The Middle is Always Evil

Dear People of America,

It appears that The Economy™ is in some trouble.

Everyone (all of you) seems to be telling me that if The Economy™ had been more regulated by the government, there wouldn’t be a problem. If you believe that, I have a bridge to nowhere I want to sell you. In short, the problem is not that we have too little government interference, the problem is that we have too much. Please heed this.

Where do you get this idea that politicians, people who not have to do anything of value in order to earn money, have the incredible economic foresight and knowhow to enact the perfect regulations on The Economy™? Most of the men (and Nancy Pelosi) who are brokering The Failout are career politicians, who have no understanding of how the free market works, who have never run a business, or even worked for one for any considerable amount of time. These are the people you are entrusting to fix everything. 

Ladies and gentlemen, I have news for you.

If you honestly believe that our present situation is the result of the unrestrained “greed” of men on wall street (notice how its always men on wall street; of course, there are no greedy women), and that the government needs to step in and save us from them, then you deserve to lose your home and to be poor. 

Any group of people that honestly believes that The Economy™ is suffering because of productive individuals and needs to be saved by unproductive ones, who nominates Barack Obama to be head of state with John McCain as the conservative alternative, deserves to suffer their own contradictions, which means:

America, you deserve to be poor.

But ignore me. Let’s put every CEO and every member of every Board of Directors of every Fortune 500 company in prison tonight, after the debate, with Barack Obama at the head of the mob (John McCain can shoot any that try to escape). After all, they are all greedy, self-interested bastards who contribute nothing to the economy, right? They are only out for themselves, and in today’s economy, we can’t afford anyone who isn’t out to serve the greatest good.

My father has done quite well for himself in his life, the majority of which he has spent working. He started his own plumbing company, which is now one of the most successful on the northshore of Chicago; he did all of this himself. I have a lot of admiration for him.

Today, I had a rare conversation with my father. We often talk about politics, since he is the more conservative of my parents, and therefore has more in common with me; but our talk is usually filled with levity– it never takes on a serious tone. Today was different.

I asked my father how much money he makes a year. I thought I had a pretty good idea, but I wanted to be sure. The number that he gave me seemed very low– much lower than I thought, considering my family’s lifestyle. I asked my him if he was sure about the figure he gave me, and he started to talk to me about tax deductions; thats when I realized why the number seemed so low to me– he wasn’t talking about how much money he made each year, he was talking about how much he made after taxes. I asked him how much he really made each year.

“Why does that matter?” He asked.

It was at that moment, looking into my father’s tired eyes, that I realized that when the government takes money from him, it takes so much more than just monetary wealth– it takes a piece of my father’s pride; it robs him of the joy that comes from the achievement of a value. It takes a piece of my father’s spirit.

Just to come to the understanding that my father doesn’t look at how much money he earns each year in terms of how much wealth he was able to create, but rather– of what tax bracket he belongs in, to really understand the full implication of that fact– it truly saddens me.

And to come home and to talk to these people on the internet who are my age, who think they know everything, who talk about how much they are inspired by Barack Obama’s plan for “social justice,” who talk about how they find socialism “interesting,” who speak voluminously about their love for humanity…

I just think about looking into my father’s eyes in that moment.

Last night, the two remaining contenders for the presidency took the stage together for the first time in the election cycle. The event, as you probably know, was held at Saddleback Chruch in Lake Forest, California. All in all, this event showed us two things:

• Any casual observer learned (and probably already knows) that Barack Obama cannot preform well off-the-cuff, and that John McCain can; this means the debates between these two are going to be interesting, and that this election may be a lot closer than many of us previously thought.
• We also learned that both candidates despise their own happiness– or at least consider it something to feel guilty for, to try to hide from the public.

Case in point: when asked what his greatest moral failure was, Senator Obama mumbled something about drug use, but then went on to say that it was a “fundamental selfishness”

I am proud to say that what Barack Obama lists as his greatest moral failure is the thing that I would consider to be the greatest moral achievement a person could aspire to: selfishness.

When Pastor Rick Warren asked McCain why he wanted to be president, he said that he wanted to,

“inspire a generation of Americans to serve a cause greater than their self interest.”

For all their disagreements (and agreements) on foreign and domestic policy, these two candidates sure do come down together on the issue of whether or not Americans have the right to live for their own sake: the answer, firmly, emphatically, is: no.

John McCain is not the first politician that has called for a generation to bow to a cause greater than themselves; watch the clip. Barack Obama is not the first politician to call for a country that– like in the clip above– “knows no class distinction;” This is not a Change I can believe in– in fact, its not a change at all. Its been done before.

