You Might Be a Liberal

by C Edmund Wright

  If not, some liberal will be in charge of your mandate. And that will really make you sick.

  YMBAL’S #24

  If you believe in government having gun control, managing rent control and handing out birth control, but have no belief in self-control…

  If you want government to buy your abortion and your contraception but want conservatives to keep their “hands off your uterus”…

  If you think George W. Bush lied but that Bill Clinton was telling the truth about Iraq’s WMDs…

  If you got so mad at Bush for spending too much that you voted for Obama to spend even more…

  If you believe in passing bills to “find out what’s in them”…

  If you think that animals have “rights” under the Constitution…

  If you think that a gun has ever caused a crime or that an SUV has ever caused a wreck…

  If you are all fired up about “Constitutional rights” and yet are not inclined to acknowledge that they come from “our Creator”…

  If you think that all “free stuff from the government” is great…

  If you blame your six figure college debt on corporate profit and on not overpaid, underworked faculties and administrators on college campuses…

  If you believe the right to assemble is the same as the right to occupy someone else’s private property…

  If you believe the path to world peace is paved with United States military weakness…

  If you have ever been quoted saying that “I leave it up to the government to make good decisions for Americans”…45

  If you want to separate the church from the state but don’t care about separating the state from the church…

  If you think that freedom of expression is very important, unless folks expressing themselves disagree with you…

  If it never dawned on you that tax rate increases might just change economic behavior…

  If you have ever based your theory for economic recovery on the idea of extending unemployment benefits…

  If you believe that Suburbans and jet skis are making us hotter, and have no idea what a sunspot is…

  ...you might be a liberal. (YMBAL)

  “But if you—if what—the reports are true, what they’re saying is, is that as a consequence of us getting 30 million additional people health care, at the margins that’s going to increase our costs, we knew that.”

  —Barak Obama

  “One of the traditional methods of imposing statism or socialism on a people has been by way of medicine. It’s very easy to disguise a medical program as a humanitarian project. Most people are a little reluctant to oppose anything that suggests medical care for people who possibly can’t afford it. Now the advocates of this bill, when you try to oppose it, challenge you on an emotional basis. They say “What would you do, throw these poor old people out to die with no medical attention?” That’s ridiculous and of course no one’s has advocated it.”

  —Ronald Reagan in 1961

  25: CONSERVATIVE PROFITS VERSUS LIBERAL PROPHETS

  If you never say the word profit without first saying “excess,” “evil” or “unfair”…

  Few things that vex liberals are as ironically necessary to the liberal worldview as profit. And yet, as surely as the liberal answer to every problem is to “hire more teachers, fire fighters and cops,” liberals seem to hate profit. You remember profits, don’t you? They are something that seemed to fade away with two dollar gas and Brett Favre and ‘hope and change.’

  And as you may remember, Lord Barack Obama actually assured the nation upon taking office that “now is not the time for profits.” Talk about liberal prophecy coming to pass. If we had only known.

  Profits, of course, are rarely mentioned by liberals without a qualifier. Profits are always ‘excess’ or ‘obscene’ or ‘unfair’ when they are generated by conservatives and referred to by liberals. And these sorts of profits are normally made only by people known as fat cats. To use these concepts in a perfectly constructed liberal sentence: We must tax big oil’s excess profits so we can lower gas prices and the sea levels at the same time, while making sure those fat cats can’t donate so much money to Republican Super PACs.

  Now, to anyone with an inkling of how the free market works, obviously raising taxes on companies involved in the gasoline supply chain could only serve to raise gas prices, which speaks to liberals’ uncomfortable relationship with logic and reality. (You will find this a recurring theme in this book, by the way.) And for the record, I’m not sure I’ve ever encountered anything that would qualify as an ‘excess profit.’ Liberal Hollywood, after all, is who tells us that you can never be too rich or too thin. Come to think of it, what liberals might call an excess profit could lead to other horrible consequences known as excess hiring, excess 401(k) values, excess donations to charity and so on. Heck, unless you are GE, excess profits could lead to excess taxes being paid.

  In fact, excess profits from company A might lead to them place excess orders from companies B,C and D, for example—which could, of course, lead to excess profits on their part also—which could again lead to the problems of excess hiring, excess donations, excess stock values, excess taxes being paid and so on, by companies B, C and D. You know, this is what we used to call “growth” in the free market economy when it would occasionally happen. Darn those evil excess profits!

