The President's Gimmick Part 1

(This blog post closes out the previous seven blog posts (The Truth about the President’s Economic Policies). It resumes the discussion with the focus on the President’s use of the term “optimism” as a character trait of the American people. “Optimism” was described by me in the previous posts as a non-essential characteristic of the American people that changes the debate from liberty to sacrifice. The previous blog posts also focused on the need for a leader with the capacity to tell the truth.)

How can a President who trades in untruth win an election? Does he not know that you can’t solve our nation’s problems by focusing on non-essential traits such as “optimism”? This approach precludes a discussion about the fundamental traits that make it possible for Americans to muster strength against difficult odds. Like the Germans under Hitler, who were told that their essential characteristic was their willingness to sacrifice for the “volk”, the American people are feeling the burden of massive deficits, constantly rising prices and an inability to know how to right the nation’s course. As they watch their incomes buying less each week, they will have to lower their expectations, reduce spending and eat less. Where will their optimism go then? Will they continue to feel that life is a great adventure and that anything is possible?

In fact, the President’s appeal to optimism solves nothing. People cannot be optimistic when they are bleeding to death. When people are called to sacrifice more and more with each government failure, eventually, people give up and the President will declare that they are not good enough for his grand vision of the future. This has happened in virtually every collectivist experiment in history.

Eventually, people will begin to see that the President is merely using the language of sacrifice in order to launder money for the sake of people who are not required to sacrifice; the cronies in some large corporations, the bureaucrats who determine life and death, the leftist organizations that dispense lies and steal elections, the politicians who enjoy yachts and private jets and Caribbean chalets; and even the poor who receive sustenance while the producers work a second and/or third shift. They begin to wonder if there is not some gimmick being used on them, some deceptive words that are intended to hurt them in some way.

What will Americans be told when their optimism is gone? As a pragmatist, the President will have another gimmick ready. He will take the opportunity to hire his old friends from ACORN, meet with his friends in the unions, his friends at Americorp, his friends at Occupy Wall Street, his friends at Media Matters and put them to work to channel your energy toward, guess what, more sacrifice. By then, he’ll have given Americans so many scapegoats who are “responsible” for the nation’s suffering that many people will blindly follow his community organizers. By then, many more Americans will be slaves who must march on his order, protest on his order, shake down businesses on his order - for the sake of $40.00 a week of worthless money in their paychecks.

For the President, sacrifice is a magic formula, a benign concept viewed positively by millions. When companies like Solyndra squander the money your sacrifice has given them, the answer is not to stop giving money. Solyndra’s failure is proof that the American people did not give enough money. When the unions destroy large industries through high wage demands, Americans are told the cause of bankruptcy was not enough bailout money. More sacrifice always fixes too little sacrifice according to the President. And the spiral goes down, down, down, across a whole country that blindly demands more of what caused the problem.

The President does not seem to realize that sacrifice is a failed idea. He has yet to question the discredited ideas of Kant, Hegel, Marx and Engels, each of whom preached duty and sacrifice. Like Francis of Assisi, the monk who seldom bathed, he thinks sacrifice brings great benefits and solidarity to mankind. He ignores the decay of the Dark Ages ruled by Christian sacrifice. He’s forgotten the killing fields of the most altruistic societies in history such as Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia and Communist China. His friends are far left fascists who reject the Constitution and think that good government is re-distribution. Like many American intellectuals, he refuses to see that the negatives associated with sacrifice are worse than any of the possible benefits. He is swamped by technocrats who think they know better what the people need. Yet, they do not have the intellectual acumen that would bring them to question the idea that men should be forced to sacrifice. For them, the need for sacrifice is a foregone conclusion, an idea so logical, that it should not be questioned. As typical altruists, they do not realize that the essence of altruism is that it demands suffering.

One of the most deceptive aspects of altruism includes many of the President’s favorite themes. These themes represent the “escape clauses” of altruism; the methods of deception that give “credibility” to the idea of sacrifice and make it seem to be about helping others. Altruists routinely equate sacrifice with such concepts as love, benevolence, helping those one loves, kindness, generosity, voluntary charity and other concepts that have nothing to do with the idea that men must be forced to give up their lives, energy, money and profits for the sake of those who have not earned them. Altruism claims to be about helping people, but throughout history, it has lambasted honest, hard-working people by calling them selfish and exploitive. Altruists of the past have even jailed, hanged and tortured people for the mere act of trying to survive. This is the essence altruism: hating people and wanting to see them suffer. It is about ridiculing the successful and stealing their success. It is about the destruction of the human mind, confusing people, making them feel guilty and berating them for self-interest.

The President routinely equates sacrifice with the success of our country. He interprets the work that Americans have done for themselves and their families as sacrifice and claims that this “sacrifice” made America great, not individual initiative, not individual rights, not economic freedom. This attempt to switch the founding principle of our nation from freedom to sacrifice is the gimmick that the President uses when he proposes more sacrifice. He seeks to turn our nation away from individual rights toward a fascist system where the government plays referee, decides winners and losers and buys votes by punishing honesty and ambition.

Certainly a person of the President’s knowledge and intellect knows that history has shown altruism to be the means for looting societies. History has shown that the failures of the sacrificial state have only been met by more sacrifice and that the people are eventually left destitute. Is he that mentally addled that he cannot see the consequences of sacrificial societies? Is his gimmick an intentional act of deception or is he merely disconnected from reality? Perhaps we should question his mental powers, his psychology.

-to be continued

The Truth About the President’s Economic Policy Conclusion

So, if none of our leaders will provide the truth about the President’s speech in Kansas, someone else will have to do it.

Yet, the President is correct. The issue of capitalism versus regulation is the defining issue of our time and we must resolve this issue once and for all. The debate, in essence, is about morality and politics because it involves basic questions about man’s nature and the purpose of government. I have written about this extensively in other blog posts.

The discussion, in this blog post, is about the proper role of government about which the President’s speech also pretended to be. The basic questions include: Should government have the authority to use force against citizens in order to advance goals that are contrary to the citizens? What should happen when the actions of government conflict with the needs of human survival? Does the government have the authority to coerce people who are not criminals? What should be the role of individual rights in framing the government?

And more specifically: Does the President have a respect for the rule of law? Does he understand that the government was created to protect individual rights and that there is no authority in the Constitution (and in reality) that gives one man the power to dictate to others how they will act, which products they will choose and what they will do with the money they have earned through their own work? What is the moral justification for expropriating the money of citizens and spending it on projects and programs that the Constitution does not authorize? How can the morality of altruism be practiced by a government prohibited from violating freedoms?

At every turn, it seems the President has an answer. But it is an answer that hangs in the ether without foundation and justification. He thinks it is perfectly within his realm of authority to act as the sole judge of these issues because the election gave him that authority. But it did not. His campaign proclamation to bring forth “change” does not invalidate the Constitution. His intent to engage in unilateral action violates the rules of Republican government. For a man who is supposedly a Constitutional scholar, his actions represent a strange twist on the concept of Presidential power. We did not elect him to make his own laws. We elected him to be the President of the United States, not the dictator of the United States. There are constraints on his power which he cannot violate.

