NJ Dems Answer Christie in Typical Fashion

New Jersey's redistributionist state government is in crisis, and the Democrats who control the legislature have the answer - more redistribution of wealth!

Two top Democrats revealed there budget plan in a Star-Ledger piece entitled Helping NJ senior citizens with true 'shared sacrifice'. They write:

"The Democratic plan to protect New Jersey’s most vulnerable residents calls for a one-year income tax surcharge on the 16,000 New Jerseyans with taxable incomes of at least $1 million. The surcharge would raise about $630 million and eliminate Christie’s plans to force senior citizens to pay higher prescription drug costs and property taxes.

"This is a compassionate approach that allows the shared sacrifice of our most fortunate 16,000 residents to help more than 600,000 senior and disabled citizens who struggle to pay for medication and keep their homes. This plan spreads the pain and protects our most vulnerable."

I've left the following comments:

Posted by zemack
May 12, 2010, 7:18PM

No armed street thug with a gun would have the gall, or the dishonesty, to claim that he is “compassionately” “allowing” his victim to “sacrifice” his wallet to pay for his needs.

No street thug would be so brazen as to claim that his gun does not represent force, but taking responsibility for paying his own way, does.

Oh, but Senator Sweeney and Speaker Oliver don’t want the tax loot for themselves. They only want to funnel that dough to “New Jersey’s most vulnerable residents”, who may or may not like the idea of being made parasites. Apparently, the 16,000 victims of their scheme of legalized armed robbery are not “vulnerable”. There’s one minority group the Dems don’t care much about. Like all humanitarian types, what these politicians seek is the phony prestige of practicing charity with other people’s tax money.

But the “most fortunate” deserve it, right? After all, it’s “the multimillionaire corporate titans, bankers and hedge-fund traders whose actions led to the recent recession.” It could not possibly be the government’s affordable housing crusades enforced through a massive interlocking network of agencies, bureaucracies, loan guarantees, laws, controls, printing-press money and untold market-distorting policies that caused it. It’s all the fault of 16,000 NJ residents, who are indicted, tried, and convicted, without evidence and through guilt by association, of causing the recession – then sentenced to need-based tax penalties. I cannot believe the authors made that statement!

The morality of need worship, which preaches that we are all our brothers’ keepers, will always lead to tyrannical socialist schemes in which the government merely wants to “allow” us or “help” us to be moral and “sacrifice” for others. Under the opposite moral principle, that each of us owns his own life and possesses unalienable individual rights, we are free to engage in voluntary charity to causes and fellow citizens we deem worthy. But there are no predatory politicians or voting blocs looking to sacrifice some to the needs of others through legislative force.

The national financial crisis and NJ’s fiscal calamity are both rooted in the political implementation of the principle that need is an automatic moral claim on the wealth produced by others. Until we recognize that production, individual achievement, personal responsibility, and respect for the rights and property of others, not any kind of sacrifice shared or otherwise, is the moral ideal, we will lurch from crisis to crisis until we go over the edge into the collective abyss.

On Obama's Christian Strategy

Conciliatory Fighting Words, by E. J. Dionne of the Washington Post, writing on President Obama's recent commencement address at Notre Dame University

My Commentary:

Zemack wrote:
President Obama’s political strategy is clear, a philosophical masterstroke, and devastating for capitalism and freedom. His grand strategy for remaking America into a nation ruled by the collective should be obvious to anyone who understands the power of ideas and of morality.

But to advocate socialism openly and honestly is and always has been a loser in America. After the tyranny, wars, and unprecedented mass murder wrought by the socialist regimes of Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany, Red China, and the many smaller variants of the 20th century, socialism is dead as an intellectual force. Notice how Obama and the American Left run from the socialist label as from the plague, despite the obvious socialist (albeit through the fascist back door) underpinnings of their agenda. How, then, to pursue a socialist agenda in America?

Enter what one might call Obama’s “Christian Strategy”. The President, a philosophically astute man (unlike most of his GOP rivals), is and has been attempting to forge an alliance with Christianity based upon a common moral foundation…altruism. Unlike socialism, religion is a live and growing force in America, and Christianity is the dominant religion. Since socialism and Christianity share the same ethical premise…that the good consists of living for others or putting others above self…Obama’s brilliant strategy is to hitch his socialist agenda to Judeo-Christian ethics.

America was founded on the opposite ethical principle, though those principles were never explicitly defined until the 20th century. The Founding Fathers created a nation based upon the supreme value of the individual possessing the unalienable rights to his own life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness. They rejected the tribal view that man must live for others (i.e., the collective). But it was philosopher-novelist Ayn Rand who comprehensively defined the philosophical underpinnings for the American Revolution. Through her classic novels The Fountainhead and especially Atlas Shrugged…and through her philosophy of Objectivism…she presents the moral case for the American Revolution and capitalism.

