The Clampdown

Michelle Malkin’s been on fire recently. Her syndicated column today is a neat evisceration of the stimulus package that was guaranteed to keep unemployment below 8% (currently at 9.5%).

The first stimulus package was nothing more than a fiscal boondoggle designed to pay off political cronies like the unions and areas that voted for Obama (H/T: Around The Sphere) and was loaded down with some of the most ridiculous pork projects ever seen.

Expectations for a second round of stimulus are for more of the same. The fact is that Obama isn’t particularly interested in stimulating the economy. If he was, he would be slashing taxes across the board, loosening regulations on industry and corporations, cutting the capital gains tax, and balancing the Federal budget. I’ve noticed that whenever Obama says, “We don’t want to do this…” then it’s time to hang onto your wallet. If he didn’t want to do these things, he wouldn’t.

Obama’s straw man is that there are only two options: his way, or doing nothing at all. He says it every time he speaks. “There are those who want to do nothing…” What crap.

There are time-tested and proven methods of getting ourselves out of a bad economy. What these methods boil down to is simply this: put more money in the hands of the people who earn the money.

Government has no money of it’s own. One hundred percent of the revenue government uses comes from taxpayers. This is why the stimulus package, and the subsequent stimulus packages (look for Porkulus III: Revenge Of The Bureaucrat within a few months of Porkulus II), will not work. The premise behind them is that in order to put money into the economy, they first must take money out of the economy. It’s why government attempts to stimulate the economy through direct action, rather than by letting people and the free market decide how to spend their own money, are doomed to failure.

If the definition of insanity is repeating the same action over and over again while expecting a different result, then it is time to haul the Democrats off to the funny farm. But then, this has never been about stimulating the economy. It has always been about changing the way the citizenry of the United States deals with the Federal Government. This is about making as many people as possible dependent on government largesse. This is about an intellectual elite who feel that you don’t know how to spend the money you earn as well as they do. The Morlocks in D.C. are trying their very best to convince the Eloi of the fifty states to follow blindly and leave the decision making and the serious thinking to the smart ones. In their hearts, they believe that we are drones, toiling to provide them with more money and more power. In return, they give us the Postal Service and promises of paradise on Earth. Well, folks, it’s all a bunch of bull. You can’t immanentize the eschaton, as Eric Voeglin said.

This is about control. Fight the power.

UPDATE: In today’s Washington Post, President Obama has an op-ed defending the stimulus. Over at The Corner, Stephen Spruiell dismantles it with ruthless efficiency.