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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; Class warfare</title>
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		<title>&#8220;Flat Broke&#8221; Hillary Clinton to Jump on Class Warfare w/Both Feet</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/flat-broke-hillary-clinton-to-jump-on-class-warfare-wboth-feet/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=flat-broke-hillary-clinton-to-jump-on-class-warfare-wboth-feet</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/flat-broke-hillary-clinton-to-jump-on-class-warfare-wboth-feet/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 26 Sep 2014 14:25:21 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Class warfare]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hillary Clinton]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=241368</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Hillary is trying to Obamize her campaign]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/08-13-14-y-03.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-241369" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/08-13-14-y-03-450x252.jpg" alt="08-13-14-y-03" width="450" height="252" /></a></p>
<p>This was always inevitable.</p>
<p>Hillary&#8217;s &#8220;Flat Broke&#8221; gaffe was part of the setup for her real campaign for the welfare state which she is now trying to pass off as feminist.</p>
<blockquote><p>Hillary Rodham Clinton joined some of the most powerful women in Congress on Thursday to push for advances on affordable child care, paid family leave and raising the minimum wage that could create greater economic progress for women.</p>
<p>Clinton noted that women hold two-thirds of the minimum wage jobs across the country and three-quarters of the jobs that depend primarily on tips — meaning that many of them are working full time but hovering at or below the poverty line.</p>
<p>“We talk about a glass ceiling,” said Clinton, who ended her 2008 campaign by proclaiming that she and her supporters had put 18 million cracks in it. “The floor is collapsing.&#8221;</p></blockquote>
<p>That&#8217;s a good line&#8230; from someone whose own career is the result of political connections, who has never had to face a glass ceiling or a collapsing floor.</p>
<p>If we had a real conversation about poverty in America and the lack of better paying jobs, the ball would roll right back to the Democrats. So they predictably push for minimum wage increases which will just push a feedback loop of higher prices and lost jobs. It&#8217;s easier to raise the minimum wage and then hand out unemployment and welfare to those who lose their jobs.</p>
<p>It&#8217;s a political win, win either way.</p>
<p>Hillary is trying to Obamize her campaign dressing up class warfare in identity politics. Meanwhile no one wants to talk about how the Clintons made so much money and why Maryland has become the richest state in the country or why all those billionaires who have been pumping money into their party have gotten a lot richer while the country has grown poorer.</p>
<p>The Clinton fortune consists of leavings from the big power brokers who have gotten rich on Democratic Party corruption, lots of it involving higher taxes and lost jobs. If Republicans want to win the class warfare narrative, they are going to have to take this on.</p>
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		<title>Dem Candidate For Raising Minimum Wage Doesn&#8217;t Pay Workers Overtime</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/dem-congress-candidate-for-raising-minimum-wage-doesnt-pay-workers-overtime/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=dem-congress-candidate-for-raising-minimum-wage-doesnt-pay-workers-overtime</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/dem-congress-candidate-for-raising-minimum-wage-doesnt-pay-workers-overtime/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 15 Sep 2014 15:48:48 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Class warfare]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=241050</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[It's the same old liberal story.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/aaronwoolfmalone.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-241051" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/aaronwoolfmalone-450x324.jpg" alt="aaronwoolfmalone" width="450" height="324" /></a></p>
<p>It&#8217;s the same old liberal story. Ralph Nader and Michael Moore played the class warfare game while treating their own people like crap. Liberal mags use unpaid interns at mags that campaign for a living wage. And a Dem wants better treatment for workers.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/candidate-accused-stiffing-workers-article-1.1940129">Someone else&#8217;s workers</a>.</p>
<blockquote><p>Aaron Woolf, a part-time Upper East Sider who is running for Congress upstate, wants to raise the minimum wage — but he didn&#8217;t always pay it to employees at a Brooklyn eatery he owns, legal filings show.</p>
<p>Woolf, a Democrat, is running in the 21st congressional district in northern New York, where he also has a home, against Elise Stefanik, a former aide to President George W. Bush, to replace retiring Democrat Rep. Bill Owens. The race offers Republicans one of their few chances to gain a House seat in the northeast.</p>
<p>Woolf, 50, touts his role as a socially conscious documentary film maker. His campaign also cites his work “championing small business&#8221; as the proprietor of Urban Rustic, a Williamsburg market and eatery.</p></blockquote>
<p>You should know by now what&#8217;s coming next.</p>
<blockquote><p>In 2010, Urban Rustic settled a suit by two former cooks, Arturo Prudente and Alfredo Ramirez, who said Lodge stiffed them and about 20 others by ignoring a law requiring time-and-a-half pay for overtime.</p>
<p>After first denying the claims, Urban Rustic&#8217;s attorney, Stephen Hans, agreed the &#8220;plaintiffs were entitled to at least some overtime payments, and that the defendants are liable to some extent for the wage violations,&#8221; according to court papers.</p></blockquote>
<p>But Woolf&#8217;s class warfare express <a href="http://www.watertowndailytimes.com/article/20140607/BLOGS18/140609216">courageously rolls onward</a>.</p>
<blockquote><p>Aaron G. Woolf, a Democrat running for New York’s 21st Congressional District seat, is not afraid to support an increase in the minimum wage but he’s looking for a little help from his friends, according to an email sent Friday.</p>
<p>In the message, Mr. Woolf asked his supporters to sign a petition in support of increasing the minimum wage, though the email does not give a figure to which he would like to see it raised.</p>
<p>“You’ve probably heard a lot of talk about the minimum wage lately. Too many politicians are afraid to take a stance on an issue that directly impacts families all across the 21st district,” the message reads. “Those families deserve to know if their representative supports an increase in the minimum wage. Aaron Woolf strongly supports an increase in the minimum wage.”</p></blockquote>
<p>Yes he does. That&#8217;s why he underpays his workers while sending out an email harvesting petition for raising the minimum wage&#8230; to some amount he won&#8217;t specify.</p>
<p>He&#8217;s courageous that way.</p>
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		<title>$15 Million Socialist Elizabeth Warren Vows to Fight for Little People Like Her</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/15-million-socialist-elizabeth-warren-vows-to-fight-for-the-little-people-like-her/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=15-million-socialist-elizabeth-warren-vows-to-fight-for-the-little-people-like-her</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/15-million-socialist-elizabeth-warren-vows-to-fight-for-the-little-people-like-her/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 12 May 2014 17:09:42 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Class warfare]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Elizabeth Warren]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=225366</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[All the "little people" like her who have to make do with a $740,000 condo ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/elizabeth-warren-class.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-225368" alt="elizabeth warren class" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/elizabeth-warren-class-280x350.jpg" width="280" height="350" /></a></p>
<p>I&#8217;m all for wealth redistribution. I don&#8217;t think anyone produces anything on their own. There is no &#8220;I&#8221;. Only a collective. Government ought to control absolutely everything. But <a href="http://legalinsurrection.com/2014/05/elizabeth-warren-finally-says-she-is-not-a/">why do people think I&#8217;m a Socialist</a>?</p>
<blockquote><p>BOB SCHIEFFER: You know, your fans say you&#8217;re a populist, but your critics say you&#8217;re just basically a socialist.</p>
<p>SEN. WARREN: (LAUGHS) I just don&#8217;t know where they get that.</p></blockquote>
<p>Me either.</p>
<p>You become famous for a &#8220;You didn&#8217;t build that&#8221; rant and suddenly people call you a Socialist.</p>
<p>You&#8217;re a slimy lawyer running as a class warrior even though your real clients are the 1 percent and people think you&#8217;re a Socialist.</p>
<p>You&#8217;re a political parasite who lies twelve times before breakfast, who would rather jump off a bridge than work for a living, all the while living off the money forcibly redistributed from those who do work&#8230; and crazy people decide you&#8217;re a Socialist.</p>
<p>Strange how that happens. Ted Bundy didn&#8217;t know why people called him a serial killer either. He didn&#8217;t know where they got that either.</p>
<blockquote><p>Warren recently released a book, &#8220;A Fighting Chance,&#8221; that is critical of the status quo in Washington.</p>
<p>&#8220;Washington works for anyone who can hire an army of lobbyists and lawyers. It just doesn&#8217;t work for regular families,&#8221; she said. &#8220;They&#8217;ve got the concentration of money and power that makes sure that every rule works for those who are rich. What we have on the other side, is we&#8217;ve only got two things. We&#8217;ve got our voices and we&#8217;ve got our votes. And we&#8217;ve got to make sure we get heard. That&#8217;s the only way we ever get a level playing field.&#8221;</p></blockquote>
<p>Who exactly is this &#8220;We&#8221; and &#8220;Our&#8221;?</p>
<p>Elizabeth Warren is Washington. She embodies Washington. She&#8217;s an academic and a lawyer and a politician and a regulator.</p>
<p>And then she starts talking about all the &#8220;little people&#8221; like her who have to make do <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/woman-of-the-people-elizabeth-warren-buys-740000-condo/">with a $740,000 condo</a> and her <a href="http://hotair.com/archives/2012/01/27/multimillionaire-elizabeth-warren-im-not-wealthy/">pitiful $15 million net worth</a>.</p>
<p>Who&#8217;s going to stand up for the little lawyer\regulator\politicians with only 1.5 billion pennies to scratch together?</p>
<p>Elizabeth Warren will!</p>
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		<slash:comments>22</slash:comments>
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		<title>8 of 10 Richest Congressional Districts are Repped by Democrats</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/8-of-10-richest-congressional-districts-are-repped-by-democrats/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=8-of-10-richest-congressional-districts-are-repped-by-democrats</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/8-of-10-richest-congressional-districts-are-repped-by-democrats/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 01 Apr 2014 15:24:07 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Class warfare]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Republican Party]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=222414</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Democratic House districts have a $1,000 higher income than Republican districts.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/New_Congress_0fa9d_image_1024w.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-222415" alt="New_Congress_0fa9d_image_1024w" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/New_Congress_0fa9d_image_1024w-450x299.jpg" width="450" height="299" /></a></p>
<p>The two richest men in America are Obama supporters. Obama won the wealthiest places in the country and the richest House districts are Democratic territory.</p>
