Cogs Won’t Work in Galt’s America, Obama

May 14, 2009 by Be Holy

Updated.

Keep your eyes open America. It can happen here. A power wielding and hungry White House is preaching to America fiscal responsibility as it did today at Rio Rancho High School in New Mexico. The President blames you Americans for your extravagant ways while spending not only money we, Americans, don’t have, but money the next generation of American won’t have.

Beside printing money to pay the bills, Obama has other irons in the fire, forging a workers’ paradise. Meanwhile, countries living socialism’s dream, England, comes to mind, are mired in mediocrity and living off the glory of the past. The talent of the country is worried and some think of “going Galt.’ According to Michelle Malkin, the talented have problems staying with England’s tax ladened Ship of State. As socialism takes it’s toll across the Pond, taxes bring fresh tears, and sneers, and have the talented crying foul. Malkin quotes the manifesto of renowned composed Andrew Lloyd Webber, who fearing a talent exodus, writes of the punitive taxes.

Here’s the truth. The proposed top rate of income tax is not 50 per cent. It is 50 per cent plus 1.5 per cent national insurance paid by employees plus 13.3 per cent paid by employers. That’s not 50 per cent. Two years from now, Britain will have the highest tax rate on earned income of any developed country.

I write this article because I fear the inevitable exodus of the talent that can dig us out of the hole we find ourselves in. It is inevitable, given that other countries are bidding for entrepreneurs. The Government must modify its proposals.

Will entrepreneurs be there when we want and need them. Don’t count on it. With ground rules being written by government bureaucrats, the inventive and ingenious may look elsewhere to plant their talent

‘Going Galt’ is an alternative option to emigration to lands of lower taxation. Eric Etheridge writes: ‘Going Galt’: Everyone’s Doing It! With Tristero of Hullabaloo’s help, Etheridge explains ‘Going Galt’ in a nutshell:

John Galt is the copper-haired, white-boy protagonist in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. Galt leads a revolutionary movement in which all the top leaders of the banks and corporations forsake their corporate jets and perks to work in diners or as subway repair guys. No they weren’t fired by Galt. Rather, Galt urged them to go on strike and withdraw their expertise from an increasingly socialist world. Deprived of the genius of their genius, the world economy collapses.

Who exactly is thinking about Going Galt? Lisa Schifferen at The Corner has the rundown:

The doctors, lawyers, engineers, executives, serious small-business owners, top salespeople, and other professionals and entrepreneurs who make this country run work considerably harder than pretty much anyone else (including most of the chattering class, and all politicians). They are not robber barons, or trust-fund babies, or plutocrats, or even celebrities. They are mostly the meritocrats who worked hard in high school and got into the better colleges and grad schools, where they studied while others partied. They pushed through grueling hours and unpleasant “up or out” policies in their twenties and thirties at top law firms, banks, hospitals, and businesses to earn salaries in the solid six figures (or low seven) today — in their peak earning years. Their work ethic is prodigious, and . . . in their spare time they sit on the boards of most of the complex charities and arts institutions that provide aid and pay for culture in America. No group of people contribute more to their community. And now the president, who followed a path sort of like that, and who claims that his wife’s former six-figure income was a result of precisely such qualifications and efforts, is demonizing them. More problematically, he is penalizing their success and giving them very clear incentives to ratchet back on productivity.

My take: “We the People” aren’t cogs in a machine, even a great machine, that our dear leader can fit to his purposes. We began this experiment of nationhood in revolution due to unresponsive tyranny: “In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury.” Decaration of Independence.

We are America and the America of our Founders is precious to the hearts of the American People, our people. We must seek better options than going Galt or conforming to Obama’s social socialist dream, never forsaking freedom and free enterprise.

