Defense of Limbaugh’s “Nazi” References

Here is a defense of  Rush Limbaugh’s recent unvarnished review of mid-20th Century history, particularly regarding the German Nazi Party’s similarities to modern day leftist agenda of socialism and fascism. The term “Nazi” when translated to English stands for “National Socialist German Workers’ Party.” (I know, I’ve already mentioned that in a recent post.) Rush wasn’t referring to the Holocaust, and accusations that Rush was “trivializing” the Holocaust were unfounded and undeserved. For those who still have painful memories or difficulties dealing with any references to WWII Germany, Harold Kushner’s When Bad Things Happen to Good People and Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search For Meaning can be helpful.

What is really being trivialized is the massive scope of the ObamaCare proposals, and the extent that it will allow government officials access into the most intimate and personal details of everyone’s private health and other matters. The legislative proposals in the House bill include giving the IRS and the Social Security Administration even more power than they already have. Americans have already given up so much freedom as we’ve allowed the government to have too much power.

It is not unreasonable to remind ourselves of how totalitarian dictators have come to power in this last century. Those of our fellow citizens who would become government officials can’t be trusted with power. That is why we have something called a Bill of Rights, a basis for laws to protect the individual from the state.

Do we really want to trust a known corrupt tax cheat like the current Treasury Secretary or a long-time head of the Kansas Trial Lawyers Association like the current HHS Secretary? And if people do not understand the connection that Rush Limbaugh is trying to make, they can read Ludwig von Mises’s Socialism.

We are constantly reminded in current events every day of how governments treat their own people, and how the world’s citizens treat each other, in many parts of Africa, in Iran and Saudi Arabia, and on the police blotters of every American city (and suburb).

When people say, in reference to the Holocaust, “It can’t happen here; this is America,” then I say they are in denial. We now have a culture of grownups who unfortunately are products of government-run schools, in which a blind trust of government and in fact a religious worship of the state is being indoctrinated. We have a culture of class- and race-based dehumanization. We have a new Supreme Court Justice who has in repeated statements devalued “white males” based on their race. Worse than that, we have a culture that devalues and dehumanizes human life only because of being unborn. And even when it is shown that adult stem cells are just as useful as embryonic stem cells in research, the pro-abortion groups still won’t let go of needing to use human embryos for  experiments. Those who are offended by a comparison of the dehumanizing involved in Dr. Mengele’s Nazi human experimentation with the dehumanizing involved with abortion and embryonic experimentation are also in denial.

No, I’m not comparing the researchers with Nazi experiments, but I am comparing the dehumanizing by both. Why is it so extremely necessary to some people to must use the embryonic stem cells, despite the equal usefulness of non-embryonic adult stem cells? It is almost of a ritualistic nature.

And all Rush Limbaugh is doing is pointing out the massive further loss of liberty we will have, and that it is unwise to let government have so much power over our lives.

It is illegal to forcibly institutionalize someone unless one is a danger to oneself or to others, but I fear that when we have ObamaCare, that might change.

Health Care and Respect for Others

August, 2009

Our government is supposed to reflect the will of the people.  But it is authoritarian when politicians attempt to force their will on the people, regardless of a majority of people in disagreement with it.

Recent polls have shown that a majority of Americans are happy with their health insurance and don’t want to change it, and that a majority of those without insurance are happy with that situation, too. President Obama, however, has been saying that he wants people to keep their current insurance, although the 1000+ page bill that he would sign into law would result in the contrary.

There seems to be a general lack of respect for others in our society, particularly by people in government. There are some people who seem to like power and who like to tell people what to do. There are people who want to use the political process to force their vision of a society onto the rest of us, a plan that doesn’t take into account all the individual differences in the lives of millions of different individuals.

At recent health care Town Hall meetings, shouting by opponents of government-run health care has interrupted members of Congress there. There have been conservative groups instructing their followers to deliberately shout down the Congressmen, which is not only disrespectful, it’s just plain obnoxious and counter-productive.

