Which political party should Christians vote for?

Mary sent me this disturbing story from Citizen Link, which shows how secular leftist special interests want to restrict religious liberty.

Excerpt:

A “who’s who” of Leftist, humanist, abortion and gay organizations submitted a stern letter to President Obama on Tuesday, demanding that he rescind part of the 2002 Executive Order protecting religious hiring rights.

More specifically, the coalition wants Obama to prohibit contractors who do business with the government from using religious-based hiring criteria.

The letter, signed by 52 organizations, comes days before the 70thanniversary of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Executive Order that barred discrimination by federal contractors. His directive was then codified into law in Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibited employers from hiring and firing based on religious beliefs. In 1972, it was slightly amended to exempt churches and religious associations.

The timing of the letter also coincides with the federal government’s stepped-up efforts to codify into law special protections for gay, lesbian, bi-sexual and transgender people.

Bruce Hausknecht, judicial analyst for CitizenLink, noted the biased news coverage of the weighty issue. “The liberal news media has given Americans the impression that faith-based charitable groups are pushing to rescind these protections,” Hausknecht said. “Not true. A closer look at the list of cosigners reveals the true motive: to silence people of faith and push them out of the public square.”

Cosigners include: American Civil Liberties Union, Americans for the Separation of Church and State, Catholics for Choice, Center for American Progress Action Fund, Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders, National Education Association, National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, National Organization for Women, People for the American Way, Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice and the Transgender Law Center.

When you elect a Democrat, you’re electing someone who wants to use the power of the state to marginalize and censor Christianity. In fact, if you read classical works on economics like “The Road to Serfdom”, you’ll learn that socialism necessarily leads to the destruction of all other liberties, including religious liberty. That is because the bigger that a secular government becomes, the less they are willing to allow individuals to make their own decisions based on their own personal morality and religion. Obama is one of the worst offenders in this regard – we have never had a more pro-abortion and pro-same-sex marriage President. We have never had a President who was more allied with pro-abortion lobbyists and pro-gay-rights lobbyists. And he is also in favor of paying welfare to women who freely choose to raise children without fathers. This man is anti-life, anti-family and anti-marriage. No Christian could vote for such a man.

Should Christians vote for Democrats who want to “tax the rich”?

Let’s make it clear, because a lot of Christians don’t understand this. In order for you to exercise your freedom as a Christian, you need to have money. With money, you can afford charity, private Christian schools, Bibles, apologetics books, marriages, children, homeschooling, and so forth. How do you get that money? You work for it. And how do you make it grow? You invest it.

Now let’s see how the secular left and their agenda of redistribution at wealth hurts that plan.

1. They get you fired, like Frank Turek was fired by Cisco Systems, because you are a Christian
2. They tax your income and give it to anti-Christian groups, like Planned Parenthood
3. They tax your investments to fund public schools which undermine Christian truth claims (evolution) and Christian morality (sex education)
4. They confiscate money from your employer and redistribute it to government workers and unions, which makes it harder for you to stay employed
5. They restrict your choices for educating your children, by sending more money to public schools and legislating against private schools and homeschooling
6. They take over health care, forcing you to subsidize secular leftist causes like abortions, sex changes, in vitro fertilization, etc.
7. They take over health care, forcing Christian doctors and nurses to perform procedures that violate their consciences
8. They halt military spending and pro-democracy initiatives, and coddle captured terrorists, encouraging terrorist attacks, like 9/11
9. They spend enormous amounts of money, increasing government dependence and discouraging families from having children

And so forth. Basically, the more you vote for free market conservatism, the more small businesses there will be. The more small businesses there are, the better your chance of finding an employer who will not discriminate against your Christian faith. (Contrary to popular beliefs, conservatives DO NOT like big corporations – because they are almost ALWAYS liberal, seeking to use the government to block younger companies from challenging them with better quality and lower prices). The more employers there are to choose from, the more likely you can find a higher salary. The higher your salary, the more you have to spend on charity, as well as your family and your community. The more money you make in investments, the more you can buy apologetics books and sponsor apologetics web sites and conferences and debates. The more the government stays out of the free market, the more choice you have to buy goods and services that are in line with your Christian values – e.g. – SCHOOL CHOICE. The more the government stays out of health care, the less you will pay for health care since you don’t need coverage for abortions, sex changes, in vitro fertilization, etc. The less government regulates business, the less opportunity there will be for these secular leftist special interest groups to lobby government to discriminate against Christians.

