The Separation of Ideology and State

Quite a few people in this country support the separation of Church and State, feeling that religion has no place in defining the role of the State. Yet, many of these same people have no problem forcing their own ideologies and beliefs of any other nature on others through the mechanism of government.

What’s the difference between the different religions and the different political ideologies of our day? Religions are old enough to base their righteousness in the idea of divine right. That’s all. In every other way, the different religions are not fundamentally different different types of belief than those various political factions that lead to our modern squabbles over the economy, over how people should live their lives. As time goes on and the major political parties take turns wielding the power of the State, we allow these ideologies and ways of life that we do not believe in to be imposed on us simply because they come from the will of 51% of the people. Is this right? Is it right for two neighbors to force the third to live as they do? Would you allow the majority religion of the country to force their beliefs on you? It would certainly be democratic, but is it liberty?

So I have a simple question to ask: Why don’t the people of this country drop the blatant contradictions in their beliefs and favor a total separation of Ideology and State? Stop using taxes and the power of the law to force others to live as you choose to live. Stop trying to force everyone in the country to support your favored programs. For liberty’s sake, just leave each other alone. The violent power of government should not be used for every goal you have in life. All it truly needs to be used for is defense against further imposition of violent power.

How can you favor the Separation of Church and state without also accepting the Separation of Ideology and State, unless your motives are duplicitous and hypocritical?

The Debt Cliff

A simple analogy for those trying to understand the debt ceiling debates:

The debt ceiling is a brick wall that we’re running towards. If we hit that brick wall, it will hurt. Hence, the Democrats want to break down that wall and remove it altogether so that we don’t run into it.

However, the Republicans understand something which the Democrats do not: that this brick wall blocks the path to a sheer cliff. The Republicans want to keep this wall up because of the far more severe pain we will experience if we run off the cliff. They see that the entire nation of Greece is painfully trying to climb back up this cliff, having run off the edge and been safely caught before the bottom in a net laid out by Germany. Unfortunately, no nation in the world can afford a net big enough to catch us if we take the plunge.

In the past, we’ve avoided the pain of running into the wall by breaking it down and rebuilding it further up the road. This will not help us when we run out of road. The only solution to avoid further pain is to simply stop running down this road. Though the Democrats blame the Republicans for leaving a brick wall up for us to run into, it is those same Democrats who keep us running towards it by protecting ever-growing entitlement spending, and who will run us right off the cliff edge in the absence of such a wall.

If this wasn’t clear enough, the road is the national debt, and the cliff edge is the point where our interest payments on our national debt become too large for the national budget to ever achieve a surplus again.

According to recent Congressional Budge Office models, we will officially hit that cliff edge in 2058, though that assumes that we’re willing to completely eliminate our military, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and just about every other government program in order to repay our debt. If we assume that a functioning military is more important than repaying our debts, then we’re going to hit that cliff in 2050. If we assume this, and that Social Security funds are untouchable because they’re owned by the people paying into the system, then we’re going to hit that cliff around 2034. With those assumptions in place, if we want to have even a single dollar available to fund Medicare and Medicaid, we better turn away from this cliff before 2026. And of course, in 2015 (just three years from now) we’re going to hit the point where it becomes exponentially more costly to steer away from the cliff every year.

Of course, all of these fiscal scenarios optimistically assume that our credit rating is never downgraded again, and that the government doesn’t add any additional spending to the current baseline scenarios. Basically, this is assuming that we don’t further speed up our run down the road, even though we have been accelerating faster than ever before under the current administration. The more realistic scenario is that all of those deadlines will approach far faster than is currently assumed.

Freedom Correlations, Part 1: Economic Freedom and State Failure

A significant portion of my political debates involve discussing the effects of libertarian-style economic freedom on a country’s well-being. This type of debate includes two major components: quantifying economic freedom and quantifying a country’s well-being. Measuring these quantities alone is a challenge in itself, but in order to really make an argument regarding their effects on each other, they must be measured independently, without having one measure create bias in the other. When looking at just one country’s policies and well-being, any number of historical events with any number of interpretations can be invoked to suggest that any of these measures are outliers. As an example, just think about how many different explanations there are regarding the causes of the 2007 global financial meltdown. Each different ideological group will adhere religiously to their own explanation, and reject all others. In order to get past all of these political games, we need to find a way to look at every country at once, averaging out the effects of historical anomalies and coincidences. Only if we find a way to do this, can we truly evaluate the general effects of economic freedom on the well-being of countries without politically biased interpretations of events getting in the way. I believe that I have found a set of indices that makes this possible.

