The Middle Class Has Become the Enemy of the State (Statists and Elitists)

Elitists and moral supremacists, referring to themselves as "progressives," believe that they know so much more about justice, the market, and how we should live. In his book “Intellectuals and Society”, Thomas Sowell explains how the “anointed” believe that their advanced education and depth of knowledge in one field automatically makes them an authority on any field in which they wield an opinion. Sowell further explains that the most educated among us know only the smallest fraction of what is to be known. That these highly educated people may know so much more than any one of us does not mean that they know a fraction as much as do all of us.

Sowell also said: "Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it.”

The excerpt below is from "Obama’s (Middle) Class Warfare" by Cheryl Pass, September 30, 2011:

The elitists, statists, and the greens are not attacking the poor or themselves. And Obama is not going after “the wealthy” to pay their fair share. The object of their hatred is all aimed at the middle class. They can, will, and have controlled the poor. In fact they’ve been doing that for 100 years, since Wilson and FDR. Statists believe they have conquered those in the lower economic tier through welfare programs, unemployment insurance benefits, social services, public education, housing subsidies, and whatever other give-away programs they have used as bribes. And I could not argue their success. The poor, with their hands out, are not in a position to fight back. Having accomplished their goals with the poor, they now are laser focused on the middle class. And it is this middle class who is giving them a fight.

The middle class is still the group closest to the Constitution. The middle class is the group who has sacrificed the most lives in wars and defense of the nation. The middle class is the group who produced the goods that made the country self-sufficient. The middle class is the group of citizens who are outraged and appalled at the assault on the nation from within by the elites. So who does Obama perceive as his enemy? Who is the next victim class of the elite and statists? The middle class.

How do you kill the middle class? You eliminate their income potential. You kill their jobs. You destroy manufacturing. You make their lives miserable with regulations. You make their energy so expensive they cannot function. You ridicule their cultural and moral codes. You promote things to undermine their family structure. You tax them to death. You take over their communications. You attempt to track all of their activities. You humiliate them in airports, schools, media, and through their health care. You call them names. You inhibit their mobility and use their tax dollars to limit auto traffic, telling them they must walk or bike. You limit their food. You limit all of their independent survival abilities and micro-manage every aspect of their lives.

The middle class has become the enemy of the state (statists).

[Source]

How does someone advocate for a smaller government while having only ever received a paycheck from the government?

Maybe this is obvious to others, but lately I have been taken aback by the number of statists who have no understanding of the economic costs of socialism (to the individual or the greater society). The academic elitists use euphemisms such as "universal health care" to hide its true nature, but lately the masses have been calling it "free health care." The term "free-health care" is not a convenient shorthand for a complicated issue, but an indicator of a severe misunderstanding of basic economics.

Some of them just assume faceless wealthy people will take on the financial burden, but a lot of these statists genuinely believe that socialism is free. It's a simple concept that is obvious to libertarians/ancaps, but if their perspective is forgotten or ignored, the debate is over before it started, as any sophisticated defense of capitalism is built on a foundation of nothing.

The best scenario is that the capitalist will come across as a moron, and the worst is that he will come across as a monster. I'm getting called out for circlejerking and setting up a strawman. I posted similar thing joking around in /r/whowillbuildtheroads, but I'm being serious here about this phenomenon. There are plenty of lefties who believe in redistribution and social justice and whatnot, but if you project these arguments onto every single person and ignore the common existence of magical thinking, you are going to have a bad time.

I'm in medicine and I talk to people about health care every single day (especially outside of work when inhibitions are lowered). It is common for people to be sincerely confused about why anyone would be opposed to "free-health care."

My experience in real-life has not been the entitlement mentality of naive /r/politics "the rich owe us." They are an over-educated subgroup that is severely over-represented on the internet of the left-wing.

In real-life, a shockingly large number of people are somewhat illiterate. They can read enough to get by and fake it, but when you have them read out loud or explain concepts to you the facade they put on to fit into society becomes obvious. They have learned to repeat things that sound pretty good and are agreeable. Who do you think they are mimicking? Economists? OF COURSE NOT. Acknowledging that many, MANY people do not have a basic understanding of economics is not circlejerking or creating a stawman. It's accepting reality. Projecting economic understanding into their opinions is a strawman. [Source]

Elite Contempt for Ordinary Americans (Excerpt)

November 26, 2014

The Tenth Amendment Center - Universities are home to the academic elite — people who believe they have more intelligence than and superior wisdom to the masses. They believe they have been ordained to forcibly impose that wisdom on the rest of us. Academic elitists have what they consider to be good reasons for restricting the freedom of others. But every tyrant who has ever lived has had what he considered good reasons.

America’s elite found on university campuses, in news media and in political office are chief supporters of reduced private property rights and reduced rights to profits, and they are anti-competition and pro-monopoly.

They are pro-control and coercion by the state. Their plan requires the elimination or attenuation of the free market and what is implied by it — voluntary exchange. Their reasoning is simple. Tyrants do not trust that people acting voluntarily will do what the tyrants think they should do. Therefore, tyrants want to replace the market and voluntary exchange with economic planning. Economic planning is nothing more than the forcible superseding of other people’s plans by the powerful elite backed up by the brute force of government.

In a 1991 speech, Yale University President Benno Schmidt warned: “The most serious problems of freedom of expression in our society today exist on our campuses. The assumption seems to be that the purpose of education is to induce correct opinion rather than to search for wisdom and to liberate the mind.”

Jonathan Gruber, MIT economist and paid architect of Obamacare, has shocked and disgusted many Americans. I watched the videos of Gruber’s speeches. Academics raised little concern as to either the dishonesty of Obamacare or the claim that Americans were too stupid to understand.

A study by my George Mason University colleague Daniel B. Klein, along with Charlotta Stern of the Swedish Institute for Social Research, titled “Professors and Their Politics: The Policy Views of Social Scientists” (http://tinyurl.com/qxne3db) concluded:

“The academic social sciences are pretty much a one-party system. Were the Democratic tent broad, the one-party system might have intellectual diversity. But the data show almost no diversity of opinion among the Democratic professors when it comes to the regulatory, redistributive state: they like it. Especially when it comes to the minimum wage, workplace-safety regulation, pharmaceutical regulation, environmental regulation, discrimination regulation, gun control, income redistribution, and public schooling.”

Focusing only on Professor Gruber’s arrogance, we ignore the more important fact that he is highly representative of the academic mindset — the people who are brainwashing our youngsters.