The View From 1776

Street mobs and mass demonstrations are a product of socialism, beginning with the Parisian mobs who assaulted the Bastille on July 14, 1789, then dragged government ministers from their homes and hanged them from the lamp posts.

Everything about these mass demonstrations is anathema to the Constitution’s Bill of Rights, which was intended to protect individual political liberties from the power of the mob.  Today, liberal-progressive Federal judges justify abrogation of individual liberties, particularly property rights, by reference to mob sentiment.

A fundamental part of Senator Obama’s campaign rests upon confiscating people’s wealth and redistributing it to the lower income elements of the mob.

In The Masses Today, I noted:

Writing in 1929, José Ortega y Gasset described the new phenomenon emerging in post-World War I Europe.  The masses had come to believe themselves entitled to the technological benefits of civilization without understanding or preserving the cultural underpinning of that civilization.

That, unfortunately, is applicable to the United States in the post-1960s student anarchist upheavals.  Senator Obama and his supporters are dead sure that everyone is entitled to whatever he wants, at government expense, and moreover, that we can afford it.  This without understanding the economic realities that have produced what we have already.

Along the same lines, Fouad Ajami writes in the Wall Street Journal:

The affluent will have to pay for the programs promised the poor. The redistribution agenda that runs through Mr. Obama’s vision is anathema to the Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and the hedge-fund managers now smitten with him. Their ethos is one of competition and the justice of the rewards that come with risk and effort. All this is shelved, as the devotees sustain the candidacy of a man whose public career has been a steady advocacy of reining in the market and organizing those who believe in entitlement and redistribution.

For more observations regarding José Ortega y Gasset’s analysis of the 20th century’s masses, see The Sordidness of Liberal-Progressivism.

Senator Obama’s short-sighted support for wealth-redistribution taxation and for socialist labor unions is nothing new for Democrat/Socialist politicians.

Both in England and in the United States, labor unions led the political assault to overwhelm the individualistic traditions that made those nations great and to impose socialistic planning and regulation.

Between 1933 and 1940, Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal nationalized agriculture, promoted the expansion of membership and power of communist-led labor unions, and pushed businesses into the National Recovery Administration (NRA), an imitative version of Mussolini’s Fascist state corporatism.

Liberal-progressives support labor unions because they are, along with the extortionate, class-action tort lawyers, the largest contributors and get-out-the-vote organizations wedded to the Democrat/Socialist party.  See Labor Unions: Socialism’s Shock Troops.

Proposed Federal legislation to eliminate secret balloting for workers in union organizing elections, by increasing union membership, will be a major force in socialist wealth redistribution.  Unions extort higher wages and benefits, usually beyond their economic worth when measured by international standards.  Unfortunately, the effect is to push us all downward toward equal, albeit lower, incomes.

Increased unionization means paying workers more than they are worth in the free market.  That reduces the number of jobs, because businesses have to keep total labor costs in check, or they will succumb to foreign competition.  Today, GM, Ford, and Chrysler are teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, because their union-inflated labor costs are so much higher than those overseas and in non-union foreign auto plants in the United States.

For another aspect of labor unions’ baleful effects, read Labor Unions Prolonged the Depression: Obama wants a new Wagner Act.

So, hang onto your hats after next year if Congress enacts massive new welfare-state benefits programs, raises taxes, and panders to labor unions by raising tariffs, restricting free trade, and curbing outsourcing of over-paid American jobs.  The prospect is for a re-run of 1970s stagflation.

Maurice Strong resembles a self-righteous drug dealer, assuring himself that fostering destructive programs is really a benefit to humanity.

Read Claudia Rosett’s interview with the former UN official.

Election 2008: “We the people” or “We the sheeple?”
By Gary Kelly
EarsToHear.net

A vote for any Democrat is a vote for socialism/Marxism/communism, increasing government control over “We the people,” stalinizing us into “We the sheeple.”

“Politically Correct” means using unrighteous deception and requires a lack of Biblical Moral Virtue. Being “Politically Correct” is not only foolish, but dangerous.

