Posted on 06/13/2015 10:51:59 AM PDT by lowbridge
When I was about 12 years old, I was taking a class in my Hungarian elementary school on Marxist economics. One day we were being told about Marxs famous goal for the communist paradise he envisioned for us all: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs."; As most kids back in Budapest, I didnt pay much attention to these lessons since they were nothing but pure propaganda for the ruling communists who ran the country.
But I did happen to be listening to this particular presentation and once the teacher was done, I didnt have the good sense to resist raising my hand to ask a question: What if my pal here next to me and I both start the week with a fixed amount of money but he purchases some wood and builds a nice table while I buy some wine and drink myself under a table? Will he have to share with me whatever he can earn when he sells his product?
As I recall, I was severely rebuked for my counterrevolutionary remark
-snip
In time I managed to escape from the communist hellhole, of course, and land in America where I have been told freedom reigns and peoples property is not confiscated to be involuntarily and indiscriminately distributed among all.
Alas, this morning I was reminded once again that my hope of coming to a genuinely free country turned out to be more of a dream than a real prospect. One of the most prominent presidential hopefuls has penned an article for The Wall Street Journal, titled,My Plan for Shared Prosperity. Its author, Mrs. Hillary Clinton, makes no secret of her plan for massive wealth redistribution should she get the chance to implement her ideas. As she puts it,
(Excerpt) Read more at brookesnews.com ...
Hillary Clinton urges new era of shared American prosperity
for many, shared prosperity will be the sharing of 4 jobs.
Each worker will have two thirty hour a week jobs each of which is shared with another thirty hour a week worker.
Sixty hours will make ends meet and pay for Banana care
These folk are going to be hard hit when they are required to repay the illegal subsidies they received
I can’t remember what grade I was in, but I was chewing gum. The teacher demanded to know if I’d brought enough gum for everybody. I said, why should I supply gum to everybody? Isn’t that communism? I was sent to the principal’s office and paddled. (Thinking back on it, that was odd, as our teacher was quite a dab hand with the “board of education.”)
Using a commonly friendly word like "shared" to describe a government policy of force and coercion is despicable on its face. Then, again, isn't that descriptive of how all totalitarian regimes initially present themselves in order to gain power?
In the course of his research for "Solzhenitsyn: A Soul in Exile" (Harper Collins), Joseph Pearch traveled to Moscow to interview the writer. The excerpt below is from that interview:
Solzhenitsyn: "In different places over the years I have had to prove that socialism, which to many western thinkers is a sort of kingdom of justice, was in fact full of coercion, of bureaucratic greed and corruption and avarice, and consistent within itself that socialism cannot be implemented without the aid of coercion. Communist propaganda would sometimes include statements such as "we include almost all the commandments of the Gospel in our ideology". The difference is that the Gospel asks all this to be achieved through love, through self-limitation, but socialism only uses coercion." Solzhenitsyn
Even the current President, at the National Prayer Breakfast this year, attempted to tie his policy of forced "sharing" to Jesus's appeal for voluntary charity.
Coercive "taking" power, when wielded against the citizenry by either the government alone (taxing), or in combination with another power (unions), is destructive of freedom and prosperity.
The following statement by Sir Winston Churchill, upon leaving office as Prime Minister in 1945, was prophetic for Great Britain, and as it turns out, the United States and the world:
"I do not believe in the power of the State to plan and enforce. No matter how numerous are the committees they set up or the ever-growing hordes of officials they employ or the severity of the punishments they inflict or threaten, they can't approach the high level of internal economic production achieved under free enterprise. Personal initiative, competitive selection, and profit motive corrected by failure and the infinite processes of good housekeeping and personal ingenuity, these constitute the life of a free society. It is this vital creative impulse that I deeply fear the doctrines and policies of the socialist government has destroyed. Nothing that they can plan and order and rush around enforcing will take its place. They have broken the main spring and until we get a new one, the watch wil not go. Set the people free. Get out of the way and let them make the best of themselves. I am sure that this policy of equalizing misery and organizing society--instead of allowing diligence, self-interest and ingenuity to produce abundance--has only to be prolonged to kill this British Island stone dead."
In the early days of America's experiment in liberty, its Founders warned of oppressive taxation by those elected to represent the people. Under their "People's" Constitution, the people were left free, and the government was limited.
While Europe struggled with oppressive government intervention, the genius Founders of America recognized enduring truths about human nature, the human tendency to abuse power, and the possibilities of liberty for individuals. Richard Frothingham's 1872 "History of the Rise of the Republic of the United States," Page 14, contained the following footnote item on the condition of citizens of France:
"Footnote 1. M. de Champagny (Dublin Review, April, 1868) says of France, 'We were and are unable to go from Paris to Neuilly; or dine more than twenty together; or have in our portmanteau three copies of the same tract; or lend a book to a friend: or put a patch of mortar on our own house, if it stands in the street; or kill a partridge; or plant a tree near the road-side; or take coal out of our own land: or teach three or four children to read, . .. without permission from the civil government.'"
