Some Last Minute Thoughts About the US Election and Socialism

With just one day left before the US election, Barak Obama is hoping to become the most hard left liberal ever to be elected to the office of president in the United States. He is certainly a socialist, although he and his advisors have gone to great lengths to try to hide the fact, even to the point of claiming that the word “socialist” is a racial slur against black people. The denials by the Obama campaign are surprising, even for democrats, given the many recorded statements and the numerous comments of the candidate (some hidden by the media until recently), not to mention his political allies. The recent uproar over Obama’s socialist economic goals and public policies came to the forefront when in a response to the question of a private citizen he stated that it wasn’t that he wanted punish the man for his success, but rather he wanted to spread the wealth around to ensure that the people below him got more. Of course taking from people who have worked to obtain wealth in order to give it to people who haven’t earned it is a socialist hallmark.

At first, the Obama campaign tried claiming that Obama didn’t really mean what he said. Then they tried to dig up dirt on the private citizen to destroy his reputation (they claimed he wasn’t licensed despite the fact that he worked for someone who was). But it wasn’t long before evidence surfaced proving that Obama’s position on the redistribution of wealth has been a long held belief for him and worse. In an interview for Public Broadcasting seven years ago, Obama bemoaned the failure of the government and courts to embark on a program for the redistribution of private property. He even went so far as to say that the US constitution was a flawed document because it outlined the things that the government couldn’t do to you and didn’t say what the government must do for you. He bemoaned the fact that judges didn't "break free" and redistribute welth, so he wants to do it as a legislator. Of course one of the main purposes of the Constitution was to protect the people from the abuses of government. The idea being that if a power had not been granted to the Government that power remained reserved to the people. I can’t say that judicial activism of this sort is a new idea, but the extent to which Obama wishes to take would create a country completely different from the one that has existed for the past 250 years.

Obama’s disdain for the US Constitution also raises the question of whether he can honestly take the oath of office for the president of the United States, which like the oath taken by members of the US military requires him to uphold the constitution and defend it against all enemies both foreign and domestic. Can anyone believe that someone who is dedicated to making the highest law of the land meaningless be trusted to defend it?

Obama is, of course, correct when he complains that US Constitution, with its “Bill of Rights” is designed to prohibit the government from doing certain things and thereby protect the people and their liberty from power hungry bureaucrats. And this is exactly what makes it the enemy of socialists like Obama. Socialism, by its very nature, seeks to control an individual’s life and even his thoughts. In order to create the world order and type of equality socialism seeks, it must take from people who achieve and produce and give to others who don’t. After all, you can’t have equality if some are rich and some are poor. And to effect this redistribution of wealth the state must have more power. (Technically, in the US taking property from one person and giving it to another without due process and compensation is unconstitutional, but if you call it a tax on the rich and a tax cut for the poor who don’t pay taxes, it is just fine.) But it doesn’t end with stealing from the rich and giving to the poor, because when you do this people will act differently.

If you give $10,000 to three different individuals you are likely to find that they will spend it on different things. The first person might waste it on drugs and loose women, the second may use it to buy a car, and the third may invest it in a restaurant. The first man no longer has any money. The second person has a car, which the other two do not have. And the third is on his way to becoming an evil rich businessman. Almost immediately we find that the three are no longer equal. In fact, we may soon have to take some money from our new businessman and give it to the first man who squandered his money. This inequality is not the desired effect of socialism, so you soon find that the state will start telling you how to spend the money. If the state institutes universal health care it will ultimately require everyone to use it, because it cannot abide allowing people the ability to obtain additional coverage, as this is an inequity the state is seeking to prevent. Eventually the state will control more and more of an individual’s life, taking more of his freedom at each step. And with each loss of freedom the individual becomes poorer and more dependent upon the state for those things he can no longer obtain for himself. And this is actually the desired effect of the socialist society. Because the socialist does not want wealthy people unless they are the leaders, since wealthy people can do for themselves and are not dependent upon the state or its bureaucrats who know better how to run their lives. The result is that socialists do not seek make all people equal by making them wealthy, rather they will seek to make them equal by making everyone poor and controllable.

In a free society inequality is natural, but it is not necessarily bad. In modern free societies, the poor live a life style that few could have imagined a hundred years ago. Even so, few people who are able to work will remain poor for long so long as they have the freedom to provide and make decisions for themselves. On the other hand, lack of freedom and poverty almost ensure equality, because no one has the ability to change their situation. And the state can easily manage equality in poverty because it simply denies the individual the ability to make choices for themselves. Everyone has the same hut, the same table and chair, etc, all provided by the State. In this case, slavery is the great equalizer, it ensures dependence on the master, and secures power for the rulers. So, the socialist will seek to eliminate freedom and wealth in order to ensure the equality they see as fair. This can be seen in Obama’s policies. For example, he wants to do away with the Bush tax cuts that resulted in increased revenues (due in large part to increased investment and spending that created more taxable transactions), when asked if he would raise taxes even if it meant less taxes revenues to pay for his socialist programs; he answered that he would because he felt it would be more fair.

This is something that people should understand about Obama and the left in general, they don’t really want their schemes to work. (Most of these things have been tried before and failed numerous times in any case.) These programs are a means to power and failure actually allows the state the opportunity to increase its power over people and to raise taxes further in order to finance the programs when they fail to achieve their promised goals. Just putting them in place serves to destroy the mechanisms by which the people used to achieve the same ends themselves. And at that point, people become dependent on the party that started the failed program because they have nothing else to go back to and they don’t dare risk losing what they have left. So, they continue to vote for the great socialist leader because he promises to keep the programs in place and take more from the rich to pay for them.

Finally, a turn towards socialism of the extent Obama plans will be a disaster for the American people, but it doesn’t bode well for the rest of the world either. Look at the banking problems in the US that were caused by the government requiring banks to make bad loans to unqualified people in order to meet quotas so they can be allowed to expand their business, all in the name political correctness. When the bad loans came do and the banks began to have trouble they touched off the current decline in the markets that affected the rest of the world. Now, imagine what would happen if Obama is elected and he was actually successful in instituting his plans (i.e. bankrupting power companies and sending power rates “through the roof”).

Whatever happens tomorrow, the world won’t come to an end, but if Obama and his gang start running things it may seem like it.

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