There are a few words and phrases out there that were designed to send me on a lengthy tirade, guaranteed to leave hapless passersby stunned and offended by my insensitivity and lack of compassion.
Imagine my concern.
We’ve touched on a few of these points already. But I think you’ll agree that the sheer impact of collecting them all in one place is staggering.
THE LESS FORTUNATE
You’ve probably heard that phrase literally hundreds of thousands of times without ever giving it a second’s thought. Well, that changes now. There’s a purpose behind this “less fortunate” nonsense, and that purpose is to manipulate your emotions.
You’re being suckered, and the time has come for it to stop.
The term “less fortunate” is usually applied to the so-called “poor.” My dictionary defines “fortunate” as “having unexpected good fortune” or “bringing something good and unforeseen.” The idea behind tagging the poor as “less fortunate” is to convey the idea that they’re merely victims of circumstance. Their lack of resources, to this way of thinking, is entirely unexpected, unforeseen, and unavoidable.
Nonsense.
The poor keep getting poorer because they keep doing whatever it was that made them poor in the first place. Ditto for the rich.
There is nothing at all unexpected or unforeseen about the behavior that’s responsible for most of the poverty in this country. If you ignore your education, fail to develop a work ethic, do drugs, get pregnant before you’re out of high school or before you can afford to raise a child, become a petty criminal, join a gang, hang with what you obviously know to be the wrong crowd, become a drinker, or generally comport yourself like a self-loathing slob, guess what? You’re probably not going to make one hell of a lot of money! You’re going to end up poor, with nothing to do but work at that occasional minimum-wage job you may find while spending the rest of your time complaining that the government isn’t doing enough for you.
Politicians and those suffering from HCCD (hypercompulsive compassion disorder) will call you the “less fortunate.”
They’re wrong.
Your situation has nothing to do with luck or fortune. You did this to yourself. You’re suffering the obvious and easily predictable result of your own failures and laziness. And things aren’t going to get any better until you stop clinging to that idea that you’re “less fortunate” and start looking in the mirror for the source of your problems.
There’s another aspect to this “less fortunate” nonsense that we need to cover.
If those who have screwed up their lives and their futures are the “less fortunate,” then that suggests that those who have made the proper choices, and who have succeeded as a result, are the “fortunate.”
Is this how things are supposed to work in our society? If you study hard, work hard, delay gratification, save, plan, invest, and make every effort to use your decision-making powers wisely, you’re probably in fairly good shape right now. You have a good job, a decent income, a nice home, an investment program, and a retirement plan. You were certain that you got here through hard work and good living.
And yet the left keeps implying that you’re merely “fortunate,” that your good job and comfortable lifestyle are all derived from “unexpected sources.”
Well, that’s a fine way to dismiss your years of hard work and determination, isn’t it?
There is a solid strategic reason why the leftist big-government types favor this fortunate/less-fortunate idea. It’s an invaluable tool in their scheme to build the size and power of government through income redistribution.
Their first order of business is to convince everyday people that the wealthy enjoy their status in life primarily through good luck (that is, “fortune”). Then they must convince the myrmidons that the poor are living in their misery because of bad luck. Once this becomes the conventional wisdom, it’ll be easy to promote income redistribution. After all, they’re merely trying to even out the odds a bit, right?
This fortunate/less-fortunate idiocy reached a new height during the 2000 presidential primary season, when Democratic contender and House Minority Honcho Richard Gephardt referred to the high achievers in America as those who “won life’s lottery.”
Now there’s a pretty good slap in the face from the left! You bust your royal hindquarters for years on end to achieve some measure of success, and this politician comes along and tells you that you achieved all of this through the luck of the draw.
Let me tell you something. You win life’s lottery when you’re born—especially if you’re born in the United States, hands down the best place in the world to begin and live your life. You’re an American, the envy of people around the globe. From that point on everything else is gravy—and it’s all up to you.
If you think you have what you have because you were lucky, then maybe you deserve to have the government take it from you. Those who recognize the hard work that went into their success might feel otherwise.
INCOME REDISTRIBUTION
So what is this “income redistribution,” anyway?
This idea of redistributing income is really quite sexy to the left. Just imagine how much power the political class will wield when they manage to amass not just the power, but the consent of the people, to seize your hard-earned income and reapportion it out among the rest of the country!
This is such a favorite of liberals. The very idea of taking income from those who don’t support them politically, and redistributing that income to those who do…what political paradise!
There’s just one little bitty problem with the phrase “income redistribution,” though.
Income, you see, isn’t distributed in the first place. It’s earned.
Before income can be traded for votes, it first has to be seized. From whom do you seize it? From the poor sap who actually earned it, of course! This whole “seize and redistribute” process works so much more smoothly, though, if you can somehow mask what’s truly going on.
