Precisely. And altho the rest of your post is spot on, this is IMHO the real opportunity in the 2012 context.One day, at least according to the Marxists, the workers will rise up and kill the capitalists, thereby taking the wealth that they created through their labor. As my prof used to point out to the delight of those of us with more pedestrian values, good and bad have different meanings based on who you are. When the workers kill the capitalists, it wont be good for the capitalists, but it will beObamaites can obfuscate until the cow come home, but two facts cannot be evaded:
- Obama was saying the same thing as Fauxcahantas notoriously recently said and, as the audio clip clearly documents,
- Obama was preaching to the choir when he said it.
There have been rebellions of this sort, in Russia and many other places. They are disastrous for the workers for one simple reason: It took leadership to assemble the elements of a successful (i.e., socially beneficial) business, and it takes leadership to keep adapting it to changing circumstances. And circumstances do change.We struggle to understand why journalism is in the pockets of the Democratic Party, but it the reason is actually obvious. For reasons having little or nothing to do with the public interest (and everything to do with the very different proposition of interesting the public), Journalism is about bad news. Consequently journalism is really criticism. The more assiduously the journalist seeks to make a difference, the more s/he engages in second guessing of the decisions made by those who do socially necessary things. That can make the journalist seem important and knowledgeable - and since journalists are fascinated with creating appearances, that is good enough for the journalist. It can even gain control of a country for the journalist (e.g., Mussolinis Italy).
But second guessing is no substitute leadership. Let your worker who did" build that try to continue its operation in the absence of the leadership which didnt build that and she will learn soon enough what that leadership was actually working quite effectively accomplishing, and what he was preventing. The Marxist idea of killing the capitalist is actually nothing more than killing messenger who tells you that the sum of your demands for credit for doing that is greater than the value of what has actually been accomplished.
The profit or loss of a business depends quite critically on seemingly modest expenses. The under appreciated problem being that profit/loss is a small difference between two large numbers representing income and expenses. Thus, a 5% increase in expenses (very reasonable wage increase) and a reasonable 5% reduction in working hours (thus, of production and revenue) can throw a modestly profitable business into a crisis.
But of course in reality this election is about one fundamental question which the Obama Administration raises - do those numbers actually matter? You and I know in our bones that they do. Obama is behaving precisely as if they did not. And every election year we are reminded of just how many people are capable of believing that. The numbers may not matter, but the reality which they describe does. Just not to a superficial person such as a journalist. Until there isnt any food on the shelves.
As an example, look what’s happened to South Africa since apartheid ended. I’m not defending apartheid, by any means. But confiscating the property of the producers and turning it over to the non-producers is a non-winning strategy. They should have ended apartheid without the confiscation.
Thanks for the post/ping to this very good thread. Thanks for those quotes, garjog. BTTT!