Everything depends on the assumptions. Assume that real estate values decline 20 percent over the next two years. Assume that 50 percent of Americans stop paying their credit card bills. Assume that Barack Obama's Kenyan birth certificate turns up and the U.S. Supreme Court declares John McCain President of the United States.

Assumptions are fiction. They're useful for planning, but the Treasury Department isn't using them for planning. They're using them for a back-door nationalization of the banks.

"A financial institution that has undergone a comprehensive 'stress test' will have access to a Treasury provided 'capital buffer' to help absorb losses and serve as a bridge to receiving increased private capital," the fact sheet says.

Obviously, a financial institution that has flunked the Treasury's "stress test" will have no choice but to accept the "capital buffer."

And once the financial institution accepts the "capital buffer," the feds move in like the Yankees at Tara.

The fact sheet says the government will "require recipients of exceptional assistance or capital buffer assistance to show how every dollar of capital they receive is enabling them to preserve or generate new lending compared to what would have been possible without government capital assistance."

For starters, "All recipients of assistance must submit a plan for how they intend to use that capital to preserve and strengthen their lending capacity."

Furthermore, "Firms must detail in monthly reports submitted to the Treasury Department their lending broken out by category, showing how many new loans they provided to businesses and consumers and how many asset-backed and mortgage-backed securities they purchased, accompanied by a description of the lending environment in the communities and markets they serve."

And, "All recipients of capital investments under the new initiatives announced today will be required to commit to participate in mortgage foreclosure mitigation programs."

A cynic might wonder why anybody would continue making mortgage payments if the banks are prohibited from foreclosing on them, but as Treasury Secretary Geithner explained to the Senate Banking Committee, this is no time to worry about details.

It might be a good time to worry that a "stress test" of major financial institutions will panic the country into a run on all the banks.

This is very alarmist language they're using. A "stress test" calls up images of heart attacks, sirens, paramedics, emergency open-heart surgery, sudden death.

Surely there must be some fusty accounting term that would be a better choice. Even "audit" is less scary than "stress test."

It's apparent that lawmakers are hearing a lot of complaints. They seem to think they'll get re-elected if they can just go home, point to a business or homeowner and say, "I forced the evil, selfish banks to forgive old debts and make new loans and now the community is saved, thanks to me."

But they're operating at right angles to reality. Nothing is going to get better in this economy until the government stops terrorizing investors.

Treasury Secretary Geithner's plan describes the "capital buffer" as "a bridge to receiving increased private capital." But what kind of masochist would invest in a bank when the government is pressuring the bank to make loans to bad credit risks, while prohibiting the bank from foreclosing on people who stop making payments on their loans?

Who would want to own stock in a bank when the value of the investment can be instantly wiped out with just a few tweaks to the Treasury Department's entirely arbitrary "stress test?"

Who is going to reassure the public that their bank deposits are safe when headlines in every newspaper report that the Treasury Department is "stress-testing" all the banks to see if they're insolvent, and, by the way, the U.S. government's FDIC program will never have enough money to cover all the deposits in all the banks simultaneously?

Who's going to pay the overtime for police departments across the country when a nationwide run on the banks threatens to turn violent?

Details, details.

We probably would have been better off if the bankers had walked out on Hank Paulson last October and refused to take his lousy TARP money, or his phone calls.

Ronald Reagan could have told them, as he once told somebody else, "When you get in bed with the government, you're going to get more than a good night's sleep."


Copyright 2009

Editor's note: You might be interested in this post from October, 2008: "Hank Paulson's casting call."

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Rahm Emanuel, Commerce Secretary?

Republican Senator Judd Gregg withdrew as the nominee for Secretary of Commerce on Thursday. He cited irreconcilable policy differences with the Obama administration.

One of those differences was the Obama team's plan to move the census out of the Commerce Department and into the White House, where chief of staff Rahm Emanuel could make all the decisions about what to ask and how to count.

If that's what President Obama wanted, he should have named Rahm Emanuel to be Secretary of Commerce in the first place.

It's too late now.

If he did it now, it would look like he was turning the Commerce Department into an auxiliary of the Democratic National Committee. Rahm Emanuel is the kind of partisan head-knocker who could easily use the department's power to shake campaign contributions out of companies seeking favors, or seeking to avoid headaches.

