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Dec. 9, 2013 - Rush Limbaugh Program
31:25
December 9, 2013, Monday, Hour #3
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The views expressed by the host on this program may be the opinions, for those of you in Riolinda, expressed by the host on this show, documented to be almost always right 99.7% of the time.
Happy to have you here.
I am Rush Limbaugh, talent on loan from God.
Well, they tried to make me the villain in the soap opera about the Pope, but it just didn't take off this time.
They're still out there trying left-wing Catholic group.
There's one with 6,000 signatures to a petition or something.
A left-wing Catholic group, a pro-abortion bunch of Catholics, which means they're not really Catholic.
Anyway, trying to raise all kinds of problems with this, but they've not been able to.
I have a story here, my formerly nicotine-stained fingers.
Actually, it's a column by Sheikah Dahlna, or I should say Dalmia, actually, at reason.com.
It's entitled The Pope's Self-Defeating Anti-Capitalist Rant.
And the piece does not mention me, but it makes a point that I made when I first talked about the Pope's badgering of capitalism.
And my point was, where does the Pope think the Catholic Church would be without it?
I mean, you can sit there and denigrate money all you want, and you can impugn the seeking of money all you want.
But one trip to the Vatican, folks, and you realize it requires a lot of money.
And it has required a lot of money.
And it hasn't come from the poor.
Although some has, but not the lion's share.
Now, let me give you a couple of pull quotes from this piece.
And the theme of this is, redistribution is great, taking from those who have more and giving to those who have less.
On paper, in theory, oh man, it just sounds so wonderfully compassionate.
It's actually the epitome of mean, if you ask me.
I mean, just take it down to base terms.
What gives government or anybody else the right to whatever somebody has earned?
And why?
Because somebody has earned it.
Are they required to give it back?
To give it away.
You know, this phrase, yeah, I did this because I wanted to give something back.
You know, it's a meaningless bunch of pap.
You know what people do?
That's just PR.
That's how you make people love you.
That's how you make people think that you're a good guy.
Yeah, I've worked really hard all my life.
I've been really fortunate here, and I want to give something back, which is why I'm asking other people to contribute to my charity so that I can give the money away.
That's how I'm giving something back.
It's all just I would never say it because I think it's phony, this whole notion of giving something back.
You know, a guest host of this program, the great Walter Williams, believes in giving something back, but only if you're a criminal.
The people who really need to give it back are the thieves.
But why are you compelled to give it back if you've earned it?
And by the way, you are giving it back after you've earned it by spending it.
You also happen to get something in the deal yourself when you spend it because you buy something or you get a service.
But this idea that I need to give something back.
I've been one of the fortunate few.
I won life's lottery and I won the genetic lottery.
I'm a good-looking, great-looking guy.
The media talks about me all the time.
I'm incredibly rich and I need to give something back.
And people swoon.
Oh, he really cares.
And if you dug deep, you'd find out he's not giving anything back.
He's raising money from other people that he gives back, or she, or whoever.
But the point is, you're going to take from people.
You can't take it from them if they don't have it.
To all of these anti-capitalists, I would say, you can't redistribute what doesn't exist.
But to the left, the golden goose is just always going to be laying eggs.
It's just always going to be there.
And it's immoral.
It's unfair.
It's unrighteous.
It's just always going to be out to people with a lot of money.
And it's never going to end.
And we're going to always have that source to be able to raid.
Well, why not praise it?
Why not applaud this surplus?
Why not applaud this level of success and achievement?
Why not encourage others towards it?
It'd be much harder to steal it if you did that.
It'd be much harder to justify raising taxes.
I mean, you have to delegitimize what people have first before you take it from them.
You have to eventually convince people that they don't deserve it, that they didn't come by it honestly.
They cheated, they lied, they stole.
If you're a Kennedy and you inherit it, that's fine.
If you're a Clinton and you're marketing your presidency by getting $400,000 a speech, that's really good.
If you're Obama and having people write your books for you and earning a lot, that's really, really good.
