Capitalism Does Not Work

How many of you have heard someone say that the economic system that we know as capitalism does not work? This is interesting in that we haven't seen capitalism at work since July 2, 1890. That was the day that Republican President Benjamin Harrison signed the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. The act was written by Senator John Sherman, a Republican. It passed the Senate on April 8, 1890 with a 51-1 vote. It then passed the House by a 242-0 vote on June 20, 1890 and then went to the President.

The Sherman Anti-Trust act is referred to as "competition law" by attorneys. It acquired this name because Sherman was designed to stop companies or entities from ganging up on new business that might compete with the old companies. That sounds real good at first glance until you look at what really happened. This Act. for all intents and purposes, emasculated companies while turning them into banks for politicians.

Now what do I mean. If you were a businessman and the government was out to regulate you what might you do? Would you obey the regulations? Would you attempt to "persuade" or "lobby" the politicians to look upon your industry favorably and in so doing become a politician's cash cow. Would you befriend the politician to the point where you might get him to put you or your representative on the board that writes the regulations for your industry? Wouldn't that put you in the cat's seat? You could eliminate your competition with the stroke of a pen.

This is exactly what happened. Call them what you will "Captains of Industries" or "Robber Barons" these businessmen, these capitalists, were not going to lose their positions or their companies so they looked for ways to insure their positions and they found that money, dinners, fine cases of wine, and other junkets, purchased the loyalty of elected officials over those who elected them

The Sherman Act, that we could refer to as the assassin that slayed capitalism, was belligerently used by none other then that so called conservative president, Theodore Roosevelt. Teddy, pretending to do good for the common good, used the act to batter organizations like Standard Oil and then turned around and asked those nasty old businessmen for donations for his presidential campaigns. How do you spell hypocrisy? TR, however, was a piker when it came to Woodrow Wilson.

Wilson was a full fledged Progressive. He was an egotistic narcissist. He was a believer in eugenics and adhered to a belief in Social Darwinism. He supported the sterilization of the"feeble-minded." He believed that history evolved based on epochs and that the Constitution was, therefore, a "living document". He talked about the collective will and the need for a good administrator who understood the collective will and would lead the nation based on that. The Constitution and Declaration of Independence were simply old, moldy documents that were no longer viable documents capable of inspiring the people and the Nation.

More importantly, however, was that Wilson found out the importance of a crisis. Initially swearing that he would keep us out of World War I, Wilson walked us straight in to the last months of that war. Why? It caused the folks to rally round the central government. Wilson put into place the War Industries Board or WIB and he put the heads of companies or their representatives on that board. Wilson was then free to come up with two wonderful laws, the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918. With these two pieces of legislation, both of them in contradiction to the First Amendment, Wilson was able to toss 150,000 Americans into prisons across the country simply because they spoke out against the war. You thought the Patriot Act was nasty.

Slowly but surely this nation took more and more steps toward socialism. The New Deal of FDR that among other things gave us the Social Security Trust Act. What a laugh that is particularly the word trust. Our elected officials found their way to power, to spend more and more money to do good things for us with our money. Like little children we got in line and said "do daddy do". Two of my favorite quotes come from two women, one a D and one an R, in the current Senate. Senator Barbara Mikulski who stated that she woke up every "morning trying to figure out what to do for her constituents". Don't you mean "do to your constituents" Senator. The other is Olympia Snowe from Maine who during the debate on health care in the Senate committees stated that only the government could solve the health care problem. This is what we have come too.

I could go on with the Great Society that gave us Medicare and Medicaid both going broke. Or the Plan D drug program given to us by George W. Bush. I thing you get my drift. The next time someone tells you capitalism does not work, ask them to define capitalism to you. Then ask them how they know that capitalism does not work tell them how do they know that since we haven't lived under capitalism since the day the Sherman Anti-Trust Act was signed by that black heart, Benjamin Harrison in 1890. Maye its time for a CHANGE.

Parties, Factions, and Identity Politica

A number of years ago William F. Buckley wrote an editorial on the accumulation and ascendancy of minority groups within our society. The point of this essay was to illustrate that the Democrats/Progressives were creating groups within this nation that would become the very core of their power base for elections. Buckley pronounced that the only problem with this political strategy is that even if you put all the various groups together, feminist, abortionists, blacks, gays and Hispanics, you still did not come up to much more the 49%. Thus the Democrat/Progressive party had not put together a majority of voters needed to win an elections.

