Liberalism: A Legacy Of Failure

I rail against liberals and liberalism all the time on this blog.  I'd like to think that everyone who reads my posts comes away with a better understanding of just how destructive liberalism is, and ultimately is persuaded to turn away from liberalism (both in themselves and in those for whom they vote) and toward conservatism.  I suspect, though, that there are at least a few of you out there who wonder, "is liberalism really that bad?"

The answer, of course, is yes.  :)

But it's one thing to make that assertion; it's quite another to back up the assertion with facts.  I wanted to do that here.  I recently read an article by a widely read political pundit with a terrific summary of many of the ways in which liberalism has failed the American people over the years.  I'll tell you who it was at the end of this post; for now, I don't want to color the facts with the name. 

The article's introduction includes the following:

All of the below are adhered to by virtually all liberals — or "progressives" — though many won't admit it in public. [This is just] a shorthand list...[a]n exhaustive accounting of liberal failures would fill thousands of volumes.  Still, it is revelatory to see these pulled together in one place.

So, without further ado, here is the legacy of failure that is liberalism...

Economy/Taxation
In 1965 LBj's "Great Society" programs, including the "War on Poverty," promised to eradicate poverty with federal dollars. To date, this has meant a $6.6 trillion transfer of wealth. The result: destruction of the black family, with illegitimacy rates at 75 percent (85 percent in some inner cities); an increase in the number of poor people (nearly 15 million on welfare and a tripling in the percentage of children on welfare); higher crime rates among the poor; families trapped in dependency.

• There are scads of federal food programs, many of which duplicate state and local programs: Food Stamps, Aid to Families with Dependent Children, Women-Infant-Children [wic] programs, Commodity Supplemental Food Program, School Lunch Program, School Breakfast Program, School Milk Program, Children and Adult Care Food Program, Summer Feeding Program, Needy Family Program, Nutrition Program for the Elderly, Emergency Food Assistance Program, and on and on. In 2006, taxpayers spent $52.9 billion on these programs. Since hunger in the U.S. is extremely rare, will such programs ever phase out? Nope. Libs now claim millions of Americans suffer from "food insecurity." A lot of funding games are played with these huge federal programs; enormous political power accrues to liberal politicians who expand them, exploit them, and use them as campaign fodder. The $33 billion Food Stamp program now advertises for "customers."

• Social Security, the centerpiece of FDR's New Deal - - the rusty vehicle generations of Democrat politicians have ridden to Washington — is nearing breakdown, with the impending retirement of 78 million baby boomers. Without reform, Social Security will be in the red by 2017, and the tax bite for boomers' children and grandchildren will be unendurable. Liberals will do nothing.

• The libs' fond notion of "progressive" taxation was the basis oi the 1969 Alternative Minimum Tax, or AMT, designed to close "tax loopholes" for the super-rich. Under 200 taxpayers, in those days. Since Congress didn't index the AMT to inflation, this yeai (as Americans' incomes continued to rise), the "super-rich tax" is set to clip 23 million Americans — 34 percent of taxpayers making between $50,000 and $100,000 — costing them as much as $2,000 in extra taxes.

• Thanks to liberals' desire for "progressive taxation" (i.e., smacking "the rich"), the government agency that does their bidding — the IRS — has metastasized into a massively intrusive, controlling, freedom-killing, social engineering behemoth with it; tentacles poking into every nook and cranny of American life. The current tax code runs 67,204 pages.

• Liberalism's love of control and consequent attraction to a Soviet-style planned/command economy and revulsion toward capitalism leads it to demonize wealth and achievement. Hence, liberals' war on the most successful American companies: Wal-Mart, McDonald's; and its hatred of lucrative industry: pharmaceuticals, Big Oil, business in general. The left's inability to respect, appreciate, encourage, or support the entrepreneurial creativity, innovation, and productive genius of the private sector is one of liberalism's biggest failures.

