Winning the economic argument is critical to saving our future
March 29, 2011 // 3 CommentsThis story broke last week, but if you haven’t heard about it, it’s important you do. If you ever doubted there was a coordinated plot to take down the capitalist system in America, well, you can doubt no more. From Business Insider:
A former official of one of the country’s most-powerful unions, SEIU, has a secret plan to “destabilize” the country.
The plan is designed to destroy JP Morgan, nuke the stock market, and weaken Wall Street’s grip on power, thus creating the conditions necessary for a redistribution of wealth and a change in government. …
Lerner’s plan is to organize a mass, coordinated “strike” on mortgage, student loan, and local government debt payments–thus bringing the banks to the edge of insolvency and forcing them to renegotiate the terms of the loans. This destabilization and turmoil, Lerner hopes, will also crash the stock market, isolating the banking class and allowing for a transfer of power.
Lerner’s plan starts by attacking JP Morgan Chase in early May, with demonstrations on Wall Street, protests at the annual shareholder meeting, and then calls for a coordinated mortgage strike.
This is real. Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) sent a letter to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder asking for an investigation. I know, it’s hard not to laugh at this point. A coordinated effort to take down Wall Street and the entire economic system we all depend on? Of course that’s a big yawner to your Federal Government, which has remained true to form and done nothing about this so far. (I’ll leave it to you to speculate why that might be.)
I’m not going to spend time hyping this thing—you can listen to the recording or read the transcript easily enough. They speak for themselves. Instead, I’m taking this opportunity to zero in on a quick comment Business Insider included in its piece:
Many Americans will undoubtedly sympathize with and support [Lerner’s remarks].
I know that’s right. And that, in some ways, frightens me more than the actual economic terror plot discussed on the recording. Because even if their plot fails—or is canceled or thwarted now that it has been exposed—the same outcome will ultimately occur if we don’t dispel the notion in America that rich people are our enemy and that benevolent government is our ally.
Before I continue with this dangerous post (defending the rich in any form is not a good way to win friends and influence people, I’ve discovered), I offer a disclaimer that shouldn’t be necessary but is because of the class warfare age we live in. I’m not rich compared to the average American. I work two jobs to support my family. I don’t have any burning desire to become rich (though I probably wouldn’t shy away from it if it ever happened). So this post is not some thinly-veiled attempt to protect my stuff.
Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, I can say this: I don’t care how much money people earn or what they do with it, as long as they’re lawful and honest in all their business dealings. That’s the free-market system. It is not evil and people who prosper because of it are not evil. But to grow their power, the Left has convinced many Americans to direct their anger at people they do not know and who have no control over their lives. It goes something like this: “Rich people are hoarding all their money and giving you and everyone else the shaft. You need Big Government to come to your aid, sticking it to the rich, and setting the world right.
“Vote for me.”
And people do.
Reversing this monumental (and rather impressive, I must admit) con job on the American people is one of the greatest challenges the Tea Party faces. While I don’t think we’re at the point where class warfare fully wins the day yet, we’re getting frighteningly close. Polls continue to show that a disturbing number of Americans support raising taxes on only the wealthy to close our federal budget hole.
This is wrong for so many reasons, both logical and moral. I won’t get into all of them here, but the heart of the matter is this: rich people don’t steal wealth, they create it; government doesn’t create wealth, it steals it. Furthermore, because wealth is created, it isn’t finite. Even if they wanted to, rich people could not stop others from producing their own wealth. Only government can stop the production of wealth. And they certainly have succeeded, using a variety of creative taxes, penalties, and regulations.
Tea Partiers take these truths for granted, but too many of our fellow Americans have bought the Left’s propaganda about government and wealth. They’ve been convinced that government exists to promote fairness by redistributing wealth. But our Declaration of Independence states that “all men are created equal” not that “all men are guaranteed equal amounts of stuff.”
The belief that the Federal Government can and should be the Great Equalizer has led to so many of the challenges we face today. Encouraging animosity toward the rich has created a culture in which we now embrace covetousness as if it’s virtue, not sin. The same people who are teaching others—whether purposefully or not—to despise the rich for having stuff are advocating the solution of … giving other people more stuff. We must combat this mindset head on, taking every opportunity we get with every friend, family member, coworker, churchgoer, etc. to correct the record that rich people are not the enemy, an overreaching Federal Government is.
