Where Greed Meets Envy — the Structural Foundation of the Political Left

The Left: Where Greed Meets Envy

By David P. McGinley | June 17, 2012 | American Thinker

In ascertaining the general hierarchy of sins, a good point of reference is the Ten Commandments.  While the Decalogue is not all-inclusive, God dictated these specific directives to Moses as the basis upon which His people should live.  Among the ten is the command not to covet: “You shall not covet … anything that belongs to your neighbor” (Ex. 20:17 [NIV]).

Covetousness (or envy), meaning the possession of a strong desire for what another has, does not get the attention that its close relation “greed” gets.  Greed, of course, is greatly derided in scripture, and for good reason, but God did not see fit to include it in the commandments He set out on Mt. Sinai.  Why?

For one thing, greed is not always destructive, while envy is.  Greed is the desire to have more and, depending how that desire is acted upon, can be beneficial or detrimental.  The profit motive has made the United States the most prosperous nation in history; but, conversely, the abuse of that motive was greatly responsible for the September 2008 financial collapse.  When envy, on the other hand, is acted upon, there is no good, only bad.  At its worst, it leads to mass theft and murder.

Are We in Revolutionary Times?

By Victor Davis Hanson | June 15, 2012 | National Review

Legally, President Obama has reiterated the principle that he can pick and choose which U.S. laws he wishes to enforce (see his decision to reverse the order of the Chrysler creditors, his decision not to enforce the Defense of Marriage Act, and his administration’s contempt for national-security confidentiality and Senate and House subpoenas to the attorney general). If one individual can decide to exempt nearly a million residents from the law — when he most certainly could not get the law amended or repealed through proper legislative or judicial action — then what can he not do? Obama is turning out to be the most subversive chief executive in terms of eroding U.S. law since Richard Nixon.

Obama’s Big Economy Speech: No Hope, No Change

By Ben Shapiro | June 14, 2012 |  Breitbart News

President Obama’s campaign speech on the economy today was an utter disaster for him. It was a bromide of tired old arguments, pathetic blame-placing, and shopworn con tricks. And even liberals like Jonathan Alter had to admit that it was, overall, a dramatic failure.

Marx’s Ghost

By Ion Mihai Pacepa | June 9, 2012 | PJ Media

I grew up with the picture of the U.S. president hanging on the wall of our house in Bucharest. My father, who spent most of his life working for the General Motors dealership in Romania, loved America, but he never set foot in this country. For him, America was just the place of his dreams, thousands of miles away. For him, the American president was its tangible symbol. At the end of WWII, we had President Truman on the wall. For us and for many millions around the world, he had saved civilization from the barbarism of Nazism, and he had restored our freedom — for a while. From the Voice of America and the BBC we learned that America loved Truman, and we loved America. It was as simple as that.

A few days after the 2004 Democratic National Convention ended, Teresa Heinz Kerry, the wife of the Democratic contender for the White House, stated that four more years of the Bush administration meant four more years of hell for America.[i] Like Teresa, I am also an American immigrant, and I have spent my 34 American years under six presidents — some better than others — but I have always felt that I was living in paradise.

I still keep the picture of the American president on the wall in my home, and I will continue to keep it there until the end of my days. To me, the meaning of his office transcends the views of its occupant. The president of the United States symbolizes this greatest country on Earth, and he embodies the essence of our unique democracy: a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. He is also the leader of the free world, and the commander-in-chief of the most powerful military and intelligence force on Earth.

The Democrat Crime Family War

By Rush Limbaugh | June 6, 2012 | RushLimbaugh.com

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: We got Bill Clinton going rogue again, even bigger and even better. And the “criminal enterprise” known as the Democrat Party… Well, “criminal enterprise,” in quotes. Think of it as a mob family. Think of the Democrat Party as a mob family with the head honcho in Chicago.

Another Daletoons Homerun: Onopoly [Cartoon]

Source: Daletoons

The Evolution of Socialist Strategies to Rescue Socialism from Failure [Infograph]

Source: Ideowar.com

Socialist Thought Has Crippled Black America

By John Rossomando | Mar 19, 2011 | Townhall.com

Leading black conservatives lay blame for black America’s rampant poverty and other ills squarely at the feet of the socialist orientation of black leaders such as Al Sharpton.