But the power to use the Commerce Department to massage donors pales in comparison to the power to manipulate the census by authorizing sampling (read, "guessing") instead of counting. Not to mention the power to write slanted questions that create data useful to Democratic interest groups.

President Obama missed his chance. He could have named Rahm Emanuel Commerce Secretary and run the whole scam under the radar. Instead, he named him White House chief of staff and announced that the census will be moved from the Commerce Department to Rahm's office.

That just looks like ham-handed, boneheaded, obvious partisan politics.

Hope and change, huh?

Bet you fell for that Sham Wow commercial, too.


Copyright 2009

Editor's note: You might be interested in the July 2008 post, "Analyzing Senator Obama's handwriting."

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And the Emmy for best villain goes to....

The House Financial Services Committee held a show trial today to demonstrate the dastardly evil of the nation's top banking executives and the virtuous heroism of your elected Members of Congress.



If Jamie Dimon, Ken Lewis and the rest of the bankers had read America Wants To Know last October, they would at least have had the foresight to negotiate for a nice dressing-room trailer outside the hearing room.

You can read "Hank Paulson's casting call" for yourself at this link.


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An answer for President Obama

President Barack Obama was in Elkhart, Indiana, Monday to promote the stimulus package legislation that's hanging by a thread on Capitol Hill.

He told a town hall meeting that critics complain he's "trying to make policy instead of just doing short-term stimulus." Why not, he asked rhetorically, why not spend the money, if you're going to spend the money, on "long-term investments" that "create a better economic future," such as his proposal to "put everybody's medical records in a computerized form that will reduce medical errors and cut down the cost of health care over the long term."

The president doesn't come to us for advice -- at least, we're pretty sure he doesn't -- but here's the answer to his question.

The stimulus package is being rushed through Congress on the claim of an economic emergency. It's very unsettling to have it loaded up with provisions that make enormous, possibly controversial, possibly disastrous changes to something as important as health care records.

Before a major change like that is forced on the country, the American people are entitled to the full legislative process. Hearings. Debate. A roll call vote.

Politicians have been calling for computerizing health care records for some time. We can recall a newsmaking joint appearance by Newt Gingrich and Hillary Clinton, both of them smiling like toothpaste models and calling for everybody's health care records to be computerized.

Someone must be donating a lot of money.

But regardless of the motives behind all these proposals for computerizing health care records, there are a few questions that need careful consideration.

What are the implications for medical privacy? What are the safeguards to prevent cross-country, or cross-border, file-snooping?

Will there be security encryption to prevent hacking or accidental release of confidential medical records?

What makes anybody think people can't make mistakes with computers? (Did you know that Senator Ted Kennedy was hassled at airports for months because his name was similar to someone on the government's computerized no-fly list?)

Will individuals have access to their files to correct mistakes that might have a negative impact on employment?

How do we know that computerizing medical records won't turn out to be the expensive boondoggle that the FBI's two new computer systems became, or, for that matter, the huge waste of time and money spent on computerized voting machines, now collecting dust in state government warehouses?

Since there's no time to ask or answer questions, it might be best to keep the emergency legislation free of anything that raises too many of them.


Copyright 2009

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Alex Rodriguez confesses

On Saturday, Alex Rodriguez declined to comment on a Sports Illustrated report that he tested positive for steroids during his MVP season with the Texas Rangers in 2003.

But in October, 2007, we caught Alex Rodriguez virtually admitting he was a steroid user.

It was the day he and his agent announced that he was opting out of his contract with the Yankees to seek a deal with another club.

Baseball commissioner Bud Selig had asked everyone in the sport to delay big announcements until after the conclusion of the World Series, but Rodriguez couldn't wait.

Not with former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell about to release his report on steroid use in Major League Baseball.

Not if he thought he might be named in it.

You can read the America Wants to Know post from October 31, 2007, "Alex Rodriguez and the big hurry," and judge for yourself.

Copyright 2009

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Senator Susan Collins runs for president

Did you notice anything unusual about Senator Susan Collins (R-Maine) on Friday?

Take a look at these pictures:




That's professional hair and make-up you're looking at.

This is what Susan Collins looks like on a typical workday in the Senate:



That picture was taken in July, 2007.

We don't bring this to your attention because we have some objection to professional hair stylists and make-up artists. Politics is a tough business for women. Any woman would want to look as good as possible when she's about to be photographed and videotaped at a big event that will be shown on the news again and again.

