BUSH’S Bastardized Conservatism is also Michael Gerson’s. As a committed ideologue, formerly of the Bush administration, Michael Gerson is a completely consistent, dangerous statist. He imagines that the General Welfare Clause gave our overlords, and the Little Lord Fauntleroys who serve them (the female version: Dana Perino), authority to enact the New Deal, Social Security, Medicare, federal civil rights law; direct what Gerson terms “economic growth,” and pursue the national greatness agenda.

To oppose “Alexander Hamilton and a number of Supreme Court rulings” that affirm such overreach is “morally irresponsible and politically disastrous,” says Gerson.

Today, Laura Ingraham referred to Gerson, affectionately, as being part of that wonderful big tent that makes the GOP so inclusive. Yet Gerson, whom BAB celebrity Myron Pauli long ago identified as the most dangerous kind of (crunchy) conservative, holds that the welfare clause, “and Congress will have the power…to provide for the general welfare”—Article I, Section 8—implies that government can pick The People’s pocketbooks for any possible project, even though the general clause is followed by a detailed enumeration of the limited powers so delegated.

Asks historian Thomas E. Woods Jr.: “What point would there be in specifically listing the federal government’s powers if the general welfare clause had already provided the government with an essentially boundless authority to enact whatever it thought would contribute to people’s well-being?” Woods evokes no less an authority than the “Father of the Constitution,” James Madison: “Nothing is more natural nor common than first to use a general phrase, and then to explain and qualify it by a recital of particulars.”

You’d think Madison knew one or two things more than Michael about this document.

I once wrote that “sometimes the law of the State coincides with the natural law. More often than not, natural justice has been buried under the rubble of legislation and statute.” When Gerson and company (you’ll find that Rove, Perino, and the rest, currently masquerading as conservatives, are no different) reject “a consistent constitutionalism,” namely a critique of the current promiscuous applications of the 14th, the “General Welfare” clause, and so on, and embrace the concept of the Constitution as a “living, breathing” document—they rely for their case on layers of that rubble.

Having shoveled the muck of lawmaking aside, constitutionalists base their case on the natural justice and the founders’ original intent.

Gerson is the enemy of liberty. But even more so, because so deceptive, are the Ingrahams of the world. Ms. Ingraham wanted to know how Gerson could bad mouth the tea part, yet still call himself a Bush conservative. Ms. Ingraham has set up a dichotomy where there is only congruity and consistency on the part of Gerson: now that is dangerous.

The execrable bunch that convened to Meet The Press on Sunday carried out a conversation about the irresponsible Republikeynesians’ tax policy.

Against the Republikeynesians, moderator DAVID GREGORY argued that “if you’re concerned, as Republicans say they are, about cutting spending and the deficit, you have to acknowledge that tax cuts are not paid for.”

“It’s still borrowed money,” contended Gregory, paraphrasing the Great Inflater, ALAN GREENSPAN.

Other than meekly pointing out that the problem we have is a problem of spending, Mitch McConnel, being a Republican, made various weak appeals such as that “if you push this economy further backward, we’ll get less revenue for the government, not more.” And “raising taxes in the middle of a recession on the major job generator in America, small business, is a very, very bad idea.”

TAXES ARE STOLEN PROPERTY. A tax cut, especially to high income earners who pay most of the taxes, is a return of stolen goods. To say that you need to “pay for tax cuts,” as Gregory does, is akin to a thief saying he can’t return the TV he just stole until he is in a better financial position.

On the other hand, “taxation hits the pocketbook directly; government’s borrowing and counterfeiting does so indirectly—it devalues Joe the Plumber’s labor, assets, purchasing power, and savings. Unaware of how he’s being ground down, Generic Joe keeps on consuming until he crashes.”

UPDATE (Aug. 24): “Arguing for higher taxes for the rich” is tantamount to arguing for a transfer of wealth from those who pay taxes to those who habitually consume them. It’s always an election-winning strategy given that the last group outnumbers the first. Ask Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Reuters: “Thousands have taken to the streets this summer to demonstrate against plans by Merkel’s center-right government to cut billions of euros in spending on the unemployed without imposing a similar burden on the other end of society.”

Come again? Does the correspondent mean to imply that the pain of doing without as much welfare as before is on par with having to fork out for it (without being entitled to it?)

In mobocracy, some are more equal than others.

Want proof that, the world over, “Statism begins With YOU”?

“Surveys indicate that if a national vote were held now, the opposition would crush Merkel and her allies, whose coalition lost its majority in the upper house of parliament after defeat in a regional election in May.”

Speaking of statism, HERE AT HOME, the booboisie want their “runny egg yolks for mopping up with toast” better monitored by Big Daddy.

A salmonella outbreak, and “the largest egg recall that has happened in recent history,” simply show that the fatter the feds the happier egg-scarfing Americans stand to be.

