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2009: Prospects for Liberty Part I
Continuing the tradition that I’ve followed since MayerBlog began five years ago, I’m beginning the New Year with an essay on “The Prospects for Liberty” in the coming year. This year the prospects are, to put it simply, not very good – and they’re likely to remain so for the next several years. The success of Democrats in the November 2008 national elections in the United States, along with the resurgence of socialism in Europe and in other regions of the world, demonstrates the single greatest threat to individual freedom and responsibility in the world today. What is that threat? It’s the persistence of paternalism; that is, the use of the coercive power of government to “protect” individuals from themselves – that is, to prevent individuals from governing themselves, from exercising both the freedom to live their lives as they please (as long as they do not harm others by interfering with their rights) and from taking responsibility for their lives (which means, taking responsibility for the choices they make). And what is the greatest force for paternalism in the Western world today? It is the persistence, now into the 21st century, of the 20th-century regulatory/welfare state – a system of political economy which originated in Europe in the late 19th century (in Kaiser Wilhelm’s Germany, under the leadership of his fascist prime minister, Otto von Bismarck), spread to Britain and other countries in Western Europe in the early decades of the 20th century (during the late Victorian and Edwardian eras in British history) and eventually spread to the United States by the middle of the 20th century (as a result of the so-called “Progressive” movement of the early 1900s and Franklin Roosevelt’s “New Deal” programs of the 1930s). The 20th-century regulatory/welfare state, sometimes called the “nanny state” (for obvious, appropriate reasons) has also been called the “mixed economy” of the United States and other Western countries – the part-capitalist (or semi-free market), part-socialist (that is, government-controlled) economic system that has prevailed since the late 1930s in the U.S. And it has been expanded, by Congress (whether controlled by Democrats or Republicans) and by FDR’s successors as U.S. presidents, again, both Democrat and Republican. Although its proponents call themselves “liberals” or “progressives,” the 20th-century regulatory/welfare state is neither “liberal” nor “progressive,” in the true sense of those words. Rather, it’s reactionary – harkening back to the paternalistic policies that the governments of Britain and other European nations followed for centuries, from the Dark Ages to the dawn of the Enlightenment. (For more on this, see my essay on “Reactionary Progressives,” Mar. 16, 2006.) In identifying paternalism as the greatest threat to individual freedom today, I emphasize that the threat is not, as many people in the Western world naively believe, the “culture war” with radical, militant Islam, which is about as likely to conquer modern Western civilization as an alien invasion from outside our solar system would be likely to conquer the Earth. No, the greatest enemy of individualism in the world today is not the anti-individualist, anti-capitalist, collectivist ideology of radical Islam (or, for that matter, any other non-Western ideological movement). Rather, the greatest enemy of individualism in the Western world today can be found in the Western world itself, in those aspects of Western thought that contradict the individualism and capitalism on which the modern West has been based. It’s the persistence of a social, economic, and political system that preceded the rise of individualism and capitalism: an older system based on collectivism – a class-based, feudal, paternalistic, monarchical and aristocratical system that eventually was replaced by "liberalism” (in the classic sense), a system based on individualism, equality of rights, free markets, and limited government (or constitutional republicanism). The only really “liberal” or “progressive” policy – to use the true sense of both those terms – is the policy of radical individualism, which in terms of political economy means free-market capitalism. It was the rise of capitalism that made Western societies – especially Great Britain and the United States – so prosperous, and so free, in the 18th and early 19th centuries. Contemporaneously, two great, revolutionary philosophical and political/economical movements – the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution – brought about the transition to individualism and capitalism, on which the distinctiveness of modern Western culture has been based. Those revolutionary movements, unfortunately, were not complete. (The American Revolution, one of the most important manifestations of the Enlightenment – the one that defined the United States of America as a nation uniquely founded on the principles of individualism and capitalism – was itself incomplete, as I have discussed in my essay “Completing the American Revolution,” written for my presentation at The Atlas Society’s conference in October 2007 celebrating the 50th anniversary of the publication of Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged. (For more on this theme, including a reprinting of my essay as well as additional essays further exploring this “unfinished revolution” theme, see the forthcoming Winter 2009 issue of The New Individualist, the magazine published (now quarterly) by The Atlas Society.) Legal paternalism, as championed by the self-proclaimed “liberals” or “progressives” in American politics today, is actually a reactionary policy. It threatens to undermine the truly liberal, progressive policies of individualism and capitalism – as well as the “principles of 1776,” the radical individualist, limited-government principles on which the American Revolution was based. It threatens to turn the clock back, not only to 18th-century British paternalistic system against which America’s Founders rebelled during the Revolution but even further back to the monarchical, feudal pre-capitalist system on which the British system was based. Paternalism, in the form of the 20th-century regulatory/welfare state, again, is the single greatest threat to liberty in the United States and the world today.
