The following is a summary of the April 2009 issue of the St. Croix Review:

In the editorial, "Breathtaking Duplicity," Barry MacDonald discovers the character of the new president in the tactics he employed to pass the economic stimulus package in February.

Lieutenant John Morris describes a "beehive" of activity, as a military unit trains for war in "The Red Bulls Are Busy at North Fort Lewis."

In "'Only Government Can . . . '?-- Parsing Obama's Speech on the Economy," Mark Hendrickson looks at history and sees poor results for government intervention; in "Love the Economic Pain!" he looks at the selfishness and ruthlessness behind Obama's chief of staff's remarks; in "Team Obama: Ready to Rock 'n' Roll," he profiles the president's cabinet choices and sees trouble ahead; in "Tough Times for Wise Virgins," he uses a parable from Matthew to demonstrate how Obama will punish the prudent and reward the improvident; in "Assessing the Presidency of George W. Bush," he notes the former president's courage and failings.

In "Did President Bush Lie?" Herbert London reveals that "a huge stockpile" of "natural uranium" was taken out of Iraq and entered Canada, and the U.S. media has mainly ignored the story; in "Transformative Change," he sees wealth creation lose, and socialism gain in America; in "The American Exceptionalism Debate," he rebuts a British author who promotes "American Declinism"; in "Terrorists Returning to the Battlefield," he asserts that is better to hold on to the detainees at Guantanamo after the prison closes; in "Aid and Radical Islam," he writes that it is folly to believe militant Islamists can be bought off with Western cash.

In "Pay-for-Play in Illinois and Business as Usual in Washington: How Different Are They in Reality?" Allan Brownfeld exposes the everyday corruption of big-government.

John Sparks, in "The Employee Intimidation Act," explains the Obama administration's plan to take away an employee's right to a secret ballot when voting on whether to join a union.

In "Fed" Up? Money Lessons for 2009," Lee Wishing writes about the Federal Reserve, inflation, economic warfare during the Civil War, and a possible new type of bond to finance debt.

In "Freedom Works: Speaker Pelosi's Teachable Moment," Paul Kengor shows the reasons why collectivist Democrats seek to limit population growth.

Thomas Martin writes on education and slavery in "Einstein on Independent Thought."

In "The New York Times, the Watchdogs, and the Crusade to Destroy the Immigration Reform Movement," Elizabeth Wright exposes the underhanded methods of the Left.

In "The Amazing Story Behind the Global Warming Scam," John Coleman traces the origin of the uproar over CO2 emissions to a few opportunistic men.

Harry Neuwirth, in "The Essence of Liberty," considers how Americans have lost our appreciation for liberty, and what we must do to regain it.

In "Herman Melville (1819-91) -- Our Greatest Novelist -- Our Keenest Critic," Jigs Gardner writes about the rise and decline of the author of Moby Dick.

Harry Neuwirth

Harry Neuwirth writes from Salem, Oregon.

"Civilizations die from suicide, not Murder" --Arnold Toynbee

Consider the difficulty of authoring a declaration of war that had, simultaneously, to inspire the allegiance of non-citizens of a non-nation on foreign shores. We are justifiably proud of our Declaration of Independence but perhaps do not appreciate the audacity of its vision, the difficulties inherent in its adoption, or the importance of preserving its objectives along with those of the Constitution.

The Declaration at the beginning claims for mankind "that they are endowed by their Creator with . . . Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness." But it is clear that being endowed with these rights was never enough as history eloquently attests, revealing only anemic glimpses of liberty in the old world along with broad vistas of suppression and discomfort as the visible record of mankind's pursuit of happiness. That any joy appeared at all in the narrative of those lives is testimony to the intrinsic courage and joyousness of mankind. But the loose knit alliance of immigrants on the western shore of the Atlantic needed to embrace this insolent Declaration if they were to be freed of British monarchy to become fully "endowed."

When Thomas Jefferson composed the Declaration he wasn't simply expressing the intent of the committee on which he served, nor even that of the second Continental Congress, but was creating a document that must rally his countrymen to rise up and "dissolve the political bands which have connected them" with Great Britain; a document that had to serve as an inspiring declaration asserting that "the Representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress. . . . publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be, Free and Independent States . . . are absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown . . . "

A careful reading of the second paragraph of the Declaration reveals ambiguities, not the least of which is that it was not only declarative, but persuasive as well. It surely was no secret to the Jefferson's committee that these were not united colonies, but restive sovereignties whose citizens needed to be persuaded, quickly, to unify with their neighbors to legitimize the claims of the Declaration; that the claim of the committee to be functioning "by Authority of the good People of these Colonies" was at best specious; that it was intended to serve as an appeal to the colonists to grant that authority ex post facto; that these colonists occupied an intellectual continuum ranging from totally illiterate to that of the expatriate second sons of England who had inherited a name along with a broad education, carrying the aura of aristocracy with them to this new land; that many, perhaps most, citizens along this narrow stretch of Atlantic coast were loyal to the crown, heartfelt or out of fear of conspiring in treason against the most powerful nation on earth; that there would be no second chance to bring liberty to these virgin shores; that their appeal was to people who knew liberty only in the abstract.

The second paragraph of what was basically a martial declaration begins like a lullaby: "We hold these truths to be self-evident" before it addresses its intended purpose: Separating from England and establishing liberty in America, probably making it the most influential and inspired document of all time. Liberty! The most precious and efficient of all social commodities. We've enjoyed it since 1783, but in the face of ever more powerful constituencies striving for preferential treatment, an imperializing presidency, and a avaricious Congress, we must wonder if we can keep it. Indeed, when asked what the Constitutional Convention had accomplished, Benjamin Franklin replied, "A Republic, if you can keep it": If we can "secure the blessing of liberty to ourselves and our posterity."

Generations of pilgrims, pioneers, early settlers persisted in the face of discomfort, poverty, and danger in pursuit of something new; in pursuit of something only dreamed of in "the old country"; in pursuit of liberty.

But what is liberty? What are its elements? Webster's dictionary dwells on the rights that conflate personal and communal liberty as well as dwells on its power to release us from various forms of restraint. Ignoring the shameful accommodation of slavery in our earliest years, our Constitution immunizes good behavior from restraint. But there is little glory in Webster's minimal view of liberty: A restricted view that sees no beauty in self-reliance; no virtue in courage and sacrifice. But is it not true that these last are the heart and the soul of liberty? That I am most free when I am fulfilling the functions of mind and body out of self-inspired hopes and efforts? Is it not equally true that personal responsibility is the practice of liberty? That a responsibility relinquished, however unwittingly, is a reduction in the capital stock of liberty -- my liberty as well as the corporate liberty of America?

Or shall we subscribe to the simple-minded view that liberty is the right to shout blasphemies at those with whom we disagree; to cast an emotional, vacuous vote at election time; to demand a generous wage with full benefits, whatever our talents. We tend -- many of us -- to think of liberty as the means of satisfying our animal desires with minimal effort.

Such selfish views of liberty are contrary to those proclaimed in our Founding documents. James Madison, our fourth president, felt that "Liberty may be endangered by the abuses of liberty as well as by the abuses of power." President Madison made this observation long before people began to demand their rights; long before Congress and the courts turned their backs on the General Welfare provisions of the Constitution; long before 1913 when the nation endowed Congress with the power of taxing incomes, the mother's milk of political power. With a power to tax limited only by a responsible electorate, irresponsible "abuses of liberty" impelled a restructuring of America in deference to selfish demands. Constituent demands! Demands to transfer responsibility from one group to another with the intermediation of government. Liberty began to wither when entitlements were born in 1913.

Not only entitlements, but a massive government as well: Access to an enticing new world of bribery by benevolence. Elected federal officials now had the ability to "give things" to their constituents and benefactors: Tax exemptions, federal contracts, retirement benefits, disaster assistance, highways and bridges as they took our responsibilities upon themselves, the personal responsibility that had transformed thirteen vulnerable colonies in a wilderness into a great nation. The government of this great nation became mother/midwife to a massive, bureaucracy administering a bewildering array of intrusions into our lives and liberty, intrusions disguised as benefits -- as we looked on, demanding more and better.

This transformation of the American character has been taking place as we concentrate our efforts on work and leisure. But while responding to those fundamentals we've ignored our responsibilities, perhaps in the mistaken notion that liberty is self-fulfilling, guaranteed by the Constitution. We've become complacent about the incomparable blessings of freedom, becoming ever more passive practitioners of citizenship with each generation.

How did this come to pass? How could we lose focus in a world that provides innumerable examples of the misery and inefficiency of government?

We began to conceive of liberty not only as a birthright, but as an indivisible part of the American polity. As the nation evolved from agrarian, to manufacturing, to the complex, big government society of today, the intellectual demands made upon good citizenship became deeper, more sophisticated, more compelling. Perversely, the popular media, instead of reacting responsibly to that complexity, sought success in shallow, easily digested news. Worse, the blatant bias evident in the early days of the nation became more subtle but more pervasive as the complexity of civilization increased and print media revenues diminished.

