We should choose freedom. Why would people want to do otherwise, unless they’re power hungry despots or freeloading low-lifes.

Great comments, howardroarke! Actually, they’d make a great posting on RochesterConservative. Really, I wish you would post your commentaries here and you have my invitation. I’ll set you up with author privileges.

Those notions reek of arrogance on their part, as if to imply that if it weren’t for somebody agitating/advocating on our behalf, that WE the PEOPLE would not have what we have, today. Which is a lie. They, the looters, love to take credit for the unearned, and they love to pick at the spoils, like raptors.

American textbooks are written by socialists hell bent on obfuscating our industrial beginnings, particularly in the area of the original tycoons of industry, the majority of whom did not fit the convenient mold the “progressives” have made for them. The mold is one of “taking advantage” of workers, etc., which certainly did happen in some cases, hell, it happens today. Yet in most cases people were happy to have a job which paid for their labor, commensurate with their skill level, “whatever the market will bear”. Yes, children worked in some factories, yet if they had not worked at all they would have starved. Compare this with places like Africa in 2009, and I think it puts things into perspective.

Capitalism flourished in the industrial North, until unions and special interests started picking at the spoils. The feudal South didn’t stand a chance, and with that economic “system within a system”, here in the South, these states didn’t stand a chance, until Jim Crow laws were repealed and capitalism was allowed to flourish. The money was no longer controlled by the few, it was in the hands of the many, and wasn’t broken down along racial or special interest lines, either. Which is why the South continues to grow.

My own great uncle Tom took over the family farm when he was 13, after his father died back in the 20′s. Life expectancy was a joke until the Second Industrial Revolution, yet it took another generation or two for it to break age 70 or so. By the time Tom died he and his siblings had all lived into their 80′s, in fact my grandmother, even with her diabetes, lived to be 89, and my grandfather on my dad’s side lived to be 89 after not having taken care of himself much during a 20-25 yr. period. He willed himself to death after all his friends had died, in fact he outlived all of his siblings. His own parents died within 6 months of each other during the flu epidemic of 1919, and they were most likely under 40 years of age.

So, tell me, Michael Moore with all 8 of your brain cells, is it Capitalism we need or slavery? Life expectancy and even birth rates are horrid in places like Russia, where Communism once ruled. 20 years after the Berlin Wall came down, Russia is a mostly miserable place, with high rates of severe alcoholism, drug addiction, suicide, etc. I guess all those 5 year plans (financed with American dollars, BTW), didn’t amount to a hill of beans.

As Ayn Rand once said, “Do we want heaven on Earth now, or when we’re 6 feet under in our graves?”, or something to that effect, meaning, should we allow altruism to rule our daily lives, and make our lives harder and less meaningful, or should we allow ourselves to live as free people under a free system of economics? Should we sacrifice and claim “we’re our brother’s keepers”? One Mike Wallace interview of Rand from 1959 is downright chilling, as he posed that very question to her, 20+ years after the New Deal was signed into law. In 2008, Barack Hussein Obama, Jr., was proclaiming, “I am my brother’s keeper!”, to cheering and adulating crowds all across the United States.

Chilling, indeed.

“It only stands to reason that where there’s sacrifice, there’s someone collecting the sacrificial offerings. Where there’s service, there is someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice is speaking of slaves and masters, and intends to be the master.”

-Ayn Rand

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As global markets have replaced local or regional ones, as well as brought new players into the fold, Keyenesian-type economics has pretty much melted away, and naturally will as a progression of sorts when controls are lifted and the markets are set free. Reagan understood this, as well as Thatcher and others in the West. Economics in and of itself can be used not only as a tool but as a weapon, yet with free markets governments are less apt to beat the drums of war, since those markets are all about wealth creation. Free markets should naturally coincide with greater freedoms for the individuals involved, right down to the local level, in fact one could argue that free markets naturally enable individuals and groups of folks to gain more freedom as they become more wealthy (working and middle classes vs. impoverished masses).

The United States was the model for this into the early 20th C., but, unfortunately, no more. Our economic dominance after WW II was largely artificial, in a way, since so much of the industrialized world had been flattened by war (see videos of W. Edwards Deming on YouTube for reference).

I enjoy watching those videos of Friedman and Ayn Rand, from the late 70′s. Rand was great at putting these concepts into plain English, while Friedman and others had the theory down pat, for sure, and even they could put a lot into plain English for the average person to understand.

‘Course lefties like Moore and Donahue can’t wrap their minds around how an economy can flourish with LESS controls, but, I guess we live in an Oprah and Michelle O. world, now.

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