In certain unscripted moments, Barack Obama has given us a glimpse of his socialist inclinations, but I wonder what percentage would vote for him if they truly understood the extent of his radicalism.
Yet the financial crisis has created a climate of fear and uncertainty and unleashed an unprecedented tolerance for large-scale government intervention, which is playing perfectly into Obama's hands. People are blaming this largely Democratic-spawned mess on Republicans because Bush is still president.
Maybe I'm being too much of an alarmist, but I'm worried for the first time in my life that the election of a presidential candidate could lead to a fundamental change in our system of government. Just listen to the comments of post-debate focus group members expressing a knowing willingness to accept Obama's socialism, such is their angst at the subprime mortgage mess.
Already some 38 percent of Americans do not pay income taxes, and Barack Obama wants to increase that percentage dramatically. How ironic that he and other Democrats pretend to be targeting their message to "working-class" people when many of their constituents aren't working. But such is class warfare that the upper-middle class and wealthy are demonized as not earning an honest living.
Do you suppose it has registered with class warfare-receptive Obama voters that Obama is deliberately turning the American dream on its head? Could it be any clearer that his message to the middle class is: Don't aspire to achievement, success and wealth because a) it is immoral to have more than others, b) the government will take your wealth away from you and give it to others, and c) why bother to bust your rear end to make more when you can vote yourselves money from the public trough?
Obama let slip his socialist proclivities to Joe the plumber when he denied he wanted to punish wealth and insisted he just wanted to spread the wealth around. Joe was justifiably repulsed by Obama's cavalier attitude toward the American dream.
Democratic commentator Bob Beckel was dismissive of the significance of Obama's outright nod to socialism, saying we've had a progressive tax system since the income tax was initiated. Yes, Bob, and we've had socialists in America since then, too.
But what Beckel did not explain is that at least in those days, the stated purpose of the income tax system was to fund government services, not to redistribute wealth.
It's one thing to say that higher income earners should pay a higher percentage for government services. But Obama makes no pretense of stopping there. He told Joe that he wants to use the tax code to confiscate money from higher income earners and give it to others. But he hasn't been so open about that in the presentation of his fraudulent tax plan.
When Obama says he will cut income taxes for 95 percent of Americans, he is dissembling. If 38 percent are already not paying, his tax credits to them amount to transfer payments from higher income earners, which are actually spending increases, not tax cuts, as The Wall Street Journal editors have noted.
Liberals, such as Obama, might deny human nature, but they can't change it. And human nature happens to dictate that people will not produce as much when you confiscate more of what they produce and give it to others. The working wealthy, especially Christians and conservatives, are some of the most generous people in the world, but we're talking about voluntary charitable contributions, not unconstitutionally coerced redistributions.
How many times must history repeat itself before we learn that socialism and communism cannot work. Liberals love to mock the trickledown theory, but they simply cannot refute the axiom that people produce less when they aren't allowed to keep as much of what they produce. When do-gooder social planners try to control how much we keep, they guarantee that everyone gets less in the end because they shrink the GDP pie.
We know from the writings of William Bradford that the Pilgrims learned this lesson the hard way when they tried a communal system of sharing, thinking it "would make them happy and flourishing; as if they were wiser than God." Instead, "This community … was found to breed much confusion and discontent, and retard much employment that would have been to their benefit and comfort." Men refused to "work for other men's wives and children without any recompense; … this was thought injustice."
Socialism and communism have failed everywhere they've been tried in the world, yet die-hard socialists, such as William Ayers, still smarter than God, insist on cramming them down our throats in the name of "fairness." Unreconstructed radicals always say that true socialism hasn't been given a real chance.
Well, if Obama is elected, we may get that chance.
