I received an email supposedly quoting Margaret Thatcher as saying: “The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.”
I’ve never found any proof that this great Briton ever said that, but there’s no doubt she knew her business. After all, she was, on February 21, 2007, the first Prime Minister to be honored with a statue in the House of Parliament while still living .
Some of my conservative friends find themselves feeling adrift with the Obama election, even though they’ve enjoyed the ongoing circus of the month of miscalculations that already has an adoring press corps turning on him. Those who have been around long enough, however, clearly see the similarities of past Democrat Presidents, Carter and Clinton, both Southern governor train wrecks who were replaced by Republican Presidents that served two terms. Given the current GOP predicament, I urge my conservative colleagues to remember what Margaret Thatcher said outside 10 Downing Street on May 4, 1979: “I would just like to remember some words of St. Francis of Assisi which I think are really just particularly apt at the moment. ‘Where there is discord, may we bring harmony, where there is error, may we bring truth, where there is doubt, may we bring faith, and where there is despair, may we bring hope’.”
Americans will need the prayers of St. Francis and all the saints, given the largest federal borrowing in American history with the majority of the funds designed to increase dependency on the federal government. We need hope to replace despair. I like Jon Stewart’s term for the thing, Clusterf#@k to the Poor House . And since only 90 million US citizens actually pay income tax that means each American taxpayer’s share of the so-called stimulus bill is $8700. We’d better hope Hauser’s Law , which states that federal tax revenues will always be equal to approximately 19.5% of the Gross Domestic Product, will continue to hold up.
There’s a funny thing about borrowing. You usually find that it takes longer to pay back, and/or is more difficult to pay back than you originally envisioned. And once you get in the habit of using other people’s money, it can become addictive. After all, the income tax in the U.S. was originally very small and meant to be temporary when first enacted in 1913 .
So who can we thank for this ridiculous mess? Arnold Kling had some interesting comments about big government and big finance in October 2008:
Big Finance and Big Government have much in common. Both are coveted by Harvard graduates. Both are characterized by an arrogant sense of entitlement and importance.
Have you ever looked over a list of Harvard graduates? George Bush got an MBA degree from Harvard Business School, the first President with an MBA. Barack Obama got a law degree there and was the Harvard Law Review’s first black president. At the then President elect Obama’s first press conference, the advisors onstage with him included Larry Summers (President of Harvard until he resigned after “women are unequal” remarks), Robert Reich (former member of the faculty of Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government), former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin (guess where he went to college), and Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm (before overseeing her economically failed state, at Harvard Law School she was editor-in-chief of the Harvard Civil Rights Civil Liberties Law Review). And let’s not forget that the architect of the first bailout, Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, also had an MBA from Harvard Business School. Maybe the real long-term solution to America’s economic woes is to put Harvard out of business.
There is also certainly “an arrogant sense of entitlement and importance” in Hollywood, which repeatedly makes unprofitable, self-indulgent movies using “other people’s money.” In Hollywood, it’s a long-standing “rule” that you should never spend your own money to make a movie when you can get someone else to finance it. In other words, let someone else be the sucker. That message was adopted by the Democrats in Congress, and certainly by those closest to He Who Used To Vote Present .
Norman Jewison, who donated $2500 to Al Franken’s campaign for the Senate , made a movie called “Other People’s Money ” in 1991. It starred Gregory Peck and Danny “Limoncello” DeVito . It was typical “underdog beats nasty rich person” fare about a corporate raider threatening a hostile takeover of a quaint New England company. The movie was a bit of a flop, with a US gross of around $26 million .
Of course, not having a hit movie would never deter anyone in Hollywood from continuing to grind a delirious and erroneous political opinion. That’s just how Democrats function. In California, where the Democrat-dominated state legislature has been spending for years like horny drunken sailors on a one-day pass, the state might not be paying income tax refunds any more . The state of Kansas is adopting the same stance .
When you combine these moves with the amount of money the “stimulus” bill will cost each American taxpayer, does anyone but a fool think that millions of Americans will decide to just quit paying altogether? What then? The underground economy will continue to explode, and the federal government won’t be able to do a damned thing about it because they won’t have the personnel and they’ll run out of borrowed money to hire them. How do I know this? Because I’ve seen Democrat politicians in California run businesses and Hollywood productions out of the state for years.
Whether the great Margaret Thatcher said that socialists eventually run out of other people’s money or not, it’s certainly true. I wonder how long it will be before people begin referring to the new President as “Broke” Obama?
Oh, and allow me to predict the weather. I foresee a giant lasting cold spell this time next year in Washington, D.C. It will emanate from Congress and the White House, as Democrats realize there’s an election coming in November. They’ll find out the hard way that one quote from the esteemed Iron Lady is true: “There can be no liberty unless there is economic liberty.”
