Tag: liberty

Why the West is best

“Western values are superior to all others. Why? The indispensable achievement of the West was the concept of individual rights. It’s the idea that individuals have certain inalienable rights and individuals do not exist to serve government but governments exist to protect these inalienable rights. It took until the 17th century for that idea to arrive on the scene and mostly through the works of English philosophers such as John Locke and David Hume.

“While Western values are superior to all others, one need not be a Westerner to hold Western values. A person can be Chinese, Japanese, Jewish, African or Arab and hold Western values. It’s no accident that Western values of reason and individual rights have produced unprecedented health, life expectancy, wealth and comfort for the ordinary person. There’s an indisputable positive relationship between liberty and standards of living.

“Western values are by no means secure. They’re under ruthless attack by the academic elite on college campuses across America. These people want to replace personal liberty with government control; they want to replace equality with entitlement; they want to halt progress in the name of protecting the environment. As such, they pose a much greater threat to our way of life than any terrorist or rogue nation. Multiculturalism and diversity are a cancer on our society, and, ironically, with our tax dollars and charitable donations, we’re feeding it.” —Walter Williams

Freedom without faith?

“It is vitally important that we recognize that there is a law higher than that of the state or the will of the majority. There is a higher law than that which springs from the fallible minds of men. This law, insofar as it has been revealed to us and can be ascertained through reason, is the basis of our natural rights. While many people look at the long and horrific history of religious wars and the lethal violence of religious fanaticism, so woefully evident in our own age, and see religion as a threat to liberty, the Founders of our republic understood that God was the ultimate source of our liberty.

“…By the standards of those who file lawsuits to remove Christmas displays from government buildings–or to remove the phrase ‘under God’ from the Pledge of Allegiance–the very people who framed and ratified the First Amendment they appeal to were guilty of creating some kind of theocracy. Of course, the constitutional republic of our Founders was nothing of the sort. A system based on God-given rights does not inherently deny the rights of an unbeliever anymore than we deny the rights of a socialist to own private property or profit from the free-market economy.

“The acknowledgement that human beings and the institutions they create are imperfect acknowledges the imperfections of professing Christians and members of other religious traditions. The idea that government powers should be limited, defined and divided acts as a check against all potential tyrants and offers protection to all potential victims. Forgetting the link between faith and freedom leaves all our liberty less secure.” —W. James Antle III

I couldn’t agree more

“We were hoping for a big and bold tax cut from President Bush and, by George, we got one. Yesterday Mr. Bush drew a bead on the twin shibboleths of bad tax policy–the fear of budget deficits and of benefiting middle- and upper-income workers–and pulled the trigger.”

[…]

“The President deserves credit for ignoring all of the Beltway trimmers and risking the political capital he won in November in pursuit of a large policy ambition. His proposal is one worth fighting for.”

[…]

“Mr. Bush’s proposal would reduce tax revenue over the next decade, though far less if the growth effects are figured in. And the possibility has already brought out the flock of self-styled ‘deficit hawks.’ Pay no attention. Currently the budget deficit is 1.5% of GDP and projections for the next year or so are around 2%. These figures amount to a whole lot of nothing both in historical terms and when compared with the potential growth of the economy.”

[…]

“The notion put forward by the deficit hawks that this will send interest rates to the sky and the economy six feet under is deeply silly. Deficits are the result of weak or negative economic growth, not the other way around. The best way to close a deficit is through strong economic growth.”

[…]

“Mr. Bush is offering, on balance, an excellent program to prevent the economy from weakening amid the short-term uncertainties of war and expensive oil. And by wringing out some of the tax barriers to economic efficiency, he is also creating the conditions for better long-term growth. A bull’s-eye, for sure.”

—The Wall Street Journal

Let’s be honest with Saddam

“There is no safety for honest men except by believing all possible evil of evil men.” —Edmund Burke

Copyright Call to Arms

Lawrence Lessig delivered “Free Culture” in July 2002 at the Open Source Convention. If you read nothing else that I post here about copyright and your constitutionally-ordained fair-use rights, read this.

