Blue Collar Muse

I started out commenting on a Lefty blog which strenuously disagrees with me on my stand that Obama is not my President. A commenter took exception to my contention

… Obama will be the President; but he will never be my President. Obama wants what he is unwilling to give. To get the job, Obama divided us. Now on the job, he yearns for unity’s strength. But leopards don’t change their spots. As he ran, so will he govern.

As proof of Obama’s unifying ability, the commenter, Ice, offered

“Obama divided us” — patently false, since Obama united us into a majority, the first majority to elect a Democrat since ‘76. Also demonstrably false, in that Obama’s rhetoric was uniting, and his plans and specifics were both appealing to the majority and specifically aimed at the majority.

I responded with the following and thought to bring it back here to get my readers’ take on the matter. I have edited my comment to keep it relevant to the discussion at hand. The offer I make Ice is open to any reader who disagrees with me. Any parties interested in adding support to my contention are welcome to do so as well. Discussion to take place in Comments. Please abide by the rules as outlined in the post.

Ice -

As far as Obama uniting or dividing us. I will grant you that he won the election. He even did so by being the first Democrat in 50 years or so to win with over 50% of the vote. Nice to finally have a majority on your side for once, I’m sure. But a 52-48 victory, while a majority is hardly evidence of Unity. It is still true that almost half of the country did NOT vote for him – tens of millions of people.

The reasons they did not, with apologies to your completely unsupported assertions that 5% of those voting against BO (more in some states) did so because of race, are grounded in issues and policies. It is here that Obama divides America. That divide is a scary one because a large portion of it is a divide between the “Producers” and the “Give me what you Produce-ers”.

Obama’s clearly Socialist leanings driving his “Spread the Wealth” ideology are divisive. And unnecessary. This is America (for a little while longer, anyway). Anyone can be whatever they want – isn’t that part of Obama’s draw? Why then shoot for the brass ring of “I’ll take whatever Government can coerce from Ken to give to me” and ignore the far more valuable gold ring of “I’ll work hard and make my own way and enjoy the fruits of my own labor”? Isn’t that what Barack, your hero, did? Why not emulate him, and by extension the Right wing principle of self reliance? Unless you believe the Left wing principle that you are not capable of succeeding on your own and have to be propped up by Government taking from your betters to support you in your inability.

I don’t happen to believe that. So many of BO’s supporters do. They voted “Gimmes” for themselves without considering the meaning of their vote. Or worse, because they actually agreed with the meaning of their vote.

Success is a heady thing. Once you’ve had a taste, it lingers for a while. You begin to play the “What if?” game. “I’ve done well in THIS area. What if I do as well over there? Or over there?” It is Obama that doesn’t want you thinking that way, not me or the Right. We want you taking counsel of your dreams! We want you to think about what could be instead of what is! We want you to be unsatisfied with your current state and strive for something better – as much better as you can imagine. We just think you should do it yourself – and then enjoy the fruits of your efforts knowing that you earned and deserved your success. It wasn’t taken from someone else who earned it and deserved it and given to you who has not.

To put forth effort, successful or not, to draw people to yourself based on that premise, sows division within the country that may take years or generations to wash out. Unlike most you may encounter, I am more than willing to debate you – on the issues, on the facts. I won’t be disrespectful or dismissive to you unless you treat me that way first. You interested? Be careful – the truth is not really on your side, here.

I’ve outlined one issue by which Obama has divided us. You can respond by showing how this is not divisive. But stick to the issue of how taking what is mine by force to give to someone else who has not earned it is not divisive. I’d be even more fascinated to see you turn this into something unifying.

Once we’ve finished this one, you can choose a point on which you believe Obama has brought unity to the country and we can debate that. Fair enough? (Editor’s note: This offer was made to Ice, elseblog. If this post generates intelligent debate without snark, I’ll extend that offer to some here.)

No more assumptions about my motives, no more making unsupportable claims, no more emotional responses with no factual foundations … just a discussion of the issues. If you think you can do that … I LOVE that sort of thing. I have to say it’s because most people end up finding they prefer the end results of Conservative principles more than Liberal ones. That’s not my fault … It’s just the nature of the discussion …

You game?

Blue Collar Muse

Popularity: 43% [?]

Paulie, a friend from Chicago and one of the handful of non-Obama Kool-Aid drinkers left in Cook County, has a great post up at Paulie’s Point on the results of Chicago’s recent efforts at generating revenue. I don’t know how many times it will need to be said before Democrats and the Left will get the message, but I’ll keep it up. Here goes …

Raising taxes is not a successful strategy to pursue if your goal is to end up with more money! Raising taxes will only result in less consumption of or participation in whatever is being taxed. That reduction usually far outstrips the revenue gained via the increase.

Cook County raised its sales tax to 10.25%, making it the highest in the nation. Paulie spills the beans that The Illinois Department of Revenue reports in the first month the increase went into effect, revenue plummeted nearly 12%!

A partial explanation is that a huge percentage of Cook County lies within easy driving distance of both Indiana and Wisconsin, not to mention other Illinois counties with lower sales taxes. Quick trips over a border to avoid ignorant, asinine and ineffective taxes are just part of the “We should have seen this coming!” reality obvious to anyone but Democratic Big Tax, Big Spenders.

To make matters worse, the flight outside Cook County does more than just hurt the city’s coffers. Business people and service providers lose revenue, too. Why should I buy gas or groceries in Cook County when I can drive 5 miles and save 10% or more? Over the course of a year, that’s serious savings for me and serious loss for businesses. When businesses lose money the cutback or close. That means even more revenue loss for the county as there are fewer working taxpayers and those that remain pay less because they make less. But Cook County Democrats don’t see that. Actually, most Democrats everywhere don’t see that.

At this point, they seem to only have two choices. They can demand people buy their highly and arbitrarily taxed goods, not because the price is good for the consumer but because Cook County REALLY needs the money. Or they can follow Tennessee’s lead and make criminals out of their citizens who have the sense to shop at places that are working for them and not against them.

Higher Taxes … just another bad idea from Democrats, Socialists and other Central Planners …

Blue Collar Muse

Popularity: 86% [?]

