I finally was able to hear Steve Poizner speak at our much delayed Reagan-Lincoln Dinner here in Sacramento County. I was most impressed by his presentation and understanding that “it’s the spending stupid” to lift a phrase from another political campaign.

He fielded a number of questions on a variety of issues. The person next to me was anxious to ask Poizner about his position on abortion—a subject that many folks are passionate about. I suggested instead of asking him which label—prolife or prochoice--he wished to apply to himself that this person ask him specifics about issues that Poizner would likely face as governor. I suggested that he ask about taxpayer funding of abortion and conscientious objections by pharmacists and other healthcare providers to being forced to provide “morning after” pills and other such methods of abortion.

The person seated at my table got up after Poizner had completed his Q & A period and went looking for his. This person had stated previously that he would only vote for prolife candidates. He must have been successful with what he was told by Poizner because when he returned to the table, he was filling out an endorsement card.

The voters have spoken. California’s legislature and our Governor were sent back to the drawing board to try again to fix the budget. Meanwhile, we have the highest and oppressive taxes this side of New York.

It’s time for voters to take the next step in the tax revolt. It’s time for a series of ballot initiatives to implement a part-time legislature; probably with a unicameral one with about 180 members. If we had one representative for every 200,000 people, we could have more responsive representation with such a variety of interests that no party would be able to firmly run the state. Budgets would be on a two year cycle and lawmakers would meet for three months every other year. Lastly, we need to reign in the power of state employee unions. They need to comply with the rules that every other business in the state must adhere to.

In the course of getting through my MBA program I have run across some really good teachers and some that are so removed from reality that I can’t seem to find much common ground to even communicate with them.

I rarely listen to Michael Savage but I know that he contends that liberalism is a mental illness. I am now not only willing to concede the point but wholeheartedly agree with his assessment. At its root however, I think that liberalism is the result of spiritual death that comes from rejecting God and his Word. Put another way, Christ is the cure to liberalism.

A case in point is my current instructor. He has multiple degrees—including economics—and a doctorate. He looks at the spending spree of the federal government and his only gripe is that President Obama is not spending enough money to effectively rescue the economy. He claims that Obama is beholden to the right wing of the Republicans because he allowed a few token tax cuts amongst all the pork. Let me get this straight, every Republican in the House of Representatives voted against this bill and the three most liberal Republicans in the Senate voted for it and Obama caved to the Republican right?

The effective debt of the US government exceeds 65 trillion dollars-- which is greater than the gross national product of the entire world—and he has the stones to say Obama is not spending enough money? In adjusted dollars, Obama has spent more than FDR in the New Deal in less than two months!

Furthermore, my instructor thinks Obama should nationalize every financial institution in the US and then after a few years the government should divest then (make then private again) and create one thousand small banks. These banks would not be allowed to merge to form larger banks by aggressive use of anti-trust legislation.

My instructor feels that all our problems can be solved by government central planning of production and aggressive use of wealth redistribution. He wants the outright confiscation of all wealth from the top five percent of all income earners. He asserts that we need to be more like France and Germany. We need more days off, nationalized healthcare and more government control of the economy. This conveniently negates fact that France and Germany are demographically on the verge of extinction due to legalized abortion and other social factors that resulted in low birth rates. For many decades the birth rate has been below replacement levels for all European countries. In addition the large Moslem populations in these countries are pressing for recognition of Sharia Law in these formerly Christian nations.

Of course my instructor is also a believer in “green” energy. He seems to want the personal use of automobiles banned and replaced with mass transit. To facilitate this, he wants housing to be changed to cram as many people as possible into the smallest amount of space. Gaia forbid that we should have yards around our houses and waste water keeping them green.

These are just some of the issues that I can recall my teacher advocating. So why you may ask do I contend that these beliefs are symptoms of a spiritual illness? Let me briefly try to explain.
God has created three institutions to govern man: government, church and family. For a healthy society, each of these must be in balance. Each has an exclusive area of responsibility but there are areas where each intersects.

All law is religious.

