Karl Marx Preached "Fairness" Too

By Alan Caruba

My father was a Certified Public Accountant and dinner time throughout my youth was filled with horror stories about the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) as he struggled to keep up with a tax code that just kept growing.

According to Nina Olsen, the National Taxpayer Advocate for the IRS who heads a staff of 2,000, the American tax system is “a huge convoluted mess.” Despite efforts to determine its length, it is variously estimated to be between 65,000 and 70,000 pages. “We looked at how many changes in the tax law (that) had occurred in the last year alone,” said Olsen, “it was something like 579 changes.” No one can keep up with that volume of changes, not even Ms. Olsen’s office.

As this is being written, President Obama is dominating the news cycle with his message of tax “fairness”, attacking men like Mitt Romney, the presumptive Republican candidate, for being wealthy and citing men like Warren Buffett and other millionaires and multi-millionaires who say they should pay more. It is a longtime populist, progressive message and it is a false message.

Chris Edwards who studies tax policy at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, says, “What happens when you raise taxes for higher-income people; they reduce their productive activities—like working and investing and starting businesses—and they increase their unproductive activities—like tax avoidance and tax evasion. So governments really shoot themselves in the foot if they raise rates too much.”

If it were not for “taxation without representation” Americans might still be “subjects” of the British Empire because, as any school child can tell you, the Revolution was fought over this issue and was kicked off in earnest by the Boston Tea Party when a tax on tea enraged the citizens of that time. There were, in fact, some ten other tea parties in the colonies.

The United States has the dubious honor of having the highest tax rate on corporations in the world. And some people still cannot understand why U.S. corporations are shipping jobs overseas and foreign corporations are reluctant to set up U.S. headquarters here.

In a recent opinion in The Wall Street Journal, Amity Shales, a former WSJ reporter and now the director of a George W. Bush Institute project on national economic growth, wrote that “The trouble is that lawmakers (especially at the federal level) insist on discussing fax reform in terms of fairness. Tax competition earns a mention from time to time, but only a mention.” She pointed out, as have others, that “states with no income tax grow faster than those with high income taxes.”

By framing the tax debate in terms of fairness and attacking Mitt Romney’s wealth, President Obama is pandering to his greatest constituency—the stupid among us. He was elected on the basis of a lot of gauzy, vague promises of hope and change, and with the adoring support of the mainstream media.

Obama’s problem is not about fairness or taxes. His problem is 13.9 million unemployed Americans, not counting those who are not looking for work or those working part-time jobs just to make ends meet. As a recent commentary on EconomicCollapse.com pointed out, “The number of unemployed Americans is larger than the entire population of Greece.”

The onerous, insane growth of the regulation industry at all levels of government is crushing the economy. “The U.S. national debt has increased by more than four trillion dollars since Barack Obama took office” and, with the aid of a Democrat-controlled Congress for the first two years of his term, he increased the national debt more than all the presidents combined from Washington to Clinton.

Believing that taxing rich people will close the gap is unbelievably stupid. As a Wall Street Journal editorial pointed out on April 10th, “The Obama Treasury’s own numbers confirm that the tax (on the wealthy) would raise at most $5 billion a year—or less than 0.5% of the $1.2 trillion fiscal 2012 budget deficit and over the next decade a mere 0.1% of the $45-43 trillion the federal government will spend.”

There is an alternative. It’s called the “Fair Tax” and you can learn more about it by visiting the website of the National Taxpayers Union.

By bleeding jobs through an insane tax system, a federal tax code filled with loopholes that even the IRS cannot keep up with, the highest corporate tax in the world, an idiotic immigration policy toward illegal aliens, and a burden on the fortunate few that still have jobs the United States is digging itself into financial collapse.

The federal government is broke. The states are broke. And with the advent of $4 and $5 gas pump prices—thanks to Obama’s anti-energy policies—the rest of us are getting more broke.

President Obama’s blather about “fairness” is straight out of Karl Marx’s “Das Kapital” and the Communist Manifesto with their emphasis the redistribution of wealth and the end of private property.

© Alan Caruba, 2012.

The U.S. is on a Suicide Watch

By Alan Caruba

In 1991, the Soviet Union, arguably the greatest experiment in Communism, collapsed. After Mao Zedong died in 1976, his successors moved to shift its Communist economy to one that embraced Capitalism while retaining centralized government control.

Following World War Two, the recovering nations of Europe were rescued from Communism by the Marshall Plan, but adopted Communism-Light in the form of Socialism. The U.S. was already headed in that direction, creating programs that we now call “entitlements.” For most of the nation’s history, such “entitlements” did not exist.

What binds together the financial problems of the West is the common thread of infantile behavior and thought. One might call it wishful thinking. Instead of encouraging people to provide for old age and possible illness, politicians decided to turn government into Big Daddy, the eternal source of money for everything.

Need to go to college, start a business, or plan for retirement? Government would be there to help. All this ignored the need to actually pay for these programs. In the case of Social Security Congress began to dip into its funding to pay for other programs! This is what children do.

One can look around the world and see what a failure both Communism and Socialism have been. Governments spending more than their tax and other revenues have suffered grievously from this path to default and that includes the United States of America. It can be argued that, with few exceptions--the Reagan years come to mind—Presidents have been poorly served by their economic advisors.

Politicians make poor economists because, in America, members of the House must think of getting reelected every two years and Senators every six. Moreover, being politicians, they believe that the more federal largess they can bring back to their State and then brag about is the one true path to reelection.

At the very beginning of the nation, Thomas Jefferson said it best. “I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.”

How many commissions and special committees have earnestly produced reports intended to deal with a government grown too large? At the federal level, some two million or more Americans are employed promulgating a deluge of regulations and pushing paper.

Now President Obama says he wants to streamline the federal government.

The real issue is not “streamlining” government agencies by gathering them together under one roof and one administrator, but the failure to end government departments and agencies that no longer serve a useful purpose and whose removal would also remove countless obstacles to economic growth.

In April 2011, Wayne Crews of the Competitive Enterprise Institute warned that “the federal government is on track to spend more than $3.5 trillion this year. What most people don’t know is that government actually costs about 50% more than what it spends. That’s because complying with federal regulations costs an additional $1.75 trillion—nearly an eighth of GDP. And almost none of that cost appears on the budget.”

The United States of America, the greatest engine of wealth the world has ever seen, is bankrupt. The national debt exceeds the Gross Domestic Product, the sum total of all revenue generated by goods and services.

The President has asked that the debt ceiling be raised another trillion or so and Congress will comply. That, I submit, is insane.

I also submit that, since Barack Obama was sworn into office on January 20, 2009, the nation has been witness to the economic insanity personified in the man and in the Democrat-controlled Congress that was his partner until 2010 when the control of the House of Representatives was wrested away by the Tea Party movement and its support for Republican candidates.

The only constant in life is change. America’s demography has changed. We have, thanks to medical care and other advantages, a much older segment of the population than ever before, but the nation from the 1930s to the 1960s had committed itself to ensure they would have Medicare and Medicaid at a time when people more often than not died in their 50’s and 60’s. We now have an average life expectancy of 78 years. My parents lived into their 90s.

Politics, not economics, continues to make it impossible to revise and restructure both Medicare and Social Security to reflect this reality. Instead, we had Obamacare foisted upon us which took trillions from Medicare and imposes rules that will let elderly heart attack or stroke victims die rather than pay for a level of care to which they contributed during their working years.

