Topic: "Useful Idiots".......Thomas Sowell.. "Degeneration Of Democracy"

[ateball]

I found this writeup by Thomas Sowell very good.  What say yee? - Eightball

Degeneration of Democracy

by Thomas Sowell
June 22, 2010

When Adolf Hitler was building up the Nazi movement in the 1920s, leading up to his taking power in the 1930s, he deliberately sought to activate people who did not normally pay much attention to politics. Such people were a valuable addition to his political base, since they were particularly susceptible to Hitler's rhetoric and had far less basis for questioning his assumptions or his conclusions.

"Useful idiots" was the term supposedly coined by V.I. Lenin to describe similarly unthinking supporters of his dictatorship in the Soviet Union.

Put differently, a democracy needs informed citizens if it is to thrive, or ultimately even survive. In our times, American democracy is being dismantled, piece by piece, before our very eyes by the current administration in Washington, and few people seem to be concerned about it.

The president's poll numbers are going down because increasing numbers of people disagree with particular policies of his, but the damage being done to the fundamental structure of this nation goes far beyond particular counterproductive policies.

Just where in the Constitution of the United States does it say that a president has the authority to extract vast sums of money from a private enterprise and distribute it as he sees fit to whomever he deems worthy of compensation? Nowhere.

And yet that is precisely what is happening with a $20 billion fund to be provided by BP to compensate people harmed by their oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Many among the public and in the media may think that the issue is simply whether BP's oil spill has damaged many people, who ought to be compensated. But our government is supposed to be "a government of laws and not of men." If our laws and our institutions determine that BP ought to pay $20 billion-- or $50 billion or $100 billion-- then so be it.

But the Constitution says that private property is not to be confiscated by the government without "due process of law." Technically, it has not been confiscated by Barack Obama, but that is a distinction without a difference.

With vastly expanded powers of government available at the discretion of politicians and bureaucrats, private individuals and organizations can be forced into accepting the imposition of powers that were never granted to the government by the Constitution.

If you believe that the end justifies the means, then you don't believe in Constitutional government. And, without Constitutional government, freedom cannot endure. There will always be a "crisis"-- which, as the president's chief of staff has said, cannot be allowed to "go to waste" as an opportunity to expand the government's power.

That power will of course not be confined to BP or to the particular period of crisis that gave rise to the use of that power, much less to the particular issues.

When Franklin D. Roosevelt arbitrarily took the United States off the gold standard, he cited a law passed during the First World War to prevent trading with the country's wartime enemies. But there was no war when FDR ended the gold standard's restrictions on the printing of money.

At about the same time, during the worldwide Great Depression, the German Reichstag passed a law "for the relief of the German people." That law gave Hitler dictatorial powers that were used for things going far beyond the relief of the German people-- indeed, powers that ultimately brought a rain of destruction down on the German people and on others.

If the agreement with BP was an isolated event, perhaps we might hope that it would not be a precedent. But there is nothing isolated about it.

The man appointed by President Obama to dispense BP's money as the administration sees fit, to whomever it sees fit, is only the latest in a long line of presidentially appointed "czars" controlling different parts of the economy, without even having to be confirmed by the Senate, as Cabinet members are.

Those who cannot see beyond the immediate events to the issues of arbitrary power-- versus the rule of law and the preservation of freedom-- are the "useful idiots" of our time. But useful to whom?

[Ultra]

Read this earlier in the week.  Thought of many on all the different forums actually.

[Bezor]

Do you think that the $20B set aside for compensation was agreed to by BP as a means for BP to maintain or prevent a run on their stock market price? 

It may be that the by going through an escrow process with an arbitrator and limiting the amount to $20B that BP may end up spending LESS than if they had gone to court to defend themselves?  This move effectively caps their financial exposure and fixes the costs rather than the alternative which would be years of litigation and ultimately higher costs which would then hang over their balance sheets for decades to come. 

The arbitration of payouts is still controlled by law.

This is now a "known" cost which they can compensate for through other budget means, rather an "unknown" cost.

Sorry I'm not an accountant, but that's my simplistic way of looking at it.

[ateball]

Bezor:  You bring up a very interesting point!

[MG]

Oh it's more than a good point. It's brilliant!    And right on target.

I don't worry so much about the creation of the compensation fund. When Enron collapsed, nobody in the Bush II administration asked anyone to put aside a single dime to compensate the victims. Why is Obama being pilloried so intensively for getting BP to agree to a fund that is many times larger than what the current law provides for?

I suggest that some people are playing politics with this arrangement. I can tell you that when this disaster started, federal law capped BP's liability at 75 million. Please tell me you don't think 20 bn is a more realistic number than that, 8Ball?