The $8,400 Solution to the Financial Crisis

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In 2007, Americans filed 139,000,000 tax returns.

The proposed Stimulus package (the name "American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009" was reportedly focus-group tested by Axelrod & company) is currently sized at $1,173,000,000,000 (1.173 trillion dollars).

Consider this alternative to government bureaucrats doling out checks, building their own fiefdoms and servicing their preferred trial lawyers, voter registration groups and union boss constituencies: each person or household would receive a check for $8,438.

For Fresno, CA homeowners Ann and Maxwell Meriweather, the $8,400 means breathing room on their mortgage payments and permits them to buy new kitchen appliances.

The $8,400 allows Huntington, WV college student Navid Nedungadi to quit his part-time job at IHOP and work full-time on his new Internet search engine. Nedungadi's idea for a radically new and different search engine will transform the world-wide web and eventually create a $12 billion business that employs 20,000.

Retiree Joan Wells of Waltham, Massachusetts puts her $8,400 to work as savings. She purchases a 6-month CD that, in conjunction with millions of similar bank deposits, enable financial institutions to begin lending capital to individuals and businesses.

Machine-shop owner Luis Hernandez is one beneficiary of a renewed business lending environment. With his $8,400 and a loan from a local credit union, he is able to buy a specialty machine tool from Bridgeport and hire a new operator. This investment permits Hernandez to finish surgical instruments for a nearby manufacturer, which will turn into a lucrative division that employs 150 by 2014.

Constitutional firewalls and the free market

The liberals are using this crisis to destroy the firewalls in the Constitution, to further crush the free market.

These are the plans that they devised decades ago.

The free market is the most transformative of economic systems. It fosters innovation and invention.

It produces new industries, products and services and improves upon existing ones.

Millions of individuals freely engaged in an infinite variety of actions each day, it is impossible to even conceive all of the benefits that occur in our economy at any given time.

The free market creates more wealth and more opportunites for more people than any other economic model. This is exactly why the Left -- be they socialists, or Marxists, or left-leaning Democrats -- attack it relentlessly.

That's why they lie, describing the free market as the cause of the current financial crisis. But it was in fact they, through onerous and arbitrary regulation and out-of-control governmental appendages like Fannie Mae, who twisted and distorted the free market.

The free market promotes self worth, self-sufficiency, shared values, and honest dealings. That doesn't mean to say there aren't crooks: they exist in every endeavor (especially government). But when you consider the trillions of transactions that make up the free market, the number of crooks is relatively tiny.

The free market enhances the individual, the family and the community. And it discriminates against no race, religion or gender.

The truck driver does not know the skin color of the individual who helped create the diesel fuel that powers his vehicle.

The cook does not know the religion of the dairy farmers who delivers milk to his restaurant.

The airline passenger does not know the gender of the factory workers who manufactured a critical component of the aircraft.

Nor do they care. The free market is an intricate system of voluntary economic, social and cultural interaction that are motivated by the desires and needs of the individual and the community.

Private property and the Left's attempts to co-opt it

The key to understanding the free market is private property, which is why the Left does not believe in it.

Private property is the material manifestation of the individual's labor: the material value created from a person's physical and intellectual efforts.

Oppressive taxation and regulation of your private property can become a form of servitude, particularly if such confiscation occurs because of arbitrary and illegitimate decisions on the part of a government bureaucracy. That is: decisions that are not Constitutional.

That is why the Conservative believes the federal government should only raise revenue that the Constitution authorizes and no other.

Otherwise, what are the limits on government power? What are the limits on taxation and regulation of the individual's labor? How do we contain and limit government? How do we draw the lines -- and on what basis?

The Marxist class struggle formulation pits the working class against the wealthy (sound familiar?). It serves as the Left's principal rhetorical argument for the confiscation of private property.

But it is anathema to the free market, for the individual has the power to make for himself anything he or she wants! There is no static class structure layered atop the free market! The free market is mutable, dynamic and vibrant.

And for this reason, we Conservatives believe the free market is a vital bulwark against totalitarianism. And it would appear the Left agrees for it is relentless in its assault on the free market.

The Left's rejection of Constitutional limits on government power is always justified on material grounds. In the name of "economic justice", "equality" and "fairness."

The Left creates an illusion of class struggle through a variety of inventions like the "Progressive" Income Tax. But the bottom 40% of wage earners pay no income tax!

"Economic equality" is unachievable, even in the most brutal and oppressive socialist states.

The mirage of "class struggle"

But it serves the Left's purpose to create a class system: artificially created economic categories. In this way, the Left stirs up class envy. The free market, therefore, is said to be incapable of serving the public interest because it produces "unjust results." This requires further government intervention.

The Left tries to intensify class struggle by routinely redefining categories and levels of wealth: who qualifies as the detested rich? The righteous middle class? The disenfranchised poor?

Thus community organizer and Obama mentor Saul Alinsky explained, "Organization for action will now and in the decade ahead center upon America's white middle class. That is where the power is."

Tax cuts for people who don't pay taxes aren't tax cuts. That's welfare. Tax cuts for businesses that can't make money: that's socialism; redistribution of wealth.

This isn't about creating jobs in the private sector. The left hates the private sector. They hate profits. They hate anything that doesn't require government subsidies, that can operate without government involvement. Those entities have to be destroyed.

You will never see a check for $8,400

That is why you will never see a check for $8,400. Because Alinsky's student seeks to build up government. To consolidate power. To destroy the private sector. And to eradicate the Constitutional firewalls that constrain the federal government.

When there's not a crisis, they'll manufacture one. Because their goal is to take from you what you've earned, what your parents have earned and what your grandparents have earned. And then they claim to give you something for nothing.

In truth, they will leech liberty from you and build a government completely unlike that envisioned by the Framers. If the Left is able to achieve its goals, the United States will be far different, far worse, and fall sadly short of what is possible with that provided by individual liberty, free markets and Constitutional separation of power.


Inspired by and based upon: Mark Levin, January 6, 2009..