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Monday, August 17, 2009

SALLY MORRIS: SOCIAL ENGINEERING IN THE AGE OF OBAMA:  CASH FOR CLUNKERS

By Sally Morris

Every city has one.  In our town it is Reeves Drive.  These are the homes on the tree-lined boulevards that staff recruiters take prospects cruising past, the ones you need special permission to see if they are for sale.  The homes of the wealthy:  doctors, lawyers, CEO’s, heirs of family fortunes.  But they’re often not as “environmentally friendly” as those being built today.
What if the City decided to bail out some unsuccessful local contractors?  Some clever councilman thinks up this idea:  We have these guys build, at our expense, several tracts of energy-efficient homes, sparing no expense.  Then we offer the owners of the nice homes on Reeves the equivalent of a down payment on one of these new structures, free.  They simply turn in the present home and pick out a new one.  Maybe the contractors will even throw in more cash incentives for the buyers.  Next we demolish their old homes.  We will make sure that no one ever lives in them again by decreeing that every system be destroyed.  To qualify the trade-in home must be worth at least $200,000, fully insured, all systems working, no flaws.  The City goes out and borrows money from some bank in New York and the deals are made.  It’s a huge success.  The wealthy are lining up to become owners of these new homes, handing in the keys to their old houses, the contractors are perking up with optimism as they count up their profits.  First, acid is poured into the furnace, just to make sure no miscreant tries to salvage anything.  Then the bulldozers move in.  As the roof caves in and the timbers crash in a cloud of dust on the hardwood floors, the oak woodwork snaps and the ceramic fixtures and windows shatter.  Jackhammers are brought in to pulverize even the bricks so no one tries to use them as flower borders.  Then it is over and everything is shoveled into the hole.
Watching this show are the residents of the local tenements, the renters of small, marginal houses, the trailer dwellers.  These people and the rest of the residents of the city have paid for this through their taxes.  These are, in actuality, their property.  The guy from the trailer park sees this through his tears.  He has been trying to get enough money together for two years so he can make a down payment on a modest home of his own.  The tenant in the apartment building realizes he will have to compete for homes in a much tighter market.  The renter’s dreams of ownership seem to be fleeing as he watches.

Well, the “upside” is that the contractor’s happy and so are the owners of new homes.  Everyone else is devastated by this misuse of their taxes.  People wonder why the city didn’t give the down payment to the little guy from the mobile home park, or the family in the housing project instead.  They could move up [the ladder and then the big guys could just by the new houses.  If the rusty old trailer were demolished instead of the $200,000 home, probably even more heat loss could be avoided.

Does the above scenario sound a lot like “Cash for Clunkers”?  It should.  While millions of Americans watched the YOUTUBE video of a Volvo being destroyed before their eyes, the Senate voted to extend the program.  We even hear from some misguided “conservatives” in support of this nonsense, one being Mike Huckabee.  One is forced to wonder why.

Let’s step back just a moment and get it in perspective.  “Cash for Clunkers” was packaged as a great, innovative “stimulus” to the auto industry.  The second reason cited was that it was a sound environmental program to get old clunkers off the streets for good, replaced by new, green cars.  Win-win?

Well, except for some other, far more serious issues.  To see what they are and what they do and why we need to look at who is being hurt by this.  The poorer Americans will suffer from this program more than anyone else.  The nasty truth is that “Cash for Clunkers” is not about stimulating the economy nor about the environment.  It is nothing more nor less than a program of social engineering.

At best the only groups which benefit from the program economically are auto dealerships (that is the ones Obama allowed to remain in business after closing all of the others arbitrarily) and the wealthy who can afford to shop for $20,000 to $40,000 automobiles.  Most of them were expected to already be in the market for a new car.  The dealers seem to like it a lot, because whether they sell new or used cars the prices will escalate impressively.  Meanwhile, the smaller local, mom/pop used car dealers are in trouble.  It is estimated (Michael Felderbaum, AP Business Writer) that 3 of every 5 of the cars destroyed by this wasteful program would have ended up for sale on used car lots or at least resold for parts.  And these dealers were struggling before!  The consumers have been holding off trading in their used cars, so there was already a shortage in the market before the removal of half a million good cars occurred.  For those of you who don’t shop for used cars, Keith Wahnn, industry expert, says that about 40 million are sold every year, or 4 times the number of new cars. This excuse of “economic stimulus”, then, is not a legitimate reason.  It is actually ruining the marketplace.

So, let’s consider the benefit to the environment.  What are we destroying?  Not older cars that don’t run well.  To qualify the car must be 25 years old or less, insured for a full year prior to turning it in, and running well.  If this were a program for the environment, why not pay the poor $4,500 as a down payment for one of these 25-year-old or less models?  Why leave a 1977 Ford Galaxy with leaky rings on the road to burn oil and guzzle gas and take off the road a 1998 Ford Explorer?  The environment, if that is the concern, would benefit just as much if the poor were helped out.  In either case a car would quit being driven and a newer car sold.  Except that the LESS WEALTHY would also benefit.  There is also no excuse in prohibiting the salvaging of parts for repair of other cars.  This is criminally wasteful.  I think we can forget about this as an “environmental” program.  If it were, there would be no reason to punish the poor with it.

