Liberalism is an Economic Virus

The word "virus" is from the Latin virus, meaning toxin or poison. Viruses don't have reproductive bodies of their own, they use the equipment of their host to replicate themselves. Transmission of viruses can be vertical (mother to child) or horizontal (as in person to person). The effect on mankind of viruses can best be described by a simple list of viral diseases: Spanish Flu; AIDS; Ebola; rabies; yellow fever, smallpox; the Black Death; polio; various STDs; hepatitis (B&C); herpes; many cancers; norovirus; measles ... in short, a hit parade of death to individual humans and whole societies.

I would like to introduce a new virus, deadly as any of the above, for your consideration. The target host is a healthy, functioning economy. Its effect is to kill that economy. It spreads, but only so long as the host does nothing to prevent the illness in the first place, or refuses to vaccinate itself. The culprit is Liberalism, as pernicious and deadly a virus as the world has ever seen, killing whole economies, societies and civilizations as surely as a more traditional virus kills humans.

You see, a healthy economy produces goods and services in a dynamic fashion, adapting to market conditions, "pruning itself of dead wood," moving as necessary. A healthy economy has a small surplus of economic bounty or health that is used to ensure that its constituent parts -- its people -- remain useful and active participants. That is public spending. It is not only healthy, it is needed to provide a productive environment for the working and productive people. In any healthy economy, there are always going to be some people that cannot be productive or useful in a significant way: they do not add to the general overall economic endeavor, they act as a drag on it.

Enter politics -- the petri dish for infection. Certain pieces of dead wood (the initial virus vectors), convince potentially productive members of the body public that they would be better off in the non-productive environment, life would be easier and what's more, they are entitled to a non-productive life, all paid for by the healthy economy. After all, as anyone can see, there is plenty left over that the productive members of the body public don't use. That is the introduction of the virus -- it then multiplies rapidly. The more members that become unproductive, the more secure the viral politician from removal by the ballot box.

The dead-wood viral politicians notice that in fact certain productive members of the body public are extremely efficient and produce far in excess of what they require for their own comfort. So they tell the infected "let's relieve them of that burden, let's set some sort of required level of excess contribution reflecting that person's efficiency." Taxation. Entitlement programs, etc. The virus has taken hold and induced a fever in the body public. In some instances this is contained and the fever subsides and the body public then manages the infection similar to a chronic illness.

But most often, the virus also seizes control of the central nervous system of the body public - -the news media and educational systems. This is similar to the virus in a human body overwhelming the immune system, sometimes a slow battle, other times an Ebola-like explosion of insanity. Either way, the march of the disease at this point becomes inevitable. If there were a vaccine -- a scrupulously constructed and protected Constitution for example -- the illness might still be contained. But as is often the case, the Liberalism virus also seizes control of the judiciary, through the aegis of its long dormant control of education.

People-members of the body public simply do not know better -- they cannot fight off the infection because they do not know that they are even infected, control of the media ensures that. It spreads vertically -- whole families have voted Democratic for generations, simply because their union (secondary infections) and parents have always done so. It becomes common wisdom to act in a fashion that can only hasten the death of the body public, indeed the members proceed to vote to reject a vaccine and inoculate themselves with ever-more virulent versions of the disease that is killing them: vote Obama or Clinton -- Marburg or Ebola? You die either way.

In the later stages of the disease, the body public experiences a phenomenon whereby the healthiest and most productive members become subject to the rages of Liberalism in its most virulent form: taxation to support the unproductive and wasteful, supported by the tyranny of the ballot box -- Liberal viral vetors manage to convince enough of the ignorant (but otherwise productive) and the clearly toxic (entitlement recipients and illegal immigrants) that they have the solution, tax the productive, tax the efficient, tax anyone that can make your life easier. Steal by power of the ballot box. Vote left and your life will be easier.

This marks the terminal stage of the disease. As the productive members of the body public start to amputate themselves from the diseased main corpus through immigration, tax shelters, retirement, asset protection strategies, the taxation base -- the lifeblood of the disease -- shrinks. It has to shrink anyway due to an aging population, but the effect is exacerbated through proactive actions of its healthy and productive members to remain disease-free. As the taxation base shrinks, the diseased element of the body public executes a viral escalation: they raise taxes, rather than cut down the deadly hemorrhagic fever of unrestricted public spending. This in turn causes yet more of the productive and healthy elements of the body public to shut down, making the deficit yet worse.

This eventually leads to a collapse. Sometimes the body public recovers in a different form, a cataclysmic metamorphosis into a new shape. Chile. At other times, an undead body self locomotors around the great universe -- Venezuela, Cuba. Sometimes the body is in a state of rigor mortis, but not quite dead: most of Europe.

There are secondary infections that characterize the disease: e.g., unbridled illegal immigration -- an infection of opportunity that can strike the killing blow. Remember AIDs does not kill in of itself, it simply disables the body's ability to fight off debilitating illnesses that can drain the body to death ... quickly. Military folly: when in doubt, attack something. History is replete with examples of this one ... wag the dog. Failure to impose reason over fantasy and fanaticism -- the rise of Western Islam.

When the body public dies -- the economic vitality is so drained that it cannot defend itself, the virus, true to form, finds another host. To be sure, the virus is attempting to infect other healthy bodies all along, but eventually the college professors, the journalists, the junk science mongers decamp to healthier climes. Having totally ruined their country of origin.

Look at Europe now. If you are young, smart and otherwise intelligent, you get the heck out of Dodge -- you can't find young ambitious Dutch and French university graduates that want to stay in their own land. But are they infected? Maybe they are not, but their politicians are, the electorate are and in the process have created moribund societies that will collapse inwards in the shortest possible period of time. They have a generation to go before the vast teeming ignorance that is modern Islam buries them -- an opportunistic infection allowed into the body public by the virus of socialism, of which American Liberalism is but a genetic mutation, but with its origin in the rotting corpse that is Europe.

Will America inoculate itself? Will the body public come to its senses and build a wall. Get rid of entitlements, shut down the bastard factories, cut taxes, give tax breaks to the productive and efficient to breed new members of a healthy body public? There is no candidate currently running for office that has this promise. They are all infected, it is only a question of to what degree. But there are signs of stirring: the productive still outnumber the diseased. Perhaps with the secondary illness in the credit and equity markets we have seen the perils that lie ahead. We were strong enough (at least I think) to weather this assault. Perhaps it is like a person that has a heart attack and suddenly realizes that he cannot eat Big Macs and hope to balance that with a Diet Coke.

But also look at Islam ... the virus of Liberalism (socialism) does not do too well there. They have powerful vaccines that we no longer use: religion (itself an alternatively benign or highly dangerous virus). A counter virus. A DNA-bomb. You show your Liberal head in Afghanistan. Try it. Just let me get away from you, say a 10 second headstart, 15 seconds if they have any napalm.

Interestingly, the paradigm of the viral infection is remarkably apt. There are few viral drugs that really work. There is no use in taking antibiotics -- they may only help with the secondary infections -- and they won't clear up the viral assault. We need to get our own immune system up and running to combat this chronic viral disease. And we can develop vaccines for new mutations, although we may not be able to totally rid ourselves of the root virus. Remember, if there is gangrene, you've got to do the painful solution. It won't be pretty. But in the long run, a healthy U.S. economy can support many programs and guest workers. A sick one just pays interest to China.