Dem and Demmer: A Lesson
in Liberal Economics
Commentary by Greg Lewis / NewMediaJournal.US
December 4, 2006
If we had any questions about Democrats'
easing up on their anti-Bush, anti-war, anti-capitalism legislative agenda,
they were answered when Nancy Pelosi went to the mat for her hard-left
homeboy, John Murtha (D-PA).
In a play that left many Washington
veterans, including Robert Novak, scratching their heads, Pelosi threw
in with Murtha against Steny Hoyer (D-MD), the popular (and relatively
moderate) favorite for second-in-command in the House.
When the smoke cleared, Pelosi's candidate had been trounced by a two-to-one
margin (give or take), and the Speaker-elect had taken an early a hit
to her ability to hold together what promises to be a feisty, not to say
recalcitrant, Democrat coalition.
As Novak correctly analyzed it before
the House vote, Pelosi had put herself in a lose-lose situation. If her
candidate, Murtha, had won, her promise to preside over an open and ethically
high-minded legislative session would have gone in the dumper, given that
Murtha's ethical scrapes were so public and so egregious, albeit the worst
he suffered was being named an unindicted co-conspirator in the Abscam
scandal a quarter century ago. (Indeed, so unavoidable was the airing
of Murtha's dirty laundry that even the Mainstream Media couldn't avoid
addressing it.)
Murtha is the Emperor of the Earmark,
having become a virtual broker of congressional pork. He's the guy you
go to when you need several million dollars worth of earmarked (that is,
clandestine and unnaccounted-for federally-funded) projects for your district,
because he (Murtha) will trade your political marker against that of another
Congressperson who owes him for similar budgetary beneficence.
It's quite amazing that liberals,
while turning a blind eye toward Murtha's covert pork-trading, seem driven
to denigrate the legitimate, transparent, and self-governing market that
has developed among those involved to trade their "environmental
credits" with each other and thus achieve compliance with Federally
mandated carbon emissions levels.
To explain: American corporations
and other entities trade their "carbon credits" (and debits)
with one another to avoid having to make expensive and often unnecessary
changes to their manufacturing processes in order to meet Federal emissions
standards.
Among those who benefit from this
market in pollution credits are farmers. By using planting methods that
do not require tilling the soil (which releases "excessive"
carbon into the atmosphere), farmers can accrue "carbon credits."
They can then trade these credits for cash on what amounts to an "environmental
exchange" that has grown up in response to the legislation.
Farmers benefit, corporations (who
purchase the carbon credits and thus defray their companies' carbon deficits)
benefit, and the whole situation is managed in the most efficient way,
not to mention the way least harmful to the west's wonderful capitalist
market system.
Dems deplore the practice of trading
such chits where "the environment" is concerned, but they're
more than willing to tacitly approve of a similar practice by looking
the other way when it involves a fellow liberal Democrat divvying up taxpayer
dollars and "redistributing" them in what is certainly one of
the most covert congressional processes practiced today. It's hardly a
surprise that Murtha called Pelosi's proposed ethical reforms, which might
have addressed earmarks, "crap."
Indeed, Democrats (read "new
age socialists") are all for a Marxian "redistribution of wealth"
as long as they're the ones doing the redistributing. If they, and by
extension an increasingly powerful central government which they seek
to control, can determine whose wealth gets redistributed and who it gets
redistributed to, they're going to be very happy, thank you.
It's the free market they deplore,
possibly because they've managed to remain collectively ignorant of how
the capitalist market system works. Since there seems not to be a single
Congressional Democrat who has progressed beyond "Socialist Economics
101," I guess it's understandable that they continue to promote economic
policies that have almost a century-old history of failure, and on a global
scale.
The next managed economy that succeeds
will be the first, and - make no mistake about it - a managed economy
is what Dems are working toward.
When liberals demand restricting
emissions in manufacturing processes to certain levels, and the market
responds by presenting them with a market-driven process that satisfies
the letter of the law, they gnash their teeth and cry, "Foul!"
That's because it's not, in this
case, the environment that really matters to leftists. What matters to
them is power, because with power comes the ability to advance their anti-capitalist,
pro-government agenda.
This can best be done by, as in the
case of the propagation of pork, accruing power and exercising it. As
long as it's one of their own who's the arbiter of the redistribution
of taxpayer money, they're happy.
But what we're really witnessing
here is not simply an internal Democrat Party squabble over a specific
position. What we're privy to is nothing less than a potentially seismic
struggle for political relevance.
The question that needs to be asked
is, "What can we take away from this early struggle for political
relevance within the Democrat Party?"
The first thing that occurs to me
is that, despite the fact that Democrats gained their recent electoral
victory by accepting the fact that the road to political power in America
in the 21st century involves acknowledging "centrists," Dems
are nonetheless willing to ignore the centrist message their victory has
seemed to be sending and to interpret it as a victory for leftists.
How else can we comprehend Pelosi's
politically ill-advised support of John Murtha?
The House-Speaker-elect has, in several
interviews, asserted that Dems are in favor of bi-partisanship, that they
support the idea that the party that controls both the House and the Senate
is amenable to negotiation with the Executive. Pelosi has seemed to intimate
that the Democrat Party is willing to temper its heretofore rabid anti-Bush,
anti-Republican, anti-conservative, anti-capitalist positions.
