BY: MIKE PORTER

Late last month, Republican Senator Arlen Specter announced he was switching from a Republican to a Democrat. His reasons for abandoning his party are not necessarily the reasons why most conservatives have abandoned the GOP as of late. He talked at length about how he is “becoming more comfortable with the Democrat’s approach” and “increasingly at odds with the Republican philosophy.”(1) Later, he went on to say how the Republican party has gone too far right then when he started back in 1980. Many feel, myself included, the Republican party has gone too far to the left and is losing elections because they have become the “Democrat light” party.

The left has wasted no time driving home the Republicans are dead, and this is the nails in the coffin for a battered and already badly beaten party. Many Democrats are seeing this as a reason to celebrate. Democrats and socialists believe this is a crushing blow to the party and ensures Democratic rule for many years to come. After being one of only a few Republicans invited to Obama’s Super Bowl party, Specter has challenged his party by granting a key vote on the most recent spending bill. He crossed party lines once more, only this time, he will cross party lines for good. Specter broke from the GOP to support a massive spending bill no conservative in their right mind would support. Many agree things cannot get any worse for the GOP.

I personally see this move in a very different light. I do not want, nor will I ever want Arlen Specter’s support on anything pertaining to the country I so dearly love. I feel much more comfortable today knowing Specter is a Democrat, rather than being disappointed by his surprise liberal vote. This move does not damage the party; to the contrary, it will only strengthen it. Specter represents exactly what is wrong with this party. In the past, when reelection came up, Specter was there to tell the moderates and conservatives exactly what they wanted to hear. He would campaign fighting for fiscal responsibility and other moderate/conservative initiatives. Every election cycle, the voters in Pennsylvania took the long time Senator at his word only to be disappointed time and time again.

His vote for the massive spending bill was the last straw. Recent polls showed Specter was trailing a more conservative GOP opponent, Toomey, by over 21 points. Specter may have fooled his conservative voters for the last time as many have come out against him and thrown their support behind the more conservative challenger. Specter was in jeopardy of losing his seat to a true conservative for the first time in many years. So what does Arlen Specter do? He turns around and becomes a Democrat, the team many believe Specter has been playing for all along.

The loss of Specter does not come without consequences. Specter will be the 59th vote and if Al Franken holds on, as many think he will, it will bring the Democrats up to the magic number of 60. Many question the timing of this change knowing this majority was in place. Fellow conservatives, the loss of Specter is not a bad thing at all, rather it is a good thing. This means perhaps the Republican Party is starting to move in the right direction. In my opinion, there is a lot more work that needs to be done before this party can be a conservative alternative again, but steps like this are encouraging and necessary. I encourage anyone else in our government who is currently a Republican today to please take long look at the Democratic philosophy. If you find you line up with more government solutions, excessive spending, and “spreading the wealth around,” then by all means, please jump to the other side while the Democratic Party is popular and in control. Republicans-in-name-only (A.K.A. RINOS) have been what has killed this party for so many years. I would rather throw my support behind a few true conservatives and know how they will stand on issues like healthcare, defense, energy, and the free market. If we cannot count on RINOS to remain with their party at a time when the Democrats are a couple of seats away from 60, then how can we count on them to stop provisions like socialized medicine? What in the world can we count on them for? Better yet, why should conservatives even vote for people like this?

Big government policies and excessive spending have been tried by other countries and have failed. More government solutions in America will also fail, and when they do, perhaps the Republicans will be there to steer the ship right like they did in 1994. If the Republican Party does not straighten up and stand for the things most conservatives want, there will be another party to represent the majority of Americans who still consider themselves conservative in one way or another. Brace yourselves we may lose a couple more before it is all said and done, but the loss of liberal Republicans is no loss at all if this party is serious about becoming a conservative alternative.


(1) http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/04/28/specter.party.switch/index.html
(2) http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/01/31/obama-host-democrats-republicans-white-house-super-bowl-party/

Someone must've spiked the Kool-Aid.

Here's a quandary. How do you wrap your head around a moral absolutist argument by those who also believe in moral/cultural relativism? How do you find the theoretical synthesis between having an impenetrable morality all the while believing that other moralities/cultures are just as legitimate, even if they violate the absolute moral code?

Want to know the answer?

The answer is that you don't.