If the Supreme Court declares Obamacare unconstitutional it will go away. If we elect a Republican Senate, the repeal already passed in the House will be passed and it will go away.

But America’s economic problems will not go away until Americans insist that the shackles of Big Government be cut loose to enable the growth of an energy industry that can not only make the nation energy independent, but produce billions in revenue as far as the eye can see into the future.

The tax system with its thousands of pages must be revised to a simpler, fairer program. It makes no sense that forty percent of Americans pay no taxes at all.

It’s not that we don’t know what must be done. Conservative think tanks like The Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, The Heartland Institute, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and others have spelled out programs that can and will save America, but the nation must be led by a president who understands that Capitalism involves budgeting, planning, hard work, and—yes—risk.

The federal government is running on “continuing resolutions.” It has not had a formal budget since Obama arrived. This is no way to run the greatest nation on the face of the Earth. America is on a suicide watch and we are just an election away from saving it.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

Obama's "Fairness" is Pure Communism

By Alan Caruba

It is clear that Barack Obama’s main campaign theme is going to be about “fairness.” This is one of those words like “hope” and “change” that can mean many different things to different people. No one can ever accuse Obama of clarity. He is a consummate sloganeer, but the results of those slogans hardly represent anything resembling fairness. Or success.

The one incontrovertible fact about life is that it is not fair.

Some are born into wealth and some into moderate means and some into poverty. Moreover, some are born with inherent gifts and talents, while others are not. Some are born into “dysfunctional” families where a parent or parents are alcoholics or use illegal drugs, in jail or just gone.

The list of the plus and minuses in life are long and varied; city-born, country-born; the lure of gang life versus the expectation of rising early to do farm chores. Inner city schools versus suburban ones with greater budgets and opportunities. There is no real fairness and those who see the obstacles and overcome them do so because of an innate desire to achieve their goals.

One young man who comes to mind was born to a white mother, Stanley Ann Dunham in Hawaii with a black father, Barack Obama Sr., from Kenya who in fairly rapid order divorced her and returned to an African wife he already had. His mother then married another foreigner, Lolo Soetoro, a Muslim from Indonesia, moving to Jakarta with her young son whom he adopted. When that marriage collapsed, she turned the care of her son over to her parents. One might not consider this the most promising beginning in life.

Barack Obama, however, got lucky. His grandparents ensured he attended a private school, Punahou, where he received an above-average education. He enrolled in colleges, eventually making his way to Columbia University and onto Harvard University Law School. Much of the information regarding his academic life remains shrouded. Indeed, we only “know” what Obama told us in two “memoirs” written at an early age about a life of relatively little achievement until politics propelled him into office in Illinois and then to the U.S. Senate where he spent barely two years before seeking the presidency.

Where did fairness play a role in any of this? Was it “fair” to be biracial? Was it fair to secure an education at well-respected institutions to which others were not admitted? So much of Obama’s life seems to hinge on remarkable, impenetrable happenstance and good fortune, but at this point he tells us that he is obsessed with the issue of “fairness.”

In a speech in December he talked of everyone engaging in “fair play, everyone gets a fair shot, everyone does their fair share.” It sounds nice, but it has nothing to do with hard work, self-improvement, personal motivation, and good values.. We look around us in any office or workplace and can pick out one or two that fit this description while the rest engage in psychological warfare and backstabbing.

For all this talk of fair share and fair play, Americans have lived through three years of Obama and have nothing to show for it beyond massive unemployment, lost homes, dislocation, food stamps, graduating into the world with a national debt that is equal to the Gross Domestic Product.

There are fewer real opportunities, no matter what one’s background or resume may be. It is fair the nation has been saddled with six trillion dollars in new debt since he took office? It is fair that future generations must pay this debt?

Obama is obsessed with what he regards as the unfairness of the income tax system, forever decrying what he perceives as differences in the rate the wealthy pay. In fact, the wealthy pay far more taxes than most Americans and some 40% of Americans pay no tax whatever.

The National Taxpayers Union’s figures for 2009 reveal that the top 1% of taxpayers paid 36.73%, the top 5% paid 58.66%, the top 10% paid 70% to the point where the top 50% paid 97.75%. The rest paid a mere 2.25% of incomes taxes that year. Is that fair?

Obama’s belief in the redistribution of income is hardly fair. Taking money from decent, hard-working Americans and giving it to those who won’t work or came here illegally hardly fits the description of fairness. It is, however, the classic definition of “economic justice” which gave us the 2008 financial meltdown when bad housing loans nearly destroyed the banking system.

As Mitt Romney campaigns in South Carolina for its primary election, a collection of yelping dogs are nipping at his heels, crying about how horrible it was that he was a practitioner of venture capitalism, cruelly destroying jobs, and growing wealthy. Newt Gingrich called it “vulture capitalism.” It is all a distortion of the truth and, worse, betrays a total lack of understanding of capitalism, the greatest job creator in the history of the world.

As The Wall Street Journal noted in an editorial, “Bain Capital has been a net job and wealth creator.” Citing just one example, Staples, Romney’s investment enabled the company to grow to a point where it currently employs 90,000 people. Also noted was the fact that some of Bain’s investments did not pan out. That is the nature of capitalism and it is often not fair.

Americans got burned by Obama’s “hope and change” mantra in 2008 and those who fall for his “fairness” mantra in 2012 will suffer a similar fate.

As for me, I am going to cast my vote for a man who made his wealth within and because of a system that rewards risk and the ability to pick more winners than losers.

I am going to avoid a president who has proven to be the biggest loser this nation has ever seen.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

America's Communist President

By Alan Caruba

In his extraordinary book, “Dupes: How America’s Adversaries Have Manipulated Progressives for a Century”, the historian, Dr. Paul Kengor, stated in his introduction that “We now know that American Communists and their masters in Moscow were acutely aware that they could never gain the popular support they needed to enlist the support of a much wider coalition that could help them push their private agenda.”

Most threatening, however, was Dr. Kengor’s discovery that “it was nothing short of stunning to research this book during the presidential bid of Barack Obama and hear so many of the names in my research surface repeatedly in the background of the man who became president of the United States of America. The way in which so many names and themes from the Cold War past aligned and made their way into Obama’s orbit was chilling.”

Obama’s December 8th speech in Osawatomie, Kansas revealed to anyone paying any attention that the President is a Communist. Speaking of the nation’s economic system that has created the greatest wealth for the most people anywhere, Capitalism, Obama said, “It doesn’t work. It has never worked.”

No one would argue that capitalism is “fair”, nor would they argue that life is “fair.” These are things that never were and never will be, but Obama’s reelection campaign theme will be that Americans are suffering because of Capitalism, because of a lack of fairness.

In a December 8 Washington Times commentary, Jeffrey T. Kuhner wrote, “There is only one problem with the White House’s narrative: It’s completely false. Mr. Obama is not a defender of the middle class but has been its mortal enemy. His policies have impoverished working-and-middle-class Americans.”

Other than the utterly brain-dead liberals for whom facts are meaningless, most Americans understand, as Kuhner pointed out, “His massive stimulus failed to restore economic recovery…his trillion-dollar deficits and skyrocketing debt have mortgaged the future of our children…Obamacare suffocates businesses, stifles job creation, and adds another unsustainable entitlement. It is creeping socialized medicine, which is wrecking the world’s finest health care system.”

