"it’s not just charity, it’s not just that I want to help the middle class and working people who are trying to get in the middle class... we actually make sure that everybody’s got a shot... when young people can all go to college, when everybody’s got decent health care...

John McCain and Sarah Palin they call this socialistic. You know I don’t know when, when they decided they wanted to make a virtue out of selfishness." -- Candidate Barack Hussein Obama, Oct. 31, 2008, Sarasota, FL

by Eric Dondero

Copenhagen is at least succeeding at accomplishing one objective of the worldwide libertarian/free market movement; it's sharpening the lines between those of us who support freedom and those who do not.

Robert Tracinski of Real Clear Politics writes this morning that British global warming activist George Monbiot "has just written probably the single most important column on the issue."

From the UK Guardian, "Bigger than Climate Change: A Battle to Redefine Humanity," by George Monbiot:

This is a meeting about chemicals: the greenhouse gases insulating the atmosphere. But it is also a battle between two world views. The angry men who seek to derail this agreement, and all such limits on their self-fulfilment, have understood this better than we have. A new movement, most visible in North America and Australia, but now apparent everywhere, demands to trample on the lives of others as if this were a human right. It will not be constrained by taxes, gun laws, regulations, health and safety, especially by environmental restraints. It knows that fossil fuels have granted the universal ape amplification beyond its Palaeolithic dreams. For a moment, a marvellous, frontier moment, they allowed us to live in blissful mindlessness.

The angry men know that this golden age has gone; but they cannot find the words for the constraints they hate. Clutching their copies of Atlas Shrugged, they flail around, accusing those who would impede them of communism, fascism, religiosity, misanthropy, but knowing at heart that these restrictions are driven by something far more repulsive to the unrestrained man: the decencies we owe to other human beings.

Humanity is no longer split between conservatives and liberals, reactionaries and progressives, though both sides are informed by the older politics. Today the battle lines are drawn between expanders and restrainers; those who believe that there should be no impediments and those who believe that we must live within limits. The vicious battles we have seen so far between greens and climate change deniers, road safety campaigners and speed freaks, real grassroots groups and corporate-sponsored astroturfers are just the beginning. This war will become much uglier as people kick against the limits that decency demands.

this first great global battle between expanders and restrainers must be won... If governments don't show some resolve on climate change, the expanders will seize on the restrainers' weakness. They will attack – using the same tactics of denial, obfuscation and appeals to self-interest. There is no end to this fight, no line these people will not cross. They too are aware that this a battle to redefine humanity...

Tracinski responds in a column at Yahoo News, "Capping our Carbon, and Crushing our Spirits":

Monbiot is right about the big question, even if he's on the wrong side of it. The goal of the environmentalist movement is not anything so trivial as capping our carbon. It's about crushing our spirits. It's about breaking the ambition of man the achiever-the explorer, the adventurer, the discoverer, the builder-and replacing him with man the meek, a modest little paper-shuffler constrained to live a small, inoffensive existence.

Make man feel small. Make man feel guilty. Kill his aspiration and his integrity....

This is most important. Don't allow men to be happy. Happy men are free men. So kill their joy in living.... Bring them to a state where saying "I want" is no longer a natural right but a shameful admission....

Let all sacrifice and none profit. Let all suffer and none enjoy. Let progress stop. Let all stagnate. There's equality in stagnation.

People say Ayn Rand's novels are unrealistic, so why does real life seem so compelled to imitate them? Monbiot even has the kind of last name Ayn Rand would have given one of her villains. Ellsworth Toohey, Wesley Mouch, Claude Slagenhop, George Monbiot. It just fits in.

Monbiot got one thing spectacularly wrong; it is those of us on the Capitalist Right, especially those of us involved in the Tea Party movmement, who are the true Grass Roots, not the Communists who control Governments around the Globe and their government-subsidized protesters in the Labor movement.

But he did get at least one thing right: We Proud Capitalists "will cross any line," to protect our Individual Freedoms, even if it means the fight will get real ugly. Bring it on!