  Now, to be fair, not all profits are hated by liberals. Just most profits, along with the general notion of pursuing profits intentionally. It seems that the very idea that one would pursue profits irks the liberal brain. If you happen to stumble upon profits while pretending that they are not your goal, that’s ok. These would be profits made by Apple Computers or Nancy Pelosi’s vineyards. Their profits are perfectly fine – even considering that both of the aforementioned enterprises are meticulously set up to remove one well known barrier to profits: labor unions. (Labor unions will also get a lot of mentions elsewhere in the book, as they are so illustrative of so many liberal notions.)

  Of course, avoiding labor unions in an attempt to maximize profits is something that is considered evil and mean spirited if the name of your company happens to be Wal-Mart or Federal Express or perhaps something like Bob’s Custom Homes. And yes, that is the same Federal Express that Apple uses exclusively to ship their iProducts—which are made in very non-union shops in China. So if you’re keeping score at home on how liberals view products, it is perfectly fine for Apple to use FedEx to ship as a way to maximize their profits—yet it is totally unacceptable for FedEx to be a non-union shop so that they can maximize their own profits.

  Huh? Exactly.

  Remember, we started off by warning you that profits and liberals have a very complicated relationship. Indeed, liberals hate profits while absolutely counting on them for much of what they advocate. So don’t go confusing them with the facts, let alone linear thinking.

  Oh, and speaking of China: Yes, ‘outsourcing’ is another way that some companies obtain profits, which, of course, is an unacceptable strategy unless you are one of the chosen few sufficiently liberal companies. Again, to demonstrate this concept in a sentence: I just got a text on my iPhone from another Occupy group about how unfair it is that Wal-Mart imports cheap goods from China. Let’s discuss this over bluefin sashimi at lunch. Well there you go.

  All of which speaks to one reason why liberals hate profits so much. Any adult discussion of profits necessarily leads to liberals tying themselves in knots trying to reach some kind of logical conclusion on their concept of profit. The over-arching reason for their hatred, however, is that profits all too often benefit the wrong people and, moreover, the wrong motivations.

  You see, profits are quite often found to benefit people who have—gasp—the “profit motive.” And any good Occupier knows that this is a mean spirited Tea Party racist sexist homophobic motive, and therefore evil. Now, this is obviously not the motive for the Pelosi vineyard, which is no doubt in existence only to fund Nancy’s good works in
the Congress forcing other businesses to use labor unions and so on. And the late Steve Jobs was only motivated by cool, not money. No doubt.

  One of the most obscenely greedy industries—as we all know—is Big Oil. Now, these folks are the worst of all worlds. In addition to making way too much money, they benefit from a product that pollutes and leads to political donations for Republicans. It’s worse than Big Tobacco. Well, almost.

  Now, of course, an examination of Big Oil’s profit on gasoline leads to some very interesting conclusions. One is that Big Oil’s margin is very thin. Something like 4%. When gas is at four dollars a gallon, that’s about sixteen cents per gallon. When you consider that Big Oil is who discovered the oil, got it from the bottom of the ocean or from underground, got it to a refinery, refined it, got it to a distributor who then got it to your local neighborhood convenience store—that 4% is a bargain. That thin margin on the gas you pump into your car leaves you some money for Doritos and a Slurpee.

  Conversely, the government makes about fifty cents a gallon on this gas (depending on which state tax you pay), and they didn’t do a doggoned thing to get the gas. But they did levy a tax on it. Which begs the question: if Big Oil’s profit of four cents is obscene or excessive, what would you call government’s fifty cents? “Theft,” “spreading the wealth around,” and “destructive” come to mind.

  But that actually misses the big picture on profit and why liberals hate it so much. That can be summed up in one word: Competition. It is the very profit motive that generated the competition at every step of the way that got the gas delivered at 4% mark-up in the first place.

  Convenience is one benefit of competition, not to mention dependable and reasonably priced gas, and that keeps our economy humming. And gas isn’t the only part of this transaction where the profit motive played a part, either. It was present at every step of the way, including the real estate transaction that led to the purchase of the corner lot, the building contractors who built the convenience store, and this same dynamic is present in keeping the Doritos on the shelf and the Slurpee machine humming.

  Taken further, it is the profit motive that is involved with the landscaping and pressure washing contracts that keep the convenience store grounds acceptable, along with the janitorial products that keep the men’s room usable.

  And unless you drive a Chevy Volt that I helped pay for, this process is also what delivered your car to you. And your clothes, your home, your laptop, etc. Keep in mind that overwhelming profit only happens when there are millions of win-win transactions. The same is true even of Al Gore’s Gulfstream jet!

  Thus, profit is what infuses efficiency into our economy. Milton Friedman uses the powerful example of the five-cent pencil. As the brilliant Friedman describes, an ordinary pencil incorporates raw materials from numerous continents along with several levels of refining and manufacturing along the way. Yet, a perfectly workable pencil costs only a nickel. Yes, a five-cent product that works exactly as advertised, and it is the result of evil profit motivations at every step.

