http://www.newswithviews.com/Rappoport/jon134.htm
By Investigating Journalist Jon Rappoport
January 21, 2011
NewsWithViews.com
I thought this article would take a great deal of time to compose. I thought I would need to indulge in considerable complexity. But that wasn't so. In fact, the simple truth hides under a welter of distraction and nonsense.
“Liberal.”
The word smacks of generosity. You know, “He gave a liberal portion of his dinner to the less fortunate man who hadn't eaten in three days.”
It contains the sense of openness, looseness, as if there is, somehow, more than enough for everyone. Don't worry about shortages. There is always something left over. We're never completely strapped. Find something in the refrigerator.
That's a good thing, isn't it?
It's the opposite of greedy.
A liberal never hoards. He dispenses. He has a smile on his face. Well, he would, because he has enough. He has enough for himself and other people, too. He's a good guy.
“He had a liberal policy toward his children. He didn't impose iron-clad rules. He trusted them. He was a decent father. (Until they let the cows out of the barn one night and burned it down.)”
Oh well, nothing's perfect.
When we move over into politics and government, something strange happens. For example, the liberal government is giving away lots of money. But the money comes from taxes. There is giving, very liberal giving, but first there was taking.
Is taking liberal? That wasn't supposed to be part of the picture. The problem seems to be this: government has no money of its own.
See, that's a real dilemma. How do you become that generous liberal when you don't have anything to begin with?
“I'd like to start a charitable foundation and dispense money to the poor.”
“Fine. How much money do you have?”
“I'm broke. I don't have anything.”
“I see. And you have a screw loose, too.”
So in government, liberal means taking before you give. It also means printing excess amounts of money out of thin air, and this, I'm told, tends to diminish the buying power of the money that's already in circulation—which affects everybody. Negatively.
What's going on?
Is is liberal to take increasing amounts of money from everyone, in order to give it away? Is it liberal to devalue the strength of the money everyone already has?
It seems that, in government, liberal means: shell game.
We might be correct in calling liberals shell-gamers.
As I recall, one of the issues involved in the 1776 revolution was the laying on of excessive taxes without representation.
I suppose we could determine, right now, whether we are laboring under the same system. I have an idea. Stage a national referendum, in which all money earners (who are, of course, taxed) check a box indicating what % of their income they believe the federal government should take.
0%
5%
10%
15%
And so on, up to 100%.
Find the average, and compare that to what the government is extracting now—and see, therefore, whether present levels of taxation are representing the desires and wishes of the American people.
For some reason, the liberals I've spoken to don't favor this referendum. In fact, they aren't smiling that big generous smile anymore.
Then there's another point. When liberal government gives, who are the recipients? There is a very long list. It's hard to keep track of. It's their list, not ours.
Again, is this fair representation? Are we supposed to believe that our elected officials have the right idea about who to help?
If we go back to the Constitution for guidance, we become more confused. Because, taking into account any recent federal budget, it seems clear the giving-and-taking government is going far beyond its enumerated powers. That's a sticky point, isn't it?
The federal government turns out to be a giant ATM machine—except our leaders decide who can insert their cards and how much they can withdraw from the pile of taxed and printed money. We're talking about a few trillion dollars.
I'd say we've departed quite far from the common understanding of the word liberal.
And now we come to motive. This is important, because it tells us where this ATM operation is heading. Unless we want to blindly believe government liberal giving is heartfelt altruism.
In recent years, the word “redistribution” has been kicked around. I think it's a very good word. It means the government is taking earned wealth from earners and giving it to other people. People who haven't earned it. And people who fulfill government contracts. All sorts of people.
In this complicated scheme, government carries out some constitutional functions and many functions it wasn't legitimately tasked to do.
Money goes from the right hand to the left.
This is all adjudicated on the basis of need, an admittedly vague term that could apply to anyone, any group. It is defined by government as it goes along. “We give to those who are in need.”
If we were to chart the evolution of the government since 1800, we would see two glaring factors. The trend for taking money (taxes) and the trend for giving away money have both gone up. Way up.
This is a key observation. It means the government has essentially been determining the fate of trillions of dollars. And THAT means the government has been exercising ownership over money. He who collects it and gives it OWNS IT.
Strictly speaking, this isn't exactly the same thing as owning the means of production (socialism), but when you think about it for a minute, the difference is negligible.
When you produce a product and sell it, as the owner of a business, you make money. So whether a government official is sitting on your board calling the shots in advance, or coming in afterwards and taking larger and larger chunks of your money (taxes on profit), he's the winner. He owns a significant piece of your company.
He hasn't enunciated and defended the principles of classical socialism, but he hasn't had to. He's just reached into your pocket.
So instead of saying the government owns the means of production, we can say the government owns greater and greater percentages of available money, as time goes on.
