Consider two famous quotes, one from a famous author and one from a
famous and heinous tyrant: "War is peace. Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength." George Orwell, author of "1984"
"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will
eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such
time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic
and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally
important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for
the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie and thus by extension, the truth
is the greatest enemy of the State." Joseph Goebbels, Adolph Hitler's
propaganda minister. Both of these quotes keep coming to mind as I
watch the Obama administration try to control the country, and its
freedoms, by controlling and distorting the language. Consider: 1)
The latest language control initiative from the Obama administration was
on display during the Hurricane Irene aftermath. The Federal government
was not coming to the aid of those affected by the hurricane, raining,
and resultant flooding. According to the Obama administration, the
"Federal family" was mobilizing to help people. I guess the Federal
government thinks that "Federal family" will make us feel more warm and
fuzzy about government functions if we consider them part of our
"family." I am assuming that the political class thinks if they tell
this lie and phrase often enough and maybe we will actually want more of
the "Federal family" in our lives. Little does the "Federal family"
know that many of us want less of our families in our lives many times so
why would we want a bigger family of people we never met or heard of?
Many times having more family in our lives results in less money in our
lives and our wallets. "Federal family" really starts to sound very much
like the Big Brother idea from Orwell's "1984" which was not a good
concept from a freedom perspective. Eventually, Big Brother became the
center of every citizen's life at the expense of family, privacy, liberty
and freedom. 2) Another recent perversion of language is this
government and political class insistence that government has a "revenue"
stream. Governments collect taxes and fees, they do not generate revenue
streams. Consider the standard definition of revenue that exists in the
real world outside of Washington: "Revenue - income that comes into
a business as a result of selling a product or service." Government
does not sell a product or service. Theoretically, a democratic
government only does certain things for citizens because it is more
efficient for government to do it centrally than for citizens to do it
for themselves (a whole other blog post could be done on how far we have
drifted from this definition of democratic government). Comedian Chris
Rock went one step further, once saying that we do not pay taxes, they
(the political class) take taxes. Revenue should be associated with
individuals acting in their own best interests and giving some of their
wealth voluntarily to a business in return for a product or service we
desire. This could not be any further from what taxes are, the mandatory
confiscation of our wealth by a central government for uses that we do
not always agree with. By trying to reposition the government tax
process from a confiscation process to a voluntary process by renaming
"taxes" as "revenue," the political class hopes that we will be more
likely to give up our personal wealth in the future in order to support
the government's revenue stream rather than its tax stream. Abe
Lincoln once said: "If you called a tail a leg, how many legs would a dog
have? Answer: Four, just because you call it a leg does not make it a
leg." Same thing here, just because you call it government revenue does
not change the fact that is confiscatory tax. 3) One of the earliest
perversions of the language and reality from the Obama administration was
its insistence that we not refer to "Islamic" terrorism. Whether it was
in reference to the 9-11 attacks or the Ft Hood massacre, the Obama
administration insisted that the word "Islamic" not be used to describe
these and other Islamic terrorist attacks. I assume that the
reasoning was that by denying the obvious, Obama would endear himself to
those in the Muslim world that were not terrorists. I really do not know
what his motives were but the simple reality was that they were Islamic
terrorists. If they were Christian terrorists, we should call them
Christian terrorists. If they were Martian terrorists we should call them
Martian terrorists. By denying the reality who and what was the
source of the 9-11 attacks and other terror actions, we are further away
from understanding the root causes of terror. Old joke: "A wife walks
into the living room and sees her husband crawling around on the floor.
She asks him what he is doing and he says he is looking for something he
dropped on the floor in the bedroom. When she asks why isn't he looking
for it in the bedroom he says the light is better for searching in the
living room." By denying and suppressing the root causes of many
terror attacks and perverting the description from "Islamic" to a more
generic description, we end up looking for root causes of terrorism in
the living room when we really should be looking in the place where the
problem is, the bedroom. Why the President elected to search in the
living room, especially after how much terrorism suffering the country
has lived through, is beyond me. 4) The all time great lie and
perversion of language has to be the "Social Security Trust Fund." This
name implies that we give up some of our wealth every pay check to the
government who holds in "trust,", i.e. keeps it save for us until we need
it back when we retire. However, that "trust" is severely misplaced.
That money that the political class and Federal government was supposed
to hold in trust for us is long gone. It has been paid out over the years
to current retirees during those years. There is no pot of money or
wealth, with our name on it, sitting somewhere for use to use in our
golden years. The only pile waiting for is a set of IOUs that track how
much of our payments have been made to other Americans. It is quite
simply a giant Ponzi scheme where those that gave their money to the
scheme first are most likely to get the highest return back over time.
