Drowning In Rules
Posted 03/19/2012 07:00 PM ET, Investors.com
Regulatory Tyranny: Washington has extended the deadline by 60 days for hotels to install lifts for the disabled in their pools. But nothing changes in two months. The government will still be invading private matters.
The regulation was to take effect last week. But the Justice Department has given hotels an additional 60 days to comply. How generous.
The regulation, written by the Obama administration in 2010 based on the Americans With Disabilities Act, affects nearly every one of the roughly 51,000 hotels in the U.S., since there are few that have no pools.
The impact would actually be wider than that. In many cases, properties have more than one pool, and each pool, or “water feature” — which includes whirlpools — must have a lift.
With each lift costing as much as $6,000, hotels are being required to make significant investments in equipment that will get little use. Hotels could simply refuse to comply, but a lack of compliance through failure or refusal results in fines that can reach $55,000.
Some will say the government’s order is only fair. And while a portion the population will no doubt benefit from the rule, we have to ask: Is it a legitimate function of government to intrude into private affairs?
Regulation supporters will argue that every paying customer has an equal right to hotel pool access. But such a right requires the violation of the hotel owners’ right to the money they have earned in peaceful, voluntary transactions. How can something be a right when to provide another’s right must be violated?
A government that can dictate how businesses are run is no longer merely a government. It is a plundering force operating without constraint.
This isn’t merely an issue of pool lifts at hotels. It’s about a mandate to buy health care insurance; it’s about telling the auto industry it has to meet a bureaucratically concocted fuel-economy standard; it’s about the compulsory participation in the welfare state.
It is, as well, about seizing private property at government whim; it’s about any of the thousands of regulations that clog the Federal Register and the incessant “lawmaking” in capitols, city halls and county chambers that has no regard for our freedom. It’s about government no longer being the protector of God-given rights, but coercively creating “rights” that don’t exist.
If voters don’t soon re-examine their principles, the plundering force will have grown too big to ever be contained.
misconceptions
Message to New-Plains leftists, and all leftists for that matter: You are way over-thinking the problem in your Lincoln Day Dinner Opinion.
It’s your politics that depend on conspiracy, elaborate design, subterfuge, underground networking, militancy, belief structures without supporting cause and effect, collective force, and activist imposition. You, evidently, think your politics are worth breaking a few eggs to make your utopian omelet.
Of course all that misspent energy begs questions about what on earth led you to such methods because they’ve never led to anything but poverty, misery and death. But then you dissemble about the poverty, misery and death that come from your totalitarian methods by saying, “Oh that’s the natural condition of things before we arrived and we just haven’t done enough yet. Give us more time and we’ll get it right.”
The problem here is that after you first claim that the natural state of things is horribly wrong in some way, your solutions invariably attempt to return us to conditions that you leftists always use to justify more intervention! If things were so bad, why in the name of progress do you always try to return us to conditions when things were worse? Apparently progression is really regression in the leftist skew.
And though you don’t know where your regression/progression is really going, you believe that whenever and wherever you arrive, the end will justify the means. Your terrible tenacity that spawned so much poverty, misery and death will be forgiven by the few who survive to cross the threshold to walk hand in hand through the gates of utopia. The awe of the perfectly sustainable, fair and clean human society will wipe their memories clean of all the horror spawned from your mythology.
Now pay attention. You really should learn to stop projecting this sort of thing on to conservatives. We’re not like you. We don’t use these techniques, these conspiracies, these impositions, or these forces. Look around you at one of these Elbert County Republican gatherings. The conservatives are the ones in the room not doing any of that stuff. You look really stupid when you paint us with those brushes.
Truth is, the only time we even think about such devices is when we’re forced to describe you. Think about this if you dare. Liberty is like a ship without a captain. It’s a massive rudderless force that takes no direction whatsoever to find the correct path. And only when you attempt to steer the ship does it go off course and crash into something.
You leftists have crashed the ship so many times in history that you’ve lost sight of how the whole thing operates.
I can’t imagine how to fix your conceptual framework. You are so broken.
—————————————————————————————————————
regulations ‘R’ us
List of New Bureaucracies in Obama’s Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act – PPACA
(Note: This is just from the enabling legislation. Each of these laws will spawn federal regulatory agency responses with tens of thousands of pages of CFR rules and federal bureaucratic enforcement. In classic Orwellian double speak, nothing about this legislation will make health care more affordable.)
