Former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich recently appeared on a Discovery Channel program that attempted to explain economics and capitalism. Reich, a seemingly well-educated man, kept referring to capitalism as simply dressed-up greed. In his fevered mind, there appeared to be no place for capitalism in the world, because it was based on greed. He referred to the writings of Adam Smith as proof that greed was the underlying motivation for capitalism - not personal achievement or bettering one’s life, not even providing the best for one’s family. It was just simple greed. Reich is not an idiot, but he is a demagogue. He’s entitled to his opinions, but when they are amplified and broadcast across the country, his extremist views influence others. The program provided no opposing views or commentary. This insult to our open, free-market economic system went unanswered, as do many other such insults.

Contrast Reich’s opinions with the observations of Alexis de Tocqueville, a French writer and political scientist who toured America in the early 1800s. He was struck by the incredible energy and vitality of everyday Americans - simple men and women who worked doggedly at improving their lot in life. He observed that this was possible only in America, because only in America did hard work pay off for the common man. Therefore, it wasn’t ‘greed’ that motivated Americans over the last 200 years, it was the possibility, the certainty, that if they worked really hard, no one could take their newly found prosperity away from them. It energized them, it gave them hope for a better tomorrow. And yes, a very few people became very rich doing so. But, the more important point is that hundreds upon thousands became very prosperous - much more so than if they’d remained in Europe. It was the growth and political stability of a solid middle class that distinguished America from any other nation at any other time.

This has always been the central argument against capitalism — the poor are exploited by the greedy rich. In Europe, the poor had been exploited by the rich and powerful for centuries, well before capitalism existed. And, there were proportionately more poor people in Europe during the 1800s than in America. They were held back by social barriers, denied education and opportunity, prohibited from relocating to areas with better economic conditions. This was the reality of life in England and Europe. Slavery was abolished in the United States by presidential decree in 1861. But only after pressure was applied by other European governments did Russia finally abolish serfdom for Ukrainian peasants in 1862, freeing hundreds of thousands from centuries of bondage. The lack of opportunity and incentive was a fact of life for millions of Europeans.

In America, those who escaped the rigid social and economic structure of Europe were becoming landowners, opened small businesses and sent their children to universities. This was impossible anywhere else in the world and in many places is still impossible today. What America’s largely classless society was able to accomplish was the marvel of the modern world - a relatively well functioning capitalist system with minimal interference by aristocrats, autocrats and bureaucrats. Was it perfect? No. Did excesses and failures occur? Yes. But, it’s still the best system ever devised by man. The irony is that the liberal elite who preach against a free-market economy and capitalism have benefited most from its bounty.

Take Robert Reich as an example -  he attended Dartmouth College and won a Rhodes scholarship to study in England. The Rhodes scholarship was endowed by Cecil Rhodes, a capitalist and diamond merchant. Reich then taught at Harvard University, the wealthiest educational institution in the world. Harvard endowments exceed $45 billion, most of them gifts from capitalist alumni. At Brandeis University he was the Maurice B. Hexter Professor of Social and Economy Policy at the Heller School of Social Policy and Management. He’s currently a professor at UC Berkley’s Goldman School of Public Policy. Maurice Hexter, Florence Heller, Richard and Rhoda Goldman are philanthropists who endowed the institutions that paid Reich’s salary. Where did their money come from? Capitalism. This ingrate, along with his former girlfriend Hillary Clinton and thousands of other liberals, have no problem taking money from capitalists only to turn around and bite the hand that feeds them.

But then, this is what liberals do. They resent the fact that someone else has worked harder, worked smarter or had the good fortune to accumulate wealth. Envy is a powerful emotion. It’s corrosive, destructive and insidious. Envy, dressed up as public policy, is what threatens free market capitalism. Demagogues like Reich and Obama have used envy to whip up class warfare, turning it to their own advantage. Socialism is their choice of socio-political structure, not because it’s inherently better than capitalism, but because it can be easily controlled by a small elite. That’s right: Socialist activists like Reich and Obama firmly believe in their own superior intellect and abilities, and they’re more than happy to impose their ideology on the rest of America. The average American can’t seem to grasp this. Why would someone dedicate their lives to telling other people what to do? There doesn’t seem to be any profit in it. And that’s the key - Americans are so conditioned to a direct linkage between effort and material reward that the desire to accumulate personal power is totally foreign.

