Actions speak louder than words, and the actions opposing political ideologies have taken during the Chick-Fil-A controversy say a lot about their respective underlying philosophies.

Free-market libertarian-types like me want people to "vote" for companies they support with their dollars. If a company has a good product at a good price and doesn't insult our values, then we'll give them our business. If they have a bad product or its overpriced or their don't have the same values, we'll take it to a company that does.

That's democratic and that's fair. If enough people like the company, it stays in business. If the company alienates too many people, it goes out of business. It's up to the business to succeed or fail. There's no need to get nasty or to manipulate circumstances by applying top-down pressure to make it cave or to put it of business.

Progressives want to destroy the company that disagrees with them--it's not enough to take their business elsewhere. They have to teach the company a lesson; they have to shout it down then shut it down.

The last time there was a on-the-streets manifestation of the opposing ideologies, the Right rallied to wave flags on street corners. The movement from the Left attacked police, smashed windows, and started fires.

In the Chick-Fil-A matter, the COO said he supported the Biblical definition of marriage. The leaders of the company have an opinion about something. And just because they have that opinion, they are the target of an unbelievable amount of hate.

Progressives and gay activists can have their opinion too. But they reveal the totalitarian tendencies that lurk in their hearts at the root of their top-down, big government ideology when they use the force of the state to squelch ideological opponents.

Along with the usual anecdotal nastiness we see from the Left--a professor berating a Chick-Fil-A employee, a bomb threat, and the hate-filled tweets--progressives also instinctively go to the state to solve the problem of people using free speech they don't like. The mayors of Chicago, Pittsburgh, Boston, and San Francisco warned the Christian company not to pursue new franchises in their cities.

Not satisfied that Chick-Fil-A is taking a beating in the press and cities are threatening to ban it, gay activists will resume the offensive on Friday, literally, by trying to offend people with public displays of gay affection in the restaurants.

When people like me disagree with something, we don't organize a boycott. We don't try to outlaw speech. We don't try to shut people up. We just go somewhere else. When my ideological opponents encounter something they don't like, all too often their gut reaction is to destroy it. And they want to do it with the big government they've created--revealing what is really in their hearts.

Chinese citizen Pan Chunyan's baby was born dead, "black and blue all over," after government thugs grabbed her from a grocery store and forced her to have an abortion. According to Monday's New York Times:

Pan Chunyan was grabbed from her grocery store when she was almost eight months pregnant with her third child. Men working for a local official locked her up with two other women, and four days later brought her to a hospital and forced her to put her thumbprint on a document saying she had agreed to an abortion. A nurse injected her with a drug.

China's "one-child policy" is something that our progressive vice president "fully understands" and won't second guess.

Addressing social and budgetary challenges faced by the U.S. and China in the wake of respective population booms, Biden told his audience, "Your policy has been one which I fully understand -- I'm not second-guessing -- of one child per family."

He added that the problem he had with the policy is that it is unsustainable in that retirees are supported by fewer workers.  Not that it's pure evil, mind you, just that they shouldn't kill quite so many people that it impacts pensions.

Naturally, the Obama Administration issued a "clarification," saying that it "opposes all aspects of China's coercive birth limitation policies" and the vice president finds them "repugnant." A Biden spokeswoman said that he was arguing that the one-child policy is "unsustainable" and therefore was criticizing it. Even if she's right, that means he only thought to criticize it on public finance ground and not on moral grounds.

Clarifications notwithstanding, the attempt to aggressively limit population growth is a hallmark of the Left--not just with Communists and National Socialists, but with progressives.

Margaret Sanger, one of the early leaders of the Progressive Movement, wrote that we should "apply a stern and rigid policy of sterilization, and segregation to that grade of population whose progeny is already tainted or whose inheritance is such that objectionable traits may be transmitted to the offspring." She also believed that "the undeniably feeble-minded should, indeed, not only be discouraged but prevented from propagating their kind."

Sanger's "no-child policy" didn't stop Hillary Clinton from saying she admired her "enormously" when receiving the Margaret Sanger award from the country's number one abortion provider. During the 2008 presidential campaign, Clinton said she is a progressive in the style of the "progressive era at the beginning of the 20^th century"--Sanger's era--one "that we need to bring back to American politics."

What is that number-one abortion provider? Sanger's Planned Parenthood, an organization so sacred to progressives that they declare war on any group that dares to challenge it. Please note at this point that the organization overseeing China's one-child policy is the "National Population and Family Planning Commission." If nothing else, progressives are great and giving bad things happy names.