1. Retiree Reserve Trust Fund (Section 111(d), p. 61)
2. Grant program for wellness programs to small employers (Section 112, p. 62)
3. Grant program for State health access programs (Section 114, p. 72)
4. Program of administrative simplification (Section 115, p. 76)
5. Health Benefits Advisory Committee (Section 223, p. 111)
6. Health Choices Administration (Section 241, p. 131)
7. Qualified Health Benefits Plan Ombudsman (Section 244, p. 138)
8. Health Insurance Exchange (Section 201, p. 155)
9. Program for technical assistance to employees of small businesses buying Exchange coverage (Section 305(h), p. 191)
10. Mechanism for insurance risk pooling to be established by Health Choices Commissioner (Section 306(b), p. 194)
11. Health Insurance Exchange Trust Fund (Section 307, p. 195)
12. State-based Health Insurance Exchanges (Section 308, p. 197)
13. Grant program for health insurance cooperatives (Section 310, p. 206)
14. “Public Health Insurance Option” (Section 321, p. 211)
15. Ombudsman for “Public Health Insurance Option” (Section 321(d), p. 213)
16. Account for receipts and disbursements for “Public Health Insurance Option” (Section 322(b), p. 215)
17. Telehealth Advisory Committee (Section 1191 (b), p. 589)
18. Demonstration program providing reimbursement for “culturally and linguistically appropriate services” (Section 1222, p. 617)
19. Demonstration program for shared decision making using patient decision aids (Section 1236, p. 648)
20. Accountable Care Organization pilot program under Medicare (Section 1301, p. 653)
21. Independent patient-centered medical home pilot program under Medicare (Section 1302, p. 672)
22. Community-based medical home pilot program under Medicare (Section 1302(d), p. 681)
23. Independence at home demonstration program (Section 1312, p. 718)
24. Center for Comparative Effectiveness Research (Section 1401(a), p. 734)
25. Comparative Effectiveness Research Commission (Section 1401(a), p. 738)
26. Patient ombudsman for comparative effectiveness research (Section 1401(a), p. 753)
27. Quality assurance and performance improvement program for skilled nursing facilities (Section 1412(b)(1), p. 784)
28. Quality assurance and performance improvement program for nursing facilities (Section 1412 (b)(2), p. 786)
29. Special focus facility program for skilled nursing facilities (Section 1413(a)(3), p. 796)
30. Special focus facility program for nursing facilities (Section 1413(b)(3), p. 804)
31. National independent monitor pilot program for skilled nursing facilities and nursing facilities (Section 1422, p. 859)
32. Demonstration program for approved teaching health centers with respect to Medicare GME (Section 1502(d), p. 933)
33. Pilot program to develop anti-fraud compliance systems for Medicare providers (Section 1635, p. 978)
34. Special Inspector General for the Health Insurance Exchange (Section 1647, p. 1000)
35. Medical home pilot program under Medicaid (Section 1722, p. 1058)
36. Accountable Care Organization pilot program under Medicaid (Section 1730A, p. 1073)
37. Nursing facility supplemental payment program (Section 1745, p. 1106)
38. Demonstration program for Medicaid coverage to stabilize emergency medical conditions in institutions for mental diseases (Section 1787, p. 1149)
39. Comparative Effectiveness Research Trust Fund (Section 1802, p. 1162)
40. “Identifiable office or program” within CMS to “provide for improved coordination between Medicare and Medicaid in the case of dual eligibles” (Section 1905, p. 1191)
41. Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (Section 1907, p. 1198)
42. Public Health Investment Fund (Section 2002, p. 1214)
43. Scholarships for service in health professional needs areas (Section 2211, p. 1224)
44. Program for training medical residents in community-based settings (Section 2214, p. 1236)
45. Grant program for training in dentistry programs (Section 2215, p. 1240)
46. Public Health Workforce Corps (Section 2231, p. 1253)
47. Public health workforce scholarship program (Section 2231, p. 1254)
48. Public health workforce loan forgiveness program (Section 2231, p. 1258)
49. Grant program for innovations in interdisciplinary care (Section 2252, p. 1272)
50. Advisory Committee on Health Workforce Evaluation and Assessment (Section 2261, p. 1275)
51. Prevention and Wellness Trust (Section 2301, p. 1286)
52. Clinical Prevention Stakeholders Board (Section 2301, p. 1295)
53. Community Prevention Stakeholders Board (Section 2301, p. 1301)
54. Grant program for community prevention and wellness research (Section 2301, p. 1305)
55. Grant program for research and demonstration projects related to wellness incentives (Section 2301, p. 1305)
56. Grant program for community prevention and wellness services (Section 2301, p. 1308)
57. Grant program for public health infrastructure (Section 2301, p. 1313)
58. Center for Quality Improvement (Section 2401, p. 1322)
59. Assistant Secretary for Health Information (Section 2402, p. 1330)
