Political Lies, Ghouls, Dictators and the Eternal Quest for your Wealth.

We can take the simplistic view and point out, as Marx did, that the world is really divided into two factions: those who can be successful, build wealth and security and enjoy life and others who cannot. This appears to be trite and a mere scoop of  hackneyed reason from a sweeping statement of history until we look at the stark reality and then look deeper into the pond at the political types who would make promises to get at your money and assets. This dichotomy really appears to be the case and this tragedy forms the basis for leftist politics. They claim [a lie] that they can fix this and bring us a better society. So far, all they have brought is misery or stagnation.

The world has never seen a place of any size that has a homogeneous collection of citizens who have what some economist might describe as a resemblance of equality. The great empires such as Egypt, the Roman Empire, the feudal systems in Japan or Europe or England or China, or anywhere in Africa for the last 7000 years have never produced equality or a reasonable distribution of wealth. This quest for equality has never materialized. We have witnessed a warped version of ‘equality’ in Cambodia and North Korea after the socialists finished with their social engineering and cut away the unnecessary masses. We can discount little places such as Switzerland or Sweden as they have special forms of parasitic income [the dirty gun business or the dirty money business] or places like Bermuda where tourism is forced upon the polis and everybody has a job. These are anomalies and cannot be distinguished from certain isolated parts of bigger countries and regions such as the French Nobility and their lands, the kings of the Middle East, the City of Rome or some islands in the Caribbean. It is not possible to even start out with a homogeneous distribution of wealth [other than zero] and maintain that balance for two or three generations. Sooner or later those who cannot manage their assets and money will spend it away and return to their earned lower station in life.  An exception might be San Francisco where a sufficiently drug-addicted community might experience equality and bliss in some unknown dimension without regard for money or housing or even food. We need to ask what happened in South America after 500 years of European enlightenment and wonder why they missed the opportunity for greatness. They have achieved little more than mediocrity. Three words can describe South America [including Mexico]: Poverty, revolution and sloth.

Religion first offered a form of equality, for a small price, in the terms of either the existing life or the afterlife depending on which one you picked. The reward was contentment and a few cures for diseases and the notion that following the path of religions morality would produce a better society for all. But, as we see in India or just outside the Vatican or in the streets of old Saigon, any form of economic equality is clearly absent. Religion usually attempted to redistribute the essentials of life in terms of food and shelter by the alms method, which was to be understood as a solemn duty and the fulfillment of a mandate according to the tenets of the church. This worked in a few places, but the propensity to collect sufficient contributions from the supplicants to homogenize the population with charity in any given area was nil.  People living in view of the Vatican have gone hungry for centuries. In the 1970s the ugliest slum I had witnessed north of Tijuana was the human wreckage that surrounded Gracie Mansion in New York. The liberals have no solutions to social problems. All they have to offer the poor are lies, threats, phony social programs that work in reverse and acts of brutality.

The First Big Lies and how they wrecked your lives:

We can start a study of overt leftist prevarications with a strange character known as J J. Rousseau and his tautological lackey Karl Marx, two jokers who were able to warp the societies of France and Russia with phony notions, mass murder and absurd promises. Rousseau proffered a host of implausible nostrums that were supposed to improve society. Rousseau taught that man was out of place in the society as it then existed and that we should preferably  share many attributes found in the animal kingdom in nature and, thusly,  crafted a social contract for us to follow that would solve this problem. The savage was nobler than the nobles it seems. This mental patient formulated his theory as Theory of Natural Man[1] and mumbled about social justice, and equality and economics and thus was made to look like a gibbering fool. He made discourtesy a social attribute.  France promptly tested his phony notions, a pack of preposterous lies, with the glorious French Revolution that resulted in the systematic murder of thousands. Baskets of heads were paraded thought the streets and this became  the grand culmination of this lunacy. Liberalism was born and died here. All books became the ‘property of the state’ and many still lie moldering away in bins in France [in Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BnF) ]unread. The Napoleonic dictator ship followed.

