Laigle’s Forum

Laigle’s staff writer Anthony Horvath had an article published with Worldnetdaily.com answering in the affirmative.

Can it really be said, though, that all taxation represents a reduction in freedom? The answer to this must be yes, even if we recognize that the effect on freedom might be slight in some cases. To illustrate, imagine a small income tax of a dollar. It might be an easy matter to get by without that dollar, but it is still one more dollar that you cannot spend according to your own priorities. Consider what the impact is if instead the tax is 25 percent of your income!

We also have to ask about those who are doing the taxing. They obviously believe they have the right to take your resources from you. They must believe that they can obtain some good that you, and perhaps few others, would have subsidized if left to your own devices. They must believe that they know how much they can fairly extract from you. They must believe that they have the right, if you protest, to incarcerate you and take your possessions by force if need be. In sum, they are almost indistinguishable from tyrants.

Christians should not support tyrants or adopt their methods and so become tyrants ourselves. If there is a cause we wish to support, we ought to do so from our own resources out of the free expression of our own hearts (2 Corinthians 8).

Read the rest of the article.

Anthony Horvath is a staff writer for Laigle’s Forum, the Executive Director of Athanatos Christian Ministries, and the author of three books, two in the Birth Pangs series and a pro-life book called We Chose Life.

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The Cloward-Piven Strategy is a deliberate series of tactics designed to bring a system down in collapse so that a preferred system can be erected in its place.   Named after two Columbia University professors, it was actually employed in the early 1970s.  I want to repeat that:  it was actually employed.

This is not your ordinary conspiracy theory.  In this case, we know that the strategy was employed and had some effect.  Namely, by deliberately burdening New York city’s welfare system, they managed to bankrupt the city, which so declared in 1975.

Cloward and Piven, therefore, have made it impossible to take at face value measures which are put forward as being ‘for the poor,’ especially when those plans emerge from people associated with them or their organizations.

Cloward taught at Columbia University for almost five decades.  During his tenure, a certain Obama attended.  Did Obama and Cloward ever interact?  Did Obama ever take any of Cloward’s courses?  No one can prove he didn’t because Obama refuses to allow Columbia to release his transcripts.   In 1982, Piven returned to New York.  Did Obama interact with these two individuals? Read the rest of this entry »

Arizona hosts enormous illegal immigrant population

Today’s feature article by Dave Levine relates to Arizona’s imminent crash.

It is so sad to see state after state unable to pay its bills. And yet, as the article Dave links to points out, the people of Arizona voted for programs they can’t pay for, and these programs are entitlements which are not optional.

For those who don’t know why this is happening, you need to bring yourself up to speed on the radical Cloward-Priven strategy, which aims to force Marxist change by killing capitalism with crises, creating demands that can no longer be met, forcing societal collapse.

This has been the Democrats’ underlying strategy for years, but Obama has brought it on in spades, doubling the national debt in just a few months after his election, making us beholden to China, an enemy of our way of life.

This video is a reminder of how bad off individual states are. Note how the CNN reporters are too polite to mention the huge amounts going to illegal aliens and the fact that many of them are working without paying taxes. This kind of niceness is killing America, as shown by this study summarizing the costs of illegal immigration just for Maryland alone.

At some point we will either face up to the real harm done by our open-borders policy and knock off the PC dance around the issue or we will perish.

Oh, and let me remind you that the Democrats will be pushing a new amnesty bill very shortly. This is even more important than the health care reform bill. It absolutely must be stopped, and you can help stop it like you stopped the Bush amnesty.

Don Hank

 

Arizona could be just weeks away from going broke

By David Levine

http://www.kold.com/Global/story.asp?S=11757254  This is a whitewash! I don’t mean the title of the story or the fact that a bankrupt Arizona is imminent. I mean that the writer — who may very well be related to pro-illegal alien activist Congressman Raul Grijalva — doesn’t even mention the words “illegal aliens” when talking about Arizona’s impending bankruptcy. As many law and order conservatives know, only a portion of the 30 to 40 million illegal aliens in the U.S. pay state and Federal taxes. Why? Because many of them work under the table. Also, millions of illegal alien women don’t work and live off the state taxpayers. The Federal Govt doesn’t reimburse the states fully for people on welfare. That is why I have advocated a concerted effort to remove illegal alien WOMEN from the U.S. as so many are on welfare and are a huge drain on the economy — AND because they drop their anchor babies who upon birth go on welfare, too.