You see, ladies and gentlemen, the actors change, but the course of history stays the same.

John McCain wants you to serve your country; Barack Obama wants you to serve, not just your country, but an amorphous “others.” But what these men forget– or rather, what they do not forget– but instead, what you forget is that where there is a servant, there is a master, ladies and gentlemen.

And don’t comment saying that its inappropriate for me to compare modern day political figures to Adolf Hitler, because it isn’t; watch the video.

Besides, that’s just what I do: I compare people to Hitler.

I can appreciate the athleticism, hard work and ability that it requires for one to get to the Olympics; in fact, I probably admire that most about the event. What I cannot stand is watching the games with others, who fail to appreciate the skill of other country’s competitors because of their blind worship of their own.

I do not wish to be misunderstood; I love the United States of America. But waving a flag and cheering for Michael Phelps just because he’s American does not make you a patriot, it makes you a tribalist moron, and when you do it, you disgrace everything that America means.

Unfortunately, for most people who watch the Olympics in this manner, America means nothing more than the flag that athletes’ hold, and the athlete is nothing more than a flag-holder. The tribalist does not admire the athlete because of his skill and ability, but because he holds his flag; and he admires the flag for no reason other than because he was born under it.

Americans jump and holler when an American man defeats a French man in a swimming competition– why did they prefer an American victory? Because they happen to come from the same country? Because of an accident of birth? What honor is there in that? The American and the Frenchman are both individual people with whom I have no relationship whatsoever; I see no reason to take pride in a victory that I did not personally have some part in, just because the victor comes from the same tribe.

There is nothing wrong with watching the Olympics, as long as one does so with no preference at all as to the winner’s country of birth. In any competition, the only rational choice for a desired winner is: the man of greatest ability; the man who deserves to win. When you’re watching the Olympics this week, here are a few questions you should ask yourself and consider:

• Do I want the best athlete to win, or simply the one from my country?

• Does this competitor’s country of origin have any real effect on their athletic ability?

• If I want someone other than the most deserving athlete to win, what does that mean that I want for the most deserving?

• In a competition between the deserving and the undeserving, where the undeserving is the victor, have they really earned their victory?

• If I desire that an athlete achieve an unearned victory, what am I really interested in when I watch the Olympics?

• If I desire the unearned, what does it mean about my values?

“Diversity Week” is a week that is set aside by my school in order to celebrate our diversity.

What is diversity, and why does it warrant celebration? Diversity is the state of being diverse. In order for a thing to be diverse, it must necessarily be made up of distinct characteristics, qualities, or elements. What does diversity mean in reference to a community, such as my school community? First we must define community. A community (in this context) is an interacting population of individuals in a common location. In such a context, diversity would then mean that these particular individuals, who make up our community, hold distinct characteristics, qualities, or elements. What is an individual? An individual is a single human, regarded as possessing a unique personality, who is considered either apart of or apart from a society or community. The above process of logical deduction shows us that every community is necessarily diverse; every person is an autonomous, unique individual that posses distinct characteristics, qualities, or elements. Diversity Week spits in the face of the true meaning of diversity, declaring that the only true standard of diversity is ethnic background, which is a racist and offensive claim.

To set the standard of diversity as one’s heritage and nothing more is to claim that it is only this trait that makes an individual unique. In other words, this means that as a school we are promoting a perverse form of racism that looks at people not as individuals with unique personalities and traits, but “groups” that are different from each other—why? Because of the color of their skin, and for no other reason. We do not celebrate people who enjoy different kinds of music or books or games or fashions or TV shows or ice cream flavors during diversity week; why do you think that is? I’m a white guy, and I’d be willing to bet that there are plenty of black guys out there who watch the same TV shows that I do, and who derive the same pleasures from the same kind of ice cream that I do—why then, during diversity week, are blacks singled out along with Hispanics, Asians, and all the other various groups? What do these arbitrary groupings mean about a person? Nothing. But the implication that is given every year during Diversity Week is that because a person looks different, they must think different because of it—otherwise why place an Asian girl in a different group than me? What makes the two of us different?

You might say to me, “But Bill, Diversity Week isn’t really about all that idealism you’re preaching of ‘diversity of character,’ or any such nonsense; I mean, what you say—it sounds nice in theory, but its really not very practical… And besides! Everyone knows that what Diversity Week is really about is celebrating the minorities in our school!”

These arguments are weak.