Not to be bested in terms of terror and propaganda, Karl Marx conjured his phony notion that if the proletariat could take over the means of production from the bourgeois then the profits of capitalism might be returned to the people and eventually government would no longer be necessary. This would be the Golden Age. The fault here is that political types were put into power after the entire means of production was confiscated in a brutal revolution and some 65 million people put to death and then they couldn’t manage the economy they had usurped. This wreckage slowly degraded for 74 years until it finally crashed in infamy and shame in 1989 with a strong push from Ronald Reagan. Lenin and several of his subsequent disgusting parasites mangled the economy and mismanaged the natural resources and were able to produce 100 million dead during their reigns. That Marxism could produce any form of a decent society is a brutal lie.  Yet, there are many on the left today who enjoy prosperity in the US while they avidly celebrate the governments of Cuba, North Korea and Nicaragua.  Liberals freeze and stare off into space when prompted to explain why the last 100 or so Marxist dictatorship in Africa failed to deliver on their promises to make a decent society for their tribal members.  They also have some deep reverence and misplaced respect for Islamo-Fascism and, as such, defend overt terrorism. Many liberals and their ignorant victims lament the demise of the USSR and would want the old régime to return to power. This is happening.

The obvious brutality and public murder of millions in order to produce a society that would be egalitarian or at least produce some form of social justice prompted some to think of other lies that might drain the wealth of the bourgeois away even in small packets and use that to create social programs that would redistribute the wealth with fewer murders. Communism morphed into radical socialism where command economies might be created that would employ Marx’s theories such as high progressive taxes and confiscatory inheritance taxes and could ‘spread around the wealth’ as we heard recently in our Presidential election.  After two world wars, 80 million dead and a Great Depression in Europe, the European Union was formed and it is now collapsing from poor administration and the predictable defect of the manifold inefficiency of big government.  The phony notion [another lie]that some cluster of politicians can micromanage the economy of millions and adjust the economic supply and demand schedules of food, housing, transportation, defense and other societal metrics is so preposterous as to be dismissed immediately if we judge the result based on the outcome. When the means of production are controlled by politicians the number of ways to fail multiplies almost in proportion to the numerical square of the number of bureaucrats on the planning boards. Thus, the nostrum that big government can solve problems and spread around the wealth in a sane and equitable manner is a sick joke and a preposterous lie. Take a close look at Europe as a test case. The proof lies there anywhere you look.

The Notion of Education:

The quest for ‘equality’ and ‘social justice’ might be attained in other ways we are told and that ‘education’ of the masses is the way to do this. If we teach our offspring to be classless and steep them in fairness and humanity then social justice will spring forth like flowers in the meadows.  The disease that prevented this splendor was capitalism. Any intrinsic truths in the educational theory entrenched in this message failed to materialize in the society as a whole because of two factors: propaganda and the maldistribution of cognitive attributes or IQs.

Given the chance to edify their citizens and others, the early educators were tutors in Egypt, Greece, Rome and other empires and they first concentrated on teaching administrative theory, then diplomacy and  then into war colleges and  then into business. The Romans were highly educated with many high schools in The City/State of Rome where Greeks were revered as those who could teach Romans the essentials of philosophy, engineering, probably war and society.  Their republic lasted either 800 or 1000 years depending on when you might think it ended.  Nothing has matched this, ever. After the Roman Empire crashed, the classical education efforts  remained concentrated in Europe  and was based on the ‘authority of the ancients’ and thus Latin was the language of the educated up to about the end of the 18 century.  But, there was no equality for the masses in the strict terms of equal incomes, equivalent housing and assets and the essential fact that those who had great wealth actually provided for the poor was ignored and refuted. That form of education only benefited the adept and was wasted on the ignoranti.

To fix this problem, propaganda must replace education. The trickle down theory of distribution of wealth was unacceptable according to the new educated view.  Now leaders of corporations became greedy tyrants and exploited their employees instead of being benefactors and employing millions from their risk-taking and ingenuity. Only a few of these entrepreneurs would rise to power and they were not the ones who by an accident of birth became royal rulers, but they were the ones who were adept in business. In England those who were originally privileged to become educated by their royal parents or peers of the realm were supplanted by those with higher intelligence, more assertive personalities and advancing business skills. Education had now, in the views of the left, produced the same monsters as the royal bed chambers and must be severely modified to teach the masses how to recognize the proper leaders that would create a more liberal society. Education, then, must be modified and transformed into a major propaganda mechanism [a lie machine] that would create a mold where the elite could push out conditioned citizens who would conform to the liberal model. The citizens must be ‘educated’ to the phony notion that socialism or one of its variants is the best form of government for all. This, of course, is a lie and a difficult one to implement without some heavy propaganda and some other drastic measures. The left used both.  Educators must now be social tyrants and act as stooges of some leftist social agenda to hold jobs in the leftist-dominated educational system. Testing must be minimized and students passed along to higher grade levels without regard for academic credentials or any recognizable form of performance. Politics has now replaced facts.