“There are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.” - James Madison (speech to the Virginia Ratifying Convention, 16 June 1788) Reference: Bartlett’s Quotations (352) - The Patriot Post Founders’ Quote Daily

The sheeple have, and are being duped by the socialist biased humanistic politically correct mainstream media. The MSM allies are more than willing defenders of the Democrat Party. The MSM is successful in keeping all the FACTS and opinions from the sheeple. Democrats simply rely on their ally, the MSM, to keep the sheeple, well, sheeple, by not questioning the rhetoric, distortions, and lies of Democrats as they do Republicans. Democrats can count on the MSM as both rely on the shallow sheeple who like the rhetoric and ignore the facts.

Americans must choose which they subscribe to? “We the people” or “We the sheeple?” Remain a Republic or become a Socialist State of massive cradle-to-grave-nanny-state taxpayer funded entitlements with the failed bureaucracy of government control? Do we want our American descendants to know Biblical moral virtue or political correctness? In 1787, when the Founding Fathers had hammered out the U.S. Constitution in Independence Hall in Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin told an inquiring woman what the gathering had produced, “A republic, madam, if you can keep it.”

“We the people” are a product of the Republic of limited government established by Founders who possessed Biblical moral virtue.

“We the sheeple” are a product (subjects) of big (more) government control intrusion (cradle-to-grave-nanny-state) being instituted and mandated by liberal secular judges. Mostly Democrats and deceived by a liberal biased mainstream media and by secular humanists government-run schools and “higher” education. (Suggest if you lack Biblical moral virtue and prefer liberty mandated by government and not “liberty from God,” you are free to move to any Socialist country that will have you.).

“Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.” ... “The worship of God is a duty...Freedom is not a gift bestowed upon us by other men, but a right that belongs to us by the laws of God and nature? I never doubted the existence of the Deity, that he made the world, and governed it by His Providence...The pleasures of this world are rather from God’s goodness than our own merit… Whoever shall introduce into the public affairs the principles of primitive (essential) Christianity will change the face of the world… Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.” - Benjamin Franklin

“[D]emocracy will soon degenerate into an anarchy, such an anarchy that every man will do what is right in his own eyes and no man’s life or property or reputation or liberty will be secure, and every one of these will soon mould itself into a system of subordination of all the moral virtues and intellectual abilities, all the powers of wealth, beauty, wit and science, to the wanton pleasures, the capricious will, and the execrable cruelty of one or a very few.” - John Adams (An Essay on Man’s Lust for Power, 29 August 1763) Reference: Original Intent, Barton (338); original The Papers of John Adams, Taylor, ed., vol. 1 (83)

Are you “mainstream?” I.E. Do you possess Biblical moral virtue or have you been duped by liberals and the MSM into being “politically correct?”

The sheeple, instead of enjoying liberty from God (as prescribed in the Declaration of Independence), appear to prefer to have their liberties as mandated by the government, which as the “Politically Correct” anti-Judeo-Christian agenda reveals, shows utter contempt for the Righteousness of God as designed and defined according to the Word of God.

- “We the sheeple” prefer a way that seems right unto man, even though that way leads to death. (Proverbs 14:12 and 16:25) - Why is it many Americans continue to vote for socialists, masking as democrats? - Do they really want government to a socialistic nanny-state providing all their needs from cradle to the grave? - Do they really want government to be their god? - Are they too busy, cynical, and apathetic and choose to let others decide the future of their children? - Are they too complacent, comfortable and complacent in their American Way of Life, howbeit it came with a price? - Are they too busy to be concerned for America’s future generations? - Are they just self-centered and selfish? - Maybe it is not that complicated. Perhaps they are just so shallow the socialists and their co-defenders, the liberally biased media, are simply taking advantage of their apathy and lack of concern? Not until the MSM is fully revealed in this deceit, AND corrects itself by providing fair and balanced coverage, will ?we the sheeple? finally hear both sides of every issue. Only then will the voters see exactly where the ?Politically Correct? Democratic Party of liberals are leading America.

