Conservatism is Not About Principle

Limbaugh put Republicans who work "around the edges" of the president's policies under his heel

Yesterday I wrote that conservatism "is not about principle; it is about "preserving" the status quo from the liberals attempts to rip apart conservative values any further than they already have. Conservative values are not based on objectivity, but rather on the subjectivity that the free market is the best, not that it is right."

This is the reason Rush Limbaugh is said to be driving a wedge in the Republican Party, with about twenty-five percent of Republicans--according to White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel--rooting for Limbaugh, and leaders like Mitt Romney distancing themselves from him by not mentioning his name in their own comments of caution.

"'He is the voice and the intellectual force and energy behind the Republican Party. And he has been up front about what he views, and hasn't stepped back from that, which is he hopes for failure. He said it. And I compliment him for his honesty, but that's their philosophy that is enunciated by Rush Limbaugh. And I think that's the wrong philosophy for America,' Emanuel said on CBS' 'Face the Nation.'

"I want Barack Obama to fail if his mission is to restructure and reform this country so that capitalism and individual liberty are not its foundation? Why would I want that to succeed?" [Limabugh] asked. Fox News Politics

Listen to the conservatives and the Republican leaders. Unfortunately, they don't want President Obama to fail, because if he fails, the nation fails, and if the nation fails, the world-wide depression would be politically disastrous--for anyone who thinks his mission is to "restructure and reform this country so that capitalism and individual liberty are not its foundation."

It would be disastrous politically for people like Romney and Huckabee and any other politician who says he or she does not want this un-Constitutional theft of free enterprise to fail. They are giving the Libertarian Party a big boost as the only free-market party. But that is good, if the Republicans don't think capitalism is morally right.

This is what I mean when I say is not about principle; it is about "preserving" the status quo from the liberals attempts to rip apart conservative values any further than they already have. Conservative values are not based on objectivity, but rather on the subjectivity that the free market is the best, not that it is right.

Limbaugh put Republicans who work "around the edges" of the president's policies under his heel, grinding on them for trying to make those policies work because in doing so they are giving up their beliefs--beliefs which unfortunately are not principles.

If they thought capitalism was right--morally, politically, and economically--they would have seen the warning signs when President Bush told them about it in 2003, and when Congressman Barney Frank said Bush was wrong.

"According to an article by Kathleen Day in the Oct. 8, 2003, Washington Post, Frank opposed giving the Bush administration the right to approve or disapprove business activities that 'could pose risk to the taxpayers.' He told the Post he worried the Treasury Department 'would sacrifice activities that are good for consumers in the name of lowering the companies’ market risks.'

"Just a month before, Frank had aggressively thwarted reform efforts by the Bush administration. He told The New York Times on Sept. 11, 2003, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s problems were 'exaggerated,' a gross miscalculation some five years later with costs estimated to be in the hundreds of billions.

“'These two entities – Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac – are not facing any kind of financial crisis,' Frank said to the Times." Business and Media Institute

Not acknowledging that capitalism is morally the only economic system that allows investors the freedom to create wealth will be a disaster for Republicans, if they manage to regain power. They will only seek their own forms and programs of "stimulating" the economy. Most Republicans said over and over that "something has to be done" to save the economy. All but one or two failed to mention free enterprise as the solution. The rest were on board with bail-outs and loans and stimulus packages.

But if the Republican return to power and play the same game as Obama and the Democrats, but with different bail-out/loan programs that eliminate what they called "pork", their programs will only contain what the Dems will then call pork.

The government needs to back off, let businesses fail because that is what businesses are supposed to do when times are bad, and everything will work its self out. That is what capitalism does. It is a self-regulating, self-correcting market, as we found out after President Reagan sat back and watched as:

"an economic tidal wave was moving in on the US Monday morning, October 19, 1987. The Tokyo exchange had experienced a record collapse in prices and panic selling. The Hong Kong exchange was wiped out. The European exchanges experienced the worst single day in their history.

"In the US panic first hit in the Chicago commodities exchange and within five minutes of the opening the markets went into free-fall. It then spread to Wall Street and the NY exchange.

