1. Multi-Culteralism and 'That's Unfair'
NOT EVEN BELIEVING IN "THE BETTER"
In his book, teacher and author Allan Bloom says his first generation students went to college in pursuit of the better education, the better books, the better philosophy, the better life. The next generation came to college not even believing there was such a thing as "the better." To say anything is "better" leads to the idea that some things are "wrong." This involves the evil of judging and discrimination. For this new generation, any one who discerns between what is "not so good" and what is "better" or says someone is wrong is intolerant and insensitive. This is the worst kind of crime.
If there is no such thing as right and wrong or better and worse, it follows that success and failure also take on a new meaning. Success must be discouraged and even hated because it creates a disparity between winners and losers. This kind of logic tells us that if there are successful people there must be unsuccessful people and that this is unfair. Distinguishing between successful people and unsuccessful people, or even between behaviors that lead to success and behaviors that lead to failure, is thus insensitive bigotry.
Even education that encourages one kind of behavior over another involves the insensitive act of judging bad behaviors. Encouraging people to abandon ways of life that lead to failure and adopt successful behaviors is insensitive. Therefore, instead of encouraging success, encouragement itself becomes seen as a form of intolerance.
SUCESS IS PROOF OF CHEATING
Furthermore, success is proof of cheating because nothing can be better than any thing else. Failure or crime is proof of victimization because nothing can be worse than any thing else. Take for example, the United States are arguably the most successful nation, in terms of material prosperity, that has ever existed. Consequently, many people attack America as the greatest and most corrupt cheater ever. At the same time, all of America's enemies are consequently seen as victims.
To this way of thinking, that equates success with cheating and failure as victimization, the ultimate cheaters are identified with "rich people." Already we see a growing hatred of the rich that comes with the emergence of class warfare. People have begun to expect the government to use taxation as a weapon to penalize those who have enough money to invest to create jobs, giving the money to the poor instead. Why? Because the successfulness of the rich is proof that they have cheated, despite the fact that they invest that money into the economy creating jobs and general prosperity for all. Furthermore, failure is proof that the poor are victims of the evil rich. Yet these are the very people who go out on a limb to create jobs and financial opportunity for the less fortunate.
PENALIZING SUCCESS
If things continue on the way they are currently going America will no longer be a nation where success and achievement are even possible. Success and achievement are already being penalized. Independence is discouraged in favor of a lowest-common-denominator "group-think" mentality. Crippling regulations restrict those who would act with innovation to create jobs and greater prosperity for society. In the future, as we move toward an egalitarian society, you will not be able to profit from your own hard work because that would be "un-fair." As a third grader famously declared, everyone will have an equal amount of stuff.
Let me just say, "We are not in kindergarten anymore." We have to stop thinking that if Bobby has the ball then I can't have it so that's unfair and we need the teacher to take the ball away from everyone. That is exactly what we are saying when we ask the government to steel money from one person to give to another person through compulsory income tax and resource redistribution.
The zero sum game, the idea that there is only a certain amount of wealth to share between everyone, is too simplistic to comprehend our reality. The truth is that the tide raises all the boats at once. People create value, they don't hoard it. When success and achievement are allowed to reap a reward the result is an increase in the amount of total wealth, general prosperity for all, and an overall society of liberal generosity. When success and achievement are penalized as "un-fair" the result is an overall society of greed, ungratefulness, and general disparity.
DISCOURAGING ACHIEVEMENT
That means expecting Mexicans to learn English is not imperialism or insensitivity. It means they may get a job paying millions of dollars as a scientist finding the cure for cancer instead of pushing a broom! Only after the left wing agenda inevitably leads to failure do their bleeding hearts cry out to tell us how much they care and how much we must sacrifice to pay for more "programs" for the poor victimized Mexicans. Our initial emotional reaction is with the bleeding heart. Of course we need to generously help the poor and downtrodden. There aught to be things that we should like to do but cannot because of our charitable giving. But if we stop and engage in rational thought we would realize that if Mexicans learned English or if were encouraged teenagers to abstain from sexual intercourse we could increase the happiness of our entire society from the beginning and reduce the need for programs that subsidize foolish, unwise, or even dangerous behaviors. Though talk like this is insensitive and unhelpful from the liberal point of view, how can you escape the conclusion that it was the people who told Mexicans not to learn English in the first place who turned them into victims. This is just one example of "not thinking" that is destroying this nation.
