Tom Hartmann- Raving Socialist Moron of the Day

There’s something about Vampire: the Eternal Struggle players and Keynesian Socialism. I was previously unaware of just how deep this ideology was entrenched amongst VTES players until Facebook came around and I started seeing all of their updates. Holy snikees. Every freaking day I’m seeing updates from such left-wing rags like Media Matters, Raw Story, and who the hell knows what else. I can understand the left’s frustration with Fox News, but the answer is not just to spread your own version of historical fiction.

Kevin, who’s consistently my only reader, brought this to my attention off of David Cherryholmes’s Facebook update.

Jesus H Christ on a popsicle stick! Where did this man learn his history? “We didn’t cut our way to fiscal prosperity,” he claims. Oh really Tom? Can you explain this graph that comes courtesy of our very own government? It clearly shows that this nation was not running deficit spending for the rest of the 40s and for the entire decade of the 1950s. Oh wait. I’m sorry, apparently Tom Hartmann really wanted to talk about the ideal tax rate for the top bracket of earners. Strange that he’s conflating two separate issues here. Along the way he massacres the history of the Great Depression while he’s at it.

Apparently, according to Mr. Hartmann, it real cause of the Great Depression was leaving the rich with too much money! If they hadn’t foolishly gambled with all that money, then the Great Depression would not have happened… or so he seems to say in his whirlwind condensation of two decades into 20 seconds. I’m about to react to this steaming heap of ignorance when Hartmann goes on to at least suggest if not outright lie with some the real whopper: government spending INCREASED during the 1950s. WHAT?!

Hartmann spends most of his video implying that the government spent more in the 1950s than prior, but I figured like any good spin doctor, he wouldn’t actually say it. If he did say such an obvious lie, anyone with a search engine and a touch of common sense could disprove it in a heartbeat, and then where would Hartmann be?

Turns out, my faith in Mr. Hartmann to only lie via insinuation was misplaced, because he really does come out towards the later part of this video and say that the government spent more during the 1950s than during the 1940s. Wow. OK fellas, I’m gonna need a moment while I reflect on the ignorance of the American public to not come unglued when they heard this one.

But, really, the spending habits of the US government in the 1950s is not what’s at stake here. We’ve got an election coming up. Somewhere members of Obama’s re-election committee are coming up with talking points for all good Socialists to hammer home. I’m guessing by watching Mr. Hartmann’s little talk here, that it’s: we need higher tax rates and more labor unions. Yes, despite couching his talk in a discussion of national spending, what Mr. Hartmann is really on the stump for are more labor unions and soaking the rich. I can’t say I’m surprised. It’s hard to argue that labor unions make us any more competitive. That’s another one of those things that I think people inherently know to be false. Of course, Keynesians what us to believe there’s this great multiplier effect that the more you pay labor, the more we all prosper. “Henry Ford paid his laborers so much so someone could afford his cars,” they’ll tell you. This is, of course, yet another Keynesian lie, but who really cares. I’ll let this one pass rather than turn this blog into a long winded dissertation about organized labor.

But notice how Mr. Hartmann is slanting history here. According to him, we must tax the rich in order to balance the budget and prosper. Over and over again in his talk, he points to tax rates as the way to control deficits and no the more obvious solution of cutting government spending. In fact, he went out of his way to suggest and, at a later point, out and out lie to tell us that we could somehow spend more than we make until we were all rich! Furthermore, he tells us that we’ll avoid any more huge depressions, which are really just caused by those evil rich people and how they foolishly chose to invest their money.

This, of course, is an easy argument to defeat. The 1800s had no economic downturn on such a massive scale as did the 1900s. Furthermore, it was the most prosperous and highest growth period in American history. What policies did the United States observe during that 1800s:

  • An across the board income tax rate of 0.0%.
  • The only time in history when the national debt actually reached zero.
  • And a economic policy that discouraged accumulating debt except in times of war.

So there ya go. If you want a good lesson for prosperity, look no where else but the 1800s. It featured no Great Depression, negative inflation, and, with the notable exception of the Civil War, no great accumulations of government debt.

Case closed.

3 thoughts on “Tom Hartmann- Raving Socialist Moron of the Day”

    1. Indeed they do. They create an antagonistic relationship between labor and management, and they make the organization much more efficient. Having lived in LA for a while, I’ve heard quite a lot about the problems created by labor unions surrounding the movie industry. One woman I was dating painted movie backdrops and was being harassed and sabotaged on set because she wasn’t in the appropriate guild or some nonsense.

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