Socialism: At some point you grabbed enough power

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www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2010/04/026193.php

The Founders of the United States were deep students of politics and history, and they shared Aristotle's concern. Up through their time, history had shown all known democracies to be "incompatible with personal security or the rights of property." James Madison and others held that the "first object of government" was to protect the rights of property. Numerous provisions of the Constitution and Bill of Rights were incorporated to protect the property rights of citizens from the power of the government.

Whatever else might be said about him, President Obama operates on a different philosophy of government from that of the Founders. As Michelle Malkin observes, he spoke the most revealing and clarifying 10 words of his administration this week: "I think at some point you have made enough money."

The Founders thought that at some point the government had enough power. Obama, however, is a devout believer in unlimited government. The common denominator among so-called health care reform and financial regulatory reform as well as Obama's other big proposals is the augmented power they confer on the government in general and the executive branch in particular.

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How America became a 'secular-socialist machine'

www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/22/AR2010042204207.html?nav=rss_opinion/columns

-- "Machine": Getting $787 billion from Congress in February when no elected member had fully read and understood the economic stimulus package. This is behavior worthy of the Chicago political machine. If no elected officials know what is in the bill, how can someone assert that this was an act of self-government?

-- "Machine": Rejecting the will of the American people expressed through town hall meetings, tea parties, polls and elections by ramming through an unpopular 2,600-page health-care bill. The moment of real clarity came after Republican Scott Brown's victory in the Massachusetts special Senate election, when by every traditional American measure the Democrats should have stepped back and said to voters, "I hear you." Instead, their actions said: "Your voice and vote do not matter."

-- "Socialist": Creating czar positions to micromanage industry reflects the type of hubris of centralized government that Friedrich von Hayek and George Orwell warned against. How can a White House "executive compensation czar" know enough to set salaries in multiple companies for many different people? Having a pay dictatorship for one part of the country sets the pattern for government to claim the right to set pay for everyone. If that isn't socialism, what word would describe it?

-- "Socialist": Violating 200 years of bankruptcy precedent to take money from bondholders and investors in the auto industry to pay off union allies is rather an anti-market intervention.

-- "Socialist": Proposing that the government (through the Environmental Protection Agency or some sort of carbon-trading scheme) micromanage carbon output is proposing that the government be able to control the entire U.S. economy. Look at the proposals for government micromanagement in the 1,428-page Waxman-Markey energy tax bill. (I stopped reading when I got to the section regulating Jacuzzis on Page 442.) If government regulates every aspect of our use of power, it has regulated every aspect of our lives. What is that if not socialism?

-- "Socialist": Nationalizing student loans so that they are a bureaucratic monopoly. This will surely lead to fraud on the scale we see in Medicare and Medicaid, from which more than $70 billion per year is stolen.

-- "Socialist": Expanding government mortgage intervention to 90 percent of the housing market.

-- "Secular": Describing America's promise as a "secular country that is respectful of religious freedom," as Obama did last April, is an act of willful historical revisionism. The United States was founded as an intensely religious country that believes our rights come from God, including the right to worship as our conscience dictates. The Founding Fathers forbade the establishment of a national religion to protect individual rights of conscience but understood that public life would reflect the religious nature of the American people. This understanding of America's promise is far more tolerant of religion in the public square than the secular purge that we have seen since the Supreme Court outlawed school prayer in 1963.

-- "Secular": Appointing David Hamilton to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit. That Hamilton had previously ruled that opening legislature sessions with sectarian prayers is unconstitutional is further evidence of this anti-historical secular outlook.

Although its actions may seem like "centrism" to some, the Obama-Pelosi-Reid system is clearly a secular-socialist machine. And Obama is the most radical president in American history.