Politics as Life

There are millions of my fellow political junkies out there who eat, sleep, live and breathe the goings on of home and the world. We read the news, the opinion sections, the blogs; we watch the news, listen to the talk hosts, agree or disagree over and over. Some of us are more informed than others. Some of us are more passionate than others. The key thing is that the amount of passion you have for politics has no bearing on the depth of your knowledge and the accuracy of your points.

This is not a phenomenon of the left or the right. Both sides have those who are informed, those who are passionate, some who are more of one than the other and some who are equally both. Of the both category, on the right, you have thinkers like Thomas Sowell, Rich Lowry, George Will and Will Wilkinson. On the left, you have such names as Ezra Klien, Matt Yglesias, Bill Scher and Fareed Zakaria. There is plenty of knowledgeable and passionate people on all sides, all with views that make sense, even if you don't agree with them.

The problem arrives with the appearance of the passionately uninformed politico. In a debate on torture on Blogginghead.tv between John McWhorter and Glenn Loury, two distinguished professors, the comments were flooded with post after post on how the Bush administration should be prosecuted for the so-called crimes these people accuse them of. Some commenters went so far as to say both men were dead wrong on the subject because said commenters knew a priori that what the United States did was wrong, and by such astounding argument any other talk on it, or any other path of thinking other than conviction, was null and void.

I'm all for an actual, intelligent, back and forth battle of wits. I think I'm right when I debate, of course (who wouldn't think that?), but I've been corrected by others and I have corrected others countless times. Such is the way you learn and grow your intellectual mind. But it's these people who take politics as a lifestyle, not just a hobby or an interest, that come to be the people who get the deluge of links from eager beaver college students in their term papers when they call President Bush a war criminal and a fascist. It's these people who get vast followings by questioning the authenticity of birth certificates or claiming FEMA is about to round us all up in the event Obama turns out to be a Muslim Martian. These people are the ones that fan the flames of unintelligent debate. And just because it'll piss off the uninformed left, I'm going to focus on their contradictory moralities and totally ignore the right.

Torture as National Moral Rot

The argument I hear constantly from the passionate moralists is that giving a green light to torture, with specific focus on waterboarding, would erode America's moral standing and national moral core. Whether the other methods like temperature fluctuation and sleep deprivation count as well depends on the moralist you're talking to. This argument crosses so many different ideas and cherry picks from them only to make an inane point that has no bearing on the real world.

To start off with torture, there is no conclusive proof of actual state-sanctioned torture. Waterboarding is still being debated by Barack Obama and Barack Obama, let alone the rest of the government. Even in foreign policy hawk circles there is plenty of room for discussion. All this while the other methods are not even on the table except by the most hardened of activists. So to sing the praises of Spanish judges or demagogues is so premature as to be embryonic.

Moving on, the green light to this so-called torture program was given years ago by not only the slew of public policy experts in the government, but by Congressional leaders. Congress is the voice of the people and the people at that time wanted to prevent another 9/11 at all costs. Luckily, for captured terrorists, at all costs in America does not mean beheading, gang rape, burying and stoning, or any other disgusting and horrific methods used by radical Islamists. At all costs, in American-speak, means within reason. What the “torture” memos describe is not the legal gymnastics to do whatever we need, but to build a legal ceiling to prevent torture from occurring while doing its best to not hamper the goal of the entire program: gathering intelligence. Basically, to do the best one can with terrorists who've been expertly trained in interrogation without it actually being torture.

And now we get to the icing on this mudcake: the idea of a collective national morality affected by the collective agreement to institutionalize torture. First and foremost, the idea of a collective national morality is fascistic. Such talk was used by every Progressive from Teddy to Kennedy. It was used by the Nazis, the Italian Fascists and many others. A belief in a collective national morality dismisses the idea that individuals are able to determine their own morality because of some kind of collective psychological slavery to the will of the mob. It also dismisses the checks and balances of our republican system in which the collective can (and has been) reserved in its fury by the executive or judicial branches, as was the case in the Civil War and its aftermath. The nation could be calling for the extermination of all redheaded stepchildren, but it'd still go against a warehouse full of constitutional protections and it would be struck down, if the judges actually did their job. As for our moral standing, other parts of the world have opposing moral/cultural codes which naturally conflict with ours, and so our moral standing with these nations probably isn't exactly high during good times, let alone the times that they can exploit as a war against their values when, in fact, we do nothing of the sort.

