In 1840, Alexis de Tocqueville (perhaps channeling his inner George Will) wondered what despotism in a republic such as ours might look like:

I see an innumerable crowd of like and equal men who revolve on themselves without repose, procuring the small and vulgar pleasures with which they fill their souls. …

Over these is elevated an immense, tutelary power, which takes sole charge of assuring their enjoyment and of watching over their fate. It is absolute, attentive to detail, regular, provident, and gentle. It would resemble the paternal power if, like that power, it had as its object to prepare men for manhood, but it seeks, to the contrary, to keep them irrevocably fixed in childhood … it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their needs, guides them in their principal affairs….

The sovereign extends its arms about the society as a whole; it covers its surface with a network of petty regulations—complicated, minute, and uniform—through which even the most original minds and the most vigorous souls know not how to make their way … it does not break wills; it softens them, bends them, and directs them; rarely does it force one to act, but it constantly opposes itself to one’s acting on one’s own … it does not tyrannize, it gets in the way: it curtails, it enervates, it extinguishes, it stupefies, and finally reduces each nation to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.

Welcome to 2011.  How did he know?  He wrote this in his famous work, Of Democracy in America.  Why is this not required reading for every American school child?  Anwer:  Because educated, thinking, freedom-loving citizens are antithetical to the Number One goal of the political class, which is to consolidate political power, that’s why.

Last week, George Will (perhaps channeling his inner Tocqueville) wrote an excellent column, Choking on ObamaCare:

Time was, American businesses could surmount such regulatory officiousness. But government’s metabolic urge to boss people around has grown exponentially and today CKE’s California restaurants are governed by 57 categories of regulations.  (Click here for entire column.)

How did Tocqueville know?

BTW, we picked up the Tocqueville quote from Mark Steyn’s excellent new book, After America.

Newt Gingrich recalls Christmas Day 1776.

This Country was created by people who were willing to say “Victory or Death” while marching in berlap bags [on their feet, instead of shoes] in the middle of a snowstorm.  We are going to have to …

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qtjfMjjce2Y

As true today as it was 30 years ago.

For all you younger people out there, Phil Donahue was a left-wing TV talk show host back in the 1970s and 80s, before the Americans discovered AM talk radio.  Of course, there were no conservative voices on TV.

I recall Donahue often being a much more argumentative sort than is shown in this clip, kind of like a left-wing version of Sean Hannity.  In fact, my disdain for gotcha interview techniques, from either the left or from the Americans, dates back to The Donahue Show.  However, this interview appears to be one of the few times he actually let his conservative guest speak.

Milton Friedman was a great American.

Occupy Wall Street is just like the Tea Party, right?  Perhaps there are a few minor differences, some of which are summarized in the video below.  For more on flag desecration of the American flag, see photos here: warning, graphic images.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gi93UDT_IUs

Great article on Herman Cain, GOP presidential candidate who’s been in the news lately.  He was born in Memphis and grew up in Georgia.  In college, he studied math and computer science.  He became the CEO of Godfather’s Pizza, and after that, a syndiated columnist and radio talk-show host.

From an article about Mr. Cain (here):

Cain credits his success to a high-school math teacher, Charles Johnson, who told him, “You can be whatever you want to be; you just might have to work a little harder and work a little longer.”

Charles Johnson is a real American hero.

Compare the education Herman Cain got from Mr. Johnson to the education inflicted on so many of our young people by the American left:  blame others for your failures, look to government for solutions, demand that others pay for your every need.  If you want to see the damage that this kind of thinking does to people, look no further than the OWS debacle.

I can’t find the exact quotation, but I read recently that people who blame others for their failures actually give away their only chance for success.  Anybody see that?

In a recent post, FAB wondered if the riots that started in Europe would spread to the United States.  We’re finding out.  What we are seeing in the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) mob is exactly what Ann Coulter talked about in her new book, Demonic: How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering America.  To really understand OWS, you should read Ms. Coulter’s book.

OWS mobsters can’t articulate any coherent justification for their “movement,”  other than their entitlement to OPS (other people’s stuff).  They rail against corporate America, but they communicate on i-pods and cell phones manufactured by American corporations.  Ann Coulter wrote:

George Will noted another incoherency, that Washington is too corrupt, but it should be given more power to control our lives. Citing the kind of corruption that would be promoted even more aggressively if the OWS mob gets its way:

[The Obama administration’s Solyndra episode of crony capitalism] does not validate progressivism’s indignation, it refutes progressivism’s aspiration, which is for more minute government supervision of society. Solyndra got to the government trough with the help of a former bundler of Obama campaign contributions who was an Energy Department bureaucrat helping to dispense taxpayers’ money to politically favored companies. His wife’s law firm represented Solyndra. But, then, government of the sort progressives demand — supposed “experts,” wiser than the market, allocating wealth and opportunity by supposedly disinterested decisions — is not just susceptible to corruption, it is corruption.

