Railway Socialism explained!...Impuestos y Tiranía...The Pill IS KILLING WOMEN but no one cares!!!

Railway Socialism and Safety

• 

MAY 21, 2015Louis Rouanet

TAGS Taxes and SpendingMonopoly and Competition

The recent Amtrak accident in Philadelphia should lead us to ask two questions: (1) why isn’t there competition within the railway sector, and (2) what is the safety record of state-owned and run railway systems compared to private-run systems. It is often said that privatizing passenger trains would lead to more accidents because greedy capitalists would sacrifice safety requirements for profits. Yet, there is no evidence that supports this assertion. In fact, the two safest railway networks in Europe (i.e., the Swedish and British systems) are open to competition. Likewise, the development of railway socialism at the end of the nineteenth century lead not to fewer accidents, but more.

To be clear, liberalism — used here to denote the philosophy of laissez-faire — should not be considered as being the utopian opposite of socialism. It is not a magic recipe that guarantees perfect solutions at all times and for all things. Socialists like to imagine that liberals believe the market can cure every ill. In other words, they think liberalism is a mirror reflection of socialism. It is not. True liberalism does not promise perfection. There will always be problems. Our goal should be to find the best way to improve the situation, not to achieve an ideal world of fantasy.

Of course the private sector is quite capable of compromising the safety of its consumers in quest for profits. Theoretically, it should be up to legal institutions to provide restitution for persons who are in fact harmed by such negligence. Nevertheless, the recent Amtrak accident does not prove or disprove the fact that state-owned and operated railroads tend to be less safe.

There is, however, a bias in the media. On one hand, each time an accident occurs on a monopoly, state-run railway system, it is said that the lack of resources is responsible. On the other hand, when a private railroad company has an accident, the blame is put on the free market and capitalism. As Schumpeter said, “capitalism stands its trial before judges who have the sentence of death in their pockets. They are going to pass it whatever the defense they may hear.”

Jean François Revel, one of the greatest French liberals of the twentieth century, showed how absurd and irrational was the behavior of the anti-capitalist and the media. With his usual punchy style, he wrote:

Revealing likewise are some of the media’s knee-jerk responses to events. Thus on the morning of October 5, 1999, two trains collided in the London district of Paddington, killing twenty passengers and injuring several hundred. The instant reaction to this accident by the French media was predictable. From every side rose the unanimous buzz, the same commentary repeated all day long: since the privatization of Britain’s railways, the new companies, motivated only by their quest for profit, had slashed their spending on safety improvements, especially with regard to infrastructure and signaling technology. The conclusion was obvious: the killed and injured were victims of liberal excess.

Were that true, then the 122 victims of the 1952 railway accident in Harrow were slain by socialism, since British Rail was then nationalized. Likewise, in France on June 27, 1988, a collision between trains at the Gare de Lyon, which killed fifty-six people and injured thirty two, was imputable to France’s nationalization of her railways in 1937 and therefore to the Popular Front. And on June 16, 1972, the tunnel at Vierzy, in L’Aisne, collapsed on two trains, killing eight hundred passengers. Structural integrity was not exemplary here either, even though the company responsible for tunnel’s maintenance was state-run.

In fact, historically, the rise of train socialism coincided with a rise in the number of accidents. This was particularly apparent with the 1908 nationalization of the Compagnie de l’Ouest in France. Murray Rothbardremarked upon this particular nationalization:

The effects of the new regime of government ownership were rapid and far exceeded the warnings of the opposition. The entire railroad was in disorder. A series of major accidents occurred on the government line, although there were no such accidents on the private lines. An economist sardonically observed that the French government had added railway accidents to its growing list of monopolies. The nationalized train service deteriorated to such an extent that many people preferred to travel by wagon.

Indeed, the eminent French economist Yves Guyot noted that the major train accidents between 1907 and 1912 were monopolized by government owned railroads:

The six greatest railway accidents that France has suffered during five years have thus all occurred on the government system: three on the Western, and three on the old government system, which the state has operated during nearly 35 years, and which has only 2 292 kilometers (1,433 miles), making the line about a fifth in size of the important systems of France.

