The West Should Stop Being Ashamed of Its Success And Stop Committing Cultural Suicide

I used to debate one of my teachers about culture.  As a fan of Rome I posited it was the greatest and most consequential civilization in human history.  He queried me about why. It’s laws, its size, its economy, its longevity? I suggested the clearest proof was the fact that there may be more Roman ruins remaining than from any ancient civilization in the world.

He disagreed, believing there were African empires whose cultures were equal if not superior to Rome's. The grandest of such being the Mali Empire in West Africa. Lasting from 1226 to 1670, it’s greatest king was Mansa Musa, who is sometimes said to be the richest man who ever lived.

He pressed me on others, stating that architecture and its survival might not be the best measure by which to measure a culture’s greatness.

Wondering if he might be right, I looked a bit more into some of those other societies about which I knew less than Rome.  There were the Incas, the Aztecs, the Egyptians, the Qin and Han Chinese, the Mongols, the Abbasid and Umayyad Caliphates and aforementioned Malian Empire.  All were fascinating.  The Mongols had the largest landlocked empire in history, but left very little in the way of architecture.  There were the Qun and Han dynasties who controlled a quarter of the world’s population some 2000 years ago and built the longest sections of China’s Great Wall. The Abbasid caliphate, which is considered the Islamic Golden Age, was considered to be the most advanced society of its time in reference to things like science, astronomy, math, and medicine.  The Egyptians not only left the Pyramids and Abu Simbel, but their papyrus was the earliest known paper. The Median and Achaemenid Empires of modern day Iran left extraordinary ruins that go back 500 years before Christ. 

Depending on how one wants to characterize them there have been thousands of cultures and civilizations and dynasties throughout human history.  As much as we might know about them, it’s likely there are even more about which we know nothing.  Which brings me back to my original point… how does one measure what a great culture is?  Is it the language they left, is it the ruins they left, is it how much of the earth or her population that it controlled?

It's possible to make an argument for any one of those, but the reality is that given the differences in time, geography and populations, it’s impossible to draw a hierarchical chart that defines “Greatness” with precision, particularly given the differences in what’s left of them.

Nonetheless, I stand by the opinion of my 15-year-old self about Rome being the greatest civilization of the ancient world.

That being said, there’s nothing in the ancient world to compare with what we have in the 21^st century.  And the world of the 21^st century was built by Europeans.  As much as Europe is in the midst of committing cultural suicide, it might be helpful to examine what that European culture has produced.

Yes, it has been cruel, barbaric at times, sanctioned slavery and resulted in bloodshed of native peoples in far off lands.  All those things are true.  But none of them are unique to Europeans.  Depravity is a mark that mankind shares across civilizations and has been constant from one degree or another across the space and time of human existence.

With that out of the way, back to western civilization. It’s brought the world democratic governance. It’s brought the world individual liberty, individual rights ordained by God, limited government and capitalism.  Together those things set the stage for the greatest advancement in the condition of man in all human history.

From the moment most of the people on the planet today wake up until the moment they lay their heads down at night, almost everything they do or interact with is a result of western civilization. Here is a short list of just some of the inventions western civilization has produced:

Automobiles. Telephony. Mobile phones. MRI machines. Plastic. Nuclear power. Bessemer Process steelmaking. Gasoline. Vulcanized rubber. Television. Radio. Elevators. Computers. Flight. Rockets. Electric light. Mechanical reaper. Heart transplants. Vaccines. The Internet. Sewing machines. Skyscrapers. Railroads. The steam engine. Internal combustion engines. Electric washing machines. Barbed wire. Air conditioning. Satellites. Movies. Submarines. Microwaves. Radar. Lasers. Artificial knees and hips. Robots. The movable-type printing press. Antibiotics. Batteries. Refrigeration. And much more.   

Then there are innovations that western civilization has produced:  Containerized shipping. DNA discovery and sequencing. Stock markets. Social media. GPS. Advanced farming. Google maps. Space travel. Blood transfusion. Constitutional Democracy. Individual freedom. Limited government. X ray machines. The assembly line.  Mars landers and solar system probes. And again, much more.

And then there’s science. Of the approximately 800 Nobel Prizes that have been handed out since 1901 in fields like Physics, Chemistry, Economics & Medicine (not including Literature because it’s so subjective and Peace, which after giving one to Barack Obama, has about as much credibility as the UN) Europeans and their offshoots have won approximately 750, including 350 for the United States alone.  

This is the world of the 21^st century and it’s been built by the west. Aside from lost tribes or primitive societies who live like their ancestors did thousands of years ago, there’s virtually not a thing people around the world do on a daily basis that hasn’t been developed by the west.  The west won on the field of battle of ideas and power.  To pretend otherwise is simply fiction.

But that which the west has built is under assault… mostly from within. From citizens who became fat, dumb and happy during the prosperous times to the invitation into their nations tens of millions of people who don’t share their culture, most of whom come from cultures anathema to it.

Prosperity is a two edged sword.  On the one hand it has created a civilization greater than anything in history, but the beneficiaries of that prosperity have lost sight of the hard work, sacrifice, risk and perseverance it takes to create prosperity or how difficult it is to maintain. 

As a result, many, if not a majority of western citizens detest their own culture.  They have tunnel vision, focused with a modern day perspective on their forefathers’ flaws while creating a fictional nirvana-like perspective on every other civilization in history.  The self loathing is rampant within the west.

It's one thing to tolerate or even encourage self reflection in the pursuit of self improvement.  But that’s not what the left does. Like a 78 pound college student suffering from anorexia who looks in the mirror and sees herself as a “fat cow”, western liberals see the sins of their fathers or focus on the imperfections of their society and believe it’s evil, and like the anorexic, they engage in self sabotage, only in this case, it’s the culture they harm.

Culture and civilization are fragile, hard to build and harder to maintain. It’s particularly difficult when the youth of a nation despise their birthright, disrespect its legacy and actively undermine its foundations. Combine that with elites who are the fountainhead from which that disdain arises, and you have a dire future.

The left accuses Trump and the MAGA adherents of being racist nationalists. We’re not.  Charles de Gaulle perhaps said it best: “Patriotism is when love of your own people comes first; nationalism is when hate for people other than your own comes first.”  America and the west will not survive the rest of this century if their citizens don’t become patriots.  Indeed, Osama bin Laden saw the writing on the wall:  “When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature they will like the strong horse.” Self loathing may communicate many things, but strength is not one of them. 

From Silicon Valley with Love... and Hope for Free Markets

I’ve just returned home to Atlanta from spending a week in Silicon Valley at a program called Founder Institute. Basically FI is a bootcamp for founders of mostly tech startups. We were a pretty diverse group of companies. One wants to put servers in space, one wants to help golfers establish handicaps and another seeks to help equipment rental companies join the mobile revolution. Some had raised $3 million in funding, others were doing hundreds of thousands of dollars a month in revenue while the majority were like me and running on past savings or paychecks. We were also a pretty diverse group of people with participants coming from around the world. In addition from the US, attendees came from Croatia, Australia, the Netherlands, Canada, Columbia, Vietnam and Puerto Rico. Finally, we were of a variety of ages as well, ranging from early 20’s to mid 50’s... weighing more heavily to the latter.

