Shut Up Chuck By: Mark W Adams

Although he doesn't actually come right out and say it, my Washington Post summary email on Charles Krauthammer's column today called From Market Economy to Political Economy did one of those "Shorter Chuckles" thingies, saying,

This is not the time to pursue an economic agenda based on liberal social goals.

Is it ever with these twits? Onward and forever to tax-cutting and cannibal capitalism!

Creepier still is what he actually has to say, conflating the evils of lobbyists who have a worse reputation than lawyers lately, Wall Street bankers who as a group are probably less popular that the C+ Augustus still aggravatingly living at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. that Chucky has been fellating O' these many years, and the entire city of Detroit with its principle industry as both a wholly subsumed nationalized colony of Washington DC with its hand out like any common crook lobbyist as well.

For the hat-trick, he looks in his crystal ball and declares any attempt to assist the auto industry in modernizing and greening our future stinks of the Soviet Union's completely planned Diktats on every factory floor, then pronounces the entire effort doomed to the same failure.

All this because we might want GM, Ford and Chrysler to build affordable, fuel efficient hybrid cars if they want a loan. (And they should look really cool too, but that's just me.)

The ruling Democrats have a choice: Rescue this economy to return it to market control. Or use this crisis to seize the commanding heights of the economy for the greater social good. Note: The latter has already been tried. The results are filed under "History, ash heap of."

I smell fear. Fear that events and the excesses of those who share Krauthammer's dementia are truly irrelevant, increasingly so in a world that is passing them by. The more they sink into the "ash heap" of their "commercial republic," the more outlandish the rhetoric will become.

I've no doubt Charlie will be deriding President Obama in stark terms in short order. He'll compare Obama to Stalin for instituting virtual gulags for FOX reporters who never get to ask a question at press conferences. He'll demand the Democrats provide bridge loans to house the refugees of a Purity Purge as soon as he doesn't retain every single incompetent US Attorney hired by AG Gonzales based their use of smiley-faces instead of periods at the end of each sentence in their essay on "What I Did Over My Summer Vacation To Make George W. Bush Even More Awesome." Obama will walk on sour wine and only heal everybody those who wait in line long enough to see a doctor that doesn't speak English -- since all the "good" docs, those still permitted membership in those whites-only country-clubs, will have left the country to set up practice in Dubai.

No doubt my crystal ball is fractured just as much as Krauthammer's. The problem is that he looks through his murky lens to see the past, and the present -- wrongly.

Just keep this in mind with all this talk of nationalization and socialism right now, communists didn't "loan" capital to industry. They just took over, declared the state the owners and ultimate authority over everything. They didn't just hand over rubles to company managers, with or without conditions. For the various bailouts to be anything remotely resembling what the Bolsheviks did, we would have to completely replace the management of those companies with federal bureaucrats and destroy shareholder equity.

Indeed, there wouldn't be any stock market for Chuckles to get his skirts all twisted over when it bolts up and down on the latest message from Obama or Secretary Paulson. Under Soviet-style socialism, for those who either don't know nor care to grok, you don't play with fractions of ownership rights in corporations like so many casino chips. You eliminate corporations altogether.

Not to put too much an edge on it, when President Obama decides to "buy" GM et al., I'll worry about our new socialist overlords. Telling the automakers that they only will get the USA as a co-signer on their loan application if they promise to use the money for good -- good for the USA btw -- is just plain old-fashioned horse trading, capitalism in it's purest form.

There are no free lunches, right? You want something from me, I get something in return -- and if you want it bad enough I can demand very favorable terms. What part of "you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours" stuff don't these Free Marketeers understand? I mean, Detroit doesn't have to take the deal and can take their chances.