Crony Capitalism Common Ground For Libertarians, Progressives, Conservatives By Nick Sorrentino February 4, 2014 I am proud to say that I work with people from all 3 groups regularly The libertarians I find are the most intellectually stimulating and they have the best taste in music. The progressives are fun because they are bewildered by my positions and seem amazed that anyone not wearing a coon skin cap can be for the 2nd Amendment. They also always have a vegetarian option for lunch. Conservatives invariably have the best food generally, the best liquor, (I don’t drink liquor) and play golf. (Which is a positive in my book.) I am convinced that real diplomacy can happen between groups which are fundamentally at odds. That’s really the point of diplomacy I suppose, and I think about the Biblical quote, “Blessed are the peacemakers” often when I am talking with people with wildly divergent worldviews from my own in DC and online. Fundamentally it’s about respect, earned and reciprocated. After that there has to be at least a tiny bit of common ground to which parties can relate and refer. One area of common ground for most politically engaged people (who aren’t cronies) is the issue of crony capitalism. As the attached article points out, most people, libertarians, progressives, liberals, conservatives, pretty much agree that using the government to further the interests of private parties for profit is wrong. On that point nearly everyone can agree. Beyond that however opinions widely diverge. For the record, having spent a significant amount of my life thinking about the issue of crony capitalism the only solution I see is the reduction of the size of the enabling party. Government must be made much, much, smaller. There is no other way.
But a number of people I respect disagree with me (or at least do right now.) And that is fine. Counter arguments sharpen the arguments we are trying to make. A robust discussion of crony capitalism with critiques from different ideological camps is absolutely vital if we are ever to tackle the issue. In the end I think people who honestly look at the issue will come to see that government is the catalyst which metastasizes the cancer of cronyism. Crony capitalism, by definition can’t happen without government enabling it. But for the time being I’m just happy that people are talking about the issue, even if they don’t agree with me on the solution. I’m not the only one who feels this way. (From Mises.org) Cynthia Tucker, the Progressive journalist and professor, so I was happy to read a recent column of hers, on the farm bill that just passed the House, and find that she and I share some common ground on our views toward government. She considers the bill an example of congressional priorities that “…protect the rich and punish the poor, comfort the comfortable while brutalizing the afflicted.” Indeed, it is an example of the cronyism that always accompanies political power, in which those who hold power use it to aid the rich and powerful. Should we expect anything else? She says about Republicans, “…if they really want to rein in government, if they believe people ought to stand on their own two feet and refuse the ‘welfare state,’ why are they preserving welfare for those who need it least? Do they not see the glaring hypocrisy in their insistence on farm subsidies?” Click here for the article.
Rewriting The Grisly History Of Communism By Tom Toth 02.05.2014 Mao, Lenin, Stalin, Kim Il-Sung, Brezhnev, and beyond. The history of Communism — a bloody tale of forced collectivism, religious persecution, and massmurdered dissenters — predictably spirals from a heroic idea for the impoverished worker into human rights atrocities and failed economics that eventually ravish a once-utopian hedonistic dreamworld-tobe into a failed state.
Hundreds of millions were murdered by the Marxist-Leninists and Stalinists to establish the USSR. Mao’s bloody military campaigns and disastrous “Great Leap Forward” economic plan ended in the death of tens of millions. And the ideologically-aligned American left doesn’t want you to care. The far-left blog Salon last weekend published a provocative piece titled “Why you’re wrong about communism: 7 huge misconceptions about it (and capitalism).” The article itself is a fairly comprehensive view of how Communism is observed and revered from the modern American liberal perspective. The left’s individual arguments in support of Communism’s history and means to power — in the abovementioned article as well as most other modern socialist literature — whimsically abandon logic while grasping at any and all explanations and justifications. The more absurd, the more fiercely promoted — for the abominable actions of their ideological comrades from years gone by in defense of their shared socialist utopian dream. Salon’s defense of Mao notes “[t]he most horrifying episode in 20th Century official Communism was the Great Chinese Famine. … [R]esults [from Mao's Great Leap Forward] were extremely grim, but to claim that the victims died because they, in their right minds, would not volunteer for “a left-wing dream” is ludicrous. Famine is not a uniquely ‘left-wing’ problem.” From the same vein, gas chambers are not a “National Socialist Party” problem. Ideas and choices have consequences. Millions met their mortal end at the hand of Mao’s murderous Red uprising, but that’s never the end of the socialist story. Was the Great Chinese Famine a genocide in the traditional sense? No. But ideas have consequences — Mao came to power through the violent revolution demanded by all Communist conceptions and, once there, established a society and economy based solely on Marxist-Leninist principles. The consequences included a famine that killed tens of millions. Mao did not care. The modern socialist does not care. It’s a means to an end or at least speed bump on the road to utopian “progress.”
