Only a Liberal…

Why did an earthquake in California only kill 63, while a similar earthquake has killed over 100,000 in Haiti?

The News media keep referring to what has happened in Haiti as a “natural disaster.” This could NOT be further from the truth. This is a poverty disaster.

Now why would I bring this up now in Haiti’s time of need? Even if you agree with me, you may be thinking, “why can’t we talk about this later, after we stabilize the devastation?” Because every dime we spend on ineffective aid is a dime wasted, and I find it to be despicable. Haitians are not helped by billions of our tax dollars being sent to their country. In fact it probably hurts them.

While we have sent no money to China over the last few decades, they have made gargantuan leaps and bounds in their economy and the quality of life for a billion people. Why is Haiti still awful, while China is booming?

The reason is not as complicated as you think. We cannot fix these countries; they must fix themselves. All we can do is hand them a crutch, in the form of billions of dollars that do nothing but teach them how to walk on a crutch. To run, they must reform their infrastructure to foster an environment where each individual can reach their full potential.

Political bottom-feeding opportunists

Now if you can believe it, there are people who strongly believe, or pretend to strongly believe, that capitalism is the culprit in the Haitian disaster, not the solution. I would generally dismiss such nonsense as unworthy of acknowledgment but I will use it as an illustration of why countries like Haiti never get fixed. This was written by Tanya Golash-Boza at the Dissident Voice.

The story of Haiti — a nation that broke the rules from the beginning by standing on its own two feet — is the story of how global capitalism works to keep most people in poverty.

Tanya Golash-Boza is on the faculty at the University of Kansas. Here’s another quote from Golash-Boza:

The earthquake in Haiti is a prime example of how unbridled capitalism kills.

Slum in Jakarta, Indonesia

In the same article, Ms. Golash-Boza cites the Bay Area earth quake of 1989 where only 63 people died, yet she still identifies capitalism as the CAUSE of over 100,000 deaths in Haiti. This woman is a highly paid educator at an American university who hates the very system that provides her with her way of life and career.

Look at this building… what planet do you have to live on to believe capitalism is the cause of this? Buildings like this don’t exist in capitalist societies.

The real problem caused by capitalism

You want to know what the real problem with “unbridled capitalism” is? It makes a country so rich, so prosperous, that intellectuals get bored being prosperous and think up pseudo-compassionate, ineffective techniques to waste their money in pursuit of social status. Start a charity, collect money, and then send it to a poverty-stricken dictatorship, and reporters will write soaring articles about what a nice person you are. The results of your work will never be evaluated. The money will never be tracked to see where it ended up or if it had any positive, long-term effect.

People like the capitalism-hating Professor are the negative side-effect of capitalism and free speech. They live in a country with so much wealth, they can produce feel-good movements that can politically pressure legislators to send other people’s money to countries less rich than us. Whether that money makes a difference or not does not matter… assuaging their own guilt is more important than actually helping. If those good intentions result in more poverty and weak building construction that causes thousands of structures to collapse on their inhabitants, that can’t possibly be placed at the feet of the people who had good intentions. They convince themselves, and unfortunately others, that the problem is they didn’t send enough money.

On top of that, they wriggle around with cockamamie arguments that their ideology combined with capitalism attempting to intervene in the socioeconomic progress of these poor countries is proof that capitalism has caused their plight rather than their own ideology.

Direct aid still doesn’t help

Even if you manage to magically ensure every penny makes it to the people instead of the coffers of the rich dictator, it still doesn’t help. Poverty-stricken people don’t know what to do with lots of money. They don’t use it to change their situations. It doesn’t help them learn economic best practices that Americans don’t even realize they know. It doesn’t change social or religious hurdles that live on in those countries.

The dominant religion in Haiti is voodoo. While voodoo is probably most widely known in America from an Indiana Jones movie, the fundamental issue with it is when bad things happen to Haitians, they believe it is the will of god and they must accept it rather than deal with it. This is not conducive to progress.

Can we fix problems like this? Should we fix problems like this? The latter is a much tougher question, while the former is slightly simpler. No one can fix the economic problems of Haiti until the Haitian people remove the relevant social obstacles. Every year we send them more useless money is another year their people don’t move in the direction necessary for change.

And frankly, as much as I think voodoo is superstitious nonsense, it is not my right nor my business to determine the beliefs of other people. If we as Americans believe that Haitians are entitled to their religious and cultural practices, and we can also determine these same beliefs will hinder their progress, then we must learn to accept the situation. Spending time and money pretending to help them is not for their benefit, but for the benefit of our own egos.

