College: It's Not Just For Smart People!

Philosophy Major

Red diaper rash ranters are marching on Wall Street and squalling for free stuff.  Among their list of demands is "free college education."

Graduates from prestigious universities with advanced degrees in Lesbian Dance and Ethnic Studies are shocked and outraged to find they are unemployable.  And they want you and I to pay off their substantial and ill-considered student loans.

They should be marching on the colleges and universities that screwed them.  They should be occupying the offices of the counselors who steered them away from math and science and instead put them on the path that leads to angry activism, unemployment lines and the crash of unwarranted self-esteem.

Higher education is ripping us off, according to the Mercury News:

Nationally, college is getting less affordable every year... Overall, tuition increased 439 percent from 1982 to 2006, while median family income increased 147 percent and the consumer price index 106 percent, the study found.

When is Congress going to drag college administrators before its pompous committees and demand Big Education stop gouging the consumer?

Finally, here's a link to a hilarious look at the 10 Most Worthless College Degrees.

The article counts them down from 10 to 1. Here are a few excerpts:

9. Philosophy:
Why It Won’t Help You Get a Job: This isn’t ancient Greece: No one is going to pay you money, or allow you to sodomize their attractive son, in exchange for your knowledge of existence. Never has there been an employer who’s said “Man, we’re having all kinds of problems, I wish we had someone on our team who could reference and draw conclusions from the story of Siddhartha that would pull up our fourth quarter numbers ...

4. English Lit:
Why It Won’t Help You Get a Job: If someone can spend a weekend with a box of Cliff’s Notes and have only a slightly less conversational knowledge of what you spent 4 years studying, you probably don’t have the most employer friendly degree. ...

America's Last Stand

The 2012 elections are the last stand.  For progressives as well as small government conservatives and libertarians.  It is America's Last Stand

The economy will not improve

The situation of ordinary citizens will become even more parlous, and government will be forced to "DO SOMETHING!"

That something depends upon which party is in power.  Liberals see the mess we're in and blame free market capitalism, ignoring the fact that we haven't seen that rare bird in a hundred years.

Yeah, we had some variants and hybrid strains, but it's not been a free market, but rather a very locked-down and expensive one.  Just ask entrepreneurial outsiders trying to pole vault in over the regulatory walls governments have erected at the behest of the insiders.  Progressive "solutions" will only make it worse.

Welcome to The Crisis

We are in a crisis, and the progressives see it has their last, best hope.  Hence the desperate cry, "The revolution is here!"   No, it's not, but progressives will keep asserting it, telling the big lie long enough until it becomes the truth.  The Obama campaign, flush with Wall Street Cash and it's own fat cat bankers and plutocrats (Daley, Immelt, etc), will demagogue the Occupy Wall Street protests to its own political advantage

This sums up the Occupy Wall Street agenda pretty well:

But the dominant feature is a fierce hatred of anything capitalistic-individualistic profit seeking, large scale enterprise, banks, joint-stock companies, department stores, "international finance and loan capital," the system of "interest slavery" in general; the abolition of these is described as the "basis of the programme, around which everything else turns."

[...] it is not a proletarian but middle class socialism, and that it is, in consequence, inclined to favour the small artisan and shop keeper and to set the limit up to which it recognizes private property somewhat higher than does communism.

[...] In the case of the wealthier capitalists, state control and restriction of income will leave little more than the name of property, even while the intention of correcting the undue accumulation of wealth in the hands of individuals has not yet been carried out.

That was written by Friedrich Hayek in 1933, and he wrote it about Hitler's socialist party.

They aim for modern-day Germany, but their agenda is from National Socialist Germany

It's scary enough that they aim for present-day Germany as their model, where government takes over half of what you make and spreads it around, and puts a lot more rules on you like no gun ownership and mandatory recycling.  Imagine paying $6 for a gallon of gas and living in half the space you live in now.

Only our government is not efficient like Germany's, so we will end up performing a sclerotic slide reminiscent of post WWII Great Britain, only without the sharp musical mockery of a Pink Floyd or the cultural parody of Monty Python...

... And we'll continue sliding all the way back to 1933...

Public-private partnerships, with governmental panels drawing up business plans and picking winners and losers will be the norm.  Free-market capitalists, libertarians, Christians and other free thinkers will not be marched off to gas chambers; we will instead be either broken to the will of the state or branded enemies of the Brave New Society, unable to find work or participate in the government-controlled marketplace.

Laugh if you want to, but that is where collectivism always leads, without exception.  Again, Hayek explains:

The inherent logic of collectivism makes it impossible to confine it to a limited sphere. 

Beyond certain limits, collective action in the interest of all can only be made possible if all can be coerced into accepting as their common interest what those in power take it to be.

At that point, coercion must extend to the individuals' ultimate aims and ideas, and must attempt to bring everyone's Weltanschauung into line with the ideas of the rulers.  (Hayek - Nazism is Socialism)

* - Hat tip to Fuzzy Slippers for sparking this post.  I am a Hayek fan but had forgotten his short essay on why Nazism is socialism.  Please go read her blog post on this subject here:  Fuzzy Slippers - Everything Old is New Again

Infantile Leftists

We want free stuff!

