Wednesday, June 23, 2010

Forced Charity

by Humphrey Stevenson

This past Sunday morning, I was perusing my local newspaper when I ran across a story about a local food bank requesting volunteers to help pack boxes. I thought, “That’s nice. A local charity has so much food they need help getting it out.” But then I made the mistake of actually reading the story and I felt the back of my neck take on the temperature of my coffee. The reason the food bank had 60 tractor-trailer loads of food and household items was that they had proudly received a $2 million Federal grant.

My objection is not the giving of funds to a food bank to help the needy, it who’s doing the “giving.” I encourage people to give to the charitable organizations of their choice. But here we have the Federal government using taxpayer money (or worse, money borrowed from the Chinese) to fund a charity.

This is not an isolated incident. According to a paper prepared by the Cato Institute during the Bush administration, overall charities receive nearly one third of their funding from Federal grants. Charities even employ persons skilled in writing grant applications in order to better their chance at receiving the government funding. They become dependent on this source of funding.

So why would the Federal government provide funds to charities instead of relying on the famous generosity of the American people? For the same reason it owns car companies, banks, mortgage providers, student loan providers, etc. In this way the Federal government, and not the individual giver, will decide which charities receive funding and which will not. In order to receive the Federal money, the organization must abide by the regulations set forth by the Federal government. This can turn charities into quasi-governmental agencies.

Many times the Federal government uses its control of these funds to force organizations to take certain actions. A few years ago the Federal government threatened to withhold Federal Highway Funds to States that did not raise their legal drinking age to 21. Whatever you or I may think the legal drinking age should be, can we agree that this is something a State is capable of determining without the supervision of Big Brother? It may be my latent Libertarianism surfacing but I think if someone is old enough to join the military and be sent to a foreign land and possibly lose their life, they’re old enough to have a beer.

A city applies to the Federal government for funding for some project. Think about the route the money takes to get there. A person in a city is taxed by the Federal government so that the Federal government can send that money back to that city to fund the project. Even worse, the same person is taxed by the Federal government who then sends the money to another city halfway across the country.

A spokesperson for the food bank was quoted as saying, “We’re grateful for the money we received to purchase food this summer, a time when food donations are typically down and the need increases because children don’t have access to their free or reduced-price school meals.”

Is this why we have these government indoctrination centers, to provide free meals to children? Don’t these children have parents? Where are they and what about their parental responsibility? Sorry, but I digress.

Maybe it’s not a digression because it’s all related to the same thing. Once again, it’s the Federal government encouraging individuals and organizations to give up their responsibility, whether that is parents feeding their kids, states building their roads, cities paying their cops or charitable organizations raising their own money, to become dependent on the benevolence of the Federal government. As dependence on the Federal government grows it becomes more indispensable. As it becomes more indispensable, it becomes more powerful.

Does it really matter? Isn’t the most important thing helping the poor? That’s the thing about big government people; they have a soft spot for the poor. That is as long as they can handle the money in transit.

Americans are the most generous people on the planet. Charity need not be forcibly extracted from the people by the IRS. When it is it cannot truly be called charity. Also, it gives people a reason not to be charitable. If a taxpayer feels they are funding these organizations through their taxes, they have less incentive to give.

Wednesday, June 9, 2010

Phony versus True Conservatism

by Humphrey Stevenson

The other day I was on my way home from the gym and found myself behind a car with a Gingrich/Romney 2012 bumper sticker. My immediate reaction was, “Please, not those two.” They strike me as “phony conservatives.” Oh, not that they don’t believe what they say, just that what they say isn’t true conservatism. Their philosophy seems to be our Federal government will be fine once we change who’s in charge.

For instance, Romney instituted a health care plan for Massachusetts. Constitutionally that’s fine; if a State wants to institute a health care plan for its citizens OK, but it’s not philosophically conservative. There are many on the Right that think it is foolish to go into the elections with “Repeal Obamacare” as our mantra. They feel it must be “Repeal and Replace.” They say, “We must have a plan of our own.” If you ask a phony conservative to describe their health care plan for our country he will argue specific points of health care. If you ask the same of a true conservative, he will say, “I don’t have one.” That may sound simplistic but it’s not that, it’s a different philosophy, “Who is he that he should plan your health care for you?” The true conservative wants you to be free to choose the health care services that make sense to you, based on the free market.

The true conservative understands personal responsibility and its relationship to personal liberty. You can’t have one without the other. If you have no responsibility, you have no liberty. However, personal responsibility is difficult and the Federal government says, Oh, don’t worry about that, we’ll handle that responsibility for you. You just enjoy the ‘liberty’.” What you didn’t realize was they took your responsibility because it was necessary in order to take your liberty, which is really what they wanted in the first place.

This same conservative concept is true for the States as well. The idea of State sovereignty is nice but it’s meaningless unless a State is taking responsibility for itself and its citizens. However, our States have become far too dependent on the Federal government … and it has been by design. Federal funds to a State are one of the greatest scams in history. Think about how it works. The Federal government takes your money through taxes. Then launders it through some Federal program or other and uses the money (your money) to procure your State’s dependence.

