But with the hopes of inspiring his audience out of their poverty-stricken ways, Conwell goes on to say  “I say you ought to be rich; you have no right to be poor.”   And he follows that up with:

I think the best thing for me to do is to illustrate this, for if I say you ought to get rich, I ought, at least, to suggest how it is done. We get a prejudice against rich men because of the lies that are told about them. The lies that are told about Mr. Rockefeller because he has two hundred million dollars — so many believe them; yet how false is the representation of that man to the world. How little we can tell what is true nowadays when newspapers try to sell their papers entirely on some sensation!

Much of Conwell’s eleven thousand plus words revolve around the relationships between society’s rich and its poor.  As the self-described “99 percenters” rail against the supposed injustices heaped upon them by the infinitely fortunate 1%, Conwell’s talk is chock full of wisdom that transcends the ages.   In fact, as we shall see, it is almost eery how currently applicable entire sections of the prose are.

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I stand accused of being an an Idealistic Capitalist, to which I plead guilty.

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Or so too many people think, nearly enough for a voting majority that would fulfill de Tocqueville’s prophesy:

“The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money.” — Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Fortunately, to back safely and permanently away from the edge of the cliff, we need only allow for true capitalism to thrive and to replace the crony capitalism that so many people confuse it with. Crony capitalism feeds on greed.   True capitalism and truly free markets, defeat it.

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When reading Paul Krugman’s latest New York Times column, “Medicare Saves Money“, it’s hard to fathom who the bigger fool is – Krugman, his employer, or the readers that keep supporting this junk.   It’s also hard to fathom a more complete demonstration of faulty reasoning.  All this from a Nobel Prize winner no less, and one calling out someone else’s supposedly bad idea, an idea according to Krugman “that’s so bad, so wrongheaded, that you’re almost grateful.”

Professor Krugman, I’m grateful to you.

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Mad Max’s Thunderdome?  “Two men enter!  One man leaves!”   Now you’re talkin’.

C-SPAN might just want to change its revenue model in time to catch the fireworks and/or steel-cage death matches that will start in January when Ron Paul takes over as chair of the House Banking Committee that oversees Ben Bernanke and The Federal Reserve.   This will be political theater that has the potential to top the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858.

But better than the theater will be Paul’s educational opportunity, if he plays his cards right.

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Right of the bat, Rich draws the wrong conclusion in his account of wealthy Republican candidates who collectively spent deep into nine figures trying to get elected.  I say God bless ‘em. At least we have a system that allows such people to try.   Advertising, marketing and communications firms around the country positively love these people, and thousands of employees probably owe their jobs to them.  Indeed, to argue that money doesn’t matter in political campaigns is to argue that the entire advertising industry is a fraud.   However, where Rich says these candidates “tried to buy Senate seats and governor’s mansions”, can we finally agree that that’s simply not possible, and move on?

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“If you were an entrepreneur, or a business owner or manager with the ability to start large new initiatives, perhaps ones requiring large numbers of new employees, in the face of the above legislative uncertainty, would you dare proceed?”

The resulting economic lockup, and the trillions of private capital sitting in fear on the sidelines, has become the story of the day.

Predicting this story was not difficult, due to the nature of The Machine itself.  Driven by a lust for power, fueled by environmental extremism, economic illiteracy, and class warfare, and financed by a self-serving cycle of union cronyism, there can only be one conclusion:  The Machine is antithetical to the founding principles that made this country great, and can only produce seizure.   Here’s how it breaks down:

A Lust for Power

This is the core principle behind every Big Government scheme that has ever been devised.   It is the reason that Health Savings Accounts have not been promoted instead of Obamacare.   It is the reason that Keynesian “stimulus” is still the statist’s preferred economic weapon.  It is the reason why all fifty states are not Right To Work states.   Simply put, the programs of Big Government exist to perpetuate the power and influence of those in charge, with no regard of their effects to their constituencies.    Under this worldview, any failure of policy can be traced back to a lack of financing or scale.

Environmental Extremism

With the hoax of human-caused global warming now fully exposed as a funding-perpetuation scheme, it is nothing short of criminal that sweeping, multi-hundred billion dollar legislative initiatives based on faulty science are still being promoted.   But again, if power and control are the real objective, rather than protecting the environment, with the help of a complicit media, such inconvenient truths can be brushed off.