Rush Limbaugh denounced the speech as “alien to American ideals and principles…your vision for this country is not rooted in any—not one—American tradition.”

Obama’s history, what is known of it given his extensive efforts to hide the facts that are usually available about a candidate or president, is testimony to the fact that he is a Communist and the only reason this remains clouded to many Americans has been the shameful failure of the Fourth Estate, the liberal mainstream media, to expose it.

He remains in office due to the failure of both the media and the Republican Party to cite the U.S. Constitution’s prohibition against anyone holding the office who is not a “natural-born” American. Obama’s father was a Kenyan, a subject of Great Britain. He should not have been on the Democratic Party ballot and he should not be in the Oval Office as this is written.

Many of the known facts about Obama were published in Dr. Jerome Corsi’s 2008 book, “The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality.” Thirty-five pages of footnotes citing the documentation of the facts cited were there for anyone to read. Obama was born into a family of Leftists. As a youngster he was mentored by Frank Marshal Davis, a member of the Communist Party USA.

Of his early college years, Obama said in his memoir that at Occidental, “To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets.”

Obama’s political career began with a fund-raiser in the living room of two dedicated, self-identified Communists, Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn. As Dr. Corsi pointed out, “The problem is that Obama sought out his relationships with the Alinski organization, the Ayers-Dohrn radicals, the scandal-ridden (Antoin ‘Tony’) Rezko, Reverand (Jeremiah) Wright and black-liberation theology, and Farrakhan and the Black Muslims. At the time he wanted these ties.” In the course of his 2008 campaign he rejected all efforts to tie him to these individuals.

The appointment of the many “czars” to oversee and guide the actions of government departments and agencies became the subject, first of ridicule, followed by the realization he was infiltrating the government with known radicals of different stripes. The one that quickly gained attention was Van Jones, an avowed Communist. When that became known, Jones resigned.

The Osawatomie speech was classic Obama. In the past he has sought to align himself with former presidents and this time around it was Theodore Roosevelt, a progressive. As Americans have sought to peel away the many layers of deceit surrounding Obama, the single abiding factor in his life is Communism. The views he expressed were a combination of class warfare and an attack on Capitalism.

In 2008 Americans, reeling from the financial crisis that all too conveniently began in the final months of the Bush43 presidency, were duped into believing that a man with nothing more than a message of “hope and change” was a messiah that would lead the nation out of its problems.

Obama was and is the first Communist President of the United States of America. We have a President who rails against “millionaires and billionaires”, corporations, Wall Street, and all other aspects of our Capitalist economy.

We have a President and a Democratic Party that have tipped their hat to the Occupy Wall Street radicals.

We have a President and a Democratic Party totally aligned with the unions in America, some of which put the auto industry in jeopardy, others in the public sector that have plundered state treasuries with sweetheart deals for pensions and health plans, and who we have seen thuggishly oppose the restructuring of collective bargaining. It is why a close ally of Obama, Andy Stern, the former president of the Service Employees International Union (SIEU), praised the Chinese Communist economic model in a December 1 Wall Street Journal article.

And we now have a President who says Capitalism “doesn’t work” and “It has never worked.” That is utterly absurd, but it reveals his ideology and his goal of fomenting a Communist revolution in America by bankrupting the nation to achieve it.

Obama is a horrid aberration, the result of a combination of the Democratic Party, the liberal media, and the education community to dumb down Americans and make them ready for the Communist America that Obama advocates.

Communism did not die with the collapse of the Soviet Union. It is alive and well in Russia, China, Cuba, Vietnam and in Venezuela. The soft form, Socialism, has brought a number of European nations to ruin and threatens the U.S.

In 2010 Americans returned power in the House of Representatives to the Republican Party. We must finish the job in the Senate and in the White House in 2012. If we do not, the America we love will perish.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Time to Rid the Streets of the "Occupy" Movement

By Alan Caruba

Is there any doubt left in the minds of observers of the Occupy Wall Street movement tends toward violence and is in need of control? The mayors of the cities—some seventy at last count—that are being occupied need to crack down on it.

Not all agree, of course. Among the list of the Occupy movement are the following organizations and individuals that have expressed support or sympathy:

Communist Party, USA
American Nazi Party
Revolutionary Communist Party
Industrial Workers of the World
International Bolshevik Tendency
International Socialist Organization
Marxist Student Union
Freedom Road Socialist Organization
Party for Socialism and Liberation
President Barack Obama
Vice President Joe Biden
Former House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi
The Revolutionary Guards of Iran
Communist Party of China
Louis Farrakhan, National of Islam
Black Panthers

There are others but they all have commonalities, not the least of which is a belief in Communism, they are representative of the American Far Left, and have an affinity for class and racial warfare.

There is nothing to recommend its supporters and considerable reason to take action against the movement that claims to be leaderless, but which has already been granted a tax-exempt status as it continues to collect a large bankroll.

As Lincoln pointed out, ‘The Constitution is not a suicide pact” and this nation fought a Civil War to ensure that the Union would remain intact. Thus, appeals to freedom of speech have their limits when it comes to efforts to undermine and destroy the nation. The free speech argument has been the initial fall-back position of some mayors, but it is rapidly wearing thin.

No doubt, Mayor Bloomberg of New York has been hoping that the dropping temperature as we advance toward winter will have the salutary affect of causing the occupiers of Zuccotti Park to leave. In a cash-strapped city, the millions in overtime and other costs do not justify his forbearance, but the Mayor is a liberal so his inaction is understandable. Mayors of other cities under siege have responded timidly for the most part.

As a student of history, I recall the hippie movement of the 1960s, the famed Haight-Ashbury refuge in San Francisco, and other places where a disaffected and unhappy youth gathered to “tune out” and listen to speeches about the Vietnam War and other grievances. In general, they did not engage in violence because their focus was on drugs and “free love.”

The Occupy movement is a different animal. The object of its anger is Wall Street, banks, capitalism, and the current  economic distress. One group, OurTime.org, “a non-profit organization standing up for Americans under 30”, noted that the October jobs report “reveals that young Americans hold a 15.4% unemployment rate, which marks the eighth straight month that the 18-24 demographic…”

Their anger would be better directed against a federal government that is responsible for the 2008 collapse of the housing market and major banking, investment and insurance companies, many of which were bailed out by Congress using the funds of taxpayers, the real 99%.

The youth have cause to be unhappy, but they would be better informed if they understood how poorly they have been served by a debased national educational system and indebtedness brought about by universities that thrive off the student-loan system underwritten by the federal government. Their ignorance of this and so much more is both understandable and deplorable.

You don't solve unemployment by embracing tyranny.

Further back in history, one recalls the mobs that brought down the Weimar Republic in Germany and opened the doors to the Nazi movement. Earlier, mobs led by Bolsheviks deposed the Russian czar and imposed some seventy years of Communist control there. It is not surprising, therefore, that so many communist organizations and nations support the Occupy movement or that Wall Street is its target.

In time we shall learn who the organizers of this “spontaneous” movement truly have been, but for now public safety must be asserted to rid Zuccotti Park of this gang of “useful idiots” and wherever else they show up.

