The Read, Right, and True

I hope you will enjoy the new issue. If you have not found a copy (we had a short run due to printing problems), it will be online tonight or tomorrow. There is a great story on the Mulcahy being our sacrificial lamb and a piece on the futility of (most) recycling.

And now a list of books:

• Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh
• Black Mischief by Evelyn Waugh
• The Price of Everything by Russ Robert
• Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
• The Complete Works of William Shakespeare
• The Portable Conservative Reader by Russel Kirk
• Capitalism and Freedom by Milton Friedman
• The Fatal Conceit by F.A. Hayek
• The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
• Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis

I could list more, many more. But I might break the Internet if I made a complete list.

Our new president has certainly established his presence on the Internet. Change.gov, currently a link to whitehouse.gov, and now recovery.gov. This new site promises to allow the tax payer to see how his money is to be spent on the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. This $800 Billion dollar plan will most likely be paid with borrowed money. Money you grandchildren will be paying off. There is also the question of whether the package will be successful at stimulating the economy.

The presumption is that if the govenment spends money, the economy will magicaly recover. That spending money is the same ans convinceing the people that it is safe to invest again.

On Tuesday, the Douglass Black Student congress held a panel on whether or not black conservatives have a voice in the political process. During that discussion, someone stated that conservatism does not come off as a convincing case. That we seem to be spoksmen for upperclass tax cuts. There is a mistake in that view. A mistake that comes from those who claim to uphold conservatism and those who have failed to articulate it. No man can claim to speak for all who agree with him without their expressed consent, but hopefully you may be convinced to understand one man’s basis for defending that which is best about the past, to preserve the future.
It is self-evident that government involvement means government regulation. Regulation is not inherently wrong, but government over regulation can have a detrimental effect on everyone. Including the special group the government seeks to help. Take minimum wage laws as an example. A basic economics course will tell you that if you set a price floor for a particular input one of two things will happen in the short run: nothing because the price floor is lower than the actual price of the good or the demand for that good will fall as the price rise above what the buyer is willing to pay. Replace buyer with employer and good with worker, and you have a just cause for opposing the minimum wage. It may put more money into the pockets of the working man but the guy who is unemployed because of reduced demand is no better off. A rise in the cost of the minimum wage will also be passed on to the consumer in the form of higher prices, thus causing the workingman to pay more for the good he helped to produce.

What about a tariff or some other trade barrier to protect that working man from foreign completion? The government has given so many tariffs, subsides, loans, and various other forms of government sugar to the American car companies, steel companies, farmers, and sugar companies, that we could have carpet bombed every comparator nation ten times over. What is the result: cars that no none wants, a decaying steel industry, Millionaire farmers and a dying agricultural sector (supported by Senator Obama), and over priced sugar that pushed every soda company to move to corn syrup. This is how the government tries to help those people they find more important than the rest.

What about healthcare? Yes our system is problematic, but that is true of every nation. We have a problem insuring the populace; fully insured nations have a problem with treatment. The British system has a mandate that everyone must be treated, but that mandate is not meet in a timely manner. The French are facing an ever rising deficit due to their highly praised system. Conservatives are not in favor of people dying, conservatives are in favor of a system that works. No nation on earth can claim to have satisfied a majority of its populace when it comes to healthcare. 

Senator McCain’s tax plan is not an attempt to give favors to the rich; it is an attempt to stimulate the economy by telling higher income levels that this current crisis will not result in the government taking your income, so it is ok to invest in the market. It is Ok to take risks; the government will not penalize you. Senator Obama’s plan may be the right move to reduce the federal deficit but it is not the right move to help us out of a recession. Senator Obama is seeking an increase in the capital gains tax, a tax on investment), at a time when the market is suffering from a lack of investment. That is like Burger King increasing their prices when fewer customers come into the store. Obama talks about tax credits but the Joint House Committee on tax policy has stated that tax credits undermine economic growth.

Some of you might ask what Conservatism does for the black man. Nothing! Conservatism holds only one group as special…the individual. For God created Adam, not men.

This has been a lot to take in, thank you for being patient. There is much more to say but that, as Alton Brown would say, is another show.

It would be presumptuous indeed to present not one but two posts when there has not been sufficient time to respond to the first.  But the force of destiny is never courteous. It is only a few minutes ago that I saw a group of my fellow Rutgers men clamoring for a cause that must be opposed. They are calling for one percent of our tax dollars, the sweat of your brow, the portion of your pittance that is taken every year, to be spent on global poverty. Not on defense, not on making this great republic solvent, but on the poor of the earth.  They are calling for you to sign that away in the form of a petition.
Perhaps I sound cruel when I attack what sounds like a kind and heavenly mission. I know that it is natural to want to help others. To share the bounty that the lord has so graciously bestowed on this nation. I would never tell the Bill Gates’ and Bill Everymen to not try and help others. I am saying that our national coffers have been emptied into the United Nations and other poverty fighting organization around the globe and they, poisoned by the weed of bureaucracy and the venom of permanence, have given stillborn results.

We are a nation that increasingly adds to its national debt, a nation that does not reduce spending to make way for new methods of positive injury, but simply increases the amount of treasury paper in circulation. Is our Federal Legislature responsible to the American people of the huddled masses waiting for a handout? I say America first, America last, America always.

I answer their demand for my signature by saying: You shall not press down upon the brow of America this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify the Federal Budget upon a cross of guilt.

I am a conservative, a Marylander, and American. I am also black. For some reason the assumption among liberals is that not only should I vote Democrat, but I should vote for Senator Obama because he is black. My co-workers have asked me if I am black and then proceed to tell me that I should vote for Obama for that reason. My own roommate took my distaste for both presidential candidates and said that I should vote for Senator Obama because he is black. I have been called an Oreo and many have attempted to create guilt within me.

This is not an isolated phenomenon, but a systemic problem of assuming that only “Uncle Sugar”, as my father so lovingly refers to our National Government, is on the side of the black man. That any attempt to drive back the hydra of big government and encourage the black man to stand as a man is racist. When Michael Steele ran for the Senate, he was pelted with Oreos and was called an Uncle Tom. Our Secretary of State has faced similar treatment in the form of political cartoons and some commentators have assumed that becuse her world view does not match their own, then she must be against the black community. I am not saying all liberals fall into this category, I have meet one or tow that do not carry the racecard as the first line of defense against my conservatism. But there are too many of them. Too many who implicitly or explicitly call black conservatives racist while staying silent while this Klan’s-man is still in the senate. A man who opposed Cabinet and Judical Nomenies who happend to be black. I would like to close this first post with the following quote from Frederick Douglass:

“All I ask is, give him a chance to stand on his own legs! Let him alone! If you see him on his way to school, let him alone, don’t disturb him! If you see him going to the dinner table at a hotel, let him go! If you see him going to the ballot- box, let him alone, don’t disturb him! [Applause.] If you see him going into a work-shop, just let him alone,–your interference is doing him a positive injury.”