Of Christmas in America and Life over Death

Welcome to Christmas and the whole Christmas season, doubly welcome this year because of the national focus of the media on the excessively trivial, even while things that matter a lot to a lot of people are happening all around us.  The media masters who have been running the presidential debates and proffering questions that emphasize the banal and the silly over substance and principle could use a vacation.

Welcome Christmas, when we can focus on things that affect real lives and the things that matter in real lives.  Welcome the opportunity to worship the Savior who brought meaning to our lives, while the leaders of men increasingly seek to pull meaning out of our lives or, failing that, distract people from all that holds lasting meaning and value and richness.

I include the routine censures of the “crass commercialism” associated with Christmas.  Those trite criticisms, trotted out at this time of every year since before the lifetimes of any of us, are really beside the point.  Is it wrong for people to seek in a myriad of ways to offer us their goods and services and to be rewarded when we eagerly respond to what they provide?  In a world of human interaction, what can be better than the free exchange of our abundance in the free markets of America.  Surely people can be as shallow in this season as in any other, and shunning bad taste merits no rebuke, but no praise of poverty over abundance will cure these ills.  Far from material things being irrelevant to Christmas, Christ and His creation and His atonement made possible the earth and the fulness thereof and our freedom to enjoy them.

True Christmas celebration comprehends all things important.  That celebration embraces the fulness of the goodness of the physical world in which we spiritual beings have been immersed.  To deny the physical and condemn its enjoyment in full measure is just as mistaken as to deny and neglect our spiritual being.  They must be taken amply together, neglecting neither.  As Christ revealed in modern times, “spirit and element inseparably connected receive a fulness of joy. . .” (Doctrine and Covenants 93:33)

Christ promises to us “every good thing” (see Moroni 7:25).  Unredeemed Death puts all good things out of our reach.  The sacrifice of Jesus the Savior overcame death in every significant way and brought all good things within our reach.

That is precisely why a fulsome celebration of Christmas must be a celebration of all good things, high and low, physical and spiritual.  These are the things that matter to everyone every day.  The brightness of stars, the love of family, the warmth of a home, the goodness of a savory meal, the beauty of music, the satisfaction of work done, the joy of light, the scent of the evergreen, the charm of children, the exhilaration of creation, and many million other manifestations of the goodness of God to His children are what Christmas means and are what power its celebration.

Christmas is the celebration of Life in all its goodness, a rejection of Death and the culture of poverty and decay and their worship by so many who would rip at faith and freedom.  Not accidentally faith and freedom--the very pursuit of happiness--were woven into the founding of American society.  The birth and physical life of Jesus Christ, including His own redemptive death and very real resurrection from the grave, merit all our praise, our worship, and our grateful enjoyment, still celebrated in America more than anywhere else.

I say, bring it on.

Of Public-Private Partnerships and Public Corruption

One of the popular phrases in Washington that makes me cringe every time that I hear it is public-private partnership.   This is a foreign concept, alien to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.  The Founders fled from the institution.  It had a rich history in Europe, and our Founders hated it, because it tended toward abuse (as it does today).  They had been methodically abused by it.

One example, the infamous British East India Company was a public-private partnership that engaged in colonization in America and elsewhere (perhaps most notably, India), harnessing the colonies with oppressive collars of monopolies that forced the colonists to do business only through the Company that enjoyed the privileges and powers of the Crown.  Those privileges were used to underpay the colonists for what they produced and sold and overcharge them for what they bought.  Fortunately for America, the Founders became champion smugglers, taking advantage of a land with an extensive seacoast and rich with usable harbors.  The smuggling was fortunate also for Britain, for without it the new British colonies in America would have been strangled in their cribs.

The Boston Tea Party was a colonial revolt against monopoly powers exercised in the name of the British Government by the East India Company.  That this revolt took place in Boston was not unusual, as the power and influence of the Crown-endorsed Companies were stronger in Virginia and other places to the south than they were in New England.  The New Englanders were less accustomed to it and therefore felt its oppressions more keenly.  Crown companies had much less of a role (but were not unknown) in lands settled by freedom-seeking Puritans and Pilgrims.  The Jamestown Colonies were from the beginning Company expeditions.  But the Virginians and many other Americans grew increasingly weary of those public-private partnerships and the corruptions that they fomented.  The wide lands of North America encouraged a freedom that the public-private partnership of Crown and Companies was not able to stifle.

