Guest Post: Socialism Is UnAmerican by Duane Lester
Tuesday, November 18th, 2008The following is a guest post from Duane Lester of All American Blogger, where you can find other great articles. Sign up for their free RSS feed so you don’t miss a single post.
What is the spirit of America, and what does it mean to be an "American." Perhaps I am old fashioned, but I think the American spirit exists in the blood, sweat, and tears of hard work, effort and the desire to achieve on the strength of self, with as little government interference as possible.
It is rugged individualism, yet it is also community. I know that sounds like a contradiction, but I’ll explain it.
An American is an individual. He is responsible for himself, and for his family. He works hard, uses his head and becomes a success, however he defines it. If he finds himself in some rough times, he turns to the community. Family, churches and charities are there to offer support, whether it be food, a place to rest his head, or simple reassurance that this too shall pass. They don’t have to. They want to. And he accepts their charity thankfully and puts it to use. He continues to move forward until he becomes a success. Once a success, he begins to give back to the community.
There was a man whose father was a traveling salesman. The father "expended considerable energy on tricks and schemes to avoid plain hard work." The son, however, took a job at 16 as an assistant bookkeeper and vowed to give 10% of his wealth to charity upon retiring. His name was John D. Rockefeller and he ended up giving away $550 million.
But no one forced him to help. No one forced him to surrender property to another because a third party thought it was "fair." That would be unAmerican. Property rights are sacred. Consider the words of one of our Founding Fathers, Thomas Jefferson:
“To take from one because it is thought that his own industry and that of his father’s has acquired too much, in order to spare to others, who, or whose fathers have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association–’the guarantee to every one of a free exercise of his industry and the fruits acquired by it.’”
In Jefferson’s mind, it was unacceptable to force you to surrender your property so that another 
could have it out of "fairness." He makes it very clear. No one, no man nor agent of government, should take from one to give to another because it is felt that one has too much and another too little, even when faced with a tragedy.
Col. Davey Crockett explains how he was educated on this principle, from a constituent of his who said he would never vote for Crockett again because he voted to give $20,000 to residents in Georgetown who had suffered from a fire. He was told:
In the first place, the government ought to have in the Treasury no more than enough for its legitimate purposes. But that has nothing to do with the question. The power of collecting and disbursing money at pleasure is the most dangerous power that can be entrusted to man, particularly under our system of collecting revenue by a tariff, which reaches every man in the country, no matter how poor he may be, and the poorer he is the more he pays in proportion to his means. What is worse, it presses upon him without his knowledge where the weight centers, for there is not a man in the United States who can ever guess how much he pays to the government. So you see, that while you are contributing to relieve one, you are drawing it from thousands who are even worse off than he. If you had the right to give anything, the amount was simply a matter of discretion with you, and you had as much right to give $20,000,000 as $20,000. If you have the right to give to one, you have the right to give to all; and, as the Constitution neither defines charity nor stipulates the amount, you are at liberty to give to any and everything which you may believe, or profess to believe, is a charity, and to any amount you may think proper. You will very easily perceive what a wide door this would open for fraud and corruption and favoritism, on the one hand, and for robbing the people on the other. No, Colonel, Congress has no right to give charity. Individual members may give as much of their own money as they please, but they have no right to touch a dollar of the public money for that purpose.
We have drifted away from the principles taught to Col Crockett, the principles this country was founded upon.
On this founding principle sits my premise. Socialism does not fit into America in any way, shape or form. Socialism is the government sanctioned genocide of the one minority not protected by liberalism: the individual. There is no individual in the collective. You do not have property, the collective does. You don’t get rewarded for your hard work, you get what the collective thinks you need. You don’t get to achieve, as there can be no one who stands out in the collective.
Winston Churchill said:
…a socialist policy is abhorrent to the British ideas of freedom. Socialism is inseparably interwoven with totalitarianism and the object worship of the state. It will prescribe for every one where they are to work, what they are to work at, where they may go and what they may say.
We have been slowly moving towards socialism. We are not there yet, but we are moving towards it every day. The government taxes people, meaning they seize their property, so that others may get food stamps, rather than going to a church run food bank. They seize property of those without children to ensure that other people’s children are taught according to guidelines established by the government. This is done for the "common good." Socialists talk about spreading the wealth around because it would be "fair." America is not about the redistribution of wealth. It is about creating the opportunity for others to create their own wealth.