They say the black intelligentsia’s rhetoric has created a defeatist and demoralizing climate that has robbed millions of black Americans of hope and has sentenced them to an impoverished existence.

“One of the tenets of the socialist ideology is to create a welfare state, and that’s exactly what has happened in the black community,” says Florida Rep. Allen West, the only Republican member of the Congressional Black Caucus. “I like to say we have sort of a reverse plantation going on here where you have people like Sharpton and [Jesse] Jackson trying to make themselves into overseers.”

Are the Poor Getting Poorer? Upward Mobility is the Key! [Video]

Data overlook upward mobility

By Steven G. Horwitz | January 26, 2011 | Atlanta Journal-Constitution

The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) is once again arguing that the United States is suffering from a widening gap between the rich and the poor. Using a variety of economic data, they argue in “The State of Working America” that a few are profiting at the expense of the many, whose hard work continues to go unrewarded. Indeed, they argue that the “poor are getting poorer.”

Left in Panic Over Bain Attack Backfire

By Rush Limbaugh | May 25, 2012 | RushLimbaugh.com

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: I’ll tell you what, folks, I really, really hope the Republicans, the Republicans in Congress, the RNC, anybody, super PACs, I hope they are writing down everything Obama is saying about how he has cut spending, how he wants to cut spending, how he has not spent it all, because when the next debt deal comes up, guess who is not going to be talking about cutting spending?  That’s right.  Barry Obama.  Barack Hussein Obama, mmm, mmm, mmm, is gonna be moving for the debt limit to be expanded, be raised, be elevated.  Why?  So he can spend more money.

I’ll tell you, there is panic out there, folks.  I’ve been telling you I don’t know how many months now, there’s real panic.  There is panic over two things. The Bain attack on Romney isn’t working.  And all of these Democrat consultants and all of the Democrat cable TV hosts and the Democrat media people, they are beside themselves.  It isn’t working.  They are also very worried that Obama is doubling down on it now in the midst of it not working. He’s doubling down on it, amidst stories we’ve now got a private equity Democrat backer for Obama who’s leaving him.  We’ve got the audio sound bites.

Bain Attacks Split Democratic Party, Obama’s Incompetence Exposed

By John Nolte May 22, 2012 | Breitbart News

Today at Politico, the left-wing site does a fairly good job of covering the blowback the Obama campaign is facing in its own party over attacks on Bain Capital, a venture capitalist firm once successfully run by Mitt Romney. After the Cory Booker fiasco on “Meet the Press,” followed by the Newark Mayor’s widely ridiculed “hostage video“(that was selectively-edited by Team Obama) the central issue of the Obama re-election strategy is also splitting the party writ large:

One prominent business official, who asked not to be identified, put it this way: “It’s demonization of capitalism. And that makes a lot of Democrats uncomfortable and Cory Booker’s one of them. … I think that anybody with half a brain knows that the story is far more complicated and, in fact, Bain and private equity generally have made some positive contributions.”

Bain Backfire: Obama Camp in ‘Full Damage Control Mode’ [Updated] [Video]

By John Nolte | May 21, 2012 | Breitbart News

 Today at the Chicago NATO Summit Obama told the audience:

[Bain Capital] is not a distraction, this is what this campaign is gonna be about.

Meanwhile, back at campaign headquarters, Team Obama is in full meltdown mode after Newark Mayor Cory Booker went off script, undermining and mocking “what this campaign is going to be about.”

The Left’s One-Percenter Problem

By Frank Salvato | May 17, 2012 | New Media Journal

In the aftermath of Vice President Joe Biden’s “Howard Dean” moment in Ohio this week, I was struck by the sheer magnitude of the Progressive-Democrat Left’s hypocrisy when it comes to their political attacks on the so-called “rich.” As the unwashed masses of the Occupy Movement – the overwhelming majority of which are anarchists, pseudo-Socialists, Progressive activists and union operatives – take to the streets of Chicago to protest the NATO summit, I really do have to wonder if they – the useful idiots of the new millennium – know that those who they follow are the one-percenters?

