When I was a kid, I'd wake up extraordinarily early every morning and turn on the television, scanning for episodes of 'The Jetsons.' For some reason, I loved the notion of a future where there would be flying cars, supercomputers, and most of all, robot maids to take care of the chores.
— Ben Shapiro
Capitalism requires individual responsibility and accountability. People are seen as atomized units in a capitalist system - they are either useful, or they are not. They are not seen racially or ethnically or religiously. They consume and they produce, and those are their only relevant characteristics.
When we say 'less fortunate,' we generally mean the poor rather than the disabled, who actually are less fortunate. In truth, the poor are generally 'less fortunate' only in terms of genetics. They are certainly not less fortunate in the amount of help they receive.
While the West tries to turn its civilization into cultural variety hour, Islam tries to turn Muslim lands into a cultural monolith. The same West that justifies the rap culture thinks that every Muslim terrorist bombing is an expression of economic angst or social alienation.
During the Great Depression, levels of crime actually dropped. During the 1920s, when life was free and easy, so was crime. During the 1930s, when the entire American economy fell into a government-owned alligator moat, crime was nearly non-existent. During the 1950s and 1960s, when the economy was excellent, crime rose again.
President Obama has only had two major policy victories during his tenure: the stimulus package and Obamacare. Both are massively unpopular. The stimulus package launched the Tea Party movement. Obamacare led to the Republican wipeout of 2010.
The Fourth Amendment is quite clear on the notion that search and seizure must not be unreasonable. It is difficult to think of something more unreasonable than searching the private phone records and digital information of citizens who are suspected of nothing.
The argument that gay marriage doesn't affect straight marriages is a ridiculous red herring: Gay marriage affects society and law in dramatic ways. Religious groups will come under direct assault as federal and state governments move to strip them of their non-profit statuses if they refuse to perform gay marriages.
Show Republicans a shiny pro-life or pro-marriage issue and they'd much rather address that controversial topic than keep pressing on the tyranny that Obamacare represents.
Primarily affecting low-information voters and members of the mainstream media, Obama Worship Syndrome attributes impossible capabilities to Obama's political opponents, finds excuses for every Obama failure in everyone around him and praises the president as the finest politician - nay, human being - of our time.
Conservatives are routinely pilloried on television. A&E likely greenlit 'Duck Dynasty' in the first place because executives believed Americans would laugh at the redneck antics of the self-described 'white trash' family.
Socialism states that you owe me something simply because I exist. Capitalism, by contrast, results in a sort of reality-forced altruism: I may not want to help you, I may dislike you, but if I don't give you a product or service you want, I will starve. Voluntary exchange is more moral than forced redistribution.
The European style of living is seductive: fewer hours worked, more hours at the cafe, less concern over self-betterment. But that style of living does not produce a purposeful life.
Wishful thinking won't make the Palestinians an Israeli peace partner, no matter how much President Barack Obama pressures Israel to make concessions; caustically mocking Putin's worldview won't make it any less real or mitigate the Russian threat.
Why should Congresspeople have to visit D.C.? Thanks to Skype, meetings are possible across the country. Thanks to email, communications are simple. And we've had the technology to vote from afar for decades. Why should we have backroom deals made over cigars thousands of miles distant from those who are affected by those deals?
Few Americans have ever met their Congresspeople. They don't see them at the grocery store; they don't meet them at the bowling alley. They're more likely to see their representatives in photographs from the Daily Grill in Washington, D.C., than at a local town hall.
In many cases, Obama's exercise of authoritarian power is criminal. His executive branch is responsible for violations of the Arms Export Control Act in shipping weapons to Syria, the Espionage Act in Libya, and IRS law with regard to the targeting of conservative groups.
Capitalism invariably boils down to barter between two willing parties, neither of whom uses force to work with the other.
The most formative time of our lives are the years between birth and age 21, when we explore who we are and learn from those who surround us.
When Americans are faced with the prospect that they can never earn their way to wealth, they have two choices: to rebel against the system, or to settle into depressed complacency.
The Muslim world just doesn't believe that skin color is all that important. Obama may be half-black, but he's still all-Western, according to them. It doesn't matter whether you're black, white or green - if you're not a devotee of Muhammad, you don't matter.
Obama has placed himself in perfect political position: he spent the 2008 campaign convincing the American people that he's a racial unifier rather than a divider, without any evidence to prove it.
President Obama is one of the great political knife-fighters in modern history. He is a failed president - his economy is bleak, his foreign policy bleaker, his vision for American even bleaker still. But he wins.
Distrust of government isn't baseless cynicism. It's realism.
Hillary Clinton is not that fascinating a person. According to those who have spent time with her, she's harsh and demanding. According to those who haven't - like her husband - she's a delight.