I don’t remember first hearing the term “9/11 Conservatives” to describe those with post 9/11 epiphanies. Realizing Liberal degradation of the US was destroying it in people’s minds, 9/11 Conservatives abandoned the Left in droves. I do remember I didn’t need the term explained to me. Its meaning was instantly grasped. The concept has been applied to different specifics over the years but it’s still clear. A big enough event can break through indifference, and even opposition, forcing us to deal with it and its consequences. Given that, perhaps it’s possible to learn something from attacks on other American institutions.

Free Market Capitalism is clearly under attack in the wake of recent financial woes. Listening to Democrats, and more than a few Republicans, Capitalism and Free Markets produced those problems. They were so bad, Government had to put Socialist bandages on Capitalist wounds. The Truth is otherwise. An objective evaluation show Government Market meddling and Watergate style Government cover-ups behind the current financial ravaging. The same is true of the subsequent bailout.

People are not as stupid as the Left needs them to be. Citizens will see Big Government, not Free Markets, caused the problem. They’ll understand the Government’s solution, as in 1929, made the situation far worse than it would have been had it let the Market work. They’ll recognize a prime Government weakness is needing to be seen doing something, even something bad! And they’ll realize one can’t eliminate Bear Markets if one also wants Bull Markets. Uninterrupted growth is unrealistic. There will be Market corrections and they are healthy. Public understanding of Governmental responsibility for the problem as evidenced by the bailout, the Community Reinvestment Act and more will ultimately push more people towards fiscal conservatism than towards centrally planned Socialism. Call them CRA FisCons.

Equally large is the assault on the sanctity of the voting process. We have peaceful transitions of power due to public confidence in the electoral process. While there have been many charges of vote fraud over the years, in the last decade, Democrats have stepped up efforts to destroy confidence in the system in order to acquire legislative power. In 2000 Al Gore retracted his concession, forcing the Florida recount nightmare on the country. Eight years later I still see “Bush was selected, not elected!” bumper stickers. The Left refused to accept a certified vote because it showed them losing. This obsession fueled efforts to ensure it never happens again, even if they need to cheat.

Ask Democrats if the GOP engages in vote fraud and twenty minutes later you might get a word in to ask for evidence. There is, no doubt, evidence of GOP vote fraud available if one looks hard enough. But the truth is the GOP behaves better than Dems in respecting the sanctity of the process. John Ashcroft didn’t demand the special election to which he was entitled following his loss to a dead man in 2000. In 2002, John Thune refused a recount to which he was entitled by South Dakota’s Constitution despite significant evidence of vote fraud by Democrats.

Ask Democrats about New Jersey illegally putting Frank Lautenberg on the ballot in 2002. Ask them about ACORN being investigated and charged with vote fraud across the country. Ask them about ACORN execs fired, resigned in disgraced or fined for vote fraud. And if you ask why Democrats continue to support such a tainted and disgraced organization, you’ll get non-answers delivered with a straight face.

Reliance on and allegiance to ACORN will ultimately cost them. The Democratic Party and individual Democrats should denounce ACORN. They should demand investigations to produce confidence in the process. They should vote to end public funding accounting for 40% of ACORN’s budget and advise private donors putting up the other 60% to cut ACORN off. Democrats should call for trials and harsh sentences for those convicted of manipulating the voting process to disenfranchise others. But they don’t and they won’t. ACORN is doing exactly what Democrats want them to do. They want distrust of the process in the public mind.

Once again, Americans are not that stupid. The Left cannot spin ACORN as part of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy or even the Right in general. ACORN is clearly both intentionally engaged in vote fraud and an obvious Democratic tool. As Americans grasp this truth, look for ACORN Republicans to make themselves known.

Finally, it never ceases to amaze how Democrats spin relationships. GWB was in the oil business so he must be a shill for Big Oil. Dick Cheney served on Haliburton’s board so the GOP must be funneling no-bid contracts their way. Yes, some Government decisions benefit Big Oil. Yes, Haliburton gets some Government contracts. But are these events in the natural course of business or is the GOP linked to them in nefarious ways? No evidence exists that it is anything other than the simple natural course of things.

Democratic relationships and connections are, however, demonstrably contaminated. Bill Clinton had more than a little baggage heading into the White House. There were bimbo eruptions; Whitewater and his wife’s part time day-trading job; questions about misuse and abuse of state troopers under his authority and more. This was all known before Clinton was elected. It either didn’t matter to Democrats or it didn’t get enough press to make a difference before election day. After the election, even more misdeeds came to light and it got worse. 16 years later, it’s happening again.

Well before election day, Barack Obama’s association with terrorists, foreign and domestic, is being revealed more clearly. Obama’s connection to ACORN and its crimes is being reported more widely. His support for Socialist regulation is becoming more widely known. The questions about Obama have been answered.  He’s a known quantity.  If demonstrable past performance is an indicator, Barack Obama will damage this country in ways my worst nightmares can’t foresee. Fraternizing with our enemies, championing destructive economic plans and ignoring illegal acts for personal benefit combine to make Barack Obama more than dagerous to our country. He could destroy it altogether.

Obama dismisses these truths. He even paints them as positive. I’m not in bed with terrorists! But what’s wrong with talking to people? I didn’t push ACORN’s radical agenda, I was a community organizer trying to involve more people in the political process! I’m not a Socialist! But shouldn’t everyone be able to own in a house? Can’t a nation as great as America make that happen?

For Bill Clinton to be right, scores of people had to be branded as liars. Democrats took up that challenge. For Barack Obama to be the President Democrats claim he’ll be, thousands must deny they saw what they saw and heard what they heard during the campaign. Thousands more must suffer from Obama policies as disastrous tomorrow as they were in a thousand yesterdays. No matter, Democrats still rally behind him.

However, sooner or later, just as 9/11 moved folks from Liberal to Conservative, the CRA will move folks from Socialism to Free Markets, ACORN will move folks from Democrats to Republicans. Like Jimmy Carter gave the country Ronald Reagan, an Obama presidency will illustrate the lie and curse that is Liberalism and reveal the Truth and the blessing, howevermuch discomfort it produces at times, that is Conservatism. The Left may argue things like Individual Liberty, Free Markets, Conservatism and the like aren’t perfect. I agree. But they are also far superior to any other option available.

