Opinion: Letters to the Editor

Letters to the Editor: Nov. 21, 2012

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Opinion,Letters to the Editor

America still needs a free market, pro-life party


The last thing our vibrant, passionate democracy needs is two liberal parties, with a minimal -- and eventually nonexistent -- contest of ideas. But this is what would happen if the Republican Party took Doug Delmont's advice in the aftermath of the recent presidential election.

The Republican Party must guard against the temptation to indulge in a panicked knee-jerk reaction by jettisoning its noble principles, such as safeguarding free-market economics, religious liberty, traditional marriage, self-reliance and the right to life. Demographic changes or not, these are five crucial principles that lead to a stronger society and ultimately a stronger country.

However, one thing must change as the GOP embarks on the road to 2016: the presidential nomination process. The current practice of very public internecine warfare, with all the party's dirty linen being washed in public, did critical damage in 2012, giving the average swing voter an image of a party at war within itself. It also gave the media and the Obama campaign a large opening to demonize those who forgot Ronald Reagan's maxim that Republicans should not attack fellow Republicans.

The solution is to bring back the proverbial "smoke-filled room" where the party's senior figures can pick a candidate who not only can explain their principles to the general electorate, but who also has the crucial likeability factor so important in a modern democracy where image tends to carry more weight than substance.

John B. Reid

County Dublin, Ireland

Dumping religious right would be certain death for GOP


Doug Delmont insists that those of us whose religious faith influences our voting choices "[cost] the GOP votes." Yet Evangelical Christians make up a substantial portion of the GOP. To eschew what Delmont and his fellow secularists call the "religious right" would cost the GOP the votes of hundreds of thousands of evangelical Christians, thus ensuring the party's demise.

Delmont claims that "spending and liberty are all that matters now" while simultaneously denying human babies the right to life and the chance to enjoy liberty and the pursuit of happiness. He insists that Christians are "fanatics" who threaten individual rights. Yet our own Founding Fathers recognized the fact that our rights are given to us by our Creator. To deny Him is to deny the very concept of "inalienable" rights.

Secularists who attack God and His just laws view individual rights the same way they view marriage: as mere societal constructs that must be abolished in the false name of progress.

Joe Garber


Keynesian economics is a fairy tale

While there are many idiotic political theories bouncing around Washington like unmanned bumper cars, Keynesian economics -- the belief that making government bigger will subsequently make the overall economy bigger -- is the worst.

Keynesian economics is the most absurd theory every devised by rational man. If it were true, then by merely making one variable common to all others larger, one could cause all other dependent variables to grow larger in unison.

That doesn't happen in real life, which is why Keynesian economics is nothing more than a fairy tale.

Matthew R. Powenski

Buffalo, N.Y.

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