Class Warfare Card Played Again

Have you ever heard of Rick Bookstaber? He is an Obama appointee who currently sits on the “Financial Stability Oversight Council” that was created by the passage of the Dodd-Frank bill that was rammed through Congress while Democrats still had control of both the House and Senate. The goal of the council is to “ensure the stability of our nation’s financial system.”

Well, guess what! Bookstaber believes that class warfare “is justifiable, and indeed ultimately inevitable.” It seems that on Monday, May 7, 2012, Bookstaber took issue with Fox’s Tucker Carlson’s accusations that liberals were engaging in “class warfare” by seeking to blame the nation’s fiscal problems on a small number of wealthy individuals.

You must read for yourself what Bookstaber wrote, including his quote of Karl Marx in an attempt to justify his position, to believe it. Bookstaber, at his personal blog, wrote regarding class warfare: “There is little that matches the artfulness in waving off criticism of the widening income gap as ‘class warfare’. And there is little that matches the gullibility of those who follow along.”

Bookstaber continues: “It is hard to discuss class warfare without referring back to the industrial revolution. Then class warfare centered on the length of the working day. So it is not surprising that Marx stated the central battle of class warfare at the time in terms of the working day:” Between equal rights force decides. – Karl Marx, Das Kapital

“Marx,” Bookstaber writes, “…argues that the question of the length of the working day cannot be solved by an appeal to rights, but only through class struggle, wherein ‘force’ decides between ‘equal rights’. (Force can mean physical force, but can also mean the force of the political process).” “There is class warfare because the social and economic pie has to be split, and there is no objective way to do so. The war can be active or passive, the sides can have a truce, one side can temporarily be resigned to its lot or be held in check through force, but the conflict never ends.” Here Bookstaber shows his true colors when he says, “…pie has to be split, and there is no objective way to do so.” He is saying that the current economic system is a zero-sum game, that economic growth is not possible, that one side’s gain is the other side’s loss.

He further contends that, “The time spent working and the share of that labor that accrued to the capitalists during the emergence of the industrial revolution is akin to the taxes and redistributions from the entitlement programs and government subsidies that are in the cross hairs today. Indeed, the timeline extends back even further. The benefits that we call entitlements are similar in our more advanced society to the rights of subsistence for the serfs during Feudal times – rights which were implicit in the social contract between lord and serf, and which were broken at the peril of revolt. The social contract between the lord and serf, as with any contract, had obligations on both sides. The serfs paid a portion of their production and provided service to the lords. The lords organized the serfs to defend against invasion, enforced a rule of law, and assured the serfs, as much as possible in that age, of subsistence. Is this so different from social contracts of today?”  [emphasis mine]

All we can do is slowly shake our heads in disbelief and wait for November to come.

May I suggest that you see for yourself what Bookstaber wrote before the Obama minions make Bookstaber pull what he wrote!

But that’s just my opinion.

“It isn’t so much that liberals are ignorant. It’s just that they know so many things that aren’t so.” – Ronald Reagan

Cross-posted at RWNO, my personal web site.