Why do some children adore their dads and others hate their dads? What’s the difference in dads? I’ve observed dads, and there’s one characteristic I’ve found in almost all dads whose children love and follow them. I’m going to tell you what that characteristic is in a moment.
Sometimes children are caught up in the mistakes and mindset of fathers who won’t do what they should to guide those children into a safe, secure haven. Their own pride and arrogance make shipwreck both of their own lives and their children’s. It doesn’t have to be this way.
The book of Proverbs is a veritable owner’s manual on how to raise a wise child. In large part, that’s why the book was written. From the first chapter, it says:
2To know wisdom and instruction, to perceive the words of understanding; 3To receive the instruction of wisdom, justice, and judgment and equity. 4To give subtlety to the simple and to the young man, knowledge and discretion. 5A wise man will hear and will increase learning and a man of understanding shall attain unto wise counsels… 20Wisdom crieth without, she uttereth her voice in the streets. 21She crieth in the chief place of the concourse in the opening of the gates. In the city she uttereth her words saying, 22“How long ye simple ones, will ye love simplicity? And scorners delight in their scorning and fools hate knowledge?” (Proverbs 1)
Underscore three words in this passage: simple, scorners, and fools. A child isn’t born a scorner or a fool. Verse 22 reveals there’s a long road in the evolution of a fool.
THE IGNORANCE OF THE SIMPLE
The word “simple” in verse 22 means open and naïve; children’ minds and hearts are plastic—easily shaped, innocent.
They lack understanding. 22“How long ye simple ones will ye love simplicity?” There comes a time when the child must be guided out of his simplicity and into wisdom and maturity.
They are easily led into error. A child is an easy target for Madison Avenue, MTV, false religions, and sinful friends. Because they’re so open, they’ll believe anything. They’re like a sponge, you can trick them, flim-flam them, but they’re living in constant danger. “The simple believeth every word…” (14:15). “A prudent man forseeth the evil, and hideth himself: but the simple pass on and are punished” (22:3). The simple thinks he’s indestructible, never weighing the future, easy to lead to the slaughter.
THE DEFIANCE OF THE SCORNER
The scorner, however, has gone a step farther. Heads up, dads. If not guided by dad and mom, they take the next step down—they become the scorner. They get their jollies from being the teenage smart aleck, the cynic in business, the mocker at the university. It breaks my heart to say it, but most teenagers in America are now scorners.
They defy instruction because “scornersdelight in their scorning” (1:22) “A wise son heareth his father’s instruction, but a scorner heareth not rebuke (13:1). A scorner will fire back at you (9:8). They won’t listen. It’s like talking to a brick wall—they’ll tune you out.
They despise the good and godly. “A scorner loveth not the one that reproveth him” (15:12). They’ll never come and say, “Dad, I need help. Will you help me out?” When you try to correct the scorner, they’ll look at you and say with their eyes, “I hate your guts.”
They’re destined for destruction. “Whoso despiseth the Word shall be destroyed” (13:13). If they laugh at the Word of God, they may laugh their way right into Hell. The scorner isvery hard to reach, but there is yet hope; they can still be reclaimed.
THE DESTRUCTION OF THE FOOL
First there was the simple—naive, open, and carefree. But if he’s not taught, he becomes the scorner. Then the scorner becomes a fool. The scorner is insolent, but the fool is immovable— rebellious, arrogant, and wicked.
The fool rejects wisdom. 22“And fools hate knowledge.” “The heart of him that hath understanding seeketh knowledge, but the mouth of fools feedeth on foolishness” (15:14).
He ridicules righteousness. “Fools make a mock at sin” (14:9). This is why we have sitcoms that laugh at drunkenness, glorify adultery, mock marriage, promote homosexuality and relish perversion. Who does that? Fools.
He rejoices in iniquity. “Folly is a joy to him that is destitute of wisdom” (15:20-21). His moral sense has been so perverted, he calls good evil and evil good. His heart is hardened, conscience seared, mind defiled.
He rejects reproof. “Whom the Father loves, He chastens and scourges every son whom He receiveth.” God will chasten those who are His own, but “A reproof entereth more into a wise man than a hundred stripes into a fool” (17:10).Trying to reprove the fool will get you nowhere. Don’t even try. He won’t hear you. He is intransigent. If he were wise, when God chastised him, he would repent.
God gives us little children who begin life “simple”—innocent and open. But if you’re not careful, society will turn them into a smart aleck. If they’re not rescued, dad, when they becomes scorners or smart alecks, they’ll become fools. The fool is on the fast-track for Hell.
We are in serious trouble in America. In 1962, prayer in public schools was declared unconstitutional. In 1963, Bible reading in schools was deemed “unconstitutional” but the killing of pre-born children somehow became (1973) a Constitutional “right.” Then (1980) the Ten Commandments posted on school walls must be removed because—they said—“The child might be tempted to emulate them.”
Secular humanists have proven to be great strategists. They found the one segment of life almost every child will pass through—public education—and targeted it to become their “Sunday School” for humanist philosophy. To do that, they had to purge out any vestige of Christian influence.
To not to raise a fool, what can you do? With everything in modern culture fighting against you, you must gear up for this battle, dads.
1. Expound truth. Saturate them in the Proverbs. Emblazon the Ten Commandments onto their consciousness. Teach them the Beatitudes, that they might learn these simple, basic truths. The battle is for the mind. As the child thinks, so is he.
It’s your God-given responsibility (see Deuteronomy 6:6-9) is to teach these commandments to your sons and grandsons that your family will survive and your home endure.
2.Expose sin. The simple will learn by example when they see discipline falling upon the scorner. Children need to see what happens when sin is exposed and consequences are suffered. “When the scorner is punished, the simple is made wise” (21:11). The worst thing would be for your child to live in a sinful society where he never sees the repercussions of sin. Our children today are insulated; often they don’t see the result of sin. You need to help them understand. Don’t only expound truth, but expose sin. Take him down to skid row. Take him to the prisons. Let him see the end result of bad choices. “Smite a scorner, and the simple will beware” (Proverbs 19:25). They will learn. He thinks he’s indestructible. He does not know. You need to pull back the veil.
3. Expel scorners. Do not let your children hang around with scorners and fools. Just don’t do it. Help him select his friends. That means you may have to be firm and cast out the scorner. Why? Impressionable children will succumb to peer pressure.
Open up your house to your child’s friends. Make your home the headquarters for happiness. And while they’re there, you can monitor those friends. Peer pressure is not bad if the peers are good. If there’s a scorner, a smart aleck, or a fool, you say, “Son, there’s the sidewalk.” “Cast out the scorner and contention shall go out. Yea, strife and reproach shall cease.” (22:10). Moms and dads, underscore this: “He that walketh with wise men shall be wise. But a companion of fools shall be destroyed” (13 20).
4. Express love. Love your children! Delight in them. “For whom the Lord loveth He correcteth, even as a father the son in whom he delighteth” (3:12). Be positive! Don’t be negative. Words can hurt your children more than a slap in the face. Learn to listen. Try to see life from their point of view. They’re facing things you never faced.
5. Be gentle. This is that one characteristic I mentioned at the beginning, which I’ve seen in all dads whose children love and follow them: They are gentle. That’s what children want out of their dad. Yes, they want a dad they can look up to, who’s the strongest, wisest, smartest, fastest, best dad in the world…but they want him to be gentle! Touch them, hug them, give them non-verbal affection.
6. Be transparent. Let them know your fears, joys, disappointments, failures, and goals. They already know you’re not perfect; they don’t want you to be a phony.
7. Be available. Make it a priority that you’re going to be available to your child.
You say, “Pastor Rogers, very frankly, I’m not adequate.”
I know—I’m not either. None of us has what it takes to be this kind of dad or mom. That’s the reason we need Jesus isn’t it? We’ve got to have Christ in our hearts! Because the Christian life is not difficult, it’s impossible. Only one can do it, and that’s Jesus. But He will do it inus and through us if we’ll let Him. The best thing you can do for your children is to love God will all your heart. Give your heart to Jesus.
Ecclesiastes 8-10 | Still Searching After All These Years Published on Oct 9, 2012 Calvary Chapel Spring Valley | Sunday Evening | October 7, 2012 | Pastor Derek Neider _______________________ Ecclesiastes 11-12 | Solomon Finds His Way Published on Oct 30, 2012 Calvary Chapel Spring Valley | Sunday Evening | October 28, 2012 | Pastor Derek Neider […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Current Events | Edit | Comments (0)
Over and over in Proverbs you hear the words “fear the Lord.” In fact, some of he references are Proverbs 1:7, 29; 2:5; 8:13; 9:10;14:26,27; 15:16 and many more. Below is a sermon by John MacArthur from the Book of Luke on 3 reasons we should fear the Lord. (I have posted John MacArthur’s amazing […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Adrian Rogers, Current Events | Edit | Comments (0)
Over and over in Proverbs you hear the words “fear the Lord.” In fact, some of he references are Proverbs 1:7, 29; 2:5; 8:13; 9:10;14:26,27; 15:16 and many more. Below is a sermon by John MacArthur from the Book of Luke on 3 reasons we should fear the Lord. (I have posted John MacArthur’s amazing […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Adrian Rogers, Current Events | Edit | Comments (0)
Over and over in Proverbs you hear the words “fear the Lord.” In fact, some of he references are Proverbs 1:7, 29; 2:5; 8:13; 9:10;14:26,27; 15:16 and many more. Below is a sermon by John MacArthur from the Book of Luke on 3 reasons we should fear the Lord. (I have posted John MacArthur’s amazing […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Adrian Rogers, Current Events | Edit | Comments (0)
Over and over in Proverbs you hear the words “fear the Lord.” In fact, some of he references are Proverbs 1:7, 29; 2:5; 8:13; 9:10;14:26,27; 15:16 and many more. Below is a sermon by John MacArthur from the Book of Luke on 3 reasons we should fear the Lord. (I have posted John MacArthur’s amazing […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Adrian Rogers, Current Events | Edit | Comments (0)
Over and over in Proverbs you hear the words “fear the Lord.” In fact, some of he references are Proverbs 1:7, 29; 2:5; 8:13; 9:10;14:26,27; 15:16 and many more. Below is a sermon by John MacArthur from the Book of Luke on 3 reasons we should fear the Lord. (I have posted John MacArthur’s amazing […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Adrian Rogers, Current Events | Tagged Gene Bartow, John Wooden | Edit | Comments (0)
Over and over in Proverbs you hear the words “fear the Lord.” In fact, some of he references are Proverbs 1:7, 29; 2:5; 8:13; 9:10;14:26,27; 15:16 and many more. Below is a sermon by John MacArthur from the Book of Luke on 3 reasons we should fear the Lord. (I have posted John MacArthur’s amazing […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Adrian Rogers, Current Events | Edit | Comments (0)
Over and over in Proverbs you hear the words “fear the Lord.” In fact, some of he references are Proverbs 1:7, 29; 2:5; 8:13; 9:10;14:26,27; 15:16 and many more. Below is a sermon by John MacArthur from the Book of Luke on 3 reasons we should fear the Lord. (I have posted John MacArthur’s amazing […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Adrian Rogers, Current Events | Edit | Comments (0)
Over and over in Proverbs you hear the words “fear the Lord.” In fact, some of he references are Proverbs 1:7, 29; 2:5; 8:13; 9:10;14:26,27; 15:16 and many more. Below is a sermon by John MacArthur from the Book of Luke on 3 reasons we should fear the Lord. It is tough to guard your […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Adrian Rogers, Current Events | Edit | Comments (0)
Over and over in Proverbs you hear the words “fear the Lord.” In fact, some of he references are Proverbs 1:7, 29; 2:5; 8:13; 9:10;14:26,27; 15:16 and many more. Below is a sermon by John MacArthur from the Book of Luke on 3 reasons we should fear the Lord. What does it mean to fear […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Current Events, Uncategorized | Edit | Comments (0)
Ecclesiastes 6-8 | Solomon Turns Over a New Leaf Published on Oct 2, 2012 Calvary Chapel Spring Valley | Sunday Evening | September 30, 2012 | Pastor Derek Neider _____________________ I have written on the Book of Ecclesiastes and the subject of the meaning of our lives on several occasions on this blog. In this series on Ecclesiastes I […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Current Events | Edit | Comments (0)
Ecclesiastes 1 Published on Sep 4, 2012 Calvary Chapel Spring Valley | Sunday Evening | September 2, 2012 | Pastor Derek Neider _____________________ I have written on the Book of Ecclesiastes and the subject of the meaning of our lives on several occasions on this blog. In this series on Ecclesiastes I hope to show how […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Current Events | Edit | Comments (0)
Ecclesiastes 1 Published on Sep 4, 2012 Calvary Chapel Spring Valley | Sunday Evening | September 2, 2012 | Pastor Derek Neider _____________________ I have written on the Book of Ecclesiastes and the subject of the meaning of our lives on several occasions on this blog. In this series on Ecclesiastes I hope to show how […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Current Events | Edit | Comments (0)
Ecclesiastes 8-10 | Still Searching After All These Years Published on Oct 9, 2012 Calvary Chapel Spring Valley | Sunday Evening | October 7, 2012 | Pastor Derek Neider _______________________ Ecclesiastes 11-12 | Solomon Finds His Way Published on Oct 30, 2012 Calvary Chapel Spring Valley | Sunday Evening | October 28, 2012 | Pastor Derek Neider […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Current Events | Edit | Comments (0)
Ecclesiastes 6-8 | Solomon Turns Over a New Leaf Published on Oct 2, 2012 Calvary Chapel Spring Valley | Sunday Evening | September 30, 2012 | Pastor Derek Neider _____________________ I have written on the Book of Ecclesiastes and the subject of the meaning of our lives on several occasions on this blog. In this series […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Current Events | Edit | Comments (0)
Ecclesiastes 4-6 | Solomon’s Dissatisfaction Published on Sep 24, 2012 Calvary Chapel Spring Valley | Sunday Evening | September 23, 2012 | Pastor Derek Neider ___________________ I have written on the Book of Ecclesiastes and the subject of the meaning of our lives on several occasions on this blog. In this series on Ecclesiastes I hope […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Current Events | Edit | Comments (0)
Ecclesiastes 8-10 | Still Searching After All These Years Published on Oct 9, 2012 Calvary Chapel Spring Valley | Sunday Evening | October 7, 2012 | Pastor Derek Neider _______________________ Ecclesiastes 11-12 | Solomon Finds His Way Published on Oct 30, 2012 Calvary Chapel Spring Valley | Sunday Evening | October 28, 2012 | Pastor Derek Neider […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Current Events | Edit | Comments (0)
Ecclesiastes 8-10 | Still Searching After All These Years Published on Oct 9, 2012 Calvary Chapel Spring Valley | Sunday Evening | October 7, 2012 | Pastor Derek Neider _______________________ Ecclesiastes 11-12 | Solomon Finds His Way Published on Oct 30, 2012 Calvary Chapel Spring Valley | Sunday Evening | October 28, 2012 | Pastor Derek Neider […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Current Events | Edit | Comments (0)
Tom Brady “More than this…” Uploaded by EdenWorshipCenter on Jan 22, 2008 EWC sermon illustration showing a clip from the 2005 Tom Brady 60 minutes interview. _______________________ Tom Brady ESPN Interview Tom Brady has famous wife earned over 76 million dollars last year. However, has Brady found lasting satifaction in his life? It does not […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Current Events | Edit | Comments (0)
Adrian Rogers: How to Be a Child of a Happy Mother Published on Nov 13, 2012 Series: Fortifying Your Family (To read along turn on the annotations.) Adrian Rogers looks at the 5th commandment and the relationship of motherhood in the commandment to honor your father and mother, because the faith that doesn’t begin at home, […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Adrian Rogers, Current Events | Edit | Comments (0)
Ecclesiastes 1 Published on Sep 4, 2012 Calvary Chapel Spring Valley | Sunday Evening | September 2, 2012 | Pastor Derek Neider _____________________ I have written on the Book of Ecclesiastes and the subject of the meaning of our lives on several occasions on this blog. In this series on Ecclesiastes I hope to show how secular humanist man […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Current Events | Edit | Comments (0)
Adrian Rogers – How to Cultivate a Marriage Another great article from Adrian Rogers. Are fathers necessary? “Artificial insemination is the ideal method of producing a pregnancy, and a lesbian partner should have the same parenting rights accorded historically to biological fathers.” Quoted from the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women, summer of 1995. […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Adrian Rogers, Current Events | Edit | Comments (0)
Tom Brady “More than this…” Uploaded by EdenWorshipCenter on Jan 22, 2008 EWC sermon illustration showing a clip from the 2005 Tom Brady 60 minutes interview. To Download this video copy the URL to http://www.vixy.net ________________ Obviously from the video clip above, Tom Brady has realized that even though he has won many Super Bowls […]
So you can understand why I get upset when the rich and powerful use the coercive power of government to line their pockets at the expense of ordinary taxpayers.
Now I have a new reason to be angry.
Reporting for the New York Times, Neil MacFarquhar describes a scandal involving Mississippi bigwigs feeding at the public trough.
John Davis, who served as executive director of the Mississippi Department of Human Services under former Gov. Phil Bryant, pleaded guilty to both federal and state charges of embezzling federal welfare funds. Millions of dollars were transferred to friends and relatives, court documents say. According to a lawsuit filed by the state in May, around $5 million was diverted to Ted DiBiase, a flamboyant retired wrestler once known as “The Million Dollar Man,” and two of his sons…Much of the money went to fictitious services, bogus jobs, first-class travel arrangements and even one son’s stay at a luxury rehab center in Malibu, Calif., that cost $160,000, the suit claims. Similarly, the state claims that Marcus Dupree, a former high school football phenom and professional running back, who was paid to act as a celebrity endorser and motivational speaker, did not perform any contractual services toward the $371,000 he received to purchase and live in a sprawling residence with a swimming pool and adjacent horse pastures in a gated community. Mr. Favre, who earned more than $140 million in his Hall of Fame career, was paid $1.1 million for speeches he never gave, the suit said. He also orchestrated more than $2 million in government funds being channeled to a biotechnology start-up in which he had invested, according to the suit. …The case follows a state audit released in May 2020 suggesting that as much as $94 million of TANF funds might have gone astray.
That’s certainly true, but some of our friends on the left argue that it is also evidence that Bill Clinton’s welfare reform backfired.
Experts said the fraud was rooted in changes enacted in such programs in 1996, when cash benefits paid to poor families were replaced by block grants issued to states.
In a piece for the American Enterprise Institute, Angela Rachidi explains the underlying issues.
A scandal involving former NFL quarterback Brett Favre and the federal welfare program Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) exploded…following new revelations that Mississippi officials, including the former governor, misdirected federal TANF money to enrich themselves, their celebrity friends, and other well-connected individuals. …the scandal draws attention to the TANF program. Critics have partly blamed the welfare reform law from 1996, which created TANF, for allowing such fraud.…Instead of an entitlement where government officials distribute money to all eligible people, TANF is a block grant provided… As awful as this scandal is, the fraud and abuse on display in Mississippi is not unique to TANF and not caused by its block grant structure. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) estimated that from 2015–2017 the annual average amount of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits (or food stamps) “trafficked,” meaning retailers taking a fraudulent profit, was $1.2 billion. The GAO also found that improper payments in Medicaid, including payments for services not provided, totaled $36.7 billion in 2017. Earlier this month, the Department of Justice charged a nonprofit organization in Minnesota with a $250 million scheme that took federal pandemic-relief money earmarked for a child nutrition program and instead pocketed the funds.
In other words, corruption is an inherent part of government programs, whether the money is distributed as block grants or sent directly to recipients.
Ms. Rachidi points out that welfare reform produced good results. I don’t know if it saved money for taxpayers, but it led to progress as measured by variables such as labor force participation and child poverty.
None of this excuses what happened in Mississippi, but the context is important. Welfare reform, which created TANF, transformed a broken entitlement program—Aid to Families with Dependent Children—into a more effective system that gives states flexibility to address the underlying causes of poverty, including limited employment and unmarried parenthood. These reforms have significantly reduced dependence on cash welfare and increased employment among single mothers, which helped dramatically lower child poverty over the past two decades.
The obvious takeaway, as I pointed out back in 2015, is that we should we should be expanding on Bill Clinton’s success by replacing other federal entitlements with block grants.
The federal government maintains a Byzantine maze of redistribution programs, so there are lots of opportunities for progress. Medicaid is an obvious example, along with food stamps. Especially since both programs are riddled with fraud.
But one of the worst things about 2022 may be the reincarnation of a slimmed-down version of Biden’s plan.
Simply stated, the “slimmed-down version” of a terrible piece of legislation is bad news – even if it is possible to envision something even worse.
The Wall Street Journal‘s editorial on the package illustrates why it is bad news that Senator Joe Manchin is trying to rescue Biden’s statist agenda.
As the economy slouches near recession, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin…unveiled a tax-and-spending deal that they call the Inflation Reduction Act.Is their aim to reduce inflation by chilling business investment and the economy? …A more accurate name would be the Business Investment Reduction and Distortion Act since that will be the result of its $433 billion in climate and healthcare spending, and $615 billion in new taxes and drug price-control “savings.”
The editorial highlights four terrible provisions.
First, there’s a big tax hike on American companies, with the biggest tax hike on firms that make new investments.
…the 15% minimum tax on corporate book income…will slam businesses whose taxable income is lower than the profits on their financial statements owing to the likes of investment expensing.
