“Our mainstream media have discovered a new issue: inequality in America. The gap between the wealthiest 1 percent and the rest of the nation is wide and growing wider.
This, we are told, is intolerable….a deformation of American democracy that must be corrected through remedial government action.
What action? The rich must pay their fair share. Though the top 1 percent pay 40 percent of federal income taxes and the bottom 50 percent have, in some years, paid nothing, the rich must be made to pay more.
That’s an appealing argument to many, but one that would have horrified our founding fathers. For from the beginning, America was never about equality, except of God-given and constitutional rights.
Our revolution was about liberty; it was about freedom.
The word equality was not even mentioned in the Constitution, the Bill of Rights or the Federalist Papers….
When Thomas Jefferson wrote that memorable line — All men are created equal — he was not talking about an equality of rewards, but of rights with which men are endowed by their Creator. He was talking about an ideal….”

Here is where it gets really good.  As a student ( and teacher of history), unequivocably, I support Buchanan’s premise here:

“Equality, egalite, was what the French Revolution, the Bolshevik Revolution, Mao’s Revolution of 1949, Castro’s Revolution of 1959 and Pol Pot’s revolution of 1975 claimed to be about.
This was the Big Lie, for all those revolutions that triumphed in the name of equality were marked by mass murders of the old ruling class, the rise of a new ruling class more brutal and tyrannical, and the immiseration of the people in whose name the revolution was supposedly fought.  [Let me add that each resulted in the destruction of Christian influences on the Nation involved proceeded by a wave of Godless Barbarism]

Invariably, Power to the people! winds up as power to the party and the dictator, who then act in the name of the people. The most egalitarian society of the 20th century was Mao’s China. And that regime murdered more of its own than Lenin and Stalin managed to do.   Inequality is the natural concomitant of freedom.”

“… as God-given talents are unequally distributed, home environments of children are unequal, and individuals differ in the drive to succeed, free societies, where rewards of fame and fortune accrue to the best and brightest, must invariably become unequal societies.
In the 19th and 20th centuries, no nation achieved greater prosperity for working men and women than the United States, where all were born free, but equal only in constitutional rights.
Yet, though inequalities of income and wealth have endured through the history of this republic, each generation lived better and longer than the one that came before.
That was the America we grew up in. As long as life for the working and middle classes was improving, who cared if the rich were getting richer?

Todays new inequality is due to several factors:   One is a shift from manufacturing as the principal source of wealth to banking and finance. A second is the movement of U.S. production abroad.   This has eliminated millions of high-paying jobs while enriching the executives and shareholders of the companies that cut the cost of production by relocating overseas.
With globalization, the interests of corporations — maximizing profit — and the interests of the country… diverged….
Yet, behind the latest crusade against inequality lie motives other than any love of the poor. They are resentment, envy and greed for what the wealthy have, and an insatiable lust for power.

For the only way to equalize riches and rewards in a free society is to capture the power of government, so as to take from those who have, to give to those who have not.

And here is the unvarying argument of the left since Karl Marx: If you give us power, we will take from the rich who have so much and give it to you who have so little. But before we can do that, you must give us power.

This is the equality racket.”

“A half-century after the long hot summers of the 1960s and two decades after the worst riot in U.S. history since the New York draft riots of 1863 — the Los Angeles riot of 1992, in which blacks and Hispanics attacked Koreans and whites — the “next time” may have arrived.

In Europe, the harbinger of the new century came a half-decade ago when North African youths in the Paris banlieues went on a days-long rampage of firebombing cars and attacking police and firemen, many of whom drove off and let the fires burn out.

This week, it was London’s turn. And when the fires burn out, we shall hear anew the old liberal litany about poverty, despair, inequality and unemployment, the excuses that long ago ceased to persuade.

For poverty existed in far greater measure in the Depression. Yet our parents and grandparents did not form mobs to burn, beat and loot.

The West is in decline because the character of its people is in decline. In Europe, Christianity is dead. The moral code it gave men to live righteously is regarded with mockery. The London riots were the work of moral barbarians with no loyalty to the people in whose midst they live and no love for the society to which they give nothing, only take.

In America, millions of fatherless young seek out in gangs the familial ties they never knew. Those gangs are now almost always formed on the basis of ethnicity or race.

What were the British thinking when they threw open their doors to mass immigration from the Third World?

Over centuries, they had failed to assimilate a few million Irish, who were European Christians. So, having failed to assimilate the Irish, they decided to invite in millions of Hindus and Muslims from South Asia, Arabs from the Middle East, Africans from the sub-Sahara, black folks from the Caribbean.

But with no common faith or culture to hold the nation together, Britain is coming apart. Multiculturalism has “utterly failed,” said Germany’s Angela Merkel, only to be echoed by Nicolas Sarkozy and David Cameron.

Is multiculturalism a success here? Or does the sudden eruption of flash mobs suggest that the curtain has begun to be pulled back on diversity’s dark side here in America?”

Sen John Kerry’s (D-Mass) finger pointing at the Tea Party for blame is ridiculous. They are the only movemt really seeking to rein in debt and deficit and restore fiscal sanity to our Republic.  The Tea Party wing of the GOP would agree to cutting the clutter from the tax code w/ overall cuts to the tax rates, and they will leave no sacred cows to cut the deficit and balance the budget.  Balanced budgets are the only remedy to reducing the federal debt now at $14 trillion.

Pat says, in spite of the President  and TreasurySec. Geithner’s rhetoric over S&P shortcomings, the downgrade was  deserved.  The US Dollar has lost 5 to 10 % of its value w/ many internat’l currencies over the last 2 yrs and has lost 30% against the Swiss Franc.  Even former FED chairman Alan Greenspan recently admitted the US can successfully deal w/ the Debt merely by printing more $; this is basically the current policy of the FED under Ben Bernanke.

