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Points to Ponder

Corporate Greed & Other Liberal Lies




Isn't it amazing how liberals can shaft our economy, and then get away with blaming capitalism when our economy goes into a recession? Isn't it great how they can force banks to give loans to people who can't afford them, and then blame the banks when they come up with strange and convoluted means to deal with these bad assets?

Don't you just love how they call capitalists greedy, but if your were to define greed as never being satisfied with the money you have received, would that not apply more to them. Honestly, have you ever met a liberal who thinks the wealthy are taxed enough? Their insatiable need to spend Other Peoples Money (OPM) knows no bounds.

The staggering degree to which they can lie and get away with it is impressive. The biggest lie of course is who to blame for this (still ongoing) recession. I for one know that it is congress that sets the budget. It is congress that establishes the taxing and spending policies of the federal government. I also know that the Democrats took over both houses of congress in 2006 – when our economy was fine I might add! This recession is not Bush's. It's the Polsi-Reed recession.

That's my story, and I'm sticking to it!


The Highs & Lows of Avatar

I was absolutely blown away by Avatar. The movie was simply stunning. It was one of the most enjoyable experiences I have had in the theater in years. I thought nothing would be able to surpass Star Trek earlier that year, but I was wrong. As soon as this movie is released on Blu-Ray, I'm buying it.

It's too bad the plot was one great, big, liberal screed... ...it didn't need to be.

DA: How can you say that? It's a wonderful movie filled with love and hope and overcoming adversity. This is the opposite of a screed.

That's your perception. I define a screed based on whether its intent is to generate hatred in the hearts of its audience, and Avatar fits that description perfectly.

I could write a book on all of the liberal fallacies on display in this movie, but the most egregious is how it perpetuates the myth of the greedy corporation. Putting aside the fact that only people can be greedy, hating corporations instead of those responsible is exactly what the greedy people in those corporations want you to do.

Many would disagree with me, but that is why corporations exist in the first place, as I'll get into in the next section.

DA: Hold on a second. You can't do that. You can't say what a great movie Avatar is then trash it as a screed. How can you reconcile those two opposites.

Quite simple, actually. I view it as nothing more than a fantasy, like Lord of the Rings. Any corporation that acts in that manner should get kicked out of there. Any marines that would follow their orders should be slaughtered as they were. Every marine that I know (and I know quite a few) would be like that one woman who said she didn't sign up for this, and would have bailed as she did.

Let me ask you something. In the face of James Cameron's clear and open statements, can you honestly deny that he intended for the audience of his movie to hate corporations, and hate what our military is doing in places like Iraq?

DA: ...no.

Then it's a screed.

DA: Oh. Like what you're writing here isn't?

Never said it wasn't. Although I am trying to fill your head with more useful ideas than technologically primitive people can beat a highly mechanized army. That's a bigger fantasy than anything Tolkin would have come up with. At least he used magic.


Insurance Fraud

Wasn't it terrible how after hurricanes Katrina and Ike, all of those insurance companies dumped their policy holders, or didn't pay nearly enough for them to recover?

DA: I'll say! And you say there is no greed in the free market!

Who says insurance companies – correct that – insurance corporations – have anything to do with the free market. Furthermore, why do you suppose they did what they did?

DA: Because they're greedy. Duh!

That only explains their motivation. Accusing them of being greedy does nothing but feed the hatred in your heart. What I'm asking is why do they think they can get away with it? Only by answering that can you stop them from doing it again.

DA: (scratches head for a few seconds, then snaps fingers) Because they think their fat-cat republican conspirators will protect them!

Really? Corporations donate more to Democratic campaigns by five to one. Try again.

DA: No they don't!

Yes they do. But rather than debating statistics (as Mark Twain says There are lies, damn lies, and statistics), would you not admit that what the insurance companies did by leading people along with them thinking they were adequately covered, only to find out they weren't, was fraud?

DA: You bet!

And fraud is a crime, right?

DA: Sure is!

Then why do you suppose there are no insurance agents and executives going to prison over what is obvious fraud.

DA: ...got me.

You're now beginning to understand why corporations exist today.


Corporations In A Nutshell

If you want to know what corporations are, there are plenty of more authoritative places to get that information than here. What I will cover is what I believe you need to know to combat the lies spread by liberals.

DA: What I want to know is why you seem to imply that the Democrats are the ones responsible for their fraud?

