Entitling Ourselves to Death

So this one was obvious, but I couldn't pass it up.
Pelosi is in China, behaving as we have come to expect.

"U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi urged Beijing on Thursday to cooperate on climate change, calling a safe environment a basic human right."

There is beautiful irony in appealing to Beijing to cooperate in the efforts to change our climate (oh, sorry, I mean disrupt the natural cycle of our climate-er, I mean... Bush caused Katrina! There we go.) on the basis of human rights, when Beijing clearly not only has a track record of ignoring human rights complaints, but disagrees with the Western concept of human rights on a fundamental philosophical level altogether.

Of course, Drudge's headline emphasized Pelosi's typically creepy statement that "Every aspect of our lives must be subjected to an inventory ... of how we are taking responsibility."

Granted, that's an interesting and revealing statement of the liberal outlook on life. More on that later, perhaps. But to me, the key phrase comes earlier in the article.

"I do see this opportunity for climate change to be ... a game-changer," she said at Tsinghua. "It's a place where human rights — looking out for the needs of the poor in terms of climate change and healthy environment — are a human right."

A human right? Since when? Are we now entitled to a static climate and optimal living conditions? It's not even possible to control the climate from a human perspective. The most of what we have accomplished so far is to murk things up a bit, and even that pales in comparison to one truly significant volcanic eruption. We might just as well speak of the entitlement to never be cold.

No generation of humans in modern history has been as concerned for the well-being of our environment, or more willing to sacrifice personal freedom (which we are also supposedly entitled to) for the sake of associated causes. And yet we are continually told by our president and other national leaders that we should be prepared to sacrifice for our country.

Pardon my frankness, but while I am quite prepared to sacrifice time, effort, and even my life if necessary for my country, I fail to see that our government deserves any of the above, nor that the interests of our country are being in any way advanced by said government.

An unfortunate event occurred in a town near my home several years back; a steel plant was taken over, the workers all laid off, and the plant dismantled and sold off. This story is unfortunately not uncommon across the country, as "looters" (to borrow a term from Ayn Rand) profit by destroying our producing power to line their pockets.

But now the looters are in Washington, and selling our freedoms isn't paying as well as it used to.
They'll be looking for more soon, which means more entitlements must be discovered.

Our forefathers knew better; we're not entitled to anything. Now we are coasting on the strength of their achievements, but inertia is running out. America was a chance for people to work hard and succeed, not for what they felt they deserved to be given to them by a nanny state.

If Americans have any entitlement, it is the chance for their hard work to pay off.
Perhaps we have forgotten that this is not always how the world works. In some cultures, you work yourself nearly to death, just to stay where you are. In others, a stratified society means that all your hard work will never help you get ahead.

America was never a give-away, it was a tough job with a good starting salary and excellent chances of advancement.

Now we are all "entitled" to prosperity, but not everyone is willing to work hard. Where then, does the money for those people come from? From the people producing all the value in this country. Right now, they are dragging everyone else along with them. But the situation can't continue forever.

If we don't kick the looters out of Washington, and also destroy the culture of entitlement, there simply is no future for America.

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Border Creep

And we're back, after a short hiatus here at MC.

I have been quite busy in Mexico for the past week, and while there made a few cultural observations that might prove increasingly relevant in the days to come.

The argument over illegal immigration (or migration, as it has been more accurately described) has raged on for years now. Former President Bush seemed more or less unilaterally in favor of "amnesty", establishing a swift and easy path to citizenship for the millions of Latin Americans living illegally inside the Estados Unidos. Congress was on the verge of passing this, but overwhelming opposition from the American people killed it.

For latin migrants, it's a question of simple economics. Barely scrape by in Mexico, or earn a decent wage in America. For us, it's akin to a cultural invasion, but one that we have on a national level neither affirmed or denied.

Without a clear message from the United States either way (most people want illegal migrant workers removed, and the borders secured. Congress evidently doesn't know what it wants, Obama has not given the issue much attention, and many businesses continue to use and encourage the flow of cheap labor), one can hardly blame the migrant workers (whose culture views laws more as obstacles to work around than anything personally binding) from moving up to where they can potentially make as much in a day as they would in a week back home.

As usual, the question is more complicated than either side of the debate presents it. The facts lie rusty and unacknowledged, while the MSM focuses primarily on the emotional aspects of the conflict.

On the one hand, it's clear that illegal entry should not be rewarded with citizenship. It's also very unclear what effect the massive importation of another culture will have on America.
Well, perhaps not entirely unclear. A quick trip to most cities within 100 miles of the border
and towns all across the sun belt will make it obvious what changes are already occuring. Just going to El Wal-Mart here, hundreds of miles from the border, has become quite a cultural experience. We even have a few tiendas (Mexican corner shops, essentially) popping up around town.