The problem and the cause.

Seek ye first the politics and political commentary or seek ye first the Kingdom of God and His Righteousness.

Because Preachers have preached “from their heart” they have neglected to preach what they were commissioned to preach, the Word of God, people no longer go to church, they go to their government.

“...because it is not the responsibility of the Christian or preacher to convict and convince. The Christian?s calling is to preach the Word of God, for the power of God follows the Word of God, not the preacher. Christ alone draws all men to Himself.” John 12:32. (Lessons of the Holy Spirit - A Guide for Entering the Kingdom of God and Discover Why it Pleased God to Hide His Kingdom from the Wise)

2 Timothy 4:1 - I charge thee therefore before God, and the Lord Jesus Christ, who shall judge the quick and the dead at his appearing and his kingdom; Preach the word; be instant in season, out of season; reprove, rebuke, exhort with all longsuffering and doctrine. For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but after their own lusts shall they heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears; And they shall turn away their ears from the truth, and shall be turned unto fables.

Reproving, rebuking, and exhorting with emotion, compassion, and intellect without the Word of God is void and will not return to Him. (Isaiah 55) Either He is Lord of all, or not Lord at all.

The neglect of preaching the Word of God in favor of being politically correct will further diminish the Republic which was founded by the minority of Americans who possessed Biblical moral virtue and courage, not the majority, the sheeple who wanted to remain British subjects.

Writer Kurt Luchs’s key points are:

Another reason that centralized government social engineering simply doesn’t work is what F.A. Hayek called “the knowledge problem.” Hayek was the only Austrian economist ever to win a Nobel Prize. He won it partly for a brief essay called “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” in which he explained that government is intrinsically helpless before most social and economic problems because the knowledge needed to solve them is too widely dispersed among the members of society. It cannot ever be made known in a timely fashion to a central authority, and even if it could, that authority would lack the godlike coordinating ability needed to use that knowledge effectively. Adding to the difficulty, much of this knowledge is tacit knowledge, not consciously known or articulated by the individuals who have it.

What can make effective use of the knowledge distributed locally among the members of society? Only the free market system and its accompanying structure of voluntary trades and changing prices. Freely determined market prices are what send signals to individuals telling them how to best use their unique knowledge to their own, and ultimately society’s, advantage. Without a free market, the only way to allocate resources is by government fiat–a few, far-removed individuals making choices for us all, perhaps with the best of intentions but in near-total ignorance. The result is government programs that clumsily and ineptly ape the market, with none of its efficiencies and never coming close to achieving consumer satisfaction. A government program must be counted a success if it does not achieve the exact opposite of its stated goal.

Government’s inability, indeed the inability of any elite group, to gather sufficient information quickly enough and to interpret it in a timely way in order to manage the entire economy as if it were a private company has been devastatingly demonstrated in the fiasco wrought by the Federal Reserve system in recent decades. 

The Wall Street Journal reports, regarding last Wednesday’s testimony before Congress by former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan:

The difficulties of forecasting served as a key defense for Mr. Greenspan. The Federal Reserve, with its legions of Ph.D. economists, has a better forecasting record than the private sector, he said, but that’s still not enough to prevent every problem. “We were wrong quite a good deal of the time,” he said. Forecasting “never gets to the point where it’s 100% accurate.”

Subprime mortgages led to a global economic crisis in considerable part because of securitization, in which the home loans were sliced up, packaged into securities and sold off to investors all around the world. Anticipating such a crisis is “more than anybody is capable of judging,” Mr. Greenspan said.

If the best experts were not able to foresee the development, “I think we have to ask ourselves, ‘Why is that?’” Mr. Greenspan said. “And the answer is that we’re not smart enough as people. We just cannot see events that far in advance."

In other words, the plan is to go back to the Great Society policies of President Lyndon Johnson that gave us simultaneously massive unemployment, soaring inflation, and destructively high tax rates.

See An Obamanomics Preview and then Obama and the Tax Tipping Point.