Furthermore, in his book, Where and Why Public Ownership Has Failed (1914), Yves Guyot, using both statistics and economic theory, shows systematically that private railways are safer, cost less, and more efficient. An unsafe private rail company is penalized by consumers whereas nationalized industries escape all material and moral penalty. Therefore, safety requirements are more likely to be respected in the private sector. Furthermore, bureaucratization in government owned industries tend to generate irresponsibility and therefore corrupt morality. People who do not feel responsible cannot act morally. If one does not feel responsible, why should he try to avoid a train accident? Thus, as Guyot showed, the total average number of passengers killed and injured from 1905 to 1909 in France was:

Despite the rise of railway socialism in France since 1878, the French railways system remained one of the most privatized system in Europe. Not very surprisingly, it was also one of the safest. Compared to the very public Belgian or German railway systems for example, the superiority of French private companies was incontestable. The statistics for the year 1909 are shown in the following:

Those enamored of “public services” think that labor for personal profit must be replaced by labor for the sake of quality. The paradox is that when you suppress the profit/loss system, people stop working for the sake of quality and endanger consumers. The advocates of railway socialism during the early twentieth century declared with admirable assurance that “wherever private initiative has proven inadequate the State must step in.” Today, experiments in the way of nationalization of railways have been sufficiently numerous to demonstrate the failure of public ownership. Should we not declare then: “Wherever public ownership has proven inadequate the State must step out?”

Note: The views expressed on Mises.org are not necessarily those of the Mises Institute.

Image source: iStockphoto

Impuestos y tiranía

• Roberto Cachanosky

  20 / 05 / 2015

  0 Comments

  La mayor carga tributaria más la “santificación” del voto son la combinación perfecta que han elegido los tiranos para apropiarse del poder.

  La forma de generar ingresos que tienen el sector privado y el sector público son totalmente diferentes. En el primer caso, el sector privado, si está bajo una economía de mercado en la cual tiene que competir, no puede obtener sus ingresos en forma compulsiva porque cometería un delito. En el caso del sector público la forma de obtener sus ingresos es en forma compulsiva. Utiliza el monopolio de la fuerza para extraer parte de los ingresos de la gente para financiar el gasto.

  El sector privado, cuando compite, solo puede obtener sus ingresos ganándose el favor del consumidor. Tiene que producir algo de utilidad para el consumidor, pero además, en la combinación de precio y calidad que éste demande. Por el contrario, el sector público puede obtener compulsivamente sus ingresos aún sin ofrecer nada a cambio al que paga los impuestos.

  Si el Estado, le cobra impuestos a un sector de la sociedad para transferírselo a otro, al que paga impuestos no le da nada a cambio como en el caso del mercado. Por el contrario, lo explota impositivamente para obtener su beneficio político.

  En general, los gobiernos populistas, buscan explotar impositivamente a algún sector de la sociedad que no tenga gran peso en el momento de las elecciones, para transferirle esos ingresos a amplios sectores de la sociedad de manera tal de beneficiarse con su voto.

  Ya lo había advertido Bastiat en La Ley. El Estado no puede hacer nada que si lo hiciese un particular constituiría un delito. Es decir, si voy con un grupo armado a quitarle parte de sus ingresos a determinado grupo de personas, eso es un robo y, en un Estado de Derecho, me meterían preso. Ahora, si yo logro convencer a los legisladores para que sancionen una ley por la cual el Estado puede utilizar el monopolio de la fuerza para quitarle parte de su ingreso a otro grupo de personas para que me lo den a mí, eso, para los progres, es un acto de solidaridad social, cuando en realidad es solo un robo legalizado. El Estado se convierte en delincuente.

  El problema es que, como decía Bastiat, del delincuente común puedo defenderme, pero del Estado delincuente ya es más complicado porque tiene todo el aparto de coerción y compulsión a su disposición, que debería ser utilizado para defender el derecho a la vida, la libertad y la propiedad de las personas pero se lo usa para violar los derechos que debería custodiar. Así, los gobernantes se transforman en simples delincuentes que saquean a la población en beneficio propio.

  No es casualidad que los gobiernos populistas que luego devienen en tiranías, argumenten siempre que sus actos están legitimados por el voto popular. Para el populista tener la mayoría de los votos significa que no hay orden jurídico al que deban someterse. Ellos solo se someten a la “soberanía” popular. Si el pueblo los votó, entonces nadie puede oponerse. Y si se opone es un golpista. Típica deformación del sentido de las palabras del populismo y del socialismo. Tal es el grado de deliberada distorsión del sentido de las palabras que, por ejemplo, cuando existía la cortina de hierro, la Alemania Oriental, dominada por la bota comunista, se llamaba República Democrática Alemana.