60. Grant program to support the operation of school-based health clinics (Section 2511, p. 1352)
61. Grant program for nurse-managed health centers (Section 2512, p. 1361)
62. Grants for labor-management programs for nursing training (Section 2521, p. 1372)
63. Grant program for interdisciplinary mental and behavioral health training (Section 2522, p. 1382)
64. “No Child Left Unimmunized Against Influenza” demonstration grant program (Section 2524, p. 1391)
65. Healthy Teen Initiative grant program regarding teen pregnancy (Section 2526, p. 1398)
66. Grant program for interdisciplinary training, education, and services for individuals with autism (Section 2527(a), p. 1402)
67. University centers for excellence in developmental disabilities education (Section 2527(b), p. 1410)
68. Grant program to implement medication therapy management services (Section 2528, p. 1412)
69. Grant program to promote positive health behaviors in underserved communities (Section 2530, p. 1422)
70. Grant program for State alternative medical liability laws (Section 2531, p. 1431)
71. Grant program to develop infant mortality programs (Section 2532, p. 1433)
72. Grant program to prepare secondary school students for careers in health professions (Section 2533, p. 1437)
73. Grant program for community-based collaborative care (Section 2534, p. 1440)
74. Grant program for community-based overweight and obesity prevention (Section 2535, p. 1457)
75. Grant program for reducing the student-to-school nurse ratio in primary and secondary schools (Section 2536, p. 1462)
76. Demonstration project of grants to medical-legal partnerships (Section 2537, p. 1464)
77. Center for Emergency Care under the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (Section 2552, p. 1478)
78. Council for Emergency Care (Section 2552, p 1479)
79. Grant program to support demonstration programs that design and implement regionalized emergency care systems (Section 2553, p. 1480)
80. Grant program to assist veterans who wish to become emergency medical technicians upon discharge (Section 2554, p. 1487)
81. Interagency Pain Research Coordinating Committee (Section 2562, p. 1494)
82. National Medical Device Registry (Section 2571, p. 1501)
83. CLASS Independence Fund (Section 2581, p. 1597)
84. CLASS Independence Fund Board of Trustees (Section 2581, p. 1598)
85. CLASS Independence Advisory Council (Section 2581, p. 1602)
86. Health and Human Services Coordinating Committee on Women’s Health (Section 2588, p. 1610)
87. National Women’s Health Information Center (Section 2588, p. 1611)
88. Centers for Disease Control Office of Women’s Health (Section 2588, p. 1614)
89. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality Office of Women’s Health and Gender-Based Research (Section 2588, p. 1617)
90. Health Resources and Services Administration Office of Women’s Health (Section 2588, p. 1618)
91. Food and Drug Administration Office of Women’s Health (Section 2588, p. 1621)
92. Personal Care Attendant Workforce Advisory Panel (Section 2589(a)(2), p. 1624)
93. Grant program for national health workforce online training (Section 2591, p. 1629)
94. Grant program to disseminate best practices on implementing health workforce investment programs (Section 2591, p. 1632)
95. Demonstration program for chronic shortages of health professionals (Section 3101, p. 1717)
96. Demonstration program for substance abuse counselor educational curricula (Section 3101, p. 1719)
97. Program of Indian community education on mental illness (Section 3101, p. 1722)
98. Intergovernmental Task Force on Indian environmental and nuclear hazards (Section 3101, p. 1754)
99. Office of Indian Men’s Health (Section 3101, p. 1765)
100. Indian Health facilities appropriation advisory board (Section 3101, p. 1774)
101. Indian Health facilities needs assessment workgroup (Section 3101, p. 1775)
102. Indian Health Service tribal facilities joint venture demonstration projects (Section 3101, p. 1809)
103. Urban youth treatment center demonstration project (Section 3101, p. 1873)
104. Grants to Urban Indian Organizations for diabetes prevention (Section 3101, p. 1874)
105. Grants to Urban Indian Organizations for health IT adoption (Section 3101, p. 1877)
106. Mental health technician training program (Section 3101, p. 1898)
107. Indian youth telemental health demonstration project (Section 3101, p. 1909)
108. Program for treatment of child sexual abuse victims and perpetrators (Section 3101, p. 1925)
109. Program for treatment of domestic violence and sexual abuse (Section 3101, p. 1927)
110. Native American Health and Wellness Foundation (Section 3103, p. 1966)
111. Committee for the Establishment of the Native American Health and Wellness Foundation (Section 3103, p. 1968)
It’s what’s for dinner
The Circus is back in town. Or maybe it never left. The names remain the same, the form of the cause evolves slightly, but the theme persists. Shut down growth. Keep the country in the county. Save us.
