Our nation is saddled with a tiny cadre of Leftists who, unfortunately, hold many key positions both inside and outside of government. These Leftists assert with great, though completely unfounded, authority that they know best how private businesses should do their thing.
Leftists think they know exactly how every little facet of the giant, endlessly faceted private economy works, which is remarkable, considering their enormous disdain for it.
President Barack Obama in his first autobiography described his few scant months spent doing actual (private sector) work thus:
“Like (I was) a spy behind enemy lines….”
And famously, recently uttered the unbelievable:
“If you’ve got a business – you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”
And this President, with this perverse perspective, is too much of an economic Centrist for a whole host of other Leftists.
Leftists exact ever more punitive tax and regulatory policies to ramrod businesses into behaving “better.”
They appear to believe that starting and operating a successful business is easy, and a license to print money, which should then be redistributed. They want this money redistributed to the proletariat through government-mandated higher wages and benefits, and to the poor through higher taxes for government welfare programs.
No tax or regulatory price is too high; the private sector can easily absorb all of it and more, and carry on unabated.
Which raises the question: if it’s so easy to run a business on Leftist principles, why don’t Leftists do it? Why don’t they open up shop, incorporate all of their absurd notions, and bring the world ever closer to their Utopia?
The reason they don’t may be that they know the private sector is a hard slog, and they don’t have what it takes to make it happen.
Let’s look at but one business sector, the World Wide Web – currently under government assault from a myriad directions – and envision what a Leftist Internet would look like.
The Web has been wisely, virtually (no pun intended) tax and regulation-free since its private inception. As a result, it has rapidly become a free speech, free market Xanadu.
Ever since, Leftists have been trying to play regulatory catch-up, to retroactively apply as much of their government-centric worldview as possible.
Leftists ask: “How many ways can we tax the Web?”
Their answer is: “Many.” You:
(C)ould soon be paying sales tax over and over on the same (Web-purchased) item….
Let’s say your phone number is based in Texas, but you happen to be in California when you buy an app on your mobile phone, and the app comes from a server in Virginia–right now all three states could attempt to assess their own sales tax on that single transaction.
Federal Leftists are looking to mandate this tax collection, so that every state government – and county, and city, and municipality, and…? can all dip their beaks.
And the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) still holds open the possibility of illegally regulating the Internet like a telephone. Which would allow the Federales to also then tax it, not to mention over-regulate the daylights out of it.
Which brings us to the Left’s coup de grace.
Building the networks that make-up the ‘Net ain’t cheap. We’re already hundreds of billions of dollars in, and bandwidth demand is increasing exponentially.
So Leftists ask: “How do we make it as difficult as possible for continued private Internet investment? So it will dry up and leave government as the nation’s sole Internet provider?”
And their answer is “Network Neutrality.” Robert McChesney, one of the founding fathers of the Media Marxist movement, explains it thus:
At the moment, the battle over network neutrality is not to completely eliminate the telephone and cable companies. We are not at that point yet. But the ultimate goal is to get rid of the media capitalists in the phone and cable companies and to divest them from control.
A government-provided Internet will look like the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV), only slower, and with bandwidth rationing – where Leftists will be connected, and we Neanderthals will not.
The real reason Leftists don’t go into the private Internet business is that they don’t want there to be a private Internet.