Notice in the previous example, not only does the Mexican get a job paying millions of dollars for himself, he found a cure for cancer. This means learning English does not only benefit himself it may also benefit everyone in our society. While telling him not to learn English, because learning English would be insensitive, hurts not only him but all of society by crippling people with unreasonable tax burdens for programs that might not have needed to be created in the first place. People have value and their work sustains and raises everyone in a society at once.
More and more people are asking for a hand-out or bail-out from the government rather than taking personal responsibility for themselves. There is a difference not just of degree but of kind between unemployment compensation for jobless workers, welfare for destitute families, and confiscating the income of taxpayers who earned it—to hand out to chronic tax consumers (poor and rich alike) who did not. This last is the socialism Winston Churchill called "the philosophy of envy and gospel of greed." "The problem with Socialism," Margaret Thatcher said, "is that you eventually run out of other people's money."
Considering the current unemployment crisis we are currently in, let me demonstrate how this positive outlook affects businesses and job creation and thus greater social prosperity.
2. The Bakery Example
or How Business Works Simplified
For most of us, we receive our income from our job. But where do jobs come from? Businesses create jobs. More accurately, profitable businesses create jobs. If a business isn't making money they are not growing and creating jobs, they are "downsizing." They must downsize because, unlike the government, businesses cannot operate on a deficit. If their cost and overhead exceed their income they must either reduce their costs or increase their income. In other words, unless the cost of doing business affords investors some profit there is no motivation to reinvest in the market and create jobs.
Pretend you own a bakery. Every month you have the following costs:
Rent | $500 |
Utilities | $200 |
Flour and other ingredients | $600 |
Cooking Supplys | $200 |
Marketing | $200 |
1 Ast Baker | $900 |
2 part time cashiers | $1,000 |
Payroll taxes | $550 |
Accountant to explain the | $50 |
TOTAL | $4,200 |
Remember, this is your cost before you have sold even a single muffin or paid yourself even a single penny. If you don't sell enough loaves of bread or birthday cakes to not only break even but to give yourself a reasonable paycheck what is the point of owning a business in the first place? Here is your income:
Sold 1400 muffins @ $1 each | $1,400 |
Sold 290 loaves @ $5 each | $1,450 |
Sold 40 cakes @ $14 each | $560 |
Sold 300 bagels @ $1 each | $300 |
Coffee by the cup | $340 |
TOTAL | $4,050 |
As you can see, before you even make a penny for yourself you are already $150 in the hole. And you aren't a greedy corporate financier. You are a family man trying to make ends meet. Your kids need food. If you can only afford to pay yourself even $5 per month why not just go work at Wal-Mart?
If you want to stay in business you have two choices. You can raise your prices and hope this increases your income. But it probably won't. There is a recession going on and people are not as free with their money. If you raise your prices people will probably just skip their trip to the bakery all together. That isn't an option.
Your other option is to reduce costs. But how are you going to do that? You could buy low quality ingredients, but you have a reputation around town for making high quality breads and pastries. Lowering your quality will also negatively affect your income. You cannot pay yourself less because you had to pull $150 out of your personal savings account to "bail yourself out" this month. If you keep that up you will eat through your savings in about a year. That is not a good solution. Maybe you have to lay off one of your employees. But the bakery is like a family. It is going to be emotionally stressful. Another thing to consider is that everyone else who remains will have a greater workload. Laying someone off is never an easy decision.
You decide it must be done. Laying off one of the cahiers frees up around $500 that would have gone to payroll and another $144 that you would have gone to payroll taxes. This means next month you will make $494 in profit. The government taxes you around 25% leaving you with $370. You can barely pay for your wife’s health insurance bill and buy groceries on money like that so you skip a few mortgage payments. You loose your house. The employee you laid off goes on unemployment and stops buying non-essentials. The factories making these products experiences losses and cannot afford to pay payroll taxes on their employees so they also lay people off. Those unemployed factory workers can no longer afford to buy your muffins because they don't have any money.
And here is the really sad part. In order to fix the international financial crisis, the government raises taxes on the company supplying you with flour and sugar. Your costs go up dramatically and your income is just cut in half. You must file for bankruptsy. You no longer have a job and must go on unemployment. You only have skills as a baker so you can't find another job. You and your family file for welfare. With fewer and fewer people actually working, where is the government getting all this money to pay your family unemployment and welfare? They are simply printing it, which devalues our currency. The federal government is going further and further into debt that must be paid off by your grandchildren.
