These PUMAs even quote Reagan, much to their own amazement:
“You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong. You cannot help the wage-earner by pulling down the wage-payer. You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich. You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves.” - Ronald ReaganThey go on:
Unless that Kool-Aid Obama’s serving is much stronger than we could ever imagine, there’s no way Americans want any part of socialism. We saw socialism in action in Europe growing up in the 80s, and it’s not pretty.
Unfortunately, 18-year-old voters were born in 1990 and have no memories of the Cold War. Heck, I'm damn near thirty and my Cold War memories are quite fuzzy. The "youth vote" has no idea what sort of fire they're playing with, and the aging hippies should know better by now.
(New blog label: "socialism")
3 comments:
The problem is that the republicans seem to think that you can help the poor by hooking up the rich - and we've seen that not working so great in our lifetime
Did you see the NYTimes figure that was talking about the value that 10,000 would have become during the last 49 years of democratic president (250,000 I think) vs. republicans w/o Hoover (54,000) or w/hoover (11,000)
Matt
In reverse order...
Barry Ritholtz covered that pretty well. To the best of my knowledge, Ritholtz isn't in the tank for anybody, and seems impressed that Paul Volcker is advising Obama.
I think many Republican officials can be fairly criticized for "crony capitalism", and many businesses criticized for seeking and taking various forms of corporate welfare. Undo it all. The law shouldn't favor business over labor, or labor over business.
But if we're talking about historical empiricism, I think socialism loses big time.
Those quotes attributed to Ronald Reagan are actually from Rev William J.H. Boetcker almost a century before Reagan was President.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_J._H._Boetcker
Post a Comment