Our problems were caused not by free enterprise but by poor governance. We can not expect government to fix us. We must fix ourselves with the help of a good God. Our Founders formed a nation that depends on a morally healthy people. We are a people awaiting our transformation; seeds breaking open, falling into the ground and bringing forth healthy, holy new life. This is the American dream. It is the dream of the broken but more importantly, the gifted, the resourceful, the ingenious and the industrious, empowered by God to be a blessing to our Nation and the world. The is an old saying that says, ‘Without God we can’t do it; but without us, God won’t do!” Together as one People, let’s do it!

“Torture” & Rhetorical One-Up-Manship

May 13, 2009 by Be Holy

Thomas Sowell calls “childish” and “fatuous” the positions taken on “torture,” inorder to appear to be morally one-up on the other side. Regardless of what they say, these people would actually act quite differently if their butts were at stake. According to Sowell:

There is a big difference between being ponderous and being serious. It is scary when the President of the United States is not being serious about matters of life and death, saying that there are “other ways” of getting information from terrorists.

Maybe this is a step up from the previous talking point that “torture” had not gotten any important information out of terrorists. Only after this had been shown to be a flat-out lie did Barack Obama shift his rhetoric to the lame assertion that unspecified “other ways” could have been used.

For a man whose whole life has been based on style rather than substance, on rhetoric rather than reality, perhaps nothing better could have been expected. But that the media and the public would have become so mesmerized by the Obama cult that they could not see through this to think of their own survival, or that of this nation, is truly a chilling thought.

When we look back at history, it is amazing what foolish and even childish things people said and did on the eve of a catastrophe about to consume them. In 1938, with Hitler preparing to unleash a war in which tens of millions of men, women and children would be slaughtered, the play that was the biggest hit on the Paris stage was a play about French and German reconciliation, and a French pacifist that year dedicated his book to Adolf Hitler.

If we could fight and win wars with words, our writers and poets would man the front lines with notepads and computers, however flesh and blood heroes are still our first defense and President’s are still compelled to command soldiers and protect citizen with more than words and lofty thoughts.

Thomas Sowell like Obama speaks of Winston Churchill. Sowell notes that the reason Churchill didn’t torture prisioners of war while bombs were falling on London was that these men were ordinary soldiers captured in war and covered by the Geneva convention. They also didn’t know anything that would have kept London from being bombed. Terrorists with life-saving information is another category entirely. Sowell concludes:

The left has long confused physical parallels with moral parallels. But when a criminal shoots at a policeman and the policeman shoots back, physical equivalence is not moral equivalence. And what American intelligence agents have done to captured terrorists is not even physical equivalence.

If we have reached the point where we cannot be bothered to think beyond rhetoric or to make moral distinctions, then we have reached the point where our own survival in an increasingly dangerous world of nuclear proliferation can no longer be taken for granted.

Read Thomas Sowell here and here.

Sykes “Limbaugh 20th hijacker” Obama Laughs

May 11, 2009 by Be Holy

Wanda Sykes makes mean-spirited jokes (humor?) while Obama laughs at distasteful humor at the White House Correspondents Dinner on May 9th. Sykes said she thought Rush Limbaugh was the 20th hijacker who missed the flight on 9/11 by being high on Oxycontin. From the head shaking in audience and sounds crying fowl, amid the laughter, many in audience, other than our president, recognized the defaming comments to be verbally assaulting calumny. People around the world witness the double standard proliferated under the guise of humor and are not fooled or laughing, Mr. President, as witnessed by the Telegraph,co,uk’s Toby Harden’s blog article: “Not Funny: Barak Obama Laughs At Wanda Sykes Joke About Wanting Rush Limbaugh Dead.” Harden makes the point:

“Imagine if a comedian “joked” that Obama was a terrorist who was guilty of treason and should be tortured and allowed to die. There would justifiably be an outcry.

But when the “joke” comes from a liberal, Obama-supporting comedienne and the target is a right-winger then the likes of Hilary Rosen and Donna Brazile are on CNN saying it’s just comedy and Limbaugh is “fair game”.

And Obama laughing when someone wishes Limbaugh dead? Hard to take from the man who promised a new era of civility and elevated debate in Washington.”

