Today, the columnist Thomas Frank of the Wall Street Journal wrote a column in which he basically says modern day conservatives are bizarrely paranoid. From reading his article, he’s talking about those conservatives who believe in capitalism, are against government propaganda, and are against government social engineering. Here’s a snippet of his piece.

Back in Hofstadter’s day this sort of thinking at least had something supremely rational going for it: The existence of the Soviet Union and its desire to bring the West to its knees.

But take that away and the theories become something far more remarkable. Consider, by contrast, the widespread belief that President Barack Obama’s birth certificate was forged. What could have been his parents’ motives for committing such a bizarre deed, or his home state’s motive for colluding in it, or the courts’ motives for overlooking it?

Or consider the widespread conservative conviction that we are being marched secretly into communism or fascism. Why would someone bother? It seems equally likely, given today’s circumstances, that conspirators would trick us into becoming a colony of Belgium or the imperial seat of the Bonaparte family.

The paranoid pattern persists regardless. It is impervious to world events; a blurting of the American subconscious that has not changed since Hofstadter analyzed it 45 years ago. Consider the recent wave of fear that the hypnotic Mr. Obama was planning to indoctrinate schoolchildren. In “The Paranoid Style,” Hofstadter wrote, “Very often the enemy is held to possess some especially effective source of power: he controls the press; . . . he has a new secret for influencing the mind; . . . he is gaining a stranglehold on the educational system.”

via Thomas Frank: From John Birchers to Birthers – WSJ.com.

Let me start off by saying, I agree to some extent on the birth certificate issue. I don’t know whether the issue is valid or not, so I don’t claim that it is. It’s a distraction, and it let’s people like Mr. Frank lump all conservatives together and say they are nuts.

With that said, I do have a problem with the remaining arguments in Mr. Frank’s article. To say that conservatives are claiming we are marching secretly to communism or fascism, and that somehow that is nuts, should highlight how the intellectuals among us are so blinded by their supposed brilliance. Apparently, the government take over of our largest financial, automotive, and soon to be newspaper institutions is of no concern to Mr. Frank. That is just silly talk. So what if the government controls them, and they say what is going to happen in the market place. How is that communism or fascism?

In addition, I think Mr. Frank doesn’t realize that this isn’t a new march. Surely the government permanently impoverishing a large population with welfare and using Medicare and Social Security to induce fear when needed on another large segment of our population could be considered something other than just crazy, paranoia.

I guess, Alexander Hamilton was paranoid when he wrote in the Federalist Papers, “.. that a dangerous ambition more often lurks behind the specious mask of zeal for the rights of the people than under the forbidding appearance of zeal for the firmness and efficiency of goverment. History will teach us that the former has been found a much more certain road to the introduction of despotism than the latter, and that of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people, commencing demagogues and ending tyrants” What kind of crazy is Alexander Hamilton warning us about those tenderhearted politicians?

We all know Jefferson was a loony, paranoid, nut case when he said, “A wise and frugal government, which shall leave men free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned – this is the sum of good government.” What a weirdo.

Don’t worry about the government trying to take over the 1/6th of our economy via health care. They would never use your health care to make you behave in a certain way. They would never hold it up at election time to scare people into voting for them. Why would you think that?

Surely, this “paranoia” that Mr. Frank so arrogantly puts down is nothing new. What most people would call skepticism has been with us since our founding. It is what led our country to revolution and then to form our union under a constitution.

As far as the school children, the media may have blew it out of proportion, but that was before the post speech exercise assignment was revised to not make it sound like the student had to do something that the President asked. I think it also went hand and hand with the video from Hollywood asking students to pledge allegiance to the President.  Surely, that’s just a little disturbing is it not? Surely, if this video and this homework assignment was from Bush, Democrats and the left would have rightfully went nuts. Oh wait, but that’s not paranoia. When Bush was in, he only purposefully let a couple thousand  New Orleanians die. Maybe I should go back and read Mr. Frank’s article on those crazy lefties.