"The Dow-Jones averages fell 508 points. By the time the NY exchange closed up stock market prices had dropped 22.6%, almost double the record losses of the crash of 1929. An astonishing 604.5 million shares had been traded that day more than double that of the crash of 1929. It was the greatest crash in US economic history.

"Black Monday was followed by Terrible Tuesday which was never reported by the US press. On the following Tuesday the world’s financial system came to within one hair’s breadth of extinction. It appeared that by noon that the market had in fact died. All trading in stocks, options, and futures shuddered to halt. For almost one hour the world’s capitalist system had completely collapsed. There were no buyers at any price.

"At this point of maximum crisis the Federal Reserve Board stepped in and flooded the banks with cheap credit. At 12:38 that afternoon the stack market rose from the dead. The resurrection of the market was the result of the deliberate manipulation by a few major firms to save the markets.

"Essentially leading corporations were entering the market after 1pm to buy back their own stocks which they had dumped that morning in order to stabilize the situation. Buying resumed on the market." [condensed from] The Reagan Revolution

The Fed did what it was supposed to do, and within hours the market was correcting itself. There was no rush to "nationalize" banks or insurance companies or mortgage lenders or the stock markets themselves.

There was no appeal to Congress to help with financial aid. It was not necessary then, and it was not necessary last fall when Bernanke and Paulson presented Congress with a three-page spending proposal for $800B.

"The Bush/Paulson/Bernanke 'panic' and 'plan' to hand unlimited funds and power without judicial or congressional oversight was ripped straight from the 'Chicago School's' playbook of inducing a financial panic in developing nations and then moving in to 'reform' the system... As noted here before: [the nation was] told we had only hours til the Apocalypse on Thursday, Sept. 18, [yet] we find the world still working 12 days later."

Before $1 of any of that money had been paid as bail-out, the market was beginning to correct itself. Only after spending the money did the economic system start tanking because "capitalism and individual liberty [were] not its foundation" any longer.

So I want Obama to fail too. Maybe then the capitalists will be allowed to step in repair the damage, and I hope that if that day comes the socialist pigs will be charged with crimes, maybe under the RICO laws for collaborating in dirty business.

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Huckabee, The Kid, and Principles of Freedom

What do Mike Huckabee and a 13-year old conservative prodigy have in common? The kid's name is Jonathan Khron, he is the author of the book "Define Conservatism," and I will let him speak first.

Quite the "wunderkind," isn't he? Did you catch his "Four Principles of Conservatism"?

1. Respect for the Constitution
2. Respect for life
3. Less government
4. Personal responsibility

"Conservatism," he said, is the principle of protecting peoples' rights.

Now what did former Arkansas Governer Mike Huckabee say? He said (on Fox and Friends, 2/28/09) that capitalism is "better" in the marketplace with its "free hand" versus the government with its "heavy hand."

Where is the similarity? Both of them think conservatism is about principle, when in fact it is not about principle; it is about "preserving" the status quo from the liberals attempts to rip apart conservative values any further than they already have. Conservative values are not based on objectivity, but rather on the subjectivity that the free market is the best; not that it is right.

Neither of them mentioned the principle of the free market as the right of men with individual sovereignty. What is individual sovereignty? In a civilization it must be defined as the most freedom available while living under the rule of law.

"Individual sovereignty was not a peculiar conceit of Thomas Jefferson: It was the common assumption of the day..." Kelley L. Ross, Ph.D.

Man is born with absolute individual sovereignty, because where no government ruled him, and where no men enslaved him, all the unalienable rights given him by nature would remain with him. In a civilization of laws, some of those rights are alienated in order to secure the rule of law, but in return the individual actually gains.

He gains the freedom of having to police other men to secure the natural rights he is left with. He is free of having to enact individual justice when he has been wronged.

Because he is free to be himself without worry that others will--metaphorically or actually--put their fist, or a gun, in his face, he is free to use his energy in the pursuit of happiness.

The principle of "respect for life" means the respect for individual sovereignty. This does not mean the sovereignty of the people in the aggregate when defined as "the greatest good for the greatest number."