My goal in going out was to get a better insight into what makes for a successful startup. I’ve been working on one startup or another for 15 years, but I’ve yet to achieve what I consider a really successful exit. In addition, I was looking for angel investors to fund my latest startup, BrandScanned, a mobile rewards app for consumers, based on brands. (Think about how much of a pain in the butt it is to collect soup labels or boxtops for the various programs that provide resources to schools. Wouldn’t it be easier if they just put a unique code on the inside of each package that you could scan with your phone and the school automatically gets the points? Or how about those contests Kelloggs runs for movie tickets or Frito Lay runs for an Xbox where you have to register on their websites and type in some ungodly long number that’s hidden inside the package. Same deal… wouldn’t it be easier to just scan the codes with your phone? I think so, which is why I founded BrandScanned.)
While I didn’t come away with an investment, I came away with some great insights. The first is something I’d been told before but never really got. Success in Silicon Valley – at least as it relates to raising angel and venture capital – is very much driven by relationships. It’s your network… investors want to get to know you… want to trust you… know that you’re resilient, creative and of course, smart. And it’s more than just a cup of coffee… although that’s where it often starts. Investors usually want to know that they are not alone and that you’ve got other investors in your network. And the key to your network is, unsurprisingly… you! As such, investors are often open to making introductions, but you’ve got to sell yourself because if you’re going to create a spectacular startup, if you’re going to make them lots of money, you’re likely going to need a lot of help in the form of employees, partners and other investors… and it’s up to you to engage and inspire them.

Another of the insights I came away with was that if you fail in Silicon Valley, that doesn’t mean you’re sunk. On the contrary. It appears to be the case that if you’ve failed, that’s almost a badge to be worn as you storm into your next endeavor having learned some lessons from your previous bruising. For every Facebook that pretty much gets it right from the beginning are dozens more like Twitter that took a circuitous route to success through failure. Failure is the fertilizer that nourishes and spurs creativity, which in can and often does blossom into success.

Finally, in Silicon Valley they love to think big. Big success followed by big exits are what investors live for. If you’re interested in starting a restaurant or building a business that will do a couple million dollars a year in revenue, good luck, but Silicon Valley investors are not likely going to help you do so… although they might become customers. They want businesses that have the potential to do $50 or $500 million a year in revenue so they can have exits that number in the eight or nine or ten figures. Since investors lose money on 9 out of 10 investments they make, they need to be able to earn enough back from one big exit to cover the cost of investing in the other nine and still make a profit. So don’t expect venture capitalists to give you the money to open pool installation business…

At the end of the day, my trip to Silicon Valley and participation in the Founder Institute program made for a great experience. But this wouldn’t be my blog if I didn’t tie that experience into the larger picture.

At a time when the government seems to be doing everything it can to undermine free markets, private property and capitalism in general, it’s good to know that the spark of enterprise still exists. That people feel like they can build something. That investors and entrepreneurs are foolhardy enough to think they can change the world. And willing to take a leap of faith to do so. And not only in the United States, which used to be a bastion of freedom, but in places where you might not expect it, like Vietnam, Croatia and Columbia. The question is however, once the long national nightmare of Barack Obama and his Democrat cleptocracy are finally on the ash-bin of history, can the spark of possibilities that still exists in Silicon Valley find its way back to places like Pittsburgh, Detroit, Chicago and the rest of California, where much of the spirit of opportunity and the American Dream seem to have been replaced by a populist economic fascism seeking to “fundamentally transform the United States”? Sadly, that the cancer of progressivism seems to have infected much of the country despite the fact that the American convergence of free markets and limited government have driven a greater advance in prosperity around the world any system in history. Nonetheless, perhaps the Silicon Valley mindset of unabashed opportunity is the canary in the coal mine that suggests the American Dream may still be alive, despite even the tech crowd’s distinctly liberal, big government leanings. Only time will tell.

Ted Cruz, Thomas Sowell and Battles Worth Fighting...

In my opinion Thomas Sowell is easily the smartest man in America. From Basic Economics, to Black Rednecks and White Liberals to his definitive dissection of the most recent economic collapse in The Housing Boom and Bust, his books are nothing short of brilliant. And of course it’s not just books, he writes a weekly column as well, does interviews, lectures and does research at Stanford’s Hoover Institute. His prodigious talents make him one of the great thinkers and writers of our time.

As much as I enjoy and agree with almost everything Sowell writes, I believe he’s wrong about Ted Cruz. He was not happy with Cruz leading the charge for the government shutdown last year and he’s not at all happy with him on his efforts to unseat RINO republicans.

On the shutdown Dr. Sowell suggested that there was no point fighting the battle because it could simply not be won. “Even if, by some miracle, the Republicans managed to get the Senate to go along with defunding ObamaCare, President Obama can simply veto the bill.” That is factually correct. There was no chance that Obama was going to sign any bill that defunded Obamacare… but that’s OK. Sowell is also correct that the GOP was going to get blamed for the shutdown by a bootlicking media. But the funny thing was, despite the Democrat’s and the media’s warnings that the sky would fall… it didn’t. During the “shutdown” 83% of all government spending went on unmolested, and perhaps most glaringly, only 22% of American people said they were inconvenienced by the shutdown at all! That’s a much lower percentage than the number of Americans who had a negative opinion of Obamacare at that same time, 44% and who wanted Obamacare repealed, 34%.

While the media sought to paint the shutdown as a GOP mistake, Ted Cruz gave the GOP leadership an opportunity to harness that attention to articulate why they were fighting to save the country from Obamacare. The fact that the leadership chose not to, or is genetically incapable of doing so is not Cruz’s fault. At a time when the nation’s attention was focused on government policies, Cruz gave the GOP an opportunity to show that “business as usual” was no longer going to fly. Not surprisingly, they failed to do so.

Dr. Sowell is equally perturbed by Ted Cruz’s willingness to attack the GOP leadership, which includes Senators who are up for election in 2014, such as Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Whip John Cornyn. Also his filibuster in October in an attempt to get the GOP to hold Obamacare hostage to the debt ceiling.

Dr. Sowell often compares (in a negative light) Cruz to George Washington. There is a United States of America today only because George Washington understood that his army was not able to fight the British troops everywhere, but had to choose carefully when and where to fight. Futile symbolic confrontations were a luxury that could not be afforded then and cannot be afforded now.

He makes a similar point using the illustration of the Dunkirk rescue: The British troops who escaped from Dunkirk came back to France four years later, as part of the massive invasion forces that stormed the beaches at Normandy, liberated France and pushed on into Germany for the final defeat of the Nazi regime.

