Oliver Stone made Gordon Gekko and his famous quote “Greed is Good” into everything that was wrong with capitalism. A quarter of a century later, liberal politicians like Obama and Bill de Blasio are still running against Gordon Gekko while pocketing his contributions and doing special favors for him.
Their
class warfare is as nakedly greedy as Gordon Gekko shouting into a
brick of a cell phone.Class warfare is the greed of the con artist
playing on the stupid greed of his mark who wants to steal from someone
else, but lacks the skill and daring to do anything but sign on to
someone else’s scheme.The only way to get conned is to get greedy. The con artist plays on his mark’s desire to get something for nothing in a socially acceptable (or sometimes not socially acceptable) way. That’s why every piece of advice about not getting conned begins with “If it’s too good to be too true…”
When Obama promised Americans that if they liked their health plan, they could keep their health plan, that everyone would somehow get more while paying less, it should have triggered all those “If it’s too good to be true” alarms.
You can’t get something for nothing. Insurance companies are not about to go out of business or even take a serious hit to their profits. So where was all that extra free stuff going to come from?
The mandate was another element of the con. Those who had health insurance assumed that forcing lots of healthy people who didn’t need health insurance into paying for policies they didn’t want and wouldn’t use would cover the costs for those who did. And while forcing the “invincibles”, the young people just getting by in a bad employment market to choose between a fine being taken out of their tax refunds or a policy they don’t want or need, may add some cash; it was never going to cover the real cost. That was a distraction. The only way that the numbers would really work was by cancelling policies and hiking premiums.
The loud outcry from those who supported ObamaCare only to discover that their policies are gone is that of the greedy mark who thought that he was cheating someone else, only to discover that he was the one being cheated all along.
Those Americans who thought that liberal greed was better than the capitalist kind are discovering that they weren't the con artists, instead they were the marks of men who make Gordon Gekko at his worst look like a saint. Capitalists even at their worst occasionally create value. The left at its best only destroys value.
Liberalism is an army of Gordon Gekkos raiding everything of value, carving it up and carting away large chunks of it for themselves in the name of the greater good. The cynicism that Oliver Stone attributed to Wall Street is far more deeply rooted in the liberal money grab behind the welfare state in all its many forms, from the non-profit to the corporate. And when they are done, nothing is left.
The 99% campaign of Occupy Wall Street was a greedier scam than anything Gordon Gekko would have imagined. It convinced millions that there was a 1% that would pay for everything that liberal politicians were promising them. Members of the middle class who should have known better decided that some nebulous class of billionaires would pay all their bills. But the 1% is better connected to the political powers than the middle class. And when the liberal bill comes due, it’s the middle class that pays.
Voters were seduced into believing that liberal greed is good. They thought that they were going to feast at an expensive restaurant on someone else’s dime and now they’re getting the bill.
You can’t be conned unless you get greedy. The easiest kind of person to cheat is the cheat who is looking for shortcuts.
ObamaCare was a monumental con. It was a shortcut around the economic facts of life that promised everyone a free lunch on someone else’s dime. And too many people who should have known better stopped using their common sense. They forgot the same lesson they were forced to relearn every April about who really pays for everything.
Instead they believed that Obama had finally found someone out there who would pay for their lunch.
As Gordon Gekko said, “It's a zero sum game, somebody wins, somebody loses.” Most of those signing on to the ObamaCare election express in 2012 understood that. But they thought that they would win and that somebody else would lose. Some of them may have even been right.
If you work, if you earn money, then you lose.
ObamaCare was yet another wealth redistribution scheme. It was a liberal Gordon Gekko with a teleprompter and an easy grin selling good liberal greed. Everyone would win, except for the people being robbed.
There are no movies made about the evils of good liberal greed, even though good liberal greed turned Russia, China and Cambodia into charnel houses filled with corpses. The 1% of Communist Party members won and the 99% got a grave, a gulag or a miserable life of working in a bad job at low pay.
When all was said and done, there was no land or bread or peace. It shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise that ObamaCare doesn’t really offer health care. It takes the health care you had and increases the price you pay for it, makes it harder to access and more expensive to use.
When someone promises you more of a finite quantity of something without having to give anything up, you know you’re being conned. But the left has done such a fine job of teaching people that liberal greed is good that their victims are no longer even able to recognize their base emotions as greed. They associate being conned with high moral values. When someone offers them stolen property, they feel that they’re being good people by accepting.
“Why shouldn’t you have X, Y or Z?”, the Obamas and de Blasios ask the eager crowds. The answer is that robbery only works if you’re the robber. Not if you’re the one encouraging the robber go about his business in the expectation that he will rob your neighbor down the block who has three cars and two leather sofas and leave you alone because you only have two cars and one leather sofa.
Class warfare cons the middle class into thinking that it’s going to be doing the robbing from some nebulous category of “the rich”, when it’s actually the one being robbed. Class warfare makes its victims complicit in its criminality. And like many victims of cons, it leaves them too ashamed to come forward and complain for fear of admitting their own guilt.
When New York’s Italian-Jewish Republican mayor Fiorello LaGuardia took City Hall away from the Democratic Party’s Tammany Hall machine, he shook his fist and shouted during his inauguration in Italian, “È finita la cuccagna!” That can be loosely translated as “No more free lunch!”
Now Bill de Blasio is campaigning for that same office on the Obama platform of a free lunch. But there are no free lunches. There are just lunches with a clear price tag that you pay for when you’re done eating and hideously expensive “free lunches” that you pay for when the tax bill comes due.
Liberal greed, like all greed, blinds people to their own character flaws, it encourages them to think that they can steal from someone else and get away with it when they’re really stealing from themselves.
The cancelled policies, high premiums and deductibles are only the first part of the ObamaCare bill. The real bill will take years to arrive and it will be much bigger and uglier.
The first phase of the ObamaCare con is wrapping up. Like all cons, those who pulled it off have a choice between flying away to Argentina with briefcases of money or doubling down and convincing the mark that even though he lost money this time around, he can get it all back and make even more money if he commits to the next phase of the con.
The next phase of the con is being previewed by Robert Reich and Paul Krugman. The endgame is health care nationalization. It’s an American NHS complete with death panels and unsustainable spending. The only question is will the marks of the ObamaCare con wake up now that their money is as lost as an advance fee sent to a Nigerian 411 scammer or will they go on making the same mistakes all over again.
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