Q: Do you consider yourself to be progressive, moderate, or conservative in your beliefs? 

A: I consider myself a conservative. I believe that a smaller government is a better government. Centralized government has a record throughout history of overstepping its bounds in times of crisis; ranging all the way from the excessive bureaucracy of Rome which the created Julius Caesar’s dictatorship to the New Deal brought to life by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. This pattern continues today with the COVID-19 rules and funding. It’s not the government’s role to support the public financially by taking money from their citizens and redistributing it to those they think need it more. The role of government is to help foster common resources that EVERYONE uses, and not a particular race, class, age, or gender because that would be discrimination. Yet, the government does that all of the time. Marx wrongly stated that society should redistribute from each according to his ability to each according to his need, which is the basis of socialism. But whoever gets to decide who needs what, and how much will always make the wrong decision. That power belongs to the individual along with the right to provide it for themselves. We know ourselves and our needs best.

Q: What is your position on Taxes?

A; Taxes are necessary evil required to fund things at the national, state, and local level which affect us all. This includes law enforcement, infrastructure, and other public services that have become part of everyday life. However, these public services continually grow out of proportion–it’s like a new one pops up every day as more and more Americans become more dependent on them. They think a public option makes what should be provided by the private sector less expensive because everyone has to buys in with their tax dollars, with no understanding of the impact on the quality of the service which generally goes down. This relates to my position on smaller government. As we continue to foster more government services, the larger and more expensive government and our tax burdens become. Eventually, the cost of government will price everyone out of their financial autonomy.

Q; What is your position on LGBT issues?

A: Live and let live… While these folks do not represent me, it is not my or anyone else’s right to infringe on their self-choices. America is the land of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It is their personal business, not ours nor our government’s. Procreation helps our society grow, which means there will always be a need for heterosexual relationships. But at the same time, we should not necessarily be promoting certain types of behavior ostensibly as representation. The government should also not regulate marriages and churches, which would eliminate the issues surrounding gay marriage entirely. It would be up to the churches to handle, not the politicians. Often marriages are documented for governmental purposes (benefits and taxes).

Q: What is your position on abortion?

A: A life is a life. From the moment of conception to the moment we take our last breath, we are alive and we are human. When an unborn human is killed by abortion, we should call out what it is, a murder. I would only condone an abortion in extreme and special cases, such as when the life of the mother is at risk when the baby would not be able to survive or would suffer, or if the mother was raped. Abortion should not be an escape from the inconvenience. When we make a decision we suffer the consequences. An unborn baby is defenseless and should have more rights, and the mother should take responsibility for her actions (rape being an exception). Ultimately the mother will have to live with the decision to terminate, but the government should not be fostering this process with taxpayer dollars.

Q: What is your position on freedom of speech and freedom of religion?

A: I support the constitution as it is written. Be it speech, religion, or bearing arms, our written rights should not be infringed upon in any way. We need to allow Christianity to thrive again in our country rather than be shunned as it is now. I also believe communism is the underlying evil corroding the soul of America and it should be weeded out and destroyed. Communism directly opposes constitutional freedoms and has led to the ruin of many nations throughout the world. We as Americans have faced much turmoil as Democrats and even some Republicans try to instill policy and logic in a society based on socialist ideas.

Q: What is your position on legalizing marijuana?

A: Mind-altering drugs are not productive in any society. While I do believe every person is responsible for themselves and can do whatever they want when they want, it should not affect anyone else in their endeavors. It’s all too common to see people get so intoxicated they do stupid things that have the potential to hurt and even kill someone else or even themselves. I have yet to see anyone that is intoxicated be very productive in our society. The question comes again comes into play: what is the government’s role? The government’s responsibility is to enforce the law, and many laws are instituted to protect us from the adverse behavior of others. But how do you pull that off without infringing upon their rights? I mean, look at alcohol, which has many of the same issues with impairment but is legal as long as you are not driving. We still see drunk people stab and shoot people in their stupor. Alcohol is legally a drug for many reasons; an alcoholic and a junkie are the same things. We must be more consistent with our laws. Either we must legalize all mind-altering drugs, or ban them all. I would lean more towards banning in order to create a more productive society. Imagine how much better people could provide their necessities without feeding habits that can cost thousands of dollars every year. In a socialist society like the one we’re inching toward, we’re literally picking up the tab by subsidizing someone who comes up short on feeding their kids but never does without a drink. I won’t lie, I do enjoy a drink once in a while, but I am always responsible and I would not miss it if outlawed. People like to say that prohibition failed, but during the years it was in effect, the numbers for alcohol-related crimes and incidents bottomed out, and skyrocketed when it was lifted. I struggle a lot with this particular question because not everyone is an irresponsible user. Overall, the bad outweighs the good.

The post Where do I stand on Hot Button topics? appeared first on Cecil County Conservative Republican.