If we raise taxes on the very people who create jobs why should we blame them for "down sizing" or taking their business to countries where the cost of doing business is less expensive? If we want to stimulate business and job growth we need to make job creation affordable for investors otherwise they will simply pack up their ball and go home. We need to help them reduce the cost of doing business so that they can operate on some kind of a reasonable profit rather than running a deficit.
Let me propose an alternative happy ending to your story. Your state decides to create a tax haven. A tax haven is a place with reduced taxes for businesses creating jobs. Your state created the tax haven in order to reduce the cost of doing business so that people like you can afford to grow your business and create more jobs. Where as before you were spending $550 on payroll taxes and $50 for an accountant to explain the complicated tax law to you, now you aren't. Instead of being $150 in the hole you are making $450 each month. It isn't much but it is a good start. Your employees also get to keep an additional $100 of their paychecks that would have otherwise gone to the government. You all go out and buy things made in factories keeping factory workers employed. They all have an additional $100 from their paychecks that would have otherwise gone toward taxes also. Consequently, the factory workers all have enough money to buy muffins at your bakery on their way to work. They ask you if you could add donuts to the menu. People love your donuts and within a year you have made enough money to open up a new shop across town. You hire six new employees. The factory also hires more workers. Your state has been successful in creating jobs and pulling out of the depression! Everyone has excess money and is feeling generous. They give liberally to their neighbors in need and to charities. No one wants for anything.
There is one catch. A considerable amount of the factory's income came from selling products in other countries. But a group of world leaders called the G8 got together and decided that tax havens are unfair. They must be unfair because they give those places an advantage over places with high taxes. They decide to put tax havens on an international trade black list. Over night the factory in your town looses more than half their income. They can no longer afford to keep as many people employed. It seems like the recession is returning. People are buying fewer and fewer donuts and muffins. You experience profit losses and are forced to lay people off. Within four month things are so bad that you close down all your locations. Millions of people are out of work and collecting welfare benefits from the government. Yet this money has to come from somewhere and the tax base is quickly diminishing. The country quickly goes bankrupt and collapses into anarchy. People are starving in the streets. There are riots and looting. China invades the west coast enslaving millions of people to work off the trillions of dollars of debt the government has accrued. Your grandchildren are slaves for generations. Everything you love about America is gone.
3. The Growth and Corruption of Government
The political principles that under gird the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution go back to the English philosopher John Locke. According to Locke and his spiritual heirs such as Thomas Jefferson, the function of government is to secure the liberty of individual citizens. Freed from the burdens of indentured servitude and the depravation of life, citizens mature and then enter into the kind of industry best suited to result in Prosperity and Virtue ending in abundance, hospitality, and generosity. This belief, that the purpose of government is to secure the liberty of its citizens, necessarily entails limited government. Limited government allows opportunities for more self-government, improved representation, and choice in the political process.
Today a massive centralized government has grown too big and too corrupt to allow for any meaningful representation or self-government. Furthermore, the government's goal is to grasp as much political control for itself and for corporate concerns by promoting a culture of fear. By means of a crippling tax burden, obligatory bureaucratic regulations, and the systematic limitation of individual rights the government is slowly eroding the personal integrity, independence, and liberty of their people.
Since it is the nature of governments to seek greater power and control through tyranny, political philosophers have been very suspicious of politicians. Therefore the principles upon which this nation was founded sought to limit the power of government. That is why the United States Constitution did not prescribe a limited number of people's rights. Instead it delineated clear boundaries and limits as to what government could and could not do leaving most of the power and rights in the hands of the people.
Clark Carlton, in his letter, writes, "The equation is quite simple: the bigger the government is, the more it tries to do, the less freedom is available to its citizens. The purpose of government within the American tradition, then, is neither to make its citizens righteous nor to take care of them from the cradle to the grave, but to protect their God-given liberty." This is the political philosophy known as "political liberalism."
Think of it like this. To whom do you a higher percent tax: Federal or State? Federal. Right. What if it were reversed? Keep more money local and more sovereignty on the state level. Though I prefer the republican (rule of law) form of government over the democratic (rule of people), you can see that democracy relies on representation and the ability to choose. That is impossible with an all powerful federal government. They do what they want and are to big to allow meaningful representation. More powerful local and state governments and a dramatically reduced federal government are more democratic, conducive to liberty, and less vulnerable to corruption.
