Paul Gottfried: Americans Are All Socialists Now

Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Transcript – There’s a guy in a state that’s modestly trying to rein some spending in and the people hate him.  They despise him.  They want to take him out in a field somewhere near Lancaster and stone him.  Don’t hold out too much hope for the renaissance of the states getting involved in this.  There are good people in the states.  I think that’s where we go back to Utica, back to what Kauffman was saying earlier, like we try to do with our ReFounding Father Society.  Check out today’s transcript for the rest…

 

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

Mike:  Here’s an interesting headline at American Conservative Magazine last night by Paul Gottfried: Are Americans More ‘Socialist’ Than Europeans?

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Although I’ve been critical of my state’s current governor, it’s usually been to twit him for not cutting budgets sufficiently. While Tom Corbett is spot on in wanting to privatize Pennsylvania’s liquor monopoly, he should not be trying to feather the nests of other public employees by promising to pay off teachers with the proceeds gained from selling state-owned liquor stores.

Unfortunately I’m not at all on the same page with most residents of the Keystone State, who presumably dislike Corbett for being a budget cruncher. According to the latest Franklin and Marshall poll, Corbett, enjoys only 26 percent approval…

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Mike:  There’s a guy in a state that’s modestly trying to rein some spending in and the people hate him.  They despise him.  They want to take him out in a field somewhere near Lancaster and stone him.  Don’t hold out too much hope for the renaissance of the states getting involved in this.  There are good people in the states.  I think that’s where we go back to Utica, back to what Kauffman was saying earlier, like we try to do with our ReFounding Father Society.  Find people that you like, that you like to commiserate with, share like and common causes, stop trying to force feed your cause to everyone else.  Organize together, meet and hopefully find more people that agree with you.  Start your own organization.  If you actually have a nucleus of people there that are passionate enough about this, you may actually be able to get some things done where it matters most, in your locality.  Work on the local.  This is the lesson of the last century.  The national is going to kill people.  There are going to be bodies in its wake.  You might be able to affect and stop the local, thus republicanism.  Then Gottfried writes this:

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This situation illustrates for me a general problem facing this country, perhaps even more critically than is the case in other Western countries. Unlike Canada or Germany, which have large welfare states but are willing to economize, in the U.S. voters just want more and more social programs, and politicians are too cowardly or ideologically driven to say “no.” I’ve never accepted the idiocy pushed on Fox News that the U.S. is a “right of center” country, but I also never realized until recently how undisciplined we’ve become as a government-dependent society. Other social democratic countries focus attention on soaring public debts. We by contrast just ask the state to pay for more stuff, which in the end we finance out of our earnings or cover with Chinese loans.  I don’t believe for a moment this problem is confined to minorities. The 74 percent of those surveyed who are against our minimally penny-pinching governor includes far more than minority discontent.

Notice my argument is not that we return to being a constitutional society with a strictly limited government. The hour for that is long over, and I may be in a diminishing number of those who regret that’s the case. I just wish we became a better disciplined social democracy, like Canada, which does better in reining in unsustainable government costs.

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Mike:  In other words, we’re all socialists now, according to Paul Gottfried, so get over it.

End Mike Church Show Transcript