There no longer is any excuse to tolerate them and plenty of communist groups who will welcome them or, if the message of “change” put forth by Barack Obama is more closely examined, they can join the Democratic Party and continue its long history of destroying the nation’s economy.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Occupy Wall Street: Communism's Clueless Foot Soldiers

By Alan Caruba

Norman Thomas, a U.S. Socialist Party candidate for president, once famously said, “The American people will never knowingly adopt Socialism. But, under the name of ‘liberalism’, they will adopt every fragment of the Socialist program, until one day America will be a socialist nation, without knowing how it happened.”

Thomas ran for president six consecutive times from 1928. He needn’t have bothered as Franklin Delano Roosevelt and subsequent Democrat Presidents introduced most of the planks of the Communist Manifesto and we live with them to this day.

The Occupy Wall Street youngsters are the latest foot soldiers of Communism, though it is likely most are too ignorant to realize it. They have been so thoroughly indoctrinated in government schools and by Hollywood and the media that they have no idea how they are being used by labor unions and other leftist organizations.

The protesters are likely unaware of the misery and murders Marx’s Communism imposed on Russia courtesy of Lenin, Stalin, and those who followed in their footsteps. Mao's Red China murdered thousands as well in the pursuit of the “equality” that is the alleged goal of Communism and liberalism.

In 1848, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels wrote “The Communist Manifesto.” Marx never held a job in his life, living off of donations from Engels and others. He failed miserably at every enterprise he tried, including publishing newspapers.

The Manifesto had ten planks. The first was the abolition of property in land and the application of all rents to public purposes. Anyone who owns land in America for their homes or any activity such as farming or mining knows that they must pay fees to various levels of government. Even in death, inheritance taxes are a penalty imposed on passing property to one’s children. These taxes were the subject of the Manifesto’s third plank which called for the abolition of all rights of inheritance.

The second plank is one that is very much in the news. It is a heavy progressive or graduated income tax. Everyone pays income taxes and there are demands that “millionaires and billionaires” pay more than others. Corporate income taxes in the U.S. are among the highest in the world. In the Supreme Court decision, McCulloch v Maryland Webster, Chief Justice John Marshall said that the power to tax is the power to destroy. Too much taxation is one of the reasons the nation finds itself in its current financial crisis as it is directly connected to whether people will invest in new businesses or existing ones and destroys job creation.

The Manifesto called for the centralization of all means of communication and transportation in the hands of the state and the U.S. government is replete with commissions that achieve this goal. The fifth plank called for the centralization of credit in the hands of the state and, ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Federal Reserve, a system of privately owned banks that have a monopoly on the creation of money backed solely by the credit of the government. Standard & Poors recently downgraded the nation’s credit rating. Is there really any gold in Fort Knox? One hopes.

Most famously the Manifesto called for the state to own all factories and instruments of production. Instead of merely permitting the standard practice of bankruptcy to occur so that they could be restructured, the Obama administration stepped in and “bailed out”, i.e. took ownership of General Motors and Chrysler companies. Creditors were kicked to the curb.

The Manifesto called for government control of all labor and agriculture. The federal government has a matrix of departments that exercise control of these sectors of the economy; a Department of Labor and a Department of Agriculture.

The tenth plank of the Manifesto called for “free education for all children in public schools and the combination of education with industrial production.” The Occupy Wall Street protesters are the result of government schools whose purpose is to create a docile work force that, along with various government “entitlement” programs provides for a cradle-to-grave submissive workforce.

But the Occupy Wall Street protesters, you say, hardly seem submission, nor do the unions that we’ve seen occupy the state house in Wisconsin, call for strikes, and other forms of worker protests. Intimidation in the quest for the Manifesto's objectives is a Communist tactic.

The protesters are calling for free college educations. The unions were protesting against the loss of collective bargaining with governments that determine their pension and health benefits, all paid for with public funding.

Little wonder the protesters are being embraced by the Democratic Party and unions, and that those spoiled brats befouling the walkways, streets, and alleys of New York and other cities are totally oblivious to the way they are being used.

Americans better insist that Capitalism emerges stronger from this latest spate of organized anarchy. If not, Karl Marx and the foolish liberals will succeed in destroying what is left of the nation.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Unemployed Imbeciles Gather to Protest

By Alan Caruba

I confess I have not paid much attention to the Occupy Wall Street protest. Watching New York cops arrest whole bunches of them on the Brooklyn Bridge for obstructing traffic was briefly entertaining, but it occurred to me I had no idea why they were protesting except for the fact that they were mostly young, mostly unemployed, and mostly led by the usual demonic Communists that have a beef with American exceptionalism.

As a sign of the times, Occupy Wall Street has a spiffy website, but it is filled with the most ignorant nonsense right out of the Communist Manifesto. Apparently the protesters have identified banks and corporations as the enemy. If you ask bankers and Wall Street folks, they will tell you the enemy is the federal government and they would be right.

Bankers and Wall Street want stability and predictability. They want to pile up money and loan it out to make more money or they want to sell stocks and make bets on which will go up and which will not. It’s called Capitalism and it works unless the government gets deeply involved in telling them what to do and picking winners and losers in the free market.

In the case of the most recent financial crisis, the government got into the home mortgage market back in the 1930s during the Great Depression. Fannie Mae and later Freddie Mac were set up to purchase mortgages from banks in order to “stimulate” the housing market.

You can read the U.S. Constitution from beginning to end and not find the words “housing market” in there anywhere. The house of cards the federal government created, combined with the pressure brought to bear on bankers to make “ninja” loans (no job, no assets) resulting in the 2008 meltdown when the “bundled” mortgages turned out to be worthless and generally untraceable. Wall Street didn’t create this, Washington did.

Of course, none of this means anything to those protesting in Zuccotti Park and elsewhere. It’s not a protest. It’s an excuse to party. Occasionally Leftist celebrities show up and shake hands with “the people” to give them a thrill. Then they go back to their tenured university faculty jobs, making movies and being hideously overpaid for doing so, and looking for a dictator to hug.

Journalists who have tried to determine what the protest is about have come up empty. Brad Knickerbocker, writing for the Christian Science Monitor, noted that “there’s no 10-point list of demands to be nailed Martin-Luther-like to the business and media establishment’s door.”

Cornell West, a Princeton University professor said, “It’s impossible to translate the issue of the greed of Wall Street into one demand or two demands. We’re talking about a democratic awakening. We’re talking about raising political consciousness.” Yada, yada, yada.

West is apparently unaware that the political consciousness of Americans has already been raised by the worst presidency in the history of the nation or that Republicans are heatedly debating who they want to elect to replace it. Democrats, too, because quite a few are looking at Mitt Romney with something close to affection.

Andrew Goodman of The Wall Street Journal reported that “Many of the protesters are young. Joblessness seems to be a persistent theme.” No surprises here. Goodman reported that a list of grievances has been circulating among the protesters and, “Among the complaints: bank executives who received ‘exorbitant’ bonuses not long after receiving taxpayer bailouts” and, even I would be happy to protest that.

An October 3rd Gateway Pundit report has listed 13 Occupy Wall Street demands and they read like an Obama-inspired wet dream. They include a universal single payer healthcare system, guaranteed living wage income regardless of employment, free college education, a trillion dollars in infrastructure projects, a trillion dollars in “ecological restoration”, open borders migration, and the immediate across the board debt forgiveness for all.

They are the demands of imbeciles.

You can find a lot of them camped out in lower Manhattan these days. Just wait until the nights turn really cold. They will go home to mommy and daddy.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

A High Stakes Clash of Economists

By Alan Caruba

“We need an impulse, a jolt, an acceleration…Let us experiment with boldness on such lines, even though some of the schemes may turn out to be failures, which is very likely.”

