Category Archives: Socialism

Atlas Shrugged Part II in Theaters This Weekend

Atlas Shrugged Part II is opening this weekend. Want to check it out? Follow this link to find a theater near you.

And now, the official Atlas Shrugged Part II trailer:

Resistance is Not Always Futile

There’s no question that the 2012 campaign has been full of disappointments for those of us who want less government, more liberty, and more prosperity in our lives. Very clearly, the game is rigged in large part due to the establishment media, powerful special interest groups, and the political parties themselves. It’s very easy to become disillusioned by the entire process and sometimes it’s tempting to give up and say “to hell with it!”

But rather than bring down you readers out there (as I often do), I want to share something very inspiring with you from Cato’s David Boaz (below). In Boaz’s lecture, he explains how everyday heroism hastened the demise of the Soviet Union. We libertarians complain – often with good reason, about how difficult it is for our voices to be heard in the two party system. For all practical purposes, the U.S.S.R. had only one political party and dissent was strongly discouraged…to put it mildly.

Yet somehow, ordinary people were able to rise up, demand the liberties we all too often take for granted, and prevailed! How did they do it? What can we learn from how these ordinary people brought down the Evil Empire, and more importantly, how can we apply these lessons here in the US?

Shenanigans Afoot at Wikipedia Concerning Obama’s New Campaign Slogan: Forward

How much can we or should we rely on Wikipedia, particularly concerning controversial issues? I have linked the site in the past from Liberty Papers’ posts and probably will in the future but I do think anything you or I find at Wikipedia should be verified by at least one other source before assuming it true. It was almost a year ago that Sarah Palin supporters tried to scrub the page concerning Paul Revere and his ride to cover up and support her mistaken history of the event.

Now it seems that Obama supporters are doing something similar as it relates to his one word 2012 campaign slogan: Forward.

Just yesterday, Neal Boortz referenced the Wikipedia article for the word “forward” as it related to politics but by the time he was off the air, the page had been significantly altered. Boortz explains:

So yesterday I gave you a laundry list of different political philosophers, publications and propaganda that all used the phrase “forward” to embody and promote their socialist or communist causes. Considering the historical use of the word “forward,” it is no surprise that our Marxist in Chief would select this phrase as his new campaign slogan. But one of the many examples I referenced was a Wikipedia entry under “Forward” that Cristina found entitled “Forward (generic name of socialist publications).” Yesterday morning if you went to this link you found a long history of socialist and communist publications published in many languages, principally German, Russian and French, using that name as their title.

[…]

By yesterday afternoon Obama sycophants and myrmidons were busy. They were demanding that Wikipedia remove that reference to the word “forward” being a generic name of socialist publications. Toward the middle of the afternoon if you clicked on that link it would say “This article is being considered for deletion in accordance with Wikipedia’s deletion policy.” By the end of the day, if you searched the word “Forward” in Wikipedia, the link to that entry had been removed from the website.

Boortz’s blog Nealz Nuze cached the original Wikipedia search and is included in his post.

The as of the publication of this post, the Wikipedia page Forward (Obama-Biden campaign slogan) says: “On April 30th, 2012 the Obama–Biden campaign announced the slogan “Forward”.” If you go back to the main page and look under “Politics,” there are 4 links in addition to the Obama campaign link of political groups, all Marxist in nature, all of which use “forward” as a slogan.

This could be a coincidence, but that is beside the point. My question is what is it about this page that certain Wiki editors who want to delete the page find objectionable? Was the original article not factual or do they not like that other Wiki editors pointed this out?*
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How far we have fallen…

Reading the point/counterpoint posts on the question of how the supreme court would decide on Obamacares constitutionality, was quite disturbing to me in several ways.

On the one hand I was heartened, because clearly both Brad and Doug are sane and rational folks with a reasonably solid background in both law and politics, and a foundational understanding of the constitution…

Of course, that only highlights how many people in this country are not.

