General Wesley C. Clark and his bizarre apologists.

Marx, Engels, Clark, Hitler, Mussolini: At least the USA stopped one of them without bloodshed.

Way back on 15 June 2003, retired General Wesley C. Clark let spew forth this gem whilst chatting with Tim Russert on NBC's Meet the Press:

The Bush tax cuts weren't fair. The people that need the money and deserve the money are the people who are paying less, not the people who are paying more. I thought this country was founded on a principle of progressive taxation. In other words, it's not only that the more you make, the more you give, but proportionately more because when you don't have very much money, you need to spend it on the necessities of life.

One 'funny' thing about this quote is it was one of the only 2003 video clips of General Clark that is not available on the internet today.  If you search for video with Wesley Clark from 2003, you get all sorts of interesting crap that New World Order conspiracy theorists love, and a little FOX News bashing, but nothing on this, although the quote above is all over the place.  I was unable to find the transcript on the NBC website too, but that might just be me.

So, retired General Clark thinks that this country was founded on a principle of progressive taxation?  Seriously? Eugene Volokh made a great response at the time:

Somehow I slept through the class session in American History where they explained just how the country was founded "on a principle of progressive taxation." "No Taxation Without Progressivity," was that the big slogan? (Thanks to Dan Gifford to the pointer; I should also note that columnist Walter Williams also made the same observation shortly after the Clark speech, and I'm sure many others did, too.)

Although I like both Volkh's and Williams' responses, I had a decidedly different reaction.  General Clark was spewing the Communist Manifesto and labeling it USA founding principles.  Progressive taxation has been item two in the handy list Marx and Engels included in the Communist Manifesto since its publication in February, 1848.  It is also addressed as a tax on business and investment income in both Mussolini's Fascist Manifesto and in the German National Socialist's 25 Points of 1920, and in the current American Nazi Party.

While trying to find the video, or just the audio, of Clark's 15 AUG 2003 Meet the Press appearance, I cam across this bit of humor by one Nathan Newman (note, all of the links to his evidence are broken):

September 18, 2003
Volokh Gets It Wrong
US Founded on Progressive Taxation

Eugene Volokh is accusing Wesley Clark of being historically ignorant.

The complaint?

Clark attacked Bush's tax cuts as a betrayal of America's progressive history:

The people that need the money and deserve the money are the people who are paying less, not the people who are paying more. I thought this country was founded on a principle of progressive taxation.Volokh snidely dismisses Clark by saying, "Somehow I slept through the class session in American History where they explained just how the country was founded'on a principle of progressive taxation.'"

But it's Volokh who has his history wrong.

For those of us for whom this country was founded in the "New Birth of Freedom" that ended slavery and completed the Constitution with the post-Civil War Amendments, the United States WAS founded on progressive taxation.

In fact, the first progressive income tax was in 1862 to fund the Union troops. From the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA):

It was a "progressive" tax in that it initially levied a tax of 3 percent on annual incomes over $600 but less than $10,000 and a tax of 5 percent on any income over $10,000. In 1864 the rates increased and the ceiling dropped so that incomes between $600 and $5,000 were taxed at 5 percent, with a 10 percent rate on the excess over $5,000. Passed as an emergency measure to finance the Union cause in the Civil War, the first income tax generated approximately $55 million in government revenues during the war. Paying the taxes was viewed as part of the patriotic war effort, and the whole country was proud when the merchant prince A. T. Stewart paid $400,000 in taxes on an income of $4 million.So yes, pride in a progressive income tax is EXACTLY what this country was founded upon.

It's worth noting that the Congress assumed it had the power to pass an income tax on that basis and revived it in the 1890s, only to have a rightwing Supreme Court strike the income tax down. This led to passage of the 16th Amendment, further ratifying progressive taxation as a founding principle of our constitutional system.

One thing that conservatives don't understand about America-- liberty was not founded in 1776. It's been a continual process with each generation having to refound this country in struggle -- a little bit of revolution periodically in Thomas Jefferson's phrase. But there is little question that our modern constitutional system was only established with the Civil War, and progressive taxation was at the heart of that effort.

