Posted on 02/19/2002 8:59:12 AM PST by Behind Liberal Lines
My family members are Democrats, and I had liberals for teachers. I watched Vietnam on Cronkite nightly. I hated Nixon and loved JFK. I secretly blamed Republicans for the deaths of the Kennedys.
I campaigned for McGovern and believed in world socialism. In short, I was a teen-age communist. The biased network news always confirmed my liberal beliefs. I thought every dollar business made came at the expense of the poor....
but then the Cold War ended and I was forced to face history.
The dead Soviet monolith started shedding secret documents, and it didn't look good for my side. This realization left me catatonic since it confirmed previous Republican warnings as correct. Oh my God, that includes McCarthy and Goldwater!
The 1980s scared me. Our tax structure and banking systems were fundamentally changed by Reaganomics and remain so. The Gipper's insistence we grow ourselves out of debt by lowering taxes seemed ludicrous, then we grew ourselves into surpluses in the '90s. I knew there was no "Clintonomics."
Federal Reserve policies were essentially unchanged from before, so I had to admit Republican economic theory worked. In addition, 1980s military spending caused the Soviets to collapse. I wouldn't accept Reagan was responsible until former Soviet officials grudgingly credited his efforts for their demise. Conclusions I was forced to draw:
• The Kennedys were phonies whose Camelot legacy is provable fiction.
• The KGB manipulated the Democratic Party for 60 years.
• Soviet records show Nixon was an extraordinary cold warrior.
• Radical environmentalism is the new home of the communist movement.
• Reagan's economic policies continue to work; he brought the Russians to their knees.
• The poor aren't poor because the rich are rich.
I'm told Jerry Springer's guests deserve acceptance, but church groups are odd and intolerant. Churchill said: "If you are not a socialist by age 21, you have no heart. If you are not a conservative by 40, you have no brain."
Whew, I just made it! After a long journey, I now believe a self-righteous liberal with a cause is more dangerous than a Hell's Angel with an attitude.
So was I. Thankfully, exposure to free-market economics and a subcription to The Nation woke me to the true nature of the Left.
Ten years on from my left-wing dalliance, I subscribe to Liberty, am an NRA member (yes, I was once part of the "let's ban all guns" crowd) and post on Free Republic.
Auburn, eh? And did he have this revelation before or after his sentencing? ;)
Ah, well - they say the first step is admitting you have a problem....
A self-righteous liberal is the most dangerous person on god's green earth.
Greetings from Geneva!
This one is actually true. It seems to me that we (as pro-market force) have to admit this right in their (the anti-market forces') faces - market economy is unfair to prols, however, it is the best deal prols (including myself) can ever get.
And about JFK, as far as I understand he was the first class hawk and he was deeply pro-market person.
His journey will be complete if he becomes a FReeper.
Anyway, here is the gospel from www.winstonchurchill.org:
"If you're not a liberal when you're 25, you have no heart. If you're not a conservative by the time you're 35, you have no brain." There is no record of anyone hearing Churchill say this. Paul Addison of Edinburgh University makes this comment: "Surely Churchill can't have used the words attributed to him. He'd been a Conservative at 15 and a Liberal at 35! and would he have talked so disrespectfully of Clemmie, who is generally thought to have been a lifelong Liberal.
In my early 20's, the first time I was able to vote and wasn't as political as I am now, I voted for Clinton. Yes, I regret it deeply. I soon learned in my mid to late twenties what liars liberals are. I started listening to Rush and our local afternoon a.m. talk show host, Mark Belling. I learned to see through the b.s. the Clinton and all of their left wing nut jobs were feeding the American people. At any rate, I'm proud to be Republican and feel sorry liberals as they don't know any better and need garbage spoon fed to them on a daily basis.
God Bless Ronald Reagan!
Bullsh-t. Businesses (most of which, in this country, are mom and pop operations) provide jobs so that we can afford consumer goods, a roof over our head, etc. BTW: I deal with small business owners everyday of my life and am sickend by how arrogant leftist assholes whine about how "the private sector screws the poor."
Never met the man.
The quote from the author of this article denies a causal relationship between the increasing wealth of the rich, and the decreasing wealth of the poor. The quote from the CIA speaker does not attempt to assert such a causal relationship exists. The two statements are not mutually exclusive.
The author here is right - the rich being rich does not make the poor, poor. Economics is not a zero-sum game.
Do Ford, GM and DaimlerChrysler sell cars to the worlds poor? It is rich people that purchase their products.
It is governments that keep people poor by not allowing them manufacture their own wealth.
Any relation to Roger Rabbit?
But by what standards do you define someone as poor? If the rich have enormous assets and those 'on the bottom' have TV sets and VCRs, are they really poor?
If we define "poor" in relative terms, then the definition of "poor" will continually shift upward as a society grows wealthier overall. If we define "poor" in absolute terms, then there is little question that the poor of today enjoy a standard of living that is much higher than the poor of a hundred years ago, or the "wealthy" of a thousand years ago.
In any case, the point I wanted to make is that a person being wealthy, whether in absolute or relative terms, is not the cause of someone else being "poor". Like I said, economics is not a zero-sum game.
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