Among the leaders of the Progressive Movement and the Democrat Party, it is nearly impossible to identify anyone among them who isn’t in the one-percent, and that includes President Obama and, yes, Vice President Biden. Maybe that’s why his statement, “They just don’t get us,” made my head cock like a dog hearing a high-pitched noise. “Who’s us,” I thought to myself.

You Cannot Miss What You’ve Never Had: The Vanishing Feeling of Freedom

By Daren Jonescu | May 19, 2012 | American Thinker

 The primary reason why it is so difficult to defend political liberty today is because freedom is a rational construct, and thus cannot be understood by the irrational.  Children, or adults whose moral reasoning skills are stalled at childish levels, are unable to experience it — they literally don’t know what they are missing.

This is why authoritarians of all stripes are hell-bent on producing and maintaining a society of childish citizens: dependent, trusting of the hand that feeds, obedient, pleasure-centered — perhaps capable of proficiency in well-defined tasks, but frightened, above all else, of being left to “fend for themselves.”

Why So Many Americans Still Don’t Know Much of Anything About Barack Obama

By Rush Limbaugh | May 18, 2012 | RushLimbaugh.com

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: You know, this Reverend Wright stuff with Barack Obama, it’s back in the news again. Something is happening.  It’s anecdotal, but I happen to think that this might be applicable in a statistical way to the nation at large.  We played the audio sound bite from Obama reading from one of his books a couple of weeks ago, in which he admitted bullying a young girl, in which he admitted trying cocaine, admitted that he drank a lot, basically just lollygagged around.  I know we’ve got new listeners to this program.  It’s been documented by the official ratings companies that monitor such things.

There are tons and tons of new listeners, but even at that, I’m overwhelmed by the number of people — we’re three-and-a-half years into his regime, and I’m getting e-mails from people that the first time they’d heard he’d done cocaine was in the past two, three weeks.  The first time they’d heard that he had bullied a young girl. They didn’t know his college transcripts hadn’t been released.  They just assumed all that had happened and they missed it. They didn’t know any of this.

Bill Clinton Undercuts Obama, Calls for Middle Class Tax Increase

By Rush Limbaugh | May 16, 2012 | RushLimbaugh.com

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: And our old buddy Bill Clinton, who, by the way, Bill Clinton’s back, and Bill Clinton’s back calling for tax increases on the middle class, ladies and gentlemen.  It’s right here in The Politico.

“Bill Clinton said Tuesday that President Barack Obama’s goal of hiking taxes on the rich alone is not enough to solve the country’s fiscal woes and suggested that middle class Americans must also eventually contribute more.” (imitating Clinton) “Look, this is just me now.  I’m not speaking for the White House.  I think you could tax me, you know, Hillary and I, we’re rich now, and I think you could tax me at a hundred percent and you wouldn’t balance that old budget.  The fact of the matter is you could tax me, you could tax Limbaugh, you could tax O’Reilly, you could tax everybody out there, you could tax me and Hillary, and you still wouldn’t balance the budget.  We are all gonna have to contribute to this.  And if middle-class people’s wages were going up again, and we had some growth in the economy, I don’t think they would object to going back to tax rates of when I was president.”

Now, is this guy doing Obama any favors here?  Bill Clinton comes out, calls for tax increases on the middle class.  Let’s take the rates back to when he was president.  I mean what is Obama doing?  Obama’s out there on this class envy tour trying to make everybody believe that the reason we have an economic problem is because we have rich people in the first place.  The second thing is, to solve it we’ve gotta tax ’em, we gotta tax that 1%.  They are the problem.

Here comes our old buddy Bill Clinton. (imitating Clinton) “Well, you know, this is just me speaking.  I mean, I’m not speaking for the White House, but I’m telling you, you could tax me, you could take everything I’ve got and that’s not gonna balance the budget. You can tax all the rich people I know, you could tax Harvey Weinstein, you could tax Spielberg, every one of these people. You could tax Will Smith and you’re still not gonna balance the budget.” I mean, that is the exact opposite message Obama wants, is it not?

