Thread: The Moral Case For Trump's "America First" Agenda

The Moral Case For Trump's "America First" Agenda


Memo to the rest of the planet: Stop panicking over the victory of Donald Trump. His “America First” agenda is not about abandoning the free world. If anything, it is about saving the free world—from itself. To do that, first we must save America. In the process, by the example we set, we intend to help you see better how to save your own countries. For now, though, without a strong and resolute America leading the way, there will be little left to save anywhere.




America First is all about getting America’s own house back in order, so that once again we are the engine of liberty and prosperity so desperately needed by all peoples of all nations. We’ve been on the wrong path for years now, especially during the Obama presidency.

We should have been advancing the cause of universal morality, through which we protect persons and their property, we encourage and celebrate individual growth and excellence, and we seek to forge meaningful empathic bonds that cut across external group differences such as race and sex. And we should have been championing bottom-up economic freedom, through which we empower sellers who believe that they can please buyers better to enter our markets, and we empower buyers to shop around and to give greater rewards to those sellers who please them better.

Instead, we have allowed universal morality and economic freedom to be supplanted by the vacuum of moral relativism, which denies that any set of values is better than any other, and by the heavy hand of top-down government, which confiscates the fruits of our labors and redistributes them as the powers-that-be choose. This unfortunate course has allowed the rich to get richer—as they almost always do in top-down systems—but at the cost of lost opportunities for the rest of us to elevate ourselves through education, hard work, excellence, and the determination to be of greater value to one another.

The cries against Trump are reminiscent of those against Ronald Reagan in 1980. But the changes Reagan brought—lowered taxation and regulatory burdens on us and our businesses, sound monetary policy to maintain the dollar’s purchasing power, and a stronger military—revitalized the United States, resulting in the implosion of the Soviet Union and the liberation of hundreds of millions of human beings from the clutches of ruthless communist dictators.
Was that so bad for you?

Obviously not—unless you personally stood to profit from imposing a costly top-down government on others, as many unelected bureaucrats in Brussels now stand to do by expanding the dubious authority of the European Union over its hapless member nations and their peoples. The same chorus of dissenters can be heard on this side of the pond, where many unelected bureaucrats in Washington have accreted power and wealth (often by slithering between large private companies and the agencies that regulate them); they, too, decry the election results. But they and their protestations should be dismissed out-of-hand, because they have contributed so much to our demise.

We are on the cusp of a great new age, if Mr. Trump and his administration succeed in implementing even half of their agenda—from reducing taxes and regulations (to fuel a dramatic resurgence in small businesses and real job growth), to fixing our immigration debacle (to allow only those who share our commitment to morality and freedom to settle here), to returning education control to local communities (so that students get a quality education that hopefully emphasizes morality and freedom), to reducing crime in our cities (so that law-abiding minority members can live in safety as they pursue their dreams), to restoring a sound dollar (so that the Fed no longer plays fast and loose with our currency and interest rates), to increasing our military power (so that America no longer negotiates from a position of weakness).

As for America’s trade policy, it is a work in progress. While Mr. Trump has given us cause for concern that he wants to wall off our commerce through steep tariffs or rigid import quotas, reverting us to the harsh trade barriers of the destitute 1930s, he also has given signs that he’s prepared to deal fairly with any country that’s ready to deal fairly with us.

Hopefully, he will see that, when it comes to the exodus of American factories and jobs to foreign shores, by far the biggest culprit has been our own federal government. Big Government, under the control of the so-called progressives, has taxed and regulated our small businesses into the ground, while mandating artificially high minimum wages and excessive payroll taxes that have raised the cost of labor to the point where the last thing any company wants is to hire our citizens. We have every right to fix this, and if we do it right we’ll minimize any front-end suffering of our trading partners.

