Bye, Bye, American Pie, As It Grinds to a Halt

Natural law as it applies to Mankind requires that men respect the boundaries of freedom that do not make economic or social slaves of others.

"Barack Obama made fifteen references to 'pie' in 100 seconds of a speech -- all about dividing up the pie of the American economy [while] his audience laughed and chanted, 'Pie! Pie!' to show how hungry they were. In one fell swoop Obama gave away the rapacity of socialism.

"Or as Michelle O explained, "The truth is, [ ] someone is going to have to give up a piece of their pie so that someone else can have more." James Lewis American Thinker

Lewis makes a compelling case about how, while "The Left likes to preen itself with the word ‘progressive,' [ ] it is actually the most regressive political strategy in history."

As I wrote in Monday's Academy Blogger, numerous states are currently declaring sovereignty from the Federal government.

For those not familiar with this concept, it has nothing to do with secession from the Union. It has everything to do with the Tenth Amendment, which states:

"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people"...

This means specifically and categorically that the Constitution was, as we know from history, created by the States to unite them under a Federalist system. What we have had for more than a hundred years is not Federalism, but Nationalism as inadvertantly conceived, in great part, from the creation of the "citizen of the United States" by the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment.

This means the roles were reversed, whereby the States became agents of the national government. The States did not accept this during the debates over the design of the Union, did not write the Constitution to be National rather than Federal, and would not have signed it that way because the States intended to keep power from being centralized in D.C., which is the definition of a national government: centralization of power.

What in the Federal Constitution gives the President, the Congress, the Courts when they side with nationalism, Michelle O. and all others who think like her, to accept the Marxist decree, "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need?"

That is precisely what our First Lady said, and precisely what she meant. She meant what she said. So did the President when he made his "pie" speech; so did the crowd chanting, "Pie! Pie!"

"Socialism is rapaciously greedy -- that's what endless envy warfare comes down to. [ ] That is why everything is grist for the mill of Obama Marxism. Old-time Marxism just pitted the poor against the rich--[but] Odacity is voracious because there's never enough free pie. It's the pie supply that grinds to a halt," says Lewis in the Thinker.

The Obamas are not asking people to altruistically give up a portion of their own pies so that government may decide who it wishes to give it to; it is economically much worse and morally more evil than that. The Obamas are telling people that the government will take as much of the pie as they deem necessary in order to redistribute it to those they deem worthy or needy enough of receiving our stolen goods.

The States are tired of being "demonstrably treated as agents of the federal government...[ ] many federal mandates are directly in violation of the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States; and the United States Supreme Court has ruled in New York v. United States, 112 S. Ct. 2408 (1992), that Congress may not simply commandeer the legislative and regulatory processes of the states; yet a number of proposals from previous administrations and some now pending from the present administration and from Congress may further violate the Constitution of the United States..." [condensed from the Michigan "Journal of the House of Representatives]

And yet, States are clamoring right now for the $40 billion removed (as of this writing) from the $815 billion (as of this writing) "stimulus" bill, which 200+ economists disagree will properly "stimulate".

To solve the problem of there never being enough pie, we must begin to recognize, as historically we used to do, at least two truths:
1) the pie belongs to those who made it, but they must voluntarily, capitalistically, re-distribute some of it--to those who can help them make the pie larger. When they capitalistically redistribute, the pie gets larger, and no one must altrusitically give some away, nor be forced at the point of the government's gun to have it taken from his/her politically dead, cold fingers. And
2) nature's evolution of man did not create him to be a rapacious beast toward the fellows of his own species. Natural rights are not to be compromised for the purposes of nationalism.

Natural law as it applies to Mankind requires that men respect the boundaries of freedom that do not make economic or social slaves of others. Everything the Left, and much of the Right, stands for anymore is a breach of that boundary.

That is why the Obama administration understands that a populist uprising will fill the streets of America will protests against these invasions of our Constitutional liberties--just as the streets of other nations are beginning to fill with protests.

"Seems to me that in tough economic times you can expect to see civil unrest, rioting and even armed resistance. The Federal government saw fit to recall soldiers from Iraq to post them on American soil waiting to be deployed to quell disorder..." Circle of 13

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Laissez-Fairre: the Economics of Individual Sovereignty

Laissez-Fairre: the Economics of Individual Sovereignty

The political accommodation of majority opinion is called democracy. The Constitution was established as a federal democratic republic form of government. This is fundamentally different from a democracy: it is removed from the tyranny of populist majority votes that cause injustices, incurred when a simple majority of votes determine the welfare and status of the losing side.

Federal means "A union of states under a central government distinct from the individual governments of the separate states;" [the antonym is "nationalism," where the government is centralized]

Democratic means "Characterized by the principle of political or social equality for all;" [but it cannot mean creating economic equalization, because those from whom capital is taken to be given to others in an attempt to balance the economics scales will be politically violated; those who recieve the alms will learn it can be expected to continue]

Republic means "A state or nation in which the supreme power rests in all the citizens entitled to vote but is exercised by representatives elected, directly or indirectly, by them and who are responsible to them." [definitions found at http://bensguide.gpo.gov/9-12/glossary.html#Republic]

What that definition of republic leaves out is that democratic republicanism counters the tyranny found in "democracy by simple majority." Democracy that is direct, that is not filtered through the elected representatives of republicanism, would quickly become a totalitarianism by populism; in other words, which ever side, right or wrong, moral or immoral, had the most votes would determine the course of law. We would become a nation of despots.