They don’t understand it because they’ve never lived under despotic rulers or communist totalitarianism. Josef Stalin murdered millions and destroyed entire civilizations. He controlled the Soviet Unions economy with an iron fist. As the supreme ruler, he could have any material thing he wanted. And yet, he lived like a pauper. This is unfathomable to the average American. Unfortunately, Americans will need to get used to it. Obama’s monstrous plan to grow government means that all Americans will be working for the government, whether they understand it or not and whether they like it or not.

Reich, Obama and other well-educated liberal elites have no problem taking money from capitalists to feather their own nests. They have no problem taking money from taxpayers, either. Using our tax dollars, they will build a utopia in their own image and likeness. And, they’ll do it in the name of ‘fairness’. At some point, Americans will wake up and find themselves yoked to a huge and unyielding machine that sucks the life out of them. But it will be too late. Betrayed by liberal ideals, Americans will have allowed the most despotic form of government to take hold. They will have thrown away their freedoms and their future.

Labor unions are starting to collect on their investment in a Democratic victory at the polls, and now it’s time for the mainstream media cabal to do the same. After all, it costs big money to harass Sarah Palin and her family, send teams of investigators up to Alaska and distribute slanderous allegations nationwide. Hollywood has already received its $300 million in tax credits, discreetly buried deep inside the pork-ridden bank bailout bill. Now, it’s the media barons’ turn to belly up to the trough. The New York Times and the LA Times are both losing readership and classified ad revenues. They haven’t been able to make much money online. Conservative pundits attribute this to extreme bias and pandering to the left, resulting in an exodus of subscribers. That’s only partially true. The big problem isn’t readership, it’s reading.

In a twist of supreme irony, the same newspapers that championed diversity and multiculturalism, that tirelessly promoted social engineering and socialist causes, are now reaping their just reward. Americans who no longer feel compelled to learn English are not going to read a newspaper printed in English, or its online analog. Americans who no longer feel compelled to be engaged in the national discourse are not going to read a newspaper, English or otherwise. Americans who have come to live in this country in order to enrich themselves and not participate in public life or public institutions are not going to read a newspaper. And finally, those who might consider reading a newspaper or its online equivalent can’t, because they have been so poorly educated by the very same unions and public schools these newspapers have always supported.

Now that bailout spending has reached an epic $7-plus trillion and President Obama promises another trillion in handouts, the newspaper guys think it’s just as well to stick their hands out. One problem - a government subsidizing only a select few media outlets effectively makes those outlets nothing more than propaganda tools. Not that they haven’t already functioned as propaganda tools. This would just formalize the arrangement.  A government-supported New York Times is as dangerous as a government-funded ACLU. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that those who don’t benefit from the government’s largess will be at a competitive disadvantage. But then, fair play has never been a concern of mainstream journalists and TV news anchors. Just ask Bristol Palin.

Obama’s surrogates and spokespersons are out on the news talk circuit, re-setting expectations for the Anointed One’s first year in office. The massive socialist spending spree promised during the campaign is now being repackaged as an economic stimulus and ‘infrastructure investment’ to quell fears on Wall Street and the world banking system. As before, they blame the ‘failed Bush policies’ for the current economic problems, but there’s a new twist - they’re now openly condemning our entire economic system. That’s right, Obama’s people are attacking free-market capitalism and the concept of private business. They’ve called free-market capitalism a ‘failure’ and they mean to change it. The $800 billion Obama intends to blow in 2009 is a down payment on a brand spanking new socialist economic system, complete with quasi-governmental corporations (remember Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac?), oversight boards loaded with government union representatives, and thousands of politically connected ‘consultants’ and ‘experts’.

Where are the media folks on this one? In fact, where are the Republicans? There is no doubt that Obama will be setting the agenda - he wants his marxist vision implemented quickly, before the masses understand what’s happened to them. This isn’t a matter of hyperbole or reactionary zeal. This man and his backers fully intend to take America down an irreversible path to socialism with a uniquely American twist. Wealthy liberals like the Kennedy’s, Kerry’s and much of the East Coast’s social elite will be protected from confiscatory income and capital gains taxes with rifle-shot exemptions and loosened regulation of private foundations, which are overwhelmingly pro-liberal. Read Phil Kent’s Foundations of Betrayal to get an eye-popping overview of how private foundations influence political discourse and shape national policy.

