Judge Vinson Also Smacks Down Crony Capitalists

by C. Edmund Wright February 2nd, 2011 - The American Thinker

Judge Vinson's individual mandate ruling is seen -- properly -- as a defeat for ObamaCare and a win for individual freedom. And it is all of that, of course.

But there's more. Perhaps almost as pleasing as the affirmation of individual freedom and the dismissal of a government run-society is the smack-down Judge Vinson's ruling gave to the concept of "crony capitalism." And that may be just as important in the long run.

After all, no government-run society is even possible without corporatists and crony capitalists eager to jump into the sack with the statists who will design laws to force unwilling customers to those corporations. This is something the statists will do under threat of sending IRS and other bureaucrats to harass every unwilling business or individual. You do remember that it was sixteen thousand new IRS agents -- not sixteen thousand new doctors -- that ObamaCare has plans to employ, don't you?

Gee, you think maybe ObamaCare was about control and not health care?

The problem Vinson addresses is not as simple as Democrat versus Republican. Nor is it progressive versus moderate. Most of the problem is simply the inability of many to understand that any form of government control is statism. Labels are useless when people have no clue what the labels mean. Which explains why this discussion itself about whether ObamaCare is about control or health care is not proceeding as any kind of logical debate.

As an example, the Republican Party has a large number of statists itself. These Republicans are owned by Wall Street. It frustrates me since it is so clear that Wall Street has long since abandoned free enterprise and capitalism and adopted crony capitalism (or as it can also be called - corporate socialism) as its working theory of profit. Mergers and acquisitions are the process by which competition is eliminated so that fat profits can be gleaned by overcharging the customers who have the reduced choices Wall Street offers. Complicity with government who passes rules to stamp out the competition from small business is an obvious next step. Why would any Republican back a group like Wall Street that gives 75% of its campaign contributions to Democrats? Does this not offer a red flag of how little common interest there is between Republicans and Wall Street? Yet most Democrats and even the majority of Republicans fail to make the connection. They simply do not understand the truth.

That lack of understanding is the problem. So few truly understand what these labels or terms really mean they are nearly useless in the discussion. To most progressives everything they see as wrong is "right wing". They are ignorant of the original basis for the progressive premise that right wing means Nazi or Fascist. That charge came from Stalin. Since Stalin dismissed anything that was not a statist political philosophy as invalid -- to him only the statist ideologies of Communist, Fascist and Socialist were relevant. When he then insisted that both Fascists and Socialists (Nazis were Socialists) constituted right wing philosophies (as compared to communism), Stalin provided communists with the idea that anyone who disagreed with them could be called "right wing." That concept evolved until even fascists and socialists called anyone they disgareed with right wing, and used the Nazi and Fascist labels to mean right wing.

After the Nazi gas chambers became an issue of revulsion, the right wing could also be smeared with the genetic superiority flaw, another progressive or liberal idea (read your George Bernard Shaw) even though it too was a statist concept those on the right had always rejected. That leads us to today. Socialists (who are the same as Nazis in ideology) smear conservatives as Nazis because they are ignorant of the genesis of the term as a smear. When I say the charge is ignorant, they refuse to accept it and insist I am an "idiot" who doesn't have to be listened to. Actually, history is what it is. Stalin created the concept of Nazi (socialist) as right wing. Nazi does not fairly apply to moderates, conservatives or libertarians who all reject socialist ideology and eugenics as irrational concepts. I actually had one progressive try and argue with me that it was still fair to call me a Nazi since I "agreed with them." When I pointed out this fact that libertarians reject both socialism and eugenics, the prime beliefs of the Nazis, and asked him how it could be claimed I agree with this, his solution was to curse me and claim I was too stupid to understand. That is the standard knee jerk response of progressives. "You are stupid and an idiot."

Already I have seen numerous posts on progressive blogs that call Judge Vinson stupid, an idiot, a Nazi, all the standard Alinsky smears that are trotted out to personalize attacks from those who arrogantly reject the possibility they are wrong about anything. I agree with this article. I agree that Vinson's ruling condemns "crony capitalists" as much as the Constitutional flaw. I just wish the Wall Street wing of Republicans would also abandon support for crony capitalism. Maybe now they will have to.