socialism

Socialism is Death

Mark Noonan37 Comments

Been seeing a lot of our Progressive friends defending Socialism – though most of them add “Democratic” in front of it, as some sort of attempt to soften the blow. Like saying a sh** sandwich is a cheese and sh** sandwich will make it better. But Socialism is death – it is purely evil and has no redeeming qualities whatsoever.

Of course, you and I know that. But, even so, I think it needs to be said – emphasized; said again and again and again until it is drilled into the public mind. And don’t think that the death part of Socialism is things like Stalin’s labor camps or Pol Pot wondering whether killing everyone will improve economic prospects. No: the very idea of Socialism is death. It is anti-human. It can’t do other than destroy.

First and foremost, it must be kept in mind that when a Socialist says things like “justice”, “freedom”, “democracy” the words don’t mean the same thing as when a sane, non-Socialist person uses them. For a Socialist, for instance, “justice” doesn’t mean the equitable enforcement of laws freely enacted by Constitutional means. No – to a Socialist, “justice” means “everyone I hate is punished”. “Freedom” means “I’m free to do whatever I want; you’re not”. “Democracy” means “we hold a vote: if I win, it is forever; if I lose, it means evil people cheated and we have to do it again until I win, and then we never do it again”.

A Socialist doesn’t care whether or not you have a house; food; medical care – he or she might say that is what will be provided, but if it is, it is incidental to the real purpose of Socialism – the punishment of those the Socialist hates. If punishing the object of ire means there’s less housing, food and medical care, that is perfectly ok, because the whole purpose is punishment. To a Socialist, what is non-Socialist is evil…and those who are non-Socialist don’t merely have a different view of what should be done but are, instead, actively evil. There is no other explanation, in the view of a Socialist, for opposition to Socialism.

But, you say, what about those kindly Socialists – Democratic-Socialists! – in Europe who have built up a Welfare State which ensures no one lacks the basic necessities? Surely they aren’t motivated by hate? Sorry, but they are. They were only able to provide the Welfare State because the United States picked up the tab for military defense (and allowed them to cheat on trade with us) – and it was only incidental that the Welfare State provided anything. Offering free stuff did get votes, but that the free stuff was provided (in a way) was of secondary importance. Far more important for the Socialists – even the kindly Democratic-Socialists of Europe – was destruction. Death. They pushed birth control, abortion, divorce, fornication, anti-religious propaganda…they taught the Europeans that their whole history was one, long crime against humanity. Europeans were taught to despise the people who had been their heroes. They were taught to think only of themselves. At the end of it all, people specifically hostile to all Europe was were imported – and given privileged status within the body politic. Small wonder that Europeans have a fertility rate of 1.58, significantly below replacement level. The destruction – death – of Europe is essentially complete. Socialism brought death…and only the immediate abandonment of Socialism can possibly save Europe from extinction.

In the end, it doesn’t matter if your Socialist is a Stalinist packing GULAG full of victims, or if he’s a Democratic-Socialist putting you on the dole and making sure you have easy access to abortion…the result is the same: death. And all of it done to punish – Europe, you see, had to be punished. It was evil, wrong, bad – in the eyes of Socialists, that is. And they were determined that it be destroyed – punished for the sin of not being Socialist.

We’re not far behind Europe – but, also, much better positioned to save ourselves from that fate. But part of saving ourselves from that fate is to start speaking firmly about Socialism. It isn’t a different means to a mutually desired end: it desires an end which is evil: namely, the end of the United States. That a Socialist USA might still have the name “United States” doesn’t really matter…it’ll just be a dead thing which hates what the United States actually is, with a population sunk into indifference and rapidly being replaced by people who have no connection to the country.

The Socialists – however they label themselves – are evil. They are the harbingers of death. Even if they don’t know it. Even if, that is, a particular Socialist you meet is someone merely gulled by the words of Socialism. Doesn’t matter if your murderer intended your death or only caused it accidentally – you’re still dead. All Socialism must be stopped. Eventually, every aspect of Socialism must be eliminated. And all Socialist ideology condemned to the point where no decent person would dream of adhering to it. It was a gigantic, anti-human mistake. And it has to go.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan7 Comments

More and more people are coming to the conclusion that liberal women don’t like men because they hang out with liberal men – Dem Rep Ellison accused of abuse. The MSM has been offering excuses as to why this story – apparently around for years – is only now coming out. Seems they are claiming that they couldn’t verify the details…if only Ellison had written an entry into a high school year book…

Don Surber points out that, so far, Trump is winning the trade war. The bottom line is that the American market is the most valuable in the world. And not just by a little bit…we are vastly richer than any other nation. By a long ways. To be sure, there are a few nations with higher per capita income than us, but we’re the only nation in the top 30 with a population over 150 million people. Its not just that we, as individuals, have a lot of money but that there are so many of us. No nation wants to be excluded from the American market. Sure, China and India have more people (do you realize we’re the third most populous nation in the world? I don’t think most Americans know that), but they are a lot poorer…so, even though there’s more of them, they simply can’t buy as much as we can. Our leverage in international trade is absolute – we can pretty much force everyone to do as we wish simply by threatening to cut them out of our market. Trump is doing that – and the world will knuckle under.

