Posted by
GunnyG on Monday, August 25, 2008 10:37:21 PM
Liberals hate capitalism, which they link to conservatism, but without really knowing what either of the two really is. They seek to wipe out capitalism for the good of humanity (so they think) again, not knowing the result of which they work for.
Capitalism is, boiled down, the search for a profit. Money is the tool for that profit. Even when liberals trade in their used Volvo they seek the best price. Why? Why to lower the price on their next acquisition. It’s common sense. Businesses are in business to…make a profit. Without capitalism prosperity weakens and dies, inventors stop inventing, and societies stagnate. Why should, say, Thomas Edison, invent the light bulb? To be a philanthropist and donate light bulbs to the Third World gratis? No. He opened a business and began to make and sell them and used THAT money, called a profit, to innovate. To tinker. To…INVENT. Why? To use his God-given talents to enrich HIS life while enriching others. Not even a liberal could argue that light bulbs have not enriched the lives of humanity. What inventions has socialism wrought on the world? Famine? Pain? Suffering? Poverty? Death? Just ask any Zimbabwean. Indeed, the liberal’s god, Karl Marx, let one of his children die of starvation and the family lived in abject poverty.
Thus, it is clear then that capitalism is good. Why? Because capitalism, when combined with a religious outlook, promotes a safer more generous society since when our needs are taken care of, we, through our church, charities, clubs, etc, whatever it is, give more. Many conservatives that the Gunny knows give to numerous charities, donate to AmVets vice doing a yard sale, and give wherever they can, usually on a middle class income. Take two rich liberals recently in the news. Senator Biden made almost 300K last year and gave a whopping 1,025.00 in charity. Now using old Math, that comes out to one third of one percent. Wow. And his running mate Obama is SO GENEROUS that he allows his half-brother to live on 12 dollars a year. Really Barry, send the poor guy a C note out of your millions, you won’t even miss it. We Conservatives have the right of it when we mix capitalism, religion, and basic moral values. We know that some will not make it but WE believe that by teaching a man to fish, HE feeds himself for life. How many rags-to-riches stories have happened in America from 1775 to the present? Only God knows. Capitalism works. Like the old adage goes: “invent a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door."
Liberals are at the polar end on this issue. They too realize that losers are produced in a capitalist society but their idea is to force the winners to help the losers through income redistribution. This kind of thinking rips holes in the entire fabric of society since it discourages winners from innovating, investing, and producing and keeps the losers from ever trying. It aggravates and splits society. Take the “obscene” oil profits as Nancy Pelosi would call them. This “obscene profit” is redistributed to society in the form of stock dividends, 401K investments, mutual funds, pension funds, etc. By the way, the National Teachers Union is HEAVILY invested in Mobil, Exxon, etc, but oddly enough liberals will decry that. They fail to mention that the profits are often plowed back INTO the company in the form of R&D, new equipment, exploration, etc. Liberals believe, for some strange reason, that giving a man a fish each day for life is better than a man fishing for himself and penalizing those who catch TWO fish per day. What liberals fail to see, every time, is that we LIKE to give to charity as it makes us feel good. When we give to the needy, we KNOW that our investment, yes, investment, is going to WHO we KNOW needs it. Liberals, on the other hand, prefer to dump the money in a big pot and distribute it to whoever walks up, needy or not. How many liberals have been busted for dipping into the pot? The president of the NEA was using pension money to buy cars, furs, homes, etc, until she was busted. When the Gunny donates to the USO, he KNOWS that HIS MONEY is being used to help service members and their dependents, not some lazy welfare pig. When liberals implement redistribution, as they are wont to do whenever they regain power, it forces business owners to pay their workers more than their productivity merits, which forces prices up for those goods and services, and all for just some lip service and vote buying. The minimum wage hurts the very ones it is supposed to help. They get a dollar more an hour and everything they want, need, or desire just went up as well.
See if you can answer who said the following quote. Every conservative should have these words hard-wired into their brain housing group.
"It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages."***
We produce to sell, to make a profit, to get ahead. The American Dream is still very evident in our daily lives. Small businesses in America employ, according to the US Dept of Labor, about 80% of America’s workers so when liberals whine about jobs going overseas via huge corporations, like Heinz, it’s all smoke and mirrors, but it makes a nice sound bite. By allowing capitalism to flourish, mom and pop can save, open a business and with skill and a little luck, seize their piece of the pie, and enjoy it FAR MORE than if it was given to them. Liberals, like their communist brethren, cannot understand that the human spirit is steeped in self-love, self-preservation, the need to produce, to work, to get ahead. They seek to stifle, we seek to liberate.
Liberals want peace at all costs and then work against that goal. How can the Gunny say that? There is an old Arabic saying that goes: “A man with a full stomach does not take to the streets in anger.” When you have a CHANCE to get ahead, you work at it. But why work when you have no chance to get ahead? When some unknown bureaucrat in some unknown government building decides what you rate and what you’ll get, that’s not life, its slavery. Conservatives LOVE a free-market and on a global scale, and we’re global whether one likes it or not, a free-global market brings nations together and makes the price of conflict too expensive to pursue. Imagine, for a second, if the entire world was capitalist in nature. We all enjoyed some level of economic prosperity intertwined with other nations. WE depended on THEM and they depended on US! Let’s say that Nicaragua does something wrong and the entire world imposes economic sanctions that cut deep. Chances are, the people in Nicaragua are going to get p*ssed real fast and provide the “motivation” their government needs to come back to the fold. Now the Gunny is not naïve enough to realize that good economics will prevent war but it should be noted that industrialized democratic nations do not go to war with one another for the h*ll of it. Economic prosperity and good democratic governments make war a high cost to bear but to believe that good economics and democracy yield peace is simply stupid, like Lennon’s song “imagine.” A conflict-free world can never be created, only dealing from strength can but that’s another essay. But when America exports capitalism and democracy, we’re also working hard to export prosperity as well as peace. Better than Jimmy Carter turning over Iran to the mad mullahs, in the name of world peace and human rights.