Printing $ w/o a metal basis causes long-term inflation; that is a basic economic law. It devalues the dollar, and that is the fly in the buttermilk where China is concerned. Red China owns more US debt than anyone else and the devaluing $ makes their debt investmt less attractive over the long haul.  Heaven help us if this crowd in charge gets four more yrs.  This country needs more men like Pat who has proven prescient in so many areas since 1988.

“Since Bush I , we have intervened in Panama, Kuwait, Iraq, somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Serbia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Libya.  Had Sens. John McCain and Joe Lieberman gotten their way, we would have been fighting  Russians in georgia and bombing Iran.

Add up all those we have killed, wounded, widowed, orphaned or uprooted, and the number runs into the millions.  All these wars have helped mightily to bankrupt us.

Have they made us more secure?”

Reading our local paper this week as the Forsyth County School Board, Forsyth County Commissioners, and the NC State Legislature get down to business framing the next budget, it becomes clear these politicians still remain blind to the reality of the economic crisis before us.  Many of the politicians and the good folks, concerned citizens, showing up for the public discussions are still relying on the “tooth fairy” to magically continue leaving the money for their interests under the pillow clandestinely as in the past.

The State Govt is overdrawn; the counties are overdrawn; which leaves the school boards overdrawn.  Bush’s bank bailout and Obama’s TARP I & II on the backs of 2 long unfinanced wars have broke the United States’ budgets since 2008.  Where does the road America is on lead to?  Look at Greece, Portugal, Ireland, Italy, and Great Britain to find out.  Cradle to Grave govt welfare programs threaten to destroy these countries and the EU as an entity.

Does Germany really want to underwrite their problems w/o major concessions?  Where does the money come from for the IMF to underwrite their fiscal mess? Can you say Uncle Sam; a large percentage of the IMF support is drawn from American taxpayers.  Remember, the US deficits are already huge. The FED merely printed $800 million last year with the Stimulus Pkg.

The bottom line is this:  No one could run a household like this… no one could run a business like this…. and the days of running a nation like this are eventually numbered and the bill of incremental socialism comes due.  It didnt work in Soviet Russia or Eastern Europe; not in Red China nor Vietnam; hasnt worked in Cuba nor Zimbabwe.  Marxism is a failed system.

“Root Canal Politics”–  drastic cuts in spending w/ the associate pain involved is the only way to a brighter future.  More to come on the solutions…

       Pat Buchanan wrote last week, “Other countries that rely on nuclear power, Japan and South Korea, surely have the capability to produce an explosive device.  They have preferred life without nuclear weapons.  Will Iran also be content with this, knowing that if it explodes a device, the Saudis, Egyptians and Turks will follow, that Israel would put a hair trigger on its nuclear arsenal, that the United States would retaliate massively against Iran if any nuclear weapon were detonated by Islamic terrorists on American soil?”      

        Buchanan continues, “The sanctions road appears headed for dead end, or war.  As one steps back and looks at a decade of U.S. intervention and war in the Middle East, what has it all availed us?”  Economic sanctions have not seemed to faze Iran; and the West should remember the educated middle class of the ayatollah-dominated nation. They have not gotten over the tainted elections earlier this year that kept Ahmadinejad in office.  There is nothing like war to unite a country.

While American forces have overthrown Saddam Hussein, “the Shia who now run the country are moving away from us, and closer to Iran”, as we look to draw down our forces there.  Will Iraq remain quasi-democratic and pro-West? Afghanistan, after eight years, remains untamed and fraught with danger.  The Karzai government controls little more than the Kabul area.  Tribal leaders reign in the mountinous country.  The Taliban remain a force to be reckoned with.  If NATO pulls out and allows the Taliban to regain power, it will create a vacuum Al-Quaida will be glad to fill.

Sanctions escalation risks taking the US toward yet another war in the Middle East.  Do we have to play this game again?  Would another MAD policy work with Iran?  Can the mullahs understand blunt language?  Support Iranian pro-reformists and announce a policy of Assured Destruction if the mullahs use nuclear weapons against the West or Israel.  Do not trust the UN to get anything done; but, continue to pressure NATO states to deal with the nukes program.  Allow Israel the opportunity to defend itself without issuing a blank check on a pre-emptive strike.  The US cannot forsake its traditional relationship with Israel.  Can MAD work with a group of fundamentalist Islamic zealots who believe in an end-time prophetic battle  with the infidel West? No choice is easy.

The tremendous deficit begun by the Bush administration, compounded by Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson’s TARP in September, is being dwarfed by President Obama’s current budget.  It is not being paid for by tax revenue, but must be covered through foreign borrowing and new Fed printing of money.  Buchanan continues:

“[Obama] wants a cap-and-trade systemm to deal with a global-warming of climate-change crisis many scientists believe is a hoax.  He is going to provide health care for all, including immigrants… He is going to plunge scores of billions more into education, though education has eaten up the wealth of an empire, as SAT scores sink further and further below the apogee of 1964, before LBJ and the feds barged in….  He is going to ensure every kid gets a college education.  He is going to drop half of all wage-earners off the tax roll, whole the top 2 percent, who already pay 40 percent of all income taxes, are forced to cough up more….

By daring Republicans to fight on the issue of a $1.75 trillion deficit, Obama has liberated the GOP from any obligation to him.  He has come out of the closet as a radical liberal spoiling for a fight over an agenda of radical change.   Sooner than any might have thought, we ahve clarity.”