I. The Indices

I’ve often referred to the Heritage Index of Economic Freedom, which tries to quantify how “economically free” a country is. Their index is compiled from a purely capitalist perspective, which may lead those who operate from a socialist perspective to reject their ordering as a measure of “true freedom.” However, what we can say is that their index is a great measure of how closely the policies of various countries adhere to the capitalist libertarian vision of economic freedom. This excludes any direct description of non-economic personal freedoms. Their scoring system is broken down into 10 categories:

1. Rule of Law
-Property Rights: The extent to which a country’s laws protect the right of individuals to acquire and keep private property.
-Freedom from Corruption: The extent to which a country’s people perceive their government to be free from corruption.

2. Limited Government
-Fiscal Freedom: A measure of how low the tax burden is upon the people.
-Government Spending: A measure of how little of the GDP the government spends.

3. Regulatory Efficiency
-Business Freedom: A measure of how easy it is to start, operate, and close a business in the country’s regulatory framework.
-Labor Freedom: A measure of the absence of regulations on employers’ hiring, use, and firing of employees.
-Monetary Freedom: A measure of the stability of prices, and the absence of government control of prices.

4. Open Markets
-Trade Freedom: A measure of the absence of tariffs, and other government-imposed barriers to international trade.
-Investment Freedom: A measure of how little the government controls investment activities, and the flow of investment resources.
-Financial Freedom: A measure of the independence of banks from government control.

Again, I’d like to emphasize that I’m not asking anyone to assume that these measures are an objective way of measuring freedom. The Heritage Foundation’s index is clearly a measure of how closely a country’s policies adhere to a minarchist libertarian’s view of economic freedom. The higher a country’s score on the index, the more that country’s economic laws and governmental activities follow the libertarian view of individual liberty, avoiding government activism, socialism, technocracy, and other forms of centralization of economic control. It is this description that I will be referring to when I talk about economic freedom throughout the remainder of this series. According to this description, Hong Kong has the world’s most economic freedom with a score of 89.9, and the United States is down at #10 with a score of 76.3. The country with the least economic freedom (that’s fully ranked and scored)¹ is Zimbabwe.

So what effects do these policies have on a country’s well-being? A socialist or progressive or technocrat would argue that these policies would destroy a country by making the poor poorer and the rich richer, destroying a country’s foundations. They say that Hong Kong and Singapore can only prosper with such policies because they’re so small, making them outliers. But a libertarian or conservative or capitalist would disagree, saying that these forms of economic freedom allow for the investment, competition, and innovation that make a country grow and prosper. So how do we resolve these differences and ferret out the effects on a country’s well-being of the economic policies originating from these two different perspectives?

Well, I found another index out there which takes an entirely different approach to ranking countries. The Fund for Peace Failed States Index tries to quantify the extent to which a country has failed and collapsed based purely on symptomatic observation of the conditions people live in under the various governments of the world. Their mission is humanitarian rather than ideological, so their scoring system is based purely on an observation of the components of a failed state (things that nobody wants to end up with), and the extent to which each country has experienced those symptoms. Their scores are also broken down into a number of categories:

1. Social Indicators
-Demographic Pressures: The extent to which a population suffers from hazards beyond their own immediate control, such as natural disasters, scarcity, and environmental degradation.
-Refugees and Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs): The magnitude of the problems associated with populations being removed from their homes, creating refugees.
-Group Grievance: The extent of tension between different factional groups (racial, ethnic, religious, etc.), in the form of discrimination or violence.
-Human Flight and Brain Drain: A measure of the net emigration of the populace, especially the emigration of educated individuals.

2. Economic Indicators
-Uneven Economic Development: The extent of disparities and inequality in income, wealth, and economic opportunities among different groups.
-Poverty and Economic Decline: A measure of how severely a country suffers from economic recession, inflation, high public debt, unemployment, and other indicators of economic decline.

