Yes, America's anchorman is away today and this is your undocumented anchor man sitting in and proud to be here.
It's the EIB network is relaunching as the All-Mark Network.
I'm here today and tomorrow and Mark Belling will be in Thursday and Friday and then Mark Foley will be here during the show on Monday.
I make a joke about Mark Foley but you know in fact I feel sorry for the guy because he is he is the illustration of the double standard.
You know this is this is bewildering to me.
He's the guy who got clobbered in a sex scandal where he didn't have any sex.
I mean that is yeah, this mayor.
There's this mayor in Portland Oregon, who's just been conducting this torrid affair with this fetching young teenage lad and you can't find any mention of his mysterious party affiliation.
When you read, if you, if you read about it in the NEW YORK Times, the D FOR Democrat, it comes, you know.
You read all the way down the front page, you turn to page 17 and, like 93, 93 paragraphs into the story, you'll discover that this mayor in Portland is Democrat.
They they, they had he's not resigning.
And they had a hilarious.
They had a a hilarious correction.
The NEW YORK Times corrections is actually the only part of the paper worth reading these days.
They had a one today.
Sam Adams, that's the name of this mayor of Portland.
It's in the the Times today.
He had this sexual relationship, 18 year old intern, and there was a quotation from Christopher Stowell, the artistic director for the Oregon Ballet Theatre, who attended a rally in support of the mayor.
Mr. Stowell said that while he was upset with the mayor, he believed that instead of allowing him to resign quote I think we should force him to do the job.
Unquote and the Times piously reported.
After the article was published, several readers reported that Mr. Stowell and the mayor had had a romantic relationship.
Mr. Stowell confirmed that they did.
If the Times had turned up the information earlier, it would have been included in the article.
This is, this is democratic politics.
This is.
This isn't pay-to-play, this is either.
What is this gay to play?
I don't know.
In Portland Oregon, in Portland Oregon, is there anyone speaking up for this guy who hasn't had an affair with the mayor?
But like poor, poor Mark Foley, this is what happens if you're a Republican.
You get clobbered in a sex scandal.
You get forced out.
You didn't even get any sex, any sex out of it.
This is like.
This is like.
This is the Clinton rules.
The Clinton, the Clinton era, established the rules.
You know, was it?
Bill Glinden said that he didn't believe whatever it was he was doing with Monica counted as sex under the Bill Clinton definition.
It doesn't count as sex unless it's with Hillary Rodham Clinton, and so no Democrat ever gets so.
Unless there's a really surprising twist to this mayor in Portland story, he's perfectly safe.
He can do what he likes either.
So I I apologize for mocking Mark Foley because I felt very sorry for him in in Britain in the tail End of the Conservative era before Tony Blair.
You know, say what you like.
I was spending a lot of time there then, and there were great sex stories.
You know, there was the guy who auto-erotically asphyxiated.
He was found, what was it?
He was found naked wearing fishnet stockings with a satsuma in his mouth or something.
And I love the response from the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police who said something like, oh, it's perfectly routine.
There's like 120,000 of these a year.
Who knew?
Who knew?
But if you're a Republican, you don't even get any.
Like, same with the guy in the men's room, the guy in the men's room.
What was he called?
Larry Craig.
Larry Craig in the Minneapolis.
I shouldn't know that because apparently it's a tourist attraction at the Minneapolis airport.
Now, I flew into Minneapolis.
Apparently, there's like people who just go into that men's room, not to use the men's room or even to have sex there.
They just go there to like visit the, you know, the senatorial heritage site that it's been designated as.
It's probably in the stimulus package.
It's probably like $4 million to put up a plaque in Larry Craig's men's room store.
So he didn't get any.
He's like there, you know, doing all this foot language with the undercover cop.
And he doesn't get any sex, but he's still clobbered.
And I'll tell you one thing, though.
I'll tell you one thing, which I do love about this country, because as some of you may know, I got into this, ran into a lot of trouble up in Canada because I offended Muslims.
And so I was accused of being an Islamophobe.
