Fellow blogger Sultan Knish (Daniel Greenfield) has a very sharp mind and lays things out very clearly 
when it comes to where the world is heading and the real threats we face. If you like this post you may want to subscribe to his blog here.
The road Socialism
One of the more insidious aspects of the government takeover is how
such takeovers are pitched as reforms. Of course reform traditionally
applies to institutions reforming themselves or being reformed by their
constituents or shareholders. The idea of government reforming the
private sector smacks of unlimited authority, which is exactly what it
is. And so a government that cannot reform itself, that cannot stop its
out of control spending, its constant legislative corruption, its
culture of pork and kickbacks, its compulsive need to appropriate
power, sets out to instead take over every aspect of life within the
country in the name of reform.
Can an alcoholic who can't stop drinking, teach others to be
teetotalers? Can a compulsive gambler who drops 10 grand a week in
Vegas, regulate the gambling habits of others? Only as an example to
others of how bad things can get. But though the government cannot
regulate itself, it insists that it can regulate everything outside
itself. The blind leading the blind is bad enough, but what are we to
make of the blind leading those who can actually see. That's what
government regulation is.
But the reform pitch is part of the whole insidious premise that
government is protecting the people from being exploited by acting as a
referee on their behalf. It's so insidious because it's both deceptive
and appealing. Most people have felt taken advantage of by
corporations. And indeed we do have a legal system in order to avoid
criminal exploitation. But what government refereeing does, is blur the
line between the criminal and the unethical, and between the unethical
and the profiteering, thereby creating a mandate to not only crackdown
on criminal actions, but on acts that are unethical or just greedy.
For example, reformers may begin by exposing an insurance company
forging documentation to avoid paying claims, an illegal act, to
focusing on misleading claims made by insurance representatives, an
unethical act, to campaigning for lower insurance rates, an area that
is not illegal or unethical, but a question simply of profit. By
exploiting this kind of slippery slope, entire industries have been
heavily regulated, even in areas well outside of the government's
purview.
The scandal generated by exposing illegal activity is used by advocates
for a government takeover to regulate unethical and profiteering
behavior, which they all class together as proof of malfeasance. By
doing so they define both legal and illegal behavior as illegal,
because it is rooted in the desire for profit-- an essentially
socialist position. Going back to the muckrakers, socialists discovered
that they could create an impetus for socialism by delegitimizing the
profit motive, and the best way to do so was to begin by building their
case around blatantly criminal activity and then move down the ladder
to attacking the basic idea of capitalism itself.
The overall target was of course the free market, promising the people
that government would act as their guardian, protecting them with
regulation from the abuses of capitalism. The genuinely deceptive thing
however, was that politicians were making the same offer to companies,
promising to act as their referee to protect them from their rivals,
their workers and their customers. What was actually happening was that
government was inserting itself as the "referee", promising to protect
the different segments of the free market from each other.
So politicians "protect" consumers from companies by price controls,
while protecting companies from their competitors by creating de-facto
monopolies through legislative loopholes, and then protect companies
from consumers by tightly regulating what products consumers can buy.
ObamaCare, which both imposes price controls and forces consumers to
buy health insurance, is a typical example, in which the government as
referee screws over both sides, while giving them both some seeming
advantage. In reality both sides are worse off than before, and only
the politicians and their camp followers gain from the regulation.
And that is how it began. Retailers were promised protection from
distributors. Distributors were promised protection from manufacturers.
The public was promised protection from all them. Of course this called
for reams and reams of legislation. And that legislation called for
more legislation. And the politicians and officials in charge of the
process naturally welcomed lobbyists from various trade and consumer
groups to "explain" their positions them, said explanations usually
accompanied by donations and pledges of political support.
By placing itself as the referee, government had a court in which cases
went on forever, while collecting "fees" from all the litigants. In
Dickens' Bleak House, there is the case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, a
lawsuit involving an inheritance that has dragged on for generations,
and eventually leaves nothing to the descendants who have been fighting
for it, but is entirely absorbed by the judges, the lawyers and the
assorted camp followers of the legal system. So too the American people
are discovering that the "inheritance" of their economy is vanishing
into the maw of the government that promised to get justice for them.
The fees are paid out in campaign contributions, in taxes collected to
fund the expanding regulatory mechanisms and in the invisible toll
added to all economic transactions by the regulations themselves. That
is because any regulatory mechanism also becomes part of the system.
Each regulation changes the way the free market works and the way that
companies and consumers behave, as both continue to strive to gain
maximum advantage for themselves. Since each regulation also adds more
expenses to both sides and blocks areas of commercial competition, both
sides become more creative and thus also more deceptive. But rather
than making economic competition better, more regulation actually makes
the competition worse. And this provides grist for the reformer's mill,
who pile on more regulations, which only makes the matter worse. The
next step leads to the black market, with the most regulated economies,
such as the USSR, also featuring a thriving black market. Because
regulations don't change human behavior, they just change the context
in which it is expressed, and the strategies it employs.
By
position itself as the referee, government has expanded well beyond its
constitutional boundaries into socialism. And it has done so by playing
on the fears of both customers and companies, promising an orderly and
tightly controlled market, for the highest bidder of course. The
government promises low prices and available products to customers. And
then raises their taxes and gives multi-billion dollar grants to
corporations, or just bails them out when those regulations help insure
their failure. The result is a diminished availability of products,
much higher prices when accounting for inflation, and a culture of
entitlement among both companies and the public, in which both sides
feel entitled to use the government to exploit the other. Which is
exactly what the "referee" wants, because then it has them right where
it wants them.
Socialism
requires simply that the majority believe that they will be better off
having government dispense the work of others to them, rather than
working for themselves. And the "reformers" have convinced large
numbers of Americans of just that. The results can be seen in an
endless assortment of consumer groups that promise us the solution to
all problems is to have the government regulate every single thing that
companies do, and they can be seen in companies with CEO's whose main
strategies are to hire lobbyists, outsource the actual labor to China
and then leave with a golden parachute on their least profitable
quarter. This is what happens when people cease to believe in working
for a living, and come to believe that the government is their best
economic solution.
This week in the news, Senator Schumer has announced that he will
investigate an airline's carry on bag fee. While the first reaction of
many people may be that such a fee is repugnant, have they considered
how much they'll be paying for the expanded government regulatory
mechanisms. Or how much they'll paying when that airline's lobbyists
agree to get rid of the fee and instead take home a bailout instead?
Because there is no such thing as a free lunch. You can buy lunch or
you can get it from the government. But government lunches cost about a
hundred times as much. And though you may not be paying for it up
front, you will pay. And your children. And their children after you.
According to the Venezuelan news site 
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