The Age of Invisible Virtue
by Ron Pisaturo

"Historians have always been fascinated by the falls of great civilizations such as ancient Greece and Rome. But no fall contains more important lessons for mankind than the fall of the United States of America, which ended the Age of Invisible Virtue and plunged the entire Earth into the Second Dark Ages."

"There were of course strong pro-reason forces in America. The Founding Fathers’ idea of individual rights, from the philosophy of John Locke, was based explicitly on the premise that individuals are capable of running their own lives by their own use of reason. 'Fix reason firmly in her seat,' writes Thomas Jefferson, 'and call on her tribunal for every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear.' "

"Thomas Jefferson, in America’s Declaration of Independence, writes of “certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. —That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men.” In other words, the kind of “security” of concern to America’s government at its founding was the security of rights, the security of political freedom. But by America’s end, the reasoning power of most Americans had so diminished that most held the ideas of “freedom” and “security” from the range-of-the-moment, non-conceptual perspective of juvenile delinquents."

"To the end, many Americans continued to proclaim freedom as the political ideal. But they did not really understand the nature of freedom. Freedom is a selfish idea. Freedom is a virtue because selfishness is a virtue. Freedom is the right of an individual to his own life, his own liberty, in the pursuit of his own happiness. And only by following his own, rational judgment can an individual achieve the happiness—happiness here on Earth, not in some “after-life”—that he pursues. But Kant and his followers had discredited not only rationality, but also the other underpinning of freedom: self-interest."

" 'Government can do certain things very well, but it cannot put hope in our hearts or a sense of purpose in our lives,' wrote George W. Bush the year before the September 11 attack. 'That requires churches and synagogues and mosques and charities.' America’s President could understand the purpose and hope of a submissive Iranian Muslim praying—'I do not pray for earthly things but for heavenly things'— in a mosque, but not the purpose and hope of a thinking American businessman working—for personal wealth and happiness—in a skyscraper."

"President George W. Bush sometimes spoke of waging war against some of America’s enemies, but his arguments were based on the ideas of Christian faith and sacrifice, and were therefore unconvincing; it is not convincing to condemn self-sacrificing, Muslim suicide bombers as evil while upholding Christian faith and sacrifice as good. Moreover, while Bush condemned some dictatorships, such as Iraq, he befriended and supported others, such as Saudi Arabia and Communist China. As every sunrise was a new and different case to Hume, so every dictatorship was a new and different case to Bush and his “advisors.” This unprincipled, range-of-the-moment “thinking” undercut the logical and moral credibility of America’s position. On a practical level, the policy of fighting one dictator by propping up others sowed the seeds of future crises in the very attempt to address the current one."

"Just as the skepticism of the Sophists and the mysticism and self-renunciation of Plato had caused the fall of ancient Greece, so the skepticism of Hume and the mysticism and duty-ethic of Kant caused the fall of America. And just as the pro-reason philosophy of Aristotle, whose rediscovery caused the First Renaissance, had arrived too near the end of ancient Greece to save that great culture, so the pro-reason, pro-self-interest philosophy of Ayn Rand, whose rediscovery caused the Second Renaissance two thousand years after the fall of America, had come too late to save America. But history did not have to have turned out that way. Americans could have chosen differently."

EXCELLENT
Thomas Sowell: "A cold shower"

"Sometimes a phrase betrays a whole mindset. Someone quoted in the New York Times recently referred to the Bush tax cut as one in which 'most of the benefits would be showered on the richest taxpayers.' Keeping money that you yourself earned is called having benefits 'showered' on you! By this reasoning, anyone who has the power to take something from you and doesn't take it all is "showering" benefits on you. Anyone who has a gun and doesn't use it to kill you is showering life itself on you.

"Big spenders and big taxers never want to face the fact that wealth is not created by government, but by the people that the government taxes.

"Most people who have money usually got it by providing other people with something they wanted badly enough to pay for it. This is never called "public service" by the politically correct. Selling people what they want, in order to get what you want, is called "greed."

"It's public service when you decide what other people "really" need and impose it at the taxpayers' expense. It's public service when you create hoops for other people to jump through -- rules to follow, forms to fill out, lives to be lived as you prescribe -- all for their own good.

"Anyone who has read "The Federalist Papers" -- or who has read between the lines in the Constitution -- knows that the people who founded this country had a great fear of government's power over individuals. They knew that there are always busybodies who cannot be happy unless they are telling other people what to do and forcing them to do it.

"Property rights were put into the Constitution to keep politicians on a short leash, instead of letting them roam at will over the land and treat the wealth created by others as something for them to dispense as largess and use to buy votes.

"If they think it is more important to look out for caribou than to look out for people, then you must be a slob if you think people are more important than caribou.

"Literally from the moment you wake up in the morning and take a shower (with a government-prescribed rate of water flow) to the time you flush the toilet (also with a government-prescribed water flow rate) for the last time before going to bed, your life has been laid out for you.

"Incidentally, the government also subsidizes water for farmers from federal irrigation projects, so that farms end up wasting far more water growing things like rice in the California desert, when the same rice can be grown in parts of the country where ample water is provided free of charge from the clouds."