• Government's multiple regulatory agencies (EEOC, FCC, FTC FAA, FEC, FHA, TSA — which issues instructions on how to pact your suitcase — FERC, etc.) attract liberals, who live to direct the (in their view) lesser lives of their fellow citizens. Though liberals in general have little expertise in the industries they regulate, they flood the marketplace with millions of rules, attempting tc "improve" society, "level the playing field," and all manner ol social engineering. They regulate virtually every aspect of the production and distribution of food and goods, buying, selling, lending, trading, earning, hiring, profit making, and movement of capital. Today's mind-boggling tangle of regulations — nectai to liberals — shackles the nation and fails America's great spirit.

Health Care
SCHIP (State Children's Health Insurance Program), originally designed to provide poor children with health insurance, has swelled into a socialist monstrosity covering the non-poor and non-children. Liberal states have maneuvered the funds to cover both adults (700,000 last year alone) and illegal immigrants, a practice encouraged by Congressional Democrats. Bush's move to expand the program without covering the middle class has been ridiculed as sadistically excluding poor sick kids. Dems want to cover those 400 percent above the poverty line; standard liberal failure to keep faith with taxpayers.

• Democrats intend to finance their SCHIP expansion with a 156 percent increase in the federal cigarette tax — on the backs of the poor. Smokers, society's pariahs, will be made to pay. More oppression of the oppressed by their liberal oppressors. To "fully fund" this program, Democrats must grow the pool of smokers by 22 million, but instead they're shrinking the pool by taxing the hell out of it. A typical liberal error flowing from the libs' failure to understand basic economics.

• The federal government — the taxpayer — currently spends about $560 billion on both Medicare (health insurance for seasoned citizens) and Medicaid (health care for the poor). In 1965, defenders promised that Medicaid would cost no more than $12 billion by 1990; they were off by $52 billion. In 1965, the cost of funding Medicare was $350 per taxpayer; today it's $10,600. At this rate, according to the Congressional Budget Office, the cost of both programs will eat up about 20 percent of our GDP by 2050. Medicaid alone covers about 53 million people, nearly 50 percent of them children. Wait a minute: if Medicaid already covers poor children's health care ... what is SCHIP for?

• Liberals habitually exploit the sick, the injured, and the young to further their political agenda on health care (using Michael J. Fox, who suffers from Parkinson's, to advocate embryonic stem-cell research, for instance, and exploiting 12-year-old accident victim Graeme Frost during the SCHIP debate). Liberals believe this tactic insulates the liberal position from criticism. It doesn't. Liberals routinely promise the most vulnerable unrealistic cures, like medicine men hawking elixirs in Wild West carney shows. On this, liberals fail the basic test of human decency. Liberals want to replace the best medical system in the history of the world with a "free," single payer, so-called universal system. This failed socialist model has resulted in inferior care, long wait times, shortages of medicine, doctors, and hospital beds, wherever it's been tried.

Law/Criminal Justice
The liberal approach to crime eschews punishment, preferring to believe the fantasy that bad behavior results from poverty or other deprivation arising from the "root cause" of American inequality. Liberals despise traditional American morality-based justice, with its confident judgments on right and wrong and its unapologetic drive to punish wrong. With liberals' preference for "rehabilitation" and coddling of criminality gaining ground from 1960 to the early 1990s, America experienced a more than 500 percent increase in violent crime.

• Last month, researchers from the JFA Institute — a George Soros funded group of libs — announced that keeping people in jail comes at great cost to society. JFA President James Austin asserts: "There is no evidence that keeping people in prison longer makes us any safer." (Despite declining crime statistics.) JFA recommends shorter sentences, alternative punishments, more parole, relaxed drug laws, and more taxpayer resources for criminals released from the pokey. Fortunately, the sad results of this failed liberal prescription for crime remains vivid in living memory and it is unlikely American society will choose to repeat the error in the foreseeable future.

