By the way, have you seen the images floating around the internet comparing pictures of Detroit and Hiroshima, then and now? It’s enough to make you trade your Chevy Volt in on one of the Japanese hybrids.
Meanwhile, back in Washington and New York shortly after Obama took over, liberals in Congress and in the media were having a field day chastising corporations for buying jets, hiring contractors to renovate posh office suites, and giving big bonuses to executives.
Well, guess what? Buying jets, hiring expensive contractors and giving bonuses stimulate the economy. It’s job friendly. And that’s what we needed, wasn’t it? Oops. More liberal dogmas dropping liberal doo-doos all over the place. Liberalism cannot get out of its own way. It is impossible. Liberalism simply runs counter to human nature, and economics is dominated by humans doing what is in their nature.
But, of course, the liberal tenet of wealth envy is paramount to common sense. And apparently, paramount to actual job creation as well. Speaking of which, do you remember the brouhaha over the Starbucks corporate jet issue? It is especially amusing with unintended consequences.
The coffee purveyor, you remember, was mercilessly raked across the media’s coals for taking delivery on a forty five million dollar jet while it was closing stores and laying off baristas. Being the good liberal corporate citizen that they are, they caved and cancelled the jet order.
But how good of a corporate citizen were they really being?
Let’s do the math. Starbuck’s deposit on the jet was lost, which is foolish under any circumstances. How do you think the stockholders felt about that? And seriously, do you really think any baristas were rehired as a result of the jet cancellation? This was an expensive, foolish move of symbolism over substance that likely helped not a single barista. And the consequences rippled past just Starbucks, as liberal consequences always do.
In this case, a big-ticket jet was put back “on the showroom floor” so to speak, reducing by one the need to manufacture such planes. So to ostensibly keep some “hamburger flipper” type jobs that liberals make fun of—which is more or less what a Starbucks barista job is—many high paying jet manufacturing jobs were lost.
And we could go on like this with stories from the headlines on any given day. It’s a fact of life. Liberal policies in action always cave in on themselves, and not just policies involving economics. This is true throughout history on all of a people’s great debates.
Take liberal Neville Chamberlain and his appeasement of Hitler in the 1930’s. He gave away part of Czechoslovakia so that we would have “peace in our time.” How did that work out? About as well as a bounced Czech. It took a violent victory, not a phony peace, to bring lasting peace. Chamberlain’s peace effort led to a stronger Hitler and ultimately millions more deaths than “war mongering” policies would have led to.
Look back at 9-11. Some thirty years of liberal policies regarding intelligence gathering, intelligence sharing and prosecuting terrorists led to an attack that killed three thousand Americans in, well, two of the nations’ most liberal cities. You cannot say this in polite company, but statistically some 90% of the victims likely voted for the policies that led to the dreadful day. I hope Neal Boortz, the self-proclaimed ‘high priest’ of the “Church of the Painful Truth,” has already said that, so I don’t take the heat for it – yet I have no reason to believe he has.
Now think about abortion’s unintended consequences. The feminist movement has called abortion rights a women’s issue. It is defined as the ultimate right for women. Fine. The result? The most likely fetus on the planet to be aborted is a female. In China. That’s women’s rights we can believe in, right? Talk about the circle of life.
Consider school choice. This concept is opposed by the teachers’ unions above all else. These are the unions who are obsessed with raising teacher pay, by the way. So what would be the teacher pay result of a broad school choice program? It would be the equivalent of “free agency” for good teachers and administrators. Think about what free agency has done for pay for athletes. This is another example of liberals being so committed to an ideology that they miss the obvious implications of what they are supporting, which hurts the very people they are supposed to be helping.
Take California’s government cash meltdown. The main culprit is retiree benefits for unionized government workers in the state. And, of course, the result is that current unionized government workers are being laid off, furloughed and not hired. More liberal on liberal crime. With Governor Moonbeam back in office—the man who put many of these unsustainable policies in place during his first run in the State House—Californy is not the place ya outta be.
And let’s not forget Europe and their coddling of Islamists for decades. The result has been a near takeover of European society by gangs and street violence, not to mention ridiculous rules and regulations in airports and schools and other public places. The incomparable Mark Steyn is brilliant on this subject by the way. With the continent’s low birth rate, which is the result of pro-abortion measures and anti-traditional family shifts in their culture, Europe is liberalizing themselves out of existence. Population projections show a majority Muslim continent in the not too distant future. Hope and change is hope and change everywhere, I guess. Liberalism’s failure is universal because liberalism embraces a false view of human nature as perfectible, if only the right political arrangements exist. As Mark Levin so eloquently said in Ameritopia, “liberalism misapprehends human nature.”