The Failure of Education and Proliferation of Propaganda:

Somehow, the citizens of so-called democracies must be educated and properly propagandized into mere obedient and static pieces of some grand collage that can be constructed in accordance with modern concepts of liberalism. But, the difficulty here is that the skeptical must be lead to believe that they are giving up both power and wealth for some cause. Fear, compassion and hate are the strongest emotions so a good propagandist must use a complex elixir of all three to strip the affluent citizens of some or all of their wealth. The leftists have not ignored this precept.

World Wars 1, 2 were suitable propagandistic instruments to convince the good citizens to give up their time, lives and much wealth in order to fix some threatening situation.  The assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand precipitated the first big war that was going to proceed anyway but that was as good an excuse as any available at the time. Here, the fear that the enemy might march in and take over your house was real so Europe went bankrupt in the hasty prevention of this threat and received something worse for the effort.  The fact that militaristic politicians conjured up this behemoth was beside the point.  Without warring politicos there would never have been war. We are reminded by George F. Will[2] that diplomacy might have solved the dispute by talking it over as reasonable persons and making some compromises.  That [diplomacy] was only one of the big lies.  By definition, diplomacy has never solved any major war or aggression in the history of the world. American taxpayers, after sacrificing 160,000 soldiers, paid Europe to restructure and they managed to get along until the Great Depression. We were promised that this was the ‘war to end all wars’ or at least until the next big one, which was set up by the Treaty of Versailles and would start within a generation.

During the Great Depression, which may not have been so great because we have not seen the end of the new one we are entering, was an occasion to institute novel social programs with grand promises that failed to solve the problems of deflation and unemployment.  Promises to decrease the unemployment with infrastructure and building programs failed. Another war was necessary to mobilize the citizens and pull us out of the depression.

The American citizens originally balked at the notion of another World War as the first one was a bummer.  The lie here was that fascism would engulf us and we would be slaves of Hitler or worse. He couldn’t even handle Russia. He was lucky to survive his own army. The Neutrality Act passed by Congress to keep us out of that wasteful mêlée was ignored by FDR and he goaded Japan on numerous issues such as oil and helium and scrap metal and credit and presto—the war was on.  We took sides against Germany and Italy by helping a belligerent [England] during the ‘neutrality’ and they knew it and responded. This one war cost us a year’s GDP and 400,000 dead. The outcome was that anti-capitalistic ideological enemies were now the masters of half of Europe and they now possessed nuclear weapons so we had a cold war for half a century or so. The fear here was that the USSR would nuke us so we dug holes in the ground and put in missiles and built subs that could hide on the bottom of the ocean in wait of a signal to destroy the enemy in 15 min.  The big lie here was that the Communists were our allies. After the war, some of our more ignorant politicos like Truman found out the truth. Today, we are still counseled that anticommunism is evil and that the Soviets were really not out to get us.[3]  Did the Poles ever hear this? What about Georgia? We must tolerate communists, in our society it was proffered, because attacking or exposing them is unacceptable and sanctions the inane process of Red Baiting or McCarthyism.  We should respect these parasites and murderers. This form of propaganda gives more latitude to the leftist attacks on capitalism. With capitalism out of the way the leftists in America could party with international communists over the wreckage and fumes. We would then experience justice and freedom.

Unexpected Prosperity Undermines Government.

By accident, and entirely unpredicted, the economy surged after WW2 and prosperity if not peace stubbornly persisted. This was not some detailed plan by government.  Indeed, the government had predicted more depression, but they could not stop individualism and capitalism. The tax cuts of JFK, Ronald Reagan and George Bush produced prosperity and marginalized socialism. This process must be halted the leftists argued if egalitarian notions were to be implemented. Capitalism is inherently evil the lie goes and the government knows how to create a balanced society. They can accomplish this by redistributive tax policies.

Big Lies About Big Government And Their  Big Promises.

