Posted on 06/02/2015 6:15:47 AM PDT by shortstop
The Democrats are right, there are two Americas.
The America that works, and the America that doesn’t. The America that contributes, and the America that doesn’t.
It’s not the haves and the have nots, it’s the dos and the don’ts. Some people do their duty as Americans, to obey the law and support themselves and contribute to society, and others don’t.
That’s the divide in America.
It’s not about income inequality, it’s about civic irresponsibility. It’s about a political party that preaches hatred, greed and victimization in order to win elective office. It’s about a political party that loves power more than it loves its country.
That’s not invective, that’s truth.
And it’s about time someone said it.
The politics of envy was on proud display last week as the president said he would pledge the rest of his term to fighting “income inequality.” He notes that some people make more than other people, that some people have higher incomes than others, and he says that’s not just.
It was the rationale of thievery.
The other guy has it, you want it, Obama will take it for you.
Vote Democrat.
It is the electoral philosophy that gave us Detroit. It is the electoral philosophy that is destroying America.
And it conceals a fundamental deviation from American values and common sense. It ends up not being a benefit to the people who support it, but a betrayal. The Democrats have not empowered their followers, they have enslaved them – in a culture of dependence and entitlement, of victimhood and anger instead of ability and hope.
The president’s premise – that you reduce income inequality by debasing the successful – seeks to ignore and cheat the law of choices and consequences. It seeks to deny the successful the consequences of their choices and spare the unsuccessful the consequences of their choices.
Because, by and large, the variability in society is a result of different choices leading to different consequences. Those who choose wisely and responsibly have a far greater likelihood of success, while those who choose foolishly and irresponsibly have a far greater likelihood of failure.
And success and failure can manifest themselves in personal and family income.
You choose to drop out of high school or to skip college and you are apt to have a different outcome than someone who gets a diploma and pushes on with purposeful education. You have your children out of wedlock and life is apt to take one course, you have them in wedlock and life is apt to take another course.
Most often in life our destination is determined by the course we take.
My doctor, for example, makes far more than I do. There is significant income inequality between us. Our lives have had an inequality of outcome. But, our lives also have had an inequality of effort. Whereas my doctor went to college and then gave the flower of his young adulthood to medical school and residency, I got a job in a restaurant. He made a choice, I made a choice. And our choices led us to different outcomes.
His outcome pays a lot better than mine.
Does that mean he cheated and Barack Obama needs to take away his wealth?
No, it means we are both free men.
And in a free society, free choices will lead to different outcomes.
It is not inequality Barack Obama will take away, it is freedom.
The freedom to succeed, and the freedom to fail. And there is no true option for success if there is no true option for failure.
The pursuit of happiness means a whole lot less when you face the punitive hand of government if your pursuit brings you more happiness than the other guy.
Even if the other guy sat on his arse and did nothing.
Even if the other guy made a lifetime’s worth of asinine and shortsighted decisions.
Barack Obama and the Democrats preach equality of outcome as a right, while completely ignoring inequality of effort. The simple Law of the Harvest – as ye sow, so shall ye reap – is sometimes applied as, “The harder you work, the more you get.”
The progressive movement would turn that upside down.
Those who achieve are to be punished as enemies of society and those who fail are to be rewarded as wards of society. Entitlement has replaced effort as the key to upward mobility in American society.
Or at least it has if Barack Obama gets his way.
He seeks a lowest common denominator society in which the government besieges the successful and productive and fosters equality through mediocrity.
He and his party speak of two Americas.
And their grip on power is based on using the votes of one to sap the productivity of the other.
America is not divided by the differences in our outcomes, it is divided by the differences in our efforts. And by the false philosophy that says one man’s success comes about unavoidably as the result of another man’s victimization.
What the president offered was not a solution, but a separatism. He fomented division and strife, he pitted one set of Americans against another.
For his own political benefit.
That’s what progressives offer. Marxist class warfare wrapped up with a bow.
Two Americas, coming closer each day to proving the truth to Lincoln’s maxim that a house divided against itself cannot stand.
There is also the America that kills babies in the womb and the America that loves babies in the womb. I would rather pay a woman to not kill her baby than pay to have little him or her offered to satan as a human blood sacrifice by the high priest of death, abortionist.