<p>The Democratic Party&#8217;s class warfare is as<a href="http://weaselzippers.us/181252-no-gop-isnt-the-party-of-the-rich-analysis-shows-8-of-top-10-richest-house-districts-represented-by-democrats/"> much a hoax as its constant claims of racism</a>.</p>
<blockquote><p>Republicans are the party of the rich, right? It’s a label that has stuck for decades, and you’re hearing it again as Democrats complain about GOP opposition to raising the minimum wage and extending unemployment benefits.</p>
<p>But in Congress, the wealthiest among us are more likely to be represented by a Democrat than a Republican. Of the 10 richest House districts, only two have Republican congressmen. Democrats claim the top six, sprinkled along the East and West coasts. Most are in overwhelmingly Democratic states like New York and California.</p>
<p>The richest: New York’s 12th Congressional District, which includes Manhattan’s Upper East Side, as well as parts of Queens and Brooklyn. Democrat Carolyn Maloney is in her 11th term representing the district.</p>
<p>Per capita income in Maloney’s district is $75,479. That’s more than $75,000 a year for every man, woman and child. The next highest income district, which runs along the southern California coast, comes in at $61,273. Democrat Henry Waxman is in his 20th term representing the Los Angeles-area district.</p>
<p>House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco district comes in at No. 8.</p>
<p>Across the country, Democratic House districts have an average per capita income of $27,893. That’s about $1,000 higher than the average income in Republican districts.</p></blockquote>
<p>The Republicans are the party of the middle class. It&#8217;s about time the GOP did a better job of representing that.</p>
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		<title>Class Warfare, An American Tradition</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-thornton/class-warfare-an-american-tradition/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=class-warfare-an-american-tradition</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-thornton/class-warfare-an-american-tradition/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 28 Feb 2014 05:26:25 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Thornton]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[America]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[anti-federalist]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Class warfare]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[faction]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Federalist]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Madison]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Politics]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=219909</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why "divisiveness" is not the problem. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><em><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/100372670-rich-poor-tattoos-gettyp1.530x298.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-219911" alt="100372670-rich-poor-tattoos-gettyp1.530x298" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/100372670-rich-poor-tattoos-gettyp1.530x298.jpg" width="292" height="209" /></a><strong>Originally published by <a href="http://www.hoover.org/publications/defining-ideas/article/169426">Defining Ideas</a>. </strong></em></p>
<p>Are we more “polarized” and “partisan” than we were in the past? Political commentators think so. In a recent Atlantic profile, conservative pollster Frank Luntz attributed his cynicism about American politics to the unprecedented polarization of the American people he has seen in his recent work with focus groups. They are “contentious and argumentative,” don’t “listen to each other as they once had,” and are not “interested in hearing other points of view.” The fault lies in Washington, where the people are “picking up their leads.”</p>
<p>Luntz blames both parties, but especially targets President Obama’s “message of class divisions, haves and have-nots, of redistribution.” But implication that class warfare rhetoric is something new in American politics is historically false. The clash of rich and poor has been a constant theme of American history since the Revolution, and was integral to the framing of the Constitution. For the Founders, the “haves and have-nots” were the two most important “factions” that in the Constitutional order would check and balance one another so that neither could threaten the freedom of the other.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The concern with class warfare was part of a broader fear of extreme democracy, which, going back to ancient Athens, was seen as the instrument of the poor’s attack on the rich. It would lead to the redistribution of property, what the Founders called a “leveling spirit.” Many of the attacks on Thomas Paine’s 1776 pamphlet </span><em style="line-height: 1.5em;">Common Sense</em><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, for example, which called for a more democratic political order, emphasized the danger to property. Churchman and loyalist Charles Inglis warned, “All our property throughout the continent would be unhinged” if Paine’s democratic government was created. It’s worth remembering that among John Locke’s natural rights were life, liberty, and </span><em style="line-height: 1.5em;">property</em><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">.</span></p>
<p>In the months before the 1787 Constitutional convention, the armed outbreak in western Massachusetts known as Shays’ Rebellion, a protest against debt and taxes, was a powerful reminder of the dangers of what Founder Benjamin Rush called “mobocracy.” Revolutionary War hero General Henry Knox in a letter to George Washington explained the outbreak in terms of class warfare. The rebels, Knox wrote, “have never paid any, or but very little taxes––But they see the weakness of government; They feel at once their own poverty, compared with the opulent, and their own force, and they are determined to make use of the latter, in order to remedy the former.” As Knox interpreted their beliefs, private property “ought to be the common property of all. And he that attempts opposition to this creed is an enemy of equity and justice.”</p>
<p>For the delegates gathering in Philadelphia, the fear of class warfare and attacks on property were an important concern in designing the government. Given that those with property and those without comprised two clashing factions, the government had to create institutions that allowed each faction to check and balance the other. In arguing for the “mixed government” that limited both the democratical and oligarchical elements, Pennsylvania delegate Gouverneur Morris highlighted the clashing private interests of the poor and those of “great personal property” and the “aristocratic spirit.”</p>
<p>And what is the “interest” of the rich? “The Rich will strive to establish their dominion and enslave the rest. They always did. They always will. The proper security against them is to form them into a separate interest. The two forces will then control each other . . . By thus combining and setting apart the aristocratic interest, the popular interest will be combined against it. There will be a mutual check and mutual security.” In the end, the “aristocratic” Senate, chosen by the state legislators and serving longer terms, would check and balance the democratic House of Representatives directly elected by the people.</p>
<p>In Federalist 10, the most influential case for the Constitutional order, James Madison made the same argument for the clash between rich and poor as the most dangerous factional strife the Constitution was designed to limit. “The most common and durable source of factions, has been the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold, and those who are without property, have ever formed distinct interests in society. Those who are creditors, and those who are debtors, fall under a like discrimination.” The mixed government of checks and balances, and the sovereignty of the states enshrined in federalism, would prevent these factions and their conflicting interests from concentrating power in the federal government and thus threatening the freedom of the whole.</p>
<p>Subsequent American political history has been driven by this same dynamic of rich and poor, democracy, and oligarchy. In Washington’s second term, politics began to divide into two parties, the antidemocratic Federalists, and the Democratic-Republicans, which eventually became the Democratic Party. In 1792, James Madison defined these two parties explicitly in class warfare terms: The Federalists are “those, who from particular interest, from natural temper, or from the habits of life, are more partial to the opulent than to the other classes of society; and having debauched themselves into a persuasion that mankind are incapable of governing themselves, it follows with them, of course, that government can be carried on only by the pageantry of rank, the influence of money and emoluments, and the terror of military force.” Madison’s party, which would take the White House under Thomas Jefferson in 1800, comprised the people who opposed rule by an elite of wealth or birth.</p>
<p>Such class warfare rhetoric continued throughout the nineteenth century. In 1824 Andrew Jackson thundered against “a moneyed aristocracy dangerous to the liberties of the country,” and argued against the Constitutional “filters,” such as the Supreme Court and the Electoral College, which lessened the power of the people. Yet Jackson was suspicious of a federal government dominated by the wealthy and prone to corruption, and supported state sovereignty as a check on the overweening power of elites. With the rise of the Progressives in the late nineteenth century, the demand for greater democracy and equality was harnessed to the expansion of the federal government as the instrument for achieving these goals. This meant reconstructing the Constitution and changing its internal order of the balance of power and the autonomy of the states.</p>
<p>Government regulation of the economy and redistribution of wealth through national taxation became the means for curtailing the power of the rich and elevating the status of the rest. It is no surprise, then, that class warfare rhetoric was common during this period. At the 1912 nominating convention for the Progressive or “Bull Moose” Party, former Indiana Senator Albert Beveridge orated, “We mean not only to make prosperity steady, but to give to the many who earn it a just share of that prosperity instead of helping the few who do not earn it to take an unjust share. The Progressive motto is ‘Pass the prosperity around.’”</p>
<p>President Obama would echo that sentiment in October 2008 when he said, “I think when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.” Arguments for legislation to increase the income tax struck the same note. The 1916 Revenue Act doubled most income tax rates of the Sixteenth Amendment, passed three years earlier, to a top rate of 13 percent. The law also created an inheritance tax. At the time, <em>The</em> <em>New Republic </em>called it “a powerful equalitarian attack upon swollen incomes.” Progressive economist E.R.A. Seligman praised the 1917 tax act, which raised the top rate to 77 percent, as “fiscal justice.”</p>
<p>Big government—and its regulation of business, wealth redistribution, and social welfare transfers—has been sold with a class warfare argument that some unfairly have too much while many have too little. Franklin D. Roosevelt and his party mastered such rhetoric in gaining support for New Deal legislation. In 1932 Roosevelt proposed that government should now be  “modifying and controlling our economic units” and “adjusting production to consumption [and] distributing wealth and products more equitably,” though “it may in some measure qualify the freedom of action of individual units within the business.”</p>
<p>The 1936 Democratic platform warned, “We shall continue to use the powers of government to end the activities of the malefactors of great wealth who defraud and exploit the people,” and Roosevelt condemned “the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power.” Such remarks are not that much different from the rhetoric of Barack Obama decrying “a dangerous and growing inequality” and calling on the rich to “pay their fair share.”</p>
