The City on the Hill Has Become the City in the Sea, Research Paper Example

The City on the Hill Has Become the City in the Sea: How Liberal Democratic Progressives are Drowning America

By fits and starts, liberalism is strangling America. Throughout its history, America was a country of opportunity: a shining beacon of hope, a place where a man could come to start a new life and make his fortune. America was a city on the hill. In the 20^th century, however, the city on the hill came under attack by a well-organized, ideologically-motivated movement designed to destroy it: Big Government, tax-and-spend liberal Democrats. Since their Progressive origins in the late 19^th century, Big Government liberal Democrats have sought to wage a war on success and hard work. The liberal Democrats have already turned the city on the hill into the city in the sea; only by stopping them can the city on the hill be restored.

At the heart of the liberal, Democratic ethos is the conviction that society can be perfected through more government. This is the liberal’s faith: through government regulations, taxes, and spending, one can produce a country that is “fairer” and more “progressive.” Doing this requires subordinating every aspect of society to Big Government, which must be entrusted with controlling the economy. Small wonder indeed that so many liberals wear the mantle of socialism, and conduct their massive central planning exercises in the name of helping the poor—even as their policies frequently have the opposite effects.

It is important to understand where all of this liberal nonsense came from if one wants to explain it and, hopefully, roll back the damage. The roots of America’s Progressive movement of Big Government tax-and-spend liberals go back to the original Progressives of the 1880s to the early 20^th century (Pestritto, 2009). Proof of this can be found in considering the career of none other than Franklin Delano Roosevelt, an icon of the liberal progressive left. FDR is a leftist icon because of his New Deal, which marked the beginning of much of the big government welfare state spending that has done so much to harm this country ever since. However, FDR’s radical ideology was nothing new: he specifically pointed to earlier Progressive leaders, like Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt (Pestritto, 2009).

What the Progressives have always wanted to do, ever since the 1880s, is to pull off nothing less than a total transformation of American government (Pestritto, 2009). Whereas the founders instituted a limited government, wherein checks and balances were designed to keep any individual office-holder or any one branch of the government from having too much power, Progressives sought to make government more activist and interventionist. To do this, they looked to the presidency. From Woodrow Wilson on, the Progressives hated the checks and balances of American government, because these restraints made it difficult to govern in the style they wished (Pestritto, 2009).

From the beginning, then, Progressives have been driven by a desire to use Big Government to shape political life, even if this came at the cost of undermining traditional American government. This conception of Big Government as the preferred model of statecraft meant an emphasis on the good of the collective, as determined by Progressives, over the good of the individual. Progressivism has always been opposed to exalting the principle of individual rights: it prefers to downplay the rights of the individual in the name of group rights (Pestritto, 2009). This led to some significant tie-ins between Progressivism and socialism from very early on. None other than Woodrow Wilson defended the idea of socialism, in an 1887 essay called “Socialism and Democracy” (Pestritto, 2009). His overall argument was that there was nothing wrong with socialism in principle, because socialism as Wilson understood it meant putting all power in the hands of the people, even and especially at the cost of individual rights. “’In fundamental theory socialism and democracy are almost if not quite one and the same,’” Wilson wrote, in a particularly revealing passage (Pestritto, 2009).

This, then, is the background for the rise of Barack Hussein Obama: a Progressive movement that has always despised the concept of individual rights in favor of group rights. Obama himself has continued in this tradition, as any sensible person can see. By his own admission, Obama attended a number of socialist conferences as a younger man (Kincaid, 2008). Moreover, his mentor since childhood was Frank Marshall Davis, a card-carrying member of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA). Like other socialist parties of the era, this party was directly subservient to the Kremlin. While Obama has generally denied that he was a socialist, even before his presidency his actions spoke against him. He sponsored a Global Poverty Act to funnel hundreds of billions of dollars in foreign aid to various countries—specifically to meet the demands of the UN (Kincaid, 2008).