Economic Illiteracy

In an environment where high schools and colleges rarely require any kind of economic education, combined with an increasing disregard for our Constitution, our public policies suffer accordingly.   Policies devised by such economic illiterates that mathematically cannot work can be sold via Teleprompters to a large portion of the public that is ill-equipped to challenge them.   We are now reaping what we have sown.

Class Warfare

Following a divide and conquer strategy, the statists seek to pit some groups in society against others.   Given the mathematical impossibility of financing an ever-enlarging state, the promoters of Big Government seek their life blood from “the rich”.    Economic illiteracy plays a big role here, in that the critical role the rich play in financing the economy, and indeed, in financing the very schemes of Big Government, is never discussed.   Big Government needs the money of the rich, so they must be demonized in an attempt to motivate the rest of society to expropriate and redistribute their assets.

Government Intervention, Job Destruction and Lost Government Revenues

As more and more intervention takes place based on the fallacies of the above, job destruction can be the only result, as the real creators of jobs, entrepreneurs, decide that taking a risk to create a job is simply not worth it.    Furthermore, those with large amounts of assets, “the rich”, engage in what Ludwig von Mises called a “flight to the real”:  fearing that the value of financial wealth can be manipulated by government policy, people seek tangible assets instead, like commodities and collectibles.   These assets wind up creating no new wealth.   As the job engine slows and corporate and individual revenues fall, government’s share of those revenues falls in sympathy.

Public Sector Unions, Calls for Tax Increases, Mandatory Union Dues and Political Donations

Rather than recognizing the root causes, class warfare groups, often funded by Public Sector Unions, such as New York’s Working Families Party, attempt to make up the lost revenues by Calls for Tax Increases.   Never mind that such tax increases never produce the projected revenues (as the economic illiterates fail to acknowledge the power of incentives).   And here we enter an entire mini-machine of destruction.

The unions, with their mandatory dues, take their considerable resources and via Political Donations, promote politicians that will keep The Machine in action.   The unions have their own Lust for Power, as the union helps only itself in the aggregate, and cannot bring about any net positive benefit for the majority of their members.   Their very presence reduces the wages of the capable at the expense of the incapable, and often reduces to a game of nothing more than a parasite trying to keep its host alive.

Unions wouldn’t possibly support such commonsense legislation as Right To Work, because it is an existential threat to their entire machine.   But the fact that such legislation would even been necessary, that we have to affirm the right for an employer and an employee to voluntarily enter into a mutually beneficial economic arrangement, indicates just how much damage The Machine has already done to the economic mindset in this country.   Knowing how this truth can not stand the light of day, unions instead attempt to hide their legislative motives behind innocuous sounding names like The Employee Free Choice Act (which actually has nothing to do with making choices freely).

In all, The Machine creates an environment ripe for corruption, as the stakes are very high.   It is said that people rob banks “because that is where the money is”.   In Big Government, with crony-capitalism running amok, it is well worth the lobbying effort to attempt to rig the game in your favor.  This in turn fuels cynicism about government itself, causing a large percentage of voters to tune out.

Breaking the Machine

Fortunately, the Machine can be stopped in its tracks, first by recognizing its parts, as I’ve done here.  But more importantly, the politicians that support this Big Government vision can be held accountable, and replaced as necessary.   Throughout their terms, regardless of what they’ve promised, their day-to-day votes are out of our control.   For one day, every two years, the tables are turned.

You know what to do.

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Let’s examine two of the most influential billionaires of our times, Warren Buffett and George Soros.  One squanders opportunities to promote and enhance the system that made both of them rich, while the other actively seeks to destroy it.

In the case of Warren Buffett, when the infamous “Oracle from Omaha” speaks, people listen (just like E.F. Hutton!).   The only problem is, what they listen to hurts our economy:  some economically illiterate member of Congress hears Buffett (or Soros) talk, feels it makes some amount of superficial sense (or can be construed into supporting some new government program) and says “What works for Buffett (Soros) works for me.  We’re done here!”   Indeed, Barack Obama continues to site Buffett’s easily-mischaracterized anecdote of his secretary paying more in taxes than he does.