The idea of income redistribution is also very popular with those who analyze and comment on government income and poverty statistics. If they can convince us that there is something inherently wrong with the way income is being distributed among Americans, we’re far more likely to accept the idea of redistribution at the hands of our compassionate and eminently fair political class.
GOVERNMENT DOLLARS
Don’t you just love it when you read that “government dollars” are being spent on the latest boondoggle or pork project? That phrase was designed to make you feel better about these government projects; after all, if it’s only government money, that’s no skin off our collective nose—right?
Tell me, just what did our wonderful Imperial Federal Government do to earn those dollars? Did they have a bake sale somewhere that I missed? Does government manufacture some great and wonderful consumer item and sell it on the open market for a profit? Is this the profits from the marvelously efficient United States Postal Service?
No. Those “government dollars” they’re talking about are dollars that were seized from us! They’re dollars taken from the people who actually worked for them. They’re “taxpayer dollars,” not “government dollars.”
Newspaper editors, take note. Every time you allow that phrase to be set in type, you’re not a part of the solution, you’re a part of the Great Big Propaganda Problem.
WORKING PEOPLE
You’ll usually see the phrase “working people” used to differentiate those who earn their money working with their muscle from those who earn their incomes (usually somewhat higher) working with their brains.
Pro athletes aside, statistics show that brain power is a more valuable commodity in the jobs marketplace than muscle power. This is why people who hang out in the college library are likely to earn more later on than those who hang out in the gym.
It’s that pesky little law of supply and demand at work again. Since it’s easier to work with your muscles than it is to work with your head, you find a larger supply of people who earn their pay through largely physical effort than those who earn by thinking and reasoning.
Now, don’t start slobbering with rage all over these pages again. I understand that even the most menial of tasks requires some mental effort, and that the world’s smartest lawyer has to lift a law book every once in a while. Still, the more tools you bring to your job, the more you’re going to make.
But here’s the rub: The left has tried to co-opt the term “working people” to sell the idea that if you work with your brain instead of with your brawn, somehow you’re not really working. You’re not one of the “working people.”
It’s a simple class warfare tactic: Lead those who make less into resenting those who make more, because those nasty rich people aren’t really working for their money. They’re not part of the “working class.” And since they aren’t working for their money, it’s really not a bad thing to hike up the tax rates on them a bit. That way the government can spend that money on the true working people—us!
FILTHY RICH
This isn’t the first time you’ve heard that phrase, is it? For some reason, somewhere along the way, “rich” became a half-word. It just didn’t sound complete until you added “filthy” to the front.
The purpose, of course, is to demonize the rich. When you successfully manage to connect the word “filthy” to the idea of wealth, you’ve succeeded in denigrating the hard work that goes into the accumulation of that wealth. You’ve also given the green light to open class warfare. Why shouldn’t we revile the rich? Why shouldn’t their money be taken away from them and used to pave the way for people who really need it? What right do they have to keep it? After all, they’re just filthy rich people, aren’t they?
The use of the phrase “filthy rich” does offer some degree of emotional comfort to the poor, poor pitiful poor. Climb into the head of a poor person, and you might find that their thought processes go something like this:
Look at that rich bastard over there with his big-shot BMW. I’ll bet he lives in a big fancy house somewhere. He probably flies around the country on private jets too. I know how he got all that money. He’s a crook, or he has a crooked lawyer. He probably cheated someone out of that money, or he has a bunch of people doing all the hard work for him, and doesn’t pay them squat. He thinks he’s better than me, with that fancy car and that Rolex watch and everything. But he’s not. I’d be rich, too, if I was willing to cheat and steal like he does. I’d be rich, too, if I had a crooked lawyer like he does. I’m honest, though. I’m a working man. That’s why I’ll never have all those things—because people like him have to keep me down. I’ll never be that rich, ’cause I don’t cheat and steal.
That line of thinking, the demonization of the filthy rich, allows our hero to believe that the only reason in the world he doesn’t have the nice things he’d like to have is that he’s an honest guy; while the guys with all the toys and the flat-belly at his elbow is nothing but a lazy crook. It helps him forget that he’s never done anything to put away some money, so that he could afford to buy a few toys himself; that he doesn’t conduct himself in a way that radiates success; that the class divides in America today are entirely self-selected.
THE POOR
Give me a break. There are very few people in this country who fit any sort of a realistic definition of being poor. The average so-called “poor” person in this country has a higher standard of living than the average European. Now, do you consider the average European to be poor?
Those defined as living in poverty in this country usually own at least one color television, a microwave oven, an automobile, and a cell phone. Not too long ago, every one of these items was considered a luxury. Today you’d be hard pressed to find a poor person without them.
