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From Townhall:
Obama’s Rhetoric
By Thomas Sowell
July 19, 2012
Barack Obama’s great rhetorical gifts include the ability to make the absurd sound not only plausible, but inspiring and profound.
His latest verbal triumph was to say on July 13th, “if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own.” As an example, “Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”
Let’s stop and think, even though the whole purpose of much political rhetoric is to keep us from thinking, and stir our emotions instead.
Even if we were to assume, just for the sake of argument, that 90 percent of what a successful person has achieved was due to the government, what follows from that? That politicians will make better decisions than individual citizens, that politicians will spend the wealth of the country better than those who created it? That doesn’t follow logically — and certainly not empirically.
Does anyone doubt that most people owe a lot to the parents who raised them? But what follows from that? That they should never become adults who make their own decisions?
The whole point of the collectivist mindset is to concentrate power in the hands of the collectivists — which is to say, to take away our freedom. They do this in stages, starting with some group that others envy or resent — Jews in Nazi Germany, capitalists in the Soviet Union, foreign investors in Third World countries that confiscate their investments and call this theft “nationalization.”
Freedom is seldom destroyed all at once. More often it is eroded, bit by bit, until it is gone. This can happen so gradually that there is no sudden change that would alert people to the danger. By the time everybody realizes what has happened, it can be too late, because their freedom is gone.
All the high-flown talk about how people who are successful in business should “give back” to the community that created the things that facilitated their success is, again, something that sounds plausible to people who do not stop and think through what is being said. After years of dumbed-down education, that apparently includes a lot of people.
Take Obama’s example of the business that benefits from being able to ship their products on roads that the government built. How does that create a need to “give back”?
Did the taxpayers, including business taxpayers, not pay for that road when it was built? Why should they have to pay for it twice?
What about the workers that businesses hire, whose education is usually created in government-financed schools? The government doesn’t have any wealth of its own, except what it takes from taxpayers, whether individuals or businesses. They have already paid for that education. It is not a gift that they have to “give back” by letting politicians take more of their money and freedom.
When businesses hire highly educated people, such as chemists or engineers, competition in the labor market forces them to pay higher salaries for people with longer years of valuable education. That education is not a government gift to the employers. It is paid for while it is being created in schools and universities, and it is paid for in higher salaries when highly educated people are hired.
One of the tricks of professional magicians is to distract the audience’s attention from what they are doing while they are creating an illusion of magic. Pious talk about “giving back” distracts our attention from the cold fact that politicians are taking away more and more of our money and our freedom.
Even the envy that politicians stir up against “the rich” is highly focussed on those particular high income-earners whose decisions the politicians want to take over. Others in sports or entertainment can make far more money than the highest paid corporate executive, but there is no way that politicians can take over the roles of Roger Federer or Oprah Winfrey, so highly paid sports stars or entertainers are never accused of “greed.”
If we are so easily distracted by self-serving political rhetoric, we are not only going to see our money, but our freedom, increasingly taken away from us by slick-talking politicians, including our current slick-talker-in-chief in the White House.
SOURCE
**Written by Thomas Sowell**
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“Collective salvation”…..No one is saved unless we ALL are saved (collectivism)
Collectivism is any philosophic, political, economic or social outlook that emphasizes the interdependence of every human in some collective group and the priority of group goals over individual goals. Collectivists usually focus on community, society or nation.
Collectivism has been widely used to refer to a number of different political and economic philosophies, ranging from communalism and democracy to totalitariannationalism.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collectivism
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In OBAMA’s own words here:
Barack Obama on Collective Salvation
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And HERE:
Obama Collective Salvation
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Statism Needs Division and Discontent to Push Their Progressive Agenda
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Marxist “Humanism”: Putting “ethics”and”empathy” in the Message
Excerpt:
Marxist-Humanism defines itself in opposition to “objectivist” tendencies in social theory, reflected in orthodox interpretations of “historical materialism” (See for example Stalin’s Dialectical and Historical Materialism, 1938), in which the agent of history is not human beings, but either abstract entities such as “laws of history” or inanimate entities such as “means of production.”
Marxist humanists therefore emphasise human agency and subjectivity, as against structuralist interpretations of social theory, as, for example, espoused by Louis Althusser, and place greater emphasis on ethical rather than social-theoretical problems of Marxism.
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The Individual and the Community by Tibor R. Machan Published in The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty – September 1991.
“Communitarians wish to place community and individual on a collision course, saying there is some kind of balance that is needed between the rights of individuals and the rights of the community. But if we consider that ‘community’ means simply a lot of other people than oneself, this makes for majority rule. And if we consider that such other people usually leave it to a few who will speak out in their behalf, we will have a few community representatives dictating to the rest of us what we must do and what our ‘responsibilities’ are.“
The New Democrats are Third Way communitarians. Here’s the list of New Dems in American politics.
President Bill Clinton embraced Communitarian values and was elected on a Communitarian platform (although few Americans know this about him). The New Covenant: Responsibility and Rebuilding the American Community, Remarks to Students at Georgetown University by Governor Bill Clinton on October 23, 1991.
The Third Way enjoys favor from both parties. (This partly explains why Democrats like Hilary Clinton and John Kerry support exporting violent overthrowing of foreign governments, and Bush and leading Right Wing Republicans support formerly Leftist programs like Community Service Laws and Faith-Based Initiatives. Senator Bayh’s “new” Third Way bipartisan group includes Dem and Republican Senators, and it expands daily. Most American Mayors have embraced Communitarian values. We will experience more confusion as to what each party represents as American voters get closer to the next election, and to the final global solution.)
Clinton-Gore Rebuilding Communities
Bush Rebuilding Communities
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Excerpted from:
PDS Progressive/Liberal Delusional Syndrome
At a Congressional Black Caucus event in Miami, Indiana Democratic Rep. Andre Carson used some incendiary words to describe what he believes is the Tea Party’s stance on African Americans.
Carson’s comments, first exposed by The Blaze, betrayed the congressman’s belief that Tea Partiers on Capitol Hill want to see African Americans “hanging on a tree.” Carson’s comments invoked the comparison of racist Jim Crow laws to current Tea Party actions:
“[Tea Partiers would] love to see us as second-class citizens…some of them in Congress right now of this tea party movement would love to see you and me…hanging on a tree.”
And now, for the first time, Rep. Carson is personally defending his remarks. A spokesman had earlier reaffirmed the Congressman’s comments.
Carson tells CNN, “I stand on the truth of what I spoke.”
Is this guy for real, or did he miss history is school? It was Democrats/Progressives who passed the Jim Crow Laws, it was Democrats who formed the KKK, lynching Blacks, it was Democrats who fought to keep Slavery, it was Democrats who segregated the Military, it was Democrats who wrote the labor laws to keep blacks out of the workforce, it was LBJ who first threatened to filibuster the Civil Rights Laws in the Senate he later signed as President, Martin Luther King was a conservative Republican, and I believe he would have been a tea party member if he were alive today. Margaret Sanger, formed Planned Parenthood as part of the Eugenics movement, a movement that believed Blacks were second class humans, and should be removed from the gene pool, and PP, was to be the instrument to get them to volunteer to abort their children. All the racism in this nation must be laid at the feet of the Democratic Party and Progressive Ideology, a group who is using the black man as a pawn in their socialist power game.
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“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy,always followed by a dictatorship.”
― Alexis de Tocqueville
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Teaparty Washington,D.C. 9-12-09
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