In politics, as in war, you need power to win, and you don't dissipate your forces fighting battles that you are sure to lose. Symbolism and emotional self-indulgence are just not worth it.

While admitting Dr. Sowell is right that Barack Obama’s veto pen would likely rule the day in most situations, I do not agree with his contention that fighting a battle is not worth fighting just because you know you’ll probably lose. That’s because there’s a difference between a battle and a war, and Americans are very much involved in a war. That war may not involve bullets and bayonets, but the stakes are as high as anything George Washington ever fought for. It is literally for the freedom that he won for us and the Constitution secured for us.

Whereas Dr. Sowell compares Ted Cruz’s battles to Washington’s at New York or to the British at Dunkirk, I think a better comparison is to Leonidas at Thermoplyae or the defenders of the Alamo. In both cases the battles were lost, but they inspired the winning of the larger war. Fortunately, in the war effort Ted Cruz is leading the consequences of losing a battle will surely not be fatal, probably even to a political career. But what they might do is finally arouse an American populace that has forgotten that liberty and prosperity are built on the Constitutional principles of individual freedom, limited government and free enterprise and not on government mandates and largesse.

Ted Cruz may lose many of the battles he fights, but the battles are worth fighting. For too long conservatives have acquiesced to the tactics of “establishment” Republicans and as a result we’ve had more than a quarter century of the winnowing of our freedoms and the unfettered growth of government. From farm bills to debt limits to welfare spending to Obamacare, the GOP’s willingness to play it safe has resulted in one unmitigated disaster after another, culminating in the reelection of Barack Obama in 2012. Maybe Dr. Sowell is right, maybe Ted Cruz’s tactics will lose the Senate for the GOP in 2014. If so, so be it. If the American system is going to collapse under its own weight – which is surely the case with the current trajectory – then let the damage be done so that we can get on with the task of rebuilding a nation based on liberty, the rule of law and free markets. I’m not convinced a majority of American citizens are suicidal however, and as Ted Cruz fights the good fight I expect more and more of them will stop and take notice of his message of (very) limited government. With all due respect to the Smartest Man in America, I believe that’s a message worth fighting for.

A Lack of Identity politics...Exactly why the GOP can't seem to attract minorities and immigrants...

The GOP establishment has spent a great deal of effort over the last decade pushing for amnesty under the guise of “comprehensive immigration reform”. This is of course because they are scared of the fact that minorities are going to become a majority in the US over the next 40 years and they don’t want to be left out in the cold. They have what I call a “Fear of a Black Planet… or at least of a minority majority country…”. And according to some numbers cited recently by Phyllis Schlafly, they have good reason to fear.

Of course the establishments’ solution to the problem is to acquiesce to the demands of the left and essentially give amnesty to the 20 million people who came here illegally. Honestly though… who can blame Boehner, McConnell and their friends? It’s hard to compete with “No human is illegal” signs and heartbreaking stories of kids brought to America at the age of 5 and at 25 they have no legal status. They don’t want to be seen as “heartless” or get tagged as racists as the press is wont to label them, so they simply give in and make the same mistake Ronald Reagan did in 1986.

Frankly, the immigration debate is the GOP’s problem in a nutshell… The GOP has a communication problem - and an identity problem too. They have a hard time distilling their messages down to a bumper sticker. Every day they face a plethora of bumper sticker issues which they typically fail to properly address. Calls for an increase in the minimum wage are heralded by stickers proclaiming “A living wage is a moral value”. Each new school year is inaugurated with teachers striking in one city or another carrying signs broadcasting the false equivalency of opposition to education spending increases with a hatred of children. Then there are the Facebook shares of posters with quips like “Keep your laws off my body” or “Stop the War on Women”.

It’s often difficult to respond to these issues (and many more) because the rebuttals to these debates are typically too complex to fit on a bumper sticker or in a network sound bite. The GOP’s feckless attempts at responding to these issues often result in them being involved in a political version of a school yard skirmish where the response is “No I’m not!” rather than explaining a nuanced opposition to the particular issue at hand.

As an example, the argument against increasing the minimum wage is based on an understanding that doing so hurts far more people than it helps. This is particularly true in the case of teens and younger workers and those with little experience or skills. In order to hire an employee at a minimum wage of $10, an employee must provide an employer with work that brings at least $10 in value to the company. If they can’t the owner is not running a business but a charity. This is exactly why virtually every time the minimum wage is increased, unemployment among the young and unskilled (particularly minorities) increases. At the same time doing so always increases the potential for outsourcing and mechanization and we’re beginning to see that everywhere, even in the burger industry.

That kind of a rebuttal simply can’t be distilled down into a pithy sentence or sound bite. The result is that in the face of such a challenge, the GOP establishment more often than not simply chooses to go along to get along. The GOP is so worried about being painted as racists or as the party that hates the poor that they forget to talk about what they actually supposed to stand for. They get caught up in defending themselves against being women haters or immigrant haters that they forget to stand up for individual freedom or the rule of law.

The GOP’s problem isn’t immigrants don’t like what they are saying… which is true, the GOP’s problem is that they are saying the wrong things.  And this is where the identity problem comes in.  With “Compassionate Conservatism” and “comprehensive immigration reform” the GOP is simply remaking itself into the Democrat Lite party. It’s no wonder that immigrants and minorities choose not to support them. Who wants generic crackers or cola when they can have Ritz or Coke instead?

As Schlafly points out, immigrants and minorities don’t support the GOP on a range of issues from small government to gun rights and others in between. But it’s not because there’s something wrong in their DNA. It’s because there’s something wrong with the GOP. On a wide range of issues from immigration to education to government spending, the GOP has simply lost their identity and have become a party that stands for nothing extraordinary and has no message. In the last two presidential elections Americans actually chose a socialist over the milquetoast offerings of the GOP. On the biggest stage in the world in a bitter fight for the most powerful position on the planet the GOP was unable to convince 50% of Americans not to vote for the socialist! It’s not because the minorities and immigrants voted for the socialist… which they did. It’s because the GOP failed to give Americans of all stripes a reason to vote for them. When your bumper sticker could essentially say “Not quite as socialist as the other guy” it should come as no surprise that people don’t rally to your cause.

The lesson for the GOP is not how to play a better game of bumper sticker politics, but rather to begin articulating fundamental ideas that will inspire people to join their crusade. Ronald Reagan promised to eliminate the Departments of Energy and Education. Unfortunately he failed to do so, but everyone knew where he stood on big government. Contrast that with the GOP of 2014, which has just signed off on a $1 trillion farm bill that sends 80% of the dollars to food stamps, subsidizes Big Agriculture and taxes such things as home heating oil and Christmas trees. Does that make you think of a party wedded to the idea of limited government, market economics and low taxes? Probably not. And the GOP is confused why they can’t attract minorities and immigrants? Maybe they need to stop worrying about the demographic makeup of the voters and start looking in the mirror for their identity.