Don't you worry about that. I'll get to it. But first – FULL DISCLOSURE – I work for a major multi-national corporation, so don't read what I am about to write as if I believe they are evil. They aren't. Only people are, and understanding corporations properly is what will prevent the evil people in them from profiting.

Corporations have been around for centuries, but what we describe as corporations are actually a recent invention from around the beginning of the twentieth century. Just Google 'Delaware corporation' and you'll see what I mean. What happened was the government found a neat way to both attract wealthy businesses and tax the bejeesus out of them. By offering a business environment with a lot of legal latitude (read: protection from liability), states get corporations to fork over huge sums in taxes.

What you won't find unless you look very hard is how these corporations are deals-with-devils. One of liberalism's greatest and most dirtiest secrets is how much it loves corporations. Without corporations, liberals can only tax the incomes of individuals, but with corporations, they can tax corporations as well. Not only that, but the existence of corporations gives them a ready made foil for them to demonize. Just watch any Keith Olbermann clip on YouTube and you will see what I mean.

DA: You keep talking, but I'm still not seeing the link. Get to the point.

I wasn't quite ready yet, but since you seem to have built a major mental block on this... What actions do liberals take to get back at corporations that harm us?

DA: They sue them! They take from them what they most desire, which is profit.

Very good. Notice that you didn't say put them out of business. So what group is most benefited by these lawsuits? And here's a hint, it's the same group that is a more reliable Democratic voter than even African-Americans.

DA: ...lawyers?

Trial attorneys, to be more precise. Just think of John Edwards and his huge mansion when you want to know why liberals want corporations to exist. I'll provide more proof of liberal duplicity soon, but I need to get back on topic.

I have heard corporations described as capitalism on steroids, which is fairly accurate, as long as you don't confuse that with the free market. Corporations require a government to create them, otherwise you would just have a company, and anything that requires the government is not the free market. Corporations are nothing more than government entities. In fact, if there was only one, and it did everything, you would have communism.

DA: Now you're talking gibberish. If they so benefit liberals, why do right-wingers like yourself work for them?

Like I said, they are deals-with-devils. Before the Delaware Corporation came along, anyone who invested in the corporation could be held liable for any wrong done by it. If you were an investor, you would be less likely to buy shares of stock in a company if you might lose more than what you were investing – including the possibility of going to jail. But now with the modern corporate law, the most an investor could lose is the money he used to buy the stock.

This freedom to invest is what fuels the dynamic nature of capitalism like nothing else can, but it's gamble, and I do mean it in the literal sense. Not only do investors have to worry about whether the company will produce a product that consumers will value, but they also have to worry about lawyers siphoning off their dividends from any plausible case against the corporation. Since it is so much easier to get a conviction against a faceless corporation than it is against an actual person, a plausible case is all that is required for a lawyer to hit a jackpot. That's why it's called 'Jackpot Justice.'


It's Just Business

DA: Are you trying to convince me that lawyers are just in it for the money?

Not really. I'm sure they believe they are doing the right thing, but like all liberal endeavors, they end up accomplishing the opposite of what they intend. They see capitalists as only caring about money, so in their mind, the best method to punish them is to take lots of it from them. But there are a couple of serious problems with this approach. The first is that the money they take comes out of what will go to the investors as dividends, not from those that will make the decisions that harm people.

The second, and most insidious aspect is that this turns what should be about justice into nothing more than a business decision. Take those insurance companies that didn't hold up to the expectations of their policy holders.

(By the way, that is as far as I go to blame the insurance companies for what happened. With the vested interest the liberal media has in getting the populace to hate corporations, I can't believe even half the stories I have heard about their misdeeds.)

These corporations were faced with huge losses following those hurricanes, but because there wasn't any threat that any of the decision makers faced jail time, they could weigh the potential loss from lawsuits with the real loss of actually paying up what was expected, and chose to make the better business decision. If on the other hand these decision makers faced criminal charges of fraud, far more money would have flowed to policy holders than ever would have flowed through lawsuits.

Liberals can talk all they want that they are only about supporting the 'little guy,' but their actions only produce the opposite results. They may say that people should care more about life than just business, but they inculcate something very different in us.


American Criminal Liars Union

DA: Sorry. I'm not buying this for a second. You're still winding up back at 'the lawyers are only in this for the money,' and I know that this is not true.

They have a very good reason for doing what they're doing, which I'll get into now.

