[VIDEO] Ted Cruz’s rainy day socialism: How a right-wing fanatic learned to stop worrying and...

Full Title - Ted Cruz’s rainy day socialism: How a right-wing fanatic learned to stop worrying and love redistribution

When New Jersey was underwater, Cruz slammed federal relief spending. Now he's asking for some of his own

For the first time ever, I agree with Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Tex., and Gov. Greg Abbott, R-Tex.. Specifically, as deadly floods drown parts of Texas, I absolutely agree that President Obama and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) ought to spend taxpayer funds redistributed from citizens in other states, including from leftists in Massachusetts, New York and California, to help with flooding relief in Cruz and Abbott’s sovereign state of Texas. Indeed, many of us generally agree that when the chips are down, it’s important to have (what’s that phrase?) a safety net, in case a particular crisis is seemingly insurmountable. It would be unfair and inhumane to demand that Texas pick itself up by its bootstraps — or, in the GOP’s favored parlance, to stop being so lazy and to get back to work.

Yes, Cruz and Abbott, who each vaulted to their lofty stations on small-government, taxed-enough-already Tea Party platforms, have requested federal relief funds and services from the Obama administration. Abbott, for his part, has already met with Obama to discuss the deployment of disaster relief to flood-stricken areas. Meanwhile, Cruz was explicit with his demands this week:

It’s Friday as I’m writing this, so I might be a little slow on the uptake, but a system in which taxpayer money that’s pooled into a common fund and redistributed fairly to other citizens and states in need… there’s an “-ism“ for that. (And it for sure isn’t “laissez-faire capitalism.”) What do they call it when everyone pays taxes into, say, the treasury of Cruz’s birth nation of Canada and, drawing from those commonly pooled resources, everyone gets free healthcare or federal relief when they need it?

Ah yes, now I remember. Socialism. Just last month, Cruz discussed socialism at a campaign rally in New Hampshire and he surely embraced it, yes?

“Obama is a disaster because he’s an unmitigated socialist; what he believes is profoundly dangerous, and he’s undermined the Constitution and the role of America in the world.”

Usually, it takes a few years or more for politicians to “evolve” on a particular issue, but based on Cruz’s remarks, he evolved on socialism in just over a month. In April he considered socialism to be “profoundly dangerous.” Prior to that, he went so far as to filibuster the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) because he believes it’s socialized medicine. As president, he’s promised to abolish “every word” of Obamacare. His parents, Cruz has repeated, fled Cuba because of socialism, even though Cruz was born in a socialized Canadian hospital. When offered free medical care, his folks weren’t all that opposed to redistributed wealth.

On top of everything else, Cruz famously voted against relief for the Northeast in the wake of Hurricane Sandy. Back in 2013, while New Jersey residents and New Yorkers were still bailing water out of destroyed homes and flooded subway platforms, Cruz released a statement that included the following remarks:

“Two-thirds of this spending is not remotely “emergency”; the Congressional Budget Office estimates that only 30% of the authorized funds would be spent in the next 20 months, and over a billion dollars will be spent as late as 2021.
This bill is symptomatic of a larger problem in Washington – an addiction to spending money we do not have. The United States Senate should not be in the business of exploiting victims of natural disasters to fund pork projects that further expand our debt.”

Yes, Cruz said the “Disaster Relief Act of 2013″ contributed to a spending addiction. He went on to fib about the “pork projects,” which indeed existed as part of the relief bill. What Cruz failed to mention was that most if not all of the pork was crowbarred into the bill at the request of red-state Republican members of Congress in order to cajole them into voting for Sandy funding, clearly because “What’s in it for me?” is a demand Jesus would’ve made.

Meanwhile, you might recall the last we heard from Greg Abbott during the Jade Helm fracas in which the Texas governor endorsed a wild conspiracy theory invented by radio host Alex Jones, suggesting that the military exercises planned for the Southwest this Summer are actually a prelude to martial law and perhaps the violent takeover of Texas, because it’s so conservative and allegedly “hostile.” Abbott was so concerned about Jones’ apoplectic performance art that he announced he’d deploy the Texas State Guard to monitor the exercises as a bulwark against any potential shenanigans.

But this week, as soon as the flood waters rose, Abbott rushed to Socialist Obama’s doorstep, hat in hand, begging for federal handouts and the rapid offloading of the dreaded “FEMA camps.”

Overall, and disaster relief funds aside, more than 33 percent of Texas’ revenue comes from the federal government. One third of all the money Texas spends on its people during a typical year is, in fact, redistributed from taxpayers in Chicago, Manhattan, Hollywood, San Francisco (home of the terrifying “San Francisco Values”) and, of course, Honolulu, the not-real-America birthplace of our “profoundly dangerous” socialist president. Rewinding to the Great Recession, Texas received $6.4 billion in funding, as requested by former Gov. Rick Perry, from the Recovery Act; which, by the way, has been referred to as the “failed stimulus” by Cruz and others. The redistributed stimulus money balanced the Texas budget and preserved its rainy day fund. In total, Texas was the third-highest recipient of stimulus funds, totaling more the $33 billion.

If Cruz, Abbott and other conservative Texans plan to comport themselves as members of the party of personal responsibility, the least they could do is to man-up and own their socialism. They won’t, of course, and instead they’ll stump throughout the summer, gloating on one hand how they helped Texas in its time of need while on the other hand condemning President Obama and Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton of fundamentally transforming America into a socialist hellscape.

There was a war on "the People's" Constitutional limits on their elected representatives' use of coercive power to "take" and "redistribute" the people's earnings, under the guise of "helping" some.

Growing a voter base in order to retain power ceded to them by kind-hearted American citizens who could not distinguish between the merits of private charity and the dangers of coercive collective power has brought us to today's debt, deficits and endangered liberty for all citizens.

Perhaps a reading of Congressman Davy Crockett's (TN) story of his inspiring encounter with a farmer who understood the Constitution and how it changed his vote might be a revealing and entertaining exercise for all of us.

The current Democrat appeal for coercively-imposed "fair share" and against "inequality of income" and appeals for government "charity" simply constitutes "slavery" by another name. Government "masters" buy votes in exchange for retaining their "master redistributionist" status, while their "voters" yield up freedom for themselves and future generations.

"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." - C. S. Lewis

Hear Samuel Adams:

"Is it now high time for the people of this country to explicitly declare whether they will be free men or slaves. It is an important question which ought to be decided. It concerns more than anything in this life. The salvation of our souls is interested in this event. For wherever tyranny is established, immorality of every kind comes in like a torrent, it is in the interest of tyrants to reduce the people to ignorance and vice.” - Samuel Adams

And:

“The utopian schemes of leveling and a community of goods, are as visionary and impractical as those which vest all property in the crown. These ideas are arbitrary, despotic, and, in our government unconstitutional.” - Samuel Adams

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