But if you really earn your money and have a lot, we're going to stigmatize you as a thief, as somebody who doesn't have any compassion.
You really didn't work for it anyway.
It's just a frustrating thing.
Now, this person, Sheikah Dahlmia, also believes that poverty is the default condition of humanity.
And it is.
Poverty is by far the economic circumstance most people are born into and live in in the world.
Again, the U.S. is the exception.
Poverty, the default condition, the gibbon.
What needs explaining is wealth.
And the greatest engine of wealth creation is the free market.
United States of America stands as proof.
This is not somebody's opinion.
It is economic fact.
The greatest creation of wealth, the greatest engine of wealth, is the capitalism free market.
Government doesn't have any money until it takes it from somebody or prints it.
But that's not real money.
The money government prints doesn't have any value until it goes to the private sector or it's exchanged for goods and services.
That is a key point, by the way.
The money government prints does not have value.
It says $100 on the bills, and that's what it'll buy once it gets into the market, but it's the market that determines what $100 is worth.
Not the fact that it says $100 on the bill.
What's it worth?
Well, whatever it'll buy you wherever you happen to be.
It's different from place to place.
The market determines value, and the value that's determined in the market is real.
It's not artificially set unless you live in a communist or socialist country.
It's not an opinion that capitalism is the greatest creator of wealth ever been devised.
It's fact.
But because that doesn't mix well with big government socialism and redistributive policies and government politicians benefiting from taking care of people, it has to be denigrated.
It has to be impugned and insulted.
And in the process, wealth is also impugned and insulted and never explained.
By raising productivity and lowering the price of goods, markets help the rich.
Walmart has done more for the rich than any government program has.
For the poor, rather.
Walmart discount stores do more.
That's why, by the way, in addition to this union business, one of the reasons the left hates Walmart, they can't compete with them.
The government gives you health care, $500 band-aids.
They don't cost $500 at Walmart.
By raising productivity, lowering the price of goods, markets help the rich, but they help the poor more.
Capitalism's most impressive achievement was not providing more silk stockings for the queen, but in bringing them within reach of factory girls.
That's a statement from the well-known philosopher Joseph Schumpeter.
And you know what that statement means?
The reason that the average American, just for the crazy about that term, but the reason why a 32-inch flat screen TV is affordable for the vast majority of people is that enough rich people paid $10,000 for it when it came out to get enough of them made so that the price would come down.
The manufacturers of all these gizmos have to charge high prices at first to even hope to recoup all the RD and manufacturing and marketing costs.
And the rich are there to pay for it.
They're the first ones.
They really want something.
They'll lay down whatever, 10 grand for a flat screen.
And it won't be long before that flat screen is $1,200.
That's what this guy means.
It's capitalism that does that.
Substitute flat screens for silk stockings for the queen.
In that example, capitalism puts more discretionary income in the pockets of people to devote to charitable pursuits.
It is hardly a coincidence that America donates over $300 billion annually to charitable causes at home and abroad, the highest of any country on a per capita basis.
How is that possible?
It couldn't happen if Americans didn't have the money.
How is it possible that Americans donate $300 billion annually, highest of any country on a per capita basis?
It's because of capitalism.
Americans have the money.
Well, I should say had, because the longer Obama's in office, the less most people have.
The church itself, remember this a piece on the Pope here.
The church itself is a big beneficiary of this capitalist largesse, with its U.S. wing alone contributing 60% of the overall global wealth of the Catholic Church.
Not Latin America, not the dustballs of Africa or wherever.
The United States of America contributes 60% of all money to the Catholic Church.
And the United States of America is capitalist and free market economics.
Well, it was.
So charitable donations, you name it.
Religious tithing giving Americans, Trump, citizens of the world, hands down.
Nothing against people in the world.
They just don't have the disposable income.
They don't live in capitalist economies.
They live in command and control socialist economies.
They don't have any money.
They have barely enough to get by.
And most of them don't even have that and exist on government programs, which is fast becoming the case here.