It took royal favor to create the public-private partnerships, and the maintenance of royal favor to continue them.  No surprise, then, that such favor had to be funded by steady payments from the partnership to the government officials possessing power to control the royal favors.  In exchange, government discretion, including the judging of right and wrong, was all too often influenced by what favored the partnership rather than what favored justice.

This was how public-private partnerships were corrupting on a personal level.  They were also corrupting to the State, corrosive of freedom.  In no small degree British freedoms from the King have been built by the power of taxation controlled by Parliament.  With great skill over centuries British Parliaments wielded the power of managing the government purse to win new freedoms from the British Kings.  Since there is money to be made by using government power in public enterprises, however, sovereigns can find ways to cash in on that value and avoid the accountability that comes with having to seek new taxes to pay for their programs.  In the great conflict between the Parliament and King Charles I, the King was long able to avoid resorting to Parliament and acceding to its demands for freedom by funding his operations through the sale of royal privileges to and by reaping revenues from the companies and other public-private partnerships.  He carried it too far and eventually lost his head, but the American Founders did not fail to learn the lesson.

Neither did our modern Presidents, many of whom have revealed a fondness for public-private partnerships as a means to extend government programs and influence, even to the exclusion of congressional and public oversight.  Franklin Roosevelt loved creating government-sponsored monopolies, even while giving many speeches against the evils of monopolies.  Today our economy is riddled with public-private partnerships, large and small, and they as always tend toward abuse. 

At the heart of the recent financial recession was the housing bubble supported by two of the greatest public-private partnerships in American history, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.  Created to promote government housing policy without using taxes or appropriations—and thereby escaping public accountability—their government privileges allowed them to borrow all the money they needed at prices little above government rates and use that advantage to drive competition out of the middle of the housing markets that they occupied.

When the housing bubble at last burst, the Treasury’s TARP used a public-private partnership with banks (most but not all of whom were unwilling partners) to push investors out of the banking markets and turn the financial crisis into a financial panic.  Once in office, the Obama Administration embraced TARP, to which they added a trillion dollar stimulus package that accelerated our budget deficit crisis.  The Obama stimulus package was lousy with public-private partnerships, a significant reason why it failed so miserably to stimulate our economy, destroying one or more jobs for each one that it promised to create through government favor.

The Faustian bargain at the core of the public-private partnerships corrupts all involved and touched by them:  the government that creates them, the partners who sell their souls for the advantages, and those disadvantaged by the whole unfairness.  Former Congressman Dick Armey—a foe of public-private partnerships—has often warned that when you partner with the devil, you are always the junior partner.

Of Civil Wars and Slavery

One hundred fifty years ago today Jefferson Davis was “elected” President of the so-called Confederate States of America.  For half a year up until then Davis had served as provisional president of the rebellion, not subjected to a formal election process.  With the election he had the trimmings of legality, enough to give him legitimacy in the eyes of most voters in the southern states.  Still, all that the phony election could do was make him the acknowledged leader of an unconstitutional rebellion against the best government then in existence on the earth.

There yet may be some shallow commentators who will claim that the rebellion was not about slavery.  You just need to ask them a couple of children’s questions—such as “Why”—to expose slavery as the fundamental reason for the break.  The attempt at secession from the Union, although threatened for years, did not take place until after the election of 1860 when Republican Abraham Lincoln defeated two different Democrat candidates and one independent.  In accordance with the procedures of the Constitution, Lincoln obtained a clear (and decisive) majority of votes in the Electoral College.  Then southern politicians in southern states started trying to peel away.

Why?, the six-year old asks.

Well, because they did not want to live under Lincoln as President, would be the modern firebrand’s reply.

Why?

Because he was in favor of the abolition of slavery and would be unlikely to do what the Democrat presidents had done before him to keep Congress from passing laws that would destroy slavery.

So the war was about slavery, then?, you might be forgiven for asking.

No, would be the reply.  It was all about states' rights.

Which states' rights?, you could ask without being rude.

Like the right to determine their own future, their own culture, their own institutions.

Which institutions in particular?, you should be expected to inquire.

Well, the institution of slavery in particular, the southern apologist would rejoin.

Are there any other southern institutions that Mr. Lincoln or the Congress were threatening? 

No, not really, responds your interlocutor, except maybe free trade.  Congress several times before imposed protective tariffs and restrictions on trade, and one time the southerners did rebel.  At least South Carolina did.

Did South Carolina really rebel and leave the Union over trade protection?

A truthful response might go like this:  Well, no, not really. No other states were much interested, and President Andrew Jackson, a southerner, by the way, threatened to send in the army.  The action became just talk and eventually died down.

