The Liberal Assault on the Poor

The ONLY thing liberals love about the poor is their vote.

The recently announced intent of the FCC to re-regulate broadband is exactly a case of using the force of government to control private property (network equipment) for the use of "the poor" who haven't paid for it. The more likely scenario is price controls that will drive current providers out of the business. Less access for everyone.

The article starts with a statement:

“In proposing welfare-state programs, by necessity liberals always make an important assumption. They assume that there is wealth in society. After all, if there is no wealth then what good would welfare-state policies do? The welfare state operates on the assumption that there are people who are earning wealth or have accumulated wealth. Those are the people from whom the government takes money in order to redistribute it to the poor.”

Okay, “they assume that there is wealth in society. ... The welfare state operates on the assumption that there are people who are earning wealth or have accumulated wealth.”

But he never states directly that the assumption that there is wealth in society is the reason WHY liberals believe government should take money from them and give it to the poor.

Is he saying that this assumption is wrong, that there aren’t those with wealth in this society?

Or is he saying that liberals want to give money to the poor from the wealthy just because they don’t they anyone else should have more than anyone else, because they are Levellers? Or are they just jealous of the wealthy? Or are they do-gooders, who have an idea of what constitutes “poor” and don’t believe anybody should live like that?

The rest of the article doesn’t explain, just attacks “liberals” for their imagine responses to various scenarios (postulations which may or may not be accurate.

But I still don’t know what the assumption I’m supposed to be making, according to him.

The only way rats can keep power is to keep the poor poor. They’ve pissed off everyone else.

Oh, I don’t think that’s their primary driving motivation for “loving the poor”.

They love the poor in that they can use them for their own sense of self worth.

“See, I care about the poor more than you do because I advocate giving them your money.”

They are narcissists who seek their own sense of moral superiority in how much they “care”.

So-called "liberals"--the Far Left in America--have acquired power by promising "goodies" in exchange for votes. They have bought their offices with promises of "hope" and "change," just as every charlatan in the history of civilization has done, and they are "transforming" America from a place of refuge for the oppressed to a facsimile of the places from which those oppressed millions fled.

America's liberty and prosperity for over 200 years was based on another idea, for the earnings of hardworking citizens were protected from the coercive hand of government by a written Constitution which did not allow the Obamas of America such "taking" power. 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

On May 1, a Catholic Priest named Father Corapi made a speech in St. Louis, in which he stated, “socialism is not in conformity with biblical teaching. Socialism doesn’t profit the poor, but only brings poverty and misery. Socialism is about the seizure of power. It only brings everyone down to the lowest common denominator.”

Both Father Corapi and Samuel Adams knew what the bottom line on such "utopian" ideas is about. It is about accumulating power over individuals by promising to "help" them.

By lower the costs of goods through supply innovation, WalMart has done more for the poor than the federal government ever will.

In proposing their array of welfare programs to help the poor, liberals operate under the mindless assumption that wealth exists naturally in a society. Even worse, they give nary a thought to the possibility that a society in which wealth is growing is the greatest benefit to the poor. Worst of all, they don’t consider the distinct possibility that their own tax-and-redistribute policies tend toward destroying the base of wealth in society, thereby relegating everyone to poverty. -- from the article

"It is no crime to be ignorant of economics, which is, after all, a specialized discipline and one that most people consider to be a 'dismal science.' But it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on economic subjects while remaining in this state of ignorance." -- Murray N. Rothbard

"If you wrote down on 5x7 index cards what the average American college student knows about economics, wadded those index cards up into one spit wad, and then shoved that spit wad up an ant's butt, it would rattle around in there like a BB in a boxcar." -- Neal Boortz

"Wealth may provoke envy, but it seldom provokes the truly venomous levels of resentment provoked by achievement."-- Dr. Thomas Sowell

"In religion and politics people's beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing." -- Autobiography of Mark Twain by Samuel Clemens

All this careful and patient explanation is wasted on liberals. They aren’t fighting poverty; they’re fighting inequality. The goal is not to eradicate poverty, it’s to eradicate wealth.

....don't forget the lottery which also fleeces the poor...

