The Patriot Post Brief 9-37

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The Patriot Post Brief 9-37
From The Federalist Patriot
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THE FOUNDATION

"I think we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious." --Thomas Jefferson

Sept. 12 march in DC
POLITICAL FUTURES

"None of the national evening news anchors were there to bring you breathless coverage. None of the networks suspended regular programming to show the event in real time. A number of the weekend shows were taped on Thursday or Friday and didn't even mention it. The Washington, DC subway -- called the Metro -- which regularly puts on extra trains for large events announced it would actually close stations if they became too crowded. The Washington Times said, 'Rally leaders estimated the crowd at about 75,000' the Washington Post said it was 'in the many tens of thousands.' It is one thing for Democrats to have ridiculed the people who turned out to those town-hall meetings as isolated groups of extremists. It is something else to have 'many tens of thousands' of people show up on a Saturday afternoon on the West Front of the Capitol to express their dismay over how their government is being run. The issue for Republicans is simple. Conservatives have shown you the parade route. The question is: Who, if anyone, will be able to race to the front and lead it?" --political analyst Rich Galen

THE GIPPER

"We warned of things to come, of the danger inherent in unwarranted government involvement in things not its proper province. What we warned against has come to pass. And today more than two-thirds of our citizens are telling us, and each other, that social engineering by the federal government has failed. The Great Society is great only in power, in size and in cost. And so are the problems it set out to solve. Freedom has been diminished and we stand on the brink of economic ruin. Our task now is not to sell a philosophy, but to make the majority of Americans, who already share that philosophy, see that modern conservatism offers them a political home. We are not a cult, we are members of a majority. Let's act and talk like it. The job is ours and the job must be done. If not by us, who? If not now, when? Our party must be the party of the individual. It must not sell out the individual to cater to the group. No greater challenge faces our society today than ensuring that each one of us can maintain his dignity and his identity in an increasingly complex, centralized society. Extreme taxation, excessive controls, oppressive government competition with business, galloping inflation, frustrated minorities and forgotten Americans are not the products of free enterprise. They are the residue of centralized bureaucracy, of government by a self-anointed elite. Our party must be based on the kind of leadership that grows and takes its strength from the people." --Ronald Reagan

LIBERTY

"As the late Nobel Laureate Professor Milton Friedman said, 'Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon, in the sense that it cannot occur without a more rapid increase in the quantity of money than in output.' Thinking of inflation as rising prices permits politicians to deceive us and escape culpability. They shift the blame saying that inflation is caused by greedy businessmen, rapacious unions or Arab sheiks. Instead, it is increases in the money supply that cause inflation, and who is in charge of the money supply? It's the government operating through the Federal Reserve Bank and the U.S. Treasury. ... The founders of our nation feared paper currency because it gave government the means to steal from its citizens. When inflation is unanticipated, as it so often is, there's a redistribution of wealth from creditors to debtors. If you lend me $100, and over the term of the loan prices double, I pay you back with dollars worth only half of the purchasing power they had when I borrowed the money. Since inflation redistributes (steals) wealth from creditors to debtors, we can identify inflation's primary beneficiary by asking: Who is the nation's largest debtor? If you said, 'It's the U.S. government,' go to the head of the class. ... Profligate spending burdens future generations by making them recipients of a smaller amount of capital and hence less wealth." --George Mason University economics professor Walter E. Williams

GOVERNMENT

"Only national health care can provide 'coverage that will stay with you whether you move, change your job or lose your job' -- as Obama said in a New York Times op-ed. This is obviously a matter of great importance to all Americans, because, with Obama's economic policies, none of us may have jobs by year's end. The only reason you can't keep -- or often obtain -- health insurance if you move or lose your job now is because of ... government intrusion into the free market. You will notice that if you move or lose your job, you can obtain car and home insurance, hairdressers, baby sitters, dog walkers, computer technicians, cars, houses, food and every other product and service not heavily regulated by the government. (Although it does become a bit harder to obtain free office supplies.) Federal tax incentives have created a world in which the vast majority of people get health insurance through their employers. Then to really screw ordinary Americans, the tax code actually punishes people who don't get their health insurance through an employer by denying individuals the tax deduction for health insurance that their employers get. ... If Democrats really wanted people to be able to purchase health insurance when they move or lose a job as easily as they purchase car insurance and home insurance (or haircuts, dog walkers, cars, food, computers), they could do it in a one-page bill lifting the government controls and allowing interstate commerce in health insurance. This is known as 'allowing the free market to operate.' Plus, think of all the paper a one-page bill would save! Don't Democrats care about saving the planet anymore? Go green!" --columnist Ann Coulter

RE: THE LEFT

"One plain fact should outweigh all the words of Barack Obama and all the impressive trappings of the setting in which he says them: He tried to rush Congress into passing a massive government takeover of the nation's medical care before the August recess -- for a program that would not take effect until 2013! Whatever President Obama is, he is not stupid. If the urgency to pass the medical care legislation was to deal with a problem immediately, then why postpone the date when the legislation goes into effect for years -- more specifically, until the year after the next Presidential election? If this is such an urgently needed program, why wait for years to put it into effect? And if the public is going to benefit from this, why not let them experience those benefits before the next Presidential election? If it is not urgent that the legislation goes into effect immediately, then why don't we have time to go through the normal process of holding Congressional hearings on the pros and cons, accompanied by public discussions of its innumerable provisions? What sense does it make to 'hurry up and wait' on something that is literally a matter of life and death? If we do not believe that the President is stupid, then what do we believe? The only reasonable alternative seems to be that he wanted to get this massive government takeover of medical care passed into law before the public understood what was in it. Moreover, he wanted to get re-elected in 2012 before the public experienced what its actual consequences would be. Unfortunately, this way of doing things is all too typical of the way this administration has acted on a wide range of issues." --economist Thomas Sowell