My Uncommon Sense

We are all socialists now- Except me

In February, Newsweek has a cover story titled We Are All Socialists Now in light of the Stimulus Bill. They noted how America is becoming more and more like France as its spending, deficits and entitlements increase. I have extreme distaste for socialism. Everyone else should as well. Socialism is the single most harmful ideology in all of history, as shown by the Nazis, Stalin, Castro, Mao (he was more Communist, but he was still largely a socialist) and now Chavez. For those of you who don’t quite understand what socialism is, my good friend Christian Malone can explain on his new blog:

I am reading about the rise of the National Socialist Workers’ Party (for those of you who didn’t know that the Nazis were also socialists, please read Mein Kampf. I’ve never found a reason to read it through myself, but it will make itself apparent…). The obvious had escaped my notice a while, although it took me to little surprise. I was in the part which explains the ideological background of the NSDAP, which was primitive at best. It was, however, based on a more radical form of Marxism which involved controlling people as well as the means of production. As I read about the other socialist and social democratic movements which sprang up at the time, the main point of this blog post occured to me, so, finally, drum roll please… … …

The reason why a person becomes a socialist is that they believe that this physical body that they are living in has importance, is good, and should be sustained for as long as possible!
(In the Nazi party, they believed this about the collective State, not the individuals in it…)

A little history of how the Democrats became socialists. The Democratic party finds its roots among the very Federalism that they despise and fight today, beginning with a strict adherence to the Constitution and favoring small government (Now that is a change). Of course this all changed come the Great Depression, when their fiscal policy changed drastically with FDR’s New Deal. Enter socialism. Six time Socialist Party presidential candidate Norman Mattoon Thomas had this to say about the Democratic Party in 1944:

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 knowing how it happened. I no longer need to run as a Presidential Candidate for the Socialist Party. The Democratic Party has adopted our platform.

While I think his political ideology is moronic, Thomas was a smart man and with a great deal of knowledge about America’s people and politics. He nailed it. The socialist policies of yesteryear are now the social norms of today. A large portion of America has accepted such largely socialist policies, enabling the Democratic party to continue pushing a more and more Marxist agenda under the guise of “progress”. Obama being the socialist that he is, obviously has ties to modern socialist groups. He was a member of the New Party, a sort of conglomerate of the old socialist party (the socialist party today is predominately comprised of Neo-Nazis and other white supremists), as shown by the American Thinker and Politically Drunk on Power. The Obama administration has been able to pass extremely socialist legislation, claiming that capitalism has failed so it must be amended or replaced. As Rahm Emanuel so stupidly put it: “Never let a serious crisis go to waste. What I mean by that is it’s an opportunity to do things you couldn’t do before.”

Of course, this all means nothing if socialism is an actual viable solution to the world’s problems. Lets look at this current financial debacle. The libs claim that it was the free market and deregulation that caused the crash, and therefore we need more oversight, more regulation, and more government control. But is this true? If we bother to even google the question we find that much of the crisis was caused by government involvement. The Community Reinvestment Act that occurred under Carter (surprise!) played a large role as it encouraged and in some instances even forced banks to make risky loans. This was later expanded under Clinton in the 1997 Housing Act. Of course, then comes in the F.A. Hayek theory of the business cycle. This may take some in depth explanation.

The business cycle is essentially the fluctuations that occur in economic growth over time, i.e. recessions every dozen or so years. Hayek proposed that a monopolistic governmental organization, mainly the Federal Reserve, can’t adequately allocate capital and therefore artificially inflates the bubble of the growing economy, causing it to burst because of artificially lowering interest rates. This has been occurring since the establishment of the Federal Reserve in 1913 and is largely responsible for the current crisis. Funny how we give the very people who caused the crash the job of fixing it. I am extremely excited to hear Tom Woods, author of the magnificent book about the crisis called Meltdown, speak at OSU on the subject. While I disagree with him on entirely eliminating the Fed, he makes some amazing points:

Government-established central banks can artificially lower interest rates by increasing the supply of money (and thus the funds banks have available to lend) through the banking system. This is supposed to stimulate the economy. What it actually does is mislead investors into embarking on an investment boom that the artificially low rates seem to validate but that in fact cannot be sustained under existing economic conditions. Investments that would have correctly been assessed as unprofitable are falsely appraised as profitable, and over time the result is the squandering of countless resources in lines of investment that should never have been begun.

If lower interest rates are the result of increased saving by the public, this increase in saved resources provides the material wherewithal to see the additional investment through to completion. The situation is very different when the lower interest rates result from the Fed’s creation of new money out of thin air. In that case, the lower rates do not reflect an increase in the pool of savings from which investors can draw. Fed tinkering, in other words, does not increase the real stuff in the economy.

So really, the only regulation we need comes from the market itself. Should the market set the interest rates, the bubbles will rarely burst, if at all. Ever hear of the great depression of 1920? No? Ever wonder why? Even though the crash resulted in even more losses than the Great Depression of 1929, yet we were out of it in only a couple years. But how? The government balanced the budget, cut taxes, and privatized industries, thus allowing the market to fix itself and giving it the means to do so. Let us compare this to the Great Depression. The Great Depression was the longest depression and caused American’s the most grief. When the markets crashed in 1929, Hoover began implementing massive public works projects to try and employ the workforce and spur growth. This obviously failed. FDR came in and implemented his New Deal, a plan that consisted primarily of welfare, government spending, regulations, increasing labor unions and the socialization of private businesses. WWII eventually pulled us out of the Great Depression, which was caused by government involvement in business (tariffs and subsidies were largely to blame). Some still say the New Deal pulled us out of the depression. I ask, why when we started to see recovery in 1931 and 1932 did FDR implement a plan that prolonged the recession nice to ten more years?

Welcome the the expansion of government power. By blaming the free market, even though government involvement was largely to blame, FDR and Obama both have been able to expand government power. Funny how tax cuts, balancing budgets, and deregulation are the few abilities of the government to revive a struggling economy, yet Obama, just like FDR, would rather blame the free market to expand government power, and continue the practices that led us here in the first place. Let the market decide interest rates, deregulate, cut taxes, balance the budget, and stop killing the economy by getting out of the way. Maybe Americans will come around when they realize that they are each $60,000 or more in debt.