00Publius Contributor

-By Dan Scott

The more we hear Obama and Pelosi talk of government stimulus projects to jump start the economy, it seems they are attempting to recreate the conditions of the Great Depression for their own political gain. It should be noted that the outcome of the Great Depression in political terms was the Democrat Party holding control of the House and Senate for nearly 50 years until 1994 when the Contract With America brought on end to their hegemony. The public was finally fed up with the never ending spend thrift ways of a Democrat controlled Congress. Actually, it’s uncanny how the Democrats are playing their cards to faithfully reproduce FDR’s policies. History tells us that FDR was popular for the very fact that he by the public view seemed to be doing something constructive upholding the line “we must doing something”, even if what he was doing was in reality self defeating by robbing the economy of investment capital through taxes and borrowing. For appearances sake, digging ditches and the like were visible to all and thus gave the false impression people were working. A recession is in the Democrat’s political best interest, it doesn’t matter who gets hurt in the process.

Socialism when viewed in the context of history always it seems focuses upon keeping people working. The Chinese, the Russians and others always kept people busy with some task as though going through the motions was an all important end in itself. Unemployment was abolished under the Communist system since everyone worked for the state as they defined success in terms of full employment and factory production output, not GDP, profit, efficiency or the quality of the goods and services. In other words, their system was focused on maintaining the status quo, not increasing the standard of living or wealth creation. John Maynard Keyes was heard to say, we can employ one group of people to dig holes and another group to fill them up to give them spending money in their pockets. (sound vaguely familiar?) While few rational people will disagree that work in and of itself is good for character and a person’s self worth, work must have tangible results to have any meaningful effect in this regard. Which brings us to the fatal flaw of the Democrat’s stimulus plan, it’s definition of success. Modern day Democrats are only a little more sophisticated than those of the 1930s in that their proposed make work jobs program will build something overpriced that may be useful like road improvement (repair) projects, mass transit, school modernization, etc. Their definition of success like the Communists and Socialists is the appearance of full employment and maintaining the status quo to keep up with the cost of living, not increasing the standard of living via wealth creation as reflected in rising GDP, profit, efficiency or the quality of goods and services. Every job in the private sector exists for one primary purpose, wealth creation – profit. Every job in the government sector goes to one primary purpose, consumption – a zero net gain, if it were not so then Cuba, where virtually everyone works for the government, would be the richest country on earth, it’s not even close.
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