The kind of government we have now at all levels bears little resemblance to the principles upon which our Republic was founded. All three branches of the federal government – branches that were created precisely as checks on each other’s power – systematically ignore the limits imposed upon the federal government by the Constitution. The Congress passes all manner of legislation not authorized by the Constitution, limiting the freedom of the public through an ever-increasing network of laws and taxes, while at the same time almost completely abdicating its constitutional duties in regard to foreign policy and war. Presidents, for their part, routinely abdicate their duty to veto unconstitutional legislation and act as a check on congressional spending and instead have taken to themselves the almost monarchical power to promulgate their own laws (Executive Orders) and to wage war without a congressional declaration. (The last time Congress declared war was 1941.) And rather than keep the other two branches of government in line with the Constitution, the judicial branch instead rewrites legislation or invents new laws simply by fiat.
4. The Revolution Was
A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest civilizations from the beginning of history has been about 200 years. During those 200 years, these nations always progressed through the following sequence:
- From bondage to spiritual faith;
- From spiritual faith to great courage;
- From courage to liberty;
- From liberty to abundance;
- From abundance to complacency;
- From complacency to apathy;
- From apathy to dependence;
- From dependence back into bondage.
People that complain that our country is headed toward socialism have not really fully awakened to the historical reality we face today. The truth is that America has been under a “mixed” economy ever since the New Deal. Since then politicians have merely tinkered with the system, imperceptivity adding to it and advancing their control, never subtracting from the political power they have already acquired.
So far it hasn't been that intolerable.
The revolution has already come silently while we were asleep. The old republic is dead and we engaged in an argument settled before we were born. In his amazingly insightful 1938 essay, The Revolution Was, Garet Garrett wrote, "There are those who still think they are holding the pass against a revolution that may be coming up the road. But they are gazing in the wrong direction. The revolution is behind them. It went by in the Night of Depression, singing songs to freedom."
5. Total Care: The Danger of Safety
So far the new regime hasn't been that intolerable. We hardly even noticed. At least it was a benign oligarchy? Right? Until now.
Until the effects such un-sustainable political ideologies have ripened in the present Health Insurance Crisis and Sub-Prime Meltdown. But instead of trying to fix the underlying problems and reverse the crisis our current "leaders," holding offices that used to be reserved for our "representatives," are taking the opportunity to grasp as much control and wealth as they can. They are steeling power for themselves through fear mongering, offering people safety and welfare, and centralizing political and police power in the form of a new total-care-state.
'When Mussolini first coined the word “totalitarianism”, it was not a pejorative slur, nor was it something connoting tyranny; rather, Mussolini used totalitarianism to refer to a humane society in which everyone was taken care of and looked after by a state which encompassed all of life within its total grasp. The oppressive totalitarian state always begins by being the compassionate totalitarian state.'
The classic British and American traditions have prized liberty just as highly as safety, as encapsulated in Benjamin Franklin’s dictum, “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Richard Weaver warned of this tendency toward the totalitarian, 'total care' state in 1962 when he said, “The past shows unvaryingly that when a people’s freedom disappears, it goes not with a bang, but in silence amid the comfort of being cared for. That is the dire peril in the present trend toward statism. If freedom is not found accompanied by a willingness to resist, and to reject favors, rather than to give up what is intangible but precarious, it will not long be found at all.”
We don't know into whose hands they are submitting their liberty!
In his book, The Theory of Money and Credit, Ludwig von Mises wrote, "A government that sets out to abolish market prices is inevitably driven toward the abolition of private property; it has to recognize that there is no middle way between the system of private property in the means of production combined with free contract, and the system of common ownership of the means of production, or socialism. It is gradually forced toward compulsory production, universal obligation to labor, rationing of consumption, and, finally, official regulation of the whole of production and consumption."
The Revolution that Was
Garrett showed how the silent revolution took place within existing legal forms, a "revolution within the form." The New Deal focused its efforts on the pursuit of power instead of real economic recovery. This is exactly what is going on today. Instead of trying to fix the economy the federal government is grasping as much power and control as they can. Often this grasping only further dis-integrate our market. The simultaneous government partnerships or takeovers of the banking, insurance, mortgage, automotive, and health care industries are merely finishing up on a massive scale a process set in motion over fifty years ago. Within ten years of this new mixed economy the government will be the economy and the economy will be the government. And when socialism finally arrives so will the complete control of your life by the state.
Garrett described the American system of free private enterprise as a conquered province. He demonstrated the scientific revolutionary technique, in terms of the problems it would have to overcome:
- The first, naturally, would be to capture the seat of government.
- The second would be to seize economic power.
