We celebrate our nation’s founding in, ironically, an age of abandoning the very principles that made us free, productive and the envy of the world. The old and time-tested values of sexual morality, religion, families, thrift and free markets have “failed” and new and untried (at least in America) socialistic, government-to-the-rescue schemes are hailed as wonder drugs to cure all our ills.
But it’s a bit like using whiskey to cure our hangover. The supposed medicine is the disease.
One of the great dangers of democracy has been the realization of the masses they can, through the ballot box, do what they would consider a crime if done privately. An act we would never do individually is somehow transformed into a “right” when exercised collectively. To stop someone on the street and demand money to pay for food or schooling or car payments or drugs or mortgages or a kidney operation and back up your demand with force — say, waving a gun in their face — would be a blatant criminal act.
But use the ballot box and the taxing power of the state to force someone else to do the same thing and it is hailed as “social justice.” As we watch Hugo Chavez types and other more advanced and perhaps cruder socialists attack “the rich” and whip up a mob mentality of envy, we instinctively see that action as backward and self-defeating. Destroying the wealth-producing members of your society by taxing them to economically level everybody is truly killing the goose that lays the golden egg.
Yet the same wealth and prosperity-destroying leveling is now the panacea demanded. To pay for the socialistic programs in California — which created deficits approaching $40 billion — the legislature pulled a Hugo Chavez, raising taxes, not cutting government programs. Sadly, Nevada’s recent Legislature did the exact same, even overriding the governor’s vetoes. As we observed the madness of California’s behavior, of raising taxes on a rapidly failing economy, our enlightenment proves insufficient. Rather than create a business-friendly tax climate to attract the financial refugees escaping the Socialist Republic of California, we instead raise ours, as well.
Can anyone out there name a time when the government, any government anywhere, took over any business or industry and made it more efficient? More productive? Lowered costs and improved services? Does anyone really believe energy will become more abundant and health care more available with government takeover?
Even more bizarre is the new socialism of Barack Obama, of using the money of the poor to bail out the rich. Not exactly what Marx envisioned, but the transfer of wealth concept remains the same. Government-collected (or printed) “wealth” is used to artificially subsidize failed businesses “too big to fail.” Formerly wealthy Wall Streeters receive huge infusions of taxpayer-backed credit or freshly printed money by the ton to cover their failures.
Watch out, too, for the socialistic demand to pay the losers in the Madoff $50 billion scam. Wealthy investors lost it all and you can bet that a pitch will be made that the taxpayers should make good their losses. Again, socialism in action, Obama style: the (formerly) wealthy using the taxing power of the state to reimburse their failures.
Socialism, of everyone sharing from the common pot, always sinks to lowest common denominator status. California is transforming into third world status, despite being the greatest potential wealth-producing state in our nation. Yet, the cure they seek is the cause of the disease.
What made our past one of an ever-upward cycle of prosperity? Answer: the conservative principles of our brilliant and inspired founding fathers. As Lincoln noted, we would be wise to review and adhere to the old and tried. Government will spend us into prosperity? The very concept shows how far we have drifted from sanity. The nuts are now running the funny farm. This is the age of unreason.
Ira Hansen is a lifelong resident of Sparks and owner of Ira Hansen and Sons Plumbing.
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