Free Republic

The Reverend Jesse Jackson laid into the GOP for “fomenting class warfare,” insisting that the “Romney/Ryan idea that people should be allowed to keep what they earn is divisive.” “The way to unite all classes is to put everything into a common pot and dole out shares based on need,” Jackson maintained. “This is the basic Democratic plan. This election, voters are facing the biggest choice of their lifetimes. Do we go backward toward a selfish, every man for himself system as the Republicans want? Or do we move forward toward a new tomorrow of equality and sharing as President...

Public awareness of Rep. Paul Ryan’s familiarity with (and apparent fondness for) the works of Ayn Rand has now seeped into the academy. The Chronicle of Higher Education features an essay today by Professor Alan Wolfe, Director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College. This is an edited version of my response to Professor Wolfe in the article’s comments section. There are any number of intellectual errors in both Professor Wolfe’s piece and in the comments that follow, and they can be summed up thusly: we read the writings of all sorts of...

President Barack Obama's youngest Kenyan half-brother George had to beg for help from conservative author Dinesh D’Souza because his famous brother refused him aid. Moved by the man's plight, D’Souza paid $1,000 to cover the medical bills for the man's son. The President's seeming callousness toward his own relative was defended by Press Secretary Jay Carney as “a matter of principle. Anyone who knows the President knows him as a man of infinite sympathy for the downtrodden of the world. Yes, he could easily have afforded the $1,000. But paying out of his own pocket would've undermined his belief that...

To paraphrase Baudelaire, the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world of the moral superiority of collectivism. According to Ayn Rand, if we don't convince the world otherwise, nothing else will work. Our greatest ally in this fight is human nature. Our greatest asset is morality itself, which is really, truly, undeniably, and absolutely on our side... --snip-- Generally speaking, it is a normal desire of all humans to achieve a better life for themselves and their children. In a free capitalist system, "greed-driven" achievers engage in lawful productive work, start businesses, and build things. In a...

Collectivism: a political or economic theory advocating collective control especially over production and distribution. If Chuck Todd is right, our country is in trouble. On Morning Joe today, discussing President Obama's "you didn't build that" remarks, NBC political director Todd opined that "half this country believes" we are about collectivism. View the video here.

American history is full of memorable campaign lines, from President Ronald Reagan’s speech on “A time for choosing,” to Senator John Kerry’s convoluted: “I voted for it before I voted against it.” Unfortunately, President Obama just unleashed a whopper that will stand the test of time, mostly because it accurately summarizes his entire first term. Speaking before an audience in Roanoke, Virginia, Obama said that, “Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business—you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen."...

Excerpts from a letter of Ayn Rand to Leonard Read, the founder of the Foundation for Economic Education, February 28, 1946 -- "The Free Market", 2001 No. 1You imply that the cause of the world’s troubles lies solely in the people’s ignorance of economics and that the way to cure the world is to teach it the proper economic knowledge. This is not true – therefore your program will not work. You cannot hope to effect a cure by starting with a wrong diagnosis. The root of the whole modern disaster is philosophical and moral. People are not embracing collectivism...

Gearing up for what promises to be a difficult campaign, President Obama laid into his critics saying “they want you to be on your own.” He contrasted this “social darwinism” approach to his “on us” philosophy. “The idea that Americans want to be left alone to pursue happiness on their own is clearly out-of-step with the way most Americans think,” Obama maintained. “People only go to work because they have to, not because they want to. When they’re on the job they’re watching the clock waiting for the workday to end. They look forward to the weekend, not the workweek....

Many years ago in college, I took a required psychology class. One day we were told by our professor we had to divvy ourselves up into two groups for a particular project. I don’t remember the nature of the project, but I am quite serious when I say it took us three class days to divide ourselves. Much of that time was spent discussing all the hidden hurt feelings and angst that come with being “chosen” into one group or another, reminiscent of the painful procedure of choosing sides for softball in gym class. After one day of this ridiculous...

The attack on religious liberty is a two front war. One front you know about, the other one you may not have noticed. Language is the blunt instrument of choice with which the secularist left in this country bludgeons our freedoms. The secularist left has successfully used seemingly slight alterations in language to change the way ordinary people perceive an argument. Most people who pay attention to these things are very much aware of this tactic, as we have seen it so often. This is nowhere more apparent today than in the President’s repeated use of the phrase “freedom of...