This Year’s Theme: “The Tyranny of Bullshit”
Last year’s New Year’s essay (“2008: Prospects for Liberty”) focused on what I called the “four fascisms,” four aspects of statist collectivism (or “fascism,” in the literal sense of the term) that posed what I regarded as the greatest challenges to individual liberty in 2008: (1) “Eco-Fascism,” the tyranny of radical environmentalists, including the global-warming hoax and other myths propagated by “green” activists as a rationale for imposing their agenda on us by force; (2) “Nanny-State Fascism,” the tyranny of the health police, who seek to turn everyone into wards of the state, including the movement pushing for “universal” health care – that is, government monopolization of the health care industry (what used to be called, and still is, socialized medicine); (3) “Demopublican/ Replicrat Fascism,” the tyranny of the two-party political system in the United States, particularly dangerous in 2008 as an election year; and last, (4) “Islamo-Fascism,” the danger of militant, fundamentalist Islam to the United States and the rest of the civilized world. With the exception of Islamo-Fascism (the danger of which is greatly exaggerated, as noted above), these “fascist” threats still remain as major threats to individual liberty. But the success of Democrats in the November 2008 federal elections in the United States – retaining, and even increasing, their control over both houses of Congress as well as recapturing the White House – was possible because of yet another phenomenon, one that today makes possible the resurgence of welfare-state paternalistic policies. That phenomenon – the theme of this year’s essay – is what I call “the tyranny of bullshit.” Welfare-state paternalistic policies are popular, among the American public and large segments of the electorate of other Western democratic societies, because they’re based on various myths that are believed in by the gullible masses. (Contrary to the old adage, “forty million Frenchmen” – or seventy million Americans – indeed can “be wrong.” And, it turns out, you can fool most of the people most of the time. Look how many Americans, for example, let Oprah Winfrey’s producers pick the books they read!) I could discuss some of the most important myths (about history, economics, and human nature) on which the 20th-century regulatory/welfare state has been founded. But I think it’s more interesting to talk not about those myths in an academic sense, but rather to talk about them in a less formal way. What scholars call myths or legends, ordinary people call, more bluntly, “bullshit.” And so, it’s the bullshit on which welfare-state paternalism rests – and, even more importantly, on which the arguments for expanding the welfare state (as spouted mostly by Democrat politicians) rest – that will be the topic of this year’s essay. I call it “the tyranny of bullshit” because it’s a peculiar form of tyranny, one based on the gullibility of people who vote for the politicians who are taking away their liberties based upon the bullshit rationalizations they espouse. I’m reminded here of Ayn Rand’s definition of politician: “men whose sole qualification to rule me was their capacity to spout the fraudulent generalizations that got them elected to the privilege of enforcing their wishes at the point of a gun." The “fraudulent generalizations” that support expansion of the welfare state today are nothing more than bullshit: theories based not on well-established facts about objective reality, but rather on phony “junk science,” or on misuse of statistics and other empirical data, or erroneous (and often unstated) premises, or on nothing but irrational “faith,” or superstition. Again this year I’ll identify four kinds of threats – four forms of bullshit – that seem most threatening to individual liberty in 2009. Part I focuses on the most visible bullshit in the news today, the new presidential administration and its talk about “change”: Nothing better illustrates the gullibility of the people, the gullibility that makes the tyranny of bullshit possible, than their naïve belief that the new president and his administration somehow will bring real change to Washington, D.C.
