Truth and Freedom - Still the Answer

At Brushfires of Freedom, everything you read will be anchored in an absolute faith that truth exists; and that the American founding principle of individual freedom and responsibility under God (the God of Judeo-Christian theology and teaching) is grounded in truth, and is the right and timeless guiding principle for progress in America and the world.

While we may or may not make this a weekly practice, let’s take a quick look at some recent news stories through the Brushfires’ lens.

1) The “I won, get over it and join me” mantra

2) Obama says the failure to adopt his plan will lead to catastrophe and ‘irreversible recession’

3) The government moves to limit executive pay for companies receiving bailout money

4) The Secretary of the Treasury cheats on his taxes

The “I won, get over it and join me” mantra

Every time Obama does this, he invites scrutiny of what exactly his ‘win’ was based on—what exactly he campaigned on. In a previous Brushfires essay, we plainly said his election was a fraud on the American people, and we still say so. Let’s update.

“Change” is an all-purpose word that applies to anything and everything, and that’s why he used it in his campaign. But why does a stimulus plan include $4 billion for ACORN and associated ‘community stabilization activities’ (whatever they are)? When ACORN was mentioned in the campaign, Obama backpedalled as fast as could, claiming he merely represented the organization as a lawyer in non-controversial matters. He knew of ACORN’s reputation as a hotbed for voter fraud, and distanced himself as a smart politician would. So how is $4 billion for ACORN in a ‘stimulus’ plan an implementation of the will of the electorate?

Simple truth: it is NOT the will of the electorate, and claiming otherwise is conscious deceit. It is a lie.

And how about socialism generally? When Sean Hannity and others tied Obama to socialism, Obama again ran for the exits (figuratively) as fast as he could. And why wouldn’t he? Americans are not socialists, and they most certainly are not atheists—which are first cousins of socialists. Americans have faith in God, and they know and have lived as individuals with freedom under God. They are picking up the smell of its opposite—the stimulus plan reeks of socialism: massive government growth at the expense of individual freedom—and they are turning away from it.

Here’s what the Obama people don’t grasp—and it will be their undoing. Faith in God and not human government; and faith in individual freedom under God, and not godless collectivism—these are right ideas anchored in truth itself. They can’t be defeated; they can’t be spun out of relevance; and people cannot be made to reject them, no matter what Saul Alinsky thought. To claim that the American people voted to reject these foundational ideas; to claim that the election was an unambiguous call to embrace socialism—again, this is conscious deceit. It is a lie.

Obama says the failure to adopt his plan will lead to catastrophe and ‘irreversible recession’

Let’s be blunt: this is not the language of an American leader. This is grotesquely irresponsible and out of touch with the mettle of those who make this country work—the people who love God, work hard, play by the rules, and raise their families to follow the same pattern. This is not ‘yes, we can!’ This is never the mindset of those with faith in God, a love of freedom, and an understanding of American exceptionalism.

This is the message of an elitist intellectual who believes only he and other elites can solve complex problems for ‘the little people’—which is everyone else. People do not rally around messages of fear; they do not respond to calls to trust a government spending spree to solve every problem and eliminate all pain and suffering and inconvenience in human life. They sense a snake-oil peddler, and they don’t like it. At. All.

At the family level, when our savings have been depleted, and our debt is out of control, the answer for us is never going to be: take on more debt and spend more. We don’t have the power to vote ourselves a loan, and nobody will give us a loan when we’re already overstretched. We can’t print money because that ultimately defrauds everyone, and we’d go to jail if we did. We have to cut our expenses to get back to living within our means. We have to work hard and pay our bills. We tell our family members to do the same. We may have to come up with innovative ways of meeting someone else’s need in order to create value for ourselves (this is called “business”). We don’t go and steal from our neighbor to pay our bills; and we don’t expect anyone to stop by and give us a free pass out of a mess of our own creating.

It’s no more complicated at the national level. The government needs to cut spending and live within its means. It needs to get out of the way of free men and women—most noticeably by lowering taxes and removing restrictions on economic activity—and let the initiative and innovation that accompanies freedom take over, and we’ll create the value that enables us to work our way out of any mess.

