My Rant: Charity From the Heart Vs. Government Forced "Charity"

To the degree that with government programs there will always be some form of charity given from the heart, whether it be a small or large amount, this statement is true. But, over the years the increase in government social programs and the taxation that accompanies these programs- government entitlement programs- they cause a decrease in charity or charitable funds given to the poor and organizations both non-profit and for profit alike.


When a government increases a person’s taxes to pay for another person’s health care that decreases the amount of funds that the person has available to freely choose from her/his heart to which needy person or organization that she/he wants to give a donation to. For the government to raise taxes for anything, but much less health care in which there are free clinics, low-income clinics, and volunteers who devote some of their time to donating their resources in helping and providing care for the poor is wrong, unconstitutional, and takes away or limits greatly the person’s individual right to freely choose where there generosity may be devoted. It is wrong to increase taxes on hard-working citizens to pay for others’ health care costs since these hard working citizens are already paying for their own health care costs, are living responsibly, and since the act of raising taxes does indeed take away a person’s free-choice, a person’s freedom to choose which charitable organization they want to donate to.

I am going to pose a scenario to those Big Government-loving people out there: What if before a health care bill is passed a couple sets aside $500 to donate to a pro-life organization and then after the health care bill is passed by Congress taxes rise, and there is a $500 increase in this couple’s taxes? Wouldn’t the government’s increased taxation preclude this couple from giving charitable donations as they choose? The government is denying this couple the right to act freely and choose where they want to donate those funds all for the sake of spreading the wealth.

Are people who rely on the State and promote the nanny-state or Democratic socialism(which is exactly where this health care bill will lead us if this is passed) replacing God with a false prophet/s known as the government? Over the past 65 years or so the government has grown bigger and expanded, and God has slowly but surely been stripped away from our society and replaced with secularism, and has increased citizens’ dependency on government or the State. If government (Big Government) is so good, how is it that since the New Deal was enacted there has been an increased dependency on the government and the number of people receiving monetary funds from welfare, Medicaid, and social security? If government really is about the “common good” and helping people to succeed how come there are so many people who are reliant on the government? If government actually helped and didn’t create an entitlement program and an entitlement population then there would be a much higher number of people employed in our society. What would happen of all the wealthy people in the United States decided to retire and close their businesses? Wouldn’t that affect both the unemployment and the amount of taxes taken in to support the poor?

Does a capitalistic system have more corruption in it than in a Socialist or a Communist system? A Capitalistic environment provides more opportunity for success than either Communist or Socialist societies. A Capitalist society provides more incentives for monetary success than in Socialist or Communist societies since in the ladder those types of governments tend to penalize success by bleeding the successful dry with high taxes. The secularists and the people on the Left who think that a capitalist system is more corrupt may want to take note that while capitalistic societies may be corrupt monetarily ( so are other forms of government), it has been proven and documented in history books that Nationalistic Socialism and Communism are far more corrupt and has in fact cost many innocent people their lives. Here are three examples where National Socialism and Communism has harmed and/or killed lives far worse than capitalism ever could: Mao Tse Tung killed about 20 million people due to starvation and the ‘Cultural Revolution‘ combined; Joseph Stalin killed approximately 20 million people between Russians being starved to death, sent to the Gulag, deported, and executed for political “offenses“; and Hitler killed approximately 11 million people during the Holocaust. They all killed people in the name of the common good.

The Left and secularists like to proclaim that their “tolerant” when in fact they are least tolerant people in world. Secularists and the Left are the ones that have forced their immorality on us, indoctrinate our children in schools(mmm mmm mmm Barack Obama), and want any sign of religious freedom removed from our society. To the Left and secularists, the only people they have “tolerance” toward are the people who think on their terms-liked programmed liberal robots unable to allow for free thought in our society if it includes: principles in accordance with God, conservatism, Right to Life as it says in the Constitution or Pro-Life, individualism, advocate that our government provide for the common defense, and promoting family values.

