Tuesday's Republican Primary

I received an e-mail from Robin Yess about Tuesday's primary.  I did a bit of homework about the three candidates, Wendy Long, George Maragos, and Bob Turner. Like most Republicans, the three say that they favor lower taxes; however, they are vague about how low.  Turner says that Obamacare should be repealed and tax increases should be avoided.  Avoided? How about tax cuts to eliminate the Departments of Energy, Education, and Labor?

Wendy Long is a lawyer. Her website says this:

 The main purpose and idea of my campaign is not original. I can't claim authorship. An inspired group of New Yorkers and other Americans came up with the idea, about 225 years ago.
It's called limited self-government, of the people, by the people, and for the people.

No one in this country is above the law, and no one is beneath it. The law is what protects the weak from the strong, affirms the dignity of every person, and overlooks no one in its demand of equal justice.


That sounds good, but what does it mean?  Would she have opposed the Bush-Obama bailout of Wall Street and the Fed's $29 trillion subsidization of global banks?  Her Republican colleagues believed those actions were constitutional. Local news sources such as Cayuga County's Auburnpub.com offer sketchy information about the three candidates.

When you log onto George Maragos's website, there is a video that does not work properly. How come Netflix can stream two hour movies into my television, but Maragos can't get a one-minute video to work?  Also, his secure e-mail (the site doesn't give any other contact information) limits questions to 245 characters (characters, not words), so I could not ask him a few simple questions.

According to Maragos's site:

We must take action now to reduce the deficit, eliminate wasteful spending, and reform entitlements in order to restore America's economic strength, provide for individual opportunity and guarantee future prosperity for our children. Government programs which have proven ineffective and wasteful should be terminated...Medicare and Social Security are a sacred commitment to our seniors and should be protected. Senator Gillibrand voted to kill these programs by her vote against raising the national debt ceiling.

I thought the Bible is sacred, but Medicare is a political program.  Maragos puts Social Security up there with the Ten Commandments.  On the one hand he says that government programs that are ineffective should be terminated.  On the other he says that one of the most ineffective programs, Social Security, is sacred.   Might we conclude that Maragos is a Three-card Monte dealer who says one thing to attract conservatives' votes and another thing to attract special interest money?

I have a basic question for any candidate: Where did you stand on the bailout?  None of the coverage in New York's all-thumbs media answers that question.  I attempted to send e-mails to the three candidates.  Only Ms. Long has an e-mail program that allows voters to send her an e-mail to inquire as to her positions.  The following is the e-mail I sent to her aide, Lynn:

Dear Lynn:

What are Ms. Long’s position on local governments’ transferring political authority to NGOs (as has been recommended with respect to the Route 28 Bypass proposal in Ulster County)? This is a longstanding strategy of environmental extremists like the WWF that has been supported by both Republican and Democratic politicians.

What is Ms. Long’s position on Ron Paul’s proposal to audit the Fed?

What is Ms. Long’s position on the 2009 bailout?

Sincerely,

Mitchell Langbert

Within minutes, Lynn responded with the following message:

 

From: Lynn Krogh [mailto:lynnkrogh@gmail.com]
Sent: Sunday, June 24, 2012 12:50 PM
To: Mitchell
Subject: Re: NGOs, Fed, Bailout

I just passed on your inquiry to Wendy.  She's traveling in Buffalo right now, but I'm hoping to have these answered asap.

Thnx

Lynn Krogh

518.618.7074

Lynn@wendylongfornewyork.com

M

My response to her was as follows:

Thank you. You’re the only campaign that has a way to e-mail questions, and I’m very impressed that you got back to me so quickly. 

Of the three, Wendy Long seems to be the one who knows how to run a campaign.  So few candidates do.  I don't think we can expect a true limited government candidate at this point in history.  The best we can do is split the nation's governance between Democrats and Republicans and hope that they will do as little as possible. Unfortunately, both parties seem to like Agenda 21 and both love the Fed, so unless the public gets tired of being milked like cattle we can expect an increasing degree of totalitarianism no matter who gets elected. 

 

Taking Ideology out of Your Child's Education

The following article "Taking Ideology Out of Your Child's Education" appears in the Memorial Day issue of the Lincoln Eagle, a Kingston, NY penny saver.  Mike Marnell, the Eagle's crusading editor, does an excellent job in putting it together. It is the only freedom oriented paper in the area, as far as I know.  It does not have a website but it reaches at least several thousand people. 