Who said that? Was it President Obama? Franklin Delano Roosevelt? Neither. It was John Maynard Keynes, a British economist. The year was 1924 and England, still struggling to recover from the cost of World War One, was trying to figure out what steps to take. The British economy was suffering from high interest rates, falling prices, and high unemployment.

Keynes’ view was that the government had to spend lots of money on public housing, better roads, and improvements to the electricity grid to get money into general circulation, stimulate the economy, and restore business confidence. The unemployed had to be given work even if it was the government not private enterprise that would provide the capital.

Keynes was already world famous because of his role as a British Treasury negotiator at the Paris Peace Conference, a precursor to the Treaty of Versailles. He had written a book, “The Economic Consequences of the Peace”, that revealed the disastrous path the treaty has set Europe upon, the beggaring of Germany and Austria that led to the rise of Hitler and World War Two.

His economic theories would eventually take his name and, ultimately, his magnum opus, “A General Theory”, would enshrine him in the pantheon of the most famed economists. Succeeding generations of economists and even politicians would call themselves Keynesians.

A quite thoroughly unknown economist, Friedrich Hayak, an Austrian who was sixteen years younger, took a far different view. While Keynes thought economics must be applied to improve the lives of people through government programs, Hayak thought that the less government interfered with the free market, the better. Indeed, the smaller the role of government, the better.

All this is told brilliantly in a new book, “Keynes Hayek: The Clash That Defined Modern Economics” ($28.95, W.W. Norton & Company) by Nicholas Wapshott, a biographer of film actors and directors, as well as political figures, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.

While one might assume that economics had to be the driest of topics and two economists most people have never heard of, the least of interest, Wapshott pulls it off, explaining some fairly daunting theories, mixing in lots of history to the present day, and bringing Keynes and Hayek to life in a way that is very entertaining.

What emerges is the recognition that politicians, whether it was Roosevelt in the depth of the Depression years, George W. Bush with a huge financial crisis in 2007, or Barack Obama struggling with high unemployment in 2009, all tend to look for the shortest route out of their problem because they want to be reelected or vindicated for the steps they took. They all think government is the answer.

Hayek reflects the conservative view that government should get out of the way and let a recession yield to natural economic forces. History demonstrates that, without government involvement, they eventually go away in relatively short order.

Government, Hayek argued, is more likely to make a mess of the economy than fix it. He has been proven correct over and over again, but that doesn’t matter because it is politics, not economics, that drives politicians. Politicians do not want to appear to be doing nothing.

Keynes was for a hands-on government, intervening to save the economy and, he too has been proven correct as in the most recent steps both the U.S. and British governments took to literally push gobs of money out the door and into banks to keep the whole system from collapse. The problem, however, is that it was taxpayer’s money and the borrowing to replace it will saddle future generations with an enormous debt unless some austerity is imposed on government.

Always in Keynes’ enormous shadow, Hayek, late in life, was vindicated with a Nobel Prize, but even more when the Soviet Union collapsed after seventy-five years of imposing a central government that owned everything; property, the means of production, and still could not compete with free market economies.

Keynes, however, has seen his view fulfilled because most Western nations subscribe to some form of socialism with the kinds of programs that he advocated to protect everyone. Social Security and Medicare are the ultimate Keynesian legacy.

Keynes was your classic “top down” manipulator of an economy. Hayek was a “bottom up” believer in the natural energy of the entrepreneur, small business and corporate enterprise.

Neither, however, could calculate greed or fear into their theories though they surely were aware of both as factors driving or retarding an economy.

Neither could predict what any particular politician might do in their own best interest. In America, both Democrats and Republicans have proved to be big spenders since the end of World War Two.

One man who was not an economist understood how to bring down an economy. Keynes warned, “Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalist System was to debauch the currency.”

Americans who have watched President Obama triple our national debt to more than $14 trillion should take note before the dollar, still the benchmark currency for the world, is debauched. Too much Keynesian government spending and borrowing will do that.

That was the warning from Standard & Poor’s when it downgraded the nation’s credit rating. Hayek would have approved.

© Alan Caruba, 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

A World That's Coming Unglued

By Alan Caruba

After you’ve read history for a number of years, you begin to realize that the world goes crazy every so often. People and nations just lose their wits. It’s usually in times of great change when old truths or old ways of doing things are thrust aside by new discoveries, new technologies, or just the renewal of old pathologies.

Instances of this include the Crusades, the Industrial Revolution, and the rise of fascism in the last century.

I think we are in a comparable period, for how long or short I cannot say, but to quote from Star Wars, “There’s a disturbance in the universe” or, to be more specific, among the nations of planet Earth.

Part of the problem is the sheer size of the human population. We now number in excess of six billion and there are serious issues of how to feed all of us, ensure clean water, employment, and, of course, the provision of the energy that fuels societies dependent on electricity.

Photos from space of the Earth at night tell one everything about which parts of the Earth are enjoying the benefits of electricity and which are not.

In the past, the four horsemen of the apocalypse, war, famine, disease, and death could be counted on to keep populations in check, but advances in technology, medicine, and agriculture have tipped the balance in favor of humanity.

Beyond sheer numbers, there is the problem of profligate spending that has several European nations, as well as the United States of America, in deep financial trouble. The merry-go-round of borrowing to keep bloated budgets afloat cannot continue indefinitely despite the efforts of central bankers to do so. Merely printing money has always led to bad events from riots to wars.

The financial problems are tied to the worst economic systems ever created, first as Communism, then its modified version, Socialism. Neither work. While politicians of every stripe like Socialism as a way to “redistribute” wealth, the entire system is confiscatory and based on coercion. It usually impoverishes the middle class of workers while creating an ever-growing class of those who will not or cannot work.

As harsh as Capitalism can be, it does work. It involves high levels of risk, often large amounts of investment, and it allows for failure. It is also the greatest engine of growth and the development of new industries, new technologies, and improved lives. Like fish in water, we are oblivious to the miracle a single supermarket represents.

All economic systems must strive to cope with corruption and, so long as there are three humans on Earth, there will be corruption. Having recently descended from the trees to walk upright, humans are subject to their aggressive nature.

Communism and Socialism promise equal misery. Capitalism offers the opportunity to enjoy the benefits of making the right investment guesses or developing new and better things people want to own. Competition improves life for everyone.

In sum, the clash between economic systems is still being worked out with nations that grant as much liberty as possible to their populations doing best. Where power is concentrated in a few, their populations and their nations do not prosper. As regards the world’s population, a huge cohort is young, unemployed and combustible.

It is the quest, the demand for more personal and political liberty that is causing much of the upheavals extant and no where is this more obvious than in those nations where Islam has been the prevailing religion. Islam translates as “submission.” It is based in seventh century strictures on how life should be lived. It is at war with modernity. It cannot prevail, but until it reforms or fails, there will be terrorism and war.

The greatest threat to humanity is the presence and continued quest for nuclear weapons. They are genocidal, capable of killing hundreds of thousands, if not millions. Allowing Iran, a nation led by a handful of crazed theocrats, to acquire nuclear parity poses a threat to humanity that has never existed before. Permitting North Korea or Pakistan to retain their nukes can only result in a bad outcome.