  En mi opinión, gente sinceramente democrática y republicana ha caído en el error de endiosar el voto. Si la gente vota a un tirano, está bien porque es la mayoría popular. Sin embargo, el voto es solo un mecanismo pacífico de elección de las personas que, transitoriamente, tendrán a su cargo la administración de la cosa pública. Pero el que es elegido para administrar, tiene que someterse al Estado de Derecho preestablecido.

  Es decir, tiene la mayoría de los votos pero no para hacer lo que quiere, sino para lo que puede y le manda el orden constitucional.

  La trampa del populismo que luego deviene en tiranía, es llegar al poder por el voto, saquear impositivamente a determinados sectores de la sociedad para repartir entre amplios sectores y de esta forma asegurarse el voto de la mayoría. Una vez que tienen una mayoría importante en la legislatura y retienen el monopolio de la fuerza, entonces comienzan a cambiar el orden institucional por el que fueron elegidos e intentan darle un aspecto de legalidad a la tiranía que pretenden instalar redactando nuevas normas jurídicas que les otorgue el poder absoluto. Es decir, cambian el orden institucional al cual deben someterse, por otro por el cual someten a la población a sus caprichos y se reservan para ellos todo el poder.

  Ese camino de una democracia republicana hacia la tiranía se consigue utilizando, entre otros mecanismos, el sistema impositivo. El Estado comienza cobrándole a unos pocos para repartir entre muchos. Como la economía se resiente, no solo por la carga impositiva sino también por las regulaciones que suelen imponer estos gobiernos populistas y por las violaciones a los derechos de propiedad que imponen, cada vez hay menos recursos genuinos para apropiarse y eso los obliga a ampliar la base de imposición a la cual expoliar.

  Es decir, los obliga a cobrarles impuestos a más sectores de la sociedad, lo cual exige más controles y represión.

  A medida que la economía se va achicando y cada vez hay menos recursos para confiscar con los impuestos, más sectores caen bajo el yugo estatal. Pero al mismo tiempo, mayor represión hay que aplicar para contener el descontento popular. Se hacen leyes más duras para sancionar a quienes se oponen y la represión contra el pueblo es cada vez más feroz. En ese punto la tiranía ya está instalada y normalmente es muy difícil quitársela de encima si no es con sangre derramada. Debe haber muy pocos casos en la historia del mundo en que un tirano no haya generado, primero una gran represión de los opositores y luego una amplia represión cuando la mayoría del pueblo muestra su descontento.

  Todo comienza, entonces, con el aumento de impuestos en nombre de la “solidaridad social” como si los políticos tuviesen el monopolio de la solidaridad y el común de la gente fuera cretina que no le importa el prójimo. La mayor carga tributaria más la “santificación” del voto que todo lo convalidad y justifica, son la combinación perfecta que han elegido los tiranos para apropiarse del poder. A esto hay que agregarle la estupidez de la mayoría de la población que también santifica el voto, cuando en realidad lo que hay que santificar son los derechos individuales y luego vemos cómo elegimos a quienes, transitoriamente, tendrán el monopolio de la fuerza para defender los derechos individuales.

  La picardía de los tiranos de “santificar” el voto y la estupidez de amplios sectores políticos y de la sociedad de hacer lo mismo, es lo que transforma la democracia republicana en gobiernos populistas que finalmente terminan en tiranías.

  
  

  The birth control pill is killing women, but no one’s warning them of the risk

 Birth Control Pill , Blood Clots

May 7, 2015 (STOPP.org) -- The young newlywed put herself at risk for collapse, stroke, heart attack, and death every day when she popped her birth control pill. Tragically, she had no idea there was any danger. Even medical personnel thought her symptoms were no big deal, and on more than one occasion chalked her symptoms up to dehydration. They never told her it could be that her contraception was causing blood clots.

Her name was Kate. She was a 28-year-old business woman whose story is told in “What Every Woman Needs to Know about Blood Clots” posted on the National Blood Clot Alliance “Stop the Clot” website. Kate’s symptoms started while she was in Hawaii on her honeymoon. She suffered pain in her calf that was so intense it woke her up at night. She went to an orthopedic surgeon, who ordered scans, found no problems, and dismissed her. She forgot about it. Seven months later she passed out in an airport following a flight. Medical personnel said she was dehydrated. 

