In an article in the Telegraph, Niles Gardiner reveals that the (undemocratic, left-leaning) European Union is actively interfering in US affairs. It is shelling out taxpayers’  money to groups in America that oppose the death penalty.

Here is a large part of what he writes:

Why on earth are British taxpayers being forced to fund European Union lobbying for policy campaigns in the United States? Furthermore, why is the EU directly interfering in domestic political debates in America, and so far without Congressional oversight? As the research detailed below demonstrates, the EU’s European Instrument for Democracy and Human Rights (EIDHR) is spending millions of Euros on US-based campaigns against the death penalty. An extraordinary development. …

This extremely unusual funding for US groups – by a taxpayer-funded foreign entity to advance a political cause – deserves to attract a great deal of public attention, including Congressional scrutiny in Washington and parliamentary scrutiny in London. …

Here is a list of US recipients of EU EIDHR aid in 2009, which amounted to €2,624,395 ($3,643,951). The recipients of EU aid include the rather wealthy American Bar Association, whose annual budget approached $150 million in 2008.

American Bar Association Fund for Justice and Education: EU grant: €708,162 ($983, 277)

Project: The Death Penalty Assessments Project: Toward a Nationwide Moratorium on Executions

Death Penalty Information Center: EU grant: €193,443 ($268,585)

Project: Changing the Course of the Death Penalty Debate. A proposal for public opinion research, message development, and communications of capital punishment in the US.

The National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty: EU grant: €305,974 ($424,829)

Project: National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty Intensive Assistance Program

Reprieve LBG: EU grant: €526,816 ($731,591) (some of these funds also went to “European countries”) Project: Engaging Europe in the fight for US abolition

Murder Victim’s Families for Human Rights Non-Profit Corporation: EU grant: €495,000 ($686,608) (some of these funds also went to other countries, including Japan and Taiwan). Project: Voices of Victims Against the Death Penalty

Witness to Innocence Protection: EU grant: €395,000 ($548,538)

Project: American DREAM Campaign [Note that this is a far left project – JB.]

MPs reading this should be asking questions why British taxpayers’ money is being used by the European Union to fund campaigns against the death penalty in the United States, without the consent of the British people. (Not least when 51 per cent of the British public support the reintroduction of capital punishment for murder, with just 37 per cent opposing it, in a recent YouGov poll.)

This is also an extraordinary intervention in a highly charged, intensely political domestic debate in the United States over the death penalty, the use of which has been ruled Constitutional by the US Supreme Court on several occasions, and is backed by 64 percent of Americans according to Gallup, with just 29 percent opposing. Can you imagine the outcry in Brussels if the US government funded policy groups in the EU, and the charges of “American imperialism” that would inevitably follow?

It is bad enough that Brussels consistently interferes with the internal affairs of EU member states, but it is surely a bridge too far when it tries to intervene in the affairs of one of the world’s greatest democracies that isn’t even part of the EU. This is hugely insulting to the US. …

Evidently, unelected bureaucrats sitting in the European Commission feel they have a divine right to lecture the United States and its citizens on how they should decide their own policies. This demonstrates a fundamental lack of respect for US national sovereignty, and a sneering condescension towards the American people. But perhaps this should come as no surprise. A supranational entity like the EU that has no respect for the democratic rights of hundreds of millions of Europeans can barely be expected to respect freedom and democracy outside its own borders.

The interference is wrong, and the cause is wrong.

We are for the death penalty.

To remove the death penalty is to permit murder.

The strange inclination some have to pity a murderer facing execution more than his or her victim is the sheerest sentimentality.

Some argue that mistakes can be made, and if someone is executed and later proved not guilty of the crime, there can be no redress. This implies that there can never be certainty; but there can be and there should be, and the law allows for ample (it could be argued too much) opportunity for arriving at it.

Some say the death penalty is not a deterrent. Sociologists and others of that kidney have toiled to show statistically that states with the death penalty have higher rates of murder than states without it. What the statistics cannot show is how many more murders there would have been in the death-penalty states if they did not have it.

We apply a simpler test of the efficacy of the death sentence as a deterrent: does it deter us? And our answer is yes: we’re absolutely sure that it would deter us if ever we thought of killing (and we can’t say the thought has never crossed our mind).

