Fallacy Of Redistribution Has Grave Economic Impact

Thomas Sowell
Thomas Sowell
by Thomas Sowell –
The recently discovered tape on which Barack Obama said back in 1998 that he believes in redistribution is not really news. He said the same thing to Joe the Plumber four years ago.

But the tape’s surfacing may serve a useful purpose if it gets people to thinking about the consequences of redistribution.

Those who talk glibly about redistribution often act as if people are just inert objects that can be placed here and there, like pieces on a chess board, to carry out some grand design.

But if human beings have their own responses to government policies, then we cannot blithely assume that government policies will have the effect intended. [Read more…]

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Marriage: The Greatest Weapon Against Child Poverty

Marriage is Greatest Weapon Against Child Povertyby Ken McIntyre –
The collapse of marriage, along with a dramatic rise in births to single women, is the most important cause of childhood poverty—but government policy doesn’t reflect that reality, according to a special report released today by The Heritage Foundation.

Nearly three out of four poor families with children in America are headed by single parents. When a child’s father is married to his mother, however, the probability of the child’s living in poverty drops by 82 percent.

Robert Rector, Heritage’s senior research fellow in domestic policy, provides a brief overview of each state with unique data and 14 charts per state, [Read more…]

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Hobby Lobby’s Christian Owners Fight $1.3 Million-Per-Day HHS Mandate Fine

Hobby Lobby CEO David Green and his wife Barbara
Hobby Lobby CEO David Green and his wife Barbara
by Kathleen Gilbert –
The Obama administration is set to levy as much as a $1.3 million per day fine against a Christian retail business based on their religious objection to abortifacient drugs, according to a lawsuit filed this week.

Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., with more than 500 arts and crafts stores in 41 states and over 22,500 employees, is reportedly the largest for-profit business yet to file suit over the Health and Human Services (HHS) mandate requiring businesses to provide free abortion-causing drugs, such as the “week-after” pill Ella, as non-negotiable “preventive services.”

Lawyers for the private retail chain filed a lawsuit in the US District Court for the Western District of Oklahoma, where the company is based. [Read more…]

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The Tedium of Leftism

Leftists Socialists communists democratsby Bruce Walker –
Leftism is not an ideology. No sane person thinks “soaking the rich” or “investing tax dollars” achieves any particular objective. The creation of predefined bogeymen is an ancient and unsavory strategy for seizing and then holding power — the Jewish people can testify to that grim fact — and there is nothing more to it than that. Leftist leaders today are simply the barbarian warlords of centuries ago who promised to steal and to share the spoils of what others have worked to produce.

Marxism is only one of several contemporary mantras dreamed up to let party bosses rob and loot. [Read more…]

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The Church and Secularism – part 1

Family Under Attack in Americaby Peter Kreft –
I’m told that in medical school they tell you that there are four indispensable steps to any medical analysis of a patient’s condition. And these four steps are the basic logic of all practical problem-solving in every field — medicine, business, detectives, whatever — because, there are two variables: there’s something good or desirable and something bad or undesirable. And then there’s the cause and the effect. So you can have the bad effect, the bad cause, the good effect, or the good cause. So the four steps of a medical analysis are first, an observation of the symptoms, which are the bad effects; then a diagnosis of the disease that is causing the symptoms — that’s the bad cause; then a prognosis of the hope for a healing, which is the good effect; and then a prescription for the treatment, which is the good cause. …

So I’d like to address the problem of the decline of Western Civilization in terms of (1) Symptoms, (2) Diagnosis, (3) Prognosis, and (4) Prescription. [Read more…]

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Government Entitlements Are Corrupting Us

Government Entitlements Are Corrupting Usby Nicholas Eberstadt –
The American republic has endured for well over two centuries, but over the past 50 years, the apparatus of American governance has undergone a radical transformation. In some basic respects—its scale, its preoccupations, even many of its purposes—the U.S. government today would be scarcely recognizable to Franklin D. Roosevelt, much less to Abraham Lincoln or Thomas Jefferson.

