Posted on 07/24/2002 1:30:44 PM PDT by jjm2111
From each according to theit ability; to each according to their need.
Execpt, of course, for the great leaders.
I must have been living in a time warp. I seem to remember eight years of Democratic (liberal) administration in there somewhere?
The "Liberals" did not save Capitalism in America in the 1930s anymore than the Socialists under Hitler saved Capitalism in Nazi Germany. Both the New Deal and the Nazis claimed to be heading off Communism, but that notion was (1) pure propaganda and (2) a complete denial of the facts that both the New Deal and National Socialism took their respective peoples a great deal further in the direction of Communist values than any alternative proposal--other than that of the actual Communists--for addressing the problems of the Great Depression.
The present melt-down in the economy is first a cyclical phenomenon. It is being aggravated because of a decline in public morality--I am not writing about sexual peccadillos, but about the widely accepted notion in Washington since at least 1930, and in the Corporate Board Rooms since Clinton became President, that it is perfectly all right to lie, so long as you are lying to achieve an end that you believe is useful or worthwhile. Cooked books is only one facet of this process.
This subjective rationalization for the lie has been particularly exemplified by activist Court decisions, which no one but an absolute moron believes reflect the intentions of the framers of our written Constitution; in the Theories of "A Living Constitution," prattled about in Academia--as also in the recent Al Gore campaign;--in the academic pretense that there is actually evidence of an equality of human potential--there is not, of course;--in Congressmen who promise all things to all people, and then pose for conflicting votes on the same issue, so that they may have something to cite to each group at election time.
The writer basically shows his Socialist bias, over and over again, in the above article. For example, his comment about American Health Care. The decline in the quality of American Health Care can be directly traced to the advent of Socialistic thinking with the launching of Medicare in 1965. His comments about personal income being subject to social concerns is pure Socialism. His suggestion that the Market cannot cope with the melt down better than Government, is pure demagoguery.
The obvious fact is this--and it will not change, however the clever rhetoric spinners on the Left obfuscate it in endless verbiage and repeated assertions of untruth: In trying times, the need for the participant in the economy--and that means employer and employee, farmer and shop keeper, manufacturer and consumer, salesman and supply house, mining company and exporter, etc., etc.--to rapidly respond to more fluid conditions, is far greater than in a period of fairly steady, long term expansion. In this situation, Government can only get in the way.
This does not mean that Government is unimportant. Legitimate American Government--Government which fulfills its Constitutional functions--can be very important in the picture. The role of Government is not to solve the problem of the individual. The idea that Government can centrally plan the dynamic interaction of 150,000,000 productive Americans better than they can direct their own activities in their own ethical self interest, is ludicrous. But a Government which provides stable money; stable measures; and deals with those who would interfere with the market's ability to adapt--all functions which the Founding Fathers envisioned--can do a lot to help the market to adjust to whatever it must adjust to. Government can also prosecute those who breach their fiduciary duties to their shareholders; making an example of those who would or have applied a Clintonesque morality to their discharge of private trusts. And Government can initiate an immigration policy which limits new arrivals, strictly to people who have jobs, and to people who have a cultural value system consistent with that of the men who founded America; a value system that understands that Government is not the answer--and never has been the answer to major economic dislocations.
We are in a cycle which will almost certainly cause a bearish bias in the market over the next couple of years, at least. That does not mean that the market need collapse. But it does mean that one can expect an end to the sort of bullish speculation, which drove Internet stocks into the Ionosphere. It is essential in these times that Conservatives understand how the Left operates; understand why the New Deal had so much Academic support; understand the inherent fallacies in their approach; understand that the Great Depression was lengthened by many years, because the "Liberal" recipe simply does not work.
In short, it is imperative that we go on the attack. Reacting to the enemy assault will not work. We--you and I--and all of the small band of politicians who have that increasingly rare combination of courage, insight and reason--must go on the offensive; we must see that the blame is put where the blame belongs.
America really is the issue, now. The Left will seek to hammer the last nails into the coffin. But if we prevail, the coffin will be for their despicable Socialist value system; for the success of the Big Lie, and the era of the charlatan and mountebank, with which they have infected us.
William Flax Return Of The Gods Web Site
That said... if you want to see Hell on Earth.... sooner.... let a Democrat/protectionist gain total control of ecomomics.
It's all a matter of your desire for torture, I suppose. Republican or Democrat.
I'd actually prefer you choose Democrat, if you want my opinion. I'd like to be alive to help pick up the pieces....
Quick poison is just as deadly and insane, and I'll still be alive...
First, you'll be lucky to have a meeting, unless you enjoy formally talking to yourself. Then you'll be lucky if you have time to think about planning a meeting. And then you'll be lucky if you can plan and schedule and have the time for one....
I feel that every day. I get a lift, I'll give you a call..
Not quite true. One of the dirty little secrets of government is that big businesses have a very strong tendency to be liberal. If in some field there are two companies that net $20M/year and twenty that each net $2M/year, a regulation whose compliance cost is $1M/year will likely benefit the large companies by putting all of the smaller competitors out of business.
Liberals like to blame conservatives for the excesses of big businesses, when it is in fact the liberals who aid big businesses in those excesses.
You're right.
But think about the exact meaning of the curse that you used in the next sentence. Literally. Think about your wording. You're not right.
I think there's a lot of truth to that. The liberals will help big business at the expense of small business, because it concentrates the money and makes it easier to siphon off. They don't want to kill off big business, they want it to get fat and lazy. No parasite wants to kill it's host.
"Bush's appalling tax cut reflects the belief that personal income is entirely private rather than subject to social claims."
Decades ago, during the early years of the Cold War, a Yugoslav dissident Communist, Milovan Djilas, wrote a manifesto against Communist rule called "The New Class". In it he charged that the "apparatus" of Communist rule was made up of a group of people who intermarried, looked out for each other, and in general, looted from the population to keep themselves in power.
Ayn Rand wrote the same thing in a different, more philisophical (if couched in fiction) way.
I contend that the Democratic Party is returning to its left wing traditions after a romance with Clintonian "centrism". Without Clinton around, there is little to keep the Hezboallah wing of the Party from reasserting control from the pragmatic Campaign wing of the party.
There is one thing that the dominant left wing culture of the Democratic Party believes in above all things: they have the right to rule and they have the right to loot.
Kuttner's statement is an appalingly frank admission that an individual is only as free as the State decides he must be. When a man's income is not his own, he is a slave. Pure and simple. Kuttner believes that his class of people has the right, indeed the duty, to determine what the level of social responsibility is of the entire population. Such is the conceit, the dangerous conceit, of liberals.
It is not that we don't have obligations to a larger society. It is that we have the right to determine, through the process of electing representatives to the Congress, what that obligation is. Kuttner, among others, wants to confine that decision making process to a few. Most people, if not forced to raise their own taxes, will keep most of their money for themselves. Kuttner's prescription for robbing the producers is to convince the people that the Democratic Party's left wing wants to "save capitalism". That's the whole thrust of his argument. But all he really is arguing for is a return to a politics in which liberal mandarins decide what is best for us by virtue of adjusting the tax code. In this way, the liberal project of making America more like socialist Europe will be advanced.
And I can't help but think back on Djilas' assertion that a New Class was founded to rule the Communist world. And I find the paralells with the modern leadership of the Democratic Party as compelling as they are eerie.
Be Seeing You,
Chris
Considering the astonishing pain and suffering that leftist philosophies have caused over the last hundred years, Kuttner has a lot of gall leading off with this headline.
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