<p>Class warfare rhetoric is not the problem we should focus on. Nor should we complain about our “divisive” politics and “polarization.” Such political angst bespeaks a misunderstanding of the Constitutional order, which assumed such divisive factional politics to be unavoidable given human nature, and sought only to keep a minority from tyrannizing a majority, or a majority from tyrannizing a minority. What we call “gridlock” was the Constitutional version of the medical maxim, “First do no harm.”</p>
<p>Moreover, the bipartisan worry that our polarized politics keeps “problems from being solved” reflects how successful the Progressive movement has been in changing our perception of the proper role of the federal government. The Founders created the political order they did to limit the federal government, and they assumed that local and state government, those closest to the people and more knowledgeable about local conditions, should solve the problems beyond the abilities of individuals, families, and civil society. National defense, regulation of interstate trade, and most important, protecting the freedom and rights of the people were the primary functions of the federal government, which was restrained precisely because the Founders feared concentrated power. The notion that the national government should expand by creating bureaus and agencies staffed with unelected and unaccountable technocrats charged with “solving problems” is the legacy of Progressivism, not the Constitution.</p>
<p>Class warfare, and the partisanship and polarization it serves, have always been part of the American political tradition. They reflect a healthy competition lacking with one-party dominance, the same political rivalry Madison intended when he wrote in Federalist 10, “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.” Rather than fret over partisan rhetoric, we should focus on restoring the Constitutional vision of limited government so we can slow the growth of the federal Leviathan whose ruinous costs and encroaching power are the real danger.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>The Inequality of Government Access</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/the-inequality-of-government-access/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-inequality-of-government-access</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/the-inequality-of-government-access/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 14 Feb 2014 05:55:43 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Class warfare]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Democrats]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Marxism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Socialism]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=218705</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why Big Government's war on "inequality" is a dead end. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/deblasiofinlayter4.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-218875" alt="deblasiofinlayter4" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/deblasiofinlayter4-450x350.jpg" width="315" height="245" /></a>A day after New York Mayor Bill de Blasio&#8217;s Tale of Two Cities address in which the wealthy Park Slope resident once again made inequality his focus, the radical pol intervened to spring one of his biggest supporters from prison. The New York Post responded by putting, &#8220;A Jail of Two Cities&#8221; on its front page.</span></p>
<p>Aside from being the commonplace corruption that one ought to expect from a politician trying to ban horses in Central Park because a wealthy real estate magnate wants to seize their stables, the Jail of Two Cities also reveals why government wars against inequality are a dead end.</p>
<p>When government is big, then the true inequality is not of wealth, but of political access. Money can buy you access, or as the recently released Orlando Findlayter discovered, so can being an activist who bets on the right horse-hating politician. The rich can write a check, but the poor can vote early and often. Access isn&#8217;t about money; it&#8217;s about becoming useful to those in power.</p>
<p>There are two cities and two countries in America; the land of the politically connected who are part of a network that can score anything from millions in cash to open door prisons and the land of the politically unconnected who don&#8217;t understand why the government won&#8217;t leave them alone. It won&#8217;t leave them alone because in a corrupt system, being left alone is a special political favor.</p>
<p>Government should not be concerned with the inequality of income, which isn&#8217;t in its purview, but with the inequality of access, which is. It&#8217;s not the job of government to even out how much money everyone makes, but it is its job to ensure that everyone has equal access to government.</p>
<p>In a city or a country run by income inequality campaigners like Barack Obama or Bill de Blasio, the inequality of wealth takes a back seat to the inequality of access. Battling income inequality leads directly to inequality of access by putting the equalizers in charge of picking winners and losers through the agency of an expanding government.</p>
<p>The bigger government gets, the less sense it makes to invest in business and the more sense it makes to invest in politicians. Powerful politicians are a much less riskier investment than millions of customers whose behavior is hard to predict.</p>
<p>The unpredictability of the public makes competition possible and reduces income inequality while the predictability of politicians is a monopoly that increases income inequality as political monopolies become economic monopolies.</p>
<p>Obama handed out hundreds of millions to the Green Energy tycoons who supported him and dispenses ambassadorships to unqualified bundlers who barely know the name of the major country they have been assigned to. Voters who came out in collective groups for Obama got wealth redistribution paydays. Everyone else got taxed.</p>
<p>There is no equality of access even within the ranks of his supporters. The Obama voter was rewarded with ObamaCare, but the ObamaCare website was outsourced to an incompetent company whose top executive was a pal of Michelle Obama. The company got a six hundred million dollar contract and the ObamaPhone voters got a broken website and hours on hold.</p>
<p>Government works when it&#8217;s held accountable. Inequality campaigners avoid accountability by assembling a base of enthusiastic voters who come out in large percentages to score special access. Those voters are hard to beat because, like the politicians they vote for, they take bribes, using their votes to gain insider access in a corrupt system while ruining it for everyone else.</p>
<p>They take the bribes and then complain that nothing works. And they&#8217;re the reason why. Their corrupt choices are why the sidewalks are cracked, the streetlights don&#8217;t turn on at night, the firefighters don&#8217;t show up and the pension fund is empty. They have become complicit in a corrupt system that encourages them to take advantage of others even as it takes advantage of them.</p>
<p>A thief is still a thief whether he wears a mask, a suit or a t-shirt with a social justice slogan. When people appoint thieves to steal for them, they shouldn&#8217;t be surprised when the thieves also steal from them. As the scorpion said to the frog, “You knew what I was when you let me ride.”</p>
<p>The voters who most depend on government vote to break it far more thoroughly than any Tea Party politician could. No Republicans could have done to Detroit what Detroit did to Detroit. Not even the most extreme Tea Party politician could have done as much damage to the federal government as Obama did.</p>
<p>Corruption and ineptitude are far more of a threat to the progressive vision than any number of people waving Gadsden flags. Republicans can shut down a progressive program, but only progressives can discredit it from the inside the way that Obama has done with ObamaCare; taking it apart piece by piece to cover for his incompetence and appease pieces of his coalition.</p>
<p>The urban and rural political centers of the Democratic Party are places where the progressive vision lies dead and buried with a stake through its rotten heart while its zombie policy corpse shambles around decaying streets moaning, &#8220;Money, money, money.&#8221;</p>
<p>It doesn&#8217;t take the Koch Brothers to kill the left. Letting the left have what it wants does it much more devastatingly, but with more collateral damage.</p>
<p>Campaigns against income inequality invariably become mandates for corruption as aggrieved voters convinced that the system is rigged against them embrace the unfair advantage that they believe they are owed and politicians escape accountability from their own corrupt voters because every crime they commit is officially for the benefit of the underclass.</p>
<p>Class warfare leads to a culture of thievery even inside the most Socialist systems. The Soviet Union&#8217;s class warfare produced Homo Sovieticus, a disgusting creature who believed that  &#8220;Everything belongs to the collective, everything belongs to me&#8221; and accordingly stole everything that he could get his hands on leading to a broken system where nothing was available in stores and everything was available on the black market.</p>
<p>Even after the fall of the USSR, $400 billion in bribes are paid out annually. Russians bribe their officials for access. Americans bundle donations to them. The more power a government has over its people, the more people are willing to pay for access to those who hold power over them.</p>
<p>The cycle of corruption follows its own inevitable momentum. The more people come to believe that a system is corrupt, the fewer will vote for honest politicians over the crooks who promise them special benefits. Everyone becomes cynical and complicit in the corruption. Politicians play divide and conquer, redistributing wealth from some groups to other groups. Trust vanishes from government and financial institutions. Everyone suspects everyone else&#8230; and everyone steals.</p>
<p>That is the formula for a failed nation, a failed city and a failed community. A society is built on confidence in its institutions and its people. When that confidence falls apart, then nothing works and everyone has someone to blame. Social justice politicians begin by telling a tale of two cities and end by locking up everyone in a jail of two cities to which they alone hold the key.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>Don&#8217;t miss <strong>Ann-Marie Murrell</strong>&#8216;s video interview with <strong>Daniel Greenfield</strong> on <em>Robert Gates’ Revelations Confirm Horowitz&#8217;s “Party of Defeat,”</em> <em>Abandoning Iraq, </em><em> How Americans Died For a War Obama Didn&#8217;t Believe In</em>, <em>The Release of Terrorist Lawyer Lynne Stewart</em>, <em></em>and much, much more:</p>
<p><strong>Part I:</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/xwp_CUfwAss" height="315" width="460" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p><strong>Part II:</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/TywIVHDnwxc" height="315" width="460" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe> <b></b></p>
<p><strong>To sign up for <em>The Glazov Gang,</em> <a href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>.</b></p>
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		<title>Income Equality, Equality of Opportunity and Living Standards</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/income-equality-equality-of-opportunity-and-living-standards/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=income-equality-equality-of-opportunity-and-living-standards</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/income-equality-equality-of-opportunity-and-living-standards/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 29 Jan 2014 21:20:38 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Class warfare]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[income equality]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=217557</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Opportunity is the opposite of equality.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/keywestchick-b.jpeg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-217559" alt="keywestchick-b" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/keywestchick-b-450x279.jpeg" width="450" height="279" /></a></p>
<p>Income equality has always been a class warfare sham. Set aside the economics and the easy way to tell is that the people calling for it earn far more than the average person ever will. They&#8217;re not proposing to equalize anything. Their endgame is to rig the system for their own benefit.</p>