3. Political and Military Indicators
-State Legitimacy: The extent to which a government fails to represent its citizens through corruption, power struggles, or disenfranchising votes.
-Public Services: A measure of the effectiveness and prevalence of the infrastructure that most governments provide as public services, including police, fire, communications, transportation services, and others.
-Human Rights and Rule of Law: The extent to which a government violates human rights through deprivation of civil liberties, arbitrary exercise of the law, or cruel and disproportionate punishment.
-Security Apparatus: The level of militarized internal conflict, and the number of fatalities that result.
-Factionalized Elites: A measure of political entrenchment, brinksmanship, and other tactics that make real political change impossible.
-External Intervention: The extent to which a country has failed to meet its international obligations, leading to foreign intervention in their affairs.

The Failed State Index does not measure policy. It directly measures reports of how far a country has progressed towards failure, in terms of establishing a stable legal framework, protecting the people, and ensuring their prosperity. With such a comprehensive description of the factors involved in the collapse of a country, this index acts as an appropriate measure of a country’s well-being. Somalia gains the #1 spot in state failure, with a score of 114.9, while Finland comes in last place at #177 (in the game where you want to lose) with a score of 20.0. The United States sits at #159, with a failure score of 34.8.

II. Correlations in the Overall Rankings and Scores

In the Heritage Index of Economic Freedom, we have a good measure of how extensively countries adhere to the policies of libertarian-style economic freedom, and in the Failed State Index, we have a direct measure of various conditions that describe the well-being of countries. So if we can find any correlations between these two scoring systems, then we can determine the extent to which certain policies may create the conditions of a failed state. Though we must be careful not to say that correlation necessarily implies causation, we can certainly say that the stronger the correlation, the more closely a policy is related to the condition.

To elaborate, there are three scenarios that may be implied by a generalized correlation between a policy and a condition:
1. The policy caused the condition.
2. The condition leads countries to adopt this policy.
3. Some external factor leads both to the condition and the adoption of a policy.

No country is absolutely bound to legislate policy based on the conditions it experiences. In other words, while a policy can directly cause a condition, a condition can only indirectly cause a policy to be implemented, by exerting pressure on whatever legislative process a country uses. Thus, we would necessarily see stronger correlations in scenario #1 than in scenarios #2 and #3. Hence, we can say that the stronger the correlation observed, the more likely it is that the policy directly causes the condition, rather than any indirect relationship occurring between the policy and the condition. Using this standard, we can distinguish relationships that describe the direct effects of a policy from other types of relationships that may pop up.

With this evaluation standard in mind, I’ve plotted every available² country on a graph comparing their Failed State rankings to their Economic Freedom rankings (Figure 1).

Figure 1: The correlation between Economic Freedom rank and Failed State rank. Each data point represents a country. The highest rank is 1.

As can be seen in Figure 1, there definitely is some sort of correlation between economic freedom ranking and state failure ranking. A linear fit can be applied to the data with an R-squared value of 0.55 and a slope of -0.731. This is a fairly strong, negative correlation, indicating there is indeed a relationship between these two rankings. Based on this data, we cannot be 100% certain that every component of economic freedom prevents state failure, but we can at least say that economic freedom clearly is not the cause of state failure.

Because of the high R-squared value, there must be at least some influence from economic freedom that prevents state failure. No nation with less economic freedom than Slovenia (Economic Freedom rank #69) has managed to avoid failure better than Italy or Argentina (tied Failed State rank #145). Additionally, no nation with more economic freedom than Jordan (Economic Freedom rank #30) has ended up failing worse than Cyprus (Failed State rank #119). For every 10 ranks a country drops in economic freedom, you can expect them to go up about 7 ranks in state failure. Interestingly, between 2008 and 2012, the US has dropped 5 ranks in economic freedom, and gone up 2 ranks in state failure, whereas the linear fit would predict an increase in failed state status of 3 or 4 ranks. The predictive power there is not bad, though not perfectly accurate.

One source of error in predicting the trends a country will follow is the fact that each ranking is a measure relative to every other country, rather than an absolute measure. So, if a country is improving or worsening their economic freedom or state failure, they may remain at the same rank if the countries surrounding them in the ranking are moving in the same direction. To account for this error, we can plot the countries based on their absolute Economic Freedom and Failed State scores, rather than their rankings (Figure 2).

Figure 2: The correlation between Economic Freedom score and Failed State score with a linear fit.

Even if we look at the raw scores, there still appears to be a correlation. With a linear fit, the R-squared value is about the same, at 0.53, and the slope is -1.54. The data appears better grouped, but the similar R-squared value comes as a result of some bias in the residuals. Instead of a linear fit, a sigmoid might fit better (Figure 3).

