American Crossroads, however, has just released a video that captures pretty well the essence of what I’m talking about:

As you know, oral argument for and against the Constitutionality of the Individual Mandate began today, and the stakes could not be higher.

Amazing what a difference a couple of years can make, isn’t it?

Here, for example, is Barack Obama now talking about Solyndra — the bankrupt solar-panel company that we the taxpayers funded to the tune of billions:

“Understand: [Solyndra] was not our program per se.”

I know what you’re thinking: who the hell uses per se?

But here’s the real point. Barack Obama addressing Solyndra in May of 2010:

So that’s why we’ve placed a big emphasis on clean energy. It’s the right thing to do for our environment, it’s the right thing to do for our national security, but it’s also the right thing to do for our economy.

And we can see the positive impacts right here at Solyndra. Less than a year ago, we were standing on what was an empty lot. But through the Recovery Act, this company received a loan to expand its operations. This new factory is the result of those loans.

The Recovery Act, in case you’ve forgotten, is the failed Stimuls Plan (so-called) that none other than Barack Obama jammed through before anyone knew what was in it.

Barack Obama’s attempt here to distance himself from Solyndra is what I call prevarication per se.

Here’s what Barack said about it just today while speaking in North Carolina:

“Looks like somebody might’ve fainted up here, have we got . . . Somebody . . . EMS . . . Somebody . . Don’t worry about it: Folks do this all the time in my meetings,” Obama said. “You always got to eat before you stand for a long time–that’s a little tip. They’ll be OK, just make sure–give them a little room.

Uh-huh. It’s not always easy being cheesy, eh, Barack?

Hat tip Daniel Halper.

Why suddenly the big furor now? I mean, this is socialism:

I don’t pay for my own medicine, because it’s not my responsibility: it’s yours.

This is exactly what you voted for when you voted for Barack Obama.

Please don’t insult us by being surprised now, after all the time we spent trying to tell you.

Governmental compulsion: it’s the American way.

“We’ve actually been operating in a way entirely consistent with free-market principles.” — Barack Obama, 2009

L Wilson Hunt, of Chanticleer Book Reviews, recently wrote a flattering and insightful piece on my novel More and More unto the Perfect Day.

That review reads, in part:

Bizarre things are beginning to happen to Joel Gasteneau. A strange illness has left him feeling weak and haunted by vivid dreams, and he feels that he is being followed. Exhausted and fearful, he decides to abandon his life as a pensive drifter and focus on a long-neglected project: To find a durable proof for the existence of God.

This pursuit will run Joel through a gauntlet of self-discovery, one that will challenge the very limits of his mental and physical endurance.

In a solid telling of a complex story of mystery and intrigue, author Ray Harvey assumes the role of master illusionist. Clues abound, but can Joel trust them? What is he really experiencing? Viral fever flashbacks? The eruption of long-buried memories? Reality? More questions than answers emerge as the reader is drawn into another world, where mysticism and philosophy tangle and clash across a stunningly-rendered, often other-worldly landscape.

The novel is stocked with well-developed, fascinating entities. Joel’s father, Neil, a brilliant and deeply ascetic man, has a weakness for violence and his own definition for the word “blood.” Has he killed in the past? And, if so, will he again, and soon? Another entity is a stranger that Joel encounters called Tom, a sort of human/alien hybrid, who seems to know too much about Joel’s past. Along with these characters are oddly-shaped, silver clouds that seem to be keeping a watchful eye on Joel’s whereabouts.

Click over and read the rest.

As a matter of fact, it wasn’t until approximately 300 years after the death of Christ that the Roman church began observing Christmas, and it wasn’t until the 5th century AD that the church officially mandated that Christmas be observed by Christians throughout the world “as a festival honoring the birth of Jesus Christ” — though, let it be noted, Christ was not born in winter but most likely fall. (Not all Christians have agreed with this official Christmas mandate: in 1659, for instance, the Puritans of New England, about whom I’ve written before, banned Christmas by law throughout the Massachusetts Bay Colony, calling it “heathen, papist idolatry,” and even went so far as to deem its observance a crime punishable by imprisonment. It was until 1856 that in Boston people stopped working on Christmas.)

What follows are some fascinating facts about the long and little-known history of Christmas. From The Encyclopedia Americana:

Christmas was not observed in the first centuries of the Christian church, since the Christian usage in general was to celebrate the death of remarkable persons rather than their birth…a feast was established in memory of this event [Christ's birth] in the 4th century. In the 5th century the Western church ordered the feast to be celebrated on the day of the Mithraic rites of the birth of the sun and at the close of the Saturnalia, as no certain knowledge of the day of Christ’s birth existed.