Posted by Nathan at September 18, 2003 05:37 PM

Today I did attempt to respond to this load of crap thusly, but Nathan Newman's website redirected to a "page not found" message:

Okay, in what universe can you possibly read the US Constitution and glean that before the ratification of the 16th Amendment that an income tax was constitutional?  The Congress attempts all sorts of laws outside their powers that they know full well are outside of their powers.

The only way a "right wing" Supreme Court excuse fits is in the same way that Howard Dean criticized the Kelo v. New London decision on eminent domain was decided by a "right-wing Supreme Court": he lied about it.  Maybe he got the idea from you, since that happened a couple of years after you made this post.

Also, the Supreme Court did not overturn the Civil War Income Taxes, the Grant administration successfully lobbied Congress to do so.

Wesley Clark was engaged in the same sort of retread falsehoods as Ted Kennedy did on 12 AUG 1980 speaking on progressive taxation. He engaged in fabrication. Kennedy may not have known that progressive taxation is item two in the list at the end of "Chapter II. Proletarians and Communists" in the Communist Manifesto, but he should have at least known that Progressive RINO Teddy Roosevelt did not invent it and it sure did not originate in the USA. BTW, a progressive tax on capital is the first item under Finance in Mussolini's 1919 Fascist Manifesto and similar can be found in the 1920 German National Socialist 25 Points.

Seeing a General express these bizarre notions is no surprise. After 30 years of service, I became surprised when I met a fellow officer *without* a natural leaning to Commu-Fascism.

 I didn't realize until after reading that my response sounds like Dr. Sheldon Cooper from The Big Bang Theory.

If I Crash My Airplane in the Desert, does it make News?

If it is my airplane and my desert, why is it the US government's business what I do with either?

Video courtesy of NBC's Today Show.

The Discovery Channel crashed an airplane in a Mexican desert.  They are not accused of stealing the airplane.  They are not accused of scaring unsuspecting passengers and onlookers.  They are not even accused of defiling Gaea. No, they are being taken to task for not getting US federal bureaucrat permission.

Another set of gripes from NBC are that the feds and Boeing were not invited to the Discovery Channel Desert Classic (not to be confused with the Jimmy Carter Desert Classic), leading them to the conclusion that it was a "stunt."  If anybody knows stunt journalism, it is NBC for sure.  Did NBC invite any General Motors engineers to watch them rig a pickup truck with a bomb to make it explode on cue?  Does not sound like it.  If you think the truck blowing up incident is ancient history, NBC has more recent experience with news stunt editing.  Some may say that this is systemic to the NBC news culture.

So now NBC is all in a huff about a competitor creating video for a show (their product) without even seeing the final product.  The story implies the Federal Aviation Administration and other government busybodies are concerned about this experiment, but they can't manage to find any current bureaucrats to go on camera and gripe.

At what point does private property matter to these people?

Below is my annotated version to the above video (HD version on YouTube), with some bonus footage of real terror by real terrorist in a Jordan desert on September 12, 1970 (corrected a spelling error of mine):

NBC Lies About Guns - Reloaded

NPR Accidentally Explains The #Occupy Kids

#Occupy Cat Fight

Have you noticed that those fun loving, crazy little #Occupy Wherever kids are angry about something, but not very focused about exactly what they are angry about?

Have you noticed how they react when people like National Review's Charles C. W. Cooke confronts them with some facts and their anger shrivels up, even for just a few moments?

NPR affiliate WBEZ took a visit to a middle school, found the same characteristics in a young boy and discovered that even a public school teacher can straighten out children better than any Liberal Arts program at an expensive university can.

Listen to ACT SIX. GRANDE WITH SUGAR  and understand how the #Occupy crowd is less emotionally developed than a middle school kid.

The boy is a victim of circumstance.  He takes care of his grandmother in a home without electricity or water, other than the water that pours through the roof when it rains.  In the real world of home, the child takes on and conquers adult problems that other children his age never think about.  Then he arrives at school in dirty clothes and frequently unwashed, with general complaining that the school was "unfair", nothing specific.

In the case of #OWS, the fault is mostly with the parents.  In the ages old truism that anybody can be whatever they like in America, the Baby Boomer parents left out a key ingredient: some careers don't pay much.  The OWS children were told to get a degree, but nobody told them that all degrees were not created equal.  However, they are not middle school children with problems at home, they are adults who made their own problems, possibly by following bad advice.