The list of OWS demands proves that nothing is too extravagant for the people who don’t have to pay for it:

… a “guaranteed living wage income regardless of employment”; a $20-an-hour minimum wage (above the $16 entry wage the United Auto Workers just negotiated with GM); ending “the fossil fuel economy”; “open borders” so “anyone can travel anywhere to work and live”; $1 trillion for infrastructure; $1 trillion for “ecological restoration” (e.g., re-establishing “the natural flow of river systems”); “free college education.”

And forgiveness of “all debt on the entire planet period.” Progressivism’s battle cry is: “Mulligan!” It demands the ultimate entitlement — emancipation from the ruinous results of all prior claims of entitlement.

Mark Steyn summed it up quite well:

[The] “occupy” movement has no real solutions, except more government, more spending, more regulation, more bureaucracy, more unsustainable, lethargic pseudo university with no return on investment, more more more of what got us into this hole.

Desperate for something to give energy to their upcoming 2012 election campaign, the Democrats have embraced OWS and have encouraged its continuation and growth.  This is too good to be true.  Looks like the Dems have created their very own Tar-Baby, but unlike Br’er Rabbit, they are eager to embrace it, not fight it.

The best outcome possible is that the OWS continues to expose itself and the American Left (i.e., the Democratic party) for what it truly is, an angry mob who claims entitlement to the fruits of other people’s labor.

From an op-ed piece by Obama supporter David Brooks:

In reality, the top 10 percent of earners pay nearly 70 percent of all income taxes, according to the IRS.  People in the richest 1 percent pay 31 percent of their income to the federal government while the average worker pays less than 14 percent, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

If you ever wondered which side of the fence you sit on, this is a great test!

If a Conservative doesn’t like guns, he doesn’t buy one.
If a Liberal doesn’t like guns, he wants all guns outlawed.

If a Conservative is a vegetarian, he doesn’t eat meat.
If a Liberal is a vegetarian, he wants all meat products banned for everyone.

If a Conservative is homosexual, he quietly leads his life.
If a Liberal is homosexual, he demands legislated respect.

If a Conservative is down-and-out, he thinks about how to better his situation.
A Liberal wonders who is going to take care of him.

If a Conservative doesn’t like a talk show host, he switches channels.
Liberal’s demand that those they don’t like be shut down.

If a Conservative is a non-believer, he doesn’t go to church.
A Liberal non-believer wants any mention of God and religion silenced.

If a Conservative decides he needs health care, he goes about shopping for it, or may choose a job that provides it.
A Liberal demands that the rest of us pay for his.

Actually, I object to the way we use the terms “liberal” and “conservative”.  Historically, the liberals are the people like George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, etc.  They wanted people to be liberated from the shackles of oppressive government.  Today, the think that we conservatives seek to conserve is classical liberalism.

Occasionally, FAB delves provides common-sense commentary on a wide range of important topics.  We’ve mentioned before the toxic effects of excess debt, both private and public.  We’ve also talked about the fact that it’s simply going to take some time to burn that debt off.

Unfortunately, there is no shortage of “experts” who encourage us to go on another spending binge at the expense of our children.  (What we’re actually buying is votes for politicians, but we’ll defer that discussion for now.)  These people are often called “Keynesian,” after early 20th-Century economist John Maynard Keynes.

We’ve always believed that (what we thought was) Keynesian economics had many problems.  First of all, it stimulates consumption, not production.  Consumption of consumer trinkets isn’t as beneficial to our economy’s long-term health as is investment in productive capacity and the creation of jobs.  Second, since many of our consumer trinkets actually come from overseas, we might just as easily be stimulating somebody else’s economy instead our own.  Third, it just hasn’t ever seemed to work in our lifetimes.

More recently, we’ve been asking ourselves, “Would Keynes really advocate borrowing trillions of dollars from the Chinese for our children to pay back?”  As it turns out, maybe not.  Here are a couple of well-written articles that explain why Keynes would never have approved of the folly and deceipt being committed by modern politicians in his name:

• One reason why Keynesian stimuli aren’t working: They aren’t Keynesian
• And now a world from a job creator

We’ve all seen the rioting in the UK, Greece, Italy, and France.  We have to wonder if it can happen here.  If the Left has successfully created in our youth an entitlement culture and a predisposition for mob-like behavior, then the answer is “probably so.”