“Change” Bullshit: Threats to Liberty from the New Demagogue-in-Chief’s Administration
The President-elect, B.O., is a master purveyor of bullshit – truly a bullshit artist – as I’ve previously discussed here. (See my essay “The Emperor Is Naked!” (Oct. 16). As to why I refer to the President-elect by its initials rather than by name, see the first entry in my “Fall-deral 2008” essay (Nov. 6).) B.O. is unfit to be president of the United States. He’s one of the least qualified persons ever to hold the office: he has no executive government experience and limited experience holding office at the national level (as a first-term U.S. Senator, he accomplished nothing other than running for the presidency). I’ve called him an “affirmative action president” because his election epitomizes the injustice of so-called “affirmative action,” or racial preference, programs, which select persons not because of their abilities or qualifications as an individual but solely because of their race. His campaign deftly played the “race card,” cashing in on the dregs of America’s past problems with racism: black group-identity politics and white liberal guilt. If he had not racially identified himself as a black man and cashed in on racism, he would not have been nominated by the Democrats’ party, let alone elected president. He also has far-left political views, well outside the “mainstream” views of most Americans. He may not be an out-and-out socialist (like, for example, Bernie Sanders, the former Democratic and now independent U.S. Senator from Vermont), but his political views have been shaped by the influence of Marxist mentors his entire life. More than any other man who has occupied the White House – including those early-20th-century harbingers of the welfare state, Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin Roosevelt – B.O. is friendly to socialism and is ignorant of, if not hostile to, free-market capitalism. Given his politics, he lacks the requisite understanding of, and respect for, constitutional limits on the powers of government – which means that on January 20 when he takes the oath of office to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States,” he will be lying. Virtually everything he’ll do as president will undermine the Constitution, the limits it places on the powers of the executive branch and the federal government generally as well as its protections for the rights of individuals. The only real uncertainty about B.O.’s presidency is how much damage he will do – and how soon. B.O. got his party’s nomination and was elected president because of his campaign – which I have likened to the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale of “The Emperor’s New Clothes” (again, see my Oct. 6 essay, “The Emperor Is Naked!”). It was a campaign based almost entirely on bullshit: the image portrayed of B.O. as a “uniter” (when in fact he employs the standard Democrat demagoguery based on race and class divisiveness), his image as a “centrist” (when in fact, as previously noted, he’s one of the most left-wing politicians ever elected president) – all this is bullshit. The biggest load of bullshit associated with B.O. and his campaign for the presidency, however, is the notion that he’ll bring “change” to Washington. The constant references to “Change,” or “Change You Can Trust,” etcetera, are nothing but pure bullshit because all B.O.’s administration will bring to Washington is more of the same – more of the same old, tired semi-socialist, paternalist policies that the federal government has been tinkering with, under both Democrat and Republican administrations, for the past century or so, since the beginning of the 20th-century regulatory/welfare state. All B.O. really promises to do is to expand the welfare state – to increase government and its controls over Americans’ lives, making the U.S. even more of a socialist country – and that’s not any kind of real “change” in public policy, at all. Consider the contrast between B.O. and the greatest president since World War II, Ronald Reagan. In his first inaugural address, Reagan spoke the memorable line, “In the present crisis, government is not the solution to our problems; government is the problem.” Those words are more true today than when spoken by Reagan 28 years ago. Yet B.O. is so out of touch with reality that he believes precisely the opposite: as he stated in a recent press conference, he believes not only that government can solve America’s problems but that only government can solve our problems. He seeks to expand, not restrict, government – to make the federal government even more intrusive in controlling virtually all aspects of Americans’ lives, and to substitute for the spontaneous order that emerges from a free marketplace the coerced order that emerges from government planning and controls. B.O. suffers from what F.A. Hayek called the “fatal conceit” of socialism: the false belief that government planning not only works but that it works better than free markets. Or, to put it another way, that government bureaucrats’ decisions ought to substitute for the choices spontaneously made by millions of individuals in a free marketplace. All this, of course, does not bode well for liberty in 2009 and in the coming years. Those of us who care about limited government and individual freedom and responsibility can only hope that B.O.’s incompetence will minimize the damage he’ll do in exercising the awesomely dangerous powers of his office. And that his incompetence will become obvious – even to a leftist partisan, blindly adoring news media (a news media still embarrassingly engaged in a “slobbering” love affair with B.O., to borrow the title of Bernard Goldberg’s new book) – soon