The only argument against it we think has some merit is that a lifetime in prison may be worse for a murderer to endure than execution. But it doesn’t persuade us. Prison these days – for those who don’t feel the lack of freedom to be the worst thing about it – is not unpleasant. Nowhere near dreadful enough to be fitting punishment for murder.

We would also favor the death penalty for treason, a crime that seems to have been removed from the book.

Justice is the prime responsibility of everyone all the time. It may be hard, even impossible, to achieve perfectly. But it has to be attempted constantly, unremittingly. It is what the law is for. Without law and the hope of  justice there is no civilization.

Be judgmental. Without personal judgment there is no morality.

You’ve probably seen this video – it’s being watched all over the United States.

Here’s information about the trade union boss who is talking in it, Richard Trumka, and the relationship he has with Obama and his administration:

This video shows the shocking level to which union bosses influence the Obama administration’s policies. AFL-CIO head Richard Trumka … states he has been in touch with the White House everyday and is present at meetings inside the White House several times a week. On the other hand, at least half-a-dozen members of his own Cabinet say Obama has never spoken with them in the two years of his administration to date. … Trumka, who has worked with European socialists for a global tax, is one of a chosen few radicals pulling the strings. So much for the assurances of psuedo-conservatives, who enthused at how “conservative” Obama’s cabinet was, especially his foreign policy choices. Wiser heads knew Obama was committed to imposing socialism at all costs. This video proves the “moderate” left-wingers in his administration are window dressing for a far more sinister agenda, one about which many so-called conservatives are utterly clueless.

And here is part of the Heritage Foundation’s discussion of the current trade union protest in Wisconsin and elsewhere, which it sums up – correctly in our view – as “Government Unions vs American Taxpayers“:

Recent studies show that state and local governments are severely underestimating their pension and benefit promises, including a $574 billion shortfall for the nation’s top major cities and a possible $3.4 trillion shortfall for the states. The cause of these crippling pension and benefit obligations is no secret. The Post explains: “Public employees often enjoy more generous pension and health-care benefits, and these are at the root of the long-term budget problems confronting many states.” …

Government unions are inherently different from private-sector unions. The purpose of private-sector unions is to get workers a larger share of the profits they helped create. But government is a monopoly and earns no profits. All government unions do is redistribute more tax dollars from taxpayers to unions. The left used to understand this. Not only did President Franklin Delano Roosevelt write in 1937: “All government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service,” but as recently as 1959, the AFL-CIO Executive Council stated that “government workers have no right [to collectively bargain] beyond the authority to petition Congress—a right available to every citizen.” …

By granting government workers the power to collectively bargain, government unions have completely politicized the civil service. State and local employees in 28 states are required to pay full union dues or get fired. Using this government coercion, government unions have amassed tremendous financial resources that they use to campaign for higher taxes and higher pay for government workers. The top outside spender in the last election was the American Federation of State and County Municipal Employees ($91 million).

Governor Mitch Daniels (R–IN), who signed an executive order ending state worker collective bargaining his first month in office, spoke in support of Walker yesterday:

“The people who are doing the demonstrating, and their allies … spent that state broke. … The most powerful special interests in America today are the government unions. They’re the leading financial contributors. They have muscle, a lot of times their contracts provide for time off to go politick and lobby.”

And lobby and politick government unions have. Across the country, from Arizona to California to Minnesota to Maine to New Jersey and more, government unions have pushed legislation and ballot measures that raise taxes and spending. In Trenton, New Jersey, last night, Governor Chris Christie (R) framed the debate:

“In Wisconsin and Ohio, they have decided there can no longer be two classes of citizens: one that receives the rich health and pension benefits, and the rest who are left to pay for them. These ideas are not red or blue. They are the black and white of truth.”

The case against trade unions for government employees was clear even to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

But what is the case for any trade unions to exist?  If full employment is desirable, if the consumer’s interests are paramount so that prices should be kept as low as possible, how do trade unions help? Do they make employers more or less keen to take on employees? Do they have the effect of lowering or raising the price of goods to the consumer? Every trade union member is a consumer. What good are higher wages arrived at through collective bargaining if the increase is consumed by higher prices? We are not persuaded that trade unions are good for anyone (except of course would-be Stalins like Trumka).