At a few of those meetings, there has been actual violence. One incident in particular, which was misreported in various media outlets, was a case of a Black conservative, Kenneth Gladney, beaten up and sent to the hospital by pro-government health care people. Gladney’s victimizing also included racial epithets directed at him.

Unfortunately, many of those Congressmen have either been untruthful about the proposals, or just plain ignorant because they haven’t taken the time to read the bill.  And much of this government-run scheme  would require some Americans to be taxed to fully fund the health care for others. Why, though, would President Obama want insurance for all Americans, even the irresponsible ones? Is it respectful of Americans who take care of themselves to force them to pay for the medical care of those who smoke like chimneys, eat like pigs and drink like a fish? I think not. That’s not only disrespectful, it’s immoral.

So far, President Obama still has not come to Mr. Gladney’s defense, as he came to the defense of a Black Harvard professor who accused a police officer of racism, a charge which has been overwhelmingly disproven. Could it be that the political views of the Black victim of actual physical violence are less important to Obama than the views of the Harvard professor? Which one is more deserving of his respect? They both should be.

A truly free country’s officials would respect the people’s right to know what’s actually proposed in Congress, as well as their right to question and protest those officials’ apparent disingenuousness. A truly free country allows citizens to choose their health insurance and their doctors, and those would actually be private matters.

Challenge Assumptions of Government and Money

We must question the long-held assumption that government ought to produce and administer the currency that we must use for trading. Government has been doing that for many generations, and it is just assumed that because that’s the way it’s been, then that’s the way it ought to be. However, we all have natural rights, among them the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. In my opinion, individuals have the right to use whatever they want to as a means of trade. And whichever currencies become the most popular and valuable at whatever given time will lead over the competing currencies, some of which will fail and go out of business.

Economist Murray Rothbard advocated a “separation of money and state,” and believed that the money and banking system we have now is “legalized counterfeiting.” There should be no government involvement in the business of currency, because once some arbitrary force intrudes, it distorts the market of that commodity. That is the ongoing theme in  modern times of  every economic aspect of daily life. Government causes markets to become dysfunctional with its intrusions, and when government gets into the business of something-anything-it causes great distortions and devaluations, and the government’s production and control of the “dollar” is the best example of that. At some point the dollar will be worthless, if it isn’t already, and, because of the state-caused distortion, it has a domino effect on all economic activity, as we have seen now. So, it really is important to challenge assumptions that government must have a monopoly on our money supply.

Now, in an earlier post, I noted that former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan went from being an Ayn Rand capitalist to being a big government control freak. And now, we can plainly see that Greenspan’s successor, Ben Bernanke is clearly uncomfortable with any public scrutiny of the Federal Reserve. What has caused these grown adults to become so enmeshed with government power? That’s what it is–the power. When people get themselves in positions of power, of the armed officialdom of governmental power, it becomes addictive, like a drug. Can you imagine suggesting to Ben Bernanke the idea of not only ending the Fed, but ending the Dollar and privatizing currency altogether? He’d start to tremble and convulse like a heroin addict suffering from withdrawal.

We must challenge the assumptions that government should control our means of trade and that our elected and appointed political leaders have the citizens’ best interests at heart.

Economics, Freedom and Truth

A lot of my writing here has been in the category of economics, even though I didn’t really study that. Well, that’s not true. While I majored in psychology in college, I did take one economics course, but it was sooooooo boring–I learned nothing in that class. But I studied economics in the sense of really learning about it after college, mostly during the 1980s, by hearing people on the radio and on tapes, and reading various material–mostly libertarian-based periodicals.

Thank God Gene Burns was on WRKO for several years. He was the most pro-free market, pro-private property rights, pro-freedom of association advocate I’ve ever heard on the radio. Now, he is on KGO in San Francisco, but his show is just too late in the evening for me to hear now–oh, well. And it was through his show in ’87 and ’88 that I heard about Ron Paul, and was very fortunate to read some of Dr. Paul’s writings. (I was able to convince at least one person in ’88 to vote for Dr. Paul: one of my former psychology professors, who, after hearing Dr. Paul’s interview on the MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour, said it was the first time he had someone to vote for, not against, for president. Me, too.)