Meanwhile the media claim to a right of institutional liberty under the rubric of "Freedom of the Press" grew louder and more strident. An invented artifact, "the media" could not lay claim to rights "endowed by their Creator," but found their privilege in the first of ten afterthoughts called the Bill of Rights. The authors, aware that the Constitution could well fail of adoption without the inclusion of a list of specific rights demanded by influential politicians of the day, appended a bill of ten rights to that document.

Probably in the hope that a free press might serve as a broad-ranging watchdog over the inevitable abusers of political and economic power, the authors included an item in the Bill of Rights that provided for a press with unabridged authority to secure and disseminate information. It hardly needs to be said that such an endowment was not established to enrich the press or to provide it with broad immunity from all laws of the land, but in the expectation that it would provide broad, deep, reliable news, and information as a vital prop of liberty; necessary information that citizens could not accumulate for themselves and that certainly would never be a service of government in a nation "of the people."

Of even greater importance, the editorial insight we welcome on opinion pages was surely never meant to be presented as news or, even more worrisome, to migrate into the curricula of our subsidized journalism schools where it would inevitably homogenize the American media. Recognizing the threat of media prejudice, we should not expect and cannot permit media forces to police themselves, a fox in our henhouse. Neither can we relinquish that responsibility to the overgrown fox of government. "We the people" must accept that burden through the power of the purse, patronizing only those media sources that meet an unprejudiced standard of newsworthiness judged by millions of people expressing their own knowledge and experience. Among the powerful tools of free enterprise is that of sending failures to the showers, and nowhere could that be more important than in the arena of policing entities who have put on the garb of an unabridged press.

That responsibility has become even greater in the 21st century in which media sources now include motion pictures, television, the internet, and whatever else may lurk over the technical horizon, media not within the ken of the authors but which have a power to influence the human mind far beyond that of print. Yet certain elements of their output fall under the First Amendment constraint of not "abridging the freedom . . . of the press." Are we then to assume that there are no restraints on them, no limiting force on the inevitable tendency on their part to refashion America and the world in their own moral and philosophical image?

Again, "We the people" are the restraining element. We are that limiting force -- or should be. The Tenth Amendment speaks loudly to "The powers not delegated . . . are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." What was true in 1791 is equally true today.

In his 1958 valedictory comments to the Radio, Television, and News Directors' Association, the highly respected CBS commentator, Edward R. Murrow, reacting to emerging trends in TV, lamented that:

. . . history will take its revenge . . . if this instrument is good for nothing but to entertain, amuse, and insulate . . . [though it] can teach, illuminate, and . . . even inspire.

Fifty years later history is taking that revenge, his prediction having come true, with titillation added to his list of distractions. Americans who depend upon TV for their information on world news, domestic politics, and economic conditions are consistently misinformed and under-informed by programs and personalities who "entertain, amuse, and insulate," but do not "teach, illuminate [or] inspire," and do not deserve our trust or our patronage. We are already sending some of them to the showers.

How could a well-educated citizenry risk its inestimable liberty by self-inflicted means? Could it be because we obligingly spend our youth in public schools at no apparent cost to ourselves, schools that are redefining America in their own image? We spend our youth in the educational embrace of government-trained, government-employed, government-tenured teachers who in turn remit generously (if reluctantly) of their taxpayer-provided dollars to self-serving unions that exist exclusively to promote their own professional status. Today's public schools are beyond reach in their legal citadel, though a thorough search of our Founding documents reveals not a word about "schools," "learning," "teaching," or any other word signifying education other than to "encourage" it -- in the Northwest Ordinance of 1787.

The public school system that has been the target of severe disapproval for decades is protected by a rising wall of laws and policy barriers, each purporting to rectify yesterdays shortcomings. Yet, though it is hard to imagine any aspect of life more important to liberty than that of choosing the means of educating our children, choice is foreclosed to us by laws put into effect by the most powerful lobby in the nation: of the teacher, for the teacher, by the teacher.

We are a nation of laws, and public education is defended by a justice system doing its duty. But the justice system has not always been the friend of justice -- nor of liberty. In addition to its inherent prejudices, the legal system has long been a toy of presidents and congresses in their game of politicizing the supreme and inferior courts, pushing legal doctrine off of its constitutional foundations toward law by national consensus propelled by powerful special interests groups which include teachers' unions of great skill and power.

Throughout history there has been a tendency in mankind to surrender to the accumulating power of arrogant men who gather other power seekers around them to fortify their success. We used to call them kings, and reserved warm spots for them in history. Liberty on the other hand has found little place in history. Yet liberty should have a prominent place in history because of its rarity.

Establishing America was little short of miraculous. Life in the colonies was hard; cruel! We are aware that many colonists surrendered, returning to the old country for lack of courage. But we are the heirs of courage. America was established by inspired men of exceptional integrity, intelligence, and courage who were intimately familiar with the under-life of the old country. It cannot be said too often or too forcefully: Liberty is rare because it is difficult to establish. It is even more difficult to sustain! You will recall Ben Franklin's comment: "A Republic, if you can keep it." It is difficult to "keep" because of the access of free men to ever greater comfort and convenience provided by others whose growing power lies in responding to requests for comfort and convenience -- which then drains the requesters of the hunger for real liberty in the face of a false liberty of ease.

So even as we lose authority to choose our own method of financing retirement, providing for our own medical needs, the best venue for educating our children, even as billions of dollars financing purely local functions are diverted through Washington D. C. to be given back to us as largesse-at-a-price; even as the elected heirs to American greatness have the audacity to earmark vast sums to their own glory; even then many of us sense no diminution in our liberty. As has been said earlier, so long as we have the right to shout blasphemies at those with whom we disagree; to cast an emotional, vacuous vote, we feel we are pursuing lives of liberty. Freedom of worship, free speech, free assembly: these have become little more than bright lights on the road to a faintly disguised suzerainty where personal responsibility and self-reliance are being extinguished.

The past several decades have seen a profoundly negative change in the character of America as the result of a joint venture between us. Since government will never attempt to reverse the trend, it is up to us: To me and you. Through the power of the ballot box, we need to force those sitting in the state capitals of America to restore original intent and thus to restore our nation to greatness. It will require millions of motivated voters over many election cycles to do it. *

"If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that, too." --W. Somerset Maugham

John Coleman

John Coleman is a weathercaster with KUSI NEWS of San Diego, California. This article is republished with permission from KUSI.com.

The key players are now all in place in Washington and in state governments across America to officially label carbon dioxide a pollutant and enact laws that tax citizens for our carbon footprints. Only two details stand in the way, the faltering economy times and a dramatic turn toward a colder climate. The last two bitter winters have led to a rise in public awareness that there is no runaway global warming. The public is now becoming skeptical of the claim that our carbon footprint from the use of fossil fuels is going to lead to climatic calamities.

How did we ever get to this point where bad science is driving big government to punish the citizens for living the good life that fossil fuels provide for us?

The story begins with an Oceanographer named Roger Revelle. He served with the Navy in World War II. After the war he became the Director of the Scripps Oceanographic Institute in La Jolla in San Diego, California. Revelle saw the opportunity to obtain major funding from the Navy for doing measurements and research on the ocean around the Pacific atolls where the U.S. military was conducting atomic bomb tests. He greatly expanded the Institute's areas of interest, and hired Hans Suess, a noted chemist from the University of Chicago, who was very interested in the traces of carbon in the environment from the burning of fossil fuels. Revelle tagged on to Suess' studies and co-authored a paper with him in 1957. The paper raises the possibility that carbon dioxide might be creating a greenhouse effect and causing atmospheric warming. It seems to have been a plea for funding for more studies. Funding, frankly, is where Revelle's mind was most of the time.

Next Revelle hired a geochemist named David Keeling to devise a way to measure the atmospheric content of carbon dioxide. In1960 Keeling published his first paper showing the increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and linking the increase to the burning of fossil fuels.

These two research papers became the bedrock of the science of global warming, even though they offered no proof that carbon dioxide was in fact a greenhouse gas. In addition they failed to explain how this trace gas, only a tiny fraction of the atmosphere, could have any significant impact on temperatures.

Now let me take you back to the 1950s when this was going on. Our cities were entrapped in a pall of pollution from the crude internal combustion engines that powered cars and trucks back then, and from the uncontrolled emissions from power plants and factories. Cars, factories, and power plants were filling the air with all sorts of pollutants. There was a valid and serious concern about the health consequences of this pollution and a strong environmental movement was developing to demand action. Government accepted this challenge, and new environmental standards were set. Scientists and engineers came to the rescue. New reformulated fuels were developed for cars, as were new high tech, computer-controlled engines, and catalytic converters. By the mid-1970s cars were no longer big-time polluters, emitting only some carbon dioxide and water vapor from tail pipes. Likewise, new fuel processing and smoke-stack scrubbers were added to industrial and power plants, and their emissions were greatly reduced as well.