Everything socialism stands for is the antithesis of what America stands for. And yet we continue to march down the road to serfdom. This should terrify those living in countries where America is the shining city on the hill. Places like Cuba, where people still risk their lives fleeing from socialist rule, in search of an American shore. I remember a story Ronald Reagan told in 1964.
He said:
Not too long ago, two friends of mine were talking to a Cuban refugee, a businessman who had escaped from Castro, and in the midst of his story one of my friends turned to the other and said, "We don’t know how lucky we are." And the Cuban stopped and said, "How lucky you are? I had someplace to escape to." And in that sentence he told us the entire story. If we lose freedom here, there’s no place to escape to. This is the last stand on earth.
The last stand on Earth is being overrun by the slow marching socialist hoards, moving under the banner of fairness. When it eventually falls, where will the downtrodden and persecuted of the world turn to for inspiration and freedom?
The only thing left will be the collective.
Does Socialism Scare The Market?–UPDATED Iowahawk’s Tour Of Socialist Celebration
Wednesday, November 5th, 2008Nah.
What little capital gains you made, you might want to take, right? Nah.
UPDATED:
Somebody’s happy. Lots of somebodies.
Why The Really Rich Love The Socialists
Friday, October 31st, 2008Why The Really Rich Love The Socialists
Socialism usually is an oligarchy. Something I’ve argued before.
If Obama’s Administration Takes Your 401K, Can We Call Him A Socialist Then?
Friday, October 24th, 2008A dear reader wrote yesterday that using the term “socialist” is a code word:
Martin Luther King Jr, W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, A. Philip Randolph, etc were all denounced as “socialists”. Just as with Obama, the term is employed as a euphamism for something else entirely.
Righties have simply reached back in history to use an old code word for black. It set whites apart from those deemed unAmerican and those who could not be trusted during the communism scare. It’s funny, McCain wants to buy your house - and Obama’s the socialist.
Well, I don’t know about whether the aforementioned men were socialist or not. What I know is this: socialism is soothing ideology in troubled times and for people who are afraid about their survival. And socialism never turns out the way people hope or plan.
Long-time readers know that I have expressed worry about Americans generally and our leadership in particular when it comes to government handouts. It seems that far too many people are willing to enslave themselves (for that is exactly the relationship when one depends on the government for survival) in order to have a guarantee of economic safety. So today, we have businesses and individuals who because of irresponsible living, rely on the government long-term. The government is a harsh taskmaster. A nameless, faceless bureaucrat will decide a person’s fate.
Long-time readers also know of my unease about John McCain and my discomfort about the “bailout”. So, when I criticize Barack Obama, it’s a matter that I think he is more extreme than John McCain when it comes to big government and redistribution. That is to say, I have not liked the socialistic trend our government has taken. There seems to be an impulse, no matter the leader, to invade every aspect of American’s lives. The most invasive way to do that is to take a person’s money–their economic choices via taxation.
Obama is just more extreme in his desire for the government to control American’s money. He has more socialistic impulses than the other candidate. That is just one reason I oppose his candidacy. It’s a big reason.
Here is the 401K concern:
House Democrats recently invited Teresa Ghilarducci, a professor at the New School of Social Research, to testify before a subcommittee on her idea to eliminate the preferential tax treatment of the popular retirement plans. In place of 401(k) plans, she would have workers transfer their dough into government-created “guaranteed retirement accounts” for every worker. The government would deposit $600 (inflation indexed) every year into the GRAs. Each worker would also have to save 5 percent of pay into the accounts, to which the government would pay a measly 3 percent return. Rep. Jim McDermott, a Democrat from Washington and chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee’s Subcommittee on Income Security and Family Support, said that since “the savings rate isn’t going up for the investment of $80 billion [in 401(k) tax breaks], we have to start to think about whether or not we want to continue to invest that $80 billion for a policy that’s not generating what we now say it should.”
A few respectful observations:
1) McDermott is right when he says the savings rate isn’t going up. But the savings rate doesn’t include gains to money you invest in the stock market. It ignores the buildup of net worth. (If you bought a share of XYZ Corp. in January at $100, for instance, and its value doubled by December, the savings rate measure would still value that investment at $100. In short, the savings rate is a phony number.)
2) So based partly on the above faulty logic, the $4.5 trillion, as of the start of the year, invested in 401(k) plans doesn’t count as savings.