We must return to the Federalism as outlined in our Constitution. I love this quote from Bruce Fein, Former Associate Deputy Attorney General. “Federalism creates competition in good government. If a state does something stupid, people can pick up, they leave, businesses go, and they’ve got to reform.” However, “When the Congress acts, everybody’s saddled with the same burden.” So if Congress does something stupid, we are all burdened under the same stupidity.

Is there anything this Federal government does well? I know your answer; the military. But if that is true then someone explain to me what we are doing in Afghanistan. If we’re fighting the Taliban, then let’s attack the enemy, kill the enemy, break its equipment and bring our men and women home. This is how we fought World War II; all out. We would accept nothing less than unconditional surrender. Anything less is unfair to the people who have committed their lives to the defense of our nation. Some say we’re “nation building,” whatever that means. This government is destroying its own nation at home, is this truly the government that should be building other nations?

This government has the reverse-Midas tough, everything it touches turns to excrement. It can’t execute its Constitutional responsibilities with any degree of proficiency. In spite of this, they want more; more power, more money. This is going to be the battle of our time. For example, Representative Barney Frank (D-MA) told a group of young Democrats, “Give us more authority and ability.” Yes, you read that right Barney Frank thinks that this Federal megalith of absolute incompetence should have more authority not less.

This Federal government is a living, breathing beast. It preys on individual liberty and private property. Progressives (now called Democrats) have been on a hundred year mission to feed and grow this beast. There is no middle ground now; you either favor the beast or you stand against it. The only solution to save individual liberty and private property is true conservatives committed to the destruction of the beast.

Wednesday, June 2, 2010

Let’s Get a Grip on Our Oil

by Humphrey Stevenson

The Deepwater Horizon accident and the resultant oil spill have brought to the forefront our dependence on crude oil. There are many saying we must find an alternative to crude oil. But think for a moment of all the things that we take for granted that are derived from crude oil. It’s not just the gasoline in your car’s fuel tank and the oil in your car’s engine. Look around you; all of the plastics, paints, home heating oil, fuel for many power plants, synthetic fibers (polyester, nylon, etc.), countless chemical compounds. I could go on and on. In our modern world, saying lets find an alternative to crude oil is like saying let’s find an alternative to water. It’s just not practical. Crude oil is necessary and there is no getting around that fact.

Also, there is nothing unnatural about crude oil. It is just as much a part of the earth as soil or rocks. It has been here for millions of years and for nearly that long the oil has been seeping through the ocean floor into the water. I recently read a story about a now-extinct group of American Indians called the Karankawas that inhabited the south Texas coastal areas until the mid-1800’s. The Karankawas would collect the tar balls that washed up onto the south Texas shore and use the material to line their baskets and pottery to make them waterproof.

What must be done is to be sure that the crude is extracted in the safest and least environmentally disruptive manner possible. To do this, oil rigs must be located in such a way that when accidents happen our equipment and expertise is not outstripped by the hostility of the environment in which they are located.

The problem with the Deepwater Horizon accident was not the accident itself, although it was tragic due to the eleven lives that were lost. What turned this into an environmental disaster was the location, forty-eight miles offshore and in nearly one mile of water. These conditions greatly reduce the resources that can be used to battle the leak. I recently spoke with a friend of mine that has over 30 years experience in this industry and he told me that if this same accident happened onshore or near-shore, in a few hundred feet of water, the well would have been capped within three days and the environmental impact would have been negligible.

So our Federal government’s response to the Deepwater Horizon accident was a moratorium on further oil exploration. This is akin to shutting down the entire airline industry because of one plane crash. A plane crash is a tragedy, but it is also an accident. We seem to have accepted that as long as we have these huge mechanical birds flying around and the law of gravity is in force, there will occasionally be a an accident. Despite our best efforts, it’s a fact of life.

Unfortunately, we have very little experience or equipment useful with an oil well rupture located one mile underwater. My friend described the response to the spill as playing “Mr. Wizard” in the kitchen sink. Only in this case the kitchen sink is the Gulf of Mexico.

But this is not the fault of BP or the oil industry in general. They have been forced into this situation because we have allowed the extremists in our society to dictate our energy and environmental policy. These extremist do not want any exploration or development domestic sources of energy and they use the environment as an excuse. As a result, we get extreme policies; policies that close off areas where oil could be extracted easily and safely with minimal disruption to the environment.

The reason these environmental extremist have gained this power is that we, the American voter, elect politicians beholden to these extremists, either because they are kindred spirits or because the politician depends on the extremists for campaign cash. We must become a more educated voter. We must make sure that these candidates understand the necessity of safe, domestic oil production. Then we must hold their feet to the fire and make sure they follow through with legislation to open up easily accessible areas for domestic oil development. As we can now see, our oil industry can drill in extreme areas but when something goes wrong, the problems are just as extreme.