America Progressing Toward Slavery

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.

The Day After Capitalism

In 1791, a new economic system was tried. It was called Capitalism and based on Adam Smith's philosophical arguments. The primary focus of capitalism was finding an alternative to slavery in various forms.
Slavery in the form of kingdoms, dictatorships, empires, and other barbaric violations of mankind's basic freedoms has dominated human history. Even religions imposed a basic requirement that limited your access to your God or Gods through a master.

Along came a man named Cicero who spoke of Natural Law. A few years later a "magician" named Jesus took up the cause and birthed a movement based upon individual salvation via direct relationship to God. These philosophies weighed heavy on Adam Smith. He was a devout believer in individual salvation, individual morality and individual worth and through his book "Theory of Moral Sentiments"; a new economic idea began to take shape.

What if each person could harness their own unique value and create a "Free Market" that enabled anyone with a unique idea, skill, or value of any kind to trade with other willing "Free" individuals? What if government did not control "Trade" or regulate who could participate in the creation of wealth? In answering these questions and because Smith had "Had enough" of Kings and mercantilism, Capitalism was created.

It was a beautiful idea and "Free Markets" led to "Freedom" from slavery as British Colonies in the New World established independent and entrepreneurial territories. Poor Englishmen began to travel to America as indentured servants who traded several years of labor for their passage toward a better life. In 1619, a Dutch slave trader traded his cargo of Africans for food at Jamestown. Africans were traded at Jamestown for food and English women cost about 120 pounds of tobacco.  The term slave began use around 1660. In 1662, Africans became servants for life.  By 1680, slaves had become essential to the economy. There was no alternative to slavery at that time.

By 1775, many tobacco growers were perpetually indebted to the British government connected mercantilists and a "Tobacco War" began. Freedom in America was being taken away through British law and financial cronyism. David Hartley called slavery "contrary to the laws of God and the rights of man." In addition, in 1776, the Declaration of Independence was drafted and for the first time in modern western history, a people declared themselves self governing and free from the King and thereby free from slavery.

"How is it," asked British author Samuel Johnson, "that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?"  Johnson did not realize the high regard for hard work and genius that American Colonists like George Washington held for everyone around them.

Washington readily recognized and applauded the talents among the enslaved. In early 1776, he received a poem from a young woman and, "with a view of doing justice to her great poetical Genius, I had a great Mind to publish the Poem." In gratitude for her gift, he invited her to visit his headquarters in Cambridge. The poet was the now famous Phillis Wheatley, who was then an enslaved Bostonian. In writing of and to her, Washington made no reference to her race: a remarkable omission by the standards of his day (and of our own). In private correspondence during the 1780s and 1790s, Washington repeatedly expressed a devout hope that the state governments would legislate "a gradual Abolition of Slavery; It would prevent much future Mischief." (Chronology on the History of Slavery)

During the American Revolution, the abolition of slavery began. Virginia 1778, the importation of slaves was ended and all slaves in the state were considered legally free. By the Constitution of 1780, in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts persons of color were declared citizens of the state. In 1783, the Revolution successfully ends. George Washington becomes the first President in 1784 and he is intent on ending slavery.

"I never mean (unless some particular circumstance should compel me to it) to possess another slave by purchase; it being among my first wishes to see some plan adopted, by which slavery in this country may be abolished by slow, sure and imperceptible degrees."--George Washington, September 9, 1786

The only economic idea available to counter slavery was Adam Smith's capitalism requiring each individual to be moral and educated. The American public school system began focused on teaching people to read The Bible. Within 100 years, slavery is abolished in Britain and America and a new era of human prosperity and freedom begins.

Unfortunately, tens of thousands of years of social drive to rule other men did not die with the abolition of slavery. Slavery has arisen with many new names under the pretext of religious and political systems. The major tools for human slavery include submission to a God through dependence upon his self-proclaimed leaders and submission to government through economic dependence.  Pseudo-economic interventionist dogma is used by both religious and political promoters of slavery. 

"Socialism" in its various forms has arisen as the most popular form of slavery.  Communism is slavery based upon class warfare. Fascism is slavery based on racism. Sharia is slavery based upon religion. Each of these political systems share red "socialist" banners. All were kept at bay through capitalist economic prosperity, individual bravery, faith and strength.

Since people generally do not "yearn to breath slave" attacks upon capitalism became the primary marketing tool. Blaming banks or "the rich" have been the most successful appeals to envy and hate. Slogans like "for the people," "hope and change," and "social justice" remain common propaganda tools appealing to group identity. Obfuscations emerged such as labeling fascism "right-wing" and coloring electoral maps to represent socialists as blue and opponents as red. 

Intimidation is the most central theme in slavery through human existence. Political correctness is the westernized tactic to keep people from discussing the failures and irrationality of slavery in its various disguises. Ignorance through miseducation and distraction is the second tenet of slavery. When these tactics fail and groups rise up in opposition they are assaulted and intimidated with personal attacks, demonization, vilification, slander and eventual violence through legal or illegal channels. Ignorant masses are exploited as the tools to exact violence upon the brave and the free.

The day after capitalism came as a shock to an entitled and miseducated public. "Free markets" converted to "slave markets" quickly as people realized that they no longer could provide for themselves or their families. Ignorant and ill equipped to defend themselves, masses of people were fooled into hating and assaulting the people who could stand up to the slave masters. Promises of "social justice" and "equality" appealed to the desperate. Code language was used to identify people to be voilently targeted by those "springing up for equality."

As the dust settled it became clear that essentials were scarce and there were no alternative leaders remaining. Opponents had all been injured, broken or destroyed.  Opposing political groups had been infiltrated and "moderated." Green re-education taught people to live with less and less in submission to "a better planet" and "more sustainable" service to the ruling class.  The tired, poor, huddled masses had no one left to believe in them, only rulers who required their belief.  To satisfy this requirement now requires service, servitude...slavery. The only alternative is to live without income, financial assets, healthcare, education and legal rights as citizenship now requires participation in the master's plan.