Heavy compliance costs for the business community, of course, but the rest of us probably care more about the estimated loss of 218,000 jobs according to the National Association of Manufacturers.
Second, there are corrupt “green energy” provisions that will degrade America’s energy efficiency and security.
…the bill’s $369 billion in climate spending, most of which is corporate welfare. …All of this will steer private investment into green energy at the cost of reduced investment in fossil fuels. Wind and solar subsidies are already creating distortions in power markets that make the electric grid less reliable and energy more expensive. The expansion of subsidies will compound these problems.
If you want to know why this is bad, just remember Solyndra.
Third, the legislation imposes back-door price controls on the pharmaceutical industry.
The bill will require the Health and Human Services Secretary to “negotiate” Medicare prices—i.e., impose price controls—for dozens of drugs. But the $288 billion in putative savings are fanciful. Manufacturers will hedge potential future losses by launching drugs at higher prices. …The bill will also discourage investment in innovative treatments that could reduce future healthcare spending.
For those of us who value the development of new drugs to fight problems like cancer and Alzheimer’s, this is very bad news.
Speculative revenue of $124 billion will also come from an $80 billion boost for the IRS. Most of this will finance more audits. The rich can afford more tax lawyers, but middle and upper-middle class Americans will be inclined to settle IRS claims, however meritless, lest they spend even more to defend themselves.
P.S. I can’t resist sharing one final bit of information.
If you peruse the Joint Committee on Taxation’s analysis of the bill, you’ll find that Joe Biden is breaking his promise not to raise taxes on people making less than $400,000 per year.
If you take a group of Democrats who are also unionized government employees, and put them in charge of policing political speech, it doesn’t matter how professional and well-intentioned they are. The result will be much like the debacle in the Cincinnati office of the IRS. …there’s no reason to even posit evil intent by the IRS officials who formulated, approved or executed the inappropriate guidelines for picking groups to scrutinize most closely. …The public servants figuring out which groups qualified for 501(c)4 “social welfare” non-profit status were mostly Democrats surrounded by mostly Democrats. …In the 2012 election, every donation traceable to this office went to President Obama or liberal Sen. Sherrod Brown. This is an environment where even those trying to be fair could develop a disproportionate distrust of the Tea Party. One IRS worker — a member of NTEU and contributor to its PAC, which gives 96 percent of its money to Democratic candidates — explained it this way: “The reason NTEU mostly supports Democratic candidates for office is because Democratic candidates are mostly more supportive of civil servants/government employees.”
Tim concludes with a wise observation.
As long as we have a civil service workforce that leans Left, and as long as we have an income tax system that requires the IRS to police political speech, conservative groups can always expect special IRS scrutiny.
The real issue is the expansive, expensive bureaucratic state and its inherent threat to any system of limited government, rule of law, and individual liberty. …the broader the government’s authority, the greater its need for revenue, the wider its enforcement power, the more expansive the bureaucracy’s discretion, the increasingly important the battle for political control, and the more bitter the partisan fight, the more likely government officials will abuse their positions, violate rules, laws, and Constitution, and sacrifice people’s liberties. The blame falls squarely on Congress, not the IRS.
…the denizens of Capitol Hill also have created a tax code marked by outrageous complexity, special interest electioneering, and systematic social engineering. Legislators have intentionally created avenues for tax avoidance to win votes, and then complained about widespread tax avoidance to win votes.
So what’s the answer?
The most obvious response to the scandal — beyond punishing anyone who violated the law — is tax reform. Implement a flat tax and you’d still have an IRS, but the income tax would be less complex, there would be fewer “preferences” for the agency to police, and rates would be lower, leaving taxpayers with less incentive for aggressive tax avoidance. …Failing to address the broader underlying factors also would merely set the stage for a repeat performance in some form a few years hence. …More fundamentally, government, and especially the national government, should do less. Efficient social engineering may be slightly better than inefficient social engineering, but no social engineering would be far better.
But here’s the challenge. We know the solution, but it will be almost impossible to implement good policy unless we figure out some way to restrain the spending side of the fiscal ledger.
___________________________
At the risk of over-simplifying, we will never get tax reform unless we figure out how to implement entitlement reform.
Here’s another Foden cartoon, which I like because it has the same theme asthis Jerry Holbert cartoon, showing big government as a destructive and malicious force.
_____________
Thank you so much for your time. I know how valuable it is. I also appreciate the fine family that you have and your commitment as a father and a husband.
Sincerely,
Everette Hatcher III, 13900 Cottontail Lane, Alexander, AR 72002, ph 501-920-5733, lowcostsqueegees@yahoo.com
We know the IRS commissioner wasn’t telling the truth in March 2012, when he testified: “There’s absolutely no targeting.”However, Lois Lerner knew different when she misled people with those words. Two important points made by Noonan in the Wall Street Journal in the article below: First, only conservative groups were targeted in this scandal by […]
Ohio Liberty Coalition versus the I.R.S. (Tom Zawistowski) Published on May 20, 2013 The Ohio Liberty Coalition was among tea party groups that received special scrutiny from the I.R.S. Tom Zawistowski says his story is not unique. He argues the kinds of questions the I.R.S. asked his group amounts to little more than “opposition research.” Video […]
Francis Schaeffer: “Whatever Happened to the Human Race?” (Episode 2) SLAUGHTER OF THE INNOCENTS Published on Oct 6, 2012 by AdamMetropolis The 45 minute video above is from the film series created from Francis Schaeffer’s book “Whatever Happened to the Human Race?” with Dr. C. Everett Koop. This book really helped develop my political views concerning […]
We got to lower the size of government so we don’t have these abuses like this in the IRS. Cartoonists v. the IRS May 23, 2013 by Dan Mitchell Call me perverse, but I’m enjoying this IRS scandal. It’s good to see them suffer a tiny fraction of the agony they impose on the American people. I’ve already […]
Dear Senator Pryor, Why not pass the Balanced Budget Amendment? As you know that federal deficit is at all time high (1.6 trillion deficit with revenues of 2.2 trillion and spending at 3.8 trillion). On my blog http://www.HaltingArkansasLiberalswithTruth.com I took you at your word and sent you over 100 emails with specific spending cut ideas. However, […]
Is the irs out of control? Here is the link from cato: MAY 22, 2013 8:47AM Can You Vague That Up for Me? By TREVOR BURRUS SHARE As the IRS scandal thickens, targeted groups are coming out to describe their ordeals in dealing with that most-reviled of government agencies. The Ohio Liberty Coalition was one of […]
Get Ready to Be Reamed May 17, 2013 by Dan Mitchell With so many scandals percolating, there are lots of good cartoons being produced. But I think this Chip Bok gem deserves special praise. It manages to weave together both the costly Obamacare boondoggle with the reprehensible politicization of the IRS. So BOHICA, my friends. If […]
You want to talk about irony then look at President Obama’s speech a few days ago when he joked about a potential audit of Ohio St by the IRS then a few days later the IRS scandal breaks!!!! The I.R.S. Abusing Americans Is Nothing New Published on May 15, 2013 The I.R.S. targeting of tea party […]
Dear Senator Pryor, Why not pass the Balanced Budget Amendment? As you know that federal deficit is at all time high (1.6 trillion deficit with revenues of 2.2 trillion and spending at 3.8 trillion). On my blog http://www.HaltingArkansasLiberalswithTruth.com I took you at your word and sent you over 100 emails with specific spending cut ideas. However, […]
We could put in a flat tax and it would enable us to cut billions out of the IRS budget!!!! May 14, 2013 2:34PM IRS Budget Soars By Chris Edwards Share The revelations of IRS officials targeting conservative and libertarian groups suggest that now is a good time for lawmakers to review a broad range […]
I have read articles for years from Dan Barker, but recently I just finished the book Barker wrote entitled LIFE DRIVEN PURPOSE which was prompted by Rick Warren’s book PURPOSE DRIVEN LIFE which I also read several years ago.
Dan Barker is the Co-President of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, And co-host of Freethought Radio and co-founder of The Clergy Project.
On March 19, 2022, I got an email back from Dan Barker that said:
Thanks for the insights.
Have you read my book Life Driven Purpose? To say there is no purpose OF life is not to say there is no purpose IN life. Life is immensely meaningful when you stop looking for external purpose.
Ukraine … we’ll, we can no longer blame Russian aggression on “godless communism.” The Russian church, as far as I know, has not denounced the war.
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In the next few weeks I will be discussing the book LIFE DRIVEN PURPOSE which I did enjoy reading. Here is an assertion that Barker makes that I want to discuss:
A universe with a god is more complicated than one without it. In order to fix all the bugs in the God task—the absence of evidence, the problem of evil, the lack of agreement among believers, the lack of a coherent definition, the uncertainty of the interpretation of unreliable holy books, the oppression of women and minorities and heretics, the failure of prayer (flag not being reset?), the dangers of sectarian divisiveness, and so on—believers need to cobble together inelegant Rube Goldberg kluges, apologetics, theologies, and theodicies to keep it clunking along. But if we can excise the God task and simply say, “No thanks, I’ll handle it myself,”
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Humanist Manifesto 2 lists the Wards as signers: Ward Tabler, Visiting Professor, Starr King School Barbara M. Tabler. I had the privilege of corresponding with them and they brought up this issue of the problem of evil shortly after the Oklahoma Bombing by Timothy McVey.
Mrs. Tabler’s obituary in 1996 noted:
Six years ago, Mrs. Tabler and her husband, Ward, a retired University of California at Berkeley professor, left the Bay Area for Santa Barbara to be closer to their two sons and their families.
Mrs. Tabler was born Barbara Marie Carteron Halloween in Oakland in 1915. She studied speech, English and music at UC Berkeley.
Besides singing, Mrs. Tabler was deeply committed to various social and political issues. She was a longtime advocate for Planned Parenthood. She served as president, vice president and a board member for the Alameda-San Francisco chapter.
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On October 16, 1995 I sent a letter to Ward and Barbara Tabler concerning the problem of evil which I had been corresponding with them about. Here is a portion of my letter:
Dear Tablers,
Thank you for sending me the article by Kaz Dziamka which appeared in the July/August 1995 Issue of the FREE MIND. You stated that this article properly represented your views. I would agree with James W. Sire who said this issue concerning the problem of evil is the toughest question thoughtful Christians ever have to answer. Kaz Dziamka starts off by saying, “If I were a Christian I would like to believe in a god of mercy, of love, of compassion — of compassion, in particular. If I were a Christian, I would be left dubfounded, paralyzed, speechless by the horro of the Oklahoma City bomb explosion.” Kaz Dziamka puts forth the classical argument that if God is absolutely powerful and ultimately good, He would deal with evil now and not allow the mad bombers of the world to exist. I also feel the pain as I watch those tragic scenes on T.V. . in fact, my pastor’s brother performed 3 funerals for children in his church who died in that blast. However, Kaz Dziamk is incorrect in the assumption that just because evil is not destroyed now that it will never be destroyed. God is all=good therefore He will destroy evil one day in the future. Romans 5:12 sheds some light on this issue of evil. It states, “Wherefore as by one man (Adam) sin entered into the world, and death by in, and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned.” Maybe Kaz Dziamka doesn’t believe in sin. May humanists believe man is born in a state of moral neutrality. R.C. Sproul asks, How then can we account for the universality of human imperfection? Surely some percentage of persons would be able to make it through life without sinning. There would be no reason why anyone would ever sin, not to mention the majority or, worse yet, everybody. How did society become corrupt in the first place? Why are there no morally perfect societies or even societies where half of the peoples are perfect? Diagenes” quest for the honest man continues to this day. If the Bible never mentioned original sin, we could easily postulate it from a study of history and human society.” Francis Schaeffer has rightly said, “Christianity’s answer (to the problem of evil) rests in the historic, spacetime, real and complete Fall. “the True Christian position is that, in space and time and history, there was an unprogrammed man who made a choice, and actually rebelled against God…without Christianity’s answer that God made a significant man in a significant history with evil being the result of Satan’s and then man’s historic space-time revolt, there is no answer but to accept Baudelaire’s answer [‘If there is a God, He is the devil’] with tears.” Evidently kaz Dziamka sees Christianity’s answer as lacking because the recommendation given in the last paragraph is to just that– cry!!!! Kaz Dziamka states, “If I were a Christian, I would never say to a mother whose little girl had just been blown to pieces that Jesus loves her and that god knows what he is doing. If I were a Christian, I would be ashamed of my god. I would shut up, walk away, and cry.” (Notice that Kaz Dziamka fails to substitute an adequate humanist reply because there is no future hope in the humanist worldview like there is in the Christian worldview.) Maybe Kaz Dziamka doesn’t fully understand that God, the Creator, did not begin the population of planet earth with a suffering human race. He created a perfect man and woman, and placed them in a perfect paradise, the Garden of Eden (Genesis 1:26-31; 2:7-9). It was like heaven on earth; with no sin, no pain, no sorrow, no suffering, and no death. But man sinned and his paradise was lost. Not only did the first man (Adam) sin, but all men have ratified that rebellion by their own actions (Romans 5:12). Before the fall, God’s universe was without suffering. Therefore, God is not the cause of these things, they are the result of man’s fall into sin, affecting the whole universe. Does Kaz Dziamk disagree with the idea of man’s Freewill? We shouldn’t blame God for the existence of evil, and we should be comforted to know that He will eventually destroy evil. My God takes evil seriously. He will judge sin (evil). Exodus 34:7 states, “God does not leave the guilty unpunished.” (That includes those like O.J. that think they have got off unpunished. The books will be balanced one day.) Yet Romans 5:8 tells us that “God demonstrates His own love for us in this: While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” Jesus took our place on that cross. John 3:16 makes it clear that “God so loved the world that He gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” My God is merciful. He has provided a way to avoid judgment. He is a God of love and compassion also!!! Revelation 21″3-4 states, “God Himself will be with them and be their God. he will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.” Yes, Christians do have an answer to this question of evil, but there is an even tougher question for the naturalist to answer. James W. Sire has said, “Naturalists who deny the existence of any transcendent, personal God cannot successfully solve the problem of good. They can not explain why there is a difference between right and wrong.”—- AT THIS POINT I WANT TO SHARE AN ARTICLE FROM GREG KOUKL:
Greg Koukl responds to a letter to the editor of the L.A. Times in which the writer’s pain causes him to ask the age-old question of why God allows evil to exist.
I was reading the L.A. Times today in the letters to the editor section and there was a letter written by a gentleman in Newport Beach that was a response to a tragic story that the Times had carried a few days ago. Maybe some of you had seen that story or have read about it in the local papers about not just the rank and file tragedy in Bosnia-Herzegovena, not about the general tragedy of war. The article was about the problems of the refugees and also of women being victimized by soldiers.
This respondent writes, “Glancing at your April 10 paper my eyes fell upon the tragic story ‘Ordeals Put Off Bosnia Rape Victim’s Healing.’ My heart ached for Amira, the 35 year old Muslim woman, mother of two children, suffering the loss of her husband, wandering about the countryside begging to survive. Placed in a detention camp, raped repeatedly by Serb soldiers acting as animal pigs rather than humans, the woman became another tragic victim of human wickedness. Where is mankind headed? My thoughts turn to God and ask, ‘Why, God? Why did you create such monsters? God, are you for real?’ If this is God’s way of teaching or testing my faith”, he continues, “then my beliefs and faith are being shattered with contempt instead. Having just lost my wife to cancer, maybe my feelings are more prone and fragile to be torn apart and my feelings turn more intensely to those who are suffering also.” It’s signed Victor Jashinski in Newport Beach.
… work from the known to the unknown.
There’s probably hardly a person listening to this account that does not feel the same emotion with him. First of all, we feel the sense of horror as we read about the kinds of things that other people do to each other. Just a couple of days ago was the last of a five part series of ‘The Holocaust’ that was on the Family Channel which was re-aired for the first time in fifteen years. But in any event, seeing again in vivid portrayal what man is capable of doing, our hearts and our minds are taken with this situation. Not only that, but we are also touched by evil in the world ourselves as we look at circumstances and we’re horrified. We also look at pains in our own life as this man has reflected and we say, “Why, God? Why me? Why this pain? Why this difficulty?” And this is really one of the most thorny problems and one of the most complex problems that anyone, regardless of their philosophical avocations or persuasions, has to address.
There is no way that I’m going to resolve this in ten minutes because this problem in its fullness, in its entirety resists a thorough resolution. I think there’s some good responses, but for the most part it is something that we kind of have to live with. But I would like to give some thoughts that may provide a few guidelines for you in dealing with this yourself and people like this gentleman as they face these circumstances both outside of their life and inside of their life.
My policy in dealing with a difficult, tricky problem that defies a thorough-going solution is to work from the known to the unknown. There are some things I think we can know about this issue. We can draw some conclusions that will at least clear the deck a bit and help us to focus on those things that are less clear and less resolvable, and maybe demystify the question for us, and maybe make our hearts feel a little better about the issue.
One of the things I need to say at the outset, by the way, is that’s it’s very important to distinguish between the issue of evil and suffering as a philosophic problem and the problem of evil from a pastoral perspective. Actually, both were raised in this letter. Why does God allow evil in the world such that a female Bosnian refugee might be subjected to repeated rape by Serbian soldiers? Why does the problem happen out there (which is the philosophic question) but why does evil hurt me? That’s a different kind of question because that’s an emotional response. Even people who have resolved the issue of evil philosophically still shudder under its impact when it hits them. Even though their mind may have answers their heart still asks ‘Why?’ when they become victimized by evil in the world. So we see both kinds here.
I’m going to start out by trying to deal with the philosophic problem and then make a comment about the pastoral problem. They are distinct questions.
if there is no God, there can’t be any evil, only personal likes and dislikes
By the way, when someone comes to you with the pastoral issue, you can’t resolve that by giving them a philosophic answer. It just doesn’t work. That’s not their need. Their need isn’t their mind at that point or their intellect; their need is their heart, the grief they are going through. There’s a different kind of approach there. I’m actually better at the first than the second. I’m better at the intellectual part than the pastoral part. That’s why I’m a radio talk show host and not a church shepherd as many pastors are. My gifts are different. In any event, let me try to deal with the philosophic problem first and then briefly address the pastoral issue.
One thing to note, by the way, is that this man presumes that God made man this way (“Why, God, why did you create such monsters?”). Now if you are thinking from a Biblical perspective, you know that that is not the case. The Bible does not teach that God created monsters. It teaches that He created human beings that were not monsters at all but were good. They didn’t have this propensity and proclivity for evil. He didn’t make man with that. But He did make man with the possibility of going wrong and the writer’s response here is really a response questioning the character of God. “How could You do this? What kind of God are you? Are you for real?” are other questions which show the approach that most people usually take when struggling with evil. In other words, when they see this kind of thing they don’t question the character of man, which in my point of view would be a sensible response. (You’ll understand why I say that in just a moment.) Instead they attack the existence of God. In other words, they say since there is evil in the world then God can’t exist. This is not a reasonable response. It is not a rational response. It is not a fruitful answer to the philosophic problem of evil and I’m going to tell you why that just can’t work.
What doesn’t make sense is to look at the existence of evil and question the existence of God. The reason is that atheism turns out being a self-defeating philosophic solution to this problem of evil. Think of what evil is for a minute when we make this kind of objection. Evil is a value judgment that must be measured against a morally perfect standard in order to be meaningful. In other words, something is evil in that it departs from a perfect standard of good. C.S. Lewis made the point, “My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call something crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line.”[1] He also goes on to point out that a portrait is a good or a bad likeness depending on how it compares with the ‘perfect’ original. So to talk about evil, which is a departure from good, actually presumes something that exists that is absolutely good. If there is no God there’s no perfect standard, no absolute right or wrong, and therefore no departure from that standard. So if there is no God, there can’t be any evil, only personal likes and dislikes – what I prefer morally and what I don’t prefer morally.
This is the big problem with moral relativism as a moral point of view when talking about the problem of evil. If morality is ultimately a matter of personal taste – that’s what most people hold nowadays – then it’s just your opinion what’s good or bad, but it might not be my opinion. Everybody has their own view of morality and if it’s just a matter of personal taste – like preferring steak over broccoli or Brussels sprouts – the objection against the existence of God based on evil actually vanishes because the objection depends on the fact that some things are intrinsically evil – that evil isn’t just a matter of my personal taste, my personal definition. But that evil has absolute existence and the problem for most people today is that there is no thing that is absolutely wrong. Premarital sex? If it’s right for you. Abortion? It’s an individual choice. Killing? It depends on the circumstances. Stealing? Not if it’s from a corporation.
The fact is that most people are drowning in a sea of moral relativism. If everything is allowed then nothing is disallowed. Then nothing is wrong. Then nothing is ultimately evil. What I’m saying is that if moral relativism is true, which it seems like most people seem to believe – even those that object against evil in the world, then the talk of objective evil as a philosophical problem is nonsense. To put it another way, if there is no God, then morals are all relative. And if moral relativism is true, then something like true moral evil can’t exist because evil becomes a relative thing.
An excellent illustration of this point comes from the movie The Quarrel . In this movie, a rabbi and a Jewish secularist meet again after the Second World War after they had been separated. They had gotten into a quarrel as young men, separated on bad terms, and then had their village and their family and everything destroyed through the Second World War, both thinking the other was dead. They meet serendipitously in Toronto, Canada in a park and renew their friendship and renew their old quarrel.