"…in any society, any change of law is an explicit or implicit change of religion. Nothing more clearly reveals, in fact, the religious change in a society than a legal revolution. When the legal foundations shift from Biblical law to humanism, it means that the society now draws its vitality and power from humanism, not Christian theism.” RJ Rushdoony

Any change in law is a change from one god to another. In the same book, Rushdoony states, “…it must be recognized that in any culture the source of law is the god of that society”.
The basis of Western civilization is rooted in biblical values.

Given the above, what my teacher is advocating is removing the last vestiges of biblical Christianity from our society and replacing them with the power religion of the secular state.

For many, it may be a distant memory but the Ten Commandments are still one of the pillars of Western Civilization. What my teacher is embracing is inverting the edict “Thou shall not steal” and making it the basis of implementing social change. His whole vision of utopia is built by wealth redistribution at the point of the sword wielded by the State. This is the formula for tyranny not liberty.

My teacher thinks by abolishing much private property and nationalizing businesses and thus investing the government with the power to plan our lives he can solve society’s ills.
One can’t help but recall that the Scripture proclaims, “Professing themselves to be wise they became fools “. 

At its root, my teacher seems fixated on jealousy and envy that others have more material possessions than he does This whole scheme that my teacher has dreamed-up is the result of years of sin eating away at his insides. Clearly the focus of his worldview is based on a violation of the Commandment “Thou shall not covet thy neighbor’s house, thou shall not covet thy neighbor’s wife, nor his man-servant, nor his maid-servant, nor his ox, nor his donkey, nor any thing that is thy neighbor’s.” Clearly my teacher covets his neighbor’s house and he covets his neighbor’s employees and he covets his neighbor’s job (ox) and he covets his neighbor’s mode of transportation (donkey) and everything else his neighbor has.

My teacher’s utopia can only end in a tyrannical society based either on fascism or socialism. You would think after the hundreds of millions that died in the last century for these two belief systems men would reject such evil. Unfortunately, my teacher thinks he can get it right where Hitler, Stalin, Mao and the rest got it wrong.

In the wee hours of the morning, Republican state senator Abel Maldonado finally caved to pressure from Democrats and cast the deciding vote in favor of the pathetic budget deal hammered out by Arnold Schwarzenegger and Democrat leaders. Maldonado traded his vote for one change to the budget and a pyrrhic dream of political reform. Maldonado swapped a twelve cents a gallon gasoline tax for an increase in personal income taxes and some hoped for federal money courtesy of the Obama bailout. He also got Democrats to reluctantly allow a ballot measure for open primaries to appear at a future election.

In reality, all Maldonado did was kick the budget can down the road a year or two. No structural reforms were implemented. All he did was allow taxes to be raised in the midst of a recession that is much deeper in California than in the rest of the country. This will make any hope of recovery in California much more difficult due to an even more hostile business climate than any of our neighboring states. The reality is that not one dime of taxes had to be raised to fix this budget. It is a spending problem. Period!

California is sitting on billions of dollars of oil and natural gas that the government won’t allow anyone to go after. We waste millions on firefighting every summer when proper timber management would prevent these fires from being severe and generate jobs and revenue to state coffers. Water is horribly mismanaged in this state and the list goes on. There is no need for any tax increases.

If we conformed to President Clinton’s welfare reform bill and quit treating illegals as citizens we could realize billions more in savings but as the Good Book says, “The compassion of the wicked is cruelty”. Education is a black hole of money that eats up over 75 percent of all its funding in top heavy bureaucracies that favor San Francisco and Los Angeles at the expense of the rest of the state. We are in the bottom of the nation in our quality of education but we have the strongest teacher’s union in the country.

There is one other factor which the media was too lazy to investigate as to why this deal had to be made this week and that is that we are one day away from the state convention of the California Republican Party. The main focus of many grassroots Republicans was a series of competing measures that would deny any funding from the State Party for any Republican that supported increasing taxes. Some ideas that went along with these resolutions included the State Party being required to fund primary challengers to any Republican politician that voted for tax increases and an automatic censure of any office holder supporting tax increases. Whether Maldonado and company will get this treatment remains to be seen.

I can assure you that rank and file Republicans are mad as hell and some heads in the Party are in serious danger of getting chopped. California is on the verge of becoming a one party state and gutless men like Schwarzenegger and Maldonado are to blame. If current trends hold, Decline to State—California’s version of “None of the Above”—will soon be the second largest political block in the State with Republicans a distant third.