So the only institution southern politicians feared for in 1860 was slavery?  So the rebellion is about slavery after all.

Here the defender of the indefensible would be left with nothing but denials and circular talk, leaving slavery as the only justification standing.

It is hard today to imagine Americans at war with each other, slaughtering each other for the better part of four years and over half a million people.  It took a mighty polarizing canker at the heart of the nation to allow it.

It may be easier to imagine American politics getting all pushed into an impossible situation by failure to come to grips with a monumental problem that only grew worse.  It was clear in the mid-1800s that slavery was unsustainable socially, politically, and even economically.  It was poisoning American government and society and polarizing the nation, but neither Congress nor President was willing to take it on directly.  Sure, there were several grand compromises, the heart of which was to avoid the problem rather than solve it.  The problem was pushed off to another day for someone else to solve.

Keeping millions of people in servitude was increasingly untenable and at odds with the governing morality of the nation, the morality that comprised the central spirit of both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.  Neither of those documents ended slavery, but both set in place governing principles intolerable with slavery and that progressively undermined it.  That is why it took one last grand breaking of the Constitution—the southern rebellion—to try to preserve slavery.  Fortunately it was met by an even greater struggle to enforce the Constitution and as a result bring an end to the South’s “peculiar institution.”

We should be able to imagine that kind of an exercise in political catastrophe, because we have a no less intolerable situation threatening our nation today, a situation that only grows worse by the month as too many leading politicians fail to address it.  Those who try are lambasted by a media sympathetic to the whole evil business.  We have our grand compromises that in fact do very little other than put off dealing with the real problem.  The social welfare society of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his political heirs down to President Obama cannot be afforded by any nation, not even the United States, the wealthiest and most prosperous of them all.  A much less prosperous Europe is coming unglued over their social welfare system.  The process of buying votes with government programs and benefits paid for by future generations may make for temporarily clever politics, but it is fundamentally immoral, destructive of society and individual character, and economically unsound and unsustainable. 

President Obama hopes to buy a few more years before the day of reckoning (enough to get him past 2012 elections) by talking of taxing the rich.  Unless he is stupid, he knows that higher taxes—whether on the rich or anyone else—cannot solve the problem.  Today 48% of the population pays little or no net Federal taxes.  What happens to our republic when the line crosses 50% and the majority come to believe that they can live by taxing the rest of the population?  How long will the working minority put up with that modern slavery?

But here is another slavery that the government welfare society is creating.  Even if we stop the whole process now, ending all government deficits where they are—no new debt—my children and grandchildren will still have to be twice as productive as we are today just to maintain current standards of living.  Today there are 4 workers for every retired person in America.  Current projections show that during my time in retirement (should I ever reach it) there will come the day when there are only 2 workers for every retired person.  At that time, more than half the production of my grandchildren will go to support other people and pay the debts piled up in many cases before the children of today and tomorrow were born.

Anyone care to predict how America’s social fabric will be held together then?

Of Good Times on Wall Street and Standing Out from the Crowd

The lot of people engaging in the “Occupy Wall Street” (OWS) party in New York City are a lot of things to a lot of people, particularly if you rely upon the glowing news reports about them.  Most Americans, let’s say 99% of them, have not been near any of the party goers, so we have had to rely upon the news media to tell us who and what they are.  A colleague of mine witnessed their march in Washington on a recent Saturday.  There were about 30 of them matched—or even overmatched—by the number of reporters accompanying the march, so in terms of numbers the parties seem to be well covered.

Still, for all that coverage I have to confess that I have not been able to get any specific or focused idea on who they are and what they want.  That is why I am indebted to Democrat pollster Douglas Schoen, who had the bright idea of sending his polling team to the party to ask the attendees themselves who they are, what they believe, and what they want.  As far as I know he was the first to come up with such an obvious idea and remains the only one to have tried it.  The occupiers were fortunately candid and forthcoming in the interviews.  I expect that they may be more on their guard in the future to repeat the party line, whatever that might be.

I understand that the OWS party goers represent 99% of the population (I am not sure if they mean 99% of America, or of the World, or of just New York City—the lack of Yankees baseball caps in the media photos casts doubt on this last possibility), 99% because they said so and the news coverage has repeated it, over and over again.  I suspect that puts me in the 1%, at least that is the percentage of fat in the milk I drink (I prefer whole milk, but my wife refuses to buy it).  In case you are wondering whether you are in the 99% that the OWS groupies represent, here is a list of characteristics of the New York City party goers, care of Douglas Schoen’s polling team, who interviewed 198 of them in their New York City party venue.  See whether you fit the list, keeping in mind that, in the words of O.J. Simpson’s attorney, if the glove does not fit you must acquit.

