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| How's Your Soft Power Today? | Protect the Government University from Bigots! |
Dems and Their Special Interests
by Christopher Chantrill
August 13, 2008 at 10:52 am
THE WAY our Democratic friends tell it, Big Oil and Big Drug are evil special interests.
But Big Green and Big Ed are noble activists and teachers. And Big Labor is just out to help working people.
It all depends on your point of view.
But Thomas Sowell takes a dim view of Sen Barack Obama’s plan to bring an end to secret ballots in union representation elections.
Labor unions have a problem. Union-represented workers in the private sector amount to less than 10 percent of the workforce and going down every year. That’s a problem—for unions, at least.
Since unions are losing the game under the current rules, their obvious answer is to change the rules. Specifically, they want to do away with secret ballots when the government conducts elections to determine whether the workers in a particular company or industry want to be represented by a union.
Sen. Obama supports the end of secret ballot elections for unions.
ā€I will make it the law of the land when Iā€™m President of the United States,ā€ Barack Obama has said to the AFL-CIO.
I wonder what the American people will think of that when the issue actually comes up on the radar?
Then there’s Big Green. Environmentalists are fanatically opposed to exploration and production of hydrocarbon resources. And so are the Democrats. Well they were, until yesterday, when Speaker Nancy Pelosi allowed as how she might allow a vote on oil drilling.
There’s no doubt that Americans want to conserve the environment. But they are not prepared to sacrifice the present to the future, whatever rich trust-fund environmentalists may say.
Then there’s education. Democrats are united in opposing reform of education through relaxation of the monopoly of union teachers.
Even the Congressional Black Caucus dares not vote for vouchers or any other form of school choice that the teachersā€™ unions oppose. Better to let a whole generation of black children be trapped in failing schools that employ union teachers.
Someday, the dam is going to break on all this special-interest politics. But that day is not yet. But at least we have Thomas Sowell to witness today’s errors, crimes, and injustices and to point with audacioua hope to a better day for America.
Sphere: Related Content |Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.
What Liberals Think About Conservatives
[W]hen I asked a liberal longtime editor I know with a mainstream [publishing] house for a candid, shorthand version of the assumptions she and her colleagues make about conservatives, she didn't hesitate. “Racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-choice fascists,” she offered, smiling but meaning it.
Harry Stein, I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican
US Life in 1842
Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism
Society and State
For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008
Socialism equals Animism
Imagining that all order is the result of design, socialists
conclude that order must be improvable by better design of some superior mind.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit
Sacrifice
[Every] sacrifice is an act of impurity that pays for a prior act of greater impurity... without its participants having to suffer the full consequences incurred by its predecessor. The punishment is commuted in a process that strangely combines and finesses the deep contradiction between justice and mercy.
Frederick Turner, Beauty: The Value of Values
Religion, Property, and Family
But the only religions that have survived are those which support property and the family.
Thus the outlook for communism, which is both anti-property and anti-family, (and also anti-religion), is not promising.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit
Racial Discrimination
[T]he way to achieve a system of determining admission to the public schools on a nonracial basis,
Brown II, 349 U. S., at 300301, is to stop assigning students on a racial basis. The way to stop
discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.
Roberts, C.J., Parents Involved in Community Schools vs. Seattle School District
Postmodernism
A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy
Physics, Religion, and Psychology
Paul Dirac: “When I was talking with Lemaître about [the expanding universe] and feeling stimulated
by the grandeur of the picture that he has given us, I told him that
I thought cosmology was the branch of science that lies closest to religion.
However [Georges] Lemaître [Catholic priest, physicist, and
inventor of the Big Bang Theory] did not agree with me. After thinking it over he
suggested psychology as lying closest to religion.”
John Farrell, “The Creation Myth”
Pentecostalism
Within Pentecostalism the injurious hierarchies of the wider world are abrogated and replaced by a single hierarchy of faith, grace, and the empowerments of the spirit... where groups gather on rafts to take them through the turbulence of the great journey from extensive rural networks to the mega-city and the nuclear family...
David Martin, On Secularization
Never Trust Experts
No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Lord Salisbury, “Letter to Lord Lytton”
Mutual Aid
In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society
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