3) Ghilarducci would have workers abandon the stock market right at the bottom of the market. A stupid idea, according to Warren Buffett: “I don’t like to opine on the stock market, and again I emphasize that I have no idea what the market will do in the short term. Nevertheless, I’ll follow the lead of a restaurant that opened in an empty bank building and then advertised: ‘Put your mouth where your money was.’ Today my money and my mouth both say equities.”
4) Ghilarducci would offer a lousy 3 percent return. The long-run return of the stock market, adjusted for inflation, is more like 7 percent. Look at it this way: Ten thousand dollars growing at 3 percent a year for 40 years leaves you with roughly $22,000. But $10,000 growing at 7 percent a year for 40 years leaves you with $150,000. That is a high price to pay for what Ghilarducci describes as the removal of “a source of financial anxiety and…fruitless discussions with brokers and financial sales agents, who are also desperate for more fees and are often wrong about markets.” Please, I’ll take a bit of worry for an additional $128,000.
5) What effect would this plan have on an already battered stock market? Well, I would imagine it would send it even lower, sticking a shiv into the portfolios of everyone who didn’t jump aboard. But I am sure the Chinese would love to jump in and buy all our cheap stocks to fund the retirement of their citizens.
With the Democrats controlling Congress, having Barack Obama in the White House will mean there is no stop to any socialist impulses. For me, I like an adversarial relationship in Washington. Gridlock is a beautiful thing. That means that no laws can be made. Good.
Everything the government touches turns to dung. Democrats unfettered frightens me. They believe in big government generally. They believe in government as a solution to all problems.
Since I believe that the government is not a force for good and never will be, I am not voting for a guy who believes that the problem isn’t big government, it’s just that big government isn’t done right. That, to me, is rank hubris.
Democrats can save their charges of racism. It’s offensive and to quote their Dear Leader, a distraction. The problem with Barack Obama is not his skin color. In fact, I eagerly anticipate the day when I can vote for a black man for president. But not this man. My opposition is based in ideology. It is philosophy. It is policy. And because I disagree with Barack Obama on nearly everything, I’m not voting for him.
Barack Obama’s Friends & Beliefs
Thursday, October 23rd, 2008Sorry to beat the drum, but Bill Ayers and Barack Obama are good friends. Period. Here’s more from a victim of Ayers:
One thing that strikes me with all this, is that with the cacophony of news and the news cycle, it’s impossible to keep everything straight. This clip was five months ago. Since Barack Obama seems to want to obfuscate and disavow his relationships with all these people, I thought I’d put his friends together in one post.
Here’s Jeremiah Wright who married Barack Obama, who baptized his children and has been Obama’s “mentor”:
Here’s Franklin Raines, Barack Obama’s financial adviser to the campaign. If you’ll recall, he was the CEO of Freddie Mac who raked in over $90 million (this video is rough, but informative):
And here are the Republicans seeking to better regulate Freddie Mac and Fanny Mae. You’ll also see prominent Democrats who are calling the firing of Franklin Raines a “lynching”.
Obama wasn’t in the United States Senate to have much of a record. His record in Illinois was liberal and par for the Chicago machine. And here, Obama is taken to task for his views on infanticide and why valuing innocent life is important in principle and how it will affect other decisions:
Barack and Michelle Obama talk about pie-sharing, spreading the wealth and “neighborliness”:
This election is about a couple things: the economy and judgment. On both accounts, Barack Obama has the instincts of a secular socialist. He has the friends of a still true-blue radical. And I think Biden is right: Barack Obama will be tested to see what he’s made of. Americans can’t say they didn’t know.
Sweden: The Canary In The Socialist Landmine
Sunday, October 19th, 2008This post, over at Brussels Journal is an excellent primer on how to ruin a Western Democracy. I’m excerpting a snippet, but please go read the whole thing:
“As political and economic freedom diminishes” said Aldous Huxley’s in Brave New World, “sexual freedom tends compensatingly to increase.” This fits perfectly with Huntford’s description. The state strips away your personal, economic and political freedom, yet grants you sexual freedom in return, boldly hailing itself as your liberator. Sweden in 2008 is a society with no real freedom of speech if you deviate from the ruling ideology. The more crushing ideological censorship and political repression become, the more frantic the displays of “sexual freedom” get. Sex is freedom; freedom means sex, and only sex.