And I had all these hate crimes suits against me.
And I came to realize that free speech is very restricted in Canada.
And around about the time that the Canadian Islamic Congress filed its suit against me, I saw Larry Craig's lawyer enter the argument that Larry Craig's foot tapping under the stall divider in the Minneapolis men's room qualified as free speech under the First Amendment.
Now, this is a fantastic country.
Up north of the border, my books and articles don't qualify for free speech protection.
But south of the border, Larry Craig's men's room semaphore qualifies as free speech under the First Amendment.
This is a fantastic country.
Anyway, I got a detoured down Mark Foley, Larry Craig, the primrose path leading to the mayor's office in Portland, Oregon.
I got completely off track there.
But there is a, these double standards, these double standards are real.
And they do apply, of course, to this tax business.
You can imagine what would happen if it had been a Republican who had some of these tax issues.
There'd be no question of confirming them.
So that double standard is real.
But I'll be interested to see how things work out in Portland because this mayor, Sam Adams, is not a, is hanging on in there and sees no reason why he should be resigning.
And the interesting thing about all these, a lot of mayors in difficulty at the moment, and it's very hard to find out what party they represent when you read the reports in the New York Times.
That little D letter seems to, you know, when they can't quite fit the story in the space, so they have to make a couple of cuts.
It's the line telling you he's a Democratic mayor that always seems to get mysteriously taken out.
Now, of course, the rest of the world, the rest of the world, will deal with, I believe that's the way it's marked on State Department maps.
So let's turn to the rest of the world.
And what I love about this is the Obama honeymoon.
It was great while it lasted, but it's over.
This is a headline from the London Daily Telegraph.
US-EU trade war looms as Barack Obama bill urges by American.
This is the stimulus package.
This is the provision in the Senate bill that prohibits any foreign-made goods from being used in the stimulus projects.
So, for example, I see that Nancy Pelosi has got some big STT prevention thing in there, STD, that's sexually transmitted disease.
Nancy Pelosi thinks that what we need to restart the American economy is to federalize the condom business.
And so she's got like this big porked up condom thing in the stimulus package where she wants all these hundreds of millions of dollars to go towards condoms.
And that's like great for the condom industry.
But if you happen to own a rubber plantation in Malaysia, don't think you're going to be getting any of that Nancy Pelosi condom action.
No way.
There's nothing in there for you.
There's a provision in the bill that says it's only going to be American used rubber that is going to be going into those Nancy Pelosi condoms.
So forget it.
There's nothing in there for you.
And like the Europeans are like mad about this.
This is in breach of all these world trade things that the United States has signed.
It's suddenly saying, no, we're putting up the big protectionist things.
I was up in Montreal on Sunday night and the top story, I was driving back to New Hampshire, the top story on the radio news is about the thousands of jobs there that are going to go in the steel industry once this buy American provision in the stimulus package goes through.
So this is, you know, all our Barack Obama said he wanted to change America's relationship with the world.
And he has.
All these leaders who got on quite well with George W. Bush, Stephen Harper in Canada, Gordon Brown in Britain, Monsieur Sarkozy in France, Frau Merkel in Germany, all these people who found George W. Bush generally genial are now furious with Obama.
And they're thinking to themselves, well, look, why can't this guy just be like the last fellow?
He just invade some third world basket case none of us cares about, do the big swaggering cowboy thing and go and invade some country.
Who cares about that?
But he knows he has to introduce this buy American first.
The Obama honeymoon with the rest of the world is already over.
And in Washington, the Canadian and European ambassadors are already complaining that this guy Obama is just a big swaggering unilateralist cowboy and they miss the old days of George W. Bush.
And I think that's interesting.
You know, the point about Obama is in the end, when he was running, he had an incoherent political philosophy.
Essentially, he was running on this sort of we are the world, Kumbaya, you know, when he gave his big speech in Berlin where he began, what was it he did when he stood up in Berlin and he begun, people of the world, like he's just arrived from Planet Zongo.
