The Patriot Post - Outing Obama's Socialist Political Agenda

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The Patriot Post - Outing Obama's Socialist Political Agenda
From The Federalist Patriot
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The ObamaNation Plantation
Outing Obama's Socialist Political Agenda

By Mark Alexander

September 20, 2012

"Repeal that [welfare] law, and you will soon see a change in their manners. Industry will increase, and with it plenty among the lower people; their circumstances will mend, and more will be done for their happiness by inuring them to provide for themselves, than could be done by dividing all your estates among them." --Benjamin Franklin (1753)

Barack Hussein Obama's Leftmedia sycophants1 declared the Romney-Ryan2 presidential ticket DOA this week. The talkingheads have convicted Mitt Romney for what they insist is a very offensive "political gaffe" uttered at a private campaign event back in May.

The colossal blunder in question? Romney identified the underbelly of Obama's socialist political agenda3 -- the fact that an ever-increasing number of "useful idiots4" have been lured into subservience by generations of Socialist Democrat5 policies, are now dependent on a laundry list of government subsidies, and, consequently, they are very likely to vote for the candidate who will continue redistributing wealth to fund those subsidies.

Romney's offhand remarks were surreptitiously recorded by an anonymous party, then leaked by an opposition researcher named James Carter IV -- yes, he's the grandson of that Jimmy Carter -- to a hard-left magazine, which timed its release of the video as part of Obama's socialist dezinformatsia propaganda.

Dezinformatsia indeed! Though Romney's assertion that most Obama supporters are government dependents has generated a flood of faux-outrage on the Left, their underlying indignation is more accurately rooted in the fact that Romney did not declare that ALL Americans are dependent on government. That is precisely what Obama himself recently proclaimed in his now-infamous assertion, "You didn't build that.6 Somebody else [read: "government"] made that happen."

In the video, Romney said, "There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president, no matter what ... who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That's an entitlement, and the government should give it to them. And they will vote for [Obama] no matter what. ... These are people who pay no income tax."

While Romney's citation of the percentage of Americans who pay no taxes was correct, and it happens to coincide with Obama's current poll numbers, clearly his reference was to the fact that 30-35 percent of Obama's most fervent constituent support is composed of those who are now culturally, if not irrevocably, dependent upon a plethora of government subsidies. These "takers" pay no income tax, and they thus have no direct liability in the economics of wealth redistribution and no stake in curtailing our calamitous $16,000,000,000,000 national debt.

Indeed, they are "dependent upon government," and "believe that they are victims, believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, [and] believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it."

Now, there's nothing new about Romney's contention regarding the relationship between populist socialism7 and popular elections. Avowed socialist George Bernard Shaw, co-founder of the London School of Economics, smugly declared at the turn of the 20th century, "A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul."

Observations about the inherent threat to Liberty posed by that electoral equation predates Shaw by at least two millennia. Greek Historian Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus wrote, "The real destroyer of the liberties of the people is he who spreads among them bounties, donations and benefits."

Six centuries earlier, Chinese philosopher Lao-Tzu wrote, "The people suffer from famine because of the multitude of taxes consumed by their superiors. It is through this that they suffer famine."

And every generation of historians since has likewise noted that long and sordid history of destruction.

In 1766, that founding sage Ben Franklin observed, "I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion of the means. I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it. In my youth I travelled much, and I observed in different countries, that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer."

In 1776, the year the ideological ancestors of today's American Patriots8 were codifying our natural right to Liberty, Historian Edward Gibbon published his six-volume treatise, "The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," detailing how opulence and entitlement led to the loss of civic virtue and the fall of the world's first great republic.

Another enlightened philosopher of the era, François-Marie Arouet (Voltaire), observed, "The art of government consists of taking as much money as possible from one party of citizens to give to the other."

In his 1781 "Notes on the State of Virginia," Thomas Jefferson wrote, "Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition."

These 18th-century observations about taxation and entitlement served as seminal reference points for the "Fatal Cycle of Democracy9" published a century later.

That cycle follows this sequence: From bondage to spiritual faith; From spiritual faith to great courage; From courage to Liberty (Rule of Law10); From Liberty to abundance; From abundance to complacency; From complacency to apathy; From apathy to dependence; From dependence back into bondage (rule of men11).

Thus, not only is the substance of Romney's assertion about Obama's "base," tragically and completely accurate, it has been substantiated throughout history. And, according to The Heritage Foundation's 2012 Index of Dependence on Government12, Obama's earnest endeavor of "fundamentally transforming the United States of America13" is well underway, with historic numbers of Americans now dependent upon the state.

While it would be patently wrong to assert that everyone who receives a government subsidy and pays no taxes is an Obama supporter, the growing number of Americans who depend on government support under Obama's Great Recession is staggering.

According to the Tax Policy Center, more than 46 percent of households pay no income tax. That is because over the last four decades, Congress has "engineered" the tax code to exempt income from targeted voter blocks.