Windows into the Progressive Mind: In Their Own Words

Film maker and proud Democrat Michael Moore, Communist theocrat:

Morgan asked Moore about his opposition to capitalism, especially given Moore’s  financial success as a filmmaker. When asked if his movie-making amounted to a capitalist endeavor, Moore replied “Is it really?” He then noted that “the only reason I do well is because people want to see my movies,” before indicting the modern financial system as a corruption of capitalism, a “shell game.”

As Moore concluded his remarks on capitalism, he said that “it’s not American.” Additionally, he said “it’s not Christian or Jewish,” after citing 46 million poor people that Moore believes the capitalist economic system neglects. “None of the major religions, in fact they all,” Moore said, “say it’s one of the worst sins you could commit, is to take such a large piece of the pie while others suffer.”

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Progressive and former Obama economic adviser Peter Orszag wants to de-democratize America to avoid “polarization“:

To solve the serious problems facing our country, we need to minimize the harm from legislative inertia by relying more on automatic policies and depoliticized commissions for certain policy decisions. In other words, radical as it sounds, we need to counter the gridlock of our political institutions by making them a bit less democratic.

Proposals abound for expanding this type of process. In the late ’90s, economist Alan Blinder proposed shifting responsibility for tax policy to a Fed-like institution of experts. Stephen Flynn of the Center for National Policy has proposed a similar process for infrastructure decisions—and, indeed, creating an infrastructure bank, as President Obama has proposed, would accomplish much the same goal. Such a bank would be empowered to select individual infrastructure projects, thereby removing some decision-making power from Congress.

Perhaps the most dramatic example of this idea is the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB), created as part of the recent health care reform legislation. The IPAB will be an independent panel of medical experts tasked with devising changes to Medicare’s payment system. In each year that Medicare’s per capita costs exceed a certain threshold, the ipab is responsible for making proposals to reduce projected cost growth. The proposals take effect automatically unless Congress specifically passes legislation blocking them and the president signs that legislation.

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Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren doesn’t think much of entrepreneurs:

 There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there — good for you.

But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory.

Now look. You built a factory and it turned into something terrific or a great idea — God bless! Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.

Putting these together, if you succeed, even despite the left’s anti-business laws, you should be grateful and be a good little leftist anyway.  Capitalism is good until it enriches actual capitalists. Theocracy is bad except when a Progressive can use it to shame a conservative into becoming a Progressive. Democracy is good until non-leftists win, at which time “polarization” demands non-democratic rule by Progressive experts.

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