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Frisco_Slug_Esq

Frisco_Slug_Esq

On Strike!
Joined
May 4, 2009
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Socialism's slow collapse...

PARIS — A specter is haunting Europe — the specter of Socialism’s slow collapse.

Even in the midst of one of the greatest challenges to capitalism in 75 years, involving a breakdown of the financial system due to “irrational exuberance,” greed and the weakness of regulatory systems, European Socialist parties and their left-wing cousins have not found a compelling response, let alone taken advantage of the right’s failures.

German voters clobbered the Social Democratic Party on Sunday, giving it only 23 percent of the vote, its worst performance since World War II.

Voters also punished left-leaning candidates in the summer’s European Parliament elections and trounced French Socialists in 2007. Where the left holds power, as in Spain and Britain, it is under attack. Where it is out, as in France, Italy and now Germany, it is divided and listless.

Some American conservatives demonize President Obama’s fiscal stimulus and health care overhaul as a dangerous turn toward European-style Socialism — but it is Europe’s right, not left, that is setting its political agenda.

Europe’s center-right parties have embraced many ideas of the left: generous welfare benefits, nationalized health care, sharp restrictions on carbon emissions, the ceding of some sovereignty to the European Union. But they have won votes by promising to deliver more efficiently than the left, while working to lower taxes, improve financial regulation, and grapple with aging populations.

Europe’s conservatives, says Michel Winock, a historian at the Paris Institut d’Études Politiques, “have adapted themselves to modernity.” When Nicolas Sarkozy of France and Germany’s Angela Merkel condemn the excesses of the “Anglo-Saxon model” of capitalism while praising the protective power of the state, they are using Socialist ideas that have become mainstream, he said.
Click to expand...

The source, of course, is not reputable...

But here's the ink anyway:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/29/world/europe/29socialism.html

This is why we work so hard to defeat Obama now, not because we're racists, but because we know that such grandiose socialist plans, once put in place, cannot be undone, and that is what Obama plans, putting grandiose into place so in the future we have to accept socialism and are left squabbling over the scraps from Longshank's table...

;) ;)
 
From yet another rwingnut rag...

Less than a year into his presidency, Barack Obama's world grows bleaker. Liberalism's world is bleaker. At home and abroad, liberalism, as advanced by the President, is failing. Are we witnessing the beginnings of another historic event, loosely comparable to the fall of communism twenty years ago? Now the fall of liberalism?

Remember, at the beginning of the 1980s, no one would have predicted that by the decade's close the Berlin Wall would fall, communism would be discredited and the Soviet Union would be less than a couple of years away from dissolution.

Though no conservative worth his salt is surprised by liberalism's shortcomings, the rapidity of its failure is surprising. More importantly, it's alarming, for though the effects of liberalism's failure are damaging to us at home, they may prove terrible to us abroad.

Step back to consider. What's working for Mr. Obama and the Democrats?

Despite the Democrats' interventions, an anemic economy promises nothing more than a tepid recovery, if that. Democrats are indebting the nation to the tune of trillions of dollars. The greenback has been debased. Serious inflation is coming, and that inflation will trigger another economic downturn, one that might be sharper and deeper than we're now experiencing.

What commonsense American believes that mountains of debt and looming inflation are good for a struggling economy? More to the point, if a party has a sober worldview and a solid grasp of recent history, how can it possibly legislate policies and spending that must have disastrous consequences?

Well, it can't. But Democrats can. They long ago raised liberalism to dogma. Reality is off-limits to the faithful.

The economic policies of Lyndon Johnson and Jimmy Carter were disasters, culminating in bitter years of stagflation. Rather than learning from those calamitous years, and from the subsequent Reagan years, when the damage was undone and the economy righted, liberals stubbornly insist on another go, as if their earlier failures were simply a matter of flawed execution.

Today, President Obama flirts with protectionism. He recently slapped sanctions on Chinese tires to appease union bosses. Free trade agreements with Colombia and other nations shamefully languish in Congress. Protectionism not only hurts consumers and producers, but could spark conflict abroad.