Figure 3: The correlation between Economic Freedom score and Failed State score with a Boltzmann sigmoidal fit.

Indeed, a sigmoid curve fits the data comparing freedom and failure scores far better, with an R-squared value of 0.61. The correlation is apparently very negative, with a loss in 15 freedom points translating into a gain of over 40 state failure points in the steepest part of the curve. No country with a freedom score higher than 76 has a failure score higher than 45. Additionally, no country with a freedom score lower than 48 has a failure score lower than 67. With such a reliable negative relationship between economic freedom and state failure, this now appears to be a strong enough correlation to establish causation.

If a country’s freedom score drops below 76, they will end up in severe danger of rapidly climbing in state failure score. Countries with an economic freedom score as low as 70 already span nearly the entire spectrum of state failure, including failure scores from 20 to 85. Ominously, the United States currently has a freedom score of 76.3, putting this country right at the edge of the cliff of rapid state failure. Perhaps this observation relates to the general perception that the U.S. is headed towards decline. The curve fit predicts the U.S. state failure score to be about 34.96, and the actual state failure score is 34.8. The U.S. economic freedom score has dropped more than 4 points over the last 4 years, increasing its failed state score from 32.8 (predicted: 30.3). So far, this correlative model is very accurately predicting the trajectory of the United States as it abandons policies of economic freedom, putting this country on pace to be worse off than Spain by the end of a second Obama term, worse off than Greece and Kuwait within 10 years, worse off than Cuba, Mexico, and Vietnam within just 15 years, worse off than Israel and Madagascar in 20 years, and putting us among the worst failed states in the world within just 25 years.

I would hope that Americans would remember their heritage of liberty and stop this decline before we get far enough along to consider ourselves equal to any of the above-mentioned countries in well-being. But before this decline can be prevented, Americans need to recognize how great of an effect economic liberty has on our lives. We cannot continue to function as a successful, developed nation if we continue electing politicians who publicly disparage the principles of liberty, equating economic freedom with an attack on the poor. As the data presented here shows, it simply is not true that economic freedom creates poor social conditions, and in fact, the opposite appears to be true. If we favor the principles and policies of economic freedom, we will gain prosperity as a country. Australia (89.1, 23.2), New Zealand (82.1, 25.6), and Switzerland (81.1, 23.3) appear to have learned this lesson, so why can’t we?

I will be continuing this analysis in Part 2 of the series, with an analysis of how the subcategories of Heritage’s Economic Freedom measures correlate with State Failure.

Footnotes
1. North Korea is included in the ranking, but is not fully scored. Afghanistan, Iraq, Liechtenstein, Sudan, and Somalia are not ranked due to the difficulty of obtaining reliable data.
2. Countries were excluded if and only if data was not available from one of the two indices.

The Dictatorship Begins on Jan. 1st, 2014

On January 1st, 2014, the Individual Mandate contained within ObamaCare goes into effect. This mandate will make a dictator out of the US President overnight.

I do not make this claim lightly. For a power being granted to a leader to be considered dictatorial, there are three requirements that must be fulfilled:
The power must give absolute power to one individual.
The power must be totalitarian in scope.
The power must be irrevocable.

Absolute Power for One Individual

When the Individual Mandate goes into effect, all Americans will be required to purchase “proper” health insurance plans, or will be forced to pay a tax. All health insurance companies will be forced to only offer “proper” plans to their customers. It will be considered illegal to offer an insurance plan that is not considered “proper.”

So you ask, what’s wrong with proper insurance? There’s a catch: The Secretary of Health and Human Services has sole authoritative power to determine the contents and requirements of a “proper health insurance plan.” The Secretary of Health and Human Services (currently Kathleen Sebelius) reports directly to the President, must follow all of his Executive Orders, and can be fired by him at any time, so that he can appoint a new one of his choice.

In other words, the President maintains a dictatorship over the definition of the “proper health insurance plans” that we are all forced to buy. The President can also force health insurance companies to boycott any health care providers (doctors and hospitals) that try to cater to individuals who choose not to buy health insurance. They already use this method to force health care providers to offer major discounts to Medicare patients, and they could easily use this method to prevent those resisting the Individual Mandate from obtaining any form of health care at all.

