Don’t Worry About Obama’s Nationalization Rhetoric, Worry About Republican Betrayal

When Gary DeMar published his article defending voting for the Mormon Romney, “Some Think Another Obama Term Would Be Good for America,” I was quite disappointed. It was obvious that he misrepresented his “conservative/libertarian/anti-establishment” opponents. None of us has ever said that “another Obama term would be good for America.” The issue has always been comparing Romney and Obama, not making absolute statements about Obama’s second term. I, for one, said the following on my Facebook wall:

If the choice is between 4 more years of open socialism vs. 8 more years of covert socialism, I prefer the 4 years. Romney is exactly the same as Obama, with the only difference that Obama has only 4 more years to go.

“If the choice is . . . I prefer . . .” This is way different from saying that “another Obama term would be good for America.” Gary DeMar spent part of his career being vilified and misrepresented by dispensationalists and amillennialists who never read his books but made up false quotes to attack his postmillennial, theonomic position. That is because they knew they had no good, honest argument against him. Now Gary is engaging in the same practice. I’d imagine that is because the knows he has no good, honest arguments for his voting for Romney.

Not to mention his curious remark that he is one of the supporters of Ron Paul. If he is, he must be part of a clandestine group that has made a vow to never make their political preferences public. Because I have never seen Gary DeMar support Ron Paul in any direct or indirect way, when it mattered.

Gary’s dishonest dealing with his opponents aside, I’d like to take on his other arguments in the article because I believe they are very important.

They are important because Gary continues the same tactics from his previous defenses of voting for Romney: “Vote for Romney because Obama is scary.” In other words, Gary is simply using the same propaganda technique which the establishment has used on the American voter for a generation now: Fear. “Vote for our guy because the other guy is scary. Very scary. Here’s what he wants to do to you. You don’t want that, do you.” Just like Biden: “They’ll put y’all in chains.”

And usually the fact that “our guy” has done the same things and intend to continue doing them is omitted from the propaganda.

So, Gary says this time that the scary thing Obama would do is he would nationalize the economy. And, “once a classic car insurance quote business is nationalized, it’s hard to privatize it again.” Therefore, be afraid of Obama and vote for Romney.

May be this is the place to remind Gary that the auto industry bailout which effectively nationalized it, was introduced by George W. Bush, and enthusiastically approved and hailed by Mitt Romney. To say that Romney “probably” wouldn’t do such a thing is to engage in willful amnesia. Willful amnesia is never a convincing argument. But I want to move to the more important problems in Gary’s post.

I don’t know how much experience Gary has with an economy that has been nationalized, and with the process of privatizing it back. Not much, I would imagine. I have quite an experience with it. I lived in a nationalized economy. I saw how it works. And I was present when it was privatized. Not only that. An entry that I usually omit from my resume here in the US – it has no specific value for the US market anyway, yet – is that for a year I was part of a privatization team for a large government-owned chemical plant (1 million tons production capacity annually) in Bulgaria, and a Trade Manager of that same plant. I know better than Gary which part of the process is easy and which part is not that easy.

Contrary to what Gary says, nationalizing an economy is a difficult and laborious process. It takes either a bloody revolution – like Eastern Europe – or many, many years of careful legislative development – like Western Europe or the United States. People do not easily surrender their ownership. They have to be forced to do it: either at the point of a gun, or by legislative actions which make it unprofitable to own or operate a business. The first takes a lot of resources, especially in a nation of over 90 million private gun owners. The second takes a lot of time given the fact that private business is very resilient, and it is always a step ahead of government control and regulations; let alone the fact that too many regulations too early would close the business and would create disaffected voters.

Even in Eastern Europe, in some countries like Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia, not everything was nationalized. Not all of the agricultural land was nationalized, and some small businesses and stores remained in private hands. And in Bulgaria after 1980, the government did allow certain measure of private ownership of small businesses. Even the Communists who had all the guns couldn’t nationalize everything.

In fact, the truth is that a truly private business can never be nationalized: The overt nationalization of a private business by legislative action is possible only when the business has been covertly nationalized by previous acts of the government and of the business itself.

And this is exactly what happened to the auto industry: The auto industry in the US was nationalized long before 2008, and that process of nationalization was not initiated by the US government but by the industry itself. It was under way, of course, as early as the 1940s when the industry acquired the habit to live off government commissions. In the period between 1945 and 1979 the nationalization grew by bits and pieces, mainly by the increasing government intervention in favor of the trade unions; but also by the demands of the industry bosses for more tariff protection and higher regulations, in order to keep the foreign competitors and the newcomers out. Big Business and Big Labor, therefore, worked together to increase the dependance of their industry on the government – a very clear indication that the fascist idea of the corporate state did not die with Mussolini. The first clear sign that the auto industry was not a free market industry anymore was the 1979 bailout of Chrysler. Corporate welfare increased enormously, strengthening the strings between Washington DC and Detroit. An additional level of dependance of the industry on the government can be seen in the fact that all auto companies are listed on the stock exchanges, and the financial market itself is closely tied to the policies of the Federal Reserve. Even before 2008, auto makers stood and fell with the US government; or, to put it in a better way, lied in the same bed with the US government. They were de facto nationalized long before they were nationalized de jure. No government can easily nationalize a company, unless it has already become dependent on the government, by the choice of the owners of the company themselves.

