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Nov. 14, 2008 - Rush Limbaugh Program
35:30
November 14, 2008, Friday, Hour #3
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Well anyway, the point I was trying to make, welcome back, Third Hour Now Up and Running on the Rush Limbaugh program.
El Rushbo back in the Itala of the Hun chair on Monday.
I, Jason Lewis, doing my best to fill in for him today.
The point I was making about the JFK quote, which I love to tweak people with because Camelot is next to godliness these days, is his inauguration when he said, ask not what government can do for you, fine.
Ask what you can do for government.
Well, no.
And that line has been reiterated time and time again.
It's immemorial.
The fact of the matter is, government shouldn't do anything for you in a free society, but you should not be required to do anything for government in a free society.
We have to go back to first principles.
What is the purpose of a legal monopoly on force, government, in an organized society?
Why did these people, these framers, why did Western civilization form government and give them guns, give them police, give them courts, give them that legal monopoly on force?
If you've got a kind of a Lockean, absolute state of nature freedom, you are absolutely free.
You have no controls.
There's no organized society, no government.
Why would you organize or put in place a government that could take away that absolute freedom?
Well, you would do it for one fundamental reason, that somebody that might be bigger than you, somebody that might be more armed than you, is taking away your liberty.
You didn't do it because you wanted government to be the largest national charity on the face of the earth.
You didn't do it because you wanted government to control the automobile companies or the future companies.
You did it for one reason, to preserve and enhance liberty.
That is the role of government.
That's why it's limited.
That's why a good originalist on the Supreme Court or in the judiciary understands there's something called enumerated powers.
If it isn't in the Constitution, the government can't do it.
That was by design.
We don't have mob rule and we don't have minority rule as in a monarchy.
We have a filtered democracy or a deliberate republic, if you will, deliberative democracy, where we have checks and balances on the majority.
We have federalism, and that's the best way to check the majority by allowing states to function as somewhat autonomous entities when it comes to things like family law, gay marriage, matters of life and death, rape, you name it, death penalty.
Those are functions of the state.
And the reason was to limit the power of the central government so that if a state got it wrong, you could vote with your feet.
That's the beauty of our constitutional republic.
But all of that is designed to enhance freedom.
It was never designed to use the government to get a goodie, knowing full well it's coming from somebody else.
You know, if you really look at government in that way, you're advocating illegitimacy.
You're advocating illegitimate government.
Because if you have a right to health care, if you have a right to transportation, mass transit subsidies, if you have a right to food stamps, a right to education, a right to literally everything under the sun, then why can't you just walk down the street and take it?
I mean, my rights to life, liberty, and the property I own, I don't have to get permission to exercise.
They're there.
I can walk down the street and exercise those rights of life, liberty, and the property I own.
Well, if health care is a right or if food is a right, walk in the grocery store tomorrow and take what you need.
You would be arrested.
You would be arrested for, under the common law, for stealing.
The modern welfare state is at war with our Anglo-Saxon common law.
It is at war with what the Constitution intended for government.
It is at war with Western civilization.
And yet, that's why so many people vote Democrat.
What are they going to do for me?
It goes back to freedom and responsibility.
As Clarence Thomas said, one of the greatest lines ever, the dirty little secret of freedom is you're on your own.
Now that, he's talking about the relationship between man and the state.
There are plenty of wonderful charities out there, Shriner's Hospital, a number of charities that don't need.
Think about this for a moment.
Why do you need government to administer a charity?
If you want to help somebody, help them.
When you get big government liberals talking about the charitable notion of government, they are not talking about administering a charity with their money.
They're talking about being compassionate with your money.
That's not virtue.
That's not charity.
That is raw force.
And it is immoral.
So that's my little spiel on the proper role of government in a free society, the operative word being free.
Now, there are going to be a number of roles for government in a society that doesn't care about freedom, and we're seeing that.
A society that doesn't care about freedom wants to bail out the automobile industry on one condition.
The automobile industry does exactly as they say.
So now you've got Democrats and Pelosi and Harry Reid pushing for a quick passage of the auto industry bailout, although the chances are dwindling, according to the Times this morning, for that to happen in the lame duck session.