·         The majority are male.

·         More than half are 30 years old or older.

·        None of them are Republicans, although 14% are either anarchists, socialists, or belong to the “Working Families Party” (that sounds socialist to me, but maybe that just means that they are not Democrats).

·        Somewhat more than half of them, 56%, voted in the 2008 presidential election, and 74% of those for Barack Obama.

·       When asked what bugs them the most, 30% claimed the influence of corporate/moneyed/special interests; 5% claimed “everything” (sounds like the teenagers or maybe the college students); 3% identified America’s democratic/capitalist system; 2% each for bureaucracy, Bush tax cuts, military spending, the Federal Reserve, and Obama abandoning the left; that gets us up to 53% without moving on to the rest of the gripes that they offered.

·       When asked what this was all about, there was a similar variety of answers, with the lead going to the 44% who said mobilizing progressives or influencing the Democrats the way that the Tea Party has influenced Republicans (that may seem ambitious, but I suspect that it is as tough as pushing on an open door given the rest of the OWS demands); curiously, 5% favored a flat tax, a favorite of many conservatives; but 4% called for dissolution of representative democracy and capitalism, and another 4% were for a radical distribution of wealth, which amounts to the same thing; and that brings us to 57% without getting to the rest of the somewhat confused list.

·       When asked who is to blame, George Bush, Barack Obama, and Wall Street tied at 7% each (suggesting that 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue should be as much of a focus for them as Wall Street); while the Republican Party only just edged out “The American People”, 16% to 15%; 5% identified the “Citizens United Supreme Court ruling”; which again gets us to 57% without going any further down the rather long list.

·       The closest point to unanimity among the party goers was that 98% agreed that civil disobedience was a good idea to achieve their goals, and even 31% believed that violence would be O.K., too.

·       Surprising to me was that these anti-Wall Street protesters were almost exactly evenly divided over whether giving TARP money to banks was a good idea, 51% opposed but 49% in favor.

·       Last point here, though there were several other questions, 65% agreed that government had a moral responsibility to guarantee healthcare, college education, and a secure retirement for all, no matter what the cost.

You are excused if you have trouble finding a clear theme in all of this.  If your head is spinning to some degree, just watch some TV or pick up a newspaper and you will learn once again what this is really all about.  I doubt that the reporters or commentators will note that there is almost a universal attitude at the OWS party that someone else is to blame for all things blameworthy.  Nor are they likely to point out that the demands of the unwashed 99ers revolve around getting others to do something for them or give them something.

This latter point seems to me to be one of the more distinguishing points separating the OWS Gimmees from the TEA Party activists.  The hundreds in the OWS crowd predominantly want to have government dictating to people how to live—while they have their hands out or want to put their hands in your pocket (a common complaint among the campers is that their stuff is constantly getting stolen by other campers).  The tens of thousands of TEA Party activists want to be left alone, want to keep what they have earned, want government to step back from making rules to control their lives.

Maybe at this point you are feeling very special, which is not a bad achievement for any writer.  If you feel that you do not fit into the Gimmees 99%, congratulations on being one in a hundred.

Of the Divine Traits of Humans and the Fatherhood of God

The Iliad, the Odyssey, and the History of the Peloponnesian Wars are among the Greek classics that are part of the classics-based education that my son receives at his school, a school that embraces our rich western heritage.  You may suspect and correctly so that he does not attend a government school (though we still get to pay—in many ways—for the bad education that other children receive in the government schools).

It is worthy of note that a common theme in many ancient western texts as well as in most cultures around that world is the descent of some person or group of people directly from God.  Why is that theme found so commonly among the ancients all around the world, east, west, north, and south?  A reading of Homer, Thucydides, and many other writers of millennia ago does not permit the conclusion that the ancients were dumber or less enlightened than more modern writers who would scoff at the idea.  The ancients seemed to have had their share of the dull, the average, and the brilliant as can be found in all ages, ours too.

Could it be that there is something to it, that there is a relationship between God and man that is close enough to be properly called familial, even of Father to son and daughter?  Is this a theme of the ages that will not die because it is based on reality? 

