Intercollegiate Studies Institute on Marquette Campus

The Intercollegiate Studies Institute is a conservative organization, both free market and traditionalist, that defines itself as follows.

The Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI) is a non-profit, non-partisan, tax-exempt educational organization whose purpose is to further in successive generations of college students a better understanding of the values and institutions that sustain a free and humane society.

Founded in 1953, ISI works “to educate for liberty” — to identify the best and the brightest college students and to nurture in these future leaders the American ideal of ordered liberty. To accomplish this goal, ISI seeks to enhance the rising generation’s knowledge of our nation’s founding principles — limited government, individual liberty, personal responsibility, the rule of law, market economy, and moral norms.

A conference on Alexis de Tocqueville, which will be coming up in just a few days, is typical of their activities.

We had lunch last week with the president of the Marquette chapter, Paco Nava, and he’s a sincere fellow committed to the values of the ISI. The organization is small on the Marquette campus, indeed Nava may be its only real activist. But it is a recognized student organization, and even a small cadre of students with some boldness and a sense of purpose can accomplish a lot. Any student who subscribes to the principles of the ISI ought to contact Nava. ISI might be the right organization at the right time and the right place.

The Authoritarianism of the Democratic Candidates Shows Itself

The World According to Nick, a video of Obama lauding the Communist Chinese way of doing things, claiming that their infrastructure is much better than ours.

Here is the video.

Nick Schweitzer comments:

And if in the process of building this wonderful new infrastructure, I protest that it will tear down my home, will you also send me for “re-education through labor”? Unless you are terribly naive Barack, you know that the speed with which this infrastructure came about came at a high cost to civil liberties. One which we as a people feel is too high to pay. . . so much so that we enshrined it in our Constitution.

Of course, one might complain that Obama really doesn’t believe in forced labor. Maybe not, but he ought to be more careful about lauding a system based on it. What he said would be a bit like lauding agricultural efficiency in the antebellum South, without bothering to mention the little issue of slavery.

But Obama’s running made, Joe Biden, most certainly does believe in forced labor. As Schweitzer explains:

Of course your new Vice Presidential pick knows all about forced labor. He wants mandatory conscription for all citizens to the army, or civil service corps:

In 1988, [we in Congress] not only introduced a bill for mandatory universal service, but you get to pick one of three things: if you chose the army, it’s six months; if you chose a domestic Peace Corps, it’s two years; if you chose foreign Peace Corps, you only have to do it a year. Everyone man and woman when they get to be eighteen they can chose what they want, but there should be universal service unless there is an extreme physical disability.

Is this how you intend to bring about “Change We Can Believe In”? Forced labor and service?

Yes, at root, Democrats simply don’t believe in individual liberty.