Posted on 10/18/2008, 6:55:55 PM by Revel
American “Joe the Plumbers” create jobs and wealth So America wants Socialism, eh? By William R. Mann Saturday, October 18, 2008
Many of you may wish to understand what it will mean to have a Liberal [Socialist] Super Majority running America.
My Dad, like “Joe the Plumber” wanted, and worked hard to build on the satisfaction and freedom of being his own boss, providing for his family, and making some money. I was a draft-age teenager in Toledo, Ohio through some of LBJ’s Presidency in the 1960s. I had yet to depart for West Point [USMA] following High School [in 1967]. Allow me to share a bit about that era, my impressions of what it was like for one small business family.
My father was an Eisenhower Republican, and later a Goldwater & Reagan supporter. He was also a small business owner. I was, often times, the “part-time employee” in his silk screen printing and commercial art shop.
(Excerpt) Read more at canadafreepress.com ...
http://canadafreepress.com/
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus
sarc/off
Dopes for Hope.
‘A Marxist/Muslim radical who all his life has been mentored by, sat at the feet of, worshipped with, befriended, endorsed the philosophy of, funded and been in turn funded, politically promoted and supported by a nexus comprising black power anti-white racists, Jew-haters, revolutionary Marxists, unrepentant former terrorists and Chicago mobsters, is on the verge of becoming President of the United States. And apparently it’s considered impolite to say so.’ (so said the Brits)
HOW CAN THIS BE HAPPENING? HOW??
THIS US SURREAL!
DON’T TAKE THIS WITHOUT A FIGHT!
McCain’s anemic attempts to fight Obama back is losing this election.
Flood McCain out with emails. DEMAND he fight back HARD- name names!
Please go to
http://www.protestthemedia.com/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=7
and pick up all the email addresses to the McCain camp and HUNDREDS of emails of MSM.
SEND A FREE FAX: https://faxzero.com/
CAN THEY IGNORE A MILLION EMAILS?
McCain’s anemic attempts to fight Obama back is losing this election.
Flood McCain out with emails. DEMAND he fight back HARD- name names!
Please go to
http://www.protestthemedia.com/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=7
and pick up all the email addresses to the McCain camp and HUNDREDS of emails of MSM.
CAN THEY IGNORE A MILLION EMAILS?
Sorry, that should have been ‘this IS surreal’.
Even the Romans learned that socialism is bad. Read on:
State Socialism
Unfortunately, Pertinax was an exception. Most emperors continued the policies of debasement and increasingly heavy taxes, levied mainly on the wealthy. The war against wealth was not simply due to purely fiscal requirements, but was also part of a conscious policy of exterminating the Senatorial class, which had ruled Rome since ancient times, in order to eliminate any potential rivals to the emperor. Increasingly, emperors came to believe that the army was the sole source of power and they concentrated their efforts on sustaining the army at all cost.
As the private wealth of the Empire was gradually confiscated or taxed away, driven away or hidden, economic growth slowed to a virtual standstill. Moreover, once the wealthy were no longer able to pay the state’s bills, the burden inexorably fell onto the lower classes, so that average people suffered as well from the deteriorating economic conditions. In Rostovtzeff’s words, “The heavier the pressure of the state on the upper classes, the more intolerable became the condition of the lower” (Rostovtzeff 1957: 430).
At this point, in the third century A.D., the money economy completely broke down. Yet the military demands of the state remained high. Rome’s borders were under continual pressure from Germanic tribes in the North and from the Persians in the East. Moreover, it was now explicitly understood by everyone that the emperor’s power and position depended entirely on the support of the army. Thus, the army’s needs required satisfaction above all else, regardless of the consequences to the private economy.
With the collapse of the money economy, the normal system of taxation also broke down. This forced the state to directly appropriate whatever resources it needed wherever they could be found. Food and cattle, for example, were requisitioned directly from farmers. Other producers were similarly liable for whatever the army might need. The result, of course, was chaos, dubbed “permanent terrorism” by Rostovtzeff (1957: 449). Eventually, the state was forced to compel individuals to continue working and producing.
The result was a system in which individuals were forced to work at their given place of employment and remain in the same occupation, with little freedom to move or change jobs. Farmers were tied to the land, as were their children, and similar demands were made on all other workers, producers, and artisans as well. Even soldiers were required to remain soldiers for life, and their sons compelled to follow them. The remaining members of the upper classes were pressed into providing municipal services, such as tax collection, without pay. And should tax collections fall short of the state’s demands, they were required to make up the difference themselves. This led to further efforts to hide whatever wealth remained in the Empire, especially among those who still found ways of becoming rich. Ordinarily, they would have celebrated their new-found wealth; now they made every effort to appear as poor as everyone else, lest they become responsible for providing municipal services out of their own pocket.
The steady encroachment of the state into the intimate workings of the economy also eroded growth. The result was increasing feudalization of the economy and a total breakdown of the division of labor. People fled to the countryside and took up subsistence farming or attached themselves to the estates of the wealthy, which operated as much as possible as closed systems, providing for all their own needs and not engaging in trade at all. Meanwhile, much land was abandoned and remained fallow or fell into the hands of the state, whose mismanagement generally led to a decline in production.
Emperor Diocletian’s Reforms
By the end of the third century, Rome had clearly reached a crisis. The state could no longer obtain sufficient resources even through compulsion and was forced to rely ever more heavily on debasement of the currency to raise revenue. By the reign of Claudius II Gothicus (268-270 A.D.) the silver content of the denarius was down to just .02 percent (Michell 1947: 2). As a consequence, prices skyrocketed. A measure of Egyptian wheat, for example, which sold for seven to eight drachmaes in the second century now cost 120,000 drachmaes. This suggests an inflation of 15,000 percent during the third century (Rostovtzeff 1957: 471).