Rabbi Hersch says to the secularist Jew Chiam, “If a person does not have the Almighty to turn to, if there’s nothing in the universe that’s higher than human beings, then what’s morality? Well, it’s a matter of opinion. I like milk; you like meat. Hitler likes to kill people; I like to save them. Who’s to say which is better? Do you begin to see the horror of this? If there is no Master of the universe then who’s to say that Hitler did anything wrong? If there is no God then the people that murdered your wife and kids did nothing wrong.”
If God wiped out all the evil in the world tonight at midnight, where would you and I be at 12:01?
That is a very, very compelling point coming from the rabbi. In other words, to argue against the existence of God based on the existence of evil forces us into saying something like this: Evil exists, therefore there is no God. If there is no God then good and evil are relative and not absolute, so true evil doesn’t exist, contradicting the first point. Simply put, there cannot be a world in which it makes any sense to say that evil is real and at the same time say that God doesn’t exist. If there is no God then nothing is ultimately bad, deplorable, tragic or worthy of blame. The converse, by the way, is also true. This is the other hard part about this, it cuts both ways. Nothing is ultimately good, honorable, noble or worthy of praise. Everything is ultimately lost in a twilight zone of moral nothingness. To paraphrase the late Dr. Francis Schaeffer, the person who argues against the existence of God based on the existence of evil in the world has both feet firmly planted in mid-air.
No, the existence of the problem forces us into some kind of theistic solution. This is a good thing, which brings me to my third point. If atheism is a self-defeating philosophic solution to the problem, and some kind of theism is necessary, then it seems to me that theism is one of the only satisfying pastoral solutions to the problem.
Let’s say for example that you are suffering with some kind of pain and evil in your life and you come to the conclusion that there is no God. What is the solution to the problem of your personal pain? The only solution I can think of is that your personal pain and suffering are meaningless. They are useless. They are helpless. And, in fact, it reminds me of Os Guiness in his fine book The Dust of Death , which has just been re-released, where he makes the point in regards to eastern religion that many eastern religions hold that the world is just an illusion – Hinduism characteristically. He quotes from a poet of the Eastern tradition who had just experienced tremendous tragedy in his life. He went to his avatar to get some comfort from his religious leader after his wife and children had been killed. His religious leader simply said to him in the face of this terrible anguish, “The world is dew.” His point was that it’s all an illusion anyway. The poet went back and he wrote this poem, a simple poem, only four lines: “The world is dew. The world is dew. And yet…. And yet….” In other words the religious answer of his religious leader was that the evil simply didn’t exist. But he knew personally that it wasn’t dew, that it wasn’t an illusion. It was there. It was real and it was impacting his life. But what comfort was there in that – nothing whatsoever.
If there is no God then there is no answer to the pastoral question of personal suffering and evil. It’s not there – your suffering is meaningless. But if there is a God, and if that God is the God of the Bible, then at least we have the potential of an answer. There’s some kind of comfort there. God is ultimately good and just, and one day the accounts will be perfectly balanced. We can place ourselves in the hands of a powerful Creator who, by all other evidence, loves us, cares for us and comforts the afflicted. One Who will not break off a bent reed and Who will not put out a smoldering wick. One Who will hold us close to Himself. There is at least the possibility that this suffering and pain can make sense because God can use it for good in our lives.
We might ask ourselves the question, Why does God put up with this kind of evil in the world? The rapes, the war in Bosnia-Herzegovena, for example? My response is that God puts up with that kind of evil for the same reason he puts up with your evil and with my evil for the time being. I’m not going to try to explain what that reason is now. The point I’m making is that this justice issue cuts both ways.
If God wiped out all the evil in the world tonight at midnight, where would you and I be at 12:01? See, the fact is that God’s going to do a complete job when he finally deals with evil. C.S. Lewis makes the point when he says, “I wonder whether people who ask God to interfere openly and directly in our world quite realize what it will be like when He does … When the author walks on the stage the play is over.”[2] Evil deeds can never be isolated from the evil doer. Our prints, yours and mine, are on the smoking gun.
What’s curious to me in dealing with this issue is that no one raises the issue of whether one ought to continue to believe in the goodness of man after these kinds of tragedies. We see things like the Holocaust, the crime level, the innocent suffering at the hands of other human beings more often than not, and instead of shaking our fists at humankind who perpetrate the action we shake our fists at God. I don’t get it.
Dennis Prager says, “Whenever I meet someone who claims to find faith in God impossible, but who persists in believing in the essential goodness of humanity, I know that I have met a person for whom evidence is irrelevant.” (Ultimate Issues , July- September, 1989) I like that. I think that hits the nail on the head.
The last thought I will offer is just another curious one from my perspective as I hear these kinds of responses. We live our lives in rebellion to God, constantly disobeying Him, constantly disregarding him, refusing to live according to His precepts and according to His rules, and then we wonder where He is when things go wrong.
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GORKY
ARSHILLE GORKY (1905-1948)
Armenian-born American painter, Gorky was a surrealist painter and also one of the leaders of abstract expressionism. He was called “the Ingres of the unconscious”.
I have gone back and forth and back and forth with many liberals on the Arkansas Times Blog on many issues such as abortion, human rights, welfare, poverty, gun control and issues dealing with popular culture. Here is another exchange I had with them a while back. My username at the Ark Times Blog is Saline […]
On March 17, 2013 at our worship service at Fellowship Bible Church, Ben Parkinson who is one of our teaching pastors spoke on Genesis 1. He spoke about an issue that I was very interested in. Ben started the sermon by reading the following scripture: Genesis 1-2:3 English Standard Version (ESV) The Creation of the […]
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A heavy heart is the beginning of misery, and we were never meant to carry the load.
A burdened soul breaks the spirit. A broken spirit thins the immunity of the body. The body then begins to wither, and we get ill. In fact, studies have shown that emotions largely contribute to one’s overall state of health. Doctors call it Emotionally Induced Illness (E.I.I.), and it is the idea that physical sickness can be a result of emotional illness.
The entire body is affected by a heavy heart. But God has given us a remedy for the soul, the spirit, and the body. And it is good medicine…Joy!
Not mere laughter, not mere joking, not mere fun and games, but deep, abiding joy is our strongest medicine and greatest weapon. Joy doesn’t depend upon material things or circumstances. It doesn’t depend upon thrills. It comes straight from the heart.
In the Gospel of John, Jesus spoke of the joy in His own heart, and He promised to give us a dose of it; not just some cheap imitation… He wants to give us the real thing. “My joy have I given unto you.” Jesus said, “I want that joy to remain in you.”
We don’t root our happiness in circumstances, because those can change in an instant and leave us emotionally stranded. We root our joy in Christ alone, who is the same yesterday, today, and forever. (Hebrews 13:8)
“Without joy, life is meaningless!” Acclaimed pastor and teacher, Adrian Rogers says, “That joy is found only in Jesus. And we ought to share the secret, the source of our joy —the Lord Jesus Christ.”
Apply it to your life
Joy is something freely given, but it must be received, day by day. Today, seek it out through prayer and in Scripture. Let it be seen in your countenance as you go about your day, and share it with someone else.
Sean Kennedy is a visiting fellow at the Maryland Public Policy Institute. Jason Richwine is a resident scholar and Steven A. Camarota is the director of research at the Center.
Summary
Activists and academics have been misusing data from the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) in studies claiming that illegal immigrants have relatively low crime rates. These studies do not appreciate that it can take years for Texas to identify convicts as illegal immigrants while they are in custody. As a result, the studies misclassify as native-born a significant number of offenders who are later identified as illegal immigrants.
Facts About the DPS Data:
Due to delays in identification, the number of illegal immigrants arrested or incarcerated in Texas is undercounted at any given time.
Recently convicted illegal immigrants are the most likely to be undercounted.
Conversely, Texas is more likely to ascertain the immigration status of offenders who have served long prison terms for serious crimes.
The illegal immigrant conviction rate for “any crime” — which would be dominated by offenses requiring little or no prison time — is not meaningful due to undercount.
Properly interpreted, the DPS data suggests that illegal immigrants in Texas are convicted of homicide and sexual assault at higher rates than the state average. Significant uncertainties remain, however, especially regarding lesser offenses.
Background
When people are arrested in Texas, the state’s Department of Public Safety (DPS) sends their fingerprints to the federal Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to determine immigration status. Illegal immigrants who have had encounters with immigration officials, such as at the border or during a prior arrest, will be identified by DHS and then flagged as illegal in the DPS data. However, the immigration status of a significant share of immigrants arrested in Texas cannot be verified by this system because immigration officials have never encountered them. Therefore, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (DCJ) continues to investigate the immigration status of offenders while they are incarcerated.
At any given time, each arrestee or convict falls into one of four categories in the DPS data:
Legal immigrants identified by DHS upon intake/arrest;
Illegal immigrants identified by DHS upon intake/arrest;
Illegal immigrants identified by DCJ in prison; and
Other/unknown (including both the native-born and yet-to-be-identified immigrants).
The distribution is not static. Over time, authorities could identify additional illegal immigrants who were previously categorized as “other/unknown” and reclassify them as illegal, shrinking the other/unknown share and increasing the illegal share.1 Due to resource constraints and offenders’ limited durations in custody, not all illegal immigrants are identified as such by either DHS or DCJ. Therefore, the number of illegal immigrants arrested or incarcerated in Texas is in a perpetual state of undercount.
Illustration
Figure 1 demonstrates how failing to understand this undercount can lead to erroneous conclusions about illegal immigrant crime rates. If we counted only the illegal immigrants who were initially identified by DHS when arrested for homicide, the 2012 homicide rate (convictions divided by population) would be 2.7 per 100,000 illegal immigrants in the state, as depicted in the light-blue bar. This rate, while hardly trivial, is lower than the state’s overall homicide conviction rate of 3.0 (orange bar) in 2012.
However, once the illegal immigrants identified during their prison stays are added to the total count of illegals, their homicide rate rises to 3.9 per 100,000 (dark-blue bar) in 2012. This rate is higher than the state average, and it could rise even further as more illegal immigrants continue to be identified in prison.
Figure 1. Homicide Convictions in Texas per 100K
Sources: Texas DPS (convictions), CMS (illegal population), and ACS (overall population). Note: Some illegals may remain unidentified, especially in more recent years.
Figure 1 also illustrates the tendency for the gap between the blue bars to increase over time. Notice, for example, that the rise from the light-blue bar to the dark-blue bar in 2012 is 3.9 – 2.7 = 1.2, but the rise in 2019 is just 0.5. Because Figure 1 is based on data requested in 2021, the state has had less time to identify illegal immigrants convicted in 2019 compared to those convicted in 2012. In other words, the more recent the conviction year, the more likely illegal immigrants are to be left undiscovered in the “other/unknown” category at the time of the data request.
Full Data
Table 1 contains the complete DPS data that we received from our 2021 request, along with the crime rates that we calculated using Census population data. It is sorted first by year, then by the offenses for which illegal immigrants are most likely to be convicted relative to the state population as a whole.
As the table indicates, illegal immigrants in Texas appear to be convicted of crimes such as homicide, sexual assault (shown in Figure 2), and kidnapping at higher rates than the state average. By contrast, they appear to be convicted at lower rates for crimes such as robbery and drugs.
Figure 2. Sexual Assault Convictions in Texas per 100K
Sources: Texas DPS (convictions), CMS (illegal population), and ACS (overall population). Note: Some illegals may remain unidentified, especially in more recent years.
There are two crucial caveats associated with Table 1. First, the “Illegal Conviction Rate” is still underestimated. It is simply the number of illegal immigrant convictions identified by DHS plus the number of illegal immigrant convictions identified subsequently in prison, all divided by the total illegal immigrant population in Texas.2 More illegal immigrants could move out of the other/unknown category over time — especially in the most recent years, as discussed above.
A second caveat is that comparisons of the types of crimes that illegal immigrants commit are inherently skewed. The longer people with unknown status are in custody, the more likely it is that Texas will correctly ascertain their immigration status. DHS and Texas DCJ have extensive time and incentive to investigate an individual’s immigration status when the crime is murder or sexual assault. Lesser offenses (e.g., larceny) carry shorter sentences and are a lower priority for deportation purposes, resulting in fewer unknown statuses moving to the “illegal immigrant identified in prison” category over time.
Therefore, the most serious crimes tend to generate the most accurate illegal immigrant conviction rates. Since serious crimes are only a small portion of all crimes, however, any estimate of illegal immigrants’ conviction rate for “all crimes” is practically meaningless, given the limitations of the data.
Mistaken Studies
Recent studies using DPS data understate the extent of illegal immigrant crime by ignoring or downplaying the fact that many arrestees and convicts move from “other/unknown” to illegal over time.
Cato Institute. In February 2018, the Cato Institute’s Alex Nowrasteh released his analysis of 2015 DPS data.3 He concluded that “the conviction and arrest rates for illegal immigrants were lower than those for native-born Americans.” This conclusion was highlighted by the New York Times, Washington Post, NPR, and many other outlets.
Nowrasteh’s error was to treat as native-born anyone who had not yet been categorized as a legal or illegal immigrant. He failed to understand the DPS “other/unknown” category and the movement of illegal immigrants out of that category over time. As discussed above, “native-born” is not a category verified by DPS. Native-born Americans are grouped with yet-to-be-identified immigrants in a catch-all category called “other/unknown”. The number of unknowns shrinks during incarceration as Texas updates the figures upon identification of an inmate’s immigration status.
It is easy to observe how the identification of additional illegal immigrants changes the relative conviction rates over time. For example, in Cato’s analysis of 2015 DPS data, the illegal immigrant homicide conviction rate appeared to be 8 percent lower than the state’s homicide rate. By the time we requested updated data in 2021, after more illegal immigrants had been identified, the 2015 illegal immigrant homicide conviction rate was 20 percent higher than the state rate.
Nowrasteh later published new studies in 2019 (with DPS data for 2017) and in 2021 (with DPS data for 2019).4 By now it should be clear that such recent data will not provide an accurate picture because the state has had too little time to identify illegals who are still categorized as “other/unknown”.5
PNAS. A 2020 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) also claimed low rates of illegal immigrant crime based on Texas DPS data.6 Lead author Michael Light, a sociologist at UW-Madison, found that felony arrest rates for illegal immigrants were half that of the “native-born”. His study has been favorably cited by the federal government in response to lawsuits filed by the state of Texas over illegal immigration.7
But Light makes the same mistake as Nowrasteh in treating illegals as fully identified by DHS at intake, even though DCJ will go on to identify more illegals who are initially placed in the DPS “other/unknown” category.
Unlike Nowrasteh, Light then relies on unverified claims made by arrestees about their citizenship and place of birth to both supplement the “legal” arrest category and create a “native-born” category. Not appreciating that arrestees of any claimed status could turn out to be DCJ-identified illegal immigrants, Light inadvertently places some illegals in his “legal” or even “native-born” categories. This is perhaps why he reaches the doubtful conclusion (opposite to Cato’s) that legal immigrants commit crimes at higher rates than illegal immigrants.8
Conclusion
Studies purporting to show low illegal immigrant crime rates in Texas fail to account for the fact that illegal immigrants are not always identified immediately upon arrest. In many cases, illegal immigrants are identified only after they are imprisoned. Given sufficient time for data collection, it appears that illegal immigrants have above average conviction rates for homicide and sexual assault, while they have lower rates for robbery and drugs. Significant uncertainty persists, however, as to how many illegals may remain unidentified, especially those who committed lesser offenses requiring little or no prison time. While strong claims about the overall criminality of illegal immigrants are not possible with the current data, prior research has understated it substantially.
End Notes
1 We learned about this process through discussions with personnel at the Crime Records Division within DPS.
1 We learned about this process through discussions with personnel at the Crime Records Division within DPS.
2 For the total illegal immigrant population in Texas each year through 2019, we rely on estimates from the Center for Migration Studies (CMS). DHS and Pew have not yet published estimates for 2019, but DHS counts are usually slightly higher than CMS and Pew, resulting in a slightly lower illegal immigrant crime rate. For example, in 2012 the illegal immigrant homicide rate per 100,000 was 3.9 with both CMS and Pew data, but 3.6 with DHS data. Occasionally, one hears dubious claims that the illegal immigrant population is far greater than the estimates made by any of these organizations. If true, the illegal immigrant crime rate would be far lower.
5 In both of these newer studies, Nowrasteh acknowledges that some illegal immigrants are not identified until they are in prison, but he suggests they could have been legal at the point of arrest before becoming illegal while in prison. DPS personnel with whom we spoke cast doubt on this suggestion. When DHS identifies arrestees as legal immigrants at intake, they will remain in the “legal” category in the DPS data even if DCJ were to later determine that they have become illegal.
8 The conclusion is doubtful because the average legal immigrant is older, has higher socioeconomic status, and has undergone more vetting than the average illegal immigrant
Milton Friedman in 2004
Power of the Market – Immigration
MILTON FRIEDMAN ON IMMIGRATION
MILTON FRIEDMAN ON IMMIGRATION PART 2
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Tucker Carlson shreds Biden over the border crisis: ‘It’s all his fault’
Tucker says the people of Martha’s Vineyard are not compassionate
We’ll admit it up front. We can’t get off this Martha’s Vineyard story because there’s just so much there. So last week, you’ll recall, our Venezuelan visitors to this country, our brothers and sisters as they’re now known on CNN, took what amounted to the shortest vacation ever recorded to Martha’s Vineyard. They were on that island for just hours, less than two full days. It was hardly enough time to pick up a Fair Trade coffee at Mocha Mott’s in Vineyard Haven or go kiteboarding on South Beach.
In fact, we have literally been talking about their trip longer than it lasted. It was that brief. On the other hand, so was the moon landing, so was the Wright Brothers first flight at Kitty Hawk. Duration is no measure of effect. Those brief hours our Venezuelan brothers and sisters spent on Martha’s Vineyard changed history and left what they’re calling an “indelible mark” on the people who live there. “They enriched us,” said one resident. “We were happy to help them on their journey.”
Unfortunately, as it turned out, that journey ended abruptly at a military base on Cape Cod, where our Venezuelan brothers and sisters are now being held against their will, prisoners in a country they thought was their own. There are no Mocha Motts where they are now. Kiteboarding is completely out of the question. It’s just a bitter dream at this point. Now, the people of Martha’s Vineyard knew this was going to happen and yet none of them thought to tell their Venezuelan brothers and sisters before it happened.
“I kept telling them it was like a dormitory,” said Jackie Stallings, who lives on the island as soldiers arrived to deport her Venezuelan siblings. “I didn’t want to say, ‘You’re going to a military base.'”
Well, of course not. It’s a dormitory, just like your dad sent your elderly dog to a farm because he’ll be happier there. But the Venezuelans are not happier in military lockup. They loved Martha’s Vineyard. As they told MSNBC, they considered it a paradise.
TELEMUNDO REPORTER ON MSNBC: They left here a few minutes ago. They’re moved to Cape Cod, to the joint base in Cape Cod with new clothes, new cell phones, having talked to lawyers for the first time and saying that they were actually brought to paradise. They don’t resent it for now and they know they’re the lucky ones.
So finally, one reporter over at NBC News tells the truth about what is actually a pretty sad story. Our Venezuelan brothers and sisters came to this country for a better life and unlike so many, they actually found it. They arrived in one of the prettiest and most affluent destinations on the planet, an idyllic island with unlimited resources, many thousands of empty beds and, best of all, a population that claimed to love them. “No person is illegal,” read the lawn signs. But it was all a lie. 50 Brown people was too many for the people of Martha’s Vineyard. They called in the army to have them removed like trash, as one island resident said.
So, actually, judging by the behavior and not simply by their lawn signs, which is the best way to judge people, the people of Martha’s Vineyard are not especially compassionate. In fact, they’re small-minded and cheap and pretty nasty as any waiter or babysitter who works on the island can tell you. So, once again, the ones you claim to be the best people are actually the worst people. Remember when Jimmy Swaggart got busted with hookers and porn? It’s very much like that. The truth turns out to be the opposite of what they told you it was. It’s highly embarrassing, but here’s the weird thing, on Martha’s Vineyard they’re not embarrassed at all.
Jimmy Swaggart famously apologized for his sins because he had shame, but the people of Martha’s Vineyard have no shame and so they’re not apologizing. In fact, against all evidence, they’re now bragging about how wonderful they are. Yesterday, Kerry Picket of The Washington Times caught up with Martha’s Vineyard’s senior senator. That would be Mrs. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. Listen to Elizabeth Warren’s version of the Martha’s Vineyard story.
KERRY PICKET: Do you think Martha’s Vineyard is getting a bad rep right now?
SEN. ELIZABETH WARREN: Martha’s Vineyard? No. Well, I think…the people of Martha’s Vineyard opened their hearts and were helpful to the migrants who were deceived and dropped there in a privately chartered jet and treated like a prop for a governor who’s just trying to make news.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., speaks during a protest outside of the U.S. Supreme Court Tuesday, May 3, 2022 in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon) (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
Well, if nothing else, it’s interesting to see history, history that we’ve watched unfold, a story in which the facts are not at all in dispute, get rewritten in real time and you wonder how many other stories have been rewritten, but we can see this one being rewritten. In Elizabeth Warren’s telling, actually the people of Martha’s Vineyard are the heroes and Ron DeSantis is the villain because he deceived them.
Now, we just heard — and it’s again factually not at dispute — that island residents deceived their Venezuelan siblings by telling them they were just going to a dorm. They’re not being locked up on a military base like terrorists. So actually, the people of Martha’s Vineyard, the residents there, are the ones who did the tricking. They tricked the Venezuelans into going to a military base, but that wasn’t deception.