• American public has lost patience with the failures of liberalism's anti-death-penalty strain, its softness on crime, its obsession with gun control, its lack of judicial support for police. But liberalism, which cannot win at the ballot box, still injects its poison into the American judicial system through the courts — the machinations of activist liberal judges, the ACLU, and the radical pro-criminal agenda of the defense bar. The result has been disastrous for the law-abiding in every segment of society.
  

• Liberalism has failed to keep faith with the U.S. Constitution, preferring "emanations" and "penumbras" (that liberals pretend support abortion) to the clear words in the document — the right to bear arms, for instance — designed to preserve the liberty of the citizens and limit the power of the government.

Environment
Rachel Carson's 1962 book, Silent Spring, claimed dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane, DDT, the tremendously effective pesticide, could kill off the world's birds by thinning their eggs, thus upsetting our fragile ecosystem and poisoning the food chain. Policymakers swallowed her every claim, labeling DDT "the world's deadliest poison" and a carcinogen. It was banned here and abroad. Result: malaria, which was nearly eradicated before Silent Spring, spread like wildfire throughout the world's poorest countries. Turns out Carson's anti-DDT jeremiad was poppycock. As City Journal summarized, "test after test has shown that DDT isn't dangerous to humans." Malaria, a preventable disease, now kills about 2.5 million people a year, mostly children, 90 percent of them in Africa. That's easily over 30 million deaths because 1962 liberals were panicked by rumors of thinning bird eggs.

• Liberals are now similarly attempting to panic the population with the latest political jeremiad, Algore's Inconvenient Truth — a junk-science propaganda vehicle for the global warming hoax, which has been adopted by the left with all the fervor and dogma of religious faith. Combining a paranoid fear of carbon, a hatred of progress (especially due to eeevil American prosperity) with a lust for control of others' behavior that is so characteristic, liberals flush with virtue and self-righteous Puritanism are attempting to inflict guilt and asceticism society-wide — absurdly blaming the American lifestyle for planetary temperature. Environmentalists constantly harangue Americans about what they drive and purchase, how goods are packaged and disposed of, attempting to make life as inconvenient as possible. Americans stubbornly choose progress, development, and innovation, and refuse the left's constant attempts to get them to live in huts as simple peasants.

• Environmentalism, the new home of socialism, considers human beings the enemy of the earth, and the internal combustion engine the greatest threat to the planet. For years, the left has been targeting SUVs in a failed attempt to control American vehicle purchases and steer us toward glorified lawnmowers.

• Thanks to the EPA and the Endangered Species Act, normal development is constantly impeded. Wetlands, spotted owls, a clump of native grasses, or the existence of a handful of sand flies have permanently shut down building projects across the fruited plain, rendering land and investments worthless.

• In what may be a first in the history of human civilization, out nation has been cowed by activist liberals from using our own natural resources. To thwart forward-looking — one could even call them "progressive" — Americans from drilling for oil or building new refineries in order to ease our dependence on foreign sources of energy, liberals sue, enact anti-development regulations, or produce shameful congressional testimony of a weeping teenager who's been made to believe her culture is being destroyed. For decades, liberals have grossly failed the nation by checkmating us in every attempt to meet our own energy needs.

Education
Public schools and universities — with curricula controlled by the social agenda of the teachers' union, the Democrats' most powerful activist bloc — are hotbeds of social engineering, anti-capitalist indoctrination, "diversity" training (where primacy is put on looking different but thinking alike), speech codes, and political correctness. Honest inquiry, debate, and dissent are rarely tolerated, a liberal failure of conscience that defrauds millions of young minds ... while pocketing their parents' tuition dollars.

• Portraying the country as a repository of injustice, American teachers pressure American students to despise America. The incomparable Founders (if they are mentioned at all) are reduced to and dismissed as racist, sexist "dead white guys" who inflicted pollution, consumerism, inequality, imperialism, and hegemony on the rest of the world. Since the 70s, liberals have run the schools as anti-American propaganda factories, cheating generations of U.S. kids of their own profound, complex, and often heroic history — an unforgivable moral failure.