Greedy, racist sons of bitches who want children to starve, grandma to die and women to be kept barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen where they belong... Why I'm a Conservative

Republicans in general, and conservatives in particular, are constantly demonized in the media as greedy, ruthless, heartless, racist sons of bitches who want children to starve, grandma to die and women to be kept barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen where they belong.

That makes for great copy, but it’s about as far from the truth as you can get. While it might be possible to find someone who actually fits that caricature, in reality conservatives are generally just the opposite.

Why I’m a conservative.

Why am I a conservative? For the simple reason that I am an eternal optimist. I believe that mankind is capable spectacular things… both good and bad, but mostly good. I believe that man has within his reach the ability to solve almost any problem that we can imagine, if given the freedom to do so.

Optimism however is not enough to understand why I am a conservative. I am a conservative because I fundamentally believe in the US Constitution and the intent of its framers. Today, 225 years after the Constitution was written we still have what is the single most powerful document ever written by men. Why? Because it provides the best framework yet constructed to provide citizens with the sustainable freedom that is necessary for progress and prosperity.

I’m not conservative because I hate black or brown or gay people. Or women. Just the opposite. I’m conservative because I believe everyone is equal and that no one should get special treatment simply because they belong to a particular group. Laws that seek to target (or protect) particular groups rarely work according to plan. Take the Alternative Minimum Tax, which was begun in 1969 to ensure that 155 rich people who had paid zero taxes in 1967 would have to pay something. Not surprisingly the law’s impact expanded rapidly and today more than 20 million citizens are impacted by the AMT. The government’s record on affirmative action is similarly precise. Treating citizens differently based on arbitrary categories is rarely a recipe for success.

I’m not conservative because I’m greedy and don’t want to share with others. On the contrary. I’m conservative because I believe everyone should have the same opportunity to achieve success. And this is particularly important because the path to success rarely comes through government. Education, healthcare and poverty programs are the three areas of our economy in which government plays the heaviest role. All three could be charitably characterized as inefficient and expensive, but more realistically classified as abysmal failures. The conservative position that government should get out of the education, healthcare and poverty business is not to suggest those are issues that don’t need attention. They do, but the attention should come from organizations closest to the problem and best able to solve it. That might be private companies, community foundations or sometimes even statehouses. Rarely is Washington the correct answer to any problem.

I’m not a conservative because I want companies to be able to work their employees to the bone and pay them a pittance. Actually, conservatives believe in a free market because they understand that free markets are the best way for investors, consumers and yes, employees, to flourish. Three decades ago IBM was set to take over the world. It didn’t… and not because of anything the government did, but rather because of Microsoft, Intel and the PC. Investors got rich, consumers got inexpensive computers and millions of employees got good paying jobs. A decade ago if you had a mobile phone, odds are it was made by Nokia or Motorola. Today Nokia is barely alive and the shadow of Motorola is now owned by Google. Neither came plummeting to earth because of anything the government did, but rather because Apple changed the world. In the process Apple stockholders got rich, consumers got unprecedented computing power at their fingertips and millions of employees across the nation and around the world got good paying jobs. The way for workers to find their fortune, or at least increase their earning power, is not by government intervention or even government sanctioned union thuggery, but rather by honing the skills and acquiring the tools that employers value. Whether those include basic literacy, a knack for app coding, arc welding experience, punctuality, a nursing degree or any of thousands of other characteristics, by increasing their value to potential employers, workers will not have to look to the government or unions to help them find success. Whether someone wants to see their name on the Forbes 400 or simply to work hard and provide for their family, conservatives recognize that when allowed to harness their genius to meet market demands, people of all backgrounds can achieve, and can do so spectacularly. Not sure? How about Oprah Winfrey, Daymond John, Sara Blakely, Ursula Burns, Michael Oher, George Lopez and countless others.

Which brings me back to optimism. Conservatives generally see that there is great potential in their fellow citizens. They also recognize that government has a way of stifling that potential. Whether it’s through a tax code as thick as an encyclopedia, using regulation to stifle small businesses at the behest of big business benefactors, pouring billions of dollars into businesses that deserve to go bankrupt, or redistributing trillions of dollars into pork barrel projects and counterproductive social programs, government inserts its judgments for those of citizens who are actually out in the world living their lives. With ever more frequency our government does what governments always do, it seeks to centralize power. And for each inch of power the government usurps, miles of prosperity are never realized as bureaucrats have little understanding or appreciation for what makes free markets work and why individual responsibility is so empowering. The result is that millions of people who might otherwise draw upon the gifts God gave them to help contribute to the prosperity of a nation find themselves trapped in the quicksand of government largesse and dependency.

Conservatives are often accused of hating all government. That is absolutely false. Conservatives, like the Founding Fathers, understand that a government is essential to maintaining a free society. The reason for the mischaracterization is simple… government today does far more than it was ever intended to do, or is qualified to do, which gives conservatives much to object to. When the Titanic was setting sail from Southampton on April 10th, a party atmosphere pervaded both her deck and the dock from which she was sailing. On April 15th the unsinkable ship was sitting at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. She and the 1,500 people who perished in the freezing water could have used a chorus of discordant voices shouting that there was trouble on the horizon. Just as the Titanic was not “unsinkable”, neither is our Republic. Conservative voices may sound dour, antagonistic or even shrill at times, but that is simply because they recognize the greatness of the Constitutional gift we have been bequeathed, the fragile state in which it stands today and the danger posed by those who continue to undermine its grace. In the face of such danger silence is simply not an option.

For better or worse, that’s why I’m a conservative…

The Fiscal Cliff gives the GOP an opportunity to engage in a battle for the future of the country.

Two weeks ago a slight majority of Americans voted for more stuff from the government. There may have been other drivers, but that is the main one. Below is a quote whose origin is disputed, but it is particularly apropos:

A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the majority discovers it can vote itself largess out of the public treasury. After that, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits with the result the democracy collapses because of the loose fiscal policy ensuing, always to be followed by a dictatorship, then a monarchy.

Although the United States is a republic, it is a democratic republic, and the author’s point applies in spades. The question is however, are we too far gone? Are we past the tipping point beyond which there is nothing but a descent into just another failed state that devolves into a third world dictatorship?

While I think we’re close, I’m not sure we’re quite there yet. There is hope, just not much.

Which brings us to the so called, Fiscal Cliff. The Fiscal Cliff is primarily the convergence of the expiration of the Bush tax cuts with sequestration – mandated cuts in government spending – both of which are supposed to occur in January. It is widely assumed that if the President and Congress do not come to some grand bargain, the economy will fall back into recession.

The key issue dividing the parties is the tax cuts. President wants to raise tax rates on the, because he absurdly suggests they are not paying their fair share. The GOP, as long as their spines hold, want keep the lower tax rates for everyone.

Many people suggest the president doesn’t want to avoid the Fiscal Cliff. The suggestion is that he wants to demonize Republicans for throwing the country back into recession. He does.