No, according to Elizabeth Warren, it was an act of love, but at some point, whatever, the people of Martha’s Vineyard got what they wanted. Everything is back to normal there. The people who live there are relieved. They’re not going to be 50 needing minorities in their midst to spoil the usual festivities and that would include the Food and Wine Festival.
NARRATOR: Each year for the past decade, more than 2,500 food and wine enthusiasts converge on the island of Martha’s Vineyard for a culinary and wine extravaganza.
WINE EXPERT TO ATTENDEES: So, have an oyster. Then, taste the wine. Then, have your other oyster and taste the wine again. That’s the routine for each one. So, two oysters per wine. See how the oyster tastes on its own. See how you like the flavors of the wine with the oyster.
NARRATOR: The Martha’s Vineyard Food and Wine Festival. Four days and three nights of celebration.
So, just so you know, you taste the wine and then eat the oyster and then you taste the wine again in the way they mesh in your mouth. Those flavors, the complexity of them, it’s like an explosion on your palate and that’s why thousands of people come to Martha’s Vineyard every year for that festival. But guess who doesn’t come? Venezuelans, unless they’re serving the oysters and pouring the wine. So really, we could go on at great length about this because it’s just such a great story and reveal so much, but it’s much bigger than the now established fact that Martha’s Vineyard is populated by nasty liberals who don’t tip and don’t actually want colored people in their midst. That’s true. We know that now.
But the bigger story and the one that affects the rest of us, the other 340 million people who live here, is that what we saw in Martha’s Vineyard is, in fact, just a taste of what is absolutely the official policy of the Democratic Party and it is this: If your town votes the right way, then you get military protection. The military shows up immediately. 50 people not hurting anybody and the army comes to remove them. Can you imagine? Talk about a 911 call. That’s pretty great. All you need to do is vote 80% for Joe Biden and you can do that and throw some donations this way too. But what about everybody else? Well, everyone else is SOL, and that would include all of us.
Over the past 11 months, American authorities have encountered more than 2 million illegals along the southern border, the highest number ever recorded by the U.S. government. At least another 1 million were allowed into this country as so-called economic migrants, meaning they want better jobs because who doesn’t want a better job? Hundreds of thousands more. We don’t know the number, but clearly hundreds of thousands just sneaked in.
That’s according to the official data. Now, how many of those are headed to military bases for deportation and how many cases to the U.S. military arrive to solve what is so clearly a disaster? Zero, because it wasn’t Martha’s Vineyard. Now, we’ve been making a documentary on this, a documentary on the borderscalled “Battle for the Borders” coming out later this year and in the course of reporting it out, we obtained this footage showing how some of these illegal aliens entered this country. These pictures were shot on July 23 this year.
COP: How are you doing? State police. Where are you from? Pakistan? What are ya’ll doing here? Keep your hands out of your pockets. Do you have any weapons on you? You got an I.D.? No I.D.s?
So, when people on Martha’s Vineyard think of illegal immigration, they really think groundskeepers and waiters and people who work at the back end of the kitchen, people who clean up or prepare the food. That’s what illegal immigration is to them. They’re not really thinking, none of us are really thinking, that people might be showing up from Pakistan. Really? Pakistan? They didn’t walk.
By the way, isn’t Pakistan the place where ISIS has just called for jihadis to enter the United States and kill Americans? Why are these guys walking on a road in Texas? Now, during their interview with the police, both of the men you just saw admitted they were here illegally. They said they each paid thousands of dollars to be smuggled into the United States. This is very common now. It’s not the immigration you remember. Who are these people? Do they mean us harm? It’s not simply a matter of competing for jobs with American citizens. It’s potentially a grave threat, and a lot of people like this are coming across the border right now. Here’s Fox’s Bill Melugin:
BILL MELUGIN: For the very first time, a brand-new Fox News drone, equipped with thermal imaging, captures images of mass illegal crossings in the middle of the night in Eagle Pass, Texas, this morning. Migrants could be seen crossing the river and walking onto private property where over 100 gathered and waited for Border Patrol processing. Sometimes the Del Rio sector here gets upwards of 2,000 illegal crossings in a single day and this was only one of three huge groups we have already seen so far this morning and it’s not even noon yet out here. Take a look at this second group we saw. This was another group of about 200 who crossed illegally and started walking along a local highway out here. This is how it is in Eagle Pass. You can just be driving down the road and you’ll see large groups of several hundred migrants just walking down the highway, waiting to be picked up and apprehended by Border Patrol.
So, we’re just getting word right now that the White House, many White House officials are telling “journalists” that they are very annoyed by Bill Milligan’s reporting. It’s “alarmist.” In other words, unlike reporters of The Washington Post and The New York Times, Bill Melugin doesn’t think that he works for Joe Biden. He’s taking pictures of what’s actually happening and that’s wrong.
What’s interesting, given what is happening, which is that we are being invaded by people who have no right to be here for reasons that we don’t really understand, is that none of the people who are complaining about Ron DeSantis sending 50 Venezuelans to Martha’s Vineyard have said a word about what else is happening on the border and a lot is happening. It’s an ongoing humanitarian disaster, a tragedy for the people being trafficked and they are being trafficked, but it’s also an ongoing disaster for us who live here. It’s our country. As Melugin reported, human traffickers are loading more than a dozen people into the backs of cars right now, which is a disaster. Watch this.
MELUGIN: In Uvalde, Fox News was with Texas DPS troopers as they pulled over a human smuggler from Michigan. Hidden inside his trunk, two illegal immigrants from Honduras, all of them arrested and in Kinney County, Texas, DPS troopers pulled over this van and were shocked when they found 16 illegal immigrants being smuggled in the back.
So, it’s a human wave and that’s not an attack on the people coming over here. They are being rewarded by the Biden administration in exchange for breaking our laws, for mocking our Constitution. They’re being rewarded with public benefits. So, why wouldn’t they come? But the volume of this is without precedent in American history, and you have to ask yourself, what does this mean for the country? It’s obviously destabilizing, but what does it mean long-term for the country?
Well, just to give you some perspective on the numbers here. As Neil Monroe at Breitbart has reported, in a given year, roughly three migrants arriving for every four Americans who were born in this country. Three migrants for every four Americans born. Oh. Remember, the great replacement theory was a conspiracy theory? It sounds more like a statistical fact. Actually, was there a vote on this? Did we get to vote on this? Do people want this? Democracy, remember that? That’s where people vote and get to decide what kind of government they get and what sort of policies the government enacts. No, no. No one voted on this. Nobody wants this. It’s happening anyway against the will of the entire country. So, what did Biden say about this? Well, here’s what he said today:
REPORTER: On the border, why is the border more overwhelmed under your watch, Mr. President?
PRESIDENT BIDEN: Because there are three countries that are never having…there are fewer immigrants coming from Central America and from Mexico. This is a totally different circumstance. What’s on my watch now is Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua and the ability to send them back to those states is not rational. You could send them back and have them when we’re working with Mexico and other countries to see if we can stop the flow, but that’s the difference.
U.S. President Joe Biden speaks before signing the agreement for Finland and Sweden to be included in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in the East Room of the White House on August 9, 2022 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)(Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Well, that’s just completely insane, of course. They’re coming through Mexico and we control the Mexican economy. We could turn off the Mexican economy in one minute if we wanted to. Of course, we’re by far their biggest trading partner, and so we have an enormous amount of leverage over the Mexican government and if we said to the Mexican government, “not one more crosses through your country into ours,” that’d be the end of it, because no one wants to tango with the Federales.
No one takes American law enforcement seriously because they know they’re just going to direct you to the local welfare office. Nobody messes with the Mexican Federales, period, and everyone knows that. But we’re not doing that. What Biden said that is true is that as of this fiscal year, migrants from places other than the Northern Triangle countries in Mexico, specifically Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela do make up nearly 40% of the total apprehensions at the border as of last month. That’s a 175% jump from last year.
What Biden didn’t say, of course, is that it’s all his fault. He’s solely responsible for this. He stopped deporting asylum seekers. He’s allowing asylum seekers with fraudulent claims to remain in this country and of course, the message has gone out to the world. Just show up and you’ll be fine.
So, let’s say you wanted to harm the United States. What would you do? Well, what did Fidel Castro do in 1980 with the Muriel boat lift? He opened his prisons and mental hospitals and sent them to Miami, thereby changing Miami forever.
Venezuela is doing something very similar. Venezuela’s opening its prisons and sending them here. Breitbart reports tonight that DHS is warning border officials to be on the lookout for Venezuelan convicts entering the country. DHS indicates that “the Venezuelan government is purposely freeing inmates, including some convicted of murder, rape and extortion.” It’s unbelievable.
Again, we’ve seen this before, and it’s a catastrophe again. During the Carter administration, Fidel Castro’s government, the Cuban government, did the very same thing. 125,000 people came to Florida. A Sun-Sentinel article from 1985 estimated that out of the 125,000 migrants who came at the time, 16,000 to 20,000 were criminals. The Miami district director for immigration called it an invasion.
“The boatlift should never been allowed to happen. At any other time it would have been an act of war” and Bill Clinton, who was governor of Arkansas at the time, said exactly the same thing, but a lot has changed since 1985. No one in the federal government will admit what this is, which is an invasion and of course, the media are totally for it because, Hey, cheap housekeepers. So, law enforcement authorities, rather than doing anything with the people invading our country, are talking about prosecuting Ron DeSantis.
JAVIER SALAZAR, THE BEXAR COUNTY SHERIFF: As we understand it, 48 migrants were lured and I will use the word lured under false pretenses into staying at a hotel for a couple of days. They were taken by airplane. At a certain point, they were shuttled to an airplane where they were flown to Florida and then eventually flown to Martha’s Vineyard. Again, under false pretenses is the information that we have that they were promised work, they were promised the solution to several other problems. We do have the names of some suspects involved that we believe are persons of interest in this case at this point, but I won’t be parting with those names I think to be to be fair, I think everybody on this call knows who those names are already. So, I won’t be naming any of them.
That’s appalling and shocking. For any law enforcement official, a guy who carries a gun and has a right to shoot you, to be parroting Biden administration political talking points in front of a camera – that man should be ashamed. That is completely over-the-top that he would say something like this. This is all crazy. We’re being invaded and now they’re talking about prosecuting Ron DeSantis because he sent 50 people to Martha’s Vineyard who were immediately deported so they wouldn’t get in the way of the Food and Wine Festival. True craziness!
Tucker Carlson currently serves as the host of FOX News Channel’s (FNC) Tucker Carlson Tonight (weekdays 8PM/ET). He joined the network in 2009 as a contributor.
Office of Barack and Michelle Obama P.O. Box 91000 Washington, DC 20066
Dear President Obama,
I wrote you over 700 letters while you were President and I mailed them to the White House and also published them on my blog http://www.thedailyhatch.org .I received several letters back from your staff and I wanted to thank you for those letters.
There are several issues raised in your book that I would like to discuss with you such as the minimum wage law, the liberal press, the cause of 2007 financial meltdown, and especially your pro-choice (what I call pro-abortion) view which I strongly object to on both religious and scientific grounds, Two of the most impressive things in your book were your dedication to both the National Prayer Breakfast (which spoke at 8 times and your many visits to the sides of wounded warriors!!
I have been reading your autobiography A PROMISED LAND and I have been enjoying it.
Let me make a few comments on it, and here is the first quote of yours I want to comment on:
WHEN IT CAME to immigration, everyone agreed that the system was broken. The process of immigrating legally to the United States could take a decade or longer, often depending on what country you were coming from and how much money you had.Meanwhile, the economic gulf between us and our southern neighbors drove hundreds of thousands of people to illegally cross the 1,933-mile U.S.-Mexico border each year, searching for work and a better life. Congress had spent billions to harden the border, with fencing, cameras, drones, and an expanded and increasingly militarized border patrol. But rather than stop the flow of immigrants, these steps had spurred an industry of smugglers—coyotes—who made big money transporting human cargo in barbaric and sometimes deadly fashion. And although border crossings by poor Mexican and Central American migrants received most of the attention from politicians and the press, about 40 percent of America’s unauthorized immigrants arrived through airports or other legal ports of entry and then overstayed their visas. By 2010, an estimated eleven million undocumented persons were living in the United States, in large part thoroughly woven into the fabric of American life.Many were longtime residents, with children who either were U.S. citizens by virtue of having been born on American soil or had been brought to the United States at such an early age that they were American in every respect except for a piece of paper. Entire sectors of the U.S. economy relied on their labor, as undocumented immigrants were often willing to do the toughest, dirtiest work for meager pay—picking the fruits and vegetables that stocked our grocery stores, mopping the floors of offices, washing dishes at restaurants, and providing care to the elderly. But although American consumers benefited from this invisible workforce, many feared that immigrants were taking jobs from citizens, burdening social services programs, and changing the nation’s racial and cultural makeup, which led to demands for the government to crack down on illegal immigration. This sentiment was strongest among Republican constituencies, egged on by an increasingly nativist right-wing press. However, the politics didn’t fall neatly along partisan lines: The traditionally Democratic trade union rank and file, for example, saw the growing presence of undocumented workers on co nstruction sites as threatening their livelihoods, while Republican-leaning business groups interested in maintaining a steady supply of cheap labor (or, in the case of Silicon Valley, foreign-born computer programmers and engineers) often took pro-immigration positions. Back in 2007, the maverick version of John McCain, along with his sidekick Lindsey Graham, had actually joined Ted Kennedy to put together a comprehensive reform bill that offered citizenship to millions of undocumented immigrants while more tightly securing our borders. Despite strong support from President Bush, it had failed to clear the Senate. The bill did, however, receive twelve Republican votes, indicating the real possibility of a future bipartisan accord. I’d pledged during the campaign to resurrect similar legislation once elected, and I’d appointed former Arizona governor Janet Napolitano as head of the Department of Homeland Security—the agency that oversaw U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and U.S. Customs and Border Protection—partly because of her knowledge of border issues and her reputation for having previously managed immigration in a way that was both compassionate and tough. My hopes for a bill had thus far been dashed. With the economy in crisis and Americans losing jobs,few in Congress had any appetite to take on a hot-button issue like immigration. Kennedy was gone. McCain, having been criticized by the right flank for his relatively moderate immigration stance, showed little interest in taking up the banner again. Worse yet, my administration was deporting undocumented workers at an accelerating rate. This wasn’t a result of any directive from me, but rather it stemmed from a 2008 congressional mandate that both expanded ICE’s budget and increased collaboration between ICE and local law enforcement departments in an effort to deport more undocumented immigrants with criminal records. My team and I had made a strategic choice not to immediately try to reverse the policies we’d inherited in large part because we didn’t want to provide ammunition to critics who claimed that Democrats weren’t willing to enforce existing immigration laws—a perception that we thought could torpedo our chances of passing a future reform bill. But by 2010, immigrant-rights and Latino advocacy groups were criticizing our lack of progress..And although I continued to urge Congress to pass immigration reform, I had no realistic path for delivering a new comprehensive law before the midterms.
Milton Friedmanwisely noted, “It’s just obvious you can’t have free immigration and a welfare state,” Is it prudent to allow illegal immigrants (60 percent of whom are high-school dropouts) access to Social Security, Medicare, and, over time, to 60 federal means-tested welfare programs? I don’t think so either!
FREE TO CHOOSE “Who protects the worker?” Video and Transcript Part
The essence of what Milton Friedman is saying in this episode is found in this statement:
“The situation of immigration restrictions really has to do with the question of a welfare state. As I say in the film, I would favor completely free immigration in a society which does not have a welfare system. With a welfare system of the kind we have, you have the problem that people immigrate in order to get welfare, not in order to get employment. You know, it’s a very interesting thing, if you would ask anybody before 1914 the U.S. had no immigration restrictions whatsoever, I’m exaggerating a little bit, there were some immigration restrictions on orientals, but it was essentially, mainly free. If you ask anybody, any American economic historian was that a good thing for America, everybody will say yes it was a wonderful thing for America that we had free immigration. If you ask anybody today, should we have free immigration today, everybody will __ almost everybody will say no. What’s the difference? I think there’s only one difference and that is that when we had free immigration it was immigration of jobs in which everybody benefited. The people who were already here benefited because they got complementary workers, workers who could work with them, make their productivity better, enable them to develop and use the resources of the country better, but today, if you have a system under which you have essentially a governmental guarantee of relief in case of distress, you have a very, very real problem.”
L. WILLIAMS: Dr. Friedman and Walter Williams go back in history and they take a look at a situation where America was empty, where we didn’t have anything like the sophisticated industrial economy we have today, but had a much more agricultural and rural kind of economy and of course when the __ when the impoverished peasants of Europe, my ancestors and most of our ancestors, except for the slaves, which is another situation, but when these people came from Europe and came to a wide open continent with the most fertile soil then available to anyone in the world, naturally there was progress; and I or any of us would be mad to deny progress. But as that developed and as population increased and as we moved into a much more sophisticated industrial economy, we moved then into the situation in the 1930s, or earlier than that , at the end of the century. As some of the more skilled jobs came along, the labor movement didn’t happen by accident. Didn’t happen because there wasn’t a need there. The results of this development, even with all the wealth available in America, the results of this development was that many working people were not having anything like, by standards of civilization or whatever, anything like their fair share in this progress.
MCKENZIE: Now you’re arguing that in a free market, for labor, everyone benefits. Does that mean that you would favor abolition of all immigration restrictions?
FRIEDMAN: The situation of immigration restrictions really has to do with the question of a welfare state. As I say in the film, I would favor completely free immigration in a society which does not have a welfare system. With a welfare system of the kind we have, you have the problem that people immigrate in order to get welfare, not in order to get employment. You know, it’s a very interesting thing, if you would ask anybody before 1914 the U.S. had no immigration restrictions whatsoever, I’m exaggerating a little bit, there were some immigration restrictions on orientals, but it was essentially, mainly free. If you ask anybody, any American economic historian was that a good thing for America, everybody will say yes it was a wonderful thing for America that we had free immigration. If you ask anybody today, should we have free immigration today, everybody will __ almost everybody will say no. What’s the difference? I think there’s only one difference and that is that when we had free immigration it was immigration of jobs in which everybody benefited. The people who were already here benefited because they got complementary workers, workers who could work with them, make their productivity better, enable them to develop and use the resources of the country better, but today, if you have a system under which you have essentially a governmental guarantee of relief in case of distress, you have a very, very real problem.
MCKENZIE: But this is true of every western industrialized country.
FRIEDMAN: That’s right and that’s why today __
MCKENZIE: Yeah.
FRIEDMAN: __ under current circumstances you cannot, unfortunately have free immigration. Not because there’s anything wrong with free immigration, but because we have other policies which make it impossible to adopt free immigration.
MCKENZIE: Well I’d like other reactions. Is it at all feasible to open the door of the labor market internationally now? Bill Brady?
BRADY: I would __ I would say yes providing they open the door to us. I think that the door to not only the labor market, the door to all markets should be __ should be open. That is the product markets.
W. WILLIAMS: My feelings about the undocumented workers of Mexican-Americans are inscribed at the foot of the Statue of Liberty. I think that the people should have the right to come to this country. Now, those who would say, you know, I hear a number of people saying that, well the immigrants are contributing to our unemployment problem. And I point this out to some people, I said, “look, you know, this is the same rhetoric that the Irish used when the blacks were coming up from the north, ” you know, they’re using blacks as scapegoats. They’re saying, “get those people back where they came from so that our members can get jobs, ” you know. Unions were as well doing this, you know, they called them scabs, strikebreakers, etcetera, etcetera. So I do not wish for Mexican-Americans to become the new scapegoats of our particular national problems. They are not the problem, and our nation benefits to the extent that these people come here and work. And to that extent __ to that extent__ so it’s kind of good for them to remain illegal aliens as opposed to being legal aliens where they’re subject to our welfare programs, so that we don’t want them to come here to __
(Several people talking at once.)
GREEN: I think that this country cannot have a group of workers to remain outside the framework of our laws and our protection. And as long as we have workers who are attracted to the United States because of the standards of living; and I think minimum wages play a part in that as part of that attraction. But it seems to me to have undocumented workers without providing either a means of protection for them and it seems to me that we’ve got to go to the question of providing the amnesty for those generations of workers who have come here over a period of time, now two, three, maybe four generations. We have to see that they have the same rights and protection of all other workers. And as it stands now, large numbers of them live outside the framework of the laws and statutes that we have on the __ on our books.
MCKENZIE: Comment Milton.
FRIEDMAN: They do and the tragedy of the situation, as what Walter Williams point out, that as long as they are undocumented and illegal they are a clear net gain, the nation benefits and they benefit. They wouldn’t be here if they didn’t. The tragedy is that we’ve adopted all these other policies so that if we convert them into legal residents it’s no longer clear that we benefit. They may benefit, but it’s no longer clear that we do. What Lynn Williams said before is again a travesty on what was actually going on. The real boost to the trade union movement came after the Great Depression of the 1930s; that Great Depression was not a failure of capitalism; it was not a failure of the private market system as we pointed out in another one of the programs in this series; it was a failure of government. It was not the case that somehow or other there was a decline in the conditions of the working class that produced a great surge of unionism. On the contrary __ unions have never accounted for more than one out of four or one out of five of American workers. The American worker benefited not out of unions, he benefited in spite of unions. He benefited because there was greater opportunity because there were people who were willing to invest their money because there was an opportunity for people to work, to save, to invest. That’s still the case today. You say, we have to provide them with something or other Ernest. Who are the “we”?
