The New York Post reports that some of the demonstrators Occupy’ing Wall Street are experiencing the joys of socialist redistribution by government firsthand. I guess this Smith guy never read “Dr. Zhivago” or “Atlas Shrugged.”

Even in Zuccotti Park, greed is good.

Occupy Wall Street’s Finance Committee has nearly $500,000 in the bank, and donations continue to pour in—but its reluctance to share the wealth with other protesters is fraying tempers.

Some drummers—incensed they got no money to replace or safeguard their drums after a midnight vandal destroyed their instruments Wednesday—are threatening to splinter off.

“F—k Finance. I hope Mayor Bloomberg gets an injunction and demands to see the movement’s books. We need to know how much money we really have and where it’s going,” said a frustrated Bryan Smith, 45, who joined OWS in Lower Manhattan nearly three weeks ago from Los Angeles, where he works in TV production.

Smith is a member of the Comfort Working Group—one of about 30 small collectives that have sprung up within OWS. The Comfort group is charged with finding out what basic necessities campers need, like thermal underwear, and then raising money by soliciting donations on the street.

“The other day, I took in $2,000. I kept $650 for my group, and gave the rest to Finance. Then I went to them with a request—so many people need things, and they should not be going without basic comfort items—and I was told to fill out paperwork. Paperwork! Are they the government now?” Smith fumed, even as he cajoled the passing crowd for more cash.

The Finance Committee dives on whatever dollars are raised by all the OWS working groups, said Smith, and doesn’t give it back.

The Comfort group has an allowance of $150 a day, while larger working groups, like the Kitchen group, get up to $2,000.

“What can I do with $150?” said Smith. “We have three tons of wet laundry here from the rainstorm—how do I get that done? We need winter gear, shoes, socks. I could spend $10,000 alone for backpacks people need. We raise all this money. Where is it?”

Read the whole thing. It’s a hoot.

Some of us always thought that the left’s political philosophy inevitably arrived at cannibalism.

Hat tip to Vanderleun.

Charles Krauthammer explains the president’s recent tax proposal. This is politics, but it’s not only politics, this is the real Barack Obama.

A most revealing window into our president’s political core: To impose a tax that actually impoverishes our communal bank account (the U.S. Treasury) is ridiculous. It is nothing but punitive. It benefits no one — not the rich, not the poor, not the government. For Obama, however, it brings fairness, which is priceless. ...

Obama has actually gone and done it. He’s just proposed a $1.5 trillion tsunami of tax hikes featuring a “Buffett rule” that, although as yet deliberately still fuzzy, clearly includes raising capital gains taxes.

He also insists again upon raising marginal rates on “millionaire” couples making $250,000 or more. But roughly half the income of small businesses (i.e., those filing individual returns) would be hit by this tax increase. Therefore, if we are to believe Obama’s own logic that his proposed business tax credits would increase hiring, then surely this tax hike will reduce small-business hiring.

But what are jobs when fairness is at stake? Fairness trumps growth. Fairness trumps revenue. Fairness trumps economic logic.

Obama himself has said that “you don’t raise taxes in a recession.” Why then would he risk economic damage when facing reelection? Because these proposals have no chance of being enacted, many of them having been rejected by the Democratic-controlled Congress of Obama’s first two years in office.

Moreover, this is not an economic, or jobs, or debt-reduction plan in the first place. This is a campaign manifesto. This is anti-millionaire populism as premise for his reelection. And as such, it is already working.

Obama’s Democratic base is electrified. On the left, the new message is playing to rave reviews. It has rekindled the enthusiasm of his core constituency — the MoveOn, Hollywood liberal, Upper West Side precincts best described years ago by John Updike: “Like most of the neighborhood, she was a fighting liberal, fighting to have her money taken from her.”

Added Updike: “For all her exertions, it never was.” But now with Obama — it will be! Turns out, Obama really was the one they had been waiting for.

That is: the new Obama, today’s soak-the-rich, veto-threatening, self-proclaimed class warrior. Except that the new Obama is really the old Obama — the one who, upon entering office in the middle of a deep economic crisis, and determined not to allow “a serious crisis to go to waste” (to quote his then-chief of staff), exploited the (presumed) malleability of a demoralized and therefore passive citizenry to enact the largest Keynesian stimulus in recorded history, followed by the quasi-nationalization of one-sixth of the economy that is health care.

Considering the political cost — a massive electoral rebuke by an infuriated 2010 electorate — these are the works of a conviction politician, one deeply committed to his own social-democratic vision.