And this would all be funny, except that the consequences are so devastating to so many people. And so often the victims are the very liberals the policy was supposed to protect.
After several years of Obama at the helm, we have seen liberalism given enough rope to hang itself. Everything he has done has failed because everything he has done runs head long into reality and human nature. It has failed for the same reason the former Soviet Union failed, and the same reason the Khmer Rouge failed, which are the same reasons Europe is failing. Liberalism is why California and Cuba, two of the most blessed geographies on the planet, are failing.
We are told that we can’t go back to the failed policies of the past. This line works on a percentage of the American people for reasons outlined elsewhere in this book. The irony is, liberalism is truly the failed policy of the past, for all of world history.
YMBAL’S #4
If you find it just fine and dandy that there is such a thing as Malcom X Elementary School…
If you find the no shirt, no shoes, no service requirement at local restaurants near your Occupy rally a cumbersome requirement…
If the phrase “did some blow back in the day” is part of your family dinner conversation…11
If you join in on a sex chain at an Occupy rally and you find your girlfriend at the end…
If your son’s wardrobe is hindered by the fact that your wife burned all of her bras in the ‘60’s…
If the service representatives at the nearest welfare office greet you by your first name…
If you have a parole officer and three bail bondsmen in your contacts list…
If the DMV strikes you as the model of efficiency…
If economic mobility for your family means you can walk from the post office to the liquor store quickly on the first of each month…
If you’ve ever written your grad school thesis with spray paint on the wall of a community center…
If you’ve ever worn Birkenstocks to a formal…
If you actually believe folks drive the 35 electric miles in their Volt…
If you have not come to terms with the fact that what Jerry Sandusky did is allowed within the mission statement of certain groups like NMBLA…
If you think of your closet and not your garage when you hear the term tranny…
If you’ve ever bribed your preacher of two decades to keep him silent during your campaign…12
If you’ve ever redefined exactly what is meant by “big tobacco” with a White House
intern…
If you don’t understand how tort reform could possibly mpact health care costs…
If you’ve ever taken every single tax deduction you could while insisting others “pay their fair share”…
If “fair” is a constant in your vernacular…
...you might be a liberal. (YMBAL)
“I defend the fundamental claim of Marxist theory: there must be countervailing forces that defend people’s needs against the brutality of profit driven capitalism.”
—Cornel West,
The Cornel West Reader
“Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.”
—Winston Churchill
5: FREE MARKET CAPITALISM VERSUS CRONY CAPITALISM
If your idea of business is to have government force an unwilling customer to your door…
One way to understand liberals’ silly perception of business is to realize that many liberals believe that genuine business is something that rarely happens. And by genuine, I mean a business transaction where a willing party of the first part separates himself or herself from money voluntarily so that a willing party of the second part will provide a good or a service to the party of the first part. In other words, a win-win where everyone is honest and happy and no one got ripped off.
You know, buying stuff we want like jet skis or cowboy boots or Caribbean vacations from people who want to sell them to us.
As liberals know, that just will not work. And if it does, it probably happens at some place hateful like Wal-Mart or a Chick-fil-A, and that’s just not acceptable. That’s why they are always in favor of a huge government that forces everyone to do business with them or short of that, a powerful government that forces you to do business with cronies of the liberals in power, buying stuff you do not want.
Now, back in the good ole days—those would be the days before Chief Justice John Roberts decided that you can now be forced to pay taxes on products and services you do NOT purchase—there was a judge who struck a blow against this notion vis a vis Obama Care. That would be Federal Judge Roger Vinson of Florida, who in January of 2011 gave Obama Care—and crony capitalism—a good kick in the pants.
Judge Vinson’s individual mandate ruling is seen, properly, as a defeat for Obama Care and a win for individual freedom. And it is all of that. But there’s more. Perhaps almost as pleasing as the affirmation of individual freedom and the dismissal of a government run society is the smack-down Judge Vinson’s ruling gave to the concept of “crony capitalism.” That may be just as important in the long run.
Vinson’s sweeping ruling, all 78 pages of it, took down not only the individual mandate but the crony system it was to fund and cram down all of our collective throats. Good for him. Crony capitalism—which is the exact opposite of free market capitalism—is a malignancy that is part and parcel of all statist societies. It is the ultimate insiders’ game, with the ultimate in outsider devastation. That’s why you will find that most liberal “capitalists” are really involved in some business that is very cozy with government, and that coziness protects the business.
Crony capitalism is another one of those phenomena that seems to vex the insider elite leftist and even the conservative pundit, yet ‘rubes’ like Sarah Palin understand it so very well.
After all, no government-run society is even possible without corporatists and crony capitalists eager to jump into the sack with the statists who will design laws to force unwilling customers to those corporations. This is something the statists will do under threat of sending IRS and other bureaucrats to harass every unwilling business or individual. For example, you do remember that it is 16,000 new IRS agents, not 16,000 new doctors, that Obama Care has plans to employ, don’t you?