So, what we have from this paraphrase summary of the layman left's argument against torture, is this:

The United States, through its representative legislature, green lighted methods that have yet to be determined as torture, but if the people, now in discussion over the issue, do not demand the prosecution of the past administration for crimes that have yet to be conclusively ruled on as crimes, then the collective morality of the nation, a concept both fascistic and questionable, will be affected by the people's choice and negatively affect the nation in ways we do not know nor in ways we can hypothesize except that it won't be good for our moral standings with nations whose views conflict with ours naturally and who exploit every chance they get to denounce us.

Compelling stuff.

Arguing To Win

These politically passionate folk, armed with their air-tight argument against the use of harsh interrogation, strut their stuff on their blogs, on message boards, in coffee shops and on the street. They proclaim the immorality of what President Bush and his administration did. They attack others as fascists and monsters. There is no way someone who is moral can support these methods. No way in hell. Anything else deserves a stern response, preferably snarky or emotional. And this is where the passionately blind lose sight of their goal, if they had a goal to being with.

Their mistake is to believe they can change the mind of someone in a political debate that cumulatively lasts less than an enema (though sometimes the enema may be preferable depending on who you're debating). You're not arguing to win, you're arguing to argue. I don't slide over to my conservative group on Facebook to turn the doe-eyed liberal into a cranky, shotgun toting conservative. I go on there to be motivated to come up with new and interesting ways to prove a point. What began as a “But I'm right” morphed into a “Of course, Alternet is a unbiased source!” to “Eh... Wikipedia? Are you sure?”. The one thing I never did was actually win an argument. The one thing I did do early on was explode due to my opponent's odd opposition of changing his entire code of values. Who knew a conservative didn't want to give up US national sovereignty to foreign powers?

Spy vs Spy: Leftist Theory Fights Itself

“Politics as life”-ers have an emotional attachment to their views and that view's superiority that it puts them in the predicament of contradicting past or current views. For example, the political left's defense of not-so-covert agent Valarie Plame (found in D.C.'s Who's Who next to the name of her ambassador husband while “undercover”) while promoting the outing of CIA interrogators. The “torture” debate puts this front and center when it pits liberal/leftist moral absolutism against their equally vigorous support for multiculturalism, which is a product of moral relativism. Of course, not everyone arguing against the use of waterboarding or other methods are moral relativists, but I'm not arguing against everyone who has an objection to “torture”, but those who have an objection to “torture” that contradicts their other standing views.

Moral relativism has a bad rap because of its association with liberal/leftist social theory. From the left, moral relativism holds that the world has a plurality of moralities and those moralities are equal in comparison as they relate to the individual's belief and passing judgment would be ignorant. Basically, the “one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter” argument. Thing is, if you scratch the egalitarianism from moral relativism, you actually have a very basic and accurate theory on the reality of moral views in the world. There are different moralities, that is a fact, but the key thing for any intelligent person (liberal or conservative) is to realize is that not every single morality can be equal with the other. This is impossible because morality is subjective, and no matter how much a liberal may try to respect every single morality that shows itself on campus there's going to be some view that'll outrage them (other than a conservative point of view, of course).

Now, how exactly does someone who believes in an equality of moralities turn around and proclaim that “torture” is immoral?

They want to win. The argument they use is partisan, not intellectual. They want to be objectively right, not just subjectively right, and that involves doing all you can to appear on the winning side of history (and that's only if history exonerates their view). Those who take to the streets, to the blogs and to the boards in anger are not trying to find out what exactly is torture in our complicated world, or add to the discourse on the morality of using torture, if what we've done is indeed torture. They want the honor of being proclaimed victorious over an issue that is mostly subjective and therefore can never be really determined on objective grounds.

So, if you ever encounter one of these moralists in the middle of proclamation of moral absolutes, ask “Who says?”. If they are anything like the person I described, you should be able to hear the explosion. Just make sure you're under something when it happens.

The title of this column may seem like a strange question. After all, how are individuals affected if President Obama cracks down on corporate tax havens? Isn’t it time companies paid their fair share? Although the corporate income tax rate in the United States is very high, tax breaks and shelters make the effective tax rate much lower – so isn’t it time to crack down? The President said the tax code is “full of corporate loopholes that make it perfectly legal for ‘companies’ to avoid paying their fair share.” (1)

Let’s focus on the term “companies” first. Who is President Obama referring to when he says companies haven’t paid their fair share? Another silly question...the answer is companies, of course! Who else would he be talking about?! This question is far more complex than what it appears to be on the surface. One may ask “if companies don’t pay the tax, then who does?” The answer is INDIVIDUALS. Apparently, the President and most people in Congress don’t know the correct answer to this question.

