Is There Originalism in the Tea Party?

Now that fiscal conservative Paul Ryan has been chosen as Mitt Romney's choice for VP, I think this is a good time to republish this article from last year. There seem to be many who think that because Ryan says he is a fan of Ayn Rand, that it means he is automatically some sort of laissez-faire radical. The fact is that in a recent FOX interview with Britt Hume, Ryan stated Rand had inspired him, but that that he is 'opposed' to her 'atheistic philosophy'. That is certainly not a rejection of her philosophy, but only of her atheism, because her atheism did not propel her economics or her support of individual sovereignty. But Paul Ryan is no Objectivist, any more than Alan Greenspan, who walked away from his Objectivist roots before he took the job of Chair of the Federal Reserve.
A good reference about this subject is at The Objective Standard, a publication that does not appear to be associated with any other Rand-oriented institutions. 

I am not ready to say whether or not anyone in the Tea Party has Originalist interpretations which they have or have not stated. I just don't know, yet. I questioned the office of Ron Paul, and the office of a locally-elected member of Congress, but as yet have gotten no response from either office. [And I never did.]

In March of 2010 the New York Times published an article about the lack of social issues in the Tea Party agenda. "The motto of the Tea Party Patriots, a large coalition of groups, is 'fiscal responsibility, limited government, and free markets.'....But the focus is also strategic: leaders think they can attract independent voters if they stay away from divisive issues."

In December of 2010 Suite 101 published this: "The Tea Party is a grass-roots movement in favor of smaller government, fiscal conservation, and an originalist interpretation of the Constitution."

The Atlantic said Tea Party members are "by and large, social conservatives, not social libertarians," and "In fact, it seems that the main intellectual solution offered, and problem posed, by the Tea Party movement is the connection between government spending and personal liberty."

That, for me, is the rub, especially if it is true--that the Tea Party sees their freedom only (or mostly) in fiscal conservatism, rather than in uprooting the anti-Constitutional legislation of coercion that has been allowed to survive not only debate, but to survive through various courts including the Supreme Court.

Why is it OK for members of the Tea Party to authorize or approve the spending of money on the dole if it is simply less money, enough less to make them happy to spend any at all? In other words, why is it OK to spend $5 trillion on Medicaid if it isn't OK to spend $15 trillion? Why is it OK to spend $500 million on a State's food stamp program, when they don't think its OK to spend $900 million? Where (and why) does the subjective line exist?

It is a subjective line, because there should be no line. Charity exists where charity is felt, not by local or State officials who have no right to redistribute what Peter has to feed Paul. It exists where concerned individuals and charitable institutions exist to feed, clothe, house, and give medical care to 'Paul'. That would be an Originalist interpretation, not necessarily on all government charity, but on such programs as social security, which is enforced on both employees and employers, yet which pays so little after retirement that anyone living only from that finds themselves in the poor column when compared to their wage-earning or pension-earning neighbors.

It wouldn't make it 'more Constitutional' if they were not in the poor column of government recipients. If our society was geared toward finding the solution to retirement income that is neither forced upon employees nor employers, a solution that does not redistribute wealth nor force anyone to set aside money but rather sets high standards of inducement for saving toward retirement, then the Constitutionality of such inducements would be the question.
   
But it is a Constitutional issue when only the cost/benefit ratio, or even simply the cost itself, is at issue rather than the law which makes the matter an issue to begin with.

The Tea Party needs its Originalists to step forward, take at least some of the reins, and steer the party, slowly-but-surely if slowly is necessary, toward the Founding ideas, rather than just in the direction of subjective and very temporal ideas, ideas that change as the political pendulum swings. The 'grass roots' represented by the Tea Party should be more substantive than to be simply fiscally conservative.

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© Curtis Edward Clark 2012

Obama's Practice of Taqiyya-style Lying

Islamicdictionary.com defines 'taqiyya' as "Dissimulation - to conceal, partially conceal or disguise one's true feelings, beliefs or information when there is threat of death or serious harm and when there is a threat of great evil." 

"In practical terms," says Islam Watch, "it is manifested as dissimulation, lying, deceiving, vexing and confounding with the intention of deflecting attention, foiling or pre-emptive blocking. It is currently employed in fending off and neutralising any criticism of Islam or Muslims"

From a description provided by a website about deception, lying is something practiced by many people in all cultures. "A sociopath is typically defined as someone who lies incessantly to get their way and does so with little concern for others. A sociopath is often goal-oriented (i.e., lying is focused - it is done to get one's way)."

The myth raised in 2007 that Obama was schooled in a radical madrassa does not change the fact that he did, in fact, go to an Islamic school. "[In] January 1968," said WorldNetWeekly, "Obama was registered as a Muslim at Jakarta’s Roman Catholic Franciscus Assisi Primary School under the name Barry Soetoro...After attending the Assisi Primary School, Obama was enrolled – also as a Muslim, according to documents – in the Besuki Primary School, a public school in Jakarta..." And according to Obama's own autobiography, "the teacher wrote to tell mother I made faces during Quranic studies."

This is not an effort to dismiss Islam. It is to make a connection, that Obama was in contact with other Muslims who must regularly practice 'taqiyya' as part of their culture, and he would have at least learned what it was, and as a boy might naturally have tried it.

But why would the American President need or want to resort to this form of false-hood? He would do it for the purpose of fending off and neutralizing any criticism of what he--and we--know to be the most progressive policies ever advocated.

Do not for one minute deny, if you are on the left, if you are a liberal or progressive, or a democrat, that Obama's are not the most progressive ideas in American history to be implemented. You are doing him a disservice if you deny it. Give him credit for doing what you have always wanted in American politics.