enough that the “honeymoon” period new U.S. presidents traditionally enjoy will be blessedly brief. And, we hope, he’ll be just a one-term president, like Jimmy Carter. Given the serious problems with the U.S. (and world) economy today, and the misguided policies that the new administration and Congress will pursue in dealing with the economic crisis, it’s fairly certain that instead of “making history,” we’ll be repeating history. As I tell my students, the old saying – that those who are ignorant of history are doomed to repeat it – is true, especially in the United States, where it seems the politicians and policymakers are always ignorant of history and therefore always continue to repeat the mistakes of the past. In the case of B.O.’s administration, the only question is which mistakes – the mistakes of which prior Democratic administration – will it repeat. The best-case scenario, it seems, would be that of Jimmy Carter’s presidency (1977-1981), which expanded upon the perverse economic policies of the LBJ-Nixon-Ford administrations (high taxes, increased government regulations including price controls, etc.), resulting in the “malaise” of the late 1970s, a time of economic “stagflation” (with high rates of inflation, coupled with high unemployment and high interest rates) as well as a serious energy crisis that included shortages in oil and gas supplies and all the hardships those shortages created. A replay of the Jimmy Carter years, I emphasize, would be the best case scenario for America with B.O. in the White House. Given the seriousness of the present economic crisis, and the misguided policies the new president and the Congress are planning to pursue, a more likely scenario will be, frighteningly, a replay of FDR’s presidency (1933-45), that is to say, a second Great Depression, as many scare-mongering political and economic commentators have been warning. We’ve already begun going down that road, with the outgoing Bush administration’s push for the $700 billion Wall Street bailout legislation, which looks like a replay of Herbert Hoover’s “New Deal” program of government subsidies for shaky banks and other business enterprises – a program that was expanded massively by FDR’s “New Deal,” which most knowledgeable experts now recognize did nothing to help our recovery from the Depression but, in fact, exacerbated and prolonged the Depression. B.O., whom many admirers are comparing to FDR, has promised a massive, nearly $1-trillion “stimulus” program – a massive increase in federal spending, with trillion-dollar budget deficits every year for the foreseeable future (by B.O.’s own admission). His plans include the largest public-works program since the creation of the interstate highway system in the 1950s, spending federal money on what B.O. has called “shovel-ready” projects to “rebuild roads, make buildings energy efficient, modernize schools and upgrade hospital technology,” as a recent USA Today article described them (“Obama eyes `shovel-ready’ fixes in a long recovery,” December 8). “Shovel-ready” certainly seems an apt way to describe B.O.’s program (and the plenty of shovels its will need to toss around the piles of bullshit it entails), a bullshit program which like FDR’s make-work programs in the 1930s (PWA and WPA, CCC, etc.) created temporary jobs at the price of sucking out of the economy much-needed capital for private enterprise to recover from the market maladjustments that originated the crisis. And like FDR’s programs, B.O.’s “shovel-ready” programs will worsen our economic problems. A second New Deal, and the worsened economic depression it created, still is not the worst-case scenario for the next few years. Given the huge increase in the money supply that the Bush administration’s Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve already have created – and which will increase exponentially as B.O.’s administration expands the misguided “bailout” programs (B.O. already has threatened to veto any legislation from the Democrat-controlled Congress that will inhibit his ability to spend the remaining $350 billion of the Wall Street bailout) and add another $1 trillion in government spending – it’s dangerously likely that inflation will become a major problem during the coming years. Not just the high inflation of the Carter years, but hyper-inflation (with annual rates exceeding 100% or more), reminiscent of Germany in the early 20th century (the German Weimer Republic, whose failures in the 1920s led to the rise of Hitler’s Nazi party) or of the “banana republics” of Latin America in recent decades. (For more on this, see my discussion of the “bailout bullshit” in Part II, next week.) In terms of domestic policy, then, the B.O. administration offers nothing really new, other than its meaningless (and fraudulent) rhetoric. In fact, it will merely replay the mistakes that other administrations have made in the past, albeit on an even more ambitious scale – meaning, on a scale that will be even more dangerous to individual freedom and to our constitutional system of limited governmental powers. The severity of the current economic recession may have forced B.O. to shelve (at least for the time being) his plans to increase taxes on higher-income Americans – the “share the wealth” policies he so brazenly espoused during his campaign – but otherwise, the list of horribles that I predicted in my “Emperor Is Naked” essay are likely to come to pass. These include government-managed, “socialized” medicine (including the loss of individual privacy rights entailed in B.O.’s plans to “modernize,” under government control, medical record-keeping), coupled with further hemorrhaging of the massive federal “entitlement” programs, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid; more