But an environmental movement had been established and its funding and very existence depended on having a continuing crisis. So the research papers from Scripps came at just the right moment. And, with them came the birth of an issue: man-made global warming from the carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels.

Revelle and Keeling used this new alarmism to keep their funding growing. Other researchers with environmental motivations and a hunger for funding saw this developing trend and climbed aboard as well. The research grants began to flow and alarming hypotheses began to show up everywhere.

The Keeling curve showed a steady rise in CO2 in the atmosphere during the period since oil and coal were discovered and used by man. As of today, carbon dioxide has increased from 215 to 385 parts per million. But despite the increases, it is still only a trace gas in the atmosphere. While the increase is real, the percentage of the atmosphere that is CO2 remains tiny, about 41 hundredths of one percent.

Several hypotheses emerged in the 70s and 80s about how this tiny atmospheric component of CO2 might cause a significant warming. But they remained unproven. Years have passed and the scientists kept reaching out for evidence of the warming and proof of their theories. And the money and environmental claims kept on building.

Back in the 1960s this global warming research came to the attention of a Canadian-born United Nation's bureaucrat named Maurice Strong. He was looking for issues he could use to fulfill his dream of one-world government. Strong organized a World Earth Day event in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1970. He developed an UN committee of scientists, environmentalists, and political operatives to continue a series of meetings.

Strong developed the concept that the UN could demand payments from the advanced nations to benefit the underdeveloped nations for the climatic damage from the burning of fossil fuels, a sort of CO2 tax that would be the funding for his one-world government. But he needed more scientific evidence to support his primary thesis. Strong championed the establishment of the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. This was not a purely climate-study, scientific organization, as we have been led to believe. It was an organization of one-world government, UN bureaucrats, environmental activists, and environmentalist scientists who craved the UN funding so they could produce the science they needed to stop the burning of fossil fuels. Over the last 25 years they have been very effective. Hundreds of scientific papers, four major international meetings, and reams of news stories about climatic Armageddon later, the UN IPCC has made its points to the satisfaction of most, and has even shared a Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore.

At the same time that Maurice Strong was busy at the UN, things were getting a bit out of hand for Roger Revelle, the man who is now called the grandfather of global warming. He had been very politically active in the late 1950s as he worked to have the University of California locate a San Diego campus adjacent to Scripps Institute in La Jolla. He won that major war, but lost an all-important battle afterward when he was passed over in the selection of the first Chancellor of the new campus.

He left Scripps in 1963 and moved to Harvard University to establish a Center for Population Studies. It was there that Revelle inspired one of his students to become a major global warming activist. This student would say later:

It felt like such a privilege to be able to hear about the readouts from some of those measurements in a group of no more than a dozen undergraduates. Here was this teacher presenting something not years old but fresh out of the lab, with profound implications for our future!

The student described him as "a wonderful, visionary professor" who was "one of the first people in the academic community to sound the alarm on global warming." That student was Al Gore. He thought of Dr. Revelle as his mentor and referred to him frequently, relaying his experiences as a student in his book Earth in the Balance, published in 1992.

So there it is: Roger Revelle is indeed the grandfather of global warming. His work laid the foundation for the UN IPCC, provided the anti-fossil fuel ammunition to the environmental movement, and sent Al Gore on his road to his books, his movie, his Nobel Peace Prize and a hundred million dollars from the carbon credits business. What happened next is amazing.

The global warming frenzy was becoming the cause celeb of the media. After all the media is mostly liberal, loves Al Gore, loves to warn us of impending disasters, and tell us "the sky is falling, the sky is falling." The politicians and the environmentalist loved it, too.

But the tide was turning with Roger Revelle. He was forced out at Harvard at 65 and returned to California to a semi-retired position at UCSD. He had time to rethink carbon dioxide and the greenhouse effect. The man who inspired Al Gore and gave the UN the basic research it needed to launch its Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was having second thoughts. In 1988 he wrote cautionary letters to members of Congress:

My own personal belief is that we should wait another 10 or 20 years to really be convinced that the greenhouse effect is going to be important for human beings, in both positive and negative ways. . . . We should be careful not to arouse too much alarm until the rate and amount of warming becomes clearer.

In 1991 Revelle teamed up with Chauncey Starr, founding director of the Electric Power Research Institute and Fred Singer, the first director of the U.S. Weather Satellite Service, to write an article for Cosmos magazine. They urged more research and begged scientists and governments not to move too fast to curb greenhouse CO2 emissions because the true impact of carbon dioxide was not at all certain, and curbing the use of fossil fuels could have a huge negative impact on the economy, and jobs, and our standard of living. I have discussed this collaboration with Dr. Singer. He assures me that Revelle was considerably more certain than he was at the time that carbon dioxide was not a problem.

Did Roger Revelle attend the summer enclave at the Bohemian Grove in Northern California in the summer of 1990 while working on that article? Did he deliver a lakeside speech there to the assembled movers and shakers from Washington and Wall Street in which he apologized for sending the UN IPCC and Al Gore onto this wild goose chase about global warming? Did he say that the key scientific conjecture of his lifetime had turned out wrong? The answer to those questions is: "I think so, but I do not know it for certain." I have not managed to get it confirmed as of this moment. It's a little like Las Vegas; what is said at the Bohemian Grove stays at the Bohemian Grove. There are no transcripts or recordings, and people who attend are encouraged not to talk. Yet the topic is so important that some people have shared with me on an informal basis.

Roger Revelle died of a heart attack three months after the Cosmos story was printed. Oh how I wish he were still alive today. He might be able to stop this scientific silliness and end the global warming scam.

Al Gore has dismissed Roger Revelle's mea culpa as the actions of senile old man. And, the next year, while running for Vice President, he said the science behind global warming is settled and there will be no more debate. From 1992 until today he and his cohorts have refused to debate global warming, and when asked about skeptics they simply insult us and call us names.

So today we have the acceptance of carbon dioxide as the culprit of global warming. It is concluded that when we burn fossil fuels we are leaving a dastardly carbon footprint that we must pay Al Gore or the environmentalists to offset. Our governments at all levels are considering taxing the use of fossil fuels. The Environmental Protection Agency is on the verge of naming CO2 as a pollutant and strictly regulating its use to protect our climate. The new President and the U.S. Congress are on board. Many state governments are moving on the same course.

We are already suffering from this CO2 silliness in many ways. Our energy policy has been strictly hobbled by having no drilling and no new refineries built for decades. We pay for the shortage this has created every time we buy gas. And corn-based ethanol costs us millions of tax dollars in subsidies, driving up the cost of food. This is a long way from over.

I am convinced there is no scientific basis for any of it.

Global Warming is a hoax. It is bad science. It's a high-jacking of public policy. It is no joke. It is the greatest scam in history. *

"Better faithful than famous. Honor before prominence." --Teddy Roosevelt

Elizabeth Wright

Elizabeth Wright is editor of the newsletter, Issues & Views, (issuesview.blogspot.com) initially published from 1985 as a hard copy edition. This article is republished with the permission of Elizabeth Wright.

Who started the lie that the Founders of this nation expended their energies, in order to create a haven for the rescue of the world's displaced populations? Did it come about chiefly from cynical 19th century industrialists eager only for cheap labor, who sought to soften their true motives by wrapping them in sentimental bombast?

Was the lie then perpetuated through the fantasies of some early lucky refugees who found their way to these shores, and who desired to make the path to the Golden Door easier for their family and kin left behind?

Or was the lie deliberately concocted by those who despised the country's powerful and entrenched establishment, with the expectation that making mass immigration a national religious mandate might eventually unglue said establishment?

When restrictive immigration laws were changed in the 1960s, who expected to benefit most from the mass influx that inevitably would begin to stream from around the world?

I ask these questions in light of The New York Times' recent editorials denigrating those Americans who campaign, through organizations and modest media outlets, to regain control over our borders, in order to preserve the traditional cultural integrity of the United States. The Times and its comrades share the presumptuous notion that the U.S. is the rightful destination of every conceivable population on earth. They send the word far and wide that, if you're hurting in the land of your birth, then you have a right to alleviate that hurt by transporting yourself to the U.S.A., no matter what stress is put upon the resources of American citizens.

Thanks to our education system and a century of media propaganda, it has become a fixed notion that this country, unlike every other on earth, was put together for the benefit of the world's faceless masses. He who desires entrance must merely claim to share certain ideals, that is, the "propositions" contained in the founding documents, with a couple of modern axioms thrown in for good measure. Because of America's "special" status, there need be no regard for prevailing social and economic conditions, since the welfare of the existing population is not as important as that of the prospective immigrant. After all, America was founded on nothing more than a bundle of universalist ideas based around themes of freedom; it has no borders and no heritage.