- The third would be to mobilize by propaganda the forces of hatred.
- The fourth would be to reconcile and then attach to the revolution the two great classes whose adherence is indispensable but whose interests are economically antagonistic, namely, the industrial wage earners and the farmers, called in Europe workers and peasants.
- The fifth would be what to do with business — whether to liquidate or shackle it.
(These five would have a certain imperative order in time and require immediate decisions because they belong to the program of conquest. That would not be the end. What would then ensue? A program of consolidation. Under that head the problems continue.)
- The sixth would be "the domestication of individuality" — by any means that would make the individual more dependent upon government.
- The seventh would be the systematic reduction of all forms of rival authority.
- The eighth would be to sustain popular faith in an unlimited public debt, for if that faith should break the government would be unable to borrow; if it could not borrow it could not spend; and the revolution must be able to borrow and spend the wealth of the rich or else it will be bankrupt.
- The ninth would be to make the government itself the great capitalist and enterpriser, so that the ultimate power in initiative would pass from the hands of private enterprise to the all-powerful state.
What this last statement means is that the government remains the only entity with the power to buy and sell. Currently our
Even language became a weapon so that it came to pass “not only within the form but within the word, so that people were all the while fixed in the delusion that they were talking about the same things because they were using the same words.”
According to Garrett, the New Deal revolutionaries were supreme opportunists whose every move sought to increase the government’s power. “But the one indispensable ingredient is economic distress,” he wrote, “and if there is enough of that the mixture will take care of itself. The Great Depression as it developed here was such an opportunity as might have been made to order.” Though Garrett referred to 1933, the similarities to 2009 are unmistakable.
Garrett identified the nine steps taken by the New Deal to seize power: (1) capture the seat of government, (2) seize economic power, (3) mobilize the forces of hatred against all opposition, (4) reconcile the farmers and industrial wage earners to the new system, (5) liquidate or shackle business, (6) create dependency on the government among the citizenry, (7) reduce all rival forms of political authority, (8) create support for an unlimited public debt, and (9) usurp the power of capital formation from the private sector to the government.
“Where was the New Deal going?” asked Garrett. “The answer to that question is too obvious to be debated. Every choice it made, whether it was one that moved recovery or not, was a choice unerringly true to the essential design of totalitarian government, never of course called by that name either here or anywhere else.” Garrett concluded “The Revolution Was” thusly: “So it was that a revolution took place within the form. Like the hagfish, the New Deal entered the old form and devoured its meaning from within. The revolutionaries were inside; the defenders were outside … Its own words and promises meant as little to the New Deal as its oath to support the Constitution.”
6. Conclusion
Patrick J. Buchanan wrote:
Indeed, how do Republicans who call Obama a socialist explain their support for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, welfare and the Earned Income Tax Credit? What are these if not government-mandated transfers of wealth to the middle and working class, and the indigent and working poor?
Since August, the Bush-Paulson team has seized our biggest S&L, Washington Mutual, and largest insurance company, AIG. It has nationalized Fannie and Freddie, pumped scores of billions into our banks, bailed out GM, Ford and Chrysler, and paid the $29 billion dowry for Bear Stearns to enter its shotgun marriage with JPMorgan Chase.
And with federal, state and local taxes taking a third of gross domestic product, and government regulating businesses with wage-and-hour laws, civil rights laws, environmental laws, and occupational health and safety laws, what are we living under, if not a mixed socialist-capitalist system?
Norman Thomas is said to have quit running for president on the Socialist ticket after six campaigns because the Democratic Party had stolen all his ideas and written them into its platforms.
If the traditional society was envisioned as helping people live virtuous lives, now the purpose of society is to keep people from suffering. Where as the first goal aims at removing impediments to virtue it left open the possibility of suffering. In fact it thought of suffering as something that could sometimes build character. The end result is a nation of mature, productive, strongly independent, and liberally generous people. The second goal aims at removing opportunity for suffering by limiting individual rights and "protecting" people from themselves. The end result is a nation of immature, lazy, and strongly dependent people with an entitlement attitude "cared for" by a state that encompasses all of life within its total grasp.
Neither of the contemporary mainline political parties have shown us a way out of this totalitarian morass. The conservative party has dis-integrated into the morally impotent religious right on the one side and impious corporate imperialism on the other. The liberal party has likewise collapsed under the weight of its own triumphal welfare-ism and decadent top-heavy legislation of laziness. Both represent a totalizing jihad against liberty.