Just For Fun

by digby

I’ve often posted emails from a rightwinger who calls himself “The Intellectual Republican” and sends around his thoughts on various issues. This one is about Princeton sociologist Larry M Bartels’ important book about income inequality, Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age

From June Cleaver To Madonna

This book is yet another socialist tome from the 1960’s hippie, university mono-culture. The entire point: democracy should produce equal economic results, is wholly anti-American. If the Constitution had said that the goal of democracy was to affect equal economic outcomes throughout our society the theme of the book would have been perfectly compatible with America. But, for some reason, our founders, who created the greatest, wealthiest country in the history of humanity, forgot that little detail in the Constitution. In fact, it seems not to have occurred to anybody until Karl Marx conjured it up out of a deranged mind that eventually could be held directly responsible for impoverishing 100’s of millions and killing 100-200 million people. Despite the deadly failure of every socialist gov’t since Marx, the university mono-culture still imagines that its’ wisdom can perfect the socialist formula in America even as the billions in Russia, China, and India turn toward the capitalism that our founders miraculously gave us, and away from the socialism that Marx gave them.

One can only wonder how liberals are so blind to what is happening so obviously right under their own noses. Recently, I had dinner with a friend who suggested a Republican understanding of America different from the one commonly suggested by university liberals. She teaches elementary school in the South Bronx. She told me about how some of her students had recently immigrated from Bangladesh where just 2 weeks before the start of the semester they had lived, literally, outside; with no modern conveniences including electricity, toilets, or running water. But somehow, she said, those students were performing better than native Americans who were born in the South Bronx. How could this be? The answer is simple: the South Bronx is the most liberal place on earth. Native American kids bring that culture with them to school. They feel the liberal, Marxist, Democratic entitlement attitude in their souls. In their souls they are victims or the children of victims who are entitled to have their needs met by their victimizers. Why should they work hard in school when Marx instructed them long ago: “to each according to his needs”.

Conversely, the Bangladeshi kids have the American, colonialist, capitalist attitude. They and their families are thrilled to be free in a capitalist country where they can create and enjoy their own lives based on what they can provide for themselves, not based on what they are “entitled” to from more productive people. Serendipitously, in a capitalist system, to provide for oneself one has to, firstly, provide more for other people. Hence, capitalism has produced the greatest wealth for all, although not the same quantity of wealth for all at any given time. After all, some have just arrived from Bangladesh, and some who arrived a long ago are just liberals.

Additionally, the author bemoans the loss of union jobs in America. To the author, it is intuitively obvious that unions jobs are good jobs because they are higher paying jobs that, accordingly, result in more equal democracy. Completely and wholly lost is the idea that in a free,wealthy, capitalist society one should get wages or prices that other free people agree to pay for one’s goods and services since other people provide an impartial point of view about what goods and services, at what prices, actually constitute a standard of living improvement for the purchaser. When liberal professors or socialist gov’t bureaucrats makes those choices they choose wrong and standards of living go down, rather than up, as history has repeatedly shown us.

The liberal, union principle is that one gets whatever one can by blackmailing one’s employer for higher wages. Forgotten is that, 1) everyone, including union members, must then pay more for expensive union made goods, thereby eliminating any net gain, 2) blackmail, rather than greater productivity, as a means to get ahead, diminishes an individual’s, company’s, and economy’s focus on productivity, competitiveness, and wealth creation, 3) non-union companies and countries will have lower prices and more competitive products so that unionized companies will ultimately go bankrupt and cost the blackmailing union members their jobs.

For example, American liberals now seems poised to lose GM, Ford, and Chrysler and the millions of jobs that they directly and indirectly provide, in large part because of unions. So why on earth do university liberals still imagine that unions and socialism are a good thing? The answer is that it is only way for them to participate in a free capitalist society that functions very precisely and well without their irrelevant academic disportment. They can come up with childlike and absurd new theories and arguments to promote old fashioned socialism, and try to foist them upon us, but in the end they can’t educate one child in the South Bronx or produce one competitive automobile.

If equality is the real issue, why do the top 1%, under Bush, now have to pay 40% (up from 32% prior to Bush) of all Federal Taxes? Why do the poor get free health care and education through high-school, in addition to numerous other entitlements, without which their lives would not be sustainable? Why did Bush introduce the first $2 Trillion budget and then the first $3 Trillion budget if not to help the poor in America? Why did Bush introduce the Prescription Drug Bill – the costliest entitlement since the 1960’s – if not to help the poor? The issue isn’t that the poor need more economic democracy, it’s that liberals (some of whom are truckling or confused Republicans) have declared war on the poor with their caring, preposterous, and counterproductive programs. The liberal attitude toward education and unions constitute two of the many battles in the liberal war against the poor.

At another time one might mention how liberal, hip hop, feminist, welfare culture destroyed the idea of love and family in poor America by replacing June Cleaver with Britney Spears and Madonna so that most kids are now born single impoverished mothers, but that’s another battle in the liberal war on the poor that, again, would only be exacerbated by “economic democracy.”

I feel so dirty.

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