The Primal Bitch of Income Inequality

Being an Economic Progressive apparently means rarely having to say you’re sorry. For even when the jig is up in some liberal Promise Zone fantasyland, you’re still the top vulture of the carrion food chain. On the other hand, in the world of accountable men, any CEO or Captain of Industry whose dismal economic track record even remotely resembled Barack Obama’s would have long since been ridden out of town on a rail, after having been regaled in an honorary suit composed of tar and feathers.

But be that as it may, there is to be no relief on the horizon for those who will not bend their knee to Baal, for Progressivism’s most fanatical native son has returned golfed and rested and ready to pontificate on the sinful state of our national covetousness. Like a Tropical Vortex spinning America into a veritable Golgotha of debt and malaise, “The One” has at last come down to us from Mauna Kea with fiery putter in hand. But despite all the manic fanfare heralded by the auspices of swooning damsels and tingling legs, it turns out that Prophet Obama’s 2014 economic prescription calls for more of the same baleful “hair of the dog” from now till 2016, or Doomsday — whichever cometh first.

Ever since he descended from the third heaven on a rainbow in 2008, Obama’s procrustean answer for all that ails America has been an unflinching dose of Keynesian strychnine poisoning. And apparently, we have not suffered enough since he would now have us double down on an economic inhaler spiked with another stimulating dose of Zyklon B. Indeed, this president is in every way imaginable the ideological archetype of pulp-fiction’s second-rate single-minded villain: a Post-Modern Judas who is driven to redouble his perfidious efforts, even as he has forgotten the scope of his ill-conceived aims. Possessing little save the clumsy but calculated weapons of class warfare in his Lilliputian bag of tricks, Obama’s precarious vantage point atop the earth has earned him the demagogue’s dark augury: the unique understanding that he can prevail only by turning man against brother — even if such a contest sets the land aflame.

But even now, as the terracotta foundations of the vaunted House of Soetero are dissolving for all the world to witness, he proudly mounts that pale steed once more to champion the tattered banner of Income Inequality — the Marxist Provocateur’s surest gambit. After having so richly won the incandescent hatred of the waning productive echelons of America, and having purchased and secured the fealty of Wall Street tapeworms and Corporatist “Last Men” with taxes purloined from our nation’s toilers, Obama will once more draw political refreshment from the poisoned well of envy. Having eschewed liberty for equality and desired the flask half empty over the full draught of economic vigor, the Progressive Prince, in the name of debauched compassion, will soon commence again the filling of Progressive rat holes with reams of worthless paper spun from our Federal presses — all at our cooing grandchildren’s expense.

If Obama is to ever keep his ramshackle beast from a crashing ruin, then the redistributed diets of Unemployment and Welfare must become the career paths for men and women with nothing to lose but their dignity, and for no price — save an unwavering loyalty to one’s trusted and benevolent Kenyan pimp. And moreover, on the busted back of a near-terminal American economy that is reeling with nearly twenty percent of its workers unemployed or underemployed, and where EBT cards are as ubiquitous as Kardashians, Obama’s hot pursuit of an additional twenty million (voting) alien mouths to feed is really the only “prudent” policy star to steer one’s true believers by: even if that star be named “Wormwood.”

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I would like to say this if I may. In our political science classes we became familiar with rights and duties and how they accompany one another as dual sides of a coin. Both imply obligations that affect the give and take transactions within civil society. But as republics expend their virtue and wax into feral democracies — the final state before servitude, the citizens’ moral duties evaporate in the minds of the immoderate mob, and government becomes the sole bearer of sweets for its spoiled children. Soon, the duty of the citizenry to maintain its own virtue and to uphold its part in the social contract vaporizes the obligation that is incumbent on the bearer of rights, and this breakdown severs the government’s burden to respect those self same rights as they dance a tango of decline. If you do not agree with this analysis, merely look around you at the state of America circa 2014.

Such reciprocation also must apply to economics. If we are to unquestioningly drink in the moral suasion argument that is inseparable from the Progressive’s eternal bitch against income inequality, shall we say nothing about the productive inequality amongst the masses of adult Americans? Is the moral onus of breastfeeding the able-bodied always to remain upon the backs of those who have played the game squarely, and is the servitude of poor wretches laboring in thralldom to the sly and indolent consistent with the ironic legacy of the Great Society: that guilt-stained bordello of misanthropy that has passed itself off as social justice? Since the wisdom of Aristotle has shown us that there is no greater injustice than to judge unequal things equal, how then do we square the incongruity that those who have shirked their responsibility for being productive in their own lives should perpetually receive the pilfered fruit wrung from busy hands? And conversely, how do we square justice if those who have put their shoulder to the plow are compelled to plow all the more for the romantic fulfillment of some Progressive dullard’s moral/political abstractions?

In continuing this thought experiment, what if all that which a people produce is ultimately counterproductive and anathema to the city? Shall the wise regime subsidize the anarchical, criminal, and destructive behaviors that thrive and perpetuate under cover of entitlement? It seems that ignorance and immorality are the two things that are not in short supply amongst those whose hands are perpetually and indignantly waiting to be filled, and who care as little about their hand-out’s origin as they do about their sick and wasted lives that are carelessly lived hour to hour, day to day. The notion that government should condone and succor its blighted creations for the sake of manipulating power is the greatest cynical evil that it can contrive. So often, these moral catastrophes lie soaked in alcohol and seething despair and have little to do with obtaining a recharged EBT card and everything to do with looking into the mirror and perceiving oneself as a societal victim, ad infinitum. Who can deny that when we see the true roots of income disparity in full relief without maudlin sentimentality, such inequality comes fused together with a string of horrid habitual choices that we can trace like Ariadne’s thread back to government’s improvident compassion — a block-headed tutelage for spiritual slavery forged in the lowest regions of calculation and despair.

To the Progressive eye, which sees the very worst in America’s constitutional vision, the future must be redeemed by putting the past to the torch. And if for them this ideological revolution means a moral rebellion against the civilizational ramparts of our national virtues heralding productivity, goodness, and excellence, well, then let the devil take the hindmost. Ordered liberty was never a viable option for a population whose highest aspirations were the relentless pursuit of wealth, the existential pleasures of the listless parasite, or the self-referential life devoted to full-blown narcissism. How tragic that when a people think and live like there is no tomorrow, there frequently is not one to be had. Barack Obama, a political character so naturally predisposed to the art of wielding the hammer of equality, perhaps wonders why it is so monumentally difficult to govern that intransigent half of America who burns white hot for his dissolution. The sage Victor Davis Hanson has put the answer bluntly: “History has shown that a government’s redistribution of shrinking wealth, in preference to a private sector’s creation of new sources of it, can prove more destructive than even the most deadly enemy.” Mr. Obama, we think that enemy happens to be you.

Glenn Fairman writes from Highland, Ca. He can be reached at arete5000@dslextreme.com and www.stubbornthings.org.

This piece originally appeared in American Thinker