Wednesday, April 9, 2008

Michele unplugged

Here's what's in store for our great nation if and when it becomes an Obama-nation--

From the Charlotte Observer:

**Obama, like her husband a Harvard-trained lawyer, listened and then spoke off the cuff.

Most Americans, she said, don't want much.

"They don't want the whole pie," she told the women. "There are some who do, but most Americans feel blessed just being able to thrive a little bit. But that is becoming even more out of reach."

After law school, she and Barack were beset by loans they'd still be paying had her husband not written two best-sellers, "The Audacity of Hope" and "Dreams From My Father."

Those debts early in their marriage, she said, equips her husband to better understand the problems many Americans face.

Should she become first lady, she said she'd focus on family issues.

"If we don't wake up as a nation with a new kind of leadership...for how we want this country to work, then we won't get universal health care," she said.

"The truth is, in order to get things like universal health care and a revamped education system, then someone is going to have to give up a piece of their pie so that someone else can have more."**


There you go, America. Because she 'had it tough', which is to say she and her husband used student loans to become Harvard-trained lawyers, she's convinced that someone has to give up a piece of the pie so others can have more.

My first difficulty is probably yours too; how does a Harvard lawyer with a Harvard lawyer husband lay claim to anything like a tough life? I have several doctor friends who are still paying student loans well into their forties. It's how you pay for enormously expensive educations that reap enormously large results. If your results come slow and your loans are hard to pay, why is that someone else's problem? Why does someone else have to hand over a slice of the pie, probably a pie they earned by going to school and paying off some student loans THEMSELVES?

My second, and larger, difficulty is of course with socialism itself.

History shows that, when you use government to decide how much of a person's productivity they are allowed to keep for themselves and how much should be given to those who did not earn it, you put a MAJOR damper on future productivity. People rightly ask why they should work so hard if it's only to put money in the pocket of someone who DOESN'T.

Human beings are consistent in that they work hardest and achieve the most when they are in a position to benefit from their own work. When they find they're instead in charge of paying for everyone else's expenses, they tend to slack off, sometimes in a big way.

And this is the rub with socialism; lower productivity per person, especially when you factor in the very high achievers who now have these targets on their backs, results in less wealth, less to redistribute, LESS FOR EVERYONE.

Socialism does NOT alleviate poverty; it spreads poverty UP the income ladder by reducing incomes in the higher rungs.

Naturally, government will get around to solving the problem of decreased productivity by becoming the agency of decision for who will do what job, where, how much of the time-- in other words, de facto slavery will be the result. It was in the Soviet Union. And of course it would be the result under HillaryCare, in which we all know doctors would have to submit to the State as to what specialty they pursue and where in America they will locate.

Folks, when government is that much in charge of your life, you're either in the military or you're a slave. Military is voluntary service; the rest is mandatory. That's the difference.

Socialism does NOT work. It's been tried enough, in enough historical times and places, for the conclusion to be obvious to all but the most determinedly blind.

But it's always the SMART people, the morally superior people, the 'wisest ones' (as Sheryl Crow's new song would have it), who think that it will work this time because this time the SMART people will be in charge.

And socialism is just communism without the 'nationalizing' of industry. The corporations are still nominally owned by stockholders and run by boards, and it's only the cash flow that's 'nationalized'. In communism, they stop pretending and actually make the corporations state-owned enterprises to be run by Central Planning Kommittee. But the principle is the same; all wealth belongs to the state to distribute as it sees fit, and anyone with moreof anything than another person is morally culpable for that wrongful state of affairs.

Like mom used to say, 'eat your dinner, there are people starving in Ethiopia". I never managed to understand how eating my Brussels sprouts helped anyone in Ethiopia, but there you are.

2 comments:

looking2learn said...

This is typical of those who believe in a zero sum game, i.e., someone has to lose for someone to win because there's only a finite amount of "stuff." But in a capitalist society, you have the chance to create MORE WEALTH for yourself without taking it away from someone else. Try opening a small business, working an "extra" part-time job, getting more education to earn more money -- improving YOUR earning opportunities without taking it away from someone else.

These people scare me. All over the world, formerly socialist societies have turned toward capitalism, and these guys want to give marxism a run in the U.S.?!

It's about time people start to realize exactly the kind of "change" Obama truly represents. That's probably all that's gonna be left in their pockets -- CHANGE!

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