Huckabee meant just this very thing when he said capitalism was "better."

The problem with conservatives is they don't understand that capitalism is not "better." It is man's right by nature, by his nature as a free sovereign, and as the "rational animal."

Krohn said "respect for the Constitution" was a principle. Well, under the Tenth Amendment whereby the States have all the power not specifically given to the Federal government nor denied to the States themselves, the people have all other powers.

There is not one word in the Constitution that allows for the men operation of free men in a free market with the "heavy hand" of the government when it has a gun it that hand.

"Less government" means nothing except as a comparison. In the 21st century we need a government that is immensely larger than what was required in Jefferson's time. "Less" is not a standard. It may be a goal compared to what we currently have.

But the goal is a government that rules free men, not a "smaller" government. We can create a smaller government tomorrow and yet not get rid of the collectivism that the gun in the hand of government has pointed at our heads.

Capitalism is not a "better" system; it is the only system commensurate with free men operating in a free market under the rule of law that protects individual sovereignty.

The Republicans lost the last presidential election and the previous Congressional elections because they don't know what a principle is. They compete for the minds and hearts of the American people by offering them bromides about freedom while chosing an economic system based not on the freedom offered by that system, but on the fuzzy idea that it is a "better" system.

And they don't understand why it's better.

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Conservative Politics and Liberty

The life of Man must be defined as unalienably self-sovereign.

In a recent article in American Thinker, Bruce Walker wrote this piece of politically conservative observation:

"Seventy-five years ago this month, one of the most insidious laws in human history came into effect in Nazi Germany. The innocent sounding name was The Law for the Prevention of Hereditary Diseased Offspring. It was the ghastly pinnacle of an unholy theory of human eugenics. Darwinism -- not the Theory of Evolution, per se, but the sinister notion that natural selection made God superfluous -- liberated man from his obligation to treat fellow men as special creatures in a divinely ordered universe."

While Walker is correct in calling the law "insidious," and "the ghastly pinnacle" of eugenics, he demonstrates what is wrong with conservative epistemology, namely, the inability to see that political and social values and the virtues required to attain them must be values and virtues proper to Man--not to a God who is unattainable in life.

Men are never "liberated" from their "obligation to treat fellow men" as endowed with self-sovereignty. Whether or not God is "superfluous" can never be allowed to be part of the equation. The most avid atheists are often the most avid defenders of human rights, and they see no "divine" order in the universe.

What they see is the equality of creatures born with the unalienable right to life and liberty. The necessity of saying "liberty" ought to be superfluous itself, since the right to life necessitates the liberty necessary to live life as the rational animal. It is entirely superfluous to say "and the pursuit of happiness," for the same rationale.
However, it has come in handy in certain arguments with people who forget that the right to pursue one's happiness necessitates the liberty to achieve it.

It ought to be enough to simply say, "Until a man violates the rights--equal to his own, of other men--he has the right to libertarian life." Libertarian in this sense does not include the right to violate the rights of other men, which are equal in value by virtue of their unalienablity by right of birth.

Libertarian means specifically the ability to act with all the unalienable rights of birth with which Man is endowed by the nature of his metaphysical existence. That existence is defined as "the rational animal."

It can only be when a man has violated the equal rights of others that justice may require forfeiture of his libertarianism for a time, e.g., jail or prison or probation. In some cases of gross violation justice has required he forfeit his very life.

America's Founders were mostly Deists, no matter which denomination they attended. It was politically incorrect for public leaders not to attend a regular denomination such as Baptist or Episcopal, but there were some like Thomas Paine who managed to evade without even that constraint on his freedom. He had to flee America for France, literally for his safety and probably his life, in order to remove that constraint, until President Jefferson invited him back with a guarantee of his safety.

It is important to note America's Deist beginings because those Deists were more dedicated to worshiping God than were most of the commoners who followed established denominations. There is one and only reason for being able to say this: the Deists themselves said their devotion to the virtue of Reason and to the Rule of Law was precisely because they believed it was God himself who had endowed Man with that virtue.

