'Progressive' Is a Funny Name for Poverty!

The American Thinker ^ | November 04, 2010 | Jack Curtis

[Scanian]

The slogans of Big Brother's ruling party in George Orwell's 1984 included Love is Hate and War is Peace. Today's leftists unwinding the country back to pre-constitutional poverty call themselves Progressives. They are truly Regressives, but perhaps truth is too hard for politicians.

The original thirteen colonies encouraged using free-standing timber for energy to promote development; later governments promoted coal, then oil and hydroelectric power for the same reasons. That, along with promoting roads and railroads, provided for the industrialization of North America, the process that produced American wealth. Our Progressives despise all that.

The Progressives are reducing energy use and diverting resources from motorized transport, as Obama's Energy and Transportation Secretaries have said. Progressive regulatory, tax, and labor policies have been sending American industry elsewhere for a decade, devastating the Rust Belt -- which returned the favor by rejecting Democrats in Tuesday's elections. While their policies have been raising the costs of energy, housing, food, and transport, family earnings have been dropping, and unemployment has turned pathological. Unproductive government now pays its workers better than private industry can afford. Such policies, reversing those that built the country, produce poverty, not wealth; housing growth is foreclosed, and food stamp use is at record levels.

Russia collectivized at gunpoint upon the dead bodies of 20 million starved Ukrainians and moved forward with the addition of more millions wasted in the gulags. Sixty-nine years later, the whole thing collapsed from inability to finance itself; statist collectives produce wealth only for their leaders, by confiscation. As the Russians famously joked, We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us.

Europe went statist less formally after World War II via bribery of the electorate by politicians, avoiding the Soviet bloodshed. Voters signed on for the security they saw in government's social programs; government expanded to provide them. It's less than 69 years, but Europe's current debt crisis is forcing retrenchment despite voter unrest; the politicians are repudiating their promises because they can't find a way to pay for them. How that will play out remains to be seen, but the process is unstoppable; wealth creation has been in retreat for too long, and the money isn't there.

Columnist Jonah Goldberg recently put questions to President Obama in an article entitled "U.S. Following European Dead End." Goldberg asked, "If your philosophy is so great, how come the countries that have embraced it for generations are so much poorer than us?"

Goldberg also wondered why no one has asked Obama "about the incongruity of saying his policies have laid a new foundation for economic growth and job creation when the countries he's trying to emulate are trying to dismantle the very same foundations in order to survive."

[paul51]

"If your philosophy is so great, how come the countries that have embraced it for generations are so much poorer than us?"

because this time they have me. (LOL)

[Tainan]

Progressive = Liberal = Leftist = Socialist


And thats the facts.

[Jack Hydrazine]

Leftist, Progressive, Socialist, Communist, Fascist, National Socialist(Nazi), Maoist, et al are all forms of collectivism. They strive/fight to put the group above the individual, masculinity, and God. They use double speak and deception based on their hate and envy of the individual to advance their agenda. Sun Tzu said, “All war is deception.”

Let’s take back the hijacked word, “liberal” since liberty and freedom are not what Leftist want for the individual.

[Jack Hydrazine]

I like this quote from the story.

‘Columnist Jonah Goldberg recently put questions to President Obama in an article entitled “U.S. Following European Dead End.” Goldberg asked, “If your philosophy is so great, how come the countries that have embraced it for generations are so much poorer than us?”’

Do Americans really want to be Euro-peon-ized? I think the Tea Parties and the vote yesterday made it very clear that we do not.

[Scanian]

I think there are people on the two coasts that identify as much with Europe as they do their own country. It’s part of their idea of “sophistication.”

I’m anxious to see what they do when the countries they view as “so far ahead of us” start to really cut back.

[Jack Hydrazine]

And as those States on both coasts, which identify with the Euro-peon collectivists, continue to see their ideas fail I’m sure it will keep them and their sophisticated sophistry feeling hopeychangey. It would be nice to export all Leftists to Europe.