Congress Has A Few Patriots, But The Rest Are Just Fighting For Their Slice Of Leviathan Pie

Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Transcript – Don’t be living in the ethereal fantasy world that these guys are actually holding the line for the reasons that you and I hold near and dear.  There are obviously other political concerns here.  There is the divvying up of the $3.8-trillion-pound pie that’s really what is going on here.  Each side is fighting for their slice.  There are some in the House of Representin’ that are fighting for the correct causes, I think.  Their numbers are small.  Check out today’s transcript for the rest…

 

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

Mike:  Lou is in Georgia.  Hello, Lou, you’re first up today.

Caller Lou:  How you doing?

Mike:  I’m fine, Lou, thank you.  I am well.

Caller Lou:  I just want to mention, it was really funny listening to the illegitimate grandchild of Elmer Fudd, Chuck Schumer.  It’s amazing how this thing carries on.  The longer the government is shut down, the more I applaud.  I’m just loving this.  I just hope that nothing gets voted on and it keeps going.  The longer the debt ceiling is kept at bay, the less that we have.  It’s just up to Obama to pass the budget as is and carry on.  That’s what I’m hoping for really, as an anarcho-capitalist and lover of Lew Rockwell and Peter Schiff and all those great people.  This is a great day for us.  I hope we’ve finally drawn the line in the sand.  Maybe it’s the start of something.  I’m really hoping.

Mike:  If you read David Freddoso’s article about Ted Poe, Republican, alleged Tea Party conservative from Texas, you will dissuade yourself of any notion that this is the day you have been waiting for.  Guys like Poe are not where your and my mind are, Lou, they’re just not.  I’m not telling you to not think the way you’re thinking, I’m just telling you that the realist is going to say that what I just said, about us being the worst generation — even though I believe that and am trying to do my little part in not being a member of the worst generation — that the legislative class around us is most certainly part of the worst generation.  Don’t be living in the ethereal fantasy world that these guys are actually holding the line for the reasons that you and I hold near and dear.  There are obviously other political concerns here.  There is the divvying up of the $3.8-trillion-pound pie that’s really what is going on here.  Each side is fighting for their slice.  There are some in the House of Representin’ that are fighting for the correct causes, I think.  Their numbers are small.

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Caller Lou:  I hope God —

Mike:  Maybe their own self-centered motivations, radically autonomous, individual aspirations might, for the moment, coincide with yours, but certainly not for the same reasons.  Of course, we also have to consider that according to the public opinion polls, like, for example, LA Times has a story out today “Tea Party Backers At Odds With Majority Of Americans On Debt Limit.”  The way I phrased that story in today’s Pile of Prep is “Polls show what some of us already know: The sheeple like their government big, ineffective and generous with OPM and they do not care how many people are grifted for this ritual, alive or soon-to-be-born.”  That’s pretty concise, don’t you think?  Freddoso writes “Conservatives Hew To Principle When It Doesn’t Matter.”

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“By allowing more foreign sugar into the United States, we create unnecessary and hurtful competition.”

What left-wing hater of business and free markets could have said such a thing on the House floor Friday? It was Rep. Ted Poe, R-Texas, who over his nine-year career in Congress has accumulated a 93 percent rating from the American Conservative Union.

On Friday, he was thundering absurdly about the danger “of becoming dependent on foreign countries for what we eat.”

In mid-September, Poe became one of the early co-sponsors of a bill that would have funded regular government operations on the condition that all funding for Obamacare was cut off.

He proudly posted on Facebook his vote to defund Obamacare. In that fight, where Republicans lacked the votes to win or even move the ball, Poe talked the conservative talk and helped mire Congress in a lengthy shutdown that at least one poll suggests is already hurting the conservative movement’s Image and helping Obamacare’s popularity rebound.

But in the fight over America’s agri-socialist sugar program – a fight conservatives could have actually won with considerable bipartisan support if they’d stuck together – Poe was helping lead the charge on the wrong side.

It’s a good example of what’s wrong with the Right at this moment. Symbolism is trumping substance. Conservative lawmakers and activists are plunging into dead-end conflicts that do little more than inspire e-mail fundraising pitches; at the same time, they fail to stand up for basic conservative principles when given opportunities to win.

The U.S. government’s role in the U.S. sugar market is to make sugar unnecessarily expensive for American consumers. The policy costs them an unnecessary $3.5 billion per year, and has led food manufacturers to substitute high fructose corn syrup for real sugar in common foods such as soda (which is why Coke tastes better in Europe). [Mike: By the bye, this also has a little something to do with why we’re so corpulent and fat. That high fructose corn syrup is not good for you, which is not to say that sugar is either.]

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American producers are essentially promised a floor price for their product well above what the market usually bears. By imposing strict import quotas and prohibitively high tariffs on cheaper foreign sugar imports, the federal government has, over the years, enriched a small number of large and lobbied-up sugar companies at the expense of consumers. [Mike: Folks, this happens every day. This is how business is done. Either you’re at the table with Ted Poe and his buddies or you’re on the menu, in other words.]

Consumers are not the only victims, either. Defenders of the sugar program argue that it saves 140,000 jobs in the sugar industry, but at the same time it costs more than four times that many jobs in the food manufacturing industry, whose prices have been needlessly inflated by the price floor.

Conservatives supposedly believe that markets work without government micromanagement. Their complaint about Obamacare has been that America’s health insurance system was already failing through excessive government interference.

At the moment, the Republican Party lacks the clout in Washington to repeal Obamacare.

Yet, even as conservatives were beating their chests in an obviously doomed, pretend effort to make Obamacare go away, 85 Republicans voted on Saturday morning to block any reforms to a far more socialistic scheme that could probably be abolished or at least scaled back tomorrow if they’d only stick together and vote their beliefs.

There are no indications that any conservative group will primary any of them or even urge constituents to call in and turn up the heat against the anti-free market measure they just supported.

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Mike:  He’s talking about ag subsidies.  I can tell you from personal experience, we had Representative Steve King on this show on Constitution Day and I asked him about ag subsidies.  I got dead air in response.  Then I pushed and challenged: If you’re a fan of the ag subsidy, you people in Iowa can have all the corn subsidies you want; you pay for it.  We’ll trade that for the sugar farmers of Louisiana paying for our sugar subsidy, which won’t last very long because Louisiana is broke, too.  I can still remember when the Tea Party Congress came in and the wundergirl of the Tea Party caucus, Kristi Noem — where’s she from, Andrew, Iowa?  It’s one of those northern states.

AG:  Maybe North Dakota.

Mike:  You remember what I’m talking about.  She was one of the Tea Party [mocking] “We’re gonna cut spending.  We’re gonna get back to the Constitution now.”  Oh, yeah, Kristi?  Show me where ag subsidy is in the Constitution.  Where is it?  Where do you find it?  Now she’s become a reliable vote for that subsidy.

AG:  South Dakota.

Mike:  Thank you.  The worst generation continues to insult the intelligence of people that seek truth.  The worst generation continues to insult the intelligence of those who can read anything written in the 18^th and 19^th and early 20^th centuries.  By insisting that they are the guardians, gatekeepers of what conservatism is, they continue to do great and grave damage to that once great and august word, conservative.

End Mike Church Show Transcript

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