As president, Obama’s actions and words have amply confirmed his socialist convictions many times over. A case in point is his own endorsement of the idea that “the rich” do not pay their “fair share” of taxes (Ferrara, 2012a). Never mind the fact that the top 1%, so maligned and detested by the resentful and clueless “Occupy” protesters, paid a full 39% of all federal income taxes in 2009. Never mind the fact that their “fair share” in terms of dollar value would have been 13%, since that was their share of national income. Other facts are even more embarrassing for the absurd, vacuous myth that the rich do not pay their “fair share” of taxes. As Ferrara (2012a) explains, in 2009 the middle 20% of earners paid 2.7% of all federal income taxes, despite earning 15% of national income. As for the bottom 40% of earners, as a group they gained a net of 10% of all federal income taxes (Ferrara, 2012a).

By any reasonable measure, then, the rich certainly pay their fair share of income taxes—and arguably they pay more than their fair share. Why, then, do Progressives, including President Obama, say they do not pay enough? The obvious answer is envy, and in the case of many of Obama’s supporters, like the clueless Occupy morons, a near-total ignorance of the economy and how it actually works is a likely factor as well. However, one can be more precise: for President Obama and his supporters, the rich are not paying their “fair share” of taxes because Obama and his supporters are Marxists (Ferrara, 2012a).

Socialism is what accounts for the contention that the rich are not paying enough in taxes, despite the fact that they are already paying far more than their share in terms of income. Following the “logic” of socialism, it is not “fair” for some people to have more than others; what is “fair” is for everyone to have resources distributed to them in accordance with their needs. As for what everyone “needs,” the progressive liberals are very glad to tell them. Much like the commissars of the Soviet Union, who are in a very real sense their progenitors and forerunners, progressive liberals have set themselves the task of regulating the economy and the personal decisions of other people.

Anyone who is still in the dark about the liberal agenda and the reasons for it should look at New York City and its ridiculous ban on Big Gulp sodas. To be sure, anyone who truly wishes to understand liberals has no shortage of examples of idiotic, meddlesome, and downright sinister policies to look at and learn from, but the case of the Big Gulp ban has the advantage of being both easy to summarize and extremely, obviously ridiculous to anyone with an ounce of sense in their head. New York’s nanny-state liberal Mayor Michael Bloomberg championed a ban on the sale of sugary drinks more than 16 ounces in restaurants and other dining establishments (Ax, 2013; John, 2014). The ban was proposed in the name of curbing obesity, the idea being that if restaurants and other eateries were not allowed to sell large increments of sugary drinks to people, people would drink less and lose weight. While the argument is laughable at best, since (to state the obvious) there would be nothing to stop someone from ordering multiple servings of a 16-ounce soda, the real absurdity was the stupid notion that it is in any way the business of government to regulate how much soda a person can buy with their meal.

While the ban on Big Gulp sodas was overturned, thankfully, it still has important lessons to teach the observer of liberal politics (John, 2014). The conservative or libertarian sees someone enjoying a Big Gulp soda and probably thinks nothing of it. If the person is clearly overweight, the conservative or libertarian might think “It would be good for that person to lay off the soda and other unhealthy foods and beverages, so that they can lose weight and be healthier.” The liberal, on the other hand, looks at that person and thinks “It’s so terrible that this person is drinking that enormous soda! Don’t they know that drinking lots of soda contributes to the obesity epidemic? We need to get government to ban it!”

Liberals seek to ban Big Gulp sodas for the same reason they seek to ban, or make mandatory, anything. If the liberals were really honest about it, they would admit that their true motto is “We know what’s best for you—and we’re going to get the government to make you do it.” Attempting to ban Big Gulp sodas was such a chuckle-headed move, such an obvious exercise of the nanny state at its most annoying, that it was too much even for New York. Plastic bag bans, on the other hand, are gaining ground. They are already present in a number of municipalities, and California has become the first state in the country to embrace a bag ban (Little, 2014).

