By Louis Avallone
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We’ve all seen those seemingly ridiculous warning labels, on so many products these days, that you wonder what’s more embarrassing: That such warning labels are necessary at all, because of the sheer half-wittedness of some folks, or that the folks writing those warning labels are just plain pretentious and pompous towards everyone else?
For example, you know the cardboard sunshield that folks use, to keep the sun off the dashboard in the car? It has a warning label: “Do not drive with sunshield in place.” Really? Or how about on a toner cartridge for a laser printer: “Do Not Eat Toner.” Is that really necessary to point out? Then there’s the warning label on most hair dryers that says, “Do not use in shower.” Or, one of my favorites, “If you do not understand, or cannot read all directions, cautions and warnings, do not use this product.”
And just last month, you may have seen a Doritos commercial that aired during the Superbowl, featuring a spry grandma launching a baby, through the air and into a tree house, to snatch a bag of Doritos, using a slingshot contraption. As this baby is being hurled through the air, the good folks at Frito-Lay thought we needed reminding not to try this ourselves (despite our obvious inclination). So, they added the fine print, “Do Not Attempt.”
Of course, this got me thinking about other activities, especially ones that seem obviously dangerous and insidious, that ought to have a warning label also, but presently do not. Take socialism for example. Atop each piece of government legislation, that expands wasteful government spending, there ought to be the disclaimer or warning label: “The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else.”
Such a disclaimer or warning would be sufficient for those who have figured out that a society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. Or that governments will always find a need for the money they take (or borrow, from future generations).
Such a disclaimer or warning is satisfactory for those who appreciate the notion that taking money from some people, in order to “do good” for another group of people, is the most inefficient form of spending money that exists, and may not “do good” at all.
These are the same people who understand that you generally cannot achieve good ends through bad means. They understand the unconscionable incompetence of evaluating government policies and programs by their intentions, rather than by their results.
These are the folks that understand that fairness is not achieved by having someone else, or the government, decide for you, what is fair, and that liberty means equality of opportunity, not equality of results.
And yet, despite these folks, our country finds itself subjected to the aftermath of a Democrat Party, and a President, that recklessly and repeatedly ignored the “warning labels”; doggedly doubling-down on policies and programs, that are rooted in socialism, and that empirically have failed, time after time, throughout history.
After all, deficit spending during the Obama administration has been nearly $5.17 trillion, including $787 billion in “stimulus” spending to “save” jobs. The results have been record unemployment, staying above eight percent for the longest period since the end of World War II. But if you count those that have not searched for a job in the past four weeks, or those working part-time, but would prefer full-time work, the unemployment rate is almost 15%. The long-term employed—those unemployed who have been looking for a job for more than six months—make up 40% of the unemployed now (which is the highest level since 1948, when such data began to be collected).
Despite the intentions of this deficit spending, and despite Obama’s 2011 budget to increase spending on welfare programs to $953 billion (up by 42% since he took office), we still have record levels of poverty— 46 million are classified as living in poverty— the highest number since 1959 when the census began tracking this number in 1959.
The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines socialism as “a stage of society in Marxist theory transitional between capitalism and communism and distinguished by unequal distribution of goods and pay according to work done.” This is the precipice at which we find our nation in 2012, amidst policies and programs which redistributes goods and pay through the expansion of government spending, and all promoted by an administration that requires those that work the hardest to be satisfied with the rewards equivalent to those who don’t work hard at all. The difference, in the words of Winston Churchill, is that “(t)he inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.”
Just ask Spain about misery. Their unemployment is at 22.9%. Ask Greece too, whose joblessness is at 19.2%. Yet this president is following their template for the same, failed policies that even Japan has used unsuccessfully for the last decade: Printing money, raising taxes, increasing regulations, adding to the debt and deficit, and providing endless bailouts.
This is serious business. No, we don’t need a government sponsored advertising campaign to explain the fallacies of socialism to our children; we can handle that fine as parents (although a warning label for those promoting socialism would sometimes help). Just remember this, in the words of Ronald Reagan: “Socialism only works in two places: Heaven where they don’t need it and hell where they already have it.”