Accepting reality

Alcoholics Anonymous learned long ago that forcing people to attend is futile. The alcoholic must choose to make a change, or else any advice and counseling given will not help in the slightest. The problem is not that we aren’t spending enough money on helping alcoholics deal with their problem. Continuing to send money to Haiti is like deciding you’re going to fix alcoholics by giving them more money to spend on getting themselves help. They will spend it on booze.

Please, send your money to the Red Cross if you’d like in an effort to help rebuild parts of Haiti, but don’t convince yourself you are changing anything. Only the Haitians can do that.

From Walter E. Williams, filling in for Rush Limbaugh’s radio show:

In 1966, the House Ways and Means committee said that by 1990 Medicare would only cost $12 billion. In 1966 it started out at $3 billion, but they said by 1990, it will cost $12 billion.

In 1990, Medicare was $107 BILLION. Nine times higher than the congressional estimate. Today, its $420 billion.

Forget Republicans and Democrats. The government is a virus for wealth and productivity. It wastes and wastes and wastes, and then it expects you to celebrate it for doing so. It doesn’t matter which party is in charge. It doesn’t matter who’s driving the metaphorical car.

Think of the government as an inefficient engine. We can get to almost all places without it, but occasionally we need to use it. Politicians are the “mechanics” so they want you to use it a lot. They will spend millions of dollars and poll small groups to find out the best way to convince you to “drive” the car more, but the fact remains you don’t need a car to get to most of your destinations.

Despite all that, our engine runs better than other countries’ engines. I’m not saying we should change the engine type. We need to “drive” less. Stop giving the government more power and money. They waste it at incredible rates… rates that make Bernie Madoff look tame.

Medicare has TENS OF TRILLIONS in unfunded liabilities, a number so high most Americans can’t even get their head around it. If a private company were to do that, no bank would give it a loan. Why do regular Americans assume the world will continue to fund our insanity? And why do otherwise regular Americans want to hand over even one more responsibility to the disease that is the federal government? What amount of waste is too much, where you’ll say, “Perhaps we’re better off paying for our own health insurance.”

Supporting government run health care requires a mindlessness I am unable to comprehend. Every argument for it is in fact an argument against it (except those supporting socialism) even if I disagree with the premise of that argument.

“Private companies are greedy and wasteful.” SO YOU WANT THE GOVERNMENT TO RUN IT?!

“Private companies will let someone die for money.” SO YOU WANT THE GOVERNMENT TO RUN IT?!

Do you know who is helping administer the TARP funds and stimulus money? Goldman Sachs executives who now work for the federal government. So the very people that liberals blame for the financial mess and think should go to jail are the ones now “fixing” it. Its as though if the government hires you, your past transgressions are wiped clean, and you are now pure as the wind-driven snow.

Guess who will be running government run health care when some politician essentially makes private insurance unfeasible? It will be a combination of politicians and the very health insurance company executives and pharmaceutical company executives that you liberals hate so much.

Use your flipping brains.

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John Stossel set out to verify or dispute a myth that liberals give more to charity than conservatives. The way liberals talk on TV, you would think conservatives hate children and the poor, yet the evidence shows the exact opposite.

All but one of the top 25 states where people give an above average percentage of their income were red states in the last presidential election (Maryland was the one blue state). Stossel spoke with Arthur Brooks of Syracuse University.

“When you look at the data, it turns out the conservatives give about 30 percent more. And incidentally, conservative-headed families make slightly less money.”

Stossel also found that conservatives donate 18% more blood than liberals.

Brooks’s book, Who Really Cares: The Surprising Truth About Compassionate Conservatism, dispells the myth that liberals care more than conservatives. Conservatives show they care by giving money to charity. Liberals show they care by giving other people’s money to the government to then give to poor people once they pay all the bureaucrats necessary to administer the charity. Thanks liberals!!

I think the wording of a poll question is critical to really understanding the “I want the President to fail” debate. Do you want the President to fail in general, or do you want policies you disagree with to fail? Most partisan invertebrates answer this question with blind emotion, and I reserve a special place in hell for these morons. President Clinton passed welfare reform. Although I strongly dislike him in general, I did not want him to fail at doing that simply because he’s a poopy head.
Regardless, this hypocritical outrage at Rush Limbaugh for wanting Obama to fail is ridiculous. In August of 2006, a Patterico poll found that 51% of Democrats did not want Bush to succeed. The majority of these 51% simply hate George W. Bush, and failure increased the chances of a Democrat in 2008. They are entitled to do so, but don’t shower us with all this outrage that you liberals didn’t have in 2006. Its amazing to see the idiotic, ignorant comments on sites like Huffington Post:

Al Eisele: The Republican Party, America’s second oldest political party and a force in American politics and government since the time of Abraham Lincoln, died on March 1. It was 155 years old.

