Foodforthethinkers's Blog

By Doug Newman – email me here.
Here I am on Facebook.
Posted at Reddit, A Call to Paul and Popular Liberty.
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Source: goldseek.com

“I’d rather have _________ in office because he has a business background and he understands economics.”

How often have we heard people say this?

If anything, it is just one more way conning people who say they support individual liberty into voting away their freedom.

Success in business does not require a knowledge of economics. One can make a lot of money cutting deals with politicians. Huge profits can be made off government activity or by enlisting the government to act on your behalf.

Consider just a few recent political heavy hitters who had “business backgrounds”.

• George W. Bush was the only president ever with an MBA – from Harvard, no less. And yet he outspent Bill Clinton by $1 trillion per year and added $5 trillion to the debt. He gave us the TARP bailout and Medicare Part D, which was a massive lurch in the direction of Obamacare.
• Mitt Romney – also a Harvard MBA – was touted for his business background at Bain Capital. Yet, while governor of Massachusetts, he signed off on the nation’s first health insurance mandate. He also supported the TARP bailout as well as increasing the minimum wage.
• Donald Trump supports universal healthcare, higher tariffs on imports from China and Mexico, printing money to default on the national debt and has given numerous donations to Democrat politicians including Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. Among the numerous evils inherent in his proposed roundup of illegal immigrants is endless harassment of all businesses. And read here how Trump is “the ultimate crony capitalist”, who has repeatedly used government at various levels to crowd out his competitors.
• Until recently, Carly Fiorina supported an individual mandate on health insurance. And how many billions of dollars in government contracts did Hewlett-Packard have when she was CEO?
• Herman Cain’s 9-9-9 plan would have increased taxes for millions of Americans.
• Dozens of millionaire and billionaire owners of professional sports franchises have lobbied successfully to raise taxes to build their stadiums.

Welfare for millionaires.Source: ollie.neglerio.com

• The medical-industrial complex – i.e. insurance and pharmaceutical companies – have spent hundreds of millions of dollars lobbying to implement Obamacare. They are also the biggest opponents of medical marijuana as it heals so many maladies cheaper and faster, thus cutting into their profits.
• It wasn’t the Occupiers or Ferguson marchers who put Obama in office. Rather, it was business people on Wall Street and Madison Avenue and in Hollywood. These same people are now doing everything they can to put Hillary in the Oval Office.
• And, yes, look at these rich business people who support Bernie Sanders.
• Conservatives always insist that they support free enterprise and loathe government education. However, whenever a new school is built, it is built by “private sector” construction firms. The same goes for all government buildings.
• Warfare, unless it is purely defensive, is just like welfare: it is a ruinously expensive big government program. The real reason that wars go on forever has nothing to do with scary looking brown guys who are hell bent on bringing sharia law to Sioux Falls and burqas to South Beach. Rather, wars go on forever because war makes a lot of people wealthy. As Major General Smedley Butler, who served for 33 years in the Marine Corps winning, among numerous other things, two Medals of Honor, so succinctly put it, “war is a racket”.
• These folks are all successful businessmen: George Soros, Ted Turner, Larry Flynt, Michael Bloomberg, Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper as well as the Wall Street and Detroit executives have taken bailout money over the years. Do you want any of them as dog catcher, let alone president?

Source: heartland.org

You’ll have to do a whole lot better than “he’s a businessman who understands economics” if you want to convince me to support your candidate. Very often, successful business people know as much about economics as does Bernie Sanders. However, they are very skilled at using the machinery of government to squelch their competition.

If you are still struggling here, just remember the words of a friend of mine: “The great game of politics comes down to this: the rich and powerful want to stay that way.”

RELATED: Elon Musk, of Tesla and Solar City fame, is a master crony capitalist.