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From: A Voice of Freedom <Freedom@nospam.xxx>
Subject: TRUTH!: There Are No Socialists
Newsgroups: 
alt.politics.usa,alt.politics.conservative,us.politics,alt.politics.usa.mis
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There Are No Socialists

    <http://pajamasmedia.com/victordavishanson/there-are-no-socialists/>

June 25, 2011 - 6:56 pm- by Victor Davis Hanson

*Are There Really Socialists?*

Two unconnected developments were announced this past week. President 
Obama is releasing oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, despite the 
absence of a global embargo or horrific natural disaster --- and despite 
a litany of assertions from 2008 that drilling and increased supply 
might only have a marginal effect on prices.

Like the sudden Afghan withdrawal announcement, the tapping is largely 
explained by political worries about reelection, as in increasing oil 
supplies to lower gas prices by election time --- and thus avoiding 
campaign ads equating Obama's opposition to drilling with high prices at 
the 2012 pump.

In a second piece of news, the Europeans seem to be winning far more 
plane orders than Boeing. One wonders whether that fact is remotely 
connected with airlines' collective worries about obtaining orders on 
time and as specified --- as in uncertainty whether Obama's NLRB ruling 
<http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/boeing-vs-the-nlrb-a-naked-power-grab-by-
radical-p
ro-unionists/> that attempted to shut down a nearly $1 billion new aircraft 
line
in South Carolina translates into something like "who knows what those 
Americans
are doing next?"

All this raises some questions. The strangest things about the global 
statist crack-up are socialists' unhappiness with their socialist 
utopia, and their subsequent efforts to avoid the consequences of the 
very redistributive state that they themselves once so gladly crafted.

Greece is the locus classicus. Why are the Greeks protesting? Against 
whom? They obtained long ago the promised bloated sector and high taxes 
that all schemed to avoid. Their alma mater EU is hardly a demonic 
capitalist-run plutocracy, but a kindred socialist state. Is Greece an 
oil producer, industrial powerhouse, high-tech innovator --- anything 
that might explain the sort of upscale life, modern infrastructure, 
legions of Mercedeses, and plush second homes that one began to see in 
Greece after 1985?

In truth, socialist Greeks are furious that they have impoverished 
themselves and demand that private money and far harder-working Germans 
bail them out --- but why so, when socialism should not need outside 
capitalist-generated dollars? Could not the Greeks, Soviet style, set up 
a Cuban collective, and adjust their lifestyles (there goes Kolonaki 
culture) to their means, living in an opportunity of result utopia with 
a huge public sector, more siestas, high but ignored taxes --- with a 
collective good riddance to those awful intrusive German bankers?

Here at home, Obama got his ObamaCare. Why, then, did he grant hundreds 
of exemptions --- many to northern California liberals? Should they 
instead not have lined up to volunteer to implement such a wonderful, 
long-needed entitlement?

He said energy would rightly sky-rocket, given his determination to curb 
fossil fuel production (cf. "bankrupt" coal companies). Why then is 
Obama concerned that gas hit $4; is not such a high price a welcomed 
retardant to burning hot fuels? The higher the gas prices, the more that 
subsidized wind and solar power, and electric cars are attractive, and 
thus the more we enjoy "sustainable" power. Right? Am I missing 
something about this desire within our grasp of "living within our means"?

Obama enjoyed big majorities in both houses of Congress; and on the 
campaign trail he had promised a de facto amnesty under the euphemism of 
"comprehensive immigration reform." So why did he not grant such 
exemptions, and absorb 11, 15, or 20 million new "citizens" from Oaxaca? 
Is not that the point of amnesty, to welcome in new constituencies who 
will remember a benefactor at the polls?

We have heard that taxes, more taxes, and more taxes are the cure for 
the massive deficits, run up by out of control spending. OK, fine. But 
why then does multimillionaire John Kerry go to great lengths to avoid 
taxes on his yacht (why a luxury yacht when so many have so little?); 
why are redistributive overseers like Timothy Geithner, Eric Holder, Tom 
Daschle, Charles Rangel, and Hilda Solis either late or delinquent in 
paying the federal, state, or local governments what they owe? Were not 
high taxes on the upper incomes like themselves the point of it all? 
Should not they pay all they can to ensure that their brethren receive 
needed entitlements? I thought Bono would lead an international effort 
of multimillionaire rock stars to relocate to socialist states like 
Ireland or Greece, so that they might gladly pay 75% of their incomes 
(which at "some point" they had enough of) to help others closer to 
home. Why instead is he fleeing 
<http://pajamasmedia.com/tatler/2011/06/25/u-pay-your-tax-2/> to low-tax 
nations? Did not such socialists have enough money by now without 
undermining the socialist state?