State authorities present this as liberation of women and sexual liberation, but it is actually about breaking down rival sources of power: The traditional Christian culture and the nuclear family. This leaves the state more powerful since it can regulate all aspects of life and, most importantly, can indoctrinate the nation’s children as it sees fit, without undue parental interference. The state replaces your family, raises your children and cares for your elderly.
Meanwhile, the country is in the midst of the most explosive rape wave in recent history, largely caused by immigration. While Swedish girls are called “whores” by immigrants, Swedish boys are told to be as “gender neutral” as possible. Traditionally, a nation has been defended by masculine men who take pride in their heritage. By removing cultural pride and any sense of masculinity among native men, the country is rendered effectively defenseless. And maybe that was the intention?
In Western Europe, great emphasis is placed on destroying the heritage of the native population and instilling whites with a guilt complex and shame designed to alienate them from their own history. They are supposed to abase themselves in front of immigrants and tell them how worthless and evil their culture is, or alternatively how much they lament the fact that they don’t have a culture.
Americans wrongly believe that this sort of thing can’t happen here. Watching European nations stumble, one-by-one into cultural annihilation–Sarkozy says that Arabic is the French “language of the future”–it is pure hubris to think America is immune to the softness inbred by post-modern, relativistic, nihilistic, anti-Christian, politically correct thought.
Delusion, Thy Name Is Democrat
Wednesday, October 15th, 2008Delusion, thy name is Democrat. Here are tolerant West Siders cheering jeering McCain-Palin supporters:
In one of Barack Obama’s ads, he talks about thinking about the working man, every single day. That his motivation is to help them. That would be nice, if liberal policies ever helped the middle class.
The kind of society that results from liberal policy is the kind of society you find in cities across America–Detroit, New Orleans, Chicago. In these cities, there are two classes of people: the rich power brokers and the poor people kept poor who support them.
Deluded Democrats hate capitalism even as they hypocritically enjoy the success of capitalism. Deluded Democrats preach environmentalism as they hypocritically hop on their private jets. Deluded Democrats speak of raising taxes as they hypocritically shelter their money, knowing damn well they won’t suffer any loss of lifestyle.
Deluded Democrats preach tolerance even as they hypocritically denigrate anyone who does not hold the same ideology as their own.
The Democrats are anything but liberal and tolerant. Their ideas sound smart, but ignore human nature–including their own.
In conclusion: A parable.
Cross-posted at Right Wing News
Barack Obama Is A Socialist If……..–UPDATED
Tuesday, October 14th, 2008Forget Jeff Foxworthy, that’s too low-brow, Rethuglican humor for ya’ll. Enter the erudite Dr. Obama.
You might be a socialist…..
……if you believe in the redistribution of wealth. Obama said to a small business owner yesterday and Rachel Lucas reports:
“It’s not that I wanna punish your success, I just wanna make sure that everybody behind you, that they have a chance at success, too. I think we need to spread the wealth around.“
You might be a socialist…
……if you believe in “refundables”. Says Ace:
How does he intend to spread the wealth? By increasing the size of federal programs?
Well, that’s a start. But I’m afraid he’s going to spread it around more directly — by taking money away from people who pay taxes to directly give it to those who don’t pay taxes in the form of a “tax cut.”
A tax cut? For people who already don’t pay taxes? That’s not a tax cut, is it? That’s more like a… well, a government handout. It’s a welfare check.
Not so.
Obama prefers to call it “refundables.” Even though you’re not being “refunded” anything, you’re just being sent a thousand or two dollars from someone else’s tax payments.
Here’s a little Wiki for ya’ll who were deprived of a Harvard education and must use online references to educate yourself:
Socialists mainly share the belief that capitalism unfairly concentrates power and wealth into a small section of society who control capital, and creates an unequal society. All socialists advocate the creation of an egalitarian society, in which wealth and power are distributed more evenly, although there is considerable disagreement among socialists over how, and to what extent this could be achieved.[1]
What part of this definition does Barack Obama disagree with, actually? You see, when the government taxes a company disproportionately and redistributes the money made, it is taking profits of the company and essentially controlling how the money is spent. No doubt, the business owners have limited choices because they cannot choose how to spend the money they earn.
As I have written before, this government behavior punishes success. If it gets bad enough, people stop producing, hiring, and do business elsewhere. The POOR and WORKING CLASS people lose what jobs they have, suck more off the government teat, the government needs more tax revenue and creates an even more punitive business environment. See Michigan as socialism is stupid “Exhibit A”.