The President thinks that in order to govern, he need only declare an “emergency” and then act unilaterally. This is one of the worst arguments for Presidential Power ever to land in the White House. Forget that this approach is an invitation to “create” the emergencies that supposedly require direct action. Forget that he is inventing emergencies virtually at will. Forget that his policies violate the principles of separation of powers and check and balances. Forget that individual rights have gone virtually out the window. What baffles most people is that the President thinks he is the only person who understands the causes of our problems (self-interest) and that the only solution is altruism and re-distribution. One could not write a serious analysis of the President’s theory of Presidential power; one could only write a comedy.

Yet, this is a deadly serious issue. The President has subordinated our very survival to the absolute necessity of his election in November. Consider what this means for your life: You will have to endure this low economy, possibly lose or never get a job, possibly lose your home if you haven’t already lost it, possibly endure runaway inflation and higher taxes, just so we can have President Obama as our leader for the next four years. Look within your soul and ask yourself whether you will be able to survive the next four years of the Obama administration?

Capitalism means survival for our citizens and our nation. The President denigrates capitalism as if the act of trying to survive is somehow immoral. Capitalism allows for the free flow of capital and investment into better ideas that make better lives. The President calls capitalists “those at the top” and he demands that more taxes be paid by the rich while he ignores the simple fact that the rich do not have enough money to pay for the massive over-spending he has done. And, when the results of the President’s policies are manifest, the President asks for more sacrifice, not just from the rich, but from the very people he claims to be helping: the middle class. The squeeze is on and we are the lemons.

Yet, the real tax on the middle class is not found on a tax return. It is the tax of inflation which will come down hardest on the aged and the poor. This tax is accomplished by printing fiat money to pay for the massive debt the President continues to build. New printed money added to the economy dilutes the value of existing money and this creates inflation. When that inflation in the form of higher and higher prices (called runaway inflation) hits and people notice they don’t have enough money to survive, many will not know that it is the President who did this to them.

So the talk of raising taxes on the rich, because it would do nothing to eliminate the deficit, is nothing more than rhetoric. The President is using the “bash the rich” class warfare mantra, not to expose an evil player on the scene, the rich, but to hide the real evil player, himself. The President would drag the nation down rather than build it up. He would rather create conflict and discord among Americans in order to set the stage for the system of government that creates poverty.

To further understand this, I’d like to quote another speech by the President, the speech he gave on the night he was elected in 2008:

“It’s been a long time coming, but tonight, because of what we did on this day, in this election, at this defining moment, change has come to America.”

There’s that “defining moment” line again, or should I say, this speech is the genesis of that defining moment that he later talked about in his Kansas speech. Since we're talking about "defining" moments, why didn't the President “define” “change” when it would have helped the voters decide?

But some of us have figured it out. His actions have shown us what change means and we say, ‘No, thank you, Mr. President.” We've figured out that the defining moment the President hoped for is the moment when the American people decide to make sacrifice the motivating principle of their society; the moment when they decide to loot the wealth of those who made prosperity possible; the moment when we become a society of cannibals. That is the change he has brought to America.

Many of us have also figured out that, in practice, the President’s “change” meant full-blown fascism; the massive looting of society by the government. I’ve written about our country’s movement toward fascism and I’ve defined the term while few others have. Fascism is the worst, ugliest system to come out of the last century. It holds that the government can make people do whatever it wants while leaving to them the responsibility for the failures of its policies. It means spending taxpayer money to bailout corporations and their unions. It means spending taxpayer money to fund the creation of new industries regardless of whether the people want those industries. It means printing money which steals peoples’ savings and creates the hidden tax of inflation. It means massive government debt imposed upon people without their consent. It means using taxpayer money to fund organizations that the government favors but which the people do not. It means putting the competitors of friends out of business through regulations and picking winners and losers. Fascism is runaway government. This is the change the President promised and his actions prove it.

We must ask ourselves a very important question: Why did fascist Germany lose the war in Europe? This question is important to us because almost all the things the President is doing today were done by the German fascists before him. The German people lost that war because they had been worn down by their own government. They were educated constantly on the vibrant future that would come about through their sacrifice for the Volk. They were promised a 1,000 year Reich and a brilliant future of world power and affluence. As time went on, the toil of the entire society, by means of aggressive war, became necessary so they could win “living space” for Germany. This goal required unceasing work and commitment from every member of society. It meant that they had to "donate" their money, time, effort and minds to a collective goal defined by the government. Germany's "defining moment" came when they voted Hitler into power; when they declared that they would be a society of sacrifice for the collective.

Eventually, these people began to see the sinister nature of fascism; the regimentation, the slave labor, the blood and the death it created. Those that did not know the evil going on, at the very least, began to suspect that the speeches of Hitler were intended to steal from them their life blood and their children for the sake of the biggest sacrifice in history, not only their own self-sacrifice but the sacrifice of entire nations and whole peoples all over the world. The inflationary policies of the government that built huge highways, powerful armies and massive government buildings were not seen as victories by the people but as the cause of rising prices and increasing misery. Before Germany was defeated by the allies, the spirit of the people had collapsed from within due to the demanding policies of the government. The end result is that Hitler blamed the German people for not being good enough for the future he promised.

Fascism always collapses because eventually it requires total sacrifice and this makes life impossible. The lies lead to failures and more lies; the failures lead to more taxes. More taxes lead to reduced standards of living and eventually to slave labor and collapse. We are not there yet, but we are on the tipping point. Once high taxes on the rich destroy future investment, and once inflation causes a collapse of the currency, poverty will have reached a level so low that society will collapse. The destruction of America will be complete and the hordes of plundering Armies from other countries will have their way. Will someone be able to look back and see that the genesis of our destruction was that we allowed altruism and sacrifice to plunder us before the Armies descended? Only the victors write the history books and you can be assured of a long dark age of misery if we don’t recognize now that the defining issue of our time is capitalism and freedom versus fascism and slavery.

How do the President and his fellow travelers respond to the charge of fascism? They laugh and tell us that anyone who would think such a thing is ignorant and worthy of ridicule. Do they define the type of government they stand for? No, they refuse to discuss ideology because they hold ideology to be an outdated way of defending their plans for society. They evade the discussion of principles in order to evade telling people the truth about what they are doing. As plunderers and thieves, they must tell people that everything is normal, as it was, and that they are just asking for a little bit of sacrifice. They use a “we versus them” approach that denigrates anyone who would disagree with them, dropping intellectual debate to the level of the street fighter, the public opinion poll and the man with the gun. They hope that people ignore the deeper philosophical issues that they must confront if they are to save themselves. Cheap character assassination and cheaper criticisms of capitalism are their stock in trade. Rumor-mongering and scandal-mongering are their political weapons. They masquerade as objective critics doing their best to understand the “facts” but they base their criticisms on an unacknowledged Marxist ideology which they pretend is scientifically proven and beyond question.

