Obama waved the bloody flag of class warfare in his press conference this past week, though it’s not clear whether he was effective since he went out of his way to attack a provision for corporate jets that was part of his failed stimulus bill.
In any event, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida was not impressed. His speech on the Senate floor was an excellent response to Obama’s politically motivated, soak-the-rich screed. (h/t: Ed Morrissey)
Being a leader involves a lot more than giving a good speech, to be sure, but Rubio has been consistently impressive in his six months if office. He’s strongly defended Medicare reform and is a leader in the fight against an illegal IRS scheme to force American banks to enforce foreign tax law.
Let’s hope he doesn’t “grow in office” and decide that Washington is a hot tub rather than a cesspool.
And let’s hope America doesn’t become more like Europe, with bigger government, more dependency, and a hostile attitude about wealth creation and capitalism. Those are some of the concerns that motivated my video on the dangers of class warfare.
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The people who support class warfare including Obama need to remind themselves that it’s the capitalist society which produced the largest middle class even when it produced some super rich people. In socialist or communist societies, there are a few well connected, rich, and privileged people and a mostly poor population. It is a lot of struggle to move yourself up the ladder in socialist, communist, feudalist or other systems in history, which is not so in a free and capitalist society even if it produces some very super rich (this seems like a pain to some people even money is earned honestly!) and leaves the rest of them in ‘middle class’.
It is unbelievable that Obama acknowledged that higher taxes won’t earn higher revenues for state but it’s only for ‘fairness’. He acknowledged backtracking on something he had been harping all along. He must be thinking he is very clever not to let that so obvious by quipping ‘for the purpose of fairness’. He does not know that reality cannot be twisted by clever words and that can easily be seen no matter how you say it.
Rubio pointed out that “it could be one of the two things, either Obama doesn’t truly understand the nature of problem that we face” or “he has decided it’s a political issue not a policy one.”
This is what is surprising, it is expected of common people who do not understand economy to amateurishly argue about class inequity but not from someone who is a president of a developed country.
I agree with everything he said here, and will give credit where it’s due. I only wish his support of Liberty included more than just the economic side.
Its just sad that most people don’t understand simple economics low flat tax gives a better life for all of us.
I’m currently from a low income family but I don’t think taxing the rich helps in anyway. individual responsibility is not popular with voters anymore.
I am one of Rubio’s constituents. He lost my support when I emailed him, urging him to vote against renewing the USA PATRIOT Act, and he responded with an email expounding the benefits of the act and stating his belief in the need for it to ensure America’s “security”. Next election, he has lost my vote!
The problem with conservatives, is that we tend to see the best in our citizens even to the point of referring to a particular tax policy of the current administration in Washington as being “misguided”. We tend to believe that if we just explain our position well enough, that the administration will come to its senses and see the error in their “misguided” ways. The current administration is, in fact, being GUIDED by an ideology of class warfare: The proletariat versus the bourgeoisie. Advisers to this administration have come directly from the radical movement of the 1960’s, or from fellow travelers of this ideology. One only has to look at Van Jones, the former so-called ‘Green Jobs Czar’ as an example of this ideology. As late as 2005, Jones was calling himself a ‘revolutionary’ and advised that, “. . .I’ll fight anybody if it will push our issues forward…. I’m willing to forgo the cheap satisfaction of the radical pose for the deep satisfaction of radical ends.” (source, discoverthenetworks.org) The ‘brain trust’ of this administration is the Center for American Progress. According to Bloomberg.com, CAP “has become … an intellectual wellspring for Democratic policy proposals, including many that are shaping the agenda of the … Obama administration.” (source, discoverthenetworks.org) One only has to compare the recommendations and agenda of the CAP and its satellite groups with the actions of this administration to see the synergy.
The issues that are before us are NOT economic; they are political and the American people as a group are responsible for the situation that we currently find ourselves in. While the problems that have befallen our nation are the result of many years of ‘looking the other way’ as these groups have been placing their vision into place by piecemeal, the current administration has taken these pieces and are currently fitting them together to complete this massive, new puzzle. One has to wonder what the subject of this completed puzzle will reveal? There can be no compromise between the economies of Capitalism and Socialism, as they are incompatible with each other. One system must end, for the other to survive. Capitalist economies are run by people; Socialist economies are run by governments. I would much rather have the freedom to personally fail in a free market, than to suffer in the tyrannical chains of the State.
“If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude than the animated contest of freedom, go from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains sit lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen!” – Samuel Adams, American Founding Father
According to “New York Times” columnist Ross Douthat:
“[Marco] Rubio is the great neoconservative hope, the champion of a foreign policy that boldly goes abroad in search of monsters to destroy… His maiden Senate speech was a paean to national greatness, whose peroration invoked John F. Kennedy and insisted that America remain the ‘watchman on the wall of world freedom.”
Maintaining a pax-americana in the world takes a lot of money; a commodity that we don’t have in abundance. Rubio may talk the talk when it applies to domestic conservative issues, but his enthusiastic embrace of the neoconservative foreign policy line should be a turn-off for libertarians.