Completely unknown to her, Kate had developed deep vein thrombosis in her calf. From there, blood clots began breaking off and going to her lungs. These blood clots in the lungs, called pulmonary emboli, “can be life-threatening and in 10-15 percent of cases, cause sudden death,” according to Dr. Jack Ansell. Dr. Ansell is a hematologist and member of the National Blood Clot Alliance’s Medical & Scientific Advisory Board. The Alliance website goes on to quote Dr. Ansell: “The first sign of a PE can be death.”

Thanks to Kate’s mother, a nurse, who suggested that she might have pulmonary emboli, Kate got help and did not die. She caught it before it killed her. Many other women are not so lucky. They don’t learn the truth until it is too late.

The truth is that the birth control pill increases a woman’s relative risk for developing blood clots 300- to 500-fold—blood clots that can cause stroke, heart attack, blindness, brain damage, and death. Still, women are not warned about the risk of blood clots with their daily steroidal hormone pill. This is serious and senseless deception and negligence.

According to a Canadian Broadcasting Company report in June 2013, birth control pill manufacturer Bayer paid out in excess of $1 billion to settle thousands of birth control pill lawsuits in the United States. Those settlements were all related to two low-dose contraception pills, Yaz and Yasmin. At the same time, an investigation by the CBC revealed that pharmacists suspected the deaths of 23 Canadian women were attributable to those two same pills. 

Miranda Scott, only 18, was working out at the University of British Columbia gym when she fell over backward and died. Her autopsy showed that she died of blood clots throughout her body. She was taking Yasmin at the time of her death. Her mother is now part of a Canadian class action lawsuit against the drug manufacturer, along with hundreds of family members and women who have been harmed or killed by the pill. 

Yet, even as Bayer pays out huge settlements, it says it “stands by” its birth control products. Even Elizabeth Kissling, writing for the radical feminist magazine Ms, is troubled by the cover-up and lack of education and testing women are given before being prescribed the pill. 

“Today . . . young women are again dying from something purported to help them, something that affects mostly women. Thousands more are experiencing life-threatening, health-destroying side-effects, such as blindness, depression, and pulmonary embolism,” Kissling said, citing accounts of young women who had suffered all these consequences. 

She referenced a first-person account posted on xojane.com, that highlighted this shocking quote by a young woman who almost died from pulmonary embolism caused by her birth control pill. “‘Isn’t this bizarre?’ [the young woman] asked doctors in the hospital. They shook their heads and informed me that they regularly encountered otherwise healthy young women with blood clots, almost all caused by birth control.”

The pill kills truth. It exists and is prescribed to women amid a swirl of chaos; amidst contradictions and lies; and amidst dead, blind, and profoundly injured women. Prescribing doctors tell women birth control is perfectly safe if they don’t smoke. Emergency room doctors tell women they “regularly encounter otherwise healthy young women with blood clots, almost all caused by birth control.” Billions of dollars are paid out by drug companies to settle lawsuits, while they say they still stand by their contraceptive pills.

Women need to know. Join American Life League and a host of sponsors around the nation on June 6 to expose the lies and shine the light on the truth about the pill. For more information, visit our website, thepillkills.org. To sign up to sponsor the National Day of Action and/or organize a local event, click here. 

Reprinted with permission from STOPP. 

Extorting the poor to help the "poor'!!!...Chile: Viraje nuevamente hacia la libertad económica?...A genderless, hopeless society!...The decline of America's foreign relations!

Extorting Low-Income Individuals to Help "the Poor"

• 

MAY 11, 2015Gary Galles

TAGS Big GovernmentTaxes and SpendingInterventionism

Many policies are supposedly justified because they would “take from the rich and give to the poor.” While that fits with the view that theft “for a good purpose” makes one a philanthropist, from the perspective of self-ownership, it is an assertion that the majority’s might makes their coercion right.

However, advocates of redistribution often ignore the fact that their policies redistribute wealth from many low-income individuals in the name of helping an abstract group known as “the poor.” At the same time, it is also assumed that many poverty relief efforts impose costs on wealthier groups, but in fact, much of the cost is borne by the low-income households themselves.

Even if low-income households did gain current income as a group when measured in statistical studies, onlyindividuals bear actual benefits or costs, and many of those individuals who bear the costs of such programs are low-income.

Wage Controls

Those who support minimum wages assume the poor will gain income as a group. However, as labor economist Mark Wilson put it, “evidence from a large number of academic studies suggests that minimum wage increases don’t reduce poverty levels.”