When the modern corporation began, government (liberals) saw the taxes they collected as the prime source of money they needed to accomplish their dreams. Not anymore. Oh sure, they still want to want to tax them heavily, but that money has to be accounted for, and can't be used to accomplish what every liberal elite knows must be done. They have tried for over a century to 'enlighten' the populace, but it hasn't worked. If you were to divide the country into liberal, conservative and moderate camps, liberals would be the smallest group.

Out right bribery of the populace, by stealing from the rich to give to the poor, has worked to some degree, yet it still hasn't got them where they needed to be. Liberal elites eventually decided that democracy wasn't going to work out, so they shifted their attention to the courts with their main shock troops the American Criminal Liars Union.

DA: What's with the ad hominem attacks? Why not call them by their real name?

Why, you ask? Because there is nothing civil about their strong arm tactics that organized crime could only envy. And the only liberties they advance are those that make people free from being held accountable to their actions, and more importantly, to make sure people are free from religion.

With their millions garnered by donations from trial lawyers – who collected what they have from corporations – the ACLU can go into small towns and threaten them with lawsuits, and when they do, they make sure it is perfectly clear that if these small town governments were to somehow prevail, it would be a Pyrrhic victory, because of how their budgets would be busted from defending themselves.

The notion that liberals want to be civil to those that disagree with them is laughable. Civility requires respect, and you don't file lawsuits against those you respect.

Conservatives may like corporations due to how well they leverage the principles of capitalism, but they don't need corporations. It is liberals that need corporations, because there is no hope of advancing their agenda without them.

This goes directly to the sick and twisted heart of liberalism. They may desperately need corporations to survive, but they also need their useful idiots (tools) to despise corporations. Without the animus directed at corporations, their victories in lawsuits would not be nearly so assured, and so denied the funding they most need.

I can't think of a more pathetic existence than having to garner hatred in the institutions they can't live without.


VAT's 'dat?

DA: That's absolutely slanderous! How dare you accuse liberals of such duplicity!

I realize that this is tough to swallow, but I do have irrefutable evidence. Do you know what a VAT is?

DA: Yes. It's a national sales tax.

That's what you liberals want to pass it off as, but a Value Added Tax (VAT), like they have in Canada and many European countries, is somewhat different. A sales tax, as employed anywhere in this country, only happens at the consumer end of the value stream. When a company buys a commodity of some nature, adds value to it, then resells it a a higher price, they don't pay taxes when they first bought the commodity.

So in a value stream like producing a chicken sandwich, the farmer who grows the chicken feed does not pay taxes for anything to produce the feed. Neither does the chicken rancher to buy the feed, nor the meat processor that produces the filets when they buy the chicken from the rancher. Not even the restaurant pays a tax until the sandwich is sold to the consumer. In a way, what we call a sales tax is really a consumer or consumption tax.

A VAT, on the other hand, would tax every sale along the way, jacking up the final sale, which would now be taxed at a higher value. A VAT is always a tax on a tax and don't let anyone convince you differently. Of course liberals will claim that they are just increasing taxes – nothing more. Certainly nothing new, because they are always trying to increase taxes. But if that is all there was to this, why not increase already existing taxes? Why create a new one all together?

The answer is quite simple. If you are a corporation that owns all parts of the value stream, you would have significant advantage over any stream that is made up of individual companies. There is no way these smaller companies could compete with the corporation. A VAT would be a huge boon to corporations, and the only people you see pushing a VAT are the liberal politicians.

Like I said. Liberals could just demand an increase in existing taxes, so if pushing for a VAT does not prove to you that liberal elites are 'all in' for corporations, I don't know what else could be shown to convince you that it's true.

What's really tragic is that when the liberals get their VAT, and smaller companies are swallowed up by corporations – quite frankly because they have no choice – these liberals will be able to decry the demise of the small companies while licking their chops at the corporate taxes and lawsuit settlements. Yes, duplicity – not hypocrisy – best describes liberals and corporations.

DA: You still have proved nothing. Your spin isn't going to convince me of believing liberals love corporations.

I'm well aware of that. As I said previously that the difference between a liberal elite and a tool for the liberal elites is how they react to the accusation that liberalism is socialism, the same is true for support for corporations. Your sincere denunciations of corporations puts you squarely in the tool category.


Liberalism Can't Make Money

Whether you want to believe it or not, someone has to make the money that you liberals want to spend, and one thing that is as sure as the sun rising in the east, it's not coming from a philosophy that hates capitalism.

DA: That's nonsense. There are lots of rich liberals, so of course we know how to make money.