So the choice we all end up with is: buy one of these “proper” health insurance plans defined by the President, or be punished through the complete deprivation of health care. This is the enforcement mechanism.

Totalitarian in Scope

But this only affects health care, and health care is special, right?

Wrong. There is no legal requirement in the ObamaCare law that the definition of a “proper health insurance plan” must only include measures relating to health care. Already, Obama has declared that every health insurance plan must provide contraception, which is only as relevant to health as our choice of food, car, home, or any other choices we make in our lives.

The President can easily decree any other purchasing mandate, requiring us to buy a GM car, or buy broccoli, or buy houses in specific areas, or buy certain newspapers, or subscribe to a propaganda newsletter touting the president’s achievements, or join a union. The President can also use his power over insurance coverage to retaliate against groups who do not support him. For instance, the President might put clause in your insurance plan that states that you lose coverage for some number of conditions if you buy a gun, or spend too much money supporting his opponent, or live in a wealthy neighborhood.

From a legal perspective, this law gives the President the totalitarian power to force any activity, or punish any activity, under the threat of loss of health care. All he has to do is say that it’s a part of your insurance plan (which would rapidly lose all relation to health care other than through its enforcement mechanism).

Irrevocable Power

What about the separation of powers? Checks and balances? Congress has already surrendered its power by delegating the power to define “proper” insurance plans to the President’s appointees. The Supreme Court has already taken a whack at this law, and bizarrely ruled the Individual Mandate constitutional so long as it only makes use of economic incentives, rather than prison sentences to enforce its goals. But of course, those economic incentives can be just as damaging as prison sentences. The only branch of government that has the power to stop this law from becoming a dictatorship is the Executive Branch. Only the dictator can prevent the dictatorship (or a 2/3rds majority in both houses of Congress to override vetoes, but that’s the stuff of legend). The separation of powers and all the checks and balances have been thwarted.

As humans have learned throughout history, once a leader gains dictatorial power, it is extremely difficult to remove him, even if he is subjected to periodic elections. Under a dictatorship, information is controlled, and political opponents are destroyed, as in Fascist Italy or Nazi Germany. The means of production are given to political allies, and elections are stolen, as in Mugabe’s Zimbabwe and Chavez’s Venezuela. The citizens may even begin to worship their leaders out of a sense of dependence, as in Stalin’s Soviet Union, Maoist China, and North Korea.

Our only hope for avoiding dictatorship is to get ObamaCare repealed before January 1st, 2014. Obama will not do it. If we cannot remove Obama from office, either in the November election, or through impeachment prior to 2014, the United States government will become a dictatorship.

If you’ve been wondering what would drive a libertarian like myself to support a conservative like Mitt Romney, this is why. After the Supreme Court upheld ObamaCare, the gravity of the situation became clear: it’s all on us to pick the right president. Unlike Gary Johnson, Romney can beat Obama, and unlike Obama, he has pledged to repeal ObamaCare. Certainly, there is always the chance that Romney is lying and would keep ObamaCare. But if he does, he loses the support of his base, and the legendary 2/3rds majority in Congress may manifest and repeal the dictatorial powers over his veto.

This is our last chance. We, the People of the United States, must remove Barack Obama from office in order to save our freedom from an untimely death.

I did build this.

For those who don’t understand, or think it’s all a matter of context, allow me to explain what is so offensive about Obama’s statements.

What Obama said cuts very deep for a lot of people. It is a very personal attack to tell someone that they only succeeded because somebody else helped them. That’s basically saying that you don’t deserve the success you received, because you didn’t do it yourself. Of course, that’s exactly what Obama wants to say, because in that speech, he’s explicitly making an argument in favor of taking more money from the successful to pay for more government-controlled “investments.”

Obama has made this personal by using his bully pulpit to attack the achievements of every single individual in this country. And we all know he’s wrong, because each of us knows what it took to achieve the success that we have. I didn’t get into a PhD program just riding on somebody else’s coattails. Certainly, I received plenty of help, from my friends, from my family, from my teachers, even from the government. And I know I couldn’t have done it without them, and am eternally grateful for all of that. But it was still my own hard work, focus, and perseverance that made the difference and got me to my goals. As a scientist, I spend every day struggling to elucidate the intricacies of systems that nobody else in the world understands. Every time I make a breakthrough, that is a great personal achievement. And yet, Obama doesn’t think so.