What is monumentally new about the American state today is the vast empire of entitlement payments that it protects, manages and finances. Within living memory, the federal government has become an entitlements machine. As a day-to-day operation, it devotes more attention and resources to the public transfer of money, goods and services to individual citizens than to any other objective, spending more than for all other ends combined. [Read more…]

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We Applaud the Republican Platform: No ‘Abortion Rights’, Only a Right to Life

GOP Republicans Pro-Lifeby Deacon Keith Fournier –
To the consternation of those who oppose the Right to Life the Republican Party passed a Pro-Life Plank in Tampa, Florida on Tuesday, August 21, 2012. The platform will come before the delegates next Monday for a vote. The platform committee is chaired by the Pro-Life Governor of Virginia, Bob McDonnell.

The language of the Republican Platform is refreshingly clear: “Faithful to the ‘self-evident’ truths enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, we assert the sanctity of human life and affirm that the unborn child has a fundamental individual right to life which cannot be infringed. We support a human life amendment to the Constitution and endorse legislation to make clear that the Fourteenth Amendment’s protections apply to unborn children.”

Sadly, the opponents of the fundamental Human Right to Life of our youngest neighbors in the first home of the human race control much of the media. [Read more…]

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Liberals’ Illegitimate War on Women

War on Women Liberalsby Jeannie DeAngelis –
Willingness or unwillingness to prevent or terminate a pregnancy appears to be the sole criterion upon which liberal women judge how well they’re being treated.  It’s stunning that the left actually embraces the idea that taking a stand for life instantly translates into hostility toward, or contention with, the female gender.

The right to abort the unborn is so precious to left-leaning women that they are even willing to overlook the fact that 50% of the fetuses losing their lives in abortion clinics are of the gender they believe Republicans are currently waging war against.  The truth is that it’s pro-choice women who discriminate; they’re fine with liberal men being womanizers, perverts, and adulterers, and if women like Juanita Broderick consider what Bill Clinton did to her a “legitimate rape,” then the men they admire can even be alleged rapists. [Read more…]

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Four Characteristics of Good Orthodox Preaching

Fr. Jonathan Cholcher
Fr. Jonathan Cholcher
by Fr. Jonathan Cholcher –
Orthodox preaching needs to be good preaching. To be good, Orthodox preaching must not only deliver good content, but it must strive to make the hearers good. Therefore, good Orthodox preaching is the Gospel (lit., good news) proclaimed and lived.

Four characteristics mark good Orthodox preaching:

  • Christ crucified and risen;
  • the language, or rationale, of Scripture;
  • plain discourse; and
  • attention to the experience of salvation through the Gospel.

All Orthodox preachers exhibit these traits beginning with Christ Jesus, the apostles, and the prophets. They only preach what they themselves have come to know.

First, Orthodox preaching is the Word, the Logos incarnate Who was crucified and raised to redeem the world from sin, death, and the power of the devil. [Read more…]

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Obamacare Begins Child Sterilization, Without Parental Consent

ObamaCare a nightmare for Americaby Stephanie Zawada –
With back-to-school season in full swing across the nation, parents in Oregon have more to worry about than shopping for sweaters and purchasing pencils. In the state of Oregon, the Obamacare mandate, which went into effect on August 1, 2012, provides free sterilizations to girls as young as fifteen. Now, your daughter, your high school freshman, can choose, without your consent, to be permanently sterilized. …

Forget the milestones of obtaining a driver’s license at 16 and being able to legally drink at 21 – getting sterilized at 15 is now the first step in the social maturity process of an American youth.

The “Required Health Plan Coverage Guidelines” set forth by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services states: “Non-grandfathered plans and issuers are required to provide coverage without cost-sharing consistent with these guidelines in the first plan year.that begins on or after August 1, 2012.All [FDA] approved contraceptive methods, sterilization procedures, and patient education and counseling for all women with reproductive capacity.” [Read more…]

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