Of course there are lots of rich liberals. If you look at the wealthiest areas in this country, they almost always vote liberal. Probably the most stunning deception by liberals is how they get everyone to believe that it's the Republicans that are the party of the rich.

I remember back in '04 looking at a map of the country that showed each county and how it broke for either Kerry or Bush. It showed the Bush counties in red and the Kerry counties in blue. Next to that map was another that showed the counties where the per capita income was above the average in red, and below the average was in blue. You would think that if the Republican party was the party of the rich they would look the same, but they weren't. They were almost completely reversed. Other than depressed inner-city areas, where ever there was blue had red and vice-versa.

No. Liberals have no problems creating wealth. They just don't use liberalism.

Let me ask you, what two non-government sectors of the economy have seen the greatest increase in cost to the average American since 1970?

DA: Oh, I don't know. I suppose one is health care, and the other... how about energy.

Health care is one, but you are way off target on energy. Adjusted for inflation, since 1970, energy has just barely kept pace with it. And adjusted for an increase in buying power, it's less.

The two I'm looking for are health care and education. Nothing even comes close to these two. In recent years housing costs have really shot up, but understanding the first two explains why it's catching up.

Next I would ask, what two non-government sectors of the economy receive more money from the government than any of the others? And no, it's not the defense industry. Not even close.

DA: (said drolly) I suppose it is also health care and education.

Very good. You're catching on. Now what two sectors (after the entertainment industries) are most likely to be run by – and populated by – liberals.

DA: Hey, wait a second! I know where your going with this, and it's not fair! The insurance companies are to blame for the high prices. Get the profit motive out of medicine, and the price will come down.

I know you liberals like to believe that, but considering that over half of the country is covered by non-profits like Blue Cross, or have government insurance of some kind, and the fact that only one-third of the hospitals in this country are still for profit, I don't think our economy could handle any more 'getting the profit out of medicine.'

This gets to the heart of why you liberals cannot be trusted to operate any segment of our economy. You honestly believe that the only factor that drives up the costs of things are people seeking profits, and never factor in the costs of things like regulations and lawsuits. More importantly, you dismiss how the free market, through competition, lowers the cost of things.

The degree to which our health care and higher education have the free market in play makes them both the envy of the world, and the degree to which they are socialized makes them the most expensive.

The Economist, a British publication, ranked the top twenty universities in the world with seventeen of them are located in this country, yet our primary education hardly ranks at all (actually, they are pretty rank indeed). Can you imagine what our universities would be like if people had to go to them based on where they live, like they do with primary education? We spend more per capita on primary education than any other country, yet we are a laughingstock.

As for medicine, people from around the world come to this country for procedures not available where they live. The only people leaving this country for medical reasons are those that can't afford what the socialization we already have has done to it.

DA: Then obviously we need to completely socialize it with Universal Health Care.

Spoken like a true liberal. You shaft an economy, then use that as justification for a complete take over.

Face facts. Everything you people control have costs that are outrageously out of control. And that includes the entertainment industries. Handing over anymore of our economy to liberals would be suicide.


The Broken Window Fallacy

DA: That's not right. I know for a fact that countries with Universal Health Care have much lower operating costs, and higher life expectancies.

You know no such thing. Every liberal idea of how an economy works can be summed up as a 'Broken Window Fallacy.' This is not something that I made up, but what all proper economists should be aware of, and it explains why liberals believe in such stupid things as stimulus spending.

This fallacy begins with a child that breaks his family's window. The father then has to pay to have it repaired. To the liberal, what the child has done was to create an opportunity for a repair man to be employed. They see that money has changed hands, which means that the economy has improved, and never factor in the other costs, such as now the father can't afford what he really wanted to do with that money, which puts him further behind in achieving his desired standard of living.

I would also add that because of the praise the liberal places on the child for doing such a wonderful and needed thing for the economy, another cost of the broken window fallacy is spoiled brats.

Rather than digging into the minutia necessary to dispel Universal Health Care in another country, let's look at something a little closer to home. The CBO (Congressional Budgeting Office) states that the health care take over by our government (Obama Care) is revenue neutral. Meaning it won't increase our national debt. How do they do that? Well one thing they do is leave out that it is revenue neutral over ten years. They then don't talk about how we'll be taxed for four years before any benefits kick in. After the end of those ten years there will be nothing 'revenue neutral' about it.

When I say that a liberal economist is an oxymoron, I mean it. An actual economist studies how economies do work. A liberal economist studies how economies should work. The difference between the two is the difference between a scientist and priest.