And if you don’t want to actually read this transcript, think on this, from Lessig:

  • Creativity and innovation always builds on the past.
  • The past always tries to control the creativity that builds upon it.
  • Free societies enable the future by limiting this power of the past.
  • Ours is less and less a free society.

Tax cut lies

Thursday night, ABC, CBS, NBC and CNBC all decided to subtly berate President Bush’s upcoming economic stimulus package, which will include tax cuts. From the Media Research Center:

ABC anchor Elizabeth Vargas worried: “President Bush will roll out more tax cuts, but will they benefit everyone?” On CBS, Bill Plante noted how President Bush “brushed aside the debate over whether his tax policy favors the rich” and that Bush’s tax cut package set to be unveiled on Tuesday will “very likely” include “the very top tax rate despite the criticism that that will disproportionately benefit the wealthiest taxpayers.” CNBC anchor Forrest Sawyer intoned that it’s “a package that critics are already saying is not enough and helps the wrong people.” NBC’s David Gregory noted how Bush insists his tax cuts “are not simply a giveaway to the rich.” NBC’s Tom Brokaw stated that President Bush insisted his “plan to fix a struggling economy” will “help all Americans–not just the wealthy.”

To the blowhard talking heads and other tax-and-spend leftists: it’s very hard to give tax breaks to people who are paying very little, if any, taxes. What the talking heads fail to mention is that from the IRS’s own records, we learn that in 2000, the bottom 50 percent of wage-earning Americans, those earning less than $27,682 annually, paid under 4 percent of the taxes. They paid 3.91 percent of the federal tax burden, to be exact. These are the people that need a tax break?

Contrast that with the top 5 percent of wage earners ($128,336), which paid 56.47 percent! And the top 50 percent of wage earners in the country paid the 96.09 percent that the bottom 50 didn’t, and still doesn’t, have to come up with.

To the point, half of the wage earners in this country pay nearly all the federal taxes, while the other half pays next to nothing.

So the economic lesson for today, boys and girls, is that if you’re poor in America, you’re paying very little, if any, federal taxes, and any proposed tax cuts are not going to impact you negatively. Therefore, talking heads need to stop instigating class warfare and shut their traps.

All along the watchtower

“But a Constitution of Government once changed from Freedom, can never be restored. Liberty, once lost, is lost forever.” —John Adams

“A group of people may have rights, but it is their responsibility, and theirs alone, to defend or safeguard such rights.” —Murray N. Rothbard

Protect Fair Use

A new site has appeared, protectfairuse.org. I encourage you to check it out. They make it easy for you to email and print letters to send to your Congresscritters regarding protection of your fair use rights.

Safer in Afghanistan than in Montgomery

Exercising the Second Amendment right he defends every day through his service, Marine Sergeant James Lowery shot and killed a would-be carjacker last Thursday, after being wounded himself. Sergeant Lowery is in fair condition, and will rejoin his unit, an aerial tanker squardon, upon his release from the hospital.

About those poor Iraqi civilians. . .

A lot has been said and written in the past few months regarding the fate of the Iraqi civilian population in the event of a U.S.-led attack on Saddam Hussein. Many charges have been laid at the foot of the Bush administration that the White House doesn’t care about the Iraqi people, or what they think. Many of these “journalists” have argued that the Iraqi people are fine with the current regime, and are utterly opposed to a U.S.-led invasion. Oh, really?

The Brussels-based International Crisis Group has released a white paper on the results of anonymous, on-the-street interviews conducted with Iraqi citizens in Baghdad, Mosul and Najaf. And I, quite happily, quote:

“A significant number of those Iraqis interviewed, with surprising candour, expressed their view that, if such a change required an American-led attack, they would support it.”

and

“Few Iraqis opposed an invasion for patriotic reasons or fear that an attack would lead to heavy civilian casualties.”

Granted, and understandably so:

“It should not be assumed from this that such support as might exist for a U.S. operation is unconditional. It appears to be premised on the belief both that any such military action would be quick and clean and that it would be followed by a robust international reconstruction effort. Should either of these prove untrue–if the war proved to be bloody and protracted or if Iraq lacked sufficient assistance afterwards–the support in question may well not be very long sustained.”

Now, everybody sing! “All the world over, so easy to see; people everywhere, just want to be free. . .”