This is just the point.  What we have here is an evil, ingenious means of social engineering.  And this is why it is so important to deny the guy driving Fred Sanford’s old pickup the opportunity to buy, at a $4,500 discount, a 1990’s model that is more efficient than his old one.  The actual purpose of this plan is to create a permanent class structure of haves and have-not’s.  For what “Cash for Clunkers” will produce in years to come is an irreversible shortage of better pre-owned automobiles.  It is estimated that at this point, “Cash for Clunkers” will at 5 - 10% to the cost of every used car in the future.  As our old cars finally die we, who can’t afford the new ones, will be forced to take the bus or walk, and this will limit our mobility and our options to improve our lives.  Would you be able to get to your job without a car?  Some will not.  It won’t kill us.  It will make our lives that much poorer and more difficult.  Gone will be the car in the parking lot when we shop for groceries - we’ll be waiting for the buss and anticipating walking for blocks with heavy sacks to carry (and they don’t make them like they used to either!).  Gone will be the short trip to the neighboring town, and the night at the movies once in a while, especially in the winter.

We could also live, for example, without laundry machines.  People did once and some still do, especially in places like India, China or most parts of Africa.  But think how your life would be impacted without these things.  You would have to get a stick and a washtub, as they do in the Third World, or spend a lot of time waiting at a Laundromat.  You wouldn’t die, but your life would change - a lot.  If you had to take a bus you would find that you couldn’t get to work if it was not anywhere near the bus route, or the hours were not service hours for the bus.  Then you would walk.  How many hours a week would you lose?  Remember the saying, “Time is life”?  How much of your life would you be losing every year of this?  The “Cash for Clunkers” program in effect, is like taking the ladder of success that we all climb and sawing out the middle runs, leaving those at the bottom cut off from progress, or building a moat between rich and poor, rather than maintaining a continuum of achievement.

Why do we promote class divisions in America?  It is truly an un-American institution.  We have always benefited from a system which provided flexibility in economic levels.  A young immigrant sells fruit from a stand on the sidewalk and eventually opens a chain of fast-food restaurants or grocery stores and makes a million bucks.  Or the scion of a great department store empire squanders the family fortune and ends up on a park bench.  But he can always learn and make a comeback.  What has made America dynamic and successful is this flexibility.  Few countries have this.

So why destroy that?  When we have stratified classes of people and reinforce them with social programs or government influence, we create a climate of class envy and hatred.  The poor fester as they see the injustice of such a scheme.  The rich are often stupid enough, as these people who go after the $4,500 “Cash for Clunkers” benefit, to bask in this.  It has to be fun to spend Friday at the golf course, to dine at the Ritz, to travel, to see Broadway shows, etc.  But when the hope of this is denied in reality to the many - when they are not allowed to move up under their own steam, when they must depend on others to control this, we have a very sick country.

Who profits from this?  In the short run it appears that the already wealthy do, and the favorite car dealerships of the Obama people.  But this is the short run.  Because it is the finish line that is important, right?  We have in place now, a number of people who have demonstrated that they wish to bring about a socialist government, a dictatorship of the proletariat, so to speak.  So the answer to the above question is:  demagogues and dictators.  Whenever there is a perceived gulf between haves and have-nots we find the have-nots in the majority.  It is this group, then, once they have created it, which the social engineer exploits.  They use the pent-up envy of the “upper class” and fan it into hatred in order to destroy the normal social order.  This is the story of one sick-minded totalitarian state after another, from that of Robespierre to those of Lenin and Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, to that of Mao, to . . . well, you know who our totalitarians are today.

The sad iron of all of this is that so many of us have been taught at school and by Depression-era grandparents that the Democrats are always for the “little guy”.  Well, look what they Democrats are doing to the little guy today.  When amendments to the extension of this horrible “Cash for Clunkers” plan were introduced by Republicans - such as donating the cars taken in to poor families or charity or allowing salvage of parts so these poor folks can maintain the cars they have, it was Democrats who voted them down and killed those amendments.  Why?  Was the real reason for “Cash for Clunkers” was to keep the poor as poor as possible?  Think about it.  We now have a permanent loss of half a million serviceable, reasonably well-maintained cars.  The price for every used car will now increase, making it ever more difficult for those who shop in that market.  And we also now have one group - the wealthy - taking unfair advantage of another - the poor - all with the encouragement of the government and with our tax dollars!

Before we all jump on the bandwagon to support this “novel” approach to depriving some and rewarding others, we should pause long enough to consider the consequences and the intent.  If we do and if we love our country we will reject any more of these plans.  Not only can a nation on the brink of economic collapse not afford this foolishness, but we don’t need to spend money to buy social injustice.

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