Parker: A New Birth of American Freedom, Again

Noting a Gallup July 4th poll showing 71% of Americans think the Founders would be "disappointed" by the way the country has turned out, Star Parker argues that many Americans are living a contradiction: they hold the ideals of freedom while allowing those freedoms to be slowly eroded.

It is hard for me to believe that many in our country see no contradiction in believing that freedom can be an American ideal while half of Americans live in households getting some sort of government benefits.

Or that somehow a country can be thought of as free in which forty cents of every dollar the national economy produces goes to government at either the federal, state, or local level.

Or that government can put us in debt to the tune of the total value of the annual output of our economy.

Or that the real debt burden sitting on the American public is some $90 trillion – more than five times the size of our GDP – that represents the unfunded liabilities of social security, Medicare, and other government programs.

How can we see this as a free, moral country when we legally and casually use abortion as a means of birth control and provide hundreds of millions of taxpayer funds to Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest abortion provider?

Or that government can tell us what kind of health care we need and must buy and can tell employers what kind of health care they must provide.

Or that government can force employers to provide birth control and abortion pills to employees, even, as in the case of the Christian owners of Hobby Lobby, it violates their religious convictions.

Or that children go to public schools where it is illegal to pray or teach traditional family values.

Parker calls for "courageous leadership that will lead us back to the path of freedom and moral principle that inspired our founders and which is our destiny."

Promiscuity Leaves Women Friendless

"College-age women judge promiscuous female peers ... more negatively than more chaste women and view them as unsuitable for friendship, finds a study by Cornell University developmental psychologists," reports Science Daily. Even women who are promiscuous themselves don't want promiscuous peers as friends: 

The findings suggest that though cultural and societal attitudes about casual sex have loosened in recent decades, women still face a double standard that shames "slutty" women and celebrates "studly" men, said lead author Zhana Vrangalova, a Cornell graduate student in the field of human development. The study, titled "Birds of a Feather? Not When it Comes to Sexual Permissiveness" and published in the early online edition of the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, reports that such social isolation may place promiscuous women at greater risk for poor psychological and physical health outcomes.

"For sexually permissive women, they are ostracized for being 'easy,' whereas men with a high number of sexual partners are viewed with a sense of accomplishment," Vrangalova said. "What surprised us in this study is how unaccepting promiscuous women were of other promiscuous women when it came to friendships — these are the very people one would think they could turn to for support."

She added that prior research shows that men often view promiscuous women as unsuitable for long-term romantic relationships, leaving these women outside of many social circles.

"The effect is that these women are really isolated," Vrangalova said.

For the study, 751 college students provided information about their past sexual experience and their views on casual sex. They read a near-identical vignette about a male or female peer, with the only difference being the character's number of lifetime sexual partners (two or 20). Researchers asked them to rate the person on a range of friendship factors, including warmth, competence, morality, emotional stability and overall likability.

Progressing Backwards to Tribalism

I occasionally rile up my liberal friends by noting that a century ago the rich were fat and the poor were thin, but today the rich are thin and the poor are fat. Same with work. Back then the poor worked all the time; today the rich work all the time. Liberals don't like to hear stuff like that.

[snip]

It is the responsible individual that created the modern world, and it is liberals, with their politics of identity and victim-hood, that are turning the clock back to a primitive age of tribalism. They are reinventing caste with their rage for credentialism, and reviving clan with their multiculturalism and race-card politics.

It makes complete sense that liberals sneer at the responsible individual, the busy bourgeois, the independent householder, the church member, and harass them. The bourgeois middle class with its businesses, its adaptability, its families, its work and its savings represent the existential threat to liberal power and its curdling tribalism.

We know full well the consequences of liberalism. They are manifesting themselves before our eyes in Chicago's bloodbath and Detroit's bankruptcy. 

Read the rest of The Consequences of Liberalism by Christopher Chantrill at AmericanThinker.

Goldberg: Freedom - The Unfolding Revolution

Jonah Goldberg addresses the question, why there are no libertarian countries today?, raised by Michael Lind in Salon.com.

Such is the philosophical poverty of liberalism today that this stands as a profound question.

Definitions vary, but broadly speaking, libertarianism is the idea that people should be as free as possible from state coercion so long as they don’t harm anyone. The job of the state is limited to fighting crime, providing for the common defense, and protecting the rights and contracts of citizens. The individual is sovereign; he is the captain of himself.

It’s true, no ideal libertarian state has ever existed outside a table for one. And no such state will ever exist. But here’s an important caveat: No ideal state of any other kind will be created either.

America’s great, but it ain’t perfect. Sweden’s social democracy is all right, but if it were perfect, I suspect fewer cars would be on fire over there.

Ideals are called ideals for a reason: They’re ideals. They’re goals, aspirations, abstract straight rules we use as measuring sticks against the crooked timber of humanity.