Any reading of the constitution… of the very intent of the founding of this nation… makes it clear that our federal government is meant to be one of of limited and enumerated powers. If the government can mandate this, they can mandate anything. This is the fundamental argument about the necessity for a limiting principle to any government act.

And anyone who doesn’t want unlimited, unconstrained government can see that. Sadly, it seems that the idea of unlimited, unconstrained government is quite popular in some quarters… even with some supreme court justices.

The basic liberal/progressive/leftist argument for socialized medicine is “we should do this even if it IS illegal and unconstitutional, because it’s the right thing to do so the supreme court should uphold it”.

I.E. “It’s good because we want it, and therefore it should be legal because it is good; and we need to get rid of this whole “limited government” thing, because it gets in the way of us doing what is right and good.”

What I also find heartening is that both Brad and Doug both seem to have a good sense of all of this…

But that is also disturbing…

Because both of them seem to share the same actual opinion:

Both believe that Obamacare is ACTUALLY unconstitutional, and should be struck down…

…It’s just that Brad is cynical enough about the supreme court and the political aspects of the decision that he thinks enough justices will be able to argue themselves into ignoring the constitution and doing what they want to do, rather than what is right.

… and Doug believes that there’s a good possibility of that as well; he just has a bit more hope that they won’t.

… and if you look around the commentariat, that’s pretty much the split of positions that every other knowledgable observer has as well.

And if that isn’t disturbing to you, then you really have no idea what is going on, do you?

I am a cynically romantic optimistic pessimist. I am neither liberal, nor conservative. I am a (somewhat disgruntled) muscular minarchist… something like a constructive anarchist.

Basically what that means, is that I believe, all things being equal, responsible adults should be able to do whatever the hell they want to do, so long as nobody’s getting hurt, who isn’t paying extra

Reducing OWS Economic Equality Demands to Their Absurd Conclusions

While I’m sympathetic and agree with some of Occupy Wall Street’s grievances, too many of their solutions are fatally flawed. Louis DeBroux over at United Liberty has written some grade A quality snark concerning OWS’s demands for economic equality. DeBroux says he had an epiphany while watching some of the ESPN coverage concerning the NBA lockout: what if the NBA adopted the OWS model?

The most obvious reform he mentioned would be to pay all the players equally regardless of talent and contribution to his team. But why stop with pay? Why not change the rules of the game itself in the name of fairness:

This new equality should not be limited to just to salaries though; it should extend to the basketball court. While winning is fun, losing just stinks. It makes the losers feel like, well, losers. Sometimes players even cry when they lose. It hurts their self esteem and makes them feel inferior to the winners. To solve this horrible injustice, I propose that at halftime of each game, the total points scored by that time be redistributed equally among the players of both teams. Then, with one second left on the clock, just before the game ends, the head referee will call time out and the official scorekeeper will once again redistribute the points evenly among the players of both teams.

Think how great this would be! Everyone that plays will be the high scorer. Never again will an NBA player experience the sadness of losing! Every team will be the L.A. Lakers or Boston Celtics, and no team will have to feel like the Washington Wizards or Toronto Raptors. Every team will go 82-0, and every player will be an MVP! It’s perfect! Just like PC-kiddie-soccer leagues, everyone is a winner and everyone gets a trophy. Isn’t this awesome?

Obviously, this would be the death of sports if such changes were implemented. As awful as that would be, DeBroux points out life and death consequences if the notion of competition was taken out of our culture completely:

There might be the occasional sacrifice that hits closer to home when little Sally, who always wanted to be a surgeon but could never quite remember the names and anatomical characteristics of the various human organs, accidentally mistakes the aorta for the appendix and snips that sucker right out of there. Oops! That’s gonna make a mess! Alas, poor mom, we loved you and will miss you, but the loss of your life was the acceptable price for keeping Sally’s self-esteem intact by letting her become the surgeon she always wanted to be, even if she never quite mastered the minutiae of performing surgery.

We would be all worse off to be sure, but hey, at least we would all be equal!

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