Sincerely,
Everette Hatcher III, 13900 Cottontail Lane, Alexander, AR 72002, ph 501-920-5733 everettehatcher@gmail.com
President Obama c/o The White House 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW Washington, DC 20500 Dear Mr. President, I know that you receive 20,000 letters a day and that you actually read 10 of them every day. I really do respect you for trying to get a pulse on what is going on out here. There have […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in David Barton, Founding Fathers, President Obama | Edit |Comments (0)
There have been many articles written by evangelicals like me who fear that our founding fathers would not recognize our country today because secular humanism has rid our nation of spiritual roots. I am deeply troubled by the secular agenda of those who are at war with religion in our public life. Lillian Kwon quoted somebody […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in David Barton, Founding Fathers | Edit | Comments (0)
There have been many articles written by evangelicals like me who fear that our founding fathers would not recognize our country today because secular humanism has rid our nation of spiritual roots. I am deeply troubled by the secular agenda of those who are at war with religion in our public life. Lillian Kwon quoted somebody […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in David Barton, Founding Fathers | Edit | Comments (0)
There have been many articles written by evangelicals like me who fear that our founding fathers would not recognize our country today because secular humanism has rid our nation of spiritual roots. I am deeply troubled by the secular agenda of those who are at war with religion in our public life. Lillian Kwon quoted somebody […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in David Barton, Founding Fathers | Edit | Comments (0)
There have been many articles written by evangelicals like me who fear that our founding fathers would not recognize our country today because secular humanism has rid our nation of spiritual roots. I am deeply troubled by the secular agenda of those who are at war with religion in our public life. Lillian Kwon quoted somebody […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in David Barton, Founding Fathers | Edit | Comments (0)
There have been many articles written by evangelicals like me who fear that our founding fathers would not recognize our country today because secular humanism has rid our nation of spiritual roots. I am deeply troubled by the secular agenda of those who are at war with religion in our public life. Lillian Kwon quoted somebody […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Founding Fathers | Edit | Comments (0)
President Obama Speaks at The Ohio State University Commencement Ceremony Published on May 5, 2013 President Obama delivers the commencement address at The Ohio State University. May 5, 2013. You can learn a lot about what President Obama thinks the founding fathers were all about from his recent speech at Ohio State. May 7, 2013, […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Founding Fathers, President Obama | Edit | Comments (0)
Dr. C. Everett Koop with Bill Graham. Francis Schaeffer: “Whatever Happened to the Human Race” (Episode 4) THE BASIS FOR HUMAN DIGNITY Published on Oct 7, 2012 by AdamMetropolis The 45 minute video above is from the film series created from Francis Schaeffer’s book “Whatever Happened to the Human Race?” with Dr. C. Everett Koop. This […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Founding Fathers, Francis Schaeffer, Prolife | Edit |Comments (1)
America’s Founding Fathers Deist or Christian? – David Barton 4/6 There have been many articles written by evangelicals like me who fear that our founding fathers would not recognize our country today because secular humanism has rid our nation of spiritual roots. I am deeply troubled by the secular agenda of those who are at […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in David Barton, Founding Fathers | Tagged governor of connecticut, john witherspoon, jonathan trumbull | Edit | Comments (1)
3 Of 5 / The Bible’s Influence In America / American Heritage Series / David Barton There were 55 gentlemen who put together the constitution and their church affliation is of public record. Greg Koukl notes: Members of the Constitutional Convention, the most influential group of men shaping the political foundations of our nation, were […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Founding Fathers | Edit | Comments (0)
I do not think that John Quincy Adams was a founding father in the same sense that his father was. However, I do think he was involved in the early days of our government working with many of the founding fathers. Michele Bachmann got into another history-related tussle on ABC’s “Good Morning America” today, standing […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in David Barton, Founding Fathers | Edit | Comments (0)
I have gone back and forth and back and forth with many liberals on the Arkansas Times Blog on many issues such as abortion, human rights, welfare, poverty, gun control and issues dealing with popular culture. Here is another exchange I had with them a while back. My username at the Ark Times Blog is Saline […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Arkansas Times, Francis Schaeffer, Prolife | Edit |Comments (0)
I truly believe that many of the problems we have today in the USA are due to the advancement of humanism in the last few decades in our society. Ronald Reagan appointed the evangelical Dr. C. Everett Koop to the position of Surgeon General in his administration. He partnered with Dr. Francis Schaeffer in making the […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Adrian Rogers, Francis Schaeffer | Edit | Comments (0)
Francis Schaeffer: “Whatever Happened to the Human Race” (Episode 4) THE BASIS FOR HUMAN DIGNITY Published on Oct 7, 2012 by AdamMetropolis ____________ The 45 minute video above is from the film series created from Francis Schaeffer’s book “Whatever Happened to the Human Race?” with Dr. C. Everett Koop. This book really helped develop my political […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Francis Schaeffer | Edit | Comments (0)
While most people pay attention to which political party enjoys success when there’s an election, I think it’s also important to look at ballot initiatives.
But, as we’ve seen in California and Oregon, not every referendum produces a sensible result.
Today, we’re going to look at the most important ballot initiative of 2022. But before looking at the details, here’s a map showing the states gaining and losing population when Americans move across borders.
You’ll notice that Massachusetts is one of the top states for outbound migration, which means people are “voting with their feet” against the Bay State.
But bad news can become worse news. And that will definitely be the case if voters in Massachusetts approve a referendum next month to junk the state’s flat tax and replace it with a class-warfare system that has a top rate of 9 percent.
Jeff Jacoby wrote last year about the idea in a column for the Boston Globe.
A century-old provision of the Massachusetts Constitution commands that if the commonwealth taxes income, it must do so at a “uniform rate.” Five times in the modern era — in 1962, 1968, 1972, 1976, and 1994 — tax-and-spend liberals have invited voters to discard that rule and make it legal to soak the rich at higher tax rates. Five times voters have said no.…There is considerable arrogance in the way advocates of the surtax blithely disregard the voters’ repeated refusal to overturn the constitutional ban. Their attitude seems to be that no matter how many times the people uphold the uniform-rate rule, there is no reason to take them seriously. …more than 150 Massachusetts businesses representing almost 16,000 workers sent lawmakers an open letter imploring them not to hobble the state’s economy with a stiff new tax, and expressing “alarm” at the proposed constitutional amendment. They…know that a surtax aimed at millionaires is bound to injure countless people who will never earn anywhere close to a million bucks.
The Wall Street Journal has editorialized against the proposal.
…progressives in Boston want to join New York and other nearby states in a high-tax arms race. …Bay State ballots in November will give voters the choice to place a 4% surtax on incomes above $1 million, bringing the top rate to 9% from 5%. The proposal would amend the state constitution to remove its flat-tax mandate. Passing the measure would rocket Massachusetts to seventh from 31st on the list of states with the highest marginal income-tax rates.…A $2.3 billion revenue surplus shows that the state is already taxing more than it needs. This year’s tax haul was so big it triggered a largely forgotten state law that caps revenue. Residents may soon receive checks that refund a portion of last year’s taxes. …Approving the tax would speed up a wealth exodus already under way. The Pioneer Institute last year noted that Massachusetts’ tax base has been eroding, and there’s no surprise about where the escapees are going. The top two destinations are Florida and New Hampshire, both of which lack an income tax. …The constitution’s flat rate mandate is a crucial limit on the demands of interest groups for ever-more spending. If tax rates rise and the revenue cap goes away, spending will soar to snatch the new revenue and soon the politicians will return to seek even higher rates, as they always do.
The economic consequences of class-warfare taxation are never positive.
And that will be true in Massachusetts. A study from the Beacon Hill Institute in Massachusetts estimates the economic damage that the surtax would cause.
…we find, using our in-house computer model (MA-STAMP) that the effects on the economy will be as follows: In its first year of implementation, the amendment will cause the state to lose 4,388 working families due to outmigration. This outmigration plus a reduction in labor hiring and labor-force participation will cause a loss of 9,329 jobs. …the state economy, real (inflation-adjusted) gross domestic product, will shrink by $431 million… Advocates of the measure claim that it will make possible a $2 billion annual in state spending. …Instead, we find that the revenue yield of the tax will be far less, the result of the expected shrinkage in economic activity. (See Table E-2.) In its first year of implementation, combined state and local revenues will rise by only about $1.2 billion.
Here’s a table showing some of the negative effects.
Alex Brill of the American Enterprise Institute also estimated that revenues would be lower than expected once the effects of the Laffer Curve are incorporated into the analysis.
Here are some excerpts from his article in the Hill.
Modifying the revenue forecast to incorporate evidence from the academic literature about likely behavioral changes yields a significantly lower estimated revenue pickup. I estimate that about 400 of the 22,000 taxpayers affected by the surtaxwould exit the state and many others would reduce work or shift and relabel their income to avoid the tax. By my estimate, the surtax would generate approximately $1.5 billion in 2023, since these behavioral responses would offset 32 percent of the revenue gain that would occur if taxpayers kept their behavior unchanged. Using a similar approach, Tufts University’s Center for State Policy Analysis recently estimated that the proposed surtax would generate only $1.3 billion in 2023.
Last but not least, the Tax Foundation crunched the numbers and also found the surtax would cause significant economic damage.
…while no one would mistake Massachusetts for a low-tax state, it has carved out a place as a competitive area to live and work within the Northeast corridor. …but consider the Commonwealth’s ranking on the Tax Foundation’s State Business Tax Climate Index…in 2022, the Bay State still ranked 34th overall on the Index—well below the median.…Massachusetts’ competitive tax advantage in New England is primarily due to its individual income and sales tax systems, which rank 11th and 12th on the Index, respectively. With regard to its neighbors, only New Hampshire has a better overall Indexranking than Massachusetts. …In 2007, Christina Romer and David Romer, professors of economics at the University of California Berkeley, conducted a study to determine the impact of legislated tax changes on the economy. …The study found that a tax increase equal to 1 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) resulted in an estimated 3 percent decline in GDP after three years. …If the Romer and Romer study were applied to the Massachusetts surtax it would result in a 0.942 percent decline in GDP after three years. In other words, the Commonwealth’s total economic output could contract by $5.98 billion by the end of 2025.
Here’s a table from the report, showing that zero-income tax New Hampshire and Florida already are big winners when people escape Massachusetts.
If the referendum is approved, we can easily predictthat future versions of this chart will show much bigger numbers.
Simply stated, some of the geese with the golden eggs will fly away (while the ones that stay will decide to produce fewer eggs – as well as figure out ways to protect the eggs that remain).
California is the Greece of the USA, but Texas is not perfect either!!!
As the chief financial officer of the nation’s second-largest state, even I have found it hard to get a handle on how much governments are spending, and how much debt they’re taking on. Every level of government is piling up incredible bills. And they’re coming due, whether we like it or not. Even in low-tax Texas, property taxes have risen three times faster than the inflation rate and four times faster than our population growth since 1992. Our local governments, meanwhile, more than doubled their debt load in the last decade, to more than $7,500 in debt for every man, woman and child in the state. In Houston alone, city-employee pension plans are facing an unfunded liability of $2.4 billion. But too many taxpayers aren’t given the information they need to make informed decisions when they vote debt issues. Recently I spent several months holding about 40 town-hall meetings with Texans across our state. Each time, I asked the attendees if they could tell me how much debt their local governments are carrying. Not a single person in a single town had this information.
In other words, taxpayers need to be eternally vigilant, regardless of where they live. Otherwise the corrupt rectangle of politicians, bureaucrats, lobbyists, and interest groups will figure out hidden ways of using the political process to obtain unearned wealth.
TUCKER CARLSON: In 2022, whether you’re considered dangerous or not depends on who you voted for
Oct 10, 2022 | 11:06 PM
Happy Columbus Day! Remember Columbus Day? That’s the day that we celebrate the discovery of the New World by Christopher Columbus and all that happened after, which was the creation of the freest and most humane society in the history of man. We’re still celebrating it, but we’re also assessing what happened to that society because it is changing.
We want to tell you the story of a man called Paul Vaughn leading off tonight. Paul Vaughn does not fit the profile of a terrorist. You’d never guess. He’s 55 years old. He’s a former pastor who now runs a small Internet service business in middle Tennessee. He and his wife are gentle people. They’re faithful Christians. They spend most of their time raising their 11 children.
Last Wednesday morning, at about 7:15 a.m., a bucolic scene at the Vaughn household. Several of Paul Vaughn’s children are standing in the front yard about to head to school. Suddenly, out of nowhere, their world falls down around them. A team of FBI agents armed with automatic rifles swoop in in their SUVs and begins pounding on the front door of the family home.
Inside the house, Paul Vaughn is watching this and he shocked, as he said later, “When I opened the door and saw the guns pointed at me, I asked them what they wanted. They said they wanted me,” and they did. The agents led Paul Vaughn away. Inside the house, his wife who had been at the back with their newest child, an 18-month-old baby, ran to the front door. Confused and terrified, she asked what anyone would ask, “Who are you and why are you taking my husband away?” We don’t need to guess about the exchange because it’s on tape. Here’s what it looked like.
PAUL VAUGHN WIFE: I want to know why you were banging on my door with a gun. You’re not going to tell me anything?
AGENT: I tried m’am
WIFE: No, you didn’t. You did not try. This is not acceptable. Can I have your name? You’re not going to give me your name? You’re not going to give me any information?
Body armor, little watch caps, automatic weapons held at the ready, taking off with her husband. “Why are you taking him? Who are you?“ she asks, but of course they completely ignore her. “No, we’re not going to answer. We tried” – when they didn’t. They don’t have to answer because when your husband is a domestic terrorist, the government doesn’t owe you an answer to the most basic questions. So, Paul Vaughn, we now learn, is a terrorist, but what did he do? You may be wondering that by this point.
Well, as the Department of Justice explained later in the statement, Paul Vaughn opposes abortion and not just in a quiet, personal way. That would be bad enough, but Paul Vaughn is outspoken about his views on abortion. He still believes, being 55, this is a free country with a Bill of Rights that allows you the freedom to say what you want and even have protests on behalf of your ideas. He believes that was the freedom that built this country. So, a year and a half ago, on March 5 2021, Vaughn and ten volunteers from a Christian pro-life group in Tennessee staged a protest at an abortion clinic in Mount Juliet. Now, we don’t need to speculate about what happened next, and that’s a good thing for Paul Vaughn. It was broadcast live on Facebook by one of the volunteers. That would be 73-year-old Chester Gallagher. Watch this:
Protesters sing church hymns.
COP:We’re going to need you guys to disperse outside, ok? This is your last warning. We need everyone to step outside and go to the sidewalk. You’re more than welcome to protest out on the sidewalk, ok? I’m just asking nicely for you to leave and go outside on the sidewalk.
So, you live in the United States and you watch nightly the chaos in your city, buildings burning, people being pushed in front of subway trains, people getting knocked in the face on the street for no reason, carjackings, murders up in every city in America. So, you look at that and you think, is that really it? That’s why armed FBI agents with automatic rifles arrived at Paul Vaughn’s home last Wednesday? Because of that? Because more than a year ago, a group of Christians, many of them elderly, sang hymns? Yeah, that’s it. That’s what he did wrong.
Now we should note that we only have this video evidence because of the hard work of Mia Cathell at Townhall, which broke this story. God bless. Without this documentary evidence, without this video, you might be tempted to believe the Biden administration when it tells you that Paul Vaughn “used force and physical obstruction to injure, intimidate and interfere with employees of the abortion clinic.”
Oh, but he didn’t. He didn’t use physical force. He sang hymns, but for doing that, Joe Biden’s Department of Justice now tells us Paul Vaughn deserves to spend 11 years in prison. 11 years? Vaughn’s “coconspirators” from that day in March of 2021, meaning other pro-life activists, are also facing long prison sentences.
This group would include 87-year-old Eva Edl. Now, if that name sounds familiar to you, it’s because she is something of a celebrity in Christian circles, pro-lifecircles, and that’s because she survived a Yugoslav concentration camp before escaping to this country, where she spent decades advocating against abortion. She has seen firsthand what happens when the government denies the essential humanity of a person. In this picture, you can see her sitting in front of an abortion clinic as a police officer towers over her. Within seconds, two officers are shoving this 87-year-old into the back of a car.
Now, again, contrast this with the country you watch every night on television or the one you experience if you live in a city where people are afraid to go to the grocery store, where Wendy’s burned down in the name of civil rights, and no one does a thing about it. Watch how they’re treated.
Same thing happened to 58-year-old Heather Idoni back in March of 2021. It took a whole team of police officers to remove her. Really? You wonder why. How dangerous does she look? Then there was 57-year-old evangelist Calvin John Zastrow. He was also arrested that day in March. Here’s a video he shot discussing it:
ZASTROW: When we have national revival, this is what every abortion clinic’s gonna look like right here, a field of rubble. Not through violence, through peace, through God bringing the high places down. So, let’s go show up in front of those high places, trust him, rescue, preach sing pray, and see this happen to the rest of ‘em.
Now, you may not share his views. Maybe you do, maybe you don’t, but be as honest as you can with yourself. Does that guy look dangerous and if so, compared to what? There are a lot of dangerous people wandering around completely unimpeded. In fact, they’re celebrated by this administration. Is that guy a dangerous person? Of course, he’s not. He’s a Christian. Maybe you’re not a Christian. Maybe you’re pro-choice.
But even if you are, you are not, if you’re being completely honest, going to conclude that that guy poses a threat to you or this country because he doesn’t and neither is his daughter, who’s 24 years old, Eva Darlene Zastrow. She was also apprehended at the clinic with her father. Here’s her violent manifesto.
DARLENE ZASTROW: I’d seen the pictures before, and I heard that it was murder before, but the connection went from knowing it here to knowing it in my heart. I just praise God that he gave me the opportunity to rescue, and Lord willing, abortion will end.
So imagine sitting back at Department of Justice headquarters assessing that video and saying to yourself, “You know what? They need an armed FBI raid. Get out the body armor. That’s a terror manifesto.” Apparently, they did conclude that because now Joe Biden’s Justice Department, the FBI, to its eternal shame, is rounding up everyone associated with Paul Vaughn’s entirely nonviolent Christian organization.
Take a look at the mug shots from the FBI’s investigation into this event in March of 2021. It’s on your screen right now. They’re telling you, the FBI is telling you, bragging about it, that these people are dangerous. and of course, you know what they know, which is in America 2022, whether you’re dangerous or not, depends almost entirely on who you voted for.
There are people in this country who molest children. True fact. You are hearing now that they are “minor-attracted persons.” You have people on television trying to minimize the gravity of child molestation. Why is that? Well, because they’re probably Biden voters. That’s the assumption anyway. Meanwhile, those people in the mug shots on the screen, those are the terrorists.
Keep in mind that Biden voters, who’ve actually killed people, are facing less jail time than these Christian protesters. Illinois BLM rioter Matthew Rupert received fewer than 11 years for setting fire to a cell phone store in Minneapolis. Oh, really? 26-year-old Montez Terriel Lee received fewer than 11 years in prison for setting fire to the Max It Prawn Shop in Minneapolis, a fire that wound up killing a 30-year-old man. He got less time than Paul Vaughn is facing.
20-year-old Samuel Elliot Frey was sentenced to just over two years in federal prison for setting fire to a health food store, but it was for a good cause. It was for Joe Biden, so not a big deal. All of those crimes and countless others that are happening around the country at a scale we have not seen in our lifetimes, all of those crimes are being treated as less serious offenses than a man who sang hymns in an abortion clinic.
So, what’s going on here? Well, a day before the FBI’s raid on Paul Vaughn, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris announced their new policy, which is pro-lifers, because they disagree with Joe Biden and upset the base, are now terrorists.
VICE PRESIDENT KAMALA HARRIS: What we believe, and I certainly believe, that a woman should have the freedom to make decisions about her own body and that her government should not be making those decisions for her. Today’s extremist so-called leaders are attacking the freedom and liberty of millions of women.
PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: We’re not going to sit by and let Republicans throughout the country enact extreme policies to threaten access to basic health care. My message to folks across the country who are worried about what we’re seeing is first, that we have your back.
So, you think to yourself as you watch something like that, “Well, of course, there’s an election coming up in just a few weeks and a lot of the Democratic base believes that abortion is the key to freedom and happiness and they’re very upset about the Roe v. Wade decision. Roe v. Wade is no longer the law of the land and so Biden and Harris and the rest of the leaders of that party are pandering to them.” It’s okay. We’re on your side.
What you don’t think as you watch something like that, that its effect will mean sending guys with automatic weapons to Paul Vaughn’s house and scaring the hell out of his 11 children. You never would have imagined that in real life, people who sang hymns in an abortion clinic could be facing 11 years in prison. So, you have to ask, since the parallels are very clear, this is effectively the modern version of Bull Connor’s fire hoses and German Shepherds, has a single Democrat pointed out that this is insane, that an 11-year sentence for him singing might be a little punitive?
Has Sandy Cortez said anything? Wait a second. We’re pro-choice and everything but 11 years for a 55-year-old father of 11? Has Rashida Tlaib? What about George Gascon or Larry Krasner? The guys who think, “Well, we put away too many people in prison. We got to pull back a little bit. We got to rehabilitate them.” What about the compassion mongers at CNN or MSNBC? Have they said a word about this? As their country becomes totalitarian, have they even noticed? We checked. No. The only clip we could find was Nancy Pelosi, where she endorses violence against her political enemies. Here she is.:
REPORTER:There has been a number of attacks on churches, on crisis pregnancy centers. Republicans are going after Democrats for not saying anything and they’re saying that your rhetoric is contributing to these attacks on these crisis pregnancy centers.