And that's the point.

On a day when the Senate was engaged in all-day, late-night, grueling negotiations over the nearly-a-trillion-dollar stimulus bill, Senator Collins found time, in between negotiating a deal with Senate Democrats and coming before the cameras to announce that she'll be voting with them, to have her hair and make-up done by professional stylists.

She was ready for her close-up.

She's running for president.

She's going to use the video clips of that hallway press conference Friday night to market herself as a post-partisan Republican in Iowa and New Hampshire campaign ads two years from now.

You're thinking that's ridiculous. She's barely a Republican at all, how can she hope to overcome the hostility of the GOP base to her views and her votes?

How did John McCain end up with the nomination?

Well, however he did it, there's your answer.

Senator Collins should have no trouble raising money now that she's the critical vote controlling a trillion dollars in federal spending. That's the kind of thing that gets your fundraising calls returned right away.

This would be a good time for the Ron Paul forces, the people who would like to see less government and more freedom, less debt and more tax cuts, a sound currency and an end to bailouts, to find a candidate who will run on a genuine conservative agenda in 2012.

Let's get rolling. The forces of blight have a running head start.


Copyright 2009

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Drowning Michael Phelps

Record-breaking Olympic gold medalist Michael Phelps was photographed smoking marijuana and now he's in a lot of trouble.

Not because smoking marijuana is a big deal.

But because he is a walking demonstration that it isn't.

The official position of the United States government is that marijuana is so dangerous that it cannot be used safely in any manner by anyone. It destroys your body, it destroys your mind, it takes away your motivation to succeed, it sets you on a path to ruin.

Oops.

Michael Phelps is setting a very bad example.

Anyone looking at him and those eight gold medals around his neck would be forced to conclude that marijuana can be used in moderation by responsible adults without causing any harm to their bodies or their lives.

Watch for a character assassination campaign against the Olympic swimming star. Watch for the drug czars and czarinas to let it be known that Mr. Phelps is not the heroic and upstanding citizen he appears to be, but instead is a substance-abusing, drunk-driving train wreck. Watch for slimy little unattributed quotations to seep into the news stories about him until every sponsor lets his endorsement contract quietly expire.

If the drug warriors don't destroy Michael Phelps, they'll have to explain why human resources professionals are forced to test the urine of job applicants for marijuana.

If they don't destroy Michael Phelps, they'll have to explain why the federal government is raiding medical marijuana clinics in California.

If they don't destroy Michael Phelps, they'll have to explain why police departments and prisons are wasting time, space and tax dollars dealing with the crime of marijuana possession.

They'll have to explain these things to all the voters who think marijuana should be decriminalized.

Then maybe the voters will explain to them why Prohibition required a constitutional amendment.


Copyright 2009

Editor's note: You might be interested in the essay, "Marijuana, Prohibition and the Tenth Amendment," at www.SusanShelley.com.

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Catastrophe fatigue

Let's straighten out a misconception.

Nobody, not any person living or dead, is or ever has been smart enough to allocate all the resources in the economy to the places where they will do the most good to create jobs, prosperity, and successful re-election campaigns.

Nobody.

There is no magical combination of government carrots and sticks that will bring the economy to life.

If you don't believe this, observe our new president.

He's panicking.

Ever since he ordered his economic team to brief him every morning on the latest trends and numbers, he's been acting like President Bush did after he started reading the daily threat assessment with his morning coffee.

"Every day our economy gets sicker," the president wrote in the Washington Post today. "We have inherited an economic crisis as deep and dire as any since the days of the Great Depression," and "if nothing is done, this recession might linger for years."

It's a catastrophe, it's a crisis, it's an emergency. If we don't do what he says, and right now, "we may not be able to reverse" the damage.

What President Obama says we should do is spend money we don't have on bridges, roads, new school buildings, a new electrical grid, computerized health records, and tax "refund" checks to people who didn't pay income taxes at all.

The running total on this package is close to a trillion dollars, and that doesn't count the trillion or so that's about to be pumped into the financial mega-companies to shore up their balance sheets.

It also doesn't count the $700 billion Congress approved after the last president gave the catastrophe-crisis-emergency speech.