To repeal Obamacare is to resist socialism and to choose freedom.

The House of Representatives’ overwhelming vote (245-189) to repeal the health-care bill which Obama and the Democrats foisted on the nation, is an act of resistance by the new Republican majority against the Democrats’ attempt to turn America into a socialist state. That is the most important thing about it.

As John Podhoretz writes at Commentary-Contentions:

So why bother? That seems to be the general question. The Republican-controlled House can pass it, but it won’t get through the Senate, and even if it did, the president will veto it. Why cast an unnecessary vote? Why have this debate now?

Simple: Where you stand on ObamaCare is now the bright line in American politics, the single issue that defines the difference between the two major voting camps in the United States.

And the Heritage Foundation is of the same opinion:

Last night, the House of Representatives, the legislative chamber of Congress closest to American popular opinion, voted to repeal Obamacare—the increasingly unpopular law which led directly to a change in the control of Congress just three months ago.

Many will tell you that yesterday’s bipartisan vote of 245 to 189 was an exercise in futility—an empty, symbolic measure. Liberals in Congress, the White House and their echo chamber in the media all insist, as NPR has duly reported, that “this measure will go no further.”

Don’t believe this for a single minute. The vote last night was an important step in the democratic process of protecting and conserving our constitutional freedoms.

Our country, it is increasingly clear, has arrived at a pivotal moment – perhaps the pivotal moment – in its history. Together, we face a choice between two futures. One is a collectivist future where the federal government claims ever increasing shares of our income and grants itself the authority to make decisions affecting virtually every aspect of our daily lives. The other future is built upon the idea that individual freedom trumps government authority, and that in those rare cases when solving a problem requires government, the government that governs best is the one that is smallest and closest to the people. That is the future that we should seek – reaffirming our individual liberty, strengthening private markets, shrinking the size of governments, and making decisions wherever possible at the local level rather than in Washington.

No issue joins this debate more dramatically than the question of Obamacare, and what to do about it. It’s not just about health care. The law redefines our centuries-old understanding of the reach of federal authority, indeed whether there are any limits at all to the government’s ability to intrude upon individuals, families, business owners, physicians and other health providers, and state and local governments. Little or nothing will be allowed outside the new regulatory scheme – no alternative state programs, no individuals or businesses that choose not to participate, no truly private market alternatives.

The debate boils down to one big question: Shall we govern ourselves, or let unelected bureaucrats rule us?

Which is to say: Shall we be free or not?

We must make the choice now. We must choose to be free.

The word “social” can have the effect of negating any other word it precedes. For example, a “social conservative” is not a conservative; “social justice” means unjustly taking money away from someone who has earned it and giving to someone who hasn’t.

Similarly, the word “environmental” can change the word it qualifies. For example, “environmental studies” means theories not derived from studying the environment but from hating human freedom.

There is also something called “environmental justice”. The phrase is doubly negating. It is not about doing justice to the environment (whatever that might entail), nor is it about making a suitable environment where  justice might roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.

No. It is about robbing industrious Peter to bestow a government “service” on undocumented newcomer Pablo.

Corruption Chronicles brings us this information:

A few months after launching a multi million-dollar campaign to help minorities get green, the Obama Administration is dedicating an additional $7 million to study how pollution, stress and social factors affect “poor and underserved communities.”

It’s all part of the administration’s effort to bring environmental justice to low-income populations by helping them obtain the same degree of protection from health and environmental hazards as wealthy communities. Here’s how it works; the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) gives money to leftwing groups—including some dedicated to helping illegal immigrants—that teach black, Latino and indigenous folks how to recycle, reduce carbon emissions through “weatherization” and participate in “green jobs” training.

How many lessons does an illegal immigrant need before he knows how to chuck a can into the recycle bin?

Oh yes, those carbon emissions – the threat that hangs over all mankind.

But what “green jobs” would those be?

To carry out that phase of the environmental justice crusade, some 80 community organizations have received about $2 million. Among the recipients is a New Jersey group (Lazos America Unida) that advocates on behalf of the “Mexican immigrant community” and a Missouri farm workers’ group that will use the money to increase awareness about the dangers of sun and heat exposure in migrant populations.