That does not however mean that the GOP should capitulate in order to avoid it. On the contrary, this battle could and should begin the fight for, not only the White House in 2016, but more importantly, for the future of the nation.

Bobby Jindal was right about Mitt Romney’s comments, if the GOP seeks to survive as a party, it’s going to have to appeal to 100% of the people. And what better time to do so than when the country laser focused on this “Fiscal Cliff”? While the mainstream media would act as little more than a mouthpiece for the administration, the reality is, that’s the world we live in and if the GOP can’t figure out how to get its message out now, it never will.

Rush Limbaugh and Mitt Romney were also right, the President tried to buy voters with gifts. Interestingly however, despite his massive redistribution program, 9 million fewer people came out to vote for him than did 4 years earlier. Despite those efforts, the real reason Mitt Romney was not Obama’s printing of money and food stamps. Romney lost was because he failed to articulate a compelling economic message to inspire not only those 9 million ex Obama voters, but the 2 million voters who supported John McCain but chose not to come out and vote for Romney…

The truth of the matter is, this fight is for far more than just a Fiscal Cliff. The Fiscal Cliff is simply the first battle in the war between statism and freedom that will play itself out over the next four years. This is a revolutionary war of ideas. Whether it was Tytler or Tocqueville who wrote the above passage, they were prescient. We are very near that point beyond which there will be no return. At some point the tax burden simply becomes too much, the regulations become too numerous and restrictive and the opportunities for success become too few. As a result, those who might otherwise become entrepreneurs, investors, job creators decide to stop being productive and simply spend their time and energy elsewhere, gravitating perhaps to becoming a cog in the government machine or abandoning the country altogether as they pursue better opportunities elsewhere.

At that point the list of the ship of state will beyond recovery and the only outcome will be its quick sinking into the lifeless depths where little freedom, economic or otherwise, can survive.

The challenge for the GOP is whether it can muster the courage to engage in the battle of ideas and articulate a vision that appeals to 100% of the population. Of course there’s no way that 100% of the population will respond, but the message itself has to be clear: We reject the notion of identity politics; we reject the idea that the government is responsible for our success and happiness; that every American individual, family and organization should be free to succeed or fail on their own merits, without government assistance nor government hindrance. And if they fail, they should have the opportunity and motivation to pick themselves up and start once again.

Given the opportunity for failure that freedom accords, many citizens will choose instead to support the cradle to grave security that government promises – but rarely delivers.

Nonetheless, the message that every American should hear is that the GOP seeks a nation where every citizen can determine their own fate; where neither race nor sex limits their opportunities; where economic status at birth does not dictate economic status throughout life; that every man, woman and child has the freedom to stake their claim to their piece of the American Dream.

In addition to the overarching message of freedom, the GOP should use sunshine to expose the Democrats (as well as some big government GOP types) as the tax and waste charlatans they are. Between now and the 2016 election there are approximately 1,500 days. The GOP should select a different government boondoggle to highlight every single day one of those days. Sure the mainstream media will ignore them, but that doesn’t mean they can’t get the message out. If the GOP has to rely on the mainstream media to win their fights, they might as well throw in the towel right now.

The truth is, this is a war that would have had to have been fought even if Mitt Romney had won the election. Statism and socialism simply don’t work, and there is a century of proof available to anyone who is willing to see it. From the fascist regimes in the 20’s and 30’s to the Communist regimes of the last half of the 20th century to the chaos of the Arab world and post-colonial Africa to the crumbling Europe we see today, the result of the lack of freedom is always the same: Failure.

The GOP should go to the mattresses in this fight. They should stand their ground or let the consequences play themselves out. And they should hang the resulting recession and unemployment squarely on the backs of President Obama and the rest of the Democrat cabal. Let liberalism be exposed for the failure that it is. If they can’t figure out how to compellingly explain and defend free enterprise and limited government against an administration and party filled with statists and socialists they are destined to fail and should exit stage left once and for all and give a someone else an opportunity to save the nation.

Will Barack Obama bring back slavery to the United States?

Without a doubt November is going to bring us the single most important election in the United States since 1860. At that time too the country was on the verge of an irreparable breach, and by the time Lincoln was inaugurated in March of 1861 seven of the eleven eventual confederate states had seceded, with the remaining four gone two months later.

I’m certainly not suggesting that the United States is going break apart if Barack Obama defeats Mitt Romney. When citizens go into the voting booth in November they are certainly not being asked to choose between Stars and Bars or the Stars and Stripes. If the choice were that stark, if the choice were that clear, even the most brain dead Americans could figure out who to vote for.

The fissure today is far more subtle. Fully half the population doesn’t pay any income taxes and many of those people are on the government dole. Government debt is 100% of GDP and at the current rate will reach 200% in a little over a decade while inefficient government spending takes up a quarter of GDP annually. Government regulation at all levels threatens not only to strangle the struggling private sector, but more and more individual freedom itself.

While far less stark than what the country faced in 1860, the consequences for the American people are no less as great. Although there is nothing the government does today that is the equivalent of the viscous and inhumane institution of slavery, in the long run an unfettered government is no less dangerous. Indeed, egalitarianism was a staple of Soviet propaganda for decades but the Kremlin’s statist policies cost tens of millions their lives and hundreds of millions their freedom.

Given the explicit choice between slavery and freedom Americans are smart enough to choose freedom. The question is, with such an explicit distinction absent from the ballot, can they make the right choice?

How many Americans want to spend over half of every workday toiling just to pay for government? How many Americans want to pay taxes so that 50% of their fellow citizens don’t have to? How many Americans are satisfied postponing vacations, clipping coupons, working overtime and choosing shank or chicken over tenderloin just so the government can take money out of their checks to give people with cell phones, multiple TVs, air conditioners and satellite dishes? How many people want government deciding what companies can make, who they can hire or telling them how to run their businesses?

But of course none of those choices will be written on any ballot. They will be there nonetheless, and that is the challenge. Are Americans willing and able to look beyond the glittery Hollywood produced commercials, the endlessly fawning media coverage and the unceasing appeals to “fairness”, and of course the ubiquitous “Hope and Change”, to understand that the real choice is simply between freedom and slavery. Not slavery in the sense that blacks are going to be fitted for shackles while whites enjoy mint juleps as they sit on their porches, but rather all of us are on the road to slavery where the overseers are government bureaucrats who tell you what you can eat, where you can live and what you must buy. At the same time the government masters will confiscate ever increasing amounts of your money to pay for things you would never pay for yourself. And of course don’t forget about your guns too.

In the ultimate irony, it is under the banners of “rights” and “fairness” the government is simultaneously turning the American population into a nation of sharecroppers. Sharecropping was of course the tactic of usurious rents and loans that indebted the newly freed slaves to the land they worked and made it almost impossible to exercise their newly granted freedom. The more money the overseers spend the deeper is the crushing debt the not so free American citizens must toil to service.