Yet, their true political ideology, the reason that the President did not define what “change” meant during his election campaign, is fascism. Their pragmatism requires that they masquerade as good people who must defend us against the “bad” people out for a profit. Just as the Nazi’s vilified the industrious Jews and other capitalists as the enemies of society, today’s fascists in the administration are vilifying business executives and rich people as the enemies of society.

Remember, that altruism, sacrifice, is a characteristic of fascism. Remember, that it has caused our economic collapse…and now consider…that the President plans on winning the next election by appealing to the very philosophical principle that is dragging our nation into the ditch…altruism. If he can get you to compromise and agree with him that we need more “giving”, he has won the debate and the rest is merely a matter of implementation via force. He wants you to blame yourself for not sacrificing enough and he wants you to vote for him because he’s the altruistic leader “fixing” America (with your dollars taken from you by force).

Yet, the guilty secret that the President refuses to acknowledge is the fact that re-distribution and altruism actually make things worse for all Americans. It is a flight of fancy to think taking from some Americans and giving to others will actually do any good. Re-distribution does not create new wealth; it steals wealth from producers and gives it to people who will merely consume it. This creates a net decline in the economy regardless of how efficient the technocrats are in re-distributing it. Eventually, the people from whom the money was taken will realize that their work yields them a poor result so they slow their effort and reduce their savings.

The flaw in the President’s system is that there will never be an end to the call for sacrifice. In spite of declining economic conditions caused by too much sacrifice, the President will call for more sacrifice. That the people are impoverished, that they are starving, poorly clothed and in poor living conditions is never blamed on the government. The government is good it is thought. It is only trying to help the poor they tell us. Yet, when people sacrifice their total production to the goals of the government, they have nothing to eat, to wear, to enjoy. We are getting there and when we reach the bottom level of misery, we’ll be told that our misery is the result of our greed and self-interest and that we have not sacrificed enough. It is an old story.

When we have eaten the productive citizens alive, we must find new scapegoats to eat, the greedy ones that have been “stealing” from the people who have nothing to steal. When we’ve destroyed the last factory, looted the last grocery store in the name of “the people”, then we’ll have reached the dead end. Some might remember hearing that “the best sacrifice is total sacrifice” and they’ll wonder why this idea didn’t make things better. Weren’t they trying to do the right thing? And some few might vaguely remember the words of the President about a defining moment when we “changed” into the “right” kind of society and we’ll wonder what happened. When we remember that someone “told you so” and warned you what was coming, you’ll vaguely remember that these people were bad. At this point, it is time to start eating shoe leather if you can find it.

Leaders such as President Obama, as did the leaders of Nazi Germany, are perennially waiting for their failed policies to someday succeed. They put off far into the future, the affluence of the coming great society they claim to be building. Today, we are told, it will happen after the election and we must stay the course.

We started this series of blog posts by recognizing our need to have honest leaders who are willing to admit the truth. But when the leaders are lying to the people; when their policies are creating rather than solving the problems of the nation, a free people has only one option; and that is to vote out the people who refuse to be honest with them.

Fascism is the worst possible system for mankind. Because it is constantly manipulating the people and their institutions, a fascist government is always on a collision course with reality. Today, one regulation is proposed to fix a problem caused by yesterday’s regulation. Tomorrow a new regulation will fix the problems created by today’s regulation and so on until there are more umpires than players, more policemen than citizens, more regulators than regulated, more dead than living.

In the past, many Americans realized that fascism was so bad they were willing to die in battle to defeat it. Today, we are being counseled by our leaders to accept it without even being told that it is fascism. We must face the fact that these leaders have accepted corruption as “practical” and they think the best way forward is to turn every man into a dependent waiting for the next handout taken from the honest work of a few slaves. This is the system they want and this is the system they tell your children is moral.

It should have been no surprise that the Nazis would eventually descend into the gutter. The murders of millions and the concentration camps are only some of the atrocities possible to a government which does not recognize individual rights. We must understand that our government, by not recognizing the right of people to their own production, by arbitrarily raising taxes, printing money, creating massive budgets, practicing crony capitalism and engaging in government corruption is on a collision course with reality as well.

No one can "regulate" prosperity into existence. No one can manipulate a people into responding positively to coercion. No one can lie themselves into power and expect that no one will know the truth. Sooner or later, someone will mumble under his breath the complaint that the leaders are bumbling idiots.

Yet, the brutal truth is that one can’t use force and “hope” for anything. One does not use force against disarmed citizens in the hope that things will get better. In order to be willing to use force against other men, a man must first hate those other men. In order to invoke policies that destroy people, one must want to destroy those people. This is not something that a person can do in ignorance. This is true of the man who gives the order, the politician who votes for it and the stormtrooper who enforces it with his bayonet. No one gets to the point of murdering innocent people without first deciding to murder someone.

The truth about the President’s economic policy is that it is a policy of deliberate destruction. The sooner we put a stop to this madness, the sooner we will be able to restore our liberties and begin living again.

There is only one way to plant the seed of prosperity in a people and that is to leave them free and protect them in their freedom. Let them think for themselves, express their own true thoughts, work according to the truth and let them trade without restriction and you will build the basis of a great society. When we recognize this again, it will be the true defining moment for a great society.

Where is George Washington when you need him?

The Truth about the President’s Economic Policy Part 7

So, if none of our leaders will provide the truth about the President’s speech in Kansas, someone else will have to do it.

The collectivists in our universities who taught the President and his friends will tell you that the intellectual enemies of mankind are the ideas of reason and freedom. They will tell you that our economic salvation can be found only in collective joining by all members of society; that the able should sacrifice to lift up the group.

They may not tell you this outright. They may actually tell you that they value reason and freedom, but their definitions of these concepts are convoluted and distorted compared to the views of the Founders. They will hold out a promise of a better tomorrow while you, the average American, know, perhaps subconsciously, that a better tomorrow, on these terms, can only come if you work hard while others do nothing. You, the producer, are being vilified as the cause of the nation’s problems while those who do not work hard are being called the victims of your drive for profit. You’ll know that the decks are stacked against you, the rules are designed to punish you and, in spite of your being punished, you are supposed to accept the “justice” that represents your enslavement. As you watch while your freedom and prosperity are slipping away, you are supposed to believe that nothing has changed, that collectivism really works and that the able sacrificing to the unable is a desirable moral ideal.

Our politicians and university professors tell us that capitalism is the problem and we need to replace it with a system that fosters sacrifice for the collective; otherwise known as social justice. Is capitalism the problem? Does capitalism really mean that each person is left to fend for himself? Yes, and that is what makes it possible for capitalism to foster the creation of incredibly efficient products and services that immeasurably improve the lives of people. That principle means that you can live in security, affluence and enduring economic abundance.

