A Voice in the Wilderness In Defense of "Mere Conservatism"

What I Learned In The Rose Garden

By: R.J. Moeller

President Obama held a press conference in the White House Rose Garden on July 19^th for the purposes of pressing congress to extend unemployment benefits past the 26 weeks the law currently allows for.

The president focused like a laser beam on the emotional aspect of the economic worries that millions of Americans have right now.  His brief statements that day tell us three important things about the psyche and ideology of modern progressive-liberal Democrats.

After offering the boiler-plate “I feel your pain” commiserations with struggling American families, the president said:

“I know the only thing that will entirely free them of those worries, the only thing that will fully lift that sense of uncertainty is the security of a new job.  To that end, we all have to continue our efforts to do everything in our power to spur growth and hiring. And I hope the Senate acts this week on a package of tax cuts and expanded lending for small businesses, where most of America's jobs are created.”

The first important conclusion to draw from the president’s remarks is that the Left thoroughly misunderstand economics.  With Leftists running the legislative and executive branches of our federal government, this is a significant problem, to say the least.

President Obama is right to say that job-creation could solve many problems in our economy, and he is also right to acknowledge the benefits of a “package of tax cuts and expanded lending for small businesses,” but other than lip-service, he thus far has proven to be unwilling to pay the political price with his own party it would require to actually enact the policies needed for true, sustained economic growth.  Policies like across-the-board tax cuts, a prolific slashing of the federal budget, and a freeze on entitlements and handouts (like the one he called the press conference to ask congress to extend).

Jobs are important, and when people become desperate for work they are willing to take nearly anything, but you cannot create one out of thin air.  There are, in fact, jobs that hurt the economy and prolong recessions (or lay the groundwork for yet another one).  For example, when the government hires employees it doesn’t need, with money it doesn’t have.  The only sector of the economy currently seeing job growth is not “small businesses,” where most people are employed, but in the size and scale of the workforce of the federal government.

We absolutely need a certain amount of civil servants, including state and federal employees.  This is not in dispute.  But whether the nation is in an economic downturn or not, the Left’s “solution” to unemployment is always to put more people on “we the people’s” payroll.  Do you want to take a guess which political party most of those newly-minted government workers vote for come election time?

The unavoidable reality is this: governments do not create wealth; they only forcibly collect and arbitrarily re-distribute it.  For President Obama to sing the praises of tax-cuts for small businesses and then continue to tax-and-spend at break-neck speeds is like simultaneously urging your neighbors to water and fertilize the trees in whose branches they are sitting while you cut those same branches off from under them.

The cash to provide unemployment benefits comes from the businesses (and owners of those businesses) that end up having to fire people because tax rates and regulation have made it un-profitable (or impossible) to hire more employees and/or grow their business (and our economy in the process).  This is the tragic irony, and fatal flaw, of modern liberal economic thinking.  Eventually you will run out of other peoples’ money.

Jobs are created (and people are removed from unemployment or welfare) when the private sector is growing, not the public sector.

This does not mesh with the Left’s collectivist, anti-capitalist ideology.  It also does not sell well on the campaign trail.  Promising free stuff that greedy “rich people” have allegedly held back from you sounds much better at a union-backed rally than does promoting personal responsibility, cuts in government spending, lower taxes for the people and companies that create jobs, and the need to rely on your friends, families, and houses of worship in times of economic duress.

“But even as we work to jump-start job growth in the private sector, even as we work to get businesses hiring again, we also have another responsibility: to offer emergency assistance to people who desperately need it, to Americans who've been laid off in this recession.  We've got a responsibility to help them make ends meet and support their families, even as they are looking for another job…

We need to pass (increased unemployment benefits) for women like Leslie Mako (ph), who lost her job in a fitness center last year and has been looking for work ever since. Because she's eligible for only a few more weeks of unemployment, she's doing what she never thought she'd have to do -- not at this point, anyway -- she's turning to her father for financial support.”

The second telling point to emanate from the president’s press conference is the progressive Left’s fervent belief that dependency on “the State” is a noble, moral good.  To their (and our) detriment, liberals never ask the all-important question, “How did we become prosperous enough as a nation that we are able to provide any benefits at all for those in need?”  Gone are the pretenses that Big Brother should merely serve as a “safety net” for those ravaged by natural disasters; here to stay is the notion that the government has the primary “responsibility” to pay your bills should the economy turn south or you, for whatever reason, lose your job.