Then He stepped back and allowed the nature he had created to run its course. A form of Darwinism one to two centuries before Darwin was born was part of the metaphysics of Deism. They believed God was superfluous only because He was willing to let the Reason He had provided them rule the affairs of the Men He had created as rational creatures.

Libertarian action translates into the value of being both free of coercion from others, and is non-coercion of others, for the purpose of furthering the pursuit of human life as well as one's own, through the virtue of Reason.

Yet, "when one speaks of a man's right to exist for his own sake, for his own rational self-interest, most people assume automatically that this means his right to sacrifice others." Ayn Rand; The Virtue of Selfishness: The Objectivist Ethics

The Law for the Prevention of Hereditary Diseased Offspring was ghastly because it used the power of government to choose the criteria set by a leader with a criminal mind, criteria for the sacrifice of others. Clearly Hitler's was not "rational" self-interest. Rational self-interest cannot be coercive or it is self-defeating and therefor non-rational.

But conservatives do not see that such men--Mao Tse Tung, Hitler, Mugabe, Stalin, Pol Pot--care nothing about whether or not God is superfluous. The only thing such men have ever cared about is power, and that is the power to control.

If it is insidious to find God superfluous, then America's Deists were insidious. Since that is not a word that can be used to describe them, Mr. Walker uses a "package deal" consisting of tying together the concepts of Hitler's policies with a disregard for God, as if God was anywhere in Hitler's thoughts. Corrupting or ignoring a "divinely ordered universe" was never a consideration for Hitler.

If Hitler had a devout belief in God, he would have continued his policies, believing as do Islamicists that what they do is in the name of God.

Neither Hitler nor the world's current Islamicists believe they are liberated from any obligation to "treat fellow men as special creatures in a divinely ordered universe." As a matter of fact, Islamicists believe that to continue the "divinely ordered universe" of Allah it is moral to martyr one's self in the destruction of those who actually see Allah--but not necessarily the Judeo-Christian God--as superfluous.

A supernatural God is superfluous for anyone who calls him or herself a naturalist, because in the cosmic scheme of the laws of nature, "nature's god" did not create existence.

The only "sinister notion" in natural selection is in the motives of men who refuse to accept individual sovereignty as the right of every human being, the selection by nature's god of the species of Man to be the one to obtain the virtue of rationality.

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Conservative Society for Action

Conservatives Uphold the Constitution

No Better Than Liberals

I just joined--with a donation--a new organization called the Conservative Society for Action. There is only one reason I did this. The site's sidebar contains quotes from none other than, and no one but, Senator Barry Goldwater.

The conservative lineage CSA claims to follow--as demonstrated by the pictures at the top of the page--are Thomas Paine; Thomas Jefferson; Robert Taft, "the first to fight 'New Deal' Socialism"; Goldwater; and Ronald Reagan, the friend and so-called heir of Goldwater's modern ideology of conservativism.

As the CSA's website makes clear, Goldwater was out to protect the Constitition, quoting him with statements such as:
"I will not attempt to discover whether legislation is 'needed' before I have first determined whether it is constitutionally permissible"; and:
"It is not to inaugurate new programs, but to cancel old ones that do violence to the Constitution, or that have failed in their purpose, or that impose on the people an unwarranted financial burden."

This is clearly not the conservatism of Washington in the Twenty-First Century. In fact, in was only by the barest standards that Reagan, the "hero" of modern conservativism, can be said to have furthered Goldwater's Originalist politics. He was the best President of the Twentieth Century, but Goldwater had the potential to be a game changer, taking the Constitution back to its originalist roots.

Stephen Flanagan of the National Defense University, founder of the CSA, has it right when he states, "Obama's win means nothing! Capital Hill is the enemy! [ ] As I said before the election, Obama won't really come through on his campaign promises because that would end up hurting HIM. [ ] But here's the REAL danger... The Liberals in this country now control 4 out of the 5 centers of political power. [ ] There's one more item on their checklist and that is the Supreme Court. By the time Obama's presidency is over, they likely will have that too. Five out of Five for the first time in American history."

