Ray Harvey

The phrase forced charity is a contradiction, and yet it’s precisely this principle that’s the cornerstone of virtually all left-wing doctrine.

In one form or another, forcing charity lies at the root of every major democratic program — from public schools, to welfare, to social security, to medicare and medicaid, to unemployment checks, and so on, all of which, the left-winger believes, cannot be handled voluntarily, and so must be forced.

But suppose for a moment that this bedrock belief is wrong. What then?

The following is an explosive phone call which recently took place on 850 KOA, and it captures the issue in such a way that it might just change your life. Ross Kaminsky is the host. It is a civil and absolutely riveting exchange between a garden-variety left-winger and black republican who does not believe in or want government handouts, and who properly understands the danger of such handouts.

Push play and then slide the player over to exactly the 22:50 mark. The call lasts about seven minutes. Listen:

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It is the insurmountable flaw in all leftist philosophy, the insoluble contradiction, the problem that cannot be overcome: No matter what form that leftist philosophy takes — whether it be progressive, egalitarian, democratic-socialist, welfare-statist, communistic, or any other name those of this mindset wish to call it — in order to redistribute wealth, there must first be wealth to redistribute.

Somebody must produce, and the left-winger cannot exist without this person.

The welfare state cannot exist without the producers of welfare.

For exactly this reason, the left-winger is at the mercy of the very person he seeks to plunder. The left-winger relies on those he so often denigrates.

The state by definition cannot produce. It is (by definition) an agency of force. If you have any doubt about that, consider this:

The state cannot spend or redistribute a single cent unless it first either borrows, taxes, or prints.

As Janet Daley so felicitously phrased it in her recent London Telegraph article:

This was the heaven on earth for which liberal democracy had been striving: a system of wealth redistribution that was merciful but not Marxist, and a guarantee of lifelong economic and social security for everyone that did not involve totalitarian government. This was the ideal the European Union was designed to entrench. It was the dream of Blairism, which adopted it as a replacement for the state socialism of Old Labour. And it is the aspiration of President Obama and his liberal Democrats, who want the United States to become a European-style social democracy.

But the US has a very different historical experience from European countries, with their accretions of national remorse and class guilt: it has a far stronger and more resilient belief in the moral value of liberty and the dangers of state power. This is a political as much as an economic crisis, but not for the reasons that Mr Obama believes. The ruckus that nearly paralysed the US economy last week, and led to the loss of its AAA rating from Standard & Poor’s, arose from a confrontation over the most basic principles of American life.

Contrary to what the Obama Democrats claimed, the face-off in Congress did not mean that the nation’s politics were “dysfunctional”. The politics of the US were functioning precisely as the Founding Fathers intended: the legislature was acting as a check on the power of the executive.

The wealth that the left-winger wishes to “spread around,” as Barack Obama famously put it, must originate somewhere.

Where?

Only one place: production.

That in a nutshell is the awesome logic of Say’s Law.

Production, said Jean Baptiste Say, is everything.

He was correct.

Capitalism, as the very name implies, is the engine of capital production.

But what is capital?

Capital is the the amount of wealth owned by a person or a business. Capital is a form of property, and it can, if the owner of that capital chooses, be used to invest. I emphasize that word because investment is the backbone of production, which is the backbone of job creation.

Without wealth, humans are impoverished. Thus, for humans the production of wealth is survival.

Ultimately nothing more fundamental than labor is required for the production of wealth.

Production = life.

Money merely symbolizes wealth. Money is not wealth in and of itself but only a representative.

When money is debased, as it is when, for example, it’s printed without real wealth (i.e. production) backing it, it loses its value. In this way, government has the power to indirectly divest the value of the savings that people have spent their lives accumulating: by printing money that can’t be backed by real wealth, government thereby strips money of its worth. When too much money is printed, the money inflates, and a dollar is no longer worth a dollar.

The left-winger’s big, big problem, which the right-winger has to his detriment also accepted (albeit tacitly), is rooted in the misbegotten belief that if government doesn’t provide it, humans interacting freely will not get it done. That is the source of the insoluble flaw in all leftist thought, which in turn has a deeper source: the belief that human survival should be assured.

I thought the following was exceptionally accurate.

From ex-liberal Roger Simon:

President Obama’s been taking a lot of flak lately for not having a plan. First it was about Libya, but now — even more importantly because, as we know, all politics is local (until it’s not) — about the budget.

The latest White House porte-parole Jay Carney has consequently been taking all kinds of in-coming himself about “where’s the President’s budget plan,” “why doesn’t he have a plan,” etc.

Well, the reason for the latter is simple: because he can’t. The minute the president evinces a budget plan, the game is up. No liberal budget will stand up to scrutiny. There is no money left for deficit spending in our aging society. The welfare state is kaput. It’s gone — probably for generations to come.

Of course, there’s always that canard about taxing the rich. That will save things. But the truth is even if you tax the rich at 100%, it barely sets back our entitlement crisis a year or two, while virtually bankrupting the few job creators who remain.

So no wonder Obama doesn’t have a plan. What would it be?

Rich Miniter put a fine point on it in a recent article for Forbes, “Why the Democratic Party is Doomed.”

The Democratic Party, as we have known it for the past 70 years, is now in its last days.

Yes, the House Republicans may raise the debt ceiling for a mix of spending cuts and revenue raisers. Yes, Barack Obama may win the 2012 presidential contest. Yes, bureaucrats and judges will continue to impose new and costly regulations on the economy.

But it doesn’t matter. The long-term trends are almost all bad news for the left wing of the party.

This week’s fight over raising the federal debt limit exposes a key weakness in the warfare-welfare state that has bestowed power onto the Democratic Party: Without an ever-growing share of the economy, it dies.

Miniter’s right. As an ex-lib, it almost makes me feel sorry for liberals. But I’m not because too many of them are still playing ostrich. One lib friend just sent me an email — I’m still somehow on her list — trumpeting a 1954 (!) quote from Eisenhower: “Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history.”

I guess the implication here is that’s what Republicans are trying to do, when, especially in the case of Social Security, they are the only ones making a serious effort to save it (see Paul Ryan). But liberals must preserve their delusions — and actually not read the small print, in Ryan’s proposal or anybody else’s. After all, they are people with no plans. Why should anybody else have them?

(Link)

Whether people recognize it or not is beside the point: the welfare state is doomed by definition because in order to have the wealth to redistribute, one must first have someone producing that wealth, which (in turn) requires capital — as in capitalism — and that pool will pretty quickly dry up, especially when you vilify and punish the producers.