Also in that period, I had some audio cassette tapes, including a discussion between Ron Paul and economics professor Lawrence Reed, Money and the Federal Reserve, and a lecture by Prof. Reed, Trade Cycles: The Economics of Boom and Bust, and several lectures by philosopher Ayn Rand, mostly at the “Ford Hall Forum.” And some of my reading material at the time included periodicals such as Liberty, which I now see is still in publication and online, Reason magazine, also online, and the Freeman, also now online, which is a publication of the Foundation for Economic Education, whose current president is the aforementioned Prof. Reed. Other people who have influenced my thinking include the Future of Freedom Foundation‘s Jacob Hornberger, economics professor Walter E. Williams, who gives a common sense approach to economic matters in everyday life, as did the late economist Murray Rothbard. Economist Ludwig von Mises‘s writing, however, maybe was a bit too convoluted for me. Perhaps to really understand what he meant, it might’ve required taking those graduate level economics courses.

Also in the 1980s, Llewellyn Rockwell’s articles gave me a more fine-tuned understanding of private property rights. Mr. Rockwell’s website, LewRockwell.com, is probably one of the best sources of discussions on liberty out there. On LewRockwell.com, you can find articles by Ron Paul, finance professor Michael Rozeff, such as this recent one, Irrationality and Fascism in Government-Regulated Health Care, and articles by Donald Miller MD, such as the Austrian Cure for Economic Illness. Given that Dr. Miller’s main field of knowledge and practice has been in medicine for many years, he still knows economics better than probably most Harvard economists. And I say that because free market advocates think and report with reasoned analysis of actual truth of history and current events. In contrast, the economists of the Left, who oppose freedom and free markets, fantasize. Most of the people in the so-called mainstream news business also live in an irrational fantasy world, and that is why they seem to worship President Obama, their Messiah.

Unlike mainstream free market economists and the ones in the media, who deal mostly with the practicality of free markets vs. the impracticality of government-controlled markets, the people mentioned here in the first few paragraphs deal with the practicalities, but also with the morality of free market economics, as did Ayn Rand. It is moral to respect the freedom of people to trade voluntarily, and it is immoral to violate and interfere with people’s private matters and relationships. Yes, it’s that simple.

And the problem with those whose job it is to inform the public, the news reporters and anchors and writers and editors, besides living in their left-wing fantasy world, is now their having become such a propaganda machine for their worshipped politicians. As I mentioned in an earlier post, the left-biased mainstream news media no longer find answers to the who, what, why, when, where and how, because they don’t care to find those answers. Instead, they use their role as “journalists” to be an activist, and delve into the pro-government, pro-fascism propaganda that manipulates their and the general population’s emotions. Objectivity and truth are now foreign concepts to these people. Of course, I won’t name names, such as Brian Williams and Diane Sawyer, but I won’t name names here. Michael Graham’s show is called The Natural Truth because he really believes in getting at the truth. In the national news media, I can say Chris Wallace really does try to ask those both left and right politicians tough and necessary questions, because, as good ol’ Jerry Williams would say, getting a straight answer out of them is like a dentist trying to pull a tooth. Chris Wallace’s is the show that should be called Hardball. Most of those news people just let Mr. Obama get away with lying through his teeth. And Don Imus also interviews people on the left and right with more objectivity than most of the mainstream news media do.

Freedom and Truth are important.

How Much Mandatory Will Be In the Government Forced Health Care System?

While there will be more waiting periods for some procedures and surgeries if the government takes over the health care system, and given that the new system will force you to have insurance and see a doctor even if you don’t want to, will the government also have the power to force you to have certain treatments even if you don’t want them? For example, I know a couple of people who have particular conditions that put them at high risk for cancer. If one is diagnosed with cancer, will the government doctor force you to have chemo and radiation (which in some cases have been shown to do more harm than good) even if you believe there are better and safer alternative treatments? Will the government doctor forbid you from have the alternative treatments? What if you resist the mandatory chemo and radiation-will they arrest you? Will they forcibly take you to the hospital for such treatments?