Category Archives: Liberty

Obama’s Hate-Your-Boss Hotline

Barack Obama, Business, Economy, Individual Rights, Liberty, Regulation

“Get in the game,” the president instructed U.S. business leaders, in an address to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce today. As Bloomberg.com reported, this audacious president urged business to “support their country by moving cash from the sidelines into the economy,” “hiring more American workers,” and, generally “investing in this nation.” This, as Obama carves greater and greater sections out of the hide of American businesses for the assorted, unproductive oink sectors.

Just the other day, this deeply silly man “launched a new program at the Department of Labor which will refer workers who have complaints about their bosses to a toll free number at the American Bar Association, where they can get a lawyer to work on their case on a contingency fee basis.” (Via Elizabeth MacDonald of Fox Business) Yes, litigation always reduces the costs of doing business, doesn’t it?! What’s not to like in a collaboration between “the federal government and private bar” to promote “worker rights,” already covered by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and other legislation. This is how Obama is “doing his part to improve the business climate” in this country.

The meek reply to BHO’s demands from Johanna Schneider, “who directs external relations for the Business Roundtable,” will not do. “Jobs will follow demand,” she said. “Unless you see sustained demand for your product or your service, you cannot from a fiduciary standpoint invest in more employees.”

Business leaders will have to learn to speak the language of individual/natural rights, and link the rights of property and freedom of association to prosperity and peace. Unless they sound morally indignant about the violation of their rights, parasitical collectivists such as BHO will continue to make light of and mock the “incredible pressure to cut costs and keep margins up,” as the Idiot-in-Chief put it.

UPDATED: Derb Is Right: ‘We Are Doomed’ (More Gloom)

Barack Obama, Bush, Conservatism, Debt, Democrats, Fascism, Homeland Security, Liberty, Paleoconservatism, Political Economy, Republicans, The State

The following excerpt is from “Derb Is Right: ‘We Are Doomed,” my new WND.COM column:

“Last week, this column explained the divide between Americans and their ‘Overlords Who Art in D.C.’ I asked that you quit invoking words too weak to describe that divide. ‘Disconnect,’ ‘disrespect’: These are soft designations; they don’t begin to bridge the moat that separates you from your sovereigns.

Proper metaphors for the relationship between The Great Unwashed and the government that literally has them by the genitals is that of ruled and ruler, Rome and its provinces, Imperial China and its peasants.

If you’re a tax payer — at least 50 percent of Americans are tax consumers — you are the Beltway’s bitch.

So stop beseeching sinecured statists for ‘hope’ and ‘change.’ They will never know what it’s like to slum it in your neighborhoods. They’ll never experience the effects of inflation and rising prices as you will; they’ve voted themselves salaries twice as high as yours and pensions in perpetuity. You’re paying.

Think of yourself as a servant, your nose pressed against your master’s mansion windows. That’s how I felt as I drove through the suburbs of Northern Virginia, in October of this year. I saw what Peggy Noonan lushly described in her Wall Street Journal column, excerpted by John Derbyshire in his full and fair assessment of the tottering American experiment, We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism

The complete column is “Derb Is Right: ‘We Are Doomed,” now on WND.COM.

Avail yourself of my libertarian manifesto, Broad Sides: One Woman’s Clash With A Corrupt Society, on Kindle.

Merry Xmas to all,
ILANA

UPDATE (Dec. 25): “IT’S GETTING BETTER ALL THE TIME” (as the Beatles lyrics go). The Powers that Be thought “Claire Hirschkind, 56, who says she is a rape victim” (and also happens to have “the equivalent of a pacemaker”), needed a reminder of her ordeal.