Remember this when you step into that booth over the next few weeks.  There’s no need to wait until 2012 to show you’ve made the move from Left to Right.

Blue Collar Muse

Popularity: 60% [?]

Welcome to visitors from Free Republic!  Please feel free to poke around a bit after reading The Twentieth Century Motor Company.  And please come back to read more!

Back in February, I wrote of my appreciation for and debt to Ayn Rand’s novel ‘Atlas Shrugged’. Its message was seminal in the development of my political philosophy and practice. To try and condense over 750 pages into a blog post is impossible. But I can do for you what was done for me.

My first contact with Rand was via an excerpt from ‘Atlas Shrugged’ telling the tale of a fictional company, The Twentieth Century Motor Company. I wasn’t able to determine what I was reading was an excerpt from a larger work. I thought it was just a phenomenally well written morality play. Later, reading ‘Atlas Shrugged’ I was delighted to find the story I loved was part of Rand’s work.

I distinctly remember from my first encounter with the tale of Twentieth Century, almost twenty years ago, two impressions. The first was that reading the story was akin to reading the headlines of today’s paper despite ‘Atlas Shrugged’ having been written in the 1950s. I suspect it is even more relevant today than when it was written. The second impression was that every person in our country ought to be required to read just this story once per year. It doesn’t take a terribly long time, though it’s much longer than a blog post, and the benefits of remembering the truth of its premise are legion.

I’ve thought for some time about reproducing the story for you here in this fashion. As with so many good intentions - family, work, church and other urgent matters called more loudly for my time. However, following the historic vote in Congress to take $700 billion from you and I to give to others; to take from those of us with the ability to generate money and give it to those who loudly claim to have a greater need for it than we do, telling this story became the most urgent thing I had to do to be true to the motivation I have to serve those of you who choose to take your time to read what I write.

I think of this story often. When Government tells me it will raise my taxes for yet another entitlement or socially planned experiment, I remember the story. When Government tells me I can’t smoke if I want, I must wear my seatbelt or helmet if I don’t want and that I am denied access to transfats if I want them, I think of the story. When Government tells me, as Joe Biden did in the VP debate three nights ago, it is “simple fairness” that Government take my money to give to someone else because Government has decided I have too much while the recipient of my money has too little, I think of the story.

Most importantly, I think of how the story ends. Socialism holds such great potential and promise on paper. As soon as you put it into practice, however, the philosophy’s promise is unmasked and shown to be the lie it has always been. Nations the world over have tried it and it has always failed. Only one system of government and economic theory has come close to delivering on the promise Socialism makes: the Republic and Free Market Capitalism found in the USA. How odd, then, that while former Socialist countries abandon the evident failure of their ways for the demonstrated success of ours, many here in America are determined to exchange what has proven successful for that which has proven worthless.

One can only ask oneself, as the narrator in the story below does, “…how it could be possible that the educated, the cultured, the famous men of the world could make a mistake of this size and preach, as righteousness, this sort of abomination - when five minutes of thought should have told them what would happen if somebody tried to practice what they preached.”

This story will be posted permanently at BCM on a page of its own. But for now, I commend to you Rand’s story and my guide.

The Twentieth Century Motor Company

“Well, there was something that happened at that plant where I worked for twenty years. It was when the old man died and his heirs took over. There were three of them, two sons and a daughter, and they brought a new plan to run the factory. They let us vote on it, too, and everybody - almost everybody - voted for it. We didn’t know. We thought it was good. No, that’s not true, either. We thought that we were supposed to think it was good. The plan was that everybody in the factory would work according to his ability, but would be paid according to his need.

“We voted for that plan at a big meeting, with all of us present, six thousand of us, everybody that worked in the factory. The Starnes heirs made long speeches about it, and it wasn’t too clear, but nobody asked any questions. None of us knew just how the plan would work, but every one of us thought that the next fellow knew it. And if anybody had doubts, he felt guilty and kept his mouth shut - because they made it sound like anyone who’d oppose the plan was a child-killer at heart and less than a human being. They told us that this plan would achieve a noble ideal. Well, how were we to know otherwise? Hadn’t we heard it all our lives - from our parents and our schoolteachers and our ministers, and in every newspaper we ever read and every movie and every public speech? Hadn’t we always been told that this was righteous and just? Well, maybe there’s some excuse for what we did at that meeting. Still, we voted for the plan - and what we got, we had it coming to us. You know, ma’am, we are marked men, in a way, those of us who lived through the four years of that plan in the Twentieth Century factory. What is it that hell is supposed to be? Evil - plain, naked, smirking evil, isn’t it? Well, that’s what we saw and helped to make - and I think we’re damned, every one of us, and maybe we’ll never be forgiven …

“Do you know how it worked, that plan, and what it did to people? Try pouring water into a tank where there’s a pipe at the bottom draining it out faster than you pour it, and each bucket you bring breaks that pipe an inch wider, and the harder you work the more is demanded of you, and you stand slinging buckets forty hours a week, then forthy-eight, then fifty-six - for your neighbor’s supper - for his wife’s operation - for his child’s measles - for his mother’s wheel chair - for his uncle’s shirt - for his nephew’s schooling - for the baby next door - for the baby to be born - for anyone anywhere around you - it’s theirs to receive, from diapers to dentures - and yours to work, from sunup to sundown, month after month, year after year, with nothing to show for it but your sweat, with nothing in sight for you but their pleasure, for the whole of your life, without rest, without hope, without end … From each according to his ability, to each according to his need …

