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Jan. 2, 2009 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:16
January 2, 2009, Friday, Hour #2
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Time Text
Hey, happy new year, America.
This is Mark Stein in for Rush.
America's anchorman is away.
And this is your undocumented anchor man here for the whole show.
Rush will be back on Monday.
But even though Rush isn't here, some things never change.
Wive from New York City.
It's open line Friday!
Yeah, Open Line Friday, 1-800-282-2882.
You know how it works.
Monday to Thursday, Rush rules the roost with an iron rod.
But on Friday, he lets the inmates run the asylum.
Whatever you want to talk about, whatever you want to talk about.
Do you think the bailout is too small?
This is bothering me, you know.
I didn't like the sound of that $700 billion when it was first mentioned back in September.
$700 billion bailout for whatever it was, the banks back then.
I think that was before GM and Ford wanted their piece of it.
And $700 billion is like a sort of strange number, isn't it?
And I love the lady from the Treasury Department who explained that the way they'd chosen the $700 billion was because they wanted like a really big number, but not too round, because it wouldn't sound convincing enough.
So they didn't want to say $1 trillion, and they didn't want to say $500 billion.
But $700 billion is like humongous, but not too round so that it sounds unconvincing.
It sounds as if they've just pulled it out of the air, which in fact they had.
But unfortunately for us, they didn't pull enough money out of the air.
So now they're coming back for more.
I gather, by the way, the Treasury Secretary, Henry Paulson, has already spent the money that Congress allowed him to spend.
He's now promised all these other people standing in line for the bailout that they're going to get theirs.
But he hasn't actually got any hard cash still to give them.
So we now need a bailout for the bailout.
We've got to have a bailout for the bailout.
Here in the United States of Bailoutistan, we do not have a big enough bailout.
We've got to have a big enough bailout.
And the Congressional Progressive Caucus is now saying we need to go immediately to a $1 trillion recovery plan.
The co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, I don't know what they are, by the way, I just don't like the sound of them.
The CPC co-chair, Representative Lynn Woolsey of California, said, quote, anything much less than $1 trillion would be like trying to put out a forest fire with a squirt gun.
So that's $700 billion, $700 billion, it sounds a lot to you, may sound a lot to you, but if you're a congressional legislator, that's just a squirt gun, man.
What was it they used to say back in the days when, in the early days of big government, a million here, a million there, pretty soon you're talking about real money.
Now, you know, a trillion here, a trillion there.
You're talking about nothing.
You're talking about peanuts, man.
We are going to need, you cannot get the numbers, you cannot buy a calculator that's got a, you can put enough zeros on on the end to figure out what this bailout is going to is going to cost us.
We've got to bail out everything.
Got to bail out everything.
And the problem for me, you may have heard, I believe it was a Polish caller.
HR confirms that.
Polish caller called into Rush the other day, said, what the hell is going on with America?
This is why I scrammed out of Poland.
Most of us who have come to America have come from places that have tried all this stuff in the past.
You know, it's nothing new, any of this.
You think it seems weird that the government should be owning automobile manufacturers?
It doesn't seem weird in Eastern Europe.
I remember doing a television film in Hungary just after the fall of communism and MTV, not the thing that shows Michael Jackson prancing around, but the MTV stands for Madia Television.
It's the Hungarian state television network.
And they put a Hungarian limousine at my disposal, which sounded pretty fancy until I got into it.
It was one of those things where the exhaust comes up straight out from under the car and into the rear passenger seat.
So like I was wreathed in a cloud of black smoke after going like 120 yards in this thing.
That was an automobile manufactured by the Hungarian government.
The government should not be making your car.
The problem is that these things, they don't just make your car in Eastern Europe.
They made it in Britain, Britain in the 1970s.
People think of Britain as being, you know, by the standards of these things.
Obviously, Britain isn't as regarded as a bastion of freedom and individual liberty as the United States is, but we don't think of it as a communist basket case.
In the 1970s, it was a communist basket case.
The BBC made a film about the famous Cambridge spies.