And he hasn't arrived from Planet Zongo.
But essentially his view of the world has.
You know, in the end, you have to make hard decisions.
And the reason Bush was unpopular with certain world leaders is because he took those hard decisions.
To govern is to choose.
And it's clear that the more Obama time Obama spends in office, that he is, you know, some people he's just doing what he did in his legislative career.
He's voting present on.
He's voting present.
That's what he's basically doing when he says he's going to continue the renditions policy.
He's this thing where instead of being kept at Gitbo, you're now taken off to Sudan where they've got the red hot pokers in the dungeon and it's you know it's it's out of sight, out of mind.
And that's on some things he's voting present.
On some things, he's appeasing left-wing interest groups.
And on other issues, he's basically flipping the finger at America's allies.
But basically, the Obama honeymoon is over.
This has been a very quick learning curve for him.
And we are reducing him.
In a sense, reality is reducing him from this messianic figure to, you know, just another guy.
You know, okay, he's up there with Lincoln and Washington at the moment, but the way things are carrying on, in a couple of weeks' time, he's going to be down there with Warren Harding and Chester Arthur.
That's the way it's going.
This is Mark Stein, sitting in for Rush on the EIB network, and we'll discuss Obama and the economy and the world and a lot of that straight ahead on the EIB network.
Mark Stein in for Rush behind the golden EIB microphone today.
Let's go to Art in Chicago, hometown.
I think passing home.
It's the way he made his name anyway, President Obama.
Art in Chicago, you're on the EIB network.
Mark, Yahider, how are you?
Great.
Thanks, thanks, Art, and glad to have you with us.
Okay, I got a question.
And I want to know what your expectancy of the escalated violence in this country is going to be by the have-nots against the haves when the have-nots realize that after four years of unemployment that their situation hasn't gotten any better.
Well, you know, you know, there's two points to make about that.
The unemployment rate in America has ticked up significantly in the last few months.
That's true.
It's still lower than it is in most developed countries.
If you look at France and Germany, they live with like permanent double-digit unemployment.
Also, the time people are unemployed.
In America, the average length of time people are unemployed in recent years has been four weeks, as opposed to, for example, six months in Britain.
I mean, that's a big difference.
If you're unemployed for six months, that is a huge waste of opportunity for you.
Whereas if you're out of work for four weeks, that's a different scale of things.
So if we were to have like European levels of unemployment and the length of time people are unemployed, so there's like a permanent unemployed class, are we going to have civil unrest?
That's your question.
And I, you know, to be honest, I don't think so, because I think that the cunning thing about socialism, which is what this bill is, this is socialism.
Believe me, I've lived under socialism.
I recognize it when I see it.
The cunning thing about it is that if you introduce it incrementally, incrementally, people take an awful lot of it before they eventually get mad enough to do anything.
You know, I live among a bunch of lot of cranky guys, you know, the kind of fellas who want to be off the grid because they think that the government, if you have electricity, the government can sort of see into your house and figure out what you're doing.
So they want to be off the grid in the woods.
These are the kind of fellas who, you know, when the ATF or the DEA or the FBI arrive to take them out, the house is always described as a compound.
If you're a realtor and if you go to see your real estate agent and she wants to advertise your place as a compound, that's not a good sign because it means that, you know, as I said, the feds will be showing up to surround it and shoot you.
The only good compound is the Kennedy compound at wherever it is on the Massachusetts coast.
That's the only desirable compound in American real estate.
And I always wish, that's what I love about America.
I love the crazy guys who say, well, we're not going to take it anymore.
We're not going to take it anymore.
And I would love it.
I would love it if more people felt like that.
But the cunning thing about socialism, creeping socialism, is if you introduce it incrementally, eventually people just, eventually their expectations of everything are lowered.
If you listen to people's pitiful explanations of the terrific service they received in socialized hospitals in Canada or in Britain because they only had to wait 18 hours to be seen in emergency as opposed to the 48 they'd been expecting.
Eventually your expectations become so diminished and you become, and this is why socialized healthcare is a big part of the problem.
