Shortly after the Obama administration started telling businesses what to do, Republicans started calling him a socialist. That's wrong - instead of having government own businesses outright as socialists advocate, he was nominally leaving them in private hands, which true-blue socialists like Lenin or Mao would never do.
Instead of letting businesses create economic growth by operating to maximize profit and job creation, however, he wrote reams of new regulations to control what businesses did. Having government control businesses in such detail is more fascist than socialist, but the end result is the same - government effectively runs businesses instead of their owners.
American politics has always descended to name-calling. Remember Chimpy McBushitler? Hitlery? People who use such labels forget the essence of politics. Politics is all about power, nothing more, nothing less.
As George Washington put it, "Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, is an untrustworthy servant and a fearful master." The only questions in government are "Who says?" and "Who pays?"
There's really only one question because it's always We the People who pay. The only question is, does government tell us what to do or do we decide for ourselves?
Our main job as voters is to defend our liberties against government, but we've been doing a lousy job. Our freedoms have been disappearing down the drain of increasing government power.
Some people desperately want to be in the "Who says?" part of the nation. George Bush, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and countless others before them went into politics because it offered them power over other people.
As soon as someone's elected to office, he or she figures out that there's only so much power to go around. Any power citizens have over their own lives means that elected officials have less power. Regardless of party, elected officials have a powerful incentive to take power from us and give it to themselves and to their friends. That's what politics is all about - gaining and using power.
The natural innocence of youth. |
Politicians often try to mobilize young people to gain power. Shortly after he was elected President, JFK started the Peace Corps, whose stated goal was to involve young people in doing good. Barack Obama mobilized so many young people to do good by helping him get elected that they became known as Yeswiccans. He followed up by promoting the Serve America Act which would have encouraged young people to volunteer for government service, on the phony premise that working for government is somehow more noble than providing goods and services that people actually want to buy.
Revolutions in the Middle East are run by young people. Mao Tes Tung mobilized millions of young people to attack his political enemies during the Great Leap Forward. Stalin had his Stalin Youth Movement. Adolf Hitler organized the Hitler Youth.
Hillary Clinton is so concerned about children and young people that she wrote a book, It Takes a Village, whose theme was that parents were so stressed out that government had to step in and help them raise their children to proper government standards. In effect, she wants government to assume parental responsibilities. Hitler agreed with Hillary about the importance of raising children properly:
The state must declare the child to be the most precious treasure of the people.
-Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler
Despite his overwhelming election victories, Hitler knew that not all voters were enthusiastic about where he was taking Germany. He couldn't persuade everyone, so he decided to control how parents raised their children:
Nov. 29, 1937 In Waldenberg, Germany, a court has taken children away from their parents because they refused to teach them Nazi ideology. The parents are pacifists, members of a Christian sect called International Bible Researchers. The court accused them of creating an environment where the children would grow up "enemies of the state." The children were delivered into the state's care.
The judge delivered a lengthy statement reading in part, "The law as a racial and national instrument entrusts German parents with the education of their children only under certain conditions, namely, that they educate them in the fashion that the nation and state expect." [emphasis added]
- Chronicles of the 20th Century, 1987 edition, p 475. Chronicle Publications, Mt. Kisco, NY.
American social service agencies use the Mondale Act to remove children into state control when parents raise children in ways bureaucrats don't like. In New Hampshire, the "live free or die" state, Fox News reported that the state Supreme Court was deciding whether to force a home-schooled child into public school. The reason? The home-school was "too religious." In other words, the child was not being educated in the "fashion the state expects."
Do similarities between how American courts treat parents who don't agree with them and what Nazi courts did mean that the politicians who wrote the Mondale act were Nazis? Do similarities between what Hillary advocates in It Takes a Village and what the Nazis did in controlling how parents raised children mean that Hillary is a Nazi?
Not at all. Hitler, JFK, Obama, Bush, Hillary - they're politicians. They do what they think will bring them power. Politicians have been kissing babies since the dawn of time; appealing to parents' concerns for children is a well-trodden path to power.
Controlling schools is another path to power, hence the controversy over teachers' unions. Hitler realized that opposition would multiply unless he kept parents from teaching their children ideas he didn't like. The Nazis controlled the school curriculum, of course, but they wanted to be sure that parents didn't undermine Nazi ideology at home; courts removed children whose parents didn't teach them as the government desired.
JFK said he founded the Peace Corps to build a better world; the fact that it helped him politically had nothing to do with it of course. Hillary says she wants government to help parents build a better world, the fact that the social workers who got jobs through her program would vote for her and teach children to vote for her had nothing to do with it of course. The fact that Mr Obama thought it might be a fine thing to find government-paid jobs for young people who supported him had nothing to do with his urging the creation of a national volunteer corps of course.
George Washington was right - government is about force, nothing more, and nothing less. Fascism, socialism, communist, and democracy are labels which have no intrinsic meaning; what matters is what governments actually do. Zimbabwe and other African countries are democracies, but somehow the ruling party always gets 80% of the vote or even 90%. In theory, Chicago is a democracy, but somehow, whomever's anointed by the machine gets most of the vote once the counting's over even if they don't actually live there.
It doesn't matter whether Mr. Obama and Hillary are socialists, fascists, statists, or what. Their actions show clearly that they and their fellow Democrats believe strongly in a big government with full power to tell us what to do.
In order to maximize the financial benefits of power, they retain the right to let well-connected people get away with not following the law. We see this in friends of Obama not having to follow the Obamacare law, in Rep. Rangel and Tim Geithner getting away with not paying income taxes, and much, much more.
There's only so much power to go around. In the US, power is supposed to reside with the people. In Obamaland, power residues with the government.
The issue isn't what to call Mr. Obama and his Democrats. They're politicians who seek to take all power away from us and exercise it themselves.
The issue is, which holder of power do we prefer? Us? Or them?
What does Chinese history have to teach America that Joe Biden doesn't know?
A small correction:
Mao Tes Tung mobilized millions of young people to attack his political enemies during the Great Leap Forward.
Should read:
Mao Ze Dong mobilized millions of young people to attack his political enemies during the Cultural Revolution.
rjp3,
"The Nazi's were RIGHT WING Monsters "
You can say what you want to but let's get the definition straight. The Nazis were LEFT WING monsters. They used the power of the gun to exert their will on the population as does the left today. It is only through the threat of the gun that producers pay their hard earned money to the moochers of the country. This too will change when we get rid of the vermin in office.
To find out more about the socialist state that we are in John Stossel has a show on Saturday night. Yaron Brook, president of the Ayn Rand Center, will appear on a rebroadcast of Fox News Channel’s John Stossel documentary special “Freeloaders.” The program will air at 10 p.m., Eastern time, on Saturday, August 20, 2011. The moocher class will be explained so even a moocher will understand. Of course the moochers won't watch or listen to the show, they just want to feel good and slide down the path to oblivion.