Socialism is as natural as crapping on a police car...

Many of us on the right are shocked and saddened at the resurgence of bald-faced socialism, which we believed had been eternally banished from our shores. It shouldn't be such a shock, really.

 Something for Nothing Gimmee-ism and a Desire for The Strong Man forever lurk within the human heart. Especially among those who eschew fundamental concepts like human nature, natural law, free markets,and personal liberties.

The thing that strikes me about the Occupy Wall Street crowd and their demands is how timeless they are.

We lazily think of socialism as something that came up with the Industrial Revolution. In fact, as Eric Voegelin, Igor Shafarevich, and many others have explained, it is a universal human tendency. (John Derbyshire – Everybody will have everything)

That Derbyshire quote reminded me of Michael Medved’s commentary on liberalism that was spurred by a Helen Thomas quote. You know Helen Thomas, the incredibly old and incredibly liberal White House reporter. Well, she was asked in an interview to explain her liberalism, and she replied that, "well, we're all born liberal."

Michael Medved had a wonderful riposte. I'm paraphrasing from memory, and probably embellishing, so my apologies to Mr. Medved:

Of course we’re all born liberal! As babies we expect someone to pick us up and suckle us when we cry. Eating, like every other pleasure, comes with no effort. Babies don't have to earn anything, they pay for nothing, but they deserve everything. Babies pee, poop, drool and spill wherever they want because someone else cleans up the mess.

Puke down the front of your shirt, pee your pants, poop on the carpet; no responsibility, just gimme, gimme, gimme! It's a fantasy world of padded guard rails, warm swaddling, and adults sacrificing mightily for your comfort and safety. A liberal paradise.

Yes, liberals and babies have a lot in common, and all the adults can do is clean up the mess and help the squalling brats grow into responsible men and women.

Obamunist Manifesto

Don't be suckered in.  The leftist chimpanzees screaming and hooting at the Occupy Wall Street theater of the absurd have nothing in common with tea parties

Once I started noticing a convergence of issues among left and right, with we on the right finally waking up to the dangers of international banking and big corporations, as well as big government, I wondered why the left remained so enraged at us and refused to make common cause. Well, it's because they hate us. That's all I can conclude.

We come over to their side, and they puke vitriol on us. We express love for an African-American presidential candidate who happens to be conservative, and leftwing wackadoos accuse us of pulling off some kind of double-underhand reverse-racist ruse: We are so racist we are willing to elect a black man to prove it!

If that makes sense, you must be an MSNBC fan...

It also makes sense to an American leftist that the government-created quagmire we now find ourselves in can only be fixed by...  More government!

We may agree on many of the problems we confront, but we diverge sharply on the solutions. That is the critical difference. This Wall Street rabble would burn bankers out of their homes if they could.  They would cheer jackbooted brownshirts forcibly taking from those who have "too much" and then "spreading it around" to those too lazy and too stupid to shift for themselves.

We on the right would simply erect a wall of separation between DC and Wall Street, tell big biz and big banks to fend for themselves, and restore liberty to her proper place.

Here are a few of their redistributionist demands:

They want "free" education, too stupid to realize that nothing is free...

Guaranteed living wage, even for those too lazy to work...

No more fossil fuels...

A trillion in infrastructure spending and another trillion in "environmental restoration"...

Forgiveness of all debt, with bankers to be thrown into volcanoes and CEOs to be ridden like donkeys through the major cities of America for the amusement of the poor and their children...

Yes, this is a real hippie protester

The crowd is populated with the usual suspects...

It is the standard lefty odd-ball conglomeration of warmed-over 60’s hippie freaks trying to relive their dope-addled glory days, old socialists indoctrinating a new and ignorant generation into their failed ideologies, latte leftists who climb down from their trust fund towers to rub elbows with the proles, never stopping to realize that they will be the first to be slaughtered if the revolution happens.

Rounding out this cavalcade of kooks, you have the standard skittles bowl of victim groups, social agitators and union leeches.  And no socialist uprising would be complete without the soft-headed college students demanding free money, free college, free everything, astroturf sign in one hand, expensive iPod in the other.

So while I believe all freedom-loving Americans should be rallying against the corporate and banking hegemons, our march should be on DC, not Wall Street.  For there lies the root of this current evil we are suffering through.

While slavering socialists titillate themselves with fantasies of free stuff, bankers hanging from lamp posts and CEOs molotov cocktailed out of their mansions, we tea partiers know that an even better revenge would be to forever bounce them from the public dole. 

Don't be fooled my friends.  We have nothing in common with the caliginous collection of communist cockroaches crawling like a red rash over Wall Street. 

H/T: Fuzzy Slippers: Greed, Revolution and Stuff

Other Links
David Harsanyi - Occupy Wall Street: A Manifesto
Conservatives on Fire - Class Warfare President
Rational Nation – Understanding Occupy Wall Street
Gateway Pundit – List of Demands
Sentry Journal - The Useful Idiots