Some Common Truths About Trees

1. Man-made global warming is a fraud. The focus on curbing carbon dioxide emissions is a complete waste of time and fortune. Concern for the environment is totally legitimate, however, the taxing of fossil fuels and regulation carbon emissions will serve only to take money out of our pockets and give it to the government and those they deem more deserving of our money. It will do nothing to curb climate change. It will do nothing to help the environment. It will condemn billions of the world's population to eternal poverty. The world's temperature has never followed changes in greenhouse gasses. There is no legitimate reason to think they will in the future. Everything you have been told about man-made global warming is a lie.

2. Government run health care is an inevitable failure. The government never runs anything more efficiently than the private sector. The only way governments save money on health care is by rationing care. The result is always reduced services, less innovation, longer waits, and less accountability. If you want to pay less for health care, join an HMO and accept less access to specialized medicines and someone else making health care decisions for you, or, better yet, start a Health Savings Account (HSA) and buy a high deductible health insurance policy which gives you responsibility for minor health related issues yet protects you from catastrophic losses. Isn't that what insurance is for after all? The reason why third party insurance is so expensive is because it is really health care financing.

3. The U.S. Constitution is the foundation of America's greatness. It established in word, for all to see, our country as one made of law, not of man, and governed for, by, and of the people. When we stray from that ideal, when we cease to become a country governed my law but rather by man, we endanger the very future of our country and the uniqueness of American experiment. I believe that America is worth preserving for future generations. So, how do we endanger the constitution? When we neglect to interpret the constitution according to the words and their original intent. Words mean what they say. When we decide to ignore what they say because their intent is inconvenient or counter to what we desire, we are saying that the words don't mean what they say and, therefore, the rights the constitution enshrines for us, given by God, do not exist.

For example, the Second Amendment of the Bill of Rights gives all able-bodied individuals (understood as the militia) the right to keep and bear arms. That right was enshrined because the Founding Fathers were supremely suspicious of the power and authority of the countries from which they came, countries governed by the rule of man. They also understood that it was possible for the government to cease to govern according to its own constitution. They, therefore, recognized in the bill of rights the natural right of individuals to keep and bear arms for their own protection and, if necessary, to hold the government accountable if it failed to govern constitutionally. The Second Amendment does not exist so hunters and sportsmen can keep a shotgun to hunt or shoot skeet!

Many people quite reasonably believe that individuals should not have the right to own handguns. That is a legitimate opinion to have. It is not legitimate, however, to simply "reinterpret" the constitution to say that individuals should not have that right because the founders could not have envisioned they way we live in this day and age. The constitution establishes the means to change through constitutional amendment and it is appropriately difficult to do. If you want to change the constitution, change it. But when we say that the constitution may be reinterpreted to reached a desired outcome, we are in effect saying that the words don't mean what they say. If that is the case then none of the words mean what they say, they are not natural rights given by God, and our rights do not exist.