But they want $50 billion in government-backed loans to bail out an industry that's going through what?
$25 billion a month?
Or not a month, I'm sorry, $5 billion a month.
$25 billion won't last five months.
$50 won't last $10.
But here's the quid pro quo, and it always happens with government bailouts.
They say, we're going to bail you out just as long as you keep losing money.
And by that I mean, as long as you keep producing cars nobody wants, as long as you keep inflexible labor rules, as long as you have a cost structure that's not competitive worldwide, as long as you do all of the things that require a bailout, we'll keep bailing you out.
Liberals love corporate subsidies.
You know, Barack Obama got far more money from Wall Street than did John McCain.
Liberals love green subsidies, corporate subsidies, football and baseball stadium subsidies.
They love corporate welfare as long as they can control the corporations.
Now, we used to call this socialism, and now we're seeing it.
Buying equity stakes in private enterprise and then telling them you've got to produce more fuel-efficient vehicles that Detroit cannot produce without losing money?
You know, the breadbasket of Detroit was the SUV, the car that everybody wanted, and the profit margins were much higher.
Al Gore and the environmental left and those green Republicans that got in bed with them, Republican governors, they put Detroit out of business.
The UAW is putting Detroit out of business in many ways.
Perhaps not as much as the government.
But the idea that bankruptcy, quite frankly, is not a viable solution for our economic ills defies logic.
That's why we have a bankruptcy code.
If we keep propping up the ethanol industry, if we keep propping up an automobile company that is not efficient and not a good allocation of resources, if we keep propping up insurance companies, which are not a systemic risk to the financial industry, what do we get?
We get bureaucrats choosing which companies will succeed, not based on how efficient they are, not based on what consumers want, but based on special interests.
That is a misallocation of resources.
It produces less wealth, and now we all have to pay more for the necessities of life when you include taxes.
You know, I get into battles with my friends in agriculture up here all the time in Minnesota over farm subsidies.
And everybody thinks you've got to be for ethanol.
You've got to be for farm subsidies to prevail.
Well, think about this for a moment.
You know, when you add the tax subsidies for the $300 billion farm bill, for the outright subsidies to ethanol and 50-cent tariff protections, 51-cent credits to the blenders, and all the rest.
And then you add to the fact that ethanol isn't even two-thirds as efficient, I shouldn't say that, ethanol is about one-third less efficient when it comes to miles per gallon.
They get about 60, 70% miles per gallon has unleaded gasoline.
When you add all of those taxes in, all of those tariffs and the lack of efficiency, by subsidizing this alternative energy that doesn't work, it's costing you not $2 a gallon.
It's costing you $3, $4, $5 a gallon for the higher prices in food, for the higher taxes, for the higher tariffs, for the less miles per gallon.
That means you have less wealth and your standard of living is lower.
Now, you could go back years and years and say we shouldn't have to explain this once again because economics was taught, but apparently it's not anymore.
And we have special interests in government, vested interests, determining how our resources will be allocated.
It's a recipe for stagnation.
You know, it's not a coincidence that the Soviets had shortages in every commodity.
They had their five-year plans, and bureaucrats, not markets, were making decisions.
And when markets make decisions, and here's the beauty of this, you know, prosperity is a byproduct of free market capitalism, but it's not its raison d'étro.
It's not the reason we have markets.
We have markets because free markets are the economic dimension of freedom.
We have markets because in a free country, you ought to be able to produce what you want, how much of it, and sell it to whomever you want, and make as much money as you want.
That's the moral case for freedom and free markets.
It just so happens that that creates the most for everybody, and therefore, everybody's prosperity goes up, and therefore when you have a free market government and a free market policy, everybody is happy and they tend to support that.
If you're looking for the avenue for the ascendancy of conservatism again, don't look for direct handouts.
Don't say we've got to compete with the welfare state.
We've got to compete with green subsidies.
We've got to compete with more goodies for education.
Make the economy strong.
Let people rise as high as their abilities can take them.
They will be happy.
They will be prosperous.
And they will keep the people who brought the economy to that particular level, the people in power who believe in markets.
That's the way out of this.
It is not.