HOUSE SPEAKER NANCY PELOSI: Well, let me just say this: a woman has a right to choose, to live up to her responsibility. It’s up to her, her doctor, her family, her husband, her significant other and her god. I’m a very Catholic person and I believe in every woman’s right to make her own decisions.
First of all, you’re not a Catholic. I mean, this is ridiculous. Let’s stop pretending. Second, you don’t believe at all of the right to choose. You applauded as nurses got fired because they didn’t want to take the mandatory vax because they did want to hurt their own fertility. They wanted to have children maybe some day and you thought that was great. So, it wasn’t their body, their choice. You’re a liar and a fraud. You’re not a Christian. Be quiet.
But what’s really stunning is nobody the people who’ve lectures for years, the criminal justice system is just to mean that MS-13 are children of God. They have a problem with us at all. The people who claim to hate mass incarceration, it turns out, are strongly for the mass incarceration of anyone who disagrees with them, and they’re doing it.
As Julie Kelly has reported relentlessly, judges have sentenced dozens of January 6 defendants to months in prison, followed by probation. Why? Oh, because they entered a public building as police officers stood by, lifted the ropes for them. What was that about, by the way? Don’t ask, shut up. They belong in jail.
As of this week, dozens of January 6 defendants are still being held in pretrial detention. No one notices. Where’s the Republican Party in that? Nowhere. At the same time, the FBI has made zero arrests, none to protect pro-lifers from actual violence, not hymn singing, firebombing. The CompassCare Pregnancy Services center in Buffalo was firebombed in June. No arrests have been made. In fact, the FBI seized surveillance footage from the facility and never gave it back.
REPORTER: This building was up in flames this morning when police and firefighters arrived and this is the aftermath: broken windows, shattered glass and graffiti which the CEO says gives him an indication as to who is behind this. CEO Jim Harden says this didn’t come as a shock. Recently, CompassCare has received threats online and in person. The graffiti on the side of the building says “Jane was here” and Harden says he thinks the abortion rights group Jane’s Revenge is behind the attack. It’s a reference to Jane’s Collective which was provided underground abortions in Chicago in the 60s. The group took responsibility for firebombing a pro-life facility in Wisconsin last month. Harden says it’ll take months to repair the $100k worth of damage to the facility.
See how this works? So, a group aligned with Joe Biden firebombs a building (firebombs!) and the FBI does nothing. Instead, they send agents with automatic rifles to the home of a 55-year-old man with 11 children because he sung hymns in an abortionclinic.
This is too much actually. There’s always going to be disparities in justice. There’s always going to be disparities in law enforcement. You have to believe they’re unintentional. This is not unintentional. This is intentional. It’s right in our face, and it’s completely unacceptable.
Chris Wray, who runs the FBI, purportedly a good guy, a decent man who cares about justice, what does he think of this? Is this all right, sending FBI agents automatic weapons to arrest hymn singer? So, we called Chris Wray’s office today and asked a simple question: Are you okay with this? You know this is happening? You run the FBI. No response just like Paul Vaughn’s wife just shut the door. We don’t have to answer your questions.
These are political raids, and they’re exactly what the most recent FBI whistleblower Steve Friend warned about last month. The FBI didn’t respond to those warnings from one of its own agents. It just suspended Steve Friend. So, the raids are continuing. People need to see this. This is going too far, and it’s getting scary.
Dr. Francis schaeffer – The flow of Materialism(from Part 4 of Whatever happened to human race? Co-authored by Francis Schaeffer and Dr. C. Everett Koop)
Edith Schaeffer with her husband, Francis Schaeffer, in 1970 in Switzerland, where they founded L’Abri, a Christian commune.
________________
______________________
September 25, 2021
President Biden c/o The White House 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW Washington, DC 20500
Dear Mr. President,
I really do respect you for trying to get a pulse on what is going on out here. I know that you don’t agree with my pro-life views but I wanted to challenge you as a fellow Christian to re-examine your pro-choice view.
I truly believe that many of the problems we have today in the USA are due to the advancement of humanism in the last few decades in our society. Ronald Reagan appointed the evangelical Dr. C. Everett Koop to the position of Surgeon General in his administration. He partnered with Dr. Francis Schaeffer in making the video WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE HUMAN RACE? which can be found on You Tube. It is very valuable information for Christians to have.
Today I want to respond to your letter to me on July 9, 2021. Here it is below:
THE WHITE HOUSE
WASHINGTON
July 9, 2021
Mr. Everette Hatcher III
Alexander, AR
Dear Mr. Hatcher,
Thank you for taking your time to share your thoughts on abortion. Hearing from passionate individuals like me inspires me every day, and I welcome the opportunity to respond to your letter
Our country faces many challenges, and the road we will travel together will be one of the most difficult in our history. Despite these tough times, I have never been more optimistic for the future of America. I believe we are better positioned than any country in the world to lead in the 21st century not just by the example of our power but by the power of our example.
As we move forward to address the complex issues of our time, I encourage you to remain an active participant in helping write the next great chapter of the American story. We need your courage and dedication at this critical time, and we must meet this moment together as the United States of America. If we do that, I believe that our best days still lie ahead.
Sincerely
Joe Biden
Mr. President, my wife was born in JEFFERSON MEMORIAL HOSPITAL in Pine Bluff, Arkansas and Adrian Rogers tells a story about another lady that was born in that same hospital: “They took that grocery sack and Maria home and one hour passed and two hours passed and that baby was still crying and panting for his life in that grocery sack. They took that little baby down to the hospital there in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, and they called an obstetrician and he called a pediatrician and they called nurses and they began to work on that little baby. Today that baby is alive and well and healthy, that little mass of protoplasm. That little thing that wasn’t a human being is alive and well. I want to tell you they spent $150,000 to save the life of that baby. NOW CAN YOU EXPLAIN TO ME HOW THEY CAN SPEND $150,000 TO SAVE THE LIFE OF SOMETHING THAT SOMEBODY WAS PAYING ANOTHER DOCTOR TO TAKE THE LIFE OF?”
Thanks for your recent letter about evolution and abortion. The correlation is hardly one to one; there are evolutionists who are anti-abortion and anti-evolutionists who are pro-abortion.You argue that God exists because otherwise we could not understand the world in our consciousness. But if you think God is necessary to understand the world, then why do you not ask the next question of where God came from? And if you say “God was always here,” why not say that the universe was always here? On abortion, my views are contained in the enclosed article (Sagan, Carl and Ann Druyan {1990}, “The Question of Abortion,” Parade Magazine, April 22.)
I was blessed with the opportunity to correspond with Dr. Sagan, and in his December 5, 1995 letter Dr. Sagan went on to tell me that he was enclosing his article “The Question of Abortion: A Search for Answers”by Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan. I am going to respond to several points made in that article. Here is a portion of Sagan’s article (here is a link to the whole article):
(both Adrian Rogers and Francis Schaeffer mentioned Carl Sagan in their books and that prompted me to write Sagan and expose him to their views.
For the complete text, including illustrations, introductory quote, footnotes, and commentary on the reaction to the originally published article see Billions and Billions.
The issue had been decided years ago. The court had chosen the middle ground. You’d think the fight was over. Instead, there are mass rallies, bombings and intimidation, murders of workers at abortion clinics, arrests, intense lobbying, legislative drama, Congressional hearings, Supreme Court decisions, major political parties almost defining themselves on the issue, and clerics threatening politicians with perdition. Partisans fling accusations of hypocrisy and murder. The intent of the Constitution and the will of God are equally invoked. Doubtful arguments are trotted out as certitudes. The contending factions call on science to bolster their positions. Families are divided, husbands and wives agree not to discuss it, old friends are no longer speaking. Politicians check the latest polls to discover the dictates of their consciences. Amid all the shouting, it is hard for the adversaries to hear one another. Opinions are polarized. Minds are closed.
Is it wrong to abort a pregnancy? Always? Sometimes? Never? How do we decide? We wrote this article to understand better what the contending views are and to see if we ourselves could find a position that would satisfy us both. Is there no middle ground? We had to weigh the arguments of both sides for consistency and to pose test cases, some of which are purely hypothetical. If in some of these tests we seem to go too far, we ask the reader to be patient with us–we’re trying to stress the various positions to the breaking point to see their weaknesses and where they fail.
In contemplative moments, nearly everyone recognizes that the issue is not wholly one-sided. Many partisans of differing views, we find, feel some disquiet, some unease when confronting what’s behind the opposing arguments. (This is partly why such confrontations are avoided.) And the issue surely touches on deep questions: What are our responses to one another? Should we permit the state to intrude into the most intimate and personal aspects of our lives? Where are the boundaries of freedom? What does it mean to be human?
Of the many actual points of view, it is widely held–especially in the media, which rarely have the time or the inclination to make fine distinctions–that there are only two: “pro-choice” and “pro-life.” This is what the two principal warring camps like to call themselves, and that’s what we’ll call them here. In the simplest characterization, a pro-choicer would hold that the decision to abort a pregnancy is to be made only by the woman; the state has no right to interfere. And a pro-lifer would hold that, from the moment of conception, the embryo or fetus is alive; that this life imposes on us a moral obligation to preserve it; and that abortion is tantamount to murder. Both names–pro-choice and pro-life–were picked with an eye toward influencing those whose minds are not yet made up: Few people wish to be counted either as being against freedom of choice or as opposed to life. Indeed, freedom and life are two of our most cherished values, and here they seem to be in fundamental conflict.
Let’s consider these two absolutist positions in turn. A newborn baby is surely the same being it was just before birth. There ‘s good evidence that a late-term fetus responds to sound–including music, but especially its mother’s voice. It can suck its thumb or do a somersault. Occasionally, it generates adult brain-wave patterns. Some people claim to remember being born, or even the uterine environment. Perhaps there is thought in the womb. It’s hard to maintain that a transformation to full personhood happens abruptly at the moment of birth. Why, then, should it be murder to kill an infant the day after it was born but not the day before?
As a practical matter, this isn’t very important: Less than 1 percent of all tabulated abortions in the United States are listed in the last three months of pregnancy (and, on closer investigation, most such reports turn out to be due to miscarriage or miscalculation). But third-trimester abortions provide a test of the limits of the pro-choice point of view. Does a woman’s “innate right to control her own body” encompass the right to kill a near-term fetus who is, for all intents and purposes, identical to a newborn child?
——-
End of Sagan Excerpt
When I was in high school the book and film series named WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE HUMAN RACE? came out and it featured Doctor C. Everett Koop and Francis Schaeffer and they looked at the issues of abortion, infanticide, and youth euthanasia and they looked at comments from such scholars as Peter Singer and James D. Watson.
C. Everett Koop pictured above and Peter Singer below
Peter Singer, an endowed chair at Princeton’s Center for Human Values, said, “Killing a disabled infant is not morally equivalent to killing a person. Very often it is not wrong at all.”
James D.Watson
In May 1973, James D. Watson, the Nobel Prize laureate who discovered the double helix of DNA, granted an interview to Prism magazine, then a publication of the American Medical Association. Time later reported the interview to the general public, quoting Watson as having said, “If a child were not declared alive until three days after birth, then all parents could be allowed the choice only a few are given under the present system. The doctor could allow the child to die if the parents so choose and save a lot of misery and suffering. I believe this view is the only rational, compassionate attitude to have.”
Carl Sagan
On August 30, 1995 I mailed a letter to Carl Sagan that probably prompted this discussion on abortion and it enclosed a lengthy story from Adrian Rogers about an abortion case in Pine Bluff, Arkansas that almost became an infanticide case:
An excerpt from the Sunday morning message (11-6-83) by Adrian Rogers in Memphis, TN.
I want to tell you that secular humanism and so-called abortion rights are inseparably linked together. We have been taught that our bodies and our children are the products of the evolutionary process, and so therefore human life may not be all that valuable to begin with. We have come today to where it is legal and even considered to be a good thing to put little babies to death…15 million little babies put to death since 1973 because of this philosophy of Secular Humanism.
How did the court make that type of decision? You would think it would be so obvious. You can’t do that! You can’t kill little babies! Why? Because the Bible says! Friend, they don’t give a hoot what the Bible says! There used to be a time when they talked about what the Bible says because there was a time that we as a nation had a constitution that was based in the Judeo-Christian ethic, but today if we say “The Bible says” or “God says “Separation of Church and State. Don’t tell us what the Bible says or what God says. We will tell you what we think!” Therefore, they look at the situation and they decide if it is right or wrong purely on the humanistic philosophy that right and wrong are relative and the situation says what is right or what is wrong.
This little girl just 19 years old went into the doctor’s office and he examined her. He said, “We can take take of you.” He gave her an injection in her arm that was to cause her to go into labor and to get rid of that protoplasm, that feud, that little mass that was in her, but she wasn’t prepared for the sound she was about to hear. It was a little baby crying. That little baby weighed 13 ounces. His hand the size of my thumbnail. You know what the doctor did. The doctor put that little baby in a grocery sack and gave it to Maria’s two friends who were with her in that doctor office and Said, “It will stop making those noises after a while.”
(Adrian Rogers pictured above)
Pine Bluff, ArkansasMy wife was born in main hospital in Pine Bluff, Arkansas
They took that grocery sack and Maria home and one hour passed and two hours passed and that baby was still crying and panting for his life in that grocery sack. They took that little baby down to the hospital there in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, and they called an obstetrician and he called a pediatrician and they called nurses and they began to work on that little baby. Today that baby is alive and well and healthy, that little mass of protoplasm. That little thing that wasn’t a human being is alive and well. I want to tell you they spent $150,000 to save the life of that baby. NOW CAN YOU EXPLAIN TO ME HOW THEY CAN SPEND $150,000 TO SAVE THE LIFE OF SOMETHING THAT SOMEBODY WAS PAYING ANOTHER DOCTOR TO TAKE THE LIFE OF? The same life!!! Are you going to tell me that is not a baby? Are you going to tell me that if that baby had been put to death it would not have been murder? You will never convince me of that. What has happened to us in America? We have been sold a bill of goods by the Secular Humanists!
Carl Sagan was elected the HUMANIST OF THE YEAR in 1982 by the AMERICAN HUMANIST ASSOCIATION
Carl Sagan asked, “Does a woman’s “innate right to control her own body” encompass the right to kill a near-term fetus who is, for all intents and purposes, identical to a newborn child?”
This message “A Christian Manifesto” was given in 1982 by the late Christian Philosopher Francis Schaeffer when he was age 70 at D. James Kennedy’s Corral Ridge Presbyterian Church.
Listen to this important message where Dr. Schaeffer says it is the duty of Christians to disobey the government when it comes in conflict with God’s laws. So many have misinterpreted Romans 13 to mean unconditional obedience to the state. When the state promotes an evil agenda and anti-Christian statues we must obey God rather than men. Acts
I use to watch James Kennedy preach from his TV pulpit with great delight in the 1980’s. Both of these men are gone to be with the Lord now. We need new Christian leaders to rise up in their stead.
To view Part 2 See Francis Schaeffer Lecture- Christian Manifesto Pt 2 of 2 video
The religious and political freedom’s we enjoy as Americans was based on the Bible and the legacy of the Reformation according to Francis Schaeffer. These freedoms will continue to diminish as we cast off the authority of Holy Scripture.
In public schools there is no other view of reality but that final reality is shaped by chance.
Likewise, public television gives us many things that we like culturally but so much of it is mere propaganda shaped by a humanistic world and life view.
_____________________________
I was able to watch Francis Schaeffer deliver a speech on a book he wrote called “A Christian Manifesto” and I heard him in several interviews on it in 1981 and 1982. I listened with great interest since I also read that book over and over again. Below is a portion of one of Schaeffer’s talks on a crucial subject that is very important today too.
A great talk by Francis Schaeffer:A Christian Manifesto by Dr. Francis A. SchaefferThis address was delivered by the late Dr. Schaeffer in 1982 at the Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church, Fort Lauderdale, Florida. It is based on one of his books, which bears the same title._________
Infanticide and youth enthansia ———So what we find then, is that the medical profession has largely changed — not all doctors. I’m sure there are doctors here in the audience who feel very, very differently, who feel indeed that human life is important and you wouldn’t take it, easily, wantonly. But, in general, we must say (and all you have to do is look at the TV programs), all you have to do is hear about the increased talk about allowing the Mongoloid child — the child with Down’s Syndrome — to starve to death if it’s born this way. Increasingly, we find on every side the medical profession has changed its views.
The view now is, “Is this life worth saving?”I look at you… You’re an older congregation than I am usually used to speaking to. You’d better think, because — this — means — you! It does not stop with abortion and infanticide. It stops at the question, “What about the old person? Is he worth hanging on to?” Should we, as they are doing in England in this awful organization, EXIT, teach older people to commit suicide? Should we help them get rid of them because they are an economic burden, a nuisance? I want to tell you, once you begin chipping away the medical profession…
The intrinsic value of the human life is founded upon the Judeo-Christian concept that man is unique because he is made in the image of God, and not because he is well, strong, a consumer, a sex object or any other thing. That is where whatever compassion this country has is, and certainly it is far from perfect and has never been perfect. Nor out of the Reformation has there been a Golden Age, but whatever compassion there has ever been, it is rooted in the fact that our culture knows that man is unique, is made in the image of God. Take it away, and I just say gently, the stopper is out of the bathtub for all human life.
______________________________________
Thank you so much for your time. I know how valuable it is. I also appreciate the fine family that you have and your commitment as a father and a husband. Now I wanted to make some comments concerning our shared Christian faith. I respect you for putting your faith in Christ for your eternal life. I am pleading to you on the basis of the Bible to please review your religious views concerning abortion. It was the Bible that caused the abolition movement of the 1800’s and it also was the basis for Martin Luther King’s movement for civil rights and it also is the basis for recognizing the unborn children.
