In Jim Cook's Archive

Expropriate The Capitalists

Columnist Vasko Kohlmayer quotes Michael Moore in his current film, “Capitalism: A Love Story.” “Capitalism is an evil, and you cannot regulate evil… you have to eliminate it and replace it with something that is good for all people.”

Kohlmayer goes on to say that, “Capitalism is increasingly cast as the great villain of our time. It’s blamed for exploitation, poverty, fraud, alienation, crime, racism and nearly everything else.”

Kohlmayer continues, “The bad rap could not be more undeserved. Rather than mankind’s scourge, capitalism has been its greatest benefactor. It is, in fact, the only socio-economic system that can provide ordinary people with dignified and prosperous lives. It was only with the advent of capitalism that the common man was able to escape the penury and filth of his existence to which he had been previously consigned. Until then, the lives of most people were short, hard and miserable. Today, as if by miracle, we can enjoy greater comforts and ease of life than the kings of the past.”

As author Lew Rockwell confirms, “Capitalism, and capitalism alone, has rescued the human race from degrading poverty, rampant sickness and early death.”

Kohlmayer points out, “Capitalism is responsible for nearly everything that makes human existence easy and comfortable. The automobile, the supermarket, the personal computer, the washing machine, the hammer-drill, the iPhone, the airplane, the TV set, the chewing gum, electricity and countless other good things have all been birthed and mass produced by capitalism.”

Rockwell agrees, “The profit system balances human needs with the availability of all the world’s resources, unleashes the amazing power of human creativity, and works to meet the material needs of every member of society at the least possible cost. It does this through exchange, cooperation, competition, entrepreneurship, and all the institutions that make possible capitalism – the most productive economic system this side of heaven.”

Says Kohlmayer, “Because of its immense wealth generating power, people who live in capitalist societies enjoy rising standards of living and material affluence. Conversely, those who live in non-capitalist societies invariably experience the opposite. . . . The rule always holds: Capitalist societies are invariably prosperous. Non-capitalist ones are always poor.”

What’s going on with Michael Moore and the Hollywood left? Actors like Sean Penn and Danny Glover are kissing up to the socialist dictator Chavez in Venezuela. They seem to prefer a government strong man who will confiscate the property and wealth of those who earned it and transfer it to illiterates in exchange for their votes. This must also be their vision for America. These are dangerous trends. If they were to prevail, those of us who aim to prosper will be on the outside looking in. Capitalists may even become like the Russian kulaks (farmers) who were exterminated by Lenin and Stalin in order to implement collective farming. Socialists and communists have often murdered those who disagreed with them. As Che Guevara advised, “the oppressors must be killed mercilessly . . . . the revolutionary must become an efficient and selective killing machine.”

Michael Moore has a lot more in common with the Bolsheviks than anyone would like to think. The author David Horowitz (a former associate of the Black Panthers who experienced the Panther’s murder of a friend) has become the leading authority on the radical left.

He puts it this way, “It’s interesting that we have words like ‘neo-Nazi’ to describe post-Hitler Nazis, and ‘neo-conservative’ to describe liberals who left the Democratic Party when it took a sharp turn to the left, but not ‘neo-Communist’ to describe the massive numbers of people on the left – and among them very influential people – who share, almost to the jot and title, the old communist view of capitalism, and are prepared to act on that perception. . . Neo-communists like Moore share the old communists’ antipathy for the United States and sympathy for its enemies, even enemies as evil as Iran and Hizbollah.

“A neo-communist is someone who is convinced that race, class, and gender hierarchies make it not only legitimate but necessary to describe America as a “white supremacist” society. Neo-communists believe that a revolution is necessary (if not opportune at the moment), that the Constitution is a disposable document, and that America’s communist and Islamo-fascist enemies (Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, Hizbollah, the PLO and Hamas) are freedom fighters or at least on the right side of the armageddon that faces us.

“These are views shared by The Nation magazine, by Commonsense.org, by the Indymedia crowd, by the social justice movement, by the majority of the Black Caucus and the Progressive Caucus on the Democratic side in Congress and by tens of thousands of university professors who indoctrinate their students in these pernicious ideologies every day. They are the views held by the leaders of ACORN, the SEIU, AFCSME, and other leftwing unions, by radical feminists, by organizations like MALDEF and La Raza, by the ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights. . . . This coalition, which I have called the ‘unholy alliance,’ presents a massive threat to America’s security and its individual freedoms and its free market system.”

Commenting on Michael Moore’s new film, which he calls lying propaganda, columnist Walter Williams sums it up; “Not withstanding all of the demagoguery, it is capitalism not socialism that made us a great country and it’s socialism that will be our undoing.”

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