Government Greed is Not Good

RUSH: This is Fabian in Staten Island. Great to have you on the program, sir. Hello.

CALLER: Hello, Rush. Mega dittos and Merry Christmas.

RUSH: Same to you, sir.

CALLER: Thank you. And regarding this No Labels stuff, I was brought up believing that if you withhold the truth, it’s the same as lying. Liberals are creating this dichotomy with this No Labels issue where they want politicians running for public office to be open and honest with the people, just as long as they don’t let us know to what party they’re affiliated. And that’s what gets me about this. I feel like there’s a certain danger here where liberals only talk about liberty when they’re taking our liberties away and they’re controlling our speech.

RUSH: Yeah, all of that and more. They’re trying to control what your kids eat now because that can’t be left to you. You’re too big an idiot. You know, the guy has a good point, which candidates hid their labels in the last election? Do we know of any that did? We know the media in any story of corruption or crime that involves a Democrat, you’ll never find out in the story that they’re a Democrat. But what candidate hid their labels during the last campaign, and why? I’m gonna tell you what this is. See, it’s easy for me ’cause I know — not personally, but I may as well — I know some of the people on the right joining this group. I know some of the people on the right, well, formerly on the right who are championing this group and I know their mind-set and I know that they’re ticked off. They basically have been rendered irrelevant in the conservative movement because these are the people who have been spouting the end of Reaganism, the Reagan era is over, we gotta move beyond that. ‘You can’t just say tax cuts and beat the communists anymore. That’s not gonna cut it. Conservatism has to stand for active, large government done wisely.’ Well, those people, of course, the Tea Party said sayonara.

So they resent the Tea Party. These are the people that resent ordinary, average people, while attempting to stand up for ’em and defend ’em. So no matter how you slice it this group is gonna fall of its own weight. It’s simply not possible. It is simply not possible to run around and live and engage in politics the way these people want to. At some point people are going to ask, ‘Are you Republican or Democrat?’ ‘Uhhh, uhhh, in the No Labels movement that’s precisely why we’re here, that doesn’t matter.’ The hell it doesn’t. Are you a Republican or a Democrat? And you’re gonna find out they’re Democrats trying to hide the fact, or they’re liberals trying to hide the fact. A lot of Democrats, to answer my own question, a lot of Democrats ran ads without party affiliation in the 2008 congressional races without saying they were a Democrat, plain and simple.

Ken in Livonia, Michigan. Welcome, sir, to the EIB Network. Nice to have you here.

CALLER: Yeah, Rush, I wanted to comment regarding this whole issue of No Labels.

RUSH: Yeah.

CALLER: Many years ago I took a college course, it was a business class called Conflict Resolution. And what was being taught was that labels were a bad thing because when you label people, you divide people, and the way they put this insane idea into the college course is they were teaching that when there’s a conflict, there must never be a winner or a loser. It must be a win-win situation so that you don’t hurt the feelings of the people that you are in a disagreement with —

RUSH: Oh, yes.

CALLER: — and this whole idea is just completely out of left field because, think of it this way. The country being an automobile, as the Democrats like to use the comparison with, if you have two unmarked jugs, one gasoline, representing capitalism, you put that in the car, and it will run nice and smooth. The second jug, soda pop, representing statism, which is what the Democrats love, you put that in the car and it’s dead. It won’t run anywhere. And so this whole idea of No Labels is just, like I said, out of left field, it makes absolutely no logical sense whatsoever.

RUSH: Again, you’re exactly right. I mean you can’t even call people girls and boys or men and women, it’s a label.

CALLER: That’s it.

RUSH: It’s just silly, and again, born of a bunch of losers. Bottom line, folks, it’s this simple. If they want to steal our money, if they want to tax us — you know, this whole notion of greed, Bill McGurn has a great column today in the Wall Street Journal about greed and tax cuts for the rich. The conventional wisdom is that the rich are a bunch of greedy SOBs and that the government, who wants to raise taxes on these people, they are fair, they understand the great inequities in our society and they seek to level them out. It’s these greedy rich people who are steadfastly opposing giving up any more of their money. They don’t need the money they’ve got, they’ll never miss a tax increase, they don’t need this — blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And the notion gets put out there that they are the greedy ones. But who are they? Whether they’re rich or not, they’re people who want to keep what they’ve earned. Who is the government? Who are the Democrats? The Democrats are the people who want to take what they have earned. They want to take from the people who have earned it and use it as their own to spend to their own benefit.

Now, to whom does the definition of greed more properly apply? As I’ve always said, the real focus of greed in this country is in the government and everybody who works there. Well, not everybody. Elected officials, that’s the greed, that’s where it’s located. It’s so convoluted to have people who earn their money being called greedy simply because they think they should be able to keep a little bit more of it, that they’ll do better with it than the government will. And that’s greed. And when Reagan won elections, it was a triumph of greed and selfishness, the media said, on the part of the voters. Yeah, the voters, they wanted to cheat the government out of what was rightfully the government’s because Reagan was for tax cuts and so forth. But the real greed exists in Washington. It is there that people who haven’t earned your money want to take it from you and spend it as though it was theirs, for their own benefit, as in buying votes, continually being elected, what have you. And he’s absolutely right about this. So, you know, whether they want to steal our money, have high taxes or what have you, Democrats, liberals, progressives, socialists, doesn’t matter what they call themselves. We know who they are. They are people who feel entitled to everybody else’s earnings while having not earned any of it themselves.