“The Industrial Revolution, starting in 1770 in Britain, had little to do with its universities and nothing to do with its government…willpower, effort and imitative raised men above their circumstances…it is also important side note that before that Revolution more than half the children born, wealthy or poor, failed to reach the age of five. By 1830 more than 75% lived way beyond that age.” –Paul Johnson

The definition of democracy implies a government by informed discourse, meaning individual views can and do change in the process of decision making, based primarily on proof, fact, logic, and reason. So, let’s do a little.

Given the perspective of history, every American alive today is easily among the wealthiest 1% of people to have lived on earth. The poorest of the poor in America have luxuries unheard of to most kings of the past. Do you appreciate running water? Electric lights? Advanced medical care? And we haven't even pointed out the fact that most of our technology -- that the "poor" largely benefit from -- has been developed by <gasp!> wealthy corporations. Understood properly, the past productivity of the wealthy is the only reason such luxuries are available to the so-called poor today. America's "poor" are far wealthier than the middle classes of most other nations.

If anything hurts the poor of the world, it's American class warfare. "In our attempt to blame poverty on prejudice, we have taught the poor to be prejudiced against the basic values necessary to sustain a free and civil society.... We've taught them there are no real absolutes to the human condition -- except perhaps that the highest value in life is to acquire things." --Star Parker.

Wealth has no agency. What matters is how people behave. Wealth depends not just on available opportunities but also on the interests and abilities of individuals, not to mention random occasional luck. In the long run, America’s along with the world's poor are most effectively helped by the system that helped create wealth in the United States -- free markets, limited government, and just laws(1). Want to help the poor, support free trade. To rebel against the free market is, in reality, self-serving, self-contradictory hogwash. At best, it's incoherent; at worst, it's a malicious deception.

Americans are overwhelmingly pro-business. They understand for the most part, businesses help their lives, government detracts from them. Businesses produce jobs, prosperity, a higher standard of living. Government produces nothing and destroys much. Businesses have to be efficient to avoid going bankrupt. Government just prints more money and inflation. Businesses have a powerful motive to succeed, governments do not. Businesses have to innovate to stay competitive, governments do not. Government is bureaucracy, the opposite of innovation. Businesses create wealth for all of society. Governments destroy wealth for all but the powerful.


(1). “Charitable efforts are vital expression of human solidarity that, when carried out wisely, play a crucial role in relieving human suffering. But they are not the way people escape poverty. The normal way is through enterprise and free-markets—through ordinary, everyday business…Applying our intelligence as well as our sympathy is actually the most loving thing we can do for the poor”---Rev Robert Sirico
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A crisis takes a much longer time coming than you think, and then it happens much faster than you would have thought.”-- Rudiger Dornbusch

“Anticipate charity by preventing poverty.”---Moses Maimonides

“Creating independence in a poor person is the highest level of charity…jobs are the best anti-poverty program…’Be fruitful and multiply’ extends beyond procreation to all that humans do to provide for themselves and others…What works, is work---creative, entrepreneurial, and free”—Rev Robert Sirico

The American public's dependence on the federal government(1) had shot up 23% under BObama. Today, under the biden regime it’s gotten worse. Dependence programs accounts for more than 70% of the federal budget. At the same time, fewer Americans pay income taxes---the top 25% of earners paid 89% of all income taxes (70% in 1981) while the bottom half paid 2.3% (7% in 1981). For the first time ever, average spending on dependence programs per recipient exceeded the country's per-capita disposable income! Another 20% are government workers(2). That means only 34% pay taxes enjoyed by the rest.

Despite spending over $27 TRILLION since 1965 there has been little progress on poverty. Americans still counted as poor, and the share of those living in poverty is close to what it was when the liberals/democrats war on poverty began.

Today, more people than ever before depend on the federal government for housing, food, and income. Welfare policies should help those truly in need and empower Americans to achieve financial independence, to achieve what every free, prosperous and open society needs, self-sufficiency.

Meanwhile, an all-time high of Americans are on disability. And many not because they're disabled, but rather because they can't or won’t find jobs in biden's economy and have exited the workforce. The poverty rate was in sharp decline when lbj pushed for his politically motivated war on poverty. It fell from almost 23% in the late 1950s to 17.3% in 1965, a year after the program was announced and before it could have made any significant impact. Since then, the rate has remained virtually flat — never better than 11%, never worse than 15%. Our government has already spent over $27 trillion in taxpayers' money on at least 80 means-tested welfare programs in the past 60 years.

