Donald Trump’s was accused of being a hypocrite during one of his recent interviews with CNN after admitting he bought a lot of merchandise from China. Why wouldn’t an American billionaire  buy from the US? There is so much more that could be written on this subject. And Trump didn’t nearly do a good enough job explaining it. So let me give it a shot.

China is currently utilizing several strategies in order to undermine America’s global economic hegemony. To cover even a few of them would fall outside of what’s really at stake between China and the U.S. What has long concerned Washington is China’s overt actions of purposefully decreasing the value of it currency which directly and negatively impacts the U.S., especially during times of high unemployment and while China continues to reach new levels of growth.

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Standard & Poors (S&P), the credit rating agency that started in business more than 150 years ago and operates in 23 countries, issued the ultimate in realty checks this week when they downgraded its credit outlook for the United States.  S&P cited a “material risk” that policymakers may not reach agreement on a plan to trim the large federal budget deficit.

While the agency maintained the country’s top AAA credit rating, it said “Authorities have not made clear how they will tackle long-term fiscal pressures.” S&P said the move signals there is at least a one-in-three chance that it could cut its long-term AAA rating on the United States within two years.

What would a credit rating downgrade mean to the average citizen?  Immediately following a downgrade, the interest required to refinance our debt would climb dramatically and the Federal Reserve would have to print more money resulting in a sharp devaluation of the dollar.  If you think $4 per gallon for gasoline is an outrage, try $8 per gallon or higher.  If you think that your 401(k) took a hit in 2009, how about a permanent hit due to the United States currency losing its value?  Food, energy, clothing, housing and all other staples of life will experience sharp and permanent price increases.  Unemployment will also rise as businesses attempt to adjust to a new and uncertain economy.

It should be absolutely clear that the growing national debt and continued federal budget deficits are a threat to our economy and a clear and present danger to our way of life.  President Obama took office with a $10 trillion debt and a $740 billion federal budget deficit.  Two years later the national debt is $14.2 trillion and the federal budget deficit has reached $1.6 trillion.  Mr. Obama and the Democrats insist that we need to keep spending, even though our debt will exceed our Gross Domestic Product (GDP) before the end of this year.  They insist that rolling back the George Bush era tax cuts for those making more than $250,000 per year and reductions in defense spending is the path to a solution.

The truth is that the additional revenue potential from rolling back those cuts would only equal a maximum of $64 billion per year.  The risk to jobs in our economy by increasing tax rates on many small businesses that are taxed as individuals, S-Corporations, is extremely high.  There could easily be a spike in unemployment as those business owners adjust their planning to preserve their net income.

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If we are to stop the march of this nation towards socialism, it is imperative that we understand and educate our fellow citizens as to what socialism is like.  This need not be limited to distant readings of history books about the gulags in Russia.  Indeed we get a very gripping modern-day reminder of the horrors of socialism from a recent article in the New York Times on North Korea.

The piece begins:

YANJI, China — Like many North Koreans, the construction worker lived in penury. His state employer had not paid him for so long that he had forgotten his salary. Indeed, he paid his boss to be listed as a dummy worker so that he could leave his work site. Then he and his wife could scrape out a living selling small bags of detergent on the black market.

It hardly seemed that life could get worse. And then, one Saturday afternoon last November, his sister burst into his apartment in Chongjin with shocking news: the North Korean government had decided to drastically devalue the nation’s currency. The family’s life savings, about $1,560, had been reduced to about $30.

Last month the construction worker sat in a safe house in this bustling northern Chinese city, lamenting years of useless sacrifice. Vegetables for his parents, his wife’s asthma medicine, the navy track suit his 15-year-old daughter craved — all were forsworn on the theory that, even in North Korea, the future was worth saving for.

“Ai!” he exclaimed, cursing between sobs. “How we worked to save that money! Thinking about it makes me go crazy.”

Such is the horrifically arbitrary nature of communist regimes.  With the swift stroke of a pen the fruits of one’s labors can be reduced to nothing overnight.

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It is not the magnitude of the rapidly collapsing Greek economy that should concern us in America.  It is, rather, that Greece is unquestionably the proverbial canary in the coal mine that should have the American ruling class burning the midnight oil to extract us from the mess they and their predecessors have created for us.  Instead, our government is ignoring the warning.

The left in America, has flirted with the European economic welfare paradigm for years and now we have an Administration that has morphed that flirtation into a full blown love affair.  Greece, which has spent itself into oblivion providing unsustainable benefits (mostly to ever-growing public payrollers) is, we are told, an aberration and the Administration will, no doubt, say the same thing about Portugal and Italy and Ireland too.  But then we have Spain and Great Britain and even France (and let’s not forget Iceland) staggering down the same path toward economic never-never land, all suffering from the same delusional affliction that is now being pursued with gusto by our ruling class…the belief that we can best improve life for all Americans, nearly half of whom pay no taxes, by raising taxes on the declining number of Americans who do.

The left has always believed that prosperity is something that can be bought through government taxation of society’s income, rather than something that is simply a by-product of society’s productivity.  Let us say it again.  Government cannot create sustainable wealth or prosperity.  Only the people, individually and through the commercial and industrial institutions they create, can do that.

Healthy societies are growing societies that earn the means (the capital) for reinvestment in continued health and growth.  In this process of market-driven growth everyone who participates eventually prospers. Healthy societies are not those such as we are witnessing in Europe, whose earnings are sucked dry by government for redistribution to accomplish objectives as dictated by government planners.   Yet it is this withering European model that our current Administration and its congressional majority have embraced, notwithstanding the warnings screaming at us from across the Atlantic and throughout nearly every precinct in America.  President Obama has stated, unambiguously, that he personally believes that at some level of income no one needs to earn any more, presumably the point at which government should take the balance for redistribution. He acknowledged, however, that this view was, “not the American way.”

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If you are under 30, you really need to read this column and pass it on to your friends.  Your elected officials are dooming you to a new sort of bondage, a form of 21^st Century slavery, if you will.

First, some background.

On October 16, 1854, Abraham Lincoln, then a former one-term Congressman, gave a three hour speech in Peoria, Illinois in which he decried the extension of slavery into the territories.  The Republican Party was barely three months old.  Lincoln warned that slavery was a “monstrous injustice” based on the raw principle of “self-interest” at odds with the “fundamental principles of civil liberty.”

Lincoln was moved to action by the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, widely seen as a check on the growth of slavery in the territories.

At Peoria, Lincoln presented the economic, legal and moral case against slavery.

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