Capitalism, as we’ve discussed, is a system that fosters cooperation. People use their minds to decide which products they will purchase and which they will offer for sale. As long as each individual is free to make his own rational judgments he can constantly improve his life. On the other hand, the financial crisis was caused by the requirement that bank managers drop their rational judgment and not evaluate prospective mortgage applications on their merits. Capitalism would have required that they make a rational evaluation of each loan, identify the borrower’s ability to pay and make a decision based upon the expectation that the bank would make money on the loan. This process would not have allowed the banking crisis; it would have prevented the banking crisis.

Does capitalism countenance people to play by their own rules? What does the President mean when he accuses people of playing by their own rules? The President uses the term in order to falsely equate production with theft and it results in the restriction of production and the liberation of theft. The destruction of society comes when you force people to do what government wants rather than what they want. To let people play by their own rules is to liberate them to use rational means to accomplish their survival. It is this that the President and his friends destroyed in 1994 with the strengthened CRA rules. The real prejudice was not that aimed at the poor or black or brown; it was the prejudice aimed at bank managers who were unfairly called racist bigots because they were making loans according to rational standards.

How does an honest businessman, playing by his own rules, enable his customers to survive? He does so by means of correctly ascertaining reality and developing viable products that improve their lives. This is not dog-eat-dog but human cooperation and trade. This is not playing by your own irrational rules but playing according to reality and the requirements of survival. It is survival that capitalism makes possible, not cheating, not thieving and not lying.

By characterizing capitalism as evil, the President creates for himself a powerful political weapon. By means of this prejudice against capitalism and banks, he can take advantage of envious hatred to loot banks of their capital. But there is one idea that makes anti-capitalism powerful and successful as a political tool. This tool is altruism. It would not be possible to vilify capitalism were it not for the pervasive influence in society of altruism. Were it not for the moral dominance of the idea of sacrifice, there would be no argument that could be used to gain coercive power in a free society.

The President knows that whenever someone advocates free markets all he has to do is point out that unchecked capitalism would take money from the poor and put it in the hands of ruthless profit-chasers. Whenever Tea Party protesters complain about massive spending by the President, all he has to do is tell us about our duty to help the poor and especially those exploited by Big Business. Whenever people demand that the spending stop all he has to do is accuse them of wanting to hurt the poor and take away services that help them survive in a world where jobs are lacking.

The truth is that the President's economic policy is nothing but song and dance that touts the value of sacrifice as a means to picking peoples' pockets. The idea that the poor need homes; that they need the “American Dream” at the expense of people who have worked hard and saved their money is a travesty and a lie. Only those people who diligently work, diligently save their money and who have the ability to pay their loans should be allowed to own homes. Only by applying a rational standard can banks make money.

Yet, the Republicans are incapable of defending capitalism and of proving that self-interest is the best, most productive, most moral idea today. They seldom point out that capitalism has created virtually all of the good in our society; that capitalism is, in fact, good. Instead, they cringe whenever someone accuses them of being in the pay of capitalists and of seeking only to advance greedy interests. They are afraid to stand up and argue that capitalism is the most moral economic system in history because it gives people the power to make rational choices and take moral actions that benefit their lives. Republicans are afraid to say that the most moral way to have an affluent society is to leave people alone.

In fact, Republicans agree with the Democrats that force is necessary to make capitalism “work”. They propose huge government programs to prove to the voters that they too believe the lie that government can do great things for people, denying to the public that they are contradicting themselves. To appeal to the voters, they pull out the “populist” message of Teddy Roosevelt, promising a “trust buster” attitude to make greedy businesspeople pay for their crimes, hoping that people will think the Republicans are principled fighters for the people against greedy acquisition.

In advocating regulations, in vilifying businesspeople, in promising to punish trusts, Republicans are helping the progressives establish the terms of economic debate. By refusing to take a moral stand for capitalism and for the right of people to make a living without interference, they make profits impossible and punish people for hard work and innovation. All they have to do is open their eyes to see the proof of the morality of capitalism. All they have to do is notice the hotels, limousines and airplanes that they get around in, visit the restaurants and factories and the teeming cities with tall buildings to get a sense of what it means to be free. Like the proverbial busy-body who never stops to smell the roses, the Republicans never stop to notice that freedom creates abundance and moral living.

And because of this, they are helpless in the face of the President's morality of sacrifice and re-distribution. They are just as much responsible for the mess we are in.

-to be continued.

The Truth about the President’s Economic Policy Part 6

So, if none of our leaders will provide the truth about the President’s speech in Kansas, someone else will have to do it.

In his speech, the President avers:

“But, Osawatomie, this is not just another political debate. This is the defining issue of our time. This is a make-or-break moment for the middle class, and for all those who are fighting to get into the middle class. Because what's at stake is whether this will be a country where working people can earn enough to raise a family, build a modest savings, own a home, secure their retirement. Now, in the midst of this debate, there are some who seem to be suffering from a kind of collective amnesia. After all that's happened, after the worst economic crisis, the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, they want to return to the same practices that got us into this mess. In fact, they want to go back to the same policies that stacked the deck against middle-class Americans for way too many years. And their philosophy is simple: We are better off when everybody is left to fend for themselves and play by their own rules.”

What does the President mean when he says that some “want to return to the same practices that got us into this mess”? He should be referring to the practices of socialism since it was re-distribution of bank mortgages that caused the crisis. But the President is actually referring to the practices of capitalism and the people who want to return to it are the Tea Party people and some Republicans. The President and his Occupy friends are blaming capitalism for the crisis and hoping that you buy into the lie. To be sure, they don’t want you to think very deeply about the causes of the crisis.

The President holds that the “practices” of capitalism involve making money at any cost, by any means and through any deception possible. Certainly, then, these practices must have caused our financial crisis – not those of his best friends. Yet, this view is not new. It is one of the most long-running non-sequiturs in the history of economics. It is caused by using a false moral evaluation as the foundation for a “factual” conclusion.

The question of what caused our economic collapse is one for science, not morality. An astute analyst would ask about the specific actions men made that caused a specific economic result. Only by identifying the individual players and the specific actions they took can we can arrive at an identification of the specific moral premises that caused the economic result. Moral premises, when practiced politically, can have economic consequences but it is important to understand the facts first. The President's approach starts with the premise that men will always do wrong if they are left free to act. And since capitalism leaves people free to act, then the causes of a specific bad economic result must always be capitalism. This approach obfuscates the actors, the actions and the philosophies that actually caused the collapse. It is another example of thinking in non-essentials.

