Sultan Knish
Think of a hybrid, whether it's one of those ubiquitous bailout-backed
vehicles that you see happy families driving around town in
bailout-backed commercials or magnificent beasts such as the Liger, the
Wolphin or the humble Mule. Hybrids are impressive at times, but they
don't have much of a future.
Our system is an ungainly hybrid of capitalism and socialism that began
when socialism was inserted as a humanizing fallback position for
capitalism. Capitalism riding on socialism was meant to be more moral
than the naked variety. But lately capitalism has turned into the horse
and socialism into the rider, and we have just enough capitalism to pay
for all the socialism.
We no longer have socialism to account for the human cost of capitalism.
Capitalism now exists to cover the human cost of socialism. The crude
bargain that we have is a free enterprise economy being ridden to death
and then sent to the glue factory to pay for all the machinery of
socialism. And this mule, this merger of the capitalist horse and the
socialist donkey, is staggering around on its last legs.
Both Obama and Paul Ryan agree that the current hybrid system has no
future. The debate is over whether America will go back to being a horse
or turn into a donkey. The donkey party is slowly breeding out the
horse lines to turn the United States into a fully socialist beast. A
creature that eats money and excretes bureaucracy with a community
organizer on every corner and a propaganda bulletin on every porch.
Anyone with minimal math skills can tote up the figures and see that the
way things are is just about done. The hybrid alliance can't work when
there is no longer enough free enterprise money to pay for the
enterprise of big government. The dehybridization process has two
possible approaches. Either we bid a fond farewell to big government or
to the antiquated idea that individuals build things and then profit
from them.
The mule has been working hard, but no amount of hard work or hybrid
vigor will allow it to work off a debt being accumulated by asses who
ride horses to death. The donkey party takes issue with Ann Romney's
horse. It does not like horses because there is something free about
them. The horse is breed exceptionalism, its speed is an exhilarating
escape that speaks of open plains and unknown frontiers. But the left
envisions a nation of donkeys patiently working themselves to death in
their traces and then trotting off to the nationalized healthcare glue
factory when they can no longer pay their taxes.
Like Animal Farm's Boxer, the American workhorse has worked
itself to the bone, paying taxes on everything imaginable to subsidize
the revolutionary state of the left, its mammoth bureaucracies and the
bribes and favors that it doles out to its voting bases. Homes have been
lost, lives shattered and families broken up so that America might
"live up to" whatever promises the left has made to itself on their
behalf. And like Boxer, the American and his way of life, is being taken
away in a knacker's van billed as a trip to the veterinarian.
The left has forcefully accelerated the death throes of the American
mule by pushing government spending beyond anything that the horse can
cover. That leaves the overworked horse with only two options. It can
either become a donkey and be fed and work without any say in what it is
fed or how it works, or it can try to break free of the great socialist
boneyard.
The one thing that everyone can agree on is that the hybrid system is
done. Whatever uneasy truce has existed between American free enterprise
and fee enterprise, the pretense of Democratic pols that free
enterprise is a blessing to our land, rather than the reason why
everyone doesn't make as much money as everyone else and why children in
the ghetto don't have a 100,000-dollar education, is on the way out.
Warren and Obama are trumpeting its death cry. The horse must be
butchered so that the donkey party can hand out very expensive free
things to all the sheep and then put them to work.
Socialism crept in the door by taking profits from free enterprise and
promising to use it to make life better for those who needed it.
Elizabeth Warren and Barack Obama are rejecting any implication that the
government is the junior partner in this relationship. "You didn't
build it," two political hacks who have never built anything in their
life clamor. The message is that free enterprise is the junior partner,
the ungrateful stepchild of the socialist stepmother who doesn't
appreciate how rewarding sweeping out the ashes from the government
fireplace where her money is burned can be.
The hybrid system began with socialism fixing the cracks in the free
enterprise system and then shifted to free enterprise fixing the cracks
in the socialist system. But the only cracks in the socialist system
according to Obama and Warren come from free enterprise not paying
enough of its fair share. And the only way to fix that is to get rid of
free enterprise completely with the same people who gave us the public
education system, the 300-dollar screwdriver, the welfare ghetto and
gambling monopolies that somehow go bankrupt completely taking over the
entire economy.
Between all the nonsense about Warren Buffett's six-figure secretary,
the Koch Brothers inventing popular anger at big government over a game
of croquet played with solid gold mallets and Sheldon Adelson's army of
Chinese-Zionist death-hookers, all the 1-percent posters wielded by the
99 percent of the 1 percent and the commercials where Obama puts on his
best smile to assure that he is a big fan of the blue-collar businesses
that he visits once every four years, the message to the American people
is that the government can no longer live within its means, so the
people will have to start living within the government's means. And that
is not a very reassuring message.
The last four years have demonstrated to most people who pay attention
to such things that the government has failed to do anything positive
about the economy. The swing voters who will likely determine this
election are making their move based on their anecdotal experiences in a
bad economy made worse by government intervention. Even those Obama
supporters struggling to construct a positive narrative for the last
four years are relying on special benefits that they received from the
government-- not on general economic improvements for all.
To the donkey party, the failure of the economy is just proof that the
American mule is dead and the economy needs to be taken over further.
Only when they can control the price of every single commodity, the wage
for every job and the amount of people hired and fired in every company
will the economic recovery kick in. And by economic recovery, they mean
jobs convincing the proles that even in the sixth year of the Great
American Famine, the economy is doing smashingly well and the beloved
leaders deserve our whole-hearted admiration and support.
That is the donkey economy we are being driven toward as the donkey
party strives to make asses of us all. No matter how much control they
have, they always want more and no matter how much money they have, they
always want more. Their greed is endless and there are a legion of grim
examples from the USSR to the Eurozone, from Mao's China to Jerry
Brown's California to show us where the path to the end of the clearing
will truly take us.
But it's an economy that we can still mount up and ride away from. And
to do that we have to begin by asking which part of the hybrid economy
really failed. Was the failure a function of free market corruption as
the donkeys insist or of government corruption of the free market as the
horses say. The donkeys say that the free market corrupts the
government through deregulation while the horses say that the government
corrupts free markets through regulation. Either argument is a call for
the death of the hybrid system but the outcome of the argument will
determine what system will replace it.
Our
hybrid system began as charity and is ending as slavery. What began as a
means of restraining monopolistic industrial feudalism has developed
into a far larger feudal monopoly whose cruelty is exceeded only by its
ineptness. The monstrosity that stretches its tentacles out of D.C. and
through every state capital and county seat, every public and private
enterprise, every store and home, makes Standard Oil seem positively
benign. It has the worst habits of corporations but with no ability to
make money. It has the worst aspects of a banana republic but with no
national security skills. And worst of all, it is unsustainable. That is
the one thing that both left and right agree on.
It may be impossible to save the American mule, which has been flogged
to death by senators, activists and crony capitalists. But the American
mustang isn't beyond saving. Neither is the American eagle. And our
coming choices are to ride, to fly or to serve.
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