America's Mobocracy

Guest Commentary by Edward Cline:

There are three overlooked or un-emphasized facets of the Obama administration and Congress’s breathless rush to seize everything in the country that is not nailed down -- health care, car production, the used or “clunker” car market, executive pay -- the list may prove to be endless, and there may be nothing that is not nailed down exempt from their avarice. These facets should be the principal foci of critics to the point of obsession.

A minor facet of the Obama administration itself is the Chicago “gangster government” character of his White House staff and his cabinet and departmental appointees. Not all of his appointees are from Chicago. They just have that odor about them, of professional political parasites who have scurried in and out of sight and up and down the totem pole of Washington politics over the years as their chosen career choices, to a soul advancing or pimping for collectivism, most of them never having worked a productive day in their lives. Heading the list is chief-of-staff Rahm Emanuel, who has all the charm and savvy of Meyer Lansky. (One can legitimately wonder if the grandfather of “community organizing,” Saul Alinsky, and Lansky traded pointers on political activism. They were Chicago contemporaries.)

The President and his wife, Michelle, of course, live like royalty and behave like it. There are the appointed thirty-two “czars” lording it over the American economy, and then there are Michelle’s twenty-two staffers who aid her in her “social” life, all of whose salaries are paid by taxpayers -- not all of them in Chicago.

The first major facet is that, if there is a crisis in any realm over which the government seeks to expand its power to control, the problem can be traced to government controls in the first place. The minuscule, hardly noticeable controls of yesteryear, when men wore handlebar moustaches and labored to write laws in un-air-conditioned chambers, have grown into a forest of lacerating rose bushes without the benefit of roses. This facet has been admirably dwelt on by better analysts than me, but it has not been emphasized by Tea Party organizers or critics to the level it deserves. It does no good to be preoccupied by cost analyses and projected debt and the like, if they are not accompanied by the moral argument. After all, if mere facts had the power to persuade the minds of our governing elite, why are they so immune to and proof against those facts?

If emails, faxes, hand-written letters, unruly townhall meetings, and demonstrations outside of legislators’ offices and the like are beginning to cause some Senators and Congressmen to think twice about the feasibility of their grandiose plans to transform the country from a republic of free individuals to a highly policed and costly hospital regime, forcing them to acknowledge the role of force and fiat law for the “public good” and how that presumptive power has exacerbated existing problems or has simply created them out of whole cloth, ought to underscore the unlikelihood that if they vote for the hospital regime in any form, they in turn will be voted out of office. Our elitist cadre will be obliged to contemplate being forced to make a living in the private sector which they once presumed to “manage,” but which their actions have helped to tie into several Gordian knots.

The second facet is that when the White House and Congress prescribe socialism (a.k.a. “progressivism”) and legislate to that end, they do it for free. It costs them nothing. They do it with taxpayer money. And, whatever destruction they cause, they are indemnified from the consequences. Ted Kennedy will die without ever having been punished for his crimes. Nancy Pelosi and Barbara Boxer and Henry Waxman will return to California and live the high life on a pension and enjoy health care packages few productive persons could ever afford. Barney Frank and Bernard Bernanke will fade into comfortable retirements and, like Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush, embark on lucrative speaking careers. Barack and Michelle will traipse back to their Chicago mansion on a pension, as well, and begin to solicit donations for the Obama Presidential Library.

This will ever be a conflict between the “governed” and the government for as long as fiat powers are sanctioned or tolerated by the electorate. It is an unfair contest between the government and the electorate. Those who advocate and pass laws destructive of freedom, property, happiness and the ownership of one’s life, work on the money extorted from those who are the subjects or targets of the destructive law. It is time that the thinking electorate woke up to this rigged game and forced the culprits to acknowledge the fact, as well. Think of it: It cost legislators nothing to regulate or ruin your life. You, on the other hand, must, with countless others, invest time, effort, and money in opposing their plans, besides paying their salaries and getting the check for all their fringe benefits, including first-class health care. And you invest your time, effort and money with no guarantee that it will accomplish anything. Ayn Rand called it the “sanction of the victim.” General Patton might liken it to supplying Nazi artillery and Panzer tanks with ordnance with which to blast advancing American forces.

The culprits should be forced to stammer transparent irrelevancies and more obvious lies, and plot to rush undetected from home to office and back again, to avoid being cornered by the citizenry’s cattle prods and pitchforks. They should be compelled to feel, for once, powerless, redundant and extraneous. They should be forced to feel mean, small and despised beyond redemption and reclamation.

The third facet concerns the motivation behind all the coercive legislation passed, most recently under the reigns of Bush I, Clinton I, Bush II, and now Bush III (a.k.a. Obama). Tea Partiers should make the key connection between “reform” of the health care system (or of “reform” of anything that attracts a Congressman’s attention, for he has nothing else to do in Washington or a state capital or a municipal headquarters but to think up “crises” needing “reform”), and the compulsory nature of such “reform.” Why would politicians bother with “reform” if force were not the key ingredient in the “reform”? There would be no point in their debating “reform” if they did not assume they would have the power to coerce everyone into participating in it. They are not working to extend liberty, but to put fetters on it or to extinguish it altogether. Be warned: Any “compromise” between the Blue Dog Democrats, the Republicans, and the Democrats must by necessity retain the element of coercion, no matter how watered down or conciliatory or “humane” they word the compromise.

Further, the element of coercion or legalized extortion in such legislation should be the main tip-off. Tea Partiers should ask: If the proposed legislation is so efficacious and practical, why, for all the puffery about it being voluntary, would it rely on force? Why would its advocates insist that participation be made mandatory? A secondary tip-off is the fact that those proposing or voting for such legislation notably ensure that they are exempt from all its provisions. Organizers should ask themselves: If this idea is so good, why do Congressmen keep their distance from it? Why do they not want to take part in what they wish to force everyone else to participate in? Is there something so seriously wrong with it that they no more would want to buy it than they would a used car from Richard Nixon?

Yes. There is something wrong with it. The element of force guarantees its impracticality and its character as a moral and economic fraud -- just as robbing a bank or a 7-11 is immoral and an impractical way to “make a living.” Waxman, Pelosi, Dodd, Obama, Frank and the rest of the “progressive” crew, all know this. They are not idiots. The only village idiots party to the fraud are those members of the news media who shill for the plan with looks of urgency -- an urgency that does not dwell on the insidiously evil aspects of the plan, chief among which are its compulsory provisions.

Crossposted at The Dougout