Obama appointed yet another socialist/communist/Marxist/wealth redistributionist to his administration. This time it’s Donald Berwick, appointed to head Medicare/Medicaid under the new government health system. This appointee was not vetted by Congress, as it’s on recess.

Berwick on the British National Health Service:

Indeed,

any healthcare funding plan that is just, equitable, civilized, and humane, must, must, redistribute wealth from the richer among us to the poorer and less fortunate. Excellent healthcare is by definition redistributional. Britain you chose well.

So we must redistribute wealth to be excellent. Of course, the NHS never turns poor sick people down, and disease cure rates there are so high, they put the U.S. to shame, where people die on the streets you know! Not!

Oh, and how about this… The U.S. health care system is “unaccountable” and it plays “out in the darkness of free enterprise”.

You know, that evil dark free enterprise system, just horrible. They torture people in deep dark dungeons over there, and never bring any useful product or service to anyone. And it’s so unaccountable, that no one is ever sued for millions of dollars with the aid or Democrat lobbying attorneys.

A planned government system, on the other hand is always looking out for you! Those politicians and non-vetted Marxist appointees in the Obama administration never do anything to hurt the common good.

And undoubtedly all those free enterprise haters in the Obama administration are proof of Obama’s commitment to a laser like focus on job creation. Laser! Because no jobs are created by the free enterprise system and it’s only government that can crate productive long term jobs.

See Obama promise:

But now starting July 1, 2010, a new 10% federal tanning salon tax goes into effect. This tax is part of the new health care law.

So in fact, this is yet another example of the welfare state being supported by people other than “the rich.” A major theme on this website is that it’s impossible to support a large welfare state without putting the heavy burden on the middle class. Yet in every election cycle the Socialists/Democrats keep claiming just that and people somehow buy into this deception!

The tanning tax is just the tip of the iceberg. There’s a slew of new taxes (on non-rich people) coming up in 2011 as the “Bush tax cuts” expire in addition to more “Obamacare” taxes down the line.

The Obama Administration represented the moratorium as a safety recommendation suggested in a report drafted by Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and peer reviewed by experts associated with the National Academy of Engineering. However, those same experts are saying that they have been misrepresented, and that the moratorium was added to the report after they had signed off on it. They noted that they agreed to a moratorium on drilling of new wells, but not on shutting down existing operations.

A June, 17th Wall Street Journal op ed piece chronicles this and explains why the drilling moratorium is actually detrimental to safety:

A big reason why those experts would have balked is because they recognize that the moratorium is indeed a threat to safety. Mr. Arnold offers at least four reasons why.

The ban requires oil companies to abandon uncompleted wells. The process of discontinuing a well, and then later re-entering it, introduces unnecessary risk. He notes BP was in the process of abandoning its well when the blowout happened.

The ban is going to push drilling rigs to take jobs in other countries. “The ones that go first will be the newest, biggest, safest rigs, because they are most in demand. The ones that go last and come back first are the ones that aren’t as modern,” says Mr. Arnold.

The indeterminate nature of this ban will encourage experienced crew members to seek other lines of work—perhaps permanently. Restarting after a ban will bring with it a “greater mix of new people who will need to be trained.” The BP event is already pointing, in part, to human error, and the risk of that will increase with a less experienced crew base. Finally, a ban will result in more oil being imported on tankers, which are “more likely” to spill oil than local production.

This is a prime example of how those who control government operate to perpetuate their own self interests rather than act for the “good of the people.”

Watch Pelosi’s comments here:

Numerous people have come to this site and complained about its logo because it contains a communist symbol, which according to them, has barely anything to do with socialism, or perhaps nothing at all.