Sincerely,
Everette Hatcher III, 13900 Cottontail Lane, Alexander, AR 72002, ph 501-920-5733,
Francis Schaeffer: “Whatever Happened to the Human Race” (Episode 1) ABORTION OF THE HUMAN RACE Published on Oct 6, 2012 by AdamMetropolis ________________ Picture of Francis Schaeffer and his wife Edith from the 1930′s above. I was sad to read about Edith passing away on Easter weekend in 2013. I wanted to pass along this fine […]
ABORTION – THE SILENT SCREAM 1 / Extended, High-Resolution Version (with permission from APF). Republished with Permission from Roy Tidwell of American Portrait Films as long as the following credits are shown: VHS/DVDs Available American Portrait Films Call 1-800-736-4567 http://www.amport.com The Hand of God-Selected Quotes from Bernard N. Nathanson, M.D., Unjust laws exist. Shall we […]
I have been writing President Obama letters and have not received a personal response yet. (He reads 10 letters a day personally and responds to each of them.) However, I did receive a form letter in the form of an email on April 16, 2011. First you will see my letter to him which was mailed around April 9th(although […]
ABORTION – THE SILENT SCREAM 1 / Extended, High-Resolution Version (with permission from APF). Republished with Permission from Roy Tidwell of American Portrait Films as long as the following credits are shown: VHS/DVDs Available American Portrait Films Call 1-800-736-4567 http://www.amport.com The Hand of God-Selected Quotes from Bernard N. Nathanson, M.D., Unjust laws exist. Shall we […]
When I think of the things that make me sad concerning this country, the first thing that pops into my mind is our treatment of unborn children. Donald Trump is probably going to run for president of the United States. Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council recently had a conversation with him concerning the […]
I have gone back and forth and back and forth with many liberals on the Arkansas Times Blog on many issues such as abortion, human rights, welfare, poverty, gun control and issues dealing with popular culture. Here is another exchange I had with them a while back. My username at the Ark Times Blog is Saline […]
I have gone back and forth and back and forth with many liberals on the Arkansas Times Blog on many issues such as abortion, human rights, welfare, poverty, gun control and issues dealing with popular culture. Here is another exchange I had with them a while back. My username at the Ark Times Blog is Saline […]
It is truly sad to me that liberals will lie in order to attack good Christian people like state senator Jason Rapert of Conway, Arkansas because he headed a group of pro-life senators that got a pro-life bill through the Arkansas State Senate the last week of January in 2013. I have gone back and […]
I have gone back and forth and back and forth with many liberals on the Arkansas Times Blog on many issues such as abortion, human rights, welfare, poverty, gun control and issues dealing with popular culture. Here is another exchange I had with them a while back. My username at the Ark Times Blog is Saline […]
I have gone back and forth and back and forth with many liberals on the Arkansas Times Blog on many issues such as abortion, human rights, welfare, poverty, gun control and issues dealing with popular culture. Here is another exchange I had with them a while back. My username at the Ark Times Blog is Saline […]
I have gone back and forth and back and forth with many liberals on the Arkansas Times Blog on many issues such as abortion, human rights, welfare, poverty, gun control and issues dealing with popular culture. Here is another exchange I had with them a while back. My username at the Ark Times Blog is Saline […]
Sometimes you can see evidences in someone’s life of how content they really are. I saw something like that on 2-8-13 when I confronted a blogger that goes by the name “AngryOldWoman” on the Arkansas Times Blog. See below. Leadership Crisis in America Published on Jul 11, 2012 Picture of Adrian Rogers above from 1970′s […]
In the film series “WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE HUMAN RACE?” the arguments are presented against abortion (Episode 1), infanticide (Episode 2), euthenasia (Episode 3), and then there is a discussion of the Christian versus Humanist worldview concerning the issue of “the basis for human dignity” in Episode 4 and then in the last episode a close […]
I have gone back and forth and back and forth with many liberals on the Arkansas Times Blog on many issues such as abortion, human rights, welfare, poverty, gun control and issues dealing with popular culture. Here is another exchange I had with them a while back. My username at the Ark Times Blog is Saline […]
I have gone back and forth and back and forth with many liberals on the Arkansas Times Blog on many issues such as abortion, human rights, welfare, poverty, gun control and issues dealing with popular culture. Here is another exchange I had with them a while back. My username at the Ark Times Blog is Saline […]
I have gone back and forth and back and forth with many liberals on the Arkansas Times Blog on many issues such as abortion, human rights, welfare, poverty, gun control and issues dealing with popular culture. Here is another exchange I had with them a while back. My username at the Ark Times Blog is Saline […]
E P I S O D E 1 0 Dr. Francis Schaeffer – Episode X – Final Choices 27 min FINAL CHOICES I. Authoritarianism the Only Humanistic Social Option One man or an elite giving authoritative arbitrary absolutes. A. Society is sole absolute in absence of other absolutes. B. But society has to be […]
E P I S O D E 9 Dr. Francis Schaeffer – Episode IX – The Age of Personal Peace and Affluence 27 min T h e Age of Personal Peace and Afflunce I. By the Early 1960s People Were Bombarded From Every Side by Modern Man’s Humanistic Thought II. Modern Form of Humanistic Thought Leads […]
E P I S O D E 8 Dr. Francis Schaeffer – Episode VIII – The Age of Fragmentation 27 min I saw this film series in 1979 and it had a major impact on me. T h e Age of FRAGMENTATION I. Art As a Vehicle Of Modern Thought A. Impressionism (Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, Sisley, […]
E P I S O D E 7 Dr. Francis Schaeffer – Episode VII – The Age of Non Reason I am thrilled to get this film series with you. I saw it first in 1979 and it had such a big impact on me. Today’s episode is where we see modern humanist man act […]
E P I S O D E 6 How Should We Then Live 6#1 Uploaded by NoMirrorHDDHrorriMoN on Oct 3, 2011 How Should We Then Live? Episode 6 of 12 ________ I am sharing with you a film series that I saw in 1979. In this film Francis Schaeffer asserted that was a shift in […]
E P I S O D E 5 How Should We Then Live? Episode 5: The Revolutionary Age I was impacted by this film series by Francis Schaeffer back in the 1970′s and I wanted to share it with you. Francis Schaeffer noted, “Reformation Did Not Bring Perfection. But gradually on basis of biblical teaching there […]
Dr. Francis Schaeffer – Episode IV – The Reformation 27 min I was impacted by this film series by Francis Schaeffer back in the 1970′s and I wanted to share it with you. Schaeffer makes three key points concerning the Reformation: “1. Erasmian Christian humanism rejected by Farel. 2. Bible gives needed answers not only as to […]
Francis Schaeffer’s “How should we then live?” Video and outline of episode 3 “The Renaissance” Francis Schaeffer: “How Should We Then Live?” (Episode 3) THE RENAISSANCE I was impacted by this film series by Francis Schaeffer back in the 1970′s and I wanted to share it with you. Schaeffer really shows why we have so […]
Francis Schaeffer: “How Should We Then Live?” (Episode 2) THE MIDDLE AGES I was impacted by this film series by Francis Schaeffer back in the 1970′s and I wanted to share it with you. Schaeffer points out that during this time period unfortunately we have the “Church’s deviation from early church’s teaching in regard […]
Francis Schaeffer: “How Should We Then Live?” (Episode 1) THE ROMAN AGE Today I am starting a series that really had a big impact on my life back in the 1970′s when I first saw it. There are ten parts and today is the first. Francis Schaeffer takes a look at Rome and why […]
Be not wise in thine own eyes: fear the LORD, and depart from evil. It shall be health to thy navel, and marrow to thy bones. Honour the LORD with thy substance, and with the firstfruits of all thine increase: So shall thy barns be filled with plenty, and thy presses shall burst out with new wine.Proverbs 3:7-10
Finances are a topic everyone is interested in! In fact, perhaps your mind is racing with details of taxes. In order to have a proper perspective, take some time right now and evaluate your financial freedom.
God wants all of us to be at peace with possessions and to experience freedom from bondage to anyone or anything. He wants His children to master their money, rather than be mastered by it. So what does God’s Word say about our financial planning and how we can achieve financial freedom? What do you think? – Are you at peace financially? – Do you feel enslaved by financial matters or possessions? – Is God honored with the way you handle your money? – Why do you think Jesus spoke more often about money and possessions than any other subject in the gospels?
The Ruin of Financial Bondage There is much haggling and squabbling over money. Almost every family has experienced this. Marriages even sometimes split over debt disagreements. Perhaps you are in financial bondage; why not ask yourself the following questions: – Do you charge daily expenditures because you don’t have enough cash to pay for them? – Do you find yourself putting off paying bills or paying them at the last minute because of a lack of money? – Do you borrow money to pay fixed expenses such as taxes, insurance, or rent? – Do you find yourself unaware of just how much you owe? – Do you have creditors and bill collectors calling or writing you about past due bills? – Have you taken new loans to pay off old ones? – Do you argue over finances with your spouse? – Have you ever thought about being dishonest about money, such as cheating on income tax or participating in an unethical financial deal? – Do you find it difficult to return God’s tithe? – Do you rationalize withholding from His offering?
If you answered yes to several of these questions, you are in financial bondage. If you don’t agree, then how would you define financial bondage?
God is opposed to any kind of bondage that enslaves us. He wants to break those shackles and set us free to be slaves of Christ, Who is the only Master Who wants His servants to have freedom, fulfillment, prosperity, and power.
Even a wealthy person may feel the false self-assurance. You may feel you have plenty of security, so financial bondage is the least of your worries. Yet you may be in great trouble. – Do you find yourself putting more faith in your money than in God? – Do you continue to ask God for your daily bread?
If you think that is unnecessary, you are putting your faith in your wealth. If your personal goals in life are no longer God’s goals, you are in bondage.
The Avoidance of Financial Bondage The Principle of Priority God is our priority, and we shouldn’t let possessions get in the way. When this priority is maintained, life is successful. What do Deuteronomy 26:2 and Matthew 6:33 say about our priorities?
The Principle of Industry Many people want more money so they won’t have to work anymore. But God created us to work. As His workmanship, we have the need to work built into us. To cease being productive in life is disastrous. Even retirement simply means more time to serve God. What do Proverbs 10:4 and Proverbs 20:4 have to say about God’s attitude towards laziness?
The Principle of Generosity God blesses us when we learn to share. The more we share, the more we have. The more we hoard, the less we have. What do Proverbs 11:24 and Luke 6:38 say about generosity?
The Principle of Reliability God is reliable. As we handle our possessions and our industry, we can, and must, trust God at all times. We know He will provide and care for us. What does God say in Philippians 4:19 about relying on God?
The Principle of Integrity We must be faithful in what we have. Luke 16:10tells us to be faithful even in the little. What is integrity? What warning does 1 Timothy 6:9-10offer?
The Principle of Sufficiency God is far more than sufficient to care for His children. What does Ecclesiastes 5:19 say about our possessions? If we will honor God with what He has already given us, He will pour out more blessings than we have the ability to handle (Malachi 3:10).
Conclusion Poverty is no sign of godliness, and wealth is no sign of wickedness. God wants us to have wealth with godliness. Prosperity is simply having what we need to do what God wants us to do.
Now you are armed with what God’s word says. Why not start now and evaluate your finances based on what you’ve read and if necessary, take some immediate steps to find the financial freedom that God promises and desires for you.
Ecclesiastes 8-10 | Still Searching After All These Years Published on Oct 9, 2012 Calvary Chapel Spring Valley | Sunday Evening | October 7, 2012 | Pastor Derek Neider _______________________ Ecclesiastes 11-12 | Solomon Finds His Way Published on Oct 30, 2012 Calvary Chapel Spring Valley | Sunday Evening | October 28, 2012 | Pastor Derek Neider […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Current Events | Edit | Comments (0)
Over and over in Proverbs you hear the words “fear the Lord.” In fact, some of he references are Proverbs 1:7, 29; 2:5; 8:13; 9:10;14:26,27; 15:16 and many more. Below is a sermon by John MacArthur from the Book of Luke on 3 reasons we should fear the Lord. (I have posted John MacArthur’s amazing […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Adrian Rogers, Current Events | Edit | Comments (0)
Over and over in Proverbs you hear the words “fear the Lord.” In fact, some of he references are Proverbs 1:7, 29; 2:5; 8:13; 9:10;14:26,27; 15:16 and many more. Below is a sermon by John MacArthur from the Book of Luke on 3 reasons we should fear the Lord. (I have posted John MacArthur’s amazing […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Adrian Rogers, Current Events | Edit | Comments (0)
Over and over in Proverbs you hear the words “fear the Lord.” In fact, some of he references are Proverbs 1:7, 29; 2:5; 8:13; 9:10;14:26,27; 15:16 and many more. Below is a sermon by John MacArthur from the Book of Luke on 3 reasons we should fear the Lord. (I have posted John MacArthur’s amazing […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Adrian Rogers, Current Events | Edit | Comments (0)
Over and over in Proverbs you hear the words “fear the Lord.” In fact, some of he references are Proverbs 1:7, 29; 2:5; 8:13; 9:10;14:26,27; 15:16 and many more. Below is a sermon by John MacArthur from the Book of Luke on 3 reasons we should fear the Lord. (I have posted John MacArthur’s amazing […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Adrian Rogers, Current Events | Edit | Comments (0)
Over and over in Proverbs you hear the words “fear the Lord.” In fact, some of he references are Proverbs 1:7, 29; 2:5; 8:13; 9:10;14:26,27; 15:16 and many more. Below is a sermon by John MacArthur from the Book of Luke on 3 reasons we should fear the Lord. (I have posted John MacArthur’s amazing […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Adrian Rogers, Current Events | Tagged Gene Bartow, John Wooden | Edit | Comments (0)
Over and over in Proverbs you hear the words “fear the Lord.” In fact, some of he references are Proverbs 1:7, 29; 2:5; 8:13; 9:10;14:26,27; 15:16 and many more. Below is a sermon by John MacArthur from the Book of Luke on 3 reasons we should fear the Lord. (I have posted John MacArthur’s amazing […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Adrian Rogers, Current Events | Edit | Comments (0)
Over and over in Proverbs you hear the words “fear the Lord.” In fact, some of he references are Proverbs 1:7, 29; 2:5; 8:13; 9:10;14:26,27; 15:16 and many more. Below is a sermon by John MacArthur from the Book of Luke on 3 reasons we should fear the Lord. (I have posted John MacArthur’s amazing […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Adrian Rogers, Current Events | Edit | Comments (0)
Over and over in Proverbs you hear the words “fear the Lord.” In fact, some of he references are Proverbs 1:7, 29; 2:5; 8:13; 9:10;14:26,27; 15:16 and many more. Below is a sermon by John MacArthur from the Book of Luke on 3 reasons we should fear the Lord. It is tough to guard your […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Adrian Rogers, Current Events | Edit | Comments (0)
Over and over in Proverbs you hear the words “fear the Lord.” In fact, some of he references are Proverbs 1:7, 29; 2:5; 8:13; 9:10;14:26,27; 15:16 and many more. Below is a sermon by John MacArthur from the Book of Luke on 3 reasons we should fear the Lord. What does it mean to fear […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Current Events, Uncategorized | Edit | Comments (0)
Ecclesiastes 6-8 | Solomon Turns Over a New Leaf Published on Oct 2, 2012 Calvary Chapel Spring Valley | Sunday Evening | September 30, 2012 | Pastor Derek Neider _____________________ I have written on the Book of Ecclesiastes and the subject of the meaning of our lives on several occasions on this blog. In this series on Ecclesiastes I […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Current Events | Edit | Comments (0)
Ecclesiastes 1 Published on Sep 4, 2012 Calvary Chapel Spring Valley | Sunday Evening | September 2, 2012 | Pastor Derek Neider _____________________ I have written on the Book of Ecclesiastes and the subject of the meaning of our lives on several occasions on this blog. In this series on Ecclesiastes I hope to show how […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Current Events | Edit | Comments (0)
Ecclesiastes 1 Published on Sep 4, 2012 Calvary Chapel Spring Valley | Sunday Evening | September 2, 2012 | Pastor Derek Neider _____________________ I have written on the Book of Ecclesiastes and the subject of the meaning of our lives on several occasions on this blog. In this series on Ecclesiastes I hope to show how […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Current Events | Edit | Comments (0)
Ecclesiastes 8-10 | Still Searching After All These Years Published on Oct 9, 2012 Calvary Chapel Spring Valley | Sunday Evening | October 7, 2012 | Pastor Derek Neider _______________________ Ecclesiastes 11-12 | Solomon Finds His Way Published on Oct 30, 2012 Calvary Chapel Spring Valley | Sunday Evening | October 28, 2012 | Pastor Derek Neider […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Current Events | Edit | Comments (0)
Ecclesiastes 6-8 | Solomon Turns Over a New Leaf Published on Oct 2, 2012 Calvary Chapel Spring Valley | Sunday Evening | September 30, 2012 | Pastor Derek Neider _____________________ I have written on the Book of Ecclesiastes and the subject of the meaning of our lives on several occasions on this blog. In this series […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Current Events | Edit | Comments (0)
Ecclesiastes 4-6 | Solomon’s Dissatisfaction Published on Sep 24, 2012 Calvary Chapel Spring Valley | Sunday Evening | September 23, 2012 | Pastor Derek Neider ___________________ I have written on the Book of Ecclesiastes and the subject of the meaning of our lives on several occasions on this blog. In this series on Ecclesiastes I hope […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Current Events | Edit | Comments (0)
Ecclesiastes 8-10 | Still Searching After All These Years Published on Oct 9, 2012 Calvary Chapel Spring Valley | Sunday Evening | October 7, 2012 | Pastor Derek Neider _______________________ Ecclesiastes 11-12 | Solomon Finds His Way Published on Oct 30, 2012 Calvary Chapel Spring Valley | Sunday Evening | October 28, 2012 | Pastor Derek Neider […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Current Events | Edit | Comments (0)
Ecclesiastes 8-10 | Still Searching After All These Years Published on Oct 9, 2012 Calvary Chapel Spring Valley | Sunday Evening | October 7, 2012 | Pastor Derek Neider _______________________ Ecclesiastes 11-12 | Solomon Finds His Way Published on Oct 30, 2012 Calvary Chapel Spring Valley | Sunday Evening | October 28, 2012 | Pastor Derek Neider […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Current Events | Edit | Comments (0)
Tom Brady “More than this…” Uploaded by EdenWorshipCenter on Jan 22, 2008 EWC sermon illustration showing a clip from the 2005 Tom Brady 60 minutes interview. _______________________ Tom Brady ESPN Interview Tom Brady has famous wife earned over 76 million dollars last year. However, has Brady found lasting satifaction in his life? It does not […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Current Events | Edit | Comments (0)
Adrian Rogers: How to Be a Child of a Happy Mother Published on Nov 13, 2012 Series: Fortifying Your Family (To read along turn on the annotations.) Adrian Rogers looks at the 5th commandment and the relationship of motherhood in the commandment to honor your father and mother, because the faith that doesn’t begin at home, […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Adrian Rogers, Current Events | Edit | Comments (0)
Ecclesiastes 1 Published on Sep 4, 2012 Calvary Chapel Spring Valley | Sunday Evening | September 2, 2012 | Pastor Derek Neider _____________________ I have written on the Book of Ecclesiastes and the subject of the meaning of our lives on several occasions on this blog. In this series on Ecclesiastes I hope to show how secular humanist man […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Current Events | Edit | Comments (0)
Adrian Rogers – How to Cultivate a Marriage Another great article from Adrian Rogers. Are fathers necessary? “Artificial insemination is the ideal method of producing a pregnancy, and a lesbian partner should have the same parenting rights accorded historically to biological fathers.” Quoted from the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women, summer of 1995. […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Adrian Rogers, Current Events | Edit | Comments (0)
Tom Brady “More than this…” Uploaded by EdenWorshipCenter on Jan 22, 2008 EWC sermon illustration showing a clip from the 2005 Tom Brady 60 minutes interview. To Download this video copy the URL to http://www.vixy.net ________________ Obviously from the video clip above, Tom Brady has realized that even though he has won many Super Bowls […]
The Incredible Steven Weinberg (1933-2021) – Sixty Symbols
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On the Shoulders of Giants: Steven Weinberg and the Quest to Explain the…
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Steven Weinberg Discussion (1/8) – Richard Dawkins
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Whatever Happened To The Human Race? (2010) | Full Movie | Michael Hordern
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The Bill Moyers Interview – Steven Weinberg
How Should We Then Live (1977) | Full Movie | Francis Schaeffer | Edith …
EMAILED TO DR. WEINBERG ON 6/24/14 on song DUST IN THE WIND by the rock band KANSAS
From everettehatcher@gmail.com, Just the other day I sent you the CD called“Dust in the Wind, Darwin and Disbelief.”I know you may not have time to listen to the CD but on the first 2 1/2 minutes of that CD is the hit song “Dust in the Wind” by the rock group KANSAS and was written byKerry Ligren in 1978. Would you be kind enough to read these words of that song given below and refute the idea that accepting naturalistic evolution with the exclusion of God must lead to the nihilistic message of the song! Or maybe you agree with Richard Dawkins and other scholars below?
DUST IN THE WIND:
I close my eyes only for a moment, and the moment’s gone
All my dreams pass before my eyes, a curiosity
Dust in the wind, all they are is dust in the wind
Same old song, just a drop of water in an endless sea
All we do crumbles to the ground, though we refuse to see
Dust in the wind, all we are is dust in the wind
Now, don’t hang on, nothing lasts forever but the earth and sky
It slips away, and all your money won’t another minute buy
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Humans have always wondered about the meaning of life…life has no higher purpose than to perpetuate the survival of DNA…life has no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference. —Richard Dawkins
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The vast majority of people believe there is a design or force in the universe; that it works outside the ordinary mechanics of cause and effect; that it is somehow responsible for both the visible and the moral order of the world. Modern biology has undermined this assumption…But beginning with Darwin, biology has undermined that tradition. Darwin in effect asserted that all living organisms had been created by a combination of chance and necessity–natural selection…First,God has no role in the physical world…Second,except for the laws of probability and cause and effect, there is no organizing principle in the world, and no purpose.(William B. Provine, “The End of Ethics?” in HARD CHOICES ( a magazine companion to the television series HARD CHOICES, Seattle: KCTS-TV, channel 9, University of Washington, 1980, pp. 2-3).
That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; …that all the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins—all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand.Bertrand Russell
TheBritishhumanist H. J. Blackham (1903-2009) put it very plainly: “On humanist assumptions, life leads to nothing, and every pretense that it does not is a deceit. If there is a bridge over a gorge which spans only half the distance and ends in mid-air, and if the bridge is crowded with human beings pressing on, one after the other they fall into the abyss. The bridge leads nowhere, and those who are pressing forward to cross it are going nowhere….It does not matter where they think they are going, what preparations for the journey they may have made, how much they may be enjoying it all. The objection merely points out objectively that such a situation is a model of futility“( H. J. Blackham, et al., Objections to Humanism (Riverside, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1967).
I think you may be quoting Blackham out of context because I’ve heard Blackham speak, and read much of what he said, but Blackham has argued continuously that life is full of meaning; that there are points. The fact that one doesn’t believe in God does not deaden the appetite or the lust for living. On the contrary; great artists and scientists and poets and writers have affirmed the opposite.
I read the book FORBIDDEN FRUIT by Paul Kurtz and I had the opportunity to correspond with him but I still reject his view that optimistic humanism withstand the view of nihilism if one accepts there is no God. Christian philosopherR.C. Sproulput it best:
Nihilism has two traditional enemies–Theism and Naive Humanism. The theist contradicts the nihilist because the existence of God guarantees that ultimate meaning and significance of personal life and history. Naive Humanism is considered naive by the nihilist because it rhapsodizes–with no rational foundation–the dignity and significance of human life. The humanist declares that man is a cosmic accident whose origin was fortuitous and entrenched in meaningless insignificance. Yet in between the humanist mindlessly crusades for, defends, and celebrates the chimera of human dignity…Herein is the dilemma: Nihilism declares that nothing really matters ultimately…In my judgment, no philosophical treatise has ever surpassed or equaled the penetrating analysis of the ultimate question of meaning versus vanity that is found in the Book of Ecclesiastes.
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Kerry Livgren is the writer of the song “Dust in the Wind” and he said concerning that song in 1981 and then in 2006:
1981: “When I wrote “Dust in the Wind” I was writing about a yearning emptiness that I felt which millions of people identified with because the song was very popular.”2006:“Dust In the Wind” was certainly the most well-known song, and the message was out of Ecclesiastes. I never ceased to be amazed at how the message resonates with people, from the time it came out through now. The message is true and we have to deal with it, plus the melody is memorable and very powerful. It disturbs me that there’s only part of the [Christian] story told in that song. It’s about someone yearning for some solution, but if you look at the entire body of my work, there’s a solution to the dilemma.”