But as modern conservativism goes, Nixon, not Goldwater, was the next Republican President. Leaving all Nixon's scandals aside, his disastrous (and traitorous) act of taking America off the gold standard eliminates him from rationally conservative status. He unilaterally cancelled the Breton Woods Agreements signed by 730 delegates from all 44 Allied nations, which adopted the gold standard as the only objective measurement of a nation's wealth. A nation's wealth is now tied only to its "good name," its economic strength, in world market comparisons.

Gerald Ford was a popular centrist in the House of Representatives, but after becoming President when Nixon resigned, he showed none of the strength of that Goldwater lineage. Had he shown any such strengths, he probably still would have lost to Jimmy Carter. Goldwater's radical defense of liberty frightened many Americans who saw him as a hawk who would take us to war against the Communist enemy.

More than likely Goldwater's international policies of strength, and his domestic policies making each American more economically wealthy and thus independent of government charity, thereby enriching the Treasury, would have broken the economic back of the Soviets two decades before Reagan was able to accomplish the same thing when he challenged the Soviets to keep up with our military spending.

Goldwater had objective standards. Reagan had objective goals, but his policies were strictly pragmatic, lowering taxes for the purpose of reaping higher levels of revenue from smaller percentages; America grows wealthy and even lower taxes will have the effect of providing a larger budget. But Reagan also blew the budget, and he left America deeply in debt. Pragmatism is not conservatism, but when used for the purposes of strengthening both our economy and our national defenses, pragmatic Presidents become heroic.

What Ayn Rand wrote about Barry Goldwater could have been written about Reagan, (although she was angered by Reagan's religious conservatism, especially his opposition to abortion based on the idea that the separation of church and state did not apply when in reference to a fertilized egg, a zygote, or a fetus undeveloped enough to live on its own.) She wrote:

"Barry Goldwater is singularly devoid of power lust. Even his antagonists admit it with grudging respect. He is seeking, not to rule, but to liberate a country."

The CSA says its first priorities are these:
ACT to Repeal the Community Reinvestment Act!
ACT to Impeach Barney Frank!
ACT to Defeat Card Check Legislation
ACT to Stop the Flow of U.S. Oil Dollars Going to Hostile Countries
ACT to Stop Congressional Censorship of the Broadcast Media.

To read the reasons behind each of the ACT links is to understand something of the nature of Goldwater's goals. Unfortunately I see no overall philosophical basis for each ACTion that CSA seeks to perform. They are worthy actions, necessary actions, and yes, conservative actions.

But the problem with conservativism is that it does not lay out a black-and-white philosophical strategy, as Goldwater did. Goldwater frightened many Americans because unlike any other candidate since Abraham Lincoln he had an unwavering plan.

The conservatives cannot allow themselves to appear to have the luxury of a black-and-white, unwavering plan. That it is not a luxury but absolutely necessary to break the back of the growing menace of the overpowering, power-hungry federal machine and its leaders is a fact.

"If a [politician] evades, equivocates and hides his stand under a junk-heap of random concretes, we must add up those concretes and judge him accordingly," Rand wrote. "If his stand is mixed, we must evaluate it by asking: Will he protect freedom or destroy the last of it? Will he accelerate, delay or stop the march toward statism?"

Whether or not Flanagan and his staff and the general membership of CSA can ACT with Goldwater-like reserve, and with Jefferson and Paine's committment to individual sovereignty, remains to be seen. Flanagan has the background. Now let's see if he has the vision and the rationality to take on Capital Hill with the balls that are necessary to make him an enemy of the state.

"I do not undertake to promote welfare, for I propose to extend freedom," Flanagan quotes Goldwater. But Goldwater also said, "Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice." Extremism of any sort is frowned upon now, because the Religious Right is extreme but so are the Islamicists. Goldwater's extremism was his downfall even in 1964.

Flanagan has the credentials to be an extremist. Let's see if he has the credentials to sell the extreme position that the Constitution must be adhered to, and sees to it, with membership help, to destroy Goldwater's idea of "necessary but un-Constitutional" legislation.








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