Democrats are now in favor of socialism. No, this isn’t a report from 1980.

Lesbian professor sexually harasses gay man…um, isn’t that doing lesbian wrong? Or am I missing something here?

Trump hung out with some bikers and one of the bikers had a tattoo which said, in effect, “I love guns and titties”. Liberals grabbed their smelling salts. I admit that the sentiment is crude, but I think that a broad swath of the American electorate is in tune with it.

As an aside, I think the next Civil War may be rather short.

Kurt Schlichter points out that Never Trump is actually Never You.

DeBlasio had his bully boys haul away a reporter who asked an impertinent question. But, yeah, Trump is the threat to the press.

You Want Fries With That Socialism?

Mark Noonan131 Comments

A lot of fast food workers went out on a wildcat strike today in several American cities.  Fox News’ Niel Cavuto interviewed one of the strikers (via Gateway Pundit):

Shenita Simon: “Those that think we’re making so much money and if we follow a particular type of budget, I can’t afford to pay rent. I can’t afford to feed my children. I can’t even afford the healthcare for my husband. Things that you guys see as everyday life is luxury to me and it’s not fair… I say, why are you the companies, you the franchisees getting raises. You’re making billions and millions of dollars per year. Why can’t we barely survive? Why is it we who are employees, who work, who put in hard sweat, why can’t we survive? Why do we have to go hungry at night? Why can’t we pay rent? Eight dollars, seven twenty-five, seven fifty is not enough.

Neil Cavuto: Is it a fast-food company’s purpose and responsibility to meet pay, to keep up with the living standards of a given city? Is it really up to that organization?

Shenita Simon: It’s their responsibility. Because when they’re cutting our checks, not giving us lunch breaks, you’re not giving us benefits. When you’re doing illegal actions against us. Yes, it’s your responsibility. Because when we’re making the bare minimum, and you’re stealing from us. Of course, we can’t survive…

Indeed, you can’t – an adult with family responsibilities can’t make ends meet while working at a fast food joint at minimum wage.  Thing is, such a job is never going to be a job which can support someone with family responsibilities.  Such a job is either for a young, entry level worker just getting started in life, or for an elderly person supplementing retirement pay.

It is true that the fast food companies are making quite a lot of money – and you can bet dollars to donuts that the senior executives are rolling in pay and benefits.  But if you have ten workers at a fast food joint making $7.50 and hour and “win” your fight to increase pay to $15.00 an hour, all you’ll get is five or less workers manning the store…the other five will be replaced by automation.  No matter how you want to slice it up, flipping burgers is just not that valuable an occupation.  It is useful work.  It is work which needs to be done.  It, like all honest work, has inherent dignity.  But it is work which just about anyone can do – supply and demand; when there is a very large pool of potential workers for a particular job then there is no rational reason for high wages being paid.

Ms. Simon’s problem is not that fast food work is low paid – her problem is that she’s working there when her skill level should have long ago moved her in to a more difficult and highly paid line of work.  There are two explanations for why she hasn’t – and I don’t know which is the more prominent part in her life, and it doesn’t really matter:

1.  She’s messed up in her own life to the point where she’s stuck in a dead end, entry level job.

2.  The people who run our government – and whom she probably voted for – don’t like having a lot of jobs around which would allow someone like Ms. Simon, if she applied herself, to rise step by step up the employment ladder until she reaches a point where her wages afford a comfortable, middle class life for an adult with family responsibilities.

If Ms. Simon wanted to do something useful, she’d lead a protest demanding Obama stop blocking the Keystone pipeline…and she’d move to those areas of the country which are booming and thus have bags of blue collar jobs available for anyone who is willing to work hard and slowly move up the ladder of success.  But, she’s not in to that – either not in to challenging her liberal leaders, or not that in to investing the sweat equity necessary to move from minimum wage to middle class wage work.  She wants a free ride – no development of her skills; no challenge to her work ethic, but double the pay she’s getting now.

