More Obama Socialism:'Do What I Want or You'll go Bankrupt'

Why Obama's socialism should not be necessary in America

My mother, bless her heart, said something very important the other day. She said that Europeans are much more socially conscious than Americans and that's why they have all those government programs (i.e., socialism or spreading the wealth). She was clearly trying to say that Americans are mean and selfish, and that's why they've traditionally leaned to keeping their wealth, rather than allowing government redistribution. She's completely wrong, of course, but wrong in a very interesting way.

What she neglected to consider with her pronouncement is that, traditionally, America and Europe had vastly different social and economic fluidity. While Europe has had an exceptionally rigid class system from which few escape, America has been since it's inception a place in which people can "make it." Every immigrant group (and such is the nature of America that all but the Indigenous Americans are immigrant groups), has managed to assimilate and rise economically.

Census records from the Lower East Side in New York, through which passed hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of immigrants from all over Europe, show that within two generations, all of the families that once lived there had moved into the working, middle or wealthy classes. Certainly, individuals may have suffered and failed but, en masse, the immigrants did well. They didn't need to become the recipients of perpetual government largesse.

In Europe, however, there were no systems by which the lower classes (and that also always meant the poorer classes) could escape their stratum. Whether by accent, education, poverty, or tradition, they stayed there. (And, interestingly, even the educational opportunities socialism provided didn't much change that. When I lived in England a couple of decades ago, after almost 40 years of free access to college education, most English people did not go on to college and people still gave away their class instantly just by opening their mouths.) Socialism, in other words, was just a totalitarian government substitute for the old noblesse oblige that saw the upper class (or, at least, the socially conscious ones) take care of the poorer orders, all the while ensuring that they stayed in their place.

The intense stratification of that system continues to exist with the new immigrants to Europe. Whether in Germany, Norway, Sweden, England, Italy or France, these new Muslim immigrants are instantly the recipients of government largesse that gives them housing and money -- and that essentially tells them to get into their immigrant ghettos, and stay there, preferably feeling grateful to and voting for the government that was so good to them. Its a shock to the ruling class, and one that they can't seem to understand, that these immigrants, rather than feeling grateful at being stuffed away into ghettos without any opportunities, loath the countries in which they live, and cheerfully envision their bloody overthrows.

My mother agreed with me on all of these points (how could she not?), but then produced her "a-ha!" to prove me wrong: "What about blacks in America (and, she could have added, Native Americans, too)?" To her, they proved I was entirely wrong in describing America's social and economic fluidity. To me, though, the were just the extra evidence I needed to prove that when, as they do you Europe, a government provides too much for people, it consigns them permanently to poverty and social exile.

As you know, African-Americans (and Native Americans) differed from all other immigrant groups in America because the American system essentially imposed against them, for centuries (and in brutal and horrible ways), a European style stratification that prevented any upward movement. This is true whether one is looking at slavery, relocation, genocidal wars or Jim Crow. I'll focus from here on out on what happened to blacks when Americans finally wised up to the error of their ways, but you can tell the same story about Native Americans.

Beginning in the 1940s (with the WWII economy) and continuing into the 1950s (with the Civil Rights movement), blacks started the same upward movement as other American groups. That is, once the nation began removing the artificial ceiling it had imposed on them, blacks too made social and economic strides. The strides were slow, because prejudice is slow to die, but they were real, and they created a rising black working and middle class composed of nuclear families. I have no doubt that, had the government continued to educate and police against discrimination, and otherwise left the market to do its work, African Americans would have joined other immigrant groups in realizing the American dream in a generation or two.

The death knell for this laborious, but real, social and economic ascent was the Great Society. The moment comprehensive welfare programs began (around the mid-1960s), government workers fanned out to black communities all over America and made huge efforts to tell blacks to stop working, because the government would pay for them. White guilt was at its apex, and government welfare was its expiation.

Being rational actors, blacks gave up bad, low-paying, often demeaning jobs for free money. And being rational actors, they gave up nuclear families and parental responsibility for even more free money. And so began the terrible slide of the African-American community. Even if you all don't remember that time, you do remember what finally arrested this slide and helped put African-Americans back on the same, slow upward trajectory that existed before the Great Society: The fact that Clinton, under duress from a real Republican Congress, ended “welfare as we know it.” Once again, African-Americans, being rational actors, were given the incentive to shelter in the strength of the nuclear family and plug into the American Dream.