The government moves to limit executive pay for companies receiving bailout money

This is creeping socialism, and it is among the foremost reasons why the bailouts were always a bad idea, and will always be a bad idea. Because once the bailout is authorized, it does make sense to put conditions on use of the money. No matter what your political leaning, it’s intuitive to all of us that if I give you a loan to buy a car, I expect you to buy a car and not buy beer and cigarettes. But when the government sticks its nose into business, the conditions put on use of the money may or may not have anything to do with business, but they most assuredly will have to do with political agendas. So executive pay intuitively has to be limited—i.e., ‘no taxpayer money for bonuses!!!’ But where do the limits stop? What about marketing expenses? What about selection, opening and closing of facilities? What about equipment, computers, furniture? The answer is that the meddling will never stop, and the effect will be to smother the original business down to a paralyzed shell of political correctness.

Does anyone stop to think: what sensible, competent executive making $5 million in an unregulated business will leap to be the executive of an obviously troubled enterprise that will only pay him or her $500K and must answer to 535 bosses in Washington, D.C.? The answer is that no sensible, competent executive will do this; the person who will do this is an incompetent political hack—one who will gladly take the $500K and spend all his/her time glad-handing politicians while the business itself goes to hell.

Freedom and the free market would fix these problems had the businesses been allowed to fail. Whether through bankruptcy reorganizations or out-and-out dissolution, the pieces would get picked up and the basic product or service would be restored, almost certainly in an improved and more responsive form.

Freedom must include the freedom to fail. Failure allows lessons to be learned. No lesson is too big to learn; and no business is too big to fail. If mismanaged banks found themselves holding too many mortgage-backed securities and fail as a result, they won’t hold as many next time. And unless management of these banks show they’ve learned the right lessons, their shareholders and depositors won’t follow them to the next bank anyway.

The real tragedy of this economic turmoil, of course, is that the real mismanagement was by Congress in its deliberate meddling in the mortgage industry. (That’s covered in another Brushfires essay ). The real entity that has failed and needs to be cleaned out is Congress. More on that later.

The Secretary of the Treasury cheats on his taxes

It is breathtaking to watch politicians try to hide behind liberal media spin and comfort themselves in the belief that nobody notices or cares that high-level officials like Timothy Geithner display an obvious disdain for the tax laws they expect the rest of us to follow and, indeed, in Geithner’s case, for the very tax laws it is his responsibility to administer. We DO notice, and we are fed up with it. We are not fooled by claims of honest mistake or sincere regret. We do not accept the notion that these are indispensable men that the President must have on his team. And we do not accept the ‘throw them a bone’ tactic of “well, we threw Daschle under the bus, so get over Geithner”. A tax cheat is a tax cheat, and the guy has no business being the Secretary of the Treasury.

Which brings us to our concluding ‘hoped for’ Brushfires’ predictions for the coming months:

1) Let’s hope for a grassroots’ inspired “throw them all out” campaign in 2010. That is, throw out every single incumbent in Congress. Doesn’t mean replace a Democrat with another Democrat, or a Republican with another Republican—it means throw out every single incumbent, because they are all responsible for the irresponsible way in which our government behaves. We need to elect an all new Congress, and one populated by people who have actually lived off something other than the public trough, and retain a modicum of common sense about not spending what they don’t have. We need people who have lived the American ideal of individual freedom and responsibility under God.

2) Look for a groundswell of demand for wholesale resignations from the Obama administration, up to and including Obama himself. This guy lied about who he was and how he thinks of America; he knew he was nothing more than a smooth-talking political opportunist who had no qualifications for the actual job of President; and he rode a manifestly corrupt and biased media that cheated the American people out of receiving the truth. We are fed up with all of them. Shame on us when we knowingly elect the unqualified, but shame on our media and the Beltway elitists when they impose a fraud on the people. They all must go.

Paul Gable

Posted February 5, 2009