And how do low-income individuals fare under minimum wage laws? They are often harmed. Some lose jobs and others lose hours. For those who keep their jobs and hours, on-the-job training and fringe benefits will fall, or required effort will rise, to offset hiked wages. And higher current wages are often less valuable than what is given up, particularly on-the-job training, that enables people to learn, and therefore earn, their way out of poverty. That is why labor force participation rates fall and quit rates rise when the minimum wage rises. This is the opposite of what would happen if all workers who kept their jobs benefited.

In addition, higher minimum wages also force the least skilled to compete with more skilled labor at mandated higher wages. They will suffer from its undermining of their one big competitive advantage — a lower price. Those with the fewest skills, least education and job experience face the greatest employment losses. The effect is magnified by the fact that employers pay far more than the minimum wage to those workers, through added costs for the employer half of Social Security taxes, unemployment insurance taxes, worker’s compensation premiums, etc.

With the minimum wage, some of those low-income workers lucky enough to already have job experience and a work history will keep their jobs. Many others will simply find themselves to be unemployable.

Rent Control

Supporters of rent control often assume they are Robin Hood-like policies that transfer money from “wealthy” landlords to beleaguered renters. In fact, the poor are among the greatest losers from rent control.

Rent control takes a large portion of the value of residential rental properties from landlords to coercively transfer wealth to current tenants (which is why those who live in strict rent controlled units almost never leave).

But that does not mean most of the poor benefit. Since landlords are unable to capture the value of their buildings, existing housing deteriorates in quantity and quality, and new construction of affected rental units becomes paralyzed. The result is a progressive reduction in the supply of rental housing.

In the end, rent control does little for the poor beyond a few lucky individuals. Those who were “there first” capture virtually all the gains, and the rest are left with a smaller and more dilapidated housing supply.

What do poor people seeking rental housing find after strict rent control is imposed? Mainly, they find “no vacancy” signs. Lowered rents increase the amount of housing renters would like, but reduces the housing available. That reduction in housing availability directly harms the numerous low-income individuals, even if policy makers are able to produce reports showing that some low-income households have benefited — at the expense of other low-income households.

Meanwhile, those with higher incomes, better connections, etc., can better maneuver around the restrictions (e.g., through under the table payments, condo conversions, etc.). The consequence is that those of limited means may populate the rhetoric of rent control, but far less of the housing available under it. Rent controlled areas are instead often increasingly populated by higher income tenants with few children.

Good Intentions Are Not Enough

Labor and housing market interventions do not exhaust the range of counterproductive government “social welfare” policies for the poor. But they illustrate an important, undiscussed form of redistribution. Attention is focused on Robin-Hood redistribution, supported with Swiss-cheese arguments for why it is acceptable to impose the costs on particular individuals who in no way caused the problem at hand, so long as the poor gainin the aggregate. But those policies also greatly harm many members of the groups whose welfare is supposedly being advanced. And harming large numbers of individuals who are poor cannot be justified by simply claiming that the intent is to help the poor.

Note: The views expressed on Mises.org are not necessarily those of the Mises Institute.

Image source: iStockphoto

Chile: Cambio de gabinete, ¿cambio de ideas?

Mauricio Pérez Espinosa

12 / 05 / 2015

0 Comments

Chile vive nuevamente otra etapa en su historia política.  El anuncio de Michelle Bachelet la semana pasada de “haber pedido la renuncia a todos sus ministros y anunciar quiénes se quedarán en 72 horas”, en un programa de entrevistas dirigido por el mítico Don Francisco de Sábado Gigante, sorprendió a muchos al tiempo que confirmó sospechas y rumores de fracturas internas.

Es así como hemos presenciado más patentemente, el ocaso de un proyecto avasallador, destructivo y lleno de soberbia llamado “Nueva Mayoría“, una coalición de partidos de centro, centroizquierda e izquierda, liderada por un grupo de “estudiantes” egresados o congelados, con declarada ideología comunista y que hoy ocupan escaño en el parlamento. Anclados en caducas ideas estatistas, son ejemplos patentes de la “Fatal Arrogancia” que tantas veces describió Friedrich von Hayek. Esa actitud de pretender mantener un monopolio de la moral y creer saber lo que deben hacer las personas con su vidas.  La sustitución de la libertad por más intervencionismo, el establecimiento de una cultura de innumerables “derechos” sociales y la intervención constante en la economía son típicos del pensamiento único.

