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Republicans and Democrats and the Economic Survival of America

Posted: 20 Feb 2009 02:25 PM PST

As usual we see Democrats and Republicans both casting themselves

as defenders of the ordinary man. Debates will be conducted over

health care, minimum wage increases and tax breaks. And the

hypocrisy will flow like wine.

The simple reality is that both sides like to cast themselves as

working to make life better for the average American, some may even

believe it. In practice what occurs is a tug of war between two extremes.

Democrats propose to address the inequities of a capitalist system by

replacing it with a totalitarian one, Big Brother with a bureaucratic face

by using government programs to fill those gaps.

Government programs can certainly help people but government

agencies and bureaucracies represent their own motive force.

Programs that sound good in theory quickly create a massive spiraling

bureaucracy full of fraud and abuse.

The people they are meant to help quickly become divided into
beneficiaries of the aid who wind up perpetually on the dole and those

who increasingly have to pay for the programs themselves. And if they

can't afford it, the programs are open to them too as soon as their

income drops enough.

(It's why Democrats bitterly oppose tax cuts but support minimum wage

hikes. The tax cuts some off their end. The minimum wage hikes aren't a

problem because they get a percentage off the top.)

The more the war on poverty is fought, the worse it gets because the

money that might have gone into allowing people to have a better
life, is being sucked up into taxes to fund those programs, both at the

income level and at the business level. And the degradation of basic

humanity and loss of rights that grows as a free society gives way to a

regulatory bureaucracy insures a populace unwilling and unable to

raise itself up anymore.

Socialism creates serf states, sometimes with populations
taxed worse than serfs were, where people are earning a little but
making very little. Two income families become the norm. Women marry

later and have less children. The birthrate drops, which worsens the
problem of finding a tax base for the growing bureaucracy, which
pushes taxes higher.

Immigrant populations are brought in to replace the worker shortages

which further strain and expand the government bureaucracies.
The government programs have by now come to resemble a Ponzi
scheme and the whole thing teeters on an imminent collapse. Take a
look at just about any country in Europe if you want to see a living

example of once great nations facing extinction by becoming devoured

by their own bureaucracies.

And then there's the Republican side of the coin. There's usually a lot of

talk about small business and the American worker. But the real policy

is to let big business do anything it likes. That means outsourcing of

workers. It means legalizing massive amounts of illegal aliens.
It means supporting terrorists who come here on HB-1 visas to fill the
tech industry's appetite for skilled workers with low pay expectations.

It means shipping American industry and jobs to Mexico and
China. At home it means letting big corporations monopolize and
crush small businesses and workers out of existence and subsidizing

those companies with tens of billions of dollars, even as they continue

their disastrous business practices while their CEO's walk away with 170
million dollar golden parachutes. The complete hopelessness of

subsidizing failing businesses never seems to make any impact on

them.

This is of course hardly limited to Republicans, most Democratic
politicians are just as bad. But it's a philosophical defect of
Republicans to believe that deregulating business is a universal good,

when it was Theodore Roosevelt, the second greatest Republican

President, who fought corruption and reined in monopolies and

abuse business practices that the Democrats had winked

at. The corruption fallout in the previous Republican Congress
came about because the party chose the legacy of Ulysses S. Grant
over that of Theodore Roosevelt.

Uncontrolled deregulation simply leaves the workers, consumers and

small businessmen naked against a never ending list of abuses. Nor is
what's good for GM, good for America. What's good for GM is

outsourcing labor and government subsidies. None of that is good for

America. It pumps America and Americans dry while the multinational

corporations move on to greener pastures in Mexico or China.

Without controlling taxes and spending, both Democrats and
Republicans continue the same destructive course. The Bush

Administration has plenty of economic successes to claim but it's

competing against the moribund socialist states of Europe, who

actually thought the falling value of the Dollar was a national

triumph for them, instead of a national disaster.

The real struggle should be the struggle of Abraham Lincoln,

the greatest Republican President, who fought for Free Power

over Slave Power. Slave Power does not merely mean the

enslavement of a particular race. It means an economy based