The wealth of ‘useful idiots’

I remember 30 years ago as a senior in high school being at the Detroit Public Library struggling to read a reference copy of Adam Smith’s “The Wealth of Nations.” While I didn’t understand much of Smith’s opus, I learned a valuable lesson in perseverance. I didn’t give up and got a good grade in my economics class.

About a year earlier in my American history class I learned that the Constitution’s framers considered Smith’s treatise on economics as their bible in deriving the fundamental precepts of national wealth-building and economic policy in America. Alexander Hamilton, America’s first and greatest secretary of the treasury, put in place critical financial structures like a free-market economy, a stable currency based on the gold standard and an economic system based on supply and demand.

Like our government, America’s early philosophy of economics were all under the rubric of natural law – an inseparability of law and morality. People provide goods and services to each other not by government altruism (welfare) or legislative mandate, but out of their own self-interests, natural rights and the law of human nature where people naturally seek to better themselves.

Adam Smith summarized these ideas with this famous aphorism from his book:

The Butcher, the Baker, and the Brewer provide goods and services to each other out of self-interest; the unplanned result of this division of labor is a better standard of living for all three.

Because the Constitution’s framers embraced the capitalist principles of Adam Smith, a financial revolution was inaugurated that transformed and moved America’s economic system away from the backward feudalism and mercantilism systems of Enlightenment Europe and toward becoming the greatest, richest economy in the history of the world.

All that came from Adam Smith’s economic capitalism, yet at present we have forgotten this singular genius and the principles of economic liberty he championed.

In modern times, under the fascist President B. Hussein Obama, who scrupulously followed the lineage of several unremarkable predecessors over the past century – Woodrow Wilson, Hoover, FDR, LBJ, Carter, Bush 41, Clinton and most infamously, Bush 43 – under whom America’s economy has been driven to the brink of the Great Depression, Part II.

Last week I read an interesting article in the New York Post titled, “Worlds richest hold secret meeting.” The article discussed a curious meeting of America’s billionaire moguls in New York on May 20 ostensibly to discuss “philanthropy.”

Below are excerpts from comments by two New Yorkers:

Steph wrote:
They might have kicked around the philanthropy football at the podium, but the backroom whispers were all about how to protect their precious behinds once the banks fail and the masses start to get outta control. Can you say “wealth transfer” and “secret hideaway”?

While the writing admittedly isn’t Emily Dickinson, the passion of her words comes straight from the rational, gritty, unforgiving streets of New York. I love the bluntness of New Yorkers. “Steph” cuts through all the bull to explain why America’s billionaires clandestinely met.

Later she theorized, “It was a when-the-SHTF-session.”

Another New Yorker, “JWV,” commenting on the story, wrote the following:

Funny that all of these people supported Barack Obama; after all, why would rich people support a Democrat since the Republicans are supposed to be the party of the rich? The answer is simple. Barack Obama supports higher taxes on income, not wealth. Since these people are already rich just like Ted Kennedy, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, etc., an income tax increase would only affect their future earning. It would not affect the money that they already have. In other words, an income tax increase would not have an affect on their wealth, but it would make it more difficult for others to become wealthy. The real beauty of their plan is that the Democrats then use the money that they have taken from the productive and give it to the slackers, freeloaders, parasites and [the] corrupt in exchange for their votes. That is why the Democrats control our federal government.

JWV nailed it!

It has been almost 100 years since President Woodrow Wilson instituted the Federal Reserve in 1913. Eighty years later G. Edward Griffin published “The Creature from Jekyll Island” (1994), a book that systematically explained the unconstitutional creation of the Federal Reserve and uncovered the tragic folly of putting America’s economic health under the control of an unelected, unaccountable oligarchy of men whose clandestine modus operandi is more analogous to socialist globalism rather than defending America’s constitutional and economic interests.

What is the state of America’s economic health 233 years after the writing of Adam Smith’s “The Wealth of Nations”?

America is perhaps a few months away from losing its AAA Standard and Poors bond credit rating. Since the passage of the America Recovery Investment Act (February 2009) Obama claims that the U.S. has created over 150,000 new jobs. Yet new jobless claims for this week alone are at 632,000. Rather than the boom times Obama promised, economic experts estimate that since February, America is loosing over 16,000 jobs PER DAY!

In the 233 years since the Declaration of Independence and Adam Smith’s economic treatise, we’ve moved from the genius of the Constitution’s framers – men like Madison, Franklin, Jefferson, Witherspoon and Hamilton – to a singular village idiot with totalitarian control, supported by the 63.7 million voters who put this man in power: people who communist dictator, Vladimir Lenin, 100 years ago derisively referred to as “useful idiots.”

America, you decide which economic principles you will follow to return our once magnificent republic to her envied place of greatness – Adam Smith’s “The Wealth of Nations” or President B. Hussein Obama’s economic manifesto he is daily writing with our blood: “The Wealth of Useful Idiots”?

Ellis Washington, currently a professor of law and political science at Savannah State University, former editor at the Michigan Law Review and law clerk at The Rutherford Institute, is a graduate of John Marshall Law School and a lecturer and freelance writer on constitutional law, legal history, political philosophy and critical race theory. He has written over a dozen law review articles and several books, including “The Inseparability of Law and Morality: The Constitution, Natural Law and the Rule of Law” (2002). See his law review article “Reply to Judge Richard Posner.” Washington’s latest book is “The Nuremberg Trials: Last Tragedy of the Holocaust.”

Link to this page