President Obama is a gifted politician. He is gifted with rhetoric virtuosity. He is gifted with the ability to lie directly to camera without blinking. And he is gifted with some of the most incompetent conservative opposition in the history of the country.
The Left masks its distaste for the Bible's condemnation of homosexuality in a straw man argument that Bible believers are violent bigots. They are not. Citing the Bible doesn't make you a bigot against human beings - it makes you a bigot against sin, which is a good thing.
When the Soviet Union fell, optimistic scholars believed the world had shifted inexorably in the direction of free markets and liberal democracy. Instead, the West gradually embraced bigger government and weaker social bonds, creating a fragmented society in which the only thing we all belong to, as President Barack Obama puts it, is the state.
When people are desperate or wealthy, they turn to socialism; only when they have no other alternative do they embrace the free market. After all, lies about guaranteed security are far more seductive than lectures about personal responsibility.
Leisure time is only leisure time when it is earned; otherwise, leisure time devolves into soul-killing lassitude. There's a reason so many new retirees, freed from the treadmill of work, promptly keel over on the golf course: Work fulfills us. It keeps us going.
Obama's pop-cultural focus may seem demeaning to the office of the presidency. It may be mockable. But it is also tremendously effective.
Members of Congress have more in common with the people they hobnob in Washington, D.C., than they do with the people they're supposed to represent.
Vice President Joe Biden believes that illegal immigrants are citizens. Obama believes that some Americans who join Islamist groups are citizens, while others are not. Who is an American? Whomever the executive branch deems an American. Who isn't? It depends on whether Obama ate his Wheaties or not.
Every time we rock our babies in the night, we bring order back to a disordered world. Every time we look down at our children and cry, we make the world one shade brighter. That's what children do to us - and for us.
Socialism has no moral justification whatsoever; poor people are not morally superior to rich people, nor are they owed anything by rich people simply because of their lack of success. Charity is not a socialist concept - it is a religious one, an acknowledgment of God's sovereignty over property, a sovereignty the Left utterly rejects.
Despite the fact that he has run the most incompetent administration in history, President Obama remains a solid bet for re-election in 2012. Obama's frontrunner status springs from two crucial facts: first, by overexposing himself in the public eye, he has made himself larger than life; second, the Republican field is pathetically weak.
Obama's entire foreign policy was predicated on the notion that by existing, he would bridge all gaps and bury all hatchets. Instead, the Muslim world burns his picture even as he tells them he respects their radicalism. It turns out that diversity is a one-way street for the devotees of global Islam.
In Britain, where the social safety net is more like a social swaddling cloth, crime rates other than murder are significantly higher than in the United States.
Obama wants to raise the issue of immigration reform so that he can demonize Republicans as anti-Hispanic. That's why Obama ignores the broad support for an immigration plan that would provide border security once and for all and then deal with the illegal immigrants who live here.
Obamacare has made the government part of our health care decisions. The IRS controls all of our financial information. The NSA apparently sees everything else.
Same-sex marriage is not the final nail in the coffin for traditional marriage. It is just another road sign toward the substitution of government for God. Every moral discussion now pits the wisest moral arbiters among us - the Supreme Court, President Obama - against traditional religion.
The story of Detroit's bankruptcy was simple enough: Allow capitalism to grow the city, campaign against income inequality, tax the job creators until they flee, increase government spending in order to boost employment, promise generous pension plans to keep people voting for failure. Rinse, wash and repeat.
Obama rammed through Obamacare legislation without a single Republican vote.
Liberals in Hollywood can't stand when Americans resonate to conservatives on television.
Socialism violates at least three of the Ten Commandments: It turns government into God, it legalizes thievery and it elevates covetousness. Discussions of income inequality, after all, aren't about prosperity but about petty spite. Why should you care how much money I make, so long as you are happy?
It took capitalism half a century to come back from the Great Depression.
There are times that everyone hates his or her job. Were they freed from the economic consequences of having these jobs, they'd drop out of the workforce. There are only two problems with this strategy: First, someone has to pay for it; second, it is not the recipe for human fulfillment.
Obama seems to inspire a bizarre personal loyalty among his advocates, particularly among young people who should by all rights be concerned with their fading futures and collapsing prospects.
With the dramatic increase in ease of transportation and the incredible decrease in the amount of time required to travel between far-flung areas of the United States, representatives began spending more and more time in Washington and less and less time in their home districts.
Thanks to presidential immunity and executive control of the Justice Department, there are no consequences to executive branch lawbreaking. And when it comes to presidential lawbreaking, the sitting president could literally strangle someone to death on national television and meet with no consequences.