What they did put together was Identity Politics. With this policy, the Progressives divided us along racial, sexual, and religious lines. They talked about the need for "diversity" and how it was good for our country. Assimilation of new citizens disappeared from the policies of our nation while the new program of Identity Politics goes on and on becoming more successful everyday

Identity politics has allowed the Progressives to create victims. Blacks, gays, women, are all victims and legislation needs to be passed both to protect them and to give them an advantage over those of us who are not victims or should I say not yet victims. In creating these protected groups, the Progressives expand their voter base because in helping these poor folks they make them loyal to the Progressive agenda and they make the Progressives the Caring Party.

It is easy to be a member of the caring partybecause that is all you do, you care and legislate e use of other peoples' money to finance your charity.You believe in giving people a fish not in doing the necessary work to teach them how to fish. Putting it another way it is known as the re-distribution of wealth, the goal of the Progressives and the Obama administration

Taking their cue from Woodrow Wilson, the Progressives believe that people and therefore government evolve. There is, for example, no such thing as fixed law or rights as outlined in documents like the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Thus citizens no longer have their unalienable rights such as "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness". You no longer have the right to own the property where you live or anywhere else. It is easy to see how those involved in Obama's health care program can take you off life support when you have no unalienable right to life despite the fact that you have a right to health care in this brave, new world. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are simply moldy old documents that no longer matter since man has now evolved to the point where these documents are "living documents" and must be brought up to date where the modern man believes that the best thing to happen is to put the government and its bureaucracy in charge of all decisions.

There is only one problem with this theory, it is not true. First and foremost in order to swallow this you must believe, among other things, that the human nature changes. It doesn't do that. One of the concerns of our Framers was that human nature does not change. Because human nature does not change, ergo improve with the evolving of time, government must be structured to take that into account. In "Federalist 6. Publius criticizes those who fail to see the permanent dangers of human nature by saying that they are "far gone in Utopian speculations." Publius continues explaining that human nature does not change and this can be seen throughout the course of human history. Hamilton in Federalist 34 writes; "To judge from the history of mankind, we shall be compelled to conclude that the fiery and destructive passions of war reign in the human breast with much more powerful sway than the mild and beneficent sentiments of peace; and to model our political systems upon the speculations of lasting tranquillity would be to calculate on the weaker springs of human character".

Our Founders and Framers were concerned with factionalism and with political parties that they believed would cause factionalism. They were correct and party differences existed from day one because governments are made by men who do not always share the same ideas. Disagreement and less then civil discourse has been around since men came together to debate and come to decisions. The question we must ask ourselves today is why are the Progressives so strident when it comes to the exchange of ideas. More importantly why are they insistent on their way and only their way? There is but one answer, caught up in their own narcissism, they believe they and their ideas are superior to all others. The Progressives live in but two time periods, that of Franklin Roosevelt and Woodstock. It was FDR who brought forth a Second Bill of Rights that could be instituted by government and taken away by government. Woodstock and the Sixties saw and idolization of teenagers by guilty adults who lost the courage to stand up to children. This in turn gave us the likes of Bill Clinton who honestly believed that his ideas were so great for the nation that he could do anything, including engaging in illegal actions, and could not be punished for it. This mindset is now the viewpoint of younger generations as witnessed by Obama and his cronies who believe that it is time for us to move forward with the redistribution of wealth, mandatory community service and a civil army directed by the White House to kick us off our property, take our guns, and kill us when we are to old to be of any use to the nation.

No Nation Has Spent Its Way Out Of An Economic Disaster

This week we saw the glorification of a truly evil man born into a truly evil family. Ted Kennedy, Senator from the State of Massachusetts, was laid to rest amazingly enough in Arlington Cemetery. He is there alongside his brother Joseph, a true hero who's explosive laden plane blew up 10 minutes before he and his crew were supposed to parachute out of the it in World War II. His brother John Kennedy, assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald, is also at Arlington. As far as I know, Joe Kennedy, named after the old man, did not have the sordid background that came to be associated with the Kennedy males. And did you know before this week that Ted, who was removed from Harvard for cheating, was in the US Army for two years.


Ted Kennedy was labeled the Liberal Lion. Actually it should be the Progressive Lion. As such he served in the US Senate for decades as one of the Left's useful idiots. His allies in the press have been praising him since his demise for his fantastic programs. I ask what programs and why were they so good. Keep in mind that it was this Senator who when told by economist Milton Friedman that in 6000 years socialism had never succeeded, responded to Friedman by saying it would work now that he, Senator Ted, was here to run it. Ah, Lenin and Stalin would be proud.


