College Republican Federation of Virginia

As someone with a very dark sense of humor, I regularly peruse The Daily Kos.  However, this little gem filled me with a terror I hadn’t known since the first time an airline stewardess explained what I should do after our plane hit the ocean at 500 mph.  Now, we all know that liberals, as a general rule, hate money.  This is a well-known cause of liberal self-loathing, especially for successful liberals.  If you don’t believe me I recommend a visit to Hollywood. 

This article takes liberal hatred of money to a new level.  Instead of simply calling for a Keynesian welfare state, author NBBooks suggests a Leninist takeover of the economy, calling for the euthanizing of Wall Street.  Here’s how this brilliant scheme would play out.  Whenever the next large investment bank fails, something NBBooks claims is inevitable, the government should let it fail.  Moreover, the government should then “take down” the big investment firms like JP Morgan Chase, Lehman, and others, and then sell off their remaining assets to local operations at bargain-basement prices.

This begs the question then, what about the shareholders?  Well The Daily Mao has an answer for that too.  Essentially, the next President should tell all the shareholders of those banks that the government is going to destroy them, and it isn’t going to lift a finger to help shareholders recoup their investments, speeding the collapse of America’s financial institutions in some Pol Pot-inspired campaign of proletarian pillaging. 

All of this is, of course, justified because as we all know, people who make money are insidiously evil and must be brought down by “a progressive movement strong enough to pry loose their grasp on the credit mechanism-the financial system-of our economy.”  “Our economy” of course isn’t the American economy, it is the “real economy,” some shadowy liberal term that loosely incorporates antiquated notions of proud, strong, and rugged proletarian intellectuals toiling away in steel mills and textile plants, instilling in their children the value of self-sufficiency and warning them of the evils of personal ambition. 

And that’s where it gets truly astounding.  The solution for what ails our economy isn’t a re-tooled credit market, newly strengthened and refined by the lessons of bad subprime lending, but a hostile government takeover designed to redistribute wealth and assets according to a quaint, mildly neurotic plebiscite pipe-dream.  Never mind the fact that, as the author states, the credit industry is the “financial system” of the economy.  It can still be totally destroyed without hurting real people, because capitalists aren’t real people, they’re sub-human monsters; thoroughly warped by their own greed and ambition into skulking, soulless husks who feed on the hopes and dreams of the working classes. 

This type of Robin Hood economics is nothing more than the delusional rambling of the wild and woolly troglodyte crowd that inhabits the lunatic fringe of the left, and sadly, the right.  The difference is that while our weirdos inhabit little shacks in Wyoming or creepy religious compounds in Texas, the left’ s space cadets star in movies, write at The Daily Kos, and run for public office.  This economic Leninism is the endgame of the American Left.  This is what they hope for.  And some of them just might have the audacity to try.  The ultimate goal here, as stated by the author, is to take over the economy and redirect it toward green initiatives and sustainable practices that work for the common good.

Will it work?  Does a command economy lead to the betterment of all?  I don’t know, perhaps you should ask the Soviets, Cubans, Burmese, Cambodians, North Koreans, or Libyans.  You should ask them how well their Socialist revolutions are going, whether they are liberated enough from their bourgeois masters, and how much they enjoy their newfound collective freedom.  While you’re at it, ask them just how liberating mutual poverty can be, ask them how much more learned they are, now that they don’t have to work so much, and ask them how much control they have over their revolution.