Obama's Army
Posted on 01/07/2012 8:51:14 AM PST by Sub-Driver
Government: The redistributionist behemoth By George F. Will, Published: January 6
Liberals have a rendezvous with regret. Their largest achievement is today’s redistributionist government. But such government is inherently regressive: It tends to distribute power and money to the strong, including itself.
Government becomes big by having big ambitions for supplanting markets as society’s primary allocator of wealth and opportunity. Therefore it becomes a magnet for factions muscular enough, in money or numbers or both, to bend government to their advantage.
The left’s centuries-old mission is to increase social harmony by decreasing antagonisms arising from disparities of wealth — to decrease inequality by increasing government’s redistributive activities. Such government constantly expands under the unending, indeed intensifying, pressures to correct what it disapproves of — the distribution of wealth produced by consensual market activities. But as government presumes to dictate the correct distribution of social rewards, the maelstrom of contemporary politics demonstrates that social strife, not solidarity, is generated by government transfer payments to preferred groups.
This includes generational strife. Most transfer payments redistribute wealth from workers to nonworkers in the form of pensions and medical care for retirees. The welfare state’s primary purpose is to subsidize the last years of Americans’ lives, and the elderly are, after a lifetime of accumulation, better off than most Americans: In 2009, the net worth of households headed by adults ages 65 and older was a record 47 times that of households headed by adults under the age of 35 — a wealth gap that doubled just since 2005.
The equalizing effects of redistributive transfer payments are less today than in 1979, when households in the lowest income quintile received 54 percent of such payments. In 2007, they received 36 percent.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Marxism Rules inside the Beltway.
Yeah, they take in 15 trillion and redistribute 3 trillion.
It's quite an efficient machine...
It tends to distribute power and money to the strong, including itself.
Mafia’s once ruled cities now they rule countries.
Political Extortion will mean the hanging of a dictator 50 years from now... Think about it.
bfl
Judging by the comments slamming Santorum for his Social Security plans, it rules here as well.
For decades now, and especially with a committed "redistributionist" as their leader, the so-called "progressive" Democrats have refused to acknowledge the simple logic of a simple question described in the next paragraph.
They, in their impassioned desire for accumulation of power to themselves throuh "transforming" our system to an unconstitutional 'government over people' entity, acknowledge the taxing power as useful for restraining motivation toward what they deem to be undesirable behavior.
On the other hand, they deny the certain fact that "taking," or taxing productive citizens also discourages and restrains motivation.
Democrats, under Obama, now have endangered the liberty of millions yet unborn with their illogical arguments on behalf of "taking" and "redistributing" the earnings of hard-working Americans. They claim they are "taking care" of those who elected them. Their "taking care" amounts to enslaving every citizen, born and unborn, for generations to come.
Their claims would fall on deaf ears, if most citizens understood their Constitution's limits on the powers of government. Here what some of the Founders said about the policies of today's "progressive" Democrats.
"To preserve [the] independence [of the people,] we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our election between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude. If we run into such debts as that we must be taxed in our meat and in our drink, in our necessaries and our comforts, in our labors and our amusements, for our callings and our creeds, as the people of England are, our people, like them, must come to labor sixteen hours in the twenty-four, give the earnings of fifteen of these to the government for their debts and daily expenses, and the sixteenth being insufficient to afford us bread, we must live, as they now do, on oatmeal and potatoes, have no time to think, no means of calling the mismanagers to account, but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow-sufferers." --Thomas Jefferson to Samuel Kercheval, 1816. ME 15:39
"I deem [this one of] the essential principles of our government and consequently [one] which ought to shape its administration:... The honest payment of our debts and sacred preservation of the public faith." --Thomas Jefferson: 1st Inaugural, 1801. ME 3:322
"I sincerely believe... that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity under the name of funding is but swindling futurity on a large scale." --Thomas Jefferson to John Taylor, 1816. ME 15:23
"[With the decline of society] begins, indeed, the bellum omnium in omnia [war of all against all], which some philosophers observing to be so general in this world, have mistaken it for the natural, instead of the abusive state of man. And the fore horse of this frightful team is public debt. Taxation follows that, and in its train wretchedness and oppression." --Thomas Jefferson to Samuel Kercheval, 1816. ME 15:40
"Is it now high time for the people of this country to explicitly declare whether they will be free men or slaves. It is an important question which ought to be decided. It concerns more than anything in this life. The salvation of our souls is interested in this event. For wherever tyranny is established, immorality of every kind comes in like a torrent, it is in the interest of tyrants to reduce the people to ignorance and vice.” - Samuel Adams
And:
“The utopian schemes of leveling and a community of goods, are as visionary and impractical as those which vest all property in the crown. These ideas are arbitrary, despotic, and, in our government unconstitutional.” - Samuel Adams
Playing devils advocate, If you support the Government then you are for job killing , high taxes and redistribution of wealth. If you support industry then you are supporting job creation, but at what price. Many major industries do not offer pensions to new hires such as the old days. So now the workers are responsible for their own pensions in later years.The new workers are now putting in 10-15% of their weekly wages towards a similar pension. This including the continuous lowering of wages means that their real income is much lower than past generations. So they are putting in much more overtime to make up the difference. Even their buying power has diminished since the 1950’s. Probably why their are so many in credit card trouble these days, and god forbid you don’t have a college education the days of working at the mill and making a decent wage are gone. In my humble opinion we are being used as pawns by both sides to see who is going to control the masses.
For libtards, the combination of the altruistic moral imperative to sacrifice one’s values to help others, plus their rejection of reason which is replaced by their emotionalism,plus their motivation by the passion of empathy,plus their mistaken consumptionist belief that government spending is beneficial to the economy makes redistributionism irresistible to them.
Slicing the pie instead of growing it doesn’t work.
Employment Misery Index increasing! See charts!
These aren’t my charts. It looks like this economist got them off the Fed of St Louis web site.
Sorry George: once in a while you actually hit back at liberalism but you dis the Pubs once too often that any material that would convince the lemmings to vote Pub is diluted. That is the problem with the media in the Beltway. No one cares but libs what is said and the great amount of masses still get their news from the Big 3 lib media outlets. The only think Conservs have to offset this is Talk Radio and Fox. So far, the lemmings seem to be winning and that is an outrage how the MSM lies to them .
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