Running Out of Other People's Money

Why socialism doesn't work, and the consequences once you've run out of other people's money.

Item: Police in Venezuela seized 2,500 rolls of toilet paper in an overnight raid of a clandestine warehouse. In addition, officers seized 400 diapers and 7,000 liters of fruit juice.

Item: The Elysee Palace sold off a tenth of its wine collection in a Presidential garage sale. The French government says it's no big deal, and they're trying to set the example.

Selling presidential wine in a nation that loves its wine might chip away at awful approval ratings, but it speaks more to the stupidity of goals that include squeezing the inequality gap by bringing the top lower, taxing rich people and businesses, and demonizing success. Venezuela has become a shell of itself after confiscation of foreign assets and saber-rattling spooked away expertise and investment. In the meantime, promises made to an entire continent aren't being kept as it's become hard enough to keep toilet paper and diapers for Venezuelans in stock.

Margret Thatcher talked about running out of other people's money, but in the game of ruining a country and squandering potential, running out of money is just the start of the fun and games. Usually by the time it begins, draconian options like higher taxes, fees and wealth confiscation has already been in place. Then it comes down to simply cutting spending or as is it's generally called- implementing austerity. But, in nations that have afflicted themselves with the most socialist policies, it's always back to higher taxes and confiscation of wealth anyway.

Of course when it's all really said and done, the end game looks like Greece where there's been talk of selling more than a thousand bottles of wine but major attractions including tourist sites and islands.

But for all these nations the spending doesn't stop, and yet they call it austerity. In America, we got a taste of austerity in the form of reinstatement of social security tax and sequestration. I didn't like the cut in social security tax, instead it should have been a permanent break on income taxes, but this was the easiest way to get wealth redistribution going along with supped up initiatives like the earned income tax credit and child tax credit. These scams used the cloak of rewarding workers when it was really focused on not helping people that earn too much.

(The starting point of most administration policies is how to make sure certain people do not benefit rather than how can we lift the entire nation. It's not a stretch to see how exclusive economic policies could lead to targeting by government toward other unfavorable people and organizations).

If This Is How the End of the World Looks- Sign Me Up!

President Obama talked about the devastating impact of sequestration and even went on a national tour touting the harsh outcomes of government slowing the rate of spending by just 2%. Never mind American households took a $1.3 trillion haircut over the past few years ... we were promised Armageddon beginning on March 1st.

This is what we got instead:

> Dow Jones Industrial Average +1,234 points or 9%
> Existing home prices (median) +19,600 from Feb or 11%
> Job creation of 303,000 with April's tally as high as or higher than seven months in 2012
> Washington DC has seen 40,000 jobs, 5.3% unemployment, and huge spikes in tax receipts for neighboring states and more cranes anywhere in the world than maybe Dubai.

Europe Continues to Spiral

While this was going on, Europe raised taxes as its form of austerity eschewing pro-business policies to support their welfare states and impossibly lavish social spending.

Headlines out of Europe this morning were heartbreaking.

Euro Zone unemployment is now at record high 12.2%, but that is just the tip of the iceberg. A country by country look speaks to a kind of desperation that can't be cured overnight or by printing money. Unemployment in the most troubled areas of Europe continues to deteriorate and is now in crisis mode, particularly for those nations' youth.

Last month I read that there are 6,000 pizza jobs unfilled in Italy because nobody wants to do that kind of work anymore. Yet the unemployment rate among Italy's youth is at an all-time record high (records kept since 1966). This speaks to the negative impact of the welfare state and welfare mentality. If you can get paid and live well, even live an inevitable life without working, then why make pizzas, why get off the sofa unless it's to go to the beach - where American tourists become jealous and think "these guys got it right."

They got it wrong!

Arvind Mahankiel got it right!

Arvind was winner of Scripts National Spelling Bee after correctly spelling "Knaidel" to become champion of the competition last night. The beauty is Arvind actually got knocked out of the competition the two prior years when he was tripped up by German words. Last night he turned his weakness into his strength and got the German word and the title. This is what America has always been about, grit and determination made us great and is the only way to stay that way. More and more of our youth along with society at large are being lured into a European existence where the state takes care of our needs relieving the need to get better, overcome adversity, and to be great.

Thanks, and may I repost here my response to another thread which quoted Margaret Thatcher's "other people's money" wisdom?

To restore freedom, opportunity, and "the Blessings of Liberty" for all citizens, we must expose the fraudulent and tyrannnical, but appealing, ideology so well understood and hidden in the semantics of Obama's "I'll take care of you" message.

America's founding principles were carefully designed by the Founders to expose, rebut, rebuke, and avoid the tyranny of any "class warfare" or "redistribution" ideas which tyrants might use to enslave individuals.

In their overwhelming desire for accumulation of power of government over people, how many have noticed that Democrats, under Obama, now acknowledge the taxing power as useful for restraining motivation toward what they deem to be undesirable behavior.

On the other hand, they deny the certain fact that "taking," or taxing productive citizens also discourages and restrains motivation toward productivity and plenty.

They now have endangered the liberty of millions yet unborn with their illogical arguments on behalf of "taking" and "redistributing" the earnings of hard-working Americans. They claim they are "taking care" of those who elected them. Their "taking care" amounts to enslaving every citizen, born and unborn, for generations to come.

Their claims would fall on deaf ears, if most citizens understood their Constitution's limits on the powers of government. Hear what some of the Founders said about the policies of today's so-called "progressive" Democrats.

"To preserve [the] independence [of the people,] we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our election between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude. If we run into such debts as that we must be taxed in our meat and in our drink, in our necessaries and our comforts, in our labors and our amusements, for our callings and our creeds, as the people of England are, our people, like them, must come to labor sixteen hours in the twenty-four, give the earnings of fifteen of these to the government for their debts and daily expenses, and the sixteenth being insufficient to afford us bread, we must live, as they now do, on oatmeal and potatoes, have no time to think, no means of calling the mismanagers to account, but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow-sufferers." --Thomas Jefferson to Samuel Kercheval, 1816. ME 15:39

"I deem [this one of] the essential principles of our government and consequently [one] which ought to shape its administration:... The honest payment of our debts and sacred preservation of the public faith." --Thomas Jefferson: 1st Inaugural, 1801. ME 3:322

"I sincerely believe... that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity under the name of funding is but swindling futurity on a large scale." --Thomas Jefferson to John Taylor, 1816. ME 15:23

"[With the decline of society] begins, indeed, the bellum omnium in omnia [war of all against all], which some philosophers observing to be so general in this world, have mistaken it for the natural, instead of the abusive state of man. And the fore horse of this frightful team is public debt. Taxation follows that, and in its train wretchedness and oppression." --Thomas Jefferson to Samuel Kercheval, 1816. ME 15:40

"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

All who claim to be conservatives need to publicize and "conserve" (preserve) these ideas on behalf of future generations.

Those who speak for conservatism must be able to use founding principles intelligently against the "chief redistributionist" and "leveler" of today.

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