One may ask “how on Earth does an individual pay corporate income tax?” Ofttimes, when people think of corporations, a vision comes to mind of greedy men in blue pinstripe suits laughing and counting their money. When elected officials say they are going to tax the corporations and make “them” pay their fair share, this rhetoric brings instant populist satisfaction, as people can now envision a cartoon of Uncle Sam turning these men upside down and shaking them until all of their money falls from their pockets. However, let’s back up for a moment. It’s also common knowledge that a corporation is an entity – not a person. Therefore, do the men in blue pinstripe suits pay the tax? Does the entity pay the tax? How can an entity be taxed if it’s not a person?

The answers to these questions are as follows: 1) the men in blue pinstripe suits do NOT pay the tax – or at least not in the way the populist perception leads; and 2) the entity is taxed, however, the tax becomes a cost of doing business and is embedded into several components – the three largest being: a) price of the product, b) employee hires/salaries and c) future opportunities for expansion.

If you buy products, then you pay corporate income tax. No business can survive without a budget and pricing models. When the corporate income tax is raised, companies must determine how to allocate that cost. The elasticity of demand for a product is the dependent variable which determines how much of this cost can be allocated to the price of the product. In other words, if a product is in demand regardless of price and economic conditions (inelastic), this means that the company has the option to bury the tax completely in the price of the product. President Obama stated repeatedly that 95 percent of the country will not see their taxes raised one dime. What he didn’t tell you is how your taxes will be raised through “back-door” methods.

The previous example outlined a scenario for inelastic products. What happens if a company sells elastic products? Does the individual still pay the tax? If the company cannot pass all of the tax through the product itself, then it must reduce costs in other areas. What is the biggest cost that a company endures? Employees! Therefore, when the government imposes higher taxes on companies, employees are paid less as a result. This works the same as payroll taxes – all of which comes at the expense of one’s compensation. For example, one of the biggest misconceptions is that a company pays half of an employee’s FICA (social security) tax. On paper, it does; but, in reality, the EMPLOYEE pays the tax at the expense of his/her SALARY. The same concept is true for any type of business tax.

Finally, and perhaps, the most damaging aspect of higher business taxes is the fact that increased tax burdens stifle future growth. Payments to Uncle Sam come at the expense of future opportunity. Companies have fewer dollars to invest in new ventures that can lead to job creation and growth. In addition, large tax burdens induce companies to close their headquarters in the United States and set up shop in more tax-friendly environments overseas. For example, many jobs in the information technology sector have moved to Ireland and Poland whose corporate income tax rates are currently 12.5 and 19 percent respectively. The current corporate income tax rate in the United States is 35 percent – the second highest among OECD countries.

Now that it is clear who pays corporate income tax, what is the best solution going forward? President Obama says “I want to see our companies remain the most competitive in the world.” “But the way to make sure that happens is not to reward our companies for moving jobs off our shores or transferring profits to overseas tax havens.” (1)

President Obama, will all due respect, your logic is backwards. The reason why companies have been moving jobs off of our shores is to ESCAPE the U.S. tax burden. There is no other way businesses could remain competitive otherwise in a global environment. There are many costs of doing business that companies cannot avoid. However, tax burdens are an avoidable/reducible cost. Countries overseas understand this and would gladly allow our businesses to set up shop there and take advantage. If the President eliminates these “loopholes,” the end result will not be business relocating to the United States. Companies have other options – one being to move ALL of their operations out of the United States.

Perhaps it is time for President Obama to abandon the age-old political rhetoric on this topic and keep the promise he made on the campaign trail. This would be a practical decision because corporate income tax affects low and middle income folks the most – the very groups he claims to “protect.” So why not cut taxes for these people Mr. Obama and bring our corporate tax rate in line with the rest of the world?

(1) http://news.yahoo.com/s/bloomberg/20090504/pl_bloomberg/ahoduslldk8_1

Have you ever talked to a political person and have them cite Nineteen Eight-Four in an argument against the PATRIOT Act or about the terrorist surveillance program? What about someone quoting Brave New World while railing against the dangers of capitalism? Oh, how about having Fahrenheit 451 put together with hardcore Christians views on certain books? It happened. I used to do it in my younger days. Its quite simple, its very effective and its wholly dishonest in that it removes the context of the action from the universe the book is set in.