The current economic effects account for little of the change in the index. liberal social programs account for the reminder. For over a half-century now the so-called "Great Society" has attempted to socially engineer the poor upward at great cost to our nation's fiscal solvency. Despite transferring all those $trillions, those classified as poor remain poor. Yet the left-wing has no exit strategy and no withdrawal date for their war on poverty. On the contrary, their true intention is to enslave the poor to ensure their vote for the politicians who promise to keep the gravy train running at full steam.

The left-wing/democrats’ social security expansion Act would expand benefits, and its enormous tax increases would exacerbate Social Security’s strain on workers and families, making all but the oldest generations worse off. The $33.8 trillion in tax hikes on workers, savers, investors, and small business owners would distort positive activities and cause significant economic damage. By taking more income away from people and promising them higher government benefits, the act would make Americans more dependent on government and more vulnerable to an increasingly likely fiscal crisis. Policymakers should improve incomes and economic growth through a targeted structure that increases benefits for the lowest earners and gives workers the opportunity to build wealth that they own and can pass on to their families.

What if the goal of public policy were not to maximize consumption but rather to make people truly better off over time? Thus, when we ask whether people are better off, what we really should mean is: do they have a greater agency in setting the course of their lives? Are they better able to form stable families and find fulfilling work that supports those families and allows the time to enjoy them? Or more of them able to earn the respect of the fellow citizens and places of pride in their communities, and to raise children able to do the same?

The proper way government can contribute to the effort to drive the poor out of poverty is through truly real education (and not the current woke version we get from our public-school monopoly run by the teachers’ unions) fair taxation and regulation, which will lead to economic expansion and career opportunities for those who are now merely content with living on food stamps, unemployment checks and housing subsidies. The best way to support an organic ethos of individual, family and community economic prosperity, freedom and a vibrant civil society is to reduce the size and scope of government intervention.
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“Today we do without God and replace him with the deification of science, identity, and wokeism; and we hold fundamental beliefs at odds with the laws of nature without any numinous explanation whatsoever. The lies we tell ourselves fill our empty, propane souls with a desperate purpose."--Sean McGlynn

Western civilization is under threat from 3 different but related forces: the resurgence of great-power authoritarianism and expansionism in the forms of the chinese communist Party and putin’s Russia; the rise of global islamism, which threatens to mobilize a vast population against the West; and the viral spread of woke ideology, which is eating into the moral fibre of the next generation.

We endeavor to fend off these threats with modern, secular tools: military, economic, diplomatic and technological efforts to defeat, bribe, persuade, appease or surveil. And yet, with every round of conflict, we find ourselves losing ground. We are either running out of money, with our national debt in the tens of trillions of dollars, or we are losing our lead in the technological race with China. But we can’t fight off these formidable forces unless we can answer the question: what is it that unites us? The response that “God is dead!” seems insufficient. So, too, does the attempt to find solace in “the rules-based liberal international order." From a secular perspective, there is no foundation or assuming that all humans have a basic dignity and value. To the contrary, for relativistic and social constructive criteria, human dignity is frail and unreliable and unavailable for many--human life and even the human species are of relatively limited value.

The only credible answer lies in our desire to uphold the legacy of the Judeo-Christian tradition. That legacy consists of an elaborate set of ideas and institutions designed to safeguard human life, freedom and dignity — from the nation state and the rule of law to the institutions of science, health and learning. As Tom Holland has shown, secular freedoms — of the market, of conscience and of the press — find their roots in Christianity.

Atheists fail to see the wood for the trees. The wood is the civilization built on the Judeo-Christian tradition; it is the story of the West, warts and all. A critique of contradictions in Christian doctrine is serious, but it is also too narrow in scope. Freedom of conscience and speech is perhaps the greatest benefit of Western civilization. It does not come naturally to man. It is the product of centuries of debate within Jewish and Christian communities. It was these debates that advanced science and reason, diminished cruelty, suppressed superstitions, and built institutions to order and protect life, while guaranteeing freedom to as many people as possible. Unlike Islam, Christianity outgrew its dogmatic stage. It became increasingly clear that Christ’s teaching implied compassion for the sinner and humility for the believer.

Yet, it would not be truthful to attributed the embrace of Christianity solely to the realization that atheism is too weak and divisive a doctrine to fortify us against our menacing foes. Ultimately life without any spiritual solace is unendurable — indeed very nearly self-destructive.

Atheism failed to answer a simple question: what is the meaning and purpose of life? Atheists believe that with the rejection of God we would enter an age of reason and intelligent humanism. But the “God hole” — the void left by the retreat of the church — has merely been filled by a jumble of irrational quasi-religious dogma. The result is a world where modern cults prey on the dislocated masses, offering them spurious reasons for being and action — mostly by engaging in virtue-signalling theater on behalf of a token victimized minority or our supposedly doomed planet. The line often attributed to G.K. Chesterton has turned into a prophecy: “When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.”