The result of this thought process is deception on the part of the President. His view of capitalism is wrong and this leads to a distorted opinion about the causes of the collapse. In fact, because of his own moral premises, he is the one individual still engaging in the kinds of "practices" that got us into the mess. For instance, I don’t see the Tea Party people asking for more sacrifice of the taxpayer’s money for the sake of those people harmed by the financial collapse. I see the President asking for more sacrifice. I don’t see the Tea Party people asking that people whose loans are being foreclosed be allowed to stay in their homes. I see the President demanding this. I don’t see the Tea Party people asking for loan extensions or other forms of re-financing of unpaid mortgages. I see the President creating programs to affect this. I don’t see the Tea Party people asking for bailouts of banks and AIG and Goldman Sachs and General Motors. I see the President bailing them out.

So who wants to return to the practices that got us into the mess? The answer is quite simply, the President.

By now, you should see that the President, in framing the debate as a sort of gang warfare, is hoping his words can create the reality he desires. The result is that everything he says winds up being true in reverse and takes on the nature of a lie. When he looks for villains, he does not look at his own gang, he looks at those who would stop his gang. When making an economic analysis, he does not identify the facts; he consults his own pre-conceived moral evaluation of capitalism. Only thinking in non-essentials will enable this form of thinking in reverse.

Yet, most of us know that wishes don’t make it so and the negative economic numbers don’t support the argument that the President has the solution to our economic mess. Those who make an actual effort to understand reality know that the President is the destroyer of the middle class and that the “practices” which caused the collapse were those of the President and his friends. The actual “greed” responsible for the collapse was that of people who schemed to steal the taxpayer’s money by means of collectivist and class warfare policies.

Yet, he is right that this is the defining issue of our time. This is a make or break moment for all of us, not just those of us in the middle class. Most of us know that the best way to “raise a family, build a modest savings, own a home, secure (our) retirement” is for America to move back to Constitutional liberties and capitalism. That isn’t collective amnesia; that’s recognizing the fact that only freedom can create the kind of prosperity necessary for the middle class to exist. Unfortunately, for the President, reality will not bend to his wishes.

The real debate that has raged for the last 200 plus years, has been between collectivist philosophies that bind man in slavery and the philosophy of the Enlightenment that declared man a free sovereign individual. In fact, this is the debate started by John Locke and the Founding Fathers. They analyzed the various forms of society and concluded that a new idea could settle the debate: a limited government that defends individual rights. The Founders knew it; the Tea Party members know it; the President and his looting friends are still having the debate as they muddle along in non-essentials about balance and fairness and making sure that no one can fend for themselves.

The worst financial crisis since the Great Depression was caused by the policies the President espouses, the idea of “re-distribution”. The critical, massive mistake; the most egregious thing that the President said in this speech is that Tea Party members and many other pro-capitalists believe “we are better off when everybody is left to fend for themselves and play by their own rules.” This statement shows an utter lack of understanding of what capitalism is and it justifies the fear of many in the Tea Party movement that the President is a Marxist who sees capitalism as evil.

The truth is that we are better off “to fend for ourselves and play by our own rules”; but it is important to understand what it means to advocate freedom against tyranny and dictatatorship. The President is criticizing freedom; a concept that most credible historians have identified as the very concept that has created our prosperity. Indeed, if one believes that freedom is wrong, then one can only seek to control men and ensure that freedom of action is curtailed. The President has joined forces with King George and taken us back to an economic policy of sacrifice and enslavement.

The Founders and many Americans would never have described freedom using those words: “to fend for themselves”. These are the words a collectivist would use to criticize freedom and capitalism. It is more of the same terminology that the President used when he talked about fairness and balance. It is based upon a hatred of the “voluntary cooperation” that Rand used when describing capitalism. A collectivist would call freedom “fending for ourselves” because he wants to ensure that you view freedom as a negative, predatory concept.

Collectivists don’t want you to discover that freedom means freedom of the mind. They don’t want you to recognize the “voluntary cooperation” that is characteristic of capitalism. They don’t want you to see yourself as “an island” responsible for your own economic results; rather they want you to view yourself as helpless without someone else’s sacrifice; helpless to think, to live, to love and to enjoy life.

Collectivists think they have a better idea; the pursuit of togetherness and commonality and sacrifice, a society that will drag us screaming and kicking into the coercive imposition of altruism - with smiles and lies to make us think we are doing it voluntarily. Collectivist dogma proclaims it a crime to be proud, to stand alone; to think with your own mind and to judge based upon your values and standards. A collectivist President would attempt to be the moral authority for all people. He would cast an evil eye toward anyone acting independently. He would use non-essentials to pass judgment upon those who “play by their own rules” and he would ensure that the scales are tipped in favor of those who can’t fend for themselves. Who pays for the tipping of the scale? Those who can fend for themselves.

But we can’t lose sight of the full reality. Collectivism has two symbolic hands: The first is the hand held out asking for your help, reminding you with a smile that you have an obligation to help others, that we should work together to make a better world, while the other hand is picking your pocket. That's what you get for thinking collectivism is a good idea in theory.

- To be continued.

The Truth about the President’s Economic Policy Part 5

So, if none of our leaders will provide the truth about the President’s speech in Kansas, someone else will have to do it.

In his speech, the President said:

“And ever since, there's been a raging debate over the best way to restore growth and prosperity, restore balance, restore fairness. Throughout the country, it's sparked protests and political movements – from the Tea Party to the people who've been occupying the streets of New York and other cities. It's left Washington in a near-constant state of gridlock. It's been the topic of heated and sometimes colorful discussion among the men and women running for president.”

It is true, the debate has raged, but the President's words are deliberately deceiving. He is actually attempting to set the terms of the debate to favor a long-standing Marxist agenda. His use of the words, "the best way to restore growth and prosperity, restore balance, restore fairness" is intended to establish false Marxist package deals in your mind. He wants you to conclude with him that we need more government controls and regulation of the economy.

First of all, today's Marxists do not care to "restore growth and prosperity". They have known for decades that Marxist re-distribution does no such thing. They use the words to pull you into their world of lies. They want you to think that they are as concerned about prosperity as you are concerned. They are not; they only want power and they use these words to fool you into thinking they actually want to make things better. In addition, their use of these terms is designed to make you think that they actually know how to restore growth and prosperity when they know nothing of the kind. They want you to think they are a vital part of the debate about prosperity and that they merely have a different view on it; that their solution, which is to create more government coercion, is just as good as your solution which is to restore capitalist principles of freedom.

The other terms: "restore balance, restore fairness" are also pure Marxist myths. They assume the premise that balance and fairness are actually proper goals of social policy (meaning goals of government force) and that you, like they, want a balanced and fair society. What they want you to ignore is that their solutions for achieving balance and fairness are nothing more than more coercion, more government force.