In the United States the whole concept of slavery has a racial connotation rightly imbued with violence and oppression and heartbreak. The slavery that lays ahead with Barack Obama’s progressive America doesn’t have that racial component, nor does it bring to mind the heart wrenching images that most of us associate with the word. The reality is however that statism has a long history of equally barbaric images, from the Soviet Union’s gulags to Communist China’s slave labor system to the Khmer Rouge’s killing fields. In those cases, the slavery was imposed at the tip of a bayonet. Here it is being welcomed in via the ballot box by people who are caught up in the anti-capitalist propaganda disguised as “hope and change”.

The assertion that the progressive policies of Barack Obama and the Democrats are nothing but Communism Lite invariably brings charges of hate speech and racism. So be it. That doesn’t make the assertion any less true. The simple question is, are enough Americans able to see through the thinly veiled pleas to “worker’s rights” and “fairness” to recognize the hammer and sickle below and the slavery that comes with it?

Greed vs. Giving... Trickle down charity is a recipe for real long term success

Rush Limbaugh caused a bit of a stir recently when he asked the question: “What do you think has fed more mouths, greed or charity?” The question seemed particularly untoward given that Christmas was right around the corner. Who besides Gordon Gekko might ask such a ludicrous question? Rush, obviously… and it turns out that it’s not such a ludicrous question after all.

Of course when he says greed, what he is really referring to – and he says as much – is self interest. Basically what he is arguing is that while giving charity to someone may make the donor feel good and sometimes has a positive effect on the recipient, the real way to improve the lot of people is to act in your own self interest – within the rule of law of course – and the benefits will flow to others, either directly or via giving. You might call this trickle down charity.

Not long ago I wrote a piece about Steve Jobs stating that despite giving Jack to charity, he did more to improve the lives of people around the world over the last 35 years than possibly anyone other than Bill Gates. Of course Gates has given away tens of billions of dollars, but in reality he has benefited the world far more by founding and growing Microsoft than anything he has done or likely will ever do with the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation.

To understand the level of failure that charity & giving can accomplish one need only look at Africa. In her brilliant book: Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa", Dambisa Moyo writes: “Over the past 60 years at least $1 trillion of development-related aid has been transferred from rich countries to Africa. Yet real per-capita income today is lower than it was in the 1970s, and more than 50% of the population -- over 350 million people -- live on less than a dollar a day, a figure that has nearly doubled in two decades.” Moyo argues that not only does aid actually destroy much of the potential economic development of African nations and enables corrupt leaders to maintain their power, at the same time it encourages would-be dictators to attempt to overthrow existing regimes, which in turn creates more war and poverty.

Food is one of the most brutal forms of aid. Many countries receive aid in the form of American agricultural products. The result of these gifts is that, as local farmers cannot compete with free food, their farms fail, and any chance of self sustainability vanishes. It’s the whole notion of “Give a man a fish, feed him for a day… Teach a man to fish, feed him for a lifetime.” In the case of Africa the world’s aid (and food is only part of that problem) is destroying the capacity of the recipients to become self sustaining, resulting in a vicious circle of aid, corruption and poverty.

Here in the United States the record of success via “giving” is largely the same. After six decades and trillions of dollars of government “aid” in the form of welfare and government education, the poverty problem is not only not getting any better, but it’s actually getting worse! We have record levels of people with no discernable skills, little ability to support themselves and most seeking support at the public trough. A smashing success of compassion!

None of this should be taken to suggest that giving is a bad thing. It’s not. Particularly when it’s done to ameliorate incidental or disaster induced problems, big or small. Giving however should not be seen as a long term solution to improving the condition of man. The problem is that giving typically comes with few, or poorly enforced, requirements on the part recipient, particularly when those “gifts” come from the government or international organizations like the UN or the IMF. Compare the different outcomes between 1960 and today of the Asian tigers and sub-Saharan Africa. In 1960 South Korea’s GDP per capita was twice that of sub-Saharan Africa’s, but in 2005 it was almost 24 times as much. The story is similar for countries such as Indonesia, Malaysia, Cambodia and Vietnam, who went from half the per capital GDP of sub-Saharan Africa in 1960 to five times it today. While all of these tigers received aid at some point, in Africa the aid became an end in and of itself while in Asia it was used as a step to economic growth and development.

Andrew Carnegie provides a perfect example of how both greed and giving can work together. In the late 19th century he was the richest man in the world, and in 1889 he wrote a piece called “Wealth” where he argued that the adult life of an industrialist should comprise two parts. The first part was the accumulation of wealth. The second part was the distribution of that accumulated wealth to benevolent causes. Philanthropy, Carnegie argued, was key to making the life worthwhile.

And Carnegie was no piker when it came to giving. By the time he died, he had given away 90% of his wealth (equivalent to $4.5 billion today) with the remainder to be distributed by others.

In Rush’s parlance, Carnegie fed many people via both greed and charity. By creating the heart of what became the most valuable company in the world, Carnegie provided food and shelter to tens of thousands of workers around the world and hundreds of thousands of family members. Whether you call it greed or self interest is immaterial. It supported hundreds of thousands of people and it gave Carnegie the resources to give to charity. Carnegie’s giving did not simply feed a man for a day. On the contrary. He wanted to prepare recipients to feed themselves for a lifetime. The majority of Carnegie’s giving came in the form of financing universities and libraries around the world where men could improve their lot in life through education. His was a gift, but he required something from the recipient in order to take advantage of it. Be it studying or reading, the recipient of Carnegie’s largesse was involved in the improvement of his own condition.

At the end of the day, as usual, Rush was right. The good Carnegie was able to do was driven by his pursuit of his own self interest. Same deal with Gates, Rockefeller, Ford and even Mark Zuckerberg. The result was that they improved the lives of their workers, their customers and the recipients of their gifts… but it all started with a profit motive. And it’s true on a national scale as well. America became the breadbasket and economic engine of the world through the pursuit of profit. That profit motive and the success it created allowed the United States to become by far the most generous nation in the world. But the same thing holds true here, people around the world have benefited far more from Cyrus McCormick’s invention of the mechanical reaper, the American innovation in the early auto, energy and transportation industries and Silicon Valley’s silicon and cyber advances than they have from any charity that was ever given by anyone anywhere.

While charity has its place in the world, free markets and capitalism are the keys to true improvement in the condition of man. They provide the opportunity for investment and innovation to ameliorate most problems on the planet. Not all, but many. If one’s goal is to help a neighbor, a friend or someone across the planet survive a disaster or get through a difficult moment in their lives, charitable giving is the perfect solution. If however one’s goal is to lift a family or a community or a country out of poverty, do what you can to help them participate in capitalism and a free market economy. That’s where long term, sustainable economic advances come from. Now that’s a gift that will pay dividends for everyone involved.