The way out of this is not to mimic the entitlement state.
Because I'll tell you something, folks.
Not only is it bad policy, but if you get into a bidding war with liberals, you will lose every time.
You offer this subsidy, they'll double it.
And the voters will go for the real thing each and every time.
I mean, we're bailing out the auto industry.
We're bailing out American Express.
We're bailing out GE and giving them government-backed loans.
If a company goes bankrupt, all that means is its assets will be sold off.
The assets don't disappear.
Now, I know it's traumatic for people in that industry, and I understand that, but it's also traumatic for all the people that don't make typewriters anymore because of the word processor.
We live in an economy that is dynamic and has creative destruction.
Things are created as other antiquated industries go by the wayside.
Let us do what we do best and we'll all be better off.
But if government tries to prop this up, prop every failing industry up, who's going to bail out the government?
It is impossible.
And we're going to prolong this recession, however troubling, into a depression.
It happened in the 30s, and I fear it may happen again if we follow these policies.
I'm Jason Lewis.
Your calls on this open line Friday when we come back on the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.
Oh, I love that tune.
That's a great tune, Mike.
Got a boy.
Do we have any share?
1-800-282-2882.
I am Jason Lewis, Minnesota's Mr. Wright, filling in for El Rushbo.
He'll be back on Monday.
In the meantime, rushlimbaugh.com up and running as always.
To the phones we go on this open line Friday, Quandas in Columbus, Ohio.
You're on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Hi.
Hello, Jason.
How are you?
I'm very well.
Thank you.
Great.
I love you when you replace Rush, and I also love Rush.
I need you to tell him that.
But I'm going to make a few points here.
In the interim, is it too much to ask the Republican Party to tell their history?
I mean, you can match the Republican Party's history to the Democrats' Party history as it pertains to the American African community.
Now, the Republicans didn't bring up that conversation.
The Democrats brought that conversation up in this election.
So, since they brought it up, why don't the Republicans tell about Reconstruction, which actually was a reparation?
Well, it's interesting you speak of all of this.
I don't think a lot of Republicans want to bring it up because they don't want to offend anybody.
They don't want to play.
I'm not going to get to telling it because, I mean, I'm down here by myself.
Here I am, African-American.
I'm running around here.
Man, can you imagine what my job is in Columbia, Ohio?
No, I can imagine.
I can imagine.
So the thing is, if you want to, if he, Rush played a little blip by Tony Mortison this week.
I hope he goes back to that and hopefully makes a parody out of that because she told the truth of actually what the feeling is, and I think it's a good point.
So we got four years to the next presidential election.
They ought to drop a what was the party in control during the Jim Crow era?
What was the party in control?
The Democrats.
Nobody knows that, though, Jason.
Nobody knows none of that history, particularly down here where I'm at.
Nobody knows.
They've been lying to him, man.
By the way, it's another great point you bring up, and it's also very dangerous to rely on the Supreme Court and unelected judges because it was the Supreme Court that upheld Plessy versus Ferguson, and I think it was 1896, that said separate but equal is just fine for 60 years.
Well, what was the court made up of?
I mean, nobody knows that history, Jason.
We do.
I saw somebody was reading it off one of the morning shows or something of what all the Republicans have did as pertaining to that issue.
And the Democrats ain't got nothing compared to that.
Well, it might change.
Quantus, I got to go, buddy, but it might change if former Lieutenant Governor Michael Steele, who has announced his candidacy for the position of chairman of the Republican National Committee, conservative African-American, becomes the head of the party.
I know he's been wanting Republicans to go into the African-American community and saying that.
And I would only add that this whole notion of taxing, taxing America's labor.
You know, I don't know how else you describe what this sordid experience of slavery was.
When you take away somebody's ability to engage in the marketplace with the fruits of their labor, we fought a great war over that.
And you're quite right.
We lost 600,000 Americans, many of them white, by the way.
This country repaired itself.
This country repaired the damage it was done.
Those are reparations.
600,000 lives.
The bottom line, however, is that we need to go into the African-American community as conservatives.
It's a natural constituency.
70% of African Americans voted to uphold traditional marriage in California, and now they're seeing the intolerance of the militant gay left.