Finally, the very survival of the state was at stake. At this point, the Emperor Diocletian (284-305 A.D.) took action. He attempted to stop the inflation with a far-reaching system of price controls on all services and commodities. [10] These controls were justified by Diocletian’s belief that the inflation was due mainly to speculation and hoarding, rather than debasement of the currency. As he stated in the preamble to his edict of 301 A.D.:
For who is so hard and so devoid of human feeling that he cannot, or rather has not perceived, that in the commerce carried on in the markets or involved in the daily life of cities immoderate prices are so widespread that the unbridled passion for gain is lessened neither by abundant supplies nor by fruitful years; so that without a doubt men who are busied in these affairs constantly plan to control the very winds and weather from the movements of the stars, and, evil that they are, they cannot endure the watering of the fertile fields by the rains from above which bring the hope of future harvests, since they reckon it their own loss if abundance comes through the moderation of the weather [Jones 1970: 310].
Despite the fact that the death penalty applied to violations of the price controls, they were a total failure. Lactantius (1984: 11), a contemporary of Diocletian’s, tells us that much blood was shed over “small and cheap items” and that goods disappeared from sale. Yet, “the rise in price got much worse.” Finally, “after many had met their deaths, sheer necessity led to the repeal of the law.”
Diocletian’s other reforms, however, were more successful. The cornerstone of Diocletian’s economic policy was to turn the existing ad hoc policy of requisitions to obtain resources for the state into a regular system. [11] Since money was worthless, the new system was based on collecting taxes in the form of actual goods and services, but regularized into a budget so that the state knew exactly what it needed and taxpayers knew exactly how much they had to pay.
Careful calculations were made of precisely how much grain, cloth, oil, weapons or other goods were necessary to sustain a single Roman soldier. Thus, working backwards from the state’s military requirements, a calculation was made for the total amount of goods and services the state would need in a given year. On the other side of the coin, it was also necessary to calculate what the taxpayers were able to provide in terms of the necessary goods and services. This required a massive census, not only of people but of resources, especially cultivated land. Land was graded according to its productivity. As Lactantius (1984: 37) put it, “Fields were measured out clod by clod, vines and trees were counted, every kind of animal was registered, and note taken of every member of the population.”
Taxable capacity was measured in terms of the caput, which stood for a single man, his family, his land and what they could produce. [12] The state’s needs were measured in terms of the annona, which represented the cost of maintaining a single soldier for a year. With these two measures calculated in precision, it was now possible to have a real budget and tax system based entirely on actual goods and services. Assessments were made and resources collected, transported and stored for state use.
Although an army on the move might still requisition goods or services when needed, the overall result of Diocletian’s reform was generally positive. Taxpayers at least knew in advance what they were required to pay, rather than suffer from ad hoc confiscations. Also, the tax burden was spread more widely, instead of simply falling on the unlucky, thus lowering the burden for many Romans. At the same time, with the improved availability of resources, the state could now better plan and conduct its military operations.
In order to maintain this system where people were tied to their land, home, jobs, and places of employment, Diocletian transformed the previous ad hoc practice. Workers were organized into guilds and businesses into corporations called collegia. Both became de facto organs of the state, controlling and directing their members to work and produce for the state.
Guliani said it at the convention, CHANGE could be good and CHANGE could be bad. We already know by Obama’s retoric that the CHANGE he preaches is SOCIALISM, PERIOD! Get the hell out of your chairs America and vote! Like Mccain or not he is our last chance to defeat these dirtbags.
Interesting read/history-lesson. Thank you for sharing.
Will it one day be The Rise and Fall of the American Experiment? It seems the liberal socialists have found out explored and exploited every pitfall to the survival of the Constitutional American government as it was originally hammered out by the Founding Fathers - and now that they have perfected their greed, will the Union truly survive?
If BO wins, his supporters are not doing him a favor. He inherits a government that is deep in debt and bailout obligations. If he wants to implement his programs he will have to tax the rich and middle class, thus ending Dem control of Congress in 2010 and his re election in 2012. Same with McCain, he has a Dem majority Congress who will override all his vetos, nothing will get done and the people of the US will blame him. If he attempts to compromise with Congress his conservative base will not come out for his re election in 2012. IMHO whoever wins will most likely be a one term president.
Live in Maine. Just got back from the local hang out for coffee. Several of us were discussing the election. A woman came up to our table saying she overheard our conversation and was surprised people in such “a poor economic region as ours” could support McCain. She said she had spent the “last year” organizing for Obama in Maine. She was appallewd at all the lies about Obama and how he was going to fix everything. I lit into her-politely inviting her to visit people’s paradises in Cuba & Venezuala. That Obama was a racist anti-American Marxist. She couldn’t believe anyone would say that after knowing the “truth” about Obama. Several people nearby applauded her. I told her her college professor would be proud. She started crying and left. She would have gotten thrown outta town 10 years ago- today most agree with her and her candidate! Prepare for 4 years of hell.
In other words, the people are just f’ing stupid. My fellow americans (at least half) don’t deserve to live in a free society anymore. Let them be slaves. And let them feel the literal whips on their backs.
We need to stock up, we may be living on our own rations for a while. Let's do it now, while our money is still worth something and while we still can.
This generation has known nothing but prosperity and doesn't understand that it could take a few natural or man-made disasters to put our nation in the toilet. They will expect the government to save them, which will not happen. Only then will they realize they are on their own, and they will be completely unable to cope with it.
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