Also, guess who’s back and in the same vein, Former Labor Secretary Robert B. Reichhhhhh-uh. Now, if you are new to the program, you might be wondering why I pronounced his name that way. Well, Secretary Reichhhhhh-uh used to be a regular commentator on the McNeil/Lehrer Newshour back when McNeil was on it. He’d do his little commentaries, and at the end of his commentaries, he would go, ‘I am Robert B. Reichhhhhh-uh,’ and trail off. He doesn’t pronounce his name that way, this is just a TV gimmick, sort of like an on-screen signature. And so, as an excellent mimic, I simply expand and exaggerate what is already an affectation on the part of former Secretary Reichhhhhh-uh. At any rate, here’s what he says: ‘Every day, we hear the mantra that where capitalism flourishes, democracy is sure to follow. But that is not necessarily the case. Rather, today’s highly competitive ‘supercapitalism’ is endangering democracy by taking power out of the hands of ordinary citizens.’
I wonder if Barack Ubama and Robert Reichhhhhh-uh are coordinating their message here. He goes on to say that, ‘over the past 30 years, global capitalism has developed into a turbocharged, Web-based system in which consumers and producers can access almost anything just about anywhere — whether it’s global warming, lower wages, unstable jobs or greater inequality — these results of supercapitalism require a response.’ Folks, seriously now, you look at Ubama, which we’ll talk about, look at Hillary’s health care plan, hell, any of these Democrat candidates’ health care plans, you look at what this guy is now back saying, there is an all-out attack and assault on capitalism, which means market freedom, market economies. Your chance at prosperity is under assault by these people. I have been warning you about this. Their mission is to take as much control over society as possible, redistribute things so that people are equal and fair and all of this sort of thing. If you look at any point in time in history, in US civilization, any nation, any population that’s tried this, A, it’s failed, nobody’s ever become prosperous other than the leaders; B, it just doesn’t work. And that doesn’t matter.
See, the results never matter to these people. We’re only supposed to calculate and be influenced by their good intentions, and their big hearts, and their compassion, and their tolerance, and all the other gunk that they supposedly have monopolies on. When you examine the results of these kinds of programs, there’s no evidence to suggest that it’s the way to go. Now, let’s take these things he said: global warming, lower wages, unstable jobs, greater inequality. All of these things are the result of supercapitalism. Even if, ladies and gentlemen, all of our current warmth is manmade, if we stipulate that for the sake of this discussion, it has been a small price to pay for the health and prosperity and long lives we now enjoy. We’re up one-degree centigrade in the last hundred years. What the hell is so bad about that? Unless your starting point is that the climate 100 years ago was ideal, and we’re in the process of destroying it, and nobody knows that.
As for lower wages — lower wages are the result of supercapitalism? What is the lowest wage? Let me ask you a question. There is an answer to this. The lowest has always been the same thing. What is it? Come on, give me a figure. What’s the lowest wage? There is an answer to this. The lowest wage has always been the same. Zero. Zero dollars an hour. For the person who’s lost their job because some idiot bureaucrat decided that workers should be paid more than the market can bear, how many people have lost their jobs because of the minimum wage increase? The lowest wage has always been the same, zero. Wages are not lower; productivity is up. Reichhhhhh-uh is simply wrong and full of it here: Unstable jobs, a result of supercapitalism. Free market thrives on competition, and that’s what he focuses on here. Competition is causing arrest; causing angst; it’s causing controversy; it’s causing doom and gloom. That’s not what’s causing doom and gloom. What’s causing that is you people on the left, Secretary Reichhhhhh-uh, because you people are constantly pounding everybody with doom and gloom and pessimism, you and your buds in the Drive-By Media.
Competition has always been the thing that free markets thrive on. Where there’s competition, bad business decisions are weeded out naturally by the market! The market’s constantly readjusting to all this. It’s a good thing to have competition, but not to these guys, because in competition there are losers. (Crying.) Can’t have losers, because that’s sad. Greater inequality. All right, as I always say, let’s make everybody equal. The only way to do that is to spread misery equally. That’s the only way, and that’s what will end up happening. Folks, go back and read some of the great philosophers, go back and read some of the great conservative thinkers now and then, compare what they said, what they did, throw me in the loop with those great philosophers. Compare that with where we are headed, and we have come way off track. Do you realize Mrs. Clinton, and Edwards, and Ubama have proposed this national single-payer, whatever it is, health care plan, and have you seen a Republican pop up to denounce it? Romney, sort of, but they’ve got a free ride on this. They’ve established the premise. Nobody is disputing the premise on our side. Karl Rove today in the Wall Street Journal has a great op-ed on the real way to fix this, but he’s not a candidate.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: This is Margot in Chicago. Margot, you’re next. It’s great to have you on the EIB Network. Hello.