On the other hand, with hospitals closing all over the country, and millions of untaxed dollars flowing southward, (forming the major portion of several Latin American economies, in fact) it could be argued that we are clinging to some principles while ignoring others, at our own great expense.

And there is a more serious problem, that has been almost totally ignored:
Without the influx of people from the south, the US birth rate falls below "the line of no return" for declining cultures. As we have previously noted, Europe has already fallen below this line, and is in the process of a massive cultural shift towards Islam, a fact that the German government has even admitted.

Any culture that decides to stop having children in sufficient numbers, dooms itself to eventual decline and collapse or displacement, by sheer lack of population. This is an inescapable historical fact.

Of course, one might reasonably question whether maintaining our culture with the importation of another culture is really possible, since as history has shown, the incoming culture will displace our own. However, as stated above, it's not a question of our culture surviving as is. We simply are not raising enough children in our own culture to perpetuate it. We can either take whoever is willing to, along with such elements of their culture as they bring with them, or slowly disappear.

Taking all that into account, regardless of where the immigration debate goes, or what solution is eventually settled on, it seems that some Spanish classes might be in order. They will be, shall we say, necesario?

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The Road to Serfdom

For those of you unaware of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, or Mises economic theory, I highly recommend you go to their website, which has a library, and doing some reading. In a nutshell, you might call Mises economic theory "reality-based", versus theory-based. It's been beating the flawed Keynesian model to pieces in predicting the economy's next steps.

THE_CSM sent me this, and I thought I'd bring it to the attention of our readers.

"The Road to Serfdom" by Friedrich A Hayek... handily portrayed in cartoon form.

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Powell vs. the People

Colin Powell offers his opinions on a couple issues, mainly the Republican's current identity crisis. Let's see if he says anything intelligent...

"The Republican Party is in big trouble and needs to find a way to move back to the middle of the country, former Secretary of State Colin Powell said Monday."

Leaving aside his bad choice of phrasing, (the "middle of the country", aka "the heartland" has been consistently conservative for a long time, not the left-leaning centrists that Powell suggests they would be best represented by) this strategy interests me (in a morbid way). Let's see what he says next.

"The Republican Party is in deep trouble," Powell told corporate security executives at a conference in Washington sponsored by Fortify Software Inc. The party must realize that the country has changed, he said. "Americans do want to pay taxes for services," he said. "Americans are looking for more government in their life, not less."

I won't bother to quote him any more. Read the article if you wish, it's fruitless verbiage.

One might assume, based on the results of the last election, that Powell's words are true.
But over half a million of my fellow Americans who joined me in the tea parties might beg to differ. Half a million, yes, that's a very, very small slice of America. But behind every one of those people who showed up are tens and hundreds who feel the same.

The American Revolution was ignited by the issue of taxation without representation.

What we have now is a new and unnatural chimera:
Taxation without representation, and also representation without taxation.

Those who pay taxes have fewer and fewer advocates in the government which siphons off the money they have earned, while those who do not contribute to the system receive the ill-gotten gain, minus their freedom.

Meanwhile, Powell advocates a shift by the GOP from "Lie to your base for votes" to "Our base does not exist, let us become our opponents".

Republicans only have themselves to blame for their current troubles. Any true conservative or smaller-government advocate has been so burned by this point that McCain's loss would have been truly epic if millions of people had not voted for him merely to vote against Obama.

The Republican party had only survived that long because of their conservative voters. The homeschooler moms who volunteered, gun owners who contributed, pro-lifers who urgently invested in their cause. Those people have been repeatedly betrayed, their interests sacrificed on the altar of political expediency.

No more. The stake in the heart of the GOP of before was not Obama's victory, but the nomination of McCain. Palin was an unexpected boost, and nearly upset the election.
And yet, as the confetti was still falling in Chicago, the Republicans turned on Palin, who offered the only breath of fresh air in the race, the only factor that made victory even conceivable, and proceeded to blame her for the whole thing.

Imagine a man who sleeps for 14 hours a day, blaming his inability to win a marathon on the fact that, had he only enough sleep, say 18 hours a day, he could have done it.

The Republican Party will totally cease to exist as a political entity in the United States if they continue on this course. Only a seismic shift in their party mentality to recognize and work for the people who have repeatedly been the motivating power behind their campaigns instead of betraying them to pander ineffectually to politically apathetic centrists who fall left by default could possibly stave off disaster.

That is, if we will ever have them back.

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