America is a free enterprise that was founded on capitalism and it should stay that way!
The U.S.A. was founded in capitalism, but thanks to liberal politicians, we keep leaning more and more toward socialism. The more the government does for you, the less you do for yourself and the more you depend on the government. This is the trap of a socialist system.
In capitalism, the people are expected to be independent and self reliant, making their own way as best suits their individual talents. They are expected to be self supporting by working and improving themselves without government aid or intervention.
Under socialism, eventually the people stop thinking and doing for themselves and just depend completely on the government. It happened in Russia and most of the eastern block countries, and has been slowly progressing across Europe since WWII.
America has resisted the spread but each year, the liberal media , left wing politicians, and minorities scream for more and more government programs, more government help, and less freedom.
As the old saying goes, the squeaking wheel gets the grease, and these groups certainly have been squeaking for a long time.
I'm a capitalist, by the way, but with a social conscience.
Capitalism is a social system based on the recognition of individual rights, including property rights, in which all property is privately owned. Under capitalism the state is separated from economics (production and trade), just like the state is separated from religion. It is the system of political freedom.
Political freedom does not mean the majority is free to impose on individual rights, it means the majority is forbidden from imposing on individual rights, no matter how big a majority may be.
Constitutionally, the government is required to step between a mob and an individual to ensure the mob does not interfere with rights.
Currently our government not only does not step in, they become part of the mob.
"A wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicity."
-Thomas Jefferson, First Inaugural Address.
Now lets talk about socialized medicine and health care....Health care is NOT a right!!
"all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness." - THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE
According to the Founding Fathers, we are not born with a right to a trip to Disneyland, or a meal at McDonald's, or a kidney dialysis. We have certain specific rights -- and only those rights.
Observe that all legitimate rights have one thing in common: they are rights to action, not to rewards from other people. The American rights impose no obligations on other people, merely the negative obligation to leave you alone. The system guarantees you the chance to work for what you want -- not to be given it by somebody else without effort on yourself.
The right to life, e.g., does not mean that your neighbors have to feed and clothe you; it means you have the right to earn your food and clothes yourself, if necessary by a hard struggle, and that no one can forcibly stop your struggle for these things or steal them from you if and when you have achieved them. In other words: you have the right to act, and to keep the results of your actions, the products you make, to keep them or to trade them with others, if you wish. But you have no right to the actions or products of others, except on terms to which they voluntarily agree.
To take one more example: the right to the pursuit of happiness is precisely that: the right to the pursuit -- to a certain type of action on your part and its result -- not to any guarantee that other people will make you happy or even try to do so. Otherwise, there would be no liberty in the country: if your mere desire for something, anything, imposes a duty on other people to satisfy you, then they have no choice in their lives, no say in what they do, they have no liberty, they cannot pursue their happiness. Your "right" to happiness at their expense means that they become right-less serfs, i.e., your slaves. Your right to anything at others' expense means that they become right-less.
Under the American system you have a right to health care if you can pay for it, i.e., if you can earn it by your own action and effort. But nobody has the right to the services of any professional individual or group simply because he wants them and desperately needs them. The very fact that he needs these services so desperately is the proof that he had better respect the freedom, the integrity, and the rights of the people who provide them.
You have a right to work, not to rob others of the fruits of their work, not to turn others into sacrificial, right-less animals laboring to fulfill your needs.
As with any good or service that is provided by some specific group of men, if you try to make its possession by all a right, you thereby enslave the providers of the service, wreck the service, and end up depriving the very consumers you are supposed to be helping. To call "medical care" a right will merely enslave the doctors and thus destroy the quality of medical care in this country, as socialized medicine has done around the world, wherever it has been tried, including Canada.
Doctors are not servants of their patients. They are traders, like everyone else in a free society, and they should bear that title proudly, considering the crucial importance of the services they offer.
Now on the topic of public "free" education in America………
There is no such thing as a 'right' to education', since such a 'right' makes slaves of those who are physically forced to pay or teach for someone else's so called right. For this reason alone public schooling should not be saved, or reformed, but it should be abolished -- as it is a violation of individual (human) rights.
