Resisting Obama

The PHILOSOPHY upon which resistance to Obama's policies is a legitimate, respectable point of view, with deep roots in American tradition and culture, and nothing to do hatred. It emphasizes individual freedom at its core. It asserts that the foundation for maintaining individual freedom is individual responsibility and consequences from individual action. It understands that any collective action is an abridgment of individual freedom, but it accommodates limited collective action as practical for the operation of society. It nonetheless reflexively resists collectivism in general. It does not regard the various calamities of life heartlessly, but it instead believes the best way to minimize these calamities (hunger, poverty, sickness, etc) is to adhere to a framework that revolves around freedom and responsibility, and that creates the incentives for human beings to both define and optimize quality of life.

Don't You Statists Understand?

Of course, I suppose on its face to be Liberal means to want to have it both ways. But the current flap over the Stupak amendment really illustrates that in a delicious way.

Now, to be clear, I am pretty staunchly pro-choice. That's not the point. The point is: when you turn over these functions to government, you have to live with the results of being controlled by others (other voters, other officials, elected and not, etc.). This is THE fundamental small-government argument in the freedom agenda: choose for yourself, or let others choose for you. You won't always like the choices of the others.

You cannot have it both ways. Take this abortion argument: regardless of your own view, this is an issue of serious contention in the US, and pro-lifers have some solid arguments. You may disagree with their moral point of view, but you must acknowledge they have a right to feel what they feel and advocate for it. So, the fact that they are represented and considered and, in this case, get something they want, means that by adopting a state-controlled process for obtaining health care liberals must suffer the establishment of some new compromises in the form of new restrictions on access to abortion.

Tough frickin' luck, statists. This is the deal you make with the state and you better learn to like it. No, you DON'T get to hand over what was once our autonomous, variegated, and yes at times chaotic health system to the feds AND have everything work the way your lefty agenda wants it. Instead, you subject yourself to the will of the "whole", and that whole includes pro-lifers as well as, among other things, holocaust deniers and Scientologists and every other kind of bullshit under the sun. But they vote, and they get their voice, and now you are stuck with it.

It's like the NEA. Don't like crosses dipped in pee? Too bad--the collective decided to fund it. Oh, and by the way, one day when they make Ollie North the NEA Chair and all we get are revivals of South Pacific from coast to coast, I for one will be laughing my ass off at you idiots for what you have wrought.

Unfortunately our health care is less of a laughing matter. You are about to turn over this autonomy to a monolith that will shut down a lot of your autonomy in the name of "access." It's a gigantic step away from individual freedom and responsibility (and CHOICE [pun intended]), and towards a collectivist nightmare. Call these crocodile tears for your stupid selling of your freedoms.

Innoculated from "Socialism"

Watching heiress and Nation co-owner Katrina vanden Heuvel on Morning Joe today, I was reminded of what a masterful job the left have done at discrediting the term "socialism." Listening to her rabidly left critiques of the House-approved Health Care "Reform" bill, one could not avoid reflexively categorizing her as a socialist. But of course, anyone who dares invoke the term is immediately lumped in with the Beck-Limbaugh-Hannity blowhard crowd. Today's left has effectively disabled the word as a functioning instrument of description.

Think about it; a formal definition of socialism is: "various theories of economic organization advocating public or direct worker ownership and administration of the means of production and allocation of resources, and a society characterized by equal access to resources for all individuals with a method of compensation based on the amount of labor expended" (Socialism: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press). If the current thrust of the current health care policy change does NOT fit the above, I'm not sure what does. Yet, I will be called, variously, kooky, mean, or cartoonish for saying so.