Atrás quedó la antigua Concertación, que buscaba acuerdos y respetaba la institucionalidad republicana, que gobernaba sin la necesidad de amenazar con “refundarlo todo”, aquélla que manteniendo sus diferencias con la oposición comprendía que el “Chile de todos” estaba compuesto por todas las diferencias, sin pretender pasar “retroexcavadoras” o imponer una mayoría parlamentaria circunstancial sin importar las voces disidentes ante la autoimpuesta tarea de refundarlo todo.

Bachelet, al parecer, finalmente ha comprendido que lo que debía reformar primero, antes que los tributos, antes que la educación, antes que la política laboral, era su propio gobierno que, a pesar de las apariencias, ya se encontraba dividido e inmerso en una dura pugna interna que buscaba imponer sí o sí la respectiva visión de “agenda del programa”.  Todo parece indicar que Michelle Bachelet asumió “el timón del buque”, aunque físicamente afectada, claramente ya no desprende alegría, confianza o la simpatía que a muchos les llamaba la atención y que instaba la adhesión de otros.

Los que quieren imponer el moribundo proyecto intervencionista no se rendirán fácilmente, pues, no es tan sólo la aspiración a mantenerse en la administración del poder, sino también, modificar el escenario para una nueva forma de país sin importar una crítica o análisis respecto a las consecuencias ni cómo afectará el consenso. Quedan en el tintero varias reformas anunciadas y ver de qué manera el anunciado “proceso constituyente” se desarrollará con los nuevos ministros y el nuevo escenario de los partidos de gobierno.

Es el momento de analizar bien el renovado gabinete. Obviando la frivolidad de cómo se hizo el anuncio, quizá Bachelet retome las ideas correctas, basadas en la libertad y el individuo. Para la oposición también es momento de olvidar la arrogancia y generar espacios para que todos los habitantes de Chile puedan crecer en progreso, libertad y paz.

Puede que Bachelet entendiera, bastante tarde, que las ideas basadas en discursos pretéritos y violentos poca cabida tienen en una sociedad en paz y libertad, que hace 40 años empezó su senda al desarrollo. ¿Dejará Bachelet de lado las ideas estatistas y abrazará la libertad económica que tan buen resultado nos ha dado? El futuro promisor de Chile depende de ello.

© Libertad.org

FAITH, GENDER, HOMOSEXUALITY, MARRIAGE Fri May 8, 2015 - 1:56 pm EST

A more genderless, hopeless, meaningless society

 Civil Rights , Homosexuality , March For Marriage , Rick Santorum , Same-Sex 'Marriage'

May 7, 2015 (TheRadianceFoundation.org) -- We’re peculiar creatures. We want meaning but leave meaning wanting. We exist by design but deny design exists. We demand love but demand that Love stay silent.

Contradiction courses through our veins. We bleed inconsistency, yet even with multiple wounds we simply slap on band-aids to cover our soul’s lacerations.

And we wonder why healing is elusive. So instead, from this condition of brokenness, we create more brokenness. Language becomes our victim. We change it to bandage our fractured state. Love becomes “tolerance.” Discernment becomes “judgment.” And conviction becomes “hate.”

Our culture is obsessed with a savior—self—that cannot save. As more and more bow at the altar of Narcissism, our meaning, our design, and our understanding of Love go up in flames.

Meaning is powerful. And where we derive that meaning is crucial. The recent Baltimore riots exemplify how finding meaning in pigmentation only divides us. Martin Luther King Jr. knew that the civil rights battle was first fought on our knees in relentless prayer. He understood that the Gospel gave our lives meaning and a righteous cause to fight for true equality and freedom.

It wasn’t mainstream media that led the charge for civil rights. That institution had to be led by those who understood the unwavering power of Faith, the transformational power of Hope, and the unstoppable ability of Love to break down any division. Just as during the abolition of slavery in this country, men and women of God refused to allow the dehumanization of God’s creation and the oppressive dictates and deception of the State to go unchallenged.

Our right to Life does not belong to Caesar. Love does not belong to Caesar. Marriage does not belong to Caesar. Our sexuality does not belong to Caesar. Our hope does not belong to Caesar.

Mainstream media, in its typical dereliction of journalistic duty, has been celebrating the “heroic transition” of Olympian Bruce Jenner from a man to a man deeply confused. Never mind the incredible irony of LGBTQ advocates rejecting the biological reality of binary gender yet affirming it when one wants to “transition” from a man to a woman or vice versa. Even conservative Rick Santorum has capitulated to the cult of transgenderism, saying of Jenner: “If he says he’s a woman, then he’s a woman.” I can say I’m Asian, and even believe it with all my heart; it doesn’t make me Asian.