If what I am saying sounds nice in theory, then why hasn’t it been tried? Could we be so slothful as a society that we abandon true diversity, the diversity the individual human spirit and mind, as our ideal and replace it with the false diversity of the skin and the body simply because it is somehow more practical? Doubtful. It is far more likely that most of us have been deceived into believing that diversity is something that it is not. Celebrating diversity is not equal to celebrating “minorities” in our school. Who are these “minorities” and why do they deserve celebration, then, while I or some other white person does not? Here’s a fact that many of the proponents of Diversity Week are unaware of and fewer care to acknowledge: the smallest minority is the individual, the single person, and all true diversity flows from him—or her. Until we recognize this fact, there can be no celebration of diversity of any kind, anywhere.

I’m currently hanging around the Defending the American Dream Summit in Austin, Texas; I’ve been passing the time talking to a cute LP spokeswoman and checking out some of the other booths. It seems that there’s a lot of support for John McCain around here– that’s a bandwagon I cannot in good conscience jump on.

Don’t be deceived by the man’s hawkish patriotic stump speeches, he’s a liberal; there have been plenty of militaristic liberals in recent history (Castro, Mao, Stalin), so I don’t understand why this throws people off so much.

McCain-Feingold and McCain-Kennedy are two of the most leftist legislative moves that I can think of off the top of my head. Indeed, McCain is to the left of most Democrats on immigration and campaign finance reform. Not to mention his shameful stance on gun rights and welfare. The man is simply not a conservative. Its pitiful that we have him as our smaller-government alternative to Barack Obama.

Both these two men are Marxists; one of them is pretending not to be. Anybody who believes in public education is a Marxist; anyone who supports the existence of the IRS to any extent is a Marxist; anyone who supports the existence of the Federal Communications Commission, the Department of Labor, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Securities and Exchange Commission, etc. is a Marxist. Anyone who believes that the roads should be publicly owned is a Marxist. Period.

I cannot bring myself to support John McCain.

The war in Iraq– the unfortunate war, as I like to call it, has been going on for 5 years. It is now necessary to ask: Why are we there? What is the duty of the United States’ military in Iraq?

Months ago, when leaders of the 25th Infantry Division’s 3rd Brigade Combat Team returned home from Iraq, they did so seeking advice. But not military advice. Not advice on how to gain the respect of their troops; not advice on how to better prepare their men for the horrors of combat. No, they wanted the counsel of the mayor of Honolulu, Mufi Hannemann, on how to manage a large municipality. Why would US military officers, whose only charge is to defeat an enemy and protect American lives, need advice on how to run a municipality?

Because the brigade, according to Lt. Col. J.B. Vowell, the deputy commander, will be helping the Iraqi government build new infrastructure for the Iraqi people. Bridges, electricity, sewage centers, water pumps, all free labor for Iraq, courtesy of the US military.

The men and women fighting in Iraq have their hands tied, unable to respond with force if attacked by a civilian. If a man throws a molotov cocktail at US troops, they are not allowed to engage their enemy. Why? Why are we doing this? Because our government’s policy towards Iraq has been consistently altruistic.

As George Bush said in his 2003 State of the Union address, “We exercise power without conquest, and we sacrifice for the liberty of strangers.” In other words, we are not masters, we are slaves. George Bush’s foreign policy calls on young Americans to spill their blood, not for the sake of American security, but for the security of those who hate us, who would see us dead.

If we’re going to be in a war in the Mideast, we need to be fighting our enemy, not building their sewers; no responsibility to the enemy or to the Iraqi people. Our government has no place spending billions of American taxpayers dollars to a largely anti-western people who hate us. This needs to end. America needs to take its gloves off.

Fight the war. Crush the enemy. Leave.

“I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!”

-Barry Goldwater

The reason we cannot win this war is simple; it results from our inability to name our enemy. Thus far, we’ve called it a war on terrorism.

But terrorism is a tactic; the United States cannot win a war on a tactic. In World War II, we did not fight a war on Kamikaze pilots; we did not fight a war on blitzkriegs; we fought fascism and totalitarianism– ideologies. In the Cold War, we did not fight a war on espionage; we fought Communism– an ideology. You see, a tactic implies a tactician; a tactician with certain motives, beliefs, and goals.