Filed under: Commentary, Big Corporations, Bigotry, Business, Capitalism, Children, Christian, Conscience, Crony Capitalism, Debt, Democracy, Democrat, Employer, Employment, F. A. Hayek, Family, Fatherlessness, Foreign Policy, Freedom of Religion, Health-care, Hedonism, Jobs, Left, Marriage, Monopoly, National Security, Public School, Religious Liberty, Republican, Road to Serfdom, Same-Sex Marriage, Secular Left, Secularism, Small Business, Spending, Tax, Taxes, Unemployment, Vote, Work

Indian economist distinguishes between rights and entitlements

From the Times of India, a good economics article from Swaminathan S Anklesaria Aiyar. (H/T Shalini)

Excerpt:

Politicians and activists constantly propose new rights — the right to work, to education, and now to food. The word “rights” is being twisted to mean entitlements, and there is a big difference.

Rights are freedoms from oppression by the state or by society (through ethnicity, religion and gender). These rights do not entail government handouts.  Entitlements, however, are welfare measures entailing government handouts. Rights are not limited by budget constraints, but entitlements are. So, rights are universal but entitlements are not.

[...]US economists calculate that three welfare measures — social security (for the aged), Medicare (for the aged) and Medicaid (for the poor)—will triple from 7% of GDP to 20% in the next decade, swallowing up virtually all federal tax revenue. Jagadeesh Gokhale of the Cato Institute calculates that, including social security, the US is headed for a national debt that’s 500% of GDP, and Europe of 434%.

Some much for entitlement spending. He then explains the origin of human rights in Britain, America and France, and then says this:

These three countries spearheaded the concept of fundamental rights. In all three, rights were about freedoms, not entitlements

In subsequent centuries, people said this was not enough, and proposed entitlements — which some called second-generation rights. Marxists declared that rights to free speech, elections and personal freedom were bourgeois illusions that did not empower the poor. So Lenin proposed a dictatorship of the proletariat that took away all basic freedoms, and instead offered the right to food, shelter and work. Mind you, nobody could sue Lenin for poor provision. Nobody could throw out Mao for the Great Leap Forward that killed 30 million people. Nobody could topple Stalin for murdering four to six million peasants in the Ukraine.

The communist experience shows that giving welfare rights priority over basic freedoms is the road to serfdom. And the capitalist welfare state now shows that entitlements, although desirable and inevitable in democracies, must be limited and targeted at the needy, so that they do not hog all spending or bankrupt governments.

It’s amazing. He’s more American than the Democrats, because he actually understands America. Thanks so much for finding this article, Shalini!

By the way, if you want to learn what the end-game is for the Democrats, you can read “The Road to Serfdom” by the Nobel Prize-winning economist F.A. Hayek, which Swami alluded to in his article.

Filed under: Commentary, Economics, Entitlement, Freedom, India, Liberty, Rights, Road to Serfdom, Socialism, Spending

Intel CEO blames Democrats for destroying the economy

Article from CNET News by someone who understands job creation. (H/T Neil Simpson’s latest round-up)

Excerpt:

Intel Chief Executive Officer Paul Otellini offered a depressing set of observations about the economy and the Obama administration Monday evening, coupled with a dark commentary on the future of the technology industry if nothing changes.

Otellini’s remarks during dinner at the Technology Policy Institute’s Aspen Forum here amounted to a warning to the administration officials and assorted Capitol Hill aides in the audience: unless government policies are altered, he predicted, “the next big thing will not be invented here. Jobs will not be created here.”

The U.S. legal environment has become so hostile to business, Otellini said, that there is likely to be “an inevitable erosion and shift of wealth, much like we’re seeing today in Europe–this is the bitter truth.”

[...]Otellini singled out the political state of affairs in Democrat-dominated Washington, saying: “I think this group does not understand what it takes to create jobs. And I think they’re flummoxed by their experiment in Keynesian economics not working.”

Here’s Republican Senate candidate Carly Fiorina, from the same article:

The comments from Intel’s chief executive echoed statements made a day earlier by Carly Fiorina, the former HP CEO turned Republican Senate candidate.

