D’ Souza has a point. Socialists are basically crooks. They are perfectly happy to live at the expense of others. Instead of using private enterprise to improve their lot in life they choose to use the government to steal and extort money from others. To use the government as a weapon to mete vengeance on their behalf against those they envy and/or imagine have taken advantage of them or held them back in some way. A classic example is Saul Alinsky, the notorious Leftist agitator and mentor of both Barak Obama and Hillary Clinton. Alinsky was a criminologist by education, he hung out with Chicago gangsters, studied their methods of extortion and intimidation and then adapted them to Marxist style political agitation. Read “Rules for Radicals” to learn his method.
Living off the labor of others is called theft whether the gun is in the hand of a street criminal or an IRS agent.
This is the thesis of Dinesh D’Souza’s book, “Stealing America: What My Experience with Criminal Gangs Taught Me about Obama, Hillary, and the Democratic Party.” D’Souza argues philosophical political discussions with liberals are totally pointless since they have no philosophy other than, we want what you’ve got and they will use the government to get it and whatever con they can think of to justify it.
In 1974 I was campaign manager for a Republican running for Attorney General of Idaho. During the race there was a riot at the Idaho State Penitentiary. My candidate pledged that if he won the race he would have a member of his staff interview every guard and inmate to find out what was going on. He won and I did.
My experience with criminals over 40 years ago was quite different than D’Souza’s recent experience as an inmate after his conviction for campaign finance law violations. Whether that difference in attitudes was because of a change in the culture or it was because I represented law enforcement and D’Souza was a fellow inmate I do not know but I suspect the former.
Most of the inmates I interviewed told me they were in prison through no fault of their own. Their imprisonment was the result of some mix-up, misunderstanding or circumstances beyond their control. While I did not believe their protestations at the time their answers were a tribute to the morality of the times in that the inmates felt the need to deny culpability.
In D’Souza’s experience he was placed in a detention center with thieves, rapists and murderers. None of them felt compelled to deny their evil deeds. They adopted the defense Bill and Hillary used in the mid to late 1990’s. The, “everybody does it,” defense. As you may recall, everybody lies about sex, everybody is immoral just like the Clintons. The media and the culture accepted this defense and Clinton’s popularity rose (if you believe the polls) while six-year-old children asked their mothers, “Mommy what’s a BJ?”
Now approximately twenty years later D’Souza’s fellow inmates are telling him the culture is corrupt, and that they are no different that the local politician, business person, or government employee other than the fact they got caught and held to a different standard because the establishment types are part of the ruling class and the convicts are not.
D’Souza believes they have a point. Was Solyndra really an effort to build solar panels or was it a criminal enterprise to rip the taxpayers off for millions of dollars? Did anyone go to jail for that?
How does one explain the many office holders who come to Washington, D.C., the state capitols, county court houses, or city halls with modest means and a few years later leave multi-millionaires?
The public seems to catching up to the perceptions of murders, thieves and rapists. A recent Gallup Poll reveals that 75 percent the public believes that corruption is widespread in the U.S. Government.
Can America recover from this loss of faith? One can only hope.
This is a guest post by Don Todd is Director of Research at Americans for Limited Government
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