Doesn’t everyone, wherever he is and wherever he’s from, know that sun and heat exposure can be dangerous? Has someone done one of those solemn academic studies to prove that immigrants are insufficiently aware of that universally acknowledged fact?

This is government parenting to a very high degree!

The “environmental justice” lobby has apparently noticed that poorer folk live in less leafy and spacious spots than the high rent payers do and they don’t think that’s fair.

This week the EPA announced that it’s giving scientists at several universities $7 million to study how pollution, combined with stress and other social factors, affects people in “poor and underserved communities.” The agency refers to it as cumulative human health risk assessment research and the goal is to rid underserved communities of extensive pollution-based problems.

“This ground-breaking research will focus on environments where people are exposed to multiple stressors such as chemicals, anxiety, and poor nutrition,” according to the EPA announcement. “When these stressors are combined, they can lead to a much higher risk of health issues.” The agency is committed to addressing these sorts of contributors to “disproportionate environmental health impacts,” according to a top official.

As none of us can hope to escape chemicals and anxiety, and according to the food-police we’re most of us poorly nourished, will these well-paid researchers come and break some ground in the leafier and more spacious environs of industrious Peter?

What a question! Are not his health impacts all too proportionate? Isn’t he one of those right-wingers who go in for non-social and non-environmental justice? How does he deserve to be researched?

To read a sad story of how “environmental justice” fanatics wrecked an industrial project that would have provided hundred of jobs where they were badly needed, see this article in Reason Magazine.

As everyone knows or ought to know, socialism and freedom are opposites.

The more socialist a state becomes, the less freedom remains to the people.

Under President Obama the US has become an ever more socialist state; and as  it has become more socialist it has become, of course, less free – though it’s still a long way from the totalitarianism which the Maoists and Alinskyites who officially advise the President would like him to aim for.

To bolster our argument we quote the libertarian free-marketeer John Stossel, who writes:

Last year, I reported that the United States fell from sixth to eighth place … in the Heritage Foundation/Wall Street Journal’s 2010 Index of Economic Freedom. Now, we’ve fallen further. In the just released 2011 Index, the United States is in ninth place. That’s behind Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, Switzerland, Canada, Ireland [?] and Denmark [?].

The biggest reason for the continued slide? Spending as a percentage of gross domestic product. (State and local spending is not counted.)

The debt picture is dismal, too. We are heading into Greece’s territory. …

New Speaker John Boehner, leader of the Republicans who now control the House, says he wants to cut spending. When he was sworn in last week, he declared: “Our spending has caught up with us. … No longer can we kick the can down the road.”

But when NBC anchorman Brian Williams asked him to name a program “we could do without,” he said, “I don’t think I have one off the top of my head.”

Give me a break! You mean to tell me the Republican leader in the House doesn’t already know what he wants to cut? I don’t know which is worse — that he doesn’t have a list or that he won’t talk about it in public.

The Republicans say they’ll start by cutting $100 billion, but let’s put that in perspective. The budget is close to $4 trillion. So $100 billion is just 2.5 percent. That’s shooting too low. Firms in the private sector make cuts like that all the time. It’s considered good business — pruning away deadwood.

GOP leaders say the source of their short-run cuts will be discretionary non-security spending. They foolishly exclude entitlement spending, which Congress puts on autopilot, and all spending for national and homeland security (whether it’s necessary or not). That leaves only $520 billion.

So even if the Republicans managed to cut all discretionary non-security spending (which is not what they plan), the deficit would still be $747 billion. (The deficit is now projected to be $1.267 trillion.)

This is a revolution? Republicans will have to learn that there is no budget line labeled “waste, fraud, abuse.” If they are serious about cutting government, they will ax entire programs, departments and missions.

I’m not confident they have it in them. …

And we are also supported in our opinion by the economist Walter Williams, who writes:

Here’s the House of Representatives new rule: “A bill or joint resolution may not be introduced unless the sponsor has submitted for printing in the Congressional Record a statement citing as specifically as practicable the power or powers granted to Congress in the Constitution to enact the bill or joint resolution.” Unless a congressional bill or resolution meets this requirement, it cannot be introduced.