In an earlier post on this blog, "Farewell to Thomas Jefferson" [to appear in the June issue of The St. Croix Review], I ask what the likelihood is that any group would form a nation for a people other than their own kind. Why would these men not desire to retain the cultural integrity of their lineage? Other than today's self-consciously de-racinating whites, what people do not possess this very preference? Would the Hutu be likely to expend their energies to develop a society to benefit alien tribes and foreigners? Would the Tamil? Those who claim that the world has now moved beyond ethnocentric loyalty, or ought to, might do well to take a look at the real world.

In that post, I also suggest that the Founders would not be in concert with the platitudes contained in that mawkish poem that was belatedly affixed to the base of the Statue of Liberty. Which Founder envisioned this country's future in the hands of "huddled masses" from every nook and cranny of the earth? Certainly not John Jay, who thanked Providence for giving

. . . this one connected country to one united people, a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs.

That doesn't sound like a proposition to win over the huddled masses to me. Today, is it unreasonable to assume that, for the sake of preserving the Anglo-European institutions on which this country was nurtured, an Anglo-Euro majority should prevail?

The Times' editorialists do not seem to blush as they pronounce the outright lie that the United States was "composed of people without any common national heritage." How can they attach the reputation of their once preeminent publication to such a colossal falsehood? Now, if you're out to eliminate the Anglo-European cultural make-up of the U.S., and are thrilled by the increasingly multiracial polyglot nature of this society, say so. But don't fabricate history, in order to prove that this country was formed in a vacuum by people who shared no heritage.

One would have thought that coping with the real disabilities of the descendants of the country's slaves, as well as accommodating the Hispanics-Latinos, who had always been a presence, would be enough to occupy the administrators of an already multiracial nation. To open the floodgates in the 1960s, ensuring an even greater heterogeneous influx, would seem an act of folly.

In its editorials, The Times cavalierly dismisses the impact of these recent decades of mass immigration on employment. With a wave of the hand, the editorialists imply that immigration reformers are not motivated by concern about jobs since, apparently, to The Times, this is just another "wedge" issue, that is, insignificant.

Blacks have known for some time that their leaders -- politicians, academics, and varieties of "civil rights" bureaucrats -- have turned their backs on the struggle against illegal immigration. The primary interest of these dignitaries is the protection of their careers and/or political turf. In Immigration: Betrayal by Black Elites, I outlined the pattern of black leadership organizations (take your pick) and black politicians (take your pick) who eagerly make alliances with the elites of other groups, no matter how detrimental such unions prove to blacks in the long run.

Black politicians like Sheila Jackson-Lee, Maxine Waters, and John Conyers seek only to expand their constituent base. As racial demographics change in their districts, they frantically scramble to court and win the confidence of the burgeoning foreigners. The fact that these foreigners, a great many of them illegal, end up displacing Americans, frequently poor blacks in a shrinking job market, is of no concern, either to these representatives of the people, or to the editorialists at The New York Times.

As more and more Americans find themselves laid off or fired from stagnating companies, they discover that even the most modest work has become a scarce commodity. If Rep. Sheila Jackson-Lee, at a special hearing, is not moved when a black worker informs her of American minorities who have been displaced by illegals as roofers, drywallers, and truck drivers, why should The New York Times care?

*****

The Times has joined the bandwagon of those who smear as "racists" and "white supremacists" decent Americans who are seeking genuine solutions to the immigration crisis. Peter Brimelow targets it exactly. He notes that, since the Democrats are made up of a coalition of minorities, they "must at all costs prevent America's majority from uniting. Hence, The New York Times' hysteria." (By the way, the "white supremacist" tag has now replaced the much over-abused label of "racist" as the epithet of choice. Watch for it everywhere.)

To the camp followers of The Times, it is imperative to prevent average white citizens, who are still the majority, from ever uniting in the name of any cause. Preventing an effective immigration reform movement is paramount to those who seek to keep this country's borders wide open. This is certainly one of the reasons why the editors of The Times are spending their energies these days castigating three of the most successful immigration reform organizations -- the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), and NumbersUSA. I have followed the outstanding work of each of these groups since their formation, and have always been impressed by the respectful manner in which they handle what has become a volatile subject.

The Times further discredits itself by favorably acknowledging the biased reports and materials disseminated by the spurious Southern Poverty Law Center. The SPLC is among a handful of self-appointed "watchdogs," a cluster of groups whose creators have mastered the ability to acquire funding by instilling fear and indignation in the general public. Besmirching individuals and groups that work to end illegal immigration as "racists" and "xenophobes," the SPLC has diligently set about the task of destroying all proponents of restrictive immigration laws.

Traveling under the umbrella of "civil rights" or "human rights," these "watchdog" groups are represented through a fawning, deferential media as altruistic protectors of society's downtrodden. Depicting themselves as noble champions of "anti-racism," they spend a great deal of time crusading for the expansion of "hate crime" legislation, that is, laws designed specifically to give government greater control over Americans' thoughts and behavior. They have acquired enough political power to behave as quasi-government agencies, and some misguided citizens actually believe that these self-appointed entities, and their executive directors, possess official power.

Two of the major "watchdogs," the SPLC and the B'nai Brith Anti-Defamation League, are darlings of the media, because they can be counted on to provide an endless stream of news fillers. Reporters are happy to take the easy way out when supposedly covering a story on race. Just get the press release from the SPLC or ADL on some particular event or individual, copy what it says and, instantly, you have a news item to send to your editor. How often have you seen a news story end with a quote by an SPLC or ADL official denouncing some individual as a "racist" or "white supremacist"? And we know it's so, because the ADL or SPLC says it's so!

Character assassination is the SPLC's speciality. Its "link and smear" tactics are notorious, along with its ever-expanding hit list. Through insinuations, it will link an individual or group to some other group or event that is deemed evil by SPLC standards. It then relentlessly pursues the public destruction of the unfortunate target, all the while sending out poisonous press releases that are lapped up and quoted by an eager, uninquiring media.

If these watchdogs could make the "white supremacist" tag stick to immigration reform organizations, and could frame their leaders with some illegal charge, they would then set about stripping these immigration groups of all their financial resources. Both the ADL and SPLC have done exactly this to other organizations whose racial politics were perceived as "incorrect."

For an in-depth examination of groups like the SPLC, there is nothing better than Laird Wilcox's The Watchdogs: A Close Look at Anti-Racist "Watchdog" Groups. Wilcox has spent over two decades watching the watchdogs and compiling detailed information on their strategies and smear tactics.

*****

If you have been paying attention, you know that The New York Times, like all newspapers, is withering away. You also know that, in a desperate move, its owners recently requested and received a $250 million investment from Mexican businessman Carlos Slim. Some observers are suggesting that the recent attacks by The Times' directors on the most high-profile opponents of open borders comes as partial payment to their Mexican benefactor.

If those New York Times editorials are any barometer, the battle to resolve this country's immigration dilemma is going to be an even longer, more acrimonious one. *

"When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it." --French economist, statesman, and author Frederic Bastiat (1801-1850)

Thomas Martin

Thomas Martin teaches in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Nebraska at Kearney. You may contact Thomas Martin at: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

[T]he ancients knew something which we seem to have forgotten. All means prove but a blunt instrument, if they have not behind them a living spirit. --Albert Einstein

Recently I found a copy of Albert Einstein's Ideas and Opinions in a used bookstore. I opened the table of contents to a collection of essays, speeches, statements, and letters on freedom, education, science and religion, pacifism, classical literature, scientific work, and E=MC2. Then I turned a page and came across the following sentence, "There are only a few enlightened people with a lucid mind and style, and with good taste within a century." Who would dare to make such a statement?

Einstein.

I read on and turned to the chapter "Education for Independent Thought," published in The New York Times, October 5, 1952, which began:

It is not enough to teach a man a specialty. Through it he may become a kind of useful machine but not a harmoniously developed personality. It is essential that the student acquire an understanding of and a lively feeling for values. He must acquire a vivid sense of the beautiful and of the morally good. Otherwise, he -- with his specialized knowledge -- more closely resembles a well-trained dog than a harmoniously developed person. He must learn to understand the motives of human beings, their illusions, and their sufferings, in order to acquire a proper relationship to individual fellow men and to the community. . . . These precious things are conveyed to the younger generation through personal contact with those who teach, not -- or at least not in the main -- through textbooks. It is this that primarily constitutes and preserves culture. This is what I have in mind when I recommend the "humanities" as important, not just dry specialized knowledge in the fields of history and philosophy.

I was reminded of a public lecture some years ago at my university, given by a former graduate currently employed by Dow chemical company. He spoke of the quality of his undergraduate education and of his position as the director of a team of scientists working in the area of super-absorbent polymers for diapers. At the end of his presentation, he answered several general questions before a student asked whether, given the volume of disposal diapers filling landfills, the diapers were biodegradable. The speaker complimented the student on his question and responded that biodegradable material was not his area of research, but surely a problem being addressed elsewhere.

