EFFin' Unsound

posted by Carl

I occasionally get emails from Pastor Ken Hutcherson. Here’s his latest.

Thank you for praying for Washington state!  Enough signatures have been gathered to try and repeal SB5688 (Everything but Marriage).

I didn’t actually do any praying for signature gathering. We’ll see if it’s actually enough signatures. If I had to, I’d bet it would get enough, just because getting signatures at churches seems like it’d have less of an error rate than at ball games and tourist attractions. But we’ll know soon enough.

God proved He doesn’t need certain shepherds from certain churches to get His will done!

Wait what? This is one of the strangest Hutch non sequiturs I’ve ever read.

Special thanks go to Larry Stickney of Protect Marriage Washington and Maureen Richardson of Concerned Women for America, Washington chapter for doing a great job.  Thanks also to all the foot soldiers who had 60 days to gather 120,000 signatures and ended up gathering more than 138,000.  These efforts prove one thing for certain:  Christianity in the State of Washington is not dead.  Janet Tu could not have been more wrong in her Seattle Times article last week in which she called into question the cohesiveness of Christians in Washington.  His sheep understood the call of God.

Nobody thought Christianity was dead in Washington.

Please continue to pray as the signatures are validated.

Um, Jesus, please make the signatures that have already been turned in valid. Amen.

Matt Manweller explains what built this country: running away.

I want to look at the big picture today. We spend so much time analyzing whether we approve or disapprove of this law or that law. This tax or that tax that sometimes, we lose site of the large political “forest for the trees.” The debates about ObamaCare and the nationalization of the auto industry can wait for another day. Today, we look at the long arc of history.

Fun.

The history of human civilization has been a battle between those who wish to live their lives independent of other men and those who wish to live their lives on the backs of other men.[Women of course are irrelevant to the long arc of history. - Carl] On one side we have people who are willing to take risks and accept the responsibility of failure if in return they get to accept the rewards of success. [Like Goldman and AIG.- Carl] On the opposing side, we have people who base most of their decisions out of fear.  What if I fail? What if I don’t have enough money? What if I can’t provide. These men seek safety in the labor of other men. They seek prosperity in the assets of what others have created. In the name of “community” or “sharing” they use governments to take what they want from other men.

Yes, horror of horrors: People who are sick being able to get healthy. A fair shot at a good education for everyone. What terrible ideals those people who care about community have.

The battle between these two world views have ebbed and flowed for centuries.  In general, time has been on the side of men who seek to take wealth rather than create wealth. They have learned over and over again that all you need is the support of 51% of your fellow citizens and you can take whatever you want from the other 49%. This is an appealing argument. Why work when you can vote to make other people give you their money? Why pay for heath care when you can vote to make the government give you health care? Because it has always been easier to vote than work, the people who hold this world view have enjoyed great success.

Why get your kid healthy when it might have a minimal impact on the super rich? Also, who exactly isn’t working? In this down economy, most people are working. Sure layoffs are pretty bad, but Manweller seems to think that there is a large group of people just lazing around, not doing anything. Unemployment is still below 10%, and yet his position is a losing one. Odd that.

But, their success has never been complete. Because the other side…those men who seek to live life on their own terms, take risks, create, build something out of nothing…have always had one “ace in the hole.” The EXIT OPTION.  They could leave. They could move. And so part of this long arc of history has been brave men choosing to live among other brave men rather than men who did not have the courage to face the world God created. And so as long as we have seen the creation of “collectivist” societies, we have seen the exodus of stronger people. Show me communism and I’ll show you people jumping over a wall. Show me socialism and I’ll show you entrepreneurs escaping to America, Singapore, Hong Kong.

I’m certainly not going to defend communist systems, but are people really fleeing to Singapore for its freedom? Is it their freedom from gum chewing? How about their freedom from having their presidential candidates not deemed unfit for office before they run (although granted, their presidency is a lot less powerful than the US). The point is if you judge freedom only based on things like the marginal tax rate, you’ll be in some trouble in actually assessing freedom.

Also, when Europe looked most like what Manweller is hoping for is when the greatest flight to America happened. My Irish ancestors, for example, came here after the British imposed “economic freedom” on them and it caused a potato famine and massive starvation. People were coming here on coffin ships to avoid the kind of policies he’d like to see in this country.

Those men and women who have always been more attracted to freedom than security, to opportunity than tranquility, to the idea of making something rather than taking something. They have been called Pilgrims, Pioneers, and dare I say it…Conservatives.

Aah yes, pilgrims and pioneers. Rugged individualists responding to the call of “the government is giving away free land. Gimme.”

It was the people who didn’t ask for or expect anyone else’s help that got into boats and landed at Plymouth Rock. But their victory was short lived. Societies develop. People without the courage to live their own lives eventually become a majority. Collectivism returns. So the next generation leaves. Men of vision and strength flee West. They go to live where other men won’t tell them how to live and won’t take what they create. But that victory is short-lived as well. Their children are seduced by the ease of collectivism. And the men and women of independence are overwhelmed again.

One system is preferred by most people in most circumstances, so clearly it is the bad one. Although, I don’t even know how you compare the Soviet Union to European social democracy, let alone the kind of modest market based approaches in favor in the Democratic Party right now, but to Manweller they are all the same system, all incredibly popular, and all awful.

It is this story that highlights why the battle we are facing right now is so important. We are confronting the forces of collectivism again, just as past generations have. But this time, there is no where left to flee. Where are we supposed to go?  Alaska and Idaho don’t have room for us all. Without an “exit option” we have to stand and fight.

Alaska has a lot of room. Go there and go Galt.

Our situation today reminds me of when Ronald Regan met a recently arrived refugee from Cuba. The Cuban refugee got a chance to tell Regan personal stories of oppression, tyranny and loss.  Reagan shook his head and said Americans don’t know how lucky we are. The refugee says ” Lucky? Mr President, I had somewhere to run to. Where would you go? “

Gigantic [sic] on that last sentence. A space before and after the first quotation mark, a space before the end quote, and no comma after “says” make that a delightful train wreck. The point of the paragraph isn’t much better: something said by a refugee is hardly the basis for sound policy. Also since Manweller’s piece is the only place you find it if you google that phrase (presumably this post will be there soon), there’s a good chance he either made it up or got the quote wrong.

Im Matt Manweller and that’s “Just my opinion.”

Im Carl Ballard, and that’s an apostrophe FAIL. Oh, also, I couldn’t find a place in the post for this link about Rand I found while doing some random googling for this post, but it cracks me up.

“She was a pop culture figure from before I was born,” says Mathew Manweller, an assistant professor of political science at Central Washington University, who includes Rand in the assigned readings for a course on political thought. For his students, Rand, who died in 1982, is more remote.

But that doesn’t stop students from being fascinated with, and in some cases reviled by, what Rand has to say. Manweller assigns a chapter from Rand’s earlier novel, “The Fountainhead,” in his class. (“It’s the same book with different characters,” Manweller says, and which book a reader prefers tends to depend on “whichever you read first.” He prefers “The Fountainhead.” Your columnist prefers “Atlas,” in part because Howard Roark, the architect hero of “Fountainhead,” tends to come off as an insufferable, irascible crank.)

Students may have a passing interest when it comes to the writings of a Thomas Jefferson or a James Madison, but when it’s Rand, “She still evokes passion,” Manweller says. “When you assign Ayn Rand, there’s no ambivalence. There’s no one in the middle.”

I am unaware of Tacoma LINK and sub area equity, take me seriously.