In a fitting tribute to Independence Day, Goldberg quickly weaves through the various experiments of governments and their failures (and Anne Morrow Lindbergh's 1940 that statist governments were the "wave of the future") to conclude:

The only truly new political idea in the last couple thousand years is this libertarian idea, broadly understood. The revolution wrought by John Locke, Edmund Burke, Adam Smith, and the Founding Fathers is the only real revolution going. And it’s still unfolding.

Indeed, what’s remarkable about all of the states Lind identifies as proof that libertarianism doesn’t work is that they are in fact proof that it does. What made the American experiment new were its libertarian innovations, broadly speaking. Moreover, those innovations made us prosper. Even Sweden — the liberal Best in Show — owes its successes to its libertarian concessions.

I’m actually not a full-blown libertarian myself, but it’s an ideal I’d like America to move closer to, not further away from as we’ve been doing of late — bizarrely in the name of “progress,” of all things.

"Someone Has to Die"

Let’s imagine for a moment that you find yourself in a difficult position — one that has led to abject panic about your future career, the fate of a valued relationship, or whether you’ll even be able to make ends meet. Let’s also stipulate that your difficulty is largely your fault. You made some short-sighted, bad decisions that precipitated the crisis, but questions of responsibility are moot now — all that exists is the crisis, the stress that has overtaken your life. To be sure, there’s a way forward, a way out of the crisis, but even the most attractive options will require considerable commitment for most of a year — with potential for prolonged heartache.

Then, one evening you’re offered a way out. Your most recent troubles can go away, for the cost of a few hundred dollars and most of an afternoon. The catch? Someone has to die.

Oh, it’s not anyone you know or will ever know. They don’t have family that knows them, they don’t have spouses or children, and they’ll be so thoroughly unmourned that no one will even have to pay for a funeral. Decide now, and they might not even feel pain. Wait longer, and they’ll feel pain — but only for a little while.

You don’t have to see the body. You won’t know the person’s name. No one will have to know what you did. Indeed, the law strictly protects your confidentiality. An anonymous kill . . . then you’re free.

Ask the vast majority of rational people if they’d kill another person to change their own circumstances for the better, and they’d quickly answer no. Put them in the actual situation, and we know that millions answer yes. We know because of abortion.

Read the rest of David French's article, Abortion and the Idol of Self, at National Review Online.

Cyberattacks and What They Would Do to Us

"The Internet's benefits are relatively modest compared with previous transformative technologies, and it brings with it a terrifying danger: cyberwar," writes Robert Samuelson in the Washington Post.

By cyberwarfare, I mean the capacity of groups -- whether nations or not -- to attack, disrupt and possibly destroy the institutions and networks that underpin everyday life. These would be power grids, pipelines, communication and financial systems, business record-keeping and supply-chain operations, railroads and airlines, databases of all types (from hospitals to government agencies). The list runs on. So much depends on the Internet that its vulnerability to sabotage invites doomsday visions of the breakdown of order and trust.

In a report, the Defense Science Board, an advisory group to the Pentagon, acknowledged "staggering losses" of information involving weapons design and combat methods to hackers (not identified, but probably Chinese). In the future, hackers might disarm military units. "U.S. guns, missiles and bombs may not fire, or may be directed against our own troops," the report said. It also painted a specter of social chaos from a full-scale cyberassault. There would be "no electricity, money, communications, TV, radio or fuel (electrically pumped). In a short time, food and medicine distribution systems would be ineffective."

If that isn't enough to stress you, Samuelson raises other "new avenues for conflict and mayhem" made easy by the Internet, including larceny and business espionage.

"The Internet's virtues are overstated, it's vices understated," concludes Samuelson. It's a mixed blessing—and the mix may be moving against us."

Does Court's Marriage Decision Mean Greater Individualism? How About Tolerance?

"It's worth taking a step back from the emotions and technical details of all these events," writes Walter Russell Mead, "to ask about the broader trend they point to."

Superficially, they point to a schizophrenic public: leaning pro-life; increasingly in favor of gay marriage; divided on gun control but unwilling to pull the trigger, so to speak, on significantly tightened gun laws. But on a deeper level, these all look like examples of the biggest cultural-political trend in America: a response to the growing complexity of 21st century life that revives individualism and states’ rights.

Individualism sometimes work for the Right and sometimes for the Left. The right to marry who you choose is as individualistic as insisting on your right to bear arms. With abortion, that same logic is muddier, which is why the public is still divided. Pro-choicers lay claim to the individualism mantle by stating that women should be free to control their own reproductive health, while pro-lifers do the same by arguing that abortion involves two individuals with rights, not one.

Given the nation's divisions, a future of a live-and-let-live individualism sounds appealing, but we've a long way to go to achieve it. The Left's passion for demonizing those with whom it disagrees reached new heights in Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy's majority opinion in the Defense of Marriage case, when he disparaged the motives of half the nation as well as DOMA legislators. As Justice Antonin Scalia retorted in his dissent,