Let’s see indeed what are the differences between socialism and communism…

From the Encyclopedia Britanica’s online entry on communism:

the political and economic doctrine that aims to replace private property and a profit-based economy with public ownership and communal control of at least the major means of production (e.g., mines, mills, and factories) and the natural resources of a society. Communism is thus a form of socialism—a higher and more advanced form, according to its advocates. Exactly how communism differs from socialism has long been a matter of debate, but the distinction rests largely on the communists’ adherence to the revolutionary socialism of Karl Marx.

(I added the bolding.)

Communism is thus a form of socialism, and its distinction rests mostly on its revolutionary tactics.

Let’s see what Britanica has to say about Karl Marx, the father of communism:

revolutionary, sociologist, historian, and economist. He published (with Friedrich Engels) Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei (1848), commonly known as The Communist Manifesto, the most celebrated pamphlet in the history of the socialist movement. He also was the author of the movement’s most important book, Das Kapital. These writings and others by Marx and Engels form the basis of the body of thought and belief known as Marxism.

(Again, I added the bolding.)

So the Communist Manifesto is “the most celebrated pamphlet in the history of the socialist movement.” If communism were only scantly related to socialism, Karl Marx would have pulled off quite an impossible feat writing a pamphlet on communism to become the most celebrated among those who believe something very different.

Modern socialists distance themselves from the revolutionary and dictatorial aspects of communism, but in fact, people who still support communism today do the same, claiming that what happened in the Soviet Union was not true communism.

In terms of implementation, all forms of socialism, communism included, seek to enact (1) strict government control and ownership of industry and (2) redistribution of wealth.

And they all fail due to exactly the same things, (1) their inability to efficiently and properly manage and allocate common resources and (2) their inherent disincentive for achievement.

In conclusion, communism and socialism work toward achieving the same ends. Only their methods of achieving those ends are different. Communism uses revolution, while socialism uses evolution, manipulating the system into accepting it over time.

New Jersey cannot solve this problem by raising taxes. “[W]e have revenue going down, not up even though we’ve raised taxes every year,” says NJ Gov. Chris Christie.

A major contributor to New Jersey’s bloated budged is state worker benefits. A state worker could retire after 25 years at age 49, contribute $124,000 toward retirement, and get back $3.8 million in pension and health benefits over the rest of his lifetime.

The money to finance this excessive retirement plan isn’t exactly money that’s going to save the poor from the evils of capitalism. Then why is a liberal state such as NJ spending it? Could this be because of socialist greed? Or perhaps it’s because once a state acquires money in the name of the poor it just spends it which ever way…

Watch the interview with Gov. Christie here:

The core explanation for why this is so, is that a tax increase discourages people from engaging in the taxable activity, (earn income in the case of income tax,) and it encourages them to avoid the tax (by shifting money around, taking it out of the country, etc.) or even illegally evade it, thereby reducing the tax base. At some point, the increase in tax rate is not enough to compensate for the reduction in tax base, resulting in a reduction of tax revenues despite the rate increase.

Now, it is debatable at which point tax revenues start decreasing with increasing rates. However, it is apparent, that there is no tax rate for “the rich” sufficient to support a significant expansion of the welfare state. The evidence is the tax structure of the social democracies in Europe, whose tax rates are considerably higher than those in the U.S. for lower income brackets. In addition, sales taxes, which are paid by all regardless of income, are considerably higher in Europe than in the U.S. Those tend to hover around 20% in most of Europe, a figure which is twice as large as that of the highest sales tax state in the U.S., California. If anyone could figure out how to support a large welfare state by soaking the rich, it surely is a Western European socialist, but no one did!

Therefore, any politician claiming he/she will soak the rich for “social justice” is being very dishonest, to put it delicately.

To learn more about the Laffer curve, watch the following series of videos. They do a great job explaining these concepts.

Some government spending for safety and order does facilitate prosperity, but further spending turns the relationship between the size of government and prosperity around, resulting in more government for less prosperity.

The following video from the The Center for Freedom and Prosperity does a great job explaining this and compares economic performance among Denmark, France, Germany, Sweden and the U.S.A.