Immigration
ln 1965, longstanding immigration law was "reformed" by ditching country-of-origin/ethnic quotas, which were said to be racist and mean. At the time, Sen. Ted Kennedy averred: "No immigrant visa will be issued to a person who is likely to become a public charge." And, "our cities will not be flooded with a million immigrants annually." Oops. Our current "big wave" of immigration is three times larger than our earlier wave at the turn of the last century. New is the phenomenon of "chain migration," mostly from Mexico, mostly illegal.

• Also new are boneheaded liberal policy innovations: driver's licenses for illegal aliens, free health care for illegals, social services for illegals, and in-state tuition breaks for illegals. Liberals fail to keep faith with American citizens, including legal immigrants.

Culture
Thanks to liberalism's "defining deviancy down," in Sen. Pat Moynihan's memorable phrase, and the injection of 1960s counterculture values into American society, there was a 400-plus percent increase in out-of-wedlock births from 1960 to the early 1990s — a liberal failure which still wounds. In 2005 out-of-wedlock births reached an all-time high at 37 percent of all births; there are 1.3 million abortions annually.

• While tearing down the traditions and institutions that made America great, liberals have an unrelenting secularist, anti-religious (particularly anti-Christian) fervor. Liberals demand tolerance for all behavior and views except conservatism, targeting, for instance, the Boy Scouts in multi-pronged attacks for refusing to hire gay scout leaders. The ACLU is tireless in its attempts to eliminate God from the public square, including erasing all mention of the Ten Commandments, Christmas, prayer, even student-mentioned God in graduation speeches. Liberals have so far failed in their mission to "redefine" marriage and the family for American society, but they don't intend to stop the pressure.

• The most damaging way liberalism fails the culture is in its worship of government nannyism, encouraging widespread victimology and dependence on government rather than the self-reliance and rugged individualism that built the nation. Instead of inspiring greatness and supporting the natural American optimism, liberals promote gloom and doom, working to ensure all are equally miserable.

National Security
The left has been wrong about just about everything internationally since the 1960s. Its trust in negotiation, diplomacy, and appeasement rather than American strength has led it to coddle our enemies (including communists during the Cold War), eschew national protection (anti-SDl), undermine the military, and invest in defeat in the War on Terror. Liberals' greatest failure is their betrayal of the Constitution's prime directive for government: to provide for the common defense.

• Liberalism's hatred of "go-it-alone" "cowboy" "unilateralism" (the U.S. acting in its own national interest) means liberals feel nothing but scorn for the most valuable national character trait of American exceptionalism.

• The global consequences of liberal anti-Americanism — the "blame-America-first" mentality — are lethal. Liberals literally give aid and comfort to our enemies. They are intent on bestowing American Constitutional rights on terrorists, and insist on responding to Islamofascism through the courts, with no power but subpoena power. As we saw on 9/11, the "threat" of trial-by-jury did not deter suicidal barbarians in the slightest. This is a liberal failure of epic proportions, and one which history will not forgive.

Pretty startling, isn't it?  When you only see one bit at a time, the creep of liberalism is almost invisible.  But, when you take a step back and look at the broader context, especially in relation to history and the intent of the Founding Fathers, it is truly disturbing where we find ourselves today.  This is why I despise liberalism.  This is why I bag on it constantly.  If liberalism is allowed to progress unchecked, the things mentioned above will be just a prologue, and America will cease to exist in the manner that was intended by the Founding Fathers, the manner that made it great.  I don't want to see that happen.

Now, who is this pundit who put together this legacy of liberal failure?  He's one of the giant liberalism-killers of the day, a man with a voice heard by tens of millions of people each day.  You may have guessed it...the one and only Rush Limbaugh.  His efforts are a large part of why there is an active and vibrant conservative movement today to combat the creep of liberalism.  If any or all of these things concern you, you might consider checking him out.

At the very least, keep reading this blog, and I'll keep you chock full of news and analysis about the creep of liberalism and the creep eradication of conservatism.

There's my two cents.