Liberals love to argue that plastic bag bans will save the environment from pollution. Everyone can simply use reusable bags! The Wall Street Journal(WSJ)performed a public service by showcasing the debate in an article that ran in October of 2012. The article was a public service because it allowed everyone to see both the ridiculous liberal arguments in favor of a ban, and the far more sensible arguments against. On the one hand, a bleeding-heart liberal argued that plastic bags should be banned because they pollute the environment and are costly to clean up (WSJ, 2012). As for options besides the liberal’s standby of banning things, Russo has little confidence in them. Take-back programs have shown little success, Russo says. Well, if people won’t reuse or recycle like Russo and her eco-warrior friends want, at least Russo will be on hand to defend having the government make them do what she wants them to do! As for market-based solutions, like having people actually pay for the plastic bags, Russo actually acknowledges they have seen some success. However, she still objects to them because “those strategies have sometimes been blocked by the legislative efforts of ban opponents” (WSJ, 2012). Here Russo showcases her liberal arrogance and her complete disdain for the democratic process: she acknowledges that a market-led alternative to banning plastic bags exists and has been successful, but she is still against it because sometimes her side doesn’t win!

Arguing against plastic bag bans, Myers made a compelling case that the estimates of the actual environmental harm caused by plastic bags are greatly overblown (WSJ 2012). Much the same appears to be true about the cost to various municipalities of cleaning up littered plastic bags. Plastic bags are nowhere near the menace activists claim they are. Perhaps even more to the point, reusable bags are not necessarily better. Myers explained that a reusable cotton bag would have to see 173 uses to match the energy savings of one plastic bag, and that is on the assumption that a full 40% of bags are reused. Perhaps even more to the point, although Myers did not make it, is that it is not the place of government to tell a grocery store that it cannot offer single-use plastic bags to customers. It is not the proper place of government to interfere in this way, particularly not over something so unbelievably petty.

Big Gulp bans and plastic bag bans both demonstrate the liberal mindset of knowing what is best for other people, and believing that it is both right and necessary to use government to impose it on them. This is the mindset that has defined the Obama administration, and nowhere is it more clearly on display than with Obamacare, aka the wildly-misnamed “Affordable Care Act” (ACA). Obamacare is, plainly and simply, the liberal “logic” of Big Gulp and plastic bag bans writ large, with far more disastrous and tragic results. Consider the employer mandate: the requirement is that every fulltime employer purchase (government-approved) health insurance for their employees. As Ferrara (2014) explained, this is likely to function as a tax on employment even in cases where an employer already has health insurance for their employees, because the government-mandated health insurance is likely to be more expensive.

There are two key reasons for this: one, the Obama administration’s pandering to its constituents, notably disgruntled activists and unions, to provide generous benefits, and two, the costs of specific government mandates pertaining to health insurance, namely guaranteed issue and community rating (Ferrara, 2014). Guaranteed issue means that everyone who applies for health insurance is eligible to receive it: insurers have to cover them, whether they want to or not, and no matter how expensive that might be. Community rating is a similarly ill-advised, woolly-headed policy: it mandates that insurers sell their services to everyone at the same price, no matter the risk and the real expenses (Ferrara, 2014).

Liberals will no doubt defend both of these policies in terms of “people over profits,” another one of those empty-headed, feel-good canards the bleeding-hearts love to toss out. Reality, however, does not run on naïve, childish sentiments about what is “good” or “fair.” As Ferrara (2014) capably explained, both of these well-intentioned policies have the effect of hamstringing insurers. Because insurers cannot turn people down, they will have to take everybody. Because they cannot charge higher prices for riskier clients, they will have to charge everyone at rates that are high enough to stay in business (Ferrara, 2014). This is incredibly basic economics, which of course means it is well beyond the capability of most liberals to internalize and acknowledge.

Of course, this isn’t simply theoretical. Appearing on Breitbart News Sunday, Chriss Street pointed out that Obamacare has already caused the average premium to rocket up by a full 41% of cost (Wilde, 2014). Street argued that Obamacare would need another 35% increase to actually pay for itself. As Mulligan (2014) explains, writing for The Wall Street Journal, the ACA’s redistribution does help certain populations—but it does at the expense of diminishing the economy as a whole. “In further expanding the frontiers of redistribution, the ACA reduces the benefits of employment for both employers and employees” (Mulligan, 2014).