This was written to counteract all those socialists and communists out there. If people believe in either Communism or Socialism there is no middle ground. You are either a socialist or not. You are either a communist or not. You may try to make yourselves feel better by rationalizing and thinking that there is a middle ground with regards to being a socialist/communist, but there isn’t. It is clear to me that socialists in our society want to relinquish their responsibilities to the State. The State is supposed to be a different, a separate entity than the Church. But, some people believe that the State is supposed to be an appendage of the Church. The Church is a gathering place for the community of the faithful and helps to provide charity to the poor but its purpose is different from that of our government. It is a moral obligation of the Church to provide charity, whereas it is not a moral obligation of the State to provide charity, especially when our government is acting like thieves, providing charity at the point of a gun, by forcing taxpayers to pay higher taxes to provide forced “charity” to the poor.  Now, we stop this Obamascare monstrosity from passing the House.

Is The Patriot Act Unconstitutional or Constitutional?

Over at my hippo blog, I am starting a debate as to whether The Patriot Act is unconstitutional or constitutional. If anyone is interested in a good, healthy debate on this issue please stop over to my hippo blog.

In my U.S. Foreign Policy class, I am writing a paper on whether certain controversial parts of The Patriot Act such as -- roving wiretaps, or warrantless wiretaps, delayed notification searches and new authorities to obtain the library, credit card and health records of individuals who are not the subject of a criminal investigation but who might be of intelligence value in terrorism probes -- are in fact constitutional or not. So, I thought that this would be an interesting blog debate.



http://ponderingsofacollegiatehippo.blogspot.com/2010/03/debate-is-patriot-act-unconstitutional.html

Lord Monckton Says: Stop Obama From Relinquishing U.S. Sovereignty in Copenhagen; A New World Order?

First, I would like to thank all my wonderful blogging friends who brought this to my attention.
I am inviting everyone to visit their excellent blogs.
H/T to Goomba's News Network
H/T to MAinfo
H/T to The Conservative Lady

The Minnesota Free Market Institute hosted an event at Bethel University in St. Paul on Wednesday evening. Keynote speaker Lord Christopher Monckton, former science adviser to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, gave a scathing and lengthy presentation, complete with detailed charts, graphs, facts, and figures which culminated in the utter decimation of both the pop culture concept of global warming and the credible threat of any significant anthropomorphic climate change.
A detailed summary of Monckton’s presentation will be available here once compiled. However, a segment of his remarks justify immediate publication. If credible, the concern Monckton speaks to may well prove the single most important issue facing the American nation, bigger than health care, bigger than cap and trade, and worth every citizen’s focused attention.
Here were Monckton’s closing remarks, as dictated from my audio recording:

At [the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference in] Copenhagen, this December, weeks away, a treaty will be signed. Your president will sign it. Most of the third world countries will sign it, because they think they’re going to get money out of it. Most of the left-wing regime from the European Union will rubber stamp it. Virtually nobody won’t sign it.

I read that treaty. And what it says is this, that a world government is going to be created. The word “government” actually appears as the first of three purposes of the new entity. The second purpose is the transfer of wealth from the countries of the West to third world countries, in satisfication of what is called, coyly, “climate debt” – because we’ve been burning CO2 and they haven’t. We’ve been screwing up the climate and they haven’t. And the third purpose of this new entity, this government, is enforcement.

How many of you think that the word “election” or “democracy” or “vote” or “ballot” occurs anywhere in the 200 pages of that treaty? Quite right, it doesn’t appear once. So, at last, the communists who piled out of the Berlin Wall and into the environmental movement, who took over Greenpeace so that my friends who funded it left within a year, because [the communists] captured it – Now the apotheosis as at hand. They are about to impose a communist world government on the world. You have a president who has very strong sympathies with that point of view. He’s going to sign it. He’ll sign anything. He’s a Nobel Peace Prize [winner]; of course he’ll sign it.
[laughter]
And the trouble is this; if that treaty is signed, if your Constitution says that it takes precedence over your Constitution (sic), and you can’t resign from that treaty unless you get agreement from all the other state parties – And because you’ll be the biggest paying country, they’re not going to let you out of it.

So, thank you, America. You were the beacon of freedom to the world. It is a privilege merely to stand on this soil of freedom while it is still free. But, in the next few weeks, unless you stop it, your president will sign your freedom, your democracy, and your humanity away forever. And neither you nor any subsequent government you may elect will have any power whatsoever to take it back. That is how serious it is. I’ve read the treaty. I’ve seen this stuff about [world] government and climate debt and enforcement. They are going to do this to you whether you like it or not.