<p>In the Republican response to Obama&#8217;s income equality pitch,<a href="http://hotair.com/archives/2014/01/29/wapo-you-know-the-official-gop-response-was-er-good/"> Senator Cathy McMorris Rodgers</a> said, “The president talks a lot about income inequality. But the real gap we face today is one of opportunity inequality.”</p>
<p>That certainly cuts much closer to the truth than the income inequality slogans. The problem isn&#8217;t how much money the rich make, but how much money the poor don&#8217;t make. Trying to forcibly shift that won&#8217;t work. It will just destroy more jobs, increase poverty and force more social spending.</p>
<p>And that&#8217;s part of the endgame for Obama and his cronies. Welfare voters are more reliable voters. Keep people poor and they have few options.</p>
<p>Income inequality directly clashes with opportunity. The more government controls the economy, the less opportunities exist for moving up the economic ladder through your own efforts, instead of government subsidies or a quota system that have their limits and come with glass ceilings.</p>
<p>Opportunity is the opposite of equality. If everyone really were forced to be equal in their achievements, then there would be no opportunity.</p>
<p>The more fundamental question though is not what the national or global snapshot of wealth distribution should be, but what the individual living standard should be. This isn&#8217;t measured in cash amounts, it&#8217;s measured in buying power. Talking about a chicken in every pot and two cars in every garage directly addresses living standards.</p>
<p>Without living standards, wealth has no meaning. An increase in the minimum wage that only leaves you able to buy the same amount you did before because the rest of the economy doesn&#8217;t stand still when you adjust one piece of it, is worthless. It makes for good headlines for politicians, but accomplishes nothing.</p>
<p>Wealthy advocates for the poor call for minimum wage hikes for fast food workers and claim that the fast food places will be able to afford it because the workers will be able to buy more fast food. Even if this fantasy of economic equilibrium were viable, it would really mean the workers buying the same amount because the price of each item would go up. The workers would have more money, the fast food places would take in more money, but neither would be wealthier, only the numbers would have shifted.</p>
<p>Nationally we&#8217;ve been playing these shell games and the country is poorer for it. Opportunity moves a country forward. Artificial equality recessions do not.</p>
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		<title>“They Promised Us Freedom from Poverty. But They Are the Ones Who Got Rich.&#8221;</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/they-promised-us-freedom-from-poverty-but-they-are-the-ones-who-got-rich/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=they-promised-us-freedom-from-poverty-but-they-are-the-ones-who-got-rich</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/they-promised-us-freedom-from-poverty-but-they-are-the-ones-who-got-rich/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 14 Nov 2013 14:20:40 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Class warfare]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[maoists in nepal]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Nepal]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[nepalese government]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=210579</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[History. No one learns from it.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<div id="attachment_210580" style="width: 460px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/prachanda-five-teachers1.jpg"><img class="size-medium wp-image-210580" alt="prachanda-five-teachers1" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/prachanda-five-teachers1-450x299.jpg" width="450" height="299" /></a><p class="wp-caption-text">No political party ever went wrong following Stalin</p></div>
<p>In an entirely unexpected turn of events, the Unified Communist Party of Nepal <a href="Unified Communist Party of Nepal ">hasn&#8217;t exactly lived up to its class warfare </a>promises. Oh it took from the rich&#8230; and gave to itself.</p>
<p>The Unified Communist Party of Nepal are Maoists and terrorists. So naturally the media welcomed their takeover of Nepal. In 2012, Obama&#8217;s State Department <a href="http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2012/09/197411.htm">delisted it as a terrorist group</a>, writing; &#8220;Today’s delisting does not seek to overlook or forget the party’s violent past, but rather looks ahead towards the party’s continued engagement in a peaceful, democratic political dialogue in Nepal.&#8221;</p>
<p>So how <a href="http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/international/nepal-disillusioned-by-top-maoists-taste-for-luxury/">has all that worked out</a> in Nepal?</p>
<blockquote><p>Commentators and former rebels say the party’s leadership has swapped its revolutionary ideals for corruption-fuelled luxury, with the strongest criticism reserved for chairman Pushpa Kamal Dahal, better known by the nom-de-guerre Prachanda.</p>
<p>The Maoists came to power promising social change, economic growth and lasting peace for a country devastated by a decade-long civil war.</p>
<p>Former guerrilla Bishnu Pariyar took up arms aged 14. By the time he was 22, he had survived gunshot wounds to become one of Prachanda’s personal aides.</p>
<p>“The rich used to treat us like dogs and I thought our war would liberate the poor,” Pariyar said.</p>
<p>Soon after he began working for the Maoist chief, he noticed Prachanda’s taste for luxury brands and imported whiskey — a fondness that has not escaped the attentions of local media.</p>
<p>“That family just loves to spend, whether it’s Prachanda blowing money on hair gel or Rolex watches, his wife buying saris all the time or his son Prakash, obsessed with changing his mobile phone every two weeks,” Pariyar told AFP.</p>
<p>Prachanda’s lifestyle first attracted criticism when news emerged in January 2012 that he had rented a 15-room mansion in Kathmandu, a property he still occupies, despite promises to vacate it.</p>
<p>&#8230;</p>
<p>The news rankled many in Nepal, one of the world’s most unequal and impoverished countries, where nearly 25 percent of the population lives on less than $1.25 a day, according to the World Bank.</p>
<p>Two months later, another scandal erupted when the Maoist-led government acknowledged offering $250,000 to Prachanda’s son Prakash Dahal to climb Mount Everest.</p>
<p>And, in April 2012, clashes broke out in a UN-monitored camp for former Maoist soldiers when troops accused the party of stealing funds owed to them.</p>
<p>&#8230;</p>
<p>Agni Sapkota, a spokesman for the party as well as an election candidate, said criticism of the party was part of a smear campaign and the Maoists remained true to their roots.</p>
<p>“The allegations that we have forgotten our ideals are wrong, they are spread by our enemies,” he said.</p></blockquote>
<p>They do remain true to their roots. Just look at the ruling class in China. Or in North Korea.</p>
<p>The left doesn&#8217;t introduce equality. It loots the country and builds a new elite around its own ranks while impoverishing everyone else, except occasionally a handful of needed professionals.</p>
<p>Wealth redistribution mostly goes past the poor and into the Party.</p>
<p>History. No one learns from it.</p>
<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/1378738165000-deblasio-nycmayor1.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-210588" alt="1378738165000-deblasio-nycmayor" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/1378738165000-deblasio-nycmayor1-450x337.jpg" width="450" height="337" /></a></p>
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		<title>Barack Obama and the Bad Ideas of Progressivism</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-thornton/barack-obama-and-the-bad-ideas-of-progressivism/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=barack-obama-and-the-bad-ideas-of-progressivism</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-thornton/barack-obama-and-the-bad-ideas-of-progressivism/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 17 Oct 2013 04:52:37 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Thornton]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Capitalism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Class warfare]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[progressivism]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=207414</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[What lies behind a president's serial gross incompetence.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/ok.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-207440" alt="ok" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/ok.jpg" width="266" height="199" /></a><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;">Barack Obama’s serial gross incompetence has elicited all sorts of explanatory theories. He’s a closet socialist, an Alinskyite radical, a secret Muslim, or an anti-American internationalist. Though some of Obama’s words and deeds give support to all these speculations, I prefer a simpler explanation. Obama is a Progressive––not a vague “progressive,” the elastic moniker liberals started using when the word “liberal” became politically toxic. I mean a Progressive of the sort that flourished between the 1890’s and 1920’s, and that laid down the principles and tactics that have animated modern Democrats for decades: faux populism laced with class warfare, disregard for the Constitution, and the desire for a mammoth federal government. These are just a few of the old Progressive ideals that comprise the political philosophy of Barack Obama and much of the Democratic Party.</span></b></p>
<p><i>Faux Populism and Class Warfare</i></p>
<p>Obama’s pose as a champion of populist democracy against elitist cabals of bankers, rich people, and corporations is consistent with Progressive rhetoric about the “people.” Theodore Roosevelt, for example, in 1910 touted “the triumph of a real democracy, the triumph of popular government, and in the long run, of an economic system under which each man shall be guaranteed the opportunity to show the best that there is in him.” But such anodyne phrases were in service to class warfare. A year later he railed against “those other men who distrust the people, and many of whom not merely distrust the people, but wish to keep them helpless so as to exploit them for their own benefit.” In contrast, the Progressives “propose to do away with whatever in our government tends to secure to privilege, and to the great sinister special interests, a rampart from behind which they can beat back the forces that strive for social and industrial justice, and frustrate the will of the people.” The Progressives’ aim is “adequately to guarantee the people against injustice by the mighty corporations.” Woodrow Wilson in his 1913 book <i>The New Freedom</i> agreed: “The government, which was designed for the people, has got into the hands of the bosses and their employers, the special interests. An invisible empire has been set up above the forms of democracy.”</p>
<p>No different are the many attacks by Obama on corporations and the rich. Remember in 2010 when he said, “I do think at a certain point, you&#8217;ve made enough money”? Or his constant harping on “millionaires and billionaires,” a category including those making $250,000 a year? Or his 2011 attack on oil companies, when he vowed that his Justice Department will “root out any cases of fraud or manipulation in the oil markets that might affect gas prices, and that includes the role of traders and speculators. We’re going to make sure that nobody’s taking advantage of American consumers for their own short-term gains”? Or his claim during last year’s presidential election that Romney “thinks that someone who makes $20 million a year, like him, should pay a lower [tax] rate than a cop or a teacher who makes $50,000”? Such exploitation of envy and resentment was rife during the Progressive period.</p>
<p><i>Disregard for the Constitution</i></p>
<p>Obama’s selective obeisance to the Constitution he has sworn to uphold––refusing, for example, to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed” (Article 2.3) when he delayed legal provisions of Obamacare ––has its precedence in the Progressive presidents and theorists. They believed that social, technological, and economic changes had made the Constitution an anachronism. “The old laws,” Theodore Roosevelt said, “and the old customs which had almost the binding force of law, were once quite sufficient to regulate the accumulation and distribution of wealth. Since the industrial changes which have so enormously increased the productive power of mankind, they are no longer sufficient.” Indeed, during the Anthracite Coal Strike of 1902, Roosevelt dismissed concerns that his interference was contrary to the Constitution by shouting, “To hell with the Constitution when the people want coal!”</p>