“We’re all one big family, they told us, we’re all in this together. But you don’t all stand working an acetylene torch ten hours a day - together, and you don’t all get a bellyache - together. What’s whose ability and which of whose needs comes first? When it’s all one pot, you can’t let any man decide what his own needs are, can you? If you did, he might claim that he needs a yacht - and if his feelings are all you have to go by, he might prove it, too. Why not? If it’s not right for me to own a car until I’ve worked myself into a hospital ward, earning a car for every loafer and every naked savage on earth - why can’t he demand a yacht from me, too, if I still have the ability not to have collapsed? No? He can’t? Then why can he demand that I go without cream for my coffee until he’s replastered his living room? … Oh well … Well, anyway, it was decided that nobody had the right to judge his own need or ability. We voted on it. Yes, ma’am, we voted on it in a public meeting twice a year. How else could it be done? Do you care to think what would happen at such a meeting? It took us just one meeting to discover that we had become beggars - rotten, whining, sniveling beggars, all of us, because no man could claim his pay as his rightful earning, he had no rights and no earnings, his work didn’t belong to him, it belonged to ‘the family’, and they owed him nothing in return, and the only claim he had on them was his ‘need’ - so he had to beg in public for relief from his needs, like any lousy moocher, listing all his troubles and miseries, down to his patched drawers and his wife’s head colds, hoping that ‘the family’ would throw him the alms. He had to claim miseries, because it’s miseries, not work, that had become the coin of the realm - so it turned into a contest between six thousand panhandlers, each claiming that his need was worse than his brother’s. How else could it be done? Do you care to guess what happened, what sort of men kept quiet, feeling shame, and what sort got away with the jackpot?

“But that wasn’t all. There was something else that we discovered at the same meeting. The factory’s production had fallen by forty percent, in that first half year, so it was decided that somebody hadn’t delivered ‘according to his ability.’ Who? How would you tell it? ‘The family’ voted on that, too. We voted which men were the best, and these men were sentenced to work overtime each night for the next six months. Overtime without pay - because you weren’t paid by time and you weren’t paid by work, only by need.

“Do I have to tell you what happened after that - and into what sort of creatures we all started turning, we who had once been humans? We began to hide whatever ability we had, to slow down and watch like hawks that we never worked any faster or better than the next fellow. What else could we do, when we knew that if we did our best for ‘the family,’ it’s not thanks or rewards that we’d get, but punishment? We knew that for every stinker who’d ruin a batch of motors and cost the company money - either through his sloppiness, because he didn’t have to care, or through plain incompetence - it’s we who’d have to pay with our nights and our Sundays. So we did our best to be no good.

“There was one young boy who started out, full of fire for the noble ideal, a bright kid without any schooling, but with a wonderful head on his shoulders. The first year, he figured out a work process that saved us thousands of man-hours. He gave it to ‘the family,’ didn’t ask anything for it, either, couldn’t ask, but that was all right with him. It was for the ideal, he said. But when he found himself voted as one of our ablest and sentenced to night work, because we hadn’t gotten enough from him, he shut his mouth and his brain. You can bet he didn’t come up with any ideas, the second year.

“What was it they’d always told us about the vicious competition of the profit system, where men had to compete for who’d do a better job than his fellows? Vicious, wasn’t it? Well, they should have seen what it was like when we all had to compete with one another for who’d do the worst job possible. There’s no surer way to destroy a man than to force him into a spot where he has to aim at not doing his best, where he has to struggle to do a bad job, day after day. That will finish him quicker than drink or idleness or pulling stick-ups for a living. But there was nothing else for us to do except to fake unfitness. The one accusation we feared was to be suspected of ability. Ability was like a mortgage on you that you could never pay off. And what was there to work for? You knew that your basic pittance would be given to you anyway, whether you worked or not - your ‘housing and feeding allowance,’ it was called - and above that pittance, you had no chance to get anything, no matter how hard you tried. You couldn’t count on buying a new suit of clothes next year - they might give you a ‘clothing allowance’ or they might not, according to whether nobody broke a leg, needed an operation or gave birth to more babies. And if there wasn’t enough money for new suits for everybody, then you couldn’t get yours, either.

“There was one man who’d worked hard all his life, because he’d always wanted to send his son through college. Well, the boy graduated from high school in the second year of the plan - but ‘the family’ wouldn’t give the father any ‘allowance’ for the college. They said his son couldn’t go to college, until we had enough to send everybody’s sons to college - and that we first had to send everybody’s children through high school, and we didn’t even have enough for that. The father died the following year, in a knife fight with somebody in a saloon, a fight over nothing in particular - such fights were beginning to happen among us all the time.

“Then there was an old guy, a widower with no family, who had one hobby: phonograph records. I guess that was all he ever got out of life. In the old days, he used to skip lunch just to buy himself some new recording of classical music. Well, they didn’t give him any ‘allowance’ for records - ‘personal luxury’ they called it. But at the same meeting, Millie Bush, somebody’s daughter, a mean, ugly little eight year old, was voted a pair of gold braces for her buck teeth - this was ‘medical need’ because the staff psychologist had said that the poor girl would get an inferiority complex if her teeth weren’t straightened out. The old guy who loved music, turned to drink, instead. He got so you never saw him fully conscious any more. But it seems like there was one thing he couldn’t forget. One night, he came staggering down the street, saw Millie Bush, swung his fist and knocked all her teeth out. Every one of them.

“Drink, of course, was what we all turned to, some more, some less. Don’t ask how we got the money for it. When all the decent pleasures are forbidden, there’s always ways to get the rotten ones. You don’t break into grocery stores after dark and you don’t pick your fellow’s pockets to buy classical symphonies or fishing tackle, but if it’s to get stinking drunk and forget - you do. Fishing tackle? Hunting guns? Snapshot cameras? Hobbies? There wasn’t any ‘amusement allowance’ for anybody. ‘Amusement’ was the first thing they dropped. Aren’t you supposed to be ashamed to object when anybody asks you to give up anything, if it’s something that gave you pleasure? Even our ‘tobacco allowance’ was cut to where we got two packs of cigarettes a month - and this, they told us, was because the money had to go into the babies’ milk fund. Babies was the only item of production that didn’t fall, but rose and kept on rising - because people had nothing else to do, I guess, and because they didn’t have to care, the baby wasn’t their burden, it was ‘the family’s.’ In fact, the best chance you had of getting a raise and breathing easier for a while was a ‘baby allowance.’ Either that or a major disease.

