Addenda: A short 11 minute piece from the John Batchelor Show in defense of capitalism against the wolves at the door.
Download an MP3 and share with people so they can understand the utter ignorance of those attacking Bain Capital.
No wonder the Republican Party is so fractured with factions. People have forgotten what conservatism really is or where it came from (some have been so clueless as to look in a dictionary instead to Burke or Kirk) and have no clue about what capitalism looks like. They think jobs are a sinecure & an employer should never reduce the number of employees or change the way they do things in order to become more efficient and that buying out the competition is sacrilegious. They fail to see [Facebook Link] that capitalism is basically survival of the fittest and that government intervention in the market (and Wall Street) has distorted market forces and businesses have had to pay out bribes and to politicians and special interest groups...both on the Left and the Right...banks have been forced to give loans to people that should never have gotten loans to begin with and that led to a whole cascade of problems that we still have yet to recover from as illustrated in the video below:
We are in a race between education and catastrophe...
If you dare call yourself a conservative, then you should read "The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot" (Amazon Link) to more fully understand what conservatism is and what it means and how you should apply it in your life. You may decide after reading it that this is not what you are and you have been led astray by other people who were just using conservatism as a buzz word without really knowing what they were saying or allying themselves with.
This book is also chock full of references to conservative thinkers and books they have written. When you read it, keep a notepad handy to write down names, books and ideas. If you wish to preserve our traditions, to stand against the forces of chaos and old night...this book is the best place to get you started on that path.
"In essence, the conservative person is simply one who finds the permanent things more pleasing than Chaos and Old Night." ~Russell Kirk
And, if I may, I'd suggest that knowing where we came from is very important. David McCullough says it far better than I can, so I'll post a link to a talk he gave at Hillsdale College in February of 2005, an excerpt of that is below:
We are raising a generation of young Americans who are by-and-large historically illiterate. And it’s not their fault. There have been innumerable studies, and there’s no denying it. I’ve experienced it myself again and again. I had a young woman come up to me after a talk one morning at the University of Missouri to tell me that she was glad she came to hear me speak, and I said I was pleased she had shown up. She said, ”Yes, I’m very pleased, because until now I never understood that all of the 13 colonies —the original 13 colonies—were on the east coast.“ Now you hear that and you think: What in the world have we done? How could this young lady, this wonderful young American, become a student at a fine university and not know that? I taught a seminar at Dartmouth of seniors majoring in history, honor students, 25 of them. The first morning we sat down and I said, ”How many of you know who George Marshall was?“ Not one. There was a long silence and finally one young man asked, ”Did he have, maybe, something to do with the Marshall Plan?“ And I said yes, he certainly did, and that’s a good place to begin talking about George Marshall.
We have to do several things. First of all we have to get across the idea that we have to know who we were if we’re to know who we are and where we’re headed. This is essential. We have to value what our forebears—and not just in the 18th century, but our own parents and grandparents—did for us, or we’re not going to take it very seriously, and it can slip away. If you don’t care about it—if you’ve inherited some great work of art that is worth a fortune and you don’t know that it’s worth a fortune, you don’t even know that it’s a great work of art and you’re not interested in it—you’re going to lose it.
Source: Imprimus
Don't take my word for it. Investigate for yourself. Make up your own mind.
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