Two names loom large in this week’s news. Two names that ordinarily we wouldn’t think about together.

But, in the great struggle now unfolding before us for our nation’s future, it seems to me these two quintessential Americans are worth thinking about in light of each other.

One is Steve Jobs.

The other is Dr Martin Luther King, Jr.

Jobs, of course, is in the headlines because of his decision to step down and retire from Apple Computer, the company he co-founded, from which he later got fired, and to which he subsequently returned and resurrected.

Dr. King is in the news because of the opening of the King monument in Washington, D.C.

Other than being in the news at the same time, why might we think of these two very different Americans together?

I think they are icons of two essential but different and opposing aspects of American life. One is the individual and the other is our social reality.

It’s these two aspects of American life, the dignity and potential of individuals living free, and the social reality, the rules by which we all agree to live and to which we all submit, that has always caused tension in American life. And this tension is becoming particularly acute today.

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Recently, I got into a big fight with my cube-mate.  After attacking him for his listening to Bill Maher during the workday, he shot back and mocked my Glenn Beck listening.  As if there was some moral equivalence between the two.

“But Beck’s predictions have been right throughout the last two years.  Why would you not at least give him a listen?” I questioned.  My Georgetown-educated cube-mate shot back: “Because most of the people that listen to Glenn Beck are uneducated mid-westerners.”  Infuriated, I protested “Do you have any idea how arrogant and elitist you sound right now?”  Leave aside the irony that I was attacking his condescension while as a colleague of ours pointed out, showing beneath my loafers were our company holiday gift socks dotted with various currencies.

As my cube-mate went on to say, though he conceded that government should not be all-encompassing, “I want smart people to make decisions for people.”  In other words, us silly hicks are incapable of governing ourselves.  This is the fatal conceit of which F.A. Hayek wrote that reflects the attitude of the intellectual class today.  Why is it fatal?

First, the “highly educated intellectual” today routinely receives a subpar education.  Believe me, I went through it at Columbia, one of the few remaining schools with any semblance of a valuable curriculum.  A real education is about teaching the pupil to think critically.  Routinely, education today is more about spending time in science classes listening to professors talk about the merits of joining the Peace Corps (yes, this happened to me), iconoclastic gender, race and political studies courses and cultural Marxist programming of the heirs apparent of the political, economic and cultural hierarchy of the country.

Of those who graduate from these institutions and matriculate to the political realm, the progressive ethic pervades.  And what is this ethic?  The elite must decide for the sheep.

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Thomas Jefferson said, “When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.” The power of this statement is boundless, and its meaning is clear in its construction.  These eighteen common words are taken together in a unique organization to express an undeniable and unbreakable truth; that a people of liberty, united in the cause of liberty, become the strongest force for freedom in all of God’s creation.

With these words I began the fifth chapter of my recently released book, Liberty Rising, A Treatise on the Restoration of Our Constitutional Republic.  I repeat them to begin this article to remind all Americans that there has always been a third party among us, and that party is we the people.  The United States of America, more than ever before in our history since the founding, needs its people to rally in the defense of liberty, self-reliance, individualism and the real concept of American Exceptionalism.  Our great nation stands at a dangerous divide.  On one side stands the America that in 234 years has become the greatest nation in the history of man.  On the other side stands a downward spiral toward tyranny and a failed republic.

Since the Democrats took control of the Congress on January 1, 2007 and then with Barack Obama becoming President on January 20, 2009, single party rule in America became a self-appointed ruling class and began to dictate to the American people, against the will of the people.  I have no excuses for the establishment Republicans who, in the years immediately prior, lost their way and set the stage for the assumption of this elitist group of power-mad progressives who believe that their ends justify their means.  The stimulus legislation, the health care debate and resultant law, the House version of cap and trade legislation and countless un-elected special advisors and czars who were appointed to positions of power without even the consent of the Senate, are all examples of how in just 20 months the state has placed itself above the people in an arrogantly un-America fashion.

The response, however, has been typically American.

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Conservative author Dinesh D’Souza recently published an insightful, much-discussed article in Forbes, “How Obama Thinks.”

Drawing upon Obama’s writings and history, D’Souza concludes that his policy agenda—so at odds with traditional American values and principles—is rooted chiefly in the anti-colonialist intellectual influence of his Kenyan-born father:

What then is Obama’s dream? We don’t have to speculate because the President tells us himself in his autobiography, Dreams from My Father. According to Obama, his dream is his father’s dream. . . .

[T]o his son, the elder Obama represented a great and noble cause, the cause of anticolonialism. . . . Anticolonialism is the doctrine that rich countries of the West got rich by invading, occupying and looting poor countries of Asia, Africa and South America . . . .

Obama Sr. was an economist, and in 1965 he published an important article in the East Africa Journal called “Problems Facing Our Socialism.” Obama Sr. . . saw state appropriation of wealth as a necessary means to achieve the anticolonial objective of taking resources away from the foreign looters and restoring them to the people of Africa . . . . As he put it, “We need to eliminate power structures that have been built through excessive accumulation so that not only a few individuals shall control a vast magnitude of resources as is the case now.” The senior Obama proposed that the state confiscate private land and raise taxes with no upper limit. In fact, he insisted that “theoretically there is nothing that can stop the government from taxing 100% of income so long as the people get benefits from the government commensurate with their income which is taxed.”

