Please don’t call it ‘state socialism’

The modern Prussian police state was built by Bismarck and others in the 19th century on a Spartan model, giving the central government vastly greater control over the individual than had ever been considered possible before.

Bismarck's program centered squarely on insurance programs designed to increase support for the ever larger and more powerful government. The program included health insurance, workman's compensation, disability insurance and old-age retirement pensions, all innovations at the time.

Starting with the model of Prussian compulsary schooling, American "educators," starting with John Dewey and Edward Thorndike eagerly imported this Prussian model to America.

Trained to accept such state control (and now the new "green" religion) in the schools for most of the past century, then made dependent on government insurance programs (Social Security, Medicare) as surely as the pimp makes sure his young ladies are dependent on the needle and the fix only he can provide, slavery to the state soon appears inescapable, even ordained by God and nature.

Why, it's a good thing! In exchange for the possibility of ever becoming truly exceptional, of growing rich based on our own efforts, it rewards us with ... "security."

"It is possible that all our politics will come to nothing when I am dead, but state socialism ("Der Staatssozialismus") will push itself through," Bismarck said in 1881.

"State socialism," he called it.

We're told that for some reason we're not allowed to call the Obama-Reid-Pelosi agenda "socialism," "communism," "Marxism," "state socialism" "fascism," or anything else that might sound unpleasant.

Much as I hate to cite the tyrant Lincoln, if we call a dog's tail a leg, does it have five legs? Telling us we're not "allowed" to use an accurate label for something doesn't change what it is.

Instead of allowing General Motors and Chrysler to go through normal bankruptcies, through which new and more efficient private operators could have purchased their worthwhile assets while shedding their crippling union contracts, the two giant auto makers have now been effectively nationalized. Meantime, an unelected federal "pay czar" decides on the compensation of executives, even at supposedly private banks that have paid back all their "bailout" loans. Does that sound like the normal function of the American free market, as understood in 1910, 1960 or even 1990?

Thanks to thoroughly unconstitutional "bailouts," the federal government now de facto manages our major banks and/or credit card companies, along with our airlines and airports.

The health care bill was "sweetened" with a federal takeover of college loans. Why? You don't imagine the federal government will ever try to manipulate the behavior of college graduates, offering to "forgive their college loans" if they agree to behave in ways favored by the fedgov, do you?

"Federalizing" all these programs shifts money and employment from the private to the government-bureaucrat sector. Unionized government bureaucrats tend to belong to outfits like the SEIU, which actively back Democrat/socialists, while dispatching purple-shirted thugs to beat up black freedom-fighters handing out "Don't tread on me" Gadsden flags outside rigged Democratic "town hall" meetings.

The so-called "health reform" bill authorizes $10 billion to field 16,500 more IRS agents to collect and enforce mandatory "premiums," which we're assured are not a "tax." Providing you're a "normal" citizen with a job and house, of course. (Illegal aliens Get Out of Jail Free, as usual.)

Last week the Review-Journal mentioned in passing, in an editorial about socialist Congresscritter Dina Titus' move to facilitate the takeover of Nevada Occupational Safety and Health enforcement by the federal government, that the Constitution grants the federals no authority to regulate workplace safety within the states. One letter writer couldn't wait to write in that the newspaper was wrong: turns out the preamble to the federal OSHA law as adopted specifies that it's all constitutional, since the federal government is empowered to regulate interstate commerce, and "workplace health and safety can impact interstate commerce."

It would be more justifiable to hold that an IRS man can climb the fence into my back yard and smash the watermelons I'm growing there, since by growing my own watermelons I reduce the demand for supermarket watermelons grown in another state, and this "impacts interstate commerce."

So we're right back to "If you call a dog's tail a leg, does it have five legs?" If Washington can do anything it likes because everything somehow "impacts interstate commerce," why do we have a Constitution with that two-page list of specifically delegated powers? Why not just one sentence: "Congress shall have power to do anything it figures might promote the general welfare and/or impact interstate commerce"?

On the radio this week I heard Congresscritter Titus asked whether she's concerned about state lawsuits challenging the new federal mandate that everyone will have to buy "suitable" health insurance. "Oh, no," she said, "The Constitution has been interpreted all kinds of ways, so I'm not concerned about that."

This from a woman -- a supposedly well-educated college professor -- who swore a solemn oath to "protect and defend the Constitution" 14 months ago.

You're still waiting for the American economy to "come back"? You may wait a long while. Once the investment capital is scared offshore, and the foreigners stop buying our bonds, who's going to pay for even the "entitlement" programs already in place, let alone this Obama-Reid-Pelosi "State-socialism on steroids"?

The biggest buyer of U.S. government bonds will soon be the Federal Reserve. Where does the Federal Reserve get its dollars? It orders the Bureau of Engraving to print them -- or just taps them into existence on its computer screens. As ever more dollars bid for a fixed pile of goods, the value of each dollar -- including the paltry few you still have saved in the bank -- shrinks.

This is like saying, "I won't starve; I can always eat my own foot." By the time you've eaten both legs up to the knees, it may start to dawn on you that this is a recourse with a limited future.

Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Review-Journal, and author of "Send in the Waco Killers" and the novel "The Black Arrow." See www.vinsuprynowicz.com/.