The American Declaration
Commentary at www.jeromehuyer.com
The Left Isn't Lying, Not About This, At Least.
The Left deplores current-day America, a land, they say racked with unconscious racism, implicit sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, white privilege, rape culture, toxic masculinity, and rampant police brutality.
There is nothing in reality that conforms to the picture of the world the Left insists on painting. Liberal leaders lie for a living. And it's often a very "respectable" living, which is just another lie.
But there is one thing they are not lying about
Modern-day Liberals and Progressives accuse Republicans & Conservatives of being just out for the rich. The 1% are given special benefits and privileges at the expense of the 99%. The little man is left holding the bag. It's the Democrats, the Left insists, who are looking out for the middle class and those less fortunate. Actually, the Big Government Left has done no such thing. Baltimore, Detroit, Camden, and a whole lot of inner cities attest to that. The inter-generational dependency and split families that social welfare policies have wrought haven't helped anyone (certainly not the harried taxpayers who have had to foot the bill).
However, there is something to the Left's depiction of the Right. There is this thing called corporate welfare, the wide-world of crony capitalism. Lawyers and lobbyists know how to put public power to private advantage. The special interests who capture public power are glad to "pay" for the privileges and immunities for which they zealously plead. These are not laissez faire capitalists, but America's crony, or "counterfeit" capitalists Of course politicians of both political parties are beholding to the interest groups that help them keep their own jobs and power.
When Congress confers special benefits on SOME, it necessarily denies equal protection under law to ALL.
All men may be created equal, but they are no longer treated as such.. It can be said that, as with slavery, segregation and racism, conditions are not as bad as they used to be. But the seed of corruption was planted a long time ago.
From the Tariff of 1789 forward, government has promoted the economic interests at the expense of other Americans. And the Republican Party was usually complicit.
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Protective tariffs advantaged domestic manufactures, and internal improvement projects, national banks and other enactments enabled "a moneyed interest," bankers and land/stock speculators to grow fabulously wealthy. Party machines grew ever more powerful.
Successively higher tariffs hurt America's rural agricultural kinterests over and over. It closed foreign markets to farmers, and enabled domestic manufactures to raise their prices on all the tools, utensils, weapons and other finished goods that the same farmers had to buy.
Case in ponit: The "noble" and patriotic Transcontinental Railroad project that would connect two great oceans and and create a nation "from sea to shining sea, " was the embodiment of corporate welfare. Shortly after the publicly-subsidizedproject was completed, going from nowhere to nowhere at public expense, no fewer than four Transcontinental railroads declared bankruptcy and through the nation into the Panic of 1873. The whole country suffered hardship for the next 7 years, or so.
Widespread graft and theft of assets was eventually exposed and the Credit Mobilier scandal of the Grant administration indelibly inscribed in the history books forever.
The sad, sordid story goes on an on, right down to the sub-prime housing fiasco of 2008 and the ensuing "Great Recession." Time and again, it wasn't laissez faire capitalism that crashed and burned, but a corrupt system run by counterfeit capitalists who instead of accepting the risks entrepreneurs must necessarily take, ran to government to avoid those risks and get guaranteed "results."