As the Lord prepared Moses for his mission to redeem the House of Israel from bondage in Egypt and restore them to their land of promise, He gave to Moses a vision of His dealings with mankind from its earliest days.  In the vision Moses was shown a prophet named Enoch.  Enoch was also taught by the Lord by vision, a vision in which he saw the panorama of the world only as God Himself could reveal.  When the mighty God wept because of the evil so prevalent among so many, the prophet was astonished and asked how the God of creation could weep.  Part of the Lord’s answer to Enoch included these words:

And unto thy brethren have I said, and also given commandment, that they should love one another, and that they should choose me, their Father; but behold, they are without affection, and they hate their own blood. . .  (Moses 7:33)

Notice the relationship of Father to children, which also meant that in a real and not figurative way Enoch and all of the race of humans were “brethren”.  It was as a father in a very real sense that God wept for the misdeeds of His children and their cruelty toward their brethren, His sons and daughters.  This is a warm and authentic relationship with deity that men and women throughout the ages have craved and have instinctively felt.  

This is not to deny that there is a lot of mythology intertwined with the truth of man’s divine parentage.  There are powerful truths at the core of all enduring myths, the story in the myth often highlighting or demonstrating some fundamental verity.  While the scriptures can present truths in clarity and purity, even the myths of men preserve and transmit fundamental realities of existence.

Thus, throughout the ages and into modern days themes of divine attributes of humanity persist, that raise man above the rest of creation.  Men make and use tools, increasingly complex tools.  In a parody of the words of Walt Disney’s Mary Poppins, I often say to my children,

In every job that must be done there is a tool.
You find that tool, and, snap, your job’s a game.
Without that tool your job’s a hassle.

So men have found since creation, and so tools have enhanced men’s ability to be creators, a divine trait of the great Creator.

Recently I noticed what to you may be a commonplace.  As far as I can tell, only humans have pets.  Other animals may develop symbiotic relationships with other creatures, but only humans seem to develop those special relationships with other species, a relationship founded upon love and affection, of master to pet.  I perceive divinity in it.  If you have ever had a beloved pet, you may sense what I mean.

Perhaps the case of man’s divinity, his innate heritage from God, his Father, can be opened and closed by this one evidence:  man’s ability to make music.  Yes, yes, yes, birds whistle and wolves howl, and so forth.  But they have been singing the same songs since the beginning.  Man’s ability to create music is apparently infinite in extent and variety, because it comes from the Infinite.  It is divine in origin and the clearest example to which I can point of man’s direct familial relationship to God.

The facile retort to this is that men are so evil, how can they be related to the divine?  I respond much as Fyodor Dostoevsky did to this old and thin objection:  the existence of evil does not deny the influence of God, but rather the good that thrives in spite of the evil is proof positive of the presence and influence of God.

My final point would be that none of this is new.  It is the oldest truth of all, understood by the first man and woman.  Paul taught it 2,000 years ago to some of the most sophisticated people of his day, the saints in Rome:

The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God:  And if children, then heirs; heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ; if so be that we suffer with him, that we may be also glorified together.  For I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us.  (Romans 8:16-18)

Of the World Bank and Washington Parties

Last evening and this afternoon I was in Washington, D.C.  That would be an unremarkable statement, since I work in Washington.  But I am not often there in the evening and even less often on a Saturday afternoon.  I was in Washington at those unusual times because my son, I’ll call him Peter, was participating in a choral program at a church in the city.

I write this to explain why in the world I would be in Washington not only on a Friday night and a Saturday afternoon, but of all weekends, on the weekend when the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) are having their annual meetings.  Two out of every three years they hold their joint meetings in the capital of the Free World, the third year somewhere else.  They like holding their meetings in the capital of the Free World because they are very much interested in the capital of the Free World.

Finance ministers, government economic development experts, and related hangers on from all over the globe gather to talk about poverty and economic hardship in the poor countries and how the rich countries have an obligation to channel more money in the direction of the poor countries.  They have been doing this for something over 65 years.  And yet, with a few exceptions, the poor countries seem to remain poor, the most notable growth being in the number of poor countries.

Early in my career in Washington, back in the early 1980s, these meetings used to be a lot of fun.  The world’s largest commercial banks would hold lavish parties.  In those days the big banks, encouraged by the IMF, the World Bank, and their own governments, were big into lending money to the poor countries, billions and billions of dollars.  That money was supposed to fuel economic growth by funding big projects that politicians could take credit for and where they could have their pictures taken at elaborate ribbon cutting ceremonies.  The projects were started, some of them built, but very little economic development resulted.  The poor nations were not very good at paying back the loans.  In the mid-1980s it almost destroyed the banks.  Since then, they have gotten out of that business.  They stopped holding the parties, too.