James Moore: The more people that hear Limbaugh articulate his disdain for the success of America the better will be the country’s chances of rejecting his hateful ideology and getting back on the path to prosperity.

Jill Brooke: Who were the undisputed champs of CPAC? Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh — two unmarried people without any children.

I feel like I’m taking crazy pills. Limbaugh said on numerous occasions that America wanted to fail, yet Moore claims Limbaugh has “disdain for the success of America.” Flat-out, shameless liar. Mr. Eisele WISHES from the depths of his soul that the Republican party died as a result of Rush’s speech, but wishful thinking will get him nowhere. Jill Brooke flat out changed the subject, showing that her opinion is as worthless as an Obama campaign promise. Check out that link and see more comments in a substance vacuum from scholars like Alec Baldwin and Michael Moore.
Rush has said on numerous occasions that he is specifically referring to the liberal/socialist policies that Obama is putting into place and planning for the future. That is what he wants to fail: not America. Getting mad at Limbaugh without addressing the substance of his argument is intellectually cowardly. “Us vs. Them” bullshit is getting worse everyday; I am so sick of it.

If you want either President to fail at everything, you are an idiot. Please stop voting and reproducing; you are too dumb to live. If you want them to fail at doing specific things that you ideologically disagree with, you are normal.  Get the facts before you form so-called “strong” opinions.

Washington Times has an article on it. I tend to dislike Michael Savage’s pattern of calling a spade a vicious, evil, pedophile spade (I exaggerate a tad), but when he compared President Bush to Hitler when talking about all these bailouts, I find it very hard to disagree. Liberal kooks were right for the wrong reasons, and premature in their Bush/Hitler comparison. The argument that “I don’t want to bail them out, but extreme times call for extreme measures” could have easily come out of Hitler’s mouth. The notion that government politicians know how to help deal with extreme measures other than war should be dismissed at the door.

No, Bush didn’t kill any Jews, but is the word Hitler always off limits except when speaking of genocide? I think not. The government has shown time and time again it is incapable of solving problems. Everyone thinks that if a market crashes, the market is broken and something ostensibly outside the market has to fix it. This is kindergarten insanity.

Numerous television pundits say we have to bailout the auto companies. Why? If they failed, subsidizing failure solves nothing. Let them fail, and someone more efficient and profitable will fill that market niche. The government arbitrarily deciding who gets money and who doesn’t is breathtaking, and any American who understands the suicide of socialism needs to get angry. These bailouts are legalized robbery. Grand theft bank account.

Picture a reservoir inside of a dam. There are multiple rivers flowing into the reservoir, but a leak has sprung in the dam, and the amount of water coming out the leak greatly exceeds the amount coming in from the rivers. Over the years the surface level of the reservoir gets lower and lower til there’s almost nothing left.

To fix the problem, local officials decide they’re going to take a huge amount of water from another reservoir and refill this one. The level of the reservoir is raised and the local environmentalists cheer.

You cannot fix American car companies by giving them money because it doesn’t FIX THE LEAK. Handing them some money to survive for a few months is no different than taking $17 billion and throwing it in a fireplace. That money will go right out the leak and you’ll be right where you started, problem unsolved.

You idiots who think we HAVE to save American car companies so that the Japanese don’t win… my Nissan Altima was made in Tennessee and my father-in-law’s Dodge Ram was made in Mexico. So who is more supportive of American auto workers?

For the record, bankruptcy does not mean the end of American car companies. It means the end of astronomically high compensation for American car company workers. A bunch of people will be fired and they need to be. If you want the company to survive, they must drastically restructure everything, especially their union contracts. Giving the car companies a lump sum of money does nothing but delay the bankruptcy I and others are calling for now. They will go bankrupt when the $17 billion runs out anyway, so get it over with.
Hotair.com article on the auto bailout

A timeless chinese proverb:
Give a man a fish, you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime.

Liberalism hands out fish to anyone who asks. Fiscal conservatives teach fishing to anyone willing to learn.

Note: Be strict with your definition of a conservative, a TRUE conservative. For instance, George W. Bush isn’t even a true conservative. There are plenty of liberal republicans to go around, as well as fish.