The Anti-Communist Socialist

Written by Eric Aurthur Blair (aka George Orwell) during the Second World War, Nineteen Eight-Four has become the icon of all political dystopia novels before and after it. Blair, a socialist, was a soldier in the Spanish Civil War, fighting for the leftist Republican faction against the monarchist-fascist Nationalist faction. It was there in the trenches with his comrades that he came face to face with the reality of what revolutionary communism and socialism has become. The Soviets had sent agents and arms to aid the leftists in the war. With the aid came Stalinist paranoia and purges. Blair's friends were gunned down by their own side because Stalin had deemed them too moderate or a threat to his rule of all communists worldwide. The author barely got out of Spain alive.

The book is about life in a futuristic Stalinist regime called Oceania that has taken over the Western Hemisphere and the English Isles. In this world, your only way to advance is to join the Party, otherwise you are relegated to the inhuman slums where the “proles” live. If you're in the Party, your life is regulated twenty-four hours by Big Brother, the ever watchful and ruthless face of the security apparatus. You are to believe whatever the state says, even if you know it to be wrong. If they say two plus two equals five, its five. Thought police kick down doors if you mutter anything against the Party or Big Brother. Children are recruited into the domestic intelligence agencies to spy on their parents. Even the much hated resistance leader and his band of ruffians are nothing more than a fiction created by the state to catch free thinkers so they can be tortured back into submission. The entire book is one big nightmare for any lover of liberty.

The left, most actively the student left, loves to point out how our interrogations are akin to the torture perpetrated in the book, but this is wrong on so many levels. First off, in the big picture, the United States is not a super-state Stalinist tyranny that enslaves the lower classes through ignorance, submits the middle class through brainwashing and has an upper class of Party members that are outside the law. The United States is a democratic republic with 50 unique states in a union held together by a federal government who leaders are elected every two, four and six years, depending on their position. Secondly, the interrogations of captured Islamist terrorists are not to break their ideological or religious beliefs, but to extract intelligence about their network, their associates and their plots to kill Americans. Our interrogations do not try to convince the terrorists two plus two is five or that Big Brother is their friend. All they need to do is give us actionable intelligence, and they have. Thousands of intelligence reports have been written based upon the vetted information given to us by these terrorists. Thirdly, the harsh interrogation were only used upon the high level terrorists in our custody. The harshest of methods, such as waterboarding, are not used on the foot soldiers. The Party, on the other hand, goes so far as to capture and torture loyal members who happen to mutter disloyal things in their sleep!

Blair was a democratic socialist. While he was disciple of Marxist economics, he wasn't for the tyrannical states that usually followed a socialist or communist coup. Blair would probably be quite content with the current status of most European nations, though the “neo-liberal” (corporatist) economics may have worried him. But, in no way, was Nineteen Eight-Four an allegory for all totalitarianism as some of the more ignorant like to profess. It was a fictionalized warning against Stalinist communism and its perversion of the ideals he held dear. There's a good reason Big Brother's face resembles Joseph's and not FDR's.

The Industrial Humanity

Aldous Huxley's Brave New World is a classic of dystopian literature. A reaction to the spreading mass industrial culture of the late 1920s and early 1930s, it sends us far into the future where mass industrialization, mass commercialization and societal collectivism have created the World State. Reproduction is no longer a individual choice, but the responsibility of the government. Most children, except for the Alphas and Betas the upper tiers of the State's caste system, are mass produced using the “Bokanovsky process” which allows an egg to create up to 96 different embryos. Through chemical manipulation, the lower castes are literally grown and then brainwashed into their jobs. There is no free will at all for those deemed to be Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons. Individuality is considered an egregious violation of the fabric of society. All citizens must interact with other citizens or be constantly looked down upon and ridiculed. Since reproduction is a state responsibility, sex has become a social and religious experience, with drug taking and orgies taking the place of prayer and Bible study. Parenthood, family, love; all the things that we hold dear today are considered evil tomorrow.