And from the 1911 Catholic Encyclopedia:

Christmas was not among the earliest festivals of the Church. The first evidence of the feast is from Egypt.

From The Buffalo News, November 22, 1984:

The earliest reference to Christmas being marked on Dec. 25 comes from the second century after Jesus’ birth. It is considered likely the first Christmas celebrations were in reaction to the Roman Saturnalia, a harvest festival that marked the winter solstice–the return of the sun–and honored Saturn, the god of sowing. Saturnalia was a rowdy time, much opposed by the more austere leaders among the still-minority Christian sect. Christmas developed, one scholar says, as a means of replacing worship of the sun with worship of the Son. By 529 A.D., after Christianity had become the official state religion of the Roman Empire, Emperor Justinian made Christmas a civic holiday. The celebration of Christmas reached its peak–some would say its worst moments–in the medieval period when it became a time for conspicuous consumption and unequaled revelry.

And here’s a passage from the New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge:

How much the date of the festival depended upon the pagan Brumalia (December 25) following the Saturnalia (Dec. 17-24), and celebrating the shortest day of the year and the ‘new sun’…cannot be accurately determined. The pagan Saturnalia and Brumalia were too deeply entrenched in popular custom to be set aside by Christian influence…The pagan festival with its riot and merry-making was so popular that Christians were glad of an excuse to continue its celebration with little change in spirit and in manner. Christian preachers of the West and the Near East protested against the unseemly frivolity with which Christ’s birthday was celebrated, while Christians of Mesopotamia accused their Western brethren of idolatry and sun worship for adopting as Christian this pagan festival.

Finally, from the Encyclopedia Britannica:

Christmas was not among the earliest festivals of the church…. Certain Latins, as early as 354, may have transferred the birthday from January 6th to December 25, which was then a Mithraic feast…or birthday of the unconquered SUN…The Syrians and Armenians, who clung to January 6th, accused the Romans of sun worship and idolatry, contending…that the feast of December 25th, had been invented by disciples of Cerinthus.

The Democrat and Chronicle, of Rochester, New York, in December 1984 wrote:

The Roman festival of Saturnalia, Dec. 17-24, moved citizens to decorate their homes with greens and lights and give gifts to children and the poor. The Dec. 25 festival of natalis solis invicti, the birth of the unconquered sun, was decreed by the emperor Aurelian in A.D. 274 as a Winter Solstice celebration, and sometime (later)…was Christianized as a date to celebrate the birth of the Son of Light.

And in December of 1989, Dr. William Gutsch, chairman of the American Museum of Natural History, said, in the Westchester, New York, newspaper:

The early Romans were not celebrating Christmas but rather a pagan feast called the Saturnalia. It occurred each year around the beginning of winter, or the winter solstice. This was the time when the sun had taken its lowest path across the sky and the days were beginning to lengthen, thus assuring another season of growth.

If many of the trappings of the Saturnalia, however, seem to parallel what so many of us do today, we can see where we borrowed…our holiday traditions. And indeed, it has been suggested that while Christ was most likely not born in late December, the early Christians — then still an outlawed sect–moved Christmas to the time of the Saturnalia to draw as little attention as possible to themselves while they celebrated their own holiday.

Lastly, from a Christian who does not like Christmas, and from whom many of these quotes have been culled:

The Saturnalia, of course, celebrated Saturn–the fire god. Saturn was the god of sowing (planting) because heat from the sun was required to allow for planting and growth of crops. He was also worshipped [sic] in this dead-of-winter festival so that he would come back (he was the “sun”) and warm the earth again so that spring planting could occur.

In an Easter post I once wrote, I quoted the genius priest-poet Gerard Hopkins, in a poem he wrote about spring. And in response to the passage just cited above, it seems relevant to recall those same words that Hopkins’s wrote:

What is spring?
Growth in everything.

Flesh and fleece, fur and feather,
Grass and greenworld all together;
Star-eyed strawberry-breasted
Throstle above her nested

Cluster of bugle-blue eggs thin
Forms and warms the life within;
And bird and blossom swell
In sod and sheath or shell.

All things rising, all things sizing
Mary sees, sympathizing
With that world of good,
Nature’s motherhood.

(Gerard Manly Hopkins, “May Magnificat”)

Winter. Death. Rebirth. The lengthening days. Life.

That, in part, is what Christmas represents.

