Socialism - the Obama Creed

http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/03/my_socialist_past.html

This excellent article at American Thinker is well worth a read.

It certainly parallels the path that Helen Clark and her Labour government were leading us down and how fortunate we are to have ridded ourselves of this evil scourge.

The United Staes of America are not so fortunate.

The writer, Jeffrey Folkes, has first-hand knowledge of the socialist state haveng lived in communist Yugoslavia in the '80's.

Anyone who has lived inside the demoralized, unproductive, gray prison of a communist state, .......... knows to what depths of impoverishment the egalitarian fantasies of socialism inevitably lead.

He highlights how the resultant poverty, lack of good food and poor state-run healthcare with a lifetime of untreated disease leads to early death.

But it does not begin like that.

Every totalitarian regime begins with the same heartfelt promises of justice and equality, just those promises of fairness that Barack Obama has made the fixation of his political career. What tyrant, one might ask, has not risen to power on promises of benevolent change?

But they soon find out that..

.......... for all men to be made equal, some men must be made poor, and most men will not agree to be(ing) made poor in the absence of force. So force must be applied, assets must be seized, censorship must be imposed, dissidents must be jailed, enemies must be destroyed. Men must be made equal by any means necessary, and soon enough those means include intimidation, imprisonment, and execution.

....

and disproportionate taxation of the productive citizens to..

At the heart of the ideal of fairness,.... is the fundamental mistake that all workers -- not just all workers, but all human beings, including those who simply choose not to work -- should be equally rewarded, regardless of effort and ability.

And so socialism stifles talent and ambition.

It is no accident that socialism always fails. It fails because of its fundamental assumption that self-interest can be suppressed in human relations. Socialism fails every time because of the arrogant lie upon which it rests. In the depths of his black heart, perhaps even Stalin suspected that Marxist economics was a lie, but he was willing to remove twelve million souls from his worker's paradise to suppress that doubt

.

So what does Obama and the Democrats have in mind for America?

As astounding as it may seem, ........ socialism remains the dream of the American Left, and it is exactly what we are getting with the Democrats now in control of the White House and Congress. In one form or another, we will have socialized medicine, with its callous specter of long waiting lists or outright denials for life-saving operations and drugs. In one form or another, we will see government control of the energy industry, and with it ever higher prices for fuel and electricity.

.......federal expenditures will rise from the current 20% to 25% of GDP, funded by a combination of ruinous debt and higher taxes.

......stealth taxes, such as the annual trillion dollar "cap and trade" tax planned...

.....(

To address)

what Democrats like to call "income disparity", massive new taxation will rob trillions of dollars from skilled, hardworking individuals and redistribute it to less hardworking or less skilled persons, to say nothing of the underclass of drug addicts, prostitutes, and shiftless losers who will claim their outsized share of new "benefits."

He highlights the thinking of the Left with...

In the liberal imagination, the poor

(and those of a darker hue?)

have special rights that extend far beyond the inalienable rights of the average citizen. The simple assertion of belonging to "the poor" confers the right of victimhood with all the perks of sympathy, support, welfare, and exculpatory excuse-making that go with it.

The poor, the working class, working families, single moms ....... all of these worthy classes are entitled not just to encouragement, charity, and welfare, but to elevation above and beyond the rest of the pharisaical population. They deserve advancement to the front of the line.

And as for the chardonnay swilling, academic leeches....

The odd thing about socialism of this sort is that it is always supported by many among the very class who are to be sent back to the end of the line.

What they gain is the pleasing aura of their own role as patrons within a world in which there exists a cheaply purchased sufficiency for all and in which they themselves are fêted for dreaming it up. They have managed to grow up without ever laboring or producing any object of use and yet, as a result of the overabundance of the world they have inherited, they are able to extend a middle-class sufficiency to all those who wish to claim it. They expect, of course, to remain a great deal above the masses of the poor, but at the same time to enjoy the well wishes of all they encounter. What could be more pleasant?

But the dream cannot last.

Quite early in the game, one finds that the wealth of nations cannot be equally distributed to all who appear with claim checks without inflating the currency. Some seem to assume that there exists a depthless bucket of cash, which can be distributed year after year as one stimulus after another and that this magical bucket of cash will create or save millions of jobs and drive consumption indefinitely.

The pernicious fantasy of the Left is that debt can mount to any level, repayment can be postponed indefinitely, and the bucket can continue to be raided in ever greater amounts with no consequences.

(Does this sound like our own recently ejected fiscal fool?)

And Barack - "at a time like this, we cannot be concerned about deficits"

On welfarism..

When will the liberal elite come to understand that welfare in every form, from cash handouts for "the poor" to exculpatory sympathy for an "oppressed" criminal class, simply reinforces failure on the part of individuals who might otherwise improve their lot? Every attempt to act as our brother's keeper, apart from decent and limited, discrete acts of charity -- charity that admits the inescapable reality of suffering but not the reified condition of victimhood -- ends by promoting the very vices that we wish to remediate.

The "solution" to poverty is not to subsidize those who are poor but to allow them to feel the effects of poverty until such time as they are motivated to work... Few who have escaped poverty by honest work ever return to it.

The threat to personal liberty.

The greatest danger is the threat to personal liberty that is posed by an ever larger and more centralized government.

.....with the proliferation of new regulation, new legislation ..

.....an ever widening definition of "hate speech," ....

.....forced acceptance of government "services," ...

...propaganda .. now broadcast through every mainstream media source and taught in every public school...

and

...Government intimidation of opposition.

Of change that we can believe in, the New Testament of the second coming.

Every communist regime in history has begun its rule with sweeping confiscations of private wealth and widespread nationalization of industry. How does this differ from Democratic proposals for government regulation and confiscation within the health care, financial services, and energy industries, or from their plan eventually to institute a four trillion dollar tax increase...

If the Democrats have their way, America will become the world's largest socialist economy at the very moment when the rest of the world, even the welfare states of western Europe, have begun to repudiate socialism.