Otherwise, we will continue to allow the non-producing Federal Government to overburden the producers with high taxes and regulations, ensuring that production decreases, jobs are eliminated, and overall wealth is reduced from top to bottom. American businesses will continue to send much or all of their operations—and the associated jobs—overseas just to stay afloat. We will continue to tax property and liberty through a progressive income tax that discourages the hard work that drives our economy. We will continue to depress the innovation and entrepreneurship that are necessary to solve the various crises we face, ultimately leading to a total economic collapse from which no one will escape, regardless of one’s income bracket. And by the time all those who wanted to “stick it to the rich” discover that they’ve instead stuck it to themselves, it’ll be too late.
The economic terrorists will have won.
And every American will have lost.
Cross-posted at richmondteaparty.com
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I’m too tired today to really give much energy to this, but here’s a short rebuttal:
I just don’t have anything to say about the first part. Crazy guy concocts crazy plan, with no apparent support and no possibility of succeeding. ‘Scuze me if my panties aren’t in a twist over this just yet, but my shoe just came untied and a man’s got to prioritize his problems. I don’t mean to trivialize what you say, but “If you ever doubted there was a coordinated plot to take down the capitalist system in America, well, you can doubt no more.” Come on, really? I mean I’ve devised a coordinated plot to blow up Uranus (admit it, you laughed), but I don’t think NASA’s bugging my phone just yet.
On to the main event (dun dun dunnnnn): CLASS WARFARE
You (and by you I mean seemingly every conservative person I read) have tried to boil down this entire problem into a liberal argument that says “Rich people got all this stuff, and I wanna take some.” It’s as if this is some kind of values debate: “I guess I was just raised differently, because my parents taught me not to take from others, and that if I’m smart and work hard I might be rich, too.” Well gee whiz, so did mine. So did everybody else’s, so you don’t get any points for announcing that it’s wrong to take what’s not yours. To take an issue like this and say it’s about jealousy, or class envy – and I feel like that’s basically what you’re saying – is to take an approach that’s so simpleminded in its reasoning that it’s as if you’re all willfully ignoring what the other side is saying. I hate using the word “simpleminded” there, but honestly, what you’re arguing for in here makes it seem like you don’t even know what the counterargument is.
Here, read some stuff. I’m an open-minded guy, so gimme some links too! Neither one of us is any kind of economic genius, so help me to learn from some people who are.
For starters:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_inequality_in_the_United_States
———
Tim Noah: The United States of Inequality
“Timothy Noah kicked off this series by looking at whether race, gender, or the breakdown of the nuclear family affected income inequality, and then he examined immigration, the technology boom, federal government policy, the decline of labor unions, international trade, whether the ultra wealthy are to blame, and what role the decline of K-12 education has played. In conclusion, Noah explained why we can’t ignore income inequality.”
It’s around a trillion words from a guy much smarter than I am.
http://www.slate.com/id/2266025/entry/2266026/
——-
Business Insider: 15 Mind-Blowing Facts About Wealth And Inequality In America
Interesting statistics like how 66% of the wealth is controlled by 10% of the country, and 33% is controlled by the top 1%. How CEO compensation has risen 300% since 1990, while production worker’s pay has increased 4.3%. How in the 60′s the wealthiest 1% had 125% more wealth than the median household, and today it’s at 190%. How we haven’t seen numbers like this since 1928, or in banana republics.
http://www.businessinsider.com/15-charts-about-wealth-and-inequality-in-america-2010-4#
——-
Ben Stein: In Class Warfare, Guess Which Class Is Winning
“There’s class warfare, all right,” Mr. Buffett said, “but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/26/business/yourmoney/26every.html?_r=1
——-
Matt Taibbi: Griftopia
Fantastic book about the housing bubble and the Wall Street bailout. Wastes no time spreading the blame between politicians of both parties.
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/exclusive-excerpt-america-on-sale-from-matt-taibbis-griftopia-20101018
——–
Paul Krugman: The Great Divergence
Smart guy, good blog.
“Since the late 1970s the America I knew has unraveled. We’re no longer a middle-class society, in which the benefits of economic growth are widely shared: between 1979 and 2005 the real income of the median household rose only 13 percent, but the income of the richest 0.1% of Americans rose 296 percent.”
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/09/18/introducing-this-blog/
You say that as if Lerner is some nobody. He’s not. He’s a player at SEIU and well known in leftist power circles. This is not some random guy meeting with a bunch of deadbeats in a garage smoking pot and coughing out, “Yeah, dude, let’s, like, you know, take down Wall Street and stuff.” The recording came from a break-out session during a big leftist conference at a respected NY university.