The other false implication of this word usage is that capitalism creates imbalance and unfairness which it does not. The Marxist idea of "imbalance" in capitalism means that some people become rich and others descend further into poverty. But, in capitalism, this does not actually happen. The accumulation of large amounts of capital enables the investment in larger and larger companies such as utilities, national transportation companies, etc., all of which create a higher standard of living for everyone especially the poor. Such successes result, not because of greed, but because some people work harder and/or smarter than others. Those who come up with the best solutions to human problems in a capitalist system are necessarily going to get richer than those who don't. The Marxist argument ignores the fact that, in capitalism, the beneficiaries of those bigger companies are the people who buy from them and that includes the poor and middle class.

The idea that capitalism is "unfair" is based upon a similar argument; that capitalism unfairly rewards people with money and punishes those without money. Again, the Marxist myth is that this is a problem. The truth is that there is nothing unfair about a person who creates great goods for trade and gains lots of money in the process. The individual has earned it. The idea that such people should pay higher taxes because they have unfairly taken more from the system than they put into it is pure collectivist hogwash. They have, in fact, put more into the system than they receive in terms of riches. The value they have created is worth much more than the profits they make. There is no way to put a price upon the long-term benefits of a system like capitalism that is constantly improving and making peoples' lives better. What is unfair, however, is the Marxist system that rewards people who use government force to put more able competitors out of business.

In spite of these ages-old myths used by the President, it is true that the debate about a proper economic system has raged. The Tea Party phenomenon began to develop after the politicians “saved” the economy by means of a massive infusion of fiat money into the banking system, most of which went to the banking institutions that contributed the most to Democratic politicians. These were institutions that had become “over-leveraged” in mortgage derivatives bundled by the Democrats at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

While the politicians insisted that TARP was necessary to “save capitalism” back in 2008, the American people gave the politicians a clear signal: “Don’t do it! Don’t bail out the companies that made these bad investments.” Congress, after first defeating the bill to authorize TARP, came back a week later to pass it. We are still struggling with the consequences of this mistake. When the American people saw that their politicians were doing things, massive things, without their approval, the genesis of the Tea Party took shape. Later, when they saw that President Obama was engaged in massive payoffs to his political cronies under the name of “stimulus” for the economy, they knew that it was time to unite against these massive violations of their rights.

However, we should not be confused about the so-called “Occupy” movement that the President mentioned. This movement is an invention of the Obama administration and the unions, not to mention the holdovers from ACORN. Union money, laundered by the administration, is behind this movement and their goal is to support the President. There is nothing grassroots about this movement. It is by, about and for the Obama administration…ostensibly aimed at the very people who support the Obama administration, the crony capitalists…but clearly it is an anti-capitalist movement (Remember, there is a difference between “crony capitalism” and capitalism). This movement is nothing more than a cynical effort by the unions and the President to gin up support for their legislative agenda and to instill in the American public an anti-capitalist attitude. It is an effort to create a faux-movement to "replace" and discredit the Tea Party movement.

Don’t be fooled when the President insists that the “Occupy” movement is a genuine reflection of real attitudes. This so-called movement is nothing more than the President’s effort to develop the pitchforks that he will need for the coming election. These people are practicing for the street riots and disruptions that will be let loose on society by the administration during the lead up to the election. This movement is nothing more than Obama’s effort to directly inject himself into the opposition’s politics so he can control the debate. The President is the Occupy movement's creator and leader and they support his goals. The unions have paid for these demonstrations with laundered money from government. This means the unions are colluding with the government in a way that is corrupt and evil – and this fact alone is a clear reason that the Democrats should be rejected wholesale in the coming elections. We must stop the unions' efforts to corrupt government. Theirs is fake outrage, fake protest and fake principles. There is nothing democratic about the so-called Occupy movement except that they are Democrats pretending to be a grassroots movement.

And should the President not be able to control his opposition, and should he somehow lose the election, these people will be ready to riot in every major city. It will be the left’s last stand and it won’t be pretty. Their goal is to create as much havoc as possible in order to save their own skins; as if this would actually save their skins. The left knows that it is due for a total repudiation by the American people and their only hope is to instill a defeatist attitude among Tea Party members.

The President is also trying to blame “gridlock” for his inability to advance his fascist agenda. Today’s gridlock is a result of Tea Party efforts to stop the President’s massive spending programs. It is, in fact, a good thing. By electing fiscal conservatives and budget hawks, the Tea Party is blocking the President’s efforts to move our nation further into fascism through massive spending and interference in the economy. The President's response is that the Tea Party movement is blocking the progress necessary to solve our economic problems. His goal is to counter the Tea Party opposition by disenfranchising it and drawing attention to the Occupy "message" of more government spending and re-distribution.

We have now discovered the next reason why the President does not want to speak in terms of essential principles. He must avoid his own essential principles because they have always been rejected by the American people. These principles are those of socialism, re-distribution and forced altruism. The President’s solution to the rejection of these principles is to discuss politics as if it were a matter of “our gang versus their gang”. This deliberate effort to obfuscate principles is the only way the President and the Democrats can run for election while at the same time moving the nation headlong into full-blown socialist re-distribution. If the President can turn the debate into a sort of “gang warfare” then he need not discuss principles; he need only throw dirt and mud at his opponents in an effort to “brand” them as evil while he pretends to be the enlightened protector of the middle class.

Can this approach win? The President supposedly has $1 billion dollars to prove that it can. The question is: Can money replace principles in a political campaign? Can money buy principles? Can the constant repetition of lies and spurious charges win an election? Can it help politicians deceive people?

Not if they are paying attention.

-to be continued

The Truth about the President’s Economic Policy Part 4

So, if none of our leaders will tell the truth about the President’s speech in Kansas, someone else will have to do it.

In his speech, the President said:

“Now, for many years, credit cards and home equity loans papered over this harsh reality. But in 2008, the house of cards collapsed. We all know the story by now: mortgages sold to people who couldn't afford them, or even sometimes understand them. Banks and investors allowed to keep packaging the risk and selling it off. Huge bets – and huge bonuses – made with other people's money on the line. Regulators who were supposed to warn us about the dangers of all this, but looked the other way or didn't have the authority to look at all.

It was wrong. It combined the breathtaking greed of a few with irresponsibility all across the system. And it plunged our economy and the world into a crisis from which we're still fighting to recover. It claimed the jobs and the homes and the basic security of millions of people – innocent, hardworking Americans who had met their responsibilities but were still left holding the bag.”

The implication here is that the house of cards collapsed because of…wait for it…irresponsible greed. It was because people wanted to make money that the house collapsed, and, the President thinks, it was wrong. But let’s look a little deeper. The President talks about the fact that mortgages were sold to people who couldn’t afford them. Who was responsible for that? Issuing these bad mortgages was caused by a regulatory scheme set up to re-distribute bank loans from credit-worthy borrowers to non-credit-worthy borrowers. Certainly, these bad mortgages would not have been given by a rational bank manager seeking to make money; he would have known that the loans were questionable and that issuing so many of them could potentially destroy his bank. Why did "rational" bank managers seeking to make money issue so many bad loans? Dig deeper and you find that this was done because of government regulations that forced banks to issue and solicit these bad loans.