“It didn’t take us long to see how it all worked out. Any man who tried to play straight, had to refuse himself everything. He lost his taste for any pleasure, he hated to smoke a nickel’s worth of tobacco or chew a stick of gum, worrying whether somebody had more need for that nickel. He felt ashamed of every mouthful of food he swallowed, wondering whose weary nights of overtime had paid for it, knowing that his food was not his by right, miserably wishing to be cheated rather than to cheat, to be a sucker, but not a blood-sucker. He wouldn’t marry, he wouldn’t help his folks back home, he wouldn’t put an extra burden on ‘the family.’ Besides, if he still had some sort of sense of responsibility, he couldn’t marry or bring children into the world, when he could plan nothing, promise nothing, count on nothing. But the shiftless and irresponsible had a field day of it. The bred babies, they got girls into trouble, they dragged in every worthless relative they had from all over the country, every unmarried pregnant sister, for an extra ‘disability allowance,’ they got more sicknesses than any doctor could disprove, they ruined their clothing, their furniture, their homes - what the hell, ‘the family’ was paying for it! They found more ways of getting in ‘need’ than the rest of us could ever imagine - they developed a special skill for it, which was the only ability they showed.

“God help us, ma’am! Do you see what we saw? We saw that we’d been given a law to live by, a moral law, they called it, which punished those who observed it - for observing it. The more you tried to live up to it, the more you suffered; the more you cheated it, the bigger reward you got. Your honesty was like a tool left at the mercy of the next man’s dishonesty. The honest ones paid, the dishonest collected. The honest lost, the dishonest won. How long could men stay good under this sort of a law of goodness? We were a pretty decent bunch of fellows when we started. There weren’t many chiselers among us. We knew our jobs and we were proud of it and we worked for the best factory in the country, where old man Starnes hired nothing but the pick of the country’s labor. Within one year under the new plan, there wasn’t an honest man left among us. That was the evil, the sort of hell-horror evil that preachers used to scare you with, but you never thought to see alive. Not that the plan encouraged a few bastards, but that it turned decent people into bastards, and there was nothing else that it could do - and it was called a moral ideal!

“What was it we were supposed to work for? For the love of our brothers? What brothers? For the bums, the loafers, the moochers we saw all around us? And whether they were cheating or plain incompetent, whether they were unwilling or unable - what difference did that make to us? If we were tied for life to the level of their unfitness, faked or real, how long could we care to go on? We had no way of knowing their ability, we had no way of controlling their needs - all we knew was that we were beasts of burden struggling blindly in some sort of place that was half-hospital, half-stockyards - a place geared to nothing but disability, disaster, disease - beasts put there for the relief of whatever whoever chose to say was whichever’s need.

“Love of our brothers? That’s when we learned to hate our brothers for the first time in our lives. We began to hate them for every meal they swallowed, for every small pleasure they enjoyed, for one man’s new shirt, for another’s wife’s hat, for an outing with their family, for a paint job on their house - it was taken from us, it was paid for by our privations, our denials, our hunger. We began to spy on one another, each hoping to catch the others lying about their needs, so as to cut their ‘allowance’ at the next meeting. We began to have stool pigeons who informed on people, who reported that somebody had bootlegged a turkey to his family on some Sunday - which he’d paid for by gambling, most likely. We began to meddle into one another’s lives. We provoked family quarrels, to get somebody’s relatives thrown out. Any time we saw a man starting to go steady with a girl, we made life miserable for him. We broke up many engagements. We didn’t want anyone to marry, we didn’t want any more dependents to feed.

“In the old days, we used to celebrate if somebody had a baby, we used to chip in and help him out with the hospital bills, if he happened to be hard-pressed for the moment. Now, if a baby was born, we didn’t speak to the parents for weeks. Babies, to us, had become what locusts were to farmers. In the old days, we used to help a man out if he had a bad illness in the family. Now - well, I’ll tell you about just one case. It was the mother of a man who had been with us for fifteen years. She was a kindly old lady, cheerful and wise, she knew us all by our first names and we all liked her - we used to like her. One day, she slipped on the cellar stairs and fell and broke her hip. We knew what that meant at her age. The staff doctor said that she’d have to be sent to a hospital in town, for expensive treatments that would take a long time. The old lady died the night before she was to leave for town. They never established the cause of death. No, I don’t know whether she was murdered. Nobody said that. Nobody would talk about it at all. All I know is that I - and that’s what I can’t forget! - I, too, had caught myself wishing that she would die. This - may God forgive us! - was the brotherhood, the security, the abundance that the plan was supposed to achieve for us!

“Was there any reason why this sort of horror would ever be preached by anybody? Was there anybody who got any profit from it? There was. The Starnes heirs. I hope you’re not going to remind me that they’d sacrificed a fortune and turned the factory over to us as a gift. We were fooled by that one, too. Yes, they gave up the factory. But profit, ma’am, depends on what it is that you’re after. And what the Starnes heirs were after, no money on earth could buy. Money is too clean and innocent for that.

“Eric Starnes, the youngest - he was a jellyfish that didn’t have the guts to be after anything in particular. He got himself voted as the Director of our Public Relations Department, which didn’t do anything, except that he had a staff for the not doing of anything, so he didn’t have to bother sticking around the office. The pay he got - well, I shouldn’t call it ‘pay,’ none of us was ‘paid’ - the alms voted to him was fairly modest, about ten times what I got, but that wasn’t riches, Eric didn’t care for money - he wouldn’t have known what to do with it. He spent his time hanging around among us, showing how chummy he was and democratic. He wanted to be loved, it seems. The way he went about it was to keep reminding us that he had given us the factory. We couldn’t stand him.