Let me tell you something about the pitiful poor—something I’ve said on the radio show countless times, and that gets people angry every single time I do it. The truth hurts, and this truth seems to hurt more than most. Know this: Barring some sort of mental or physical disaster, the people living in what we describe as poverty in this country are there because of the sum total of the decision and choices they made during their lives up to this point. Poverty is something you do to yourself, not something that’s done to you. Poverty isn’t a condition; it’s a behavioral disorder at best, and a mental disease at worst.
It’s important to understand the genesis of the method we use for measuring poverty in this country. The poverty scale, and the methodology behind it, was designed during Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society,” and it was created specifically to exaggerate the need for funding anti-poverty programs. The more poverty the government could show, the more money they could spend. The more government spends, the more powerful government becomes. The more powerful government becomes, the weaker we become.
The poverty statistics were a sham then, and they’re a sham now—a sham with a purpose. Strengthen government, weaken the people.
Just how meaningless are those poverty stats? Just try to wrap your mind around this concept:
You could have $15 million in your checking account, a paid-for $23 million dollar home, a different private jet for every day of the week, color-coordinated BMWs for every suit you own, and $1 million of walking-around money in your pocket—and still be classified by our government as living in poverty.
Why? Because you don’t have any income! You’re rich; you don’t have to work! You’re just living off your assets, and doing it rather well, I’d say. To the simple-minded government bean-counters, though, what makes a person poor is a lack of income, not a lack of wealth. Sign up for your benefits right here!
Are there people in need in this country? Sure. Could they use a little help? You bet. Do they usually put themselves in this position? Absolutely.
And that brings me to the following totally insensitive observation:
One of the undisputable facts of life is that you will always get more of the behavior you reward, and less than the behavior you punish. So if poverty is a behavioral disorder, as I believe to be the case, why are we rewarding it? Why do we reward laziness in this country, and punish hard work?
Doesn’t common sense tell you that we would have less poverty in this nation if we were to punish the poor? And wouldn’t we have more in the higher income brackets if we rewarded their behavior rather than punishing it?
Punish the poor? How?
I dunno. Maybe a public spanking. Take away their TVs and cell phones. Make them pick up cigarette butts from the roadways. We’ll think of something.
OBSCENE PROFITS
Here’s a phrase that’s used by the left to demonize successful businesses and soften them up for the kill. (By “kill,” I mean higher taxes. Perhaps even a so-called “windfall profits tax.”)
As I’ve said, if you were to walk into your local shopping mall and ask the first one hundred people you met to tell you the difference between a profit and a profit margin, you wouldn’t find two who could give you a correct answer. To most people, the only figure that means anything is gross profit. Leave that margin nonsense to the bean counters.
This ignorance really came into play when Exxon Mobil announced record profits—around $38 billion—for their 2005 fiscal year. The media and the political class went nuts! Here was an ideal opportunity to exploit the ignorance of the public to further the leftist agenda.
The most important point, of course, wasn’t the size of Exxon Mobil’s gross profits that year, but the size of their profit margin during that year of record profits. In other words, how much profit did Exxon Mobil earn on every dollar of sales?
Before you answer that, let me ask you to tell me what you think a fair profit margin would be. Out of every dollar of business a company does, how much would it be fair for them to keep as earnings? Most people would answer around 20 percent. When you tell them that this far, far exceeds the normal profit margin for an American business, they can’t believe it.
Back to Exxon Mobil. During the year of the great $39 billion gross profit, Exxon Mobil earned about a dime on every dollar of revenue. That’s right, around 10 percent. And a huge portion of that 10 percent was plowed right back into research and exploration for new sources of energy.
Here’s your economics lesson. Perhaps after reading this you’ll be willing to challenge the next clown you hear complaining about the “obscene profits” those evil corporations make.
Let’s say you sell widgets. It costs you $90 to make a widget, and you sell each one for $100. Your needs are small, so you only make and sell a hundred widgets a year.
Do you need your calculators for this?
So you spend $9,000 making a hundred widgets, and you collect $10,000 in sales revenue. Your profit is $1000. Your profit margin is 10 percent. You’ve earned one dime on every dollar of sales.
Now let’s say that the price of raw materials you need to make your widgets suddenly skyrocket. The next year, it costs you $180 to make the same widget that used to cost $90. You want to earn the same percentage on every dollar of sales, so you hike the price of your widgets to $200 and quickly sell all one hundred of them. (Widgets, it seems, are a necessity.)
Now you’ve spent $18,000 making the widgets, and you sold them all for $20,000. Your profit margin is still only 10 percent. You’re still only making ten cents on every dollar of sales. But look—your profit has doubled! You sold the same amount of widgets, but you made $2,000 in profit!