But it also represents something more, something equally beautiful, and something much wider than the laws laid down by any one particular custom or creed: it represents peace on earth and good will towards women and men.

Happy Holidays!

Straight from the horse’s mouth — and it doesn’t get any plainer than this:

One would be wise to note here that there’s never in world history been a system of total unregulated laissez-faire capitalism, but the societies that have come the closest have prospered the most.

In fact, there’s an indisputable correlation between freedom and flourishing, which is why Hong Kong, a barren rock in the middle of the ocean, with virtually no resources at all, grew to such astronomical proportions in so short a time during the 20th century, and it’s also why America became the greatest civilization in all of human history in less than 200 years.

Occupier Bianca Piemonte, 21, above, will be spending Thanksgiving with family away from tent city (photo courtesy of the Boston Herald).

It looks as though even some of the Occupy Wall Street people can’t resist the warm allure of heading home for the holidays — despite the fact that these folks are against the true spirit of Thanksgiving:

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

Here’s the 99 percent you and I are supposedly a part of:

“Shut Down Burger King”:

Crapping quite literally in the entryway of a bank:

Pushing a 78-year-old (conservative) woman down the stairs:

Lice outbreaks in Portland:

Let us remember and never forget that this is the movement Obama and the democrats explicitly support.

According to Jordanes, the Goths reached the pinnacle of their power around the 5th Century AD, when they conquered Rome and most of Spain.

The original Goths — and this is important — have no real connection with what that word eventually came to mean.

It was many centuries later, you see, that a certain non-classical style of architecture emerged. Because this style of architecture wasn’t classical, it was pejoratively termed Gothic, which meant “barbaric.”

Gothic literature came about centuries after this and is so called because a great number of these novels are set in Gothic monasteries and Gothic Abbeys.

That is how the genre of Gothic literature came to be.

Setting is the crucial component to Gothic fiction. As Ann Blaisde Tracy wrote in her 1981 book The Gothic Novel, this literature depicts “a fallen world,” a world of ruin and desuetude, dilapidation and disrepair, death, decay — a vital and thriving world no more.

The English author Horace Walpole is generally credited with writing the first Gothic novel, and that novel, written in 1764, is called The Castle of Otranto.

Though she didn’t originate Gothic literate, the enigmatic Anne Radcliffe (1764 – 1823) is undoubtedly that genre’s greatest early popularizer, and her Gothic novel The Mysteries of Udolopho was immediately parodied by the likes of Jane Austin and Thomas Love Peacock, among others.

The early Gothic novels are, however, diffuse and stylistically difficult to our modern-day eyes and ears, the pace often bogging down in its baroque prose. Among the best of the early Gothic novels ever written is Melmoth The Wanderer, by Charles Robert Maturin (which Victor Hugo and Lord Byron also loved).

Yet for all its difficulty now, Gothic literature employed wildly intriguing plot devices which at the time were quite new — secret closets, mysterious manuscripts, ghostly abbeys, unspeakable deeds — so that at it’s best, there is an undeniable sense of strangeness and fascination that pervades Gothic literature. That is the reason some of the world’s greatest writers have used Gothic literature as a model for their own non-Gothic novels.

Happy Halloween.

“I’m a millionaire, I’m a multi-millionaire. I’m filthy rich. You know why I’m a multi-millionaire? ‘Cause multi-millions like what I do. That’s pretty good, isn’t it? There’s millions that believe in what I do. Pretty cool, huh?”

“That was the same year as ‘Bowling for Columbine’ and two years before his big success with ‘Fahrenheit 9/11,’ so however many multi-millions he had banked at the time, he’s got more now — and that’s not counting the millions he claims he’s owed but hasn’t received.”

(Source).

Now watch Michael Moore, just last week, caught lying through his teeth:

In related news, Peter Schiff, an economist and financial adviser whom I much admire, confronts Wall Street protesters and asks them very basic questions the answers to which they do not know:

One woman who was recruited from a homeless shelter to protest and then canvass as part of a campaign ostensibly aimed at home foreclosures told Fox, “I get the money and then the money is being used for Occupy Wall Street—to pay for all of it, for supplies, food, transportation, salaries, for everything … all that money is going to pay for the protests downtown and that’s just messed up. It’s just wrong.” So in case you were wondering how they can afford the new Port-a-Potties, there you go.

Also, in response to Joe Biden’s false and outrageous remarks, as Ed Morrissey notes, “the President’s ‘jobs’ bill doesn’t go directly to hire police officers anyway. Instead, it allows states to paper-over budget gaps for another year rather than address their systemic budgetary issues, and protect unionized bureaucrats whose jobs should be on the chopping block.”

