Calling it what it is
By Colin McNickle
PITTSBURG TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Sunday, September 19, 2004
Much time is devoted within these pages warning of the manifest dangers of socialism. After all, it does permeate contemporary society. But our monitions usually prompt the illiberal intelligentsia to chortle and chide about the Trib's seemingly amazing ability to find a Karl Marx devotee lurking virtually everywhere.
Ah, to be so "smart" but yet so blind.
A good example of this unlettered discourse can be found almost daily on the editorial page of The New York Times. To wit, Wednesday last, it was darn near apoplectic over President Bush's efforts to create an "ownership society."
For the love of Mike, what could be so dastardly about promoting higher rates of home ownership and the reduction or elimination of taxes that penalize savings and investment? A supposed companion, but thinly veiled, move to switch to a consumption tax to offset the "cost" of tax cuts, The Times alleges. Apparently, it's "progressive" to soak the rich who, by far, pay the most taxes but "regressive" to let the common folk build wealth.
Actually, what socialists are frenetic over is a frontal assault on their interdependent society. For you see, a more independent society can better make its own decision and see to its own needs. And, tsk-tsk, we just can't have that! After all, that means less money for those who have a vested interest in keeping society dependent on government to fund their redistributionist schemes.
In true Orwellian fashion, The Times opines that to turn Americans "into owners requires a strong economy in which the people who work for a living share in the benefits of economic growth." Sure sounds reasonable, right? But dissected, this is pure Marxist dogma. The clear implication is that the "rich" didn't work for their money, don't deserve it, and that there must be a government middleman to "better" spread the fruits of their labor.
The Times' wacky solution to creating its version of an "ownership society" is, effectively, more heavily subsidized health care (that actually increases its cost while creating shortages); reducing our dependence on foreign oil (by not tapping domestic reserves and by increasing mileage standards that do nothing to reduce consumption, and by, I guess, tying windmills to vehicles); and by scotching "unaffordable" tax cuts (in favor of, what, "affordable" tax increases?)
There's not a word about cutting spending. It's all about keeping the federal leviathan well- fed and watered and, well, pooping on this nation's job creators -- that nasty entrepreneurial investment class. Tax, tax, tax. Redistribute, redistribute, redistribute. Spend, spend, spend.
(use drop cap here) The Fourth Estate, however, does not have the corner on promoting socialism. Consider some of the fine leftists in the academy.
In a commentary in last Sunday's Philadelphia Inquirer, Cornell University economics and management professor Robert H. Frank offered a novel argument against "tax cuts for the wealthiest."
When the "rich" have more money to spend via tax cuts, middle-income households spend themselves into trouble trying to keep up with them, he says. This is the real definition of "class envy," Professor Frank instructs. Incredible.
"Through a chain of events, the increased spending of the top 1 percent, who earned three times as much in 2000 as in 1979, has placed many basic goals out of reach for the median family," he says. "In short, burgeoning incomes at the top have launched 'expenditure cascades' that have ended up squeezing the middle class."
Damn those rich bastards, they're forcing me to live beyond my means? Nope. And that has Frank flummoxed. "What's surprising ... is that (the middle class) remain so free of resentment toward the rich."
Dude, perhaps because it's not their fault?
If only those horrid "tax reductions to the wealthiest 1 percent during the next decade" are repealed can the "squeezed" classes be able to navigate themselves out of their financial dire straits. Through redistributed tax receipts to make their life "more affordable," right?
Oh, and a final thought from Professor Frank: Why should anyone have a "60,000 square foot house" anyway? "If fewer people built houses that large, fewer would feel any desire to own one."
Hey, and while we're at it, why don't we abolish private property and single-dwelling homes and build block after block after block of apartment complexes, a la Soviet Russia, just to make things fair and equal?
This, class, is textbook socialism. And it's what is being peddled in too many of our newspapers and in too many of our classrooms.
In 1922's "Socialism," one of Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises' seminal works, he offered that it is the "intellectual leaders of the peoples" who "have produced and propagated the fallacies" of socialism "which are on the point of destroying liberty and Western civilization."
It is "reason and ideas" -- not mythical and magical forces -- that determine the course of human affairs, Professor von Mises reminded. "What is needed to stop the trend toward socialism and despotism is common sense and moral courage."
Then, as now. |