While the boons of capitalism have led to some very unhealthy things such as celebrity cults, mass advertising at children, and other things that have come to define our free market culture, Brave New World is not attacking capitalism and consumerism alone. Huxley's intention was to parody both the consumerism of America with the cold industrial fetish of the socialists and communists. Along with that, much of the future society of the World State is anti-traditional, anti-religion and anti-individualism; things hardly associated with conservatism and conservative values. The mass production of human beings is exactly what the conservative argument about cloning and embryonic stem-cell research is about. Despite the liberal myth, President Bush invested federal funds in stem-cell research, but refused to allow human embryos to be grown simply to be destroyed. The brainwashing of children isn't exactly what conservative presidents and Congresses do, especially not straight out of the womb (or the tube). But, it is a staple of communist and fascist governments to reform society from the infant up, creating fanatics by the time they've mastered riding a bike.

Huxley was an early hippie. Not the ones you see today who are one with nature, but also one with Marxist theory. Huxley was a believer in the mind and he took countless amounts of psychotropic drugs to prove it. He hated any kind to totalitarianism, either real like the USSR's anti-democratic governance or spiritual like American consumerism and American reliance on neurological medication. To use the book as a example of runaway capitalism, or of any other conservative cause, as many student revolutionaries do, just proves our education system needs revamping in the literary departments.

Books Are Hard

When some devout Christians questioned the Harry Potter books and some went so far as to burn it, constant allusions to the Ray Bradbury novel Fahrenheit 451 were made by social liberals, the media and other critics of these passionate religious folk. While I think its silly to believe that the Harry Potter series may incite children to take up the more dangerous and violent parts of witchcraft, I also think these people have every right to do what they want with the books. As for the citation of the classic novel about anti-intellectualism, those who use it use it wrong.

The world of Fahrenheit 451 is not one of theocracy or religious fervor, or of hyper-nationalism like the Nazis, but a pleasure-loving society who has deemed that learning is too hard, that any kind of lawful governance or cultural discipline is just not right. Teens drive into people and no one cares. People kill animals just to enjoy the gory death. The main character is a fireman: someone who burns the books found by the government. After a chance interaction with a free-thinking neighbor, he's set on a path of resistance to this destructive society. He's told years before his time, the people of this dytopian America decided rather than deal with minor backlashes from offended minorities, political correctness would flourish through the destruction of all books. Better for everyone to be equally unoffended by no literature than some people be offended by some literature.

Now where exactly in the book does it state that a cabal of Christian conservatives have deemed books to be blasphemous so they burn them all? Where exactly is the analogy (or allegory) to the zealotry of the faithful? Of course, it isn't there. Like the two previous examples, these famous novels of a world gone wrong are taken out of context so often its become common knowledge. Those who deem themselves political, liberal and well read, they would be aghast to know that the three books are, in fact, against what they believe. Usually, is hedonism associated with liberal or conservative ideology? How about the nanny state? How about genetic manipulation of embryos?

The classical dystopias of our literary cannon are not against a nation of free thinkers and humble faithful, nor are they against a separation of powers, a reasonable national defense, free markets or natural diversity. These horrors of our political imaginations are warnings against the very things we conservatives detest and the very thing many liberals, unwittingly, are for.

Obama is trying to fast track his insane healthcare plan along with Cap & Trade so that it gets voted on by THIS WEDNESDAY so he can say in his teleprompted speech on Wednesday night that he passed these things... or at least Socialized medicine.

I KNOW you have all been hammering away at your Senators and Reps but if ANY of you have a Democratic Senator who cares anything about their constituents or country - we need your help!!!!

They are probably voting today to make it so that the Senate only needs 51 votes to pass 2 of the most DEVASTATING bills in the history of this country.

I absolutely hate sending call to actions so often but guys... no one seems to care what WE, the people, WANT... it's all about Obama and his outrageous ideologies that are screwing this country.....only WE can make a difference!!!

THANK YOU!!!!!!!

http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm

BY MIKE PORTER

As the financial crisis continues to linger, our government has already expanded the national debt by dumping money into private enterprises. Today we see our government is now a significant owner in all major banks and two of the three US automakers. I have disagreed with the approach our government has taken in regard to bailing out failing companies from the beginning. I was outspoken when federal dollars were going to “save” companies under orders by George W. Bush, and I disagree with Obama’s continuation and expansion of this policy. I am sickened by the lack of ownership our government has taken in the financial problem and their failure to change the policies that contributed to this crisis. While federal ownership in any private industry is dangerous, I would like to send a special warning to the rest of the world should the US government decide buy into media and newspaper companies.