Here are a couple of other Jason Mattera videos that I hope you enjoy as much as I did:

Openly socialist Vermont senator Bernie Sanders selling his book (capitalistically) at (capitalistic) Barnes & Noble:

Jason Mattera to Barney Frank: “All right, sir. Fist bump?” Barney Frank: “No.”

Al Franken to Jason Mattera: “You have to shut up right now and listen to me.”

“Show some respect for taxpayer dollars?”

Many more of these instructive videos here.

The protesters are massively wrong about the incompatibility of capitalism and social justice.

Social justice shouldn’t be measured on what the rich have, which is the fixation of the protesters. Instead, the focus should be on the lot of the poor. The spread of market capitalism has done more to improve living standards for more of the world’s poor than anything else in human history.

There is, however, a serious social justice problem that has developed in American market capitalism. Two of the bridges to the middle class for those without a college education — manufacturing and construction — have been eroded. Manufacturing jobs haven’t been lost mainly to free trade, as the brief against capitalism would have it, but to sharply improved productivity. And construction wages have been undermined by illegal immigrant labor.

The American economy hasn’t really developed substitutes for these bridges. While the protesters misdiagnose and exaggerate the problem, conservatives shouldn’t be so dismissive of the rising income gap based upon education.

The protesters are occupying Wall Street because they see large investment banks as the heart of American capitalism. They are also wrong about that, but their mistake is shared by the policymakers in both of the country’s major political parties.

Capital is the bloodline of commerce. Businesses produce first, then get paid by those who buy their goods or services. They need money to get from Point A to Point B.

There are an infinite number of ways that businesses get capital. Large Wall Street investment banks play a role, but a rather small one. And almost exclusively for big businesses, which isn’t where the growth in the American economy occurs.

(Read the full article here.)

In related news — and in response to the emails I keep getting from folks who insist that these protests aren’t Marxist — please check out these recent vids:

Here’s an example, taken from their website:

Demand one: Restoration of the living wage. This demand can only be met by ending “Freetrade” by re-imposing trade tariffs on all imported goods entering the American market to level the playing field for domestic family farming and domestic manufacturing as most nations that are dumping cheap products onto the American market have radical wage and environmental regulation advantages. Another policy that must be instituted is raise the minimum wage to twenty dollars an hr.

Why not just make the minimum wage $50.00 an hour? Or $100.00? Money, after all, doesn’t actually need to be produced. Businesses just have it. Therefore, businesses can pay any amount demanded. Also, as Ryan Young of OpenMarket.org articulately explains:

Take as true that importing goods across international borders kills jobs. Well, as a matter of logic, importing goods across state borders is no different. Oregonians should be forbidden from importing goods from Californians. Inter-city free trade has the same harmful effects. Consistency demands banning that, too. Even inter-household trade kills jobs under this line of thought.

And of course, one of the main things these protesters are against is “corporations” — this despite the fact that they don’t have any good idea of what a corporation really is.

As I wrote in Leave Us Alone:

Any business, no matter its size, can become incorporated.
Incorporated simply means that businesses draw up contracts, known as the Articles of Incorporation, which contain information about intended activities of the upstart business and also the intended financing. The state then issues a certificate of incorporation, at which point the certificate becomes an enforceable contract….

The present-day model of the American corporation began right after the Civil War, with the development of the trust movement. The trust movement was against the existing laws, imposed by the state, which made the formation of corporations extremely costly and difficult. It took a special act of legislation to deregulate, so that following the Civil War, this new legislative act made it possible for private corporations to combine with one another, via stockholders, turning their shares to “trustees.” This is all private, contractual, and voluntary.

Under the trust arrangement, stockholders of separate corporations can and will turn their shares over to trustees, who then have the power to vote the shares and run the incorporated business. By assembling the shares into the hands of the same trust, it’s possible and perfectly legitimate to run the corporation as a single unit.

The protesters have said (and I quote): “We’re tired of Big Money dictating what [government] programs get funded.”

Really? Is Big Money, then, funding over two-thirds of the federal budget that’s spent on social security, medicare/medicaid, unemployment checks, welfare, food stamps, public schools, and so much more (all of which, incidentally, dwarf national defense spending)?

The answer is no. We the taxpayers are funding these profligate and endless programs, which the Wall Street protesters are calling for more of.