A case in point here is yet another way in which Obama’s well-meaning, feel-good reforms cause harm is with regard to the requirement that full-time employers provide health insurance. Because Obamacare taxes full-time employment, and because Obamacare defines a “full-time worker” as someone working 30 hours a week or more, businesses are already scaling back by cutting hours (Ferrara, 2014). Businesses unable to afford as many full-time workers as they did before the Obamacare tax are now reducing the hours of more and more of their workers to 29 hours a week or less. Since there is a small-business exception under Obamacare, and since a “small business” is defined as one that has fewer than 50 employees, many small businesses near that 50 employee threshold are also limiting their growth (Ferrara, 2014).

About 25 million Americans will occupy a particularly unenviable position under Obamacare: that of full-time workers who will not be eligible for any government assistance with regard to healthcare (Mulligan, 2014). These people are ineligible for government subsidies because they are eligible for their employers’ healthcare. On the whole, their position is unenviable because they will be required to help bear the costs of Obamacare, in one form or another (often through taxes), without receiving the benefits of its largesse. For some, this will probably be fine: they will be making enough that it will not matter.

For others, however, the prospect of a subsidy will be too much to resist, and they will either reduce their hours, find another job that pays less, or simply stop working altogether so that they can take advantage of the new policy (Mulligan, 2014). Some people are working full-time, but they are not fond of their jobs, and if cutting a few hours so that they can go from 35 hours a week to 29 means they will become eligible for a government-provided, taxpayer-funded healthcare option that is better than whatever their employer is offering, they will do precisely that. Still other people will simply be glad for an opportunity to work as little as possible, or even to not work at all. What Obamacare demonstrates is that if you give people incentives to produce less, whether by rewarding them for producing less or by punishing them for producing more, they will respond accordingly.

Thus, the good intentions of liberals create perverse incentives that harm the economy and the livelihoods of many people.For all of the liberals’ good intentions and desires to help people by telling them what to do and making them do it, there are cold, hard realities governing human behavior, and those realities determine the impact that ill-conceived boondoggles like Obamacare actually have in the real world.

Time travel may be the stuff of science fiction, but there is a place where a person can go to see what the liberal and Democrat program of tax-and-spend Big Government, not to mention grievance-mongering identity politicking, has in store for America. Detroit, Michigan, is a perfect example of precisely what happens when bleeding-heart liberals in the Democratic Party are allowed to take the reins and hold them without being held accountable. Today Detroit is such a miserable cesspool that it is easy for those who have no connection with the city to forget that it was at one time the 4^th largest metropolis in the country (Hawkins, 2013). The auto industry kept the people employed and prosperous. It was even a thriving center of music and culture (Hawkins, 2013).

And then, in 1962, the people of Detroit elected a Democrat as mayor—and have continued to do so ever since. The trick, though, is that they did not simply elect Democrats: they elected liberal, bleeding-heart types, the kind who were prepared to put liberal ideology before reality (Hawkins, 2013). The liberal Democrats in power formed a very cozy relationship with the unions, and they maintained that relationship over the decades, even as the unions slowly throttled the auto industry to death. With the full backing of the liberal Democrat bleeding-hearts in power, the union thugs forced the automakers to pay workers more than market wages, burdened them with business-killing regulations that made it essentially impossible to be innovative and flexible, and of course, instituted pension plans that were generous and unsustainable (Hawkins, 2013).

Liberal Democrats’ generosity to the unions ultimately harmed the auto industry that made the entire city possible as a viable, thriving city. Hobbled by regulations and burdened by excessive, needless costs, the automakers were simply not able to keep up with a changing auto market over the course of the decades. The quality of the cars they produced dropped, and they were out-worked, out-innovated, and inevitably, outsold by their competitors overseas, who did not have to deal with such onerous, job-killing conditions (Hawkins, 2013). Of course, the automakers also relocated: as early as the late 1960s they were moving production to states like Alabama and South Carolina, which are friendlier to businesses and take a stronger line against union demands (Alexander, 2013). It is also true that Detroit failed to invest in other industries, clinging to a model for economic growth that was simply obsolete. This in turn, of course, was influenced by high public spending on—what else—public employees, not to mention the regulatory burden (Stanley, 2013).