Michelle Malkin calls the White House Correspondents Dinner “the most self-absorbed night in Washington since the inaugural.” I concur and note that it is in keeping with the ongoing revelation of gotcha politics and public defamation we have seen coming from this White House.

Motherhood Most Important Role – Daah

May 10, 2009 by Be Holy

Seems Motherhood’s still in style and in the running for things worth doing. The future generations may keep arriving with a little luck despite Planned Parenthood.

Hot Air brings some cheer with Rasmussen Report which finds “66% say being a mother is a woman’s most important role.”

Rausmaussen Report’s polling finds “66% say being a mother is a woman’s most important role.”This Mother’s Day, two-out-of-three adults (66%) believe that being a mother is the most important role for a woman to fill. Only 17% disagree and 16% are not sure.

Gangster Government-The Strong Man Using Strong Arm

May 8, 2009 by Be Holy

Gangster government on the prowl?

Michelle Malkin writes of the abusive treatment the hedge fund industry is receiving at the strong arm tactics of Barack Obama. “He keeps taking their money. They keep getting publicly tongue-lashed.”

This week, AQR Capital Management LLC hedge fund manager Cliff Asness — at considerable risk to himself and his business — issued a striking manifesto responding to the president’s self-serving demagoguery and flagrant disregard for the rule of law. You can find Cliff’s essay and his other invaluable work at Stumbling on Truth.

Asness writes in this manifesto:

Let’s be clear, it is the job and obligation of all investment managers, including hedge fund managers, to get their clients the most return they can. They are allowed to be charitable with their own money, and many are spectacularly so, but if they give away their clients’ money to share in the “sacrifice”, they are stealing. Clients of hedge funds include, among others, pension funds of all kinds of workers, unionized and not. The managers have a fiduciary obligation to look after their clients’ money as best they can, not to support the President, nor to oppose him, nor otherwise advance their personal political views. That’s how the system works. If you hired an investment professional and he could preserve more of your money in a financial disaster, but instead he decided to spend it on the UAW so you could “share in the sacrifice”, you would not be happy.

….. This is America. We have a free enterprise system that has worked spectacularly for us for two hundred plus years. When it fails it fixes itself. Most importantly, it is not an owned lackey of the oval office to be scolded for disobedience by the President.

I am ready for my “personalized” tax rate now.

Michelle further writes:

Asness minced no words: “The President’s attempted diktat takes money from bondholders and gives it to a labor union that delivers money and votes for him…Shaking down lenders for the benefit of political donors is recycled corruption and abuse of power.”

Business as usual in the Era of Hope and Change. Perhaps demonized entrepreneurs will finally learn that when the dog you feed bites your hand, you don’t roll up your sleeve and give him your arm. You get a new dog.

Is the power grab over? I hardly think so, nor does Examiner Editorial (Washington Examiner.) writing of another in your pocket action of the President giving UAW something they never earned nor could earn for themselves, effectively ownership of Chrysler:

True, the union doesn’t get an explicit controlling majority of the board of directors, but who needs that when you’ve got the White House guaranteeing your work and the U.S. Treasury Department making sure you never have to worry about the bottom line. UAW President Ron Gettelfinger’s place in Big Labor’s Hall of Fame is now secure. He found a sugar daddy with an endless supply of cash. So UAW members and retirees can keep right on drawing those pay and benefits so excessively generous they made it impossible for the old Chrysler to compete with Toyota and Honda.

Hans Bader of OpenMarket.org writes:

Obama effectively gave ownership of Chrysler to the United Auto Workers Union (which spent millions electing Obama), rather than taxpayers (who have spent billions to bail out Chrysler) or the institutions that lent money to Chrysler based on the legal right and expectation that they would receive its assets before the UAW union would. Veteran political commentator Michael Barone also calls it “gangster government.” The UAW will also retain “lucrative” pension and health benefits, courtesy of the taxpayer.