It is only Ayn Rand who provides the vital intellectual ammunition to counter the accelerating collectivist trend in America, and thus save our individual freedom, because she can defend the individual’s right to exist for his own sake…and prove it. She offers the anti-dote to the doctrine that “we are all our brother’s keepers”, the moral root of Obama’s policies and the root of all variants of socialism. If Obama is to be stopped, Capitalism must be discovered. For Capitalism to be discovered, our Founding principles must be rediscovered and fully understood. For our Founding principles to be fully understood, Ayn Rand and Objectivism must be discovered and embraced.

The President is right that we are at “a rare inflection point in history”. He intends to steer America away from its Founding ideals by hitching his car to the engine of Christianity. It remains to be seen how successful he will be. But Obama understands fully that morality is the key to the direction America will take. It’s time that Capitalism’s defenders understood that, too.

Sanchez on Class and Other Subjects

Commentary: It's time for America to think straight about class

By Mary Sanchez | The Kansas City Star
So now, with people's 401(k) retirement accounts vanishing along with their puffed-up middle class pride, perhaps there is space for a little truth telling.

The average American never leaves the class level he or she is born into. Yes, it's true, despite all those Horatio Alger kitchen table talks about "you can be anything you want dear, this is America!" I don't want to let greedy financiers off the hook for current market turmoil, nor do I wish to deflate the ambitions of next great entrepreneur, Google founder or Warren Buffet in the making. But Americans just don't understand class and how it works within the version of capitalism that is the U.S. of A.

Just consider the heedless and lemming-like way most Americans stumbled into this recession.

For decades, people truly believed they were far better off financially than they actually were, even though the average American worker saw a 16 percent drop in his earnings (adjusted for inflation) between the 1970s and 2004, according to economist Benjamin Friedman of Harvard. Meanwhile, the top 1 percent of the income scale skyrocketed ahead? Yet somehow, every American proudly proclaims membership in "the middle class." Amazing what E-Z credit and the ability to buy a latte every morning can do to a worker bee's perspective.

It is time for the voting masses – and I'd include myself here – to understand economic facts better and begin pushing for real change. We need to shed our mythical beliefs about class and build a stable economic foundation that all Americans can depend on. I suspect more people will be open to this line of learning now that unemployment has hit 8 percent. For decades, people missed the fact that a white collar job, a college degree and a cubicle did not necessarily offer them a level of job or financial security above the blue-collar, manual labor workers they thought they'd moved ahead of.

Consider the findings of the 2009 MetLife Study of the American Dream, released in March: Half of all respondents admitted they were one or two paychecks from ruin. If they lost their jobs, within a month, 50 percent of the people polled admitted they would not be able to pay their bills.

Another 28 percent said losing their job would find them unable to pay their bills within two weeks. More than a quarter of people earning $100,000 said they'd be insolvent after a month of unemployment. That's not middle class stability as most people would define it. No doubt this situation owes much to the recent crash in home prices and the cratering of the stock markets. But that's another way of saying that many Americans were simply never as upwardly mobile as they had assumed, or deluded themselves into thinking they were.

You may own a sprawling home with the three-car garage, take an annual trip to Cancun, and be able to discuss basic investment strategies, but somehow at least a quarter of you are living one month away from financial oblivion. The trappings of middle class life are not the same as security.

Another sign of our cluelessness is that half of us are railing (a few decades late) at the excesses of the executive class, while the other half of us are railing at deadbeat subprime borrowers. What we should be doing is pouncing upon our elected officials, demanding that Congress lay a foundation for true prosperity and security, as previous generations did in the 1930s and 1950s. In this session, Congress will likely decide on major legislation that would make it easier for unions to organize workplaces; that would reform the American health care system; and possibly that would overhaul the way we regulate banks and other financial institutions. In each of these areas we need bold change from recent policy.

I hear the cry of "socialism" coming from the back of the room.

This isn't about class conflict; this is about building a stable foundation for the future, so hard work really will get people ahead.

My Commentary:

America does not have a “version of capitalism”, but a mixed economy of steadily eroding capitalistic freedom and ever expanding government control. There is nothing new or bold about Obama’s policies, which continue America on the century-long path toward total statism.

Ms. Sanchez points to the 1930s and 1950s as models we should follow to “lay a foundation for true prosperity and security”. Far from any such thing, the foundation for the current crisis in finance and healthcare were laid in the early to mid 20th century in a quest for the free lunch of government-guaranteed “security”. Instead of turning toward a free market, she calls boldly for government to be rewarded for its failures with still more power.

