It looks obvious

Short, and right on the money:

That’s how much Paulson’s plan might cost. That’s a lot of zeros. But, hey, no one said socialism was cheap, did they?

It is sad to see how the promise of individual liberty and freedom being destroyed, not because it failed but because it was poorly represented.

What is a patriot? Wikipedia tells us that “Patriotism is commonly defined as love of and/or devotion to one’s country”. This is still somewhat vague - is it necessary for one, in order to be considered as patriot, to served in the armed forces and put his life at risk to defend one’s country? Or is it enough to support the national team in the Olympic games? Or maybe in order to be a patriot one have to support measures that limits one’s civil liberties? The answer is simple - Patriot is one who is willing to give up his liberty, property and life so politician, very much like Joe Biden, can trade it for power.

It never cease to shock me - the gall of those politician, the cynicism deceiving other people to harness their ideal, their values and they willingness to do the right things. You can call Joe Biden’s plan in many names - armed robbery come to mind - but they have nothing to do with patriotism.

Via Below the Beltway

There is one theme rising above all others in this election cycle that really worries me. It isn’t the prospect of higher taxes and it isn’t the likelihood of the continuos irrational foreign policy and the complete blindness in the way we confront the radical terrorism and it isn’t the fear of deep recession. The issue that really makes me worried is the new call for national service and the notion that both, McCain and Obama, will welcome such development.

Don’t mistake the calls for national service with campaign populism, it isn’t. It is rooted deeply in both candidates core ideology and it is pushed by very broad and influential organizations. Wrap in a package of highly ideological and promises organizations, like the Time Magazine, lobbying , and preparing the public opinion, for enslaving broad portion of the population.

It is a unique moment for the idea of national service. You have two presidential candidates who believe deeply in service and who have made it part of their core message to voters. You have millions of Americans who are yearning to be more involved in the world and in their communities. You have corporations and businesses that are making civic engagement a key part of their mission.

Last September, our cover story “The Case for National Service” caused an outpouring of interest in and support for citizen service across the country. This year, in addition to publishing another issue on the idea of service, we are convening–along with the Carnegie Corporation of New York and with presenters AARP and Target–a national bipartisan summit in New York City that will bring together hundreds of leading Americans to plan and lay out a bold blueprint on citizen service. The event will start on the evening of Sept. 11–that solemn anniversary seemed an appropriate time to launch this effort–and the meeting itself will occur the next day, Sept. 12. The summit will also be the first major public event for ServiceNation, a national campaign of more than 100 organizations–ranging from AARP to the National Council of La Raza and Habitat for Humanity–that collectively represent some 100 million Americans. My co-chairs at the summit will be Alma Powell, Caroline Kennedy, Carnegie president Vartan Gregorian and AARP CEO Bill Novelli. The summit will be opened by New York City mayor Mike Bloomberg, who himself is an exemplar of citizen service, and will be closed by California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who is the first governor to create a cabinet post to oversee service and volunteering.

The great American promise to protect “Life Liberty and the Pursuit of happiness” is being in direct attack since national service is neither life and liberty nor the pursuit of happiness. In a big push to eradicate the American promise those organization calling for to transform the American society to a big labour camp with forced labor prisoners as a condition for citizenship, which is their right by nature.

There is one hope, however, that despite the growing popularity and the willingness of many americans to put their head under the harness of slavery this idea will not pass. The only hope is that the supreme court will not allow legislation that is, by its nature, in direct contradiction to the 13th amendment:

Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime where of the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

Section 2. Congress shall have the power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

The true nature of collectivism, and the complete failure of the idea behind social security, is encapsulated in this quote:

Want to do something truly patriotic to help preserve the American way of life?

Don’t retire. At least not yet.

[...]

If boomers all turn in their keys at age 55, 62 or 65 and head for the Tuscan hills, that great sucking sound you’ll hear is untold amounts of taxpayer dollars being leached from the economy. That is money heirs will have to replace or do without.

It’s an act Yarrow calls “profoundly selfish and unpatriotic.”

According to this authoritarian clown being patriot is to keep working and paying taxes to serve the need of other people instead of retiring at the age you gathered enough saving to stop working. I on the other hand believe that in order for people to demonstrate real American patriotism they need to be much more Selfish. They should stop funding the entitlement that might force them to delay they retirement and they need not to listen to people that want to enslave to the needs of other.

When I was reading this I could not avoid make the reference to the “Blame the speculators” trend among the Presidential candidates here:

Zimbabwe announced Wednesday that it is knocking 10 zeros off its hyper-inflated currency — a move that turns 10 billion dollars into one.

[...]

“Entrepreneurs across the board, don’t drive us further,” Mugabe warned in a nationally televised address after the currency announcement. “If you drive us even more, we will impose emergency measures. … They can be tough rules.”