Now, some people, like Harry Reid, would declare that there is indeed
$2.6 TRILLION sitting somewhere in the Social Security Administration
building or elsewhere for all of us. What he is too ignorant too
understand is that there is $2.6 TRILLION of accounting entries sitting
somewhere in the Social Security Administration. Accounting entries are
not wealth and they are not money. You cannot take an accounting entry to
the store and buy something with it. When you retire, the Social
Security Administration will have to take some of those IOUs over to the
Treasury Department for redemption. Since the Treasury Department is
currently running an annual deficit of over a TRILLION dollars, it does
not have any money laying around and will have to go out and tax existing
workers to cover your retirement check. Don't believe me still?
Think back to last month when it was possible that the debt ceiling would
not be raised. What was the first scare tactic out of Obama's bag of
demagoguery? Social Security recipients might not get their checks if the
debt ceiling was not raised. Why would he say that if there was $2.6
TRILLION sitting in the Social Security"trust" fund? Why couldn't he
just take some of that money out to cover the short term shortfall?
Because it is not money, it is accounting ledger entries. Social Security
is now a negative cash flow operation, money coming in from workers is
not enough to cover the money that has been promised to be paid out to
retirees. Your trust that the political class would hold your Social
Security pay check deductions in trust could not be trusted. [Note:
We will do a lot on Social Security next week since it will be a hot
topic up until the November, 2012 elections.] 5) I am not a
bankruptcy expert but I am pretty sure I know what happens when a company
goes bankrupt but still wants to continue on as a business after cleaning
up its financials via a court supervised bankruptcy proceeding: -
The company gets to get all or much of its debt forgiven. - The
company gets to break distribution contracts with existing dealers of its
products if needed to get solvent again. - The company gets to
break contracts with its unions and workers if needed to get solvent
again. - The company gets to make changes to its arrangements with
its stock holders and debt holders including turning their investments
into junk if needed to get solvent. It is a pretty straightforward
process. Small to large businesses have been doing it for hundreds of
years under the watchful eye of a judicial branch. The vast, vast
majority of these bankruptcies have been done without government input
and interference and certainly without wasting tens of billions of
dollars of taxpayer wealth. Until Obama bailed out two of the big
three domestic auto makers. We are constantly told the big lie that Obama
"saved the auto industry." Which is totally a lie being told so many
times. If General Motors and Chrysler had been forced into bankruptcy
proceedings without any government involvement, all of the above
bankruptcy steps would have still been executed but without the loss of
billions of taxpayer dollars. Both companies would have shed debt,
broke contracts with dealers they did not want to deal with any more,
reworked their union contracts to a more favorable pay scale, and
probably greatly diminished the wealth that stock holders and debt
holders had given the company. The end result might have looked different
but there were enough valuable assets in both companies that they would
have emerged out of bankruptcy as smaller, but stronger competitors. They
did not need Obama's or our politicians' intervention. But Obama
wanted to intervene in order to leverage a political goal: protect as
many union jobs and union voters as possible. He did not intervene to
save the auto industry, he intervened, using taxpayer money as
collateral, to protect his political interests. To prove this,
let's look at an extreme case. The American car market sells about 16
million cars a year. General Motors has about a 25% share of that market.
Let's assume that General Motors never emerged from bankruptcy, i.e.
Obama had not intervened to "save" the car industry in America.
What would be the size of the car market if that had happened? No, not 12
million, it would still be about 16 million. The market did not change,
that market demand would still have been there, for the most part, with
or without General Motors being a competitor. About 16 million buyers of
cars would still have needed cars, the absence of General Motors would
have forced them to buy Fords or American made Hondas, or American made
Toyotas or foreign cars. The auto industry would still have been
intact, with many of those 16 million cars still being made in American
factories, some of them owned by America companies and some of them not.
But the Obama administration wants you to believe the lie that it saved
the American car industry. It did not, the American car industry would
have survived nicely, with a revamped General Motors and Chrysler and
without billions of dollars wasted. So what do we know for sure:
- There is no "Federal family," there are only Federal government
agencies, run by an incompetent and wasteful political class, that should
be seen and not heard until they are needed. Much like we do want Big
Brother at our dinner table, we do not need or want this Federal family
around our family dinner table either. - The government does not
generate revenue like viable businesses do, the collect taxes. By the
way, did you ever notice that when you put the words, "The IRS" together,
it spells THEIRS? That is confiscating taxes, not generating revenue.
- There truly are Islamic terrorists in the world. - It is too late
now but we never should have trusted the government and political class
to put our wealth in a Social Security Trust fund. - The political
class and Obama did not save the auto industry, it would have been fine
without taxpayer bailouts. As agent Mulder used to say on X-Files,
"The truth is out there." Unfortunately, entities like Orwell's Big
Brother, Goebbels propaganda machine, and the political class spin
doctors and politicians would rather you believe their lies and will keep
telling them, hoping that their lies become your reality, a reality that
is usually more restrictive when it comes to freedom and liberty.
Never forget the warning from the past: "The truth is the mortal enemy of
the lie and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the
State." And, if I may add, the State is usually the mortal enemy of
freedom.
Related Articles -
goebbels, orwell, obama, social security, revenue, islamic, terrorism,
government, federal family,
Email this Article to a Friend!
Receive Articles like this one direct to your email box!Subscribe for
free today!