These were the guys, Philby Burgess and MacLean, who worked for MI5, the domestic intelligence agency, and all turned out to be communist agents.
What's the guy called in, if you watch the James Bond films, M. M, who's the head, who's James Bond's boss, played by Judy Dench currently.
One of these guys was in line to become M. In real life, he's called C. Don't know why they changed the letter for the James Bond films.
You have to take that up with Ian Fleming.
But he's called C in real life, not M.
And the guy in line to become C was a communist agent.
And the BBC made a film about them at the end of the 1970s and about them living their post-traitorous life in retirement in Moscow in drab Soviet-era apartments.
And they think to yourself, well, where can you go to film drab Soviet-era public housing?
And they picked the town of Dundee in Scotland, because by the 1970s, Dundee in Scotland was indistinguishable from a Soviet basket case state.
In Britain, in the 1970s, everything was nationalised.
The steel industry was British steel.
The coal industry was British coal.
And the car manufacturing industry was called British Leyland.
They used to make a lot of cars in Britain.
The famous names, Rover, Jaguar, Triumph.
And eventually they'd all been merged into one and they were owned by the government.
The government made your car when it was in the mood.
It was very hard to actually get them to make your car on a regular basis.
They would do like they do here.
They'd announce the new models.
And you would say, wow, that looks great.
What a fantastic car.
You know, they would do the same kind of fancy car ads that you see here in the US.
They'd show the new Jaguar, the new rover, the guy sitting in the seat with the hot-looking babe in the passenger seat, and they'd be going around the hairpin bends in the south of France and the new thing.
And they say, go and get your new rover, go and get your new Jaguar.
And then you went to the showroom to get your new rover or your new Jaguar, and you had to put your name down on a six-month waiting list.
It was like, it was indistinguishable from the Soviet-era housing and putting your name down for an apartment in Moscow or Leningrad.
And there was a famous man, who was like the most famous man in the country.
He was like the equivalent of the UAW.
He was the union leader called, he was called Red Robo.
He was the car workers guy, and he was a communist, and that's why they called him Red Robbo.
But he was going in to see the prime minister every week, every two weeks, as the government frantically tried to persuade the unionized car workers to get back to stop being on strike and to go back to making a car.
The print unions were on strike all the time in Britain, which nobody would notice here in that town in Connecticut where nobody's buying the newspaper anyway.
The print unions went on strike.
Nobody, it'll be like they say, hey, hey, they haven't been bringing out the newspaper for six months.
Who knew?
But in those days, people still read the newspaper, and the print unions were always on strike.
The country was bankrupt.
At one point, they had to, the electricity guys were on strike, and the TV had to shut down, I think it was at 9 o'clock at night, 9 o'clock at night, because they didn't have enough electricity for the BBC after 9 o'clock at night.
So you remember, you think back to America in the 70s, and it's like a glorious golden, I like sure you had Jimmy Carter, but you still could watch TV after 9 o'clock at night.
And yes, you had like cheesecloth shirts, but you could still go and buy a car in a week or two.
And yeah, yeah, yeah, you still had the Partridge family.
But life was not total hell.
For a lot of people living in the United States now, the 70s, not just in Eastern Europe, but in Western Europe and Britain and a lot of other places, was hell.
And now all the policies that drove those countries into stagnation and hyperinflation, President-elect Obama is wanting to introduce here.
And that's the real danger, I would say.
That's the real danger.
You know, people say, I get a lot of people say to me, you know, Obama's a Marxist, Obama's a socialist.
It doesn't really matter what Obama is.
Who knows what he is, really?
I mean, he's been very, and whatever he is, if it suits him, he'll detach himself from whatever that position was.
You know, he sat listening to that guy in church for 20 years and didn't bother him.
And then when it became inconvenient, poomf, the guy's out the door.
But, but the bigger problem is that the remorseless left-wing drift, just incrementally, almost imperceptibly, the left-wing drift that goes on in this society toward the kind of societies they have now in Scandinavia and in Belgium and in Germany and France.
And that way lies stagnation.
