"The American people will never knowingly adopt socialism, but under the name of liberalism they will adopt every fragment of the socialist program until one day America will be a socialist nation without ever knowing how it happened." - Norman Thomas, American socialist
With the initiatives being proposed by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in the 2008 presidential campaign, it appears Norman Thomas was right all along. Americans will, indeed, embrace every fragment of the socialist program in the name of liberalism. Both of the leading Democrats call for nationalized health care - for a power grab by Washington in which the federal government will seize full control of another one-seventh of the U.S. economy. This would, of course, be the most dramatic and irreversible step toward U.S. socialism in the nation's history.
Even today, however, the architects of these plans conceal from the public the centralized, command-and-control nature of the new system they devise. They are not asked by the press to show the American people even one successful program government has run. Yet the American people seem ready to put the lives of their children and grandchildren in the hands of Washington bureaucrats.
Now comes an even grander proposal by Barack Obama. It's called the Global Poverty Act, that would, in the next decade, transfer at least $845 billion of U.S. taxpayer money overseas. Think of Johnson's failed war on poverty going international - directed not by Americans but by the United Nations.
How we could even be debating ideas like this in the 21st century, after all of the climactic failures of socialism around the world, is amazing to me. But we're not really debating them. It seems we're not even capable as a people of debating them, reasoning over them, using our brains to consider them. Americans may simply be too far gone spiritually, morally and intellectually to reject the temptations of socialism.
Socialism is antithetical to human nature, yet it has great appeal to the human mind. It's one of the great lies of all time - similar to the one told by the deceiver in the Garden of Eden. You can be like God! You can have it all right here on Earth. You can live in utopia, and you don't have to obey the laws of the universe to achieve it. That's the essence of socialism. And it is finally seducing America as it has seduced much of the rest of the world over the last century.
Unfortunately, Americans don't even have a party representing clear, unequivocal opposition to socialism. The Republicans dare not even speak its name. John McCain admits publicly he doesn't know much or care much about economics. And so, Americans don't even have a reason or a mechanism to say no to the socialism that is coming to their country under the guise of liberalism - just the way Norman Thomas predicted it would come.
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And it will be the Fascist form of socialism -- the most insidious because it has a lot of popular support and retains some semblance of "life as before".
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Like all forms of socialism, Fascism is economically incompetent
As Fascist Russia proves yet again
At least he made the trains run on time. That was said of Benito Mussolini, Italy's fascist dictator from 1922 to 1943. Much the same is now said of Vladimir Putin, Russia's authoritarian president. He may have crushed the fragile shoots of democracy, but he has at least restored the economy, the state and his country's place in the world.
This view is shared by Mr Putin himself. He stated only last week that: "We have worked to restore the country after the chaos, economic ruin and breakdown of the old system that we saw in the 1990s." But it suffers from a drawback: it is false, as Michael McFaul and Kathryn Stoner-Weiss of Stanford University argue in a powerful article.
True, between 1999, the year before Mr Putin became president, and 2007, the Russian economy expanded by 69 per cent. But the economies of 11 of the 15 former republics of the Soviet Union expanded by more than Russia's. Indeed, only Kyrgyzstan did markedly worse. A number of the former Soviet republics did, it is true, benefit from an oil and gas bonanza. But so, too, did Russia: its oil and gas exports jumped from $76bn in 1999 to $350bn last year. Even so, the Russian economy expanded by less than Ukraine's.
Like all post-communist countries, Russia's economy suffered a steep initial decline, which reached its trough in 1998. Countries that reformed more decisively, such as Poland, bottomed out more quickly and are now far ahead. Again, Russia's recovery is in no way exceptional: tiny Estonia has done far better. Maybe this is why the Kremlin hates the Baltic state so much.
It is simply wrong to assign credit for the upswing to Mr Putin. Not only did it begin with the devaluation of 1998, but nearly all the reforms that underlay the improvement were initiated, if not brought to fruition, under Boris Yeltsin's despised rule. Under Mr Putin little progress has been made on structural reforms.
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ELSEWHERE
There is an excellent dissection here of a very unscientific article in The Scientific American. Its Leftist bias is hilarious. With typical Leftist projection, they themselves do exactly what they accuse others of doing.