draconian use of the antitrust laws and more government regulation of industries, including a practical government takeover of the banking and domestic auto industries; an energy policy that will make the U.S. even more dependent on other nations for reliable supplies of oil and gas and which, by pushing a misguided scheme to foster “alternative” energy sources, will make electricity not only very expensive but also often scarce (with blackouts and brownouts common across the nation’s energy grid); increased power for Big Labor, not only in industries like the domestic auto industry but also in government employees’ and teachers’ unions – and with it, further deterioration of “public education,” that is, of government schools, in America; and some sort of compulsory, national service requirement (in blatant violation of the Thirteenth Amendment’s prohibition of involuntary servitude). In terms of national security and foreign policy, B.O.’s administration also will have more continuity than change, compared to the preceding Bush administration. People who voted for B.O. because they disliked Bush’s policies in the Middle East and who expected B.O. to immediately pull our troops out of Iraq are in for a massive disappointment, for B.O.’s actual policies will not be anything like the “anti-war” rhetoric of his campaign. Like other Democrats in the White House, B.O. shows no propensity to limit U.S. military involvement in foreign nations to only legitimate wars or to imminent threats to the United States; rather, like other Democratic presidents, B.O. is likely to use our military forces to intervene for “humanitarian” or “policing” purposes around the globe – converting them into a kind of “Peace Corps with guns” – as the Clinton administration did by intervening in such places as Somalia and the former Yugoslavia. B.O. will, in fact, escalate the war in Afghanistan (which is likely to become not just a quagmire but a real mess, if as many pundits predict, the Pakistani government collapses); and he will continue the U.S. military occupation of Iraq for at least another year and a half. If B.O. does change U.S. foreign policy, it’s likely to be change for the worse – a retreat from some of the misguided policies of his immediate predecessor, Bush (and his administration’s so-called “War on Terror”), but a reversion back to similarly misguided (albeit for different reasons) policies of Bush’s predecessors, including Clinton. B.O. already has promised to end the use of “torture” (that is, vigorous interrogation techniques) in dealing with militant Islamic terrorists; and he plans to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay, thereby releasing back into the world various dangerous Islamic terrorists captured as enemy combatants. The so-called “smart power” policy espoused by Mrs. Clinton, B.O.’s nominee for secretary of state, during her recent confirmation hearings amounts to nothing more than a return back to the pre-Bush policies of appeasement, with regard to militant Islamic terrorist states (like Iran) and groups (like Hezbollah and Hamas). During B.O.’s “watch” as chief executive and commander-in-chief, we can expect Islamic militants to become emboldened by U.S. weakness and hence more aggressive – with Iran acquiring the dangerous capability of using nuclear weapons, with pro-Palestinian terrorists escalating their attacks on Israel (and “diplomatic efforts” on the part of the United States, under the most anti-Israel administration ever, designed to thwart Israel’s ability to defend itself against its homicidal neighbors), and, most ominous of all, real danger of another devastating, 9-11 type attack on the United States (with an administration that lacks the competence necessary to protect Americans from another attack on American soil). The bottom line is that, as misguided as the Bush administration’s policies against militant Islamic terrorists were, they at least averted another 9-11 for the past seven and a half years; the even more misguided policies likely to be followed by the B.O. administration will give Americans less security against foreign attacks. In short, not only will there be much continuity, rather than change, compared to the preceding Bush administration, but there’ll also be continuity with the previous Democratic administration, under “Slick Willy” Clinton. The B.O. administration will be staffed by many Clinton administration retreads, including Hillary, the “great bitch” (and Slick Willy’s partner-in-crime) herself, as secretary of state; Eric Holder, Janet Reno’s deputy as attorney general; and Leon “Panacea” Pinetta, Clinton’s former chief of staff, as the new nominee to be director of the CIA (despite the fact he’s a political hack with no experience in intelligence, quite literally). Is this what B.O.’s supporters consider “real change” – a reversion back to the late 1990s, when the Clintonistas wielded power? Of course, as many libertarians argue, there are a handful of issues on which the Democrats in Congress and in the B.O. administration actually will be better – that is, better from a libertarian standpoint, i.e., more pro-liberty – than Republicans and the previous administration under George W. Bush. Among these issues may be “gays and the military”: critics of our current homophobic “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy regarding homosexuals in military service are hopeful that B.O. might change that policy, initiated by Clinton, and allow gay men and women to open serve. Another possible positive change could be a softening of “the war on drugs”: critics of our failed policy of criminalizing drugs are hopeful, based on some early statements by