<p>So too the most influential Progressive theorist, Herbert Croly. In 1909 he counseled that Americans discard the “strong, almost dominant, tendency to regard the existing Constitution with superstitious awe, and to shrink with horror from modifying it even in the smallest detail.” Woodrow Wilson agreed that the Constitution was outmoded. “The laws of this country have not kept up with the change of economic circumstances in this country; they have not kept up with the change of political circumstances.” Invoking Darwinian evolution, Wilson continued, “All that progressives ask or desire is permission—in an era when ‘development,’ ‘evolution,’ is the scientific word—to interpret the Constitution according to the Darwinian principle.”</p>
<p>Obama exhibited the same critical view of the Constitution when he <a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/paulroderickgregory/2012/09/23/why-the-fuss-obama-has-long-been-on-record-in-favor-of-redistribution/">complained</a> in 2001 that the highest law of the land “is a charter of negative liberties. Says what the states can’t do to you. Says what the federal government can’t do to you, but doesn’t say what the federal government or state government must do on your behalf.” In office he has acted on this belief, selectively enforcing laws from the Defense of Marriage Act to immigration laws and the legal provisions of Obamacare. And he bragged about violating the Constitution’s defining principle of the separation of powers in his 2012 and 2013 State of the Union speeches when he said, “If Congress won&#8217;t act . . . I will.”</p>
<p><i>Big Government</i></p>
<p>Progressives were impatient with the Constitution’s dispersal of power through structural checks and balances and federalism. They thought the novel problems created by modernity needed a powerful central government wielding the power necessary to solve such problems without the cumbersome interference from the state governments. Theodore Roosevelt asserted, “The national government belongs to the whole American people, and where the whole American people are interested, that interest can be guarded effectively only by the national government. The betterment which we seek must be accomplished, I believe, mainly through the national government.” In his address to Congress, Roosevelt said, “The danger to American democracy lies not in the least in the concentration of administrative power in responsible and accountable hands. It lies in having the power insufficiently concentrated, so that no one can be held responsible to the people for its use.”</p>
<p>Herbert Croly agreed: “The realization of a genuine social policy necessitates the aggrandizement of the administrative and legislative branches of the government.” Elsewhere he added, “Only by faith in an efficient national organization, and by an exclusive and aggressive devotion to the national welfare, can the American democratic ideal be made good.” Another influential Progressive theorist, Mary Parker Follett, in 1918 similarly wrote, “The state has a higher function than either restraining individuals or protecting individuals. It is to have a great forward policy which shall follow the collective will of the people, a collective will which embodied through our state, in our life, shall be the basis of progress yet undreamed of . . . Democracy is every one building the single life, not my life and others, not the individual and the state, but my life bound up with others, the individual which <i>is</i> the state, the state which <i>is</i> the individual.”</p>
<p>Consistent with Follett’s remarks is Obama’s frequent “you didn’t build that” rhetoric in which he equates citizens with the federal government, and privileges the collective over the individual. In July he said, “We all have a stake in government’s success, because the government is us.” This attitude lurks as well in the rhetoric of his Ohio State commencement address earlier this year, when he decried the “voices that incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate, sinister entity that’s at the root of all our problems” and “that our brave and creative and unique experiment in self-rule is somehow just a sham with which we can’t be trusted.” Of course, the Constitution is founded precisely on the opposite idea: the legitimate fear of centralized power, which as George Washington once said is “of an encroaching nature.” That’s why the Constitution created checks and balances, limited the power of the federal government, and preserved the sovereignty of the states, so that no one branch could become powerful enough to compromise the freedom of the rest of us.</p>
<p>Obama and the Democrats share many other tenets of Progressivism, which have penetrated our politics to the point that many people take them for granted. When Obama told Joe the plumber, “When you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody,”  he was simply repeating the numerous Progressive demands to equalize incomes and redistribute property. At the 1912 Progressive Party presidential nominating convention, for example, former Indiana senator Albert Beveridge orated, “We mean not only to make prosperity steady, but to give to the many who earn it a just share of that prosperity instead of helping the few who do not earn it to take an unjust share. The Progressive motto is ‘Pass the prosperity around.’” Punitive taxation of the rich, metastasizing government regulations, creeping collectivism, all have their origins in the Progressive Party.</p>
<p>We need to recall this history to understand just how embedded in our political culture is the Progressive ideology, and just how outdated and reactionary it is. Doing so––and studying the responses of Progressivism’s now forgotten challengers like Calvin Coolidge, William Taft, and Elihu Root––can be useful for understanding and fighting the political ideology now running and ruining the country.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p><em>Don&#8217;t miss <strong>Jamie Glazov&#8217;s</strong> video interview with <strong></strong> <strong>Daniel Greenfield</strong> on &#8220;Obama&#8217;s Shutdown Strategy&#8221; and the administration&#8217;s overall destructive endgame:</em></p>
<p><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/hpyoCFF-iL8" height="315" width="420" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Uber-Liberal Politicians Will Set NYC Back Many Years</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/ronn-torossian/uber-liberal-politicians-will-set-nyc-back-many-years/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=uber-liberal-politicians-will-set-nyc-back-many-years</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/ronn-torossian/uber-liberal-politicians-will-set-nyc-back-many-years/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 12 Sep 2013 04:05:43 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ronn Torossian]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Bill de Blasio]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Class warfare]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[New York City]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Taxes]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[wealth]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=203861</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The destructiveness of class warfare. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/bloomberg-deblasio.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-203862" alt="bloomberg-deblasio" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/bloomberg-deblasio-337x350.jpg" width="202" height="210" /></a></p>
<p>For Bill de Blasio and other ultra-liberal politicians, I am evil &#8212; because I am successful. The Public Advocate of New York, who came from nowhere to win the New York City Democratic primary and is now the frontrunner to be the mayor of the city, ran his campaign focused on vowing to address the issue which he deems “The Tale of Two Cities.” As someone born in Brooklyn and raised in the Bronx, who now lives on the vaunted Upper West Side, I am indeed very familiar with the different neighborhoods, and the DNA of New York.</p>
<p>I was raised in the Bronx in a single-mother household, attended public school and worked in a local pizzeria many hours from the age of 12 until after I graduated college. I remember returning bottles for the 5 cent deposits (well before the days when anyone thought about the need to be “green” friendly) and the constant struggle for my mother to pay the bills so she could do everything in the world possible for my sister and I to get ahead. And indeed, my holy mother never failed, and we got ahead thanks to her love, sweat and tears.</p>
<p>I very clearly remember the dangerous streets filled with three-card monte games, hustlers, pickpockets, drug dealers and slimeballs. I remember the fear of riding the subway and of walking on the streets after dark. And indeed, while de Blasio, the Cambridge, Massachusetts transplant (who was then known as Warren Wilhelm) was getting his B.A. from New York University and then his masters in the Ivy League school of Columbia University, the great city of New York was suffering tremendously.  I am a proud graduate of the New York City public school system – although I remember cutting school often, and doing plenty of other things I don’t want my kids knowing about.</p>
<p>Today, when de Blasio speaks of “The Tale of Two Cities,” I understand the other side. I live in a uber-luxury condominium building in Lincoln Center, and my children attend private school.  Thanks to working very hard, at the age of 39, <a href="http://www.ronntorossian.com/">I own one of the largest PR agencies</a> in the city and employ over 110 people.</p>
<p>De Blasio, the uber-liberal believes I need to be penalized for my success.  He claims  “We don’t have to continue to live the Tale of Two Cities that confronts us today.” And indeed, in the great country of America, we don’t.  People in New York can work hard, take risks and get ahead – and all have opportunity.  Does everyone’s American dream mean they have to be wealthy? Or does it simply mean they have equal opportunity? Shouldn’t the 1<sup>st</sup> African American President in the White House tell all Americans that indeed anyone can do anything?</p>
<p>Why is it that New Yorkers should be taxed and penalized more because they are successful? De Blasio – like liberals throughout the US – is proposing a tax on the wealthy to fund universal pre-kindergarten and other radical ways to “address the city’s growing income inequality.” <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/ronn-torossian/occupy-wall-street-may-soon-occupy-new-yorks-city-hall/">De Blasio is an old-school liberal who will harm business interests throughout this city</a>.</p>
<p>Ads that the NY state government is running say, “In New York State, a business can grow as big as anyone can possibly imagine.” Why don’t the ads explain that one will pay more than 50% in taxes if they are successful in New York City? And clearly with extreme liberals in office that number will only go up. New York imposes high taxes on personal income, individual capital gains, corporate income, and corporate capital gains.  Everything here is expensive, and indeed for liberals, when you make it then you are to blame.</p>
<p>Too many liberal politicians fail to remember that the successful (wealthy) create jobs. They aren’t bad. They are good – and it’s the essence of capitalism. Stop demonizing the wealthy via class warfare – encourage kids and people to be successful.</p>
<p>Class warfare is something that turns this boy from the Bronx off – and should turn everyone off.  Demonizing the people who employ people, the people most likely to pay large taxes, the hard-working folks of this city – how does that make New York better? Shame on any politician who engages in class warfare.</p>