Passive-aggressive capitalism non-defender, Warren Buffett

In a recent interview with CNBC’s Becky Quick, Buffett seemed to indicate he was pretty flummoxed by the apparent failure of Keynesianism to right the listing supertanker that is our present-day national economy.   He’s so close,

I think the most important factor in getting out of the recession actually is just the regenerative capacity of– of American capitalism.

and yet so far:

I thought maybe– maybe they [the Fed] ought to charge them [the banks] a quarter of a percent to leave their money on deposit and that would really push it out.  (Laughter.)  But– but I mean, we’ve used up a lot of bullets.  And we talk about stimulus.  But the truth is, we’re running a– federal deficit that’s nine percent of GDP.  That is stimulative as all get out.  I mean, that is more stimulative than any policy we’ve followed since World War II.

And, of course, World War II, we had a huge stimulus and it– it took us out of– a depression. But we are– it doesn’t depend on calling it the ‘Stimulus Bill’ to be stimulating.  I mean, if– if– if the government is spending $3 for every $2 it takes in, that is– that is fiscal stimulus.  And it isn’t kick-starting things as much as the American public would like.  I’m sure as much as the Administration or Congress would like.  It’s probably had some effect, probably less than the economists thought it would have going into this.

That’s probably true, if the “economists” he has in mind are Robert Reich, Paul Krugman, and other modern-day purveyors of that discredited theory from Lord Keynes.   Ironically, these and other comments were made surrounding Goldman’s Sachs’ “10,000 Small Businesses” graduation (a firm from which Mr. Buffett profited handsomely as an appropriately private investor, proving that attractive investment opportunities will find financing).   Where Quick gives The Oracle room to opine on just about anything, nowhere does he launch into the litany of reasons why small (and large) businesses are being stymied by our current government, something this author forewarned of nearly a year ago.

But what truly gets this writer’s blood boiling is Buffett’s yearning for the higher tax rates of a prior generation, and saying that our country’s prosperity was no worse for the wear.  This is a common theme for Buffett, as demonstrated on June 27, 2007, November 15, 2007 and  September 10, 2009, just for starters.   Nevermind how much better things could have been then had taxes been lower.   Nevermind the “malaise” we found ourselves in at the end of the period he reminisces.    Nevermind the explosion of tax revenue that resulted from Reagan’s tax cuts.   Nevermind that the stock market rally that they helped fuel helped to make Buffett who he is today.  Buffett seems either genuinely embarrassed by the wealth he’s accumulated, oblivious to the reality of the Laffer Curve and how lower taxes on upper income earners would free up capital for investment, clueless that government could instead attack the expense side of the deficit equation, or all of the above.    Again, all harmless, if it weren’t for his role as the statists’ financial Pied Piper.

Buffett also couldn’t resist taking a swipe at the rising Tea Party-induced activism, and the resulting fear from the big government forces who perhaps sense their days are suddenly numbered:

…sentiment has turned very sour in the last three or four or five months.  It’s been generally sour on Congress and Washington, but it seems to have taken a turn for the worse.  I — I hope we get over it pretty soon, because it’s — it’s not productive.

Democracy-in-action “not productive”; what a segue for our other most-notable-billionaire, George Soros…

George Soros, anti-Capitalist

George and I have something in common:   In the early 1990′s, we were both trading currencies.   The difference is, I didn’t have a balance sheet gigantic enough to take on the Bank of England, betting that central control would never be able to overcome the forces of the free market.  Such forces wanted to make the Pound drop dramatically versus other currencies, and Soros knew it.  Soros positioned himself for the inevitable and it yielded him a billion dollars in profits.  Overnight, he became a celebrity in the hedge fund world.

So it is the height of irony that the man who foresaw the failure of price fixing, the man who experienced Nazi and Soviet rule firsthand, would now be pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into organizations that seek to dramatically grow the influence of government in our lives.   You’ve heard of the obvious ones:  MoveOn.org, Center For American Progress, the Democracy Alliance, all chronicled by DiscoverTheNetworks.org and elsewhere.     But how about Soros’ $50 million dollar check last fall, funding an effort to “purge economics of its free market zeal”?

Just over the last several weeks, Soros has helped launch a website seeking to discredit the Tea Party. What a great example of that great World War II pilot saying:  ”When you start taking flak, you know you’re over the target.”    As Stanley Fish writes, it’s an effort that may very well backfire, badly.   Clearly, the “height of irony”‘s twin tower is the stream of people complaining to Fish that the Tea Party is being funded by the rich, while they rally (literally) around organizations funded by Mr. Soros.   Now that is truly rich.

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