By now you probably guessed that I am not a Senator Ted fan and you would be right. While I was initially a supporter of John Kennedy, I was a sophomore in high school, I moved in the opposite direction as I grew older and the philandering of John Kennedy came to light. It also became quite obvious that he did not have all the smarts that others claimed. He blew his meeting with Khrushchev in Berlin and stated that Khrushchev had "... just beat the hell out of me.". He screwed up the Bay of Pigs, sent special forces troops to Vietnam and took us to the brink of nuclear war with the Cuban Missile crisis. Meanwhile the luscious Marylin Monroe created enough steam at his birthday party to close down Dulles Airport and the Baltimore and Washington Beltways.


Senator Ted lost favor with a lot of Americans over the Chappaquiddick incident and particularly the nine hour interval that surrounded the death of Mary Jo Kopechne. There have been a ton of rumors on this issue. Ted and Mary Jo were having an affair. Both were drunk and he drove his car off the bridge. His story states that he dove several times to rescue her but was injured and swam away. Some nine hours passed until Kennedy told the police about it. By that time the car and body had been found. Kennedy denied he had been drunk but many viewed the nine hour delay as the time used by Kennedy to get sober. Another story tells about another woman in the car. Purportedly Mary Jo, a bit inebriated herself, fell asleep in the back of Ted's car during the Chappaquiddick Party. Ted and another lady got in his car and headed for their own tryst not knowing Mary Jo was in the back seat. Ted went off the bridge and his biggest concern was getting rid of the other woman so that Joan, his pregnant wife, would not know about the other woman. That is the supposed reason for the nine hour delay. What shook most of us was the fact that Senator Ted was charged with leaving the scene of the accident and received a slap on the wrist with a 2 month suspended sentence and a year's probation. Some how I pictured something a lot harsher even at that time in history when people got away with drunken driving. The icing on the cake was that when Ted ran for re-election in 1970 he received 62% of the vote in Massachusetts.


Let's put Chappaquiddick in the past and look at some of Ted's latest efforts. You might recall his alliance with George W. Bush on the No Child Left Behind Act passed in the first Bush term. This act increase educational costs to the states by 40% and as usual it was an unfunded mandate. It ultimately drew the wrath of the Progressives because it held teachers accountable for the education of children and caused a huge amount of additional paper work. The teachers' union bellowed and Ted became an opponent of his own legislation. Probably forgot to read it. Meanwhile as things heated up for the non-combative Bush administration Kennedy's connection to NCLB was obliterated and Bush became the sole owner of the Bill.


Kennedy was also a supporter of the war in Iraq under Bush 43. In September of 2002 Kennedy proclaimed that the US knew that Hussein was seeking wmds. He went on to say that Hussein's regime is "a serious danger" and that "his pursuit of lethal weapons cannot be tolerated." But when the moment came Ted and his fellow Progressives did a 180 and turned on the Iraq war and the troops in a move they saw as a political opportunity.


While ranting against the war, Ted then teamed up with his Republican buddy, John McCain and gave us the Kennedy-McCain Amnesty Bill. This piece of legislation would have given amnesty to millions of illegal aliens in this nation. Keep in mind that Senator Ted was the man who had changed our immigration laws to allow the unfortunate to immigrate to our shores. Shifts in quotas were made so that now two immigrants a year could enter the USA from let's say England while 2 million could come from Yemen. Kennedy, at the time, promise us that we would not be picking up gazillions of these less then qualified folks as entrants into our nation. He lied. His goal all along was to enhance the Progressive voter base as was the case with Kennedy-McCain in 2008 when he wanted to add the illegal Hispanic voters to the rolls by granting amnesty to those already here and add additional illegals as they crossed the border. Ted, of course, was not affected by the failure of this bill to become law but McCain suffered mightily when it became a real bone of contention during his presidential campaign in 2008. Ted, once again, became the invisible man on a bill he had co-authored. What a guy.


With his demise, Ted's fellow Progressives want to use him as an ad for Obamacare. Let's do this in memory of Ted. Behind this are such distinguished individuals as Banking Queen Barney Frank, Mortgage Master Christopher Dodd, and Tax Evader and Landlord Charles Rangle. I am sure that other luminaries like Kent Conrad, Hillary Clinton, and Charles Sumerwant the plan to immortalize Senator Ted, Chief Progressive and Major Fascist Leader.


In closing let me add that Ted Kennedy and his ilk pushed the Progressive mantra of identity politics that ended up pitting one American against the other. He used his power as a Senator to increase the spending of the government that allowed the poor to become comfortable in their poverty. He allowed for the expansion of the deficit and implemented and supported programs that added to the national debt while participating in the cutting of our military forces making us more venerable to attacks by our enemies. Indeed he sat idly by while Bill Clinton saw to it that our enemies were able to acquire the means to defeat us. Senator Ted was not a good man, indeed one has to question was he a good American with his nation's concerns or his own well being and political position his primary objective.