We need to go into the African American community.
They're there on cultural issues, and they should be there on taxes because they know what it's like to have to work for free.
And during the times of slavery, we targeted black folks.
Well, now I guess it's okay to target wealthy folks.
Either way, you're taking something that doesn't belong to you.
Thanks for the call and the reminder in Worthington, Indiana.
Art, you are up next.
Hi.
Hey, how are you doing?
I'm doing fine, sir.
How are you?
Great.
Just one little small comment before I go into my thing.
Your voice sounds identical to Neil Cavuto.
Well, Neil's a friend.
I'm glad to hear that.
Yeah, I like him.
He's a good guy.
And he's been right on the bailout bill, too.
So there.
Huh?
Yeah, yeah, I know.
Okay, listen, my question had to do with John F. Kennedy's speech.
Yes.
You made a comment, and I kind of, I don't know, maybe it's me.
Maybe I'm off my rocker or whatever.
I had a 33 and a third RPM record back in the 1970s.
My mom still has it now.
But I remember listening, it was a record an album of John F. Kennedy's speeches and what have you.
I can't remember what it was, right?
But anyway, on there, John F. Kennedy, okay, you said that John F. Kennedy said, ask not what America can do, what your country can do for you.
Ask what you can do for your country.
Right.
And I'm wondering when he, that second part, was he actually talking about ask what you can do for your government or ask as citizens you do for each other.
The reason I ask is because right after that, immediately right after that, it sounds to me like he explained what he meant.
Right after that, he said, my fellow citizens of the world, ask not what America can do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man.
Wasn't that what he was talking about, or did I miss something?
Well, I think Kennedy, certainly, by comparison to today's Democrats, was an international hawk, although he went to Vienna and got kind of beat up pretty well by Khrushchev.
But the very phrase, what you can do for the state, has always bothered me, whether it's the government, the state.
We are not children of the states.
We are not wards of the state.
That's what makes Americans different.
We have a bargain with government.
Their job is to keep us free.
We are not supposed to sacrifice for the nation-state.
That's what the Brownshirts did.
That's what Stalin expected.
I really don't think that's the American ideal.
1-800-282-2882.
Great to be back, filling in for El Rush Bow.
As I say once again, back on Monday.
The king is back.
In the meantime, check out RushLimbaugh.com.
And in the meantime, we will go to more calls right now in New York, or York, Pennsylvania, I should say.
Here's Tim on the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.
Hi.
Hi, Jason.
How are you doing?
Could not be better.
I just have a very easy question that I'd like to be answered by the one who knows most everything.
A couple years ago.
He's back on Monday.
Now, you're filling in for the day, so you're the one now.
A couple years ago, Delta Airlines filed for bankruptcy, if I remember right, and they came out of bankruptcy.
But in the meantime, if I remember, other airlines plus Delta, they went to their unions, not their unions, but they went to the unions and they asked for cost cutting in every way they could.
And plus, they went to the employees to take cuts beyond measures.
And to this day, those airlines are still flying, still hauling people around all over the world.
And what I can't find anywhere in the papers, I haven't been able to find anything on the news or anything, is I don't hear anything coming out of GM, Chrysler or Ford, any of the automakers, that they're going to the unions and saying, look, we've got to cut here.
We've got to really cut.
That's because the bailout is not designed to bail out the automobile companies.
You are bailing out the Sierra Club and the UAW.
The Sierra Club is imposed.
These outlandish.
And by the way, speaking of sacrificing for the country, sacrificing for the state, I'm not talking about, obviously, the military sacrifices our brave men and women make, but they make it for freedom.
They're not fighting for the Department of Housing and Urban Development or the EPA.
They're fighting for freedom.
And that's a sacrifice that redounds back to themselves and to everybody.
That's a little different.
I'm talking about giving up your standard of living and your liberty for a cause that some bureaucrat thinks is important, like fuel efficiency standards.
And that's really, you know, you combine what the environmentalists have done to the American automobile manufacturer, plus what the UAW has done in a competitive world that they can't compete in with these labor contracts.