The main problem is that capitalism isn’t as sexy as wearing a Che t-shirt and chanting socialist slogans in a crowd of other underachievers. Capitalism doesn’t set people’s heart to pounding like the screeches by socialists for a utopia. Nope, all capitalism offers is a CHANCE to succeed and IF you TRY for the brass ring, you MIGHT grab it. Scary to the underachievers, a challenge to the rest of us. Capitalism delivers the goods if you work at it and it MAY take a lifetime but socialism has never delivered. Indeed, if one examines the history of socialism, it is replete with failure after failure and with a huge dose of human suffering stirred in. But it’s sexy to the college kids who wear a Che t-shirt and who never had to live like Zimbabweans, Cubans, or anywhere else where socialism has been rejected. Good old boring capitalism has brought America, and indeed, the West, to a level of living hitherto unknown in human history and to the point where many are spoiled by it, bored by it, and craving something “different.” There isn’t anything sexy to these immature children about rolling out of bed every morning, getting to work on time, earning a living, buying a home and raising a family, and putting money away for a rainy day and retirement? As the father of Conservatism, Edmund Burke noted, “the tried and true is better than the new and untried.” Capitalism has worked forever, socialism, never.
Capitalism throws a yoke on human self-interest which translates to an outcome that benefits all. The farmer grows the pig, to sell to market, for the butcher to buy, for his patrons to buy pork, and so it goes. Those who DO, get more. Those who DON’T DO, get what they work for, less. It cannot get any fairer than that. When companies make more, they expand, they hire more workers, and they compete for the BETTER workers. Thus, to improve oneself is to make oneself MORE MARKETABLE. Thus, when we pursue profits, money or higher education for example, it results in a higher quality of life for us, more business, and ultimately, down the line, more goods and services for consumers at a lower cost. Liberals reading this will call the Gunny a liar but facts are facts. For example, 85% of the world’s population, in 1820, lived on a dollar a day (today’s measure.), however, by 1950, it had fallen to 50%, and today it’s at 20%. It’s not guys like Bono demanding that we give ANOTHER eight BILLION to Africa that has lowered the human misery of poverty; it’s CAPITALISM that has done it. The ability to work for oneself in order to get ahead, not get what some mindless bureaucrat deems we “rate.”
Marx was dead wrong when he stated that human’s could never be happy in a capitalist state and that the prole would never get a “guaranteed” life filled with food, clothing, shelter, etc, since a few owned all of the wealth. Just look at America today and it screams that Marx was full of bull dung. Many of us earn GOOD wages, drive a decent car, and own their own home that keeps the rain out and the cool/heat IN and the bugs out. We have 401K investments, IRA’s, stock funds, profit-sharing plans, go to advanced schooling (usually on the company’s dime), go into business, and profit from our hard work! Even the POOR in America have TVs, cars, microwaves, and usually, waste their spare cash buying beer, dope, and lotto tickets where the rest of us save it and invest it. That separates the doers from the non-hackers. We win, they lose, and it’s by their own choices. A fairer method the Gunny cannot fathom. Indeed, can ANY liberal out there name ONE country that has NOT moved AWAY from socialism towards capitalism, when they got the chance? Anyone ever leave West Germany for East Germany?
From the liberal’s outlook, it is easier to:
1. Be dependent
2. Spend OPM (Other People's Money) than your own
3. Protest your deficiencies than to self-improve.
4. Follow like sheep than lead the way
5. Be liked than to take the hard stance
6. Beg for an entitlement than to earn one’s own way
7. Tear down vice build up
8. Bloviate vice perform and “DO THE JOB!”
9. Group think vice think for yourself
Conservatives, at the polar end of THAT scale, PREFER to go to work, WANT to raise our children OUR way, save for OUR retirement (not some illegal aliens), and WORK for OUR piece of the pie. We’re grown-ups. We’re mature. We’ve accepted that sometimes life serves up chickensh*t and YOU have to turn it into chicken salad and when YOU DO, it makes life ALL the sweeter. Ask ANY Marine what he or she felt after 13+ grueling weeks of EARNING that Eagle, Globe, and Anchor, as they passed in review and were dismissed as MARINES! We FLOATED across that grinder. We EARNED IT through hard work, blood, sweat, tears, and pain. It was OURS! Conservatives don’t whine, riot, get outraged over someone wearing a fur coat, protest, or seek to inflict our beliefs on others or stick our noses into other people’s business. We can’t! We don't have the free time to be liberals; we’re too busy working to get ahead. Life isn’t fair and we deal with it. We Capitalists MOVE ON otherwise life leaves us behind. Liberal-socialists are like Bigfoot believers in that, no matter how many times the latest film of Bigfoot is crap, or some “fur” ends up being from a bear, Bigfooters (Liberals) will still throw their collective hands around the next event with all the gullibility they brought to the last twenty hoaxes. Capitalism works, socialism is a failure, but telling that to a liberal is like telling them that Bill Clinton is a pervert.
*** Adam Smith
Dedicated to Caday5, liberal anarchist. Hope you mature one day and smell the coffee.