That way lies the decline and the sapping of American will and the deterioration of American energy.
And take it from, if you don't want to take it from me, take it from that Polish guy who called in a couple of weeks back.
That for those of us who came to this country, this is the last stop.
There's nowhere else to go.
Until Obama introduces his plan to lower the oceans and the lost city of Atlantis emerges from the waves, America is the last stop.
We have come to this country because Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Scandinavia, and a lot of other places have all tried this stuff and it does not work.
It leads incrementally, almost imperceptibly, to long-term decline.
And I don't want that to happen in this country.
That's why I'm here.
That's why I stand for individual liberty.
I stand for the entrepreneurial spirit.
And I stand for the self-reliant citizenry on which this great republic was founded.
1-800-282-2882.
It's Open Line Friday on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
Mark Stein in for Rush with more straight ahead.
Mark Stein on the EIB network, Infra Rush.
Rush is back Monday.
1-800-282-2882.
Arian in Los Angeles.
Thanks for waiting.
You're on the air at the EIB network.
Happy New Year.
Top of the morning theater, Mark.
Yep, top of the morning to you.
Top of the morning to you, Bigara.
Yeah, listen, I want to ask you something.
Now, before I tell you my point, I want to make sure I don't make any assumptions here.
I assume at one point you believed, or still do believe, or believe whatever, yes, that if democracy came to Iraq, it might spread throughout the region, yes?
I don't use the word democracy.
I do use the word liberty.
Liberty, liberty.
Fair enough.
And by the way, that is a fair argument.
I hope you're right.
And I think maybe if democracy is in the Middle East, that might be better.
Maybe, yes.
Here's what I don't understand, though.
A lot of people who come up with this argument either don't know or care or realize there is a democratic country right in that region.
It's right by Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, not that far from Iraq and not that far from Saudi Arabia, the world's largest democracy, and in my opinion, a legit democracy.
Do you know which democratic country I'm talking about?
Are you talking about India?
Yes.
So here's my question to you.
I have two questions, at least for now.
Number one, is it fair to say democracy really hasn't spread from India throughout the rest of the region as much as some of us would like it to?
Well, the interesting thing is democracy doesn't spread in the world.
Liberty, I'm sorry.
In that sense.
One way to look at it is imagine the British invested a lot of time in India in building the bulwark of democracy.
If India had been like the Middle East, if it hadn't had the British rule up to 1948, it would look like the Arabian Peninsula does today.
It would be a sort of crazy quilt of kleptocrat sultans and various psychotic dictatorships.
Well, hold on, hold on, hold on.
That's not fair.
I hope this doesn't come into a new sub-argument.
You know, I'm an Indian guy.
My parents were in the country.
No, no, I'm not.
No, but I'm...
Hear me out, hear me out.
Yeah.
India, you have to go by its history.
You could be right.
Maybe it would be like the Arabian Peninsula, yes.
But you can judge a country by its history.
And throughout India's long and tragic history, there have been plenty of times where people of all faiths can live in this country, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, whatever, and live in relative peace.
There have been times where there have been violence.
I don't know if I'd go that far to say it would be like the Arabian Peninsula.
But when I called you, I wanted to ask you.
No, no, but just to deal with that point, I think that one of the conditions for real democracy, by democracy, I never mean, I never mean holding an election, you fly in Jimmy Carter and the UN observers, they say the election is free and fair, and they fly out, and the next day the guy gets back to killing all his enemies.
What I mean is the conditions for liberty, by which I think you need enforceable property rights, you need a justice system, you need a mercantile middle class.
India has all those things.
I take your point that it has a different history from the Middle East, but a lot of those things were not present in its tradition.
But, you know, I'm not arguing about the benefits of British colonialism because the British had the Middle East too.
The British invented Jordan and Iraq, and they botched the job.
So these things can go either way.
Yeah, forgive me for trying to cut you off.
I just don't know how much time I have as a follower.
Have your second point.
Okay.
I just have two simple questions.
I assume, number one, you agree that in the last few decades, democracy, liberty, whatever, yes, really hasn't spread from India as much as some of us would like it to throughout the rest of the Middle East, right?