The Occupy Wall Streeters should put down their copies of Das Kapital and pick up this year's Forbes 400

Back in 2000 or 2001 I read a piece in Newsweek or TIME that discussed flyers whining that they didn’t have enough storage space in the overhead compartment bins on airplanes. I remember writing a letter to the editor saying that the only reason that people had the luxury of being able to whine about such things was that flying had become so safe that flyers could shift their focus to the more mundane. Then of course September 11th came along and people started focusing on the basic reason planes exist… to get them from point A to point B in one piece.

The Occupy Wall Streeters are just like the people whining about the overhead compartments. These are the people who enjoy the fruits of the capitalist system in which they live – iPhones, Starbucks, Facebook, Twitter, Twinkies, Nikes, ATMs, MSNBC, not to mention adequate food, shelter, and transportation, yet want to destroy that very system. They vote for economic dolts in the Democrat party like Barney Frank, Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama and then blame capitalism when they screw it up.

Not only do they have no clarity about what they want, but they are wrong about most of those claims they are making. Bankers may be SOBs, but they didn’t cause the financial meltdown, Congress did. Their college loans are so heavy because government drove up college costs faster even than the rise in health care costs, not because of the 1%. The fact that with degrees in hand they can’t find jobs is because of government regulation and tax policy, not because of big corporations.

These people could benefit from putting down their copy of Das Kapital and ask their local banker for his copy of the Forbes 400.

The annual Forbes 400 issue lists the 400 richest people in the United States, the uber 1-percenters if you will. Just to make it on the list this year you had to have a net worth of slightly over $1 billion. Strangely, this list of the most hated of the really hated 1%, includes stars in the Democratic constellation like George Soros sitting at number 7 with a net worth of $22 billion and Mark Zuckerberg, Sergey Brin and Larry Page sitting at positions 14-16. Oh, and of course there’s also Mr. Solyndra, George Kaiser, at # 31 with $10 billion and President Clinton’s buddy, Ron Burkle, at 107 with his $3.2 billion.

When you hear the Occupiers talk about the 1%, it brings to mind a banker or industrialist sitting in his office gleefully writing pink slips just before Christmas so that he can improve the bottom line and buy another Gulfstream with his bonus money. Of course at the same time he’ll find some loopholes through which he can avoid paying any taxes on the bonus he earned for firing all of those workers. As he walks to the limousine that takes him to his Connecticut estate each night, he doesn’t even deign to make eye contact with the passing workers upon whose backs his fortune was made, at least the part that wasn’t left to him by his father and grandfather.

It’s of course possible that that caricature could be found amongst the people who make up the Forbes 400. That, however, is not the story of the list. What is the single most important thing about the list? The fact that 278 of them are self made. Think about that. While you’ll still find a Rockefeller and a Ford on the list, 70% of the richest of the rich in the United States are self made. That doesn’t mean that all of them were born into poverty like Oprah Winfrey or started selling shoes out of the trunk of their cars like Phil Knight, but 278 of the 400 started out in families that would never have made it anywhere near this list.

And the question is, how did those people make their money? Did they steal it from hard working Americans in some dark alley somewhere? No. Did they set up a high tech printing press and start forging bearer bonds? No. Did they use the police power of the state to jail competitors and take their money? No. Most of those people made their money the old fashioned American way, they earned it. They figured out how to provide a good or service to Americans and people around the world at a price they were willing to exchange their money for.

Obviously, if you listen to the Occupiers, all of those services must have been in banking, where the little guy has no alternative but to put their money in Wall Street banks. Not quite true. While 95 of the 400 made their fortunes in finance of one sort or another, there is a wide spectrum of other areas from which the fortunes came…

• 17 made their money in manufacturing… like Jim David of New Balance Shoes, a company that manufactures 25% of their shoes in the United States.


• 27 made their money in real estate… Like Bradley Hughes who built Public Storage into a $19 billion behemoth from a single self storage facility.


• 30 made their money in food and beverage… like Truett Cathy, who started Chic-Fil-A with one restaurant after getting out of the Army in 1946.


• 24 made their money in retail… like Bernie Marcus & Arthur Blank who started Home Depot (a company that employs 190,000 people) after getting fired for disagreeing with their boss at Handy Dan.


• 40 made their money in energy… like Harold Hamm of Continental Resources who started off pumping gas and working on cars.


• Then of course there are the 49 who made their money in technology… like Zuckerberg, Moskovitz and Saverin of Facebook or Scott Cook who created Quicken after his wife complained about balancing the checkbook.

The members of the Forbes 400 made their fortunes by giving consumers, businesses and governments goods or services they were willing, if not happy, to pay for. They delivered food to stores and pizza to homes, they made shoes, software and toys, they built roads, bridges and buildings, and they entertained with movies, music and video games. And the funny thing about those 400 people is that they are only a fraction of the entrepreneurs and businesspeople in the United States who are providing those services. There are 22 million small businesses in the United States headed by people who are trying to become successful enough to make that exclusive club, and virtually every one of them understands that the way to get there is to provide customers with sufficient value to convince them to willingly exchange their hard earned dollars for their particular good or service.

The existence of guys like Bernie Madoff, Dennis Kozlowski or Kenneth Lay in no way diminishes the benefits that Americans (and people around the world) have enjoyed as a result of the efforts of the people in the Forbes 400 or the hated 1%. They may have been thieves and con artists, but none of them did a fraction of the damage done by Franklin Raines, Jamie Gorelick or Chris Dodd.

The question of the day is, would you rather have unaccountable bureaucrats and politicians using the police power of the government to decide the fate of the economy or would you rather let companies and entrepreneurs compete for your interest and money in a free market? While the Occupiers and their union and Democrat comrades would prefer the former, I'd take the latter 10 times out of 10. Things might not work perfectly, but they’d certainly work far better than if they were run by government apparatchiks.

Obama's unconvincing feint to the center

Reading President Obama’s piece in the Wall Street Journal last week made me think of something Tom Dye, one of my Political Science professors at Florida Sate used to say when discussing the Soviet approach to arms negotiations: “If it’s someone’s goal to kill you, you should not be surprised to discover that they are more than willing to lie about it in the first place.” That basic truth of that statement seems fairly obvious, but it’s a lesson liberals never learned during the Soviet era and President Obama demonstrates he thinks Americans have not learned it today.

He starts off paying homage to the free markets that he rightly acknowledges allowed the United States to become the most prosperous nation in the history of the world. He then goes on to (again accurately) state that it is our entrepreneurial spirit that is the key to our continued leadership in the world.

The remainder of the piece involves his demonstrating for us his understanding that too much government regulation can be a hindrance to those free markets and can suffocate entrepreneurship. He talks about regulatory excess and highlights how agencies can even work at cross purposes to one another. He also discusses his plan to sign an executive order that will instruct federal agencies to reduce excessive regulation, eliminate redundancy and repeal regulations that are obsolete.

The take away from this piece however is that President Obama thinks Americans are incapable of logical thought. He says all the right things, but few people paying attention will believe a word of it.