It was Ronald Reagan who said that entrepreneurs and their small enterprises were responsible for nearly all economic growth in the United States. And he was right about this, because unlike their larger corporate counterparts, the small business by its very size has the most room plus incentive to grow and innovate.

America’s economy is based on commerce and has historically expanded on the creation of new goods and services for consumers. Those are more likely to be born from smaller enterprises and individual inventors than from a large company. When Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak built the Apple I and helped pioneer the digital age, they were working out of their garage, not from a corporate office.

The same argument can be made about the inventors of the telephone, the television, the light bulb, and the automobile. And as new industries explode and grow, there are new jobs created by necessity rather than convenience.

In order to facilitate this growth, capital is required to invest. Under administrations that cut marginal tax rates; such as the administrations of Calvin Coolidge, John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and now Donald Trump, being allowed to keep more money up front fast tracked economic growth and resulted in higher yields of revenue by the federal government due to more taxes being paid rather than higher taxes being paid.

This has been dubbed the Laffer Curve, due to the idea being brought to prominence by Arthur Laffer.

Often this is lambasted as “trickle-down economics” by critics, often Democrats who are either state-capitalists or syndicalists who want a more socialist system. They deride the philosophy insisting that the largest breaks are going to the wealthy, which is frankly not true at all.

Even under a flat tax code where everyone pays 10% of their earnings, the individual who makes one million dollars will pay $100,000.00 in taxes per capita. Meanwhile, the individual who makes one-hundred thousand will pay $10,000.00 per capita.

When you file your tax returns and have excess amounts paid in returned to you, the person who paid more per capita will receive more back per capita, based on the percentage that was paid in.

There rests the propaganda employed by the syndicalists who want to push America toward their Marxist fantasy. They use different terms with different meanings interchangeably to skew the narrative and make it sound like low tax codes hurt the little man.

They claim that the period of America’s greatest economic growth was when the top tax bracket was 90% without stating that tax deductions which had greater value than they had today gave taxpayers most of their money back. The standard deduction alone was equivalent in spending power to what $75,000 buys today. When they talk about what the minimum wage would be if it kept up with inflation, they are making the wrong point, and should be talking about what the deductions for everyone would be.

The likes of state-capitalism/cronyism and socialism draw closer logically to the narrative portrayal of trickle-down economics by the very nature of collecting high percentages of revenue and using it for subsidies and retirement funds.

What you pay into social security is definitely less than what you’ll be drawing back when you retire. If the dollar amount relieved from your paycheck was kept by you and placed in an interest-bearing savings account at your bank, you would not only keep the full amount, it would grow in value. And depending on your will, it will be passed to your children and grandchildren after you die.

The same logic applies to every government program. What you put in trickles back down on you while people who paid less or nothing get more than what was invested. It operates, as Marx put it, from each according to his ability to each according to his need.

But because the government views its own needs above all others, they always keep the largest share for themselves. It is an inherently corrupt fixture that serves the same role in a community that cancer serves in the human body.

State-Capitalists—the traditional standpoint of the Democratic Party and some who stand on the Republican side—is closely similar to Socialism as it pertains to taxation and the desire for a large centralized government to be in control of it all.

Technically, any measure of public influence on private citizens and their enterprises can be considered socialism, but in varying degrees. The truth of the term state-capitalism rests on the politician understanding that the business must flourish if he wants the government to get its cut.

That is why state-capitalists and socialists go hand-in-hand. Even Barack Obama who is often regarded as a Marxist and a Socialist by the left was nothing but a state-capitalist who used cronyism in his administration. His tax code allowed the largest corporations like Walmart and Amazon to thrive on tax dollars while paying as little in as humanly possible while their smaller counterparts and the individual American were crippled under the weight of it plus his regulations. It is why many manufacturing jobs were outsourced to Mexico and China.

If you’re wondering why Barack Obama’s GDP growth rarely passed 1%, there’s your answer.

Even the Affordable Care Act/Obamacare, POTUS 44’s legacy, was designed to give large health insurance companies guaranteed business without competition. If all had went according to plan, the entire market would have been consolidated under the largest companies like Aetna and Kaiser Permanente and nationalized by Hillary Clinton if she had become President.

The greatest economic growths happen when you empower the individual to innovate and become an entrepreneur. These are people are your friends and neighbors who are rooted in the community and have that interest in supporting it. The God-given inalienable rights of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness are the root of this.

While the larger company with a tax break might create a large amount of jobs in the short term, as soon as that incentive dries up and it becomes cheaper to do business elsewhere, they have nothing anchoring them down and laying everyone off when it’s convenient. But the government in this circumstance only cares that they can use these jobs as a handout and exploiting the tax code to stifle individual freedom.

Guest writer ~Ryan M. Farmer (Rising Sun)

The post The Toxic Relationship Between Big Government and Big Business appeared first on Cecil County Conservative Republican.