Evidently, currying favor with a key constituency -- unions -- is of greater importance to Mr. Obama than the economic and national security ramifications of protectionism. The Smoot-Hawley Act, which built the economic equivalent of the Berlin Wall around the American economy, is increasingly understood as the trigger for the Great Depression.

History points to the advantages of open trade, not a closed economy. Oddly, on this score, liberals are embracing Herbert Hoover.

The President's advocacy of government-controlled healthcare is another testament to belief over reality. In Canada and Great Britain, socialized medicine has proven to be expensive, inefficient, deficient (rationing) and, at best, mediocre. Proposals for it here are proving to be broadly and intensely unpopular. Yet, the President forges ahead.

In the Senate, Majority Leader Harry Reid threatens to invoke an arcane budget resolution rule to pass healthcare reform if he can't round up sixty votes to end debate to move the matter to a final vote. Senator Robert Byrd (D-WV), who authored the budget resolution rule, has flatly stated that using it to pass healthcare reform would be a gross misapplication and a disturbing precedent.

But this is what liberals are down to: ignoring the will of the majority and bending rules to impose a takeover of healthcare on Americans.

A political party with principles and ideas that resonate with voters doesn't need to ignore the people, nor does it need to resort to parliamentary chicanery to win a result. It speaks tellingly of the weakness, not the strength, of modern liberals that they're willing to end-run the popular will.

But it's overseas where liberalism, as expressed through Mr. Obama's foreign policy, poses great dangers to the Republic. In truth, the question now isn't will the United States pay a terrible price for the President's policies, but when.
Click to expand...

J. Robert Smith
American Thinker

I don't need to provide a link, it's like showing a vampire a mirror...
 
For St. Pete...

A similar situation underlies a vicious fight between United Parcel Service (UPS) and its main private competitor in the delivery business, FedEx, over archaic labor rules that classify the companies based on their favored forms of transportation. Because 85 percent of FedEx deliveries go by air and 85 percent of UPS deliveries go by truck, the two companies are obliged to obey different labor laws.

FedEx Express, the company’s air delivery service, operates under the Railway Labor Act (RLA), instituted in 1926 to arbitrate labor disputes in industries (including, by 1936, airlines) that are deemed vital to interstate commerce. Under this law, in order to be recognized, a union must receive a majority of votes from all a company’s employees, rather than merely a majority of those who choose to vote. That makes it much more difficult for labor to organize. As a result, FedEx Express, and therefore FedEx, have been mostly union-free for decades.

[chart omitted]

UPS, by contrast, operates under the 1935 National Labor Relations Act (NLRA, commonly known as the Wagner Act). This Depression-era law allows unionization at each individualoffice of a national company, thereby significantly lowering the barriers to labor organizing. As a result, UPS is one of the largest unionized companies in the country. (Like UPS, the FedEx Ground and FedEx Freight divisions of FedEx are covered by the NLRA.)

This legal distinction has had a significant impact on the two competitors’ labor costs. Average compensation and benefit cost per employee at UPS is more than double that at FedEx—$74,413 vs. $29,310. (See table.)

By now, UPS has had enough of the extra costs labor unions impose on its business. To tackle the problem, Big Brown teamed up with the very people responsible for the costs: the Teamsters. Working together, they’ve lobbied the Democratic majority in Congress to transfer approximately 100,000 of FedEx’s employees—basically the ground pickup and delivery operations of FedEx Express—to fall under the Wagner Act. The change would make it easier for these employees to unionize, which would raise FedEx’s labor costs.

House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chairman Jim Oberstar (D-Minn.) inserted language changing FedEx’s labor status into a reauthorization bill for the Federal Aviation Administration. The legislation passed the House by a vote of 277 to 136 in May, over FedEx’s objections. The measure is now awaiting passage in the Senate.

...

It’s interesting that these lawmakers think leveling the playing field needs to take the form of giving more, not less, power to unions. Where were they back when UPS was trying to be reclassified under the Railway Labor Act?