No, it certainly hasn't spread.
Okay, now here's my basic question I want to ask you.
If democracy really, or liberty or whatever, yes, hasn't really spread from India throughout the rest of the region as some of us would like it to, why do you think it'll spread from Iraq if it hasn't spread from India?
Well, I don't, I don't, as I said, I don't believe it does spread.
It's a difficult thing to create, to grow genuinely free societies in arid soil where they have never been known is one of the hardest tasks ever.
If you look at the history of the European empires, they went all over the world.
They came to the Americas.
They went to Africa.
They went to Australia and the Pacific.
They all sailed around the Middle East.
They understood that the Arab world was a tough nut to crack.
And by the time the European empires got their hands on the Middle East after the First World War, they were too exhausted to do anything with it.
Hence the botched creation of states like Syria.
There's a problem with that.
And Iran.
There's a problem with that argument.
I'll tell you what the problem is.
You are right that certain soils in that region, in general, have not had democracy.
Yes, but you use the word Arab.
There are plenty of countries in that region which I assumed you want democracy to go to.
They're not Arab countries like Pakistan, like Afghanistan, like Iran.
And these are countries that have a history in that region of being linked to India and have lived in peace at times.
It can happen at some point.
No, I think Iran, I think if you look at Iran, I think Pakistan, the creation of Pakistan was a disaster and it has got worse over 60 years.
Iran was in many ways under the Shah a flawed society, but one that was showing signs of in which Islam had reached an accommodation with modernity.
You cannot, you can't, democracy doesn't spread.
It's not like some Eurasian milfoil in a pond that it just takes it over.
You have to do the hard work of seeding it.
And that doesn't come naturally to the United States because the United States is a country that takes the view that if free men want to live in freedom, they will choose it for themselves.
Sometimes it isn't as obvious.
I'm confused about something because that's why when I called your show, I asked you if democracy, or as you said, liberty, can spread.
And you kind of implied that, I hope you don't think I'm fighting with you, but you kind of implied that you think it can spread or go from Iraq.
But now you're saying that it doesn't think of it as spreading.
No, I don't.
I think you build it.
I think you build it.
Iraq is the least worst state in that part of the world.
Jordan, which again is one of the more benign Arab states, nevertheless has a deformed political culture.
And the trouble is that that part of the world was allowed to marinate in its pathologies, and by the time of September 11th, was exporting its pathologies to the rest of the planet.
That has to stop.
And liberty is the honorable weapon in America's armory.
This discussion will go on, Arianne, because it is the big question over our time.
You know, whether America believes only in, if you like, in cheeseburger imperialism, in exporting cheeseburgers and Britney Spears records and all the rest of it, or whether it's willing to do the hard work of helping seed free societies in parts of the world that has never known them.
That's still an open question.
Willa, more straight ahead, Open Line Friday on the EIB Network.
Hey, that's kind of mellow for the day after New Year.
That's the way we are.
We're easing gently into the new dawn of the Obama era.
Mark Stein in for Rush, Rush Back Monday, 1-800-282-2882.
You know, we were talking at the top of the hour about this kind of incremental decline, which is, you know, it's not the wildest topic to start the year with, but it's like something I worry about.
The idea that somehow rampant, untrammeled capitalism read in tooth and claw is what has brought us to the current situation is complete nonsense.
It's complete nonsense.
It's this kind of incremental distortion, small incremental distortions of market capitalism, like this, whatever it's called, the Community Reinvestment Act, which came in 30 years ago, basically to give people who wouldn't qualify for mortgages mortgages.
Basically, to destroy the relationship of, destroy risk assessment, which is the foundation of capitalism.
You know, if you go in to your banker and you say, I'd like to borrow half a million dollars, and he goes, What for?
You want to start a business?
You want to buy a home?
And you go, no, I was thinking of spending it on Coke and hookers.
He'll say, No, sorry, I'm not going to give it to you.
That's risk assessment.
That's risk assessment.
That is the bedrock of capitalism.