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"The belief that all wealth comes from stealing is popular in prisons and at Harvard." -- George Gilder

"Wealth is based on productivity, and productivity is expandable. In fact, productivity is fabulously expandable." -- P.J. O'Rourke in Eat the Rich

THE GAP BETWEEN RICH & POOR
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CLICK ON THE GRAPH TO SEE A CLEARER VERSION OF IT:

gapgraph.jpg from http://FreedomKeys.com/gap.htm

And check out the charts HERE, HERE, HERE and HERE.

"Never mind the low wages and harsh living conditions of the early years of capitalism. They were all that the national economies of the time could afford. Capitalism did not create poverty -- it inherited it. Compared to the centuries of precapitalist starvation, the living conditions of the poor in the early years of capitalism were the first chance the poor had ever had to survive. As proof -- the enormous growth of the European population during the nineteenth century, a growth of over 300 percent, as compared to the previous growth of something like 3 percent per century."-- Ayn Rand

"Economic growth was non-existent during the centuries 500-1500 -- and per capita GDP rose by merely 0.1 percent per year in the centuries 1500-1700. In 1500, the estimated European per capita income was roughly $215; in 1700, roughly $265." -- Andrew Bernstein

"In a poor country like ours, the alternative to low-paid jobs isn't well-paid ones; it's no jobs at all." -- Jesús Reyes-Heroles, Mexico's Ambassador to the USA

As Robert A. Heinlein said, "Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded -- here and there, now and then -- are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty."

In a modern open-market capitalist society, entrepreneurs get rich and the poor get better off as a result -- OF COURSE they're not going to get as rich as fast (duh). So, of course the gap thereby gets wider -- but the top AND BOTTOM of the gap both rise to levels much higher than before. The gap is widening?? Well, hooray for everyone’s sake! ESPECIALLY the poor!

If the rich weren’t free to "get ever richer," developing or investing in ever-increasing productivity, the poor would NEVER have any chance to improve their conditions at all, let alone to obtain their ever-increasing access to the latest tools of that expanding productivity, making every hour of their labor ever-more valuable. And YOU wouldn't EVER have the chance to read this or anything else brought to you by advanced technology.

Freedom incents the creators to empower YOU and as many other people in the world as possible. There's little an entrepreneur likes better than a bunch of ever-richer loyal customers. Remember, the wealth you see around you didn’t always exist; it was and is CREATED wherever the right CONDITIONS OF FREEDOM (including the rule of natural law evenly applied, with the rigorous protection of individual rights including property rights and respect for contracts, effective prosecution of the perpetrators of force and fraud, and the ease of engaging in trade without the interference or "permissions" of politicians and bureaucrats) are established and guaranteed._

Now recognize the true nature and scope of evil and wherein it really lies. And don't be too limp a wimp to to call viciousness viciousness even if all your friends and neighbors fawn like groupies over any mantle of global "compassion" in which the evil appears to be cloaked.

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Find: "Popular understanding of economics is at least two centuries behind economists' understanding of the economy." HERE
And: "Wealth is not a fixed quantity and one person's success does not come at the expense of others ... Economists have understood [that] for over two centuries, but moralists have not caught up." HERE
"When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men together in a society, they create for themselves in the course of time, a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it." -- Frédéric Bastiat

http://freedomkeys.com/gap.htm

"Wealth, when you get right down to it, is not the cause of poverty." -- Mitchell B. Pearlstein, paraphrasing George Gilder

"Ultimately it is only wealth that can reduce poverty." -- Thomas Sowell

"If we want the whole world to be rich, we need to start loving wealth. In the difference between poverty and plenty, the problem is the poverty and not the difference. Wealth is good. ... wealth is not a world-wide round-robin of purse snatching, and ... the thing that makes you rich doesn't make me poor. ... Without Productivity, there wouldn't be any economics, or any economic thinking, good or bad, or any pizza, or anything else. We would sit around and stare at rocks, and maybe later have some for dinner. ... Wealth is based on productivity, and productivity is expandable. In fact, productivity is fabulously expandable."-- P.J. O'Rourke in Eat the Rich