There is so much work to be done. But it is good work. Give President Trump two years, and then ask yourself how it’s going. I predict you’ll like what you see.


http://www.conservativehq.com/node/24630

The same chorus of dissenters can be heard on this side of the pond, where many unelected bureaucrats in Washington have accreted power and wealth (often by slithering between large private companies and the agencies that regulate them); they, too, decry the election results. But they and their protestations should be dismissed out-of-hand, because they have contributed so much to our demise.

Read: Clintons.

When reading the OP, I was reminded of this piece by Edwin A Locke:

The Greatness of Western Civilization

Edwin A Locke


In this age of diversity-worship, it is considered virtually axiomatic that all cultures are equal. Western culture, claim the intellectuals, is in no way superior to that of African tribalists or Eskimo seal hunters. There are no objective standards, they say, that can be used to evaluate the moral stature of different groups. They assert that to deny the equality of all cultures is to be guilty of the most heinous of intellectual sins: “ethnocentrism.” This is to flout the sacred principle of cultural relativism. I disagree with the relativists — absolutely.

There are three fundamental respects in which Western culture is objectively the best. These are the core values or core achievements of Western civilization, and what made America great.

Reason. The Greeks were the first to identify philosophically that knowledge is gained through reason and logic as opposed to mysticism (faith, revelation, dogma). It would take two millennia, including a Dark Ages and a Renaissance, before the full implications of Greek thought would be realized. The rule of reason reached its zenith in the West in the 18th century — the Age of Enlightenment. “For the first time in modern history,” writes one philosopher, “an authentic respect for reason became the mark of an entire culture. ” America is a product of the Enlightenment.

Individual Rights. An indispensable achievement leading to the Enlightenment was the recognition of the concept of individual rights. John Locke demonstrated that individuals do not exist to serve governments, but rather that governments exist to protect individuals. The individual, said Locke, has an inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of his own happiness. The result was the United States of America. (Disastrous errors were made in the West — for example, slavery, which originated elsewhere, and Nazism — but these were too incongruent with Western values to last and were corrected, by the West, in the name of its core principles of reason and rights.)

Science and Technology. The triumph of reason and rights made possible the full development and application of science and technology and ultimately modern industrial society. Reason and rights freed man’s mind from the tyranny of religious dogma and freed man’s productive capacity from the tyranny of state control. Scientific and technological progress followed in several interdependent steps. Men began to understand the laws of nature. They invented an endless succession of new products. And they engaged in large-scale production, that is, the creation of wealth, which in turn financed and motivated further invention and production. As a result, horse-and-buggies were replaced by automobiles, wagon tracks by steel rails, candles by electricity. At last, after millennia of struggle, man became the master of his environment.

The result of the core achievements of Western civilization has been an increase in freedom, wealth, health, comfort, and life expectancy unprecedented in the history of the world. The achievements were greatest in the country where the principles of reason and rights were implemented most consistently — the United States of America. In contrast, it was precisely in those Eastern and African countries which did not embrace reason, rights, and technology where people suffered (and still suffer) most from both natural and man-made disasters (famine, poverty, illness, dictatorship) and where life-expectancy was (and is) lowest. It is said that primitives live “in harmony with nature,” but in reality they are simply victims of the vicissitudes of nature — if some dictator does not kill them first.

The greatness of the West is not an “ethnocentric” prejudice; it is an objective fact. This assessment is based on the only proper standard for judging a government or a society: the degree to which its core values are pro- or anti-life. Pro-life cultures acknowledge and respect man’s nature as a rational being who must discover and create the conditions which his survival and happiness require — which means that they advocate reason, rights, freedom, and technological progress.

Despite its undeniable triumphs, Western civilization is by no means secure. Its core principles are under attack from every direction — by religious fanatics, by dictators and, most disgracefully, by Western intellectuals, who are denouncing reason in the name of skepticism, rights in the name of special entitlements, and progress in the name of environmentalism. We are heading rapidly toward the dead end of nihilism.

The core values and achievements of the West and America must be asserted proudly and defended to the death. Our lives depend on them.



http://capitalismmagazine.com/2004/0...-civilization/