Monday, August 15, 2011

A Horrible Week for Global Socialism

By Alan Caruba

Over the weekend of August 6-7, the Wall Street Journal’s lead headline was “U.S. Loses Triple-A Credit Rating.”

On Monday, August 8, the Journal’s headline was “Markets Brace for Downgrade’s Toll.”

By Tuesday, August 9, it was “Downgrade Ignites a Global Sell-Off.”

On Wednesday, August 10, it was “Markets Sink Then Soar After Fed Speaks.”

Thursday, August 11, the Journal cast its eyes across the Big Pond noting that “Italy’s Woes Weigh on Europe.”

On Friday, 12, the headline said, “Stocks Swing Up in Wild Week.”

A week after the Standard & Poor’s downgrade of the U.S. credit rating from AAA to AA+, in the August 13-14 edition, the Journal took note of a “Global Crisis of Confidence”, adding that “World Policy Makers’ Inability to Agree on Fixes Led Markets on Wild Ride.”

As the new week dawned on August 15, the Journal said, “Markets Gird for Fresh Drama.”

It was a great week for dramatic headlines and a horrible week for the rest of the world. Mostly, though, it was a fulfillment of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s observation that socialism works just fine until you run out of “other people’s money.”

That is a perfect definition of “redistribution” or, as President Obama once observed, “At some point you’ve made enough money.” A more un-American statement has rarely been uttered by an American President.

The U.S. has been engaged in a huge experiment in redistribution since the years of the Great Depression when Franklin D. Roosevelt, a man who knew absolutely nothing about running a business and who had spent most of his life living off an allowance from his mother, tried everything he could think of to get the economy going again.

FDR could have tried cutting taxes. He could have encouraged Congress to avoid voting for trade barriers in a fit of protectionism. Instead, he came up with Social Security, among an alphabet soup of government programs which were a disaster when it came to encouraging private sector job creation. Not unlike President Obama's "stimulus" and other doomed-to-fail experiments

The history of Social Security is one long succession of lies that Americans have been told. By the time Lyndon B. Johnson was President, the funds set aside for Social Security payments were moved to the general fund where they could be plundered by Congress. Under President Clinton Social Security payments began to be taxed as income.

World War Two arrived in the U.S. on December 7, 1941, and full employment followed to defeat the fascists in Germany and Japan. The government that had expanded during the FDR years continued to expand.

Americans emerged from the war without a scratch on the homeland. With the exception of Hawaii’s Pearl Harbor, none of our cities were bombed. We had a million battle-tested young men returning home in 1945, the GI bill let them go to college if they wanted, and by the 1950s we were on our way to being the greatest military power in the world and the greatest economy ever known.

And the federal government never stopped expanding. It needed more money, but the stock market, with occasional recessions, just kept growing too. As time went along, Great Britain and Western Europe rebuilt, alliances such as NATO were created to thwart the Soviet Union’s ambitions, while Eastern Europe stagnated under Soviet imposed communism.

In Asia, Japan became an economic powerhouse and South Korea too. China which had suffered under Chairman Mao waited until he died to convert its economy to a capitalist model, while retaining all the worst aspects of an Orwellian communist government. In the Middle East, oil allowed nations led by a handful of tribal chiefs and assorted despots acquire wealth beyond belief. Their populations remained oppressed. Now they are in the streets demanding freedom and justice. They will get Sharia law and more oppression.

Economies became increasingly global and interconnected. Europe became the European Union, a huge bureaucratic mess with the Euro as a common currency. Western bankers purchased Europe’s securities and vice versa. When the housing market imploded in September 2008, they discovered that most were de-linked from the original mortgage assets and were essentially worthless to the tune of billions.

The Federal Reserve responded by shipping $600 billion to prop up European central banks and Congress responded by authorizing the Treasury Department to “bail out” U.S. banks and the huge insurance company, AIG, with public funds--your money.

So what have we learned from all this? Foremost of all, socialist economies are inherently unfair and disconnected from the real world of hard work, property ownership, and capital investment. We learned that bankers are greedy and take greater risks than they should.

Great Britain, which has become one of the greatest welfare states in the world, was rewarded for its generosity with looting and rioting by youths whose families had lived on the dole their entire lives. Greece had already had its spate of riots.

Everyone keeps saying that the U.S. must not become Greece, but the U.S. has become Greece and that accounts for all those horrible headlines from last week.

The Obama administration, which has steadfastly ignored every previous “commission” that has studied the economy, has now engineered “a super committee” in Congress. It is composed of the twelve worst ideologues on either side of the economic policy divide in an effort to cut some spending, any spending! Failure has been baked into that cake.

The old way of conducting the affairs of nations, particularly their economies, is coming apart at the seams. It has exposed the hypocrisy of socialism here in the United States and everywhere else it has been practiced.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

6 comments:

Travis sez said...

@Alan: typo in 4th paragraph from the end "most" should read "must". Your history lesson is a fair and accurate one. Thanks for your unparalleled daily efforts. As one who worked from age 14 to age 75, and never sought or received unemployment or welfare payments, today's world has a "through the looking-glass" unfamiliarity.

Harry Dale Huffman said...

The first thing to learn from this is that Wall Street, and money-moving by the "world (financial) order" in general, is socialism too, and thus part of the problem, not the answer. Getting as many individuals invested in it as possible has spread the blame and the guilt over everyone, making them all complicit, but not profiting, in any fall of the house of cards. We have a biblical deluge in the works, and a new dispensation likely coming after (which no Wall Street "have" is going to tell you, because he/she believes in "creating wealth" out of nothing). At bottom, it is not about capitalism vs. socialism, nor individual vs. state's rights. It is about respect for others and moral responsibility, and our institutions have become lax, and worse, in keeping their houses clean -- they have invited economic rodent infestation, and now there are mice droppings, filthy nests, and severely gnawed savings everywhere.

Rich Kozlovich said...

Alan,

Here is my take on this Super Congress that is supposed to resolve the budget issues.

The One has now managed to completely shift the blame for any future failures to fix the budget on Congress if this Super Congress can't come up with a solution. He knows they won't, Congress knows they won't and the entire world knows they won't.

He went from doing nothing; having no ideas; no plans; no solutions to complete absolution when Congress fails. That was brilliant. I wonder who gave him that idea.

I wonder how the leaders in Congress could be so easily duped. I wonder how the Congressmen and Senators who will be serving on the committee could be foolish so as to accept. It is a wonder!

Alan Caruba said...

@Rich: I am beginning to regard this Congress as a bunch of kindergartners led by retards.

Laura Lee - Grace Explosion said...

@Alan -- Remember Rep. Hank Johnson, a Georgia Democrat, thought that if 8,000 troops landed on Guam, the island might be overpopulated, tip over and capsize. This is the Kindergarten, handicapped level persons in Congress.

Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-20001611-38.html#ixzz1VEfloN7j

LarryOldtimer said...

Ditto what Travis said for me.

It is quite clear to me that the EU is about to crumble, and the Euro will go down with it.

Germany (with France as a hopeless sidekick) is demanding that Germany have complete authority over budgets in all European mainland nations. In other words, The Forth Reich, i.e., German Empire. With the austerity demanded by Germany. . . balanced budgets by 2012, how absurd, there will be either total ignoring, or serious rebellion, in any of the "Club Med" nations . . . and the idea that Germany will essentially fund it all will not play well with German citizens at all

The balloon is about to go up, in all of Europe.