But for some reason, we are unable to state the motives, beliefs, and goals of our enemy. We are unable to do so much as name him. This is the direct result of our low moral self esteem. There is such a cult of moral grayness in the west that any proclamation of moral superiority is immediately taken to be naive and immoral. Didn’t you know that whats wrong to you may not be wrong to someone else? The only people worse than those who preach this tripe are those who know it to be misguided but appease the people preaching it anyway. It is these kinds of people that are running the war. Instead of standing up and proclaiming moral superiority over the enemy, Islamic Fundamentalism, they appease the liberal intellectuals and call it a War on Terrorism.

I couldn’t invent a better example of such appeasement than this. A US military sniper was using the Qur’an for target practice; the wrong people found out, and he got arrested. Not only was he arrested, but George Bush officially apologized, and

U.S. military commanders in Iraq held a ceremony to formally apologize and presented a new copy of the Qur’an to tribal leaders in the area where the incident took place.

When your military commanders are presenting tribal leaders with a copy of the book that inspired the death of nearly 3,000 of your fellow citizens as an apology for an act of desecration taken against that same book, you’ve lost the war that you’re fighting, and you aren’t going to win.

If we are unable, as a country, to proclaim our moral superiority over Islamic Totalitarianism, then we can’t win, and we should end the war and come home.

Gay marriage is one of those fluffy, football issues that I usually try to avoid at all costs. But seeing as how it was legalized in California just yesterday, and since it is one of the first issues I am asked to comment on whenever discussing policy with the average Joe (or Jane), I will comment on it here, and I will do so in a composed tone of finality that I reserve only for things that I wish never to discuss again.

When considering the question of gay marriage, there are two popularly accepted positions in the marketplace of ideas:

There are those who would have gay marriage completely legalized, with homosexuals retaining the full legal rights that straight couples now enjoy; in the most practical sense, these individuals would like gay couples to be able to obtain a marriage license with the same ease as a straight couple. This is the view generally held by liberals, and is therefore the viewpoint of most everyone I know and converse with on a regular basis.

On the other side of the fence, there is a movement to rid the country of the marriage of gay couples by means of a constitutional amendment that would define marriage as the union of a man and a woman. This would be entirely accurate according to every cited definition on Dictionary.com, and thats a lot of citations. This position is commonly held by the religious right, as well as by the politicians that attempt to appeal to and appease them. Pictured right is the notorious Baptist pastor Fred Phelps, arguably the most vocal (and assuredly the most controversial) activist in the campaign to end what he views as a morally reprehensible bastardization of a sacrament of God.

Both of these views are wrong, and it is truly a sad statement about the political culture in the United States that these positions are accepted to be opposites, when, in reality, they have more in common than not. The first platform mentioned above seems to be the position of most people today; they declare that they stand for equality, for “gay rights,” as well as many other abstract platitudes that are essentially meaningless. There is no real label that you can place on these individuals, because they come from a broad political spectrum. Yes, there are gay conservatives who fall under this umbrella too, like this blogger, who goes by the name of GayPatriot; he is a conservative, and he seems downright sensible when it comes to most things, writing in one post:

The greatest enemies of gay people are not social conservatives in the West who may question (what they call) our lifestyle and oppose legislation benefiting us, but Islamic theocrats who execute gay people in jurisdictions where they predominate and seek to destroy the nations with political systems which allow us to live freely.

However, in a completely different post, he advocates for the same position on gay marriage that is usually held by liberals. So we can’t call everyone in favor of gay marriage liberal– not all of them are, as you can see. The only word that can be used to describe them is statist. What are they really after when they demand the right to get married?

They’re after marriage licenses. A little piece of paper issued by the State that says: Joe Shmo and John Doe are married now, because the State so decrees. That’s all. Surely this is not the sacred rite that religious nut-jobs like Phelps have sworn to defend. Surely, all this fuss couldn’t be over a little piece of paper, could it? Just what is a license, anyway? According to Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary , a “license” is

a formal permission from the proper authorities to perform certain acts or to carry on a certain business, which without such permission would be illegal.

It would be illegal for you to get married if the State didn’t give you permission first. The argument that gays, lesbians and their sympathizers are currently having with the religious right is based on an entirely false premise. They should not be saying what they are saying, which is something to the effect of: “Please, Mommy State, let me and my lover get married, it would be so kind of you if you let us! Pleeeeease,” they should be saying, “Government, unless I am initiating the use of force against another person, it isn’t your business what I do. Ever. And if I want to get married, its between the person I’m marrying, the person marrying us, and me. That’s it. I don’t want your marriage ‘license,’ and I certainly do not need it to make a promise to someone that I will be with them and only them, forever.”