The woman the president referenced above, Leslie Mako, in fact did not "lose her job" in the traditional sense.  She was convicted of drug fraud and politely asked never to come back to work again.  Setting aside (for now) the gross incompetence of the White House in putting a woman like Ms. Mako on television next to the president without doing a thorough background check, we hear in the president’s own words his disdain at the thought of Americans having to turn to their families for help in tough economic times.

Progressives, liberals, collectivists, socialists, and Marxists have certain core ideological characteristics and beliefs that they generally all share in common.  They believe in centralized power in the hands of the few.  They believe that free market enterprise (and the private sector of any economy) is less trustworthy, less productive and more selfish than the benevolent public sector.  They believe in “equitable” re-distribution of wealth, conveniently adjudicated by the same centralized government they humbly offer to run for us.  They believe that “the family” is an antiquated concept that has been replaced with what Hillary Clinton would call the “It takes a village” mentality.  Collective responsibility, in the mind of a Leftist like President Obama, trumps individual and familial responsibility.

The government gets no glory and Democrats get no votes when relatives are helping relatives that would otherwise end up dependent on the government for their livelihood and sustenance.  The same goes for local churches and synagogues.  The fact that Ms. Mako would actually have to seek financial help from her father, instead of being taken care of by compassionate legislation enacted by compassionate liberal politicians, is objectionable to President Obama and a central argument in his case to the country as to why more funds should be spent on federal entitlements and handouts.

“Over the past few weeks, a majority of senators have tried, not once, not twice, but three times to extend emergency relief on a temporary basis. Each time a partisan minority in the Senate has used parliamentary maneuvers to block a vote, denying millions of people who are out of work much-needed relief.

These leaders in the Senate who are advancing a misguided notion that emergency relief somehow discourages people from looking for a job should talk to these folks….It's time to stop holding workers laid off in this recession hostage to Washington politics. It's time to do what's right, not for the next election, but for the middle class.”

The third and final revealing thing President Obama’s press conference brought to light is the stark and vivid differences between the two prevailing political ideologies in this country.  Some 40% of Americans describe themselves as being “conservative,” while around 20% are “liberal.”  Among the remaining 40% of “independents,” the majority support what are essentially conservative and/or libertarian positions on the most important issues of our time.  This is a Center-Right country, plain and simple.

No responsible parent raises his or her child to practice what liberals preach.  Spending money you don’t have and sending the bill to someone else (including future generations) is reckless and immoral.  Giving someone a job because of the color of their skin and not their qualifications is silly and wrong.  Teaching young people that their government owes them health care, bailouts, and welfare entitlements is de-habilitating and unsustainable.  It would be impossible to live out these types of values and have any degree of success in your own life.

But it just might work for the government of 300 million people, right?

Certainly there are sizeable blocks of pro-choice, pro-gay marriage liberal voters, but when it comes to economic and foreign policy matters, very few Americans practically embrace Leftist principles on a day-to-day basis (where it matters most).

President Obama sees every disagreement with his policies as nothing more than petty, partisan bickering.  This is to the detriment of his presidency and the nation’s well-being.  How could someone who believed in limited government and fiscal responsibility keep quiet while Democrats pass 2,000-page bill after 2,000-page bill?  How could someone who desperately wants the federal government to take seriously its constitutional duty to secure the borders and maintain the integrity of American citizenship look the other way as the administration makes states like Arizona the villain instead of those breaking our laws?

How could someone who believes deeply in the institution of the family, and in the integral role the local church ought to play in the lives of “the least among us” in its community, sit idly by as our own president undermines both and actively seeks to put the secular government in their places?

Come November, regardless of which party they may hail from, we must rid ourselves of any and all politicians what think like this.  I mean it: if there are Republicans who are promoting a progressive agenda, or have participated in advancing one in the past, kick ‘em to the curb.  Make your allegiance to your family, to your values, and to the truth.  Real change is coming to this country, in one direction or another.

Choose liberty.  Choose prosperity.  Choose to live in a country where family members freely and voluntarily helping other family members in dire economic straits receives the same kind of praise modern liberals lavish on government handouts.