Sometimes they're more blunt. President Obama's science czar, John Holdren, floated the idea of forced abortions, forced sterilizations and government oversight of human population levels.

In a 1977 book, he and two other environmentalists wrote, "To provide a high quality of life for all, there must be fewer people."

The trio discussed possible government programs to regulate the population.

Those plans include forcing single women to abort their babies or put them up for adoption; implanting sterilizing capsules in people when they reach puberty; and spiking water reserves and staple foods with a chemical that would make people sterile.

That's not far off from Pan Chunyan's forced-abortion injection.

Holdren's book continues with advocating a two-child policy:

Holdren and the Ehrlichs offer ideas for "coercive," "involuntary fertility control," including "a program of sterilizing women after their second or third child," which doctors would be expected to do right after a woman gives birth.

Are modern Progressive Democrats calling for forced population control in this country? No, but as Biden says, maybe they wouldn't second-guess it.

So far we've seen that the number one progressive in the United States, President Obama, saw fit to add to his administration a scientist who one advocated forced sterilizations. The number two progressive, Hillary Clinton, greatly admired a woman who advocated forced sterilizations, and said her entire political ideology is rooted in bringing back the movement that first championed population control in this country. The woman that she and other progressives identify as one of their movement's founders, Margaret Sanger, laid the framework for the country's biggest abortion provider and it remains one of the most fiercely protected organizations on the Left.

While they are unlikely to call for forced birth control anytime soon, is it a stretch to imagine that one day they may attempt to control population growth with a penalizing tax? Many taxpayers already get a credit for having children--how long before progressives flip that around and impose an additional tax on, say, any child after the third. Or perhaps, they can merely provide insurance coverage for the first two children and it's a 100% out of pocket cost after that? On the surface, they could make a pretty convincing argument: Now that government is in charge of health care, we all share each other's burden. Is it fair to ask people with no children to help pay for couples that have six? Shouldn't people kick in a little more if they want to have an "excessive" number of children?

Now that the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court has said that the government has the power to penalize any behavior with taxation, won't taxation as a form of birth control be the next logical step in the century-old progressive campaign to limit populations?

President Obama's Health Care Act and the subsequent Supreme Court stamp-of-approval clears any legal obstacles to the longstanding progressive vision of government control over "family planning". Forget about forced abortions or sterilizations--why go to all that trouble when it's legally possible now to just impose massive financial penalties on people that have "too many" children? 

Michelle Obama is leading a campaign to fight child obesity.

"We want to eliminate this problem of childhood obesity in a generation," the First Lady told Good Morning America in 2010 to kick off her Let's Move nutrition program.

"We all know the numbers," she said. "I mean, one in three kids are overweight or obese, and we're spending $150 billion a year treating obesity-related illnesses."

I'm politically aware enough to realize that her campaign is all about politics, designed to showcase her leadership skills in a safe arena, in what's become a tradition for previous First Ladies, including Laura Bush and Nancy Reagan.

However, that doesn't take away from the legitimacy of the issue selected for Michelle Obama to crusade against. The CDC reports that childhood obesity has more than tripled in the past 30 years. American kids, like American adults, are fat. Food is easily obtainable and cheap, even for poor people.

Sure enough, a study from the Oakland-based nonprofit Children Now showed that 37% of low-income children are overweight or obese.

But while Mrs. Obama complains about kids eating too much, other Progressives say they're starving. Kids can't be fat and starving at the same time, can they?

In the Progressive world we live in, they can.

CNN reported that one in five children are "at risk of hunger." And no, they don't mean hungry the way fat people are always hungry--CNN means they're starving, and cited a report from Feeding America.

The nonprofit Feeding America, a network of more than 200 food banks around the United States, reports one in five children are at risk of hunger.

CNN also referenced a 2010 Department of Agriculture report that 14.5% of households in the United States "lacked the resources to provide enough food for everybody." Kids don't have access to food and are starving, they say.

Michelle Obama and Children Now says kids are fat. The USDA, Feeding America, and CNN say they're starving. So what's going on?

Despite the opposing messages, Mrs. Obama, CNN, the USDA ,and the nonprofit groups are coming from the same place--they're just using two different tactics.

The overarching concern of each of those Progressive entities is to lead you stupid people to do the right thing. You see, you're not responsible enough to take care of your children's nutrition. You feed them too much fast food and not enough veggie wraps like enlightened people do. You need to be nudged to do the right thing.

