To achieve equality of outcome among all people (as opposed to equal opportunity) the government must keep us from failing.
To keep us from failing requires preventing us from making bad choices.
To keep us from making bad choices requires eliminating choice.
This is the inescapable logic of egalitarianism and the reason why all socialist projects end in totalitarianism and oppression.
You’re not likely to get this information anywhere else, because it doesn’t fit the preferred narratives of the dominant media culture.
Discover . . . Why California’s Drought was Completely Preventable
So embarrassing.
In his ongoing quest to make Jimmy Carter’s one catastrophic term seem like a four-year festival of victory, awesomeness and genius, the current occupant of the White House just continues to come through.
This week we read that the President thinks it would be a grand idea to make voting compulsory. Washington Post: President Obama endorses mandatory voting.
“Other countries have mandatory voting,” Mr. Obama said at a town hall-style event in Cleveland, Ohio, citing places like Australia. “It would be transformative if everybody voted — that would counteract money more than anything.”
The president continued, “The people who tend not to vote are young, they’re lower income, they’re skewed more heavily toward immigrant groups and minorities . . . There’s a reason why some folks try to keep them away from the polls.”
Perhaps. But there’s certainly a reason some folks desperately want them at the polls. One party/ideology benefits greatly when the easily bamboozled and bribed vote in larger numbers. One party/ideology thrives on convincing the gullible that they can have free stuff with other people’s money and that we’ll never, ever run out of other people’s money.
One party/ideology benefits when the mal-educated, the unassimilated and the uninformed show up at the polls. (In related news, we also learned this week that only 35% of adult Americans can name all three branches of government.)
For some time it has been an unquestioned article of faith among left-liberals that when more people vote, better government results.
Pardon me. Could you kindly direct us to the nearest polling place?
“Faith” is the wrong word here because faith holds fast where there is merely no sensory evidence. Liberals hold their belief—that pure democracy will somehow produce good outcomes for “the common people”—in the face of mountains of contrary evidence.
The word for this is delusion.
There is a reason Mr. Obama cited only Australia in support of his argument. Actually his precise words were, “Australia and some other countries . . .” So, who are those “other countries?” Below is a map of all the nations of the world that have already embraced Mr. Obama’s grand idea of compulsory voting:
Ahhh, Latin America, bastion of stability and corruption-free government. And we see you over there North Korea!
Australia is the only one in this group that isn’t either an economic basket case, a liberal-fascist dictatorship or both. Funny how the President didn’t point to all the excellent government the citizenry is enjoying in Thailand or the Democratic Republic of Congo in his remarks.
Many other countries have tried mandatory voting in the past—usually during some fascist-dictator-y phase in their past—but have since abandoned it. They learned the hard way that idiots tend to vote for idiotic politicians.
A former Minnesota governor.
A current Minnesota Senator.
Nevertheless, this president’s banana republic-ification of America continues apace. And we have a whole new generation of potential voters who get their news from Jon Stewart.
Oh, and San Francisco wants to lower the voting age to 16 because . . . Democracy!
Recently I was told how man outwits his nearest mental competitor, the monkey. He ties a small-neck bottle to a tree. Puts bait in the bottle. The monkey can reach in, but with the bait clutched in his grip he cannot get his fist out again.
And he will not let go. So he is stuck, trapped by his stubborn greed.
Every election year in the United States the politicians are catching a lot of monkeys.
We have been baited with promises, pseudo-prosperity and stage money. We have been lured into a trap.
In the past two decades in the United States . . . a beneficent government has sold us a substitute for freedom. It is called security.
Suddenly the gamble was taken out of job seeking. Taxes took all the excess profits–the bonus of business.
We were promised that the government would take care of us if we get ill or get old and that we will never earn less than 40 cents an hour no matter what. Thus we have lost the good sense and moral integrity that set man apart.
If the old pioneering fire has died out of us, if we will hang on to new deals, fair deals and raw deals at the sacrifice of our i-deals, then we deserve to be trapped by our own clutching fingers because we are animals, nothing more.
History, for six thousand years, is the record of free people made slaves trying to get the free lunch out of the bottle.
Remember These Things (1952)
Paul Harvey