Several big lies from the New Deal era were worked simultaneously. The big one was that social security would provide some retirement benefits and would benefit all. The lie here was the taxes on this program were excessive and unnecessary so politicians spent the excess and let the system debt grow like a cancer upon our society. We now face some 30 trillion dollars in costs by 2050 with no obvious way to pay for this. The IOUs at the Treasury are worthless as the taxpayer is stuck with this. Other social programs such as new forms of ‘education’ were instituted with massive costs. We wonder why the SATs are down and the high school graduation rates in half the population is barely 50%.The strange notion that many who could not seem to pass courses and were marginalized in their education by insufficient unit spending was crushed when Washington, D. C. trudged on for decades with the highest spending per pupil in the Western Hemisphere and produced horrible results. Indeed, the debate over cognitive skills as described in the Bell Curve was hot and nasty and the scientific findings of the very basis of cognitive skills were dismissed by the left.[4] They could not handle even a discussion of the educational ‘gap.’ The truism that many minorities and everybody else on the left tail of the bell curve could not compete with equality on standardized tests was known from 1906, but became a major political issue in 1965 after LBJ asked Professor Jensen at Berkeley why his Great Society educational spending failed to produce results. The big lie was the tests were racially biased as any differences in cognitive skills among races would be the equivalent overt racism [a lie] hence not true.  People are ‘equal.’ Affirmative Action was then instituted to make up the difference between certain minorities and others who participated in the society. The big lie here was that if quotas and race norming test scores were instituted the results could show that everybody could have an equal outcome in economic terms. A bigger lie was that the IQ tests proved nothing and the emotional intelligence[5] was the true measure of the citizen and more important than a mere cognitive metric.  The standardized tests were ‘unfair’ and just another lie.  It is interesting that when the tests were redesigned according to norms suggested by experts in minority matters that the tests show that the IQs did not change significantly. Lies of this magnitude allowed political parties to attract minorities with the promises that they would ‘fix’ the problem. That was a lie. What else should an IQ test do except sort out the test takers by IQ?

The Big Lie That Tax Cuts Do Not Produce Prosperity.

Keynesians and other ‘economists’ insist in some big lie that lost taxes are ‘costs’ to an economy and that tax cuts result in bad economies. The New York Times publishes the foaming screeds of this failed economic theory twice a week for our amusement. [6]This lie has been disproved many times, but the left cling to this notion because if they were to agree then the funding for the politicians would decrease and they would lose power and see capitalism become even stronger. Capitalism is the enemy here and taxes curtail capitalism. Only half of this is true. Excessive taxation destroys capitalism and results in distressed economies like we see in Germany, England and France. They are now beggared by socialist levels of taxation, have lost hope and crawl to the US for money to bail them out.  We cannot afford to bail them out three times in a single century.

The Big Lie That ‘Affordable Housing’ Is Good For Our Society.

If any lie can top this one then we must look to the future and see how the Carbon Cap taxation and Climate Change taxes work out. We see now that the CRA [the Community Communist Reinvestment Act][7][8] created mountains of bad debt[9] by forcing banks to give away free houses to the uncreditworthy low class in exchange for their votes under penalty of prosecution by the government. The scam here was that banks were forced to loan money to people with poor credit, scant educational skills, drug addicts and even illegal aliens and could peddle this worthless paper into the dumpsters known as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.  What happened here is that the process demanded ‘affordable housing’ for millions and wealth was then lost from the failure to make mortgage payments. These two phony big-lie federal quasi-government corporations racked up 3-5 trillion dollars in debt [we don’t know how much yet] and started off a steep recession that will probably turn into a depression.  Somehow, this mortgage process mentality infected Europe and elsewhere and they have the same problem with the deflation of housing prices.  Europe is busted now and Japan is following. But, this may be nothing if we look for even a bigger lie.

The Big Lie That Global Warming Will Destroy Our Planet.

The biggest lies are the most preposterous but like the [false] Hitlerian case[10] cited as:”… if stressed long enough then the populace will eventually be convinced of the lie’s efficacy or “…in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie,...”  Hitler was talking about somebody else and not offering this as his own propaganda mechanism.  Nevertheless, the notion of the big lie seems to work well for the left and they use it as far as they can. The lie here, thus, is that we cannot confine big lies exclusively to the narrow zones of National Socialism as this variant is only one small historical sector of the broad expanse of socialism and Communism, its charter benefactor. We cannot allow the environmentalists [read EcoNazis here] the opportunity to escape the provable accusation that they are wantonly using this fascist propaganda theme to support their big lie. The quest for wealth and control of assets and means of production has never matched this attempt at control of our society.