How do you tell that a grassroots, decentralized movement has moved into mainstream politics and has been thoroughly co-opted by its forces? Here’s one sign: A movement that arose in order to address profound issues of political philosophy begins to front “spokespersons” to apologize and bend over backwards in order to pacify mainstream muckrakers and race-baters. That’s one way to know for sure that the Tea Party is being schooled and groomed for grimy politics as usual.

MSNBC:

Mark Williams, the flamethrower leading the battle against the Ground Zero mosque, was kicked out of the National Tea Party Federation Saturday for a racist blog post.
He shrugged off the diss, calling it “grandstanding” from a “minor player on the fringe.”
A California radio host and leader of the Tea Party Express, Williams had labeled the Manhattan boro president a “Jewish Uncle Tom” and President Obama an “Indonesian Muslim turned welfare thug.”
But when he posted a satirical letter supposedly from “the Colored People” to President Lincoln praising slavery, that apparently crossed the line.
The federation, an umbrella organization that claims to represent 85 Tea Party groups, kicked out Williams’ group when it wouldn’t fire him. “We have expelled Tea Party Express and Mark Williams from the National Tea Party Federation because of the letter that he wrote,” federation spokesman David Webb said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”

You got a hint of the forces controlling the Tea Party—the kind of people who’ve clawed their way onto establishment forums such as “Face the Nation”—when the “gritty” movement doubled up in pain and then went into defense mode over being accused of racism by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Being so accused by such people is always false and is almost always a badge of honor.

Andrew Breitbart’s “Go to hell” is a start. But even better would it have been to ignore an organization that is too stupid to debate, but is sufficiently wily to work to ensure that nothing of the old, founding liberties remains or is revived.

It was wrong to so much as dignify these contemptible efforts to silence the small segment of America that is still true to her origins. Leaders of that America should never have chomped down on the bait, which is nothing but ad hominem intended to paralyze and marginalize liberty.

“The Many Ministries of Truth,” I wrote,

“make truth telling a difficult task. In fiction, the Orwellian Ministry of Truth is a reified entity. In reality, there isn’t one concrete ministry that decides how the nation thinks—there are many such entities. They’ve evolved over time, and they issue countless subliminal edicts.
One type of aversion treatment is to call the unhappy victim a racist. It’s the contemporary version of fingering a witch during the Salem witchcraft trials. This treatment awaits any and all who fail to conform to the correct thinking, transmitted by the education system, the churches, and the intellectuals.”

UPDATE (July 19): “Is it not an absurd world we live in?” asks a fired-up Pat Buchanan, who I’ve been seeing less and less on MSNBC.

“Here is an organization whose very name, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, pronounces its goal—advancement through affirmative action, quotas, contract set-asides based on race—accusing another organization of being motivated by race.”

Jealous and the NAACP are trying to change the subject from Obama’s failure to Obama’s race, and from the failures of liberals to the motivations of conservatives.
By accusing the tea party of harboring racists, the NAACP is, in effect, demanding that the party appear in a court of public opinion to prove itself innocent of an unsupported slander.
Sorry, that’s not how things work in America.

Oh, but that’s exactly how things work in America.

As someone who doesn’t believe the Constitution gave the government the right to enforce the Bill of Rights in the states, the Supreme Court’s latest gun-rights decision presents with the usual dilemma. The SCOTUS has decided that “the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms applies to every jurisdiction in the country – throwing doubt on a Chicago law that bans handguns in the home.”

Still, and overall, the ruling will revive the eroded, immutable right to defend life, liberty and property. (The title of John Lott’s op-ed encapsulates exactly that: “Court’s Gun Decision An Important Win for Americans Who Want to Defend Themselves.”) This is a war. Progressives have left little of the original Constitutional scheme. A victory for natural rights in the rights-violating society we inhabit is a good thing. The good guys won. A toast to the patriots who fought the good fight: a besieged black man from Chicago and his lawyer.

Is there any surprise that one of the inconsequential females GWB sired supports the colossal health-care entitlement program BHO passed? One can hardly consider Barbara Bush’s statist father and left-liberal mother intellectual and moral role models capable of steering this brassy young woman toward an understanding of freedom.

In an interview on Fox News Sunday, Barbara Bush said she’s “glad” Democrats passed the massive spending measure and President Barack Obama signed it into law.
“Why do, basically, people with money have good health care and why do people who live on lower salaries not have good health care?” the 28-year old said. “Health should be a right for everyone.”
Asked specifically what she though about the president’s health care initiative, Bush replied with a smile, “That is a good question – obviously the health care reform bill was highly debated by a lot of people and I guess I’m glad the bill was passed.”

The former First Dolt is using her celebrity clout to promote the unethical idea that a medic should be conscripted to serve those in need of his services; in other words, that healthcare is a natural right, and not a service. Men and women who work in this industry thus must be conscripted by central planners, rather than left to offer their services on the free market, or as part of voluntary charities.