Quick! Someone pass a windfall profits tax!
Our politicians would really be crippled if the people of this country had even the most rudimentary understanding of economics.
PRICE GOUGING
Now here’s a favorite of the political class. Politicians just love anti–price gouging laws because they leave the impression that they’re there to protect the poor consumer in times of urgent need. The truth is, they hurt the situation more than they help it.
Florida is a hotbed of anti–price gouging demagoguery. Every time a hurricane approaches the Florida coastline, the governor rushes to sign a proclamation declaring a state of emergency. As soon as the proclamation is signed, the anti–price gouging laws go into effect. Shortages on essential items soon follow.
Anti–price gouging laws may make politicians look good to government-educated economic illiterates, but that’s about all they do. The fact is, the laws actually decrease the available supply of the very goods and services that people in hurricane-damaged areas desperately need.
Let’s take hotel rooms. When those anti–price gouging laws go into effect, a hotel operator can be severely fined—I think the penalties include having one limb amputated—if he dares to increase the price of his limited resource in the face of increased demand.
Let’s say you have a family of five evacuating a coastal area—Mom and Dad, the two rug rats, and the mother-in-law. They arrive at the Comfort Inn near Ocala to find that rooms are running at their usual rate…say, about $79 a night.
What luck! Now you can afford to get three rooms! Mom and Dad can have a room of their own for a little motel nookie. The kids can have another room, and the mother-in-law can have a third room so she can smoke to her heart’s content.
Then, an hour or two later, along comes another family looking for shelter. The Comfort Inn has no more rooms. Why? Because most of the people who arrived earlier took advantage of the low prices and got multiple rooms.
Now, if the motel operator had increased the price of these hotel rooms in response to the increased demand—say, to $200 a night—our evacuees wouldn’t be so eager to rent three rooms. Perhaps one would have sufficed, and the old bag would just have to sleep on the pull-out couch and smoke her butts outside. Then there would still be rooms available, although at higher prices, for that second family driving in.
The anti–price gouging laws hurt consumers in almost all other areas. Generators, for instance. When the electricity goes out, and stays out, people want generators. Once the local Home Depot and hardware store run out, the supply is pretty much exhausted.
When the price is kept artificially low in the face of increased demand and limited supply, people suffer. Just as with the hotel rooms, you will get some eager buyers who will walk out with two or maybe three generators! Not only do they want to power the essential equipment in their kitchen, and maybe the downstairs air conditioning unit, they want another generator as a standby unit, or to power extra equipment.
Now…allow the price of generators to rise with the increased demand and the situation changes. Fewer people buy multiple units. You will also have entrepreneurs buying generators in other markets, loading them on trucks, and driving to Florida to sell them. When some people did this after Hurricane Charlie they were arrested and their goods confiscated.
So—you want to call these entrepreneurs greedy? They’re profiteering? They’re making money off the misery of others? Oh, I get it. In your world a person is only allowed to make a profit selling something or providing a service that people don’t really need, right? How brilliant is that?
So, congratulations to the politicians who push these anti–price gouging laws. They’re not stupid. They know what the true economic impact of their action is. It’s about pandering—pandering to the economic ignorance of the common man, even if the common man suffers as a result. Votes are everything. Leadership is nothing.
HATE SPEECH
Talk about an over-used term. You’ll be hard-pressed to read any article dealing with talk radio without running across the “hate speech” phrase at least once.
It’s easy to understand what’s going on here. Liberals increasingly find themselves unable to effectively counter some of the ideas presented on libertarian and conservative talk radio shows. They know the facts aren’t on their side (“there was no Al Qaeda in Iraq”) and they’re unprepared to argue the point on any logical basis. The “hate speech” line is their escape valve.
“I don’t have to respond to your arguments; I don’t have to even talk to you because you are full of hate. I prefer to spend my time discussing things like this with people who are not so full of hate. So take your hate speech and go away.”
To many liberals the very definition of “hate speech” is “any utterance made by a conservative that I disagree with.”
NEO-CON
Excuse me, but just what in the hell is a “neo-con”? I’m sure there’s a definition of that term out there somewhere, but it’s my experience that most of the people who bandy the “neo-con” line about can’t tell you what that definition is.
Basically, I believe that “neo-con” is simply intended to be a derogatory epithet used to define anyone-not-liberal.
I can say this: Since the word “neo-con” came into our vocabulary I have not received one single on-air phone call, e-mail or letter from anyone who had any ability to use the phrase in any manner that sounded even marginally intelligent.
There’s more, but there are only so many pages between the covers of this book. The only way to cram more in here would be to reduce the size of the typeface. Studies show that liberals don’t like to read smaller type. Since we don’t want to deny them the privilege of reading this book, we’ll just move on.