The result is the same.
Marx and Lenin could have declared, “On behalf of the people, the government will own money.”
Liberals, you may have noticed, always multiply groups they give more money to. This is their never-ending program.
And lately, we have seen several operations designed to coerce the “giving and the taking” that is the hallmark of modern liberalism. Among them: the public has been forced to buy health insurance (taking); the cap and trade plan would significantly cut industrial profits (taking); and the government intention to permit unlimited illegal immigration would further raise the trend line of giving to these people, while taking greater taxes from everybody else to pay for all the government services rendered in the process.
I believe this very brief sketch of liberalism leads to the conclusion that liberals are de facto socialists.
I've omitted many details, because I wanted to make this piece as stark as possible. And because the actual story is so simple. It seems we'd have to examine many more factors, in order to come to the finding that liberals are socialists, but it turns out that's not the case.
Take in order to give.
Over time, take more and more, and give (redistribute) more and more.
Own people by owning their money.
Own the means of production by owning the money that is the profit of production.
Follow those steps and you're on the road to socialism. You're there. It's just a matter of time and degree—and sufficient propaganda to convince the people to go along with the give and the take.
You now know more than most PhD economists. Or more than they're willing to admit.
Of course, many liberals, if they could admit the deep and corrosive agenda of this philosophy, would stop short and say, “I'm not that liberal. I want the government to give up to a point—but not 'all the way.'” To them I would say, speak up. Make your position clear. Separate yourself from the far-reaching implications of radical liberalism. Open your eyes. Don't align yourself with every liberal that comes down the pike. Don't be taken in.
And now we come to: what is a conservative?
Conserve—it means protect...protect valuables and assets...save what is worthwhile...including values.
Traditionally, a conservative wants to maintain and preserve the original meaning and values of the Constitution. Limited government. Limited government spending and taxation. Wide individual freedom. Free market. Strong defense.
Pretty straightforward.
However, modern conservatives tend to favor large corporations as monolithic examples of free enterprise. They tend to overlook the crimes of such corporations or they call them imaginary, fairy tales invented by liberals who seek to destroy the nation.
For example, as I have documented many times, pharmaceutical companies produce drugs that routinely kill 100,000 people a year in the US. Conservatives never seem to acknowledge that fact. Nor do they go after companies that egregiously pollute the landscape with dangerous chemicals.
Nor do they acknowledge the power of the military industrial complex—which Eisenhower warned against—and its propensity to seek wars to fight.
Even though bloated agencies of the federal government like the CIA have a history of meddling in the affairs of other countries and subverting those governments, and even though conservatives are supposed to be against big American government, it appears that conservatives make selective choices about which parts of big government they oppose. The CIA tends to get a pass.
Conservatives tend to support any war the US fights, whether it's justified or not.
They take a dim view of independent criminal investigations into, for example, the assassinations of JFK, RFK, MLK, or the actual facts of the 9/11 attacks. They assume such probes are solely motivated by a desire to defame and degrade America.
In the medical arena, they unthinkingly claim the US system is the best in the world, and they ignore illegitimate ties between government and conventional medical societies that are seeking a (non-free-market) monopoly over health care—all of this, while the medical system in the US kills 225,000 people per year. (Starfield, JAMA, July 26, 2000; “Is US health really the best in the world?”)
They absolutely refuse to champion the right of every American to manage his own health through alternative means, without government (FDA, FTC) interference. They assiduously remain ignorant of illegal FDA moves to clamp down on health claims made by nutritional supplement companies, even though those restrictions violate the First Amendment.
They support nuclear power, even though those gargantuan facilities couldn't be built without massive government monies—a violation of free-market principles.
While they rightly blame government for pressuring banks to grant mortgages to people who could never pay them off, they tend to ignore the Wall Street criminals who packaged those bad mortgages as investment instruments and yet knew they would eventually collapse—an egregious example of fraud.
Overall, what is the deep conservative agenda? Some conservatives want American empire. The Founders would never have stood for such a program. George Washington, for instance, specifically warned against entangling foreign alliances.
Other conservatives seem, consciously or unconsciously, to be seeking a kind of government-corporate partnership, a look-the-other-way policy of pushing, for example, for massive corporate control of the food supply, at the expense of the small farmer.
Significant evidence that corporate GMO farming is distorting and making unsafe our food escapes conservative attention.
So how much authentic strength do these “conserving” people have? To what degree are they actually supporting the kind of nation the Founders envisioned? To what degree are they trying to preserve the original pattern?
It turns out that both “liberal” and “conservative” are misnomers. They don't describe the people or the agenda.
It would be convenient to suppose one side or the other is “the real American way,” but I believe a sober look at reality contradicts this wishful thinking.
© 2011 Jon Rappoport - All Rights Reserved
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