The President’s stated willingness to destroy the coal industry, his nationalization of the auto industry and his administration’s threats to business leaders who go off script might suggest to a reader that he may not be quite the fan of the free markets as he suggests. It is the 5th paragraph however that puts a lie to the entire piece: Over the past two years, the goal of my administration has been to strike the right balance. And today, I am signing an executive order that makes clear that this is the operating principle of our government.

After rubbing one’s eyes and re-reading that two sentence paragraph then re-checking the byline you have no choice to conclude that either President Obama is a victim of body snatchers or he thinks you were born yesterday. The President’s assertion that his administration has been a model for good governance and balanced regulation is like someone beating you to a pulp and then proclaiming himself a pacifist.

President Obama’s first two years could hardly have been any less balanced had Ralph Nader been sitting in the Oval office. The examples of the President’s duplicity are legion.

• His FCC Chairman, Julius Genachowski has moved forward with rules to regulate the Internet despite a court ruling in April explicitly stating the Commission had exceeded its authority.


• His EPA, led by Lisa Jackson was a regulation machine. Not only did it seek to regulate CO2 (the stuff we exhale) as a pollutant but it also decided that states that disagreed with its air quality rules (Texas in this case) would simply lose their ability to issue industry permits within its borders.


• He appointed a Pay Czar to dictate salaries for private companies, some of whom were forced to take loans from Uncle Sam.


• His (recess) appointment of Andy Stern’s right hand man, Craig Becker to the National Labor Relations Board did not suggest a balanced approach to a free market America. Becker once said "employers should have no right to be heard" in cases before the Board, which supervises union elections, investigates labor practices and most ominously, issues rulings that interpret the National Labor Relations Act.

Then there is of course the minor issue of the 159 new bureaucracies, agencies, boards, commissions, and programs that ObamaCare creates, not to mention the myriad mandates such as the one requiring restaurant companies with more than 20 locations to list their nutritional information virtually everywhere but on the toilet paper. Then there are the 1099’s. And of course, not to be forgotten is the unknown number of agencies and regulations that Dodd Frank – one of the most far reaching and incomprehensible financial laws ever passed – will produce. Together these two laws alone – all 4,000 pages of them – will produce strangling regulation for almost 1/4 of our economy.

Given that the beginning of the 2012 election cycle has just begun no one should be surprised that the President is seeking to paint himself as a centrist once again. No doubt his SOTU speech will be full of rhetoric that tacks to the right. It certainly worked well three years ago. Now however, despite a still fawning media, we have demonstrable proof that Barack Obama is nothing but a man of the far left. There’s an old saying: “Trick me once, shame on you; Trick me twice, shame on me.” The question is, how many Americans are going to be sufficiently gullible to take the President’s words at face value and disregard Ronald Reagan’s advice of “Trust but verify?” Hopefully fewer than did in 2008.

Blumenthal & Pelosi showcase Democrat's incompetence

There is an old adage that goes something like this: It’s better to keep your mouth shut and let people think you’re stupid than to open your mouth and prove them right.

Thankfully for America not all Democrats are paying that adage much heed, and just in time for the election. Last week Linda McMahon, the GOP candidate for US Senate from Connecticut did the voters of her state a great service. She asked Richard Blumenthal, her Democrat opponent, a simple question: “How do you create a job?” His answer, if you can call it that, was a minute and a half of television gold, which would have been suitable for Laugh In were it still on the air:

“A job is created, and it can be in a variety of ways by a variety of people. But principally by people and businesses in response to demand for products and services. And the main point about jobs in Connecticut is, we can and we should create more of them by creative policies. And that's the kind of approach that I want to bring to Washington… I know about how government can help preserve jobs. And I want programs that provide more capital for small business, that are tax policies that will promote creation of jobs, stronger intervention by government to make sure we use the Made in America policies and Buy America policies to keep jobs here rather than buying products that are manufactured overseas.”

At the beginning you think he might almost be stumbling into the right answer only to watch him find his bearings and focus so that by the end it's crystal clear that he has no idea how to create jobs. The key phrase in his answer is “stronger intervention of government”. Dick Blumenthal in one moment of clarity demonstrates the typical Democratic approach to solving every problem in the country: Government intervention.

Despite decades of failed examples of government intervention in virtually every aspect of the American economy, Democrats still seem unmoved by actual evidence of failure and cling to their progressive notions that nirvana is to be found at the end of a bureaucrat’s pen.

If Blumenthal were the only one then you could make the argument that he was an outlier and that most Democrats aren’t of that cloth. Luckily he’s not the only one who opened his mouth this week to demonstrate Democratic ineptitude. He was joined by Nancy Pelosi as she responded to Newt Gingrich. In a note to GOP candidates Gingrich suggested they make the campaign about the “Democratic Party of food stamps and the Republican Party of paychecks.” He points out that when Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats took over Congress: ‘Unemployment was 4.6% and food stamp usage was around 26.5 million Americans. Today, the unemployment rate is 9.6% and over forty million Americans are on food stamps.”

Pelosi responded and in very short order demonstrated exactly how Democrats put us in this position in the first place: "It is the biggest bang for the buck when you do food stamps and unemployment insurance. The biggest bang for the buck." The solution to all problems is government.

The Democratic belief that prosperity can be legislated or redistributed into existance makes no sense, particularly in a universe where there is simply no empirical evidence that such policies work and legions of examples that it doesn’t work. It almost makes one think of the Soviet Union’s Five Year Plans where the planning committee would set out rosy economic plans for the country that had little connection with the actual conditions in the economy. Invariably, in Orwellian fashion, the plans were invariably officially “successful” regardless of their abysmal failure on the ground. That practice didn’t work out that well for the Soviets and I’m not sure it’s a plan for success here either.

Finally, while Congress has much blame for our current economic mess, they are only part of the legislative partnership. Luckily for them, in President Obama they have found soul mate. A week before his inauguration he told an audience: "Only government can break the vicious cycles that are crippling our economy -- where a lack of spending leads to lost jobs which leads to even less spending; where an inability to lend and borrow stops growth and leads to even less credit." Once in office he boldly set forth implementing the Democrats solution for the country. We had the Stimulus, the nationalization of the auto industry and student loans, the government takeover of healthcare and massive increases in regulation. And, if all that inept legislation were not bad enough in itself, his cabinet appointees, the people who actually implement that legislation intended to revive the economy and spur job creation, have less business experience than any cabinet in 100 years.

America faces a stark choice in November, one between a newly energized, free market solution oriented GOP (albeit having been dragged in that direction by the Tea Party movement – sometimes kicking and screaming) and a party of Democrats, who have pulled back the curtain to reveal what most of us assumed all along: They are economic illiterates. Their solution for creating jobs, reinvigorating the economy and putting America back on the road to prosperity is only to be found through government intervention. As the voters sit back and evaluate their choices, they need simply examine the success those Democratic policies have engendered everywhere from Detroit to California to the Soviet Union. Do they want to sign on for another American version of a Five Year Plan or is it time to give the free market a chance for a change?