The Microwave Oven Analogy

DA: Are you seriously trying to get me to believe that people trying to make as much money as they can are going to drive down the cost of anything? That's ludicrous!

You can call it whatever name you'd like, but facts are facts, and while you are entitled to your own opinion, your not entitled to your own facts.

Take microwave ovens as an example. When these things first came out they were very expensive. Only the rich could afford them. Yet because the rich created a market for them, free market innovations could engage to lower the price of them so that they can now be found in the poorest of homes.

In a socialist society, where nothing is developed without approval by a committee, the microwave oven wouldn't stand a chance. They would have looked at the cost-to-benefit ratio of the initial ovens and just nipped them in the bud as nothing but unnecessary toys. Quite the contrary. They are far more efficient at heating food, and there is less excess heat entering a room that air conditioning will have to remove.

DA: That's all well and good for something like microwave ovens, but you can't allow something as important as health care to be subjected to the free market.

Do you think there is something magical about health care? What I am describing applies to everything, and the more dear it is to us, the more important it is that the free market be allowed to work on it. Let's face it. We do not have a health care crisis. We have a health care cost crisis.

Due to your zealotry, you cannot see the future poor people who will be saved by the lower cost medical solutions brought about by the free market. Our health care options should be as veried and inexpensive as grocery stores, but that is irrelevent to you, because of how blinded you are to government run health care. You may claim to care about the poor, but it is only through self-deception that you can maintain it.


The Monopoly Myth

DA: Stop it right there! If you think you're going to get me to believe that a bunch a capitalists running around buying up everything and creating monopolies is good for us, you're insane!

I suppose you then believe that an important role for our government is to prevent monopolies?

DA: And you don't!?!

Of course I don't. In order for a monopoly to exist, someone has to prevent others from competing against the monopoly, and that someone is always the government. Expecting the government to protect you from a monopoly is truly a 'fox guarding the hen house' situation. In a real free market, there can't be any monopoly.

DA: Well what about collusion? Surely you believe the government should protect us from big corporations that get together to conspire against us?

You mean like a couple of summers ago when gasoline prices shot over $5 a gallon?

DA: Exactly! We need the government to protect us from Big Oil.

No we don't, because it is government that creates Big Oil. Any belief that government should protect us from them results in things like the Kabuki theater of a show trial we were presented with when it happened. The politicians could tell the masses were upset by what was going on, so they dragged their corporate accomplices before them to pretend how outraged they were. Considering how hard they have been working at jacking up gas prices through taxation to levels seen by their ideological brethren in Europe, if there was any real outrage by the politicians, it was the fact that they weren't collecting all of the increases through those taxes.

Of course the oil corporations are in collusion, but it wasn't of their own making. They aren't the ones responsible for an economic condition where no new oil refineries can be built. I don't mean hard to be built. I mean they can't be built due to government regulations. Once the oil corporations caught on that there would be no new competition to worry about, that's when all of the mergers started taking place. Now we have ExxonMobil, ChevronTexaco, ConocoPhillips, and so on and so forth. It is government and only government that creates 'Big Anything.'

When the liberal politicians dragged those corporate heads before them, did you expect either of them to point out the real problem here? I didn't. I don't believe the corporate heads have any responsibility to point out the favorable business environment that government has created for them. Nor do I believe that politicians have any responsibility to tell the people what they know in the hearts is what is best for us, like increases in gas prices in order to get us out of our freedom inspiring cars and into government scheduled mass transit.

Who I blame for everything that is wrong with our country is knuckleheads like you who expect the government to protect us from ourselves. It's one thing to say the government should protect us from criminals who operate outside of the law. It's another thing to use the law to shape our behavior for their utopian dream, not ours. If it were ours, we wouldn't need the government.

Look. There are times when monopolies make sense, like the power lines to our homes, or even the principle behind patents that allow inventors to monopolize their creations for a certain amount of time. Just never forget that it's the government that creates them. If you think your utility company is charging too much or has poor service, don't waste your time complaining to them. The real culprit is the government and they are the ones that need to be held accountable. As long as you are blaming the utilities you're letting them and the government off of the hook.

Whenever you see a monopoly, or collusion among companies (which is the same thing), always look to see how the government is responsible. Governments don't allow monopolies – they create them. Monopolies are not created by the government doing nothing. It is government regulations that create them, and not the lack of them. Monopolies are created by someone preventing any competition to them, and only the government can do that.


