Here is a rare, 43-second clip from a “60 Minutes” interview with Ronald Reagan in the 1970s. In it, he defines conservatism, libertarianism, and fascism better than any living politician ever could.
He certainly was the Great Communicator!
Sublime.
(Via Lex)
The great difference between communism and fascism is that the latter was more intelligent. There’s no need to go through the tedious business of robbing the capitalists and throwing them into their own blast furnaces: just reduce them to servile status.
Communism was foolish because it took away from the people who knew how to run things, the things they ran. Fascism left them running things but induced, by one way or another, them to cooperate with the rulers. What we have here today is crony capitalism where they are bribed with taxpayer money. The only one who gets hurt is the tax payer.
Don’t call it “Crony Capitalism,” call it “Aristo-communism.” Government-favored businesses, run by a wealthy ruling elite and their friends, and given special privileges and powers over their workers, their customers, and ordinary people in general are the spiritual descendant of the antebellum, slave-worked plantations which were “the beau ideal of Communism.” Calling it “Crony Capitalism” is a piece of left-wing propaganda, similar to calling the system in the USSR “State Capitalism” rather than “socialism” or “communism.”
But it really is communism: A variant that emphasizes the importance of having an enlightened aristocracy running things. Because plantation-bound darkies and bitter clingers in flyover country are just too stupid and short-sighted to manage their own affairs, even if they could somehow be purged of their false consciousness. Thus: Aristo-communism.
“Thus: Aristo-communism.”
I disagree. I think it is fascism because the “cronies” are the owners as long as they do what the deep state tells them to do. It’s not the “Deep State” that Bill Moyers thinks it is.
It is the “Top-bottom” alliance that comprises the Democrat Party. Rich contributors and theoreticians that are the top and provide the funds and, they think , the thinking, plus the Low Information Voters at the bottom who provide the votes. Fred Siegel’s book talks about it at one point. He describes a meeting of Democrat donors where a new executive director was meeting them. She made a joke that did not go over well. She said, “What is the difference between billionaires and terrorists ? You can negotiate with terrorists.” She was quickly replaced.
He written about it in several places. One is here.
As for improving people’s lives, the “billionaire boys club” of radical environmentalists central to the Democratic Party’s finances is dedicated to a stratified America, in which the masses are kept in their properly subordinate place. Opponents of economic growth””billionaires such as Tom Steyer and George Soros, as well as the Rockefeller and Page Foundations””seek to curtail the expansion of the natural gas industry in the name of climate change. On both sides of the Atlantic, a liberalism dedicated to heading off the supposedly imminent threat of environmental catastrophe has scant concern for the declining middle class.
Elsewhere. he has to ay.
The liberal billionaires, such as George Soros and Peter Lewis, and the bloggers, such as “blogfather” Jerome Armstrong, are certain of what they’re against, Bai demonstrates. They are passionate in their hostility to the Republican “dictatorship,” the reviled George W. Bush, and his war in Iraq; they despise the evangelical “lizardheads” who live in “Dumbfuckistan”; they detest the Clintons as compromisers whose strategy of triangulation has turned the Democrats, as they see it, into me-too Republicans chasing after the middle-class vote; they loathe the centrist Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) and, as famed Hollywood liberal Norman Lear puts it, “Joe ‘Fucking’ Lieberman”; and they are sure, insofar as they give it any thought, that the war on terror is largely a scam that has been sold to the “morons” of middle America.
Their problem is deciding what they are for, other than more power for people like themselves.
He has them pegged pretty well.
That link was supposed to read “more to say..”
The two definitions closely approach each other if we take a hard look at what we mean by “own.” A large part of meaningful ownership is control, not just the power to appropriate the profits. Fascism leaves the profits alone much more than communism does, but it still reduces the profits by micro-managing the “owner’s” control of the asset. In some configurations, that starts to look a lot like appropriating a chunk of the profits. Still, communism appropriates 100%, so they’re always different.
LaHood wins in Illinois. What a surprise ! Corruption triumphs.
Nonsense.
There was no corruption. Darin Lahood won because he was the best candidate. His opponent moved away decades ago and only came back a few months ago to run. No one in the district knew who he was. He had some of his media contacts behind him, but few care about Reason Magazine in Central Illinois.
Darin, on the other hand, is known in every community in that district. He’s the hardest working senator in a state where Republicans have serious impediments to getting anything accomplished. He has made a name for himself sponsoring ethics bills and helped get the concealed carry law passed.
I would encourage anyone to check out his Facebook page from the past year or two. Rarely did a week go by when he wasn’t visiting some group in some town in his district. That kind of thing goes a long way to getting people to trust you, especially when most of the time they feel that government has forgotten them.
People know where he lives, know his kids, and see him coaching their little league games. He’s one of them.
His opponent, Mike Big Media, did present a nice anti-government, libertarian message. That’s all well and good, but theoretical arguments don’t get much traction in a regional election where the main concerns are the volatile price of wheat or the fluctuation of manufacturing jobs or the quality and availabilty of family homes, etc. and then electing someone who can relate to those things. He was that guy and won it fair and square