To really understand the mob mentality, read Ann Coulter’s book, Deomonic: How the Liberal Mob is Endangering America.  You don’t have to be a Coulter fan to learn a lot from this book.  She begins with a detailed analysis of the French Revolution, drawing heavily on Gustave Le Bon’s 1896 book, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind.

Le Bon — a French physician, scientist, and social psychologist — was the first to identify the phenomenon of mass psychology.  His ground breaking book The Crowd paints a disturbing picture of the behavior of mobs.  Adolph Hitler and Benito Mussolini used his book to learn how to incite a mob.  Our liberals could have been Le Bon’s study subjects.

She goes on to identify the mob-like behaviors of the modern liberal/progressive:

[L]iberals thrive on jargon as a substitute for thought.  According to Le Bon, the more dramatic and devoid of logic a chant is, the better it works to rile up a mob:  “Given to exaggeration in its feelings, a crowd is only impressed by excessive sentiments. … To exaggerate … and never to attempt to prove anything by reasoning are methods of argument well known …”

Liberals love slogans because “laws of logic have no action on crowds.”  Mobs, Le Bon says, “are not to be influenced by reasoning, and can only comprehend rough-and-ready association of ideas.”  He could be referring to the New York Times and other journals of elite opinion when he describes periodicals that “manufacture opinions for their readers and supply them with ready-made phrases which dispense them of the trouble of reasoning.”

To see what happens when a people abandon logic and reasoning, take a look at the riots going on in the UK.  Listen to the words of these young mobsters who blame the riots on “conservatives” and “rich people”:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0pblS1DuBU

There’s no logic to it.  But there is a lesson for the rest of us.  It really doesn’t matter how much wealth you confiscate from the producers and give to the looters and moochers, it’s never enough.

You can hear these young people blaming the producers — the very people who pay for their educations, health care benefits, and Lord knows what else — for the rioting.  It makes no sense.  It’s just like hearing liberals/progressives blaming taxpayers for the debt crisis here.  It doesn’t matter how much the taxpayers provide, it’s never enough.  The takers want more and more and more.  If they don’t get it, watch out!

Although several factors have been identified as contributing to the UK rioting, the sense of entitlement to OPS (other people’s stuff) is a major one.  From the Wall Street Journal:

The rioters in the news last week had a thwarted sense of entitlement that has been assiduously cultivated by an alliance of intellectuals, governments and bureaucrats. “We’re fed up with being broke,” one rioter was reported as having said, as if having enough money to satisfy one’s desires were a human right rather than something to be earned.

“There are people here with nothing,” this rioter continued: nothing, that is, except an education that has cost $80,000, a roof over their head, clothes on their back and shoes on their feet, food in their stomachs, a cellphone, a flat-screen TV, a refrigerator, an electric stove, heating and lighting, hot and cold running water, a guaranteed income, free medical care, and all of the same for any of the children that they might care to propagate.

According to Reuters:

“It’s been building up for years.  All it needed was a spark,” said E. Nan, a young man in a baseball cap surrounded by other youths in Hackney in east London.  “We ain’t got no jobs, no money … We heard that other people were getting things for free, so why not us?”

Consider this essay by Max Hastings entitled “Years of liberal dogma have spawned a generation of amoral, uneducated, welfare dependent, brutalised youngsters.”  In this piece, he asks who is to blame for the rioting, and then he answers:

The breakdown of families, the pernicious promotion of single motherhood as a desirable state, the decline of domestic life so that even shared meals are a rarity, have all contributed importantly to the condition of the young underclass.

The social engineering industry unites to claim that the conventional template of family life is no longer valid.

***

This has ultimately been sanctioned by Parliament, which refuses to accept, for instance, that children are more likely to prosper with two parents than with one, and that the dependency culture is a tragedy for those who receive something for nothing.

He concludes:

So there we have it: a large, amoral, brutalised sub-culture of young British people who lack education because they have no will to learn, and skills which might make them employable.  They are too idle to accept work waitressing or doing domestic labour, which is why almost all such jobs are filled by immigrants.

They have no code of values to dissuade them from behaving anti-socially or, indeed, criminally, and small chance of being punished if they do so.

They have no sense of responsibility for themselves, far less towards others, and look to no future beyond the next meal, sexual encounter or TV football game.

They are an absolute deadweight upon society, because they contribute nothing yet cost the taxpayer billions.  Liberal opinion holds they are victims, because society has failed to provide them with opportunities to develop their potential.