If the House of Representatives had the courage to follow through on this rule, their ability to spend and confer legislative favors would be virtually eliminated. Also, if the rule were to be applied to existing law, they’d wind up repealing at least two-thirds to three-quarters of congressional spending.

You might think, for example, that there’s constitutional authority for Congress to spend for highway construction and bridges. …

But there isn’t. Williams goes on to point out that President James Madison was not persuaded that there should be, though a law establishing such an authority might “facilitate commerce”, and even strengthen “the common defense“. So in 1817, Madison “vetoed a public works bill, saying: “Having considered the bill this day presented to me … which sets apart and pledges funds ‘for constructing roads and canals, and improving the navigation of water courses, in order to facilitate, promote, and give security to internal commerce among the several States, and to render more easy and less expensive the means and provisions for the common defense,’ I am constrained by the insuperable difficulty I feel in reconciling the bill with the Constitution of the United States and to return it with that objection to the House of Representatives, in which it originated.”

Defense of the nation and the individual citizen is the first duty of government. It is the essential thing that government is for. Yet here was Madison, “the father of the Constitution”, refusing to sign into law a bill that was being promoted as an aid to defense, because he could not reconcile the nature of the expenditure with the Constitution.

“What about handouts to poor people, businesses, senior citizens and foreigners?” Williams asks. And to that too Madison gave an answer:

Madison said, “Charity is no part of the legislative duty of the government.”

Some of his successors took the same view as Madison: if the Constitution does not authorize a dip into the public purse for this or that purpose, then neither should Congress:

In 1854, President Franklin Pierce vetoed a bill to help the mentally ill, saying, “I cannot find any authority in the Constitution for public charity. (To approve the measure) would be contrary to the letter and spirit of the Constitution and subversive to the whole theory upon which the Union of these States is founded.”

President Grover Cleveland vetoed a bill for charity relief, saying, “I can find no warrant for such an appropriation in the Constitution, and I do not believe that the power and duty of the General Government ought to be extended to the relief of individual suffering which is in no manner properly related to the public service or benefit.” …

But, someone may ask, doesn’t the “general welfare” clause of the Constitution allow tax-payers money to be spent on “compassionate” projects?

To this President Thomas Jefferson had an answer, Williams tells us:

Suppose [Williams writes] a congressman attempts to comply with the new rule by asserting that his measure is authorized by the Constitution’s general welfare clause. Here’s what Thomas Jefferson said: “Congress has not unlimited powers to provide for the general welfare, but only those specifically enumerated.”

And he adds these words of Madison:

“With respect to the two words ‘general welfare,’ I have always regarded them as qualified by the detail of powers connected with them. To take them in a literal and unlimited sense would be a metamorphosis of the Constitution into a character which there is a host of proofs was not contemplated by its creators.”

The Constitution was designed to preserve liberty under the rule of law. It was not a set of rules for a Benevolent Association.

If  the government turns itself into an agency for succoring the poor and handicapped, it can only do so by robbing the people of liberty.

Williams quotes a warning given by President John Adams:

“A Constitution of Government once changed from Freedom, can never be restored. Liberty, once lost, is lost forever.”

Which means that any governmental program of wealth-redistribution, all socialist legislation  – social security, food stamps, Medicare, Medicaid, sub-prime housing loans, state-provided education and health-care, government compensation for loss caused by natural disasters, government grants to sport and the arts (to take only the most obvious examples of benevolent spending)  – is unconstitutional and should be repealed and never introduced again.

Then there would be small government, low taxes, and true liberty – and money enough in every earner’s pocket to donate to charity if he chooses to.

Professor James Ceaser writes that the 2010 election result was the Great Repudiation of Obama’s and the Democratic Party’s ideology.

Here are quotations from his essay:

2010 is the closest the nation has ever come to a national referendum on overall policy direction or “ideology.” Obama, who ran in 2008 by subordinating ideology to his vague themes of “hope” and “change,” has governed as one of the most ideological, partisan presidents. Some of his supporters like to argue in one breath that he is a pragmatist and centrist only to insist in the next that he has inaugurated the most historic transformation of American politics since the New Deal. The two claims are in tension. Going back to 2009’s major political contests, beginning with the governors’ races in Virginia and New Jersey and the Senate race in Massachusetts, the electorate has been asked the same question about Obama’s agenda and has given the same response. The 2010 election is the third or fourth reiteration of their negative judgment, only this time delivered more decisively. There is only one label that can describe the result: the Great Repudiation.

