The Regiment

You’ve seen the disgust rising deep in the throats of the American public in response to the broken promises of health care reform “transparency.” The backroom dealings in Congress alone likely extend well beyond Sen. Mary Landrieu’s “Louisiana Purchase” and Sen. Ben Nelson’s “Cornhusker Kickback,” the latter of which is reportedly being challenged by 15 state prosecutors. But this congressional payoff gig is small-time. How about the giveaway that President Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid are planning for the unions? The proposed exemption of union employees from the Cadillac healthcare insurance tax amounts to a $59 billion transfer of wealth to unions.

It is unconscionable that $59 billion will be extracted from taxpayers and others to subsidize labor unions. The Obama administration and Congress are now planning on taking $15 billion more from hospitals and $10 billion more from pharmaceutical makers to cover part of this fortune. But there is no reason hospital and drug costs should go up to subsidize unions.

This transfer of wealth to unions has become part of a pattern. Over the last year, the unions have been given a long string of massive wealth transfers. Take the government forcing GM and Chrysler bondholders to forfeit their legal right to be the lead creditors so that auto unions could get large shareholdings in both companies through bankruptcy. Similarly, the stimulus package placed all sorts of restrictions on how the money could be spent, requiring that much of the spending go only to unionized workers.

With only about 12.4% of the American workforce unionized (16.1 million as of 2008), how will this massive, vote-buying wealth redistribution program to a distinct yet vociferous minority of U.S. workers play among the rest of the workforce when the next election rolls around?

The tin ears of Obama and the Demonrat Congressional leaders are only exceeded by their profound hubris. Regardless of what happens in the battle for Teddy Kennedy’s the people’s Senate seat in Massachusetts, the writing is on the wall: Americans will have none of this.

Brit Hume said on Fox News recently that, perhaps it would be the best thing for the Democrats if Scott Brown actually won the race and, by killing their filibuster-proof Senate majority, could allow the Republicans to shut down the most radical elements of their agenda such as ObamaCare and Cap and Trade. Perhaps some vulnerable Democrat seats might even be saved come November, bada bing. With all due respect to Mr. Hume, the train has already left the station, and it’s bearing a bold flag with a cruel serpent that reads DON’T TREAD ON ME.

Cross-posted from Moonbattery.

So-called “intellectuals” pepper us from the left and the right with their wit and wisdom. That’s fine — you can generally take it or leave it as an individual. However, watch out when the ideas of those “intellectuals” are elevated to prominence through socio-political forces. Thomas Sowell points out in his new book Intellectuals and Society that, on balance, the Intelligentsia and the ideas they espouse could well have done more harm than good, especially throughout recent history.

Intellectuals generate ideas and ideas matter, whether those ideas are right or wrong, and they matter far beyond the small segment of society who are intellectuals. Ideas affect the fate of whole nations and civilizations. Nowhere is that more true than in our own times, when some people make suicidal attacks to kill strangers who have done nothing to them, as on Sept. 11, 2001, because the attackers are consumed with a set of ideas – a vision – and driven by the emotions generated by those ideas and that vision.

Sowell offers Karl Marx as a prime example of someone whose ideas were not only pushed beyond their initial intent by despotic dictators, but also perpetuated by the aloof elitist intelligentsia of the day, all with dire consequences.

The ideas that Karl Marx created in the 19th century dominated the course of events over wide portions of the world in the 20th century. Whole generations suffered, and millions were killed, as a result of those ideas. This was not Marx’s intention, nor the intentions of many supporters of Marxist ideas in countries around the world. But it is what happened.

Some of the most distinguished intellectuals in the Western world in the 1930s gave ringing praise to the Soviet Union, while millions of people there were literally starved to death and vast numbers of others were being shipped off to slave labor camps.

Many of those same distinguished intellectuals of the 1930s were urging their own countries to disarm while Hitler was rapidly arming Germany for wars of conquest that would have, among other things, put many of those intellectuals in concentration camps – slated for extermination – if he had succeeded.

The 1930s were by no means unique. In too many other eras – including our own today – intellectuals of unquestionable brilliance have advocated similarly childish and dangerous notions. How and why such patterns have existed among intellectuals is a challenging question, whose answer can determine the fate of millions of other people.

Indeed, addressing the “how” and “why” appears to be the aim of Sowell’s latest effort.

Think back to those valiant thinkers who gave birth to a tiny nation through a bold dream, a brazen idea that they were willing to fight to the death for — an idea that was eventually realized as the greatest nation on earth. Woe are we who bear witness to the decimation of the Founders’ dream by countless progressives (Democrat and Republican) who, inspired by “brilliant intellectuals,” promulgate their own twisted notions of social democracy through social, economic and environmental statism.

Cross-posted from Moonbattery.