Lastly, in part of the article that I don’t have sited here, you can read it at the Journal, Mr. Franks poo-poohs Glenn Beck as the master conspirator. Glenn Beck must be a lunatic questioning the Federal Reserve, oh along with all Austrian economists. Surely, the Federal Reserve had nothing to do with the tech bubble, followed by the housing bubble and who knows what bubble they are creating now.

Mr. Frank’s complete lack of historic and conceptional perspective is an embarrassment for my paper of choice. While, he’s entitled to his opinion, maybe he can keep his head in ground. We’ll pull him back out once we take our country back.

Tony Blankley has column out today that talks about the insane notion that the government seems to have that it can continue spending with out regard to the debt. The debate on health care is so ridiculous when you think about where we are heading already without adding any new programs ever going forward. Here is a small piece of his column.

Don’t take my word for it. In June, the Congressional Budget Office published “The Long-Term Budget Outlook,” its summary reading in part: “The federal budget is on an unsustainable path — meaning that federal debt will continue to grow much faster than the economy over the long run. … Rising costs for health care and the aging of the U.S. population will cause federal spending to increase rapidly.”

And yet the same Congress and president who want to stop the banks from taking too much risk cannot stop themselves from expanding deficits.

The federal government is giving the “green light” for the country to drive to the poorhouse — and drive there, I would argue, by way of the lunatic asylum.

Before Sen. Max Baucus’ health bill is enacted, $9.3 trillion of newly created deficit already has been added to the national debt. The Baucus bill is considered a triumph of careful budgeting because it may cost only $829 billion

via Debt-driven madness – Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.

Now, I don’t think the American public is as crazy as the government, in particular the Democratic party. That is why the majority of the public does not support a public option. Also, this is partly why you see a mass movement against the government’s ever expanding welfare state. The future of our country looks extremely dire with the predictions of the CBO, and yet politicians keep pressing on for more spending. Could it be that the statists would love to see the downfall of the capitalist United States or at least a partial collapse, so that they can grab even more power from a frighten and impoverished citizenry?

As responsible Americans, we have to forget even the notion of any type of health care bill that leads to government expansion. Not only that, we need to start realizing the party is over, we’ve drank way too much, and the hang over is going to be nasty. It’s time for us to make drastic cuts in the welfare state. We can no longer hand out government dollars for today’s “me, me, me” population to the detriment of future generations.

Today I finally picked up my own copy of The Federalist Papers at Half Priced Books for $3.48. Thank God For The Free Market #TGFTFM as I like to say on Twitter. Anyways, I only made it to the third page before I found my first gem.

Alexander Hamilton wrote, “.. that a dangerous ambition more often lurks behind the specious mask of zeal for the rights of the people than under the forbidding appearance of zeal for the firmness and efficiency of goverment. History will teach us that the former has been found a much more certain road to the introduction of despotism than the latter, and that of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people, commencing demagogues and ending tyrants”

What he was saying here is there are people who will benefit from weak or inefficient government, and those people will use their fake concern for the people to hide their bad intentions. While I don’t believe our government is weak. It would have been weak if the Constitution was not ratified. In that circumstance there would have been people who benefited from the chaos. There were those who argued against the Constitution to maintain the weak Articles of Confederation. Many of them claimed to be looking out for the people, but they were really trying to maintain their status and power.

What we can take from this is the warning about inefficient government and the warning about those who are excessively for “the people”.  Surely, in our current day and age we can see how inefficient our government is compared to the government that our founders envisioned. How many times have you heard of unaccounted for billions in HUD, the department of education, or medicare?

Surely, you can recall how those who pushed these inefficient programs screamed their great attentions, “zeal”, from the rooftops. They are looking out for the people, the down trodden, or the most often group of concern, “the children”. How about this one? “We have to bail out Wall Street in order to bail out Main Street.” Really? It’s not because you want to bailout your buddies at your former companies? That’s right. Of course, not. It’s for the people.

The waste is horrible, but the second part of Hamilton’s warning is more disturbing. He warns that listening to the people who proclaim to be the champions of the people are the ones who more often than not are the ones who overturn liberties and become tyrants.

