There's been a lot of talk recently about the devaluation of human life – late-term abortions … elderly woman dying because of a nurse's refusal to give her CPR … killing of American citizens without judicial oversight … refusal of Colorado to implement Jessica's Law … and more.
But the devaluation of human life goes beyond not caring whether people live or die. Whenever an individual's sovereignty is violated, that, of and by itself, demonstrates a devaluation of life. The very essence of Natural Law is that a person's life belongs to him, and therefore no one has a right to interfere with his life or property.
I thought about the devaluation of human life as I read about the proposed new bill introduced by socialist Democrats Sen. Bernie Sanders and Oregon Rep. Peter DeFazio. The title of the bill has the usual Orwellian ring to it – "Keeping Social Security Promises Act" – the same kind of sugarcoated words that have been slapped on thousands of other pieces of tyrannical legislation over the past 237 years.
The objective of the proposed bill is to force the wealthiest Americans to "pay their fair share into the fund." What a unique (yawn) idea. Left-wingers are the most noncreative bunch of angry miscreants on the planet.
But give them credit for one thing: They never let up. They trudge forward with the same, old fairness message, year after year, never underestimating the avarice and ignorance of the average voter. Of course, the names of the bills change, but they all have the same intent: making it legal for the government to commit more aggression against individual citizens whom it is constitutionally bound to protect.
The Sanders/DeFazio bill would remove the income cap (currently $113,700) on Social Security taxes and require that the 6.2 percent payroll tax also be paid on all income above $250,000. As one of his justifications for the bill, Sanders said that "People are quite dependent on Social Security now." To which a pro-liberty humanoid from another galaxy might be inclined to quizzically ask, "So what?"
False premises come in many forms, but the absolute worst is the a priori argument. The a prioriargument is always fallacious because it presents a person's conclusion as a premise. It's dirty pool, of course, but that's a game politicians are masters at playing. A priori arguments are outrageously illogical, which is why it's so easy for politicians to get the walking dead to enthusiastically support them.
But to a thinking person, it's self-evident that if you start with a false premise, you're guaranteed to arrive at a false conclusion. Not surprisingly, most of what government does is based on false premises, usually a priori premises – which is why it is not surprising that their conclusions are usually wrong by default.
Now, back to comrades Sanders and DeFazio. The fact that "People are quite dependent on Social Security now" is one of their excuses for wanting to take more money from financially successful people and hand it to others. After all, it's "fair," right?
Wrong. "Fair" is a subjective term politicians never tire of using to justify committing aggression against law-abiding citizens. Where Republicans have gone astray over the years is that they almost never challenge the underlying premises of the Dirty Dems.
The premise that it is "fair" to take more money from someone because he is financially successful and give it to someone who is "quite dependent" on receiving a check from the government every month is false. It's nothing more than an opinion posing as a premise.
Thus, whether or not Barack Obama serves a third term is not really the issue. There will always be another tyrant anxious to take the reins of power, as we've seen most recently in Venezuela and, prior to that, Egypt. Regardless of who is in the White House, nothing will change unless a majority of members in both houses of Congress are prepared to renounce the premise that the government has a moral right to take an arbitrary amount of each citizen's property without his consent.
There's no denying it would be a huge step in the right direction if a true liberty candidate were to win the presidency in 2016, but even an individual with the best of liberty intentions would have to deal not only with Democrats, but Republican Party statists as well. (We just saw a vivid example of this when Lindsey Graham and John McCain threw temper tantrums in response to Rand Paul's courageous 13-hour filibuster.)
Even though most people see Nancy Pelosi as an ignorant airhead because of her compulsive habit of blurting out asinine statements, I think the doozy she came up with last week is actually very important for liberty folks to think about. I'm talking about Nutty Nancy's loony comment, "Tax cuts are spending."
Laugh if you will, but I think she did us all a favor by putting a spotlight on just how convoluted statist thinking is. The premise, of course, is that all money belongs to the government, and whatever it allows you to keep is an expense it must bear.
In a period of just 13 hours, Rand Paul pumped new life into a given-up-for-dead Republican Party. But he can't do it alone. He needs help from libertarian-centered conservative voters who are willing to help throw out the vile old geezers who don't want to see their cushy way of life threatened.
In that vein, in my interview with Sen. Paul last week, he emphasized that the most important thing a person can do to help change the misdirection of America is to find and vote for libertarian-Republican candidates in the 2014 primaries.
In that regard, the upcoming mid-term elections may be the last train out for freedom. Are you awake, tea-party people? You obviously were not when you gave Orrin Hatch another plane ticket back to Washington.
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