Clearly, our graduate had mastered a specialization in the area of super-absorbents for his company and, in turn, applied his research to create "new and improved" disposable diapers which help parents clean up the mess around the house. However, while the disposable diaper saves millions of gallons in laundering the soils of daily life, it adds up to 18 billion diapers, or 82,000 tons of plastic and 1.3 million tons of wood pulp -- 250,000 trees -- a year being trucked away to landfills. Theoretically, the bacterial remains might even infest the water.

Einstein makes the distinction between the training of students for the means of life in specialized professions, such as computer scientists, business administrators, counselors, chemists, speech pathologists, graphic artists, accountants, designers of kitchens and bathrooms, nurses, physicians or undertakers, who are all prepared to perform procedures and execute techniques, and educating them for the ends of life, which offers a vivid sense of the beautiful and of the morally good.

The scientist as scientist lacks a directive principle and the prescience to understand the outcomes of his research, seeing, as it were, through a glass darkly, a part of the picture but not its entirety. There is a difference between knowledge derived from past observations and forethought. Einstein, in speaking to the ends of science, states:

For the scientific method can teach us nothing else beyond how facts are related to, and conditioned by, each other. The aspiration toward such objective knowledge belongs to the highest of which man is capable, and you will certainly not suspect me of wishing to belittle the achievements and the heroic efforts of man in this sphere. Yet it is equally clear that knowledge of what "is" does not open the door directly to "what should be."

In short, you cannot derive what ought to be done from what can be done. The directive principles for establishing goals and determining value is derived from a vivid sense of the beautiful and of the morally good.

Man is more than his corporeal self.

Einstein continues:

Intelligence makes clear to us the interrelation of means and ends. But mere thinking cannot give us a sense of the ultimate and fundamental ends . . . [a]nd if one asks whence derives the authority of such fundamental ends, since they cannot be stated and justified merely by reason, one can only answer: they exist in a healthy society as powerful traditions, which act upon the conduct and aspirations and judgments of the individual. . . . They come into being not through demonstration but through revelation, through the medium of powerful personalities.

Revelation?

In these times of the compartmentalization of knowledge, the college graduate is too often simply trained to perform the tasks that his employer hopes he can perform. Most modern students are not well-rounded; they have little sense of tradition, having only a textbook survey of history, one course in literature, no foreign language, several elementary composition courses, elementary math, a choice between several textbook-driven, social science courses, and, at my university, an introductory economics course, though none are required to take ethics or read philosophy. While a student will have a rudimentary understanding of economic systems and the means of how the economy works or does not, he will not discuss the ends of life nor have an idea of how to distinguish between courage and cowardliness, generosity and greed, self-control and self-indulgence, gentleness and apathy, motivation and sloth, all of which are necessary in the self-examination of a life that is worth living. In effect, too many universities are turning out human beings who lack humanity.

What did former head of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan's well-trained economic genius do for our country? When sitting before a Senate hearing, he admitted he had not foreseen that there would be greedy investment bankers who would fill their pockets while draining those of their fellow citizens:

I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interest of organizations, specifically banks and others, was such as they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders.

They are fixated on what Aristotle calls the goods of the body, or external goods, without any sense of the goods of the soul and, hence, are unaware of the moral and intellectual virtues which are manifested in the actions necessary to become mature adults.

Einstein thinks that a person who lacks a sense of moral values is like a blunt instrument who may well unquestionably follow those whom he deems to be his superiors without ever asking himself if what he is doing is beautiful and morally good.

Einstein reminds one of Aristotle when making the distinction between a university graduate being trained to be a kind of useful machine as opposed to being educated towards a harmoniously developed personality. Aristotle thought that a person who did not develop the intellectual and moral virtues through a liberal education fitting for a free man is a slave to be used as an instrument by his master. In Aristotle's words:

It is also from natural causes that some beings command and others obey, that each may obtain their mutual safety; for a being who is endowed with a mind capable of reflection and forethought is by nature the superior and governor, whereas he whose excellence is merely corporeal is formed to be a slave; hence it follows that the different state of master and slave is equally advantageous to both. [Politics]

Neither Einstein nor Aristotle are religious, the former thinking God a creation of primitive man to answer his fear of nature, and the latter viewing God as the uncaused cause who set the cosmos to order, which is grasped by the faculty of reason placed in man by God. Einstein thinks the principles of morality a "cosmic religious feeling" which he finds difficult to elucidate, "to anyone who is entirely without it, especially as there is no anthropomorphic conception of God corresponding to it."

What is a student to do?

He must learn to understand the motives of human beings, their illusions, and their sufferings in order to acquire a proper relationship to individual fellow men and to the community. . . . These precious things are conveyed to the younger generation through personal contact with those who teach, not -- or at least not in the main -- through textbooks. It is this that primarily constitutes and preserves culture.

Einstein is opposed to textbook education and sees that the students need personal contact with those who read the stories of humanity with students, much like parents read tales to their children to teach them values.

He must learn to understand the motives of human beings, their illusions, and their sufferings in order to acquire a proper relationship to individual fellow men and to the community. . . .

The character of human beings is seen in Adam and Eve's disobedience, Benedict Arnold's treachery, Sam Gamgee's loyalty, Fyodor Karamazov's lust, Scrooge's selfishness, Madame DeFarge's vengeance, Alyosha's love, as well as in pondering what Charles Myriel tells his sister in Les Miserables, by Victor Hugo:

Have no fear of robbers or murders. Such dangers are without, and are but petty. Prejudices are the real robbers; vices the real murderers. The great dangers are within us. What matters it what threatens our heads or our purses? Let us think only of what threatens our souls.

A machine and a dog, however well-trained, lack souls -- the living spirit -- and, being incapable of self-reflection, are lodged in a state beneath that of man. That man has the capacity for self-determining thought, through which he thinks about his motives and the value of his actions, is at the basis of a harmonious personality.

In "A Message to Intellectuals," August 29, 1948, Einstein notes:

By painful experience, we have learned that rational thinking does not suffice to solve the problems of our social life. Penetrating research and keen scientific work have often had tragic implications for mankind, producing, on the one hand, inventions which liberate man from exhausting physical labor, making his life easier and richer; but on the other hand, introducing a grave restlessness into his life, making him a slave to his technological environment, and -- most catastrophic of all -- creating the means for his own mass destruction.

Einstein saw what some scientists did under Hitler when offered a salary, life with their families, and laboratories for their research in the areas of genetics/eugenics/race hygiene which were used in the mass sterilization and euthanasia programs. Being unable to generate wealth to equip laboratories, scientists can be at the mercy of politicians and corporate benefactors, so technology becomes especially dangerous when:

. . . they have fallen into the hands of morally blind exponents of political power. . . [a] power in the hands of small minorities which have come to dominate completely the lives of the masses of people who appear more and more amorphous.

The person whose excellence is merely corporeal, body without soul, is an instrument and, if he has a good master, it is best that he be used as such, given he is incapable of reflection and forethought -- his life is an afterthought. Aristotle makes the further distinction between instruments being inanimate and animate. Though a machine is inanimate, a slave belongs to a class of animate objects purchased to pursue his master's directions, which are in his best interest to follow.

As in all arts which are brought to perfection, it is necessary that they should have their proper instruments if they would complete their works, so is it in the art of managing a family: now of instruments, some of them are alive, others inanimate, thus with respect to the pilot of a ship, the tiller [rudder] is without life, the sailor is alive, for a servant in many arts. Thus property is as an instrument to living; an estate is a multitude of instruments; so a slave is animated, but every one that can minister of himself is more valuable than any other instrument . . . .

In effect, all men who have developed their souls are like accomplished musicians as they direct themselves in the art of preparing a meal, reading to children, piloting a ship, or mowing the grass. The person that can minister of himself moves by a directive principle which he wills into action.

Man, according to Aristotle, is composed of a body and a soul. The freeman uses his soul to rule over his body. If the body rules over the soul, the corruptible will be guiding the incorruptible, and this is simply not a good idea. If the body were to rule over the soul this would be an unnatural condition, as it is

. . . clear that the rule of the soul over the body, and of the mind and the rational element over the passionate, is natural and expedient; whereas the equality of the two or the rule of the inferior is always hurtful.

Slavery is the condition of the body ruling the soul, of the belly and/or the groin making decisions, as it were, instead of the soul focusing upon principles and living by conviction. A slave is a person who cannot restrain himself before the appetites of the body and the excessive desire for external possessions. This form of slavery is not a condition that can be abolished by a proclamation. Every person has the potential to fall into slavery -- priests, garbage men, plumbers, corporate executives, professors, college administrators, etc. The Wall Street bankers and scientists under Hitler are slaves, doing what they are told and led by what they feel. It is an old adage, if you cannot control yourself, you will be controlled.

This reminds us of G. K. Chesterton:

Quick machinery worked by slow men will be slow machinery; efficient machinery worked by inefficient men will be inefficient machinery; exact machinery worked by inexact men will be inexact machinery; good machinery worked by bad men will be bad machinery. For there is nothing that is really cut off from man or really independent of him in the whole human world. All tools are, as it were, his extra limbs.