Salon also reached to defend Joseph Stalin’s streak of murder by noting that “a large number of the people killed under Soviet communism weren’t the kulaks everyone pretends to care about but themselves communists. Stalin, in his paranoid cruelty, not only had Russian revolutionary leaders assassinated and executed, but indeed exterminated entire communist parties.” Again, this socialist perspective isn’t factually incorrect. The Stalinist brand of Communism was indeed particularly ineffective at consensus-building. Thus, mass murder was just another necessary means to the ends of the Communist utopia, and therefore morally OK — notice the following: this is an idea not challenged by Salon and the modern American left (see: the lack of attention to the Communist genocides of the 20th century from Hollywood and modern literature). Salon, an effective mouthpiece for modern liberalism at large, disregards socialism’s historical skeletons and venerates the damnable principles of Mao, Stalin, and Kim Il-Sung to the modern American political palate by painting Communism as “an aspiration, not an immediately achievable state. It … is utopian in that it constantly strives toward an ideal.” The truth, however, is that Communism has proven itself a cancer that demands unto itself a revolution baptized in the blood of human beings unwilling to subjugate themselves to the will of the sovereign man in his collective expression: the socialist state. There is nothing ignorant or coincidental about the American left, as personified here from Salon, arguing as apologists for Communist history and principles. They see the same utopian Communist ends described by Marx and pursued by the likes of Lenin, Stalin, and Mao, but argue that perhaps “given the technological, material, and social advances of the last century, we could expect an approach to communism beginning here and now to be far more open, humane … and egalitarian than the Russian and Chinese attempts managed. … they can even include reforms with support among broadly ideologically divergent parties.” Enter democratic socialism (i.e. the American Democrat party). But Karl Marx’s vision was not one of peace or democracy. Marx was a man of violent action. The famous last lines of the Communist Manifesto read, “The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.” Modern socialism (e.g. Fabian Socialists, democratic socialists) got the memo that genocide doesn’t win you much moral support from other peoples they’d prefer to conquer through concession than the barrel of a gun. But their ends resemble few to no differences from Marx’s original philosophy. The United States and the hearts of the American people have traditionally been infertile soil for ideas such as international socialism. Democratic socialism has effectively shifted that currant by methods including bastardized history such as that promoted by Salon. In the United States centuries and decades past, there was a practical middle ground between the polar political persuasions. Some question, and rightly so, why the same is conspicuously absent from today’s political environment. The fact is, there is no middle ground between the socialist and lover of individual responsibility, achievement, and liberty. At the end of the day, conservative annihilation is a necessary means to a socialist utopian end. If it cannot be accomplished by peaceful, democratic capitulation, history suggests the conservative watch his six o’clock.
Congressman Adam Kinzinger: ‘Our Enemies No Longer Fear Us, And Our Allies No Longer Trust Us’ by Ben Bullard February 6, 2014 The U.S. House of Representatives’ customary general speech sessions, which permit Congressmen to speak from the floor for five minutes on any topic of their choosing, can yield a lot of bloviating and hot air. But Congressman Adam Kinzinger’s (R-Ill.) floor speech Tuesday should be required listening for Secretary of State John Kerry and the U.S. diplomatic corps, who must walk the Mideast policy path laid down by President Barack Obama. Kinzinger, an Iraq veteran, lamented the way in which recent American Presidential Administrations have devalued our Nations’ global credibility. And he and drew a line between President George H.W. Bush’s myopic understanding of Islamist terror and Obama’ present approach — which attempts to treat Islamist fundamentalism as a fly-in-the-ointment security problem, even as the President expands upon the fear-based domestic security apparatus he inherited from President George W. Bush. “…[W]e have people who live solely for the purpose of killing and destroying people that don’t see eye to eye with their specific religious ideology,” said Kinzinger. “Failure to confront those terrorists in the 1990s led to the big problem we have today. And what we’ve seen lately is that same kind of retrenchment by the United States of America — undoubtedly, still the most powerful country in the world. Our enemies no longer fear us, and our allies no longer trust us.” Kinzinger: Our enemies no longer fear us, our allies no longer trust us VIDEO BELOW http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Z13wrpaLpE Impeachment is Appropriate: An Open Letter to Congress: Michael Anthony Peroutka VIDEO BELOW http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtxt4x5bcHM
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