Which group of people created and favored these programs? The answer is progressives of the “New Deal” variety. In fact, the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), which was passed in the ‘70s, was strengthened in 1994 after a law suit that claimed banks were guilty of racial discrimination when deciding who got home loans. The goal of these lawsuits was to force the banks to issue more loans to poor people. The strengthened CRA demanded that banks prove they were not discriminating against blacks under threat of prosecution by the Clinton Justice Department. And it was a willing ACORN that encouraged poor people to take these loans and they had a working scheme in place to take advantage of the CRA regulations. In addition, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac bought these loans and bundled” them into investment packages to be sold to financial institutions as top-rated securities. Certainly, there was some fraud involved here.

It was a failed re-distribution scheme fostered by progressives that caused the stock market to collapse, TARP to be created and the literal theft of almost one half of the savings of many middle class Americans. Yet, not one government official has been charged with a crime. It was the government, not capitalism, that was responsible for the collapse and it was progressives, including President Obama, who lobbied and sued the government to create this entire scheme. So now, one of the architects of the fiasco (the President), tells us that it was not caused by the people who forced the banks to issue the mortgages (the Clinton administration), or the people who shook down the banks (ACORN), forced banks to prove they weren’t racist (ACORN) and solicited (pressured) poor people to apply for the loans (again ACORN). And, in spite of this, we are supposed to believe that the real problem was “greed”. Is the President fingering his own greed or that of his employer ACORN? I don't think so.

Understand what I am saying: all of these bad decisions that the President criticizes were decisions made by people who share the President’s philosophy of re-distribution and they were undertaken by institutions created to effect that re-distribution. These include Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, government appointed heads of those companies, Countrywide, a Democratic Congress, Barney Frank, Chris Dodd, ACORN; all of whom claimed to be working on behalf of the “poor”. Yet, this sounds like altruism to me, not greed.

Why isn't the altruism inherent in these programs blamed for the economic collapse? It was not greed but socialist principles that sacrificed the savings of the middle class in order to give homes to the lower class. The actors whose philosophy caused the collapse were involved in socialist irresponsibility, not capitalism. Why didn't the media pick up on this?

The answer is pretty simple: socialism doesn’t work and they are invested in socialism. The cold, hard truth is that socialism is the means through which a smart criminal can cover up the fact that he is stealing money. All he has to do is say he is doing it for the poor. And rather than expose the charlatan scam that caused the financial collapse of the most powerful economy in history, the media looks the other way. And they allow the President to blame the fiasco on an institution, capitalism, that was raped and violated by the scam.

It should be no surprise that one of the lawyers involved in changing the CRA back in 1994, President Obama, is the one person who benefited most from the economic collapse. Not only was he able to skim some of the stolen money for his Presidential campaigns (he is one of the largest recipients of Fannie and Freddie campaign contributions), but when the economy collapsed, it paved the way for his election as President. Although he and his progressive friends caused the collapse, the Republicans got blaimed. In fact, Obama may have lost the election were it not for the collapse made possible by the failed policies he advocated. Is it a coincidence or a plot? I’ll let you decide.

Needless to say, the President won’t blame himself for the financial collapse, nor does he want to blame his own philosophy. But his denials don’t change the truth. And this is a time when honesty and truth are required (as if there is ever a time when they are not). Rather than tell you the brutal honest truth, the President would rather play politics and continue to assert in a major economic speech that capitalism is the cause of the problems that he created.

The truth is that the philosophy destroying our economy is altruism, the philosophy of the President. Does he care that re-distributing money violates the rights of hard working Americans? Does he care that it makes virtual slaves of the very people he claims to be defending? Apparently not, since he is not willing to admit that he is the real destroyer of the middle class. It is not his fault, he says. He inherited the situation, feigning innocence.

Are you now beginning to see why the President does not want to think in terms of essentials and why it is not possible for him to tell you the truth? If he were truly an honest man, he’d admit that his philosophy is bankrupt and that socialism has failed.

Apparently, judging from the President's words and actions, this is not the time for the truth. According to the President, it is the time for posturing, for pretending to be an honest critic. It is a time for telling lies and for accusing his political enemies of doing the very things that he is doing, and, if that isn’t enough, he now intends to spend $1 billion dollars (that he got from someone) to convince the American people that the real culprit is the greed of “fat cats”.

On the contrary, I think it is the time for telling the truth. We cannot survive without it.

-to be continued

The Truth about the President’s Economic Policy Part 3

So, if none of our leaders will provide the truth about the President’s speech in Kansas, someone else will have to do it.

In his speech, the President said:

“Today, we're still home to the world's most productive workers. We're still home to the world's most innovative companies. But for most Americans, the basic bargain that made this country great has eroded. Long before the recession hit, hard work stopped paying off for too many people. Fewer and fewer of the folks who contributed to the success of our economy actually benefited from that success. Those at the very top grew wealthier from their incomes and their investments – wealthier than ever before. But everybody else struggled with costs that were growing and paychecks that weren't – and too many families found themselves racking up more and more debt just to keep up.”

Here the President is attempting to provide a reason why the “optimism” of the previous statement (Part 2) has been “eroded”. Yes, the President says, we still have the most productive workers and the most innovative companies, but the “basic bargain” has been eroded, hard work stopped paying off for too many people. What does this mean? Who eroded the “basic bargain”? What was that basic bargain? How was it brought about? Who made it possible?

The basic bargain to which the President refers was a sort of implicit contract that if you “give it your all” you have some assurance that you’ll be able to take care of your family, have your health care taken care of and put away money for retirement. It is this “bargain” that has been eroded, according to the President. The “middle class” is no longer receiving the benefit of the “basic bargain” and someone is responsible for that: “those at the top”.

Before we go back to the President’s speech, we must establish the full context. First of all, we should understand what made possible those “most productive workers” and “most innovative companies” to which the President refers. I think it is important to have this background if we are to think in essentials. Indeed, you can’t decide what to do in the future if you don’t know the essential principles that got us where we are.

How does a nation accomplish productive workers and innovative companies? Not every nation has been able to do this and it is important to be clear about the ideas and values that create prosperity. In other words, what must we have in the way of economic principles in order to build a vibrant economy?

History has provided an answer: capitalism. Capitalism is the prerequisite of prosperity. Remove capitalism from a nation and you lose it. Why is this? What is so good about capitalism that it creates such tremendous abundance?

As Ayn Rand has pointed out: “Capitalism is the system that made productive cooperation possible among men, on a large scale—a voluntary cooperation that raised everyone's standard of living—as the nineteenth century has demonstrated.”(1)

The fact that capitalism enables voluntary cooperation is missed by the President and his economic advisers. And they have no idea why voluntary cooperation is accomplished more effectively by capitalism than by their vaunted collectivism that requires cooperation through shared sacrifice. Capitalism must be inferior to them because it is only about “playing by your own rules” and stealing from people. This view sees exploiters everywhere and it misses the spectacle of millions of individual acts of mutually beneficial cooperation that take place every day under capitalism.