Hirschkind said because of the device in her body, she was led to a female TSA employee and three Austin police officers. She says she was told she was going to be patted down.
“I turned to the police officer and said, ‘I have given no due cause to give up my constitutional rights. You can wand me,'” and they said, ‘No, you have to do this,'” she said.
Hirschkind agreed to the pat down, but on one condition.
“I told them, ‘No, I’m not going to have my breasts felt,’ and she said, ‘Yes, you are,'” said Hirschkind.
When Hirschkind refused, she says that “the police actually pushed me to the floor, (and) handcuffed me. I was crying by then. They drug me 25 yards across the floor in front of the whole security.”
An ABIA spokesman says it is TSA policy that anyone activating a security alarm has two options. One is to opt out and not fly, and the other option is to subject themselves to an enhanced pat down. Hirschkind refused both and was arrested.

Hey, what do you know: A noisy, irate, flying public has changed the behavior of their sovereigns not a whit. Who would have thunk? (See “Derb Is Right: ‘We Are Doomed.”)

And what do memebers of the sheep herd say about a middle aged, ill American lady being mauled by rabid TSA dogs?

“I understand her side of it, and their side as well, but it is for our protection so I have no problems with it,” said Gwen Washington, who lives in Killeen.

It matters not a bit that “less than three percent of travelers get a pat-down.” This practice is a matter of policy, not happenstance. Theoretically, everyone could be molested, very many are. No freedom loving individual should be consoled by the repulsive, “rare-occurrence” excuse.

UPDATED: Tag The TSA Dogs (Make That Remorseless Dogs)

Constitution, Homeland Security, Liberty, Regulation, Terrorism, The State

Fliers who are frisked should write down the name of the TSA agent who pawed them, and then blog or YouTube the event by exposing the personal details of the perp. Footage abounds, but the agents—the stars in these horror films—remain nameless. Name the bastards! It’s one way to bring about some attrition. If you know an agent; be sure to dissociate from him or her. If I knew one of these vermin, I’d pin the perp’s poster to a tree or something.

The revolt against The Transportation and Security Administration has resulted in very little fundamental change, so far, other than exemptions for sectional interests. By fundamental change, I mean restoring the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution.

The TSA is just one department. All government departments are like the TSA: Bureaucrats write most of the laws under which we live, and which no elected official has approved. This is why some conservatives (the smart ones) use the term “Managerial State” for the Thing the Huckster and the Hannity call “our freedoms,” “our democracy.” We really have very of the first. And as bad as mobocracy is, we are, in truth, managed by unelected apparatchiks.

I am unable to fly to a destination of my choosing because I refuse to be fondled or zapped with photons.

“The Australian” carries a gallery of pictures of the American peon being pawed.

UPDATE (Nov. 29): MAKE THAT REMORSELESS DOGS. Finally, a lone agent has repented. Well, sort of. I guess he’s feeling the antipathy. Having discovered the Ten Commandments, this man laments that, “It goes back to, ‘Do upon others as you would wish others to do upon you.’ And I would not want that done to me, or my family, or my mother, or my grandmother.'”

Nothing about resigning.

Thomas Paine: 18th Century Che Guevara

Classical Liberalism, Conservatism, Founding Fathers, History, Ilana Mercer, libertarianism, Liberty, Political Philosophy

My Friday column for October 22 will probably be titled “Thomas Paine: 18th Century Che Guevara.” The column following it, to be published on Friday October the 29th, is “The ‘Moronizing’ Of Modern Culture.”

You’ll have to read the first to appreciate the second, as they are part of a conversation with Dennis O’Keeffe, Professor of Sociology at the University of Buckingham, and Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Economic Affairs, “the UK’s original free-market think-tank, founded in 1955.”

Under discussion is the subject of Professor O’Keeffe’s latest book, “Edmund Burke.”

One of the questions I asked Dennis was “Why is it that one rarely hears Edmund Burke mentioned in American public discourse, yet my countrymen know and love Thomas Paine, who sympathized with the Jacobins and spat venom at Burke (‘the greatest Irishman who ever lived’) for his devastating critique of the blood-drenched, illiberal, irreligious ‘Revolution in France’?”

Indeed, although neglected, Edmund Burke’s thinking is central to American—and any other—ordered liberty.

Be sure to read the two columns, which you can follow from Barely a Blog to WND.COM.

I am away at the 3rd annual meeting of the HL Mencken Club. Please join me if you are in the vicinity. The details are HERE.