What accounts for the great repudiation? …

The main Democratic explanation going forward … [denies] that the election ever had anything to do with “change.” It was instead all about the economy. The stimulus bill, alas, did not stimulate quite as promised. So the administration now claims that there was no fix possible for the economy, in the sense of being able to achieve a recovery as fast as Americans came to expect. The blame rightly belongs to the previous administration, although President Obama now understands that pressing this argument, a year and half in office, looks petulant. The new line is therefore simply to blame “the economy,” as if it were an alien force dropped in from the outside, with no connection to his policies. … The notion that “the economy” is an actor in its own right, impervious to the change, has led some analysts to float the strange argument that Republicans should have won more convincingly than they did.

The real purpose of this explanation is to limit this election’s meaning in a way that leaves the president and his agenda untouched. The election was voters’ anguished response to the economy-nothing more. It was the Great Protest, not the Great Repudiation. This position, which Obama embraced in his post-election news conference, allows him to join up with the spirit of the election and participate in its message. He will now concentrate on the economy like, dare one say, a laser beam.

Republicans have agreed on the economy’s importance as part of the explanation for their victory. Yet in their account the anemic recovery is not unrelated to the core elements of Obama’s “change.” The president failed to appreciate what generates productive wealth, which comes not from bigger government and more spending but from the activity of private businesses and entrepreneurs. Economic “philosophy” in this large sense was in fact the main voting issue in this election. …

For many Republicans, and especially the Tea Party movement, the economic issues were linked to a deeper concern. The size of government and the extent of the federal debt represented not only a burden on future generations and a threat to American power, but also a violation of the spirit and letter of the Constitution. The Tea Party, in particular, with its Jeffersonian ideas, has reintroduced the Constitution into the public debate, a place that it has not held in the same way for over a century. This theme is what connects the Tea Party to the American tradition and makes their concerns matters of fundamental patriotism. The stakes in the 2010 election for these voters went far beyond economic questions, and for Democratic leaders to reduce everything to frustrations about “the economy, stupid” represents a final act of belittlement.

There was an additional factor in this electoral outcome, then, that was hardly noted or tested in the polls. It was a cultural clash between an elite and much of the public, between liberal intellectuals and the Obama Administration on the one hand, and the Tea Party activists on the other. The one has shown disdain and the other has responded with indignation. It is impossible, then, to say that Barack Obama was not a major factor in this election, for when he was not himself the leader he became the frequent enabler of this dismissal of middle America. That Obama would have to descend from the lofty heights that he inhabited during the campaign and after his election was something that no sane observer – and no doubt Obama himself – could fail to have foreseen. But this loss of bloated charisma has never been the real problem. It has instead been his demeanor as president. Obama modeled himself on Abraham Lincoln, and it is painful in retrospect to draw the contrast in how they have behaved. One showed humility, the other arrogance; one practiced sincerity, the other hypocrisy; one made efforts at cultivating unity, the other seemed to delight at encouraging division; and one succeeded in becoming more and more a man of the people, while the other, despite his harsh populist appeals, has grown more distant. …

Although the essay doesn’t tell us anything we didn’t know, or provide any new insights, it goes so directly to the heart of the matter, and so well describes not only what happened in the 2010 elections but why it happened – especially the role of the Tea Party – that it seems to us a document worth preserving. Read it all here.

The great victory scored by the Republican Party in yesterday’s elections should mean the whole of the USA may now be saved from socialism.

But will the tide of salvation reach California?

From Maggie’s Farm:

George Soros works to destroy the free market liberalism which allowed him to make the colossal fortune he uses to work for its destruction. He does it through a string of organizations, chiefly his Open Society Institute, whose name is Orwellian: it aims to close the open society and establish totalitarian state control.

He has done, and continues to do, much harm in and to America.

He has also done, and continues to do, much harm in and to Europe.

His ambition stretches further yet.

