Worth a read....

[Backlighting]

Much of it seems to appear in chapters of Atlas Shrugged.

http://www.cnsnews.com/public/content/arti...px?RsrcID=41265

[Alfonso Jones]

Much of it seems to appear in chapters of Atlas Shrugged.

http://www.cnsnews.com/public/content/arti...px?RsrcID=41265

Interesting fictional read.

We have great cause to be concerned, in reality. It appears that, in real life, today, Paulson and crew are merrily spending money without congressional authorization. There is far too little outcry about this practice.

I'm not talking about the fact that Paulson is doing stupid things, etc. I'm talking about the fact that he appears to be allocating funds without authorization from congress.

Where is the massive outcry about this? What have I missed?

Bill P

Edited December 26, 2008 by Bill P

[syrakusos]

... Paulson and crew are merrily spending money without congressional authorization. ... allocating funds without authorization from congress. Where is the massive outcry about this? What have I missed?

Bill P

You missed about 50 years of public education. Public education was never much more than minimal and what there was of value depended on the individual teachers and learners as well as a general societal preference for hard work. My mother was born in 1931. She never wanted to be more than a wife and mother. It was the expected out come. She had two years of Latin in high school -- a public schoo, not Catholic. She had a year of algebra and a year of geometry. Mostly, she liked music. (She taught my brother to play the piano. I never learned.) In a retrospective of the women's movement, Betty Friedan -- author of The Feminine Mystique -- challenged the post-modernists who denigrate the role of wife and mother, especially as being unintellectual. Friedan said that she and her Seven Sister School cohort generally expected to benefit personally and socially from their educations and she never felt it wasted by running a home for her family.

That was then. ... sort of like Russia after the first flush of the Revolution ...

Then, the reality of communism set in

Like Soviet agriculture, public education is a failure mode. Intellectually, we suffered "starvation" and survived only by "importing" ideas from outside the classroom -- Ayn Rand, for instance.

Where do you learn respect for the Constitution? Not in a classroom where the teacher's approved lesson plan points to the class conflicts that were resolved when the men in power seized the government for themselves -- and that's how I learned it in an Advanced Placement high school class -- and nothing in college ever contradicted that. Even when I went to The College of Charleston (1967-1969) and had nominally "conservative" professors, they were not consistent advocates of much, but were rather, clearly on the defensive and -- more to the point -- actually had to admit that the Constitution served a class interest, even if it turned out to be the greatest good for the greatest number.

So,you didn't miss anything, Bill. You lived through it. And here you are.

The real question is: what are you going to do about it?

Mike M.

Michael E. Marotta

[syrakusos]

Where is the massive outcry about this?

You know, Nixon refused The War Powers Act. During Vietnam, Congress gave the President the power to send troops anywhere without a declaration of war from Congress. Nixon vetoed it. Congress overrode the veto.

Take either side of McCarthyism. What about the internment of the Americans with Japanese-sounding names? In the previous world war, the targets were Americans with German names. How could Prohibition be enacted? What about the genocide agains the native Americans or 300 years of slavery, slaves in Jamestown even before Plymouth Rock? "All men are created equal...." except the ones tallied as 3/5 of a person. Where was the outcry, indeed.

Myself, I regard Objectivism -- and free market economics -- as a personal philosophy. When technology took a downturn, I went back to college and completed a new degree to remain marketable. When still no opportunities opened, I went on to Plan B.

"My life would be a lot better if everyone else [... fill in the blank...]"

As they are unlikely to do so, what is your Plan B?

[Alfonso Jones]

... Paulson and crew are merrily spending money without congressional authorization. ... allocating funds without authorization from congress. Where is the massive outcry about this? What have I missed?

Bill P

You missed about 50 years of public education. Public education was never much more than minimal and what there was of value depended on the individual teachers and learners as well as a general societal preference for hard work. My mother was born in 1931. She never wanted to be more than a wife and mother. It was the expected out come. She had two years of Latin in high school -- a public schoo, not Catholic. She had a year of algebra and a year of geometry. Mostly, she liked music. (She taught my brother to play the piano. I never learned.) In a retrospective of the women's movement, Betty Friedan -- author of The Feminine Mystique -- challenged the post-modernists who denigrate the role of wife and mother, especially as being unintellectual. Friedan said that she and her Seven Sister School cohort generally expected to benefit personally and socially from their educations and she never felt it wasted by running a home for her family.

That was then. ... sort of like Russia after the first flush of the Revolution ...

Then, the reality of communism set in

Like Soviet agriculture, public education is a failure mode. Intellectually, we suffered "starvation" and survived only by "importing" ideas from outside the classroom -- Ayn Rand, for instance.

Where do you learn respect for the Constitution? Not in a classroom where the teacher's approved lesson plan points to the class conflicts that were resolved when the men in power seized the government for themselves -- and that's how I learned it in an Advanced Placement high school class -- and nothing in college ever contradicted that. Even when I went to The College of Charleston (1967-1969) and had nominally "conservative" professors, they were not consistent advocates of much, but were rather, clearly on the defensive and -- more to the point -- actually had to admit that the Constitution served a class interest, even if it turned out to be the greatest good for the greatest number.

So,you didn't miss anything, Bill. You lived through it. And here you are.

The real question is: what are you going to do about it?

Mike M.

Michael E. Marotta

What am I going to do?

Live my life, targeting my own goals.

Work toward freer societies - both free markets and free minds.

Bill P