In 1993 UPS argued to the NRL Board that all of its activities, “including ground operations,” should be subject to the RLA “because the ground operations are part of the air service.” Whatever you think of the Railway Labor Act, the law was intended to protect the arteries of commerce and to ensure that any bargaining agreement for employees be the same throughout the entire company, so that no local unit could paralyze the entire company. It was designed for companies that primarily use rail and air in conducting or facilitating interstate commerce. In that sense, FedEx, with its integrated system, probably has a stronger claim to be an RLA company than UPS does. Yet according to Washington Post columnist George Will, “FedEx supported UPS’s efforts, even though the vast majority of UPS parcels never go on an airplane, whereas FedEx’s trucking operations exist to feed its air fleet and distribute what it carries.” UPS’s demand was denied, opening the path to today’s battle.

Rather than continue pushing for reclassification, or just competing fair and square under current law, UPS is using the federal government to inflict damage on its competition. While this maneuver is hardly commendable, it is predictable. In their 2004 book Saving Capitalism From the Capitalists, economists Raghuram G. Rajan and Luigi Zingales of the Chicago Booth School of Business brilliantly describe this Washingtoncentric way of competing. “Capitalism’s biggest political enemies are not the firebrand trade unionists spewing vitriol against the system,” they warn, “but the executives in pin-striped suits extolling the virtues of competitive markets with every breath while attempting to extinguish them with every action.”

Yet unions do play an important part in this comedy. Teamsters gave $2.4 million to Democrats during the 2008 federal election season and are now collecting the rewards....
Click to expand...


Veronique de Rugy
Reason.com

http://reason.com/news/show/135712.html
__________________
"When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that justifies it."
Frederic Bastiat
 
Le_Trouve, THAT's how you go from "Social Democracy" to Hitler...




As per Hayek, the "enemy" of lazy-fare Capitalism...



;) ;)
 
Who Wrote the Stimulus Bill?

Barack Obama?
Nancy Pelosi?
Harry Reid?

No. The Apollo Alliance.

van Jones, Wade Rathke, ACORN, SEIU, Podesta, other assorted communists...

;) ;)
 
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This one's for Le_Trouver all the way baybee!

Thomas Sowell

Many people, including some conservatives, have been very impressed with how brainy the president and his advisers are. But that is not quite as reassuring as it might seem.

It was, after all, Franklin D. Roosevelt's brilliant "brains trust" advisers whose policies are now increasingly recognized as having prolonged the Great Depression of the 1930s, while claiming credit for ending it. The Great Depression ended only when the Second World War put an end to many New Deal policies.

FDR himself said that "Dr. New Deal" had been replaced by "Dr. Win-the-War." But those today who are for big spending like to credit wartime big spending for bringing the Great Depression to an end. They never ask the question as to why previous depressions had always ended on their own, much faster than the one under FDR, and without government intervention or massive government spending.

Brainy folks were also present in Lyndon Johnson's administration, especially in the Pentagon, where Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara's brilliant "whiz kids" tried to micro-manage the Vietnam war, with disastrous results.

There is usually only a limited amount of damage that can be done by dull or stupid people. For creating a truly monumental disaster, you need people with high IQs.

Such people have been told all their lives how brilliant they are, until finally they feel forced to admit it, with all due modesty. But they not only tend to over-estimate their own brilliance, more fundamentally they tend to over-estimate how important brilliance itself is when dealing with real world problems.

Many crucial things in life are learned from experience, rather than from clever thoughts or clever words. Indeed, a gift for the clever phrasing so much admired by the media can be a fatal talent, especially for someone chosen to lead a government.

Make no mistake about it, Adolf Hitler was brilliant. His underlying beliefs may have been half-baked and his hatreds overwhelming, but he was a genius when it came to carrying out his plans politically, based on those beliefs and hatreds.

Starting from a position of Germany's military weakness in the early 1930s, Hitler not only built up Germany's war-making potential, he did so in ways that minimized the danger that his potential victims would match his military build-up with their own. He said whatever soothing words they wanted to hear that would spare them the cost of military deterrence and the pain of contemplating another war.

He played some of the most highly educated people of his time for fools-- not only foreign political leaders but also members of the intelligentsia. The editor of The Times of London filtered out reports that his own foreign correspondents in Germany sent him about the evils and dangers of the Nazis. In the United States, W.E.B. Du Bois-- with a Ph.D. from Harvard-- said that dictatorship in Germany was "absolutely necessary to get the state in order."

