LABOR CONTROLS THE LIBERALS

Labor Controls the Liberals
By Thomas E. Brewton

American labor unions are pushing candidates for the Democratic 
Party's 2008 presidential nomination toward expansion of the welfare-
state and massive inflation of the sort that the Great Society spawned.

After both World War I and World War II, the British Labour Party led 
England into its destructive liaison with socialism that destroyed 
British industry and reduced England to the "sick man of Europe."

Harold Meyerson's January 31, 2007, article in the Washington  Post describes the behind-the-scenes power exerted by labor unions,  especially the government employees unions.  Their immediate goal is imposition of universal, socialized medicine, of the sort championed in 1993 by Hillary Clinton.

If labor unions succeed, two results are inevitable.

First is a resumption of the devastating inflation caused by 
President Johnson's Great Society, the most recent push forward of 
socialism.  Raising taxes to pay for socialized medicine will throw 
business into another recession, thereby reducing income tax revenues 
at the same time that Federal expenditures will be required to 
expand.  Even if business later booms, the funding requirements for 
present Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid programs, before 
universal socialized medicine, dwarf the prospective tax revenues.

The only way to finance socialized medicine, in the final analysis, 
will be the Federal Reserve's creating more money via bookkeeping 
entries.  By definition, more money without an offsetting increase in 
production of goods and services is inflation.  And it is always the 
working people who get wiped out by inflation.

The second result will be the sine qua non of socialism: further 
steps toward collective tyranny.

Anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, opposing Marxian collectivism in 1872, 
described what life was to be under socialism:

The government will not content itself with administering and 
governing the masses politically, as all governments do today.  It 
will administer the masses economically, concentrating in the hands 
of the State the production and division of wealth, the cultivation 
of land.All that will demand the reign of scientific intelligence, 
the most aristocratic, despotic, arrogant, and elitist of all 
regimes.  There will be a new class, a new hierarchy.the world will 
be divided into a minority ruling in the name of knowledge, and an 
immense ignorant majority.  And then, woe unto the mass of ignorant 
ones! (quoted in David Horowitz's, The Politics of Bad Faith.)


Sir William Beveridge, one of the British Labour Party authors of 
socialized medicine and other welfare-state services after World War 
II, stated the necessity quite forthrightly.

The State," he wrote, " in this field is not wholly master of 
events so long as it desires to preserve the freedom of individuals..
the State cannot undertake the responsibility for full employment 
without full powers.

In other words, central planning necessary for imposition of 
socialism can not become effective without subordinating the rights 
of individuals to the goals of the planners.

Socialist Paul Ricoeur, writing in the American socialist journal  
put it this way:

The problem of political power in a socialist economy is not 
fundamentally different from the same problem in a capitalist economy;
.political power in a socialist economy offers comparable or even 
greater possibilities of tyranny..One must go still further and 
assert that the socialist state requires a more vigilant popular 
control than the bourgeois state.  And this precisely because the 
socialist state is the more rational, extending design and planning 
to areas of human existence that previously had been left to chance 
or improvisation.  Since the rationality of a state which plans to 
end class division is greater than that of its predecessors, its 
potential power and the opportunities offered to tyranny are also 
greater.


Thomas E. Brewton is a staff writer for the New Media Alliance, Inc. 
The New Media Alliance is a non-profit (501c3) national coalition of 
writers, journalists and grass-roots media outlets.

His weblog is THE VIEW FROM 1776
http://www.thomasbrewton.com/

By Thomas E. Brewton Email: tbrewton@thenma.org Click here for bio and archived articles