The Coming victory of the socialists

Barack Obama's America: High Unemployment to Last for "Years"
: Rush Limbaugh November 10, 2009

Rush writes "It is to create so much transference of wealth. It is to create so much dependence on the middle class on government that Democrats will never lose power. That's the objective here, to make so many of you dependent on your very existence for government subsidies, handouts, and checks that you think only the Democrat Party will provide those for you; that everybody knows, "The Republicans, if they ever get in power, are going to cut that back." So this is the long-term goal."

What I can add here is that this an entanglement, a confusion, an economic fog around checks I'm writing (or not, thanks to the withholding), and the checks I'm getting in transfer payments or services.

What I fear is that there will never be credible political movement to take an axe and strike at the root. The last chance for that vanished with the failure of will on the part of Hastert, Frist, and Bush to provide an "exit strategy" for those under 40 from Social Security and Medicare. No, we're stuck with that.

We will wake up in a world, where not only the employees of the federal government will look to Washington with anxious anticipation of what impact nameless faceless bureaucrats will have, but every citizen on the grid as well. Over time, we'll feel like we're federal government employees.

Catholicism and Economics

At the Nassau Community College, Center for Catholic Studies

The speakers were

Charles Clark, the Democratic Socialist, St John's University

Michael Novak, the Democratic Capitalist, American Enterprise Institute

Thomas Storck, for the Distributists, The Distributist Society

It was not capitalism's day to shine. It's wasn't a classic debate along the lines of "Resolved: The United States should abandon capitalism for socialism." or
"Resolved: The United States should abandon capitalism for distributism" it was more like put the texts of An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations through Meltdown: A Free-Market Look at Why the Stock Market Collapsed, the Economy Tanked, and Government Bailouts Will Make Things Worse into a pinata and beat it around.

Really, there were so many lies and half-truths said about the "c" word, there would be scarcely any time to offer up criticism on socialism and distributism.

Michael Novak, I think, fell into several traps, citing government interventions into political matters as favorable evidence for capitalism. I thought citing the provision for patents and copyrights in the Constitution as a very odd way of defending capitalism -- an example of how the government grants a limited monopoly. Rather, it demonstrates that government often intervenes into markets.

Rather than convincing me to stop being a capitalist, I heard many familiar complaints which I could have answered like "capitalism necessarily increases income inequality", but I also heard a few that made me think about things: how different the country would be if it were not so easy to create limited liability corporations.

The lasting impact on me was a resolution to reread Rerum Novarum (1891) and its sequels through Centesimus Annus (1991) to get a better sense of how they connect to Catholic social justice.

Finally, if they do this again, it should include someone who can argue for more capitalism -- that the Louisiana Purchase was unconstitutional because it was not an enumerated power, and that "commerce clause" cases all the way back to Gibbons v. Ogden were decided in contravention of the principles of capitalism. Don't stop with unwinding creeping socialism in FDR's new deal, let's unwind all the way back to George Washington.