Some of the money, the 60% that goes to Catholic Church of America, some of it comes from donations, but a big chunk comes actually from directly partaking in capitalism.
The church, are you ready?
The Catholic Church is reportedly the largest landowner in Manhattan, the financial center of the global capitalist system, whose income puts undisclosed sums into its coffers.
And this is inarguably true, and it's just another reason why I was totally befuddled when I read what the Pope was saying about capitalism and greed and selfishness and how governments need to work harder to level income inequality.
If it weren't for capitalism, the Catholic Church wouldn't be anywhere near the economic force that it is.
I really was stunned by it.
It was what the Pope wrote was exactly what you would read in any high-level American leftist economic school.
I mean, even the term unfettered capitalism, there is no such thing, by the way.
Hong Kong was the closest ever had to it before the Chikons came in.
Brits gave it away.
But it just totally blew me away.
It was one of the most uninformed things I could have ever imagined reading from somebody so powerful with access to the truth.
Now, this piece begins, and Pope Francis doesn't have to thank capitalism, a system that's done far more to elevate poverty or alleviate poverty, his pet crusade.
Pope Francis does not have to thank capitalism, a system that has done far more to alleviate poverty, his pet crusade, than his church has.
This is Shika Dalmia.
Capitalism has done more to alleviate poverty than the Catholic Church has, he writes.
But the Pope should at least stop demonizing it, not least because it enables the very activity he cherishes most, charity.
Peace is right on the money.
We got a book.
Back up to this.
Let me give you some numbers here.
The citizens of the United States of America in 2012 donated a total of $316 billion to charity.
The Catholic Church's charity, Catholic Charities USA, distributed $4.7 billion.
$316 billion donated to charity by the American people.
Catholic Charities USA distributed $4.7 billion.
The point is, that's not to denigrate the church.
That is to illustrate, as thereason.com writer said, Pope's big cause is charity.
Without capitalism, there wouldn't be any.
Without capitalism, the Catholic Church wouldn't have any money to donate to anybody.
Without capitalism, there wouldn't be enough people with enough money to give it to the Catholic Church in the form of donations itself.
And this is what, as I said, I don't want to beat a dead horse here.
It just really, that whole economic treatise that he wrote, folks, it was so distant from economic reality.
I mean, it really was juvenile, left-wing blog economics, which made me suspicious of the translation or of who actually wrote it.
I don't say this with any disrespect.
I have total respect for the Catholic Church, by the way.
That's another reason why the whole thing just bamboozled me.
Let me grab Vinny, Bristol, Rhode Island.
Vinny, great to have you on the program, sir.
Hello.
Hey, thank you, Rush.
Great honor once again.
Great to have you here.
Thank you very much.
Merry Christmas to you and apparently also.
Hey, look, I'm puzzled by Wall Street's reaction to what was the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the BLS statistics, 7% drop.
We're down to 7% now in the unemployment rate.
And what we have with the 205,000 jobs or so created, with the 41% were government jobs, I assume that's state and federal.
I remember once a statistic that it cost $180,000 to initiate a government job to give the guy $89,000 to $125,000 instead of.
Something like that, yeah.
Yeah.
So I came to a calculation just rough, and I know I'm off.
It's a little arbitrary, but at $48,000 median income for private sector, right?
Isn't that about right?
Somewhere in that position.
That's close.
Yeah, it takes about 30 private sector people to support one government non-producer for the GDP, one government job.
So with approximately taking that 83,000 jobs that are federal and rounding it off to 100.
You better hold your thought.
I thought you were going somewhere.
I got to take a break here.
Don't go away.
Okay, we're back to Vinny in Bristol, Rhode Island.
How many private sector jobs do you think it takes to create a government job?
I'm coming up with 30, but I think that's a conservative.
And if that's true, then we're at a 3 million person deficit.
That last report from the BLS should have been we lost effectively net 3 million jobs.
If we figure 30 jobs where the federal and the state taxes were confiscated and put to pay for that single $180,000 job created by the Fed.