Rand also provides the definition of capitalism:

“Capitalism is a social system based on the recognition of individual rights, including property rights, in which all property is privately owned.

The recognition of individual rights entails the banishment of physical force from human relationships: basically, rights can be violated only by means of force. In a capitalist society, no man or group may initiate the use of physical force against others. The only function of the government, in such a society, is the task of protecting man's rights, i.e.., the task of protecting him from physical force; the government acts as the agent of man's right of self-defense, and may use force only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use; thus the government is the means of placing the retaliatory use of force under objective control.”(2)

According to progressives, capitalism is not about the banishment of physical force; it is about the use of physical force through government to create monopolies, get special privileges and steal from the consumers who have no choice but to work in the factories and use the products. They ignore the men who rose from poverty to become some of the most successful industrialists in the world; whose enterprises provided virtually all of the luxuries we enjoy today. They ignore the elevating standards of living, the longer life-spans, the mobility and self-confidence that people develop because they hold their destinies in their own hands. They ignore the millions of morally proper decisions that people make daily. They ignore the fact that capitalist systems tend to be more peaceful and secure because people who earn their own livings do not feel compelled to violate the property rights of others.

Leftists cannot think in terms of essentials. They don’t understand that survival is about work and that any system that liberates man to pursue survival through production and trade is one that creates a million mutually beneficial trades every day. They confuse production with force and criticize production as if it means a zero-sum transaction where one person wins and gets rich and the other person loses and becomes poor. They ignore the fact that it is capitalism, and nothing else, that created the middle class. So they proclaim themselves champions of the middle class while they seek to destroy or undermine the source of voluntary cooperation: capitalism. And they countenance physical force by government in order to rectify what they consider to be problems created by capitalism (that are actually created by their own coercive policies).

Progressives act as if they are righteous defenders of the average man, protectors of the rights of man, as if they were fighting dictators not industrialists. They posture as courageous critics of a corrupt system while ignoring the fact that the capitalist “dictators” they denigrate are merely clear thinking men who have mastered the art of production, not the art of conquest. They don’t understand what it takes to create and manage a thriving corporation because they have never done it and they let their altruist morality cloud their minds to the fact that capitalism has lifted more people out of poverty than any of the sundry dictators they admire. Where capitalism enables thriving, socialism enables murder; and yet they don’t see it – they don’t see the killing fields and mass graves.

They don’t see the beautiful cities of capitalism, the tall buildings, the bustling factories and the brilliant shops offering stunning products. They don’t see the automobiles and the jet airplanes and the HDTVs, the 5-speaker sound systems and the iPods and iPhones. Instead, they imagine dead bodies and starving children in the clutches of a blood thirsty capitalist eager for plunder. They proclaim that capitalism would just as soon let people starve for the sake of profit without noticing that the real starving people in the world are those trapped by the progressives' view of the world.

And what is their view of the world? Like all altruists, they believe man is evil at base and incapable of being moral. They send out this teaching through every pronouncement and judgment of men. They treat individuals as expendable and particularly worthy of ridicule. Since their morality holds that man should sacrifice for others, they see man’s inability to be totally self-sacrificial as a black mark on man. Therefore, the most successful, those who practice sacrifice the least, are viewed as particularly evil and deserving of forced sacrifice, control and punishment. If you notice a similarity between this view and the views of some of the most brutal tribal leaders of the past including some of the most monstrous dictators, the similarity is not a coincidence.

What is the greatest threat to capitalism, peace and cooperation? It is the progressives' view of man coupled with the idea of collectivism, the modern form of tribal organization; the idea that people must cluster into bands or tribes and battle one another for political power. Anti-capitalism is essentially anti-reason and anti-man in the same way that collectivism is anti-individual. It is a desire to destroy the good because the good is unwilling to grovel at the altar of self-sacrifice.

Don’t proclaim that altruists really want to do good things for people. There are two sides to the altruism coin. One side is protestations of love for man while the other side is protestations of hatred for everything. One side, the side of professed love, is the outward expression of altruism that keeps altruists in the game of acting on their hatred. And this brings us back to the President’s speech.

The President, by proclaiming a love and support of the middle class, declares that the enemy of the middle class is the very system that created the middle class: capitalism.

Yet, capitalism can only exist in a nation where the government protects individual rights and the rule of law. Its basic principle is that the individual is free to use his own mind, create his own survival and keep the results of his work. It declares that man is essentially good, capable of reason and that he acquires his survival through production and trade with others, by means of reason. What does capitalism require? Capitalism requires freedom, freedom to think, freedom to evaluate reality, to make judgments, to develop products, to obtain capital, to trade and to keep the results of one's work. The President will have none of that.

Remember what I said about the character of the American people in the pre-war and wartime period; that their victories were made possible by the fact that they were free. Their freedom meant they were free to live, to think, to invest and to create…they were not regulated into prosperity; their Constitution liberated them to create that prosperity because the Founders knew that their hard work and thought would directly benefit them and that a government that protected their rights is the most advanced government possible.

Because of capitalism, the American spirit was free to win the war and this spirit, this sense of life, released upon the world a “can do” attitude that says anything is possible if you are free to act. Capitalism means freedom to survive; not just for “those at the top” but for all Americans. Americans become “those at the top” compared to the rest of the world by producing and investing their own savings (for retirement). The middle class was created when Americans were liberated to work in the factories; liberated to become the workers, middle managers and the upper managers. Without capitalism you do not have productive workers, innovative companies or a middle class.

How can the President be a defender of the middle class when he does not seem to understand this critical point about freedom - and especially about capitalism? How can he, on the one hand, champion freedom and on the other champion re-distribution of the income of producers? Isn’t he turning the producers into slaves through re-distribution? How can he, on the one hand, claim to be liberating producers, “those at the top”, while on the other hand raising taxes upon them? How can he, on the one hand, praise the free market, while on the other hand creating oppressive regulations that stifle economic activity? How can he, on the one hand, recognize that Americans are productive and our factories innovative while on the other hand not even acknowledging that it was capitalism that brought it about? And if it was capitalism that brought this situation about, how can he, on any hand, claim that “playing by your own rules” is what brought capitalism down and ended the "basic bargain"?

So the real question is not how did we lose our optimism and the “basic bargain”. The real questions should be “how did we lose capitalism?” and “how can we get it back?” And the real answer should be, by eliminating regulations, letting people keep what they earn and returning to the Bill of Rights.

-to be continued

1)How To Read (And Not To Write), The Ayn Rand Letter Vol. 1, No. 26 September 25, 1972
2)What is Capitalism, Capitalism: the Unknown Ideal by Ayn Rand