And what we're doing, and this is why the Democrats love to bail out corporations, we are bailing out the UAW, Democratic voters, bailing out the environmentalists, Democratic voters.
And so what they're saying is we will continue to bail you out as long as you keep the UAW in place, as long as you keep fuel-efficient mandates, CAFE standards, which, by the way, kill people every year because small cars are dangerous, as long as you keep those in place.
And so your intuition is dead on, Tim.
Okay, because I haven't heard anything, you know, was explained why actually that, but that does make sense.
Well, think about it.
I mean, right now, General Motors, you know, they spent about $1,500 to $2,000 per car on health care costs and pension costs for their employees in retirements, or retirees, I should say.
You can't compete in a worldwide economy that way.
Why is it that all the other automobile manufacturers, yes, many of them foreign, but they employ Americans, 110,000, 115,000 of them, why is it that they can make cars without being organized, be happy, and produce a product people want?
Why aren't they asking for a bailout?
I don't know.
You know, can you imagine these legacy costs that require a car company to jack up the price for consumers so they can pay retirees $4 billion annually in health care costs and pension benefits?
Now, let me ask you a tough question, though.
Here's what the union would say.
Well, so what you're saying is that those of us making six figures on the assembly line in Detroit ought to take a pay cut in order to compete with the world.
Well, why is that prosperous?
Why is that good?
What do you say to that?
Well, you would take a pay cut if you want to continue to have a job.
Bingo.
That's exactly what you say.
Well, okay, $50,000 or $60,000 is better than zero.
More importantly, what they're really asking is not to take or not to be able to keep getting $100,000.
They're asking from, by the way, people who buy cars, they're demanding that taxpayers subsidize their salary.
Right, but you have Uncle Sam standing at your door knocking and saying, here's a handout.
So why should I take a cut?
That's what I mean.
If the bailout for the automobile industry goes through, taxpayers will essentially be subsidizing the UAW.
And if the government restrictions continue that don't allow Detroit to make profitable vehicles, SUVs, because we're on this bizarre preoccupation with global warming, by the way, it's going to snow in Minnesota this weekend.
It's November before Thanksgiving.
If we keep going down that road, we are imposing big costs on the rest of the economy.
And so you're going to get less production in the rest of the economy in order to prop up something else that's misallocating resources.
That's not a recipe for growing the economy.
All right.
Tim, thanks for the call.
I do appreciate it.
Let's try Ken in Jacksonville.
You are next, sir.
Hi.
Jason, thank you very much for taking my call.
Mega, 23-year retired Navy dittos from Jacksonville.
Thank you, sir, for your service.
Well, thank you very much.
Jason, I've got to tell you, though, when Rush is not here, you the most concise and clear analyses that, you know, if anybody has questions afterwards, they're just not listening.
So much we could talk about, but I'm going to stick to point.
Sharon had called earlier, and I believe she was from Ponte Vivra, which is just south of us.
And she was talking about how she would like for Rush and, you know, and other call show hosts and so forth to provide a list of what we can go out and do.
God bless her.
I wish more Republicans, more conservatives had a fire in the gut like she has, but we don't need you guys to do that.
What we need is we need a Republican leader, not a Republican.
We need a conservative leader to get out there and speak the principles to which we all prescribe.
And this election did something for me.
It clearly defined the difference between a Republican and a conservative.
And I find myself, I'm a conservative, not a Republican.
Yeah, that's so true.
I mean, we've got, once again, this is a matter of priorities.
What do you place the most loyalty towards?
The party?
What's good for the party, winning at any cost, or what's good for the cause?
And as a military man, you know what the cause is all about, which confounds me.
I mean, Kit and I were talking during the break.
How do you get people ginned up over a moderate candidate?
You know, the left wing in this country gets energized because they're led by committed socialists.
We ought to be led by committed capitalists.
That will energize people.
But if somebody comes along and says, well, I'm not really a socialist.
I'm not really a capitalist.
Come on and follow me.
It's not going to energize anybody.
No, no, not at all.
And, you know, talking of that, this is my point, though.
I never had that fire in my gut for McCain.
I had a fire in my gut for George Bush back in 2004, just when I was retiring, did a lot for the campaign, worked on it, was even out shouting down Democrats and so forth.