Ecclesiastes reasons that chance and time have determined the past and will determine the future (9:11-13), and power reigns in this life and the scales are not balanced(4:1). Is that how you see the world? Solomon’s experiment was a search for meaning to life “under the sun.”Then in last few words in Ecclesiastes he looks above the sun and brings God back into the picture: “The conclusion, when all has been heard, is: Fear God and keep His commandments, because this applies to every person. For God will bring every act to judgment.”
Steven Weinberg Discussion (2/8) – Richard Dawkins
RESPONDING TO HARRY KROTO’S BRILLIANT RENOWNED ACADEMICS!!
Steven Weinberg – Dreams of a Final Theory
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Steven Weinberg Discussion (3/8) – Richard Dawkins
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Steven Weinberg, Author
How Should We Then Live | Season 1 | Episode 6 | The Scientific Age
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Steven Weinberg Discussion (4/8) – Richard Dawkins
I am grieved to hear of the death of Dr. Steven Weinberg who I have been familiar with since reading about him in 1979 in WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE HUMAN RACE? by Dr. C. Everett Koop and Francis Schaeffer. I have really enjoyed reading his books and DREAMS OF A FINAL REALITY and TO EXPLAIN THE WORLD were two of my favorite!
C. Everett Koop
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Steven Weinberg Discussion (5/8) – Richard Dawkins
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Francis Schaeffer : Reclaiming the World part 1, 2
and you will hear what far smarter people than I have to say on this matter. I agree with them.
Harry Kroto
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Below you have picture of Dr. Harry Kroto:
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I have attempted to respond to all of Dr. Kroto’s friends arguments and I have posted my responses one per week for over a year now. Here are some of my earlier posts:
In the 1st video below in the 50th clip in this series are his words.
50 Renowned Academics Speaking About God (Part 1)
Another 50 Renowned Academics Speaking About God (Part 2)
A Further 50 Renowned Academics Speaking About God (Part 3)
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Steven Weinberg: To Explain the World
I have a friend — or had a friend, now dead — Abdus Salam, a very devout Muslim, who was trying to bring science into the universities in the Gulf states and he told me that he had a terrible time because, although they were very receptive to technology, they felt that science would be a corrosive to religious belief, and they were worried about it… and damn it, I think they were right. It is corrosive of religious belief, and it’s a good thing too.
The John Lennon and the Beatles really were on a long search for meaning and fulfillment in their lives just like King Solomon did in the Book of Ecclesiastes. Solomon looked into learning (1:12-18, 2:12-17), laughter, ladies, luxuries, and liquor (2:1-2, 8, 10, 11), and labor (2:4-6, 18-20). He fount that without God in the picture all […]
______________ George Harrison Swears & Insults Paul and Yoko Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds- The Beatles The Beatles: I have dedicated several posts to this series on the Beatles and I don’t know when this series will end because Francis Schaeffer spent a lot of time listening to the Beatles and talking […]
The Beatles in a press conference after their Return from the USA Uploaded on Nov 29, 2010 The Beatles in a press conference after their Return from the USA. The Beatles: I have dedicated several posts to this series on the Beatles and I don’t know when this series will end because Francis […]
__________________ Beatles 1966 Last interview I have dedicated several posts to this series on the Beatles and I don’t know when this series will end because Francis Schaeffer spent a lot of time listening to the Beatles and talking and writing about them and their impact on the culture of the 1960’s. In this […]
_______________ The Beatles documentary || A Long and Winding Road || Episode 5 (This video discusses Stg. Pepper’s creation I have dedicated several posts to this series on the Beatles and I don’t know when this series will end because Francis Schaeffer spent a lot of time listening to the Beatles and talking and writing about […]
_______________ Francis Schaeffer pictured below: _____________________ I have included the 27 minute episode THE AGE OF NONREASON by Francis Schaeffer. In that video Schaeffer noted, ” Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band…for a time it became the rallying cry for young people throughout the world. It expressed the essence of their lives, thoughts and their feelings.” How Should […]
Crimes and Misdemeanors: A Discussion: Part 1 ___________________________________ Today I will answer the simple question: IS IT POSSIBLE TO BE AN OPTIMISTIC SECULAR HUMANIST THAT DOES NOT BELIEVE IN GOD OR AN AFTERLIFE? This question has been around for a long time and you can go back to the 19th century and read this same […]
____________________________________ Francis Schaeffer pictured below: __________ Francis Schaeffer has written extensively on art and culture spanning the last 2000years and here are some posts I have done on this subject before : Francis Schaeffer’s “How should we then live?” Video and outline of episode 10 “Final Choices” , episode 9 “The Age of Personal Peace and Affluence”, episode 8 […]
Love and Death [Woody Allen] – What if there is no God? [PL] ___________ _______________ How Should We then Live Episode 7 small (Age of Nonreason) #02 How Should We Then Live? (Promo Clip) Dr. Francis Schaeffer 10 Worldview and Truth Two Minute Warning: How Then Should We Live?: Francis Schaeffer at 100 Francis Schaeffer […]
___________________________________ Francis Schaeffer pictured below: ____________________________ Francis Schaeffer “BASIS FOR HUMAN DIGNITY” Whatever…HTTHR Dr. Francis schaeffer – The flow of Materialism(from Part 4 of Whatever happened to human race?) Dr. Francis Schaeffer – The Biblical flow of Truth & History (intro) Francis Schaeffer – The Biblical Flow of History & Truth (1) Dr. Francis Schaeffer […]
Because of their despicable tendency to buy voteswith our money, I view politicians with considerabledisdain. But when a politician goes above and beyond the call of duty by doing something laughably awful, I give them special recognition.
Here are some past winners of my “Politician of the Year” award.
Today’s column adds someone to this rogue’s gallery. Congratulations to the Mayor of New York City, Eric Adams.
In a story for the New York Post, Susan Edelman reveals a cozy and corrupt arrangement between the Mayor and one of his top appointees.
Schools Chancellor David Banks quietly promoted Mayor Adams’ girlfriend to a top job at the Department of Education, just months after Adams hired Banks’ girlfriend as a deputy mayor, The Post has learned. Banks named Tracey Collins — Adams’ longtime partner and NYC’s unofficial First Lady — the DOE’s “senior advisor to the deputy chancellor of school leadership,” Desmond Blackburn. She started the new job in July, and got a giant, 23% raise to $221,597 a year, records show. Hizzoner named Banks’ girlfriend, Sheena Wright, and four other women deputy mayors last Dec. 21. Deputy mayors made $251,982 in FY 21. …David Bloomfield, a Brooklyn College and CUNY Grad Center education professor, said, “It’s not only a bad look, smacking of favoritism and cronyism. It displays a degree of insularity and groupthink that’s adverse to organizational effectiveness.”
Needless to say, everyone involved claims that the appointments were based on merit.
DOE spokesman Nathaniel Styer said Collins, “a veteran educator with 30 years of experience,” replaced another senior advisor, Mariano Guzman, who retired. Styer said Collins “went through a rigorous process that did not include City Hall’s oversight. …City Hall spokesman Fabien Levy said, “Mayor Adams was not involved in the hiring for this position and has a strict firewall when it comes to any matters involving her employment.”
Needless to say, these claims don’t pass the laugh test. Anyone with an IQ above room temperature understands that Mayor Adams and Chancellor Banks are helping to enrich themselves at the expense of taxpayers.
But I want to make a different point.
If you paid close attention to the above excerpts, you noticed that the girlfriend of Mayor Adams is making more than $221K to serve as “senior advisor to the deputy chancellor of school leadership.”
I realize this is just a stab in the dark, but that job should not even exist, just like the job of “deputy chancellor of school leadership” should not exist (and the same is true if there’s a “chancellor of school leadership”).
And let’s not forget about the girlfriend of Chancellor Banks, who is getting nearly $252K to be one of a plethora of deputy mayors.
Once again, I’m going to take a wild guess and assert that none of the deputy mayors serve any necessary function. These slots almost surely are patronage appointments that allow insiders to get fatter and richer at the expense of taxpayers.
Texas has better government policy than California, most notably in areas such as taxation and regulation.
Since people are moving from the Golden State to the Lone Star State, public policy seems to matter more than natural beauty.
Now let’s look at a bunch of evidence to support those three sentences.
We’ll start with an article by Joel Kotkin of Chapman University.
If one were to explore the most blessed places on earth, California, my home for a half century, would surely be up there. …its salubrious climate, spectacular scenery, vast natural resources… President Biden recently suggested that he wants to “make America California again”. Yet…he should consider whether the California model may be better seen as a cautionary tale than a roadmap to a better future… California now suffers the highest cost-adjusted poverty rate in the country, and the widest gap between middle and upper-middle income earners. …the state has slowly morphed into a low wage economy. Over the past decade, 80% of the state’s jobs have paid under the median wage — half of which are paid less than $40,000…minorities do better today outside of California, enjoying far higher adjusted incomes and rates of homeownership in places like Atlanta and Dallas than in San Francisco and Los Angeles. Almost one-third of Hispanics, the state’s largest ethnic group, subsist below the poverty line, compared with 21% outside the state. …progressive…policies have not brought about greater racial harmony, enhanced upward mobility and widely based economic growth.
Next we have some business news from the San Francisco Chronicle.
Business leaders fear tech giant Oracle’s recent announcement that it is leaving the Bay Area for Austin, Texas, will lead to more exits unless some fundamental political and economic changes are made to keep the region attractive and competitive. “This is something that we have been warning people about for several years. California is not business friendly, we should be honest about it,” said Kenneth Rosen, chairman of the UC Berkeley Fisher Center for Real Estate and Urban Economics.Bay Area Council President Jim Wunderman said… “From consulting companies to tax lawyers to bankers and commercial real estate firms, every person I talk with who provides services to big Bay Area corporations are telling me that their clients are strategizing about leaving…” Charles Schwab, McKesson and Hewlett Packard Enterprise have all exited the high-cost, high-tax, high-regulation Bay Area for a less-expensive, less-regulated and business-friendlier political climate. All of them rode off to Texas. …the pace of the departures appears to be increasing. …A recent online survey of 2,325 California residents, taken between Nov. 4 and Nov. 23 by the Public Policy Institute of California, found 26% of residents have seriously considered moving out of state and that 58% say that the American Dream is harder to achieve in California than elsewhere.
Not according to this column by Hank Adler in the Wall Street Journal.
California’s Legislature is considering a wealth tax on residents, part-year residents, and any person who spends more than 60 days inside the state’s borders in a single year. Even those who move out of state would continue to be subject to the tax for a decade… Assembly Bill 2088 proposes calculating the wealth tax based on current world-wide net worth each Dec. 31. For part-year and temporary residents, the tax would be proportionate based on their number of days in California. The annual tax would be on current net worth and therefore would include wealth earned, inherited or obtained through gifts or estates long before and long after leaving the state. …The authors of the bill estimate the wealth tax will provide Sacramento $7.5 billion in additional revenue every year. Another proposal—to increase the top state income-tax rate to 16.8%—would annually raise another $6.8 billion. Today, California’s wealthiest 1% pay approximately 46% of total state income taxes. …the Legislature looks to the wealthiest Californians to fill funding gaps without considering the constitutionality of the proposals and the ability of people and companies to pick up and leave the state, which news reports suggest they are doing in large numbers. …As of this moment, there are no police roadblocks on the freeways trying to keep moving trucks from leaving California. If A.B. 2088 becomes law, the state may need to consider placing some.
The late (and great) Walter Williams actually joked back in 2012that California might set up East German-style border checkpoints. Let’s hope satire doesn’t become reality.
But what isn’t satire is that people are fleeing the state (along with other poorly governed jurisdictions).
Simply state, the blue state model of high taxes and big government is not working (just as it isn’t working in countries with high taxes and big government).
Interestingly, even the New York Times recognizes that there is a problem in the state that used to be a role model for folks on the left.
Opining for that outlet at the start of the month, Brett Stephens raised concerns about the Golden State.
…today’s Democratic leaders might look to the very Democratic state of California as a model for America’s future. You remember California: People used to want to move there, start businesses, raise families, live their American dream. These days, not so much. Between July 2019 and July 2020, more people — 135,400 to be precise — left the state than moved in… No. 1 destination: Texas, followed by Arizona, Nevada and Washington. Three of those states have no state income tax.
California, by contrast, has very high taxes. Not just an onerous income tax, but high taxes across the board.
Californians also pay some of the nation’s highest sales tax rates (8.66 percent) and corporate tax rates (8.84 percent), as well as the highest taxes on gasoline (63 cents on a gallon as of January, as compared with 20 cents in Texas).
Sadly, these high taxes don’t translate into good services from government.
The state ranks 21st in the country in terms of spending per public school pupil, but 27th in its K-12 educational outcomes. It ties Oregon for third place among states in terms of its per capita homeless rate. Infrastructure? As of 2019, the state had an estimated $70 billion in deferred maintenance backlog. Debt? The state’s unfunded pension liabilities in 2019 ran north of $1.1 trillion, …or $81,300 per household.
Makes you wonder whether the rest of the nation should copy that model?
Democrats hold both U.S. Senate seats, 42 of its 53 seats in the House, have lopsided majorities in the State Assembly and Senate, run nearly every big city and have controlled the governor’s mansion for a decade. If ever there was a perfect laboratory for liberal governance, this is it. So how do you explain these results? …If California is a vision of the sort of future the Biden administration wants for Americans, expect Americans to demur.
Some might be tempted to dismiss Stephens’ column because he is considered the token conservative at the New York Times.
But Ezra Klein also acknowledges that California has a problem, and nobody will accuse him of being on the right side of the spectrum.
Here’s some of what he wrote in his column earlier this month for the New York Times.
I love California. I was born and raised in Orange County. I was educated in the state’s public schools and graduated from the University of California system… But for that very reason, our failures of governance worry me. California has the highest poverty rate in the nation,when you factor in housing costs, and vies for the top spot in income inequality, too. …but there’s a reason 130,000 more people leave than enter each year. California is dominated by Democrats, but many of the people Democrats claim to care about most can’t afford to live there. …California, as the biggest state in the nation, and one where Democrats hold total control of the government, carries a special burden. If progressivism cannot work here, why should the country believe it can work anywhere else?
Kudos to Klein for admitting problems on his side (just like I praise the few GOPers who criticized Trump’s big-government policies).
But his column definitely had some quirky parts, such as when he wrote that, “There are bright spots in recent years…a deeply progressive plan to tax the wealthy.”
That’s actually a big reason for the state’s decline, not a “bright spot.”
I’m not the only one to recognize the limitations of his column.
Who but Ezra Klein could survey the wreck left-wing Democrats have made of California and conclude that the state’s problem is its excessive conservatism? …Klein the rhetorician anticipates objections on this front and writes that he is not speaking of “the political conservatism that privatizes Medicare, but the temperamental conservatism that” — see if this formulation sounds at all familiar — “stands athwart change and yells ‘Stop!’”…California progressives have progressive policies and progressive power, and they like it that way. That is the substance of their conservatism. …Klein and others of his ilk like to present themselves as dispassionate pragmatists, enlightened empiricists who only want to do “what works.” …Klein mocks San Francisco for renaming schools (Begone, Abraham Lincoln!) while it has no plan to reopen them, but he cannot quite see that these are two aspects of a single phenomenon. …Klein…must eventually understand that the troubles he identifies in California are baked into the progressive cake. …That has real-world consequences, currently on display in California to such a spectacular degree that even Ezra Klein is able dimly to perceive them. Maybe he’ll learn something.
I especially appreciate this passage since it excoriates rich leftists for putting teacher unions ahead of disadvantaged children.
Intentions do not matter very much, and mere stated intentions matter even less. Klein is blind to that, which is why he is able to write, as though there were something unusual on display: “For all the city’s vaunted progressivism, [San Francisco] has some of the highest private school enrollment numbers in the country.” Rich progressives have always been in favor of school choice and private schools — for themselves. They only oppose choice for poor people, whose interests must for political reasons be subordinated to those of the public-sector unions from which Democrats in cities such as San Francisco derive their power.
Let’s conclude with some levity.
Here’s a meme that contemplates whether California emigrants bring bad voting habits with them.
Much of my writing is focused on the real-world impact of government policy, and this is why I repeatedly look at the relative economic performance of big government jurisdictions and small government jurisdictions.
So we’ve looked at high-tax states that are languishing, such as California and Illinois, and compared them to zero-income-tax states such as Texas.
With this in mind, you can understand that I was intrigued to see that even the establishment media is noticing that Texas is out-pacing the rest of the nation.
Here are some excerpts from a report by CNN Money on rapid population growth in Texas.
More Americans moved to Texas in recent years than any other state: A net gain of more than 387,000 in the latest Census for 2013. …Five Texas cities — Austin, Houston, San Antonio, Dallas and Fort Worth — were among the top 20 fastest growing large metro areas. Some smaller Texas metro areas grew even faster. In oil-rich Odessa, the population grew 3.3% and nearby Midland recorded a 3% gain.
But why is the population growing?
Well, CNN Money points out that low housing prices and jobs are big reasons.
And on the issue of housing, the article does acknowledge the role of “easy regulations” that enable new home construction.
But on the topic of jobs, the piece contains some good data on employment growth, but no mention of policy.
Jobs is the No. 1 reason for population moves, with affordable housing a close second. …Jobs are plentiful in Austin, where the unemployment rate is just 4.6%. Moody’s Analytics projects job growth to average 4% a year through 2015. Just as important, many jobs there are well paid: The median income of more than $75,000 is nearly 20% higher than the national median.
That’s it. Read the entire article if you don’t believe me, but the reporter was able to write a complete article about the booming economy in Texas without mentioning – not even once – that there’s no state income tax.
But that wasn’t the only omission.
The article doesn’t mention that Texas is the 4th-best state in the Tax Foundation’s ranking of state and local tax burdens.
The article doesn’t mention that Texas was the least oppressive state in the Texas Public Policy Foundation’s Soft Tyranny Index.
The article doesn’t mention that Texas was ranked #11 in the Tax Foundation’s State Business Tax Climate Index.
The article doesn’t mention that Texas is in 14th place in the Mercatus ranking of overall freedom for the 50 states (and in 10th place for fiscal freedom).
By the way, I’m not trying to argue that Texas is the best state.
Indeed, it only got the top ranking in one of the measures cited above.
My point, instead, is simply to note that it takes willful blindness to write about the strong population growth and job performance of Texas without making at least a passing reference to the fact that it is a low-tax, pro-market state.
At least compared to other states. And especially compared to the high-tax states that are stagnating.
Such as California, as illustrated by this data and this data, as well as this Lisa Benson cartoon.
Such as Illinois, as illustrated by this data and this Eric Allie cartoon.
P.S. Paul Krugman has tried to defend California, which has made him an easy target. I debunked him earlier this year, and I also linked to a superb Kevin Williamson takedown of Krugman at the bottom of this post.
P.P.S. Once again, I repeat the two-part challenge I’ve issued to the left. I’ll be happy if any statists can successfully respond to just one of the two questions I posed.
California is the Greece of the USA, but Texas is not perfect either!!! Just Because California Is Terrible, that Doesn’t Mean Texas Is Perfect January 21, 2013 by Dan Mitchell Texas is in much better shape than California. Taxes are lower, in part because Texas has no state income tax. No wonder the Lone Star State […]
We should lower federal taxes because jobs are going to states like Texas that have low taxes. (We should lower state taxes too!!) What Can We Learn by Comparing the Employment Situation in Texas vs. California? April 3, 2013 by Dan Mitchell One of the great things about federalism, above and beyond the fact that it […]
I got on the Arkansas Times Blog and noticed that a person on there was bragging about the high minimum wage law in San Francisco and how everything was going so well there. On 2-15-13 on the Arkansas Times Blog I posted: Couldn’t be better (the person using the username “Couldn’t be better) is bragging […]
Does Government Have a Revenue or Spending Problem? People say the government has a debt problem. Debt is caused by deficits, which is the difference between what the government collects in tax revenue and the amount of government spending. Every time the government runs a deficit, the government debt increases. So what’s to blame: too […]
Former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger with his family I posted a portion of an article by John Fund of the Wall Street Journal that pointed out that many businesses are leaving California because of all of their government red tape and moving to Texas. My username is SalineRepublican and this is […]
John Fund at Chamber Day, Part 1 Last week I got to attend the first ever “Conservative Lunch Series” presented by KARN and Americans for Prosperity Foundation at the Little Rock Hilton on University Avenue. This monthly luncheon will be held the fourth Wednesday of every month. The speaker for today’s luncheon was John Fund. John […]
___________ California and France have raised taxes so much that it has hurt economic growth!!! Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall, which Nation and State Punish Success Most of All? September 25, 2014 by Dan Mitchell I’ve shared some interested rankings on tax policy, including a map from the Tax Foundation showing which states have the earliest […]
___________ Jerry Brown raised taxes in California and a rise in the minimum wage, but it won’t work like Krugman thinks!!!! This cartoon below shows what will eventually happen to California and any other state that keeps raising taxes higher and higher. Krugman’s “Gotcha” Moment Leaves Something to Be Desired July 25, 2014 by […]
Open letter to President Obama (Part 573) (Emailed to White House on 7-29-13.) President Obama c/o The White House 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW Washington, DC 20500 Dear Mr. President, I know that you receive 20,000 letters a day and that you actually read 10 of them every day. I really do respect you for trying to get […]
Open letter to President Obama (Part 561) (Emailed to White House on 6-25-13.) President Obama c/o The White House 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW Washington, DC 20500 Dear Mr. President, I know that you receive 20,000 letters a day and that you actually read 10 of them every day. I really do respect you for trying to get […]
The Daily Hatch 