“Gerald Starnes was our Director of Production. We never learned just what the size of his rake-off - his alms - had been. It would have taken a staff of accountants to figure that out, and a staff of engineers to trace the way it was piped, directly or indirectly, into his office. None of it was supposed to be for him - it was all for company expenses. Gerald had three cars, four secretaries, five telephones, and he used to throw champagne and caviar parties that no tax-paying tycoon in the country could have afforded. He spent more money in one year than his father had earned in profits in the last two years of his life. We saw a hundred pound stack - a hundred pounds, we weighed them - of magazines in Gerald’s office, full of stories about our factory and our noble plan, with big pictures of Gerald Starnes, calling him a great social crusader. Gerald liked to come into the shops at night, dressed in his formal clothes, flashing diamond cuff links the size of a nickel and shaking cigar ashes all over. Any cheap show-off who’s got nothing to parade but his cash, is bad enough - except that he makes no bones about the cash being his, and you’re free to gape at him or not, as you wish, and mostly you don’t. But when a bastard like Gerald Starnes puts on an act and keeps spouting that he doesn’t care for material wealth, that he’s only serving ‘the family,’ that all the lushness is not for himself, but for our sake and for the common good, because it’s necessary to keep up the prestige of the company and of the noble plan in the eyes of the public - then that’s when you learn to hate the creature as you’ve never hated anything human.

“But his sister Ivy was worse. She really did not care for material wealth. The alms she got was no bigger than ours, and she went about in scuffed, flat-heeled shoes and shirtwaists - just to show how selfless she was. She was our Director of Distribution. She was the lady in charge of our needs. She was the one who held us by the throat. Of course, distribution was supposed to be decided by voting - by the voice of the people. But when the people are six thousand howling voices, trying to decide without yardstick, rhyme or reason, when there are no rules to the game and each can demand anything, but has a right to nothing, when everybody holds power over everybody’s life except his own - then it turns out, as it did, that the voice of the people is Ivy Starnes. By the end of the second year, we dropped the pretense of the ‘family meetings’ - in the name of ‘production efficiency and time economy,’ one meeting used to take ten days - and all the petitions of need were simply sent to Miss Starnes’ office. No, not sent. They had to be recited to her in person by every petitioner. Then she made up a distribution list, which she read to us for our vote of approval at a meeting that lasted three-quarters of an hour. We voted approval. There was a ten-minute period on the agenda for discussion and objections. We made no objections. We knew better by that time. Nobody can divide a factory’s income among thousands of people, without some sort of a gauge to measure people’s value. Her gauge was bootlicking. Selfless? In her father’s time, all of his money wouldn’t have given him a chance to speak to his lousiest wiper and get away with it, as she spoke to our best skilled workers and their wives. She had pale eyes that looked fishy, cold and dead. And if you ever want to see pure evil, you should have seen the way her eyes glinted when she watched some man who’d talked back to her once and who’d just heard his name on the list of those getting nothing above basic pittance. And when you saw it, you saw the real motive of any person who’s ever preached the slogan: ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.’

“This was the whole secret of it. At first, I kept wondering how it could be possible that the educated, the cultured, the famous men of the world could make a mistake of this size and preach, as righteousness, this sort of abomination - when five minutes of thought should have told them what would happen if somebody tried to practice what they preached. Now I know they didn’t do it by any kind of mistake. Mistakes of this size are never made innocently. If men fall for some vicious piece of insanity, when they have no way to make it work and no possible reason to explain their choice - it’s because they have a reason that they do not wish to tell. And we weren’t so innocent, either, when we voted for that plan at the end of the first meeting. We didn’t do it just because we believed that the drippy, old guff they spewed was good. We had another reason, but the guff helped us to hide it from our neighbors and from ourselves. The guff gave us a chance to pass off as virtue something that we’d be ashamed to admit otherwise. There wasn’t a man voting for it who didn’t think that under a setup of this kind he’d muscle in on the profits of the men abler than himself. There wasn’t a man rich and smart enough but that he didn’t think that somebody was richer and smarter, and this plan would give him a share of his better’s wealth and brain. But while he was thinking that he’d get unearned benefits from the men above, he forgot about the men below who’d get unearned benefits, too. He forgot about all his inferiors who’d rush to drain him just as he hoped to drain his superiors. The worker who liked the idea that his need entitled him to a limousine like his boss’s, forgot that every bum and beggar on earth would come howling that their need entitled them to an icebox like his own. That was our real motive when we voted - that was the truth of it - but we didn’t like to think it, so the less we liked it, the louder we yelled about our love for the common good.

“Well, we got what we asked for. By the time we saw what it was that we’d asked for, it was too late. We were trapped, with no place to go. The best men among us left the factory in the first week of the plan. We lost our best engineers, superintendents, foremen and highest-skilled workers. A man of self-respect doesn’t turn into a milch cow for anybody. Some able fellows tried to stick it out, but they couldn’t take it for long. We kept losing our men, they kept escaping from the factory like from a pesthole - till we had nothing left except the men of need, but none of the men of ability.

“And the few of us who were still any good, but stayed on, were only those who had been there too long. In the old days, nobody ever quit the Twentieth Century - and, somehow, we couldn’t make ourselves believe it was gone. After a while, we couldn’t quit, because no other employer would have us - for which I can’t blame him. Nobody would deal with us in any way, no respectable person or firm. All the small shops, where we traded, started moving out of Starnesville fast - till we had nothing left but saloons, gambling joints and crooks who sold us trash at gouging prices. The alms we got kept falling, but the cost of our living went up. The list of the factory’s needy kept stretching, but the list of its customers shrank. There was less and less income to divide among more and more people. In the old days, it used to be said that the Twentieth Century Motor trademark was as good as the karat mark on gold. I don’t know what it was that the Starnes heirs thought, if they thought at all, but I suppose that like all social planners and like savages, they thought that this trademark was a magic stamp which did the trick by some sort of voodoo power and that it would keep them rich, as it had kept their father. Well, when our customers began to see that we never delivered an order on time and never put out a motor that didn’t have something wrong with it - the magic stamp began to work the other way around: people wouldn’t take a motor as a gift, if it was marked Twentieth Century. And it came to where our only customers were men who never paid and never meant to pay their bills. But Gerald Starnes, doped by his own publicity, got huffy and went around, with an air of moral superiority, demanding that businessmen place orders with us, not because our motors were good, but because we needed the orders so badly.