In addition to being too generous to their public employees, Detroit’s Democratic leaders provided their constituents with very little in return. As Williamson (2013) explains, “the people of Detroit were left with some of the worst schools in the country, some of the most dangerous streets in the country, and a public transit system that is a non-functioning mess.” A large dose of corruption was in the mix, too, and former mayor Kwame Kilpatrick has been sent to prison, along with a crony, for a total of 31 counts of extortion, bribery, and racketeering (Williamson, 2013).

As if the corruption and dysfunction were not enough, Detroit’s liberal Democrat leaders also resorted to race-baiting. The city did not de-segregate peacefully, producing a pattern of white flight to the suburbs (Hawkins, 2013). But instead of pursuing a policy of racial reconciliation, Detroit’s first black mayor proved himself to be from the same mold as Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson. Young drove whites out of the public sector on the basis of their race, specifically so that they could be replaced by black appointees. In addition, he engaged in long-running antagonism against the white suburbs, and generally ran an anti-white administration that inflamed the wounds of segregation and racism, rather than healing them (Hawkins, 2013). However, the policies of Young and his successors were also bad for black residents, because they produced an underfunded and incompetent police force—which in turn led to crime (Hawkins, 2013).

Between the lavish tax-and-spend that consistently benefited only the public sector, the corruption and greed, the job-killing regulations and requirements, and the race-baiting, the liberal Democratic leaders of Detroit managed to kill the city. In 1960, Detroit’s per capita income was the highest in the whole country; today it is the very poorest large city in the whole country (Williamson, 2013). Many of the people of Detroit finally had enough of being robbed blind by exploitative, greedy liberal hucksters, and they called it quits. Detroit lost nearly two-thirds of its population under the Democrats. In the 1950s, the city had 1.8 million people; today it has about 700,000 (Alexander, 2013). Today the city has 18,000 retirees—former public employees—to take care of, compared with a mere 10,000 active public employees (Alexander, 2013).

Detroit’s lavish and irresponsible spending left it operating in the red for a full nine years, reaching a deficit of $327 million in 2012 (Alexander, 2013). The city’s debt stands at $18 billion, owed to some 100,000 different creditors, particularly pension systems. Unemployment stands at 18 percent. Other dismal statistics are plentiful: the city has about 80,000 buildings that stand abandoned. Detroit’s schools have been closing, and its education system is so abysmal that a mere 7 percent of its eighth graders can read well. Police response time stands at an average of 58 minutes, and—not surprisingly—the city has the highest crime rate of any large city in the country. Only about 8.7 percent of violent crimes are ever solved (Alexander, 2013).

Obama is using the same terrible policies that destroyed Detroit, and they will have the same results: the impoverishment of the American people and the destruction of their liberty. Despite Obama’s wild over-spending, both in the bailout and since, liberals still claim we need more government spending, not less (DeMint, 2013). The Obama administration went on a massive spending binge early on with the stimulus, and that funneled enormous sums of money away from the part of the economy that creates the most jobs: the part comprised by small businesses. Multimillion-dollar contracts have been awarded to labor unions, and to green energy firms, and generally to others that are sufficiently politically connected (DeMint, 2013).

The traditional Progressive faith in Big Government as the answer to all problems with the economy is to blame for Obama’s massive spending. The idea that the way to deal with a recession is for government to spend its way out of a recession is madness, and goes against absolutely anything resembling economic sense, but liberals believe it anyway (DeMint, 2013). This belief is what is driving Obama’s high-tax, high-regulation, high-spending policies: the idea that Big Government can and should intervene to direct the economy. For Big Government to do this, of course, it needs to be even bigger than it is now: it needs to be huge, so that it can carry out the great endeavor of central planning (Ferrara, 2012b).

