Now that John Kerry has picked his running mate, John Edwards, he has begun to ramp up his presence in the media, trying to reach out to the voters who know (and like) him least. There is an ad that's currently running in my area showing Kerry talking to a group of mostly old men and housewives, advocating the notion that health care should be a right for all Americans because we're "the richest country in the world". They hang on every word, and nod in almost hypnotic agreement with him "Yes master, socialism is good".
I don't agree that health care is a right, nor do I feel that it's the responsibility of the government to legislate health care, and I really don't feel that it is my responsibility to pay for other people's medical services. I have enough issues in my own family to deal with, I shouldn't have to pay for someone elses.
This stand on health care is similar to many of the other issues that Kerry believes in: more government, higher taxes, less civil liberties for you and me.
But as I've dug a little deeper, and people have talked to me, I find something even more disturbing: the radical activism practiced by Theresa Heinz, John Kerry's wife. Her flip-flop from the wife of Republican H. John Heinz III, to full-blooded socialist is startling.
Some estimates say that she's donated $4 million to the Tides Foundation, an organization that promotes "positive social change". If you dig deeper on their site you find out that that means limiting, or completely banning handguns, increasing the minimum wage to a so-called "living wage" (who pays for that?), "combatting gentrification" (which is a fancy way of saying, stopping development and renewal in the inner city), "promoting environmental justice" (which they say they do by exposing the abuses wrought by industry, but it never mentions whether they discuss the positive benefits brought into towns by these companies), etc.
The Tides Foundation platform is, in its entirety, take from the middle-class and the rich, and give it all to the "politically correct" "protected classes", and radical programs that you can find.
If you're a lesbian transgender pregnant low-income latina from the inner-city involved in an indigenous drum and music arts project to protest the creation of good jobs by big industry, then the Tides Foundation would like to help you.
If you're just plain vanilla white folk, living in a shotgun shack on the side of a hill in the Appalachians, preserving early American culture, music, and religion, they don't give a shit about you. You're not the culture they wish to preserve.
To think that we might have a first lady who's politics make Hillary Clinton's look conservative scares the hell out of me. It should scare you too. Big government doesn't just appear out of nowhere and operate without affecting the world around it. The larger government gets, and the more it attempts to regulate, the less freedoms you have, the more it costs you in the end.
Most often, the liberties that are taken away from us when a "progressive" (didn't Eugene Debbs and the other Socialists call themselves progressives?) takes control is economic freedoms. More taxes, a mandatory higher minimum wage to something called a "living wage", tight controls on businesses (for example, in France, it's illegal for a store owner to have a sale, without first consulting with the government, and then, all of your competitors in that are are required to have a sale as well, so as to not unjustly harm their economic well-being. Your prices must be in lock-step with all of your competitors), and government run heavy industry. All of these actions make prices go up, and that cost has to go somewhere. You either pay for it upfront, at the store, or on the tail end, in taxes.
Do you really want to support a government that's going to take most of your money on the assertion that they know better how to manage it for you?
Jesus, this year feels like I've I'm standing between a steamroller and bulldozer, and one of them's going to crush me, we just don't know which one yet. Thank God there's a better choice.
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