Florida Pundit is getting tired of the relentless attempts to link the violent actions of a schizophrenic to Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, talk radio, the Tea Party movement and Fox News. The ghouls on the left are desperately grasping at anything that will distract the American public from the destructiveness of their policies.
So we won’t let them do this and present a — warning: violent political hate speech ahead! — targeted attack on Obama’s economic policies by Thomas Sowell (via The Right Scoop):
Thomas Sowell, one of America’s greatest commentators of social policy, has written a column about his concern that the current administration’s actions are putting the U.S. on a “slippery slope to tyranny.”
In our times, American democracy is being dismantled, piece by piece, before our very eyes by the current administration in Washington, and few people seem to be concerned about it.
The president’s poll numbers are going down because increasing numbers of people disagree with particular policies of his, but the damage being done to the fundamental structure of this nation goes far beyond particular counterproductive policies.
Just where in the Constitution of the United States does it say that a president has the authority to extract vast sums of money from a private enterprise and distribute it as he sees fit to whomever he deems worthy of compensation? Nowhere.
And yet that is precisely what is happening with a $20 billion fund to be provided by BP to compensate people harmed by their oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
Many among the public and in the media may think that the issue is simply whether BP’s oil spill has damaged many people, who ought to be compensated.
But our government is supposed to be “a government of laws and not of men.”
Sowell is concerned not just about this particular instance, but the vast expansion of government power under Obama:
With vastly expanded powers of government available at the discretion of politicians and bureaucrats, private individuals and organizations can be forced into accepting the imposition of powers that were never granted to the government by the Constitution.
If you believe that the end justifies the means, then you don’t believe in constitutional government.
And, without constitutional government, freedom cannot endure. There will always be a “crisis” — which, as the president’s chief of staff has said, cannot be allowed to “go to waste” as an opportunity to expand the government’s power.
That power will of course not be confined to BP or to the particular period of crisis that gave rise to the use of that power, much less to the particular issues.
He discusses how Hitler and Lenin came to power by getting support from uninformed people who had not previously participated in politics. Lenin called these people “useful idiots.”
Those who cannot see beyond the immediate events to the issues of arbitrary power — vs. the rule of law and the preservation of freedom — are the “useful idiots” of our time. But useful to whom?
Here is an interview with Thomas Sowell, one of the clearest voices on economics and other policy issues. Sowell discusses his new book Intellectuals and Society with Peter Robinson.
If you have not read Thomas Sowell before, you must listen to this interview. Sowell covers a wide range of topics including the Great Depression, our current economic crisis, the fallacy of appeasing dictators, global warming and how left wing ideas disseminated in our schools and other institutions.
His main point is that intellectuals believe that decisions on public policy should not be made by voters but rather by so-called “experts” when in fact knowledge on how to address problems is widely disseminated and requires decisions by the 99 percent of people who are not professional intellectuals.
Sowell will turn eighty this year. He looks great and we can only hope we have this American treasure around for a long time to speak with clarity about the problems America faces and the misguided policies of Obama, the Democrats and their intellectual allies at our universities.
Here is the interview in five segments. The comments before each segment only provide a few highlights. You will get much more out of listening to each segment and the whole interview.
Segment 1: “The Species of the Intellectuals” – Thomas Sowell on Obama’s call on Republicans to trust experts. “[laughing]…Talking to experts does make a difference. Many of the great disasters of our time have been committed by experts.”
Segment 2: “Intellectuals and Economics” – Sowell discusses among other things how government policy prevented the recovery after the 1929 stock market crash and created the Great Depression.
Segment 3: “Intellectuals and Vision” - The intellectuals’ vision that decisions should be transferred from the people to experts. “You can become President of the United States without contact to economic reality.” Comments on Obama’s decision to give al-Qaeda terrorists a jury trial when there is no basis for such a “right”.
Segment 4: “Intellectuals and War” Gun control: “In Britain they have made burglary a safe occupation.” The role of schools in disseminating the liberal agenda. The fallacy that an arms race will lead to war. The heroic roles of President Truman in containing the Soviet Union and President Reagan in ending the Cold War.
Segment 5: “Intellectuals and the Rest of Us” – Intellectuals sell their services by making alarming predictions like global warming. The revelations of Climategate.