Read more

BBC survey shows world disenchanted with capitalism

By Don Hank

Soon after last year’s disastrous bank crash, liberals and RINOs were quick to infer, from evidence to which only they seemed to be privy, that the capitalist system was flawed and needed regulation. Even conservatives seemed confused. Oddly, no one could come up with a uniform regulation design that would fix things or prevent such a crash. Something didn’t seem right about their take on the causes.

Not long after that, conservative pundits made an amazing revelation: Starting in the Clinton administration, an old banking law, the Community Reinvestment Act, passed under Carter for the purpose of channeling mortgages to the poor, had been strengthened. As a result, banks had been strong-armed into issuing mortgages to “underserved groups” meaning Hispanics and African Americans. Those that refused were harassed by radical groups like ACORN and/or blacklisted and/or sued by the government. Those that complied were given the highest marks and put into enviable positions from which they could make more money. The shrewdest lenders realized that this was a government-supported racket with which they could enrich themselves at little risk, as long as Fanny and Freddy were willing to back up their seemingly foolhardy lending policies. So they continued the game, and even lenders not subject to the CRA were soon cashing in, realizing that the government actually wanted them to play Russian roulette with public funds. Even when the inevitable crash came, they thought they were protected. Indeed many did get bailouts, but because of the innovative banking practice of bundling, or derivatizing, these mortgages, and then securitizing them – selling them as “securities” like stocks, bonds and mutual funds, the risk was actually multiplied to the point that even the bailouts were no longer a safeguard, because, surprise, even the US government isn’t too big to fail. The banking world on both sides of the pond, moving in lockstep like lemmings, sold and bought such “securities,” many made in the USA but also many homegrown ones, and a global disaster ensued that you are now witnessing, perhaps in person.

I know that many of you are aware of this background of the crash, but there is a whole industry devoted to telling you that this historical fact, authenticated by responsible, sober economists like Thomas Sowell, never happened. This disinformation campaign, supported by the mainstream media and universities, is overwhelming in both its magnitude and its absurdity.

I discovered this firewall of lies and distortions serendipitously while looking for articles on the issue. I had not read or heard anything lately on the causes and had also heard a Keynesian investment advisor on the radio boldly proclaiming that the capitalist system needs regulation to prevent such a crisis from recurring. Over a year ago, Sean Hannity had tried to tackle this issue, but I noticed that his grasp of the facts was a bit slippery. Later, the rest of the pundits also just dropped the ball. In retrospect, it is easy to see why. People are lazy by nature. There are a lot of esoteric concepts and language in this issue and it takes a bit of study. And after all, what’s it matter? We are only talking about your survival (please excuse the sarcasm).

To get to the bottom of this, I typed “cra causes bank crisis” in my search engine and found, compared to the legitimate articles plausibly describing the role of the CRA and government meddling in mortgages, about 20 times more articles either downplaying the role of the CRA and Fanny-Freddy and the strong-arming of banks or actually bold-facedly declaring that the CRA had absolutely nothing to do with the crisis. The gist of each one: capitalism can’t sustain itself without government regulation. We desperately need socialism under a scheme of global governance. Quick, give up your sovereignty and pledge allegiance to the UN before we all die. The truth is that government over-regulation of a toxic kind had threatened the world’s economy and those who were responsible for this outrage were self-righteously preaching to the rest of us that we were somehow the culprits and would now have to submit to their tyranny.

This is the time for conservative pundits to fly into action and defeat this insidious disinformation campaign. It is not new information that is needed, but someone must look at all the rubbish that is being written and start debunking it, because these government induced toxic loans are still ongoing. Right now the FHA has taken over the role of Fanny-Freddy in backing them and is starting to suggest that they too need a bailout. Nothing has changed. The actors are just shifting roles. We are not supposed to pull out of the crisis. It is just going to get worse — with “stimulus” money.