Here’s another question I have: if corporations are so powerful and Machiavellian, why hasn’t corporate money stopped the above-mentioned federal spending — which spending, for the record, is what’s driving the crushing national deficit we’re all laboring under?

As Mark Levin sensibly asks:

• Who’s the biggest health insurer in the country?
• Who’s the biggest bank in the country?
• Who’s the biggest land-owner in the country?
• Who runs the biggest retirement plans in the country?
• And who alone has the force of law to force you to comply with their decisions?

Answer: the federal government.

Reader, make no mistake: the philosophical underpinnings of these protesters are socialistic to the gills.

The following video clip will give you an idea of the caliber of economic understanding these protesters possess, and I post this clip not because I side with Adam Kokesh (I don’t), but because I myself have been astonished by the number of emails I’ve received from libertarians asking me if I “stand with” the Wall Street protesters.

Emphatically I do not.

Here are a handful of the reasons why:

If you wish to know more about these Adbuster hypocrites, who have made a lot of money with their anti-capitalist campaign, read this.

The video clip won’t embed, but you can watch it here (and I suggest you do).

This is what Michael Moore said:

When you say the word capitalism, you have to talk about it in its current sense. You can’t told about the old days or the way maybe, you know, Adam Smith. The sort of old capitalism….

[In the] old days when you worked hard and prospered, everyone else prospered as well. And not only that, as you prospered, the wealth was shared with your employees, with the government. Everybody had a piece of the pie. You, who started the business or invented the light bulb or whatever, you got a bigger piece of the pie. And you know what, nobody cared because you invented the light bulb. That was a pretty cool thing….

None of the major religions, in fact they all, say it’s one of the worst sins you could commit, is to take such a large piece of the pie while others suffer.

Isn’t that heavy?

But the truth is, capitalism is the diametric opposite of what Michael Moore would have you believe.

What is capitalism?

Capitalism is a social system based upon private ownership of the means of production and the preeminence of the individual over the group.

This issue — capitalism-versus-socialism — hinges upon one thing, and this one thing is the only thing you’ll ever need to know about the subject: private ownership (capitalism) versus public or government ownership (socialism).

Do we each own ourselves and (corollarily) our property?

Or do others own us and our property?

Money is property.

Capitalism is an entire political theory — not, as is sometimes supposed, merely economic.

The exclusively economic component of capitalism can be described as the right to life, liberty, and property applied to commerce and industry.

Pure laissez-faire capitalism, which does not exist now and has never existed fully, means that government removes itself from all commerce (and that includes healthcare), in the same way that government removes itself from the bedroom.

In addition to early America, there is at least one other society that has come close to laissez faire capitalism:

“After the War Hong Kong had no minimum wage, low and simple taxes, zero tariffs, zero capital controls, and a stable legal environment. Postwar Hong Kong went as far with economic laissez faire as any other country in history. This resulted in economic development that benefited virtually all the people of Hong Kong. Living standards increased substantially even for the poorest people in Hong Kong” (Stefan Karlsson, “Inflation Leads to Protectionism,” 2004).

Capitalism means that commerce and industry are entirely privatized.

Corporations that receive government subsidies are not capitalistic. They’re the opposite: they’re mercantilistic.
The same is true of small businesses and farms that receive subsidies.

Trade tariffs are not capitalistic but mercantilistic.

Mercantilism is an ancient and more primitive form of socialism. It is socialism before Karl Marx.

Political theory is the theory of government, and government, properly defined, is the body politic that possesses rule over a certain specified geographic region.

Economics is the science of production and exchange, but production does not just mean agriculture, although that is certainly included.

Productive work is any kind of work geared toward the task of survival — survival in the fully human sense of the word, including, therefore, arts, sports, industry, and so on.

Thus the essential questions of government are these:

Do humans exist by right or by permission?

Are we free by nature?

If so, why?

Are we free to produce, exchange, and exist, or do politicians, elected or not, have authority and jurisdiction over the lives of us — to any degree?

Obviously, there’s only one sane answer to all these questions; for to say that humans do not exist by right is the same as saying humans only exist when someone permits us to. But if that were true, we must then ask: who permits? And why? And who gives these people permission?

Fundamentally, political freedom can be achieved only through recognizing each and every single individual’s right to life.

If, then, you believe that we are each individuated and sovereign, and if you believe that our lives are entirely our own and not the government’s and not another’s, if, in short, you believe “we each have a property in our person,” as John Locke said, then you believe in the inalienable right to life, liberty, and property.

You believe, therefore, in laissez-faire capitalism.


More here on the many permutations of socialism.