I only wonder who should be more worried from the comparison - Mugabe or McCain and Obama…

When Obama calls on Americans to save on energy use and to limit their fuel consumption he obviously demonstrates proper leadership by providing personal example of the kind of sacrifices he asks from others. This is why he is going to use, during the next months of presidential campaign a smaller airplane.

One shouldn’t be surprise knowing Obama’s choice of school for his daughters compared to the lack of choice he would like me to have for my daughters.

Guess who can we add to the list of hypocrite busy bodies? That’s right:

Senator Obama sends his own two daughters to the private “Lab School” founded by John Dewey in 1896, which charged $20,000 in tuition at the middle school level last year. Though he says “we” should not be “throwing up our hands and walking away” from public schools, he has done precisely that.

That is his right, and, as a wealthy man, it is his prerogative under the current system of American education, which allows only the wealthy to easily choose between private and government schools. But instead of offering to extend that same choice to all families, Senator Obama wants the poor to wait for the public school system to be “fixed.”

Unfortunately he joined a, not so, respectful list including Al Gore, F.D.R and even the wannabe senator from Minnesota. These stories aren’t pettiness, they are demonstration of the true nature of those who are busy telling other people how should they live, and what sacrifices should they make for the “common good”. They were and remain as described in Orwell’s story:

For once Benjamin consented to break his rule, and he read out to her what was written on the wall. There was nothing there now except a single Commandment. It ran:

ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL

BUT SOME ANIMALS ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS

After that it did not seem strange when next day the pigs who were supervising the work of the farm all carried whips in their trotters. It did not seem strange to learn that the pigs had bought themselves a wireless set, were arranging to install a telephone, and had taken out subscriptions to John Bull, TitBits, and the Daily Mirror. It did not seem strange when Napoleon was seen strolling in the farmhouse garden with a pipe in his mouth-no, not even when the pigs took Mr. Jones’s clothes out of the wardrobes and put them on, Napoleon himself appearing in a black coat, ratcatcher breeches, and leather leggings, while his favourite sow appeared in the watered silk dress which Mrs. Jones had been used to wear on Sundays.

This is a very good post, on the issue that become more worrisome this election:

Which brings us to a wider point, which is that I do not like the idea of service to the nation or to the community being equivocated with service to the government or through the government. Putting aside the specifics of which services will count, I don’t want the State adjudicating what helps society in general. I don’t need Fearless Leader directing brigades of Citizen Junior Workers to enact his Grand Vision. The State already spends enough of my money telling me that they know better than I do how I should be spending the rest of my money and my time. I don’t want to put great swaths of extra time at their disposal to start deciding what should be done with it. The less labor, and fruits of labor, central planners have to work with, the better.

Finally, I can’t help but think these plans also feed off the perniciousness of the same anti-profit sentiments discussed by Roberts and Munger on this week’s EconTalk. There’s a common disposition in a large swaths of society that making a profit on something is greedy, conducting commerce is crass and that if you’re making money then someone, somewhere, must be loosing money. This Bobo, zero-sum, anti-Protestant-work-ethic is the second pillar of this drive for national servitude, along with the aforementioned ageism. Put politely, this view is fallacious. Put more directly, I have seen more cogent points of view encapsulated in the Tupperware containers that have been pushed to the back of my fridge and left to fester for weeks.

When I think about the issue of compulsory volunteering, as the writer of post nicely called it, boil down to the question of who we are putting in the center: the collective or the individual. The questions of efficiency, although conveniently serving my point, are less important to me. In other words, even if the observations will suggest that subjecting the individual to the needs of the collective generate better economical results for the collective, I would still be against it. However both, the efficiency and the moral question, tend to generate the same answer - enslaving people is wrong morally and is bad practice.

(Via Cafe Hayek) 

I was worried about the increasing collectivist tone coming from the Obama campaign. The resemblances other are finding to FDR making Obama even less attractive candidate.

The general feeling of looming disaster makes Obama more likely to become a President, mostly after the shameful results of the “conservative”. With a cooperative legislature body he might be able to achieve big portion of his agenda which will make our recovery from possible depression even worse than the last round. unfortunately I can not argue that McCain is less dangerous.

How do one reconcile between the concept of “The Pursuit of Happiness” as a fundamental human right and this:

“That’s what history calls us to do, because loving your country shouldn’t just mean watching fireworks on the Fourth of July. Loving your country must mean accepting your responsibility to do your part to change it.”

“There is a lesson to be learned from generations who have served: from soldiers and sailors, airmen and Marines, suffragists and freedom riders, teachers and doctors, cops and firefighters,” he said. “It’s the lesson that in America, each of us is free to seek our own dreams, but we must also serve a common purpose, a higher purpose.”

Apparently by saying one thing and its exact opposite in the same sentence….

The real sad thing with Both Obama and McCain subjecting us to serve at the pleasure of the collective is that it doesn’t make any real noise. The idea that individuals will be coerced to serve, and not volunteer to serve if the want, should have drive us to revolt in protests - but it doesn’t.