You eventually become transformed from a citizen of a freeborn society into a junkie with the government as pusher.
And once a citizen is a junkie with the government as pusher, it's very hard actually to rouse them to take to the streets and riot over it.
You know, if you look at the successful demonization that Obama has done about Wall Street greed, it isn't Wall Street greed that's brought us to this pretty pass.
It's actually political annexation of the market.
But he's figured out a way to blame the fat cats on Wall Street.
Hey, Art, was that the answer to your question?
Yeah, that's pretty much it.
I love the way they managed to assign all this blame to assign this blame to Bush in spite of the fact that this Community Reinvestment Act started the hallball rolling and was a problem from the Democrat party.
Yeah, and actually that Community Reinvestment Act, which is what gave us this subprime mortgages, again, that's an interference in the market.
You know, when a guy goes to buy a house, asks the bank to lend him money to buy a house, and they go, you know, they say, well, you want to buy this $500,000 house?
How much money do you earn?
And you say, well, I earn, you know, I earn $30,000 a year, but I spend most of that on coke and hookers.
So the bank manager says, well, you know, okay, does it have to be a $500,000 house?
Why don't we start with a $200,000 house?
That's what a bank manager does.
He's essentially making an evaluation of risk.
What the Community Reinvestment Act did 30 years ago is said, no, You're not allowed to make a rational evaluation of risk.
You've got to give this guy the money anyway.
You have a ludicrous world now where welfare payments can be entered as income for the purposes of buying a house.
Tom Daschell gave us that.
Tom Daschell gave us that because that's the world he lives in.
He doesn't have to declare his car and driver.
And welfare payments qualify as part of your income for the purposes of buying a house.
I mean, this is insane.
It's the interference in the market that has brought us to this situation.
But Obama has done, and the Democrats have done a terrific job of just demonizing it as part of some Wall Street Greed.
And what happens is you have nothing, this little nothing act that's passed in the late 70s.
And then a few years go by, it's not a big deal.
And then a few years go by and they amend the act slightly.
So now it's even bigger and it's distorting the market even more.
And then a few more years go by and it's distorting the market even more beyond that until effectively, in the end, it destroys the American housing market.
And that is nothing to do with the free market.
That is a conscious act of government, government interference in the self-correcting mechanisms of the market.
And that is the truth.
We'll have more straight ahead.
Mark Stein in for rush on the EIB network.
Also be in tomorrow.
And then Thursday and Friday, it's Mark Belling.
Hey, good to be with you.
And Mark sitting in for Rush.
Let's go to Gail in Central Valley from the great state, the golden state, the once golden state of California.
Gail, good to have you on the air.
Thank you, Mark, for taking my call.
I wanted to say I agree with you.
There are so many problems here in California, and I feel it's quite the nanny state.
But I want people to understand I'm a public employee for California, and I think all this talk is trying to start a class war between public employees and private enterprise employees.
So I want to explain something.
It isn't our pay in our benefit package that's a problem.
It's the number of employees, the state employs, because of all these nanny programs.
It's not the fact that they're paying me my salary and my benefit.
It's that they just have so darn many employees.
When I started in 1984, I was making $9 an hour.
I have a four-year degree from a university.
So did my brother.
He chose to go into public or private industry.
People used to laugh at how little I was making compared to them with the bonuses they'd get at the end of the year.
I've never seen a bonus, for heaven's sake.
But I knew that if I stuck with my job for 25 years, that I would have this benefit package that was a security.
So I didn't have to risk what private industry people risk, but they make more during the years they work.
But at the end, I had a better benefits package.
Go ahead.
No, no, no.
Go ahead.
Finish your thought.
Yeah.
What were you saying?
I'm a peace officer.
So there's a perfect example.
You try and hire peace officers anywhere in this state, and I venture to say in the United States, you could have 500 people be interested in being an officer and show up in some way to apply for that job, but you would be down to about 50 candidates by the time you lose the ones that can't pass the written, can't pass the physical, can't pass the mental background or the background on your criminal behaviors.
