Today is the day for Fox News commentator Glenn Beck to share his dream on the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s famous speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.
King delivered his “I Have A Dream” exactly 47 years ago and will now be the scene of Beck and his followers offering their own “dream.” The article below describes supporters wearing telltale teeshirts with Palin’s name that the legend “Babies, Guns, Jesus.”
Here is another tee-shirt from the rally:
Some accounts are almost biblical of Beck’s role in reshaping America. Former House Majority Leader Dick Armey explained “[w]e see Glenn Beck as a guy who is bringing revelations of understanding to the American people.”
Revelations by St. Beck will commence this afternoon.
Source: Bloomberg
Woosty:
A corporation that prevents an idea coming to market by illegal means should be sanctioned/penalized.
Blouise:
he was free to do whatever he wanted with his money. That is the point. Your money is your money, you earn it. It is part of your life to which no other man has a right.
Elaine:
The working class/middle class is paying way too much in taxes. I don’t think anywhere have I ever said that loss should be socialized, they should have gone out of business and paid the piper.
Elaine:
I am talking about people who earn their money legally and ethically. But I disagree about the cause of the financial crisis. Interest rates are controlled by the Federal Reserve not Wall St.
Byron,
‘A transference or distribution of wealth is not social justice it is theft. A rich man, at least in America, is not rich because he took from the workers. He created value where none existed. ‘
I agree, and it sounds great….but then how do you ascribe the anti-competitive realities into that statement? What about the market that caters to only those who are already wealthy? Corporations that actually work to HALT that dynamic of creating substantial value for society? [electric car…..], it sounds good on paper….it isn’t real and it leads people astray…
and I agree w/Elaine M. on the transfer of wealth issue….it’s been less than forthright in the translation…
… I forgot the first set of quotation marks … it should read:
Here is a little more on Carnegie:
“However ………….
Byron,
Olbermann is not the Glenn Beck of the left. Give me a break!
I watched the Olbermann clip again. What did he say that twisted the facts? He provided listeners with information that is available at the National Park Service’s Washington Monument webpage. Glenn Beck lied or was ignorant of the facts when he said that the building of the monument was stopped because of the Civil War.
Byron,
Here is a little more on Carnegie:
However, a belief in political egalitarianism was another ambition Carnegie inherited from his family. Andrew’s father, his grandfather Tom Morrison and his uncle Tom Jr. were all Scottish radicals who fought to do away with inherited privilege and to bring about the rights of common workers. …..
Fond of saying that “the man who dies rich dies disgraced,” Carnegie then turned his attention to giving away his fortune. He abhorred charity, and instead put his money to use helping others help themselves. That was the reason he spent much of his collected fortune on establishing over 2,500 public libraries as well as supporting institutions of higher learning. By the time Carnegie’s life was over, he gave away 350 million dollars.” (American Experience)
I’m going to respectfully suggest that both Milton Hershey and Andrew Carnegie would have been more in agreement with Rawls’ views than with yours. 😉
Byron,
You said: “A transference or distribution of wealth is not social justice it is theft. A rich man, at least in America, is not rich because he took from the workers. He created value where none existed.”
Some rich people earn their wealth. There are other wealthy people who get it through devious means–folks like Joe Cassano and some others who worked for Goldman Sachs and other banks and Wall Street firms who didn’t produce ANYTHING of value–but blew a hole in our country’s and other countries’ economies, lost working people’s pensions–all because of greed. There have been heads of corporations who are incompetent–but they get millions of dollars in golden parachute deals when they get fired.
Ken Lay? Great role model. So too Ivan Boesky and Michael Milken–and too many others to name.
I’d say that in recent years it’s been more of a redistribution of the wealth from the middle and working classes to the wealthy.
There are a lot of working poor, working class, and middle class folks who are far more productive than many of our richest Americans.
Elaine:
The information I read was similar to what you posted. The No Nothings tried to build it and could not raise money so they had to abandon it. By the time the Free Masons took back control it was the late 1850’s and it was stopped by the political upheaval of the day.
So both Olbermann and Beck are somewhat right. Olbermann is the Glen Beck of the left. Depending on your political persuasion one or the other is the anti-Christ.
Olbermann had an axe to grind and so did not exactly give the facts and neither did Beck. I think Beck is a little goofy and I am not one of the 2,000,000 plus who watches him. I don’t care for Olbermann and do not watch him either.
“A rich man, at least in America, is not rich because he took from the workers. He created value where none existed.”
Interesting myth you’ve got there Byron.
This would only be a true statement if people like Carnagie did all the work themselves. In fact, what he did was exploit the value creation of workers by disproportionately reaping the rewards of their efforts. That’s not a value adding relationship. It’s a parasitic relationship.
Social justice is not antithetical to the founding principles of this country, especially if one is using the Declaration as a guide to those principles. What social justice is antithetical to is your version of unrestrained capitalism which by its very nature is exploitative.
Mike A:
At the bottom of what you said is share and share alike. Certainly if it is voluntarily it is equitable, if it is forced it is not.
Central and South America are/were feudalistic societies as you say run by a small minority of people. I imagine though if you trace the history of those families there was one poor bastard that worked his ass off and started it all. He had the same opportunities as any of his peers in whatever era he worked.