The nation’s Catholic bishops have vowed to close their religious institutions rather than comply with the HHS mandate that they provide insurance coverage for contraception, sterilization, and abortion-inducing drugs. In a column printed on CatholicNewWorld, Francis Cardinal George urged people to purchase a copy of the Archdiocesan directory “as a souvenir,” because in two years the page containing a list of Catholic hospitals and health care institutions “will be blank.” Ed Morrissey of the Hot Air blog calculated what it would mean if the Catholic bishops shut down all religious institutions that are ineligible for the conscience clause under the...

President Barack Obama has an emerging slogan — “greater together” — that he’s using to spur support among younger voters worried about jobs, education and debt. The collectivist slogan is appearing in more places, including fundraisers and in the title of the “Greater Together Student Summit Tour,” which is sending Obama’s deputies to colleges to galvanize students and youth. On Feb. 1, Obama used the slogan to spur support among young and old African-Americans, and especially African-American women. Less than half of younger African-American men are in the workforce, and the average wealth of African-American families was slashed by the...

The result of this two-party charade is that Americans – and those in most other countries in the Western World – are the victims of a great deception. Voters have been fooled into thinking they are participating in their own political destiny when, in reality, they are being herded into a high-tech feudalism entirely without their consent and, to a large degree, even without their knowledge. This is accomplished by the mirage of a meaningful choice at election time when, in fact, the major parties and their candidates are merely two branches of the same tree of collectivism. Voters today...

The recent NDAA Bill has been decried as an act of governmental tyranny. This is true, but the implications are much more than just a mere overstep. It is, in reality, a further step in the direction of decilivization. The word “collectivist” is sadly absent from the popular language of politics. Collectivism, in short, composes the political viewpoints that are focused on the collective, or the whole. This is starkly opposed to individualism, which is focused on the individual. Some of the political philosophies that are considered collectivist are Communism (and its various varieties), socialism, modern liberalism, and anarcho-syndicalism. The...

A half-dozen House Democrats led by Representative Dennis Kucinich (Ohio) introduced a bill that would establish a new government agency aimed at insuring that no one makes an unreasonable amount of profit. The bill—the Gas Price Spike Act, H.R. 3784—is initially focused on excessive profits from oil and gas production. “It’s not that the oil and gas industry is the only one ripping us off,” Kucinich said. “It’s just that we had to start somewhere. Right now, we think there’s enough anger and envy toward this industry that people will more readily accept the idea of a government bureau to...

There were two thinkers who were greatly influential in forming philosophies that would affect the future political theories that followed. The greatest thinker of the modern age was John Locke, who provided the framework that would allow for liberal democracy. A thinker who perhaps inadvertently laid down the foundation for totalitarianism was Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Both Locke and Rousseau were grand thinkers, but Rousseau was an advocate of his own form of collectivism while Locke believed in individualism, the basis for a truly free society. It is sensible to begin by analyzing Locke, as he preceded Rousseau. John Locke writes in...

"Lest we forget at least an over-the-shoulder acknowledgment to the very first radical: from all our legends, mythologies, and history (and who is to know where mythology leaves off and history begins — or which is which), the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that at least he won his own kingdom — Lucifer." Rules for Radicals, Saul Alinsky "A radical programme of social legislation, particularly unemployment insurance; the shifting of the burden of taxation to the wealthy classes; free popular-education — all these and similar measures, which in themselves do...

Those who still think that it's a good idea for government to "spread the wealth around" must think they're "wiser than God." That's what Plymouth Governor William Bradford concluded nearly 400 years ago after one of America's first socialist experiments led not to shared wealth, but pooled poverty. The Pilgrims, whom we remember at Thanksgiving, started life in the New World with a system of common ownership forced on them by Plymouth colony investors. That quasi-socialist arrangement proved disastrous, and had to be scrapped for one which gave these first Americans the right to keep the fruits of their labor...

Have you ever noticed that people on the left hold the public sector and the private sector to a different set of standards? If a public official and a private citizen commit the exact same wrongful act, the private citizen will be judged much more harshly. Consider this revelation in the news the other day: · Arizona…plans to limit adult Medicaid recipients to 25 days of hospital coverage a year, starting as soon as the end of October.· Hawaii plans to cut Medicaid coverage to 10 days a year in April.· Other states have already limited hospital stays under Medicaid:...

Elizabeth Warren, Harvard law professor and former Obama administration regulator (for consumer protection), is modern liberalism incarnate. As she seeks the Senate seat Democrats held for 57 years before 2010, when Scott Brown impertinently won it, she clarifies the liberal project and the stakes of contemporary politics. The project is to dilute the concept of individualism, thereby refuting respect for the individual's zone of sovereignty. The regulatory state, liberalism's instrument, constantly tries to contract that zone — for the individual's own good, it says. Warren says: "There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You...