Bruce Jenner will never biologically be a woman, yet too many are fine with treating our genitalia like accessories that need to be swapped out to match a different outfit. Santorum apparently doesn’t agree with the former chief psychiatrist-in-chief at Johns Hopkins Hospital, Dr. Paul R. McHugh, who says transgenderism is a “mental disorder” and that “sex-change” is biologically impossible. McHugh also indicates that the suicide rate of “transgendered” people, who’ve gone through the drastic “reassignment surgery” is 20 times higher than non-transgendered people. Where’s the compassion in any of this?

What exactly are we affirming Mr. Santorum, mainstream media, and churches across America? More importantly than ignoring McHugh’s documented medical evidence is ignoring the essence of salvation—becoming a new creation. When we discard the possibility of God transforming any life or any situation, we’ve given the Gospel reassignment surgery.

Last week, as The Radiance Foundation  joined Alliance Defending Freedom, Family Research Council, Heritage Foundation and others at the Supreme Court to rally defenders of natural marriage, there was one person among the crowd who stood out most powerfully to me. It was a young woman holding a bright yellow sign that read: “I was Queer. Then I found Jesus.” I thanked her for her vulnerability and the message that put the whole day into context: no amount of rallying can mask the brokenness many feel in the rejection of our design. People like her (and there are many) are immediately silenced by the monolithic LGBTQ activist movement who cry “hate” to silence debate.

Click "like" if you want to defend true marriage. 

As Christians, we are called to love God with all of our hearts, all of our souls, and all of our minds. When we do this, we dare to let our soul orientation overcome any other identity that denies who and what we were created to be—new creations that glorify God. When we follow this command of Christ’s, loving our neighbors as ourselves is the natural outflow.

Our culture is hurtling into a genderless, hopeless, and meaningless society, but we can stop this self-inflicted destruction. We could reclaim what it means to love and show how that love can restore brokenness. We live in a world in desperate need of redemption. The question is: When will the people of God feel the desperate need to reveal and reflect the Source of that redemption?

VOICE

The Amazing Decline of America’s Special Relationships

Why the new (old) governments in Israel and Britain bode ill for what once were Washington’s most important alliances.

• BY DAVID ROTHKOPF
• MAY 8, 2015
• 

Most Americans have never heard of Edward Miliband. And given this week’s result in the U.K. elections it is very likely they never will. After a crushing defeat he has already resigned as leader of the Labour Party and is poised to return to the Wallace & Gromit animated films from which he seems to have been discovered. His electoral failure and that of his party once again proves the old electoral adage that unappealing leaders and incompetent campaigns often produce bad results.

That’s not to take anything away from David Cameron, whose Conservative Party won a resounding victory that was so surprising that not only has it left Miliband out of a job, but in all likelihood he has taken scores of U.K. pollsters with him. Cameron stunned the pundits to a degree that echoes therecent electoral victory of Bibi Netanyahu in the elections in Israel, the country that along with the U.K. has historically had the greatest claim on having a special relationship with the United States.

Both elections however, suggest on several levels that those special relationships, neither of which has been what it used to be during the past several years, are in for a period of further decline.

In part, the decline in the relationships has been due to historical reasons that have made both countries less important to the United States. The United Kingdom is a shadow of its former self, the sun long ago having defied the old saying and actually having set on the former empire. British school children no longer study maps that show a quarter of the world in red or pink to depict the lands loyal to their monarch. Even Britain’s last great claim on global domination — in the area of TV car shows — suffered adevastating blow this year when “Top Gear,” broadcast in 214 countries with an audience of hundreds of millions, saw its blowhard, politically troglodyte host Jeremy Clarkson unceremoniously booted off the air for behaving like an ass, thus shutting down production.

Perhaps the fact that puts this decline in clearest focus is the steep decline in the size of the British Army. With cuts slated to take it from 102,000 to82,000 regulars and a recent report suggesting that further cuts could reduce it in size to 50,000 within a few years, we face the prospect that in the not too distant future the military that once conquered the world will be roughly the same size as the New York Police Department. (A promise of Cameron and the Tories was that they would stop such cuts from taking place, but whether Britain’s financial health — more on that later — will permit them to honor that pledge is another matter.)