Clearly the government of France at that 1868 date laid an oppressive regulatory and tax burden on citizens, robbing them of their Creator-endowed liberty and enjoyment thereof. Frothingham observed that such coercive power constituted "a noble form robbed of its lifegiving spirit."
Thomas Jefferson warned Americans:
"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
Note Jefferson's very last thought here. He declares that when government taxing and debt have reached certain levels, in order for individuals to survive, then their chosen "employment" becomes "hiring ourselves to rivet their (the government's) chains on the necks of our fellow-sufferers." Might that account for why it is government employment levels which have risen at such great rates in the past 2 years?
Inasmuch as government creates no wealth and has no money, the pay for every job in government must first come out of the pockets of hardworking citizens in the private sector or be borrowed (to be paid back eventually from the pockets of future generations).
Ahhh, guess that's what you call "redistributing" wealth! In Jefferson's words, it's called "rivet(ing) chains on the necks of our fellow-sufferers."
Hillary Rodham and William Jefferson Clinton are the most accomplished political charlatans this nation has ever seen....and may prove far more demanding than King George III as they are an exceptionally dangerously corrupt pair who cannot nor will not undue Obama's Socialism. When did this woman ever mention her will to uphold the United States Constitution other than to repeat as many politicians do, the oath of office, an easy lie.
to self: undo....hate when that happens.......
I still say the American people as a whole adore her. It would seem that she could implode. But she is no ordinary politician. She is royalty to the American people.
Well, Jefferson was right about economics, but he was wrong about placing too much faith in the American people as a whole.
I debate these idiots all the time, I got into it with one woman yesterday. I asked her do you honestly think Hillary gives one damn about women?? PLEASE give me one single solitary example other than what comes out of her lying yap where she has EVER helped women! And of course she couldn't answer me but instead told me she was "very well educated" and I told her whatever school you went to, get your money back because you've been ripped off. LOL!
Oh yes then I was asking her, WHAT exactly do women need help with anyway? What inequality is there? That there's never been a female coach in the NFL? Some of the richest most successful people in this country are women. Oprah is worth a billion, how come I'm not? It must be sexism. Then she starts in with the insults, calling me a misogynist of course of course. Resort to name calling. Where did these people come from? I don't remember morons like this growing up, maybe when Carter and Clinton were elected, but not on this scale. Look at all these people!
Oh! It's the pantsuit Messiah! Save us Messiah with your magical pantsuit!
Jefferson's "faith in the American people," though, rested on a premise, repeated in one form or another in many of his writings, and that premise is summed up in some of the following quotations directly from the man himself:
"I know no safe depositary of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power." --Thomas Jefferson to William C. Jarvis, 1820. ME 15:278He also recognized when governments did not rest on recognition of the need for an "enlightened" people.
"If Caesar had been as virtuous as he was daring and sagacious, what could he, even in the plenitude of his usurped power, have done to lead his fellow citizens into good government?... If their people indeed had been, like ourselves, enlightened, peaceable, and really free, the answer would be obvious. 'Restore independence to all your foreign conquests, relieve Italy from the government of the rabble of Rome, consult it as a nation entitled to self-government, and do its will.' But steeped in corruption, vice and venality, as the whole nation was,... what could even Cicero, Cato, Brutus have done, had it been referred to them to establish a good government for their country?... No government can continue good but under the control of the people; and their people were so demoralized and depraved as to be incapable of exercising a wholesome control. Their reformation then was to be taken up ab incunabulis. Their minds were to be informed by education what is right and what wrong; to be encouraged in habits of virtue and deterred from those of vice by the dread of punishments proportioned, indeed, but irremissible; in all cases, to follow truth as the only safe guide, and to eschew error, which bewilders us in one false consequence after another in endless succession. These are the inculcations necessary to render the people a sure basis for the structure of order and good government. But this would have been an operation of a generation or two at least, within which period would have succeeded many Neros and Commoduses, who would have quashed the whole process. I confess, then, I can neither see what Cicero, Cato and Brutus, united and uncontrolled could have devised to lead their people into good government, nor how this enigma can be solved." --Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, 1819. ME 15:233
Possessing a clear understanding of the failure of previous civilizations to achieve and sustain freedom for individuals, our forefathers discovered some timeless truths about human nature, the struggle for individual liberty, the human tendency toward abuse of power, and the means for curbing that tendency through Constitutional self-government. Jefferson's Bill For The More General Diffusion Of Knowledge For Virginia declared:
"...experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms (of government), those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny; and it is believed that the most effectual means of preventing this would be, to illuminate...the minds of the people...to give them knowledge of those facts, which history exhibiteth. History, by apprizing them of the past, will enable them to judge of the future...it will qualify them judges of the actions and designs of men; it will enable them to know ambition under every disguise it may assume; and knowing it, to defeat its views...."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1mYW5nmS9ps
If link fails, go to YouTube and search Hillary Clinton Exposed.
I urge you to do so quickly. She had it banned in theaters and, now that she's running, it's just a matter of time before they lean on YouTube to chuck in down the Memory Hole!
No wonder Obama was so quick to get the bust of Winston Churchill out of the White House: Churchill was against socialism.
Thanks.....filed....
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