Rational Nation USA

by: Les Carpenter Rational Nation USA Liberty -vs- Tyranny Something for everyone to contemplate. Especially if one is to understand liberalism in the classical sense verses modern liberal philosophy or progressivism. Understanding the concept of classical liberalism, the political philosophy of the founders of the United States of America is essential in understanding the concept and principles of freedom and liberty.

Europe's famed and admirable liberalism and tolerance are being snuffed by militant Muslims.  It's a case of tolerance taken too far, to its logical extreme: Tolerating intolerance kills tolerance Having tolerated Muslim intolerance, Europeans are now horrified to see rightwing political movements gaining ascendancy: Socialists' long-standing support for European unification, religious tolerance and integrating immigrants has made them vulnerable to right-wing populists like the Sweden Democrats, Geert Wilders' Dutch Freedom Party or France's National Front. ( Reuters - Anti-Immigrant Europe ) Angry, bigoted Muslims, the recipients of European tolerance, repay their liberal benefactors by spewing intolerance of anything outside their narrow, bigoted ideology.  Europeans are growing weary of it and voting rightwing as a result. The People Get It "People in Europe have grown comfortable in the decades since World War Two and now they see that...

Alas, it wasn’t supposed to be like this. We should have been carried away to a liberal utopia amid billowing clouds of fluffy hope and change by now... It’s the damned people... Others are aiming their sound and fury at the American people. According to Maureen Dowd , “Obama is the head of the dysfunctional family of America — a rational man running a most irrational nation, a high-minded man in a low-minded age. The country is having some weird mass nervous breakdown.” Jonathan Alter argues that the American people “aren’t rationally aligning belief and action; they’re tempted to lose their spleens in the polling place without fully grasping the consequences.” And Slate’s Jacob Weisberg has written that “the biggest culprit in our current predicament” is the “childishness, ignorance, and growing incoherence of the public at large.” ( Peter Wehner - Contentions ) Wehner goes on to list the hobgoblins that inhabit the fevered imagings of the New York Times and MS...

How to think like a liberal--Follow the staggering steps Unwashed progressivel Michael Tomasky demonstrates what is wrong with statist liberalism.  He describes a dinner party he attended where they engaged in a discussion of communities and the role of government in them: Then a woman I didn't know spoke up. She was southern. She was very friendly and chatty. She said she was all for beloved communities. But what was clear to her, the really important point, was that in the good old days, those communities had nothing to do with government. And when we started thinking it did was when it all went wrong. It was a small group, so I was polite and didn't say anything, but what I thought was: you idiotic, irresponsible, egotistical cretin. Nothing to do with government? Let's go ask the black people of your age cohort and home town whether they felt part of a beloved community, and let's ask them whether they think government had anything to do with the c...

What is it with liberals and taxes?   Despite all real-world evidence to the contrary, liberals see higher taxes as the solution to every fiscal problem.  The chart at the bottom of the post refutes this.  States with the highest levels of taxation have the worst economies and the greatest debt.  Low taxation states have healthier economies and less debt.  It Takes a Crime-Ridden Village... The New York Times , in detailing Illinois’s budget crisis, steers clear of facts and instead plucks the liberal heartstrings by focusing on community organizer agencies... ...holding together poor and working-class neighborhoods. With an annual budget of $16 million, the agency tends to families torn by crime and violence as well as people who are psychologically stressed and abusing drugs. Jail the violent criminals and the drug pushers and you won’t have “families torn by crime” and “people psychologically stressed and abusing drugs.”  There you go...