CALLER: Hi, Rush?
RUSH: Hi.
CALLER: Hi. I’m a retailer, and I want to go back to what you were talking about in the very beginning of the show about Robert Reich and the jobs.
RUSH: Yes.
CALLER: Being a retailer, I have seen so much manufacturing go to China. And, in business, if the competition is doing something right, well, you know, imitation is the highest form of flattery. So, often in business, you’ll adapt your business model to mimic that of a tough competitor. I think China qualifies there. So if you think of America as a business, and China as a competing business, I would like to know, what are the stats on China? I’d like to know, is there a minimum wage? How much is forcibly extracted from their paychecks, like workers’ compensation, Social Security, unemployment compensation, Medicare, health insurance, all of that? Because I pay about $1.24 for every dollar in wages and the employee sees about 76 cents on the dollar. So that’s the business data you need, and I think that the Democrat candidates —
RUSH: Wait a minute. Wait just a second. You raced through that, and this is important, and people have to hear this.
CALLER: Uh-huh.
RUSH: I want to repeat this. It costs you $1.24 for every dollar you pay somebody.
CALLER: Correct.
RUSH: Now, people are saying, ‘Rush, that doesn’t make sense to me.’ If you’re from Rio Linda, it doesn’t. What it means is, you’re actually being paid the $1.24, it’s just you’re only seeing a dollar of it.
CALLER: No, they’re only seeing about 76 cents (cross-talk) depending if they’re married or single, but they’re not really seeing the dollar, either, because then you’ve got your federal taxes taken out.
RUSH: Exactly right. It’s costing you a buck twenty-four to hire them, and they see 76 cents?
CALLER: Correct.
RUSH: Of every dollar they earn.
CALLER: That’s right.
RUSH: And so what she is asking here is, ‘Are ChiCom workers subjected to the same kind of circumstance?’ Actually, the ChiCom workers don’t make nearly as much as American employees or workers. I hate the word ‘worker.’ It’s a communist word.
CALLER: Right. But just employees, let’s just call them ’employees.’ But since China is getting — I mean, you can’t believe how many jobs they’ve snared from us in the last 20 years since I’ve been in business. It’s incredible.
RUSH: I know. And they’re putting lead in the toys.
CALLER: Yeah. Well, we know they’re cutting their costs that way. But, you know, I would really like to know, what is their minimum wage? What is that, and how much is taken out, because they’ve obviously got a winning business plan. So if the Democrats are going to emulate that or whoever, you know, to try and get jobs — I mean, the Democrats are always saying they want to create jobs and everything like that and I don’t think it’s the Chinese government creating the jobs, that’s for sure. It’s entrepreneurs.
RUSH: Ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah. I know the point that you are making, and, in theory, you’re right. But the Chinese government is effectively creating these jobs by opening up their market, which was closed. The biggest problem that the Chinese president has — his name is Hu Jintao — his biggest problem is creating 25 million new jobs every year. That’s how fast his economy is growing.
CALLER: Wow.
RUSH: The reason he needs to do that is because he needs to keep the people who don’t live in the cities in China out of the cities. He can’t have them coming to the city. He’ll lose control of his population. Those cities are infested with people now. They’ve got cars, the pollution, it’s a mess. He needs to keep his people that live outside the cities, outside the cities. He’s got to have jobs for them there. So factories are built there to keep them there, and so they are finding a way to create jobs by opening up opportunities for other nations to build factories there. And Hu Jintao is entirely happy with his population earning very little.
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: Minimum wage over there is staying alive.
CALLER: And another question is, what do they tax an American import that comes into their country versus what do we tax their imports coming into this country? What is the import tax on their exported goods coming into this country versus what they’re charging on something we make and send over there?
RUSH: There’s an inequity in it, the balance of trade is, a big deficit trade with them. At any rate, that stuff theoretically, now, if you leave it alone, it evens out. The problem is the ChiComs are going to leave it alone and we’re not going to leave it alone because we’ve got micromanagers of everything on the Democrat side running for president. You say Democrats want to create jobs, you tell me they want to create jobs. They’re trying to destroy the pharmaceutical industry. You talk about retail, their biggest enemy is Wal-Mart, and they’ve got Big Food now, fast food. I mean, the Democrat Party in this country is setting its sights on industries that are the engine of capitalism in this country, and it is not by accident this is happening.