Don's Tuesday column

       THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson  Red Bluff Daily News   8/06/2013

Abilities, needs, taxes, benefits, cynicism

You can hear Don Jans speak on the subject of Marxism tonight at the Tea Party Patriots meeting, 6 PM at the Westside Grange. By the way, he’s against it.

What do you really know about Marxism? From the simple but oft stated adage, “From each according to their abilities, to each according the their need,” to the last hundred years of attempts to implement those utopian, collectivist ideals—any objective observer of history would have to concede the utter failure of such systems and ideologies. To its devotees on the hard left in academia, entertainment, government and the body politic, there are always excuses for such abominable records: Poorly formulated planning (as in the USSR’s vaunted but catastrophic 5-year plans), or the inevitable non-cooperation of the “bourgeoisie” (middle-class) who had eeked out and possessed modest abundance, or the ideological reluctance of Western, capitalist nations to prop up socialist regimes through trade.

It has always been the fervent desire and design of the international leftist movement to seize upon the wealthy jewel of the free-market, entrepreneurial world: the United States of America. Domestically, beginning with the dismissive near-derision by progressives like President Woodrow Wilson toward our Founding Documents; to the writings of Godfrey Wilshire (“Socialism Inevitable”); to the quasi-collectivist programs of the government-centric New Deal under FDR; to the realization by socialists that the American people would never knowingly accept socialism but could be fooled with different labels—there has never been any retreat by the humanist, statist left.

Failing to accomplish their goals through military conquest—when the Soviet Union collapsed—only strengthened an existing strategic move by those devoted to socialism to change their terminology and take over the Democrat Party. You would have found little in the news pages or broadcasts in the 60s, 70s and 80s to inform Americans of that process; it proceeded quietly in conferences and seminars, much like those that one Barack H. Obama attended while at Columbia University, documented in Stanley Kurtz’s book, “Radical-in-Chief: Barack Obama and the Untold Story of American Socialism”.

The so-called “coat and tie” radicals like Hillary Rodham, Barack Obama (and future wife, Michelle) kept their true beliefs masked in euphemisms and coded intellectual double-speak. They let the bomb-throwers like Barack Obama’s future buddy, campaign supporter and fellow leftist-education-transformer, William Ayers, take the flack. Meanwhile, the hard left academic establishment laid the groundwork for redistributionism, power-to-the-downtrodden, American-white-people-all-racists, aka Critical Race Theory, aka “white privilege”. Hence, Marxist community organizations like ACORN, and Saul Alinsky acolytes like Barack Obama, became the shock troops for deconstructing American, free-market private enterprise; and replacing it over time with crony capitalism and redistributive poor and middle-class benefit programs.

What has come to fruition is a system whereby nearly one-half pay no income taxes and more than half receive more in some sort of benefits than they pay in taxes. Rather than urge people to save for their own retirement, their own medical care, and their own children’s future, program after program like ObamaCare encourage just the opposite. The middle-class has always been the greatest enemy to the collectivist schemes of the socialists because that group of people has made their economic life rewarding and relatively comfortable by their own efforts, thus reinforcing their natural skepticism of governmental “take-from-rich-give-to-poor” redistribution.

So, we come full Marxist circle with a massively intrusive and controlling tax/spend/regulate bureaucracy unable to find the funds to honor its self-imposed commitments of benefits to the poor and the middle class. The fiscal reality is that every dollar earned by everyone over $100,000, maybe even less now, would not fill that bill. There are not enough “rich” people, rich folks’ income or even the entire possessions of the rich, to satisfy those commitments in perpetuity. No, the dirty little secret is that only by ratcheting up the tax burden on the middle class, can all those fiscal promises be kept.

Now, it’s “From each taxpayer according to their assigned share, to each benefit receiver according to their legally assigned needs.” It is the most cynical “transformation” of the American dream of self-sufficiency, economic freedom and political liberty to ever be foisted on a nation in all of modern history. It’s never been debated, certainly not by Mr. Hopenchange as he ran for President; even now none of the leftists in the Democrat Party will own up to how much our tax structure will have to grow and expand into ever lower income groups to avoid default on our debts and obligations.

Now, consider an editorial by Investor’s Business Daily, “Obama Calls Income Gap ‘Wrong’—After Widening It,” (7/30, Investors.com). “Obamanomics: The president has been decrying the growing gap between rich and poor in the U.S. to help sell his retread tax-and-spend proposals. But those policies have already produced record levels of income inequality… University of California economist Emmanuel Saez shows that since the Obama recovery started in June 2009, the income of the top 1 % grew 11.2% … the bottom 99 % shrank by 0.4%.” Growing income gap=growing demand for more taxes … eventually on all of us. “In other words, Obama is selling snake oil. And that’s what’s morally wrong.”