America’s skilled-worker visa system is so badly broken and anti-immigration that “we have to start from scratch,” Fiorina said, adding that too many government policies push jobs overseas instead of making U.S. companies competitive against international rivals.

“Our corporate tax rates are the second highest in the world,” and Congress has repeatedly failed to make an R&D tax credit permanent, Fiorina told the Aspen audience. It’s time to start “acknowledging the reality that companies go where they’re welcome,” she said. (The effective U.S. corporate income tax is 35 percent, far over the industrialized-nation average of 18.2 percent.)

Here’s a recent IBD article with more from Otellini, and other CEOs

First Otellini:

“I can tell you definitively that it costs $1 billion more per factory for me to build, equip and operate a semiconductor manufacturing facility in the U.S.,” he said. And 90% of that added cost, he said, is due to taxes and regulations that other countries don’t have.

Then other CEOs:

Earlier in the week, Illinois Tool Works CEO David Speer, whose company employs 60,000 worldwide, laid out his dilemma — and that of hundreds of other CEOs: “I could borrow $2 billion tomorrow for 3 1/2%,” Speer said. “But what am I going to do with it?”

[...]In June, Ivan Seidenberg, CEO of Verizon Communications and head of the Business Roundtable, warned of a growing anti-business slant in both Congress and the White House. Tax hikes, regulations and constant policy shifts, he said, “harm our ability … to grow private-sector jobs in the U.S.”

And don’t forget the costs that Obamacare imposed on companies, causing all medical premiums to go through the roof because of the new health care mandates and taxes on things like medical devices.

Red State explains what the Obammunists should be doing:

As our government continues to make it more difficult to do business in the US, companies must increasingly look to more favorable climates abroad. If Washington really wants to spur job creation here in the US, they should repeal the health care overhaul, reduce spending, cut the corporate tax rate, give up on cap and trade, and reform litigation. Instead we have been treated to an extended experiment in government control – one that is obviously not producing new wealth, new jobs, or any real hope for the emergence of the industries of the future.

It takes a lot of courage for a CEO like Otellini to come out against the Obama administration, and the neo-Keynesian oligarchy in Washington. Taking a billion dollars from Intel to study Chinese prostitutes and to build turtle tunnels is not a good thing to do if you want to have more jobs. But the thing is – Obama thinks it is a good thing to do, because he is totally ignorant of how the economy works. So, don’t vote for him or any of his silver-spoon limousine liberal friends who were born with rich parents. Democrats don’t know how jobs are created.

Filed under: News, Anti-Business, Barack Obama, Boom, Business, Bust, CEO, Costs, Economics, Economy, Employment, Government, Hayek, Jobs, Keynes, Keynesian, Litigation, Obama, Outsourcing, Overseas, Regulations, Rich, Road to Serfdom, Spending, Taxes, Unemployment

George Will explains how Democrats favor increasing dependency on government

Article here in the Boston Herald. (H/T Dad)

Excerpt:

For congressional Democrats, expanding dependency on government is an end in itself. They began the Obama administration by expanding the State Children’s Health Insurance Program. It was created for children of the working poor, but the expansion made millions of middle-class children eligible – some in households earning $125,000. The aim was to swell the number of people who grow up dependent on government health care.

Many Democrats favor – as Barack Obama did in 2003 – a “single-payer” health insurance system, which means universal dependency on government. The “public option” insurance proposal was to be a step toward that. So was the proposed “alternative” of making 55- to 64-year-olds eligible for Medicare. Both of these dependency multipliers will be revived.

The government used TARP funds not for their stipulated purpose of buying banks’ “toxic assets,” but to pull auto companies and other economic entities into the spreading web of dependency. Servile – because dependent – banks were pliable during the farce of Chrysler’s bankruptcy, but secured creditors resisted when settled law was disregarded. Nevertheless, those creditors received less per dollar than did an unsecured creditor, the United Auto Workers, which relishes dependency on government as an alternative to economic realism.

Democrats’ financial “reforms” may aim to reduce financial institutions to dependent appendages of the government. By reducing banks to public utilities, credit, which is the lifeblood of capitalism, could be priced and allocated by government.

Many Democrats, opposing the Supreme Court, advocate new campaign finance “reforms” that will further empower government to regulate the quantity, timing and content of speech about government. Otherwise voters will hear more such speech than government considers good for them. Such paternalism is American progressivism’s oldest tradition.