Much like Milton Hershey or Andrew Carnegie, both started from nothing and achieved great wealth and made many people wealthy. The unfortunate part is that not all people are capable of achieving great wealth, granted it takes workers to help do it but most work for a company because they have neither the ability nor the desire to expend the effort required. A man like Milton Hershey could have made a very fine living selling candy out of one store and doing most of the work himself.
A transference or distribution of wealth is not social justice it is theft. A rich man, at least in America, is not rich because he took from the workers. He created value where none existed. I fundamentally disagree with Dr. Rawls and say social justice is at the expense of the individual which is the reason our nation was founded. Therefore social justice is antithetical to our founding principles. Social justice implies the right to happiness whereas the founders merely allowed for it’s pursuit and guaranteed it for no one.
As Jefferson said, you cannot build-up one man by tearing another down. Social justice comes at someones expense, it is anti-individual.
As an aside a person has a right to join a union and engage in collective bargaining.
Mike A,
As a youngster I was not as appreciative of the adults in my father’s circle of friends as I am now, 40 to 50 years later. However, I used to listen intently to all the debates and find myself even now, upon hearing a certain phrase or turn of phrase, saying to myself … I knew that. Upon further reflection I remember that I first heard the idea from the adults gathered around our dining room table all those years ago. I enjoyed a rather spectacular childhood … which at the time seemed perfectly normal. (It was my job to pour the Port)
Blouise,
I’m sure I would have enjoyed those sessions, especially since there were no tests at the end. I didn’t know Prof. Rawls outside of the classroom (I pretty much spent my college years in a state of perpetual inadequacy), but I found him to be not only a profound thinker, but a kind and gentle man with a tremendous grasp of human nature.
Mike Appleton,
John Rawls was a very good friend of my father and I spent many an evening, as a teenager, sitting on the peripherals of the adult circle absorbing the ideas discussed. The impact of those discussions on my adult views were major, to say the least.
Byron,
Who is “more partially correct”–Keith or Beck???
Byron,
I strongly disagree with your view that “social justice” is a code phrase for communism or socialism. Pope Leo XIII issued the encyclical “Rerum Novarum” in the early 1890s, in which he urged recognition of the rights of workers in response to the intolerable conditions imposed on the working class by industrialization. In the 1960s Pope John XXIII issued “Mater et Magistra” and “Pacem in Terris,” which expanded on many of the principles laid out by Leo XIII. Consider the following from paragraph 74 of “Mater et Magistra”: “…[T]he economic prosperity of a nation is not so much its total assets in terms of wealth and property, as the equitable division and distribution of this wealth.” While Catholic teaching on social justice condemns communism and socialism (i.e., in their materialistic forms), it recognizes that productivity is a function of capital and labor acting collaboratively. Thus the importance of labor unions lies in their ability through collective bargaining to equalize the division of wealth produced through that collaborative process.
“Liberation theology,” another body of work concerning which Glenn Beck and his allies are completely clueless, was an effort to apply Catholic teaching on social justice to the plight of peasant classes in Central and South America, where governments and economies have traditionally been controlled by a handful of families. This effort was initiated largely by clergy working among desperately poor people in rural areas. The reaction was frequently vicious and deadly, and very little has changed.
John Rawls is in my view one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century. My view is no doubt skewered by the fact that Mr. Rawls was one of my professors in college. But despite his brilliance, he did not “invent” the concept of social justice. What he did do was attempt to develop the idea that a justice must be ameliorative as well as distributive.
At the bottom of all of these writings is the simple principle that in a just society, sole control of capital should not translate into sole ownership of what is produced. That is to say, those who argue that the providers of capital constitute the “productive element of society” are merely eliminating half of the productivity equation. They are arrogant and they are wrong.
Byron,
P.S.
I wrote in an earlier comment: How was Beck “partially correct?” Was the building of the monument stopped because of the Civil War or not? According to the National Park Service, work on the project stopped in 1854.
Correction: Evidently, the building of the monument was stopped in 1858–according to the NPS webpage about the Washington Monument.
Byron,
I did a little more checking on the story of the Washington Monument.
**********
From the National Park Service Washington Monument webpage
http://www.nps.gov/nr/travel/presidents/washington_monument.html
In 1855, the small anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant American, or “Know-Nothing” Party seized control of the Washington National Monument Society through an illegal election, following a dispute over a memorial stone donated by Pope Pius IX. The Know-Nothings retained control of the society until 1858. While in control, the Know-Nothings added just a few courses of masonry to the monument using inferior marble, which were later removed. Construction halted in 1858 when the monument was at a height of 156 feet and the money ran out. It did not resume until after the Civil War. The monument remained unfinished for more than 20 years. Today a distinct color difference is still visible near the level at which construction temporarily stopped in the 1850s.
Elaine M.,
Don’t let fact and logic dissuade you from dealing with supporters of beck. If it doesn’t fit the paradigm they have attempted to build with words, what will justify there action?
Ah ha, facts did not annoy the building blocks of the Third Reich either, which I understand was based on the 10th Century Holy Roman Empire… Didn’t they dislike the Weimar “Liberals” and booted him out for a much more likable guy and then based the sole autocratic democracy in the hands of a master puppeteer Gobbels……
“The above was based upon history as I understand it and could or not be correct as it is based upon numerous influences, but it what I understood at the time to be correct.”
Notice I did not say Hitler once in the above….