In a world of socialized medicine, we can't have a bunch of fat people increasing the cost for everybody. So, we're going to treat you like infants and, in Mrs. Obama's case, we'll teach you how to shop at a grocery store, and in CNN's case we'll lie to you and say that children are starving to get your attention to get you to part with even more of your taxpayer dollars to fund more government programs to tell you how to live your life.

Tragically, we waste time, money, and energy worrying about getting food into the mouths of people that are already suffering from obesity instead of committing those resources to helping truly starving people in other countries.

Things are never quite so disgusting while they're still happening. It's only when we look back when we see how bad things were. Had we read that in Ancient Rome well-fed Romans complained they didn't have enough food as they engorged themselves on lavish sofas while non-Roman children died in the street of starvation, we'd shake our heads in disbelief.

But the same thing is happening in the United States, it's just not obvious to most people, particularly Progressives. If Progressives were eating ants off an anthill in Africa to stave off starvation, however, they might see how disgusting it is to spend your time fighting to get more money to pay for food to go into the mouths of already-fat American children.

 Yet in our backwards society, those Progressive elites are the smart ones that we get our information from and lead us, even though a child has more sense than they do.

A little quest of mine is to determine the most succinct way of articulating the difference in worldviews between someone like me and a progressive--discovering a singularity in belief that sends someone down the left or the right path.

Of course, I'm trying to keep it out of the "they-are-dumb-we-are-smart" realm and instead would rather have something that people both sides could look at and agree on.

I always criticize the Left for their reliance on bloated, wasteful, fraud-riddled, and unsuccessful big government programs to socially engineer society. For example, progressives are just learning that kids don't like vegetables. But why do they support this kind of nanny-state stuff and I don't?

For someone that spends a good deal of time complaining about people who can't manage their own lives, you'd think I'd hop on the nanny state train and force people to conform.

Progressives and many conservatives can agree on one thing, I think. People are generally ignorant, discourteous, uninformed, and lazy.

Progressives like to throw around a country bumpkin caricature with a thick southern accent to represent the common man. Obama Regulation Czar Cass Sunstein calls us Homer Simpson. President Obama says cling to our guns and religion. His wife doesn't think we can feed our own children properly.

They're right about that more often than I prefer--I run into many more Homer Simpsons during my day than people who've mastered the art of self government.

Where we differ, however--and hopefully I'm at least approaching a singularity--is what we want to do about it.

I want people to be rewarded naturally for making the smart choices and to accept the consequences of making the dumb ones. If you work hard and make a lot of money, you get to keep it. If you invent a product that people want to pay you for, keep it. If you don't want to work or think, then your life isn't going to be very good. Sorry.

Good behavior, thus encouraged, would increase. Likewise, bad behavior would decrease. And we wouldn't need government overlords to decide who wins and who doesn't. In a paragraph, I've summed up laissez faire economics.

Progressives start out at the same place. There are societal problems and they largely have to do with people making poor decisions. But rather than let people get their just desserts, they want to harness the power of government to eliminate poor decisions through regulation. We're going to make it illegal for you to own guns. We think you aren't smart enough to see through the lies of talk radio or Fox News. You can't be trusted to raise your kids without government's help so we're just going to have to feed your kids for you. You really aren't responsible enough to spend your money in a way that benefits society so we're going to take half of it and spend it for you. You're not bright enough to save for retirement or have savings for periods of unemployment, so we'll have trusts that do that for you.

It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. People become so dependent on unemployment and retirement benefits that they don't save for a rainy day. Shielded from the consequences of their bad decisions, they simply make more of them. Single mom on welfare with three kids? You get more money the more kids you have, why stop there?

Good behavior--being productive members of society--is punished because their incomes are transferred to those on social programs making poor decisions. Many of those people made bad decisions and then get a check in the mail to boot. Society gets worse, increasing the need for government solutions in the eyes of progressives.

However, I'm getting a head of myself. The point here is to simply summarize the difference between us, not analyze whose worldview is superior.

Both sides can agree that people make poor decisions .But while progressives want government to externally influence the individual's decisions via regulations, conservatives want the individual to internally make better choices.

In other words, progressives want to limit choices by making things illegal or heavily taxing them, while conservatives want people to make the correct choice from a wide field of options.

Forming it into a sort of singular definition then, we get this. Progressives think government imposition is necessary to achieve the best result while conservatives think that imposition is precisely what prevents the best result from occurring.

I don't think either side would find anything too distasteful about that statement.

Of course, I can always be trusted to take it one step further, however I lose any chance of getting a definition both sides can agree to.

But I can't help but say, that at the root of it all is that the progressive wants to maximize control, and the conservative wants to maximize freedom.

