Generous With Other People's Money
By Tom Brewton (12/02/08)
Liberal-progressives presume that they can do no wrong, so long as they take other people's money for the benefit of the secular and socialistic welfare state.
Citicorp's Robert Rubin is getting harsh words from investors who ask why he should receive $115 million in annual compensation, while shrugging off any suggestion of personal responsibility for the banking giant's horrendously imprudent investment policies. Mr. Rubin says that he was merely a broad-gauge policy advisor, that problems arose from the policies he supported only because of poor execution by underlings.
In the same vein, liberal-progressives steadfastly maintain that socialist welfare-state policies always fail only because the government didn't spend enough money, long enough.
Like New Jersey governor Jon Corzine, his liberal-progressive, former Goldman Sachs colleague, Mr. Rubin, the Clinton administration's Secretary of the Treasury, apparently believes that liberal-progressives can do no wrong, because they know what is best for you and me. What is best in their judgment is confiscating our earnings and redistributing them to favored special-interest groups in the name of social justice.
Redistributing wealth, in the dogma of the socialist religion, is a step in the direction of eliminating private property ownership. That mythology, elaborated in Jean Jacques Rousseau's Social Contract, instructs us that original sin was the advent of private property, which changed human nature and introduced greed, crime, and warfare to society.
In the Judeo-Christian tradition, original sin was Adam and Eve's eating fruit of the tree of knowledge, seeking to become God's equal in knowledge and power. Christians and religious Jews are schooled to eschew preoccupation with self and to seek ways to help others, while prayerfully acknowledging that all their blessings come, not from themselves or the secular political state, but from God.
In contrast, liberal-progressives like Messrs. Rubin and Corzine assume that they have successfully eaten the fruit of the tree of knowledge (the modern gnosticism of socialism) and are therefore wise and powerful enough to play God here on earth.
Just as in Mr. Rubin's failure to take responsibility for disaster on his watch at Citicorp, liberal-progressive Republicans and Democrat/Socialists repeatedly raise taxes to confiscatory levels, and expand the nanny state with deficit financing, heedless of the destructive effects on public morality and financial stability.
Liberal-progressivism's welfare state encourages self-centered, special-interest greed, evidenced currently in the public's unwillingness to reduce government spending in the face of approaching bankruptcy at state and Federal levels.
Ironically, the Federal Reserve's massive over-expansion of the money supply to finance deficit spending, the be-all and end-all of liberal-progressive policy, is the root cause of the financial system disaster in which Citicorp played a major part. Mr. Rubin, we may suppose, sees no connection between his advocacy of imprudent policies in the Federal government and their fostering greed at Citicorp.
Thomas E. Brewton
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