And it doesn't count the money we spent on a needless invasion and occupation of Iraq after Secretary of State Colin Powell gave the catastrophe-crisis-emergency speech at the United Nations.

The point is not that the danger isn't real. The point is that the existence of danger is not an argument for the efficacy of the proposed solution.

You may have dangerous salmonella bacteria on your hands after you handle raw chicken, but plunging your hands into boiling water to sterilize them is not a good way to solve the problem.

In his op-ed, President Obama complained about "misguided criticisms" of his plan that "echo the failed theories that helped lead us into this crisis." He mentions specifically "the notion that tax cuts alone will solve all our problems."

America Wants To Know is getting pretty tired of hearing politicians talk about whether tax cuts will or will not solve "our" problems.

If a tax rate of one hundred percent would create economic prosperity and jobs, does the government have the power to set the tax rate at one hundred percent?

Or do you have a right to the money you earn, a right that may not be taken from you in the name of providing economic prosperity and jobs for other people, for other cities, for other states, and maybe even for other countries?

Just asking. Somebody ought to.

Even granting the premise -- which we most certainly do not -- that the government's proper role is to take money from some people and give it to others in order to create a better country for everyone, it's easy to see from President Obama's grim expression that it can't be done.

It's the classic problem: If you subsidize something, you get more of it; if you tax it, you get less of it.

When the government announces that it will take money from certain individuals engaged in certain kinds of activities, people gradually stop engaging in those activities.

And when the government announces that it will give money to people who are in certain kinds of circumstances, people come out of the woodwork to declare that they are in those circumstances.

Run the numbers any way you want, if the government manages the economy there will never be enough to go around.

The answer is to give up the collectivist premises that there's a "pie," that people are competing for slices of it, and that the government is morally entitled to be the distributor. The answer is to accept the perfectly American premise that people are morally entitled to the fruits of their own labor.

The government should not be picking winners and losers in the economy, or subsidizing businesses that cannot succeed on their own with money from businesses that can.

There's an appropriate role for government as a policeman. Not as a kingmaker. Not as a life-support system for failing industries.

The economy will recover when investors big and small begin their day with something other than a news report on the latest government proposals to help them or put them out of business.

It's easy to say, in the face of a crisis, that we have to try something.

Here's an idea. The U.S. Constitution limits the power of the federal government. Let's try that.

Copyright 2009

Editor's note: You might be interested in the 2007 post, "Barack Obama explains socialism," and in "Defending Capitalism" and "A Plan to Get Out of Iraq" at www.SusanShelley.com.
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How to be free

In honor of the 104th anniversary of the birth of Ayn Rand, America Wants To Know wanted to invite the novelist and philosopher to speak to us through a psychic medium and explain why it's a bad idea to accept the government's word that we should give up some of our rights, our freedoms and our money for the common good.

Unfortunately, our psychic medium is on loan to the Federal Reserve, so instead we just read Miss Rand's 1944 Reader's Digest article, "The Only Path to Tomorrow."

"The greatest threat to mankind and civilization is the spread of the totalitarian philosophy," she wrote. "Its best ally is not the devotion of its followers but the confusion of its enemies. To fight it, we must understand it.

"Totalitarianism is collectivism. Collectivism means the subjugation of the individual to a group--whether to a race, class or state does not matter. Collectivism holds that man must be chained to collective action and collective thought for the sake of what is called 'the common good.'"

Miss Rand goes on to list some of the vicious dictators who came to power by vowing to serve "the common good."

"No tyrant has ever lasted long by force of arms alone. Men have been enslaved primarily by spiritual weapons. And the greatest of these is the collectivist doctrine that the supremacy of the state over the individual constitutes the common good. No dictator could rise if men held as a sacred faith the conviction that they have inalienable rights of which they cannot be deprived for any cause whatsoever, by any man whatsoever, neither by evildoer nor supposed benefactor.

"This is the basic tenet of individualism, as opposed to collectivism. Individualism holds that man is an independent entity with an inalienable right to the pursuit of his own happiness in a society where men deal with one another as equals.

"The American system is founded on individualism. If it is to survive, we must understand the principles of individualism and hold them as our standard in any public question, in every issue we face. We must have a positive credo, a clear, consistent faith.

"We must learn to reject as total evil the conception that the common good is served by the abolition of individual rights. General happiness cannot be created out of general suffering and self-immolation. The only happy society is one of happy individuals. One cannot have a healthy forest made up of rotten trees.