<p>P.S.:  Mr. de Blasio – During the campaign you spoke regularly of “$1,000 caviar pizza, and – for the same price –  a ‘Golden Opulence’ sundae for dessert.”  Would love to find out if I can have it delivered for lunch tomorrow to <a href="http://pinterest.com/5wpr/">5WPR</a>. Where from?</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Should Liberals Be Charged More for the Same Products?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/should-liberals-be-charged-more-for-the-same-products/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=should-liberals-be-charged-more-for-the-same-products</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/should-liberals-be-charged-more-for-the-same-products/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 15 Jan 2013 21:36:21 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Class warfare]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Socialism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[wealth redistribution]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=173594</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[We can either have a society where people work and earn, and are treated equally. Or we can have a society whose whole purpose is to redistribute wealth. And considering that liberals are among the wealthiest Americans, they might not find such a society to their liking.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/should-liberals-be-charged-more-for-the-same-products/no_guns_allowed_4-2/" rel="attachment wp-att-173598"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-173598" title="no_guns_allowed_4" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/no_guns_allowed_41-450x300.jpg" alt="" width="450" height="300" /></a></p>
<p>By conventional free market principles, no. But by wealth redistribution logic, there is a case to be made for a liberal tax.</p>
<p>Over at the &#8220;<a href="http://www.ilovedrilling.com/">I Love Drilling Juice &amp; Smoothie Bar</a>&#8220;, owner George Burnett in Vernal, Utah,<a href="http://www.ksl.com/?sid=23737239&amp;nid=148"> has made headlines for applying </a>a special tax of a dollar to liberal customers.</p>
<p>Liberals have played the wealth redistribution game, transforming the economy into a shell game for taking money from some and giving it to others based on income. A progressive smoothie tax follows that same logic.</p>
<p>Studies have shown that <a href="http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/03/conservatives_more_liberal_giv.html">liberals on average earn more</a> than conservatives. (It helps to be in a line of work where it&#8217;s nearly impossible to be fired, such as a university or certain unions.) And paying more for a smoothie, just means that they are paying their &#8220;fair share&#8221;.</p>
<p>Obama has been a big believer in wealth redistribution. So what&#8217;s wrong with a little wealth redistribution at the smoothie level anyway?</p>
<p>We can either have a society where people work and earn, and are treated equally. Or we can have a society whose whole purpose is to redistribute wealth. And considering that liberals are among the wealthiest Americans, they might not find such a society to their liking.</p>
<blockquote><p>Democrats now control the majority of the nation&#8217;s wealthiest congressional jurisdictions. More than half of the wealthiest households are concentrated in the 18 states where Democrats control both Senate seats.</p>
<p>This new political demography holds true in the House of Representatives, where the leadership of each party hails from different worlds. Nancy Pelosi, Democratic leader of the House of Representatives, represents one of America&#8217;s wealthiest regions. Her San Francisco district has more than 43,700 high-end households. Fewer than 7,000 households in the western Ohio district of House Republican leader John Boehner enjoy this level of affluence.</p></blockquote>
<p>If the left really wants a class war, it might just begin in a smoothie hut.</p>
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		<title>Hey, Who&#8217;s Up For Some Class Warfare</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/hey-whos-up-for-some-class-warfare/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=hey-whos-up-for-some-class-warfare</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/hey-whos-up-for-some-class-warfare/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 29 Nov 2012 18:37:24 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Class warfare]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=167360</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Here's your class warfare. The real deal in all its tawdry liberal glory. The redistribution isn't going from middle class whites to poor blacks, that's just another tier of the scam. The actual redistribution takes money from the working middle class and gives it to the government middle and upper classes.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/hey-whos-up-for-some-class-warfare/61itdesst1l-_sl500_aa300_/" rel="attachment wp-att-167361"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-167361" title="61Itdesst1L._SL500_AA300_" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/61Itdesst1L._SL500_AA300_.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="300" /></a></p>
<p>Do you even have to ask?</p>
<p>The Democrats <a href="http://visiontoamerica.com/13079/democrat-operatives-launch-class-warfare-website/">are now convinced</a> that they can win every election with class warfare. So long as they can convince Republicans to keep running stiff wealthy businessmen against them. But we&#8217;re not exactly dealing with a party that thinks beyond ways of sticking taxpayers with their latest &#8220;government meeting&#8221; and &#8220;donor payoff&#8221; bill.</p>
<blockquote><p>A George Soros-funded radical think tank with close ties to the Democratic Party has launched a new website urging politicians and activists to wage class warfare while hailing what it calls a new era in politics – the use of class warfare to win elections.</p>
<p>CAF’s co-director, Robert Borosage, explained the need for such a website.</p>
<p>“America’s growing diversity and its increasingly socially liberal attitudes played a big role in this election. But looking back, we are likely to see this as the first of the class warfare elections of our new Gilded Age of extreme inequality,” he wrote in a statement.</p>
<p>“More and more of our elections going forward will feature class warfare – only this time with the middle class fighting back. And candidates are going to have to be clear about which side they are on,” he wrote.</p></blockquote>
<p>I don&#8217;t think Bob Borosage really wants the middle class fighting back. The only middle class he wants fighting back is the one that holds down government jobs and feeds off the working middle class.</p>
<p>But let&#8217;s look at who the Reign of Obama has benefited. Was it <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/11/28/Median-household-wealth-down">the middle class of the 1 percent</a>?</p>
<blockquote><p>According to NYU economics professor Edward Wolff, the median wealth of American households is down shockingly from 2007 to 2010; the top 1 percent, however, increased their wealth by a stunning 71 percent.</p></blockquote>
<p>And<a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/man-of-the-people-obama-won-8-of-10-wealthiest-counties/"> who are the 1 percent</a>?</p>
<blockquote><p>In an election that often focused on debates about class warfare, President Barack Obama was favored over multimillionaire businessman Mitt Romney in eight of the nation’s 10 wealthiest counties.</p>
<p>And his margin of victory in all eight counties was greater than that of the national vote, in which Obama was leading by 50 percent to 48 percent with 97 percent of precincts reporting.</p>
<p>The Washington region has emerged from the recession looking even more affluent compared with the rest of the country, boasting seven of the 10 counties with the highest household incomes in the nation, new census numbers show.</p></blockquote>
<p>Here&#8217;s your class warfare. The real deal in all its tawdry liberal glory. The redistribution isn&#8217;t going from middle class whites to poor blacks, that&#8217;s just another tier of the scam. The actual redistribution takes money from the working middle class and gives it to the government middle and upper classes.</p>
<p>It&#8217;s the Russian economy with an American flag and a framed photo of Obama in the background.</p>
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		<title>The Real %47 &#8211; Washington DC Gets Richer, America Grows Poorer</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/the-real-%47-washington-dc-gets-richer-america-grows-poorer/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-real-%2547-washington-dc-gets-richer-america-grows-poorer</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/the-real-%47-washington-dc-gets-richer-america-grows-poorer/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sat, 22 Sep 2012 19:22:34 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Big Government]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Class warfare]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=145066</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[In 2007, before the recession began, five counties in suburban Washington made it into the top 10. By 2010, there were six. The seven in the latest ranking is an all-time high.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/michelle-obama-drinking-champagne.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-145067" title="michelle-obama-drinking-champagne" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/michelle-obama-drinking-champagne-300x220.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="220" /></a></p>
<p>Class warfare. <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/seven-of-nations-10-most-affluent-counties-are-in-washington-region/2012/09/19/f580bf30-028b-11e2-8102-ebee9c66e190_story.html">This is what it really looks like</a>.</p>
<blockquote><p>The Washington region has emerged from the recession looking even more affluent compared with the rest of the country, boasting seven of the 10 counties with the highest household incomes in the nation, new census numbers show.</p></blockquote>
<p>For some reason, while the ranks of the unemployed swell, things are <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-state-of-nova/post/the-rich-state-of-nova-loudoun-fairfax-arlington-top-wealthiest-counties-list-with-pwm-alex-rising/2012/09/20/b9bca078-032a-11e2-91e7-2962c74e7738_blog.html">looking really good over on government lane</a>.</p>
<blockquote><p> The Post’s Carol Morello and Ted Mellnik note that the Washington area, flush with federal contractors and high-tech companies, now has seven of the 10 most affluent counties in the country. While Loudoun’s median income dropped by $400, that was within the margin of error of the survey. Arlington’s median income, which was previously fifth highest, rose by almost $6,000, and Fairfax’s rose by nearly $3,000, making the three NoVa counties the only ones in the U.S. with median incomes over $100,000. Prince William (about $2,500) and Alexandria (about $5,000) also saw significant jumps in income.</p></blockquote>
<p>It&#8217;s almost like income is being redistributed by the Federal government to&#8230; itself. And that&#8217;s the real 47 percent. The swelling ranks of people who make their money off the government.</p>
<blockquote><p>Household incomes rose in most counties around Washington last year, even as they continued to sink around the country. The stability of an economy built on the pillars of the federal government, its legions of contractors and a flourishing high-tech sector is evident in the income rankings.</p>
<p>In 2007, before the recession began, five counties in suburban Washington made it into the top 10. By 2010, there were six. The seven in the latest ranking is an all-time high.</p></blockquote>
<p>And give Obama another term and most of the country will be bankrupt, but the Washington area will be sitting pretty. Because building an economy on the back of the Federal government works for a small group of insiders, not for the rest of the country.</p>
<p>As the country gets poorer, Washington gets richer. As government reigns, wealth goes from the people to the parasites.</p>
<p>This is the real 47 percent that we should be talking about.</p>
<blockquote><p>The District, which the census compares to both states and counties, has seen its ranking shoot up in the last five years as its median household income has risen from $54,000 to about $63,000. When compared with states, it rose from 16th to fifth.</p></blockquote>
<p>16th to fifth. Not bad. Redistribution works. And this is the real class warfare. The middle class is being robbed to pay for the government class.</p>
