LEVIN ATTACKS STATISTS

The Statist urges Americans to view themselves through the lenses of those who resent and even hate them. He needs Americans to become less confident, . . . and to accept the status assigned to them by outsiders—as isolationists, invaders, occupiers, oppressors, and exploiters. The Statist wants Americans to see themselves as backward, foolishly holding to their quaint notions of individual liberty, private property, family, and faith, long diminished or jettisoned in other countries. . . . -- Mark R. Levin

Mark Levin in his book, "Liberty and Tyranny, A Conservative Manifesto," demonstrates the tyranny of Statists by their positions on current issues. According to Levin on his radio show, he wrote 98 percent of the book before Barack Obama became President. Obama’s name appears only twice, but his positions are apparent on many of the issues discussed.

How does the Statist operate? He attacks the Founding Fathers as slaveholders, and he favors revolutions because they cleanse “society of religious dogma, antiquated traditions, backward customs, and ambitious individuals who differ with or obstruct the Statist’s plans.” He favors the progressive income tax (Marx would endorse, Adam Smith would oppose). He creates more agencies (Retrofit for Energy and Environmental Performance is in the Cap-and-Trade bill, Consumer Financial Project Safety Commission surfaced last week).

The Statist is a master of the public vocabulary. Challenged on Global Warming, he accuses the skeptic of being a “denier,” of favoring corporate polluters, of being “against saving the planet.” He takes up issues that threaten liberty and prosperity, like Cap-and- Trade. Those who disagree with his immigration policy are “exclusionists, nativists, xenophobes, or even racists.” The Conservative believes that immigration is good if it contributes to the “social cohesion of the civil society.”

Levin shows how the housing subprime fiasco came about in which “the Federal Reserve Board’s [hurtful] role cannot be overstated.” It provided bailout funds to financial institutions and then acquired equity in private corporations. (pp.68-71; there is no index).

Levin turns to the Great Depression, in which the Presidents raised taxes and invented new agencies to dictate production and pricing. Not once during Roosevelt’s terms did unemployment fall below 14%. “His ill-conceived stimulus policies” retarded growth, extending the Depression by seven years, according to a report by two UCLA economists. (No bailouts then.)

Hoover, amidst rising unemployment, raised the income tax from 24% to 63%, and FDR raised the top rate from 79% to 90%. Industrial production fell 25% in the six months after Roosevelt introduced the NIRA (National Industrial Recovery Act), which forced companies into cartels and set up a government bureaucracy of two million firms and 22 million employees to control the economy.

He gives a clear, brief history of how global cooling is being dealt with as Global Warming, of Cap-and-Trade, CAFÉ standards, and DDT. The killers of DDT, which had saved millions of lives of World War II forces from malaria, William Doyle Ruckelshaus and Rachel Carson, today are honored. “The Enviro-Statist position is now law.”

Treaties that do not improve and preserve civil society, Levin says, are useful to lock in the Administration’s position. Subjects like weakness on foreign policy (Law of the Sea Treaty hasn’t yet come up), national security (civil rights used to weaken it); criminalizing war, global citizenship.

START I expires on December 5, 2009. President Obama has returned from Russia with a new treaty. He says he will preserve some START provisions by Executive Order if the Senate has not acted upon them, which may be unconstitutional.

We constitute a fifth of the world’s population but use most of the world’s resources, so we are expected to shrink our economy, according to the Statist-global governance and Socialist International’s Commission for a Sustainable World Society.

“Henceforth, Mother Nature’s doings will be mankind’s responsibility,” says Levin, “no matter what science reveals. The Enviro-Statist has declared war on the civil society and he is impatient.”

A pending fiscal disaster is cost of entitlements Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Medicaid subsidizes low-income, pregnant, and disabled people—one fourth of the population. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that, if nothing is done to stop the inclining trend, those who now pay 10% in income tax will, by 2082, pay 25%; those who pay 25% will pay 63%; the highest bracket now paying 35% will pay 88%.

Social Security was started by Roosevelt. These days, the government regularly sends the individual “the false impression that his payroll taxes have been set aside for his use upon retirement.” We have been deceived by the Statist to believe that the government has been prudent in managing his accumulated pension investment in Social Security.

There is no “Social Security trust fund.” So virtuous is its purpose that no one dares betray the fraud. Economist-journalist Martha Derthick wrote about it and Medicare and Medicaid 25 years ago: “Economic analysts who exposed . . . the myth of social security learned to expect a swift and vigorous response from program executives especially if critics were liberals”—heretics endangering the system. Social Security is not a program, it is a religion observes Levin.

Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are built on a family of frauds—the fraudulent concealment of material facts, the fraudulent representation of material facts, and the fraudulent conversion of one’s money for another’s use. . . .

What should conservatives do? See Levin’s Epilogue.

By Natalie Sirkin
c2009