Locally it started with the Preble’s Meadow Jumping Mouse, a creature near and dear to our hearts that was uniquely threatened by evil developer bulldozers. We awoke to find one day that this rodent species owns a whole basket of usurped property rights. Based on this novel discovery, hundreds of green and left warriors combined with sympathetic government regulators to form the Circus and bring into existence, by mere presumption, thousands of pages of growth-stopping regulations. They empowered the federal Environmental Protection Agency and all subordinate levels of government to save that mouse, and by their curious chain of cause and effect, us too. The economic clout now wielded on behalf of that mouse makes it one of the most powerful rodents in the history of the universe, probably second only to Mickey. And we were not saved.
The Circus rested for a bit and recharged its batteries. Then along came an evil developer intent on bringing commerce to the eastern plains of Colorado with a broad vision for a super highway complete with utility corridors and railroad tracks. Imagine the environmental impacts–pretty much the worst things possible–the smog all that transportation would cause, the ancient trees to be felled, the noise, the light. Don’t go toward the light! Imagine the poor mice that would have to be relocated and provided similar habitat—if it could even be found—outside of the right of way. The damages would surely be irreparable. The Circus shifted into high gear and put the pedal to the metal. They rented busses to carry occupants to the State capitol. They saturated planning and commissioner meetings. They filled the internet with a relentless onslaught of do or die hyperbolic predictions about the end of the world that this road would precipitate. The end of the world was serious stuff. No one wanted that. The laws were passed, the court cases came in. The Circus rested. And still we were not saved.
One day an evil developer came along, intent on bringing water commerce to the eastern plains of Colorado with a broad vision for long distance water transportation to quench the thirst of citizens in a sub-development in Colorado Springs. The Circus double clutched their well-oiled machine and slipped it into gear. Hundreds of loud clamorers filled auditoriums, government meetings and state house offices with a new flag of presumed entitlement, “our water.” The fact that not a drop of it actually belonged to them gave them no pause. “Our water” was not actually “their water” but the mob has never been one to quibble about details like legal property rights. They were all about momentum, sound bites and the persuasion of pure force. Demonstrators and occupyers don’t wait for the subtleties of legal technicalities, unless of course a legal technicality can be found to put wind into their sails, that’s another matter. The evil developer was persuaded to recede into the tapestry of the world, and the Circus rested once again. And still we were not saved.
Then along came the evil energy developers, intent on bringing commerce to the eastern plains of Colorado with a broad vision of energy independence from the beneficial use of dormant oil and gas supplies lying ten thousand feet down in the ground. The Circus kicked their machine into overdrive. To save us once again, the green and left warriors sallied forth and wrote hundreds of pages of zoning laws incorporating every growth stopping agency and device ever conceived by statist man. They employed lawyers to tune their language so those laws could only be challenged—never repealed—by endless years of impossibly expensive litigation.
The Roman government gave bread and circuses to the people to distract them from the messy details of their oppressive governors. Today’s Circus combines the clamoring class of green and leftist warriors with a sympathetic regulatory class of unelected bureaucrats, to form the government itself. Gone are those halcyon times when the mob could be placated by mere food and entertainment. Perhaps conditioned by reality TV, the mob now insists on being part of the action. They want a hand in actually creating the government fascism that will turn around and oppress them. So long as they can applaud a victory, it matters not that the beast they create intends to dine on them.