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		<title>The Real &#8220;1 Percent&#8221; Deserving of the Public&#8217;s Wrath</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/ann-coulter/the-real-1-percent-deserving-public-wrath/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-real-1-percent-deserving-public-wrath</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/ann-coulter/the-real-1-percent-deserving-public-wrath/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 17 May 2012 04:14:57 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ann Coulter]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Class warfare]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[government unions]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[pensions]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[salaries]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Scott Walker]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Wisconsin]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[workers]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=132221</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Government jobs are safe, secure, pressure-free -- and now, amazingly lucrative. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/money-down-the-drain.gif"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-132227" title="money-down-the-drain" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/money-down-the-drain.gif" alt="" width="375" height="243" /></a>The real class warfare in this country isn&#8217;t rich vs. poor, it&#8217;s government employees vs. we, the taxpayers, who pay their salaries.</p>
<p>Working for the government is supposed to be a trade-off: You can&#8217;t be fired and don&#8217;t have to exert yourself, but you will receive smaller remuneration than in the private sector, where layoffs are common (especially in the Obama economy!). Instead, government jobs are safe, secure, pressure-free &#8212; and now, amazingly lucrative!</p>
<p>Whether it&#8217;s in Wisconsin, Illinois, California or the nation&#8217;s capital, today&#8217;s public sector workers expect to do little or no work (I&#8217;m not counting partying in Las Vegas as &#8220;work&#8221;), and then be lavishly compensated. Often, the only heavy lifting they do all week is picking up their paychecks.</p>
<p>When government employees mobbed the state capitol in Wisconsin last year, the upside was: They got to bully people. The downside: Voters finally found out what these public servants were being paid.</p>
<p>Their compensation included not only straight salary, but also lavish overtime benefits, pensions, health care plans, sick days and vacation time (most of which they spent protesting).</p>
<p>The unions thought they could fight back against Gov. Scott Walker&#8217;s tiny rollbacks without anyone finding out the details. Most people saw what public employees were getting and assumed it was a misprint.</p>
<p>Two years ago, seven bus drivers in Madison, Wis., made more than $100,000 a year.</p>
<p>A few years before that, we found out that the city manager of little Bell, Calif. &#8212; per capita annual income $24,800 &#8212; was making $787,637, or including benefits: $1.5 million a year. The chief of police was getting $457,000 a year &#8212; $770,046 counting benefits &#8212; making him the first chief of police to commit highway robbery on the job. The assistant city manager was taking home $376,288 per year, for a total compensation package of $845,960.</p>
<p>All were Democrats, the party of Big Government.</p>
<p>Speaking of which &#8212; whatever happened to that investigation Gov. Jerry Brown was launching into these thieving public servants drawing million-dollar pensions from California taxpayers? The Bell scandal broke during the California gubernatorial race between Meg Whitman and Jerry Brown, who was then state attorney general. Brown vowed a no-holds-barred inquiry.</p>
<p>Anyone seen his report yet?</p>
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		<title>Should the Rich Be Condemned?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/walter-williams/should-the-rich-be-condemned/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=should-the-rich-be-condemned</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/walter-williams/should-the-rich-be-condemned/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 21 Nov 2011 04:14:03 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Walter Williams]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Afternoon Edition]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Barack Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Bill Gates]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Class warfare]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Liberty]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[thomas edison]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=113172</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why class warfare thrives on ignorance.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/OWSNH-KillAndEatTheRich.gif"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-113173" title="OWSNH-KillAndEatTheRich" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/OWSNH-KillAndEatTheRich.gif" alt="" width="375" height="255" /></a></p>
<p>Thomas Edison invented the incandescent bulb, the phonograph, the DC motor and other items in everyday use and became wealthy by doing so. Thomas Watson founded IBM and became rich through his company&#8217;s contribution to the computation revolution. Lloyd Conover, while in the employ of Pfizer, created the antibiotic tetracycline. Though Edison, Watson, Conover and Pfizer became wealthy, whatever wealth they received pales in comparison with the extraordinary benefits received by ordinary people. Billions of people benefited from safe and efficient lighting. Billions more were the ultimate beneficiaries of the computer, and untold billions benefited from healthier lives gained from access to tetracycline.</p>
<p>President Barack Obama, in stoking up class warfare, said, &#8220;I do think at a certain point you&#8217;ve made enough money.&#8221; This is lunacy. Andrew Carnegie&#8217;s steel empire produced the raw materials that built the physical infrastructure of the United States. Bill Gates co-founded Microsoft and produced software products that aided the computer revolution. But Carnegie had amassed quite a fortune long before he built Carnegie Steel Co., and Gates had quite a fortune by 1990. Had they the mind of our president, we would have lost much of their contributions, because they had already &#8220;made enough money.&#8221;</p>
<p>Class warfare thrives on ignorance about the sources of income. Listening to some of the talk about income differences, one would think that there&#8217;s a pile of money meant to be shared equally among Americans. Rich people got to the pile first and greedily took an unfair share. Justice requires that they &#8220;give back.&#8221; Or, some people talk about unequal income distribution as if there were a dealer of dollars. The reason some people have millions or billions of dollars while others have very few is the dollar dealer is a racist, sexist, a multinationalist or just plain mean. Economic justice requires a re-dealing of the dollars, income redistribution or spreading the wealth, where the ill-gotten gains of the few are returned to their rightful owners.</p>
<p>In a free society, for the most part, people with high incomes have demonstrated extraordinary ability to produce valuable services for — and therefore please — their fellow man.</p>
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		<title>Poor Get Richer, Rich Get Poorer</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/tait-trussell/poor-get-richer-rich-get-poorer/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=poor-get-richer-rich-get-poorer</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/tait-trussell/poor-get-richer-rich-get-poorer/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 16 Nov 2011 04:01:47 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Tait Trussell]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[cato institute]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Class warfare]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[income inequality]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[occupy wall street]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Tax Foundation]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=112450</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why class distinctions are practically meaningless. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/class-warfare-fight-back-e1316470647521-500x3224.gif"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-112647" title="class-warfare-fight-back-e1316470647521-500x322" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/class-warfare-fight-back-e1316470647521-500x3224.gif" alt="" width="375" height="252" /></a></p>
<p>Despite the false and angry charges from the president and the Wall Street Occupiers, the truth is that the earnings of both the so-called 1 percent (the supposedly rich) and the 99 percent (the supposedly poor) shift dramatically over the years.</p>
<p>The number of Americans earning more than $10 million a year has fallen by <a href="http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/the_real_percent_mDxpXnIgtFGBv8xlexdfVO">55 percent</a> since 2008. As for the Democrats’ favorite whipping boys, the politically disparaged millionaires, 80 percent of them are not “trust-fund babies” as they have been branded by some. Rather, they are “the first of their family to be wealthy,” according to Cato Institute scholar Michael Tanner. A column by Tanner appeared earlier this month in the New York Post.</p>
<p>Moreover, as Donald J. Boudreaux, professor of economics at George Mason University, and a lawyer, has explained, the 20 percent in the lowest tier of taxpayers grew <a href="http://www.cato.org/multimedia/daily-podcast/top-1-income-mobility">by 91 percent</a> over a nine-year period measured by the IRS in a study in 2005. There is no reason to suppose that earnings in America are not dynamic and fluid. A young person not long out of college, for example, may be in the lowest fifth of income earners. But by the time he or she is in their mid-fifties, depending on the work they are in and their position, they could well be in <a href="http://www.taxfoundation.org/news/show/250.html">the top bracket</a>, where the gross adjusted income averages about $325,000.</p>
<p>The nonpartisan Tax Foundation has found that since 2007, there has been a 39 percent decline<a href="http://But+the+nonpartisan+Tax+Foundation+has+found+that+since+2007,+there+has+been+a+39+percent+decline+in+the+number+of+American"> </a>in the number of American millionaires. As Tax Foundation tables also show the 1 percent of all taxpayers shovel out an average rate of a little over 23 percent of all taxes paid. The top five percent pays almost 59 percent of all income taxes. The bottom 50 percent pays only a skimpy 2.7 percent of U.S. income taxes.</p>
<p>The Associated Press reports that <a href="http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Articles/2011/11/03/AP-1-in-15-Now-Desperately-Poor.aspx">poverty</a> in the U.S., in this Obama depressed economy, has reached a record high.</p>
<p>“New census data paint a stark portrait of the nation&#8217;s haves and have-nots at a time when unemployment remains persistently high&#8230;(with) more Hispanics, elderly and working-age poor have fallen into poverty.”</p>
<p>Poverty differs widely, however, from that perceived by most Americans. Most of whom the government defines as “in poverty” are not poor in any ordinary sense of the term. The overwhelming majority of the poor have air conditioning, cable TV, and a host of other modern amenities. They are housed, have enough food and other basic needs, including medical care. Some poor Americans do experience significant hardships, including temporary food shortages or inadequate housing, but these poor souls are in the minority.</p>