It's A Global Market

DA: I can't believe you are really this anti-government? There must be something you want it to do? How about preventing all our best jobs from being exported?

First of all, the best jobs didn't leave the country. They left Michigan and went to Alabama. The only jobs that left the country are the low skill jobs that really should have left. Free market forces all jobs where they should belong.

DA: Doesn't it bother you that we don't manufacture things like we used to?

That's just a liberal, union lie. We manufacture more value than ever before; we just use fewer people to do it. Our manufacturing is the most efficient in the world so stop looking at the layoffs, and start paying attention to what we really are doing. For the most part, the only ones impacted are union members who would have seen this coming if they weren't so biased against their own employers.

DA: You're a real piece of work. The way you can dismiss the suffering of people losing their jobs to foreign companies is why I'll never be a conservative.

And your refusal to see how your policies harm those very same people – with its mantra of It's not your fault you're in this situation. It's your employer's – is why I'll never go back to liberalism.

I remember back in the early 80's everyone was freaking out about the Japanese, and how they will dominate the global economy. I was in the Navy at the time, and I had been to Japan. I had seen how industrious and hard working these people were with my own eyes, so I was easily persuaded into this rising panic. Then I read an article that changed everything for me.

It was written by an American who had been living in Japan for the past 10 years. He wrote that this rising panic was completely without warrant, and he used the rice market as an example. At the time, the Japanese were paying five times what Americans were paying for rice, because the government put massive restrictions on rice imports in order to save the thousands of rice farmers in their country. No matter how terrible it was for California rice farmers to not be able to sell their crops in Japan, it pales to how badly the Japanese economy was being harmed by this policy.

Then he wrote something that I'll never forget. 'If you want to dominate the world economy then you have to actually compete in the world economy.' What popped into my mind just then was Can you imagine someone claiming they will dominate a football game that they have no intention of playing?

He then went through a huge laundry list of tariffs and out right bans designed to protect cherished businesses in the country that would wind up as a huge millstone draped around the necks of the industries that could have dominated the world, but now never will. And why? To protect jobs that shouldn't be protected.

Make no mistake about it. Every time a government attempts to protect any job it prevents an economy from growing in some way. In other words, it prevents better jobs from being developed. There may be some strategic, or nostalgic reasons for doing so, but there are never any economic reasons.


Which Broom Has Better Value

DA: You're just plain wrong. There have been lots of good and valuable jobs lost to foreign imports.

No. You're the one that is wrong. Every job that has been lost to foreign imports, should have been lost, just as the buggy whip manufacturing jobs should have been lost to the auto manufacturing jobs. Any job that is not providing the best value to the consumer needs to make way to those that do.

A great example was this broom manufacturing plant out east that closed down a few years back. I remember watching a news broadcast of it with this hysterical woman bemoaning the loss of her job to brooms made in Mexico. She was particularly miffed that the Mexican brooms were clearly inferior in quality to the ones her company made. When she held them up side by side, there was no doubt that the company she worked for made the better broom.

It looked like a real sob story until the reporter noted that the broom her company made retailed at $30, while the Mexican import sold at $5. I may have preferred the better made broom, but at six times the price? No way.

What this woman and the company she worked for didn't fully understand is the concept of value. Value is a combination of quality, price and service. You must focus on all three in order to create wealth, otherwise you're needlessly wasting wealth, and when you do that, you run the risk of someone who is focused on all three taking your market share.

Her and her company also don't see the opportunity that all of these people who now pay less for brooms have more money for other things, and then sought to provide those other things. Rather than bemoaning her life, she needs to see the opportunities that can exist only in a free market. The more a government steps in to preserve a job, the more they hinder new jobs from forming. What you liberals see as protection, we conservatives see as a straight jacket. An economy where you can easily lose your job to competition is an economy where you can easily find another one.

A simple and basic fact is that the free market has always sought the largest possible market, because the larger the market the more opportunities there are. The smaller the market, the less likely that you can get out of any rut you're in. This has been true since the dawn of mankind. People have been trading with others from as far as they can reach because of how that trading makes their lives better.


Social Justice = Revenge

DA: And people have been at war with each other since the dawn of man too, but that is no reason to continue it. What matters is social justice. Is it right that a woman only makes 75 cents on the dollar to a man? Is it right that a CEO makes hundreds of times more than the lowest paid person in his own company?