Now, but 180,000 Fed jobs a little high, because that's GS14, you're way up there.
It might be better to use 100 grand issues.
Okay, even then.
Even if we dropped that figure in half, the net result wasn't 205,000 plus jobs.
The net would have been 1.5 million.
Right.
Okay, so what Vinny is saying here, folks, is that the taxes, in order to hire government workers, it takes the taxes of X number of private sector people.
And you've got that anywhere between 2 and 3 million people taxes necessary to hire a government worker.
By definition, you're thinking that's how many jobs we're losing in the private sector in order to have them filled in the public sector, right?
Absolutely.
They hire 100,000 federal workers or state and federal workers.
We're looking at a figure around that.
That should have been the actual no-spin calculation.
That's never going to happen.
Never going to happen.
It's going to be left to people like you to point out.
The stock market did not respond that way.
I find that very odd.
Now, you talked about...
Well, the stock market is not responding to anything in the market right now.
Okay.
The stock market exists solely at the pleasure of the Federal Reserve.
The Federal Reserve is pumping $85 billion of printed money every month.
It's in the form of the purchase of bonds and securities.
And one of the problems, Vinny, that the regime faces, the Fed is doing this, they say, to keep inflation down and to keep the economy churning because the economy wasn't growing.
However, now that the regime is monkeying with the unemployment numbers, and a lot of people think these are faked, like they were a year ago before the election, as the unemployment number comes down, because the regime says it is, and as the number of private sector people working goes up, as the regime says it is, then the economy is going to start theoretically growing,
as the regime says it is, which means the Fed will be less inclined to pump that $85 billion a month into the stock market.
If the economy starts growing, the Fed's going to say we can pull out of the stock market.
That is going to cause the stock market people to literally panic.
A bubble has been created in the stock market because nothing happening there, or very little, is related to what's happening in the market.
The money keeping the stock market at $15,000, $16,000, the DJI, NASDAQ's name, is coming from the Federal Reserve.
And if they stop pumping it and putting it in there, hello bubble.
So the regime's got to be careful here.
The regime wants to report good economic numbers for PR.
They want to report that Obama cares the reason for it.
They want to report people are going back to work.
But the Fed will then be tempted to pull out of the stock market.
There won't be any need to prop the economy up because it's going to be roaring, says the regime.
So I don't know what's going to happen.
But the stock market, normally, if the Fed were not pumping the money, Vinny, and if there were not $85 billion a month being printed to put in the stock market, the way a rising employment number would be dealt with is panic.
The market would be panicking over the indication of inflation that is represented by the rise in employment.
It has been the most remarkable thing to observe for the past 10 to 15 years.
Great economic news.
And this actually began to happen during the Clinton years.
Great economic news, private sector economic news, created panic in the market.
They feared, because of greenspan, inflation in the stock market.
And so when it was crazy, when there was bad economic news, the market went nuts.
Good.
When there was good economic news, the market fell.
Everybody's scratching their heads over it.
And finally figure out that it was inflation everybody's worried about because the Fed is controlling everything, not the market right now.
And the Fed can do whatever they want to do when they want to do it.
There's no supervision.
So if they decide to start, if they reduce the $85 billion that they're printing or eliminate it, you are.
I don't want to see it, but there'll be a lot of people with some Shavin Freud who'd like to see it because it's an instant bubble.
It's like the tech bubble in the early 2000s.
I mean, there were tech companies worth nothing with valuations of $5 and $10 billion, all because these, what do you call them, venture capitalists had put a bunch of money in it, but there was nothing underneath it.
There was nothing supporting it.
Some of these companies had $300 and $400 share prices.
And for what?
And it turns out nothing.
And the bubble burst, and it was not pretty.
And the same circumstance exists now in the market at large.
So anyway, Vinny, it's a good call.
I'm glad you made it through.
It's an interesting point, folks, about the number of private sector jobs, taxes, because that's all necessary to create a government job.
And look, I don't mean to impugn government people here, but there's a big difference in a government job, private sector job.