Like a rumbling volcano, the tremors felt as the result of the United States being led by a dedicated Communist and likely Muslim is a destabilizing factor not only for its citizens, but for others around the world.

It is up to the present leaders of the world to thread their way through the upheavals and divisions causing growing instability. Some will do it better than others. Some will cling to failed systems and philosophies of the past. Some will simply pursue power for power’s sake.

Alliances will change. Allies will become enemies. Enemies will become allies. Nations will pursue their shifting interests.

For the world in general, a good start would be the abandonment of the United Nations, an institution that failed initially as the League of Nations, and which is now so putrid with corruption and schemes to impose a one-world government that it poses a threat to the sovereignty of all nations.

Just as neighborhoods thrive when the common interests of neighbors for security and peace are observed, international organizations designed to concentrate power inevitably fall short of their heralded benefits.

In the same way shifts in the Earth’s tectonic plates, volcanic eruptions, and the latest cooling cycle are posing massive challenges for humanity, the nations of the world are trying to cope with changes in the financial universe they have created as well as outmoded concepts of security.

How the present upheavals, financial, religious, and demographic work themselves out remains unknown. In a neighborhood people find it best to “get along.” In a world beset with rival systems of belief and governance, the outcome is far more murky and, ultimately, more threatening.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Murdering America

By Alan Caruba

We are all witnesses to the crime; the deliberate murder of the United States of America.

In just under a year and a half, the White House in collusion with the Democrats in Congress has conspired not to “save” America from a financial crisis they created, but to kill America through a series of multi-billion dollar “bailouts” that have two things in common. (1) They did not work and (2) they have created levels of national debt beyond anything in the entire previous history of the nation.

Seen in this light, they are a brilliant game plan for destroying what was once the greatest economy in the world. It was based entirely on capitalist principles of free market competition, constant innovation, and entrepreneurial enterprise. Tied now as we are to the economies of other nations, there’s not much good news of late.

The Obama administration has imposed the takeover of one sixth of the nation’s economy through its so-called health care “reform” and there are already revelations that it will not save money, but cost much more. It will deprive Americans of the right to make decisions with their physicians regarding all manner of treatment, some of which will literally determine life or death. It will reduce options for medical care as physicians, particularly in private practice, close their doors.

Writing in the June issue of Health Care News, John C. Goodman said, “Despite assurances, the Medicaid expansion included in the health care legislation signed by President Barack Obama is not another unfunded mandate foisted on the states, many states will find their budgets bloated with new Medicaid spending.” Goodman is CEO of the National Center for Policy Analysis. It defied credibility that millions could be added to Medicare and Medicaid roles without raising the costs of these programs. In the end, Obamacare was forced upon Americans, the majority of whom opposed it and still do.

Among the priorities of a new Congress, in the event that power passes to the Republican Party, is the repeal of Obamacare.

The new financial “reforms” need to be rolled back as they too place limits on Wall Street that found itself victimized by the fact that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, two “government sponsored entities” are directly responsible for the housing bubble. It is insane that the federal government should hold the majority of mortgage loans. Yet the “reforms” just passed make no mention of either agency!

The Cap-and-Trade Act, renamed a “climate” bill and awaiting a vote in the Senate, would raise the cost of all energy use in the nation and literally destroy the economy. Likewise, the effort of the EPA to regulate carbon dioxide would have the same effect.

Another priority is to take General Motors off life-support for the unions that destroyed it through their salary, healthcare and pension demands. Here again, the federal government has no rational justification for such ownership. The most recent proposed bailout at a cost of $165 billion is yet another bailout for union pensions and this, too, is not a responsibility of American taxpayers.

There was a time in the nation’s history when unions were needed, but now they are largely parasitic, draining the treasuries of the federal and state governments, and no where is this more obvious than in the Service Employees International Union. Obama is so closely allied with SEIU that one wonders why so little attention was paid during the 2008 campaign. This union alone is alleged to have spent as much as $60 million to secure his election.

There are other government worker’s unions such as the teacher’s unions that exert political power in money, campaign manpower, and votes. The teacher’s unions have largely failed their mission to impart the most basic skills, leaving American students behind their counterparts in other nations. Their health and pension benefits, well in excess of the private sector, are a massive drain on the public treasuries of state governments.

There are only two protections left to Americans, the courts and the ballot box. The courts appear to moving far too slowly on the issue of constitutionality regarding Obamacare and, in particular, Barack Obama’s eligibility to be President.

All this demonstrates an astounding lack of power that has always being attributed to Wall Street and to corporations in general. Environmental opponents popularly refer to them as Big Oil, Big Coal, or Big Pharma. They appear to have no power against an aggressively Marxist President, his administration, and a Congress dominated by progressives.

On May 22nd, Rasmussen Reports revealed that 72% of likely voters say they are not confident that Congress knows what it’s doing as regards the economy. There has been little change in this opinion since September 2008.

The voters, however, have demonstrated their power in the election of a Republican as Senator from Massachusetts and two Republican Governors in formerly Blue States. The primaries are demonstrating that the only way to win is to be anti-Obama and the best way to lose is to be an incumbent participating in the destruction of the nation.

The current national state of mind is understandably one of growing fears and it should be in the face of the determined effort to destroy America.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Superpower China

By Alan Caruba

As the sun begins to set on an America whose dollar set the standard and whose capacity for manufacturing was unchallenged, a new superpower is emerging and it is China.

Many of the economists and China-watchers have been quick to seize on any bad news coming out of the Asian giant, but for the most part they have marveled how, since the new century began, China has proven adept at maintaining a fast growing economy. Indeed, so fast, it is beginning to show signs of protectionism.

In July 2007, an article in The Washington Times noted that “China, this year for the first time, has dislodged the United States from its long reign as the main engine of global economic growth, with its more than 11 percent growth eclipsing sputtering U.S. growth of about 2 percent, according to the International Monetary Fund’s 2007 projections…”

Further down in the article, the IMF’s deputy director of research, Charles Collyns, was quoted saying, “if you add together Russia and India as well, you get over half of global growth coming from the emerging-market countries.”

C-Span recently aired a segment in which John and Doris Naisbitt answered questions from a group of students at Tenafly High School (NJ) when they launched a tour to promote their book, “China’s Megatrends: The 8 Pillars of a New Society.”

Why, I wondered, start a book tour in a school, but it later occurred to me that these students will grow up and live in a very different world than either their parents or grandparents. It will be a world in which China will be a superpower and American may be in decline if current trends continue.

Up until the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, China had suffered grievously from the communist takeover he had led, beginning with the founding of the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) in 1949. Prior to that from the 1930s on through World War Two, the Chinese had suffered from Japanese occupation. Mao, a dedicated Communist, was clueless regarding how to create a successful economy.

The story of how China embraced capitalism while retaining its communist government is quite remarkable, if for no other reason, than the progress it has made. John Naisbitt authored “Megatrends” in 1982, a book that was on The New York Times bestseller list for more than two years, was published in 57 countries, and sold more than eight million copies. Many of those copies were bought by an emerging generation of leaders in China after Mao had decimated much of the nation’s educated classes.

Naisbitt, long before most others, knew that China was embracing change on a scale that most Americans and others could barely comprehend. He and his wife began to spend a lot of time there. Today, his wife Doris is the director of the Naisbitt China Institute in Tianjin and is a professor at the prestigious Nankai University where John is also affiliated.