Similarly, whereas a generation ago Israel was seen as central to U.S. Mideast policy, today, while it is still America’s most important and best-supported ally in the region, events have undercut its importance in practical terms. Once it was key to the U.S. Cold War strategy in the region, but the Cold War ended. Once the Middle East was more important to the United States as a source of energy, but that is clearly less true today than at any time since the Second World War. Once the Israel-Palestine conflict was seen as central to all the problems and geopolitical issues of the region; now that is far from being the case. Indeed, that issue, once number one among U.S. regional priorities, might have a hard time making the top ten today. (Coming in after: Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, containing Iran, the Iranian nuclear deal, the spread of extremism, the current crisis in Yemen, the looming crisis in Libya, Egyptian stability, maintaining eroding support among our traditional Arab allies, and a host of other such issues.)

Further, both special relationships are fading in the minds and hearts of Americans as a new generation starts assuming power, one that has few memories of the historical reasons for the founding of Israel or of Britain’s vital partnership with the United States in two world wars.

Part of the deterioration in these two relationships has to do with policy decisions made by the governments that have just won second terms in power.

Part of the deterioration in these two relationships has to do with policy decisions made by the governments that have just won second terms in power. The U.S.-Israel relationship sure doesn’t feel that special when the prime minister of Israel tries to politically body-slam the U.S. president. It is devalued when the prime minister of Israel appears to choose sides in the U.S. political debate, seeming to be willing to save his specialness for his Republican friends. And it is certainly deeply damaged when Israel wages a brutal and unjustifiable campaign against the people of Gaza that violates international norms and offends the sensibilities of all with a hint of conscience, as the Netanyahu government did last year.

Britain has not so much offended as it has simply slinked away from center stage. Perhaps in the wake of British public revulsion at the degree to which Tony Blair was seen to have become George W. Bush’s “poodle,” perhaps due to the degree to which national attention has been drawn to domestic problems, we have seen a reordering of the power landscape of Europe. Britain, once our closest and most important ally, now falls third on that scale behind Germany (more important) and France (more supportive of the United States in recent years). Add in the belligerent, erratic, dangerous Vladimir Putin and a newly aggressive Russia, and Britain is now only the fourth most important power with which the United States regularly deals in Europe.

The fact that Britain’s role in Europe will now be open to question for months to come, thanks to Cameron’s pledge to hold a referendum regarding whether Britain should remain a part of the EU, only makes further deterioration more likely. That is because the doubt the referendum is likely to raise may have deleterious effects on the British economy. It is also because there is a possibility that Britain could choose to leave the EU. This would be economically foolish and would take the country from being an important player in the world’s largest market to being a more marginal independent actor. Further, should Scotland renew the push to breakaway from the United Kingdom, and the election results showed huge stridesmade by the Scottish National Party, it would clearly make a Not-So-Great Britain more likely.

Given the likelihood of President Barack Obama’s Iran nuclear deal being successfully concluded and the U.S. administration’s commitment to ensuring that is the case, the prospect for further bad relations between Netanyahu and the White House is great. This alienation will have multiple effects, many of which have already manifested themselves to some degree. The Israelis will seek to diversify their international alliances, reaching out to India, China, Russia, and others. And the United States will seek to emphasize and cultivate other ties in the region (whether that means with Iran or with GCC partners is unclear…. Both seem unlikely, but at the same time both may expect greater efforts at outreach from Washington even as Israel sees a further chill.)

None of this is improved upon by some of the behavior and policies of the Obama administration. It doesn’t help, for example, to call the Israeli prime minister “chickenshit,” or to get drawn into petulant exchanges with the Israelis more suited to the schoolyard than to statecraft. Matters have not been helped by America’s shying away from playing the leadership role that is expected of the United States nor by the inconsistent nature of Obama’s personal diplomacy with our friends abroad. And frankly, the likelihood of the Obama team spending much real time repairing these problems during their waning days in office is pretty slim.

Will the next U.S. president aggressively seek to reverse the course of these once-crucial but now-declining relationships cited here? Undoubtedly candidates for that job will certainly promise to do so in the months ahead. But the historical factors and current geopolitical trends cited above will make it very hard for anyone to restore these relationships to the special place they occupied in the past. For Cameron and Netanyahu and their new governments, this is a reality they may wish to deny but that they will find it very difficult to reverse.

BEN STANSALL/AFP/Getty Images