In this nihilistic vacuum, the challenge before us becomes civilizational. We can’t withstand China, Russia and Iran if we can’t explain to our populations why it matters that we do. We can’t fight woke ideology if we can’t defend the civilization that it is determined to destroy. And we can’t counter islamism with purely secular tools. To win the hearts and minds of Muslims here in the West, we have to offer them something more than videos on China owned tikTok.

The lesson is of the power of a unifying story, embedded in the foundational texts, traditions, and dogma, to attract, engage and mobilize the masses. Unless what's offered is something as meaningful, the erosion of our civilization will continue. And fortunately, there is no need to look for some new-age concoction of medication and mindfulness. Christianity has it all.
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https://nypost.com/2023/12/01/....opinion/george-santo

https://www.americanthinker.co....m/articles/2023/02/p

https://www.dailywire.com/news..../fetterman-pushes-to

https://justthenews.com/govern....ment/congress/oustin

https://www.newsmax.com/newsfr....ont/burchett-santos-

https://www.breitbart.com/clip....s/2023/12/01/fetterm

https://www.foxnews.com/politi....cs/confidence-us-pre

https://freebeacon.com/biden-a....dministration/watch-

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After 30 years of watching liberals-turned-leftists run roughshod over the Rule of Law, governors and legislative leaders in Republican-controlled states have decided to take a more activist role for themselves — and leaders in Democrat-held cities within these states don’t like it one bit.

So they ran to The Washington Post and, predictably, the “Democracy Dies in Darkness” activists there didn’t disappoint. Now they claim that these conservative states are violating the “home rule” rights of these cities that generally pick and choose which federal laws they want to enforce. For our money, it’s worth the bag of popcorn to read.

Molly Hennessy-Fiske, whom the Post has deemed its “red state” reporter — hopefully she’s getting hazard pay for hanging out among the rubes — begins her penny-ante screed by calling what red-state governments are doing “hypocrisy.” She whines, “Despite long advocating small government and local control, Republican governors and legislators across a significant swath of the country are increasingly overriding the actions of Democratic cities — removing elected district attorneys or threatening to strip them of power, taking over election offices and otherwise limiting local independence.” Apparently, misfeasance and malfeasance aren’t in the vocabulary of Hennessy-Fiske, nor is there consistency in the editorial stance of the Post. Remember the idea of Second Amendment sanctuaries? We do.

“Using this disingenuous logic, proponents have convinced cities and counties in Oregon, Washington, New Mexico, Illinois, Colorado, Florida, Virginia, and elsewhere that they should resist laws enacted by duly elected legislators upon their own declarations — not those of the courts — that such laws violate the Second Amendment,” wrote Washington Post columnist Mary B. McCord in 2020.

McCord continued: “This not only misunderstands the Second Amendment, but it also misunderstands the limited powers of local jurisdictions, which exist solely based on authorities conferred by state law. State constitutions, statutes and common law generally affirm the ‘supremacy’ of federal and state law, meaning that local jurisdictions are preempted from enacting conflicting ordinances and resolutions. And in no state do local governments have the prerogative to declare a state or federal law unconstitutional without involving the courts.”

Amazing the difference three years can make.

So let’s go back to the more recent conundrum, where blue-city mayors chafe at state legislatures and governors that have curtailed their fever dreams in states like Florida, Texas, Louisiana, Tennessee, Mississippi, and Ohio. According to the Local Solutions Support Center, a left-leaning advocacy group, the largest portion of state limitations came in the areas of education, election law, abortion, and LGBTQ rights. States with conservative majorities often look to their legislatures to enact age-appropriate school curricula, ensure more fair elections, uphold duly passed restrictions on abortion, and protect kids by tempering the Rainbow Mafia’s grooming operation.

Since the states won’t bend to their will, these blue-city mayors are appealing to a higher authority: the federal government. Justin Bibb, the mayor of Cleveland who the Post says “struggled to pass local tobacco and gun control ordinances” but was stymied by the GOP-controlled Ohio legislature, appealed to the Biden administration for more direct federal aid to bypass the “gatekeepers” at the state level. “If they want to see a real change, send that money directly to the mayors … to make sure as mayors we can control our destiny and preserve home rule in our cities.”

There are a lot of small town mayors and city managers who are denied that privilege because their state is controlled by democrats. When the Post comes out advocating for them, we’ll believe this is an issue. But we’re not holding our breath.

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