Category Archives: Socialism

European By Any Other Name

America, Europe, Journalism, Media, Socialism, The State, Welfare

The stock characters we see on TV have certain stock phrases. Triteness goes with the Talker’s territory. A variation on a theme is as follows: “We want to avoid becoming a welfare state like the European states.” Obama is “converting America into a European style social-welfare state.” This, in the teeth of a 160 percent debt to GDP, a figure easily arrived at by adding to US liabilities, not only the paltry “$14.5 trillion in federal debt,” but the $2.7 trillion in state and local debt, “plus the $6.5 trillion federal mortgage guarantees to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.”

These figures, cited here, don’t, I believe, fully account for the promises made on the Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security fiscal fronts.

How European is America? Peter Ferrara at Forbes.com has grappled admirably with a reality ordinarily avoided in our mummified media. “America’s welfare state is not a principality,” he writes. “It is a vast empire bigger than the entire budgets of almost every other country in the world.”

Hey, just like our military, which, as I’ve contended, “works like government; is financed like government, and sports many of the same inherent malignancies of government.”

Back to the “welfare/entitlement empire“:

Just one program, Medicaid, cost the federal government $275 billion in 2010, which is slated to rise to $451 billion by 2018. Counting state Medicaid expenditures, this one program cost taxpayers $425 billion in 2010, soaring to $800 billion by 2018. Under Obamacare, 85 million Americans will soon be on Medicaid, growing to nearly 100 million by 2021, according to the CBO.

But there are 184 additional federal, means-tested welfare programs, most jointly financed and administered with the states. In addition to Medicaid is the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP). Also included is Food Stamps, now officially called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Nearly 42 million Americans were receiving food stamps in 2010, up by a third since November, 2008. That is why President Obama’s budget projects spending $75 billion on Food Stamps in 2011, double the $36 billion spent in 2008.

But that is not the only federal nutrition program for the needy. There is the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC), which targets assistance to pregnant women and mothers with small children. There is the means tested School Breakfast Program and School Lunch Program. There is the Summer Food Service Program for Children. There are the lower income components of the Child and Adult Care Food Program, the Emergency Food Assistance Program, and the Commodity Supplemental Food Program (CSFP). Then there is the Nutrition Program for the Elderly. All in all, literally cradle to grave service. By 2010, Federal spending for Food and Nutrition Assistance overall had climbed to roughly $100 billion a year.

Then there is federal housing assistance, totaling $77 billion in 2010. This includes expenditures for over 1 million public housing units owned by the government. It includes Section 8 rental assistance for nearly another 4 million private housing units. Then there is Rural Rental Assistance, Rural Housing Loans, and Rural Rental Housing Loans. Also included is Home Investment Partnerships (HOME), Community Development Block Grants (CDBG), Housing for Special Populations (Elderly and Disabled), Housing Opportunities for Persons with AIDS (HOPWA), Emergency Shelter Grants, the Supportive Housing program, the Single Room Occupancy program, the Shelter Plus Care program, and the Home Ownership and Opportunity for People Everywhere (HOPE) program, among others.

READ ON. And don’t listen to anything that comes out of the mouths of America’s Sino– and Europhobic bobbleheads, whose grasp of reality is tenuous at best.

The Father Or The Son?

Government, Healthcare, Individual Rights, libertarianism, Natural Law, Political Philosophy, Regulation, Republicans, Ron Paul, Socialism

Ron Paul is the elder statesman, Rand Paul is scrappy and fit for a fight. And you do know that breaking free from the moochers and the looters, if at all possible, is going to necessitate a fight. I used to wonder about Rand’s deadpan delivery. But a poker face is just what the doctor ordered together with those revolutionary statements.

“SEN. RAND PAUL (R-KY): ‘With regard to the idea of whether you have a right to health care, you have realize what that implies. It’s not an abstraction. I’m a physician. That means you have a right to come to my house and conscript me. It means you believe in slavery.'” (RealClearPolitics)

Read the entire statement; it’s beautifully put.