B.O., that he might be willing to propose decriminalizing marijuana, at least for medical uses. B.O.’s administration, moreover, is not likely to follow his predecessor’s “pro-life” policies, limiting women’s rights to obtain abortions or terminally-ill persons’ right to commit suicide (Bush policies, such as the Bush administration’s encouragement in the Florida case of Terri Schiavo, as I’ve argued previously – see my essay “A Life That One Owns,” Feb. 28, 2005 – actually amounted to a policy against the “right to life,” properly understood, as the right of individuals to own their own lives). Yet another issue on which a B.O. administration could be more pro-liberty than his predecessor’s administration is the Federal Communication Commission’s war on “indecent” speech (see my previous essay “Abolish the F*CCing FCC!” Feb. 8, 2006). B.O.’s likely nominee for new FCC chairman comes from a high-tech business background and seems less willing than his predecessor, Bush appointee Kevin Martin, to cave under pressure from conservatives to “crack down” on indecent speech over the broadcast spectrum. But, as I warn my libertarian friends, whatever might be gained, as “pluses” on behalf of individual freedom, on these and other issues, will be more offset by “minuses,” through the loss of individual freedom, not only on economic matters but many other areas of “personal” freedom as well. Democrats and left-liberals generally are no more friendly to “personal freedom,” in all its aspects, than are Republicans and social conservatives. (Consider, for example, their hostility to Second Amendment rights – something that’s especially well-documented for B.O., who has been accurately described by the NRA as the most “anti-gun” president ever to occupy the White House, as well as his nominee for Attorney General, Eric Holder, who had a horrendous record with regard to gun rights during his tenure as Janet Reno’s deputy in the Clinton Injustice Department.) So, true, B.O. may scrap the misguided “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy and allow homosexual persons to openly serve in the military; but he’s unlikely to support any other initiatives to expand the personal freedoms of homosexual persons. He’s opposed to same-sex marriage, and his inclusion of social-conservative pastor Rick Warren (an outspoken opponent of same-sex marriage) in the inaugural program shows that B.O. (like many other Democrats) tends to take homosexuals’ political support for granted and is unwilling even symbolically to push for any real “change” in the laws that might alienate the majority of homophobic Americans. Similarly, even if B.O.’s administration were to soften the “war on drugs” by modifying the federal rules criminalizing marijuana use, it’s unlikely to bring about the kind of real reform that we desperately need in our drug laws and other laws criminalizing “moral” offenses and other “victimless” crimes: a total decriminalization of such activities as drug use, gambling, prostitution, and so, which harm no one but the adult individuals who freely engage in them. Democrats generally are just as unwilling as Republicans to allow individuals to govern themselves, even when they’re acting in ways that other people think are self-destructive. (Anyone who naively believes that Democrats are “better” on personal freedom than Republicans ought to consider not only the federal War on Drugs, which has persisted under both Democrat and Republican administrations, but also the “war on tobacco,” which politicians from both parties – egged on by “public health” activists – have been waging in recent years against Americans who choose to smoke.) And perhaps an FCC staffed by B.O.’s appointees may cease the silly (and decidedly un-libertarian) crack-down on “indecent” speech, but it may pose even greater dangers to free speech through such initiatives as a revival (in some form) of the so-called (and misnamed) “Fairness Doctrine” (regulating the content of broadcast speech in order to silence conservative talk radio), as well as other “consumer protection” initiatives (following up on the paternalistic policies followed by Chairman Martin) that, in the name of “protecting” consumers, will limit the economic freedom of broadcasters. One final observation about the new president: B.O.’s inaugural planners are trying to wrap him in the mantle of Abraham Lincoln, whose bicentennial will be celebrated next month: there’ll be a pre-inaugural celebration at the Lincoln Memorial, B.O. will try to reenact Lincoln’s arrival in Washington by a “whistle-stop” train trip, and he’ll even take the oath of office January 20 on the same Bible that Lincoln used for his inaugural in 1861 – all symbolic acts designed to link B.O. with the blessed memory of Abraham Lincoln in the American public mind. But that effort, too, is sheer bullshit. There are only two things that B.O. has in common with Lincoln: they’re both lawyers, and they were both residents of Illinois when elected as president.
In Part II, to be posted next week, I’ll discuss three other ways in which “the tyranny of bullshit” will threaten individual freedom in the coming year, and beyond: “green” bullshit (the theory of “climate change,” or “global warming,” espoused by radical environmentalists and their dangerous agenda), “bailout” bullshit (persistence of the fallacy that government spending and subsidization of failed business enterprises will “save” free-market capitalism), and finally, the bullshit espoused by paternalistic “conservatives,” who offer no real alternative to the paternalism of the left.
| Link to this Entry | Posted Thursday, January 15, 2009 | Copyright © David N. Mayer |
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