That politician now returns. Obama’s new populism surely is a calculation that his halfhearted feints to the center after the midterm “shellacking” were not only unconvincing but would do him no good anyway with a stagnant economy, 9 percent unemployment and a staggering $4 trillion of new debt.

But this is more than a political calculation. It is more than just a pander to his base. It is a pander to himself: Obama is a member of his base. He believes this stuff. It is an easy and comfortable political shift for him, because it’s a shift from a phony centrism back to his social-democratic core, from positioning to authenticity.

The authentic Obama is a leveler, a committed social democrat, a staunch believer in the redistributionist state, a tribune, above all, of “fairness” — understood as government-imposed and government-enforced equality.

That’s why “soak the rich” is not just a campaign slogan to rally the base. It’s a mission, a vocation. It’s why, for all its gratuitous cynicism and demagoguery, Obama’s populist Rose Garden lecture on Monday was delivered with such obvious — and unusual — conviction.

He’s returned to the authenticity of his radical April 2009 “New Foundation” address (at Georgetown University) that openly proclaimed his intent to fundamentally transform America.

In a 2001 NPR, State Senator Barack Obama complains of constitutional constraints on redistributive change.

We’ve recently heard a lot of condescending accusations that Republican candidates who refuse to accept Warmism are anti-scientific, just as we heard an awful lot during the battle over Obamacare how backward anyone was who did not understand that universal government-provided healthcare was an essential feature of any modern advanced society.

Dan Greenfield explored the issue of just who the reactionaries harboring hostility toward science and Modernity really are in an excellent essay written early last year.

The narrative that liberal pundits have constructed and continually replayed over the last year is one in which progress minded and enlightened liberals are working to reform America into a modern society, while being stymied by a bunch of knuckle dragging reactionary conservatives who are anti-Science and want to drag America back into the dark ages. There’s only one problem with this narrative, it’s actually a mirror image of reality.

When it comes to holding on to reactionary ideas or maintaining an ideological worldview built on a reflexive hostility to modernity; nobody can top the modern leftist or his tamer liberal cousin. If you took away leader worship, fear of technology, the state as the solution to all problems, the supremacy of the group over the individual and the belief that the “enlightened” should rule over the common masses for their own good and control every aspect of their lives—there would be nothing left of the modern liberal. Literally nothing at all.

The modern liberal is wedded to a thoroughly reactionary worldview in which he worships the institutions he control and is full of paranoia and suspicion of those he does not. He disdains the common man and longs for enlightened leaders to uplift him and to transform his country into a messianic vision of a kingdom of heaven in which no one ever goes hungry and everyone is perfectly equalized—a pseudo-religious vision of government as religion that is wholly primitive in its conflation of theology and civics.

Every time a liberal pundit self-righteously trots out the stereotype of the ignorant science bashing conservative who just won’t accept the science of the environmentalist movement, he needs to be reminded that the entire environmentalist movement is founded on a fear of the products of science, namely technology and modern civilization. ...

When its flashy clothes are stripped away, liberalism stands revealed as a fear of modernity. There is nothing progressive about liberalism, it is the ideology of a political, cultural and economic elite that reviles everything modern, that longs for a mystical right of kings and well ordered oligarchies, denounces technology as the tool of the pollution devil, distrusts all science that is not in the service of its ideology and is threatened by any sort of debate or opposition.

Today liberalism is the second most backward, most paranoid, most reactionary and totalitarian ideology in the West after Islamism. Both are based on the fear of the modern, the fear of the liberated individual, technology and the nation state. Their great dream is the same, a vast mystical world-state ruled over by the enlightened and providing an inhumanly perfect justice for all. Both believe that the only solution for mankind is to go backward, to crawl instead of walk, to fear instead of know and to obey rather than think. That is Liberalism and Islamism in a nutshell, two reactionary ideologies walking together into the dark ages.

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip to Vanderleun.

Michael A. Walsh, in the New York Post, identifies the key issue in the current political crisis, something at stake even more important than economic prosperity: the choice for America of freedom versus dependency.

When did it become the primary function of the federal government to send millions of Americans checks?

For this, in essence, is what the debt-ceiling fight is all about—the inexorable and ultimately fatal growth of the welfare state. If you don’t believe it, just look at President Obama’s veiled threat to withhold Grandma’s Social Security benefits if Congress doesn’t let him borrow another $2 trillion or so to get himself safely past the 2012 election.

The feds now borrow 43 cents of every dollar they spend. Under Obama, outlays have soared to nearly a quarter of GDP (the historical average is just under 20 percent)—and once ObamaCare starts to fully kick in around 2014, it will only rise.

Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and debt interest consume—at the moment—nearly half of our $3.8 trillion budget. ...

The debt-ceiling cage match is the culmination of the Democrats’ 75-year-long fight to establish a voting bloc of dependents under the false flags of “compassion” and “social justice.” It’s sapped our strength, created a welfare mentality and, if unchecked, will reduce us to a nation of aging, resentful beggars with eyes cast permanently toward Washington.

The preamble to the Constitution talks about promoting the general welfare, not the welfare state. For the welfare state is incompatible with the rest of the preamble, which concludes: “and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.” By definition, dependents are not free.

Via Jim Geraghty.

Victor David Hanson explains that liberal social benevolence is a very old game which has led to ruin for many states before ours.

[S]tatism is not a desired outcome, but rather more a strategy for obtaining power or winning acclaim as one of the caring, by offering the narcotic of promising millions something free at the expense of others who must be seen as culpable and obligated to fund it — entitlements fueled by someone else’s money that enfeebled the state, but in the process extended power, influence, and money to a technocratic class of overseers who are exempt from the very system that they have advocated.

So what is socialism? It is a sort of modern version of Louis XV’s “Après moi, le déluge” – an unsustainable Ponzi scheme in which elite overseers, for the duration of their own lives, enjoy power, influence, and gratuities by implementing a system that destroys the sort of wealth for others that they depend upon for themselves. ...

Who are socialists?

There are none. Only technocratic overseers who wish to give someone else’s money to others as a means of winning capitalist-style lifestyles and power for themselves — in a penultimate cycle of unsustainable spending. When this latest attempt at statism is over, Barack Obama will enjoy a sort of Clintonism, a globe-trotting post officium lifestyle of multimillion dollar honoraria to fund a lifestyle analogous to “two Americas” John Edwards, “earth in the balance” Al Gore, a tax-exempt yachting John Kerry, a revolving-door Citibank grandee like Peter Orszag, or a socialist Strauss-Kahn in $20,000 suits doling out billions to the “poor.”

That is just the way it has been and will always be.

Read the whole thing.

Kevin Drum complains that we conservatives view lefties like himself unfairly.

Reading Tim Pawlenty’s paean to double plus supply-side-ism yesterday made me wonder, once again, why conservatives think we liberals are opposed to it. I mean, if it actually worked, why would we be? It’s politically popular, and by their accounts it would generate trillions of dollars in extra revenue that we could use to finance our beloved lefty social programs. What’s not to like?

The only answer I can come up with is that conservatives are now completely invested in their theory that we liberals loathe rich people so much that we don’t care. We all want to screw the wealthy so badly that we’re willing to forego the elections we’d win and the mountains of revenue we’d gain if we lowered their taxes. We hate them that much.

This is an interesting example of mocking a proposition without actually denying it.

Barack Obama is an excellent representative of the same political philosophy held by Kevin Drum and he is renowned for explicitly advocating increased taxation for purposes of “fairness” even if higher rates resulted in lower growth and less revenue being collected. He said exactly that, and by so doing defined himself, in one of the most famous of his campaign debates.

——————————————————-

So, are we conservatives being unfair? Would left-wingers like Kevin Drum and Barack Obama ever really support tax cuts for wealthier Americans if that was what it took to grow the economy and provide government with the funding the left desires to spend?

The answer is No. Left-wingers will never accept the reality that growth can only be achieved by lower taxes. The notion that allowing the rich to keep more grows the economy and benefits all is unacceptable. The left has ridiculed and dismissed this commonsensical proposition as “trickle-down economics.”

Leftism is fundamentally based on envy and societal division, and its route to power relies on agitating the passions of the masses, on mobilizing them on the basis of their animosity toward those better off than themselves. A theory of economics that proposes that failing to punish the rich will make everyone better off fundamentally contradicts leftism’s basic methods and ideology.

The psychology of the left is one of bitter resentment and hatred of anyone better off than oneself. The true leftist would rather everyone were worse off, as long as no one was permitted to be better off than anyone else.

This is the classic peasant mentality, which is the subject of a thousand bitter Eastern European jokes.

“An angel appears to a poor peasant, and informs him that God has taken pity on his sufferings and has sent a messenger to relieve his hardships. The peasant, he is told, may make one wish, and the angel will grant his desire. There is, however, a catch. The angel informs the peasant that, whatever he wishes for, his neighbor will receive also, and that neighbor will be given twice as much. The peasant reflects a moment, and tells the angel: ‘Pluck out one of my eyes.’”

Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Socialist

John Hinderaker admires the life-style of leading European socialists, which in the case of IMF chief DSK included $3000 per night single hotel rooms, “an arrangement with Air France that allow[ing] him to get on any flight and sit in first class,” suits from the same tailor favored by President Obama.

After all, when you working on behalf of the poor and the dispossesed, when you are the representative of the worthiest of all possible causes, only the best is good enough for you.

The ruthlessness and appetitiveness of leftwing political leaders is commonly observed. Not surprisingly, a real percentage, DSK, Bill Clinton, have, in the course of their political careers, made a habit of extending the customary socialist perspective on people’s rights and property to womens’ bodies. Why should anyone be surprised at the same philosophy expressing itself in more than one form?

Mary Katherine Ham performs the math and demonstrates that total confiscation of all the assets of the rich would not, in fact, solve the federal entitlement spending problem.

This week, Michael Moore offered a simple and elegant solution to our debt problem.

Calling the assets of wealthy Americans a “national resource,” he suggested our problems would all be solved if we could just have access to all that money.

“What’s happened is that we’ve allowed the vast majority of that cash to be concentrated in the hands of just a few people, and they’re not circulating that cash. They’re sitting on the money,” Moore said. “That’s not theirs, that’s a national resource, that’s ours. We all have this… we all benefit from this or we all suffer as a result of not having it.”

“America’s not broke,” he told a cheering crowd of pro-union protesters in Wisconsin. ...

The United States of America has about 400 billionaires. Moore calls them “400 little Mubaraks.” About half of those have less than $2 billion each, and those with a net worth in the double-digit billions is an exclusive club of about 30.

Still, as Moore says, “there’s a ton of cash out there.”

The grand total of the combined net worth of every single one of America’s billionaires is roughly $1.3 trillion. It does indeed sound like a “ton of cash” until one considers that the 2011 deficit alone is $1.6 trillion. So, if the government were to simply confiscate the entire net worth of all of America’s billionaires, we’d still be $300 billion short of making up this year’s deficit.

That’s before we even get to dealing with the long-term debt of $14 trillion, which if you’re keeping score at home, is between 10 to 14 times the entire net worth of all of the country’s billionaires, combined. That includes the all-powerful Koch brothers ($40 billion between them), the all-powerful George Soros ($14.5 billion), all the Walton family (of the Wal-Mart fortune), Steve Jobs, Oprah (at a paltry $2.7 billion), the Google Founders, Michael Bloomberg, and the Mars family (of the candy bar empire).

Contrary to the left’s favorite talking point, our economic problems do not have anything to do with inequality. The problem is actually the reverse: government is taking away from its rightful owners (and redistributing) so large a portion of this country’s economy that investment, enterprise, opportunity, and economic confidence have been depressed.

The real solution is for government to restrain its appetite and stand aside in order to allow the economy to function and to grow, increasing the general prosperity, lowering costs of goods and services, and making everybody better off.

Karl Smith, an Assistant Professor of Public Economics and Government at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, shares his confidence in the survival, and continued inevitable advance, of the welfare state, even in the face of federal deficits.

In reality, Professor Smith informs us, the only thing really causing Americans to object to wholesale redistributionism is racial animosity.

Contrary to Jonah Goldberg and others who see Canada and the United States as examples of two clashing ideologies, they are actually examples of two different ethic distributions. The United States is not Canada because there is ethnic strife between Southern Blacks and Southern Whites. That strife reduces the sense of moral obligation on the part of the white majority and so reduces government spending.

I want to be very clear that I don’t say this to paint those against social spending as racists. From where I sit I am betting that most of the intellectuals lined up against expanding the welfare state are naively unaware that their support rests upon racial strife. Otherwise they would realize that as America integrates they are doomed. They are fighting as if they believe they have a chance of winning. Given the strong secular trend in racial harmony, they do not.

I point this out also to show why the major Republican strategy for limiting government was doomed from the start and why I am also not particularly worried about Americas fiscal future per se.

I must say that Professor Smith’s perspective on the fundamental character of African-Americans seems a bit excessively pessimistic.

We have here, it seems, a vision of a nation permanently and irremediably divided between between productive, independent and self-supporting whites and needy and dependent blacks, in which the only thing that is going to change is white resentment of exploitation gradually being reduced by social integration and racial harmony. In other words, as we attend school with, mix socially with, and come to know better our helpless, ineffectual darkie neighbors, we will like them better, recognize our moral obligation to support them, and quit complaining about our tax burdens and the federal budget.