Lerner’s plan for collapsing the system is basic Cloward/Piven strategy. If you’re not familiar with that, do yourself a favor and read up on it. Frances Fox Piven is also a player in leftist power circles and has been openly calling for revolution in America. She – and many others – want a collapse of the U.S. financial system so they can then implement a much more managed system (i.e., socialism).
When you couple all that with a report the Federal Government recently released about the reality of financial terrorism, stating that it must be addressed immediately, you start to realize that there are bad people out there who want to do serious damage to this nation. You can read the entire government report here: http://www.scribd.com/doc/49755779/Economic-Warfare-Risks-and-Responses-by-Kevin-D-Freeman
I’m not saying all this stuff WILL happen, but you’d be naïve to think that there aren’t powerful people out there doing everything they can to bring it about. If you want to squeeze your eyes shut, though, and not watch your own back, rest assured that I’m watching your back for you, my friend. And I will continue to ask the questions the mainstream media is too biased or clueless to ask.
Enough of that, though.
Trust me, bro, I know EXACTLY what the other side is saying. I hear, read, and watch it every day. You may have been raised to not steal from others and it may seem obvious to you, but the people we’re putting in power from BOTH parties DO want to steal from others and are intentionally ginning up anger at rich people to grow their own power base. If you don’t believe that, then you’re as naïve as I used to be before I started following this stuff closely.
One example is, of course, they want to raise taxes on those making over $250,000/year. You may not like it to think of it this way, but that is, by definition, stealing. Money is being taken from those who have earned it to give it to those who haven’t. It doesn’t matter how rich the person is they’re taking from or how poor the person is they’re giving it to; stealing is stealing.
And I know the statistics on wealth disparity as well. I’ve studied them. What are you proposing to do about it, though? Some form of government intervention? That brings us back to stealing.
Beyond that, though, what often is lost from this debate is that taxing the rich harms the middle class and the poor more than it does the rich anyway. Because you’re mainly taxing businesses and productivity when you do that. Those taxes simply get passed through to regular people in the form of higher costs of goods and services, and lower wages and benefits and layoffs for employees. But the CEO will still have his yacht. Meanwhile, the entire economy is crushed from deflated economic activity, unemployment goes up, and people can’t feed their families. All so politicians can pretend like they care about the poor and grow their power in the process. It’s shameful.
Has it occurred to you that at least part of the reason for the wealth disparity might be because the Federal Government is making it very difficult for people to start businesses and take risks now? With the second highest corporate tax in the industrialized world (soon to be the first highest if Japan lowers theirs on schedule this year), ever-increasing and cumbersome regulations, and no certainty about what taxes will be in the future, no one wants to step out and invest in anything. So the well-established keep doing great, but it makes it incredibly hard for new people to get established and create their own wealth. Add to that the additional costs associated with “taxing the rich” that are passed through to you and me, and climbing the economic ladder is a much bigger challenge these days.
That’s partly why the entire federal tax system – a true disgrace – should be thrown out and replaced with a national sales tax to fund every government function. No loopholes. No tax evasion. No IRS agents hounding average Americans because they missed one box while filling out the ridiculously complicated tax forms. No way to politicize the issue and pit Americans against each other. No way to take unfair advantage of a complicated system. The rich will carry the biggest burden and not be able to find creative ways to avoid paying taxes. Also, no one steals from anyone, so the moral issue is taken off the table. It’s the best possible system from every angle.
Okay, I have to comment on your approach that we should be listening to the “smart” people on the economy. You’ve fallen prey to the one of the Big Government acolytes’ most powerful weapons: convincing you you’re an idiot. You’re not. Neither am I. Neither is the average American who seems to be able to run his own life FAR better than the people we keep sending to Washington can run either theirs or the country.
The political class, which includes the mainstream media, has convinced you that you have to be an “expert” on economics in order to have a valuable opinion. That’s garbage. Economics ain’t that complicated. They try to make it seem complicated by using insider speak that sounds technical, but really isn’t. For example, they talk about “quantitative easing,” which is simply a silly way to refer to printing more money. This is intentional. They make it sound too technical so people with common sense won’t question it by asking the obvious, “Hey, if you flood the economy with trillions of dollars of new money, won’t that cause massive inflation and destroy people’s lives?” See how that works? That’s a trick the self-proclaimed experts – the ones who have caused all the problems we now face – use to keep themselves in positions of power (and out of prison).
You may not realize it, but I’m actually on your side. You are my American brother, one of We the People, and I will continue to stand on your behalf against We the Government.
You’re welcome.
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