To libertarians what Rand Paul said is real clear. We often describe the fabricated (positive) right to health care as a right to conscript doctors in the service of humanity. For what else does it mean? (“Protesters for a public plan have the right to seek out a doctor and pay him for his services; they have no claim to the products of his labor, and no right to enlist the State to compel third parties to pay for those products.”) But to hear a man who sits in the ossified Senate echo the natural law is just wonderful.

The other day, Rand Paul was quizzed about the absence of entitlement reform in his five-year budget plan. Without flinching, Rand replied that he chose to do away with whole departments, instead.

Enforcing Information Socialism

Business, Criminal Injustice, Law, Socialism, Trade

For violating laws enforcing information socialism, billionaire Raj Rajaratnam, innocent in natural law, could be incarcerated for decades. In their latest efforts to bring ruin to capital markets, SEC blood hounds have ensnared one of the country’s most powerful hedge-fund “impresarios.” MORE.

It’s easy to be thrown off scent when trying to divine the vague, ill-defined, unconstitutional laws under which the Securities and Exchange Commission hunts for corporate prey. Suffice it to say that the SEC operates with the understanding that competition in capital markets must proceed from a level playing field. All investors are entitled to the same information advantage irrespective of effort and abilities.

In a word, information socialism.

Rajaratnam had not violated the rights of other shareholders or potential buyers. There is no natural right to a guaranteed profit, nor is there a right to be shielded from losses. And there most certainly is no such right as a one that guarantees to the collective information the individual has worked hard to obtain and optimize.

UPDATED: ‘You Can’t Fix Stupid’

Affirmative Action, Barack Obama, Debt, Economy, Government, Intelligence, Political Philosophy, Reason, Socialism, Taxation

The following is from my new, WND column, “You Can’t Fix Stupid”:

“How stupid is President Barack Hussein Obama? Let me count the ways.

Judging from the philosophical pose he struck during Wednesday’s “debt-reduction” address, the president is so stupid as to believe that the “rugged individualism,” “self-reliance,” and “healthy skepticism of too much government”—all qualities he attributed to the American people in that speech — can survive in the shadow of his government.

During his two years in office, Mr. Obama has accrued more debt than any president in American history. Why, in the month of March alone, his souped-up civil servants spent eight times what they collected in tax receipts and revenues.

For every year their honcho has been in office, the Obama officials have devoured over a trillion dollars, and will put Americans in hock to the tune of $1 trillion in interest payments alone, by the end of this decade, if not sooner.

How stupid is our president? So stupid as to believe that the governmental juggernaut over which he presides is what connects us a nation, and ensures that “we … do together what we cannot do as well for ourselves.”

How stupid is Obama? So stupid as to believe that America became a great country in 1935, which is when the earliest of the Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security entitlements was signed into law. Dummy did, after all, declare yesterday that, “We would not be a great country without [these programs]”? …

… But, as Ron White, that great satirist from the great State of Texas, teaches, ‘You can’t fix stupid.’

‘There is not a pill you can take, not a class you can go to. Stupid is forever.'”

Read the complete column, “You Can’t Fix Stupid,” now on WND.COM.

UPDATE (April 15): An Ivy-League education is increasingly not indicative of intelligence. What with affirmative action, one can hardly assume that Obama’s admission to these institutions bodes well for his IQ. It certainly does nothing of the sort for his wife’s; anyone who has read her graduation thesis will confirm what I’m saying. This effort is written on a high-school level. Obama’s transcripts remain well-concealed. Despite being appointed as an editor for the Harvard Law Review, Obama has never written a serious jouranl article for this publication.

Obama’s easy passage through this country’s finest schools shows just how worthless these once-proud institutions have become, and how worthwhile it is to be a privileged minority. (Or, in the case of Bush, McCain’s mindless daughter, and the likes—to belong to an American political dynasty.)

By the way, I agree that BHO has the cunning of a fox. But that’s a far cry from the brilliance with which he has been credited.