And then to close it out by saying, “I think the middle class, if they had some income, they wouldn’t object to paying taxes.”  If they had some income.  If we had some growth to the economy, the middle class wouldn’t mind. Obama’s out there trying to tell the middle class they’re not gonna pay anything.  They’re gonna get and get.  They’re gonna have nothing but benefits.  That’s Obama’s message.  Here comes old Bill.  “Hey, you can tax me all you want, ain’t gonna close the budget.”  In other words, “You know what?  Obama doesn’t know what he’s talking about.  He’s telling you that he can raise taxes on the rich, but it ain’t gonna fix the budget.  He’s gonna have to raise taxes on you.” The thing is, Clinton’s more right than he’s wrong here.  That’s the irony here is that Clinton’s exactly right. You could take everything the rich have and you wouldn’t balance the budget, ever, and if you took everything the rich have, you can only do it once.  By definition, they’ve got no more.

“Yes, Mr. Limbaugh, but they will earn it next year.” Why, Mr. New Castrati, if you take everything they’ve got, why go earn any more of it if it’s all gonna be taken?  You can only take it one time.  Still don’t balance the budget. We gotta raise taxes on the middle class.  And we got it in Ed Klein’s book, Bill wants Hillary to run for president.  He wants Hillary back in there. He wants back in there.  The Politico says here, “The former president’s remarks about his own tax rate seemed to be a reference to Obama’s ‘Buffett Rule,’ which proposes higher taxes for the wealthiest Americans. Clinton asserted that when he was at the White House, ‘very few people’ thought they were being overtaxed.” (laughing)  I know it’s absolutely ridiculous. Clinton is the one who called Obama an amateur, and that’s
the title of Klein’s book.

It was Clinton that called Obama an amateur.  So now he’s out there attacking the Buffett Rule. He’s attacking Obama’s class envy.  He’s telling the middle class that he knows that they wouldn’t object to a tax increase if they had any income.  Clinton said, “Look, we can’t be in a position here where one of the negotiating partners says that that’s not negotiable. I mean, not only will we not raise taxes, we want the Bush tax cuts and we want more tax cuts and we want the right to disregard what the CBO says our budget — you can’t do that.  It’s hard to have a deal if there’s no arbiter.”  Looks to me like — and of course, I could be wrong — it looks to me like Clinton seems to differ on just about every Obama policy.  And yet he’s out there campaigning for him. We got Clinton saying this.  Of course you don’t need to hear Clinton say it; you just heard me do it.

Read the full article here.

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Demonizing Conservative Thought

By Howard Slugh | May 13, 2012 | American Thinker

The president has adopted an electoral strategy of demonizing conservative thought.  In a now-infamous speech, President Obama referred to his conservative opponents as “stuck in the past,” and as “naysayers” who “don’t believe in the future.”  He scoffed that his detractors were “founding members of the Flat Earth Society” who “just want to keep on doing things the same way that we’ve always done them.”  The president contrasted his critics with people who “refuse to stand still” and who “put their faith in the future.”  In a second speech, discussing Congressman Ryan’s proposed budget, the president implied that liberal policies create “opportunity” and “upward mobility” while conservative policies entrench inequality.  These false dichotomies mischaracterize conservative ideas.

These were not merely off-the-cuff remarks intended to smear political rivals.  This caricature of conservative ideas is popular among liberal social scientists.  In 2012 alone, two well-respected psychology journals published studies perpetuating these smears, citing more than a dozen previous studies.

“Bright Minds and Dark Attitudes: Lower Cognitive Ability Predicts Greater Prejudice Through Right-Wing ideology and Low Intergroup contact,” by Gordon Hodson and Michael Busseri, argued that conservatism is linked to low cognitive ability and that it acts as a precursor to racism.  This study described conservatism as characterized by “resistance to change” and “the promotion of inter-group inequalities.”

“Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism,” by Scott Edelman, et al., links an absence of critical thinking to conservative conclusions.  He describes conservative positions as evincing “low-effort thought” and as “initial and uncorrected responses” correctable by “overriding and adjusting initial conservative responses.”

Edelman claims that conservatives are marked by an “acceptance of hierarchy” and an “opposition to equality.”  He describes this acceptance as “proceeding in the absence of effortful information processing.”  Hodson and Buseri claim that these apparent cognitive problems are “associated with prejudice” and stem from fear and anxiety.

But this reductionist view ignores reality and the beauty contained in the conservative position.  In fact, the president and these social scientists denigrate conservative thought because its rejection of utopianism and insistence on cautious incremental change denies them the ability to unilaterally design a future that reflects their preferences.