If you have the government intervene in risk assessment, you distort the market.
You don't do it in a big way.
This like Community Reinvestment Act thing 30 years ago wasn't a big deal.
And then in the 90s, they add to it and they add to it and they add to it.
And eventually it's like barnacles on the rusting hulk of capitalism.
And capitalism can no longer function because it's got too many barnacles on it.
And that is what this country has.
69,428.
69,428.
That's the number of pages in the 2006 edition of the Federal Register.
That's the rules and regulations you, you, have to comply with if you're stupid enough to start a business.
I flew back to my home in New Hampshire a couple of weeks ago, and I go into the office the day after I get back, and my assistant is in the middle of filling in this form.
And like, I'm impatient to get going, start the day, do some productive work that will generate income and will raise revenue and enable me to grow my business and hire more employees and all the rest of it.
And she's filling in this form.
So after about 10 minutes of watching her, I say, well, what the hell is that?
And she goes, it's a form from the Department of Labor that she's been sent and she's got to fill in under penalty of whatever they do with it now.
So she's got to fill in the form.
Question 13 or whatever it was is, in the course of your work, do you work with uranium?
I'm a writer.
You know, I don't, you know, so she's answering the question, do we work with uranium a lot around here?
No, of course we don't.
I'm a writer.
How many people does the United States government ask that stupid question to before they get a positive answer?
They send it out to me, they send it out to your hairdresser, they send it out to your grocery send it out to your car salesman, and we're all sitting there every day going, do in the course of your work, do you, in the course of your business, do you work with uranium?
No.
Well, what answer are they expecting?
Yes, I work with uranium.
I'm a columnist.
I'm a guest host on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
I like to work with uranium just to get myself pumped up and ready to go on air.
I work with uranium because the whole column writing business wasn't working out.
But fortunately, I got a call from Makhmoud Akhmadinejad, and he said, we'd like to outsource the Iranian nuclear program to you.
So I've got the uranium down in the basement.
The federal government is asking every business in the country whether people work with uranium.
This is a complete waste of time.
And anyone who goes into business in this country is dealing with this nonsense every day of the week.
You know, if you really wanted to sort out the problems in this country, you would lower the corporate tax rates.
You know, our corporate tax rates in the United States are a third higher than Sweden.
Sweden.
The socialist utopia.
Is it asking too much to ask that United States corporate tax rates be competitive with the Scandinavian socialist utopia?
This is the real problem here.
I mean, you know, Sweden has got these world companies.
What's this furniture?
What's the furniture store called?
IKEA, IKEA.
You know, where you go along and you buy this cheap furniture and you then spend the whole week trying to put the thing together.
And in the amount of man-hours you have invested in trying to assemble the piece of furniture you bought from IKEA, you could have gone to Sotheby's and bought a Queen Anne antique chair at auction for the cost of the man hours you got trying to put the cheap furniture together from IKEA.
IKEA is a world company from Sweden where corporate tax rates are a third lower than the United States.
That will, again, it's not a big thing.
And it's an unsympathetic argument, but because everyone thinks corporations are faceless beings.
They're not corporations.
A corporation doesn't pay tax.
Human beings who own the corporation and who work for the corporation and ultimately the ones who buy the products of that corporation pay the tax.
So every time some class warrior in the Democratic Party is saying we need to increase corporation taxes, we need a windfall profit tax and all the court.
There's no such thing as a corporation.
A corporation doesn't file a tax return.
You don't go in to Globo Corp HQ and the Globo Corp HQ is sitting there with a pen in its right-hand wing of the building filling in the tax return.
It's human beings to whom that corporate tax gets onto.
And U.S. corporate taxes are too high.
And if the Republican Party cannot stand for simple economic liberty to keep U.S. corporate tax rates competitive with Sweden, then that is surely the least we're entitled to ask of them.
And they don't, and they don't.
And that makes me very sad.
Let us take a call from a fellow foreigner.
Donald is calling from Ontario, which is in the Dominion of Canada.
Donald, welcome to the EIB network.
Thank you, Mark.