Dostoevsky Was Right, And I Hate Socialism

By: R.J. Moeller

In the opening pages of his masterpiece The Brothers Karamazov Fyodor Dostoevsky gives a description of the key players the reader is to meet in his epic tale of generational sins and familial redemption.  The third and virtuous Karamazov brother Alyosha is commended by the narrator not only for his devout and fervent faith in God, but the methodic patience and due diligence he exhibits in his pursuit of moral truth and wisdom.  In contrast to the rudder-less passion that so many young people of that generation (1860's Russia) had for new and constantly-changing "causes," Alyosha is described as follows:

"The path he chose was a path going in the opposite direction of many his age, but he chose it with the same thirst for swift achievement.  As soon as he reflected seriously on it, he was convinced and convicted of the existence of God and of the immortality of the soul, and at once he instinctively said to himself: 'I want to live for immortality with Him and I will accept no compromise.'

In the same way, if he had decided that God and immortality did not exist, he would at once have become an atheist and socialist. For socialism is not merely the labor question, but it is before all things the atheistic question, the question of the form taken by atheism today. It is the question of the tower of Babel built without God, not to mount to Heaven from earth but to set up Heaven on earth."

I couldn’t have said it better had I blogged it myself.

As much as I would love to write an entire column on the subtle genius of Dostoevsky’s analysis of the human condition in Brothers, let me focus like a laser-beam on the profound insight he made some 150 years ago regarding the “question” of socialism.  Socialism, the economic and political theory that advocates for the state to control the means of production and oversee the distribution of resources, was relatively new back in Old Fyodor’s day and the assumption among intellectuals from Moscow to Mexico was that it would inevitably become the way all countries ran their government, society, and economy.

Now, with the winds of a century-and-a-half of unflattering evidence at our back, it ought to be much easier to identify the failings and false assumptions of countries that adopted Leftist (i.e. collectivist, Marxist, and socialist) creeds for the management of their nation.  I say “ought to be easier” because it seems that each new generation in Western nations thinks that it will be the one to find that elusive utopian pot-of-gold at the end of their artificially-created, progressive rainbow.  These dreamers have it set in their minds that the problems with socialist thought are all superficial ones.

If we only had the right leader.  If people just knew the good intentions we have in trying to help them.  If the citizenry could just be educated properly.  If the right piece of legislation were to be passed.  If bothersome things like the traditional family structure and local church were to disappear.

Equally frustrating are the responses (or lack thereof) from Americans who don’t believe in top-down socialism, yet remain unconvinced that those who do believe in it are supporting something that is a potential threat to their way of life.

We’re not going to turn into Cuba tomorrow, so why all the fuss?  Progressive liberals aren’t really advocating socialism.  The American system is too strong to be disrupted by a few rabble-rousers at Harvard and in the media.  The Bible doesn’t say that much about “politics” so I don’t think we should even worry too much about it.  Ever heard of “separation of church and state”, bro?

What the naïve on both sides of the political aisle in this country are missing is this: the problem with socialism is not simply this or that policy, this or that leader, this or that educational improvement.  The problem with socialism (and any ideology using socialism as its proverbial North Star) is an inherent rejection of a Higher Power, mankind’s fallen state, and the immortality of the human soul.

Of course not every liberal, progressive, leftist, or out-right socialist is irreligious, but the ideas that have fueled the ideological Left’s engine for two centuries (about the same amount of time America’s Judeo-Christian, free-market value system has been in place) come from the minds of irreligious men and have almost exclusively produced irreligious results.

This matters, or should matter, to anyone who claims to believe in God.  Almost any recent study puts that number at about 90% of Americans.

In the 18^th and 19^th centuries, thinkers such as Robert Owen, Henri de Saint-Simon, and Friedrich Engels (pictured right) began to lay the intellectual groundwork for socialism’ move from a fringe idea to the most dominant socio-political force of the 20^th century.  They rejected private property.  They loathed the excesses and exploits of industrialization.  They believed in the supremacy of science and the ability of the enlightened human mind to coordinate the activities of millions of less-enlightened human beings.

Above all else they denied the existence of a personal, rational God and any moral code for living He might have.