What is going to happen when in the midst of all the instruments and machinery, the soul of man becomes numb, and he is sapped of vitality as is marked by an active imagination, initiative, courage, moderation, and fidelity? When he no longer uses a hoe, a spade, a pick, or a computer but becomes a hoe, spade, pick, or computer to be used by another person. That is what it means to be a slave.

Will we look to the politicians to bail us out? *

"Wars in old times were made to get slaves. The modern implement of imposing slavery is debt." --American poet Ezra Pound (1885-1972)

We would like to thank the following people for their generous contributions to this journal (from 1/14/2009 to 3/13/09): John E. Alderson, David D. Barbee, Willaim A. Barr, Douglas W. Barr, Gordon D. Batcheller, Erminio Bonacci, William C. Campion, Cliff Chambers, Laurence Christenson, Garry W. Coudis, Maurie Daigneau, Dianne C. DeBoest, Michael D. Detmer, John H. Downs, Neil Eckles, Edith E. Ellwood, Nicholas Falco, Reuben M. Freitas, Jane F. Gelderman, Thad A. Goodwyn, Daniel J. Haley, John H. Hearding, John A. Howard, Thomas E. Humphreys, Steven D. Johnson, Mary A. Kelley, Robert E. Kelly, Robert E. Kersey, Gloria Knoblauch, Robert M. Kubow, Eric Linhof, Ronald B. Maddox, Howard S. Martin, Thomas Martin, Roberta R. McQuade, Walter, M. Moede, Mitzi M. Olson, Harold B. Owens, David Pohl, Bernard L. Poppert, Francis D. Reynnet, Matthew J. Sawyer, Morris R. Scholz, Joseph M. Simonet, Thomas E. Snee, John A. Sparks, John R. Stevens, James J. Whelan, Robert L. Wichterman Sr., Charles W. Wilson, Piers Woodriff.

Paul Kengor

Paul Kengor is professor of political science and executive director of the Center for Vision & Values at Grove City College. This article is republished from V & V, a website of the Center for Vision & Values. Paul Kengor is author of God and Ronald Reagan: A Spiritual Life (2004) and The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism (2007). His latest book is The Judge: William P. Clark, Ronald Reagan's Top Hand (Ignatius Press, 2007).

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) recently provided a stark illustration of the fundamentally divergent worldviews of big-government liberalism and free-market conservatism. She told ABC's George Stephanopoulos of the intention of House Democrats to include hundreds of millions of dollars for Planned Parenthood and contraceptives in the economic "stimulus bill."

"Well, the family-planning services reduce cost," explained Pelosi. "The states are in terrible fiscal budget crises now, and part of what we do for children's health, education, and some of those elements, are to help the states meet their financial needs." "One of the initiatives," said a matter-of-fact Pelosi, "contraception, will reduce costs to the states and to the federal government."

A stunned Stephanopoulos responded, "So, no apologies for that?"

Of course not, averred the mother of five children and lifelong Roman Catholic:

No apologies. No. And this is to stimulate the economy, is an economic recovery package . . . to deal with the consequences of the downturn in our economy.

Pelosi pushed for this funding under the massive umbrella of government handouts collectively known as the "stimulus bill." What began as a bailout of banks and automakers had morphed into federal disincentives to baby-makers.

Pelosi's comments came two days after President Obama signed an executive order reversing Ronald Reagan's 1984 Mexico City Policy. Obama's order funnels U.S. taxpayer dollars to groups like International Planned Parenthood to provide abortion and contraception overseas. For these cash-strapped groups this was a bailout.

Likewise, then, domestic "family-planning" groups are hoping for a bailout. Speaker Pelosi's comments seemed to signal the government green-light.

This begs a question: How could this be an economic stimulus? What is Congresswoman Pelosi's economic rationale?

The answer is that certain people on the political left view a growing human population as an economic burden for government -- that is, a government that operates according to their mindset. They view the world's resources as limited. Given those finite resources, an expanding population is a problem for a government whose job -- in their view -- is to take care of people through collectivism and redistribution. The more babies -- the more daunting the task. A burgeoning population, they further believe, also hurts the environment.

This is a old argument, one that exploded onto the global stage in the late l960s and 1970s through the likes of Paul Ehrlich and his Population Bomb, through movies like Soylent Green, through groups like the UN Population Fund and Club of Rome, through Communist China's one-child policy. It was a concern of racial eugenicist Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood. It is also a dominant view in our graduate schools, especially in "development" programs.

This worldview runs completely contrary to the thinking of the free-market conservative, who, philosophically, and religiously, takes seriously the mandate to be fruitful and multiply, to fill the earth, and to unleash people to be producers and entrepreneurs. Unfettered by government controls, regulation, and high taxation, the producers will find new resources, expand current ones, and generally take care of themselves.

Pelosi's assessment hit home with me because it dovetails into the lectures in my Comparative Politics course at Grove City College. In that class we use several indices of political and economic freedom. Thanks to modern data collection, we now know -- as shown in these indices -- that the traditional big three bogeymen of over-population, limited resources, and colonialism, are not reliable predictors of a nation's economic prosperity.

Those who advance such thinking in the classroom cherry-pick the countries that they believe make their case, while ignoring those that stand in glaring defiance of their model. To cite merely one example that blows up all big three bogeymen: Hong Kong is bursting with people, has no resources, and was a colony very, very recently. It is also an extremely wealthy country -- and the world's freest economy.

Take out a map and run through countries that have high population densities and those that do not -- ditto for resources and colonialism. You will find that the big three are not, by any stretch, reliable predictors of prosperity.

Is there a reliable predictor? Yes, economic freedom -- a statistically proven formula for success. Countries that are economically free succeed, whereas countries that are economically un-free do not succeed. The freest countries in the world are the most economically prosperous; the un-free are the poorest. Period.

So, if freedom works, why do the likes of Speaker Pelosi not seek to limit rather than expand government? For one, they do not buy this policy prescription, having for too long been spoon-fed otherwise. They judge the free-marketers the modern equivalent of flat-earthers. Secondly, and more significantly, limited government is anathema to government collectivists, redistributionists, managers, and central planners. It is not the answer they want to hear. It puts them out of business.

Alas, President Obama asked Pelosi and the House Democrats to remove the Planned Parenthood spending from the stimulus, which they did. (Could Barbara Boxer and friends reinsert it in the Senate version?) Obama plans to get funding to Planned Parenthood in politically smarter ways.

Still, Speaker Pelosi offered a telling insight into the thinking that pervades the highest echelon of the U.S. Congress -- literally life lessons that speak volumes about the leaders Americans have elected to spend their money. *

"The trouble with practical jokes is that very often they get elected." --Will Rogers

Lee Wishing

Lee Wishing is administrative director of the Center for Vision & Values at Grove City College. This article is republished from V & V, a website of the Center for Vision & Values.

Could 2009 be the year the United States of America starts to go subprime? Just as subprime mortgages wrecked the economy in 2008, 2009 might be the year we begin to see problems associated with the debt that funds our nation's $10-trillion deficit. If we look to Civil War history we may be able to avert the looming problems.

Although the Federal Reserve did not cause the subprime crisis, it was the ultimate source of excess money for subprime home mortgages as well as much of the money used to finance our national debt. The Federal Reserve creates money out of thin air, with a few strokes of a computer keyboard, and uses the money for U.S. banking operations as well as financing the federal debt and various economic stimulus programs. If you and I were to create money, it would be called counterfeiting. When the Federal Reserve creates money, it's called monetary policy.

The Fed's monetary policy has been to create money, to crank up its "printing press." As the Fed creates money, each dollar in circulation eventually falls in value. Prices then rise to compensate for the falling dollar. The purchasing power of the dollar has declined 87 percent since 1957, according to Niall Ferguson in his new book, The Ascent of Money.

In light of the Bush and Obama stimulus packages and growing deficit, it looks like there's no end in sight to the Fed's dollar-creation policy. Rather than paying off our national debt and cutting spending, we continue to create deficits and borrow money to finance the imbalances. We borrow from ourselves and foreign governments. The biggest domestic owner of federal-debt instruments, U.S. Treasury Bills and Bonds, is the Federal Reserve, which pays for these investments largely with its printing press. Foreign governments now hold about $3 trillion in U.S. debt obligations with China and Japan accounting for approximately 47 percent of that amount.

Can you see the problem brewing here? Even though the dollar has strengthened a bit lately, would you want to lend the U.S. federal government money at today's paltry rates of one to three percent if you thought there was a good chance you would lose money due to the Fed's monetary policy? Fortunately, foreign nations have been willing to lend us funds, but how long can we count on them in light of monetary risk?

We have to give bondholders a better deal. History may be our guide.