Which part of Ontario are you in, by the way?
Because if you were in a regular U.S. jurisdiction, they'd put the town up.
But they've just told me your sinister, exotic foreign province.
So which part of Ontario are you in?
Southern Ontario, near Detroit.
Oh, are you in Windsor?
No, across the border or further east from Windsor.
Oh, right.
Okay.
Well, that's the trivial pursuit question.
Which direction do you drive from Detroit to get to Canada?
And you drive southeast.
You're in the bit of Canada that's south of the United States.
Thanks for joining us, Donald, and Happy New Year to you.
You still celebrate New Year up in Canada or has it been abolished by the government?
No, we're still celebrating New Year's.
Because I thought it might be like Thanksgiving that you'd get it around November the 3rd or something.
But you still get it on the regular old timeframe, do you?
Yes.
Okay.
Happy New Year to you, Donald.
Thank you.
I wanted to express my appreciation for your writing.
I've appreciated it.
And I do a lot of public speaking, and I've quoted quite a bit from your book, America Alone, but I could never use the title.
I had to use the subtitle, The End of the World as We Know It.
Because as soon as you mention America, of course, the blood pressure goes up here in Canada and faces turn red.
No, no, no, that's true.
That's an incendiary word.
You know, when I had my little difficulties with the human rights commissions up in Canada and up in British Columbia, the time I knew when I was in trouble, initially when the cases started, the CBC would use phrases like Canadian writer Mark Stein or Canadian-born writer Mark Stein.
And then just before the trial in British Columbia, it changed to American resident writer Mark Stein.
And I knew when they used the evil A word to apply that to me, I was dead.
I was screwed.
It was over.
You know, the minute the CBC TV network applies the dreaded A word to you, you know you have been put in the role of designated villain.
So I'm glad you're helping get the message out there, Donald.
Leaving aside the unfortunate title, are people taking it seriously?
Well, I hope so.
There are many people here that do love America and do appreciate what President Bush did.
The level of hatred for him has been amazing to me.
Yeah, that is true, and it is unbecoming.
And I think it's also idiotic.
You know, the idea, when I drive around in these college towns, and you're behind these things with stickers saying 9-11 was an inside job.
I mean, this is insane talk.
If 9-11 was an inside job, what about the Bali nightclub bombings?
What about the Bombay bombing a week ago?
What about the London tube bombings?
The idea that somehow Bush and Cheney cooked up this racket.
That is a level of derangement and an investment in derangement that nobody, no serious person should be willing to entertain.
Thanks for your call, Donald, and happy new year to you in your little bit of that country north of the border that technically happens to be south of the border.
Calling from near Detroit, near Windsor, Ontario, that was Donald.
This is the EIB network, Mark Stein in for Rush.
Rush is back on Monday.
1-800-282-2882.
Open Line Friday and more straight ahead.
Happy New Year to you.
This is Mark Stein sitting in for Rush on the EIB network.
Rush is going to be back on Monday, fighting fit, raring a go, looking forward to the coronation of King Barak and to, you know, holding out as the voice of dissent in the new harmonious landscape that Barack is building for us.
You know, this trillion dollar bailout now, they're talking like trillion dollars, basically the floor.
You know, I was saying the trick with 700 billion, you've got to choose a big number, but one that's not too round.
Here, I think a trillion dollars is way too round.
You know, you need to call it $1.56 trillion.
And then people think you've actually done some math and worked out and figured out what it is you're going to need.
When you actually look at what they're spending this trillion dollars on, at least $100 billion allocated to green jobs creation, including at community level.
Construction of libraries in rural communities in order to expand broadband access.
Nobody needs that.
Nobody needs that.
Federal Arts and Writers Project, this is great, to create jobs for American artists, writers, editors, researchers, photographers and others.
Because, you know, there are just not enough left-wing artists and writers and filmmakers out there right now.
And no matter how many left-wing movies and plays and art exhibitions they come up with, there's still some people who can't get a piece of the left-wing arts action.
So we need to have a federal arts and writers project to create jobs for American artists, writers, editors, researchers, photographers, and others.