That is why Obama’s statements were so very insulting. That is why Obama’s entire economic philosophy is an insult. Obama believes that success comes in the form of five year plans and Sputnik projects for the glory of a nation. But we are not just cogs in some productivity machine that he runs. We are all individuals, and we all have our own individual goals and achievements. Collective success comes from the contributions of individuals, not the other way around. I don’t want to live in a country where I am a servant to the nation. I want to live in a country that secures the freedom for me to achieve my goals, and lets me help society in the way I feel I am best suited to.

Barack Obama, the Communist

Certainly, everyone has someone to thank for helping them get to where they are. As Isaac Newton once said, “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” However, we still give Newton credit for his work. Certainly, others laid the foundation that Newton built off of, but he still pushed mathematics and physics to, at the time, unimaginable heights. Nikola Tesla, Albert Einstein, and Richard Feynman can claim similar distinctions. For that, we recognize them as geniuses.

We can apply this sentiment to other fields of science as well- Linus Pauling won the Nobel Prize (twice- once in Chemistry, and once in Peace) for his contributions. We don’t offer the Nobel Prize to the people who started the project- we offer it to the person who found the answer and finished it. That’s why Watson and Crick were so excited when they beat Pauling to the finish in elucidating the structure of DNA.

And this sentiment extends to the business world. We give patents and the accompanying profits to the person who actually develops something useful for us, not to the people who tried, but didn’t get quite far enough. We can extend this concept to every human endeavor: People deserve credit for what they offer to society. This is a fundamental aspect of morality, and is the defining feature of Capitalism.

And yet, not everyone agrees. Notably, just last night, President Obama said, “If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.” He’s taking a page out of the Communist Manifesto by declaring that Society deserves credit for all of your accomplishments, and you don’t. This is consistent with his previous statements that, despite the weak economy, “The private sector is doing fine. Where we’re seeing weaknesses in our economy have to do with state and local government.” This also matches the sentiments expressed when he said, “I do think at a certain point you’ve made enough money.”

These statements should offend anyone who believes that individuals deserve credit for their own accomplishments. Barack Obama’s rhetoric speaks towards a complete rejection of Capitalism altogether. He will continue to lie and pay lip service to Capitalism when it’s demanded of him. But it’s clear that his view of individual accomplishment is purely a Communist one.

Keeping Track of Obama’s Attacks on Liberty and Fiscal Sanity

I recently had someone on the forums ask, “Why do you think Obama is such a bad president?”

Well let’s see…

• Obama wasted over a trillion dollars on a failed stimulus based in an economic hypothesis that was already discredited in the 1970′s.
• He used additional taxpayer money to prop up his own personal investments (such as Solyndra), which later failed spectacularly.
• He pushed through and passed a monstrous law giving his health secretary Kathleen Sebelius absolute dictatorial control over the health care services in this country, while raising costs for all Americans.
• He has kept the budget deficit above $1 trillion because his socialist sentiments have led him to refuse to cut any sort of spending or government programs.
• He has maintained a crusade against the job-creators and innovators in this country, threatening them with higher taxes and greater regulation at every turn.
• He has altered the patent system to give patent rights to the first-to-file the patent application for a thing, as opposed to the first to invent the thing.
• He signed the “Food Safety Modernization Act,” converting the FDA from an organization that levies fines against food safety violators to an organization that actively micromanages and harasses food producers, defining the procedures they must use. Under this law, hundreds of Amish farms were raided by regulators in SWAT gear with assault weapons, all for the “crime” of selling raw milk and raw honey.
• He nationalized the student loan industry, confiscating student loans from banks so that students in debt now owe the Department of Education. Students who have missed payments recently have been raided by regulators in SWAT gear with assault weapons (notice a trend here?).
• He has encouraged his Federal Reserve Chairman to continue printing money, even as inflation in necessary goods that all Americans must buy, such as food and gas, soars above 8%.
• He has refused to reform Social Security, which continues to grow exponentially in costs.
• His head of the Department of Justice, Eric Holder, sold thousands of fully automatic assault weapons to Mexican druglords in a failed sting operation (Operation Fast and Furious) while arguing for greater gun restrictions on US citizens. He lied about his role in overseeing this operation, yet still holds his job.
• He has inflamed racial tensions, crying “Racism!” against anyone who is critical of his authoritarian socialism.
• Obama has violated numerous court orders, and was actually held in contempt of court for his defiance in maintaining his illegal ban on oil drilling.
• He continues to fancy himself a dictator, contemptuous of constitutional restrictions on his power, openly admiring the way the People’s Republic of China keeps their citizens submissive to the State…

This is just what comes to mind off the top of my head. There’s certainly plenty of room to expand this list and provide more details.