For all their efforts put in to save our quality of life, our environment, and our property values, you’d think real estate around here would be getting more expensive.
The Jews have their Talmud, the Muslims their Hadiths, exhaustive rules of religious law and taboo to define every nuance of permissible human action. Secular Americans have City, County, State and Federal regulations in a great fascist web waiting to entrap citizens, pending the whim of an invisible unelected bureaucratic shaman somewhere who may notice a non-compliant act, and who then brings down the wrath of government upon the citizen, er, applicant.
The applause is always deafening.
the cost of regulation
“Every year regulatory compliance costs U.S. businesses $1.75 Trillion. That would be enough to hire 43 Million workers.”
See this short youtube video at Episode Two: Economic Freedom in America Today.
Regulation is not only a Federal problem. Regulation is pernicious, at every level of government. Today Elbert County has a clear choice whether or not to greatly expand our county’s regulatory reach into energy development matters it knows next to nothing about.
At the county level the force of regulation is imposed through zoning law. Our county’s Community and Development Services department works every day to write, refine, expand, detail and enforce their ubiquitous vision of a perfectable society. They want to save this land and this county from its people because, essentially, they don’t trust the people.
They think they are wise stewards who, with a third-party steward’s interest, have a more valuable right to forecefully impose their vision about a sound local economy, than the stakeholders and property holders in the county have in doing so for themselves.
Zoning regulators think that by stopping people from the pursuit of economic activity, they serve a higher purpose of preservation of our local world. This of course begs questions of preservation for what? For who? For when? And for why?
Of course they have answers for all of these questions. The answers are myths — myths consisting of more tenuous myths in a great pyramid of “smart,” sustainable, no-growth, enviro-jihad mythology.
The future beneficiaries of county zoning and regulation don’t exist. They are a myth–not real–and unless you’re a believer, not even foreseeable. The great probability is they will never come to exist because future unforseen circumstances will change everything long before these present day socio and eco myths can ever be tested, long after they are forgotten in favor of some future mythology as yet unkown.
Man took matters that used to be in God’s domain and invested them in Gaia, the environment and universe-trekking aliens. That’s what humans do at the margins of their knowledge where observation ends and speculation begins–we create mythologies–myths that we love. And then we create the legalities to enforce those mythologies.
Regulatory zealots consider this sort of talk heresy. They believe that the forced perfectibility of man and the environment is actually possible. Just as the power that was – the Church – once defended Ptolemy’s geocentric universe against the heresy of Copernicus, so too the regulatory powers of today know, without a shadow of doubt, that they know best, and that they can sufficiently describe, legislate, and enforce a set of rules to govern our behavior, for our own best interest.
To even imagine they could succeed at such a task is a pinnacle of hubris. When has an authoritarian process ever led to a best outcome for its subjects? When have a small minority of minds ever created the economic output of a diverse population acting in their own interests? The regulatory model cannot succeed.
Regulation makes inevitable change much more costly. The regulatory parties in government who do this to us have no personal skin in the game–only myths and the iron fist–a deadly combination. Ironically, the regulatory mission of governing progressives is about the most regressive thing they could do.
If we can’t stop creating mythologies, at least we should learn to stop legalizing them.
~
here we go…
The declared Republican challenger to the Elbert County commissioner district 3 seat, Mr. Larry Ross, briefly introduced himself at a Republican Central Committee meeting last night. He told the members that the poor condition of the local economy had motivated him to run for commissioner. And he told the members that he was a strong proponent of regulation.
It was during a period of brief introductions of various candidates and the purpose of the meeting was not to vet candidates, so no one questioned him on the juxtaposition of those two statements.
No one remarked about how regulations suppress economic activity.
No one mentioned how county zoning is an authoritarian process for imposing government takings in a heavily tilted playing field where the government holds practically unlimited power and the citizen is treated as a serf.
No one informed him that a pro-regulation position is an inherently unconservative and unRepublican stance.
And no one asked him why in the world he’s running as a Republican.
Even though there wasn’t time for it last night, these things needed to be mentioned.
~
By the way, all Republican caucus attendees should pre-register for the 2/7/2012 caucus at http://www.caucus.cologop.org This is quick process that simply verifies your Republican party voter registration, a requirement to vote in the caucus. Pre-registration is not mandatory but it will help those running your caucus speed things along that night if you are pre-registered.