This direct democracy is derived from the Greek "popular government" existing in the middle of the 5th-4th century BC, notably Athens. "In this form, there were no defined human rights or legal restraints upon the actions of assembly, making it the first instance of 'illiberal democracy.' An illiberal democracy is a governing system in which although fairly free elections take place, citizens are cut off from real power due to the lack of civil liberties." Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy

"Civil liberties" is a misnomer, when "unlaienable liberties" is the literal description. The phrase "civil liberties" as used in the United States has always had the hollow ring for me of describing something other than "human rights." The rest of the world does not use "civil rights." The United Nations adopted the "Universal Declaration of Human Rights," in 1948. http://www.un.org/Overview/rights.html "Human Rights Watch" is the name of an organization dedicated to "defending human rights nationwide." http://www.hrw.org/ "European Convention on Human Rights (4 Nov 1950) and all Protocols" is obviously older than the American concept of "civil rights," as instituted in the attempts to gain for black Americans the unalienable and equal liberties not denied to white Americans.

Of course, the American phrase "civil liberties" absolutely means the same thing as "human rights," but I say it is a misnomer because it deflects the idea that all "human" rights are "individual" rights as determined by "individual sovereignty."

This concept of individual sovereignty is very often challeged by those who don't understand that it is derived from the Enlightenment idea of "common sovereignty."

John Locke and others made the case that "The government has no sovereignty of its own--it exists to serve the people." http://www.sparknotes.com/philosophy/locke/summary.html

go to Laissez-faire and Individual Sovereignty cont.

Obama is Jimmy Carter Redux

condensed from Rick Richman American Thinker http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/10/the_second_coming_of_jimmy_car.html

Barack Obama is taking America down a path modeled by Jimmy Carter, and threatens to be as bad a president as his trailblazer. A unlikely guide unwittingly will help make the case.

On November 3, 1976, the day after Jimmy Carter's election, the New York Times ran a profile explaining his remarkable political victory -- how a one-term governor from Georgia, with no significant record, began planning his presidential campaign in the second year of his one-and-only four-year term, and then went on to secure the nomination from more experienced rivals and defeat a sitting president:

"He believed passionately that if he could talk to enough voters about a "Government as good as the American people," he could win. . .
"Words, skillfully used, could play dual roles for him. Liberals came to conceive of him as one of their own. Conservatives responded to him sympathetically as well. Blacks in Harlem voiced their support. Whites in Mississippi got behind him. . . .
[T]he theme was always visible: a government as good as the people. It was voiced a hundred different ways, but the impact on his listeners was constant.
Americans, he said, were entitled to decent, compassionate, honest, competent government because Americans are decent, compassionate, honest and competent."

In other words: Jimmy Carter won by constantly telling Americans that he was the one they were waiting for.

Carter was certified as the One in the closing benediction at the 1976 Democratic convention, given by no less a figure than the father of Martin Luther King, Jr. Televised on all three networks (the entire visual media at the time), the benediction heralded Jimmy Carter as someone sent to redeem the country: "Surely the Lord sent Jimmy Carter to come on out and bring America back where she belongs."

Thirty-two years later, no one associates Jimmy Carter with Roosevelt or Kennedy, or with "governing." Few people believe the Lord sent him, or that he brought America back where she belonged.

What were we thinking when we elected him? The answer is: some of the same things we are thinking now."

Immortality Question Given Wrong Philosophical Answer

In Talking Philosophy - The Philosophers' Magazine Blog, (posted yesterday, October 21st, by Jeff Mason,) the question is asked about why humans search for the answer to immortality. Mason goes through the various civilization's searches, from the Egyptians to the Greeks to Christians.

But when all is said and done, he answers very little about the spiritual connection men have inside them to what is commonly called our souls. The soul is called into question and denied by scientific naturalists. It does not sound as if Mason fits that bill.

But his final answer is this: "The question of the existence or non-existence of an immortal soul is a practical metaphysical question. We cannot know the answer, but we have to take a stand. How we answer it says something about our ultimate values, our conception of the good life for human beings, the art of living well and the meaning of death."

Where Mason is wrong is that it becomes a metaphysical question only after the epistemological questions have been answered. For the majority of people this is done informally, as they question what and why the soul might be, and how and why it might be transcendental, surviving past physical death, or how it might have been "implanted" at the moment of conception.

People who go through the crisis of questioning their faith in God and the afterlife do have a serious metaphysical problem to contend with. But the problem will not be solved by answering a question of metaphysics. Metaphysics is the answer; the questions and the validations come from epistemology. Theology is epistemology applied to the spiritual side of metaphysics. Theology is supposed to answer those questions and lay a groundwork of metaphysics for the faithful and the believers.

Epistemology is the road traveled by Pilgrim in his "Progress"; metaphysics is the destination at which he arrived. Mason gets a "D" for his answer.


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The Free Assemblage of Metaphysical Naturalists is the SM of
The Free Assemblage of Metaphysical Naturalists LLC.
The Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism TM,
The Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism Blogger TM, and
Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism Blogger Extra TM are the educational arms of the LLC and are:
© 2008 by Curtis Edward Clark and Naturalist Academy Publishing ®