Illinois public pensions

I’m happy to read the Tribune acknowledging the public pension problem in Illinois (Will a 6^th  year of population loss jolt voters to change?, Dec. 31), but I can’t believe what they said.

The Tribune is quite willing to keep the current pension system in place as long as we can change it for future retirees. 

The current pension system is already bankrupting the state.  If it stopped paying any future public employee retirees, the state will still fall deeper and deeper in debt. 

Why can’t the state admit that it made a mistake?  The current pension system is unsustainable. 

They won’t admit it, because they don’t have to.  Residents need to keep writing Springfield telling them to fix this.  And the Republican Party needs to step up and offer alternative candidates for those who won’t fix this.

atheism

The Sun-Times ran a major article on atheists (Why some people distrust atheists, December 27).  While the article was insightful, I think it missed a few significant details.

In the early years of our country, atheists were generally refused as witnesses in court cases.  It was felt that any person who did not believe in a God who held people accountable for their actions, even those done in secret, could not be trusted to always give reliable testimony. 

An atheist’s value system comes from within.  Oh, they may accept the value system of somebody else, but they decide ultimately if it becomes theirs.

A Christian believes that God created the world, or, you could say, invented the world.  He knows how it is supposed to run, how life is designed to function.  We admit God knows more than we do, so we trust His judgement over our own. 

So when God tells us to forgive and to love our enemies and pray for those who do us wrong, it’s not always easy.  But we try, because we believe that God wants us to. 

Love your neighbor as yourself.  Another thing we are taught to do.  It’s easier, because we see people as created in the image of God and so everyone has enormous inherent value.  I consider that a marked improvement over tolerate your neighbor, the best a secular value system can come up with.  If people are just accidents of nature, maybe they don’t deserve to be loved. 

In the 20^th century, we had our first glimpse of an atheistic nation.  Several actually.  And they all found it necessary to eliminate millions of their own people to make things better.

The greatest example of love was Christ sacrificing Himself for the sins of the world.  Christians have often sacrificed their lives for others, because they believe that death is not the end, and what happens after is related to what happened before.  I have an atheist friend.  I’ll have to ask him about this.

Christians and Trump

I am a Christian.  Christians are being criticized a lot lately for their support for the President.  When did supporting the President become such a controversial thing?

Remember, we only get two choices for President.  Our current system makes it almost impossible for a third-party candidate to win.

Democrats, in general, believe the Founders gave us a country that is highly flawed and in serious need of a major transformation.  They think they have the answers and can improve greatly on what we were given.

I submit that most people today don’t even know what we were given by the Founders.  We haven’t taught it in our schools for almost 50 years, and we certainly haven’t taught it to the millions of people who have moved here in that time either.

People keep saying that the separation of church and state means that the government must be neutral toward religion, so that public schools must not even talk about God lest it be seen as promoting religion.  Yet the founding principle of our country’s founding is that God gave unalienable rights to human beings.  A secular country cannot give you unalienable rights, because there is no Higher Power than the government. 

According to the Declaration of Independence, governments exist to secure these rights.  Because we no longer talk about unalienable rights, because that means talking about God, now rights are things that the government does for people, things that people have a right to.  And we have been discovering that there isn’t enough money to pay for all these things.  Governments all over the Western world are in debt, because they don’t have the money to pay for all the things they feel responsible for.

The Founders believed helping people was voluntary.  Love your neighbor as yourself.  Democrats believe that it is the role of government to do that, and they are forever in search of more money to pay for all of that.

I thought picking a President was an easy decision.

the electoral college

The Founders were astute students of history.  In the Federalist Papers, which were written to explain and make the case for our Constitution, they refer constantly to governments throughout history to show the shortcomings of each, and one that earned their particular disdain was a direct democracy.

This is the main reason we have a Senate.  With a direct democracy, we would only need a House of Representatives.  They saw the masses as too easily swayed and too easily shifting in their views.  That is why Representatives are elected every two years and Senators every six years.  The Representatives would be closer to the current mood of their constituents.  They could be changed as quickly as the mood changed.

Senators were originally chosen by the state legislators, not the people.  We are the UNITED STATES of America.  They saw the states as unique territories with their own governments which were closer to the people they represented rather than having a national government that made uniform laws for everyone. 

And the Presidents weren’t even directly elected by the people either.  That was the responsibility of the electors.  No, it wasn’t due to the slowness of communication of the day.  It was because of the gravity of the decision.  They would definitely not be in favor of daily polling and politicians making decisions based on them.

Under the electoral college, the states essentially elect the President.  People complain how so few votes in a ‘swing state’ adversely affect the results, but what about huge differences in our larger states?  The difference in the popular vote in California was more than 3 times the difference in the entire country. 