But I think it is here, here in your great nation, which I so love and I so admire – it is here that perhaps, at this eleventh hour, at the fifty-ninth minute and fifty-ninth second, you will rise up and you will stop your president from signing that dreadful treaty, that purposeless treaty. For there is no problem with climate and, even if there were, an economic treaty does nothing to [help] it.
So I end by saying to you the words that Winston Churchill addressed to your president in the darkest hour before the dawn of freedom in the Second World War. He quoted from your great poet Longfellow:
Sail on, O Ship of State!Sail on, O Union, strong and great!Humanity with all its fears,With all the hopes of future years,Is hanging breathless on thy fate!

Lord Monckton received a standing ovation and took a series of questions from members of the audience. Among those questions were these relevent to the forthcoming Copenhagen treaty:

Question: The current administration and the Democratic majority in Congress has shown little regard for the will of the people. They’re trying to pass a serious government agenda, and serious taxation and burdens on future generations. And there seems to be little to stop them. How do you propose we stop Obama from doing this, because I see no way to stop him from signing anything in Copenhagen. I believe that’s his agenda and he'll do it .

I don’t minimize the difficulty. But on this subject – I don’t really do politics, because it’s not right. In the end, your politics is for you. The correct procedure is for you to get onto your representatives, both in the US Senate where the bill has yet to go through (you can try and stop that) and in [the House], and get them to demand their right of audience (which they all have) with the president and tell him about this treaty. There are many very powerful people in this room, wealthy people, influential people. Get onto the media, tell them about this treaty. If they go to www.wattsupwiththat.com, they will find (if they look carefully enough) a copy of that treaty, because I arranged for it to be posted there not so long ago. Let them read it, and let the press tell the people that their democracy is about to be taken away for no good purpose, at least [with] no scientific basis [in reference to climate change]. Tell the press to say this. Tell the press to say that, even if there is a problem [with climate change], you don’t want your democracy taken away. It really is as simple as that.

[Update: this section on a question from an attendee to the presentation has been removed from this WUWT article because even though Monckton clearly refuted it, it is turning into a debate over presidential eligibility that I don't want at WUWT. If you want to see it and discuss it. Do it at the original blog entry Fightin' Words - Anthony]

Regardless of whether global warming is taking place or caused to any degree by human activity, we do not want a global government empowered to tax Americans without elected representation or anything analogous to constitutional protections. The Founding Fathers would roll over in their graves if they knew their progeny allowed a foreign power such authority, effectively undoing their every effort in an act of Anti-American Revolution. If that is our imminent course, we need to put all else on hold and focus on stopping it. If American sovereignty is ceded, all other debate is irrelevant.

Edited to add @ 8:31 am:
Skimming through the treaty, I came across verification of Monckton’s assessment of the new entity’s purpose:

38. The scheme for the new institutional arrangement under the Convention will be based on three basic pillars: government; facilitative mechanism; and financial mechanism, and the basic organization of which will include the following:

World Government (heading added)
a) The government will be ruled by the COP with the support of a new subsidiary body on adaptation, and of an Executive Board responsible for the management of the new funds and the related facilitative processes and bodies. The current Convention secretariat will operate as such, as appropriate.
To Redistribute Wealth (heading added)
b) The Convention’s financial mechanism will include a multilateral climate change fund including five windows: (a) an Adaptation window, (b) a Compensation window, to address loss and damage from climate change impacts [read: the "climate debt" Monckton refers to], including insurance, rehabilitation and compensatory components, © a Technology window; (d) a Mitigation window; and (e) a REDD window, to support a multi-phases process for positive forest incentives relating to REDD actions.
With Enforcement Authority (heading added)
c) The Convention’s facilitative mechanism will include: (a) work programmes for adaptation and mitigation; (b) a long-term REDD process; © a short-term technology action plan; (d) an expert group on adaptation established by the subsidiary body on adaptation, and expert groups on mitigation, technologies and on monitoring, reporting and verification; and (e) an international registry for the monitoring, reporting and verification of compliance of emission reduction commitments, and the transfer of technical and financial resources from developed countries to developing countries. The secretariat will provide technical and administrative support, including a new centre for information exchange [read; enforcement].