It is weaned down to a fine group of people who can do these jobs.
And I don't know how many of you that will go in the dark alley at 3 in the morning with a guy that certainly could be armed, but beyond that may have hepatitis, tuberculosis, meningitis, and you're expected to fight him, win that fight, take him to jail, and not get yourself sued in your family and lose your house to some lawyers.
And not to mention the lawyers with their education are making $250 an hour.
Well, my top step pay right now is $39 an hour.
Now, Gail, that's a fair point.
When you say peace officer, that's what some of us in other parts of the country call police officers, right?
Yes.
So that is a legitimate function of government.
It's legitimate to have a police department.
It's legitimate to have a fire department.
It is when you get into some of these other things.
There was a story in the paper the other day from Berkeley, California.
They have a Peace and Justice Commission.
And Berkeley has passed this nuclear-free zone.
It's like all these poser municipalities.
You go in nuclear-free zone.
Now, what happened was the library wanted an exception to the fact that Berkeley is a nuclear-free zone because the only people who do their library, who service their library checkout, book checkout machines is a company called 3M.
And this company has operations in 60 countries.
So when they were asked to sign the thing on the Berkeley form, are you a nuclear-free company?
They refused to check that box.
So now all the checkout, all the library book checkout machines in Berkeley have gone unserviced because they can't find a nuclear-free company to service library book checkout machines.
And they went to the so-called Peace and Justice Commission to get a waiver, and the Peace and Justice Commission turned them down because they think it's very important to have nuclear-free library checkout in the town of Berkeley.
I agree with you.
The waste and the amount of programs, it's just insanity.
And the other part that I am so crazy about is you can't fire anybody in government.
You end up losing good workers because you're stuck with just a seniority face, and that is pathetic compared to private industry that has, I think, a little more leeway to weed out workers that aren't working.
Let nobody get mixed up.
My point that I wanted to make was don't think that my benefit package is so damn wonderful because you weren't making my pay rate for all the years it took to get to that benefit package.
Okay.
Okay.
Thank you, Gail.
And you're right, the numbers involved in the California public sector are huge, staggeringly huge.
One of the things I like is if you want to do anything in California now, the first thing they've got to do is have an impact study report.
That's a whole level of bureaucracy that didn't used to exist.
You have an impact study report for everything now.
But I'm certainly supportive of police departments.
I think that's a legitimate function of government.
I must say I quite like the way it is in small towns in New Hampshire, where generally it's the guy who would be attracting the attention of the police department who gets elected police chief.
So it's a kind of way of killing two birds with one stone.
Because most of the need for a police department comes from this guy.
So if you like, make him the, it's a bit like the, you know, it's a bit like the way it works at the Treasury Department.
You know, most of the need for tax enforcement comes from Obama cabinet appointees.
If you put them in the cabinet, you can, you know, it cuts down on the cost of your IRS enforcement.
Similarly, in New Hampshire, it's the guy who would be attracting the attention of the police department who gets elected police chief.
And God bless him.
But it is, you know, the problem is once you said you got a four-year degree, you went to work for government.
I can understand a police department is a real career.
When you're going on the Peace and Justice Commission in Berkeley, California, these are non-jobs.
And at a certain point, there's so many government non-jobs and bureaucracies to jump through the hoops of that it's killing every other activity.
California is sane by some parts of the world.
California has a population of 30 million.
I think the province of Quebec has a population of about 7 million.
Yet their public service is pretty much about the same size.
And so it took me a while to figure this out.
If you go on vacation in Quebec and you'll go to these remote Pac Nationale, these little wildlife parks they have in the middle of Nowhere, up around Hudson's Bay, up around James Bay, middle of Nowhere, there's nothing but Inuit.
And all these parks, you go there, you drive in in the wilderness, and the park will be staffed by like four really hot-looking girls of 22, 23, 24.
In any functioning society, these girls will be movie stars or supermodels.
But there's no point to that if you're in a socialist basket case state.