The Democrats aren’t the party of making the little guy bigger, they’re the part of making the little guy even smaller than he is right now.

Bigger government means smaller individuals

Consider this article about food stamps from the New York Times. (H/T Protein Wisdom via ECM)

Excerpt:

A decade ago, New York City officials were so reluctant to give out food stamps, they made people register one day and return the next just to get an application. The welfare commissioner said the program caused dependency and the poor were “better off” without it.

Now the city urges the needy to seek aid (in languages from Albanian to Yiddish). Neighborhood groups recruit clients at churches and grocery stores, with materials that all but proclaim a civic duty to apply — to “help New York farmers, grocers, and businesses.” [note who is missing from that list ... ed.] There is even a program on Rikers Island to enroll inmates leaving the jail.

“Applying for food stamps is easier than ever,” city posters say.

[...]The drive to enroll the needy can be seen in the case of Monica Bostick-Thomas, 45, a Harlem widow who works part-time as a school crossing guard. Since her husband died three years ago, she has scraped by on an annual income of about $15,000.

But she did not seek help until she got a call from the Food Bank of New York City, one of the city’s outreach partners. Last year, she balked, doubting she qualified. This year, when the group called again, she agreed to apply. A big woman with a broad smile, Ms. Bostick-Thomas swept into the group’s office a few days later, talking up her daughters’ college degrees and bemoaning the cost of oxtail meat.

“I’m not saying I go hungry,” Ms. Bostick-Thomas said. “But I can’t always eat what I want.”

It is not good for people to depend on the government. It turns adults into children. People need to live with the results of their own decisions and not expect to be bailed out by their neighbors. For those of us who are concerned about poverty, we should solve the problem ourselves by private charity. Just taking an interest in your neighbor is a good thing.

Filed under: Commentary, Bailout, Big Government, Capitalism, Deficit, Dependence, Economics, Equality, Free Market, Freedom, Government, Individual, Liberty, Personal Responsibility, Redistribution of Wealth, Reponsibility, Road to Serfdom, Serfdom, Slavery, Social Programs, Socialism, Spending, State, Tyrannt, Wealth Redistribution, Welfare

MUST-SEE: The John Maynard Keynes vs Friedrich A. Hayek rap video

This is from ECM.

I watched this about a half-dozen times so far. It’s awesome! I love it!

I’m sure it will come as no surprise to everyone that I come out on Hayek’s side on this debate. I like the Austrian School of Economics. I’m a supply-sider. I believe in the free market, free trade, private property, saving and investing, entrepreneurship, distributed power, small government, and freedom from government intervention.

Who was F.A. Hayek?

F.A. Hayek was the greatest economist of the 20th century. He won the Nobel prize in Economics. His greatest works are “The Road to Serfdom”, “The Constitution of Liberty”, and “The Fatal Conceit”. If you take a look at the list of the top 10 books that all conservatives should read, you will see that The Road to Serfdom is #1 and The Constitution of Liberty is #10 on the list.

And lucky you, because you can find a free condensed version of the Road to Serfdom here.

But wait! There’s more!

This is part 1 of a 3 part series produced for PBS called “The Command Heights: The Battle for the World Economy”. But the only part you need to watch to learn about Keynes and Hayek is part 1, which is 2 hours long.

This video is basically a history of the 20th century from the point of view of an economist. This is a must see for you young people who don’t know who Reagan and Thatcher were. These two leaders were the greatest defenders of freedom in the 20th century, along with Winston Churchill. And they’re both solid Christians, acting from a Christian and capitalist worldview that valued liberty, security and prosperity.

Today, Stephen Harper, the prime minister of Canada, best embodies the free-market, freedom-loving ideas of Hayek, while Barack Obama embodies the big-government, deficit-spending ideas of Keynes. Guess which economy is doing better?

Filed under: Videos, Austrian School, Bankrupt, Bear, Boom, Boom and Bust Cycle, Bull, Bust, Calgary School, Capitalism, Chicago School, Credit Crunch, Deflation, Economics, F. A. Hayek, Government Spending, Hayek, Hayekian, Inflation, Infrastructure, Interest Rate, Keynes, Keynesian, Liberty, Liquidity, Politics, Project, Prosperity, Road to Serfdom, Security, Stimulus