WhatFinger


Left tries to convince us that AIG is a more menacing threat to the American way of life than Al Qaeda

Capitalism Didn’t Fail:  We Ought to Try it Sometime



As the left tries to convince us that AIG is a more menacing threat to the American way of life than Al Qaeda, it is disheartening to see some conservatives getting sucked into the whirling mythology about the Evils of Capitalism. We expect liberals to attack big business; it’s what they do. But, conservatives ought to be showing more sense than to recommend Hari Kari for insurance executives as the cure for America’s economic woes.

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We are not witnessing the failure of capitalism. We are not a true capitalist economy. For years, we have been allowing big government and big business to blur their boundaries until we now have an economic system closer to Benito Mussolini’s corporate statism than true capitalism. In an ideal capitalistic society, all means of production are privately owned and operated. Corporate America and big government are now thoroughly enmeshed. As is typical, when big government got involved in corporate America, they wrecked it. The federal government has been encroaching on private enterprise with evermore increasing regulations and burdens. Witness the waddling back and forth that goes on between the public and private sector. The same players keep turning up on both sides of the same fence, one day you’re a bureaucrat in charge of harassing executives, the next day you’re in someone’s cabinet, only to return to the private sector another day. As predictable as daylight, increasing government interference assured the disruption of our economic system. We can track in a straight line the collapse of the housing industry right back to the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) which was created during the happy and prosperous Carter years, creating a shakedown mandate for corrupt community organizations like ACORN. At taxpayer expense, groups like ACORN were able to literally force banks to make loans to borrowers who would not be able to repay them. In 1999, under pressure from the Clinton Administration, Fannie Mae further relaxed credit requirements for subprime borrowers and generated staggering profits for itself and such luminaries as Jamie Gorelick and Franklin Raines. Fannie Mae is, itself an example of a Mussolini style economic unit. Fannie is some sort of monstrous government/private sector hybrid. This kind of ill conceived breeding program keeps spawning bigger, more corrupt and more inept agencies. There is nothing capitalistic about Fannie Mae nor the government backed mortgage system. Barack Obama and the rest of the left are taking advantage of the collective economic ignorance of the population by insisting that the economic meltdown was caused by capitalism run amok. Without strict government controls, we are supposed to believe, capitalistic greed will devour the universe. Why are people buying this? Is there really no one left who can see just a scintilla of hypocrisy when Nancy Pelosi lectures us about corporate “greed and arrogance”? Evidently, most of America is too angry at AIG executives to care about the larger issue: a massive centralized government that is now completely out of control. Expect the Obama administration to seize on the AIG bonuses and other relatively insignificant issues to fan the flames of class warfare. Performing on cue, the Alinsky alum is dutifully agitating the Have Nots in hopes they will turn on the Haves. What’s alarming is not that Obama is doing this. Everything in his background indicated that he would try to start a civil class war. Nor should anyone be surprised when the Peggy the Moochers of the world jump on the bandwagon. What is disturbing is the number of people who are smart enough to know better joining the AIG lynch mob. The AIG bonuses, on their own merit are not very important. Corporate execs don’t get paid by the hour; they negotiate compensation packages structured in various ways, ideally tied to performance. By performance, we mean profit. AIG was contractually bound to pay out bonuses to some of its employees. What should be embarrassing to the democrats is that they themselves approved the bonus payouts when they passed porkzilla. Not that anyone could be expected to know that, as there was no time to read this vital emergency legislation before it passed and the president sat on it for four days. Rather than come to the obvious conclusion: that it was a monumental mistake to provide a government bailout to AIG, the democrats are having a lot of success in demonizing AIG to the point of creating a national obsession. Two very disturbing narratives are evolving out of this mess, the first of which is the savagery employed in the demonization of the AIG employees. A United States senator appears on national television to recommend that AIG employees commit suicide. This is leadership? Graphic death threats are rolling in. The current White House leadership has yet to call for any toning down of the inflammatory rhetoric. In fact, this is a bit of a dream come true for Obama whose mission it is to wreck the current economy and replace it with a new one. For awhile, we could give him the benefit of the doubt, assuming he and Turbo Tim Geithner are just incompetent. We can move past that now and accept this destruction of wealth is intentional, not negligent conduct. The other issue America is ignoring at her peril is the conduct of the government using its power to harass private citizens. This didn’t start with AIG, but emboldened by the new administration, congress has taken its boundary violating to unprecedented levels. The asinine baseball hearings were bad enough. What we are seeing today is genuine abuse of power. Not content to simply harass and demonize the employees at AIG, they are now busying themselves trying to pass draconian ex post facto legislation targeting the executive bonuses. Can thinking people set aside, for a moment, the schadenfreude of it all and consider the real implications of this type of persecution of private citizens by our highest elected officials? This issue is so much larger than the stupid bonuses. Be concerned, be very concerned that congress may actually get their way in drafting legislation designed to punish employees for accepting bonuses to which they were legally entitled and the government itself had approved. According to Harvard’s Laurence Tribe, Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution’s prohibition against ex post facto legislation only applies to criminal punishment. Tribe points out that the courts have consistently upheld retroactive changes to tax codes and other financial measures Is this the road we want to be traveling? Meanwhile, while Obama has the entire nation fixated on what Michelle Malkin correctly labels Kabuki theater, the president is pushing truly bizarre and frightening proposals. Is anyone following the story about Obama’s efforts to end the federal firearms program which allows commercial airline pilots to carry guns after going through appropriate training? Also grotesquely under reported was Obama’s despicable plan to restrict health care services to our wounded veterans. There was sufficient hue and cry over this one to get the administration to spike it. But the issues remain. Why does the President of the United States want to disarm our pilots? What was the point of laying out a plan as poorly conceived as the veteran’s health insurance affront? The plan itself offered very little in the way of any real savings and was guaranteed to generate ill will. But no, we have allowed the mainstream media to dictate that we care only about getting those evil AIG executives. Meanwhile, the Obama administration is free to run wild, crafting all sorts of orders and directives aimed at destroying our way of life. I’m not surprised when I hear the populist caterwauling coming from the left. I expect better of conservatives who should understand that capitalism did not fail. In fact, if practiced as true capitalism, nothing could be more failure proof. Capitalism is completely consistent with human nature; it doesn’t have to be forced upon the population. Corporate statism is what failed. The current economic meltdown is not the product of greed; it’s the product of government intervention. Contrary to Nancy Pelosi’s delusions, greed and arrogance are not the exclusive domain of capitalists. Were there excess on Wall Street? Certainly. And the market would have flushed it out and re-righted itself had the government not shoved it’s snout into everything. Conservatives who parrot the populist screed about the evils of corporate America are going to be held to account for helping lead us into this accelerated nose dive into an economy and way of life we aren’t going to like very much.



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Joy Tiz -- Bio and Archives

Joy Tiz,Joytiz.com, has been quoted by Ann Coulter, as heard on Lou Dobbs radio, The Rusty Humphries Show, Bill Cunningham, KSFO in San Francisco, WOR in New York, Premiere Radio Networks, Air America and other major shows.

Joy was born in Chicago, long enough ago to remember when many democrats were actually normal people who were just wrong about everything. Joy holds a M.Sc. in psychology and a JD in law.  Joy hosts The Joy Tiz Show  Wednesdays at 2 pm Pacific/5 pm Eastern.

 

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