On the Other Hand

by D. J. Herda

I've been watching the developing run for the president (version 2012.0.0) a lot lately, and I've noticed a few things that income-earning vulnerable freelance writers need to be aware of (I mean, of which vulnerable freelance writers need to be aware).

First, nothing Obama says appears to be the truth anymore.  I threw that last word in as a conciliation to those who thought Obama (version 2008.0.0) had once actually been honest with them.  Nor, in fact, does anything he says seem to be based in reality.  His own Democratic advisers are telling him there's no money for that healthcare thingy that Harry Reid and Obama promised us had already been paid for, but Obama is still out stumping for it. 

And, while Obama's Chicago crony attorney general is so mired in the mud of that Mexican gun fiasco cover-up, the president still openly backs him.

Obama's approval rating is in the tank.  In fact, if the election were held tomorrow, he would lose to Republican Herman Cain.  (Truth be known, he'd lose to the hall monitor, but that's another story.)  Meanwhile, he continues to lead us down the rosy path to financial Armageddon by inventing new ways to work ourselves even deeper into debt than his last economic "rescue package" did.

Just as curiously, he is now praising the idiots "occupying" Wall Street.

Now, I thought I'd seen a lot in my years as a backyard politician.  But when a sitting U.S. president praises people advocating the Marxist overthrow of the entire economic system of the United States, there's something wrong with him upstairs.

Of course, it could be me.  (I mean, Of course, it could be I.)  So just to see, I ran a Wiki search on Karl Marx. 

Marx was born into a wealthy family and studied at the universities of Bonn and Berlin.  Following college, he traveled around the continent, writing for various radical newspapers while developing his Hegelian concepts of dialectical materialism.  He moved to Paris, where he continued his writing.  Five years later, he wrote his most famous book, The Communist Manifesto. 

Marx was exiled to Brussels in 1845, where he became a leading figure of the Communist League before returning to Cologne and exile again.  In 1849 he moved to London, where his family had cut off his funds, forcing him to live in poverty.  He became a leading figure in the International Workingmen's Association, a left-wing communist, socialist, and anarchist political group and trade union.

Marx hated capitalism, which he called the "dictatorship of the bourgeoise," and promoted socialism, which he labeled the "dictatorship of the proletariat," or working class.  While advocating revolution to overthrow capitalism in favor of communism, he failed to recognize a few basic socio-economic principles, such as incentivism.  Remove incentive from the working class, and you reduce its output to nil.

Today, the communism and socialism of Marx's dreams are responsible for producing thriving, financially secure, and culturally booming societies such as those in the Soviet Union (1922), all the nations in the Soviet Bloc (1944-1945); the People's Republic of China (1949); the Republic of Cuba (1959); the German Democratic Republic (1949); and most of the continent of Africa.  In fact, Marxism worked so well in these locales that leaders including Idi Amin, Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Vladimir Lenin, Muammar Gaddafi, and Mao Tse-Tung regularly rewarded their citizens by starving them, torturing them, executing them, or exiling them into years of forced labor.

Not so in the less enlightened democratic capitalistic societies of the United States, Canada, Germany, and Spain, of course, which just happen to enjoy the greatest quality of life and longest span of prosperity in world history.

So I can see Obama's dilemma in praising the Wall Street Occupiers for praising Karl Marx and his disastrous theories of social design.  I really can.  On the one hand, it's just plain unAmerican.  It's self-defeating.  It's counter-productive.  It's self-destructive.  It's economic social suicide.

On the other hand...

Well, now that I think of it, I guess there is no other hand.  Except the one that feeds the president.  Which, oddly enough, is the very one he's biting.

And I…am D. J. Herda.

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D. J. Herda is President of the American Society of Authors and Writers (http://amsaw.org), an organization made up of authors, writers, editors, publishers, agents, directors, producers, and other media professionals who rely upon the printed word in the creation of quality literature and entertainment.  He is a member of the Author's Guild, a former member of the American Society of Journalists and Authors, and a former member of the National Press Club.  He has published more than 80 books and several hundred thousand articles, short stories, columns, interviews, plays, and scripts.
 

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