Leftists who protest at the socialist label are being obtuse. They know that all socialists are not the same, that it’s a broad category, and that Barack Obama certainly is not a Capitalism champion. So what is he, if not a socialist?
Says Investor’s Business Daily:
“I think when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.”
He certainly does, and his unguarded statement to a voter in a key swing state is socialist economics distilled to its simplest terms.Eliminating small business capital gains taxes — whatever the details would be (and you can bet it would be a fraction of total private investment) — will not rescue the middle class from the job losses of a high-tax Obama administration planning to spend an extra $293 billion annually. It does, however, cunningly deaden charges that Obama is camouflaging a socialist agenda.
The other components of his so-called rescue, lovingly described by the New York Times as “proposals to spur new jobs, to give Americans penalty-free access to retirement savings to help them through the downturn, to urge a 90-day moratorium on home foreclosures and to lend money to strapped local and state governments” are worded to sound equally innocuous. But a close look tells another story.
His $3,000 income-tax credit for each new full-time employee hired by businesses is an obvious anti-outsourcing incentive likely to increase business costs, of which we can expect plenty more — of a directly punitive nature — in an Obama administration. He would replace the judgment of banks with that of the federal government regarding when or if to foreclose. And he wants the Federal Reserve and the Treasury to bail out spendthrift state and local governments.
And one thing that has been patently absurd is the whole 95% of people will get tax cuts. It makes no sense. Is Obama really saying that taking the money of the top 5% of American wage earners will make up for what is lost everywhere else? It makes for a good soundbite but it sounds crazy…and yet, people must believe it. The Wall Street Journal notes:
There’s another catch: Because Mr. Obama’s tax credits are phased out as incomes rise, they impose a huge “marginal” tax rate increase on low-income workers. The marginal tax rate refers to the rate on the next dollar of income earned. As the nearby chart illustrates, the marginal rate for millions of low- and middle-income workers would spike as they earn more income.
Some families with an income of $40,000 could lose up to 40 cents in vanishing credits for every additional dollar earned from working overtime or taking a new job. As public policy, this is contradictory. The tax credits are sold in the name of “making work pay,” but in practice they can be a disincentive to working harder, especially if you’re a lower-income couple getting raises of $1,000 or $2,000 a year. One mystery — among many — of the McCain campaign is why it has allowed Mr. Obama’s 95% illusion to go unanswered.
The government controls the money. And when the government controls money, it controls the citizen. Their choices are limited. Their lives constrict to the size the government deems adequate. They are boiled like frogs. Socialists count on the fact that the average person will be swayed by the class warfare rhetoric and ignore the fine print.
“The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.” - Winston Churchill
Obama’s hubris is that he believes socialism just hasn’t been done “right”. Never mind that it never works no matter the iteration. He’s going to try anyway. We can’t say we didn’t know ahead of time.
UPDATED:
Maxed Out Mama lays it out as usual:
Keep in mind that incomes will be trending lower for the next couple of years, due to that little thingamabobble I call a “recession”. Median income is still around $50,000. American households earning less than $30,000 are about 29% of the total. Your subsidies and credits should be mostly aimed at this group. If you want to give 95% of Americans a tax break, that means you are going to be taxing the remaining 5% monumentally more, beginning with household incomes at around $175,000.
For all intents and purposes, raising taxes that much on this group is impossible. Let’s round that group to about 4.5 million, and say that’s equivalent to 9 million individuals. That 9 million individuals would collectively have to pay over 500 billion more in taxes to pay for the refundable portion to the lower brackets. A billion has 3 more zeros than a million, so (500 billion/9 million = 500,000,000,000/9,000,000 = $55,556 per such taxpayer. Needless to say, you are not going to be taxing a person making $175,000 an ADDITIONAL $55,000 if you expect this person to keep working, much less tax a household making $200,000 an ADDITIONAL $110,000, so you are going to have to shift most of that onto much higher income persons.
Cross-posted at Right Wing News
So Barack Obama Isn’t Just A Socialist In Word, But In Membership, Too
Thursday, October 9th, 2008Yesterday, a few readers protested because I said that the current candidates used socialist rhetoric. In the comments, I even pointed to socialist actions. That view was derided as being ignorant of the meaning of socialism. Given what Van Helsing reports today, my post seems even more restrained than it first appeared:
The DSA and its New Party were socialist in the same sense as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics — i.e., they were communists, reviled as extreme even by the Green Party. From American Thinker:
The New Party was a radical left organization, established in 1992, to amalgamate far left groups and push the United States into socialism by forcing the Democratic Party to the left. It was an attempt to regroup the forces on the left in a new strategy to take power, burrowing from within.