This is what Roosevelt did, by the way.
Any good come out of the Federal Writers Project, Federal Arts Project?
No, it's all unreadable, unproducible stuff 70 years on.
Tim Robbins made a film about, what was it, the thing, Cradle Will Rock?
He made a film about the production of the Cradle Will Rock, which was the big Roosevelt-funded play in the 1930s.
And the reason he made a film about making it is because you can't do the actual play now because it's a piece of junk.
American novels, if you go back to the 1930s, you didn't need a subsidy for Gone with the Wind.
You didn't need a subsidy for gold diggers in 1934.
You didn't need a subsidy for As Time Goes By.
Those things are self-sustaining.
The idea of a federal subsidy project for useless writers and artists who can't actually make a living in the marketplace is not where this country needs to go.
And similarly with a lot of this other stuff, you know, what the government needs to do is stop impeding the resourcefulness of the citizenry.
Everyone thinks that countries die, that countries decline instantly, that you can kind of chart a moment when it happens.
It doesn't.
It doesn't.
It happens a little bit by bit over a generation or two generations.
And you suddenly realize what has happened is that people have changed and people, as they have in Europe, in the end, lose even the survival instinct.
European politicians explain to their voters that they can't afford six weeks of paid vacation.
They can't afford, in France, they're trying to tell people who retire at 53 and then use government health services for another four decades that this is, what is it, the eco-crowd say?
Unsustainable.
Of course it's unsustainable.
You shouldn't even need...
Common sense tells you that if you educate a guy, if he's at college until he's 30, and then he works for, oh, you know, a decade and a half, and then he takes retirement and is paid by the government and lives till 97...
common sense will tell you no society in human history has created a form of government whereby that math can add up.
And yet Sarkozy, who everyone thinks is the great right-wing hope when he starts telling the French people they've got to cut it out, they've got to maybe give back some of these six weeks paid vacation and the 35-hour work week and all the rest of it.
In the end, in the end, even though the survival of their society is at stake, the French and the Germans will not get serious about giving up those benefits.
And you remember that famous line, Gerald Ford, a government that is big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take away everything you have.
And that's true.
But there is an important intermediate stage, and that is that a government that is big enough to give you everything you want isn't big enough to get you to give any of it back when times go bad.
And that's why the worst thing of all, the worst legacy of all of the Bush years was the creation of the prescription drug entitlement.
Anytime somebody creates an entitlement, that is a huge problem because tax cuts, you know, they put sunset, they sunset the tax cuts.
You get them for a couple of years and then they take it away from you.
But an entitlement is forever and it's unpredictable.
And nobody can predict where it's going to go, except what we do know is it's always going to cost more and more and more money and there are going to be fewer people to prop it up.
So what you have on the demographic profile in Europe is you have more and more retirees with these lavish benefits and fewer and fewer workers actually doing work and paying taxes to support the retirees.
So eventually that drives emigration.
Los Angeles is now something like the eighth biggest French-speaking city in the world.
Los Angeles has got tons of French immigrants who got out of their own country because if you're a young Frenchman, if you're like a pimply French guy, pimply French burger flipper, you don't want to be supporting entire gated communities of 53-year-old retirees.
You get on the boat and you leave.
Germans are leaving.
Dutchmen are leaving.
They're going to countries where their economic energy is being rewarded.
And we do not want to end up in the same situation as those European countries.
More of your calls.
Straight ahead.
Open Line Friday, 1-800-282-2882.
Mark Stein at the EIB network, sitting in Faroch on Open Line Friday.
I just saw this poll from Rasmussen that a majority of Democrats, 55%, say Israel should have tried to find a diplomatic solution with Gaza first.
You know, from Gaza, they were getting 20 rockets a day lobbed into Israel and into straight into civilian areas.
Very hard to find a diplomatic solution when you're on the receiving end of 20 rockets a day.
That's how 55% of Democrats view what's going on at the moment.
More straight ahead, Open Line Friday.
Your calls, 1-800-282-2882.
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