Posted By: John on 11/01Attacking Capitalism?
From CNN:
During remarks to a U.S. Chamber of Commerce legal summit in Washington, (Jeb) Bush had tough words for the president in response to an audience question.
“I think President Obama has used the bully pulpit as a way to attack capitalism.”
Governor – you act like this is a surprise? Any who paid attention to his campaign should know Obama considers capitalism the enemy. The larger issue is that you, your brother and virtually the whole of the Republican establishment attack capitalism daily by your actions. Everyone knows that Democrats, and Obama in particular, are enemies of capitalism. Your side, however, has managed to con the entire nation into believing that Conservatives are its defenders. That’s the insidiousness of the Right – their Capitalist stance is, in reality, only a slower slope downward to true socialism. Despite your pro-capitalist lip service, the record shows that you are anything but. Two of the more egregious examples of this during the last administration was the passage of both Medicare Part D and TARP. Both passed with overwhelming Republican support, and both significantly undercut the free market. The country thinks we have a party interested in defending capitalism. If only that were the case. Sadly, America has no such party. A true defense of Capitalism starts with the idea that, just as there is a wall of separation between Church and State, there should be a similiar wall between State and Economics. Capitalism requires NO government involvement in the markets. Not limited, not “less than the Democrats” but NONE.
ARI has a great site that launched earlier this year called Principles of a Free Society. Here they detail exactly what is required for a free society to function, and they explain just why government intervention into the economy must be rejected, outright. The essence of a free society is individual rights. Under a free society, an individual must remain in total control of his life, liberty and property. The moment the government steps into the economic life of its country, they violate those rights. As they point out on the website (quoting Rand in The Virtue of Selfishness):
There can be no compromise between freedom and government controls; to accept “just a few controls” is to surrender the principle of inalienable individual rights and to substitute for it the principle of the government’s unlimited, arbitrary power, thus delivering oneself into gradual enslavement. As an example of this process, observe the present domestic policy of the United States.
Once you open the door to government intervention in one area of the economy, you open the door for every well connected pull-peddler in the nation to get the same intervention where they feel it’s necessary. Eventually you’ll have government setting interest rates for the entire economy, government insuring bank deposits, government confiscating 12.4% of every individual’s income under the guise of a retirement fund, government controlling the car companies, government telling companies how much they can pay their employees, government rationing of the healthcare system, government telling you how you must operate the computer networks you’ve spent a fortune building, government telling you which apps you must accept in your online App Store, which software you must include with your operating system, which ingredients you may put in the food that you sell, and where you can smoke on your own property. Eventually you have current day America.
The Pandora’s Box of socialism is opened at the first crack, not once the box has had its lid removed and all its walls demolished.