Clinton or Trump? It’s your choice. Socialism or fascism.
Take a look at Venezuela. Or Cuba. Or North Korea. If Clinton has her way, that’s the direction in which America will continue to head. Those are socialist regimes. They are also impoverished, bankrupt regimes in which people are suffering chronic economic hardships and perpetual chaos and crises.
The pure idea of socialism is when the government owns everything and everyone works for the government. But that pure socialist paradigm has always been inherently defective because in order to get the money to pay its expenses, including salaries, government must first take the money from people who have it. That means people who have produced wealth in the private sector. The government takes their money, through taxation, and funds its expenses.
Thus, if government owns everything and if everyone works for the government, there is no one in the private sector to tax or loot. That necessarily means mass starvation for everyone.
Therefore, it has always been necessary for socialist regimes to leave in place a certain amount of private sector activity to plunder and loot through taxation.
The ideal, of course, is when the private sector is large and booming and paying lots of taxes, which then enables the government to expand its services and activities.
The problem that inevitably arises, however, is that in a welfare-warfare state, the government sector inevitably expands at a higher rate than the private sector. That means ever increasing debt and taxation, a burden that continues to fall heavily on the private sector. Ultimately, the burden becomes so large that the private sector cannot sustain it anymore and the entire system starts to implode, with more and more people going on the dole and more and more businesses going out of business.
That’s what is now happening in the United States.
The country began with a free-enterprise system, one that lasted more than a century. No income tax. No Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, farm subsidies, education grants, foreign aid, DEA, ICE, Pentagon, CIA, or NSA, or most of the other agencies and departments that now characterize the federal government.
The result was a massive accumulation of savings and capital, which made the American people the most productive and prosperous in history. And the most charitable too.
Then the turn came in the 20th century, with the adoption of the welfare-warfare state that now characterizes the federal government. In the early years and decades, it was fun for the socialists and military interventionists to adopt and expand their welfare-warfare state programs. That’s because there was a tremendous amount of private-sector wealth to seize and redistribute.
As the decades went on, the welfare-warfare state continued to expand. For a while, the private sector could produce enough wealth to keep up, but finally the welfare-warfare state expenses became too large for the private sector to sustain.
That’s where we are today. Socialists keep hoping that the private sector will “recover” and that people in the private sector will work harder to produce enough wealth to sustain the out-of-control spending and debt that now characterizes the welfare-warfare state way of life.
But it’s not going to happen. The welfare-warfare state burden is now too large, and no one — repeat no one — who is on the dole is willing to support the cancellation of his particular program. Certainly, not the warfare establishment, which keeps inciting crises around the world to show people how necessary it is to their safety and security. Not the Social Security, Medicare, and other welfare recipients, who are convinced that they would never survive without their dole. And not the DEA, SEC, Homeland Security, and other regulatory agencies, which are convinced they are essential to America’s safety and security.
No one is willing to see his particular largess program cancelled, which means the out-of-control spending and debt will continue. At the same time, the private sector is stymied, unable to break out of the ever-increasing burden of the welfare-warfare state.
What does Clinton want to do? She wants to expand the welfare-warfare state. She wants more Social Security, more Medicare, more subsidies, more bombings, more troops, and more of everything else that the welfare-warfare state provides.
At the same time, she’s convinced that by putting her husband Bill in charge of the economy, he’ll make the private sector produce enough wealth that happy days will be here again.
It’s not going to happen. Things are only going to get worse.
If you want to get a good idea of where Trump will take America, just consider Benito Mussolini’s Italy or, for that matter, Franklin Roosevelt’s 1930’s America. Trump is determined to make America great again, and he’s not going to let anything get in the way of that goal — not Congress, not the judiciary, and certainly not the Constitution.
That was Mussolini’s attitude and it was Roosevelt’s attitude too. (And Hitler’s too.) Faced with the Great Depression, FDR embarked not only on a program of socialism (e.g., Social Security), but also economic fascism, a system that leaves wealth in private hands but ensures that government directs the way it will be put to use. The National Recovery Act comes to mind. So does FDR’s destruction of the gold-coin monetary system that the Constitution established and which had been the official monetary system of the American people for more than 100 years.
When the Supreme Court declared some of Roosevelt’s program unconstitutional, he was outraged that those “nine old men” would interfere with what he knew was best for America. That’s when he proposed to pack the court with his cronies in order to remove that obstacle to getting program adopted.
That’s the way things work with dictatorships, including democratically elected ones. The dictator knows best. He knows how to make the trains run on time. Any interference or opposition must be smashed as unpatriotic, maybe even treasonous.
This is where the welfare-warfare state has brought us — to the point where the two major parties have presented the American people with a choice between socialism and fascism — or actually a combination of both, given that Clinton and Trump, and the Democratic and Republican Parties, all favor the mixed socialist-fascist programs that today characterize America’s welfare-warfare state way of life.
But he fundamental problem facing America is neither Clinton nor Trump but rather the welfare-warfare state way of life that 20th-century Americans adopted. That’s the real poison that is killing our nation. The only antidote to the poison is a restoration of the principles of free enterprise, capital, and limited government on which America was founded.