My generation enjoyed all the fruits of the post-WWII bounty that accrued to an America that had no real economic rivals. Along with the Soviet Union, China was regarded as a threat because it was communist, but to his credit President Richard Nixon understood China should not be ignored and began the process that has led to an extraordinary economic partnership.

The Naisbitt’s book focuses on how China rose from the ashes of Mao’s horror show, asking “Why has ‘autocratic’ China succeeded while many other, democratically governed states have failed to make economic progress? Why is it that despite all efforts by westerners to push China toward western-style democratization, there is no similar outcry for such a shift in China?’

They conclude that “the constancy of the Communist Party has worked not against but for the well-being of the Chinese people. Long-term strategic planning could be carried out without the distractions and disruptions of elections that characterize western democracies.”

That transformation has been overseen by Deng Xiaping, Jiang Zemin, and Hu Jintao, three remarkable CEOs who created “an entirely new social and economic society with a ‘company culture’ that serves the needs of the enterprise and its people on its own path to modernity and prosperity.”

In the process, the Communist Party itself changed, adapting a “top-down, bottom-up” approach to governance that set the objectives at the top and allowed the people to introduce their “bottom-up” answers. As a result, “China, often thought as a monolith, is actually decentralizing power more than any other country in the world.” It has unleashed a torrent of entrepreneurial activity.

When one considers how the battle over healthcare “reform” has torn apart Americans in the struggle to avoid turning the nation into a European-style socialist economy and society, China’s “highest goal is a harmonious society and governance that is based on trust.”

This has worked in China because “Chinese gain power and self-confidence in the family, in a group, in the network in which they are integrated.” Not surprisingly, “The first reforms took place in agriculture, where today 40 percent of the Chinese still work…” What is often overlooked, however, is that by 2008 two-thirds of China’s economy was in the private sector!

Some of the results are remarkable. With a population of more than a billion people, “China has a literacy rate of 90.9 percent; life expectancy at birth is 73 years; and the per capita GDP is $5,962.” India, often noted as the other emerging economy, still has a lot of catching up to do. Its literacy rate is 6l percent, life expectancy is 69 years, and a per capita GDP income of $2,762.

It is not my purpose to load you down with statistics. It is to say that, while America suffers from a surfeit of too much government spending and borrowing—debt—the Chinese are forging ahead and doing so, ironically, with an economic system that has to be considered western in origin.

It is folly to not recognize the economic and societal miracle that has allowed the Chinese to move from a rigid system to one in which its people had a GDP in 1980 of $209.3 billion to about $1.2 trillion by 2000. A decade later, it continues to show growth.

Some time ago my nephew asked me what language his little girl should begin to study. I told him it should be Chinese.

(c) Alan Caruba, 2010

Obama: Repeating the Same Mistakes (and Lies)

By Alan Caruba

It is the duty of being a “pundit” to have an opinion on the events of the day and, of course, everyone has an opinion about President Obama’s State of the Union speech.

My most distinct impression while listening to it was that I had heard it all before.

It was a repeat of Obama’s 2008 campaign and a repeat of the past year’s failure to gain support for healthcare “reform” and the stalled “Cap-and-Tax” bill. It was a siren call to his fellow Democrats in Congress to continue supporting policies that will surely get them thrown out of office in October.

Some sage said that repeating the same thing over and over again, and expecting different results is a definition of insanity. I am no psychiatrist, but the narcissism that so defines Obama was on display. I kept count and he said “I” or some version of it at least 100 times in the course of the speech. He used the word “we” a lot, but that was a rhetorical “we”, not the one where we all pull together.

And we shall surely all pull together in November when we pull the lever in the voting machine for any candidate not on the Democrat Party line.

There is little to be added to the analysis of other pundits, but I did notice one particularly disturbing, albeit brief, reference to “climate change.” He wants the United States “to be a leader in the fight against climate change.”

If you recall, during the campaign Obama promised that, if elected, the seas would begin to recede. One of the more absurd claims of global warming was the massive melting of the North and South Poles, thus causing the oceans of the world to rise and swamp the coastlines of nations.

You may also recall that the President went to the Copenhagen UN Conference on Climate Change that happily resulted in nothing at all. This was a good outcome and it occurred in the wake of the release of emails between a handful of rogue climate scientists who had labored for years to distort the actual data on climate in order to further the vast global warming hoax.

The President actually said there was “overwhelming evidence” of climate change. No, but there is growing evidence that Al Gore and everyone else who said that global warming was occurring was lying or seriously misinformed.

How the President of the United States could continue to assert that global warming was or is real is beyond any rational explanation.

The President also repeated the falsehood that “investment”, i.e., taxpayer subsidies and “stimulus” cash, in “green jobs” and “clean energy” was the way out of the nation’s current economic difficulties. This is so absurd as to constitute willful deception.

About the only thing that made any sense was his passing reference to the need for more nuclear plants to generate electricity for the nation’s growing population and the need to open up exploration of the nation’s offshore reserves of oil and natural gas. The Institute for Energy Research projects that developing oil and gas reserves has the potential to create 1.2 million jobs and provide an additional $70 billion in annual wages.

Everywhere around the world, nations are cutting back on their investments in wind and solar power. It is inefficient and impractical. In a nation that has several hundred years of coal reserves, it makes sense to build some more coal-fired plants as well, given the fact that coal provides fifty percent of all the electricity we use daily.

Beyond the environmental and energy issues the President touched upon, his favorite theme was an attack on the nation’s banking and insurance industries. This no doubt derives from his Marxist outlook that sees any form of capitalism as wrong.

Finally, in an administration overflowing with former and future lobbyists, the hypocrisy of blaming them for the failure of a Congress that for decades has been mostly controlled by the Democrat Party is yet another absurdity. Lobbyists have been part of the nation’s political structure almost from the first session of Congress in 1789.

In sum, President Obama has learned virtually nothing from his first year in office. He will not be a “great one term President”, but he will be a one-term President in 2012.

On Not Understanding Capitalism or Liberalism

By Alan Caruba

Not long ago, Rasmussen Reports conducted a national telephone survey and asked “American adults” if they believe capitalism is “better” than socialism. I found it disturbing that only 53% responded that they did.

That is a very bare majority of Americans who think capitalism is a better economic system than one essentially controlled by unelected bureaucrats, no matter where it’s found.

Fully 20% thought socialism is better and 27% weren’t sure.

It turns out that age has a lot to do with your attitude about capitalism. Adults under 30 were evenly divided. “Thirty-somethings,” Rasmussen reported, “are a bit more supportive of the free-enterprise approach with 49% for capitalism and 26% for socialism. Adults over 40 strongly favor capitalism, and just 13% of those older Americans believe socialism is better.”

Republicans by a margin of 11-to-1 favor capitalism. Democrats are more closely divided with just 39% favoring capitalism, while 30% favored socialism. Among those not affiliated with either major political party, 48% preferred capitalism while 21% favored socialism.

I have no proof of this, but I suspect that most Americans would have some measure of difficulty defining the differences between capitalism and socialism. One of my favorite definitions is by Winston Churchill who said that “Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy; its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.”

Back in the 1940s, Norman Thomas, a U.S. Socialist Party candidate for President, said, “The American people will never knowingly adopt Socialism. But, under the name of ‘liberalism’, they will adopt every fragment of the Socialist program, until one day America will be a socialist nation, without ever knowing how it happened.”

