Daniel Greenfield writes in his blog Sultan Knish, The Art of Building Things, 6/10/13.
Excerpts:
Creativity is an individual act. The act of building something, whether with hammers, blueprints, words, boards or plans is individualistic. Collectives can build, but not creatively. A mass has no vision because it has no personality. It can follow rules but not dreams.
American exceptionalism emerged out of a society which empowered the creative talents of the individual, not through grants, regulations, instructional pamphlets, inspectors and guidelines, but through the simple virtue of leaving men alone to do their work.
Freedom is the greatest creative force because it liberates the individual to build and as freedom diminishes within a society so does its creativity. Progress in restricted areas dwindles to a trickle as collectives expend a thousand times the money and effort, and still fail to equal the achievements of individuals operating on shoestring budgets.
HKO
When government is perverted from the constitutional purpose of protecting individual human rights to fulfilling human needs and wants it stifles the progress that has done so much to advance human growth. All great progress has come at the expense of rules and institutional order. Human progress will suffer when we are required to serve the institutions that should serve us.
Robert Zubrin writes Green Anti-Humanism in The National Review 2/21/13
Excerpts:
The use of fictitious necessity to rationalize human oppression is not new. Whether the justification is a putative lack of food (e.g., Malthus, 1817, “A great part of the [Irish] population should be swept from the soil”), shortage of Lebensraum (e.g., Hitler, 1941, “The law of existence requires uninterrupted killing, so that the better may live”), overpopulation (e.g., Ehrlich, 1967, “India . . . will be one of those we must allow to slip down the drain”), or global warming (e.g., Cafaro, 2013), the argument has always been the same:
- There isn’t enough of x to go around.
- Therefore human numbers, activities, or liberties must be severely constrained.
- Those of us enlightened by wisdom must be empowered to do the constraining.
- And having obtained such power, let’s make the best of it and stick it to those we despise anyway.
All these cases were frauds. Ireland never lacked the capacity to feed its people. During the entire “great famine,” the island continued to produce massive amounts of beef and grain. The Irish just couldn’t afford to buy any of it due to the enforcement of rack-renting, high taxation, and suppression of manufactures. Germany never needed additional living space. It has a bigger population now than it did under the Third Reich, on much less land, yet it has a far higher living standard. Hitler just used theLebensraum imperative as an excuse for genocide. Contrary to Population Bomb author Paul Ehrlich, the world was not overpopulated in 1967. In fact, since that time, as world population has doubled, average GDP per capita has nearly tripled. Yet, unfortunately, that did not stop population-control advocates from obtaining billions of dollars of U.S. taxpayer money to help Third World regimes stop reproduction among their poor, in general, and despised national minorities, in particular. And there is certainly no moral case for limiting carbon emissions.
Daniel Greenfield writes in his excellent blog The Sultan Knish, Government is the New Race, 6/7/13.
Excerpts:
While you might think that it would be impossible to run an entire cable news network around accusing people of racism, MSNBC has taken your bet and now expects you to buy it coffee for a month. It would be impossible for reasonable people to constantly talk about racism. But unreasonable people racialize everything.
Rather than bringing the racial healing that some expected, the Obama years so dramatically racialized national politics that even IRS is now a racial slur. And that racialization reveals how dependent on race the entire liberal program has become.
Liberalism racialized itself by defining itself entirely in terms of social justice. To oppose the liberal expansion of government was to be a racist.
The abstraction of political racism from real racism and social justice from the actual interests of the black community has gone so far that an administration that has presided over record black unemployment is always defended in racial terms.
Liberalism has not only become identified with racial politics, it has swallowed racial politics so completely that they no longer exist on a national level. National racial politics is just liberalism misspelled and when an MSNBC anchor equates IRS with a racial slur, it becomes rather clear that there is no longer any race in racism. Racism in politics has become so abstract that it no longer has anything to do with black people. …racism no longer refers to policies that disadvantage black people, but policies that limit the power and scope of big government.
And that reduces the civil rights movement to an apologetic for the uncontrolled expansion of government. It turns “I Have a Dream” into “I Have a Government Office” and the Selma to Montgomery March into a commute to a Washington D.C. bedroom community that most of the black population of the city can’t afford to live in.
HKO
Racism has become a pejorative that is used to silence the opposition when there is no rational argument to make. What I liked about Andrew Breitbart is that he refused to be intimidated by such charges.
A true liberal would take great offense at the racialization of American politics because it demeans the very real racist struggle of our recent history and ignores its great victories.