I really got into it.
I never had that fire this time until Sarah Paling came on the scene.
She started speaking as a conservative.
And I'm one of those persons I would be first on board to support her in 2012.
But let me get to the point I was going to make, though.
Sharon was saying about how we need our celebrities to get out and provide us with that list.
If a Republican would get out there and grow, you know what, we would follow them.
And that's evident if you look at the numbers of voter turnout on our side.
A lot of people stayed home, and a lot of people called Rush.
As soon as McCain won the nomination, people called Rush, called up all the other shows, and were saying, I'm staying home.
Republicans need to be taught a lesson.
I'm not going for John McCain.
He's a great man.
He's a hero.
I have nothing personally against him.
I just don't like to compromise my principles.
I feel that he does that just a bit too much, and that's what moderates do.
They can't make up their minds, so they try and get it both ways.
That's not what we're about to do.
Well, here's what the moderates will tell you.
Here's what Michael Gerson or David Brooks of the New York Times, these pseudo-Republicans will tell you, and all the Republican governors, not all, I should say, but the Republican governors like Christ and Schwarzenegger and Poleny.
You can't win with just conservatives.
Reagan is dead, and there aren't enough to get us elected.
Well, if your only goal is winning, then I suppose you need to water down your principles and look at the polls.
But what prevents us from re-educating Americans and moving the polls in our direction by leading?
There's fear out there, Jason, and I don't know what that comes from.
And Rush talked about this a lot, too.
When we were in power, we didn't know what to do with it.
We were out of power for so long.
When I say we, the Republican Party, the conservatives, did not know how to lead.
They were in charge in Washington and really truly didn't know what to do with it.
Well, as I said earlier, as I said earlier, Ken, they got used to big government.
It had no direct impact on them.
It had no direct impact on them.
The college preppy kids at the RNC got paid regardless.
Incumbents got paid regardless.
There was no pressure put on them, and they became the party of the status quo, and this election was a verdict on the status quo.
I know.
And you know what was really scary?
Duval County, Florida was almost, what, three-fourths Bush to carry.
It's a very conservative area.
It's one of the most conservative urban areas in Florida, if not the most.
It was a very close race here.
McCain won, but not by double digits.
You got it.
Great point.
I got to run, my friend.
My great point, as always, I do appreciate your call.
I'm Jason Lewis.
More on this when we return, so don't go away.
You know, we've tried to explain why the misallocation of resources when bureaucrats decide what to invest in, what to create, always fails.
That's the economic side of this.
But the political side of it is it doesn't work any better.
That is, it's an electoral loser.
The GOP, pursuant to the last caller, has unilaterally disarmed in the last decade on so many issues.
Unilateral disarmament on spending, immigration, campaign finance, energy, the environment, you know, the tobacco nanny state, education, getting in bed with the education unions, unemployment benefit increases.
You got Arnold Schwarzenegger out there in California saying he hopes a federal court overturns Prop 8.
Talk about creating the laws under which you live.
The people spoke in California.
If you want to change that, go to the legislature or change the minds of people and reame the Constitution.
But Schwarzenegger's out there saying, telling gay backers don't give up.
We'll have some court overturn this, like they overturned the amendment in Colorado a few years ago on preferences for certain individuals.
That's unilateral disarmament.
Someone ought to tell Arnold, the last time I looked, the bans on same-sex marriage were about 30 and 1 in the affirmative when states could vote on them.
Does that sound like an electoral loser?
But we disarm on that.
We disarm on spending.
We've spent $1.1 trillion since 2000.
And so the Republicans, in my view, in this election cycle, became the party of big government of the status quo, and people are not happy with the status quo.
And now we're bailing out anything that moves to the tune of a billion dollars.
It's not working, so we'll have to do more.
And don't get me wrong, Barack Obama will do more, which is why this is flirting with kind of an FDR scenario, which was not pleasant, contrary to conventional wisdom.
If I could pick one thing where you can use or one area that could be a litness test for you to decipher, it would be this environmental nonsense that is being put out there by Republican moderates from Lincoln Chafee.