  What would a government pencil cost? Fifty bucks? And would it work?

  And this is where the real hatred of profit is born for the liberal mind. You see, profit leads to opportunities, and opportunities to success, and success to freedom, and freedom leads to a lack of control. And at the bottom of every liberal fantasy about how society should be organized is the liberals’ desire to be the ones controlling that organization. Everything liberal can be broken down just this way.

  Which brings us back around to the necessary consternation liberals have while proudly hating profits. You see, liberals love tax revenue, and wouldn’t you know it—taxes are based on profits! And taxes go to fund all kinds of things that liberals love, like big education, DMV workers, crony contracts to well connected ‘non-profits’ and transgender programs for California inmates.

  Liberals also love labor unions and, of course, union jobs have to be paid for out of what? Yes, profits. All of this is just so complicated for liberals, which could explain why most of them are so unhappy so much of the time.

  Their worldview just does not work. The liberal hatred of profit simply ignores human nature. And yet, despise them they do.

  YMBAL’S #25

  If you were flabbergasted to find out that conservatives are more generous than liberals…46

  If you are concerned with sound bytes claiming to represent what “the American people” think but you don’t give a damn what an “American person” thinks…

  If you have ever been convinced by a Florida Democrat lawyer that you voted by mistake…

  If you are well versed on all things Che Guevera, except who he is and what he did...

  If the Khmer Rouge experiment was simply a matter of not having the right liberals in charge of the program…

  If you believe that true peace was ever the result of any United Nations negotiation…

  If you believe that true peace was ever the result of the bad guys winning a conflict…

  If you just can’t wrap your head around the fact that an effective military is one that is very good at killing bad guys and breaking bad things…

  If you have never connected to politics of Lennon and Lenin…

  If you believe that income inequality is a bad thing and that work ethic inequality doesn’t exist…

  If you are still searching for that book, “Great Moderate Leaders in American History”…

  If you think keeping Gitmo open really helps the recruiting of terrorists who come from countries with no Miranda Rights in the first place…

  If the phrase “service to your country” makes you think of politicians and bureaucrats and not soldiers…

  If you speak with an annoying, tortured, professorial brogue…

  If you refer in political debate to school system bureaucrats as “ed-you-kay-TORS”…

  If you have ever watched CNN at any place other than an airport…

  If you don’t know where the money comes from and you don’t even understand that question…

  If you think a parent should have to fill out more paperwork to find out about what the school nurse did to a child than an illegal alien has to fill out to vote…

  If you think a moment of silence at the beginning of a school day constitutes government religious indoctrination and an intrusion on parental rights while sex education and condom distribution are merely common sense conveniences…

  ...you might be a liberal. (YMBAL)

  “Al Qaeda really hurt us, but not as much as Rupert Murdoch has hurt us, particularly in the case of Fox News. Fox News is worse than Al Qaeda—worse for our society. It’s as dangerous as the Ku Klux Klan ever was.”

  —Keith Olbermann on MSNBC

  “I won’t insult your intelligence by suggesting that you really believe what you just said.”

  —William F. Buckley, Jr.

  26: TED KENNEDY VERSUS JUDGE ROBERT BORK

  If you liked the “Lion of the Senate’s” hateful rants…

  The late Ted Kennedy was long known to adoring liberals as the “Lion of the Senate.” Or was that the “lyin’ of the Senate?” I keep getting those confused. Of course, Kennedy’s career highlight outside of his ‘waitress sandwich’ with Chris Dodd and his vehicular irregularity on Chappaquiddick, is perhaps one particular speech. This was the memorable and spectacularly churlish diatribe credited with ending the Supreme Court chances of the brilliant judge, Robert Bork.

  The extremely discourteous nature of this speech was actually very typical of Kennedy. Still, some faux conservatives like David Brooks try to curry favor with their liberal employers by touting Kennedy as a paragon of partisan civility. Brooks, lecturing the supposedly uncivil Tea Party and town hall protestors on decorum during the early days of the Obama Care debates, told Jim Leher in August of 2009 that “for conservatives who are now in the wilderness, (Kennedy) is a model for them. Find the best in your tradition and follow it the way (Kennedy) followed liberali
sm during the Reagan years.”

  Brooks is always on the lookout for the transgressions of unapologetic conservatism, a subject with which he is totally unfamiliar, since all he does is apologize for conservatism. Nonetheless, for the sake of argument, let’s see what following ‘the Kennedy model’ looks like. In the spirit of the Lion of the Senate and his Bork speech model, I offer the following contrast regarding HR 3200 (Obama Care) to his famous ‘Bork speech.’