Taking Ideology Out of Your Child’s Education

Mitchell Langbert, Ph.D.*

When I attended high school in New York City, my class was required to read Karl Marx's "Communist Manifesto."  But we were not assigned to read any alternative view, such as Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations or Friedrich A. Hayek’s Road to Serfdom.  Communism was extolled, freedom disparaged.  I was recently speaking to a friend whose son graduated from a high school in this region and she told me that the emphasis on Marxism has not changed one bit.  Her son had not been assigned any book that describes free market economics or how and why free markets work better than government-controlled ones.  However, he had been assigned to read Marx and his teacher repeatedly preached in favor of socialism. 

The debate between people who believe in government control and those who believe in freedom is not new.  However, there are many myths not only about the subject but about its history.  The myths come from relentless efforts by advocates of government control to spin the debate. This has led to a takeover of the educational system by left-wing ideologues.  Thus, what students learn in public schools is often socialist propaganda and more often than not ignorant nonsense.

For example, the claim that adding layers of government or regulation is "progressive" is not historically true.  Yet, the students are told that it is.  In fact, the Roman Empire was based on a state-controlled, mixed economy like that advocated by today’s "progressives." What happened to Rome?   

In modern times, the idea of free markets originated out of a debate that had been initiated by advocates of government authority and regulation.  The mercantilists, such as Lord Shaftesbury and David Hume, advocated the use of government force to open markets, print money and regulate trade. Adam Smith responded to the mercantilists' "progressive", state-based ideas later in the 18th century.  Free markets are progressive, not socialism.  Advocates of monetary expansion to stimulate growth, such as David Hume, wrote before the advocates of the gold standard and zero inflation.

This was true in American history.  The first socialist in the history of US government was the first man to conceive of our Constitution, Alexander Hamilton.  Hamilton favored the use of paper money to expand the economy; government owned manufacturing; a central bank, the ancestor to today's Federal Reserve Bank; the use of subsidies to stimulate shipping; and taxes to fund government debt.  The problem with Hamilton's ideas was in part that they had led to hyper-inflation during the earlier Revolutionary War.  The central bank led to the earliest examples of corrupt speculation, and the stock of Hamilton's First Bank was the object of among the earliest financial bubbles in American history.  The government owned manufacturing firm he tried to start was associated with the corrupt bank stock speculation.  Hamilton’s Keynesian ideas (140 years before Keynes) failed.

In reaction to Hamilton's big government, "progressive" ideas, Jefferson, winning Hamilton's former ally, James Madison, formed the Democratic Republican Party.   The response to the big government ideas of Hamilton and his Federalist Party was to emphasize freedom.  This reached a crescendo in the 1830s, when Andrew Jackson founded the Democratic Party and abolished central banking, putting the US on a gold standard.  The most rapid growth in American history occurred during the 80 years that there was no central bank and money was based on the bi-metallic and then the gold standard.  Establishment of the Federal Reserve Bank in the 20^th century has led to slowed growth and stagnant real hourly wages.  You are poorer as a result of increasing government involvement in the economy. Much poorer.

The problem with government intervention is that it didn't work. But that’s not what students are taught in school.  

The examples of government failure get worse, though, when you fast forward in time to the early twentieth century.  The hyper-expansion of communism in Russia, China, Cuba, North Korea and elsewhere led to economic retardation and mass murder.  State-dominated economies were utter failures, and repeatedly so.  They failed so frequently and so thoroughly that one would think that anyone seriously studying them in universities would have tried to understand why they failed.  Yet, university professors throughout the communist era, until the 1980s, uniformly claimed that the performance of the Soviet economy exceeded that of the United States.  In other words, virtually 100% of university economic and social science departments ignored reality; preached ideological propaganda in favor of socialism; and excluded anyone who disagreed. 

When the Soviet Union fell in the late 1980s for the very reasons that the critics of socialism such as Ludwig von Mises and Frierich von Hayek had predicted in the 1920s to 1940s, you might think that university social scientists might have reconsidered their dogmatic, religious commitment to socialism. But that is not so.  The intolerance of anyone who disagrees with now obviously failed socialist and big government dogma has become even more extreme in universities.  Any academic who disagrees with the left is slandered and drummed out of universities.

Thus, it is not surprising that the local high schools are purveyors of ideological dogma. Having been educated by ignorant ideologues in universities, the teachers have been trained to be ideologues.