“By that time a village half-wit could see what generations of professors had pretended not to notice. What good would our need do to a power plant when its generators stopped because of our defective engines? What good would it do to a man caught on an operating table when the electric light went out? What good would it do to the passengers of a plane when its motor failed in mid-air? And if they bought our product, not because of its merit, but because of our need, would that be the good, the right, the moral thing to do for the owner of that power plant, the surgeon in that hospital, the maker of that plane?

“Yet this was the moral law that the professors and leaders and thinkers had wanted to establish all over the earth. If this is what it did in a single small town where we all knew one another, do you care to think what it would do on a world scale? Do you care to imagine what it would be like, if you had to live and to work, when you’re tied to all the disasters and all the malingering of the globe? to work - and whenever any men failed anywhere, it’s you who would have to make up for it. To work - with no chance to rise, with your meals and your clothes and your home and your pleasure depending on any swindle, any famine, any pestilence anywhere on earth. To work - with no chance for an extra ration, till the Cambodians have been fed and the Patagonians have been sent through college. To work - on a blank check held by every creature born, by men whom you’ll never see, whose needs you’ll never know, whose ability or laziness or sloppiness or fraud you have no way to learn and no right to question - just to work and work and work - and leave it up to the Ivys and the Geralds of the world to decide whose stomach will consume the effort, the dreams and the days of your life. And this is the moral law to accept? This - a moral ideal?

“Well, we tried it - and we learned. Our agony took four years, from our first meeting to our last, and it ended the only way it could end: in bankruptcy. At our last meeting, Ivy Starnes was the one who tried to brazen it out. She made a short, nasty, snippy little speech in which she said that the plan had failed because the rest of the country had not accepted it, that a single community could not succeed in the midst of a selfish, greedy world - and that the plan was a noble ideal, but human nature was not good enough for it. A young boy - the one who had been punished for giving us a useful idea in our first year - got up, as we all sat silent, and walked straight to Ivy Starnes on the platform. He said nothing. He spat in her face. That was the end of the noble plan and of the Twentieth Century.

Popularity: 71% [?]

Now that our Representatives in DC are done abasing themselves before political logic at the altar of “Being seen doing something, no matter how destructive, is better than being seen doing nothing!”, let’s take a look at what just happened.

Stripped to essentials, you and I are being forced to buy something the current owners don’t want and which destroyed individuals and companies which owned even some of it. Government believes the magic pixie bailout dust which will ensure success is assuming responsibility for all of it.

Wall Street holds a bag full of bad mortgages. So bad, owning them has already destroyed companies with even a mix of good and bad ones. Government is going to buy just the bad ones! But Government has no money with which to purchase mortgages, good or bad, that doesn’t come from taxpayers. Your Government is buying, in your name and with your money, mortgages the mortgage experts know are bad, don’t want and wish they had never made.

“Unknown” is the best description for the prices taxpayers will pay for these mortgages.  It is currently unclear how the value of the bad mortgages will be determined.  Wall Street will want as much as possible to reduce their losses. Government has little incentive to realistically assess their value.  This would seem to assure a good deal for Wall Street and a lousy deal for Main Street. The Director of the Congressional Budget Office, Peter R. Orszag, told Congress that in plain terms in a recent hearing. (Orszag’s comments appear between 22:30 to 23:00)

Government believes it will perform better than the Market. 337 legislators with nothing at stake but re-election feel better qualified to risk taxpayer’s money and future than the 200,000,000 taxpayers either opposed to or unsure of the plan.  By what measure are they more qualified?  By virtue of being able to ignore the people and impose their will on them.  But being powerful doesn’t make one right.

Bailout opposition drops dramatically if one assumes Government is making a sound investment. Tell taxpayers they’ll get their money back when the homes they’re buying are re-sold and many more favor the deal. But will that actually happen? All we have are assurances on that point.  Government doesn’t know it will work out well, they hope and assume it will.

There are some great ideas for Private Sector involvement. That few investors are clamoring to be let in on the action is telling. However, if profiting from bad mortgages was the sure thing Government needs it to be to garner public support, we wouldn’t need the Bailout. The Private Sector would be lined up to do it.  That they’re not undermines the Government’s contention this is a low cost, no cost, or even profit making venture.

Interestingly, the Bailout isn’t about the Housing Market at all.  It’s about the Credit Market.  Holding bad mortgages is a threat to financial health.  In today’s volatile market, even the hint of weakness spells disaster.  No one knows how much in bad mortgages anyone else is holding so no one is extending credit.  The borrower may be destroyed in mere hours by a loose word or a breeze on their house of cards. The Government solution is to buy up all the bad mortgages.  Freed from worry about risk, lenders will begin extending credit again.  This is exactly the solution the Market would have imposed had it been allowed to with some differences in implementation.

The Market would not make taxpayers responsible for the sins of others.  It would have relaxed tension in the Credit Market by making those responsible for bad lending decisions endure the consequences.  This would dump bad loans on the market at a low price for investors to see as good investments which they then begin buying.  As the Market cleansed itself confidence between surviving lenders, demonstrating unquestionable financial soundness by virtue of their survival, would increase and the Credit Market would loosen. This is essentially identical to Government’s plan while taking a little longer. Government is underscoring the soundness of Market principles without being willing to permit Market processes.

By far the worst result of the Bailout is deeper Government intrusion into the Private Sector. The crisis was not a failure of the Market. The Market expects there will be downturns, corrections or cutbacks at times. No one likes them, but only certain forms of Government abandon responsible behavior to avoid them.

We used to have wise and responsible Government; limited and small, it taxed little and meddled less. That allowed a Free Market in a truly Private Sector to transform a wilderness into the world’s richest economy in mere decades. The inertia of that Economy carried us forward despite the low speed, high drag baggage of Woodrow Wilson’s Socialism, FDR’s New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society.

But even that powerful engine is not immune to the braking action of constant friction.  Today Government spends hundreds of billions monthly in unconstitutional entitlements. Crying that a minority will fail in their quest for success, it impedes the majority’s quest, ignorant that a single success does more than a single failure can wipe out. Left alone, we would provide far more for the least of us than the pittance Government doles out for votes. But that garners no power for Government.