This aversion to the divine wasn’t some peripheral, incidental motivation for the founders of modern socialism: it was as foundational to their ethos as “endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights” is to the American one.  Committed socialists have always been either adamantly anti-religious, or at the very least, unrelenting critics of religion.

Belief in a Higher Power carries with it certain realities for our day-to-day lives, and even for the way we construct a society and government.  For example, it requires humility to acknowledge “there is a God, and I’m not Him.”  Such humility is a precursor for the acceptance that mankind is not inherently good, but actually inherently flawed (and in need of redemption).  If I’m flawed, then we’re all flawed.  If we’re all flawed, then the idea that we can centralize power in the hands of a few and trust their good will and judgment to organize the lives of 300 million people living in the most technologically-advanced, complex civilization in human history becomes untenable (and literally impossible).

Social engineering, an irreplaceable plank in the socialist platform, never works because of the complexities of even the simplest societies and so the socialist committed to science and logic is left floating in the wind with an idea that doesn’t produce the results their theories promised it would.

It is here that the secular collectivist and socialist, realizing that no matter how hard they try they can never fully eradicate man’s primal desire for higher truths and objective standards, begins to invoke language that is soaked in moral, religious connotations.  Words like “justice”, “compassion”, and “fairness” are bandied about on the Left by everyone from Karl Marx to Bill Maher.  To compound the confusing, contradictory positions they take, socialists seek out religious leaders sympathetic to their anti-capitalist, anti-establishment message.

As I wrote about last summer, Barack Obama moved to Chicago 25 years ago for this very reason.  An atheist until his late 20’s, then Barry Obama responded to an ad in The New York Times looking for a young, articulate minority activist to come work in the South-side neighborhoods of the Windy City to help advance the secular-socialist dream of fundamentally changing America as envisioned by the grand puba of community organizing: Saul Alinsky.  The people that recruited Obama were, like Alinsky before them, white secular socialists who thought that their inability to capture the hearts and minds of the black and Latino neighborhoods had to do more with the color of their own skin than their revolutionary message.  What Barack Obama found out from a local pastor named Jeremiah Wright was that to be taken seriously in these predominantly religious communities, young Obama would have to be in church on Sundays.

Dostoevsky had something to say about this wolves-in-sheep’s-clothing tactic the secular-Left constantly employs as well.  During a conversation later in Book One of Brothers Karamazov, a minor character named Peter Miusov recalls the words of a French police inspector put in charge of squashing the 1848 socialist uprising in France.

“We are not particularly afraid of all these socialists, anarchists, atheists, and revolutionists; we keep watch on them and follow all of their doings.  But there are a few peculiar men among them who believe in God and are Christians, but are at the same time socialists.   Those are the people we are most afraid of…The Christian who is a socialist is to be dreaded far more than the socialist who is an atheist.”

This unholy union between church and big-State proponents is as ironic as it is prevalent throughout the history of the last two centuries.  While I can never know the heart or real motivation of someone who claims to believe in both the God of the bible and the tenets of socialism, I can know (and judge) their actions and the results of the things they publicly promote.

I want to be as clear as I possibly can: I hate socialism, in all its various forms and guises.  I hate it like I hate the habitual, willful sins in my life that I struggle with on a daily basis.  I hate it like I hate the thought of someone who has access to clean water refusing to drink it in favor of contaminated pond-water just because they dislike the person offering them the bottle of Aquifina.

It doesn’t matter if we’re talking about the political, economic, or historical aspects of socialism: it all stinks (and to high heavens).

Rejecting socialism and the notion that the centralization of power and redistribution of income are compatible with liberty and prosperity does not mean that one must instantly become a Ronald Reagan-loving capitalist.  It also doesn’t mean that every opponent of socialism has to sign their name to a theologically uniform document, or even be a religious person themselves.

My concern today is two-fold:  First that those of you reading this that do hold Judeo-Christian convictions would at least recognize the fundamental rejection of God that lay at the very heart of socialist (Leftist) thought.  And second, whether you are a believer or not, that you would have had your intellect intrigued enough to set out to find out if I’m accurate in my appraisal (or at least my agreement with Dostoevsky’s appraisal) of socialism.

“The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.” -Winston Churchill