That sounds like the Obama/Ayers strategy, all right.Now the New Party has joined the huge crowd under Obama’s bus. There are enough skeletons under there already to keep journalists busy for years, should they ever develop a sense of curiosity.
More at No Quarter, which also has a time line.
Here’s the thing: anyone who has even a cursory knowledge of Karl Marx or socialism, hears the language of a socialist every time Obama speaks. He was schooled in it and marinated in it while coming up through his political career. It is the language of discontent, of government solutions, of screwing the rich, of fairness, of egalitarianism. The fundamental belief, and Obama has this in spades, is that life is not fair and that government can make life fairer. America is unfair. There is also the belief The Greedy and Powerful keeps people down and The System needs to be used to balance this out.
Socialist language soothes in times of trouble. Socialists make promises they simply can’t keep, but when has that ever stopped any politician? Socialism also doesn’t work–well, it doesn’t work well, because it fundamentally ignores human nature. Thus, my joking about not paying my mortgage.
What the government pays for, it reinforces. When a hard working person can make the same amount of money if he doesn’t work, guess what the smart person does? If Barack Obama taxes small business owners, what will the small business owner do? They will STOP hiring or they will let employees go. In response, the socialist government will make laws making it harder to fire people. What will employers do? Stop hiring and start looking for cheaper work forces with less hassle. What will the socialist government do? Require businesses to stay in the country. Cost of goods will inflate. People will have less disposable income. The economy will stall. What will business owners do? CLOSE UP SHOP.
This cycle is so easy to predict because it happens every time it’s tried. And yet, Barack Obama looks across the Atlantic with admiration and Hope and CHANGE! The Germans know a socialist when they see one. One can only hope, Americans do, too.
Even more interesting to me: Why don’t the socialists ever pay more than their fair share? Why do Obama and the rest of his liberal ilk even hire an accountant? Whatever percentage of their hard earned dough they get, why don’t they send it to the Federal Government and earmark the money for the government program they believe is so underfunded? Liberals give far less in charity, mainly because they believe a social safety net should be part of the government not dependent on individuals giving charitably. So, they force people to pay taxes for questionable programs. So fund the programs yourself. Give more in taxes.
But no. Barack Obama, when he made his millions from his book, did what every greedy capitalist does–he bought a nice house in a nice neighborhood for his nice family. He ignores the fact that everyone is free to do the same thing.
He succeeded, but he’s ashamed. It’s not enough for him to privately help those who are in need. No, he wants to force everyone, because he believes everyone is as “selfish” as him, to pay. And yet, right now, he could put his money where his mouth is. He could give extra in taxes. Maybe he believes, like the rest of us looking at a mortgage and kids education, that he doesn’t make enough yet to be so generous. But see, those are evil capitalist thoughts.
With the money Obama has made with his campaign, he’s finally got enough money to be a socialist. The rest of us can’t afford his generosity.
The Next [Socialist] President
Wednesday, October 8th, 2008“God will choose the next president,” said a visiting acquaintance today. And she’s reading prophecies, too. She also mentioned that an extremely socially conservative person was voting for Obama because the person was employed by the federal government and freaked out when McCain mentioned freezing the federal government. See, a big fat government has government employees who are paid by the government and the government is…
YOU.
You pay the taxes. Does this seem obvious?
Increasingly there are the have and have nots–the haves have a intimate relationship with the government teat. The have nots, pay their taxes and ask nothing of the government besides safety and roads without potholes.
The intoxicating part of socialism (the government milk is laced with narcotics and arsenic; the people sucking live like infants in what our family calls a “milk coma”–that lulled state that is sated but not quite asleep) is that someone else pays and it’s not “me”. To get to power socialists point to the few corrupt and sow seeds of discontent. It’s fear that gives elites the strength who then make policies to give themselves more power. Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez is Exhibit “A”.
I haven’t run the numbers as I”m no statistician or economist, but I just wonder what percentage of the American public directly links their employment or accepts handouts from the government. That might explain why both candidates sound like big government, protectionistic socialists.
Cross-posted at Right Wing News
Dr. Melissa
Donations