Of course it's right – on both counts. But it's not hard to understand why you think differently. In a rare lapse of honesty during Barack Obama's campaign to become president, he laid it out explicitly. When asked by ABC news anchor Charlie Gibson to comment on the now well known fact that decreasing taxes increases the revenue a government collects due to the growth in the economy that is spurred by the cut in taxes, then senator Obama replied how every liberal should honestly reply. He didn't try to deny that the phenomena known as the Laffer Curve is true. He simply stated that it doesn't matter. What matter's to him is justice.

In other words, he doesn't view taxation primarily as a vehicle to bring in money to the government in order to do the 'good works' he claims to want to accomplish. He sees taxation more as a means to whack the rich people with. Although the words he uses is 'spread the wealth around.'

Whenever I hear some liberal talk about social justice, what he really means is revenge. Mankind in general, and liberals in particular, equate justice with revenge when neither has anything to do with the other. Justice is about righting wrongs, while revenge is about getting back at those you believe have wronged you. The only reason the word justice comes to mind is so that you can sleep at night after the evil you have perpetrated. The notion of accomplishing good is irrelevant with revenge, but without accomplishing good, there can be no justice.

DA: But there is good. There is a lot of good that comes out of the money we take from the rich people who earn more than they deserve.

Once again you have cemented your designation as a liberal tool, and not an elite. Now that your messiah responded as he did in that interview, liberals have forever lost the moral high ground on this issue.

I actually have more respect for communists in this matter. They at least want a system that does not allow people to get rich in the first place. The system you liberals that run from the word socialist want is a system where the rich get their supposed ill-gotten gain, then you demand your cut of the action like some two-bit crime lord.

DA: How dare you accuse us of this!!!

Oh do I dare, and how!

If you think the rich are doing something wrong, then arrest them and throw them in jail. More importantly, don't let them get off by paying fines. You people sure like to sneer at profits, but you have no problem with profiting off of the people you publicly claim are evil.

As for your issue with what women and CEO's are paid, what's fair is what the free market dictates. If women flock to low paying jobs, and take lots of time off to raise children, then of course they should be paid less.

DA: That's outrageous! Have you no respect for women.

Let's admit it. You're easily outraged. And the only obvious thing is how much you liberals have no respect for women. You seem to think that women can't start their own businesses when they believe they are not respected where they work. If these woman deserve to be paid better, then they obviously should be able to put out of business those that are run by those evil, chauvinistic pigs who are incapable of recognizing the value they have in the women that work for them.

(I really should write a book on the paternalistic nanny state that liberals desire, and how much damage it does to women. Get it – paternalistic – nanny state. Now there's something that should be an oxymoron, but sadly isn't) Moving on...

In a free market, everyone gets paid based on what others of their skill set gets paid. No exceptions. When a CEO making 100 million annually is deciding on the salary for the janitor at his building, he isn't going to consider how much his salary is to determine what the janitor should receive. He's going to look at what others doing the same work at other companies are getting paid, then he'll set the salary based on whether he wants the best with these skills, or whether the less than the best will do.

Not one dime of a CEO's salary comes out of what is paid to the janitor at his company. This is just another example of the liberal fallacy that the rich get richer by the poor getting poorer. The money paid to CEOs comes out of the dividends paid to shareholders. So if you think CEOs shouldn't be paid what they are, then trot yourself out in front of the shareholders and convince them that you can do the job for less.

Of course that will never happen, because that would mean competing against them, and risk actually becoming wealthy. It's so much easier and safer to denounce those you hate than doing anything that could make a difference.


Who Is Exploiting Who

DA: I may not know how to run a coporation, but I do know exploitation when I see it.

Exploitation? That's rich! You people have it ass backwards on who is exploiting who. I have never had any desire to own my own business. Instead, I have always sought to exploit those that do by working for them.

Let me ask you, on the previous page I stated 'I do not want anything from anyone for any other reason other than what I have to offer is what they believe is worth what they are offering in exchange.' This applies great if I were running my own business, but I'm not. Instead, I live by the principle that I will always bring more money to my employer than what my employer will pay me. Do you know why?

DA: I suppose it's because you believe the rich deserve more money.

Wrong again. Something that I will take most of the rest of this web book to explain, is the concept of freedom, and what it means to not be a slave. When my boss makes more money off of me than what he pays me, then he needs me more than I need him. That makes me free. When I need my job more than my boss needs me to be employed by him, then I am a slave.