I think we've lost all meaning of the word freedom, but when you spell it out in terms of limiting choices versus maximizing choices, it becomes clear. The world suddenly rotates from right versus left to up versus down, freedom versus slavery, light versus dark, and good versus evil.

Former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan said President Obama is "a president in trouble" after the 2010 version of the Republican Revolution.

Noonan, addressing an audience at the Thousand Oaks Civic Arts Plaza Tuesday night, touched on a topic that bothers me about Obama and the Progressives.

Since last week's election, she said, Obama shows no sign of understanding why it happened, why he took such a drubbing. "So once again, he seems a little off-point, like he's not seeing the same reality as the American people."

Progressives have this thing about them where they think anyone who disagrees with them is just plain stupid. The universities, the high-society cocktail circuits, the chic A-list actors are all on their side.

But each of those groups has one thing in common, other than being factories churning out Progressive thinkers--they are all out of touch with the real world.

University professors strive for tenure, which is essentially another way of saying you don't have to compete for your job anymore. Unlike every other (private sector) employee in the world, tenured teachers don't have to stay on top of their game to remain viable. Wouldn't you love to have a job like that, where it's almost impossible to fire you? Consequently, teachers are shielded from market forces that affect businesses--yet they have plenty of free time to spout all sorts of theories on them, and they never have to apply their thoughts to a real-world situation. After all, their domain is a college campus, and what closer thing is there to an environment insulated from the rest of the world?

Then there's the high-society cocktail circuit. This is where your media elites and your trust-fund babies rub elbows to regurgitate information about the latest trendy causes, and guffaw at how ignorant people in flyover country are. The only people they associate with are other liberal elites, so they start thinking that their positions are the only real ones. Consider what longtime journalist Bernie Goldberg observed about these elites.

Just think back to that famous observation by the New Yorker's otherwise brilliant film critic Pauline Kael, who in 1972 couldn't figure out how Richard Nixon had won the presidency.

"I can't believe it!" she said. "I don't know a single person who voted for him!" Nixon carried forty-nine states to McGovern's one, for God's sake--and she wasn't kidding!

That's one of the biggest problems in big-time journalism: its elites are hopelessly out of touch with everyday Americans. Their friends are liberals, just as they are. They share the same values. Almost all of them think the same way on the big social issues of our time....After a while they start to believe that all civilized people think the same way they and their friends do.

Finally, we come to the A-list celebrities. Oh, the celebrities. Is there any group of people in the world more out of touch with reality than these people? Most probably don't know their own zip codes.

President Obama is a mix of all three out-of-touch groups--university professor, cocktail-circuit elite, and presidential rockstar.

He's never had a meaningful job in the private sector--he was a student, community activist, teacher, civil rights attorney, and a politician.

He is about as far removed from your average American as you can get, so it's no surprise he was blindsided when we turned against his Euro-socialist big-government policies.

But he learned the wrong lesson.

"[I]t's a matter of persuading people. And giving them confidence and bringing them together. And setting a tone. And making an argument that people can understand," Obama told "60 Minutes."

See? We're stupid. We weren't bright enough to understand what he was doing, so he needs to try harder to get it through our thick, gun-and-bible-clinging skulls.

It's not just an annoying habit of Progressives--the attitude that they know what's best drives everything about their agenda. In a nutshell, they believe that some of us are enlightened and do the right thing, and some aren't--and the ones that aren't need to be coerced into doing what is right by Big Government.

You don't recycle like you should or you drive a big SUV? You small-minded person. You need to have those choices made for you. So we'll just make laws to correct that.

You want plastic bags for your groceries? You don't understand what effect that has on the environment. We'll just have to ban those.

You didn't get your environmentally friendly light bulbs on your own? We'll just have to force you to buy the right ones by banning the "bad" ones.

You Neanderthals still like to own guns? We need to think about others' safety so you can't have those anymore.

And on and on it goes until one day the government is telling you that you can only have one child per family. Meanwhile, the "smart" people aren't bright enough to see where this road leads.

Now, let me say at the start that I'm not trying to offend anyone. There are people I love very dearly that are on the far Left and that support socialism.

"I hate it when people say I'm a commie," one such person told me once, about a conversation they had had with a Republican. "There's a big difference between socialism and communism."

I guess, in the way that a Quarter-Pounder differs than a Big Mac. They are called different things, and are priced separately. One has special sauce, but c'mon, they both have a beef patty, cheese, a bun and they both come from one place. Sure, the Big Mac has more patties and 50 percent more buns, but they are both burgers, right?

