DENNIS CLAYSON, For The Courier | Posted: Sunday, March 8, 2009 12:00 am
Liberals are very bright. If you don't believe it, just ask one.
This creates a problem. The dilemma can be illustrated by the classical problem of what a dog would do if it actually caught the car it was chasing.
Liberals have been pursuing their dream of a socialist America for over a hundred years. It has been the repository of all their wishes and illusions. Imagine a world where everyone respects everyone, where there are no rich and poor, where there is no racial, sexual, gender or any other discrimination of any kind. Children are cared for, the aged are cared for, the poor are cared for, the student is cared for, indeed, all of God's children are cared for. The environment is respected, nay, worshipped.
The sun shines while healthy children play in daisy-covered meadows and benevolently intelligent adults smile while listening to the good news broadcast between classical music (interspersed with the appropriate mix of ethnic) on NPR.
Of course, there would be no war because other "peoples" and nations would find no reason to be aggressive toward us because we have shown them our good intentions by disarming, beating our swords into Volvo station wagons, and forever denouncing war.
That is the dream, but what is the method? As long as you live in a society that produces wealth and a certain amount of individual freedom, it is easy to be an advocate of socialism. You don't have to live with socialism's actual consequences.
After all, you once lived in the richest country in world history, not in some "People's Republic."
But in Obama's and Pelosi's America we are rapidly becoming a socialist country. The dog has finally caught the car.
Here is the problem. Intelligent liberals, who are not control freaks or neurotic busybodies, know deep inside their souls that socialism doesn't work. It was fun to advocate it if you knew that it wasn't going to happen. It made people feel good, even virtuous. It was exciting to act the part of the romantic revolutionary. It was sort of naughty to go to Cuba and praise Castro and Che as long as you knew you could always go back to the good old USA.
What intelligent liberals know is that socialism has a 100 percent chance of failure. Margaret Thatcher nailed this with only 14 words. "The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money."
Economically, socialism is parasitical. A parasite can thrive only under a limited number of conditions.
If a parasite spends its entire existence with a host, then it is in the parasite's best interest to keep the host healthy. Without a symbiotic relationship, the parasite would be committing suicide.
The Chinese mastered this lesson by making its markets as free as its communists masters could tolerate.
Alternately, if the parasite only used the host temporarily it can kill the host, but then either it or its offspring must find another.
Socialism will kill its host society. In many ways communists are actually more truthful about this than are socialists. Communists know two things. 1) True socialism must be international. When one host is drained dry you must move on.
That is one of the reasons that communist nations have some of the largest and most aggressive militaries on the planet. They are not "peace loving" because they know that they cannot survive without conquest.
2) They know that "the people" is a fiction, so that a dictator is necessary to institute and control socialist policies.
Now that you liberals have, like the dog, caught the car, what are you going to do now?
Other than your support, what can you give to the new socialist state?
Your taxes are irrelevant. The governments are now spending money in amounts that are not controlled by the ability of the American people to pay. So whatever you "donate" in way of taxes means nothing.
You can give your body over to nationalized health care, which is the same as handing it over to the nearest welfare office, post office, or car registration bureau.
You can think deep thoughts as long as they are politically correct.
Some of your deep thoughts should be about the virtue of poverty, the actual results of the denial of individual freedom, and how everyone can become equal in their inability to change anything at all.