Most of us would say this is nonsense.  Rather, they are victims of a perverted social ethos, which elevates personal freedom to an absolute, and denies the underclass the discipline — tough love — which alone might enable some of its members to escape from the swamp of dependency in which they live.

Only education — together with politicians, judges, policemen and teachers with the courage to force feral humans to obey rules the rest of us have accepted all our lives — can provide a way forward and a way out for these people.

There it is, the liberal mob in action.  And the entitlement mentality that infects the UK is threatening to engulf our own society.  Unless we work and pray and work to stop it.

Marco Rubio, the next Vice-President of the United States, is a rising star in American politics because he can see the important issues of the day with clarity and talk about them with conviction.  His clarity of thought and power of oratory are nothing like we’ve seen since Ronald Reagan.

On the floor of the US Senate, he laid out the terms of the debate that will dominate the years ahead.  It’s a debate between two very different visions for America’s future:

1. The job of government is to deliver economic “justice”, where the government makes sure that everyone does well.
2. The job of government is to protect economic opportunity, where the government doesn’t guarantee the outcome, but preserves your opportunity to fulfill your dreams and hopes.

He makes one mistake in his analysis.  He says that neither vision is more moral than the other.  He is mistaken about this.  Where is the morality in the government deciding who gets what?  More to the point, where is the morality in professional politicians and bureacrats deciding who gets what?  Here’s what politicians and bureaucrats do: they take money away from the people who won’t vote for them and give it to the people who will.  Where is the morality in organized thievery?

Other than that, Senator Rubio is right on target:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-nj2H7ALzg

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Did you hear what our Senator Corker said on TV this morning.  It was one of the most astonishing things I had ever heard any legislator say.

He was asked, “So, you’ll vote yes for it, right?”  His stunning response:

I would like to at least read the 70 pages [before I decide how to vote].

We are not making this up.  See for yourself … click here.  We thought you were supposed to pass a bill before you can find out what’s in it!

Great article by Rich Lowry, editor of the National Review.

Both sides, then, tend to misunderstand the well-springs of Reagan’s achievement. Having grand goals is easy, if you don’t care much about reaching them. Cutting deals is easy, if you don’t care much about where they take you. Knowing how to accommodate reality, when to give way and when to stand firm, while never deviating from your ultimate purposes, is the stuff of statesmanship.

Click here for entire piece.

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Great column out today by Michael Barone.  He nailed it when he pinpointed the main culprit behind the skyrocketing cost of college education:

Between 1975 and 2008, the number of faculty rose by 3 percent, to 12,019 positions. During those same years, the number of administrators rose 221 percent, to 12,183. That’s right: There are more administrators than teachers at Cal State now.

These people get paid to “liaise” and “facilitate” and produce reports on diversity. How that benefits Cal State students or California taxpayers is unclear.

It is often said that American colleges and universities are the best in the world. That’s undoubtedly true in the hard sciences.

But in the humanities and to a lesser extent in the social sciences, there’s a lot of garbage. Is a degree in religious and women’s studies worth $100,000 in student loan debt? Probably not.

Just like the housing market, college prices are being bid up and up and up, in many cases out of proportion to the actual value of the product.  Like the housing market,  you can trace this hyperinflation to a number of factors:

• the notion that having it is a fundamental right for everyone,
• the influx of public money to pay for people to attend college, with no regard to whether the degree sought is of any value or not,
• the increased reliance on debt-financed dollars to pay costs for (a) necessities that previosuly were paid for out of family resources, and (b) luxuries that were previously done without.
• the tendency of universities to find heretofore unknown “needs” for all this money, including departments and VPs of Diversity who do nothing to make the campus more diverse—at most colleges, diversity means the full range of political expression, from the far left to the extreme far left—LGBT indoctrination programs, etc.

Individuals have no choice to pay the inflated prices, because they must operate in a market that is dominated by government- and debt-financed dollars that have bid up the prices way out of proportion to the market.

Click here to see the rest of Barone’s article.

Let me get this straight …

• We’re going to be “given” a health care plan
• that we are forced to purchase,
• and are fined if we don’t,
• which purportedly covers at least ten million more people,
• without adding a single new doctor,
• but provides for 16,000 new IRS agents,
• was written by a committee whose chairman says he doesn’t understand it,
• passed by a Congress that didn’t read it,
• but exempted themselves from it,
• signed by a President who smokes,
• with funding administered by a treasury chief who didn’t pay his taxes,
• for which we’ll be taxed for four years before any benefits take effect,
• by a government which has already bankrupted Social Security and Medicare,
• and financed by a country that’s broke!!!!!

What the hell could possibly go wrong?