Give Till it Hurts Obama
1st November 2008
The Hog is relaxed.
When a government decides to take wealth from productive people and pass it around, it has to give itself new, unnatural powers in order to get the job done. It has to be able to locate wealth, and it has to be able to identify what it perceives as need, and it has to decide who deserves the money it has forcibly confiscated from working people. A small, limited government can’t do those things. To get those things done, the government will have to diminish our privacy and our property rights, and it will have to employ a lot of bureaucrats to stick their nose in our business and decide who gets what. A socialist America (truly socialist, I mean) will be like Cuba or any other socialist state. There will be boards and agencies manned by cronies of the chief executive, and they will funnel loot and power to their buddies before thinking about the public good. That’s how socialism works. Jesse Jackson has a history of going to meet CEOs and saying, “We have to get rid of this meritocracy.” That is literally the way he says it; no paraphrasing. Under socialism, government bureaucrats by the tens of thousands will be paid to say the same thing, as policy. When merit no longer determines compensation, other measures have to be used. And that means empowering bureaucrats to decide what the measures are, and to do the measuring. That’s the Obama plan.
The basic truth about modern American politics. Print that out on a piece of paper and tape it to the mirror you look into every morning.
When it comes to giving, observant Jews and Bible-believing Christians typically START at ten percent; that’s a baseline. And they make up a big portion of the “selfish” hordes that support John McCain. Obama doesn’t begin to measure up. Joe Biden is also incredibly stingy in this regard. So was Gore. So was Clinton. Then there’s Dick Cheney, who gives a colossal, multimillion-dollar portion of his income to charity. Bad, evil Dick Cheney. Giving more per month than the Obamas, Bidens, Clintons, and Gores do, combined, in a decade. Once again, I have to ask: isn’t he supposed to be greedy and full of hate? If he is, how come Al Gore’s giving amounts to a tiny fraction of one percent of Cheney’s? Pope Prius I is not living up to expectations.
The basic truth about modern American culture. Remember that one, too.