Oh, how'd that election work out for you there, Lincoln?
From Chris Shays, how'd that work out for you, Chris?
All you Northeast moderates, you've got the way to the future.
You're all out of a job.
But you've got this global warming nonsense and this flirtation with Al Gore, and McCain had that, that is going to be the death knell of not only free market capitalism, but Republican ascendancy if they keep going down this road.
And yet that's what governors Poleny and Christ and Schwarzenger and Purdue all are preaching.
You've got to be environmental.
Why?
Because that's what the polls say.
That's what the suburban moms in the suburbs want.
They want more environmentalism.
They want more Chevy Volts at $40,000 a year that'll never pay for themselves.
They're losers.
They want more than $14 billion in taxpayer subsidies for wind that doesn't work when it's not windy out, wind turbines for crying out loud.
You know, there's a new study out by Thomas Crowley from the University of Edinburgh and a Canadian colleague, William Hyde, that say now the real danger going forward, the next ice age.
Scotland, Northern Ireland, England, presumably North America, could be covered in ice in a few decades.
And they say the culprit is we're reducing greenhouse gas too much.
We have to get off this kick that we can convince die-hard members of the Sierra Club that they ought to vote Republican.
You will lose the base, and the Sierra Club will still vote for every left-wing socialist out there like Al Gore.
I think that's a pretty good litmus test.
When you consider what something like the Lieberman Warner cap and trade bill will cost, $670 billion by 2030 in lower national income, employment down.
This is from the National Association of Manufacturers.
Household income down, $6,700 by 2030, lost 3 to 4 million jobs, all in the name of a fictitious theory that Michael Crichton, the late Michael Crichton, who's done more double-blind studies in a day than Al Gore could ever dream up, said was a joke.
Go out there and read State of Fear.
Great appendix in State of Fear.
Great book that explains this.
We have had net global warming since 1940 of a whopping 0.2 degrees Celsius.
Any warming we'll have over the next 100 years will be similar to the last hundred.
We've done okay.
This is a ruse to collectivize the world.
And any freedom-loving Republican or conservative worth his or her salt that doesn't see this and yet goes along with his command and control version of what they're talking about telling us what kind of light bulbs to put in our house.
The CFL nonsense.
We've got to import mercury in our light bulbs and put them in our house so the kids can swallow thermometers.
All right, a little bit facetious there, but you get the drift.
Don't get me started on this environmental nonsense because that's exactly what it is.
If we don't start standing up for property rights and sound science and a takings clause for every environmental regulation, if it costs somebody income, by God, the rest of the citizens ought to pay them for it.
Just like as if eminent domain took your building.
And we don't.
This cap and trade nonsense, which we're probably going to get, you add cap and trade, you add tax increases, you add windfall profits, you add empowering unions, and anybody wonder why the markets are in flux?
We'll come back and wrap it up right after this short pause.
I'm Jason Lewis.
And a bit of a lather filling in for El Rushbo on the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.
Hey, before I forget on this open line Friday, my thanks to Mike and Kit back in New York, Jess here for making this program sound as good as it does.
Jason Lewis in for El Rushbo.
He's back on Monday, rushlimbaugh.com.
Let's squeeze in a call before we say goodbye.
Mike in Eagle River, Arkansas.
Hi.
Hey, I just wanted to get this off my chest.
A couple days ago, we have a radio station up here after years, the Andrew Halcrow Show, who lost resoundingly to Sarah Palin in the governorship, by the way.
And he calls himself a Republican, but you can tell he's moderate.
He said that Reaganomics don't work anymore because life is so much more complex than it used to be.
And that just goes against what government is supposed to be.
Government is supposed to be simple.
It should never change.
It should always be the same.
Government should stay out of the way of the people.
And that's the problem that we're having with the moderate Republicans.
They're willing to go along and make life a little more complex.
Why is it that Democrats never have these problems?
Because they are a band of committed lefties, committed socialists.
Why can't the Republican Party be committed capitalists?
For any of these moderate Republicans that are pulling a Benedict Arnold on the causes that drive us, somebody ought to ask them, hey, how did that whole Soviet Union experiment go, huh?
Folks, that's it for me today.
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