Generous With Other People’s Money
Liberal-progressives presume that they can do no wrong, so long as they take other people’s money for the benefit of the secular and socialistic welfare state.
Citicorp’s Robert Rubin is getting harsh words from investors who ask why he should receive $115 million in annual compensation, while shrugging off any suggestion of personal responsibility for the banking giant’s horrendously imprudent investment policies. Mr. Rubin says that he was merely a broad-gauge policy advisor, that problems arose from the policies he supported only because of poor execution by underlings.
In the same vein, liberal-progressives steadfastly maintain that socialist welfare-state policies always fail only because the government didn’t spend enough money, long enough.
Like New Jersey governor Jon Corzine, his liberal-progressive, former Goldman Sachs colleague, Mr. Rubin, the Clinton administration’s Secretary of the Treasury, apparently believes that liberal-progressives can do no wrong, because they know what is best for you and me. What is best in their judgment is confiscating our earnings and redistributing them to favored special-interest groups in the name of social justice.
Redistributing wealth, in the dogma of the socialist religion, is a step in the direction of eliminating private property ownership. That mythology, elaborated in Jean Jacques Rousseau’s Social Contract, instructs us that original sin was the advent of private property, which changed human nature and introduced greed, crime, and warfare to society.
In the Judeo-Christian tradition, original sin was Adam and Eve’s eating fruit of the tree of knowledge, seeking to become God’s equal in knowledge and power. Christians and religious Jews are schooled to eschew preoccupation with self and to seek ways to help others, while prayerfully acknowledging that all their blessings come, not from themselves or the secular political state, but from God.
In contrast, liberal-progressives like Messrs. Rubin and Corzine assume that they have successfully eaten the fruit of the tree of knowledge (the modern gnosticism of socialism) and are therefore wise and powerful enough to play God here on earth.
Just as in Mr. Rubin’s failure to take responsibility for disaster on his watch at Citicorp, liberal-progressive Republicans and Democrat/Socialists repeatedly raise taxes to confiscatory levels, and expand the nanny state with deficit financing, heedless of the destructive effects on public morality and financial stability.
Liberal-progressivism’s welfare state encourages self-centered, special-interest greed, evidenced currently in the public’s unwillingness to reduce government spending in the face of approaching bankruptcy at state and Federal levels.
Ironically, the Federal Reserve’s massive over-expansion of the money supply to finance deficit spending, the be-all and end-all of liberal-progressive policy, is the root cause of the financial system disaster in which Citicorp played a major part. Mr. Rubin, we may suppose, sees no connection between his advocacy of imprudent policies in the Federal government and their fostering greed at Citicorp.
Thomas E. Brewton is a staff writer for the New Media Alliance, Inc. The New Media Alliance is a non-profit (501c3) national coalition of writers, journalists and grass-roots media outlets.
His weblog is THE VIEW FROM 1776
http://www.thomasbrewton.com/
Email comments to viewfrom1776@thomasbrewton.com
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Thomas E. Brewton, who maintains this blog, had the great good fortune in the middle 1950s at Louisiana State University to study under two of the 20th century's great minds: Eric Voegelin in political science, and Walter Berns in Constitutional law. These two professors opened the door of education to a glimpse of Western civilization and of American political and social thought as they had been before socialism was unconstitutionally established as the official national religion of the United States in 1933. | More from Thomas Brewton
Stumble It!
No, Thomas. The problems Citicorp has is not because they paid Rubin a hundred and fifteen million dollars. It was because Citicorp didn’t pay Rubin a hundred and fifty million. If only they had thrown more money at the problems they would have been solved. Just like our government has cured poverty in America.
Rubin’s income is certainly open to critisism given that he takes no responsibility for anything. I’d love to get $100 million just for broadly expressing opinion. I can certainly do that. But I also tend to stress that implementation is critical and would be willing to take some responsibility. Maybe I should get $500 million.