So when Obama said that he wanted to do it to the “manufacturing jobs,” he knew what he was talking about. For most of the manufacturing jobs in the US are owned by corporations who – just like the auto industry – are already nationalized, if not directly, at least by their dependance on the US government.

Obama can’t nationalize the small companies, those that have remained private, outside of the reach of the government-sponsored unions, outside of the corrupting influence of corporate welfare and government protection against competitors. That would be dangerous to do, politically.

In fact, nationalizing even that compromised, addicted to government welfare and protection part of the industry would be politically dangerous for the elite. Experience teaches us that nationalizing a company does not save the company, if it has started on its way to bankruptcy. And the French experience of the last 40 years tells us that a successful company that is nationalized, soon goes into bankruptcy. For a government that is struggling under a mountain of debt, having to constantly bailout big businesses will spell bankruptcy for the government itself. Obama’s rhetoric may be just rhetoric. He knows that GM is now heading to new bankruptcy, after the bailout 4 years ago.

Also, nationalizing a business has the additional disadvantage that it destroys the influence of the unions. Strange as it may sound, unions in the US have always been staunch opponents of nationalization. And no wonder. When the business is private, the unions have the owners for their opponent, with the government on the side of the unions. When a business is nationalized, the government is the owner, and the unions oppose the government. And no one opposes a socialist government successfully. Unions were useless in Eastern Europe under Communism, and had no influence at all, before Lech Walesa created the first independent union in Poland which openly declared war on the Communist government. Obama will meet serious opposition from the unions if he decides to move to nationalize the manufacturing industries.

So, contrary to Gary’s scare tactics, there is nothing to fear of Obama’s empty rhetoric. What he can nationalize, is already nationalized, and that not by the government but by the industry bosses themselves. An open nationalization of those industries will only accelerate their bankruptcy, and the bankruptcy of the US government. And it would destroy the remaining influence of the trade unions. Obama’s rhetoric is empty, and it is used in the same way as Romney uses his rhetoric: to please the hearers, not to denote true intentions.

Let’s imagine Obama proceeds to nationalize those industries nevertheless. Is it hard to privatize them again?

Not at all. After more than 40 years of government ownership over the big industries, nations like Poland, Czechoslovakia, Slovenia, Lithuania, Estonia, were able to completely decentralize and privatize their economies within a few years. Bulgaria and Romania lagged behind but only because the process started much later. In Bulgaria, it started in earnest only in 1997. By 2001 there was no significant government share in the economy, except in a few monopolies. By 2005 even those monopolies were privatized, and the market was fairly deregulated and demonopolized. But even before 1997, right after the fall of Communism in 1989, small private businesses were emerging in every area, from agriculture to machine tools production to education and software. Even firearms production – an area traditionally reserved for government companies in Eastern Europe – saw the growth of its own private sector. (The Arcus 94 and Arcus 98DA handguns, developed and produced in Bulgaria, are a good example.)

Here again, Gary speaks out of his lack of experience, and lack of understanding of the realities in the economy. Or may be he is using the typical neocon scare tactics. Nationalization is very difficult; it takes a violent revolution or long years of legislative action and surrender on the part of the business owners to the state. Privatization doesn’t take a violent revolution, and it doesn’t take long years; and it doesn’t take an awful lot of legislation. Whatever Obama does, can be repaired easily; no need to fret about it, and to surrender to the neocons’ political manipulation. We do not need Romney to save America. In fact, Romney has no intentions to save it anyway.

What we should be afraid of is the betrayal of the Republican Party. No other word can describe the violent attempts by the GOP establishment to push on the conservative voters a man who is not a conservative, and in fact, is no different than Obama. Romney, in fact, is way to the left of Al Gore in 1990, for example. Voting for Romney is not an “incremental step,” it is a radical retreat, a break with all the principles of Christianity and conservatism. Voting for him as a “conservative” is a betrayal.

And betrayal is what we need to be worried about, before we worry about Obama’s rhetoric.

Therefore, again, Gary’s argument for voting for Romney is moot. A true Christian can not be motivated by fear, and forced to fall in the hands of a corrupt establishment and its pawn who is a member of a Satanic cult. No matter what manipulation of fear the establishment uses on us, we should stand on our principles, not driven by fear. And let God sort it out.

As Rushdoony said, “History has never been dominated by majorities but by the committed few who stood unconditionally on their faith.”