Remember those stories of Chinese slave labor, and third world country sweatshops? How is it that America rose up and ended slavery and sweatshops? According to Mitt Romney in the New Hampshire debate, "(American)
GDP Per capita is 50% higher than Europe". America became the breadbasket for the world. "
United States produced between 60 and 70 percent of the world's oil supply". America's armed forces became the world's superpower. American ingenuity was released causing us to essentially invent everything over the last 170 years. What explains it all: Free Markets (or Karl Marx's pejorative: Capitalism).
What has changed?
The Progress in Progressive is Toward Slavery
Progressivism is rolling back the individual freedom and innovation that this country at one time personified. We are progressing toward a slave society; a society where the rich use poor and middle class people as natural resources. We are progressing to a society where individuals will no longer hope to start their own business due to regulations, legal and insurance paperwork, taxes, a corrupt bureaucracy and cronyism.
Doo Doo Economics Blog 9/30/2011: President Obama signed the America Invents Act into law. A full discussion of this action can be found on The Blaze, but allow me to summarize. America now has Europe's patent system. You know the system that does not work. The system that makes innovation by small business, responsible for 100 percent of U.S. job growth over the last 35 years, impossible. The European system where "less than 1 percent of patents are filed by job-creating small businesses and independent inventors compared to 28 percent in the U.S." as Business Insider guest writer Henry Nothhaft writes.
I blame Progressives because their social programs enable slavery to once again compete with free markets. Consider Obamacare: instead of an employer competing for workers by offering benefits like health care, the meager $2,000 annual "penalty" or "exchange buy-in" encourages employers to drop health care insurance instead of paying on average $17,000 per year. Many
health insurance companies and doctors are leaving medicine before the law is enacted. This is a precursor to an eventual government-run, "single-payer" medical system.
In this way, Obamacare offloads the cost of production to the public sector. Everyone is sold that they can live at the expense of everyone else. In truth, their children and those more financially well off but without waivers are pushed into perpetual debt. Government debt, taxation and regulation leave the masses desperate and without hope for a better life. The American dream is to have your own house, your own business and "get ahead" financially.
Government dependence destroys this dream. Section 8 housing, the lack of classical education and demonizing those who succeed ensure the dream is unattainable. In slave vernacular, those who succeed are "house" not "field" workers.
Capitalists (free traders) must pay for all the costs associated with a product or service. Like a communist Chinese slave state, American
progressive policies use public funding to balance a lack of innovation, productivity and risk with the services of desperate "illegal", dependent and miseducated workers.
The same can be said for retirement and pension plans vs. social security. Home interest deductions, solar panel subsidies and other tax credits may similarly be viewed as reducing the pay required to retain labor. Any entitlement programs relating to essentials that would otherwise require income also offload the cost of production to the public. All of these costs would be borne by the entrepreneur in a free market, thus the competitive drive for innovation and value.
It was innovation that allowed America to end slavery and embrace self-reliance. Free markets made America great. The destruction of innovation and self-reliance is the indicator that we are "progressing" back to slavery. When slave labor becomes more cost effective than skilled workers, you are dealing with
progressive tyranny.
Let me reiterate that all of this "everyone living at the expense of everyone ELSE" is a fallacy. Either we must pay for these benefits through taxes, or our descendants will be saddled with the additional debt. Eventually, this scheme collapses, ironically, because it is not "sustainable." The only "sustainable" path is self-reliant, free-market, capitalistic FREEDOM!
Epilogue - Post Script
The American worker is a productive marvel. There is no doubt that as government slaves we would be highly sought after. The problem is that Americans require self-reliance and independence. We require the ability to keep what we have earned. America requires the hope for a better life. Without these things Americans will be no more productive than anyone else.
Further, miseducation at Harvard and other "elite" institutions is just as worthless as and more dangerous than politically correct miseducation at your local community college. Having the ability to quickly learn, retain and comprehend that 1+1 =3 is no more valuable than badly learning it. However, the Harvard elitist class, that has led America so far astray, is far more dangerous because they have been taught to unquestioningly believe that they are actually better than everyone else. They will not be swayed by logic and reason because some expensive professor knows best. To admit that they are wrong would invalidate that expensive degree and illuminate the missing "think for yourself" wisdom that most of America learns at an early age.
Finally, I find it amazing that America currently tolerates the "illegal alien" invasion. These poor souls may be better off in America, but the truth is that unscrupulous people use them as cheap, slave-like labor. America fought the
Mexican-American War from 1846 to 1848, prior to the civil war:
The war had been widely supported by Democrats and opposed by Whigs. Many Northern abolitionists (Republicans) attacked the war as an attempt by slave-owners to expand slavery and assure their continued influence in the federal government. Henry David Thoreau wrote his essay Civil Disobedience and refused to pay taxes to support the war. Former President John Quincy Adams also expressed his belief that the war was an effort to expand slavery.
With American successes on the battlefield, by the summer of 1847 there were calls for the annexation of "All Mexico," particularly among Eastern Democrats, who argued that bringing Mexico into the Union was the best way to ensure future peace in the region.
(Italics ours)
Democrats have a long history that is continued today. At the end of the war, congress debated annexing all of Mexico, but there was no doubt that Democrats would make slaves of the Mexican people. I am a
steadfast Tea Party patriot, but my Republican roots are deeply abolitionist. It is difficult to believe that this battle is ongoing and again threatens America. It is astonishing that minorities vote for the pro-slavery,
anti-civil rights Democrat party.
The Democratic Senate Majority Leader, Lyndon Baines Johnson from Texas, realized that the bill and its journey through Congress could tear apart his party, whose southern block was anti-civil rights and northern members were more pro-civil rights. Southern senators occupied chairs of numerous important committees due to their long seniority. Johnson sent the bill to the judiciary committee, led by Senator James Eastland from Mississippi, who proceeded to change and alter the bill almost beyond recognition. Senator Richard Russell from Georgia had claimed the bill was an example of the Federal government wanting to impose its laws on states. Johnson sought recognition from civil rights advocates for passing the bill, while also receiving recognition from the mostly southern anti-civil rights Democrats for reducing it so much as to kill it.