There is some hope. People are starting to see through Obama’s deceptions, and they are beginning to realize that Obama’s Big Government, tax-and-spend policies are killing jobs. Earlier this year, in February, a Gallup Poll confirmed that many Americans see unemployment as the top problem facing the nation. Twenty-three percent, nearly one in four, Americans surveyed named it as the top problem facing the country, a figure that was up from a mere 16 percent in January (Lambro, 2014). Second up was the “economy in general,” with 20 percent of those polled saying they thought this was the biggest problem facing the nation. Around the same time, Obama was also hit by a devastating report from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), which reported on the real consequences of raising the minimum wage to the figure of $10.10/hour as Obama wanted to do. That report found that although Obama’s proposal would raise wages by a total of $31 billion for all workers affected, lifting 900,000 Americans out of poverty, it would also erase about 500,000 jobs thanks to higher costs (Lambro, 2014). In fact, the CBO even said that Obama’s proposal could cost up to 1 million jobs, but went with 500,00 as a more likely estimate (Lambro, 2014).

Today liberalism rules America, and it is not hard to see why. In order to sell the liberal program, Democratic politicians have cleverly appealed to various segments of American society, especially the poor, with generous welfare programs. Instead of a social safety net, liberals have turned the welfare system into an entire way of life, more of a hammock than a safety net (Hawkins, 2014). Not only do they oppose limiting the amount of time someone can be on welfare, they also oppose drug testing and even work requirements (Hawkins, 2014).

There are at least two ways to understand why liberals favor lavish welfare schemes, and the first is the rather obvious fact that it produces dependable voters. Think about it: a person who is dependent on government for their entire existence, not working to support themselves and any dependent children, is the most dependable voter imaginable. A person like that will always vote for the policies that keep them living off of the hard work of others. While this is bad news for everyone else, it is great news for the Democratic politician, who can be that much surer of winning re-election if they have a comfortable bloc of dependent voters (Hawkins, 2014). Of course, such an existence is a gilded cage, but some people are indolent enough to be content in one.

The second way in which to understand liberal politics on the subject of welfare and entitlements is the way in which liberals sell everyone else on these policies: the cult of the victim. Liberals are absolute masters of outrage, feelings of offense, and of course finding the victim in everything (Coulter, 2008). As Ann Coulter said in Guilty: Liberal “Victims” and Their Assault on America, “Fake victims have become so crucial to liberal argument that you need a pathos-meter to follow politics in modern America” (2). Take a look at any liberal policy, and you will inevitably find that the name of a victim, whether an individual or a group, is invoked at some point. Liberals love victimhood, because it has been relatively easy for them to make claims of victimhood, and victim status, unassailable. If someone is declared a “victim” of something, they are automatically exempt from legitimate criticism, no matter how warranted it might be in some situations. Coulter gives the example of then-Senator Hillary Clinton’s shameful use of a deceased New York City police officer, Cesar A. Borja, as a ploy to get more federal money for the city. The story was based on a fabrication (Coulter, 2008). The point is that liberals use victims, often imaginary ones, to sell policies that end up harming the country as a whole—and often the very people they mean to help. Well-meaning liberals have pushed welfare policies in the name of helping the poor, but all they have created is more dependence and less productivity.

One cannot multiply wealth by redistributing it, and one cannot strengthen an economy by punishing those who have achieved success and disincentivizing production. This is basic economics and common horse sense, but not to a liberal. However well-intentioned liberals may be, they are naïve, and their policies are harming this once-great country. Again and again, the liberal formula of regulate, tax, and spend has led to reduced incentives to work and a generally poorer state of affairs for everyone. The liberal Democratic faith in Big Government is a vision that has produced countless woes and much ruin, but it has not deterred the liberals from proposing the same failed solutions. Only by getting back to the true meaning of this country can the city on the hill be restored. America was founded on hope: the hope that one could make something of one’s self without Big Government trying to stop one or punish one for doing it. Only if this promise is restored can Americans know true freedom and prosperity again, because only then will they have to achieve it and the incentives to actually try.

References

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