The problem today is not that the electoral college is out-dated or out-moded.  It’s that one political party sees that the popular vote is favorable to them at the present time and given the current immigration system for the foreseeable future as well.

Christmas

Christmas is a national holiday, unlike other December holidays which are either religious or ethnic.  And most people get a paid day off from work on Christmas.

So I say unabashedly, Merry Christmas to all!  Or, maybe you would prefer, Happy Christmas!

Maybe the United States isn’t for Everybody

Our national anthem calls our country “the land of the free and the home of the brave.”  Every country has brave people in it, but to say that this is the home of the brave is saying something different, something more.  It means that bravery is an essential part of what it means to be an American.  

And why would that be?

Because America fought its first war against its own government, and the Founders thought they might have to do it again.  Which is why we have the Second Amendment.

The Declaration of Independence says that God gave unalienable rights to human beings, and governments exist to secure those rights.  And when they don’t, the people have the right to change it or make a new one.  And that’s what the Founders did.

America is built on the idea of personal freedom.  The average person today probably couldn’t tell you what they meant by freedom, because we haven’t taught that in our public schools for decades, and we haven’t taught it to the millions of people who have moved here in that time either.

Why not?

Freedom has to do with people having unalienable rights.  Unalienable rights come from God.  A secular nation cannot give you unalienable rights.  They require a Higher Power.  In a secular nation, there is no higher power than the government. 

And not just any Higher Power.  Islam, for example, does not believe in unalienable rights.  Neither does Hinduism.

It was the Christian God who the Founders saw gave them unalienable rights, and it was the Bible and Christianity that informed them of that.

But all that talk about God was deemed to be religious, and religion was deemed to be something not fitting in public discussion let alone public schools. 

But since unalienable rights come from God, and God was banned from public life and schools, rights are no longer seen as unalienable but government-given, and the whole idea of rights has changed.

While unalienable rights are things you can do without the government’s permission, regulation, or intrusion, government-given rights are things the government is required to give you.  Why?  Because you have a right to them.  So essentially government-given rights require other people to do things for you and often at enormous expense.  Which is the exact opposite of freedom. 

Somebody argued recently online that abortion was a constitutional right.  I wrote back and said, Actually, no.  Constitutional rights are things you can do without government intrusion.  Abortion is something that requires somebody to do something for you.  If nobody is willing to give you an abortion, the government would then have to compel somebody to do it, which is the very definition of slavery.

This is the short answer why our government is now $23 trillion in debt.  With every election cycle, the list of new rights keeps growing.  The government cannot take in enough money to pay for all the things that it wants to give to people.

People don’t need to be brave anymore.  The government is there to protect you, even if people say unnice things about you.

The most common idea of America today is that America is a nation of immigrants, that the Founders wanted to create a nation that is defined by ideas and not culture, race, or ethnicity, that they wanted a nation where everyone can come here and create a rich potpourri of diverse cultures. 

Except that our Founders did not go to war with their own government over its immigration policies.  The fact that our country is a nation of immigrants is not because our Founders thought the diversity of the world would create the society they desired, but because the kind of nation they created was a kind of nation that many people wanted, and so they came.

Much is being made today of the inscription on the Statue of Liberty:

"Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

People yearning to breathe free were invited to come here, but it doesn’t say what will happen to them when they get here.  They weren’t invited here so we could take care of them.  They were invited here so they could make what they could out of their lives.

There was no SNAP, TANF, or CHIP.  What we had was the freedom to pursue your happiness with the minimum of government interference.  When people were in need, there were thousands of churches and charitable organizations, usually affiliated with churches, who were there to help.  It wasn’t done at public expense through taxpayer dollars.  It was volunteers who worked with money that was voluntarily contributed.  What we call welfare today used to be called charity. 

What’s the difference? 

Charity is voluntary.  When the government does it, it’s mandatory.  The government has no money but what it takes from the people.  When the government makes its people do things for other people, that’s the definition of slavery. 

When a government has an expansive system of financial assistance, you don’t need to be brave to come here. 

I have a 1949 textbook on our government.  There were 11 requirements for immigrants to be admitted to our country.  Now the only requirement is to show up.

Kamala Harris and what is wrong with our electoral process

As I write this, Kamala Harris became the latest Democratic hopeful to drop out of the race for the Democratic nomination for President.

She is I think the fourth candidate to do so, and this is before anybody had even voted in the primaries.

Does anybody see the problem here?

In all the polls, people are asked to pick one candidate.  When the Republicans had 17 candidates running for President in 2016, I could have supported about 8 of them. 

The polls are asking the wrong question.  It shouldn’t be the one person you want to be President, but which candidates can you support in the election?  I’m sure most Democrats would be happy with any number of candidates. 

This current system is too dependent on candidates having or raising money and doesn’t show a candidate’s true support.  This is just plain wrong.