Like father, like son, says D’Souza:

It may seem incredible to suggest that the anticolonial ideology of Barack Obama Sr. is espoused by his son, the President of the United States. That is what I am saying. From a very young age and through his formative years, Obama learned to see America as a force for global domination and destruction. He came to view America’s military as an instrument of neocolonial occupation. He adopted his father’s position that capitalism and free markets are code words for economic plunder. Obama grew to perceive the rich as an oppressive class, a kind of neocolonial power within America. In his worldview, profits are a measure of how effectively you have ripped off the rest of society, and America’s power in the world is a measure of how selfishly it consumes the globe’s resources and how ruthlessly it bullies and dominates the rest of the planet.

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Suddenly the American public is shocked.  Perhaps there is no economic recovery.  Perhaps the One really does favor Islam.

Democrats and Republicans shake their heads and wonder, how could our President pursue such divisive and unpopular policies?  What is the rationale for his decisions?  Is he incompetent?  Is he naive?

The answer is none of the above.

I have said before and I will say again, Barack Obama does not share the values of Americans.  His vision is completely anathema to an America based on individualism, private property rights and Judeo-Christian morality.

When one argues that Barack Obama is merely mistaken in his economic program, they completely discount the notion that he knows exactly what he is doing and that he has been 100% successful in achieving his policies and their intended ends, means and ends that any objective viewer would realize were insane.  After all, an economy is nothing more than the collection of mutually beneficial voluntary exchanges of labor and the fruits of labor.  Anything that impedes one’s labor, or the trading of its fruits is necessarily bad for the economy.  Hence, almost everything a government does to try to stimulate an economy, impeding the natural spontaneous harmony of such a system necessarily postpones any recovery.

We were in major trouble with unsustainable public and private debt prior to this President, coupled with a completely insolvent financial system, a destined to fail monetary system and numerous stagnant businesses sucking up economic resources.  A real financial restructuring would have taken significant time, and even the most “fiscally conservative” President and Congress would not have been able to move enough roadblocks out of the way to make this recovery painless or quick.  I question whether or not anything could change the direction of the economy in the long run, save for a collapse that would force us to let the free market work and liquidate the welfare state.  But this President ensures that there will not even be a chance for recovery for many many years, regardless of who the next President is.

And it is all by design.

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As many thrills as he sends up Chris Matthews’ leg and despite his ability to walk on water, Barack Obama like all legislators cannot create jobs.  All any politician can do is take resources from the private sector and allocate them according to his or her own fancy, often towards favored constituencies, at a prohibitive and wasteful cost.

Instead of letting individuals determine how best to allocate land, labor and capital based upon their own subjective values and aspirations, the government in its self-attributed divine wisdom believes it is morally right for it to squander other people’s money.  Apparently, we are not ourselves capable of deciding how to dispense with our property, and deal with the consequences of such actions good or bad.

Then again, in our “social”ist democracy we feel it proper that government take care of our health and our retirement under the auspice of the “public good.”  So what of a little more state paternalism?  To that I say, the so-called public good is a public bad because when the collective supplants the individual, society fails.  If people would rather have the government take care of such things then take care of them themselves, then the best we can hope for is that the government not monopolize such goods and services but allow for unobstructed private competition.

In any event, to ascribe the word “sector” to the limitless Unconstitutional and unnecessary public “businesses” is pure subterfuge.  The plunder sector is the only accurate title for what the government does outside its strict Constitutional scope.

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As readers are likely aware, the NBA’s Phoenix Suns wore ‘Los Suns’ jerseys for Game 2 of the Western Conference Semifinals.  First off, let me just say that if they were to be grammatically accurate, the jerseys should have read ‘Los Soles.’

More importantly, the premise that the the Arizona immigration law is unjust, and that thus the Suns should wear these jerseys to stand in solidarity with Hispanics against it is a flawed one.

As Byron York has been adeptly arguing in recent days, the Arizona law is a carefully crafted one.  According to Mr. York it is only

the criticism of the law that is over the top, not the law itself.

The law requires police to check with federal authorities on a person’s immigration status, if officers have stopped that person for some legitimate reason and come to suspect that he or she might be in the U.S. illegally. The heart of the law is this provision: “For any lawful  contact made by a law enforcement official or a law enforcement agency…where reasonable suspicion exists that the person is an alien who is unlawfully present in the United States, a reasonable attempt shall be made, when practicable, to determine the immigration status of the person…”

Critics have focused on the term “reasonable suspicion” to suggest that the law would give police the power to pick anyone out of a crowd for any reason and force them to prove they are in the U.S. legally. Some foresee mass civil rights violations targeting Hispanics.

What fewer people have noticed is the phrase “lawful contact,” which defines what must be going on before police even think about checking immigration status. “That means the officer is already engaged in some detention of an individual because he’s violated some other law,” says Kris Kobach, a University of Missouri Kansas City Law School professor who helped draft the measure. “The most likely context where this law would come into play is a traffic stop.”

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This book, by emerging author James Byrd, paints a telling portrait of the true agenda of the Green Movement. It successfully exposes the underlying agenda of collective power in the hands of the State; at the expense of the individual. Mr. Byrd creates a world of dynamic characters, their interrelations, and the societies in which they are cast. It is a powerful first book, by an author who has a firm grasp of the way in which an oppressive government uses propaganda and fear to control the general population. The Light of Day is the story of Jeff O’Hara and his struggle for personal freedom and the realization that the things most worth having sometimes require the greatest sacrifice.

From the first paragraph, the reader is thrust into the O’Hara family dynamic.

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