(Again) "Wealth is based on productivity, and productivity is expandable. In fact, productivity is fabulously expandable." -- P.J. O'Rourke in Eat the Rich
"of the vast increase in the well-being of hundreds of millions of people that has occurred in the 200-year course of the industrial revolution to date, virtually none of it can be attributed to the direct redistribution of resources from rich to poor. The potential for improving the lives of poor people by finding different ways of distributing current production is nothing compared to the apparently limitless potential of increasing production." --Robert Lucas

"When government will expropriate any wealth that people create, the present value of future output can actually be less than the value of the country's tangible resources. The power of predatory government to destroy wealth is truly awesome." -- Arnold Kling

"Look around: It just isn't true that countries get rich at each other's expense.Would America be better off now if Europe and Japan had stayed poor after 1945? Did its jobs migrate, its economy stagnate, leaving rising poverty and chronic unemployment? Not exactly: America thrived. One of the things that helped it after 1945 was expanding opportunities for trade with other rich countries. Americans would be worse off today if Europe and Japan had stayed poor. What's changed? Why isn't this still true? In my view: Nothing; it's still true. The faster India grows, the better off every other country will be... I do not regard the prospect of global capitalism as 'harrowing.' I regard it as the best opportunity for relieving human misery the world has ever seen." -- Clive Crook, deputy editor of The Economist,in the February 25th, 1997 issue of Slate, in a letter to John Judis

"I observed the talks and was shocked not only by the riotous atmosphere, but also by the protesters' misconceptions about trade, the WTO and the developing world. As an Indian national, I know only too well how lack of trade, investment and freedom keeps the world's developing nations in a state of perpetual poverty and environmental degradation. Sadly, the largely middle-class Americans who trashed Seattle last week had little if any comprehension of this fact." -- Barun Mitra, in a column in the Wall Street Journal 12-9-99. Mitra heads the The Liberty Institute, in New Delhi, India

"The 'progressive' Left, even while wailing about international poverty, has long decried the Westernization of the 'developing world', the polite term for societies kept poor by socialist governments." -- from The Free Market Means Civilizationby Lew Rockwell, President of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, originally published in Spintechmag.com,12-22-2000.

"Socialism is an ideology. Capitalism is a natural phenomenon." -- Michael Rothschild in BIONOMICS: Economy as Ecosystem

"Capitalism is not an 'ism.' It is closer to being the opposite of an 'ism,' because it is simply the freedom of ordinary people to make whatever economic transactions they can mutually agree to." -- Dr. Thomas Sowell

"Not understanding the process of a spontaneously-ordered economy goes hand-in-hand with not understanding the creation of resources and wealth." -- Julian Simon

"The market is not an invention of capitalism. It has existed for centuries. It is an invention of civilization." -- Mikhail Gorbachev, June 8, 1990

"How a conflict-ridden, grossly over-populated place with no resources whatsoever gets rich is simple. The British colonial government turned Hong Kong into an economic miracle by doing nothing." -- P.J. O'Rourke in Eat the Rich

"In terms of natural resources, Africa is the world's richest continent. It has 50 percent of the world's gold, most of the world's diamonds and chromium, 90 percent of the cobalt, 40 percent of the world's potential hydroelectric power, 65 percent of the manganese, millions of acres of untilled farmland as well as other natural resources. Despite the natural wealth, Africa is home to the world's most impoverished and abused people. Of the 41 black African nations, only three (Senegal, Botswana and Mauritius) allow their people the right to vote and choose their own leaders. Only two (Botswana and Senegal) permit freedom of expression and criticism of government policies. In countries like Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Mozambique, Sudan, Chad and others, ethnic genocide has taken the lives of untold millions of innocent victims. Slavery is still practiced in the Sudan and Mauritania." -- Dr. Walter E. Williams

"Capitalism is not just a system for producing wealth. It is, above all else, a system based on the noblest moral principle: the protection of the individual's right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Free markets are founded on the individual's right to pursue a career, trade the products of his effort, and enjoy the wealth he has earned without having to seek permission from others or pay ransom for the privilege of living." --Robert W. Tracinski