"The power of society must always be limited by the basic, inalienable rights of the individual."

The author explains the eternal antagonism between the "Active Man," who produces, creates, originates, and needs independence to function, and the "Passive Man," who dreads independence and prefers a collectivist system that removes all need for thought and initiative.

"Some humanitarians demand a collective state because of their pity for the incompetent or Passive Man," she writes. "For his sake they wish to harness the Active. But the Active Man cannot function in harness. And once he is destroyed, the destruction of the Passive Man follows automatically. So if pity is the humanitarians' first consideration, then in the name of pity, if nothing else, they should leave the Active Man free to function, in order to help the Passive. There is no other way to help him in the long run."

America Wants To Know is constrained from quoting much more by a decent respect for the opinion of copyright law. But we wanted to call up the spirit of the 20th century's greatest freedom fighter to warn of the dangers of a policy of wealth redistribution in the guise of "economic stimulus," this week's synonym for "the common good."

Okay, just a little more....

"While men are still pondering upon the causes of the rise and fall of civilizations, every page of history cries to us that there is but one source of progress: Individual Man in independent action. Collectivism is the ancient principle of savagery. A savage's whole existence is ruled by the leaders of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.

"We are now facing a choice: to go forward or to go back.

"Collectivism is not the 'New Order of Tomorrow.' It is the order of a very dark yesterday. But there is a New Order of Tomorrow. It belongs to Individual Man--the only creator of any tomorrows humanity has ever been granted."

Happy 104th birthday to Ayn Rand. She was right about everything. But so was Galileo and a lot of good it did him.


Copyright 2009

Source note:
"The Only Path to Tomorrow" appeared in Reader's Digest, January 1944; Vol. 44, No. 261. It is described by the editors as "Condensed from 'The Moral Basis of Individualism,' a forthcoming book from the Bobbs-Merrill Co." The book was never published.

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Tom Daschle: Done

President Obama's nominee for Secretary of Health and Human Services has a problem.

Tom Daschle didn't pay income taxes on what he called "a gift from a good friend," specifically a car and driver that were provided to him for a couple of years by Leo J. Hindery Jr., the owner of InterMedia, a New York private equity firm. InterMedia was paying Mr. Daschle a salary of a million dollars a year for "consulting services," and the car and driver were thrown in as a perk.

There was also some unreported income and some improper tax deductions for charitable contributions.

"Inadvertent errors," Mr. Daschle said. "Nobody's perfect," the White House press spokesman explained.

Mm-hmm.

Here's the problem.

Tom Daschle isn't some newcomer to federal tax law. He's the former Majority Leader of the United States Senate.

The Senate regularly debates and votes on legislation that makes the American people pay taxes on all kinds of income, gifts included. And Senator Daschle served on the Finance Committee.

So he knew perfectly well that he owed taxes on a gift from an employer or client or friend or supplicant or lobbyist or influence-buyer or however you want to characterize his relationship with Mr. Hindery and InterMedia.

There's just no way around it.

The Obama team dug out the fact of this gift during the vetting process and the former Senate Majority Leader paid $140,167 in back taxes and interest.

But that's not going to be good enough.

Not for the man whose job description includes drafting a proposal for the overhaul of the nation's health insurance system.

One of the things you need in government, if you want people to trust you, is credibility. People have to believe that you're exercising your very best judgment based on all the facts and nothing else.

Nothing else.

If people look at your proposal and believe it's the accumulated wish list of a lot of wealthy and well-connected friends and lobbyists, they are not going to accept your word that it's the best that can be done.

In the last two years, Tom Daschle made almost $5.3 million dollars as a "consultant," including $220,000 in speaking fees from organizations and companies with a direct interest in health care reform legislation.

While he's returning favors, President Obama's health care reform proposal will be dying the death of a dog.

Of course, that will probably happen anyway. There's no way to give everybody everything they want at everybody else's expense, which seems to be everybody's definition of a health care system that works for everybody.

President Obama may not know that yet. He's been in office less than two weeks and likely still believes he can part the Red Sea if he just invites the right fish over to the White House for drinks.

And hey, we wish him good luck with that.

But if he wants anybody to believe he's serious, he'd be well advised to throw Tom Daschle out of the boat.


Copyright 2009

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