`Most Britons belong to no religion': "Freedom from religion in Britain is becoming as important as freedom of religion, according to a United Nations investigation. A 23-page report by Asma Jahangir, the UN special rapporteur on freedom of religion or belief, says that the 2001 census findings that nearly 72 per cent of the population is Christian can no longer be regarded as accurate. The report claims that two thirds of British people do not admit to any religious affiliation. The report calls for the disestablishment of the Church of England. It says that the role and privileges of the Church do not reflect "the religious demography of the country and the rising proportion of other Christian denominations". The report says that there is an "overall respect for human rights and their value" but it gives warning of discrimination against Muslims."
Ronald Reagan's derided "Star Wars" program not so silly after all: "The US defence secretary has said that the shooting down of a disabled spy satellite with a missile shows the country's missile defence system works. Robert Gates said the operation "speaks for itself", adding the US was prepared to share some technology with China. The comments came after China said the missile strike could harm security in outer space. US officials are confident that the satellite's potentially toxic fuel tank was destroyed by the missile."
For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and TELSTRA/BIGPOND.
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here or here or here
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"Why should the German be interested in the liberation of the Jew, if the Jew is not interested in the liberation of the German?... We recognize in Judaism, therefore, a general anti-social element of the present time... In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.... Indeed, in North America, the practical domination of Judaism over the Christian world has achieved as its unambiguous and normal expression that the preaching of the Gospel itself and the Christian ministry have become articles of trade... Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist". Who said that? Hitler? No. It was Karl Marx. See also here and here and here.
The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialistisch) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party".
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3 comments:
Hi, JR,
Fascist governments are economically incompetent, certainly! But why? I think it is because all government is economically incompetent. Economic competence comes from taking risks, and effective productivity - which comes from individualism.
signed,
Any Rand (no just kidding; it's Layer Seven!)
"The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day."
Absolutely 100% CORRECT!
In 1924 Hitler said, "We are socialists, we are enemies of today's capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance, and we are all determined to destroy this system under all conditions." --Adolf Hitler
(Speech of May 1, 1927. Quoted by Toland, 1976, p. 306)
Nothing could be clearer than THAT!
Hitler was a Big-government Leftist, who opposed individual Liberty at every turn.
"Now comes an even grander proposal by Barack Obama. It's called the Global Poverty Act, that would, in the next decade, transfer at least $845 billion of U.S. taxpayer money overseas. Think of Johnson's failed war on poverty going international - directed not by Americans but by the United Nations."
I want to point out one thing. Calling global financial aid (despite UN corruption likelihood) of $2000 per person in the USA, "fascism" is sort of discomforting. That's a *lot*, but you know what? We are, up here in the USA, feeling pretty damned proud of the idea that by the time that BLUNTLY honest $2K per person gets around to being handed out, it wont cost that much.
Reagan screwed up. He denied HIV, early on, whereas Bush offer "shock and awe" levels (as did a humbled Bill Gates) for Malaria and HIV issues in Africa, back where man migrated from, but for those who didn't actually, uh, migrate. And Nancy Reagan's "Just Say No" school drug education project called DARE, resulted in more drug use in the schools it was used in.
You should talk more about China. I think because I live in the USA, when you USA-bash, it's like, hey man, your prison colony country just ELECTED the spitting image of Al Gore, who won by claiming that the population explosion droughts were caused NOT by society but by the USA, i.e. "climate change" (weasel-phrase for "global warming").
I think it's patriotism. We are a country of experiments. The Federal Reserve Bank stopped recessions from turning into Great Depressions. And we saved the world from Fascism, period.
What you don't see is that young people are, in my not so humble opinion, since I live on the notorious Upper West Side of NYC, "getting it" by which I mean their Lefistist professors are jerks. Just jerks. Not free thinkers. Yet should they thus elect some half assed "conservative" who looks and acts like Ted Kennedy?
Let us have our Fascist era, and don't spaz out so badly about it, for comparing Obama to Hitler by MERE analogy (MINUS MASSIVE PUBLIC HATRED OF ANYBODY NOR NATIONAL DISGRACE TO FEED OFF OF), is not apt, nor civil. In a way, it's rude.
The Reagan Era had it's fair share of Fascism too. I know. I was growing up in it, with a Harvard-bound interest in NEUROCHEMISTRY, as in your field: how the BRAIN works. But funding for that sort of stuff was killed, under Reagan and Bush Sr. And that, dear sir, is not fascism, but worse, it's the Bible re-asserting itself as a force, just as Bush Jr. is killing US science by ending funding for stem cell research.
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