Tuesday, March 3, 2009

Everything You Need To Know About Socialism...and Communism

Everything you need to know about statist "solutions" is encapsulated in this one little story that won't get much national coverage. Executive summary: Michelle Obama and David Axelrod ran a program for the University of Chicago hospital that shunted off poor patients to other hospitals, and sold this program by telling everyone how great it would be for both the patients and the hospitals.

It also tells you a bit about capitalism and the free markets. And that Michelle and David "don't care about black people".

What can we learn:

  • If the state provides a service, it will set the price for that service, and that price will be out of whack with the market.
  • The market itself will be out of whack because of the presence of the government. This will result either in skyrocketing prices or the death of the non-socialized areas of the market.
  • Success in a free market can require a broad strategy of lowering prices, cutting costs, raising quality, raising awareness, positioning, etc. Success in a socialized market requires giving the wives of politicians $317,000/year jobs.
  • Because a socialized market has all the same drives that power and sometimes corrupt the free market , a socialized market tends to have all the same flaws as a free market--unless you count "an embarrassment of riches" as a flaw (and some people do)--but with scant hope of correction, with such rare corrections being temporary and the result of political opportunism.
  • The state doesn't care about the well being of citizens; it cares only about crushing its enemies, and is a million times more ruthless than a Gates or a Rockefeller. And the state can live for hundreds or thousands of years.
  • The state has no shame. It will say "there is no pork in this bill" or "this will help the poor" even as the opposite is apparent to anyone with the integrity to look.
A lot of people seem to back Democrats because "their hearts are in the right place"; this little trifle should be a reminder that no, no they aren't.

Just as when the Republicans had power, they abused to enrich themselves at the cost of the rest of us, the Democrats have done the same. It is the nature of state power, and why the Founding Fathers put so many limitations on the state. "The Founding Fathers could never have imagined...." people often start out their plea for the expansion of state power. They then go on to say something that might or might not have been imagined by the Founders.

But guaranteed, they understood clearly the nature of the state to grasp, and having grasped, to clutch.

7 comments:

  1. Yes. But in America we are in the minority now, believing these things to be true. I hate believing that, but I do.

    I guess. Somebody talk me out of that. :)

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  2. I think we are a 35-35-20 nation. 35% are kind of hard core liberals, 35% are libertarian leaning and are of the less is more philosophy when it comes to government, and then you have the 20% who can be convinced one way or the other. In the last election, when both candidates were offering big government solutions, that 20% swung to The One offering the biggest government solutions.

    As people see the inherent unfairness of the Obama administration's plans manifest, they'll come back to their Jacksonian roots and throw some of the bums out in 2010, but only if the GOP chooses to run non-bums against the DEM bums.

    Time to work on that 20%, just as the market and banking mess helped Obama and a bunch of DEMs get elected in 2008, the same mess should cripple the DEMs in the next election. I suspect that if the GOP get their act together and run attractive, idealistic, and tech-savvy candidates in 2010, there could be a tidal shift like the one that happened in 1994.

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  3. Just pretend I typed 30% everywhere I typed 20% . . .


    I do math good!

    (and what I meant to include was that only two thirds of that 30% generally swings one way or the other, it's a rare election where the hard core from either the right or the left sways the whole group in the middle, but as we saw in the last election that group broke for the DEMs, and now we are where we are at)

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  4. Either that or we are a 35-35-20-10 nation, with the ten being the idiots who vote based on the best clothes, the glibbest sound bites on the campaign trail, or the hottest spouse, cause there are voters who focus on the superficial, and they are an unpredictable demographic in each election (unless there's a huge charisma gap, then you can slot those voters in with the charmer).

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  5. (why say in one comment what you could spread out over four?)

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  6. LOL, XWL! Well, I'm comforted by all of that, so thanks!

    Must get to work on the idiots and/or persuadables....

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  7. But guaranteed, they understood clearly the nature of the state to grasp, and having grasped, to clutch.

    How in the world did this fundamental idea get lost? It's really the principle notion on which this country is founded.

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