How ironic that Barack Obama, the candidate wedded to a tired ideology which failed everywhere it has been tried, can make change the centerpiece of his campaign. The Communist Manifesto was penned one hundred and sixty years ago and its author, Karl Marx, died one hundred and twenty-five years ago. Communism or socialism (Marx used the terms interchangeably) is old stuff. Yet socialism is precisely the sort of change that Obama promises.
Coveting, the Decalogue instruct us, is sin, and so socialism is a system which advocates sin. Socialists like Obama, for example, favor higher capital gains taxes even if lower tax rates bring in more revenue. The only justification for that is to bring more successful people down to the level of less successful people. That is seething rage, self-righteous sin, feral coveting – all masked behind the calm mask of Obaman socialism.
Obama wants to take more money from Joe, the Plumber – a man who actually works hard in service to others to get his money – simply because Joe, the Plumber has earned some money. This ordinary American simply wants the chance to improve his life by his own efforts without Socialism. He works to do so. But to the extent that Joe, the Plumber succeeds, he offends the champions of mass coveting, the bosses of socialism.
The candidate who constructed his whole image around the peculiar notion that change is the answer actually offers nothing more than the ancient curses of those who covet against those who do not. Like all sin, coveting carries the seeds of self-destruction. Socialism has never, ever, worked. The decline of Europe is directly traceable to the embrace of socialism. The whole hideous Hell of Bolshevism, Nazism, Maoism and other ghastly incarnations of socialist Leftism were united by their gleeful embrace of hating those deemed successful at the expense of the people. Nothing new here. No “change,” unless you consider the imposition of murderous totalitarianism to be “change.”
Obaman socialism is not about caring for the truly needy or helping the truly helpless. We must do that, ideally through a broad and private embrace of the moral necessity of charity. How easily we overlook the fact that among certain religious groups in America like Mormons, Orthodox Jews, and Amish, desperate poverty does not exist because the religious commandment of charity is taken seriously. When people abandon God’s solutions, like charity, then man must make his own answers.
The welfare state, very imperfectly, does what must be done in a wealthy land. No one goes hungry (obesity, not hunger, is the biggest health problem among the poor.) All children receive a free education (the decline of schools in the inner cities are a consequence of the chaos created by students in those schools, not a lack of funding.)
Anyone who needs emergency care in America receives it. Housing is highly subsidized (the recent crisis was not about housing for the poor, but rather about home ownership, which is evidence of affluence anywhere else on earth.)
How much does government spend on Americans already? If defense and interest on the national debt are removed from the federal budget, the federal government still spends about $7,000 for every man, woman, and child in America. If state and local expenditures are added to figure, government (again, excluding defense and interest on debt) spends a mind-numbing $13,000 for every man, woman, and child in America.
Not all of that, of course, goes to programs which care for Americans but much of it does. Government spends enough so that real hardship exists in America only in tiny pockets. The poor in America are affluent by the standards of most of the world. So why does Obama need to “spread the wealth around”? Because his gospel is not helping those in need but rather the dreary, seedy theories of income leveling – the inversion of sin of coveting into the man-made “virtue” of mythical social justice.
This is not change. Socialism is a return to the horse and buggy. It is a dull acceptance of bogus theories because these theories let some “leader” snatch liberty and accrete a pool of undeserved personal power. What Obama promises is more of the same. What, on earth, does anyone really expect that the geriatric misology of socialism can do for America?
Individuals as individuals produce real change. Government only stops change. Politicians do not want change. How many support term limits? How many want to end gerrymandering? How many propose to abolish failed programs? How many have even identified a failed government program? If Americans want happy change then they must look to themselves. Power-hungry politicians have no new ideas, no new thoughts, and no new dreams. Socialism has been tried and tried and tried and tried. It is intellectual quackery and moral surrender. Embrace Obama and expect all the grim failures of the past.
Bruce Walker has been a published author in print and in electronic media since 1990. His first book, Sinisterism:// Secular Religion of the Lie, has been revised and re-released. The Swastika against the Cross: The Nazi War on Christianity, has recently been published, and his most recent book, Poor Lenin’s Almanac: Perverse Leftist Proverbs for Modern Life can be viewed here: outskirtspress.com.
