The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) is one of the World’s leading chronicles of international financial data and commentaries about many other topics. One of the WSJ’s contributing writers is William A. Galston, PhD, a liberal that has been employed in presidential election efforts by several Democratic presidential hopefuls.
In a recent issue he reports that ‘Freedom House’ has indicated that the United States has fallen in standing of freedom, blaming President Trump. The important characteristic mentioned by Galston is that Trump ‘rejects the premise of our founding document, that all men are created equal.’ What would cause this scholarly professor to conclude that Trump believes nature assigns different levels of opportunity for a girl born in Detroit and a boy born in Oklahoma City?
Galston is probably confusing the concept of equality at birth by nature and equality of opportunity, a human characteristic created by politics and culture. By doing so he has intensified the liberal concept of ‘resistance’ to perceiving our reduced standing of freedom to politicizing and blaming President Trump for these backward steps.
Freedom House and Professor Galston have overlooked Obama’s proliferation of regulations and executive orders that were contrary to existing law regarding immigration and enforcement. Galston and Freedom House are simply extending the concept of internationalizing all nations as Obama advocated the removal of national borders rendering sovereignty ineffective and mixing culture, languages and currencies into a conglomeration of confusion. Britain for example considered membership in the EU a mistake and withdrew (Brexit).
Immigration and climate change also elicit polarization, politicization and weaponization. The Trump administration is determined to phase out the DACA program that was not created by Congressional action and is thus considered an arbitrary program by former President Obama. Somewhere around 900,000 foreign youths came in under this program and are considered illegal aliens although those who brought them here use the softer term of ‘undocumented guest-workers.’ They are also called ‘Dreamers’ based on bills that were introduced but failed in Congress in both 2007 and 2011.
The hue and cry on the part of Democrats is the moral stance of keeping families together and utilization of skills that have been created by these DACA children many of whom are now young adults. Any discussion of morality in government should include some disturbing facts that get easily overlooked; families are torn apart by our divorce rate that is about 50%. According to government (National Center for Health Statistics of the CDC) statistics, childbirth to single mothers among Hispanics is 53%, among Blacks; it is 70.5% with the national average of all races at 40.3%. Our nation has been rife with sex and abuse scandals in 2017; our families are already in turmoil! Bringing DACA to an end including chain and lottery-style immigration only seems like another step in lawful swamp drainage.
Climate change is an accepted principle by most experts and world leaders. That’s an easy concept to grasp; what is difficult is the share of change that is induced by human activity. The ‘Climate Accords’ of December, 2015 in Paris set out conditions that were agreed upon by about 195 countries with 174 agreeing to pursue efforts to limit temperature increase to about 1.5? (C) in this century beginning in 2020. Be skeptical when all participating parties agree on something that is both scientific and subjective.
For example, while Angela Merkel is a world leader who signed the Paris accords, Germany is on the brink of missing their greenhouse gas emissions by 8% by 2020. Imagine the disbelief by German taxpayers when Merkel announced that the equivalent of $22.5 billion was also needed to cover the cost of training and education of about a million refugees.
Other EU nations are also not on schedule to meet the new greenhouse gas emission standards. Meanwhile, The Financial Times (UK) recently reported that international banks have channeled $630 billion over the past three years to fund construction of new coal generating plants.
All 327 million citizens of this great United States have endured eight years of government over-spending, over-staffing and over-regulation. We must all be participants in taking back our nation from corrupt government elites and placing it in the hands of our citizens.
Dick Baynton