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		<title>Why Is Class Hatred Morally Superior to Race Hatred?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/dennis-prager/why-is-class-hatred-morally-superior-to-race-hatred/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=why-is-class-hatred-morally-superior-to-race-hatred</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/dennis-prager/why-is-class-hatred-morally-superior-to-race-hatred/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 18 Oct 2011 04:34:47 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Dennis Prager]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Afternoon Edition]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Class warfare]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Communism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hilter]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[mao tse tung]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Pol Pot]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Stalin]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=109268</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The major difference between Hitler and the Communist genocidal murderers was what groups they chose for extermination.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/classWar-ahead-occupy-wallst.gif"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-109272" title="classWar-ahead-occupy-wallst" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/classWar-ahead-occupy-wallst.gif" alt="" width="337" height="223" /></a></p>
<p>The major difference between Hitler and the Communist genocidal murderers — Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot — was what groups they chose for extermination.</p>
<p>For Hitler, first Jews and ultimately Slavs and other &#8220;non-Aryans&#8221; were declared the enemy and unworthy of life. For the Communists, the rich — the bourgeoisie, land owners, and capitalists — were labeled the enemy and regarded as unworthy of life.</p>
<p>Hitler mass-murdered on the basis of race, the Communists on the basis of class.</p>
<p>Because the Holocaust was unique in its industrialization of death and in its targeting of every Jew, including babies, for death, the post-World War II world has been rightly obsessed with eradicating racism (but not anti-Semitism!), i.e., the hatred of another solely because of race. But the world has not been obsessed with eradicating the other source of genocide: classism, or the hatred of others based on class.</p>
<p>The reason for this embrace is that class hatred is as fundamental to the left as the Trinity is to Christians, and the left dominates the media and education. This is dangerous because there is an ideological continuum from the democratic left to the Communist left. Making the rich into scapegoats for society&#8217;s ills unites the left.</p>
<p>The democratic left believes in democracy, and, before the 1970s, some of its adherents were fierce anti-Communists. But while the decent and the indecent left differ on democracy versus tyranny and on non-violence versus violence, the nicest leftists in the world agree with the indecent left about who the enemy is.</p>
<p>Being on the left means that you divide the world between rich and poor much more than you divide it between good and evil. For the leftist, the existence of rich and poor — <em>inequality </em>— is what constitutes evil. More than tyranny, inequality disturbs the left, including the non-Communist left. That is why so many on the left fell in love with Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez and, at other times, with every left-wing dictator.</p>
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		<title>Obama&#8217;s Breathtaking Gall</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/larry-elder/obamas-breathtaking-gall/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obamas-breathtaking-gall</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/larry-elder/obamas-breathtaking-gall/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 10 Oct 2011 04:04:48 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Larry Elder]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Barack Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Bill Clinton]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Geraldine Ferraro]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=108198</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[What did the president mean when he said America has gotten "soft"?]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/ap_obama_economy_jef_110829_wg.gif"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-108200" title="ap_obama_economy_jef_110829_wg" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/ap_obama_economy_jef_110829_wg.gif" alt="" width="375" height="255" /></a></p>
<p>&#8220;The way I think about it is, you know, this is, uh, you know, a great, uh, great country that had gotten a little soft, and you know, we didn&#8217;t have that same competitive edge that we needed over the last, uh, couple of decades. We need to get back on track.&#8221; — President Barack Obama.</p>
<p>The gall is breathtaking, even from a man who as a presidential candidate said, &#8220;We are the ones we&#8217;ve been waiting for.&#8221;</p>
<p>This from a President who, in chastising the rich, said, &#8220;I do think at a certain point you&#8217;ve made enough money.&#8221;</p>
<p>This from a man who, during the brief time he actually worked in the private sector, represented a black woman who accused a bank of redlining her out of a loan. The proximate cause of the housing bubble and meltdown is the notion that the &#8220;underrepresented&#8221; deserve a home, whether or not they qualified under traditional lending criteria.</p>
<p>This from a man who told a Toledo plumber that government should &#8220;spread the wealth around&#8221; by taxing &#8220;the rich&#8221; and giving the money to others, because &#8220;it&#8217;s good for everybody.&#8221;</p>
<p>This from a man who blasts any suggestion that young people just might be capable of investing a portion of their Social Security contribution into an account that they manage. Former Congresswoman and vice presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro, in opposing the idea, fretted for those who lack &#8220;the knowledge and the wherewithal&#8221; to handle the responsibility.</p>
<p>This from a flip-flopper who initially opposed the 1996 welfare reform — legislation that resulted in a 50 percent reduction in the welfare rolls, and without a corresponding increase in teen pregnancy. Then-state Sen. Obama called President Bill Clinton&#8217;s support of the federal bill &#8220;disturbing,&#8221; and a year later — on the Illinois state Senate floor — he said, &#8220;I probably would not have supported the federal legislation.&#8221; A decade later, when presidential candidate Obama was asked if he would have signed or vetoed the &#8217;96 reform bill, he repeatedly dodged the question, insisting that he looked to the next 10 years, not the past 10 years. Then his campaign began running ads touting the reduction of welfare cases made possible by the 1996 reforms.</p>
<p>This from a man who blames corporations for &#8220;shipping jobs overseas,&#8221; yet shows no concern for the high corporate tax rates — rates that would be unnecessary were the federal government to actually stick to the handful of duties permitted by the Constitution.</p>
<p>This from a man who thinks it&#8217;s the government&#8217;s job to &#8220;invest&#8221; in &#8220;green jobs of the future&#8221; because the private sector cannot be trusted to take risks.</p>
<p>To the extent America has gotten &#8220;soft,&#8221; Obama can&#8217;t mean working hours.</p>
<p>The average American works longer hours than other people in the industrialized world, including the Japanese, the Germans and the British.</p>
<p>Nor does Obama, by &#8220;soft,&#8221; mean the growing and unsustainable reliance on government. In 1900, government, at all three levels — federal, state and local — took about 10 percent of the American workers&#8217; pay. Today, if one assigns a price to unfunded federal mandates imposed on the states, government&#8217;s take approaches 50 percent. Obama and his party encourage government growth and expect Americans to depend on it for health, welfare and retirement. These are, they tell us, &#8220;human rights.&#8221;</p>
<p>So, let&#8217;s recap the President&#8217;s playbook.</p>
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		<title>The New Attack on Palin? Associate Her with John Edwards</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/petercollier/the-new-attack-on-palin-associate-her-with-john-edwards-3/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-new-attack-on-palin-associate-her-with-john-edwards-3</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 08 Feb 2010 05:11:18 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Peter Collier]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=48952</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The obsessive attacks on Palin take yet another morbid turn. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/palin.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-48953" title="palin" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/palin-300x188.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="188" /></a></p>
<p>Wednesday, February 3, 2010, marked a new turn in the obsessive attacks on Sarah Palin: associating  her with <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=631" target="_blank">John Edwards</a>.</p>
<p>In the <a href="http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/03/grifters-tale/" target="_blank"><em>New York Times</em></a> Timothy Egan sees them as a pair of ethically similar “grifters” using populism to con the American voter–“playing to outrage while taking care of themselves.” In Egan’s view, both ginned up and profited from fears among a broad segment of the public who increasingly resent the success and power of the elites and feel that “America is passing them by.”</p>
<p>Edwards did this an arrant fashion by tearing the labels off his Armani suits and driving someone else’s clunker to rallies where he preached his blow-dried version of class warfare.  Now Palin is doing the same thing, Egan believes, by “charging Tea Partiers $100,000 to stoke their fears.”  (Yes, she has promised to plow her take back into “the cause,” but Egan assumes that she is a cynic whose only cause is herself.)</p>
<p>The comparison between the pair is asymmetrical and tendentious.  Egan doesn’t consider Edwards’ banality of evil—notably the lying treachery committed against wife and family, and friends and supporters.  But while  Palin’s failings, notably her “incoherence” and her lack of response to Glenn Beck when he asked about her favorite founding father, are not in any way equivalent to Edwards’ evil, they are more fully explored. It’s clear by the end of his piece that Egan isn’t really comparing the two at all, but using Edwards’ nastiness to make Palin seem sleazy by association.</p>
<p>Andrew Sullivan posted a nuttier but more interesting piece on Palin   and Edwards on his blog on thursday   titled <a href="http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2010/02/my-john-edwards-failure.html" target="_blank">“My John Edwards Failure.”</a></p>
<p>He begins by acknowledging that he committed a double standard treating Palin harshly and giving a pass to Edwards.  But then he immediately reassures the reader that this doesn’t mean he is “backtracking” on Palin.  In fact, says Sullivan,</p>
<blockquote><p>“All I regret is not being  able to expose her for real yet.”</p></blockquote>
<p>A surprising admission of failure by someone who has spent the last year and a half obsessing on her private parts, producing sick innuendoes about her family, and licking his chops over the dull normal baby daddy, Levi Johnston, and the big revelation he’s supposedly getting ready to deliver. Hasn’t he run her to ground yet? What more could Sullivan have done to her after months of subjecting her to the blog equivalent of waterboarding?</p>
<p>In the rest of his post—about his deficiencies is not getting  the Edwards story—he cultivates a weepy tone while making a very big deal out of an inessential disclosure.  He ignored the Edwards story, he says, because of his “leeriness of investigating people’s sex lives” (obviously he made an exception in Palin’s case).  Then he grandiosely struts his “sensitivity” by saying that he also “felt protective toward Elizabeth” whom he didn’t want to hurt at a time when she was “faced with mortality” and that he grieved over her loss of a child.</p>
<p>The bottom line is that he made a mistake “in making an assumption of a baseline of decency in public officials” and won’t do it again. Of course this assumption never did apply to Palin whom Sullivan has been lighting up—especially on the circumstances of Trig’s birth–during all those months when he was studiously ignoring Edwards.</p>
<p>What we can take away from this jive confession is that Sullivan will feel it his duty to concentrate his fire even more fiercely on Palin now that he has “learned” from his kid glove treatment of Edwards.</p>
<p>As if he needed a justification to continue this loony quest.</p>
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