Obviously, there does exist a pathological and dependent black subculture, but it is not unique. There are significant sized white and Hispanic welfare-dependent subcultures as well. Dependency is a product of culture, of a cultural aversion to effort and education and of a cultural acceptance of unmarried promiscuity and unwed childbirth, not specifically of ethnicity or race at all. Those cultural pathologies are difficult to change, and they are cultivated rather than opposed by the condescending paternalism of Professor Smith and his ilk.

According to Smith, it is completely impossible to restrain federal spending in the face of the intransigent, irrefutable moral obligation of socialism.

Much of the handwringing about fiscal irresponsibility is a sense of alarm not only on the right, but throughout much of the political center, that these spending cuts are not actually materializing.

But, by what theory of government did you ever believe they would? Governments don’t look at how much money they have and then decide what they want to buy. They decide what they want to buy and then they look for ways to find the revenue.

Divorcing the two – through sustained deficits – was only going to lead to ever increasing levels of debt. This is what we got. At no point was the beast ever starved. The peace dividend lowered government spending growth somewhat, but that was undone by the war on terror. Otherwise spending hummed along, as it always will, with the government buying things the public thinks it ought to buy.

Yet, if this is causing upset stomachs among many of my fellow bloggers it calms mine. Its quite clear how this will end. Racial strife will continue to abate. The public will coalesce around the welfare state and taxes will be raised to meet the cost.

The fundamental do not predict rising debt forevermore. The fundamentals predict a VAT.

This is not to say I am unconcerned about our economic future. Health care costs will continue to eat up more and more of our economy unless something is done. However, trying to convince people that health care is not a social obligation a fool’s errand. The best you could do is convince them we have no obligation to the other. As the other integrates this will likewise prove impossible.

No, people will ultimately believe that health care for all is a social obligation and therefore government will pay for it. There is no more analysis to be done on that part of the question.

And, there you have it. There are people who require other people’s money to meet their personal exigencies. There are the people like Professor Smith who understand that altruistic redistribution of other people’s means on the basis of one’s moral intuitions is obligatory, and that is the whole story.

There is democracy, a hungry mob, and an indulgent and sentimental bien pensant elite, and the rest of us are in the position of the sheep participating in the democratic process with a couple of wolves to decide on what’s for dinner.

Fortunately, I think Professor Smith is as bad a prophet as he is a sociologist and an ethicist. The compelling power of liberal moral intuitions is, I would predict, going to be proven to wane very significantly as the general public inevitably comes to recognize that current (pre-Obamacare) entitlements are unsustainable, and faces a choice between maintaining entitlements and economic prosperity and growth.

You do not have to be Tocqueville to recognize that the fundamental American character has always featured a powerful determination to get ahead, to build a better future on the basis of current effort and sacrifice. It is not sectional ethnic animosity that stands in the way of implementing socialism in the United States, it is the fundamental American character and the values and attitudes that the country was built upon.

We are not Canada, not because we have blacks, but because we are the rebels who threw off the yoke of monarchy in favor of Liberty and individualism, and Canada was, practically speaking, founded by the Tories who preferred being subjects and dependents. We will never be Canada.

Back in 1950, the American Medical Association was firmly opposed to socialized medicine. The same organization endorsed Obamacare in 2010 demonstrating just how far the country and its institutions and professions have declined.

70 House democrats (really 69, since Robert Wexler, 19-FL, resigned in January in order to accept a lucrative position heading up a marvelously well-funded, pro-Palestinian Jewish organization) belong to the Democratic Socialists of America. “Democratic Socialist” is a term of art for you-know-what. (Hint: Begins with “C.”) They’ll soon be short two more, once ethics problems end the careers of Maxine Waters and Charlie Rangel. (Gateway Pundit)

Neil Reynolds comments on the financial collapse of the European welfare state.

Democracies produced Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, fulfilling the expectation of Socrates and Machiavelli that democracies end in tyranny. Now democracies are fulfilling the complementary expectation of Nobel laureate economist Milton Friedman that democracies end in bankruptcy. Put a democracy in charge of the Sahara, Mr. Friedman once said, and sand itself will become scarce. Democracies are indeed profligate trustees – or have been for the past 30 or 40 years. Mr. Friedman’s primary fret, though, was the tendency of democracy to centralize political and economic power in the same hands. Most critiques of democracy reflect this elemental distrust. “Democracy is two wolves and a lamb,” Benjamin Franklin reputedly said, “voting on what to have for lunch.”

A must read article.