The trick is just to get a job and do a government job and get the benefits from doing a government job.
So that's if you go to Europe and you go to renew a driver's license in Scandinavia, there's really hot-looking women at the driver's license renewal thing in Sweden.
Again, you know, 30 years ago, the hot-looking women were in ABBA.
But like if you are, if you want to be in ABBA now, there's no point.
You might as well go along and be the clerk at the Department of Motor Vehicles.
And that's the point.
Once the state gets that size, there really is no point to being in the private sector anymore.
1-800-282-2882, Mark Stein sitting in for Rush.
Let's go to Wayne in Morristown, Tennessee.
Good to talk with you, Wayne.
Good afternoon, Mark.
Hey, good to have you on the show.
Mark, I just wanted to call and tell you that I appreciate your brilliant use of humor to illustrate the ridiculous nature of some of the things that are going on in America today.
And I wanted to ask you a question.
Do you think these individuals that have been nominated here and then found to be tax evaders, are they atypical?
Or do the elites operate on a different level from what the great unwashed in this country do?
I think they do operate on a different level.
And as I said, I'm sympathetic to the argument that Tom Dashell makes.
You know, it's very, what Tom Daschell is an example of is the way it's HR was saying to me, you know, that if he was Tom Dashell, he'd have said, well, you know, I'm the big picture guy.
I don't want to get hung up on details.
And that's what, generally speaking, a permanent political class is.
It's in favor of it living well while everybody else pays the taxes to support it.
But there's a more general problem, I think, with liberals, which is that if you look at, say, if you look at, say, wealthy celebrity liberals, you take Paul and Linda McCartney.
Paul and Linda McCartney made a campaign ad in the 1997 British election saying that they were perfectly happy to pay more taxes.
So they couldn't understand why the rest of you weren't willing to pay more taxes and by voting for the Labour government and Tony Blair.
And their argument won the day.
People said, oh, we should be prepared to pay more taxes, like Paul McCartney and Linda McCartney says.
Linda McCartney had been living in the United Kingdom for 30 years at that point.
It then turned out when she died, she'd gone to an awful lot of trouble to have her estate probated in New York, where she hadn't lived since the 1960s, because if she had her estate probated in New York, she wouldn't have to pay any death duties, and her family would get to keep all these hundreds of millions of dollars for herself.
And that's it.
When it's your money, you figure you know how best to spend it.
But when liberals talk about money in general, the government knows how best to spend it.
And I agree with Tom Daschell and Linda McCartney.
I know better how to spend my own money.
Linda McCartney was this big-time left-wing vegetarian, and you would have thought that she'd be perfectly happy to throw her $150 million down the great sucking moor of the British Treasury and death duties, but in the end she wasn't.
So she figured out a way to avoid it.
And that's why when it comes to liberals, whether they're political liberals like Tom Daschell or rock and roll liberals, you should not do as they say, but you should do as they do.
More straight ahead with Mark Inforush on the EIB network.
Mark Stein, Infor Rush behind the golden EIB microphone.
President Obama, one of the first things he did, he signed this executive order to close Club Gitmo eventually.
He's not being too specific about it.
In fact, I'll take a bet with anyone on when you think the last jihadist will be out of Gitmo.
What's it going to be?
2012, 2015, 2018, 2037?
He's being very unclear about all that.
But in the meantime, what it has done is it's put an enormous question mark over Russia's Club Gitmo merchandise.
So he's adapted.
He's got a brand new Club Gitmo t-shirt available, terrific looking one, live waterboarding on it.
You'll love it when you see it.
And the way to see it is to go to the EIB store at rushlimbore.com.
That's the one swab shop for all your club Gitmo merchandise.
And don't forget rushlimbo.com also got the stack of stuff and all the rest of it.
I love it.
I went down to Gitmer a couple of years ago.
I had a terrific time.
Admiral Harris, who was no, I wasn't doing a big time speech.
It wasn't one of these Tom Dashell thing.