Niall Ferguson tells the Civil War-era story of the startup Confederate States of America and their "cotton bonds." In order to entice Europe to lend it money to conduct the war, the South sought to assure its creditors that it would repay them with something of value rather than paper money that could be printed like Monopoly cash. The rebels backed their bonds with a valuable commodity: cotton. Because cotton was in high demand, the bonds doubled in value at one point during the war. With the Union's blockade of New Orleans, the South couldn't export its cotton and the value of its bonds, and its ability to sell more of them, plummeted. The South resorted to the printing press to pay for its goods and hyperinflation set in. Ferguson says that the North's success in blockading the port of New Orleans was more important than its decisive victory at Vicksburg in bringing down the South.

In addition to the economic strategy of winning the Civil War, there's something else of value in this story. Bonds backed by a revenue stream redeemable in a valuable commodity give investors additional incentive for lending money.

The Obama administration may want to consider the consequences of paying our creditors with dollars that are likely to fall in value. At the rate that the Federal Reserve has been expanding the money supply over the past several years, those dollars could decline in value quickly.

The new government may want to be prepared to issue a new type of bond, a debt security backed by our vast untapped resources of oil and new sources of energy. A strategy could be worked out that would allow private industry to thrive while generating energy-related revenue to fund the debt securities. Such a plan would also help to keep our dollar strong, generate high-paying private sector energy jobs, tax revenue, and reduce our reliance on foreign energy. Would any administration seriously consider this idea? Probably not. But it's not a bad idea to be prepared if foreign countries shun our current form of debt.

We need to pay our creditors with a currency that holds its value. As we look forward to a happy new year, let us consider history to bring about a bright future. *

"Laws are made for men of ordinary understanding and should, therefore, be construed by the ordinary rules of common sense. Their meaning is not to be sought for in metaphysical subtleties which may make anything mean everything or nothing at pleasure." --Thomas Jefferson

John A. Sparks

John A. Sparks is Dean of the Alva J. Calderwood School of Arts & Letters at Grove City College, Grove City, Pennsylvania, and teaches business law and Constitutional History. He is a Fellow for Educational Policy at the College's Center for Visions & Values. This article is republished from V & V, a website of the Center for Vision & Values.

The Obama administration will make every effort to pass a key piece of pro-union legislation. The bill has a misleading label: The Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA). In the interest of truth in advertising, the bill should be called, "The Employee Intimidation Act." Why? Because one of the features of the EFCA, should it become law, would be to do away with traditional secret-ballot elections that are now used to determine whether or not employees in an enterprise want to be represented by a union.

Here is how union elections work currently. Suppose company A has 75 assembly workers, and they are not members of a union. The union, let's say the United Steel Workers, in an attempt to unionize these workers, sends paid organizers and local employees sympathetic to the union to talk to the workers, often after work or during breaks. The union's goal is to have workers sign authorization cards. Once at least 30 percent of the workers in the plant sign those cards, the cards can be presented to the employer. The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), a federal governmental entity, then conducts a secret-ballot election, usually, within a month and a half after the presentation of the cards. If a majority of those in the plant vote "for" the union, the union becomes the representative of all the workers in that unit.

That, in brief, is the current system. There are two features which Obama and union advocates don't like. First, the NLRB election is held only after the business gets an opportunity to present its side of the story to workers who have often only heard the union's side. Secondly, an employee's decision, for or against unionization, is kept confidential.

What Obama and the unions are asking for is to supplant the secret-ballot election with what is called a "card check." In other words, when over 50 percent of employees have signed authorization cards, the union must be recognized by the employer. No secret-ballot election would be conducted.

What this invites is the pressuring of workers and a denial of their private right to free choice. Here is one possible scenario:

Employees are walking out of the plant at the end of a workday. A group of employees who favor the union walk behind their buddy "Joe," who is not convinced of the need for a union. They pressure Joe, saying that he certainly does not want to be considered an "employer lackey." They continue until, in an effort to get them off of his back, Joe signs an authorization card. Or imagine a "home visit" with a well-trained union organizer and a local employee. Once again, in front of other family members, the organizer tells Joe that he certainly does not want to stand in the way of higher wages and better working conditions. In the worst documented cases, the organizers may threaten workers or imply that if they do not cooperate, when the union gets in, the employee will lose his job.

Unions say that the current system gives employers a chance to convene closed-door meetings with workers in which the employer provides them with anti-union propaganda prepared by high-paid consultants. Of course this argument ignores similar activities conducted by well-financed and professionally skilled union organizers.

The existing system of secret balloting, if not perfect, does provide employees with a chance to express their decision about unionization, free from the pressure of either the employer or the union. Think of it this way. Suppose someone proposed to hold national presidential elections by means of such "card checks," and dispensed with the secret ballot. Using such a system, that would mean that if John McCain presented more signed authorization cards than his opponent, Obama, he would have become president. No secret ballot; no sanctity of the voting booth. How would such a plan be greeted? Citizens would regard it as preposterous -- an outrage! Then why is taking away the privacy of a worker's choice about unionization any less outrageous? *

"The true test of civilization is not the census, nor the size of cities, nor the crops -- no, but the kind of man the country turns out." --Ralph Waldo Emerson

John Morris

Lieutenant John Morris is the 34th Infantry Division Command Chaplain with the Minnesota Army National Guard.

Dear Friends,

Thank you for your prayers. Winter greetings from damp, cold North Fort Lewis [Washington]. We concluded our Ash Wednesday services this evening. Chaplain (LTC) Coe, a Roman Catholic Priest, was gracious enough to cross the installation and offer Mass for almost one hundred of our soldiers. The Protestants followed the Roman Catholic Ash Wednesday service with a service of our own in the "Red Bull Chapel."

We use a World War II chapel as "our" chapel. It is a blessing and the

soldiers love it. We offer Bible Studies in the morning, 0645-0715, Monday-Friday, and evening programs, Monday-Saturday. On Sundays we hold worship services. The chapel is a beehive of activity. "Battlerhythm" is a word we use a lot here. We are trying to establish our "battlerhythm." That's the Army's way of saying we are trying to settle into a new routine, and find some sort of balance for our lives. We are pulled from early morning, until late at night by demands of training. We have soldiers going in dozens of directions: to the firing range, to the driver's training, to the field sanitation class, to the Iraqi language class, to the signal intercept class, etc., etc., In between we schedule meetings and briefings.

With almost 900 soldiers on the ground, and more joining us daily, you can imagine how complicated managing this training can become. Somehow we manage to get everyone to where they need to be, mainly because of a cadre of NCOs who manage the chaos and keep us headed in the same direction. Nonetheless it is hard to find a "battlerhythm." Leaving the comforts and routines of home is like turning one's life upside down. Adopting the new routines of training takes adjustment. Some of us adjust gracefully, others have to be pulled along. All will adjust, as the Army does not adjust to the individual's needs.

So, we learn to walk everywhere, as we don't have cars. We learn to eat with hundreds of others and we absorb volumes of information everyday. From identifying hidden bombs to treating the wounds of injured soldiers, we go to "training" everyday.

All of this builds up to major exercises to train us how to function as a higher headquarters coordinating the operations of thousands of soldiers. Every once in a while we pause and get a glimpse of the enormity of what we are training for, i.e., war, and we are sobered by our responsibilities. I think you'd be proud of your citizen-soldiers. Their morale is very high despite the rain, the cold, the constant demands, and the new routines. They are a resilient group with a great attitude. I am often impressed with the "can do" spirit and the eagerness to set aside personal agendas to accomplish a greater good. Their dedication to learning the skills needed to master their mission is something to behold. It is humbling to serve with men and women who have given up the comforts of civilian careers to serve the nation. I count it an honor to be in their midst.

So on Ash Wednesday, Christians around the world "give up" important things in their lives to focus on the most important thing: our relationship with God. The Red Bulls grapple with giving up their civilian lives in order to effectively serve the nation as soldiers.

Please pray for our health, our homes, and our organization that we could accomplish all the training before us, and deploy from here fully prepared for the missions ahead of us.

God Bless. *

"Do your duty in all things. You cannot do more. You should never wish to do less." --Robert E. Lee

Editorial -- Barry MacDonald

Setting the Stage

The president made a mockery of his campaign promises with the tactics he employed in passing his economic stimulus package in February. The first consequential act of his presidency should wake up America. A pattern has emerged: this man cannot be taken at his word.

At a news conference on February 9 he set the stage for the American Recovery and Reinvestment bill. He said the country was in a "full-blown crisis" and a failure to act could "turn a crisis into a catastrophe" from which the nation might not recover. The stimulus bill was about fixing the economy, about putting people back to work:

. . . at this particular moment, with the private sector so weakened by this recession, the federal government is the only entity left with the resources to jolt our economy back to life. It is only government that can break the vicious cycle where lost jobs lead to people spending less money which leads to even more layoffs. . . . Doing nothing is not an option.

American workers are suffering; however, whether "only the government" can bring recovery is dubious. But for a man who talked so much about hope during the campaign he has shown skill in playing upon peoples' fears at a propitious moment.