The two areas of concern mentioned by Ms. Sanchez, the financial crisis and the mess that is our healthcare system, are perfect examples of a mixed economy, not capitalism. The third-party-payer system, the thousands of insurance mandates, barriers to interstate competition for health insurance, and rights-violating programs such as Medicare, Medicaid, SCHIP, and EMTALA have virtually destroyed all but a few remnants of capitalism and free markets in healthcare. The current financial crisis is proof of the failure of government regulation and market interference, not capitalism. This crisis occurred within the context of a heavily regulated banking system under the control of a coercive government central bank money monopoly. On top of that is a whole network of market distorting government housing policies accumulated over a period of decades spawned by the intention to "encourage" homeownership. We are witnessing the climax of the failure of those policies and regulations today.

Ms. Sanchez doesn’t like hearing the term “socialism”. But words have meanings, and ignoring the nature of where America is heading will not wish it away. The fact is that socialism is coming to America via the back door of welfare state fascism, a system whereby most property remains in private hands, but is totally controlled by the state. It is just this mixed economy trending toward total fascism that tends to freeze people into economic “classes”. The graduated income tax, massive government business regulation, dependency-fostering welfare-state programs, and tax and monetary policy are among the reasons upward mobility is shackled in America. Capitalism, the system of individual rights, eliminates all of those barriers under a system not of classes or tribes or special interest groups but of individuals associating with each other through voluntary trade and contract to mutual advantage.

“Hard work” is not the primary ingredient to “get ahead”. People worked a lot harder in pre-capitalist times just to stay ahead of the next famine. Slaves can be made to “work hard”. The irreplaceable virtue that lies at the foundation of economic prosperity and progress is the individual human mind. But reason and thinking require both political and economic freedom…i.e., to be free from interference by force from one’s neighbors and the government. Only one social system establishes the proper social conditions man’s rational faculty (and thus wealth production) requires…capitalism.

The fundamental battle today is between capitalism and socialism, or individual rights and the total collectivist state. Mostly what we hear today in varying degrees from both major parties is more of the second. The truly bold change would be to discover and embrace individual rights and capitalism as the foundation for a truly free and prosperous laissez-faire society.

Other's Commentary:

borisjimski wrote on March 17, 0:29 AM:
"Local projects should be paid out of local funds, not by federal moneys taken from people who are nowhere near . . . in a quest for the free lunch of government-guaranteed “security.”" Right you are! So all those southern states that live off the largess the Yankee states give them each year as the excess over what they pay into the federal system, time to cough it up. As to healthcare being a market-based business, do you really believe people price out how much it will cost them at each hospital with each doctor when they have a heart attack or discover a lump? "This crisis occurred within the context of a heavily regulated banking system under the control of a coercive government central bank money monopoly," notwithstanding the fact all those regulations were ignored the last eight years. Geez Mike, sounds like you're getting your talking points directly from the AEI. Capitalism isn't a social system, it's an economic system. And socialism isnt the total collectivist state.

MikeZemack wrote on March 17, 9:06 PM:
Capitalism in the philosophical sense is a social system based upon the recognition of individual rights to life, liberty and property, and a government limited to protecting those rights. A free market is an economic system, which is integral to capitalism. But capitalism encompasses both political and economic freedom, Political freedom is only possible under economic freedom. Freedom of speech, religion, association, etc. are not practicable when government controls one’s property and livelihood. Only capitalism provides both freedoms.

Government economic regulation is the means by which politics corrupts the private economy. Political pressure on the banks applied through the conduit of the regulators and the GSEs, compounded by the Fed’s easy money, low interest rate policies, led to this crisis. The quick-buck artists on Wall Street, while not to be excused, were merely riders on a political train. At no time did the government relinquish any of its regulatory powers.

Other's Commentary:

mongrel wrote on March 17, 3:10 PM:
Mike Zemack said it all:

"The fact is that socialism is coming to America via the back door of welfare state fascism, a system whereby most property remains in private hands, but is totally controlled by the state."

This is not new, it has happened elsewhere in the past. "Limousine liberals" and misguided leftist do-gooders were instrumental in making "welfare state fascism" become reality.

What "our" limousine liberals forget that all those previous limousine liberals also thought they will be allowed to keep their limousines while the misguided "masses" will be ruled by the socialist government. Instead of limousines, they were labelled "enemies of all classes" & ended up in prison, in concentration camps, and execution chambers. The "masses" lost freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of religion, the right to private property, and became poorer, hungrier, completely oppressed by government.

MikeZemack wrote on March 17, 9:22 PM:
Mongrel, you are scarily right.

The growing dependency on government, the breakdown of society into a civil war of special interest pressure groups at the expense of the individual and his rights, government controls breeding more government controls, calls for more and more sacrifice to the state (or the nation or the race or society), exploding government debt, a flood of printing press money…it’s all happened before.

The closest historical parallel to the America of recent decades is pre-Hitler Germany…from Bismarck’s 1880s welfare state to the 1930s.