But Mr. Obama knows of what he speaks, and because he knows, he must use the tactics of dissimulation that he must have heard over and over again living in Indonesia. His two Islamic fathers may have used the tactic in his presence.

So let's name one, specifically that pledge he made over and over again, that if the health care bill passed you would be able to keep your health care and your doctors. Given the ideas contained within the bill, many right wing and independent critics said it could not happen, that many people would lose their plans or their doctors or both.

In January of 2010--2010, mind you, the President said, "I think that some of the provisions that got snuck in might have violated that pledge." [emphasis added] Aside from the fact that nothing was snuck past us, but rather Speaker Pelosi said we had to pass it "to see what is in it," there were people who wrote things that made the President's pledge false, and the White House had to know it. The website Scared Monkeys asked, why the President was not more upset about it. "Wouldn’t one think the reaction would be outrage and that he would get to the bottom of this reprehensible action perpetrated on We the People?"

No, he would not be more upset, because making the pledge in the first place was a dissimulation tactic intended to make those who sat on the fence feel a little softer about having their health care messed with. If you were one of those who had no health care, you wouldn't necessarily care if others could keep their plans and doctors, so long as you got a plan and a doctor. 

What Mr. Obama sees as truly reprehensible is an axiom of progressive politics--that 'positive rights' (as opposed to negative rights) are natural human rights--has been allowed to go unfulfilled in the area of health care. Don't forget that Hillary Clinton also describes herself as progressive, and that President Bill Clinton's 1997 health care plan was dubbed 'Hillary care' because it was she who did all the behind-the-scenes work to put it together.

In 2010, Medicare said healthcare costs would nearly double to $4.5 trillion by 2019, accounting for 19.3 percent--almost a fifth--of our GDP. But by June, 2011, health care spending reached an all-time high of 18.2 percent. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that this percentage will double again over the next 25 years to 31% of GDP.

If you were a 'goal-oriented' President trying to endow government-sponsored 'rights' upon a nation, wouldn't you use a lot of deflecting, foiling or pre-emptive-blocking-taqiyya in your speeches?

And why wouldn't anyone try to demonstrate before nearly 4 years had passed, that you constantly used the art of dissimulation?

© Curtis Edward Clark 2011

Obama Economics is Artificially Hobbesian

     We are not flawed by nature, as Hobbes believed; yet we are not the way nature intended, either. 'Natural law', on which even the UN Charter is partly based, doesn't allow for such things as jihad, no matter what Hobbes may have thought about man being in a constant state of war.  
     It was Locke whose ideas were on the money, and from which were derived the Bill of Rights, in which the Ninth Amendment states that we still retain those natural rights which are not enumerated in the other Amendments. http://teapartyoriginalism.blogspot.com/…
     If you believe in Hobbes, you can accept the idea, if not the form, of jihad. If you believe in Jefferson's version of natural law, jihad is an abomination. When we literally had our gun sights on Osama bin Laden and our men were told to stand down and not take him out, that was an abomination; by the same logic that was used, we would not have killed Hitler in 1939, when he invaded Czechoslovakia and Poland.
     The 'command economics' of the Obama Administration and some similar actions in previous administrations are an abomination against the Ninth Amendment. They put Americans in a state of war against other Americans--as all command economics have done. The most famous of them, of course, are Social Security and Medicare; but the Tea Party, nor other conservatives, are calling for their abolition. They merely want to make them smaller, or in the case of S.S., to privatize it. That doesn't remove it from the field of command economics.
     No, we are are not acting in the way nature intended, so we are not the way nature intended us to be. We are fulfilling in many ways the wrongful description of being a species always at war with itself, because we are not listening to John Locke who told us "...that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his Life, Health, Liberty, or Possessions."
     "...command economies are unable to efficiently allocate goods because of the knowledge problem - the central planner's inability to discern how much of a good should be produced. Shortages and surpluses are a common consequence of command economies." Investopedia
     Yet, our government under President Obama is now telling us how much coal, versus how much oil, versus how much nuclear, versus how much "green" electricity we are to produce. It has (as of this writing) approved only one permit for oil drilling in the Gulf since the BP spill. Obama hates coal and says there is no such thing as 'clean' burning of it; nuclear reactors are off the table; and yet this Administration has given hundreds of millions to certain cities to build "recharching" stations for the coming of the electric car--which the government is "commanding" be built.
   This administration is even mandating the demise of the incandescent light bulb so that America doesn't have to produce any new electricity--even when  they are pebble bed modular reactors, very safe and extremely cheap.
     The idea is to maintain the current levels of electric usage, even while consumers know of much less expensive ways to run an economy:
1>produce more electricity, thereby putting more people to work and lowering the cost of power;
2>quit telling us how to use our capital, which only creates an artificial but untrue proof of Hobbe's war among men.   Or perhaps it isn't true that men such as Obama, Harding, FDR, and Hillary Clinton (Clinton-care) are not true Hobbesians. Maybe they think Hobbes was correct and simply "work" his system as if no systems with built-in justice existed:
     "Locke's state of nature, however, does contain right and wrong, and so natural rights. Thus, 'to secure these Rights, governments are instituted among men.'". Joseph J. Ellis
     Governments ought not be 'secured' in order to institute intellectual and economic wars among men, but to prevent them with open markets of ideas and goods. If we continue on the Obama Road to ruin, our great-grandchildren will be burning candles and wondering why the word "I" has been banned.

© Curtis Edward Clark 2011
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