That is the essential pull of socialism for the lower class – a promise of getting a lot more for doing no more (or even less) than they are now.  Of course, if Ms. Simon and those like her really get their way, there won’t be fries with that socialism…not much work would get done, at all…especially as we’d all be too busy lining up for our potato rations…

UPDATE:

Some really great points have been made in the comments and now I’ll step up and defend Ms. Simon a bit. She does, indeed, have a cockeyed view of the world and if she “wins”, then all she’ll do is lose…unless, of course, she becomes an apparatchik passing out the potato rations to the rest of us (socialist revolutionaries fall in to two categories – in the upper echelons, wanna-be Lenins; in the lower ranks those who essentially aspire to be bureaucrats or policemen). But, remember, the world she lives in has not been made by her – that she lives in a world where getting a decent education is becoming increasingly difficult and finding blue collar work with a future ever rarer is because of the design – conscious or not – of the Ruling Class. That this Ruling Class is largely made up of people whom Ms. Simon votes for – and which feeds her the terminology she uses in her battle – is neither here nor there; she is living in their world, and following their script.

In New York City rent control keeps rents high; a miserably bad education system is in the iron grip of the unions which entirely control the city government; high taxes discourage new business formation; various regulations and taxes make manufacturing within the city limits difficult to do at a profit; imported illegal labor ensures that a great deal of the entry-level jobs are priced genuinely too low for a legal American to live on (illegal immigrants are commonly – and illegally and unsafely – jammed very many in to each substandard housing unit); union control of the few genuinely productive areas left (especially the port) ensures that unless you’re juiced in with the union, you ain’t getting a job there. For someone like Ms. Simon, there isn’t much of a chance – she can’t get educated (even if she goes to school – even to college; they won’t teach her), she can’t start her own business, there aren’t any decent blue collar jobs for her to get…so, she’s working at McD’s and is frustrated – and then in the final, sick irony, she’s set out in to the streets by the rhetoric of the very Ruling Class which has set up a system where she is bound to fail, unless she becomes one of their little, Stalinist tools for continued control. Have pity on the poor lady – she knows not what she does.

We have to change this – we have to get in there and start “community organizing”…explaining to the Ms. Simons that her problem is, indeed, a rich, white oppressor…but it ain’t the redneck with his rebel flag painted on his truck…its the upper class liberal with his “equality” sticker on the back of his Prius.

Dystopia–In His Own Words.

Leo Pusateri15 Comments

Just prior to the 2008 elections, Barack Obama boldly stated,

“We are 5 days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America” (October 30, 2008)

Many among my conservative friends took that to be so much fluff; pretty much liberal boilerplate consistent with his whole “Hope and Change” campaign message.  Given, however, Obama’s background, cutting his teeth with the radical leftists/communists of his day (i.e., Frank Marshall Davis, Bernadine Dorn, Bill Ayers, Jeremiah Wright) I believe I was one of the relative few that took him at his word.  Unlike most of America, conservatives such as myself and others who actually took the time to vet Obama, knew that background and worldview mattered, and that Obama’s past gave more than a glimpse of how he intended to govern in the present.

When Obama uttered those words, “.. fundamentally transform America” I knew he meant it. It was Obama himself who stated (emphases added),

“As radical as I think people try to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn’t that radical.  It didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution, at least, as it’s been interpreted and Warren Court interpreted in the same way, that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties. Says what the States can’t do to you; says what the Federal Government can’t do to you, but doesn’t state what the Federal government or State Government must do on your behalf.”  (Barack Obama, June 18, 2001).

There is no question that Barack Obama was unhappy with his perception of unequal distribution of wealth that America so unfairly championed, and that he wanted to transform this nation into something more ‘equitable’ in his eyes.  The question was how, and to what extent.  Just how does one “fundamentally”  transform a nation whose very basis for existence is freedom, itself?  The only feasible answer is to transform that already-free nation, into a nation with fewer freedoms.  Given Dinesh D’Souza’s brilliant insights as to Obama’s worldview engendered by his past, one knew that Obama’s absolute contempt for what he saw as America’s unequal distribution of wealth would result in his promoting policies that would necessarily stifle economic growth.   Obama’s America would no longer be one of unbridled economic opportunity; rather, America would be a nation of egalitarian outcomes, regardless of effort; to coin a phrase, to each, according to his needs; from each, according to his means.  

As a means of bringing about this transformation, America could no longer be a free nation.  No where as free, at least, as it was at the time of he assumed his presidency.  Liberties would need to be forsaken to bring about his vision of utopia.  The free market system would need to be reined in, and done so in no small measure.   Obama would have four years, eight at most, to make this happen.  This transformation would need to be done quickly, and in a big way.