"Socialism is an ideology. Capitalism is a natural phenomenon." -- Michael Rothschild

"Any stray mediocrity rushes into print with plans to control the production of mankind -- and ... no one questions his right to enforce his plans by means of a gun." -- Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

"Cuba's poverty is caused by the crackpot Marxist doctrines imposed by its sociopathic ruler and promoted by half the liberal arts professors on American faculties." -- David Horowitz

"If concern for human poverty and suffering were one's primary motive, one would seek to discover their cause. One would not fail to ask : Why did some nations develop, while others did not? Why have some nations achieved material abundance, while others have remained stagnant in sub-human misery? History and specifically the unprecedented prosperity-explosion of the 19th century would give an immediate answer : capitalism is the only system that enables men to produce abundance - and the key to capitalism is individual freedom." -- Ayn Rand, "Requiem for Man", Chapter 24 of Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal

"The benefits of securing the freedom to create wealth are significant -- especially for the poor. 'In nations in the top fifth of economic freedom, the average income of the poorest 10 percent of the population was $6,877 compared to just $823 in the least free nations,' according to the 2004 Economic Freedom Report, which ranks 123 countries on such policies as taxation, property-rights protection, and freedom to trade internationally. The report also shows that poor countries that embrace economic freedom accumulate wealth faster: From 1980 to 2000 poor countries whose economies were relatively free of government interference had economic growth rates of 5.2 percent per year, compared to 3.4 percent for all economically free countries." -- Gabriel Gasave

http://freedomkeys.com/gap.htm
"Western civilization was the child and product of reason -- via ancient Greece. In all other civilizations, reason has always been the menial servant -- the handmaiden -- of mysticism. You may observe the results. It is only Western culture that has ever been dominated -- imperfectly, incompletely, precariously and at rare intervals -- but still, dominated by reason. You may observe the results of that." -- Ayn Rand
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   "Today, in the Twenty-First Century, an age of jet aircraft, personal computers, wireless telecommunications, laser surgery, and incipient space travel, the mentality with which many presumably educated, intelligent people approach matters of economics and business is, however astonishing it may seem, still that of the Dark Ages."-- George Reisman
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   "Most Americans living below the official poverty line have air conditioning, microwaves and VCRs. About half have a car or truck. Moreover, most of the people in the bottom 20 percent of the income distribution in 1975 have also been in the top 20 percent at some point since then. ... People who are genuinely poor all their lives still exist, but only about 3 percent of the American population remains in the bottom 20 percent for as long as a decade." -- Dr. Thomas Sowell
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"Not understanding the process of a spontaneously-ordered economy goes hand-in-hand with not understanding the creation of resources and wealth." -- Julian Simon
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   "America's abundance was not created by public sacrifices to the common good, but by the productive genius of free men who pursued their own personal interests and the making of their own private fortunes." -- Ayn Rand

"Scratch the surface of an endemic problem -- famine, illness, poverty -- and you invariably find a politician at the source."-- Simon Carr, in his review of The Mystery of Capital by Hernando de Soto

"You can bet the rent money that whatever politicians do will end up harming consumers. ... Economic ignorance is to politicians what idle hands are to the devil. Both provide the workshop for the creation of evil." -- Walter E. Williams
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"From the fact that people are very different it follows that, if we treat them equally, the result must be inequality in their actual position, and that the only way to place them in an equal position would be to treat them differently. Equality before the law and material equality are therefore not only different but are in conflict with each other; and we can achieve either one or the other, but not both at the same time." -- F. A. Hayek
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"If welfare and equality are to be primary aims of law, some people must necessarily possess a greater power of coercion in order to force redistribution of material goods. Political power alone should be equal among human beings; yet, striving for other kinds of equality absolutely requires political inequality." -- Tibor R. Machan in Private Rights and Public Illusions

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"Anything other than free enterprise always means a society of compulsion and lower living standards, and any form of socialism strictly enforced means dictatorship and the total state. That this statement is still widely disputed only illustrates the degree to which malignant fantasy can capture the imagination of intellectuals." -- Lew Rockwell
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"I consider socialism an obscene ideology, doomed to end in either total self destruction or total dictatorship." -- Pamela Hemelrijk, Leiden, Holland, April 3, 2004.04.16

