Congress and Obama: Freedom be Damned

Hello all. Very busy here with work. But here is an important issue to be aware of.

Ed Cline has written an excellent article, entitled Congressional Duplicity, or Treason?, about Barack Obama's Global Poverty Act.

The beginning of the article lays out his theme:

I rarely write commentary from anger, preferring a properly objective, psuedo-dispassionate approach to a subject deserving my attention. But news of the details, nature and scope of pending legislation in the U.S. Senate has caused me to make an exception to that rule.

As though Americans were not already burdened with:

• Extortionate and confiscatory taxes wherever they turn on virtually everything they earn, purchase, or do, from the local level on up to the federal level;
• Myriad regulations, controls and arbitrary rules that hamper or obstruct their productivity and their lives;
• Footing the endless bills of earmarked pork barrel projects at home in the amount of billions;
• Footing the bill in the amount of the billions for bottomless altruist and "humanitarian" pork barrel projects abroad;
• Footing the bill for an ever-expanding and ever more costly welfare state to subsidize the ill, the retired, the aged, the young, etc.
• Being held hostage by, say, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, and other hostile "oil-producing" countries, because our government has decided that snail darters, sea cows, and caribou have a greater right to live than have human beings;
• Paying more for food because mandated ethanol, which reports prove costs more in oil to produce than it "saves," in the gas they buy is taking more crop acreage out of production;

Congress is proposing, in Barack Obama's Global Poverty Act (S.2433, based on H.R. 1302, passed by the House September 25, 2007), that Americans be delivered into a state of indentured servitude as laborers for the United Nations. Perhaps "indentured servitude" is too kind a term, for as horrendous a condition as it is, there is usually a time limit to such servitude. Slavery would be the more accurate term in this instance, for what Congress is considering is servitude by Americans in perpetuity, in exchange for nothing but the privilege of laboring to "save" the world without thanks or reward, of filling the alleged needs of others, of performing unlimited "community service" for the offense of merely existing.

He does an expert job of concretizing the issue, of developing the consequences of the Global Poverty Act, and of identifying the principles which the act violates: freedom and natural individual rights.

P.S. Dr. Yaron Brook has an excellent article, entitled "War On Free Political Speech," on "campain finance" law published on Forbes.com. Dr. Brook says:

"Without [campaign finance laws], advocates say, the wealthy would control political speech.
...
What is the actual effect of wealth on political speech? Is it true that a diversity of political viewpoints would be shut out without campaign finance restrictions? Clearly not, when wealthy Americans include a vast diversity of individuals, and when we are free to watch Fox News or CNN, read the Wall Street Journal or The New York Times, listen to Rush Limbaugh or Air America, visit Instapundit or Daily Kos. No private citizen (or corporation), however wealthy, has the power to censor the speech of others. He can refuse to support, finance or promote ideas or candidates he disagrees with--which is his inalienable right--but he cannot forcibly suppress them. Jack Welch could choose not to contribute to MoveOn.org; he can't forbid them to speak or us to listen.
...
It's not money that corrupts--it's the lure of arbitrary political power."

The article has solid reasoning and good examples, and it puts the issue in proper context: in context of individual rights, including the rights to property and free speech.

June 2, 2006