“His goal is a new global imperium … that will be truly totalitarian,”  Srdja Trifkovic said in an address he gave to the H. L. Mencken Club in Baltimore on October 23, 2010.

Trifkovic deplored Soros’s lavish funding for campaigns to legalize cannabis, promote euthanasia, further abortion rights, impose gun control, and abolish the death penalty; and his support for radical feminism, gay activism, and same-sex marriage.

We agree with Trifkovic that Soros has had “an enormous and hideously destructive impact” on the societies he has targeted.

But we strongly disagree with him on how Western civilization could and should be defended.

Trifkovic said:

Soros’s vision is hostile even to the most benign understanding of national or ethnic coherence. … His hatred of religion is the key. He promotes an education system that will neutralize any lingering spiritual yearnings of the young, and promote the loss of a sense of place and history already experienced by millions of Westerners, whether they are aware of that loss or not. Estranged from their parents, ignorant of their culture, ashamed of their history, millions of Westerners are already on the path of alienation that demands every imaginable form of self-indulgence, or else leads to drugs, or suicide, or conversion to Islam or some other cult.

To understand Soros it is necessary to understand globalization as a revolutionary, radical project. In the triumph of liberal capitalism, the enemies of civilization such as Soros have found the seeds of future victory for their paradigm that seeks to eradicate all traditional structures capable of resistance. The revolutionary character of the Open Society project is revealed in its relentless adherence to the mantra of Race, Gender and Sexuality. …

Religion itself is no longer, if it ever was, a “traditional structure capable of resistance” to the post-national totalitarian nightmare envisioned by Soros and the left. The left despises Western religion but promotes Islam in its human-and-civil-rights guise because it helps undermine Western freedoms born of free market liberalism. If Trifkovic believes traditional religion can defend civilization, he is wrong.

Christianity or Judaism offer nothing to counter the zeitgeist of ever-loosening social constraints. “Spirituality” is a commodity marketed variously even within the traditional religions. The last bastion of civilization – of voluntary collective polities, democracies of free people in pursuit of happiness under law – is the nation-state, constitutionally protecting the individual, regardless of his identity with any race, gender, or sexuality, against being subsumed by collective (“human”) rights and privileges.

It might be that: the legalization of pot means greater numbers of children and adults will be stuck on stupid more often than they currently are; the legalization of homosexual marriage means greater numbers have (non-procreative) sex; the legalization of abortion may result in many more dead babies, but fewer dead women. All that may disgust the very traditionally faithful, but restoring the social stigma attached to it, let alone the legal proscription, is not going to happen.

All those are individual decisions. They do not jeopardize civilization. What will bring civilization down are the post-national leftist choice architects, the people who decide carbon dioxide is a pollutant, that you must have government health care, but forfeit it if you’re fat, that international human rights preempt justice and self-defense, that governments own everything and must distribute proportionally to collectives’ demands.

The globalization of welfare government – that is the dream of the left and Soros. Insofar as traditional religions preserve the ideas of the morality of institutionalized compassion and the compulsion of individual conduct they are easily coopted by the forces of darkness. In the coming Universal State, Muslims will be allowed to continue honor-killings as a collective right, but the right of an individual – to kill in self-defense, to expect justice, to start and mind his own business, to allocate his resources as he pleases, to provide for himself and his family, to have children and to raise them, and to say what he likes to whomever he wishes – will be regulated out of existence. “Civilization” will have been redefined as “acceptable choices”. Enlightened self-interest will be knowing the difference between private (cholesterol levels) and public (carbon usage) virtue. Religion can do nothing whatsoever to stop this, only a resurgence of belief in individual liberty and the free market can. Good luck with that.

C. Gee  October 28, 2010

In an article for the Washington Post, Charles Murray writes about a “new elite”, and what the Tea Party thinks of it.

That a New Elite has emerged over the past 30 years is not really controversial. That its members differ from former elites is not controversial. What sets the tea party apart from other observers of the New Elite is its hostility, rooted in the charge that elites are isolated from mainstream America and ignorant about the lives of ordinary Americans.

He finds “some truth” in the Tea Party view:

There so many quintessentially American things that few members of the New Elite have experienced. …

Taken individually, members of the New Elite are isolated from mainstream America as a result of lifestyle choices that are nobody’s business but their own. But add them all up, and they mean that the New Elite lives in a world that doesn’t intersect with mainstream America in many important ways. When the tea party says the New Elite doesn’t get America, there is some truth in the accusation.