An interesting example of the fallacy you are afflicted with that sticks out in my mind, comes from someone who called himself a conservative. His name is Jerry Doyle, and I initially found his story quite interesting. He was one of the stars of the long running, syndicated series, Babylon 5. He was a popular actor that was in fairly high demand until he let his conservative view points slip out publicly. This of course is suicide in Hollywood, so he had to make a living by some other means, and he chose to be a political talk show host.

Because of this interesting story of his, I decided to give him a shot and tuned in to his show. The first few programs seemed fairly reasonable, but then one night he went off on this populist rant, and lost me for good. His beef was with the Ford Motor Company and how they were laying off thousands workers while spending hundreds of millions of dollars on the naming rights for the stadium the Detroit Lions play in.

The amount of money the company spends on advertisement to generate more business has nothing to do with the salaries paid to its workers, other than the the more they advertise, the more money there will be for the remaining workers to make.

Only a fool would layoff workers that can make money for them, and keeping workers that are costing more than they make jeopardizes the remaining jobs there, which means that keeping these jobs would make them bigger fools. I for one would never consider working for such a company.

DA: Well I wouldn't work for anyone else.

Of course you wouldn't. I'm well aware of all liberals' desire to be slaves.


FDR's Great Depression

DA: That tears it! I've had enough of your slander! Just where do you get off calling us slaves?

Your problem is that you only recognize the slaves that have occurred by force, and disregard those that have walked willing into it. I'm not prepared to get into a full explanation of this just yet, but let's look at the man responsible for enslaving more Americans than any other; Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

DA: (jaw drops – eyes bug out)

I know. I know. How could I possibly believe this of such a great humanitarian?

DA: (jaw still dropped – eyes still bugged out)

His Great Depression devastated us...

DA: Wait just a damn minute! He inherited the depression! How dare you blame him for it!

He inherited a recession. A recession no different than a dozen previous ones this country has experienced. If it wasn't precipitated by a dramatic stock market crash that would have blown over on its own in a few years, it would have been considered a minor recession. Granted, he didn't initiate the stupid decisions that his predecessor did, but he did take those decisions and amplify them many times over to a devastating effect.

(Is any of this sounding familiar?)

No. He didn't cause the recession, but the Great Depression is all his. And it's really not hard to understand why. When you have a do-gooder president who is constantly passing new regulations in a vain attempt to shape the free market into his preferred image, those with money are not going to invest in a business environment they have no confidence will remain relevant to their initial decisions. For capitalism to work – or any investment for that matter – you have to take a long term view of the market. So if all you see is a government on a rampage of regulation, there's no telling if what you invest in today will fall out of favor with the government tomorrow.

Of course that's assuming there is any money to invest. As Ronald Reagan would say, to say FDR was spending money like a drunken sailor is an insult to drunken sailors. Absolutely every dime of this money came from sources that would have invested it in areas that could have improved the economy. Who knows just how screwed our country would have gotten if Roosevelt hadn't been distracted by a little thing called World War Two.

DA: You're not going to be all devastated if I don't buy into all your bull$%#&, are you?

I'd be shocked if you did. You're a liberal. That means as long as people mean well when they do the things they do, then the devastation they cause can be written off as 'well, it would have been worse if he hadn't done what he did.'

Take Obama's original stimulus package. When he was selling his plan to congress, he stated that unemployment could climb above 9% by the end of the year if they didn't pass his plan. Yet when it climbed over 10% before the end of the year, did you hear any liberal news source hold him accountable.

On the contrary. May God strike me blind if I didn't hear some liberal news babe say Can you imagine how bad things would have gotten if President Obama hadn't acted so decisively when he came into office?

Seriously! You people are immune to reason and anything approaching historical accuracy. The only thing that matters is what supports the narrative of the day. What you see when you view FDR's presidency is a man who helped millions during a time of great hardship. I on the other hand see a bumbling, liberal fool mired in a situation of his own making. He got that way because he was afflicted with the 'do-something' disease who unwittingly enslaved millions by making them dependent on the government.

(Full disclosure – I actually have a certain degree of respect for FDR. His domestic policies were a disaster, but I'm glad he was in charge of our war policy when Pearl Harbor was attacked, and not the isolationist Republicans.)

DA: Where do you get off calling people slaves just because they needed help during the depression?

It's not that they needed help that made them slaves. We all need help from time to time.

I have a saying for you that I have no intention of explaining at this time, because you're just not ready for the explanation. It's something that I heard or read a long time ago, and I wish I could remember where I got it. It goes: 'There are no chains that bind as tight as the ones you put on yourself.'

Think on that awhile... if you dare.



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