Showdown in America: Workers vs. the Welfare State

by Daniel Greenfield


The 2012 presidential election is coming down to a contest between those who want the economy to succeed and those who want it to go on failing. Hope and Change is dead, at least the brand that depended on oratorical inspiration injected via teleprompter from between Greek columns taken out on loan before they were due back for an arena rock show. Anyone capable of balancing a checkbook has done the math, and come reluctantly to the conclusion that it’s a choice between Romney and ruin.

No one seriously believes that another four years of Obama will fix the economy, mend race relations or restore international relations. Those things didn’t happen in four years and they won’t happen in eight. But even with lowered expectations, few of those voters who walk into the booth and go for the zero even expect any of these three areas to stay at their current level after another four years. Most of them know that the economy will be worse, the racial pool will be more poisoned than ever and the world will be a more dangerous place. They aren’t stupid. What they are is selfish.

We assume that it is in everyone’s interest for the economy to rebound, for the jobs to come back, for the factories to hum and the cash registers to sing their song. But what if it’s not?

The election is no longer a race between Democrats and Republicans; it’s a race between those who hope to benefit from an economic recovery and those who benefit more from the lack of an economic recovery. It’s a race between the entrenched interests of failure and the revolutionary surge of success. It’s a death match between the state of free enterprise and the welfare state.

Forget your traditional image of the welfare queen. Sure she’s out there, but she isn’t buying lobster with food stamps. She’s serving as a consultant to the State of Michigan on how to improve the dietary balance of the diverse populations of SNAP food aid recipients in compliance with a federal directive that her partners had a hand in drafting. The take home pay on her end is in the six figures and it’s all rolled into the cost of the welfare state, toted up as cost-savings measures for preventing heart attacks in the children growing up on food stamps and fated to live on them for the next 60 years.

Barack and Michelle Obama are the perfect power couple of the welfare state, not because they would ever touch it, but because they are a testament to how much money there is to be made feeding off the infrastructure of the welfare state, filing lawsuits, managing patients and organizing the hell out of every living dead voter in the State of Illinois.

Parasites like Barry and Michelle used to be a dirty little secret, vital links in the chain stretching from the vast treasuries of the national budget down the favor network over to the urban neighborhood and the people who get rich helping the poor. They were there for a long time, but they rarely got past the House of Representatives. Mostly they were satisfied grabbing their chunks of the aid pie and living a cheerfully upper-middle class life on the dirty trade in souls of the welfare state.

Barack Obama is a trailblazer, not on account of race, but on account of his profession. This isn’t a racial or class conflict, but a power struggle between those who work and those who work them over. It’s a power play by the professional organizers, activists, trainers, representatives and all the other players in the machinery of the welfare state who used an economic crisis to move one of their own into a position of ultimate power.

The welfare staters aren’t interested in an economic recovery. Like every company, they want to expand their sales territory, and what they are selling is dependency and false promises. Their stock in trade is promising their clients freebies which they get through agitation, activism, protests, lawsuits and deals that all end with the clients voting Democratic while the middlemen and middlewomen pocket 9/10^ths of the take while their clients get the other 1/10^th.

This scam is no different than the one practiced by every ambulance chasing lawyer. The difference is that the welfare staters make their scam seem benevolent. And their clients are often willing to accept the tenth, because while it may only be 10 percent of the total being spent on their freebies, it’s still free. And those clients will vote for the welfare staters and fight to the death to preserve their hold on power, because it’s the only form of economic participation that they know.

This is the living dead vote and it won’t be easy to beat. Its constituents are quite satisfied to see that the economy is a shambles and that race relations are in the toilet. They have no aspirations beyond making things worse and these two sets of conditions are the ones that favor their agenda the most.

The worse the economy becomes, the more clients turn up and the more violent the opposition becomes to enacting any financial reforms. The economic failures of the last four years are not a disappointment to them, but an encouragement. If they can move a majority of the population onto the welfare rolls and make it impossible for them to leave, then they will have won.

Their victory is defined by creating a political climate in which their economic position cannot be challenged and an economic climate in which their political positions cannot be challenged. Once the linkages are in place, then there will still be elections, but they won’t mean anything because the only purpose of such elections will be to reaffirm the political bosses who negotiate the payouts of the welfare state. America will become Chicago and Chicago will finally become the sum of America.

Even left-leaning Democrats are starting to pull away from the prospect of living under such a system, and as invested as they are in the networks of non-profits, many of them are none too enthusiastic about instituting economic failure and reducing the political and economic potential of the United States to the same system of bureaucratic collectivism and political patronage that has taken over its cities.

In a few short days we will see a critical clash between those who want to turn the United States of America into another Cuba or Venezuela, a corrupt dysfunctional oligarchy masquerading behind socialist ideals and rent-a-mobs, and those who want to see the restoration of a functional country of free people. It is a contest between those who still hope that individuals can use their creative abilities to fulfill their destinies and those who believe that reform requires investing total power into unaccountable institutions.

This election is nothing less than a showdown between the vitality of a living America and the living dead vote of the welfare state.

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam. He is completing a book on the international challenges America faces in the 21st century.

Source: http://frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/showdown-in-american-workers-vs-the-welfare-state/

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