Conservatives recognize that talents, such as the ability to write great novels, paint beautiful paintings, or hit five-hundred-foot home runs, will never be equally distributed.  Inequalities will exist even between people with similar levels of natural talent due to differences in their levels of dedication and pure luck.  Social scientists cannot wish these “hierarchies” out of existence, no matter how many papers they write.

Of course, this says nothing of political and legal equality, which conservatives embrace.  What conservatives do deny is that a society that suppresses the differences between people is attainable or even desirable.  Such an effort eliminates notions of nobility, heroism, and the aspiration for self-improvement.  We can either appreciate the novel, the painting, and the home run — or we can begrudge the “hierarchy” created by inequalities.  We cannot do both.

Only a dystopia, such as the one described in Kurt Vonnegut’s story “Harrison Bergeron,” could achieve perfect equality.  Vonnegut’s story takes place in a time where “everybody [i]s finally equal … every which way.”  This equality is perpetuated by a tyranny that forces intellectuals to place buzzers in their ears to prevent them “from taking unfair advantage of their brains,” hides the handsome behind masks, and encumbers the athletic with weights.

The characters live in a world devoid of joy; everyone is equally uninspired and miserable.  Vonnegut illustrates this dreariness by describing a ballet in which the ballerinas are “burdened with sashweights and bags of birdshot, and their faces [a]re masked, so that no one, seeing a free and graceful gesture or a pretty face, would feel like something the cat drug in.”  The imposition of equality obliterates everything that makes the ballet worthwhile.  This is allegorical hyperbole, but only because no one actually believes we should truly pursue a world without hierarchy.  The debate between conservatives and liberals is over where to draw the lines and which of our differences are worthy of esteem.

The adoption of universal equality is contrary to the natural human inclination to seek out excellence.  The attempt to deter such behavior cannot destroy that longing.  It merely perverts and distorts it.  This has led to the phenomenon of the celebrity who is “famous for being famous.”  Once people were admonished against recognizing and honoring people for their merits, they transferred that honor to entirely unremarkable people, undeserving of such esteem.  Is society better off because our children revere Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian rather than brilliant minds, moral exemplars, and great leaders?  As a conservative, I think not.

Edelman claims that conservatives have a “preference for the status quo” which requires “little time, effort, and awareness.”  He maintains that conservatives “simply assume that existing and long-standing states are good and desirable.”  Hodson and Busseri attribute this to the fact that “individuals with lower cognitive abilities may gravitate toward … conservative ideologies …  that maintain the status quo and provide psychological stability and a sense of order.”

What these social scientists view as laziness is actually a humble understanding of our own limitations.  Conservatives value tradition because we recognize that our inheritance contains wisdom that we could not quickly or easily replicate.  Conservatives do not view tradition as perfect or final; they see it as a collection of ideas that were successfully implemented throughout the ages and should not be hastily discarded.  The trial and error of generations have delivered a product superior to the one society could design based on current theories and prejudices.

Conservatives recognize that no individual or even individual generation is wise enough to recreate society from scratch.  Society is far too complex to maintain or improve without relying on the knowledge transmitted through tradition.  This, more than anything else, irritates these social scientists because they think it is their job to free us from tradition and to teach us how to remake the world.  They trivialize conservative thought because it counsels prudence and stability, while they think it is their place to lead the revolution.

Read the full article here.

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The Ryan Test: Demagoguery Versus Ideas

August 12, 2012 By John Malcolm Leave a Comment

By Jonathan S. Tobin | August 11, 2012 | Commentary Magazine As John wrote earlier today, liberals are convinced that Mitt Romney’s choice of Paul Ryan to be his running mate offers them a golden opportunity to savage the Republicans about the Wisconsin congressman’s budget plans. Predictably, the New York Times delivered one of the first such salvos in its editorial posted […]

Smoking Obama’s Crack and Yearning for the Mud

August 12, 2012 By John Malcolm Leave a Comment

By Vanderleun | August 10, 2012 | American Digest [From 2008. Only the names have been changed because the target has changed.] This downward flight of intellectuals has been going on ever since the Romantic movement began its counter-revolution a couple hundred years ago. No matter how much they flap their lips it’s a fall, not […]