We think there is a lot of truth in it. That this elite is isolated and ignorant as charged, could not be better demonstrated than by the vicious calumnies and petty sneers that its members (see the Murray article for who they are) direct at Sarah Palin (for examples go here): they are characterized by snobbery.

A point on which we wholly disagree with Murray is the very point which he says is not controversial. We do not agree that the elite he writes about is essentially new. He is speaking of an intellectual elite, a grandly educated elite. They marry among themselves so that they bequeath to their progeny not only money but also their superior genes. He gives figures to show that most of its members are planted firmly in the political left, but does not say that their leftism defines them: he names conservatives that belong among them too. The fault he finds with them all is that they are out of touch with ordinary people.

There have always been just such elites, and – with individual exceptions – they have probably always been out of touch with ordinary people. (Did Plato socialize with hoi poloi?) And they have always married among themselves.

What’s particularly dangerous about the present elite is precisely its predominant leftism. And that danger in such a class is not new. The important Austrian School economist Ludwig von Mises wrote in his book Socialism, which was first published in English in 1936:

The intellectuals, not the populace, are moulding public opinion. It is a lame excuse of the intellectuals that they must yield to the masses. They themselves have generated the socialist ideas and indoctrinated the masses with them. … The intellectual leaders of the peoples have produced and propagated the fallacies which are on the point of destroying liberty and Western civilization .

The intellectuals alone are responsible for the mass slaughters which are the characteristic mark of our [20th] century.

But he also writes that –

They alone can reverse the trend and pave the way for a resurrection of freedom.

Not mythical “material productive forces”, but reason and ideas determine the course of human affairs.

And he concludes with a statement that goes to the heart of our present predicament:

What is needed to stop the trend towards socialism and despotism is common sense and moral courage.

Both of which are plentifully possessed by Sarah Palin and the Tea Party.

There’s nothing wrong with an intellectual elite. We could not do without one. What is wrong with the one America’s got is that it is holds wrong opinions. Its members, or most of them, have not learnt the lessons of the 20th century. And that means that intellectuals though they be, they are not intelligent – a distinction which Thomas Sowell makes at the start of his book Intellectuals and Society:

The capacity to grasp and manipulate ideas is enough to define intellect, but not enough to encompass intelligence, which involves combining intellect with judgment and care in selecting relevant explanatory factors and in establishing empirical tests of any theory that emerges.

Socialism was empirically tested for decades in Soviet Russia and Maoist China, and is still being tested in impoverished Cuba and hungry North Korea, and if socialists (or “progressives”, or “redistributionists”, or “community organizers”) cannot draw a lesson from its utter failure to better the lot of mankind, they are  proving themselves not just unintelligent but dimwitted, or intentionally evil, or both.

We have a proposal to make that is sure to be greeted with universal approbation.

We start from the principle – not quite universally conceded – that the state should not be an agent for the redistribution of wealth. Which is to say, government should not be the provider of welfare.

But, we acknowledge, there will always be some people who cannot provide for themselves and have no one else willing and able to provide for them.

Then we ask: is there some institution other than the state that could manage their support?

We propose that the churches be charged with the responsibility. It would be splendidly consistent with their declared principles. They could collect money from the tens of millions of people who believe they have a duty to care for their less fortunate neighbors and compatriots.

As giving voluntarily is truer to the social consciences and religious precepts of these good people than having it extracted from them by government, with what delight they’ll seize the opportunity!

With the ample funds that will pour in from liberals, progressives, socialists and Christians, the churches will establish shelters for the homeless and clinics for the sick; feed, clothe and equip the helplessly dependent. They’ll be able to do it lavishly. Material want will be abolished.

They’ll take great pride and pleasure in doing it. Have they not been preaching charity for millennia? There they are, well established, thousands of them; organized, tax-exempted, self-dedicated to moral ends. This is clearly the use they must be put to. They’re a perfect fit for it.

Once the churches have permanently taken over all welfare provision, government can shrink, taxes come down, the defense budget be enlarged, and everyone will be happy.