We built the global economy — by gutting our own.

Not long ago, the shirts, skirts, suits and dresses Americans wore were “Made in the USA” — in plants in the Carolinas, Georgia and Louisiana, where the lower wages, lighter regulations and air conditioning that came after World War II had attracted the factories from New England.

The American idea was that the 50 states and their citizens should compete with one another fairly. The feds set the health and safety standards that all factories had to meet, and imposed wage and hour laws. Some states offered lower wages, but there was a federal minimum wage.

How did we prevent companies from shutting down here and going to places like today’s Bangladesh to produce as cheaply as they could — without regard for the health and safety of their workers — and to send their products back here and kill the American factories?

From James Madison to the mid-20th century, we had a tariff.

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“The federation of godless error.”

“The federation of godless error” is a phrase as appropriate for the twenty-first century as for the first. If it has a modern ring to it, it’s because error, the most boring of all things, hasn’t changed in twenty centuries. For any doctrinal errors you find today, you’ll find analogues or even exact matches during the years following the death of John the Evangelist, the last survivor of the apostles (and the only one who died of old age rather than of martyrdom).

One difference between now and then is that many enemies of today’s Church don’t choose to lurk in obscure darkness. They prefer to bathe in the lights of the cameras. They aren’t so much interested in countering the teachings of the Church, which they dismiss as passé, as in promoting their own pet theories. In ancient times they would have been lumped among the Gnostics, those who claimed secret knowledge.

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The late Alexander Solzhenitsyn on the Culture of Death

In one sense, of course, the secular fundamentalist experiment which was the Soviet Union floundered and fell after almost a century of bloody excesses culminating ultimately in the killing of tens of millions of people. But it did flounder and fall in the late ’80s and early ’90s. But what we’re really talking about here is big government, and big government animated by a secular fundamentalist philosophy. In other words, ultimately, that enemy is still very much present and we are still in danger of lurching blindly in a belief that problems can be solved by big government and that problems that are caused by the lack of God can be solved by a godless response.

So in that sense the lessons haven’t been learned, and the lessons haven’t been learned in the West, absolutely, that we could be lurching toward a secular fundamentalist big government, regardless of whether or not it quotes Karl Marx, it’s basically of the same spirit. That’s exactly what Solzhenitsyn was getting at in his Harvard address — that the spirit that unites communism and decadent materialism in the West is this secular fundamentalist materialism, this atheism at the root of politics and the root of society and how that leads ultimately to a culture of death.

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The liberal’s godless (utopian) society: Frighteningly close to hell on earth.

There are places where real need is desperate, particularly in Africa, but the cause of hardship is not economic.  Rather, it is political.  Leaders cannot have their subjects affluent.  These wretches must, instead, be forced into corrals of poverty.  All the trillions of dollars of aid which America and Europe have given to these nations have not helped the poor.

Why would anyone want his own people poor?  Why do leftists here create phantasms like global warming and demand holy altars to worship dirt?  Why do they ignore the ghastly deconstruction of wholesome youth, which is the sole aim of state-controlled education and culture?  It has nothing to do with money or with markets or with any other aspect of conventional economics.

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God touches us through children … and the godless pro-aborts instinctively know this.

“My daughter was in her high chair. I was watching her eat. She was the most miraculous thing that had ever happened in my life. I liked to watch her even when she smeared porridge on her face or dropped it meditatively on the floor. My eye came to rest on the delicate convolutions of her ear–those intricate, perfect ears. The thought passed through my mind: ‘No, those ears were not created by any chance coming together of atoms in nature (the Communist view). They could have been created only by immense design.’ The thought was involuntary and unwanted.

I crowded it out of my mind. But I never wholly forgot it or the occasion. I had to crowd it out of my mind. If I had completed it, I should have had to say: Design presupposes God. I did not then know that, at that moment, the finger of God was first laid upon my forehead.” God touches us through children.

So it is today. The 50 million unborn babies murdered in this country since 1973, the additional millions killed by chemical birth control and intrauterine devices whisper to the hearts of those who killed them. They cry in the dreams of their parents. They call the sensitive of heart to witness on street corners and at pregnancy help centers.. Their broken bodies testify to the absolute evil of a godless hedonism that usurps God’s role as the author of life. They are the tiny apostles, catalysts of conversion. Look at the mothers of Silent No More sharing their regret for taking the lives of their little ones. They demonstrate graphically that the blood of martyrs is the seedbed of faith. And the tiny martyrs of the culture of death are reaping a harvest of life. Polls show that America is becoming more pro-life. Generations of survivors recognize that they are the fortunate ones who dodged the abortionist’s knife. More and more they stand up for life like Tim Tebow, quarterback for the Florida Gators who goes into games with Scripture passages on his face. The word apostle means witness. The Bible says, “A little child shall lead them.” Let us follow them with courage.

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What it’s like when life has no other meaning than Obama

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the factors in my life that lured me far Left for so long;  what captivated me and held me there even with mounting evidence that the ideology was bankrupt.  And why are millions still following the Pied Piper of Chicago, even though he’s looking increasingly more corrupt and vacuous?
             

And I’ve come to this: the Left is filled to the brim with people like me, who grew up in homes with God in permanent exile and various adults floating in and out in hot pursuit of self fulfillment. With no way to understand life, this realm starts looking like an unmanageable House of Horrors. The result: people turn to someone like Obama to engineer a whole new world.
        

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