Social Darwinism in the GOP?

According to the San Francisco Chronicle, “if one of the current crop of Republican hopefuls becomes president, Social Darwinism is back.”

Okay, I think a history lesson is in order. The claim in this article is that Social Darwinism consists of the belief that “life was a competitive struggle in which only the fittest could survive – and through this struggle, societies became stronger over time.” But wait a second- that’s natural selection, not Social Darwinism. There’s a world of difference between the statistical inevitability that is natural selection and the social philosophy that is Social Darwinism.

Natural selection happens whether you like it or not, adapting populations to survive as efficiently as possible. If you create a society that lets individuals survive without doing any work, then very few individuals will do work and that society will collapse.

On the other hand, Social Darwinism is a philosophy which suggests that society should actively seek out and destroy the elements considered “weak” or “inefficient.” Who makes that judgement? Generally, the government. Social Darwinism is a philosophy of letting the government pick winners and losers, NOT the philosophy of letting societies naturally evolve towards adaptability.

For example, consider Nazi Germany. How do we envision Hitler’s version of Social Darwinism? Was Hitler a proponent of laissez-faire policies, giving people the liberty to make their own choices and live with the results? No, of course not! Hitler was a totalitarian who usurped the power for his own administration to decide who gets to succeed (or even survive) based on their own narrow judgements of who deserves it. Hitler was no free-market advocate, and free-market advocates are no Social Darwinists.

So if you want to find the Social Darwinists, look for the politicians who are trying to give government the power to arbitrarily pick winners and losers according to the judgements of appointed bureaucrats, rather than letting people make their own fortune in an unbiased market. Can you think of anyone who this description fits? I’ll give you a hint: it starts with “O” and ends with “bama.”

Here’s what Obama is gonna do if he stays for 4 more years

He will continue doing much of what he’s done for the last 2.5 years. That means:

More indefensible bureaucratic expansion. [link]
More regulation of company mobility to prevent profitable enterprises from fleeing Democratic majority states to search for more freedom elsewhere. [link]
More economic failure, leading to Carter-style stagflation. [link]
More debt growth, as he resists all attempts to steer the country away from an imminent Greek-style crash. [link]
More moralistic nationalization, enforced through militarization of the US police forces, pushing us towards a Soviet-style police state. [link] [link] [link]
More corrupt abuses of executive power, bordering on illegality. [link] [link] [link]

If you want to continue these disturbing trends, to disregard liberty in favor of a Soviet-style socialist nation under a government with totalitarian control over your personal life and endeavors, then by all means, vote for Obama in 2012. But if you want change- economic recovery and the restoration of the values of liberty -then for your own sake, vote against the Democrats!

Obama is Actively Holding Back the Economy

In order to secure reelection, Obama will have to argue that the economy would’ve been worse without his policies. He will argue extensively that no matter how bad things are, they would’ve been worse without him. However, that’s not what the data shows.

As you can see, the natural growth of the economy normally results in a strong growth trajectory following a big crash. This can be attributed to the fact that no technology is lost, and the efficient market hypothesis should lead to oscillation around a constant exponential growth trajectory, as shown in the first graph. This pattern even appears throughout the Great Depression.

However, in our current economic depression, we haven’t had that bounce-back they way we naturally should. You’ll notice in the second graph that recovery began in 1st Quarter, FY2009 (which is actually Oct. 1st 2008 through Dec. 31st 2008). A strong growth curve continues through 4th Quarter FY2009 (ending in September 2009). But then it stops. What happened?

Was it because the stimulus ended? Well, no, the majority of the stimulus money was spent throughout 2010. Yet, growth was stagnant throughout 2010. So the argument that “the stimulus just wasn’t big enough” really doesn’t match the data.

With the worst economic recovery in the history of the country upon us, this data makes it very clear that Obama’s economic policies have actively hindered economic growth to an extent never seen before under any previous president. No Republican or Democrat has held back economic growth as severely as Obama. He must be removed from office and his policies must be repealed if we want to see economic growth return to this country. Think about this when it comes time to vote in the 2012 elections.