“You’re telling me, they stink on ice” (Mel Brook’s History of the World Part 1)
And from one of the best films ever, Monty Python & The Holy Grail.
ARTHUR: I am your king! (Think Obama, The Ivy Tower Harvard Educated Community Organizer and Academic Professor )
OLD WOMAN: Well, I didn’t vote for you.
ARTHUR: You don’t vote for kings.
OLD WOMAN: Well, how did you become king, then?
ARTHUR: The Lady of the Lake, her arm clad in the purest shimmering samite, held Excalibur aloft from the bosom of the water to signify by Divine Providence … that I, Arthur, was to carry Excalibur … That is why I am your king!
DENNIS: Look, strange women lying on their backs in ponds handing out swords … that’s no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony. ( and ours ignores that in favor of Socialist Keynesian Liberal Academic Fantasies and “democratic” cramdowns for your own good because we are so morally and intellectually superior)
ARTHUR: Be quiet! (HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to the Insurance Industry)
DENNIS: You can’t expect to wield supreme executive power just ’cause some watery tart threw a sword at you!
ARTHUR: Shut up!
DENNIS: I mean, if I went around saying I was an Emperor because some moistened bint had lobbed a scimitar at me, people would put me away!
ARTHUR: (Grabbing him by the collar) Shut up, will you. Shut up!
DENNIS: Ah! NOW … we see the violence inherent in the system.
ARTHUR: Shut up! (DAMN TEA PARTIERS!)
PEOPLE (i.e. other PEASANTS) are appearing and watching.
DENNIS: (calling) Come and see the violence inherent in the system. Help, help, I’m being repressed!
ARTHUR: (aware that people are now coming out and watching) Bloody peasant! (pushes DENNIS over into mud and prepares to ride off) (Bloody Teabagger!)
DENNIS: Oh, Did you hear that! What a give-away.
ARTHUR: Come on, patsy.
They ride off.
DENNIS: (in the background as we PULL OUT) did you see him repressing me, then? That’s what I’ve been on about …
Call the NAACP!!, LA Raza, or MSDNC…
But now to the more serious point. This amazing article by Victor David Hanson.
Traditional peasant societies believe in only a limited good. The more your neighbor earns, the less someone else gets. Profits are seen as a sort of theft. They must be either hidden or redistributed. Envy rather than admiration of success reigns.
In contrast, Western civilization began with a very different ancient Greek idea of an autonomous citizen, not an indentured serf or subsistence peasant. The small, independent landowner — if left to his own talents and if his success was protected by, and from, government — would create new sources of wealth for everyone. The resulting greater bounty for the poor soon trumped their old jealousy of the better off.
Citizens of ancient Greece and Italy soon proved more prosperous and free than either the tribal folk to the north and west, or the imperial subjects to the south and east. The success of later Western civilization in general, and America in particular, is testament to this legacy of the freedom of the individual in the widest political and economic sense
We seem to be forgetting that lately — though Mao Zedong’s redistributive failures in China, or present-day bankrupt Greece, should warn us about what happens when government tries to enforce an equality of result rather than of opportunity.
Even after the failure of statism at the end of the Cold War, the disasters of socialism in Venezuela and Cuba, and the recent financial meltdowns in the European Union, for some reason America is returning to a peasant mentality of a limited good that redistributes wealth rather than creates it. Candidate Obama’s “spread the wealth” slip to Joe the Plumber simply was upgraded to President Obama’s “I do think at a certain point you’ve made enough money.”
The more his administration castigates insurers, businesses and doctors; raises taxes on the upper income brackets; and creates more regulations, the more those who create wealth are sitting out, neither hiring nor lending. The result is that traditional self-interested profit-makers are locking up trillions of dollars in unspent cash rather than using it to take risks and either lose money due to new red tape or see much of their profit largely confiscated through higher taxes.
No wonder that in such a climate of fear and suspicion, unemployment remains near 10 percent. Deficits chronically exceed $1 trillion per annum. And now the poverty rate has hit a historic high. We are all getting poorer in hopes that a few don’t get richer.
The public is seldom told that 1 percent of taxpayers already pay 40 percent of the income taxes collected, while 40 percent of income earners are exempt from federal income tax — or that present entitlements like Medicare and Social Security are financially unsustainable. Instead, they hear more often that those who managed to scheme to make above $250,000 per year have obligations to the rest of us to give back about 60 percent of what they earn in higher health care and income taxes — together with payroll and rising state income taxes, and along with increased capital gains and inheritance taxes.
That limited-good mind-set expects that businesses will agree that they now make enough money and so have no need to pursue any more profits at the expense of others. Therefore, they will gladly still hire the unemployed and buy new equipment — as they pay higher health care or income taxes to a government that knows far better how to redistribute their income to the more needy or deserving.
This peasant approach to commerce also assumes that businesses either cannot understand administration signals or can do nothing about them. So who cares that in the Chrysler bankruptcy settlement, quite arbitrarily the government put the unions in front of the legally entitled lenders?
Health insurers should not mind that Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius just warned them to keep their profits down and their mouths shut — or face exclusion from health care markets.
I suppose that no corporation should worry that the government arbitrarily announced — without benefit a law or court ruling — that it wanted BP to put up $20 billion in cleanup costs for the Gulf spill.
What optimistic Americans used to call a rising tide that lifts all boats is now once again derided as trickle-down economics.
In other words, a newly peasant-minded America is willing to become collectively poorer so that some will not become wealthier.
The present economy suggests that it is surely getting its wish. (Townhall.com)
But damn it will feel good, at least for liberals, to stick to the rich bastards.
Class warfare is like the fire they set at night to keep them warm and to warn off the predators lurking in the dark. It warms the cuckolds of their hearts and give them sustenance.
Envy, and Fear. Fear and Envy.
FEAR IS HOPE
Mind you, Everyone in Congress and the President are “rich”, millionaires in fact. But they aren’t evil because they are Liberals. And they are in “Public Service” so they are the Insufferably Morally and Intellectually Superior Left and not evil “rich” millionaires.
And big companies run by Millionaire CEOs (hello, GM,Chrysler etc) or Unions are not evil capitalist bastards out to destroy everyone in their path, because they are Liberals.
Evil “rich” people are only Republicans and Conservatives, you notice. Funny how that works out.
No partisan politics involved there.
Orwell was piker compared to these guys.
Did you see him (the evil “rich” and/or republican) repressing me?
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