Keep this in mind next time you hear politicians claiming to be looking out for the people with health care, student loans, jobs, or the myriad of other government programs. The next three years are sure to be a case study on the warning above from Alexander Hamilton.

Why are we Americans moving away from self reliance to the nanny state more and more every year? Do Americans truly believe because something comes from the government, that it is free? Financially, it is much more expensive than the private sector, but the most disturbing cost of government control is the loss of liberty.

America was founded on the belief that the government is a necessary evil, but an evil that must remain small and restrained to prevent it from becoming an unbearable evil. We used to always be skeptical of anything the government said knowing that government always wants more power to control us. Now we just seem to take politicians at their word that they want what’s best for us. Skepticism is something we much pass on generation after generation if we are to last as a nation.

Let’s take the health care reform debate. So many Americans are fed up with the rising costs, that they are begging the government to step in. They believe the government will take over health care, and some how they will be relieved of that burden. Not so fast. With the government controlling your health care, they will control your life on a much larger scale than ever before.

As I said in my previous blog, the economics of health care is suffering from price being hidden from the end consumer. Because of this, demand is constantly driven up with supply not keeping pace. This drives up cost, and the only way to bring cost back under control is to bring down demand. In a normal market this is done naturally through price signals. In a government controlled economy this is done by rationing or by force.

Let’s take rationing first. If the government’s budget for open heart surgeries is X and with the total budget of X only N amount of surgeries can be peformed, how does the government make sure there are not any more open heart surgeries than N? The government will setup strict criteria on who can have open heart surgery. If they find that criteria is allowing more patients than N, they will then make it even more stringent. So, knowing that this is the case, one must ask what criteria will they use? Will you be out of luck if you are too old? What if to keep the number of surgeries at N, you need to have a chance of survival at 75% and your chance is only 60%? What if that is your child’s chance of survival and now yours? As you can see, this is a very scary decision for us to leave in the hands of the cold, lifeless bureaucracy, but what’s worse is driving down demand by government force.

The second way I mentioned the government controlling demand is by force. “Now, come on.”, you say, “You are really going over the top here. Our government would never use force.” While you may see force as guns and tanks, that is not the only force the government uses. Again, as I mentioned in my previous blog on the root causes of rising health care cost, one of the biggest contributors to the demand side of health care is the obesity epidemic in this country. So as the government, how do you control the rate of obesity?

Is it too far fetched for government to outlaw certain foods? How about as mentioned above using criteria to control you? If you want to have access to X, you have to have an accounting of what you eat, similar to doing your taxes. Surely, we can already see the possibility of the government taking your kids away from you if the government deems that you are feeding them too much junk food and they weigh too much.  How about forcing everyone to have a chip injected into them for ease of keeping medical records and driving down cost via efficiency? Even worse, how about forced DNA screening and alteration to minimize the chance of cancer or other diseases? Science progresses so fast, we really have no way of knowing what the government may require of us five or ten years from now as part of the “public good” and “cost containment” when it comes to health care.

If you think the IRS is bad, how about the how about the Medical Records Service (I made this up, I think). Is it possible that the government would require an annual accounting of all medical services delivered to you to insure you are having regular checkups, following the doctors orders, etc?

“No problem.” you say, “I’ll just refuse this “required” screening or this “required” procedure.” Really? Can you refuse to do your taxes? There are already provisions in the bill for not having health care under either a private plan or the public option. If you don’t have health insurance, you will pay a fine and face prison time. If the government isn’t getting the results it wants, surely it will increase the fines and the prison time.

We have gone so far away in this country from what our founders believed, that they would roll over in their graves just at the thought of the IRS, and here we are today contemplating giving the decisions over our health to the government. Here we are begging the government to ration health care and force us into servitude so we can avoid going bankrupt or pay the family doctor out of our pocket for services rendered. We once believed that liberty was worth dying for in this country. Now it seems we don’t even think it’s worth being financially stressed for. Time will tell if we made the right decision, but I beg my fellow Americans to think this decision through with the worse case scenarios. Chance are those scenarios will come to fruition. Liberty is dear, so don’t give it away so cheaply.