First, let us focus on why government ownership in any private company is bad. Today our government has already bought significant ownership in automotive and financial industries. Government coming to the rescue of any failed company is bad for the company, the industry, and for our country as a whole. Investing government dollars in a failing business might save the company in the short run, but the long run effects of doing so are far more problematic than letting these companies fail. If these companies ran themselves to the point of going out of business, then the market should determine whether or not these companies go into Chapter 11 and not our government. A large automaker or a bank going out of business will create some short-term problems in any economy. There is no denying that fact. That being said, a large competitor going away in any industry could save the other lagging companies or possibly lead to expansion from companies who are being ran well and are profitable. The customers who used to go to the failed firm will still need the goods and services their old company provided. However, now they will have other firms to choose from. Large companies leaving an industry will open the door for new smaller companies to compete who weren’t large enough to compete before. Many times, companies that go into chapter 11 will emerge later as a smaller, more efficient, company. A company going out of business is just as important as business success because it tells everyone they did something wrong.

Government ownership in a company turns government bureaucrats and tax payers into vocal partners in an organization. We have already seen how Obama asked the former CEO of GM to step down - a decision that should have been left to the board of directors. Salaries and bonuses of executives and all employees can be dictated by the primary owner who is now the government. Taxpayers are in a position where their tax dollars are being invested in a company they did not choose. This opens the company up to tremendous scrutiny that otherwise would not exist. Anything from where billboards are placed to the soap they use in their bathrooms can and will be questioned. Taxpayers will be free to criticize any investment that appears to them as “wasting their money” even if the company is taking steps that could lead to turning the company around in the future. Many high level decisions appear questionable to investors initially only to bear fruit at a later date. It will only be worse when taxpayers have a vested interest in the company and a government who can block these decisions. The existence of government in a private firm will allow the government to have a say in how that company uses its resources or what direction that company will go. This can be used for political expediency in the case of making “green cars” that may be too expensive, asking banks to give out loans to political friends or unqualified borrowers, or forcing unwanted mergers as has been discussed with Chrysler corporation. Our government getting involved only increases taxpayer stake in a company which will only get more costly for the taxpayer when they come back asking for more capital. Many economists have also voiced concerns about inflation as billions and billions of dollars are being borrowed and thrown in the private sector which will complicate the existing macroeconomic problem.

Finally, let us examine the most important and more dangerous next step. The step I believe is coming soon for the “good of the nation” as our government will put it. Several leading media and newspaper companies have fallen on hard times like many other companies. Clear Channel, NY Times, Washington Post, and the Chicago Tribune are only some of the examples. If our government uses the same logic that was applied to the auto and bank industry, then federal bailouts of media companies seem to be the next logical step. Aside from the problems I have listed above, all of which still apply, our government will have a vested interest in the press and the media. Our government advancing to this step will stand as the greatest threat to American freedom we have ever seen. They would then have a direct voice in what we see, hear, and read. Government officials would have the power to shut down any voice that opposes or disagrees. They will be able to tell journalists what they should and shouldn’t print. This would be the end of free speech as we know it and therefore the end of our freedom. This sounds more like Communist Soviet Union than free America, and I fear this is coming soon if we do not voice our concerns against it. This identical tactic has been used by fascist governments time and time again who have turned democracies into dictatorships.

Let me be clear, I do not believe Obama (or Bush for that matter) is the Manchurian candidate and has an agenda to knowingly destroy America. Unfortunately, nobody can be certain about future administrations that come to power after. I believe most people in government today mean well and really want to prevent short-term job loss. However, if members of our government think they can play God and save the economy by doing bailouts, then they are naïve at best. Losing jobs in the short run through free market capitalism have occurred countless times in our history; and, as a result, we have grown to become the largest and most successful economy this world has ever seen. Regardless of what you hear, this financial crisis will turn out no different than any other economic setback in the past. Jobs going away in the short term are a small price to pay for reckless spending at the expense of losing our liberties, freedom, and our country as we know it. The good news is Uncle Sam doesn’t own any newspapers yet, so you are still in power to prevent it. Please call your Senators and Representatives and tell them you do not want any more bailouts and especially bailouts of media companies. If they do not listen, you have the power to let others know what they said to you and vote for someone else. America simply cannot afford to bail out media (or any) companies…in more ways than one.