Enter Obamacare, America’s first stop on its train ride to Utopia. Against the wishes of 60-70 percent of Americans, and without the vetting of congressional legislators who rammed through the legislation, the United States Federal Government took control of a full one-seventh of the American economy, which had the net effect of driving up the cost of health care for all involved,  taking away freedom of choice, relegating freedom of conscience incompatible with the party line to irrelevancy, while at the same time having the no-doubt intended effect of casting a chilling pall on America’s ability to sustain economic growth and prosperity.  For those who wish to argue regarding this latter point, how better to right the wrongs of the perceived injustice of unequally-distributed wealth than to stifle the engine that creates such wealth?

As I’ve said, Obamacare is but stop one on America’s train ride to Obama’s Dystopia.  Obama’s seeming assault on everything traditional America has held dear for centuries appears to have taken on epidemic proportions.  Remember- Obama only has three and three-quarter years left.  Those who haven’t yet felt the pinch of his “transformations,” most likely have not yet realized that they, too, have been pinched.   Obama’s willing media accomplices can only cover for him for so long before a critical mass of Americans, admittedly as dull as many of them are, will start to put two-and-two together and finally determine that the hopey-changey unicorn jockey they voted for may actually have had something to do with the plight in which they suddenly find themselves.

Then what?

When the critical mass of Americans finally wake up one morning, to find that they have been played as chumps, they are liable to get a bit–shall we say, testy. When this inevitability finally does come home to roost, The TEA party protests that grew out of Rick Santelli’s historic February, 2009 rant will no doubt look like a series of school pep assemblies.   Such civil unrest would certainly be difficult to quell, and will no doubt be yet another bump in the tracks on the way to Obama’s Dystopian dream.

What to do, what do do? You can’t just sick the military after the troublemakers. Well, you could, I suppose, but then you risk pissing off your fellow travelers who have had a history of contempt for men and women in uniform.

What to do??

Since, at least philosophy- and policy-wise, one can take Obama at his word, one may get a clue as to Obama’s plans by again, studying his own non-TelePrompter inspired rhetoric:

“We cannot continue to rely on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives that we’ve set.  We’ve got to have a civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well funded.”   -Barack Obama, July, 2008.

Yeah- remember that phrase?  Neither did a lot of other people.  Like the rest of Obama’s sordid past and rhetoric that if brought to the light of day would have rendered his election impossible, The media (true to their sycophantic nature) pretty much glossed over that little tidbit.  A powerful Civilian security force. Remind you of anyone?

So when you see articles like this, or like this, or like this, and then think, aww–Leo–take off that tinfoil hat!  You’re just blowing smoke.  That would never really happen here.  There’s no way.

Just remember.  I didn’t put those words into Barack Obama’s mouth.

He did.

Applied Liberalism

Mark Noonan28 Comments

Liberal, Democrat governor; liberal, Democrat legislature; tax hikes…and what do you get?  From the Illinois Policy Institute:

In a trend that continues to worsen, more Illinoisans found themselves unemployed in the month of July.

Illinois lost more jobs during the month of July than any other state in the nation, according to the most recent Bureau of Labor Statistics report. After losing 7,200 jobs in June, Illinois lost an additional 24,900 non-farm payroll jobs in July. The report also said Illinois’s unemployment rate climbed to 9.5 percent. This marks the third consecutive month of increases in the unemployment rate.

Illinois started to create jobs as the national economy began to recover. But just when Illinois’s economy seemed to be turning around, lawmakers passed record tax increases in January of this year. Since then, Illinois’s employment numbers have done nothing but decline…

This is entirely unsurprising – in fact, it was predicted in many quarters.  Why on earth should business expand or even remain in Illinois if they are to be taxed higher than elsewhere?  Do you liberals out there really think that higher taxes are just so much water off the business duck’s back?  I mean, seriously – tell us:  did you really expect that things would get better after a tax hike?

Over in Wisconsin the conservative, Republican governor and legislature took the opposite course – and it is paying off in jobs growth.  Anyone want to bet that some of those new, Wisconsin jobs are old, Illinois jobs?  Not like its all that far to move.  This isn’t rocket science – make something more expensive and there will be less of it being used…Illinois made having employees more expensive, so less employees are being used.

As I’ve said before, the dichotomy between the States being governed by liberalism and those by conservatism will be immensely instructive for a generation of Americans.  In practical application, the people are seeing the results.  Those States with the most liberalism are doing worse than those States with the most conservatism…and as time goes on, this will merely become more pronounced…and when the next election rolls around, I think we’ll see some startling results in the liberal States.

HAT TIP:  Mish’s