Today there are dozens of annoying hipsters and hippies wallowing in their own excrement, on private property in Manhattan, who have no concept that literature degrees are not very lucrative.  They think the American system is unfair because they have to pay back loans and work at being successful. They are shocked that the people they need to pay the loans back to are wealthy and cannot make the mental connection, so they assign "unfairness" to the predictable outcome.

Certainly there are children who grow up to be financially successful artists and poets, but none of these protestors are complaining about an "old boy network" in West Chelsea, they are whining that bankers made money when the bankers lent students money and the federal government guaranteed those loans.

They are not even whining that the education industry ripped them off, by rapidly expanding "staff" positions, overpaying faculty, and creating ostentatious monuments to academia.  No, their Socialist indoctrination about "fairness" overrides any facts that are flying in their face.

What Is So Bad About Monopolies?

Can a monopoly be sexy?

A monopoly (from Greek monos / μονος (alone or single) + polein / πωλειν (to sell)) exists when a specific person or enterprise is the only supplier of a particular commodity.

Thankfully, the question in the subject line is not so alien today as it was in the mid 1990s when my Strategic Management instructor used that as a lecture topic.  I was in the same boat then as many reading this today, with my reaction somewhere along the lines of How can you even ask that?  Of course they are bad!  They destroy the competition in the marketplace!

He, being a great lecturer, listened to a few of our comments and then launched into a quick destruction of them all: monopolies are short lived and competition destroys them.  Barriers to entry eventually disappear with new innovations and alternate products.  Of course, the lecture was much longer than that.

Now, there has been this lie spread through non-business academia and the mainstream media that once a monopoly is established, nobody can compete with it any more.  The consumer is a captive slave of the monopolist and that is that until the government does something.  As usual, the poets and news readers get this as wrong as one can possibly get anything wrong.  The persistent monopoly exists because of the intervention of government, not a lack of government action.

Need a few examples?

One often cited is Standard Oil of New Jersey.  The way it is told by Professors of History is that Standard had taken over the oil business (omitting that it was primarily kerosine, a replacement for whale oil in lamps, and a replacement for coal fired engines) and was gouging consumers.  They beat their competitors to a pulp and ran the show from derrick to home.

In reality, Standard had about 20% of the refining capacity by the time their case came before the United States Supreme Court and gained that through buying out their competition.  Some monopoly, huh?  By the time the case got to court, crude oil and refining competitors were emerging in the Western States and Getty (the primary shareholder) was boycotting those States because they were not giving him favorable deals to expand Standard to that part of the country.

Another falsehood in this Liberal Arts Department fable is that Standard owned oil fields.  In fact, they did not own a single oil well and were delighted when suppliers undercut each other on the price of crude.  When the government "broke them up" they were "divided" into different firms, all with the same owners with the same proportion of ownership as Standard of New Jersey.  All the government did was add inefficiency to the mix.

In reality, Standard had a short lived spike in market dominance that was going away through competition and a lack of government support from Western States.

The AT&T story is a study in the other half of the monopoly lie.  The story goes that "Ma Bell" (American Bell Telephone Company) created and protected their monopoly on voice telephone service through various sorts of dastardly acts and they thwarted government action to break them up until the feds were finally able to break the monopoly in the early 1980s.

First, the only reason that "Ma Bell" had any monopoly at all was because the federal government granted them one, as a national utility, under the Franklin Delano Roosevelt administration in 1934.  In spite of being granted a monopoly, the US Justice Department decided to muck around and make some headlines for themselves in the 1950s and got the monopoly throttled back to 85% of the US market, along with restrictions on their foreign business.

By the 1980s, the American Bell System had had enough and asked the government nicely to become a "regular" company and compete without the umbrella of government monopoly power.  The agreed settlement resulted in a breakup of the firm into regional operating companies and an explosion in innovation and profit due to normal competition.  Those profits came in spite of overwhelming persistant government regulation that continues to this day.

Note also, in both of the above examples, National Socialist regimes were behind all of the government meddling with businesses that would have succeeded just fine with normal competition.

AOL CD Throne

AOL disk dress

CD bikini

Now for a few "monopoly" examples that should make anybody laugh: AOL, Netflix, Walmart (also accused of being a 'monopsony', NBC, Microsoft, and IBM.