The Jihad, generally speaking, invests its funds more soundly than Tom Daschell's clients.
So the jihadist hadn't had a whip round and got $100,000 to have me come down and speak to them.
But Admiral Harris, when I arrived, I loved it.
Admiral Harris introduces you to the guys who run the base.
And he's going, and this is our head army guy.
This is our head Air Force guy.
This is our head Navy guy.
This is our CIA guy.
This is our FBI guy at the end of the line.
And this is the pastry chef who's flown in to create these special rabbidad pastries.
The back lava.
You know, the back lava I had at Gitmo is the best tasting back lava.
And I don't care.
You know, I really, I mean, these were like the most corputant.
If you go to Afghanistan, Afghans are tall, thin men.
These were the most corpulent Afghans I've ever had.
They'd all been porking up on this exquisite backlava that United States taxpayers are paying for them.
And what I want to know is when Obama closes Gitmo, what is happening to the pastry chef?
Where's he going to go?
Because, you know, I want to go where he's going.
Is he going to go to the Ritz Carlton in Chicago?
He's going to go to the Intercontinental.
I want to know where he's...
I want to know where the Club Gitmo pastry chef is going to be because I would like to have a piece of...
I'd like to taste that back clava again.
Mmm, mmm.
That is really what you need to start the day.
If you're going to go up and self-detonate in a shopping mall, mm, mmm, having some of that great Gitmo back clava is the way to do it.
Anyway, new Club Gitmo merchandise over at rushlimbo.com.
Let's quickly go to Evan in Pittsburgh, North Carolina.
Evan, you're on the Rush Limbaugh show.
Awesome.
How are you doing today, Mark?
I'm doing great.
Glad to have you with us.
Good to hear.
I'd just like to comment on the religion that is socialism.
I mean, it seems that everything you hear is, well, we believe that this welfare state is going to make everybody's lives better and this, that, and the other thing, when the real science of the matter is capitalism.
That's what the Wealth of Nations was written about as a scientific description of the natural events of the pre-market.
And we're getting these attacks on capitalism like it's some evil conspiracy.
It's not.
It's just an observation of the fact.
No, you're right.
Capitalism, as Mrs. Thatcher always used to say, the facts of life are conservatives.
Conservative.
And I think that's true.
Socialism is a religion.
Big government is a religion.
In America, we have the separation of church and state.
In continental Europe, in most countries, they have, in effect, the state as a church.
They have the state as a kind of religion.
And you're right.
Socialism is a religion to that extent.
And that, of course, is the problem is that when you talk to people, you know, it's like when you talk to communists.
Communism has never worked anywhere it's been tried, but it remains theoretically perfectible.
No matter how many millions and millions of people get killed in its name, you know, you say, look, Russia, they tried it and millions and millions of people died.
China, they tried it, millions and millions of people died.
Cambodia, they tried it, millions and millions of people died.
They say, well, we just haven't quite got it right in practice yet.
You imagine, you you know, you talk to guys like Ralph Nader.
If you make a car, if you make a if you make if if General Motors makes a car and one of them veers off the road and crashes and then another one veers off the road and crashes four months later, that car's got to be withdrawn.
Well, then in that case, why does Ralph Nader never insist that socialism is withdrawn?
Socialism kills people everywhere it's tried in practice.
But the fact is, it's an article of mystical faith.
It is a religion in the sense that we cannot build God's kingdom on earth.
That is something we will only know in heaven.
And it's exactly the same thing with socialism.
Mark Stein in for Rush.
More coming up.
Mark Stein on the Rush Limbaugh show.
I mentioned last hour that breaking news that Zimbabwe has knocked 12 zeros off the value of its currency.
It's got the highest inflation in the world.
I think we should hold out for knocking 12 zeros off the stimulus package.
That is what is going to take to get it down to human form.
This is Mark Stein.
I'll be in with you tomorrow.
Got to go now.
Got my afternoon shift as Tom Daschell's driver to look forward to.
But I will be back here with another three hours of the most stimulating parrot package in radio.