Gee, you think maybe Obama Care was about control and not health care from the get go?
And you can believe that the resulting threats from bureaucrats are indeed scary to those entrepreneurs who put it all on the line daily. Business owners successful enough to be targets, yet too small to be crony capitalists with Beltway connections, know full well that unelected and unaccountable and incompetent bureaucrats can wipe out a life’s work with mindless and asinine regulations and rulings. You know, like Obama Care. Or OSHA. Or the EPA. Or an EEOC ruling. You get the picture.
Now, in the case of Obama Care, the chief crony capitalists were the shortsighted health insurers who backed a program that would end capitalism as we know it, even as it temporarily swelled their customer base. What a bargain. Of course, I guess by the time the free market collapses, the CEOs of these companies will have their own private temperate-zone islands paid for by a huge one- or two-year spike in stock options, what with 35 million new customers paying premiums, but not yet diagnosed as sick.
A true free market advocate does not think this way. If free enterprise is a faithful, sexy, and loving wife who is in it for the long run, then crony capitalists are skanky prostitutes out for a one-nighter. Just think of Obama Care as Elliot Spitzer (aka ‘Client Number 9’) and the shameless health care CEO’s as the skanks.
And let’s not overlook the media impact of crony capitalism. It gives the illusion of free-market respectability to insidious socialist government programs because there is “public support” by so-called “private companies.” This spoonful of sugar helps the sour medicine go down to an electorate that all too often pays scant attention. It is classic liberal political cross-dressing.
The truth is, crony capitalism is not capitalism at all. It is the opposite. Free enterprise means just that—the freedom to buy and sell as one sees fit for his or her situation. Obama Care, by way of Kathleen Sebelius and the Department of HHS, will dictate what must be sold and what must be bought and by whom. This is the opposite of free market capitalism. Most of Obama Care is.
The insurers, for some reason that must have been taught by some clueless professor, thought that they could come out ahead in a world where every person would have to buy from them, while, on the other hand, every person sitting on top of a million-dollar cancer or failing heart could force them to sell.
Inexplicably, it was acceptable in their calculus that, in this win-lose-win scenario, the nanny state would make all of those decisions for all of us, and that they would do so on huge blank slates handed over to Kathleen Sebelius and legions of her bureaucrats. Why they refused to believe that some of those blanks would be filled in with what amounts to death sentences for their entire industry is beyond comprehension.
It is important to know that, quite often, the people who run big business are liberals, too. Or, for the sake of a quarterly stock dividend, they will play along as good little situational liberals. It is also important to realize that our entire Wall Street system is now so perverted with so much cronyism throughout that one can make millions by making decisions that are just plain stupid when analyzed through the template of pure free enterprise. This is one reason so many liberals are on Wall Street. It hasn’t been pure capitalism or free enterprise in decades.
The decision by the insurers and others in the health care field was the ultimate Faustian bargain, playing out in front of all of us. And I say “ultimate” because it threatens to take down one seventh (or is it one sixth?) of a free-market economy in one fell swoop. So devastating to our economy and to our notions of freedom and a free market would this huge “hope and change” be, it could indeed be a death knell for the nation as we have known it.
Supposed capitalists in the health industry were more than willing to destroy the entire free-market system for their chance to profit from it for a very short period of time. This cannot be allowed to happen, in this industry or any other, and that’s why Vinson’s ruling could really have positive ramifications down the road.
These deals with the Devil are all over the place, thanks to this administration. We have the Chevy Volt. We have Archer Daniels Midland and the entire ethanol scam. And we have g
lobal warming crony capitalists like Jeff Immelt of GE and the folks of Solyndra, to mention a few. None of these products—the Volt, ethanol, windmills, stupid curly-que light bulbs and, for gosh sakes, low flow toilets—can survive the genius of the free market. None of them entices the real entrepreneur producer because none of them has a willing customer base.
And yet crony capitalists are getting rich off all of these failing products every day because government is perverting the market with mandates and subsidies and regulations that strangle legitimate decisions about allocation of capital, production, and purchasing. Crony capitalism is the ultimate insiders’ game of government-anointed winners and losers. And the biggest loser of all is the economic system that made America what it is.
Obama Care is going to have more of this than any other industry. And there are chilling implications to those who would stand in the way, be it by their independent spirit or their advanced age. That’s why we owe such a debt of gratitude to Judge Vinson. He might have been trumped by John Robert’s ridiculous ruling, but at this early stage, he has stood in the way on Crony Capitalism and helped draw attention to it.
You Might Be a Liberal Page 4