If Thomas were alive today, he would no doubt take a great deal of pleasure in Social Security, Medicare, and other “entitlement” programs that constitute a third or more of the nation’s annual budget. They are not voluntary.

The problem all such programs are encountering is that they are going broke. As the demographics of the nation change, we are running out of a younger, working population for the support of older ones. Europe has long since arrived at this point.

The irony is, of course, that capitalism is the only system that has a built-in motivation (called risk) for people to start new businesses, employ others, and strive to grow and succeed. America is one long story of such entrepreneurship, of venture capital looking for the next new idea, new product, or new service.

Capitalism also caters to the most inherent attribute of humans; greed. What is always overlooked, however, is the way wealth, once acquired, finds expression in philanthropy. Countless worthy causes in the arts, health, scholarships, aid to the less fortunate, et cetera, flourish because of private giving. And there is much to be said for inheritance; the right to pass on one’s wealth and property to one’s family.

Thus socialism is counter-intuitive to how humans organize themselves, their lives, and their societies.

As former President Ronald Reagan put it, “The Founding Fathers knew a government can’t control the economy without controlling people. And they knew when a government sets out to do that it must use force and coercion to achieve its purpose.”

As we close in on April 15, the date your income tax payment is due, the power of governmental coercion becomes quite evident. It is also the day this year that nearly two thousand “Tea parties” will be held around the nation to protest the tripling of the nation’s deficit, the proposed increases in taxation, along with the wastefulness of so much of what passes for government spending.

The Unconstitutionality of “Bailouts”

There needs to be another item on the Tea Party agenda. It is the fact that the “bailout” monies disbursed to General Motors and to a variety of banking, investment, and the huge AIG insurance company are totally in violation of the U.S. Constitution that forbids government choosing what enterprises will be allowed to continue or fail.

Judge Andrew P. Napolitano warns against this in his most recent book, “The Revenge of Dred Scott.”

“The Constitution does not repose in the Congress the power to bail out individuals or private industry; Bailouts violate the equal protection doctrine because the Congress can’t fairly pick and choose whom to bail out and who to let expire; they violate the General Welfare Clause because they benefit only a small group and not the general public; they violate the Due Process Clause because they interfere with contracts already entered into; and they turn the public treasury into a public trough.”

Now consider this: This year’s bailout, stimulus, and other spending binges have obligated future generations of Americans to $12.8 TRILLION in debt, according to a recent Bloomberg study. Meanwhile, Congress and the Obama administration are poised to impose a bogus “climate change” program that could cost $3 trillion and regulate every aspect of our lives.

America is at a critical turning point and it must, if it is to have any future whatever, turn away from this profligate and very liberal use of the public treasury, combined with the baseless “cap-and-trade” program of carbon credits that will cripple what economy is left.

Socialism aka liberalism, as it is currently being put into effect by the Congress and the White House, prevents the failures that are necessary for the correction of bad management and bad judgment.

Hating Capitalism

By Alan Caruba

“Abolish money!” was the cry of some of those rioting in London, destroying property, and doing their best to get attention by creating mayhem at the G-20 meeting.

It is doubtful that most of these people have held a job for any length of time and particularly doubtful that any have ever started a business, met a payroll, or done those things that have since the earliest era of civilization created great economies in which the majority of a society thrives.

Generally, from my observations and experience, such people are young enough to not have a clue about the process by which labor is turned into profit. The absence of profit or gain of any sort is slavery.

In good times, everyone loves Capitalism. The money flows, the champagne flows, the purchasing of all kinds of things is intoxicating. The wealthy indulge themselves, often in obscene displays of their wealth, and the middle classes are inspired to become wealthier.

At the bottom of this pyramid are life’s losers. They are the ones who dropped out of school, committed crimes and went to jail, over indulged in alcohol and drugs, or engaged in unprotected sex, producing more poor people.

Envying the wealthy, including the middle classes, is as old as the days of the caveman. Indeed, throughout much of what we call recorded history the main occupation, other than farming, was pillaging and looting. Tribes and nations grew wealthy by banding together to steal from others. Those who were most successful at this were declared to be kings, built castles for their ill-gotten goods, and “lorded” it over those who could not afford to hire mercenaries of one description or another.

Thus, when Capitalism suffers a fit of some sort, we see the usual mobs in the streets who, for lack of the jobs that Capitalism provides, shake their fists at the bankers and the corporations for failing to “share the wealth.”

It is instructive to look at those nations that combine poverty with despotism. Every year Parade magazine’s David Wallechinsky lists “The World 10 Worst Dictators.”

Number one this year is Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe. He has managed to turn a nation with many natural resources into a place that recently issued a $50 billion banknote that will purchase, at best, a loaf of bread.

Number two is Omar al-Bashier of Sudan; recently the subject of an arrest warrant by the International Criminal Court on charges of crimes against humanity. In the 2007 Pocket World in Figures, Sudan ranked second for total number of refugees after Afghanistan. People “vote” with their feet to leave nations that are corrupt or careless to aid general prosperity.

Number three this year is Kim Jong-il of North Korea, a nation that imprisons hundreds of thousands of its own people in labor camps and whose main export appears to be missiles and other weapons of war.

Without wishing to bore you, those nations with the leading despots are almost exclusively Islamic. They include Iran, Eritrea, Libya, Turkmenistan, Saudi Arabia, and the aforementioned Sudan. The exception is China which is still ruled by a Communist cadre that has heartily embraced Capitalism, but not for the purpose of governance.

Little of the oil riches of the Middle Eastern and African nations ever reach the citizens of these nations and corruption is the primary instrument by which anyone achieves any wealth. Oppression is the primary form of political power.

Meanwhile, the rioters in the street of London loudly decry the one economic system that has truly “spread the wealth around” to quote the current Socialist President of the United States.

The great “problem” of Capitalism is that it is based on two premises. The first is “risk.” This includes, of course, investing in stocks. America has a huge investor class. The second element is plain, old hard work. A meritocracy, those who work the hardest generally reap the benefits of that effort. The sanctity of the contract and an impartial justice system supports all working relationships.

The great “promise” of Socialism and Communism is that all the wealth common to a nation’s population will be “redistributed” even to people who do not work at all. This seldom—never—works because people who work for a living generally resent those who do not. They have even less sympathy to those who steal for a living.

Something is very wrong when members of Congress pass unconstitutional laws to impose a punishing, ex post facto tax on people who have received “bonuses” for their labors or on those who enjoy a higher standard of living as the result of their work.

Something is very wrong when a President can, in effect, take over an investor owned corporation like General Motors to require that its CEO be fired and likely replace its board of directors with his own choices. This is fundamentally illegal when the logical and proper recourse is bankruptcy. Giving taxpayer’s billions to such companies is appalling.

Something is wrong when the federal government intrudes into the housing and mortgage marketplace instead of leaving it to function unfettered except for reasonable regulation to avoid abuses. Requiring banks and mortgage companies to make bad loans is an insane practice and is still the law of the land.

Something is very wrong when virtually all of the regulatory agencies, as well as those members of Congress charged with oversight, completely fail to exercise their duties, thus allowing elements of our financial system to encounter huge losses.

History has repeatedly demonstrated that, in a Capitalist economy such as ours, it is the failure or intrusion of our government that produces recessions and depressions. Excessive spending and excessive borrowing punishes everyone.

Given our present elected leadership, Americans are guaranteed only one thing—more of the same.