Two big lies are intertwined here: The first is that Carbon dioxide is a pollutant and the second is that the global temperature is rising due to the use of fossil fuels. CO2 is not a pollutant.[11] This is a lie. The temperature of the earth is not rising—this is a lie.  The temperature has been falling the last three years.

The big prize for the socialists is that the entire planet can now be taxed because the toxic gas produced from respiration of animals like us pervades the entire sphere and everybody must reduce emissions. This big lie transcends the socialist notion of confiscatory taxes on individuals or corporations as now everybody can pay for the abusive use of certain forms of energy from any source. A bigger lie would come from a few years of destroying our industrial base and living like beggars when the EcoNazis can announce that all these measures prevented the oceans from rising and boiling and saved us. Here we have the potential case where a big lie that predicted a nasty outcome was the correct path of prevention because the dire outc0me did not happen to materialize. This self-aggrandizing ‘truth’ resembles the act of hanging of garlic around the house and this prophylaxis has prevented the home owners from being bitten by vampires. Perhaps we should just howl at the moon every evening during the CBS News broadcasts and measure the height of the oceans and if the waters do not rise then we can just keep howling on key and in time. This would be proof that such nonsense fixed any problem. This is a lower cost version and just as effective.

The Big Lie about Tax Cuts in 2009.

The politicians that seem to float to the top of the heap are mostly disgusting parasites. They are crooked and tell lies to get power. We were promised ‘tax cuts’ for those making less than $250,000 by president-elect Barack Obama and this was seconded with by his VP running mate Joe Biden. [12] This is probably a lie.  We will find out soon enough.

We were assured by Barney Frank about the security of Fannie Mae and that story was this: on July 14, 2008:

“I think this is a case where Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae are fundamentally sound. They're not in danger of going under. They're not the best investment these days from a long term standpoint going back. I think they are in good shape going forward. They're in the housing market. I do think their prospects going forward are very solid.”[13] [14]

This was probably a lie, but Barney Frank is not the kind of person we can be persuaded that knows what he believes in, if anything. He seems to speak in some political dialect so we don’t know what he knew. I doubt if he does.  Now, we face new ‘leadership’ in the form of a person who is 100% left liberal and has no accomplishments other than blindly voting for far leftist causes. So far, Obama is nobody with nothing to say outside some liberal script.

“Obama is nothing but a sophomoric political construct that is nothing more than a scripted oratorical puppet that performs on a glittering stage and gives sterling speeches that fall backward upon old, stale socialist precepts. He would be pedestrian-level, but has a new and talented style of tinsel-town stage delivery and a few hundred million dollars in funding from the Middle East and Europe. The money makes the man here.”[15] –from my previous blog by rycK

The Real Ugly Question: Do the Lefties Care if We Enter a Depression?

This is hard to tell at this point. The history of the various quests for power in numerous countries by those in power in leftist circles is strewn with dead bodies, wasted economies and even piles of human skulls. A crushing depression would allow our elected ‘leaders’ to institute drastic measures like setting up confiscatory taxes, the attachment of  our 401(k)s and mandated closure of banks so that we cannot get to our bank accounts. There are many political opportunities here for Democrats to proclaim that capitalism has failed and needs to be suppressed. They would then use our ill-gotten wealth to institute socialism.

You might watch the movie Doctor Zhivago[16] again and pay special attention to the scenes where Gromeko's house is confiscated by a citizen’s committee and his literary works condemned by the state. That movie tells us much about the left and their mentality. The outcome of Doctor Zhivago is one leftist-endorsed way to get an enlightened ending to capitalist society that matches the typical leftist’s notions of fairness and equity.  War and/or depression are the only changes that will allow for a concrete change in our society according to the left. They have nothing else but other people’s wealth.[17]—revised comment from a previous blog by rycK

The answer to the last question will probably be revealed if and when Obama and his friends go after the tax base, place a high tax on gasoline and restructure the economy based on the EcoNazi tenets of clean and green.  The residual wealth in the US is in our bank accounts, 401(k)s and homes.  They could roll our IRAs into the phony Social Security system and close the banks for a time and reopen them with government downsized account balances.

We shall see how much they hate capitalism very soon. They may try to confiscate guns soon.

rycK

Comments: ryckki@gmail.com