This discussion is, of course, a belabored example of why and how 
socialists do not like socialism. Indeed, statism is not a desired 
outcome, but rather more a strategy for obtaining power or winning 
acclaim as one of the caring, by offering the narcotic of promising 
millions something free at the expense of others who must be seen as 
culpable and obligated to fund it --- entitlements fueled by someone 
else's money that enfeebled the state, but in the process extended 
power, influence, and money to a technocratic class of overseers who are 
exempt from the very system that they have advocated.

So what is socialism? It is a sort of modern version of Louis XV's 
"Apr�s moi, le d�luge"  -- an unsustainable Ponzi scheme in which elite 
overseers, for the duration of their own lives, enjoy power, influence, 
and gratuities by implementing a system that destroys the sort of wealth 
for others that they depend upon for themselves.

Once the individual develops a dependency on food stamps, free medical 
care, subsidized housing, all sorts of disability or unemployment 
compensation, education credits, grants, and zero-interest loans --- the 
entire American version of the European socialist breadbasket --- then 
expectations for far more always keep rising, with a commensurate 
plethora of new justifications, usually in the realm of someone else 
having more than the recipient, always unjustly so. The endangered aid 
recipient is always seen as being pushed off a cliff in a wheel chair 
--- therefore, "they" can afford to give "me" more; things are not 
"fair"; there is no "equality."

Cutting back $2,500 a month in combined benefits and subsidies to $2300 
a month is always seen as far more heartless and cruel than not in the 
first place giving someone without subsidies a mere $200 a month. For 
every dollar taken, two are demanded. And that creates a powerful 
constituency for whom the shrillest rhetoric of oppression is, well, 
never too shrill. Revolutions are not fueled by the very poor seeking 
their daily bread, but by those on entitlements that revolt at the 
thought of less to come. A rioting Greek today is far better off than 
his parents in 1973 when I first arrived in the country; and he would 
remain far better off even under an "austerity" plan. But his 
expectations have soared geometrically with each euro received, and he 
now has convinced himself that not to have more is to have nothing.

History is not kind to such collective states of mind. Pay an Athenian 
in the fifth century BC a subsidy to go to the theater; and in the 
fourth century BC he is demanding such pay to vote in the assembly as 
well --- and there is not to be a third century free democratic polis. 
Extend to a Roman in the first century BC a small grain dole, and by the 
late first century AD he cannot live without a big dole, free 
entertainment in a huge new Coliseum, and disbursements of free coined 
money. Let the emperor Justinian try cutting back the bloated 
bureaucracy in sixth century AD Constantinople and he wins the Nika 
riots that almost destroy a civilization from within even as it is beset 
by hosts of foreign enemies.

Social Security started out as a few dollars a month to the elderly, in 
their last two or three years of life, to ensure that they could feed 
themselves without the indignity of borrowing from their children. It 
has morphed into someone living well for twenty years on far more money 
taken than was put in --- or a young family with a dyslexic child on 
"disability" for life. To cut any for the latter would cause far more 
riot and mayhem than not to have given the former anything in the first 
place --- despite the fact that the 21st century recipient was far less 
needy and got far more than the early 20th century recipient who needed 
more and got less.

What stops socialism?

I fear bankruptcy alone.

Who are socialists?

There are none. Only technocratic overseers who wish to give someone 
else's money to others as a means of winning capitalist-style lifestyles 
and power for themselves --- in a penultimate cycle of unsustainable 
spending. When this latest attempt at statism is over, Barack Obama will 
enjoy a sort of Clintonism, a globe-trotting post officium lifestyle of 
multimillion dollar honoraria to fund a lifestyle analogous to "two 
Americas" John Edwards, "earth in the balance" Al Gore, a tax-exempt 
yachting John Kerry, a revolving-door Citibank grandee like Peter 
Orszag, or a socialist Strauss-Kahn in $20,000 suits doling out billions 
to the "poor."

That is just the way it has been and will always be.

*Out West Update*

I thank readers for security tips in the aftermath of an awful month of 
burglaries and thefts, and plan to implement many of them, since one 
cannot flee and give in to the tides of lawlessness. Two postscripts: 
this week Fresno was declared the car theft capital of the United 
States, and Selma, two miles away, was found to be a breeding ground (as 
in specimens found) for the West Nile Virus carrying mosquito. So I am 
wondering whether the steering wheel "club" of the 1980s is on its way 
back, along with DDT? (PPS: I remember my grandfather's stories that 
there was out here malaria on occasion in the late 1890s before the 
advent of the Mosquito Abatement District and pesticides, and horse 
thievery was once epidemic: so are we postmoderns becoming premodern, as 
2011 in decline resembling 1890 on the upswing?