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Pelosi's New Direction for America
by Christopher Chantrill
November 14, 2006 at 3:03 am
IF YOU WANT to know what life will be like under a Democratic Congress, here is an article by House Speaker-to-be Nancy Pelosi that lays out her agenda for the 110th Congress.
She writes that the American people voted for a change, for “greater integrity” and “greater civility” in Washington D.C. On Iraq, she writes,
The strategy of "stay the course" is not working, has not made our country safer, has not honored our commitment to our troops and has not brought stability to the region.
And she promises to enact the New Direction For America.
We will make America safer by implementing the recommendations of the 9/11 commission; make our economy fairer by raising the minimum wage and ending taxpayer subsidies for sending jobs overseas; make college more affordable by cutting the interest rates on student loans; improve healthcare by allowing Medicare to negotiate for lower prescription drug prices and promoting stem cell research; achieve energy independence within 10 years by investing America's energy dollars in the Midwest instead of the Middle East; and guarantee a dignified retirement by improving Medicare, protecting Social Security and making it easier to save for retirement.
All these policies, she writes, are supported by large majorities of Americans.
They are, in fact, minor crowd-pleasing course corrections to the direction of the vast welfare state. But what do the American people really want from their government? That is always the question.
It is, however, a meaningless question. You might as well say: What do the customers really want from their neighborhood restaurant? What they want is a good meal and a feeling, after they have left, that they would like to come back.
When you have been eating at the same restaurant for years and years, you get an impulse to try something else.
The question is: Will you stay with the new restaurant, or return to the old one?
Sphere: Related Content | | printChristopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.
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 300–301, 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
Moral Imperatives of Modern Culture
These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self
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