I had an interesting discussion with Bradley Rees on the Sons of Liberty show the other day. The last two weeks have been interesting to say the least, so we took a few steps back to do our own state of the union assessment.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m astonished that the American people appear to be spreading the blame for the present economic malaise across both Democrats and Republicans, and between the White House and Congress. Of course, the Republicans didn\u2019t manage the debt ceiling negotiations well. After passing the Ryan budget and receiving no counters from the President, they proceeded to develop a watered down proposal on their own to\u2014as Boehner put it\u2014stave off economic catastrophe. As it turned out, investors focused on global economic problems and were not just interested in getting a deal. The S&P downgrade and market tumble demonstrates that people who put their own money on the line are not impressed with 10-year budget plans and special committees. Obama and the Democrats are certainly culpable, but the Republicans lacked the courage to tag them with the majority of the blame for their fiscal irresponsibility, at least since the 2008 election. Apparently, many Americans don\u2019t understand the details and just see this as another case of Washington as usual. This is unfortunate.<\/p>\n
Indeed, the economic logic advanced by John Maynard Keynes has been flawed from the beginning, but even Lord Keynes wanted to balance budgets and save capitalism from what he saw as its fundamental weaknesses. Today\u2019s twisted notion of Keynesianism is even worse, replete with unsustainable deficit spending, heavy central economic planning, and a big dose of class warfare. One might think that a reasonable person would examine the world today and reject this neo-Keynesian mentality outright, but this doesn\u2019t seem to be happening.<\/p>\n
Perhaps we might need to articulate our case more effectively, but there is a fundamental problem we must face. About 50% of Americans don\u2019t pay federal income taxes in the first place, and many in this group have become accustomed to the notion that wealth redistribution is an appropriate function of government. They appear unwilling or unable to consider economic reality if it means entitlement cuts. In other words, the national debt doesn\u2019t matter if you won\u2019t have to pay it back. Obama\u2019s numbers might be trending down, but true conservatives are facing an uphill fight.<\/p>\n
To make things worse, the battle for the Republican presidential nomination is still anybody\u2019s guess and the current frontrunner has been largely quiet about the crisis. But Marxist thinking is on the ropes and can be defeated. The last two weeks should be a solemn reminder that a middle-of-the-road response to Obamanomics is not only bad economic policy, but it also fails to make the clear distinction between philosophies that is essential if we are going to make the kind of advances in 2012 necessary to return to a fiscally sound, Constitutional form of government.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I had an interesting discussion with Bradley Rees on the Sons of Liberty show the other day. The last two weeks have been interesting to say the least, so we took a few steps back to do our own state of the union assessment. I\u2019m astonished that the American people appear to be spreading the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/battle4liberty.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/378"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/battle4liberty.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/battle4liberty.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/battle4liberty.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/battle4liberty.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=378"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/battle4liberty.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/378\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/battle4liberty.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=378"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/battle4liberty.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=378"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/battle4liberty.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=378"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}