And that will be more evidence that the free market system “needs government control,” quick, before anyone has time to study the issues and recognize what actually hit them.

With the mainstream media and America’s – and Europe’s – professional pseudo-intelligentsia working overtime to show that global capitalism has self-destructed and that the story of the big-bad CRA and of Fanny-Freddy being the fox in the hen house are all part of a vast right-wing conspiracy, it is no wonder that the entire world is tilting to the Left in its thinking on so-called capitalism. As BBC reports (not without a certain unmistakable Schadenfreude), almost a quarter of people surveyed throughout the entire world are now saying that capitalism is fatally flawed.

Yet when you look at these statistics, you see that Americans are among the least deceived. BBC states: “In only two countries, the US and Pakistan, did more than one in five people feel that capitalism works well as it stands.”

I believe this is due to at least 3 phenomena:

1—Americans are smarter than the rest, including the BBC, because they have the commons sense to support the free market,

2–We have pundits like Rush, Savage, Farah, Beck and a whole slew of small but mighty web sites out there, like Laigle’s Forum, unspinning the spin and setting people straight.

But there’s also this I’m afraid:

2—Many Americans haven’t figured out that capitalism is no longer in place here. Many years ago they watched sanguinely as their government propped up a failing Chrysler, naively believing that the government was actually “saving” capitalism and the free market.

What was actually happening was that the stage was being set (BY BOTH PARTIES!) for Obama to come along decades later and deal the free market what was calculated to be its death blow.

There were other steps along the way to what is now being called alternately fascism, corporatism and even communism. Pick your –ism, but don’t call it capitalism, because Adam Smith would not see his ideal embodied in what we call big business in the West today.

Afterword: A reader emailed me that it was good news that 3/4 of the world still believe in capitalism. But if you go to the BBC article linked above, you see that of the 3/4 who still have not given up on capitalism, the majority by far believe the propaganda. They choose the option that capitalism “Has problems that can be addressed through regulation and reform.” A European Christian friend writes that neither capitalism nor communism are good — a conclusion that leaves socialism as the default system. If we lose this one, there will be no powerful conservative in the USA to say “tear down that wall.”

For Christians who think socialism is part of Jesus’ plan, please read the following article:

http://laiglesforum.com/2006/12/11/the-religious-left-in-bible-times-part-1/

Modern Westerners have been brain-washed into tolerating communism — something most Russians, Poles or Czechs, for example, would never do. Many of the older ones have lived through the murders of up to 20 million. They know what this barbaric system is and freely condemn it.

Thus only ignorance makes us tolerant of communism, which killed over 100 million people (not to mention the unborn) to Hitler’s 6 million.

Yet, despite the heavy loss of life and freedom, a history lesson etched in the hearts of all who witnessed it first hand, in the US today, anyone identified as anti-communist risks being labeled a McCarthyite nut. We’re clearly supposed to trivialize communism to get along. In Germany, you can even go to jail and face a heavy fine for saying in public that the communists killed more people than Hitler, because that is considered by some judges to be “trivializing the holocaust.” Obviously, the German government got it backwards. It is no exaggeration to say that the worst holocaust of the 20th century by far happened in Stalin’s Russia, Mao’s China (up to 70 million dead), Pol Pot’s Cambodia (about one-third of the population killed) and other communist countries, and is still happening in Kim Jong Il’s North Korea.

Despite the facts of history, it is a risky thing to stand up in the Western world and denounce communism because the Left has infiltrated our education system, entertainment world, media, universities and almost every facet of our lives. The fact is, by denouncing communism, we are practically denouncing most Western governments, which practice wealth distribution, and that makes the elite ruling class very nervous.

Yet if we don’t denounce communism for what it is, we will lose our freedoms, the way the Germans did.

So please sign this petition to defend what is left of freedom:

http://praguedeclaration.org/

And never be intimidated into being quiet.

Dare to say it now out loud: Communism is an evil system and I reject it.

And finally, remember that the initiators of the system called it by its near-synonym: socialism. Neither is a good system for a free people.