Speaking of private charities, Barbara Bush “runs the Global Health Corps, a nonprofit group that aims to connect ‘outstanding young leaders with organizations working on the front lines in order to promote global health equity,’ according to the organization’s website.”

From operating a successful, private, non-profits, health-care charity, Bush has taken away that the world needs more state-run care.

Swiss bankers can no longer perform a function which in Switzerland is legal and commendable: helping private property owners shield their assets against legalized theft. The Swiss are not allowed to uphold victimless laws that contradict their ultimate sovereign: Uncle Sam.

YourMoneyInfo.com: “The Swiss laws do not consider tax evasion as a criminal offense. [They recognize that a man's property is his and his alone?! Is this possible?!] The Swiss banks do not release the identity of the account unless the foreign government proves that the account holder has committed a crime. [Or unless pressured by big bully US, the protector of freedom the world over.]

The US has managed to dispense with the venerated traditions in the financial sector of an ostensibly sovereign state. I repeat myself, but next time you hear Messrs Hannity, Steyn and others of their ilk wax about the US being the last bastion of freedom, fire off a corrective email. Point out that our government lawyers have been prosecuting UBS AG, a Zurich and Basel-based financial establishment, and its American clients, for tax evasion. (You’ll probably be told that we should have declared war, or bombed Basel…)

When they are not bailing out failed financial institutions, our statists are bankrupting viable ones.

Recommended reading: “The War on Tax Havens”

And “Hotel California“:

Last thing I remember, I was
Running for the door
I had to find the passage back
To the place I was before
‘Relax,’ said the night man,
‘We are programmed to receive.
You can check-out any time you like,
But you can never leave!’

Update I: A “Robin Hood tax” they are calling it, and, no doubt, BHO will be on board: Under the guise of “sparing the taxpayers another massive public bailout of the financial sector,” the International Monetary Fund has “called for a financial stability contribution (FSC), which should be paid by all financial institutions, not just banks, and used to bail out weak and failing firms.”

Now note how these statists who are corralling us all into a big pen cleverly build their new scheme on a faulty premise: the idea that bailouts are a financial fait accompli. Since when? And who dictatorially decides to commandeer taxpayers monies to bail out financial institutions that ought to be allowed to fail? They do!

Update II (April 22): A correction to our reader hereunder: Neal Boortz is a “liberventionists”; “a statist, not a libertarian.” Anything he supports is usually an indication to the contrary

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman expresses the monetary policy of the US government, both Obama and his predecessor. If anyone doubts how progressive the US is, listen to Krugman (via Peter Schiff) berate “the monetary priggishness of the German heavyweights in the European Union, who are ‘foolishly’ seeking to prevent inflation [in the Greek debt crisis] and impose fiscal discipline.”

Krugman argues “that the best solution for Athens would be to simply inflate away its debt burden with printing press money. His theoretical justification is put forward in a familiar Keynesian recipe: deficit spending leads to inflation and growth, which leads to greater employment and rising GDP, which makes debt payments much easier to bear in relative terms. He laments that Greece does not control its own currency and is therefore unable to pursue such a policy on its own accord. He implores U.S. policy makers, who do control their own monetary policy, to take heed of the danger and avoid such a course.

In simple terms, Krugman believes that inflation is the best cure for burdensome debt problems.” …

Peter Schiff, always worth reading.

Update I (April 12): Keynes’s theory is not economics, but politics. He came to dominate political platforms by opposing free trade, balanced budgets and the gold standards, and by proposing economic management and interventionism through busting the budget. His devotees are indeed pimps to the political class, with no fealty to or familiarity with the laws of economics.

Update II (April 13): WHEN KEYNESIANS PREACH TO COMMONERS. “Fed’s Bernanke stresses need for financial literacy”:

“Many American families are struggling in the aftermath of the financial crisis, which reinforces the need for reliable and useful information to facilitate good financial choices,” he said in remarks prepared for delivery to the National Bankers Association Foundation.

If applied by the Little Man, literacy such as the Chairman’s would imply endless spending financed by the counterfeiting of funny money.

“THE CONSTITUTION AND FREEDOM” is a series about the greatest political document ever written, the American Constitution. It is presented by the one and only Judge Andrew Napolitano on The FOX Nation, and is easily the most important broadcast in the checkered history of American television.

From my new, WND.COM column, “The Defunct Foundations Of The Republic”:

“In the course of the agonizing debates over the soon-to-be-merged Senate and House health-care bills, Republicans cried out for partisanship, griped about procedure and said next to nothing about principles, an accusation that cannot be directed at the Democrats.

‘Health care in America ought to be a right, not a privilege,’ thundered Sen. Christopher J. Dodd. The Democrat from Connecticut was expressing sentiments that are par for the course in Democrat discourse.