And don't give me a hamburger and tell me I'm eating a taco. For example, the latest thing now is to call Marxism "state capitalism."

That's like saying, "meet Whiskers, he's my feline dog."

Um, that looks like a cat. It just meowed.

"No, I just told you, it's a feline dog."

Fortunately, we have organizations like the Party for Socialism and Liberation that are so rabid they don't care about hiding the truth. That's the party for Socialism, and Liberation, ok?

What sort of ideas are mulling through the socialists' heads over there?

On Tuesday, maybe I should head down to Los Angeles and stop by the first of a three-part series of classes on "myths and facts and socialism."

There, the Party for Socialism and Liberation will correct the myth that socialism and communism are related, right?

"Living in the world capital of anti-communism, there are a wide variety of misconceptions and distortions about what socialists believe, and the world we fight to build," a PSL ad for the class reads.

Did they just use communism and socialism interchangeably? Maybe I hallucinated that.

Or maybe not--if the description of the second class is any guide.

Nov. 2: The Communist Manifesto--a guide to changing the world: The Communist Manifesto stands as one of the most well-read books of all time. Printed more than 160 years ago, it has been republished in almost every language, and has been a guide to action in the hands of workers and poor people on all over the world. What is it about the Communist Manifesto that has captured the minds of generations of people, and lead them in struggle? Find out why the Manifesto has been studied by workers in China, farmers in Cuba, soldiers in Russia and autoworkers in Detroit--and what we can learn from it today as we struggle for a better world.

Hmm, autoworkers in Detroit? Certainly American unions wouldn't get mixed up in this. You don't think Andy Stern read the manifesto, do you? (Even the MediaMatters rebuttal of the Stern video refers to "communist and socialist dictators"--but aren't they two entirely different things?)

But certainly we wouldn't confuse socialism, communism, AND Marxism, three, totally separate, unrelated ideas.

Unless you go to the PSL's third class, "Making a revolution--the role of a Marxist party."

No, PSL! You are the Socialist Party, not the Marxist party! Get with the program! S stands for socialism, not Marxism or communism. Can't you see they are three completely, separate, wholly independent ideas, with absolutely nothing to do with each other?

What's next, are you going to tell me that "liberal" is just a happy sounding word for the same idea, that liberals are all about sociali, uh...um...<pause>...er...would be about...<pause>...basically...taking over...and the government running everything?

I'm confident that many liberals/socialist/progressive big government types don't want collectivism, or communism or Marxism in the United States. But I don't think that they see that the uninterrupted growth of government eventually leads there. And it's not me saying it; I wish they'd ask themselves why the Socialist Party seems to be saying it.

With the announcement of the elimination of 500,000 State jobs in Cuba, there are major developments taking place in Cuba's socialist economy. It is essential for progressives and revolutionaries to study these developments through a Marxist lens and draw the appropriate conclusions, as the bourgeois press and the White House pounces on the opportunity to discredit Cuba's revolutionary course.

It is important not to confuse this classical liberalism with the political ideology known as "liberalism" in the United States in the twentieth century. In fact, the ideology of classical liberalism is closer to what today is a current of conservatism in the United States....Also central to classical liberalism was a commitment to a system of free markets as the best way to organize economic life.

A play written by Pulitzer-Prize-winning author George Bernard Shaw will be performed in Ojai this weekend. "Great Catherine" takes place in 18^th century Russia -but Shaw himself might have been more comfortable in 1950's USSR.

The Progressive icon who helped start Britain's Labour Party seemed to have an affinity for Stalin. Of course, we only read about his artistic genius and biting satire. But by just browsing through the Wikipedia entry on the man we can easily see that there was a darker side to the man.

After visiting the USSR in the 1930s where he met Stalin, Shaw became a supporter of the Stalinist USSR. On 11 October 1931 he broadcast a lecture on American national radio telling his audience that any 'skilled workman...of suitable age and good character' would be welcomed and given work in the Soviet Union. Tim Tzouliadis asserts that hundreds of Americans responded to his suggestion and left for the USSR.

It probably wasn't hard for Stalin to win him over. Shaw was already an ardent Socialist and Marxist, though at times he sounded like something else:

He condemned the democratic system of his time, saying that workers, ruthlessly exploited by greedy employers, lived in abject poverty and were too ignorant and apathetic to vote intelligently. He believed this deficiency would ultimately be corrected by the emergence of long-lived supermen with experience and intelligence enough to govern properly.

Supermen, eh? Where have I heard that before...[continue reading]