Democrat Brags about Tyranny

Tuesday, June 10th, 2008 4:32 pm by Neal

His face had the expression which, these days, was the mark of an honest man: an expression of bewilderment. He was looking at his companion, trying hard — conscientiously, helplessly, hopelessly — to understand.

His companion was younger and shorter, a small man with lumpy flesh, with a chest thrust forward and the thin points of a mustache thrust up. He was saying, in a tone of patronizing boredom, “Well, I don’t know. All of you are crying about rising costs, it seems to be the stock complaint nowadays, it’s the usual whine of people whose profits are squeezed a little. I don’t know, we’ll have to see, we’ll have to decide whether we’ll permit you to make any profits or not.”

Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand

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Rarely do high-ranking politicians so candidly reveal their disdain for free-market capitalism as Senator Chris Dodd did in this exchange with CNBC’s Joe Kernan. The quote is remarkable in it’s scope and arrogance: Dodd has no reservations asserting that Congress can and will tell every American company what is an allowable profit. Profit too much and Congress will simply seize what it deems excessive.

If Congress can arbitrarily seize corporate profits then no American’s income is safe.

When a high-ranking U.S. senator sounds more like Karl Marx than Adam Smith over the issue of energy prices, it must be an election year.

Democratic Sen. Chris Dodd, the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, appeared on CNBC’s June 10 “Squawk Box” pushing government control of corporate profits. Dodd said he considered a company to be “doing very, very well” with profits above $8 or $10 per barrel of oil. He said he advocated a windfall profits tax, where Congress would determine what amount of profit is fair and what isn’t.

Co-host Joe Kernan called the Connecticut senator on the idea, asking if he was going to apply the same strategy to other types of businesses. “Are you going to go across industries across the board and decide what Congress thinks is a fair amount of profit and drawing a lines on what’s fair and what’s not for corporations?” Kernan then emphasized the point. “That’s not the way it’s done in this country, senator. It could never be done that way, could it?”

“Yes, it could be,” Dodd said. “In fact it’s been done that way in the past and particularly when you’re trying to get some relief for people out here when the economy is in a tailspin. We’re about to go into a recession here. This is really causing a tremendous dislocation, not only here, but around the world.”

It is simply incorrect that we are “about to go into a recession here” as the astonishingly-ignorant Democrat Dodd claims. We haven’t had one month of negative growth, much less two quarters in a row. So Dodd is proposing that we destroy the essence of free-market capitalism in order to save us from a fallacious premise.

Democrats also want to destroy free-market capitalism in order to save the world from “global warming”.

When it comes to destroying freedom, Democrat politicians have an unlimited number of bogeymen.

UPDATE:
While we’re on the topic of free-market-hating, socialist Democrats, don’t miss Maxine Waters threatening to nationalize America’s oil industry. She’s so damned stupid, however, that she can’t even articulate “nationalize”, but we know what she means. Oh yes, we know.

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