Comrade Obama?
Posted on October 30th, 2008
by Patrick J. Buchanan |
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If Barack Obama is not a socialist, he does the best imitation of one I’ve ever seen.
Under his tax plan, the top 5 percent of wage-earners have their income tax rates raised from 35 percent to 40 percent, while the bottom 40 percent of all wage-earners, who pay no income tax, are sent federal checks.
If this is not the socialist redistribution of wealth, what is it?
A steeply graduated income tax has always been the preferred weapon of the left for bringing about socialist equality. Indeed, in the “Communist Manifesto” of 1848, Karl Marx was himself among the first to call for “a heavy progressive or graduated income tax.”
The Obama tax plan is pure Robin Hood class warfare: use the tax power of the state to rob the successful and reward the faithful. Only in Sherwood Forest it was assumed the Sheriff of Nottingham and his crowd had garnered their wealth by other than honest labor.
“Spread the wealth,” Barack admonished Joe the Plumber.
“From each according to his ability, to each according to his need,” said old Karl in 1875. When Barbara West of WFTV in Orlando, Fla., put the Marx quote to Biden, however, Joe recoiled in spluttering disbelief.
West: “You may recognize this famous quote: ‘From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.’ That’s from Karl Marx. How is Sen. Obama not being a Marxist if he intends to spread the wealth around?”
Biden: “Are you joking? Is this a joke?”
Biden’s better defense, however, might have be the Tu quoque” retort: “You, too!” — the time-honored counter-charge of hypocrisy.
Indeed, how do Republicans who call Obama a socialist explain their support for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, welfare, and the Earned Income Tax Credit? What are these if not government-mandated transfers of wealth to the middle and working class, and the indigent and working poor?
Since August, the Bush-Paulson team has seized our biggest S&L, Washington Mutual, and largest insurance company, AIG. It has nationalized Fannie and Freddie, pumped scores of billions into our banks, bailed out GM, Ford, and Chrysler, and paid the $29 billion dowry for Bear Stearns to enter its shotgun marriage with JPMorgan Chase.
And with federal, state, and local taxes taking a third of gross domestic product, and government regulating businesses with wage-and-hour laws, civil-rights laws, environmental laws, and occupational health and safety laws, what are we living under, if not a mixed socialist-capitalist system?
Norman Thomas is said to have quit running for president on the Socialist ticket after six campaigns because the Democratic Party had stolen all his ideas and written them into its platforms.
Did Ike repeal the New Deal? Did Richard Nixon roll back the Great Society? Nope. He funded the Great Society. Did Ronald Reagan cut federal spending? Nope, defense spending soared. Bill Clinton slashed defense, but George Bush II set social spending records with No Child Left Behind and prescription drug benefits for the elderly under Medicare. Surpluses vanished, deficits returned, the national debt almost doubled.
Is the old Republic then dead and gone, in the irretrievable past? Are we engaged in an argument settled before we were born?
In his 1938 essay “The Revolution Was,” Garet Garrett wrote:
There are those who think they are holding the pass against a revolution that may be coming up the road. But they are gazing in the wrong direction. The revolution is behind them. It went by in the Night of the Depression, singing songs to freedom.
Nevertheless, there is a difference not just of degree but of kind between unemployment compensation for jobless workers, welfare for destitute families, and confiscating the income of taxpayers who earned it — to hand out to chronic tax consumers who did not.
This last is the socialism Winston Churchill called “the philosophy of envy and gospel of greed.” And it is this suggestion of socialist ideology in Obama’s words that has produced the belated pause by a nation that seemed to be moving into his camp. What did Barack say in 2001?
He spoke of the inadequacy of the courts as institutions to bring about “redistributive change” in society, of the “tragedy” of the civil rights movement in losing sight of the “political and organizing activities on the ground that are able to bring about the coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributive change.”
Normal people don’t talk like that. Socialists do.
This is ideology speaking. This is the redistributionist drivel one hears from cosseted college radicals and the “Marxist professors” Obama says in his memoir he sought out at the university. It is the language of social parasites like William Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, and Father Pfleger.
Enforced egalitarianism entails the death of excellence. For it seizes the rewards that excellence earns and turns them over to politicians and bureaucrats for distribution to the mediocrities upon whose votes they depend. One need not be Ayn Rand to see that Barack has picked up from past associates utopian notions that have ever produced nightmare states.
COPYRIGHT 2008 CREATORS SYNDICATE INC.
Filed under: Politics
Pat, I just want to say that I’m your biggest fan.
I’m sorry to say it, but Obama is very fond of socialism and probably marxism as well.
He’s smart enough not to come right out and admit it, but it’s there between the lines.
Negative Liberty = Adam Smith
Positive Liberty = Marx
What does this have to do with Obama?
Glad you asked!
Obama complaining about our Constitution:
“…the Constitution is a document of negative liberties, says what the states can’t do to you, says what the federal government can’t do to you, but it doesn’t say what the federal government or state government must do on your behalf.”