This attitude should not be isolated to gays and lesbians, it should be the attitude of all adults. As a society we need to reexamine our ideas about marriage, and what it means. Instead of asking ourselves, “Should the government allow these two individuals to form a union together?”, we should be asking, “Should the government ever have a say in the private affairs of individuals for any reason?” The answer, of course, is an emphatic no.

Frame the issue in terms of economics. If two people voluntarily choose to engage in trade with one another, it is no one’s business but their own. What they are trading, and how much they want for it can be decided by no one but them, since only they can accurately determine of how much value any given thing is to them. Whatever arrangement they come to in the end is a private matter, not to be regulated interfered with by anyone, and that includes the government. That’s nice, isn’t it? But how does it relate to marriage as a legal institution?

All voluntary human relations are trades, exactly like the one mentioned in the previous paragraph. Take the following as an example: one man sees value in another man, and believes that his own life would be benefited in some way by that man’s presence in it, and so he seeks to spend time with him. If the second man, in turn, sees value in the first, he will (probably) enter into a relationship of some kind with him. Both these individuals find the relationship to be beneficial, otherwise they would not participate in it; they would seek elsewhere. The conditions of their relationship are theirs to decide, and cannot rationally be determined by anyone other than them, since they are the only ones who can accurately determine of how much value they are to one other. Like any other mutually voluntary trade, it is their private matter, and it is not to be regulated, approved or disapproved of, considered, or even acknowledged by the government. This means that when two people, seeing great value in one another, decide that they would like to make their relationship permanent and monogamous, and they come to an agreement, a contract, if you will, about the conditions of that that relationship, the government not only does not have the right to regulate, sanction, and/or approve of said contract, but any regulation, sanction, or approval would be unnecessary in the extreme, for such a contract already has all the authority it needs: the sanction of willing participants. By issuing (or not issuing) a marriage license to the individuals in question, the government is implicitly stating that it can determine the value and legitimacy of the marriage better than those involved, and by allowing the government to do this, the individuals in question are admitting, not only to themselves, but to the world, that they need the government’s sanction on their marriage, because their own is not enough to make it legitimate.

What about divorce, you say? There would be no way to divorce someone if the government doesn’t regulate the institution of marriage, you say? Poppycock, says I. If a willing participant in a contract chooses to void it, the terms of severance are (or at least, they should be) stipulated within the contract itself. If someone does not abide by these stipulations, it is then the proper role of government to enforce them. This would be the case with any business contract between individuals. Marriage should not be an exception.

Remember that the government’s only claim to existence is the protection of its citizens from those who would force them to act against what they believe to be their best interests, or: the initiation of force. The government should, therefore, hold no power whatsoever over those who do not initiate its use. This, of course, means that the “opposite” of the liberal platform on gay marriage is not an opposite position at all, it is just another variant on the same statist measures of control over individual’s lives– which brings me back to the purpose of this post.

The fact that we are presented with two different forms of statist control over the lives of private individuals as opposites– one of them upholding “moral values,” the other upholding “equality”– while neither of them are upholding anything but the destruction of the human spirit, along with the fact that the only issues that seem to be important to anyone these days are issues such as this, is a sad reflection on the political culture of America today. You can blame the mainstream media all you want, but the media is the effect, not he cause of the problem, which is something much deeper. I believe that the root cause of our culture’s current state is that Americans– all Americans, irrespective of party leaning, irrespective of any racial, economic, or any other kind distinction that you can draw between human beings– (for the most part) have no driving philosophy that guides their lives. Most hold no real standard for what is good and evil. Is it any wonder that we have such pragmatic politicians, like John McCain and Barack Obama, men who, unable to stand on any real principles, value compromise above what is right and wrong? It isn’t them, its us, America. Like the media, politicians appeal to what they think you want to hear. If one were to listen to either of these men talk for even ten minutes with this premise in mind, one would come to the conclusion that Americans don’t want to be too liberal– and they definitely don’t want to be too conservative. Americans want to play for both teams, it seems. The only problem is that the teams that they are playing for are owned by the same company: Serfdom INC., and every game is rigged. No matter who wins, we lose. Soon, Americans are going to have to realize that it isn’t about “left” versus “right,” its about right versus wrong; it isn’t about “liberal” versus “conservative,” its about freedom versus slavery.

We reap what we sow, America, and until we, as a nation, really examine our lives and our values, until we stand up for the culture of our heritage, the culture of our founding fathers, the culture of independence, of freedom, of the rule of law, we will continue to earn presidential candidates like Obama, and presidents like George Bush, and this cultural famine will not stop. It will kill us, and there’ll be grass growing in the streets.

Later.