Nothing's produced in the public sector.
They're just strictly taking.
But there's nothing produced.
The government does not add a thing to economic growth.
The government cannot create wealth.
All they can do is redistribute it or destroy it, but they cannot create it and they don't.
Well, look, there's exceptions to everything.
And if Obama wants to give a crony capitalist partner $500 billion in so-called loans to build worthless windmills, yeah, I mean, it can happen that way.
But that's, again, that's not real.
I'm talking about real, not artificial.
And there just isn't enough real anymore.
Everything is artificial with this regime.
Everything is.
It's either a lie or it's artificial, but there isn't anything substantively real that's the foundation for anything happening in this regime.
It's just, folks, a disaster.
And Obamacare, even David Robham Gergen, when he heard that Obama had not met once in three years with Sebelius alone, she might have been in group meetings.
He couldn't believe it.
He said, that shows there's no one in charge at the White House.
He was astonishing.
He said this on CNN.
He could not believe it.
Now, he's obviously a big government guy and thinks that government people need to have hands-on 24-7 if something's going to work.
But here's a story.
Veteran Washington Advisor, who's worked for four presidents, said the stunning report that found Obama had not had a one-on-one meeting with Sebelius since the passage of Obamacare is an indictment of the entire White House operation.
It shows that the regime has bordered on malfeasance.
And this is a guy who wants him to look good and has been doing everything he can to massage that for the past five years.
He says there's a serious case in malfeasance here.
The bottom line is, Mr. Gergen, Obama doesn't care.
I know you can't understand that.
That doesn't compute.
You can't get your arms around that.
He doesn't care about the day-to-day details of this, the problems.
He only knows and cares about where this is going to end up and that's socialized medicine.
That's all he cares about.
He doesn't care about the problems, the website, the pain and suffering.
None of that matters.
He doesn't need to meet with Sebelius.
Who would want to meet with an idiot?
What's he going to learn talking to?
All he's going to hear is problems.
He doesn't want to hear about the problems.
Problems don't exist in Obama's world.
They always get papered over.
Somebody else deals with them.
Problems are not part of his world.
Golf.
College students at an audience.
Flying on Air Force One.
That's what matters.
He doesn't want to hear problems.
He doesn't know what to do about them anyway.
But the bottom line is, in his world, there aren't any problems in anything he does.
And he doesn't want anybody else's mess to fix, so she's on her own.
Deal with it when it ends up where he wants it to be.
South Windsor, Connecticut, this is Chris.
Welcome.
Great to have you on the EIB network.
Hello.
Hi there, Rush.
You know, I was listening to that study about men looking at women.
I'm 66 years old, and I'm married for a long time to the love of my life.
I look at men.
I look at young men.
My friends look at young men.
We make comments about what, nothing salacious, but what a beautiful young man.
You men are missing the boat.
You ought to be doing your own study.
You'll find out women look at men just like men look at women.
This is crazy.
Yeah.
You're right.
I mean, you're exactly right.
The objectifying goes both ways.
But I've, you know what I've found, Chris?
I've found that it's not just men looking at women.
Women look at other women too.
With daggers in their eyes and either jealousy or appreciation or judgmentalism of some kind.
Well, I'm sorry to tell you that at 66, I still do some of that.
Well, I'll tell you what.
God bless you.
And the truth of the matter is, you leftists, we men would love to be objectified.
We would love to be looked at by women the way we look at women.
But they don't see us the same way.
And that's because our brains are different, because they're born different.
They're wired differently.
These people just, they can't leave anybody alone.
They have to enforce their perverted, convoluted way of thinking on everybody and their way of eating or whatever it is on everybody.
They just are not content to live their lives alone.
Got to force those.
Well, we're off to a rousing start here, folks, in another busy broadcast week at the EIB Network.
Sit tight, have fun the next 21 hours, and we'll be back, revved up and ready to go again.
I'm going to let this health stack keep building as at some point we're going to be able to do an entire two shows on the things going wrong.
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