~
our money buys Obama votes
The American Community Survey
U.S. Supreme Court
ICC v. Brimson, 154 U.S. 447 (1897)
Interstate Commerce Commission v. Brimson
No. 883
Argued April 16, 1894
Decided May 26, 1894
154 U.S. 447
“Power given to Congress to regulate interstate commerce does not carry with it authority to destroy or impair those fundamental guarantees of personal rights that are recognized by the Constitution as inhering in the freedom of the citizen.”
“The inquiry whether a witness before the Commission is bound to answer a particular question propounded to him, or to produce books, papers, etc., in his possession and called for by that body, is one that cannot he committed to a subordinate administrative or executive tribunal for final determination. Such a body could not, under our system of government and consistently with due process of law, be invested with authority to compel obedience to its orders by a judgment of fine or imprisonment.”
“Neither branch of the legislative department, still less any merely administrative body, established by Congress, possesses or can be invested with a general power of making inquiry into the private affairs of the citizen. Kilbourn v. Thompson,
Page 154 U. S. 479
103 U. S. 168, 103 U. S. 190. We said in Boyd v. United States, 116 U. S. 616, 116 U. S. 630 — and it cannot be too often repeated — that the principles that embody the essence of constitutional liberty and security forbid all invasions on the part of the government and its employees of the sanctity of a man’s home and the privacies of his life. As said by MR. JUSTICE FIELD in In re Pacific Railway Commission, 32 F. 241, 250, “of all the rights of the citizen, few are of greater importance or more essential to his peace and happiness than the right of personal security, and that involves not merely protection of his person from assault, but exemption of his private affairs, books, and papers from the inspection and scrutiny of others. Without the enjoyment of this right, all others would lose half their value.”
Now, see:
The American Community Survey
~
megalomaniac
PRESIDENT OBAMA: Well, we’re not done yet. I’ve got five more years of stuff to do. But
not only saving this country from a great depression. Not only saving the auto industry. But
putting in place a system in which we’re gonna start lowering health care costs and you’re
never gonna go bankrupt because you get sick or somebody in your family gets sick. Making
sure that we have reformed the financial system, so we never again have taxpayer-funded
bailouts, and the system is more stable and secure. Making sure that we’ve got millions of
kids out here who are able to go to college because we’ve expanded student loans and
made college more affordable. Ending Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. Decimating al Qaeda, including
Bin Laden being taken off the field. Restoring America’s respect around the world.
The issue here is not gonna be a list of accomplishments. As you said yourself, Steve, you
know, I would put our legislative and foreign policy accomplishments in our first two years
against any president — with the possible exceptions of Johnson, F.D.R., and Lincoln — just
in terms of what we’ve gotten done in modern history. But, you know, but when it comes to
the economy, we’ve got a lot more work to do. And we’re gonna keep on at it.
ACLU Key Issues
From the ACLU 50-State Survey for January of 2012:
- Access to abortion and birth control. [Must keep killing babies.]
- Equal treatment of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered. [Must treat those who display sexual preference the same as those who do not.]
- Protection against racial profiling and discrimination by law enforcement. [Must not profile those most likely to commit terrorism.]
- Equal access for eligible residents to vote. [As opposed to citizens.]
- Non-preferential treatment of any one religion by the government. [Except Islam.]
- Preventing the teaching of creationism and intelligent design from interfering with the teaching of evolution in public school science classes. [When government sanctions a theory it must be protected. See global warming.]
Let’s see: infant death and dismemberment, sexual obsession, terrorism, illegal aliens, Sharia, spurious government science. That’s an impressive series of harmful policies to rack up by one organization in one fund-raising mailer. How did I get on this nutjob mailing list? Yeah I’m going to send them a check, where’s my pen?
Thank you American law schools.
disaster redux
Landmark Speeches of National Socialism, Edited by Randall L. Bytwerk
- “National Socialism was the most prolific rhetorical movement of the twentieth century.”
- “…[R]hetoric moved a civilized nation to support Nazism, and to close its eyes to the crimes that were not difficult to see.”
- “Everything that Nazism intended was revealed in its rhetoric.”
- “[Hitler] thought that the average person is uninterested in complex arguments, being ruled more by emotion than intellect. Nazi rhetoric therefore avoided presenting detailed solutions to complex problems.”