Walking through Washington last night and this afternoon I could see nevertheless that lavish parties were still going on.  I am not sure who was hosting them.  I think that at least some were sponsored by non-profit groups.  But they were still lavish.  It was very difficult getting past the fanciest hotels and restaurants and some of the popular museums.  Stretch limos were packed in as the financial leaders of these poor countries were climbing out and milling around, dressed in tuxedos, evening dresses, and pricey jewelry, to hear speeches from well-paid development experts, delivering their latest reports on the tough financial times and their clever theories about the obligations of rich nations like the United States to send more money to the poor nations.

This afternoon we walked by Lafayette Square, within earshot of a group of protesters in front of the White House.  Somebody was bellowing through a bullhorn.  I could not quite make out what he was chanting.  I think it had something to do with the World Bank and IMF not giving poor nations enough money.  As I say, I could not quite make it out.  My son said it sounded all the world like,

No more pencils,
No more books,
No more teachers’
Dirty looks.

Of the Spirit of America and the Spirit of Tyranny

Last week I experienced two memorable events, each in its own way pointing to the spirit of America. One, appropriately enough, was called “The Spirit of America,” the annual presentation of the U.S. Army’s Old Guard, headquartered at Fort Myer, in Arlington, Virginia. The program chronicled the history of the Army from its first days in the War of Independence to the present.

There is no reliance upon hyperbole in saying that the U.S. Army has been one of the most effective instruments in the history of mankind for the promotion of freedom. Without the Army, independence would not have been achieved and very likely not even attempted (the Army came into being a full year before the Declaration of Independence).

The very existence of the United States has been a beacon and stimulus to people around the world to strive for and obtain freedom. Would the colonies of Latin America have sought liberty without the successful example of the United States? How significant was the example of America to the struggles of the peoples of Europe to cast off their monarchies? To what extent did Great Britain learn from its painful mistakes administered by the citizens and Army of the United States and provide for a gentler path to liberty for its many colonies around the globe? The Army has been a reliable and effective protector of that beacon of American freedom.

With direct action, the U.S. Army became the essential element that gave force to Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. Without the victories of the U.S. Army over the rebels who rose up against freedom and constitutional government Lincoln’s Proclamation would have been a scorned piece of paper that offered false hopes to millions laboring in slavery.

In the Twentieth Century the U.S. Army helped bring World War I to its end, the western republics triumphing over the central monarchies. It was the U.S. Army that not only played the central role in defeating the dictators of central Europe and Japan in World War II, but wherever it went the U.S. Army left free republics in its wake, including among the vanquished nations. Again in Korea, Viet Nam, Grenada, and Panama the U.S. Army fought for freedom and against tyranny. Throughout the Cold War the Army—together with the other important branches of the armed services, equally effective instruments of freedom—remained strong and active to protect the free world against totalitarian communism.

This idea did not originate with me. Our grandfathers knew these things. They were commonly understood until recent generations witnessed the armed services and even national defense itself become open questions with left-wing academics seeking to reintroduce into America, and dress in pseudo-intellectual clothes, the exploded Old World programs of tyranny and rule by elites. That the idea of the liberating role of the American military can seem fresh and insightful is a mark of how much the religions of tyranny have found a place in popular media and even in the education supplied in many government schools.

By contrast the spirit of America silhouetted the other event to which I referred. This was the speech of President Barack Obama before a joint session of Congress, outlining his latest plan to restore job creation that has been so effectively undermined by his economic policies. If you reach through the cloud of rhetoric, President Obama’s proposal does not rise above expanding the size of government and raising taxes on successful people and entrepreneurs. That is not the spirit of America.

That is the spirit of the old nations of Europe and Asia from which our forefathers fled to found something entirely different in the New World. That is the spirit where people get ahead by the favor of those in power, and the people in power take what does not belong to them to reward their supporters and hangers on. A leading news story of this week is the scandal of a bankrupt “green” factory that was awarded nearly half a billion dollars by the Obama Administration and used as a television backdrop to announce how government subsidies to “green” industry would pave the road to national prosperity. That idea is today just as bankrupt as the business. It seems that what made this business green was the color of the money that Washington elites poured into it from the U.S. Treasury.

Together the two events demonstrate what the spirit of America is and what it is not. The first is a legacy of personal sacrifice by free soldiers for the freedom of others. The second, the spirit of tyranny, would sacrifice other people for the expansion of government and the power of Washington elites.