Parents have serious reason to be concerned about their children’s’ education.  The schools today are preaching socialism more aggressively than ever, even though historically socialist policies have repeatedly failed.  In order to counteract this tendency parents might consider taking the following steps:

1. Tell your school board that if the students are reading Karl Marx, they should also be reading Adam Smith.  If they are not reading Karl Marx, they should be reading Adam Smith anyway.

2. Ask you children for feedback about the claims being made by social studies teachers.  If the teachers are advocating socialism, they are incompetent.  If the school is encouraging the teachers to do so, the school board needs to be replaced.

3. Read your children’s social studies text books.  One parent told me that their child’s textbook’s discussion of the Second World War consisted of five pages on the internment of the Japanese (a terrible misdeed) and only one page on the war itself.  That is propaganda. It is not education.

Are your children being told of the advantages of freedom, or are they being propagandized as to the advantages of socialism?  I have worked in higher education for nearly twenty years.  I have repeatedly seen students who have been indoctrinated into failed, socialistic ideas in their primary educations.  I can undo some of the damage done by elementary and high school teachers, who in turn have been brainwashed by ideologues in universities.  You can undo some as well.

*Mitchell Langbert, Ph.D. is a member of the Town of Olive Republican Committee and is associate professor of business at Brooklyn College, CUNY.  He blogs at http://www.mitchell-langbert.blogspot.com.

Lazio Should Step Down

PO Box 130
West Shokan, NY 12494
June 12, 2010

Rick Lazio
Lazio 2010 Inc.
PO Box 4818
New York, New York 10185

Dear Mr. Lazio:

I am writing as a registered Republican and a member of my Town’s Republican Committee.

Your opponent, Carl Paladino, has publicly stated that during your tenure as a full-time employee and lobbyist for JP Morgan Chase you lobbied for and arranged a payment of $25 billion from the US Treasury to your employer. In other words, Mr. Paladino has publicly alleged that you participated in the “bailout." In return you received a $1.3 million bonus.

If Mr. Paladino’s allegations are inaccurate, please respond to this inquiry publicly.

If Mr. Paladino’s allegations are accurate then you are morally unfit to serve in public office. I am posting this letter on my blog and stating explicitly that if Mr. Paladino’s allegations are accurate you are morally equivalent to a common criminal and belong in jail. Consequently, I would urge you to step down from the gubernatorial candidacy and allow the better man to run.

Sincerely,


Mitchell Langbert, Ph.D.

Contrairimairi on Political Strategy

ContrairiMairi of Chi-town just sent me this e-mail:

Honestly, Mitchell, I think we MUST look outside BOTH parties! I do not trust ANYONE on an inside track that either party will endorse right now.....The rhetoric during election cycles all sounds so wonderful....then BAM! Once they are in office, the hierarchy pull all the strings!

I think if the Tea Party Movement is going to be ABSOLUTELY successful, we MUST disassociate from ANY and all candidates running on a Dem or Repub ticket. That is going to put a ton of pressure on the Libertarian and Constitution Party candidates, but I believe it is THE ONLY WAY! Repubs and Dems MUST be taken to their knees.

Look what happened with Brown in Massachusetts. I DID contribute, but only to send a message to D.C., "You're next!" But what really changed? Brown is a RINO from the get-go. His term will be an abbreviated version, and I can live with that for now.....but if we REALLY want America and The Constitution back, then ALL DemocRATic and Republican sponsored candidates MUST be refused!

I believe we MUST make a list of focused demands. Once that list is compiled, we MUST make candidates sign a pledge to adhere to it. If they do, they will be supported by the Tea Party Movement, grassroots, NO big-money backers......the people know how to, and WILL, spread the word.....it's already underway.....

I think the information I sent you previously form the Thomas Jefferson Center is an EXCELLENT place to start. The one thing I feel badly that they have not included, is a DEMAND that all candidates PLEDGE to rid this Country of illegal aliens. They must also pledge that there will be no such thing as an "anchor baby"......any mother who illegally enters this Country to deliver, passes her crime on to the child.....baby shall NOT be eligible for citizenship and BOTH will be thrown out summarily! The arrangement shall be retroactive......no baby born here by a mother entering illegally should EVER have been considered a citizen. Only babies born to individuals here on a legal basis shall have that distinction!

Not sure what you will think, but we have GOT to get smart in this Country, and quit standing back wringing our hands and complaining. We have to INSIST on REAL applications to already existing laws. We have enough laws already to keep us busy....time to roll up our sleeves and get the hard work done.

E-verify MUST find and remove the illegals here.

GOD Bless,
airi