That, of course, is laughable. The
fact remains that nothing Pelosi has done since the election would indicate
that Dems are in a conciliatory frame of mind.
We have only to take a look at the
House Committee Chairmen who are poised to assume power in the wake of
the Democrat electoral victory to understand that Democrats are interpreting
their electoral wins as a leftist ideological mandate.
From Charles Rangel to John Conyers
to Alcee Hastings (for God's sake! Alcee Hastings!?), the ranking House
Democrats are, across the board, old-time hard-line leftists, not to mention,
at least in Hastings' case, ethically challenged.
Conyers has, for instance, promised
to bring impeachment charges against President Bush, and nothing he has
said since the recent Democrat electoral triumph would indicate that he
has changed his position.
Never mind that Charley Rangel, savvy,
hard-line, race-baiting leftist that he is, nonetheless managed to commit
a gaffe worthy of a political novice when he declared, "Mississippi
gets more than their fair share back in federal money, but who the hell
wants to live in Mississippi?"
And never mind that Rangel did a
startling about-face regarding his position on the military draft when
he recently spoke out in favor of reestablishing just such a process.
If nothing else, Rangel's recent
ill-advised utterances, though they arguably reveal Democrats' true attitudes
toward their professed constituency, serve to demonstrate that what you
get with Dems is not necessarily what they've promised, but rather what
they think you should get based on their implementation of a leftist agenda
that will dictate what you deserve.
Notwithstanding Democrats' indirect
attacks on the economic front, the American economy today represents by
almost all accounts the most robust and successful economy in the history
of the world.
For instance, our economy is employing
a greater percentage of its citizens, and at higher wages, than ever before
in its history. And the U.S. economy has, over the past six years (excluding
the 9/11 anomaly) grown steadily, month-by-month, quarter-by-quarter,
at an annual rate of between 3% and 4%, an historically exceptional performance.
Democrats' whining that "average"
wages have not kept pace with the economy's general growth rate is no
more than their failing to understand that, as more and more people take
jobs, those people tend to enter into the job market at the low end of
the pay scale. Thus, they tend to dampen the "average" wage
rate. The fact is that the relative "stagnation" of the average
wage rate actually is an indicator that more and more Americans are finding
work, a positive economic indicator.
The truth is that the very fact that
so many "new" people are finding employment, and that their
employment on a broad scale has had the effect of causing the average
wage rate to remain relatively stagnant, is an indicator of the strength
of our economy, and not the opposite. In a powerful growth economy such
as ours, "average" wages are at best a lagging indicator.
When large numbers of people are
entering the job market at relatively low wage rates (it's at these lower
rates that job growth typically occurs), this represents a positive economic
indicator, even if the large number of new low-paying job-holders tends
to suppress the average wage rate.
Which is to say that the so-called
"stagnation" of the "average wage rate" that Democrats
typically cite as an indication that that the economy is in trouble is
in fact precisely the opposite.
Our economy has an extraordinarily
high employment rate, which is reflected in our very low unemployment
rate. Our 4.4% unemployment rate should be compared with the unemployment
rates of such putative managed economies as those of France (greater than
9%) and Germany (greater than 10%), both of which show stagnating, even
negative, growth.
There is no reputable economic index
that can be cited to support a position that America's economy is not
flourishing.
Indeed, according to even such a
politically and ethically compromised body as the United Nations in the
report accompanying its recently released "Human Development Data,"
in 2004 more than 63 countries had an economic index score greater than
0.800. (The data supporting this report typically lags by two years.)
This compares to only 20 countries which achieved such an economic index
score in 1975.
The report finds that extreme poverty
on a national scale is extremely rare outside the continent of Africa.
The kicker is that the report ascribes the broad increases in living standard
as measured by economic performance to - are you ready for this? - the
spread of capitalist democracy.
According to the report, where capitalist
democracies are established, economic success and significant improvements
in standard of living follow.
One hopes that newly-elected U.S.
Democrat legislators are at least as informed as the UN folks who put
together the referenced report. One further hopes that the strongly Democrat
41-member-strong contingent of new Federal legislators will have the good
sense to recognize that the aging socialist leadership Nancy Pelosi and
Chuck Schumer are promoting is not in their own best interests, let alone
those of the American citizens they've been elected to represent.
It's really quite simple: Where capitalist
democracies flourish, people's standards of living, along with the degree
of their personal and economic and political freedom, all rise. Across
the board. No-brainer. 100% positive correlation.
Where managed economies of any stripe
persist, these universally cherished aims of life on earth are initially
and immediately constrained, then suppressed, then extinguished.
In this context, it will be instructive,
to watch as Democrats work to implement their anti-capitalist (and therefore
anti-freedom) agenda in the coming Congresses.
I have great faith that the American people will quickly see through Democrats'
transparent leftist ploys to transform America from the Christian-capitalist
wellspring of personal and economic and spiritual freedom it represents
in the world today to some sniveling, politically correct shadow of what
it must continue to be if western democracy itself is to survive.
My sense is that the American people
will quickly sniff out these Democrat pretenders to political power and
the socialist agenda they represent, and that, further, the American people
will resoundingly reject, in the 2008 elections, what they will by then
have come to realize is the anti-capitalist, anti-spiritualist, anti-individual-freedom
Democrat agenda.
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