The revealing moment in the passage of the bill came during the House-Senate conference at which the two bodies compromised their differing versions of the legislation. Firstly, no Republicans were allowed to negotiate in the conference -- so much for bipartisanship. But most importantly, the conference had completed its work by Thursday afternoon, February 12; the text was posted on a web site for members to read at 11:00 p.m.; and debate on the compromise began in the House at 9:00 a.m. the next morning. Members of the House had ten hours to read the 1,071 pages of the bill. No one had time to digest the details. No one could comprehend its contents.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) spoke on Thursday about the importance of reading the language of the bill -- referring only to the portion on school construction -- but she seemed oblivious to the larger point:

Around here language means a lot. Words weigh a ton and one person's understanding of a spoken description might vary from another's. We wanted to see it. And not only just I had to see it. I had to show it to my colleagues and my caucus. We wanted to take all the time that was necessary to make sure it was right. --Connie Hair, Human Events

While lawmakers remained in the dark, lobbyists had an advantage. Paul Bedard of U.S. News and World Report wrote:

We're receiving E-mails from Capitol Hill staffers expressing frustration that they can't get a copy of the stimulus bill agreed to last night at a price of $789 billion. What's more, staffers are complaining about who does have a copy: K Street Lobbyists. E-mails one key Democratic staffer: "K Street has the bill or chunks of it, already, and the congressional offices don't. So, the Hill is getting calls from the press (because it's leaking out) asking us to confirm or talk about what we know -- but we can't do that because we haven't seen the bill. Anyway, peeps [people] up here are sort of a combo of confused and like, 'Is this really happening?'" Reporters pressing for details, meanwhile, are getting different numbers from different offices, especially when seeking the details of specific programs.

Worse, there seem to be several different versions of what was agreed upon, with some officials circulating older versions of the package that seems to still be developing. Leadership aids said that it will work out later today and promised that lawmakers will get time to review the bill before Friday's vote.

CNSNews.com reported that Senator Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) said "No, I don't think anyone will have the chance to [read the entire bill]." Representative Zach Wamp (R-TN) said:

The Democrats have thrown this at us very last-minute. . . . That's why the rule of thumb in the United States Congress should be, "When in doubt, vote no," because the devil is in the details, and that's why this stimulus is not worthy of support.

Representative John Boozman (R-AK) said:

The American public expects for us to get in and know what we're voting on. . . . But there are very few members from Congress that are going to have time to actually read this thing. --Ryan Byrnes, CNSNews.com

The president wanted the bill passed and ready to sign by Monday -- he signed it on Tuesday, February 17.

What's in the Bill?

God knows maybe. A long list can be found at the Wall Street Journal's web site published on February 17. There are hundreds of listings. Education, healthcare, and scientific research for renewable energy are well rewarded.

What's not clear is how many government agencies the money will be filtered through on the way to its destination, whether the money is doled out in proper measure or is wasted, or how quickly it will be spent. The federal government is dictating to state governments the manner in which the money must be spent, which may be unconstitutional.

It takes an army of Washington staffers to write such a bill in haste. They must have been toiling their lives away in Washington in preparation. It's hard to know what secrets are hidden in its details.

Will this bill actually stimulate the economy and put people back to work? Nobody knows, maybe God does. But government does not have a good track record in spending money.

One egregious change has come to light: Bill Clinton's welfare reform bill has been undone. Clinton's reform reduced the number of people receiving welfare by two-thirds. The poverty rate plummeted and millions of people, many of them minorities, found work. It was one of the genuine achievements of his presidency.

This bill restores a perverse incentive for government to add people to the welfare rolls. Robert Rector, a welfare and entitlement analyst for the Heritage Foundation writes:

For the first time since 1996, the federal government would begin paying states bonuses to increase their welfare caseload. Indeed, the new welfare system created by the stimulus bills is actually worse than the old AFDC [Aid to Families with Dependent Children] program because it rewards the states more heavily to increase their caseloads. Under the stimulus bills, the federal government will pay 80 percent of the cost for each new family that a state enrolls in welfare; this matching rate is far higher than it was under AFDC.

So instead of stimulating the economy and putting people back to work, as the president promised, this facet of the bill would do the reverse: foster increased dependency and inhibit productivity.

Who is responsible? Their names aren't reported. Didn't Barack Obama promise to make government transparent? To do away with secrecy? Yes he did. Can he be blamed for killing welfare reform -- he didn't write the bill himself after all? No one knows who did.

President Obama is responsible, and he is entirely responsible. Only through the weight of imminent catastrophe and the frenzied dash to spend money could this have happened. Under normal circumstances there would have been public hearings and the whole nation would have known that the Democrats were trying to kill welfare reform.

With television cameras present, and welfare reform the only issue under consideration, even Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), though he might not have been ashamed to try (as a normal politician would be), would have known that it was folly to gut welfare reform in America during normal times.

Barack Obama brought the panic necessary to get the job done. He provided the cover of secrecy with a mass of simultaneous activity.

Barack's Words at Variance with His Deeds

Barack Obama has posted his program for "ethics reform" at the web site http://www.barackobama.com/issues/ethics (as of March 13, 2009). He says:

Sunlight Before Signing: Too often bills are rushed through Congress and to the president before the public has the opportunity to review them. As president, Obama will not sign any non-emergency bill without giving the American public an opportunity to review and comment on the White House web site for five days.

President Obama gives the impression that he wants an open, deliberative process, but in the event he does precisely the opposite; he does exactly what he criticizes others for doing. It is as though he made the statement to put his opponents off guard, and then he takes them by surprise. Note the escape hatch he left himself: he will not sign any "non-emergency bill . . . " but of course the stimulus bill was an emergency measure, so he has the out he needs.

We need to be watchful in the future for the escape hatches in his language, as they will point to his true intentions.

He even insulates himself from criticism, as it was the Democrats in Congress who wrote the legislation and speeded the bill through -- but it was he who spoke of a looming "catastrophe" from which the nation would never recover if immediate action were not taken. He set the strategy, his congressional lieutenants did the deed.

It is symbolic that he chose to sign the bill at a news event in Colorado without any congresspeople present (against custom). He was making a statement: it is his bill, his accomplishment.

The above quote is not a single instance of a policy position to which he is lightly committed; the quote reflects the many promises he made throughout the campaign. On his first full day in office he said: "Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency."

He said that it would be impossible to sneak earmarks into bills, that laws would be open to the public. He said that secrecy was to be a thing of the past, that the American people would know the contents of bills. Every earmark would be online for the public to see. However, there are many earmarks in the stimulus bill and the lawmakers requesting them are undisclosed.

He had especially harsh words for lobbyists and special interests: They would have no place in his administration. Yet as we see above the K street lobbyists knew the contents of the bill before the members of Congress, so evidently their access to information remains undiminished.

Here are two additional quotes from President Obama's web site on ethics:

Shine Light on Earmarks and Pork Barrel Spending: Obama's Transparency and Integrity in Earmarks Act will shed light on all earmarks by disclosing the name of the legislator who asked for each earmark, along with a written justification, 72 hours before they can be approved by the full Senate.

Close the Revolving Door on Former and Future Employers: No political appointees in an Obama-Biden administration will be permitted to work on regulations or contracts directly and substantially related to their prior employer for two years. And no political appointee will be able to lobby the executive branch after leaving government service during the remainder of the administration.

But on February 3, less than two weeks after his inauguration, the news organization Politico put together a list of former lobbyists appointed to positions by the Obama administration:

Eric Holder, Tom Vilsack, William Lynn, William Corr, David Hayes, Mark Patterson, Ron Klain, Mona Sutphen, Melody Barnes, Cecilia Munoz, Patrick Gaspard, Michael Strautmanis, [and Tom Daschle, who was paid millions for his political connections but never registered as a lobbyist].

During the campaign Obama spoke so often about the malign influence of lobbyists that his position on lobbyists acquired maximum emphasis. He pointed out repeatedly that lobbyists were a principal example of the corrupt ways of "business as usual" in Washington. Even an inattentive viewer of a five-minute news clip couldn't help but take away Obama's disparagement of lobbyists -- yet here is Obama doing exactly the opposite of what he promised.

The point is not that appointing lobbyists is corrupt; often they are uniquely knowledgeable and situated so as to be most qualified. Every presidency has employed lobbyists. The point is that Obama chose to make lobbyists central villains, and then he appointed a boat-load of them to his team.

Obama's words are a ruse. His intent is to create a virtuous impression, but he will not be bound by what he says; he may do the opposite of what he says. And he is counting on the complacency of the nightly-news broadcasters, The New York Times, and The Washington Post not to report the difference between his words and actions. *

"A politician will do anything to keep his job -- even become a patriot." --William Randolph Hearst

Some of the quotes following each article have been gathered by The Federalist Patriot at: http://FederalistPatriot.US/services.asp.