Nancy Pelosi’s core beliefs vis-à-vis conscripting individuals into buying (or providing) a commodity at the pains of punishment came across loud and quirky. When the House passed its hulking health-care legislation, the speaker was asked where in the Constitution is the warrant for individual health mandates. Pelosi’s response was for posterity. ‘Are you serious?’ she shot back.

No, Democrats are not in the habit of hiding how they feel about the US Constitution.

As much as he dislikes the philosophical foundations of the republic, the president seems to know – and prattle – about them more so than do the Republicans. Here’s Sen. Barack Obama talking about the document Republicans discount and Democrats deem dated”…

The complete column is “The Defunct Foundations Of The Republic.”

My libertarian manifesto, Broad Sides: One Woman’s Clash With A Corrupt Society, is back in print. The Second Edition features bonus material. Get your copy (or copies) now!

A Happy New Year to all,
ilana

Glenn Beck is invaluable in highlighting the constitutional underpinnings of the republic violated by almost every law enacted by both parties. However Beck’s discussion is generally incomplete (along the lines highlighted in the article “Life, Liberty, and PROPERTY,” where I also readily conceded that “The man exudes goodness and has a visceral feel for freedom”).

Again and again Glenn has alerted his viewers to Obama’s disdain for the Constitution as a “charter of negative liberties.” Said the president: (Transcript here)

If you look at the victories and failures of the civil rights movement and its litigation strategy in the court. I think where it succeeded was to invest formal rights in previously dispossessed people, so that now I would have the right to vote. I would now be able to sit at the lunch counter and order as long as I could pay for it I’d be o.k. But, the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth, and of more basic issues such as political and economic justice in society. To that extent, as radical as I think people try to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn’t that radical. It didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution, at least as its been interpreted and Warren Court interpreted in the same way, that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties. Says what the states can’t do to you. Says what the Federal government can’t do to you, but doesn’t say what the Federal government or State government must do on your behalf, and that hasn’t shifted and one of the, I think, tragedies of the civil rights movement was, um, because the civil rights movement became so court focused I think there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalition of powers through which you bring about redistributive change. In some ways we still suffer from that.
I’m not optimistic about bringing about major redistributive change through the courts. You know, the institution just isn’t structured that way.

To the president’s telling complaint vis-a-vis the Constitution being deficient in its articulation of negative liberties only, Glenn has retorted as follows: “That’s the way the founders designed it, because they saw what governments do when they are allowed to do stuff for you.”

I’m afraid that’s not quite it. Articulated by the Founders, in the philosophy of classical liberalism and natural law, negative liberties are the only authentic rights. Glenn must articulate more than a utilitarian perspective, which doesn’t do justice to the profundity of America’s Founding Fathers. Glenn is welcome to use the following explanation from “CRADLE OF CORRUPTION,” in my book (buy it), with attribution, of course:

“The only rights of man are the rights to life, liberty, and property. These rights exist irrespective of governments. Rights always give rise to binding obligations. In the case of natural rights, the duty is merely a duty to refrain from doing. My right to life means you must refrain from killing me. My right to liberty means you cannot enslave me. My right to property means you should not take what is mine, or stop me from taking the necessary action for my survival, so long as I, in turn, heed the same strictures.”

“If to exercise a right a person must violate someone’s life, liberty and property, then the exercised right is not a right, but a violation thereof. Because my right to acquire property doesn’t diminish your right to the same liberty, this right is known as a negative right. Negative rights are real or natural rights because they don’t conscript me in the fulfillment of your needs and desires, and vise versa. They merely impel both of us to keep our mitts to ourselves.” ["CRADLE OF CORRUPTION"]

[SNIP]

You see, positive liberties are rejected outright in natural law, unless undertaken voluntarily. So, dear Mr. Beck, the reason the Constitution is by-and-large a charter of negative liberties, as the president put it, is because positive, state-minted rights violate the individual’s negative (real) rights.

The Great Glenn in action:

Update (Dec. 18): Sitting in for Glenn, Judge Andrew Napolitano delivers a superb explication of the natural-rights doctrine, joined by Joe Salerno, whose lectures at the Mises Institute I greatly enjoyed, and John Tamny of RealClearMarkets.com. What a shame the Wall Street Journal’s statist extraordinaire, Stuart Varney, now tenured at Fox Business, gets to TALK over the Three Wise Men. I’ve had enough of the Stephen Moores and Stuart Varneys of the world, wrong for decades, yet able to keep lucrative careers going, as they pepper their verbiage with the occasional, non-committal, crudely stated truths (“government needs to be throttled”).

Allow freedom and reality to be heard for a change. Expunge the snake-oil merchants from forums friendly to freedom.

Readers, please send me the YouTube clip of this round table, which should be up very shortly (after all, YouTube is not yet run by the state).