Comments by "Harry Mills" (@harrymills2770) on "What I Lost by Leaving the Left & Why So Few Stand Up | David Horowitz | POLITICS | Rubin Report" video.

  1.  @rtorres4132  This has gone on since long before Reagan and Thatcher. Just look at how rights-of-way were doled out to robber barons for the transcontinental railroad, and how protecting that corporate welfare justified killing the buffalo and destroying the native population. And every time the public gets fed up with the robber barons, the U.S. Gov't creates another agency to protect the robber barons in the name of restraining the robber barons.
    6
  2. Almost since our nation's birth, there have been robber barons eager to influence the government to tilt the playing field in their favor. It's called crony capitalism and it seeped into our system very early, with such things as land grants to robber barons and thieves to build the transcontinental railroad. The pesky natives obstructed this "noble goal," and so the robber barons got the U.S. Cavalry to back their play. This and other corrupt/fascist plays by our government throughout its history are what fuel the Howard-Zinn characterization of American history. We didn't CURE our ills by asking government to solve them. We made them worse, or just created OTHER problems, also 'requiring' government intervention (i.e. force) to "fix." Zinn gets some things right, but totally mischaracterizes things to fit HIS state-centric world view. Free-market capitalism is good. Crony capitalism is bad. Progressives claim that the latter is the former "run amuck,' when the only problem with free-market capitalism is it creates so much wealth that even idiot socialists can survive long enough to destroy it. Where America went wrong was NOT with free markets. Where it went wrong was when it DEPARTED from free markets, in the name of whatever latest lie they were feeding the public. Not a HUGE Ayn Rand fan, but her book, "Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal" gives chapter and verse on regulatory capture and crony capitalism dating back to the 19th Century. This isn't about Reagan and Thatcher, although they both did little to slow the march towards a peculiar, fascist-flavored form of socialism. If we just stuck to our limited-government principles in the first place, we wouldn't be ruled by multinational corporations, today. Government isn't the scourge of the robber barons. It's their partner in crime, and the most powerful partner the corporations could have hoped for.
    1
  3. They definitely sold us out on trade deals. Some of that was to keep a lid on prices so the people at home didn't rebel at our government's inflationary monetary policies. Slave labor, abroad, helps to keep that under wraps. Also, these very favorable trade deals for our trading partners is a way they manufactured consent to build alliances and make it SEEM like the wars they wanted to fight were broadly supported around the world. That was a huge part of getting NATO to go along with our adventurism in the Middle East.
    1