The New America Movement

The New America Movement
By John Ransom
6/1/2011

I believe in America and the American way.

Unashamedly and unreservedly.

It’s been fashionable the last few years, in circles both on the Right and the Left, to talk about Europe and China as world leaders on par with the United States.

As leaders, neither is even close to the United States.

Some advocate that we should be more like Europe and China; that we should “invest” more of our money in fashionable and splashy projects, like solar power, as they do overseas- projects that twinkle in the eye, but only glitter.

Others abhor the global influence that Europe and China have increasingly exercised over the last decade, saying that it’s proof of America’s decline.

I reject both of these notions.

I think in a world that puts premiums on ideas, our best days are ahead of us. And you can’t talk me out of it.

In fact, I think that the way forward for Europe and China will either look a lot more like the free-market principles that conservatives around the world advocate- essentially American principles- or the progressive economies- and those of their acolytes- will be relegated to decades of stagnation and market subservience.

Just as will we in America if we continue to follow a Progressive course.

That’s the simple choice that’s before peoples of the entire world today. It’s the call to leadership that many around the globe expect that sooner or later America must answer.

Either America will renew itself and its leadership position defending real freedoms, and by that I mean economic freedoms, or we’ll move closer to the monolith of globalism, where every country is part of the Third World, as a matter of fairness.

We are seeing this story played out in Greece, this week, and by extension in the I.M.F.

Paul Taylor of Reuters, has it wrong in the most liberal sense of the word, when he bemoans the loss of Dominque Strauss-Kahn at the I.M.F., as if DSK’s departure is the main cause of the Euro’s trouble.

Taylor and his band of elites couldn’t be more out of touch.

“’We are missing him terribly already,’” said a senior E.U. official at the center of the financial firefighting, writes Taylor about the European debt crisis. “’Just look at the shambles this week over Greece.’”

“Meanwhile, some analysts, mainly in the United States and Britain,” continues Taylor “have argued that it would be better if the next I.M.F. chief came from outside the Euro zone precisely to take a tougher, less indulgent approach to the debt crisis rather than throw more money at it.”

Ya think?

America scored a partial victory this week when Greece’s socialist government agreed to cut taxes in order to jump start its economy and avoid default on its debt.

"Greece's conservative opposition leader Antonis Samaras," reports Reuters, "has demanded tax cuts -- including a 15 percent flat rate for corporate tax -- as the price for a deal with the government, which the EU has insisted on as a condition for more funds."

Samaras’s party, head of the conservative opposition, is called New Democracy.

Does any of this sound familiar? It should. It’s the same fight we are having here.

In the U.S., which has one of the highest corporate taxes in the world, Republicans have proposed a corporate tax cut to 25 percent from 35 percent in order to jump start our economy. 25 percent is the current standard corporate tax in Greece today.

Cutting taxes is the American way to get the economy moving again.

As for China, they have grabbed a tiger by the tail by introducing free market reforms without corresponding social reforms. The problem with this approach is that China can only keep its people down for so long. Upward mobility can paper over many problems in China, but what happens when growth slows in a fascist state?

“Officials are instructed not to go to crowded places, not to turn off their cell phones, and to keep military vehicles out of the streets, where their presence is considered a provocation,” writes Hong Kong-based paper Ming Pao about pro-democracy agitation in China back in February. “Meanwhile, there has also been a push to cleanse the internet. The five bureaus of the State Council Information Office responsible for news websites and the nine bureaus responsible for social network sites and blogs will take the lead, while the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television, and the General Administration of Press and Publication will assist in the campaign to root out those who initiated the Jasmine Revolution emails, chats and texts.”

Good luck to the Chinese. I have yet to see a tiger eat a billion people, however big his appetite.

It’s clear from these crises, little and big, that whatever else is true, Progressives- including the Chinese Communists- are out of ideas.

They believe in a command economy in which legislation is written to solve all of our economic ills. If they don’t like the results, then they write more laws with larger appropriations attached to them, just to see what happens.

They command, the economy obeys.

If it doesn’t, then all they have to do is make sure the story doesn’t appear on Google. For elites, from Beijing to the Beltway, it’s the same thing: It doesn’t matter what they write about them, as long as it doesn’t appear in a search engine.

For these technocrats, entitlement spending comes first- it must be protected at the expense of all else- because it’s the key to controlling our social behavior. Politicians promised cradle-to-school-to-car-to-house-grave; promises which they simply could never pay for, never intended to pay for. They used them instead as a hook in Ponzi scheme.

That’s what folks like Dominique Strauss-Kahn stand for. That’s what Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid and Barack Obama stand for. That’s what the French Socialist Party, the British Labour Party and now, most of the Democrat Party here in the U.S., stand for.

Worldwide, people are not suffering from the excesses of Wall Street, the Nikkei or the Bourse that created bubble economies. Instead, they are suffering from an excess of promises made by politicians globally who wished to use entitlements to control their population.

The one hope that Progressive governments had to pay for their promises, was that the bubbles never bust, supplying an ever-upward slurge of tax revenues to fund their schemes.

Now that the bubble has burst, they’ve set sons against parents, rich against poor, race against race, teachers against students in the warped belief that by setting us upon one another they’ll protect their social compact- you know the one where we all get compacted together into a lump of equal size and consistency?

Sorry: That way won’t work.

That bubble has already burst.

I believe, unashamedly and unreservedly, in the American way to prosperity.

And so, apparently, do some Greeks called New Democracy.

With you and me and them, that’s a start.
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To read another article by John Ransom, click here.