- “Propaganda also needed to be one-sided. Since the masses did not understand complex issues, presenting balanced arguments would only shake their confidence in the rightness of a cause.”
- “A speaker, Hitler thought, should stand before an audience with the fervor of an evangelist preaching a religious faith.”
- “Just as a religion or a church can never stop preaching and explaining the faith in a thousand ways from the pulpit, no more can National Socialism surrender the direct and powerful effect of the speech, which ever and against strengthens the faith of the movement and provides new power for the never-ending struggle.”
- “To maintain power required unceasing efforts to persuade Germans that National Socialism deserved their unconditional allegiance.”
- “Germans did not support Hitler because they expected him to lead them into a ruinous war, but rather because he and his party drew upon deeply rooted values and beliefs.”
- “…Nazism presented itself not as a political party, but as a movement that encompassed everything Germans held to be true and just.”
- “What propaganda avoids saying is at least as important as what it does say. The Nazis realized that blatant lying often fails, and that people accept some things in general that they reject if they know the details.”
The number of speeches Obama has given since taking office roughly equals the number of days he has been in office.
The editors and columnists at Investor’s Business Daily [Investors.com] regularly provide sound analysis of the Obama administration, however, they may be missing the real nature of Obama.
He’s not just campaigning. He’s relentlessly propagandizing a dangerous mythology with himself at the center.
The Beasts of Buchenwald by Flint Whitlock
- “The persecutions did not come all at once; they gradually grew more onerous once the Nazis saw that the open harassment of Jews and the imposition of unreasonable restrictions on them were not being objected to by the great bulk of non-Jewish German society. There was, of course, no way for the Jews to know if the Nazi’s threats were substantive or merely idle. There was no way for the Jews of Germany (and, later, Austria, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, etc., too) to realize that concentration camps, death camps, gas chambers, mass graves, and ovens were in their future.”
- “By the time they comprehended the enormity of the danger, it was too late.”
the face of useful idiocy
Have the OWS useful idiots been set up, organized and funded through Obama and paid for by George Soros, to provide an expendable target for the national socialists?
We’ll see. National socialism needs an enemy. Conservatives are wise to this gang, they’re not going to play along, and they’re too well armed. Occupants, however, are stupid. It’s not plausible that Obama and Soros would make them the standard bearers for leftist policy. So they must be there for another purpose, and cannon fodder, so to speak, is about all that’s left.
the tax effect
Imagine what businesses and employment opportunities would arise in a free country without business taxation.
The Only Good Occupation…
By James Lewis
-
Is getting a job. So you won’t have to leech off Mom and Dad anymore.
- Is taking responsibility for your own neurotic hangups, and not blaming your gnawing feelings of inferiority on the most miraculous, creative, and popular economic system in the world — including the parts of China, India, and Russia that actually work.
- Is learning about capitalism, before revealing your fathomless ignorance to the world. And no, Das Kapital is not about capitalism. It’s about the personal alienation and greed of an angry kid who grew up in Prussia almost two hundred years ago, and who thirsted to make the whole world like the Prussian Empire, complete with millions of marching robots. (See North Korea today).
- Is not getting manipulated by a sinister cabal of billionaire lefties who want to buy political power for themselves, and thinking that you’re doing something noble, idealistic, and unselfish. You’re not. You’re just flattering your own neurotic egomania, the personality disorder that kept getting you in trouble with your family, your friends, and your impersonal sex partners.
- Is growing up.
- Is respecting other human beings, who know a lot more about living than you, in your arrogance, think you do.
- Is understanding that the Nazi Occupation of Europe, the Chinese Occupation of Tibet, the Soviet Occupation of Eastern Europe, and the Radical Occupation of American Universities are all the same, evil, and deeply selfish thing. They always lead to tyrannies and dictatorships, and they always, always end in killing people by the hundreds of thousands. Or more.
- Is to get that Communism has been more humanly destructive than Hitler, because Hitler lasted only 13 years before he shot himself in that bunker. Communist regimes lasted 70 years in the Soviet Empire, and killed 100 million people in that time, while making everybody else poor, miserable, and brainwashed.
- Is to realize when you’ve been cultified and suckered, but good, by Crony Capitalists who have convinced you and a million other dead-heads to believe that you are going to bring peace, love, and proper obedience to the whole wide world. They are making out like bandits for themselves, and you’re just the junior storm troopers.