In an age when facts seem to carry less weight than the visions of brilliant and charismatic leaders, it is more important than ever to look at the actual track records of those brilliant and charismatic leaders. After all, Hitler led Germany into military catastrophe and left much of the country in ruins.

Even in a country which suffered none of the wartime destruction that others suffered in the 20th century, Argentina began that century as one of the 10 richest nations in the world-- ahead of France and Germany-- and ended it as such an economic disaster that no one would even compare it to France or Germany.

Politically brilliant and charismatic leaders, promoting reckless government spending-- of whom Juan Peron was the most prominent, but by no means alone-- managed to create an economic disaster in a country with an abundance of natural resources and a country that was spared the stresses that wars inflicted on other nations in the 20th century.

Someone recently pointed out how much Barack Obama's style and strategies resemble those of Latin American charismatic despots-- the takeover of industries by demagogues who never ran a business, the rousing rhetoric of resentment addressed to the masses and the personal cult of the leader promoted by the media. But do we want to become the world's largest banana republic?
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__________________
"In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists."
Eric Hoffer
 
Meet the New World Order,
Same as the Old World Order,
They decide and think they're kings again...
 
I never even entertained the thought that The_Trouvere could be La Jacqueline, but that actually makes a lot of sense...

I can't believe it's taken me till now to recognize it. Boy, am I slipping.... :(
 
Dr_Adewolu said:
I never even entertained the thought that The_Trouvere could be La Jacqueline, but that actually makes a lot of sense...

I can't believe it's taken me till now to recognize it. Boy, am I slipping.... :(
Click to expand...

Your 500 posts have made you a Lit rocket scientist.
 
See. I told you there was no socialism in europe.

And le trousers isn't le jerk. Le jerk isn't as smart as le trousers.
 
Europe’s Socialists Suffering Even in Downturn

The New York Times By STEVEN ERLANGER Published: September 28, 2009

Europe’s center-right parties have embraced many ideas of the left: generous welfare benefits, nationalized health care, sharp restrictions on carbon emissions, the ceding of some sovereignty to the European Union. But they have won votes by promising to deliver more efficiently than the left, while working to lower taxes, improve financial regulation, and grapple with aging populations.

Europe’s conservatives, says Michel Winock, a historian at the Paris Institut d’Études Politiques, “have adapted themselves to modernity.” When Nicolas Sarkozy of France and Germany’s Angela Merkel condemn the excesses of the “Anglo-Saxon model” of capitalism while praising the protective power of the state, they are using Socialist ideas that have become mainstream, he said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/29/world/europe/29socialism.html?_r=1

----------

This is where European conservative parties differ from the Republicans. They really are conservative, in that they want to conserve the status quo. Now in Europe the status quo has been shaped by political parties considerably to the left of the Democrat Party.

In the United States Republicans keep trying to repeal the economic reforms of the Progressive Era, the New Deal, and the Great Society. They keep failing, because those reforms represent a status quo that the overwhelming majority of the voters support.

When Republicans say that we need to return to "Constitutional government," they express a desire that we revert to a laissez faire capitalism that most Americans, oppose, and that F. A. Hayek opposed.
 
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Eisenhower was a conservative.

President Dwight Eisenhower was a true conservative. Like European conservatives, who as The New York Times article pointed out, do not want to repeal Social Democracy, but administer it better, Eisenhower accepted the basic reforms of the New Deal, angering reactionary Republicans in so doing. This is what he wrote in a letter to his brother:

"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.5 Their number is negligible and they are stupid...

"No matter what the party is in power, it must perforce follow a program that is related to these general purposes and aspirations. But the great difference is in how it is done and, particularly, in the results achieved. "

http://www.eisenhowermemorial.org/presidential-papers/first-term/documents/1147.cfm
 
The_Trouvere said:
Originally Posted by Frisco_Slug_Esq View Post
such grandiose socialist plans, once put in place, cannot be undone...




Is that what you are hoping for?
Click to expand...
A little rebellion now and then is a good thing. (Thomas Jefferson)
 
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