Barack Obama and Democrats have already told us what they intend if elected. They plan even more Government regulation and control, weakening even further the economic engine that is Capitalism. They won’t be satisfied until the engine stops altogether.

I’m not convinced we’ve reached the point of no return in our rush to self destruction at the hands of Socialists and Central Planners. But neither am I convinced we have not. The bailout is a huge step in that direction. Granting Democrats control of all 3 branches of Government would be another. And I’m not sure Americans and the GOP is up to the challenge of stopping it. For now, work like it all depends on you and pray like it all depends on God. In the final tally, it does.

Blue Collar Muse

Popularity: 75% [?]

As part of my online activism, I participate in a number of forums. One of the most recent is my posting some of my material at Newsvine.com. There are a number of people I know that don’t care for Newsvine as it seems to hold the same opinion so many other social networking sites have. Namely, it permits Leftists to band together and punish opposing thought despite claiming to be all about discussion and dialogue. Anti-American, -Capitalist, -Democracy screeds get promoted while defenders of same are savaged and disrespected. No rest or quarter is given until Americans are either silenced or driven from the conversation or thrown off the site after being lied about and misrepresented by hateful Liberals. I’ve seen it happen, at Newsvine and elsewhere. Still, some of us persist and I count my recent efforts there among them.

This is what I found today. A member with the Username Jcpas posted last Wednesday that he was ‘Leaving the US!’ Since then his post has received 80 positive votes supporting his views and over 255 comments, many of them also supporting his views.

Among those views and opinions posted by Jcpas himself are:

I’m leaving this country. I’ve simply had it. I cannot do this anymore.

People in this country are truly blind to the idea of cooperation for mutual benefit. It is cut throat “them” vs “us” only.

I hate to say it, but the majority (at least 51%) of the people in this country are either stupid or crazy.

I’m trying to work my way through college… I will leave with a lot of debt, there’s no way around it. I have no idea how I can afford a place to live, college prices keep going up, food, gas… you name it. I’m not making any more many than before but things keep getting less and less affordable. I haven’t driven my car in weeks; if a friend can’t take me somewhere I walk or take the bus… which makes my days quite a bit longer. I have decided to leave the country.

Corporations - As a socialist I feel this is the primary reason why nothing will improve in the near future.

I haven’t driven my car in weeks, I have to rely on public transportation (thank god for some socialist conventions), I have no idea how I’m even going to pay for my next meal! As a tax payer, I deserve better, we all do. My taxes are going to Iraq and I can’t afford to eat. There’s something wrong with that. How about my government taking care of me? Novel idea. I give them money, they give me something in return. What are we getting in return now besides war and rich corporations? Debt. Prices keep going up and salaries stay the same (if you’re not getting laid off). Sure, we have infrastructure and a certain degree of security, but what difference does that make when I can’t even afford food? What good is a nice road when gas is too expensive to use it? Screw security. I don’t feel any safer, hell I didn’t feel unsafe before. I’m more worried about having something go wrong again. If I were to get cancer again, it would be the end, how could I afford it? Why should I worry about a handful of Islamic extremists when I have my own physical health to worry about. This government needs to get its priorities right.

I thought you all might enjoy my comment on the thread. It’s #255.

Lots of comments here but the one that comes closest to my sentiment is DreadSpyder’s “Goodbye Jcpas, don’t let the door hit you in the ass.”

To Firsty - way upthread - who fussed at Americans who responded like this, your critique of Americans who wished Jcpas “Bon voyage” is not based in reality. You said something to the effect that Jcpas is an American just like the rest of us are.

Excuse me? Jcpas has self identified as a Socialist. While he is welcome in America because we are truly tolerant of those different than us, America is not a Socialist nation. If he embraces Socialism, he is stating he is not an American although he is physically present here.

Further, he has expressed his desire and intent to leave. One presumes he will be seeking residency in some Socialist utopia such as Cuba or Venezuela. I have to ask, does Jcpas REALLY believe that his life will be BETTER there? He’s in college here; will he be able to get an education there? Will it be of the same quality? He says gas is expensive here; will he even be able to own a car there or will there be public transportation of any sort to utilize there? He is highly critical of everything here but anyone even remotely well read understands things are far worse in any Socialist setting you care to mention. Except Jcpas and his defenders.

The one thing that Jcpas and his posse will not speak poorly of is themselves. Their need - be it to be somewhere else or to have health insurance - their need is the driving force for their ideology. It is not meeting the needs of others, that’s the government’s job. It’s not meeting your own needs yourself, that might actually take some work and responsibility. It’s enough for Jcpas to self identify his own needs and then demand the government take care of those needs and if it doesn’t then something is wrong with government and not with Jcpas.

He implies that if we weren’t involved in Iraq we’d have the money to take care of his needs. How silly. We spend far more money daily in the US taking care of people who will not take care of themselves than we ever thought about spending in Iraq. Further, what is it Jcpas thinks we are doing in Iraq in the first place if not taking care of his ungrateful backside? At least defending the nation is a Constitutional task assigned to the government whether or not you believe that’s what’s happening over there. But neither Jcpas or anyone else can show Constitutional authority for Universal Health Care and the rest of the Entitlement spending. Finally, it is all of that non- and extra-Constitutional spending that has almost bankrupted the country in the first place as opposed to a few dollars for defense.

So, I make no apologies for wishing Jcpas “Bon Chance” on his self styled trip to personal fulfillment and salvation. He doesn’t want to be here and hates what we stand for. I’ll not beg him to stay and point out how much worse his life is about to become. Because I’m truly tolerant. I tolerate his hatred and ignorance. I tolerate his drain on productive citizens. I tolerate the equality granted to his opinions. I tolerate everything about him. And when he finally, in a burst of Socialist bile, decides to leave a country that holds nothing but good for him if he applies himself for a Utopia that exists only in his mind, I both tolerate and applaud that decision. I can even admire it. At least he has the courage to put his future and his life on the line for what he really believes in. That both are likely to be short anywhere but the US of A is not my problem. We tried to tell him, he made his choice, and I tolerate that, too. And for all of that - I’m told that I’m intolerant …

Some people simply are unclear on the concept …

Blue

Popularity: 65% [?]