It won’t.
We are so screwed.
Taking away these freedoms has failed everywhere it's been tried, whether in a community, a country, or a continent.
> We are so screwed.
JFK is owed such an apology...as is Nixon
There was an article not too long ago about how entrepreneurism has imploded in the US. The current “malaise” the country is experiencing (teetering between barely-perceptable economic growth and recession) is due to the folks who can grow the economy essentially checking out.
Call it economic passive-aggressiveness, or “Going Galt” or whatever ... the fact is that between stifling regulations and crushing taxes, too many people see no benefit to taking the kinds of economic risks necessary to drive the economy.
A government big enough to give everyone “free Obamacare” is big enough to tell everyone what size BigGulp and meals that might affect their health they are allowed to have.
A government big enough to redistribute the wealth from those much richer than me is also big enough to redistribute my wealth, and with the government-encouraged flood of millions of illegals, big enough to take money from every working American to give to those poor illegal aliens and to parasitic legal residents.
A government big enough to redefine marriage nationwide, against the will of voters and even against the constitutions of many states is big enough to start telling people who to marry and how many children they are permitted/required to have.
A government big enough to compel a florist/baker/photographer to service others in violation of deeply-held religious beliefs is big enough to compel everyone to work at the jobs chosen for them by FedGov according to their abilities and for the wages allocated to each according to their needs.
I prefer freedom, which is why I reject Obama and his policies.
That's only half the story. He didn't mention that its the Obama world that made the other guy rich in the first place - because that guy is able to game the many government rules, is an insider, and protects and promotes the redistributionist system.
When I finished HS and started to work, I was aware TOO that there was income inequality.
I decided I didn’t like it and that to get a better job, I’d have to struggle.
ALSO I was real clear that there was going to be NO fun for the next few years while I went to college. All my friends (not going to college) were out having a ball and going on with their lives.
I started school and made sure that:
1.) I didn’t get pregnant
2.) Didn’t get involved with drugs
3.) Took jobs, (awful, low paying jobs) sometimes 2 or 3 part time jobs at the same time ... WHILE a student
4.) Didn’t get lazy and give up so society could take care of me
Those are the decisions and the choices I had to make and STICK TO in order to qualify for better paying work.
I am no millionaire, but I am loads better off than if I didn’t work and ‘do without’ for several years.
Or forced to fight.
THIS is Obama's legacy: able-bodied, working people who CAN'T contribute to society—they simply don't make enough money.
And these aren't just thirty-somethings supporting a family who make a career in minimum-wage jobs; these are people marginally attached to the work-force, having been employed previously in skilled work, but taking any and all available jobs after getting laid off from same.
My dad worked in manufacturing in the 90s and early 00s—Nafta, the influx of illegal immigrants, other forms of cheap labour, and outsourcing of manufacturing jobs have conspired to work low-wage, unskilled jobs at restaurants. (On illegal immigration: can't stand them. He understands that the whole lot of them are utterly unskilled, with the attendant problems that stem from this)
He was non-union: he ABHORS trade unions—if you think they're bad enough here, they're even worse south of the border!
"Call it economic passive-aggressiveness, or “Going Galt” or whatever ... the fact is that between stifling regulations and crushing taxes, too many people see no benefit to taking the kinds of economic risks necessary to drive the economy."
We have too many people who are incapable of visualizing the inevitable results of current policy. All one need do is visualize someone attempting to farm fields that have little ridges five or six feet higher than the lower areas. It is a fairly simple matter to make it all equal by bringing in machinery to knock the peaks off and level it all out. In the end it will be flat and the surface will be only slightly higher than the lowest spots were in the beginning. On the other hand, to bring the whole field up to the height of the highest ridges would require bringing in freight train loads of soil from somewhere else, necessitating that “somewhere else” is brought down to a lower level. If a person cannot understand that attempts by government to achieve equality of outcome rather than equality of opportunity work the same way I don’t know how to explain it to them.
post #10 ; you are awesome.
It’s still a struggle, but I won’t be demonstrating in the streets any time soon... I have to be at WORK.
0bama to Joe the Plumber: Everyone should “trickle up”
You trickle up from dirt.
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