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MEMBER DIARY

Why we fight the red herring

Left wing academics cum politicians are great at the art of misdirection and Obama is nothing if not an academic/politician – a poor one, but one nonetheless.

So why do so many voters keep on believing him? He would dispute it, but his contention that, say, The Heritage Foundation is only concerned about tax cuts for the rich is right out of the Communist Manifesto. He believes conservative think tanks, as well as conservatives in general, do not care about “the working class.” Surprise, he is not a member of “the working class.” He aspires, consciously or not, to the ruling class and I’ll tell you why.

Whatever one thinks about the Heritage Foundation, we need the rich. We like the rich. We want tax cuts for the rich. The rich provide jobs, investment and opportunity for us. Our economy now is in dismal shape due almost entirely to Obama’s war on “the rich” combined with misguided attempts to make the housing market “fair.” Meanwhile, “the rich,” are simply sitting on investment money until a more favorable economic (read political) climate comes along. The reason Obama doesn’t care about the rich (and indeed is free to vilify them) is that he is paid with the tax money which is extorted from taxpayers at the point of an IRS gun and has been all of his adult life. He has no conception of earning an honest living. Probably half of “the working class” does not pay taxes now anyway. It’s the “wealth creating class” that pays most of the taxes, but that could soon end.

Consider, if we took EVRYTHING the rich has, not just their “obscene profits” as Obama would put it, but ALL of their assets, together the sum would not run the federal government for a year. That is precisely what the old Soviet Union did in the name of Marxist “equality.” They either killed or ran off all the rich people in a vainglorious “class struggle” to protect “the proletariat” and guess what happened? Breadlines, gulags, block watchers, warrantless raids by the state police and KGB murder for seventy years.

No, brother, there is no guarantee that the U.S. must be rich and prosperous. We could easily be as poor as Biafra and we WILL be if we continue to listen to political/academic eggheads like Obama. He sees everything as a function of top down “fairness”, but the market does not work that way. It can indeed appear very unfair. No system operated by man will ever be completely “fair,” however. But rewards (note: not “privileges”) earned (note: not “distributed”) through market capitalism are provided by the most fair of all economic processes. It generally, though not always, rewards merit, industry, frugality, sobriety, maturity and persistence. Big government and high taxes are the enemy of “the working class” far more than some mythical entity known as “the rich.” Most folks who occupy the top quintile of wealth in this country have earned their way up. If you want to get down to it, the six wealthiest Congresspersons are Democrats and most of them inherited or married their wealth, think John Kerry, Jay Rockefeller, Mark Warner, Diane Feinstein, the Kennedy clan, etc. The liberal rich give away a far smaller percentage of their income than do wealthy
conservatives. So much for the vaunted liberal claim to “compassion.” As the old saying goes, I never got a job from a poor person.

The government does not have any money. Yes, it prints money, but it has no wealth creation capacity of its own. It can hinder or enhance wealth production, but in and of itself it is just a giant drag on the economy, that is, beyond its Constitutional mandates for defending the country, securing its borders, regulating interstate commerce, enforcing contracts and whatnot, most of which it does poorly. In fact, a preponderance of what the government does nowadays in unconstitutional and unlawful. Remember, every pencil used by the government, every pointy-headed professor hired by state universities (the vast majority of whom are liberals: sheesh, talk about “unfair”), every car used by the government, every toilet seat, every scrap of paper discarded by some government flunky comes directly out of and is paid for directly by the private sector. Except for the Constitutional caveats mentioned, you can think of the government as pure debt (and much waste, fraud and abuse.)

And while we are at it, public employee unions should be banned forthwith as well. The original ban on them was lifted by JFK and as you can see, government has metastasized from a group of civil servants into a gang of uncivil masters. Now, I’m not talking about the individual NASA engineer or the lone school teacher, for the most part, they are just looking for a job or, at worst, in the possible case of the school teacher, are “useful idiots” as described by Marx. But there now exists an army of faceless, nameless bureaucrats whose sole purpose in life is demanding that they receive cradle to grave benefits along the line of kings and screaming bloody murder when they don’t get them. As we’ve seen repeatedly, there exists a scant few felonies for which they will actually be fired. They can literally kill someone, sit in prison and collect their federal or state salary. For crying out loud, if you don’t like government service or the way you are being treated – quit. There is no law saying you MUST work for the government. Try it in the private sector for a while. Obviously then, no rational, objective reason exists for government unions, except to soak the taxpayer and gold plate the lives of superfluous bureaucrats.

We simply cannot all work for the government, sell insurance to each other or run restaurants. Someone has to create wealth and Obama and his crowd are daily killing our ability to do that. He stopped the Keystone Pipeline; he slowed down domestic drilling in the Gulf (and everywhere else, for that matter); his EPA is closing factories or hamstringing them with redtape as quickly as it can — all without Constitutional authority. Even prior to the ’08 election, Obama told us the problem with the U.S. Constitution is its failure to include “positive rights,” that is, it does not enumerate the right to healthcare, the right to housing, the right to food, the right to shelter, etc. And thank God it does not, because if it did, the implication would be that rights come from the state. And if rights come from the state, they can be taken away by the state. As mentioned above in relation to the old USSR, when the state starts handing out and taking away “rights,” it soon becomes genocidal.

The American way has always been for individuals and families to care for themselves. A so-called safety net may seem reasonable for a “rich society,” but such compassion soon becomes a rocking chair for the indolent and a magnet for the fraudulent. Churches used to fill the gap. Unfortunately, modern liberals want to do private benevolence the easy way, i.e. by letting unaccountable bureaucracies handle all the dirty work while they themselves munch brie, sip Chablis and feel morally superior to me and thee.

Constant attention to “the rich” is simply a red herring used to distract people from Obama and his government-union/aggrievement-mongering class warfare and subsequent plunder of the wealth producers through confiscatory taxation and crushing regulation. We will end up with a Soviet/Greek-style economy soon if we don’t wake up, stop vilifying the rich, stop glorifying the poor, start looking after market capitalism and stop listening to the likes of egg-headed Harvard Law Review editors like Obama who never wrote a review or held a private sector job (“guest lecturer” does not count.)