For most people, including those listening to that broadcast, the word NEGATIVE is synonymous with BAD. Obama knows this. If Obama knows anything, he knows how to choose words carefully. Obama is a constitutional scholar, and if he wanted to make the Constitution and its “negative liberties” sound like the best thing since chicken noodle soup he would have chosen different words.
For some insight, take a glance (online) at the book “Negative Liberties” by Cyrus R. K. Patell. This book, perhaps coincidentally, was released three months before Obama made his comments. Do you think Patell admires the negative liberties of the U.S. Constitution? Do Patell and Obama have similar viewpoints? Wouldn’t it be nice if someone had the courage to ask Obama about this and insist on a straight answer? Wouldn’t it be nice if more voters actually cared?
Everyone please study this issue more, and share your knowledge with anyone who will listen.
http://rightklik.blogspot.com/
eeeh, sorry Pat, I love your books, I love you on tv, but I’ll stick with Huey Long on this one. 40% tax for an income over 250K is not an unjust idea, whatever you call it. And the payroll tax which everybody pays is just as much a tax as the income tax.
Stick to defending western civilization, instead of defending rich people who don’t want to pay their taxes.
I think Pat Buchanan is becoming for the American Conservative, what Marty Perez is for the New Republic.
Socialism requires state ownership of economic sectors. I don’t like Obama’s tax ideas, but its not socialism in any form.
Gee, I guess that puts Ike somewhere between Karl Marx and George Bush since that increase is just a resumption of the tax that GWB had in place before he decided that it was too much to pay. On the other hand the tax was much higher under Ike, but then he was a known commie loving socialist.
Socialist? You can argue against Obama’s tax policies, but no intelligent person can call them “socialist” and mean it.
If we did mean it, then let us consider whom else we would need to call “socialist”:
“The necessaries of life occasion the great expense of the poor. . . . The luxuries and vanities of life occasion the principal expense of the rich, and a magnificent house embellishes and sets off to the best advantage all the other luxuries and vanities which they possess. . . . It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion.” –Adam Smith
Since Mr. Buchanan is ready to say that the Republicans are also socialist, there is no need to mention Alaska’s “share the wealth” oil dividend for all its citizens, or John McCain’s clear support for progressive taxation in 2000.
“Socialists,” all of them: McCain, Palin, Obama, and Smith!
I’m sure Mr. Buchanan has reserved outrage for all those federal checks going to Haliburton, Blackwater, banks, and defense contractors.
The old trick of labeling every democrat a socialist isn’t going to work anymore. We no longer believe you. You’ve said it too often and it’s never been true. It still works on the biased and the know nothings but that group is smaller than you think.
Chicken Littles can spend all day writing and yelling that the sky will fall if we elect a democrat but we know it won’t happen and now you’ve cried wolf once too often.
To rawshark et al,
And when the wolf does come and the alarm is raised and no one listens, what happens then? You and your loved ones die. Is that what you desire, the final nail in the coffin of the once great US constitutional republic? Surely, say it ain’t so!
Come on Pat! You are more clever than that! What is the difference between Bush’s tax cuts and Obama’s tax increase? The only thing Bush did was to transfer the burden to the future tax payers. Isn’t it better for people to pay for what the government spends right away? That way people know the real cost of the government programs and wars. The best thing real conservatives can emphasize right now is: “tax
to the full extent of spending!”
Moreover, isn’t it a little hypocritical right now to call Obama a socialist for wanting to transfer the wealth from up to down, when Bush and Co (including McCain) did the reverse just a few weeks ago? Wasn’t bailout one of the biggest redistribution of wealth in history? Have I seen you anywhere calling Bush specifically a socialist?
Like clockwork, every four years, as Nov 4th approaches, you can always count on Pat to come home to the GOP clutching at any and every bit of straws he could find!
If I remember correctly, the Earned Income Tax Credit was advocated by the famed socialist Milton Friedman
Pat, you have really disappointed me. Rather than being socialist, Obamas ideas are meant to get us back to when we were most successful. Reading of history for what works, and for that successful, pragmatic, balance=Conservative, or so I always thought. Take a look at these thoughts by some other promient “socialists”.
“Republicans are for both the man and the dollar, but in case of conflict the man before the dollar.”
Abraham Lincoln
“Let the watchwords of all our people be the old familiar watchwords of honesty, decency, fair-dealing, and commonsense.”… “We must treat each man on his worth and merits as a man. We must see that each is given a square deal, because he is entitled to no more and should receive no less.”"The welfare of each of us is dependent fundamentally upon the welfare of all of us.”