Obama wants to undo the American Dream and turn us into a European economy, where all benefits flow from the government, rather than individual effort. You can call it "socialism," or "big government," or "spreading the wealth," or whatever else suits you, but the outcome will be the same: People will be locked into government induced poverty in perpetuity, the middle class will become slack, the economy will enter into stagflation, unemployment will rise, and service in every area of American life will fall as people lose their incentive (because they've lost the ability) to rise upwards and join in the American Dream.

Obama and Ayers in Their Own Words

Will 2012 be like 1980?

Convincing people with ideas

I carpooled to a soccer game today. The driver, who is someone I don't know very well, is a very charming man who is quite obviously a potential Obama voter. He wasn't quite sure about me and, since he was a very civil individual, he never came out and either insulted McCain or lauded Obama. He did say, though, that he thought it was the government's responsibility to provide medical care. He also characterized Vietnam as a complete disaster. That gave me an interesting opportunity to explain to him a few historic facts he didn't know -- because very few people know them.

I started out by reminding him of something that most people forget: the Vietnam War was a Democratic War. Kennedy started it and Johnson expanded it. (Nixon, the Republican, ended it.) I didn't say this in the spirit of accusation, because I wasn't being partisan. I said it to give historical context to a larger discussion about freedom versus statism.

I noted that, in the 1930s -- and, again, most people have forgotten this -- the major battle in Europe was between two Leftist ideologies: Communism and Fascism. When he looked a little blank, I pointed out that the Nazis were a socialist party, a fact he readily conceded. I also reminded him that, in the 1930s, given that Stalin was killing millions of his countrymen, and that Hitler hadn't yet started his killing spree, Fascism actually looked like the better deal. World War II demonstrated that both ideologies -- both of which vested all power in the State -- were equally murderous.

Men of the Kennedy/Johnson generation, I said, saw their role in WWII as freeing Europe from the Nazi version of socialism. When that job ended, they saw themselves in a continuing war to bring an end to the Communist version of socialism. Again, they were reacting to overwhelming statism.

Thus, to them, it was all a single battle with America upholding the banner, not of freedom, but of individualism. They knew that America couldn't necessarily make people free or bring them a democratic form of government, but that it could try to protect people from an all-powerful state. That's always been an integral part of American identity. He agreed with everything I said.

I then moved to the issue of socialized medicine, which I pointed out, again, gives the state all the power. The state, I said, has no conscience, and it will start doling out medical care based on its determining of which classes of individual are valuable, and which are less valuable, to the state. My friend didn't know, for example, that Baroness Warnock of Britain, who is considered one of Britain's leading moralists, announced that demented old people have a "duty to die" because they are a burden on the state.

A few more examples like that, and we agreed that the problem wasn't too little government when it comes to medicine, but too much. Health insurer companies operating in California are constrained by something like 1,600 state and federal regulations. I suggested that, rather than give the government more control over the medical bureaucracy, we take most of it away. He conceded that this was probably a good idea.

Lastly, I reminded him what happens when government steps in as the pater familias. He didn't know that, up until Johnson's Great Society, African-Americans were ever so slowly "making it." As a result of the Civil Rights movement, opportunities were opening for Northern Blacks, and they -- meaning the men -- were beginning to make more money. The African-American family was nuclear and starting to thrive.

This upward economic trend collapsed in the mid-1960s, and its collapse coincided absolutely to the minute with government social workers fanning out to black communities and telling them that the government would henceforth provide. Since it seemed stupid to work when you could get paid not to work, black men stopped working. They also stopped caring about their families, or even getting married, since unmarried mothers did even better under welfare than intact families. In a few short years, not only did African-Americans as a group collapse economically, their family structure collapsed too. Men were redundant. The state would provide. Again, my friend nodded his head in agreement.

The ride ended at that point but, as he was dropping me off, my friend told me (and I think he was speaking from his heart), that it was an incredibly interesting ride. And I bet it was, because I gave him real food for thought in the form of facts and ideas that fall outside of the orthodoxy that characterizes our ultra-liberal community.

Cross-posted at Bookworm Room and Right Wing News.