- Is to get that:
- the leftie media are owned by Giant Corporations, you moron.
- That the mind set of Occupy is identical to the mind-set of the Hitler Youth, of Mao’s Red Guards who killed 40 million of their fellow Chinese, and of Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge, who killed three million innocent Cambodians — while your kind did nothing but cover up those murders.
- That Islamic mobs are just another version of your kind.
- That the American people are learning from your Rich Kids’ Revolution what you really are.
- That capitalism is the engine of prosperity, technology, real science, and real progress.
- Is to get it straight through your thick skull that we’ve seen your kind before — we fought three major wars against your kind in the last 100 years — and that the West, as decadent as it is, will gather itself together and win.
- That normal people will win in the end, because capitalism, individualism, personal creativity, and electoral democracy are more powerful than a gaggle of power-hungry freaks.
So look, kids. There are all kinds of useful Occupations. But first one is to get a job and stop bothering productive people who are paying to keep your sorry hide in food, clothing, shelter, and police protection.
Lotsa luck, kids.
Don’t forget to grow up.
Stimulus II
Mary Kay Henry, president of the Service Employees International Union, in an editorial in the Wall Street Journal today, said Congress must pass the American Jobs Act immediately so Americans can be put to work “rebuilding outdated and dangerous roads and bridges and ensuring our kids have first-class schools….keep[ing] teachers in our classrooms, police on the beat, healthcare workers at our hospitals and clinics, and ensure[ing] that we have enough firefighters to protect our communities.”
She says [in so many words] the Occupy Wall Street protests are a new spark of destiny for a new union resurgence to give every American a job, presumably working in road and bridge construction, public education or as a first responder of some sort.
Leave aside, for the moment, that Stimulus I already swelled the ranks of police, fire, teacher, road construction and school janitor staffs with fresh new faces, and leave aside that Stimulus I already re-equipped first responders and construction crews across the nation with new fire trucks, ambulances, police cars, SWAT vans, and all the gear that goes into them.
Stimulus I and II [the American Jobs Act] are funded with public debt and they don’t add a nickel of net new value to the economy. They are wealth redistribution schemes that move capital from the productive private sector into the consuming public sector, with a large amount of government overhead consumed in the process. They don’t add any productive–wealth generating–capacity to the economy. Public sector employers can only hand out paychecks for as long as the debt Ponzi scheme funding them keeps functioning. The jobs they provide don’t create products, don’t yield profit, don’t generate capital, and don’t lead to new investment.
Eventually, perhaps soon, the well will run dry on public debt and a whole lot of unfunded public employees will become very angry. Many of them will be well armed for a living.
Only jobs created through private capital can potentially–there’s always risk–produce a profit and thereby build new capital which can grow the economy and create more new jobs. Only private sector jobs can replicate capital to grow new jobs. Publicly financed jobs can never do this. They may look nice and shiny driving down the road in a brand new fire truck or police vehicle, but those vehicles are symbols of a debt that will never be re-payed, and a job that will never create wealth to re-invest and grow our economy.
Moreover, public sector jobs pull scarce labor out of the private sector and thereby raise the cost of labor to the private sector. Increased costs reduce the private sectors productive capacity to generate profit, capital and wealth, and to create more productive jobs. In addition, more public sector jobs enlarge vocal voting constituencies who advocate for more public spending, more public sector jobs, more taxes, and more non-productive public-debt-financed economic activity.
It is a pernicious, vicious cycle, and Mary Kay Henry and the Occupy Wall Street bunch couldn’t be more wrong.
The New Normal
SCHOOLS FOR MISRULE pp. 219-220
“THE U.S. IN THE DOCK (CONT’D)
Another enforcement mechanism for international human rights likely to assume greater visibility in coming years is the U.N.-supervised process known as universal periodic review. [Read more…]
Progressives
I’ve had enough of the progressives. Consider their accomplishments.
At the turn of the progressive century, in the name of civilization Teddy Roosevelt and William Howard Taft gave us brutal repression in Cuba and the Philippines, hundreds of thousands killed, conditions that led to Japanese militarization and World War II, war on the Korean peninsula, war in Indochina, the Malay Peninsula, and Viet Nam. The progressive body count in the Pacific Rim runs into the millions. To the dead, a progressive bullet and a communist bullet are a distinction without much of a difference. [Read more…]