The price of a "free" (state-funded) public education is freedom. The socialist notion that there is such a thing as a "free" education is a monstrous myth -- anything of value must be paid for. The state per say produces nothing, all state funds are forcibly taken from others through taxes, etc. When one recommends the "state funding of education to preserve freedom", one is asking that the freedom of one's fellow citizens be abridged, that their wealth be looted by public officials, all for the alleged purpose of protecting freedom. This is a contradiction in terms: freedom of action under a system of rights, is never preserved by the violation of those rights. That is, no matter how good the alleged ends, evil means are never justified.
In the short-term, the political solution is tax credits for education. This will allow people (who pay for public schools through their taxes) a tax credit which can be used to pay for the private (or public) school of their choice, or it can even be used for home schooling. Individuals, or businesses, can even use the money to pay for someone else's education, and then receive a tax credit. More importantly, tax credits will transfer fiscal control from bureaucrats back to individuals, thus forcing public schools to compete in the market for dollars -- just like private schools do.
My views on robbing from the rich to give to the poor….
For those of you who say that capitalists distribute wealth unfairly, I ask that you really think about what you are saying. Capitalism "distributes" wealth justly, i.e. to those who earned it, in proportion to how much they produced. For example, do you really think that it is "fair" for me to pay a large portion of my hard earned money just so someone can sit on their behind all day and not have to work for it like everyone else. Wealth is not a "collective resource" to be distributed by some totalitarian or his cronies, but is produced by individuals. Wealth belongs to the individual who produced it. It is not an amorphous public good to be distributed by looters for the aid of moochers. That a man does not have wealth and another does, is no excuse for the first to rob the latter -- neither is it a moral justification for the state to rob the first for the benefit of the latter.
Just in case you are wondering, YES, I am against welfare -- the extortion of wealth from those who produce by the "humanitarians" in government, to be distributed to those who consume (but do not produce), is to render the producers slaves and the "humanitarians" thieves. Whether the thief is wearing a ski mask, or is a dressed in a pinstripe suit with the letters IRS labeled on it, does not change the nature of their actions in principle: both are looters as both are initiators of force. With one exception, the man wearing the ski mask is more honest: he is not a big enough hypocrite to tell the citizen that he is robbing him of his hard earned wealth "for his own good", or even worse "for the good of the people."
As for poverty, no poor man is prohibited from creating a fortune. Observe that in late 19th century and early twentieth century America how hundreds of really "poor" immigrants, who could not even speak a word of English, came to America and within a generation were America's newest elite -- and they did it without the government on their backs, or on the backs of others. Even today, in semi-free America, many such immigrants come here starting with nothing and create fortunes -- though this is a rarer occurrence due to the vast weight of the volumes of incoherent and irrational regulations that punish those who have an urgent need to accumulate capital (the poor). The "poor" don't need government handouts -- they need government off their backs and most importantly off the backs of those who can really help them -- the "rich."
Which is the poor better off under? A Mother Teresa who hands them bowls of slop every day, so they can barely exist -- or a genius like Bill Gates who creates a fortune for himself by helping others to create fortunes for themselves, i.e., "where the first feeds them for a day, the second helps them feed themselves." Observe that it is the Bill Gates of the world who are not allowed to exist in India -- and the Mother Teresas who are. You may be thinking what about those who cannot truly help themselves? The few individuals in a capitalist society who are incapable of taking care of themselves -- such as the mentally handicap, crippled, and orphans (which are a small and tiny minority in any free country) -- are provided for through voluntary means, i.e., private charity.
Capitalism is the only social system that results in peace and prosperity. As history has shown, the greatest period of world peace was during 19th century predominantly capitalist America. Please observe that in the 20th century the major world wars were all started by the anti-capitalist collectivist countries.
Obama is not promoting a 'Change we can believe in," he is promoting a change that we need to reject!!
The bottom line is that Obama wants to turn America into a European style socialist democracy!! Regardless of Obama's presumed good intentions, socialism always brings a society to a bad ending. I don't want to believe that Americans who live in a free society that allows people to think what they will, do what they want, and succeed if they can, will willingly hand themselves over to the socialist ideology. They must therefore be reminded, again and again and again, that socialism isn't just another political party; it's the death knell to freedom. So remember, while McCain wants to change DC, Obama wants to change America and everything it was founded on!!
posted by Mrs. Rachelle Dooley
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