Barack Obama has been President of the United States now a little shy of three years. His policy positions have remained clear and unswerving both when he had workable majorities in the Congress and , since January 2011, when he has not.
Unlike President Clinton, President Obama will not adjust to accommodate changes in electoral preferences. So, if he is re-elected in November 2012, a decisive plurality of voters, as reflected in the Electoral College, will overtly and explicitly endorse his policy platform. This time, there will be no error of calculation. Americans will know precisely what they have chosen, and why they have registered that choice.
“President Obama…is a true believer in the European model of the welfare state. Everybody who was listening learned that three years ago. The fact that the European welfare states are crashing is irrelevant ti him; true believers are never rattled by facts, not even facts that slap them in the face like a cream pie. The opportunity to impose a failing welfare state on America is what drew him to the presidency in the first place. The congressional elections last year, the Republican rout that Mr. Obama rightly called a ‘shellacking’ of his party, made no impression either. The results were all about cutting taxes and dismantling government, but not to Mr. Obama. Those elections were merely a few pebbles on the road to Utopia.” Wesley Pruden, ‘If only pigs really could fly’, The Washington Times, November 25, 2011
Barack Obama is running for re-election on a platform of consolidating forever the expansion of government during his first two years at 25 per cent of gross domestic product or more, while increasing federal taxes to 28 per cent of gross domestic product or more in order to pay lip-service to debt reduction. That involves almost doubling federal income taxes. And that cannot remotely be achieved on the backs of the top 1 percent alone.
The path that Barack Obama has chosen is unsustainable in the longer-term. Greece, Spain, Portugal and Italy have already demonstrated that. And France is right on the edge. The only country that conceivably can pull it off is Germany, because their population is industrious and frugal.And the German government is already trimming its spending. A majority of other Europeans and Americans do not share those Germanic qualities. So they are on the big spenders’ roads to ruin.
Barack Obama, of course, does not care at all about the longer-term. He cares only about the present and the following fours years. By then, wealthy as he and his immediate family will be, he can relocate anywhere across the globe. And allow the United States to go to Hell in a handbasket:
“Everyone knows that unless someone does something, everything will be swallowed by one of those black holes from outer space. Health care costs, which already consume 3.7 per cent of the gross domestic product, will take almost twice that by the year 2020. Democrats are determined not to reform any of that. Who will still be in Washington then? The distance to 2020 might as well be measured in light years. Next year is the short run, where Washington measures it all. In the long-run, as Winston Churchill famously said, there is no long run.” Wesley Pruden, ibid.
Tags: Americans will get what they deserve, ideology dominates reality, Obama's road to the welfare state, Obama's socialism unswerving, voters will make their choice
November 26, 2011 at 12:15 am |
The Great Thanksgiving Hoax
by Richard J. Maybury
Each year at this time school children all over America are taught the official Thanksgiving story, and newspapers, radio, TV, and magazines devote vast amounts of time and space to it. It is all very colorful and fascinating.
It is also very deceiving. This official story is nothing like what really happened. It is a fairy tale, a whitewashed and sanitized collection of half-truths which divert attention away from Thanksgiving’s real meaning.
The official story has the pilgrims boarding the Mayflower, coming to America and establishing the Plymouth colony in the winter of 1620-21. This first winter is hard, and half the colonists die. But the survivors are hard working and tenacious, and they learn new farming techniques from the Indians. The harvest of 1621 is bountiful. The Pilgrims hold a celebration, and give thanks to God. They are grateful for the wonderful new abundant land He has given them.
The official story then has the Pilgrims living more or less happily ever after, each year repeating the first Thanksgiving. Other early colonies also have hard times at first, but they soon prosper and adopt the annual tradition of giving thanks for this prosperous new land called America.
The problem with this official story is that the harvest of 1621 was not bountiful, nor were the colonists hardworking or tenacious. 1621 was a famine year and many of the colonists were lazy thieves.
In his History of Plymouth Plantation, the governor of the colony, William Bradford, reported that the colonists went hungry for years, because they refused to work in the fields. They preferred instead to steal food. He says the colony was riddled with “corruption,” and with “confusion and discontent.” The crops were small because “much was stolen both by night and day, before it became scarce eatable.”
In the harvest feasts of 1621 and 1622, “all had their hungry bellies filled,” but only briefly. The prevailing condition during those years was not the abundance the official story claims, it was famine and death. The first “Thanksgiving” was not so much a celebration as it was the last meal of condemned men.
But in subsequent years something changes. The harvest of 1623 was different. Suddenly, “instead of famine now God gave them plenty,” Bradford wrote, “and the face of things was changed, to the rejoicing of the hearts of many, for which they blessed God.” Thereafter, he wrote, “any general want or famine hath not been amongst them since to this day.” In fact, in 1624, so much food was produced that the colonists were able to begin exporting corn.
What happened?
After the poor harvest of 1622, writes Bradford, “they began to think how they might raise as much corn as they could, and obtain a better crop.” They began to question their form of economic organization.
This had required that “all profits & benefits that are got by trade, working, fishing, or any other means” were to be placed in the common stock of the colony, and that, “all such persons as are of this colony, are to have their meat, drink, apparel, and all provisions out of the common stock.” A person was to put into the common stock all he could, and take out only what he needed.
This “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need” was an early form of socialism, and it is why the Pilgrims were starving. Bradford writes that “young men that are most able and fit for labor and service” complained about being forced to “spend their time and strength to work for other men’s wives and children.” Also, “the strong, or man of parts, had no more in division of victuals and clothes, than he that was weak.” So the young and strong refused to work and the total amount of food produced was never adequate.
To rectify this situation, in 1623 Bradford abolished socialism. He gave each household a parcel of land and told them they could keep what they produced, or trade it away as they saw fit. In other words, he replaced socialism with a free market, and that was the end of famines.
Many early groups of colonists set up socialist states, all with the same terrible results. At Jamestown, established in 1607, out of every shipload of settlers that arrived, less than half would survive their first twelve months in America. Most of the work was being done by only one-fifth of the men, the other four-fifths choosing to be parasites. In the winter of 1609-10, called “The Starving Time,” the population fell from five-hundred to sixty.
Then the Jamestown colony was converted to a free market, and the results were every bit as dramatic as those at Plymouth. In 1614, Colony Secretary Ralph Hamor wrote that after the switch there was “plenty of food, which every man by his own industry may easily and doth procure.” He said that when the socialist system had prevailed, “we reaped not so much corn from the labors of thirty men as three men have done for themselves now.”
Before these free markets were established, the colonists had nothing for which to be thankful. They were in the same situation as Ethiopians are today, and for the same reasons. But after free markets were established, the resulting abundance was so dramatic that the annual Thanksgiving celebrations became common throughout the colonies, and in 1863, Thanksgiving became a national holiday.
Thus the real reason for Thanksgiving, deleted from the official story, is: Socialism does not work; the one and only source of abundance is free markets, and we thank God we live in a country where we can have them.