Working under the premise that repeating a lie often will find it accepted as truth, Obama’s people will relentlessly pound the ‘free-market failure’, drumming this nonsense into the heads of unwary and unsophisticated Americans simply looking for a handout in troubled times. Our fellow citizens will give away their economic freedoms and hope for the future in exchange for a government handout that will be gone in a week. Obama’s counting on it.

Republicans will sit back, shake their heads and pronounce that nobody’s stupid enough to give away economic opportunity in exchange for some cash, and this couldn’t possibly happen. They’re wrong. American voters have proven gullible to a breathtaking degree and demagogues like Obama have taken full advantage of it.  Never underestimate the shortsightedness of parasites or their champions.

Consider what liberals have at their disposal - Hollywood, celebrity worship, alcohol, drugs, promiscuity, mysogeny, sloth, greed and all manner of human frailties. These are the incentives, the lures, that are used to degrade and debauch our society. From the ‘liberal’ perspective, it’s okay to be an utter failure as a father, mother, friend or even as a human being, as long as you harbor resentment and hatred toward those who work hard, take care of their own and occassionally show up at church. From the ‘liberal’ perspective, it’s definitely not hip to stay married, care for your kids, stay sober, try to get ahead or believe that just maybe there’s a divine plan. That immediately puts you in the category of rube, hick, redneck, reactionary and racist. Heck, that makes you a clone of Dick Cheney, who according to Vice-President Elect Joe “Plagiarism is my middle name” Biden, is the ‘most dangerous man in America’.

Here’s what needs to happen over the next four years: we need to make 52% of Americans understand what America is, who Americans are and how our destiny was cast some 200 years ago. America is an extraordinary place, filled with exceptional people. How do we know that? Simple. Think about Europe in the late 1700s. Those who were restless, ambitious and dynamic, that had no place to go because of societal restrictions and class structure, gave up everything they had to come here. They were the strong ones. The weak ones gave up and stayed in Europe, resigned to their lot in life. They’re still in Europe, putzing around in a socialist purgatory that rewards mediocrity and dispenses misery. The truly exceptional? Well, they came here and they succeeded. America became the beacon of opportunity for everyone else around the world, beckoning the adventurous, the self-reliant and the motivated to come here, because here was the only place in the world where you could pull yourself up by the bootstraps and become something incredible.

And now, Barack Obama, Nancy Pelois, Harry Reid and the rest of the liberal left wants to throw it all away.

As Americans go to the polls on Tuesday, they’re not thinking about the historic consequences of their actions. Uninformed, bamboozled and misled, many Americans will vote in a regime that will destroy a political and economic system that has been a wonder to this world for more than two centuries. Years from now, honest historians will analyze the 2008 election, trying to understand how a free people could have so willingly taken on the yoke of servitude. Dishonest historians will celebrate the 2008 election as the triumph of the People’s Republic of America, when a Great Leader was at last permitted to shape his utopia, taking from the rich and giving to the, well, not necessarily the poor. First, to his friends and flunkies, and then maybe what’s left over, to the less fortunate.

Honest historians and political commentators may look back on the 2008 presidential and congressional races as a dark day for America, when socialism triumphed and the mistakes of 1930s and 1960s were to be repeated and amplified. In the 1930s, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a liberal elitist, aided and abetted by a Democrat-controlled Congress, created programs and policy that still carry their toxic fallout into the 21st century. FDR instituted the concept of Big Government, the all-knowing, all-seeing Big Brother, and the rule of ‘experts’ who decided the fate of the country, as well as individual citizens. The country reeled from the effects of this socialist agenda. It took years to recover.

Lyndon Baines Johnson followed in FDR’s footsteps. Along with a Democrat-controlled Congress, Johnson, a liberal elitist, created more programs and policies that have devastated American society, the economy and our political system. LBJ and the Democrats created a culture of entitlement, a society of permissiveness and sloth, a nation of whiners and  hustlers constantly clamoring for more handouts.  The Great Society, War on Poverty and other social engineering programs have indelibly altered the American psyche and our country’s guiding principles. The Democrats knowingly and willingly sacrificed economic freedom and opportunity for America’s working class and poor in order to gain power. And, the story is about to repeat itself.

Where will Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid take this country? Will we be able to weather yet another round of failed policy and programs that pushed us over the brink into the hellpit of socialism? Who knows. Not even the Anointed One can predict the outcome.