Europeans' passion for totalitarianism: Jörg Haider

So much for "European enlightenment". I just read in the news that the funeral of Jörg Haider drew 25000 people:

"Thousands of Austrians packed the southern city of Klagenfurt on Saturday to mourn Joerg Haider, a politician who was denounced as a Nazi sympathizer in the 1990s but had remained hugely popular as a provincial governor"

Nazi = National Socialism. That's right. I am not saying that all European socialists are Nazis; all I am saying is that Europeans' passion for socialism has less to do with love for "spreading the wealth around" than "spreading the wealth around among us". And who is "us"? Well, go and check how difficult is to get each of the different European citizenships, compare that with the process of becoming a US citizen and you'll understand better. For instance, until 2000, Germany had a very strict Jus sanguinis citizenship law! After the law changed, it's easier for children of non Germans born in Germany to get the German citizenship, but it's still not a straight forward right as in the US.

Obama: "My Plan is to Spread the Wealth Around"

So much for "enlightened policies". We knew this was the case all the time around; now we have Obama being unapologetic about it. He wants to turn the United States into another socialist country. In his own words,

Obama's "cwazy" friends and "wed" background

Joshua Muravchik, a self-admitted Red Diaper baby, is now one of the best thinkers and writers on the conservative side of the political spectrum. I first came across him several years ago when I read one of his articles in Commentary Magazine, a conservative political magazine with a Jewish orientation. I wrote him praising the article, and he was kind enough to write back.

Through our email exchanges, he ended up recommending that I read his book, Heaven on Earth : the Rise and Fall of Socialism, which was one of the most eye-opening books I've read in years. Muravchik goes back to socialism's origins in 18th Century France and, in genuinely lively prose, examines all of the socialist experiments that have risen and failed -- with most failures etched in blood and tears.

What Muravchik's expertise means is that, when he speaks of the "Left," he knows whereof he speaks. He does not use that term loosely, but gives it a very precise political meaning. All of which leads me to the subject of today's post: Murvachik's short, pointed article in this month's Commentary Magazine describing in very careful detail Obama's long history of Leftist associations and Leftist conduct.

Muravchik is too much the gentleman to speak harshly of Obama, but he does call into question Obama's early (and increasingly less repeated) comments that he would be a uniter, not a divider. In the introductory part of his article, after repeating the most salient parts of Obama's famous 2004 speech, in which he introduced halcyon images of bipartisan coaches at Little League games, Muravchik introduces the walk behind Obama's talk:

Four years later, Obama is the Democratic nominee, and even his occasional shrill attacks on his opponent seem to have chipped away little of the cornerstone of his own candidacy: the promise to bring us, all of us, together. Can he do that? Is he well-suited to raise the curtain on a new post-partisan, post-ideological era?

From his record in office, it would hardly seem so. Non-partisanship does not just mean Democrats coaching Little League, lovely as that is, but cooperating with members of the other party in developing compromise solutions to national problems. The Senate has a particularly rich tradition of such bipartisanship, but Obama appears never to have participated in it. On the contrary: according to Congressional Quarterly, which measures how often each member votes in accordance with or at variance from the majority of his own party, Obama has compiled one of the most partisan of all voting records.

Last year, for example, the average Senator voted with his own party 84 percent of the time; Obama voted with his party 96 percent of the time. In the prior two years, his number was 95 percent, making him the fourth most partisan member of the Senate. And not just partisan, but also highly ideological. In 2007, according to the National Journal, Obama’s voting record made him “the most liberal Senator.” Throughout his Senate career, according to Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), the dean of liberal advocacy groups, Obama voted “right” 90 percent of the time. Actually this is misleading, since ADA counts an absence as if it were a vote on the “wrong” side. If we discount his absences, Obama voted to ADA’s approval more than 98 percent of the time.

That's just Obama's voting record, which is, euphemistically, merely "liberal." The meat of the article, however, examines his friends, such as Wright, Ayers, and Davis. Unsurprisingly, given Muravchik's intellectual background, the article doesn't just stop with looking at Wright's or Ayer's more inflammatory, stupid utterances, from which Obama has distanced themselves, but focuses on their life's work and meaning.

If you want to have a very good idea about the kind of man running for the White House (and currently in the lead), I strongly recommend that you read Muravchiks' article -- and then email it to your friends. It's an important article, as evidenced by the fact that Commentary is making it freely, rather than "fee-ly," available. Even those Americans put off by Palin's pro-Life stance may find themselves even more put off by Obama's pro-Left stance.