From The CATO Institute:

When Republicans were in power, dissent was the highest form of patriotism.  Now that Democrats are in power, obedience is the highest form of patriotism.

While a right-wing dictatorship might demand your obedience under pain of death, a left-wing dictatorship demands unity of thought, hence 1984’s Thought Police.

This just plain old pegs my hypocritical meter. When the Right has a position on something, the Left screams and shouts and drowns out any opposition to their views. When the Left has a view, there is no discussion and it’s simply the Left is correct, and that’s the end of the discussion. Anybody who disagrees by even a sliver is demonized and destroyed personally, rather than actually discuss the issue. I can’t recall a discussion with a hard left person that didn’t hinge his agrument on a hook made out of blue smoke and mirrors.

Example: I got into a comment discussion with a couple of Left wingers, who proclaimed that “The police are there to protect us from criminals and bad people.” When I produce case law ( SCOTUS South v. Maryland, 1856) that the police have no obligation to protect individual citizens, their job is to insure that there is order and the laws of the government are not broken, they go, “but…but…it says To Protect and Serve on the sides of their cars!” And I can’t shake them off that position. Their world view is the world view, and that’s just how it should be.

Lord save us from people who would save us from ourselves, whether we like it or not.

Here you go. Found on the internet and I thought these were very relavant and even related.

“Stupid is a condition; Ignorance is a choice”

“Always question the good intentions of government”

I posted them in the order that I found them, but they might go better the other way around. After all, it takes ignorant people to trust the good intentions of good government.

Very little good has come from government, especially when it interferes with the lives of its’ citizens. Many of the Liberal programs, while good intentioned, have most of the time brought about catastrophic side effects. Like the Compact Flourscent Lights. When they burn out, where do you think the mercury that’s in the bulbs are going to go? Into our landfills, where they will eventually poison our water supply. If, if global warning is true, (and with the globe cooling like it is, I doubt it) it is a better choice in my eyes to have a little bit more CO2 in the air rather than our drinking water being tainted.

Right now, I’m in a test Zip code for Memphis’ local utility to do a “Smart Grid” system. This is where both myself and my power company can do real time measuring of my power useage. This might sound neat, but when they can start selling me power on a more expensive rate during my individual peak useage.

Also, with monitoring now, control inevitably follows. California is already trying to control the thermostats of homes and businesses because they don’t have enough power. So your house temperature would be set by the government, not by you. Doesn’t that sound a little, intrusive? But it will be the future, maybe not tomorrow, or next week, but within 5 years, it won’t sound so far fetched.

The Laffer Curve, a formula that describes the inverse relationship between taxes and derived income, strikes again.

When you tax the rich, they leave and take their business with them. This leads to losing the taxes of not only the rich, but of the employees as well. In fact, the employees go on unemployment, which leads to a drain on the state’s coffers, instead of putting money in.

Now, that’s all fine and dandy if it’s one state raising taxes. If the Federal government raises taxes dramatically on the rich to redistribute the wealth nationwide, then they will likely take their money and leave the country. Which will magnify the effect.

I think it’s hilarious that the economic team surrounding the President dismisses the Laffer Curve, but in that nervous kind of laugh. Unless that’s what they want to happen…..

Found on the Interwebs:

Let me get this straight… Obama’s health care plan will be written by a committee whose head says he doesn’t understand it, passed by a Congress that hasn’t read it, signed by a president who smokes, funded by a treasury chief who did not pay his taxes, overseen by a surgeon general who is obese, and financed by a country that is nearly broke. What possibly could go wrong?

It’s nice to see wisdom like this. It gives me hope for the future. A future of independent thought and action, not tied up with dogma, political correctness and groupthink.

This article, from the Memphis local daily paper, talks about the cost of someone dropping out of school. There is a personal cost, and a societal cost as well.

High school dropouts earn about 64% of what young adults who do graduate earn. The exact numbers are $17,299 for a dropout, and 26,933 for the graduate. Working an hourly job of 40 hours a week, the difference is $4.63 that the graduate is paid more than the dropout. That’s if the dropout has a job.

Over the lifetime of the dropout, that $4.63 turns into $266,000 of lost wages, because they didn’t see the need for that diploma. That’s the personal cost.

The societal loss is even greater. You have to add in the costs of things like food stamps, and other public assistance programs. Then you have the large amount of dropouts that turn to crime. Incarceration costs Tennessee $23,400 a year per inmate. You also have the female dropouts, that use WIC and public assistance for survival, so they breed like rabbits. At that point you are planting the seeds for another generation who will grow up without hope, without graduating, and extending the problem another 50 years.

So, what can we as a society do about it? Not a lot. We can chain the children and young adults to their seats, but that only causes graduates that can’t read their diplomas. No, the change must come from the society that creates this problem.  I’ve talked too many times about what has to happen, and why. I’m blue in the face. The solution is there, plain to see, but no one is willing to do anything but throw money at the symptoms and not address the problem.

What needs to happen is simple. It needs to be drilled into the kids from Kindergarten on how important it is to learn. The minority society must give up the paradigm that having smart people is looked down upon. We must educate the young women about the consequences of having unprotected sex. If we can’t get them to stop, at least use some kind of birth control. Have the young men who get these young women pregnant to step up and take responsibility for what they’ve done. The worst thing done to the minority population was the destruction of the nuclear family. When you have a woman at 21 with no diploma, no future and 4 kids at her feet, all by different fathers, what do you think is going to happen? A repeat of their mothers fate. And they damn the children to another cycle of this.

This is America, and this does not need to happen. There is too much room in the economic pie for 30% of Memphis students to drop out and be relegated to a life of jobs that can be taught with pictograms.