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| Alexander's Column – September 20, 2012 The ObamaNation PlantationCalling Out Obama's Socialist Political Agenda"Repeal that [welfare] law, and you will soon see a change in their manners. [I]ndustry will increase, and with it plenty among the lower people; their circumstances will mend, and more will be done for their happiness by inuring them to provide for themselves, than could be done by dividing all your estates among them." --Benjamin Franklin (1753) Barack Hussein Obama's Leftmedia sycophants declared the Romney-Ryan presidential ticket DOA this week. The talkingheads have convicted Mitt Romney for what they insist is a very offensive "political gaffe" uttered at a private campaign event back in May. The colossal blunder in question? Romney identified the underbelly of Obama's socialist political agenda -- the fact that an ever-increasing number of "useful idiots" have been lured into subservience by generations of Socialist Democrat policies, are now dependent on a laundry list of government subsidies, and, consequently, they are very likely to vote for the candidate who will continue redistributing wealth to fund those subsidies. The video was surreptitiously recorded by an anonymous party, then leaked by an opposition researcher named James Carter IV -- yes, he's the grandson of that Jimmy Carter -- to a hard-left magazine, which timed its release of the video as part of Obama's dezinformatsia campaign. In the video, Romney said, "There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president, no matter what ... who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That's an entitlement, and the government should give it to them. And they will vote for [Obama] no matter what. ... These are people who pay no income tax." While Romney's citation of the percentage of Americans who pay no taxes was correct, and it happens to coincide with Obama's current poll numbers, clearly his reference was to the fact that 30-35 percent of Obama's most fervent constituent support is composed of those who are now culturally, if not irrevocably, dependent upon a plethora of government subsidies. These "takers" pay no income tax, and they thus have no direct liability in the economics of wealth redistribution and no stake in curtailing our calamitous $16,000,000,000,000 national debt. Post Your Opinion Indeed, they are "dependent upon government," and "believe that they are victims, believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, [and] believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it." Now, there's nothing new about Romney's contention regarding the relationship between populist socialism and popular elections. Avowed socialist George Bernard Shaw, co-founder of the London School of Economics, smugly declared at the turn of the 20th century, "A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul." Observations about the inherent threat to Liberty posed by that electoral equation predates Shaw by at least two millennia. Greek Historian Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus wrote, "The real destroyer of the liberties of the people is he who spreads among them bounties, donations and benefits." Six centuries earlier, Chinese philosopher Lao-Tzu wrote, "The people suffer from famine because of the multitude of taxes consumed by their superiors. It is through this that they suffer famine." And every generation of historians since has likewise noted that long and sordid history of destruction. In 1766, that founding sage Ben Franklin observed, "I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion of the means. I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it. In my youth I travelled much, and I observed in different countries, that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer." In 1776, the year the ideological ancestors of today's American Patriots were codifying our natural right to Liberty, Historian Edward Gibbon published his six-volume treatise, "The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," detailing how opulence and entitlement led to the loss of civic virtue and the fall of the world's first great republic. Another enlightened philosopher of the era, François-Marie Arouet (Voltaire), observed, "The art of government consists of taking as much money as possible from one party of citizens to give to the other." In his 1781 "Notes on the State of Virginia," Thomas Jefferson wrote, "Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition." These 18th-century observations about taxation and entitlement served as seminal reference points for the "Fatal Cycle of Democracy" published a century later. That cycle follows this sequence: From bondage to spiritual faith; From spiritual faith to great courage; From courage to Liberty (Rule of Law); From Liberty to abundance; From abundance to complacency; From complacency to apathy; From apathy to dependence; From dependence back into bondage (rule of men). Post Your Opinion Thus, not only is the substance of Romney's assertion about Obama's "base," tragically and completely accurate, it has been substantiated throughout history. And, according to The Heritage Foundation's 2012 Index of Dependence on Government, Obama's earnest endeavor of "fundamentally transforming the United States of America" is well underway, with historic numbers of Americans now dependent upon the state. While it would be patently wrong to assert that everyone who receives a government subsidy and pays no taxes is an Obama supporter, the growing number of Americans who depend on government support under Obama's Great Recession is staggering. According to the Tax Policy Center, more than 46 percent of households pay no income tax. That is because over the last four decades, Congress has "engineered" the tax code to exempt income from targeted voter blocks. The Census Bureau reports that almost 50 percent of Americans in the most recent quarter of record resided in a household where a family member received direct government assistance, at a cost of almost 70 percent of the federal budget. During the Reagan years, only 30 percent of households received government support, and the percentage has increased almost 10 percent since Obama took office. About 16 percent of American households (one in seven) depend on food stamps -- the rolls of which have swelled from 31.9 million when Obama took office, to a record 46.5 million people today. And when Obama gutted Welfare reform, that shuffled millions of voters into his camp. Of course, most Americans who receive Medicare and Social Security have been forced to pay into those non-existent "trust funds" for their whole careers. Thus, to call that support an "entitlement" would be entirely wrong. Responding to Romney's exposure of the relationship between Obama's socialist agenda and his electoral support, Barack endeavored to distance himself from his "redistributive justice" platform and instead enlisted his minions to kill the messenger.Post Your Opinion House Democrat Whip Steny Hoyer claimed, "I don't know that any Democrat believes redistribution of wealth is the end of government -- it is not." Apparently Hoyer does not recall candidate Obama's own words on the subject: "There has been a systematic, uh, uh, I don't think it is too strong to call it a propaganda campaign, uh, against the possibility of government action and its efficacy. ... As we try to resuscitate this notion that we are all in this together ... the trick is figuring out how do we structure government systems that actually pool resources and hence facilitate redistribution, because I actually believe in redistribution." Meanwhile, Joe Biden, in a recent speech to the ultra-Leftist Center for American Progress Action Fund, said that Romney and Ryan "are gonna put y'all back in chains!" But what Obama's state-dependent lemmings don't understand is that they've already voluntarily slapped on the chattel slavery chains of the ObamaNation Plantation. In 1982, as the last Evil Empire was disintegrating from within, Ronald Reagan observed, "In an ironic sense, Karl Marx was right. We are witnessing today a great revolutionary crisis, a crisis where the demands of the economic order are conflicting directly with those of the political order. But the crisis is happening not in the West, but in the home of Marxism-Leninism, the Soviet Union." It is an even greater irony that today, the birthplace of Liberty is slovenly slipping into the Fatal Cycle of Democracy and is on the precipice of an irrevocable plunge into the abyss of tyranny. The good news is that if Obama's re-election serves as the tipping point for that plunge, there is always the option of restoring Liberty by bullets when ballots fail. The notion that the ballot box is not the only path to restoring Liberty may make some in our Patriot ranks uncomfortable. But that must be all the more motivation for every one of us to contribute the utmost of our time, talent and treasure toward ensuring an electoral outcome that restores our heritage of God-given Essential Liberty. To that end, I recall the words of Thomas Paine: "If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace." Pro Deo et Constitutione — Libertas aut Mors
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