The Death of an American Mule

Think of a hybrid, whether it's one of those ubiquitous bailout-backed vehicles that you see happy families driving around town in bailout-backed commercials or magnificent beasts such as the Liger, the Wolphin or the humble Mule. Hybrids are impressive at times, but they don't have much of a future.

Our system is an ungainly hybrid of capitalism and socialism that began when socialism was inserted as a humanizing fallback position for capitalism. Capitalism riding on socialism was meant to be more moral than the naked variety. But lately capitalism has turned into the horse and socialism into the rider, and we have just enough capitalism to pay for all the socialism.

We no longer have socialism to account for the human cost of capitalism. Capitalism now exists to cover the human cost of socialism. The crude bargain that we have is a free enterprise economy being ridden to death and then sent to the glue factory to pay for all the machinery of socialism. And this mule, this merger of the capitalist horse and the socialist donkey, is staggering around on its last legs.

Both Obama and Paul Ryan agree that the current hybrid system has no future. The debate is over whether America will go back to being a horse or turn into a donkey. The donkey party is slowly breeding out the horse lines to turn the United States into a fully socialist beast. A creature that eats money and excretes bureaucracy with a community organizer on every corner and a propaganda bulletin on every porch.

Anyone with minimal math skills can tote up the figures and see that the way things are is just about done. The hybrid alliance can't work when there is no longer enough free enterprise money to pay for the enterprise of big government. The dehybridization process has two possible approaches. Either we bid a fond farewell to big government or to the antiquated idea that individuals build things and then profit from them.

The mule has been working hard, but no amount of hard work or hybrid vigor will allow it to work off a debt being accumulated by asses who ride horses to death. The donkey party takes issue with Ann Romney's horse. It does not like horses because there is something free about them. The horse is breed exceptionalism, its speed is an exhilarating escape that speaks of open plains and unknown frontiers. But the left envisions a nation of donkeys patiently working themselves to death in their traces and then trotting off to the nationalized healthcare glue factory when they can no longer pay their taxes.

Like Animal Farm's Boxer, the American workhorse has worked itself to the bone, paying taxes on everything imaginable to subsidize the revolutionary state of the left, its mammoth bureaucracies and the bribes and favors that it doles out to its voting bases. Homes have been lost, lives shattered and families broken up so that America might "live up to" whatever promises the left has made to itself on their behalf. And like Boxer, the American and his way of life, is being taken away in a knacker's van billed as a trip to the veterinarian.

The left has forcefully accelerated the death throes of the American mule by pushing government spending beyond anything that the horse can cover. That leaves the overworked horse with only two options. It can either become a donkey and be fed and work without any say in what it is fed or how it works, or it can try to break free of the great socialist boneyard.

The one thing that everyone can agree on is that the hybrid system is done. Whatever uneasy truce has existed between American free enterprise and fee enterprise, the pretense of Democratic pols that free enterprise is a blessing to our land, rather than the reason why everyone doesn't make as much money as everyone else and why children in the ghetto don't have a 100,000-dollar education, is on the way out. Warren and Obama are trumpeting its death cry. The horse must be butchered so that the donkey party can hand out very expensive free things to all the sheep and then put them to work.

Socialism crept in the door by taking profits from free enterprise and promising to use it to make life better for those who needed it. Elizabeth Warren and Barack Obama are rejecting any implication that the government is the junior partner in this relationship. "You didn't build it," two political hacks who have never built anything in their life clamor. The message is that free enterprise is the junior partner, the ungrateful stepchild of the socialist stepmother who doesn't appreciate how rewarding sweeping out the ashes from the government fireplace where her money is burned can be.

The hybrid system began with socialism fixing the cracks in the free enterprise system and then shifted to free enterprise fixing the cracks in the socialist system. But the only cracks in the socialist system according to Obama and Warren come from free enterprise not paying enough of its fair share. And the only way to fix that is to get rid of free enterprise completely with the same people who gave us the public education system, the 300-dollar screwdriver, the welfare ghetto and gambling monopolies that somehow go bankrupt completely taking over the entire economy.

Between all the nonsense about Warren Buffett's six-figure secretary, the Koch Brothers inventing popular anger at big government over a game of croquet played with solid gold mallets and Sheldon Adelson's army of Chinese-Zionist death-hookers, all the 1-percent posters wielded by the 99 percent of the 1 percent and the commercials where Obama puts on his best smile to assure that he is a big fan of the blue-collar businesses that he visits once every four years, the message to the American people is that the government can no longer live within its means, so the people will have to start living within the government's means. And that is not a very reassuring message.

The last four years have demonstrated to most people who pay attention to such things that the government has failed to do anything positive about the economy. The swing voters who will likely determine this election are making their move based on their anecdotal experiences in a bad economy made worse by government intervention. Even those Obama supporters struggling to construct a positive narrative for the last four years are relying on special benefits that they received from the government-- not on general economic improvements for all.

To the donkey party, the failure of the economy is just proof that the American mule is dead and the economy needs to be taken over further. Only when they can control the price of every single commodity, the wage for every job and the amount of people hired and fired in every company will the economic recovery kick in. And by economic recovery, they mean jobs convincing the proles that even in the sixth year of the Great American Famine, the economy is doing smashingly well and the beloved leaders deserve our whole-hearted admiration and support.

That is the donkey economy we are being driven toward as the donkey party strives to make asses of us all. No matter how much control they have, they always want more and no matter how much money they have, they always want more. Their greed is endless and there are a legion of grim examples from the USSR to the Eurozone, from Mao's China to Jerry Brown's California to show us where the path to the end of the clearing will truly take us.

But it's an economy that we can still mount up and ride away from. And to do that we have to begin by asking which part of the hybrid economy really failed. Was the failure a function of free market corruption as the donkeys insist or of government corruption of the free market as the horses say. The donkeys say that the free market corrupts the government through deregulation while the horses say that the government corrupts free markets through regulation. Either argument is a call for the death of the hybrid system but the outcome of the argument will determine what system will replace it.

Our hybrid system began as charity and is ending as slavery. What began as a means of restraining monopolistic industrial feudalism has developed into a far larger feudal monopoly whose cruelty is exceeded only by its ineptness. The monstrosity that stretches its tentacles out of D.C. and through every state capital and county seat, every public and private enterprise, every store and home, makes Standard Oil seem positively benign. It has the worst habits of corporations but with no ability to make money. It has the worst aspects of a banana republic but with no national security skills. And worst of all, it is unsustainable. That is the one thing that both left and right agree on.

It may be impossible to save the American mule, which has been flogged to death by senators, activists and crony capitalists. But the American mustang isn't beyond saving. Neither is the American eagle. And our coming choices are to ride, to fly or to serve.