"All socialism involves slavery." -- Herbert Spencer

"Many Western journalists, in contrast to revolutionaries, do not treat ideas seriously, and therefore fail to recognize the power of ideas in action. They don't realize that chaos and brutality must accompany a determined effort to implement ... thorough-going socialism." -- Prof. Morgan O. Reynolds
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"Scratch the surface of an endemic problem -- famine, illness, poverty -- and you invariably find a politician at the source."-- Simon Carr, in his review of The Mystery of Capital by Hernando de Soto

"You can bet the rent money that whatever politicians do will end up harming consumers. ... Economic ignorance is to politicians what idle hands are to the devil. Both provide the workshop for the creation of evil." -- Walter E. Williams
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"Many Western journalists, in contrast to revolutionaries, do not treat ideas seriously, and therefore fail to recognize the power of ideas in action. They don't realize that chaos and brutality must accompany a determined effort to implement ... thorough-going socialism." -- Prof. Morgan O. Reynolds

"No 'middle class' worth the name aspires to economic benefits without bothering to acquire the skills to produce the wealth to make those benefits sustainable." -- Holman Jenkins
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"To embrace a collectivist system ... and thereby jeopardize sustained economic growth, inevitably misallocate scarce resources, and almost necessarily perpetuate destitution, hardly merits moral acclaim. Indeed, intellectuals in general and church leaders in particular who bewail the continued existence of poverty absolutely defined, and who state that they yearn for a world in which the hungry are fed, the naked clothed, and the destitute housed, yet who ceaselessly undermine the very system which, to date, has best done what they claim to value most, are, surely, moral imbeciles." -- The Reverend Doctor John K. Williams

"Capitalism is not an 'ism.' It is closer to being the opposite of an 'ism,' because it is simply the freedom of ordinary people to make whatever economic transactions they can mutually agree to." -- Dr.Thomas Sowell

"Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it." -- Thomas Sowell

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"Some people argue that regulation in the developed world is a good thing, but that poorer countries are under-regulated, which is a bad thing. They're wrong on both counts. A recent report by the World Bank found that businesses in poor countries face much higher regulatory burdens than those in rich countries. The combination of the presence of higher administrative costs and the absence of property rights can have a devastating effect. It takes 153 days to start a business in Maputo, but just 2 days in Toronto. There are 21 procedures to register commercial property in Abuja, but only 3 procedures in Helsinki. It costs 126 per cent of the value of a debt to enforce a contract in Jakarta, but 5.4 per cent of the value of a debt to do so in Seoul. If a debtor becomes insolvent and enters bankruptcy, creditors would get 13 cents on the dollar in Mumbai, but more than 90 cents in Tokyo. Where would you want to do business?" -- David Cameron

"The perception of poverty as morally intolerable in a rich society had to await the emergence of a rich society." -- Nathan Rosenberg

"The attempt to make heaven on earth invariably produces hell." -- Karl Popper

-- all from http://freedomkeys.com/gap.htm

(One more time now): "Wealth is based on productivity, and productivity is expandable. In fact, productivity is fabulously expandable." -- P.J. O'Rourke in Eat the Rich

-- all from http://FreedomKeys.com/gap.htm -- where THERE'S A LOT MORE

-- from http://freedomkeys.com/gap.htm or http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://freedomkeys.com/gap.htm

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Liberals say that they love the poor, needy, and disadvantaged... and they are trying real hard to make us all poor, needy, and disadvantaged.

... drive current providers out of the business

Once the private companies are out but the demand for service remains, the government will step in and we can all watch creeping socialism at work.

When the government seizes the assets of the private networking companies, they will also claim their ownership means they have total control of what passes over those networks. It will be monitored even more closely than it is now. Dissent against the regime will be punished.

Liberals say that they love the poor, needy, and disadvantaged.

Always a mistake to put too much weight on what liberals "say". What they mean is, they love that there ARE poor, needy and disadvantaged...because when there is felt need liberals can play on fears, hopes and hatreds to garner votes.