New York State Fair, Syracuse, September 7, 1903 Teddy Roosevelt
“Probably the greatest harm done by vast wealth is the harm that we of moderate means do ourselves when we let the vices of envy and hatred enter deep into our own natures. But there is another harm; and it is evident that we should try to do away with that. The great corporations which we have grown to speak of rather loosely as trusts are the creatures of the State, and the State not only has the right to control them, but it is duty bound to control them wherever the need of such control is shown.”
o Teddy Roosevelt Speech at Providence, Rhode Island (1902-08-23), Presidential Addresses and State Papers (1910), p. 103
“We wish to control big business so as to secure among other things good wages for the wage-workers and reasonable prices for the consumers. Wherever in any business the prosperity of the businessman is obtained by lowering the wages of his workmen and charging an excessive price to the consumers we wish to interfere and stop such practices. We will not submit to that kind of prosperity any more than we will submit to prosperity obtained by swindling investors or getting unfair advantages over business rivals.”
o Teddy Roosevelt Speech at Progressive Party Convention, Chicago (1912-06-17)
Abraham Lincoln, quotes about Wealth:
I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country; corporations have been enthroned, an era of corruption in High Places will follow, and the Money Power of the Country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the People, until the wealth is aggregated in a few hands, and the Republic is destroyed. I feel at this moment more anxiety for the safety of my country than ever before, even in the midst of war
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This is, I repeat, the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron. … Is there no other way the world may live?”
o Dwight D. Eisenhower Speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, “The Chance for Peace” (1953-04-16)
“Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H. L. Hunt (you possibly know his background), a few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid.”
o Dwight D. Eisenhower Letter to his brother Edgar, November 8, 1954
“Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.”
Abraham Lincoln
Pat, Obama is not great but to say he’s a socialist because of his tax policy is a bit much. Stop the republican propaganda. It’s not like McCain is getting rid of the current “progressive” system so until he agrees to a flat tax or something not so “progressive” I see no real difference between the two. It’s semantics, that’s all. Increase a little here, decrease a little there. As far as I know, Obama has no plan to purchase all of the bad mortgages, unlike the supposed “conservative.” Stop trying to fool us Pat. There’s two bad options here and one’s supposed to be the good one. I’ll take the bad one that’s not pretending to be good over the “good” one who’s lying to us blatantly.
I echo what Hotchney just said. This breathless red-scare tactic is worn and just makes the Republican Party look even more pathetic than it is now.
Those who think that George W. Bush has been a great president object to the way that the so-called Republican John McCain has treated George W. Bush, a great president, a true conservative, and a great man.
In this interview with the Washington Times, a conservative newspaper, McCain treats Bush worse than Obama has. See http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2008/oct/23/mccain-lambastes-bush-years/
Why vote for McCain?
Pat, You’re getting drunk on the talking points kool-aid.
I am no fan of the Democrat’s social platform and Senator Biden’s stance on the second amendment should frighten anyone who believes in the bill of rights as a document to be taken as a whole and not just a group of singular ideals to edited. But a nation such as ours needs income to support its infrastructure and promote a cohesive socioeconomic playing field if it is to avoid resentment and class warfare.
To nothing of it’s imperial fantasies.Perhaps a way of subsidizing this would be a tariff system but somehow the “Free traders” have convinced the masses that this is somehow antithetical to the American experience and as such is never to be discussed inside the beltway.
Another Taboo subject that impacts the nation financially is our foreign aid entanglements. This of course has other negative effects on our nations foreign policy as well.
But it is difficult explain why we continue to borrow money from China to give to Countries that have economies bigger than some European countries that receive no aid.
The disparages between the wealthiest Americans and the rest of us has grown exponentially since the eighties. As a result those at the top ten percentile have become much more of an international class than American. It is perhaps not surprising then that their priorities might not reflect those of this countries.
Charles E. Wilson, the former head of General Motors and Secretary of Defense under President Eisenhower told a Senate subcommittee, “What is good for the country is good for General Motors, and what’s good for General Motors is good for the country.”
This may have been true in 1952 but there are no longer any truly American companies and corporations are not patriotic entities willing to sacrifice for the greater good. There only allegiance is to their stockholders and in this regard, in many cases they have sold them out as well.
The new reality is that when our government attempts to stimulate the economy that they have turned from the manufacturing giant of the 40s and 50s to the consumer based economy of today, all they are left with is “stimulus” checks and the “Patriotic” mantra, lets go shopping.
In truth even this is not though out logically. When those in the higher income brackets received their “stimulas”checks they most likely saved it or spend it on an exotic vacation overseas.
Those at the lower end of the economic spectrum spend it as fast as they could cash it and on local goods and services. In the consumption based economy that we are now stuck with it would seem that the redistribution you fear is our only hope.
[...] idea of an Obama landslide must torture the old guy for any number of reasons, but once in a while he looks over the table at his erstwhile [...]
“Indeed, in the “Communist Manifesto” of 1848, Karl Marx was himself among the first to call for “a heavy progressive or graduated income tax.” ”
—–
Please spare us the cheap rhetorical tricks. Something is not a bad idea just because Marx thought it was a good idea.
In the section of the Communist Manifesto where he endorses things like the progressive income tax, he also endorses free public elementary schools and an end to child labor. So, Pat: do you think that public education should be abolished? Do you favor removing restrictions on allowing 10 year old children to work underground in coal mines?
You don’t? Heavens me, Pat Buchanan is a Marxist! Who knew? (See how easy it is?)
Americans must work until late April to pay all their taxes.
If the date is moved back to May, is it socialist, or on a path
toward socialism. When we get to June 30, 1/2 our income
will go to the government. Hang on to your wallet.