RUSH: Fairfax, Virginia. Steven, glad you called, sir. Welcome.
CALLER: Rush! This is Steven.
RUSH: Yeah. Hi.
CALLER: Hey, before I start, I wanted you to know that I was packing my boxes in my townhome to move to our nice new single family home that we’re able to buy because of the current housing crisis.
RUSH: Why is that, sir? The prices are cheaper?
CALLER: Yeah. The prices are a lot cheaper.
RUSH: Prices are cheaper, and of course interest rates are down now.
RUSH: Yeah, I haven’t talked about it. I saw it. You know, maybe this is a mistake on my part, but I don’t really care what’s in TIME or Newsweek anymore, in the magazines. It’s so predictable. Newsweek? When I see a story that Newsweek does that says America is slipping to number two, of course this is what these people want! There’s so much guilt in the American left over the prosperity and greatness of this country that they relish the fact that we slip like this. In what areas are we ‘slipping’? I did not read it. I saw a reference to it. But what’s their premise?
CALLER: Everyone should read this, because the content of the article, where there is substantive content; is uplifting. It’s great news. The world is embracing free market in certain places that haven’t been in Third World countries, in high population areas, and all the substance of the article is great. Whenever the author comes in and begins to give his spin on it, it’s that America is slipping behind. The reason I really called, the reason I originally called about it was because I wanted to know — I remember in grade school or junior high getting one of those Weekly Readers.
RUSH: Yes, I used to read those, too.
CALLER: The picture on it was a scale with Uncle Sam on the right, up in the top of the scale with his raw materials and some Asian caricature on the left with all of his electronic equipment that was being imported into America and how America was falling behind. I remember about that time also all the news about how our education system was slipping to 14th of 24.
RUSH: Right, and Japan was going to buy up the country. They were buying up The Rockefeller Trust, buying up movie houses. Japan was going to own America. We were all going to be wearing kimonos or whatever.
CALLER: Right. And it seems what’s going on now — of course, that was during the great Reagan administration, which we won’t forget or let go of — and now we’re here at the end of the Bush administration, and I’m wondering if it’s just — I mean, I suspect it’s just a drumbeat that affects us, because he mentions a poll in there about how American… You know, ‘Are we on the right track?’ is at the most alarming rate it has been in 40 years or so.
RUSH: What, people say we’re not?
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: The thing about this article is that it points out how America has been exporting these ideals and how it’s affected people who are finally understanding. You know, Third World countries that are understanding, embracing economics and using it in free market societies, and that they are doing better than America, surpassing America. The ten things he lists on page one — it’s a seven-page article — are tallest building, biggest mall, biggest casino, richest man. They’re things that don’t mean a whole lot to me. But his point is that here America has been working on doing this, and somehow we don’t get the credit for it. It’s almost, ‘Oops, it happened, and here we are.’
RUSH: Let me tackle this from a different perspective, because if they want to say that we’re slipping to number two because capitalism exports are causing other countries to rise and shine and they’re using places like… If you’re going to talk about tallest building, you gotta talk, what? Where is that going up, China or somewhere?
CALLER: China and India are… India now has —
RUSH: Yeah, then you’ve got what the Emirates in Qatar and Dubai are doing — or, not Dubai — not Qatar — well, Qatar, too, but the United Arab Emirates and Dubai, they’re springing up. Here’s the thing. I will lay you ten to one — and just accepting the premise of the article here for a second, because I haven’t read it. When I see America slipping to number two, I don’t care what reason they give for it. I know that it’s probably something they’re happy about, and I’m not, and I don’t think it’s true. So I just get sick of it. I’m tired of accepting these people’s premises and then arguing on that basis. But for the sake of discussion here, one of the reasons in Dubai, for example — you ought to see what they’re doing in Dubai. Now, you can talk about the fact that they’re Muslims and that they’re Arabs and they’re anti-Semites and so on. Fine and dandy. But what they’re doing, they are growing exponentially. They are building homes, houses, airports, golf resorts. They’re doing all kinds of things, and I’ll lay you ten to one they don’t have to deal with environmentalist wackos to get it done!
And I’ll bet you in every one of those other countries where we are exporting capitalism, we’re not sporting enough liberalism to go along with it, because it used to be that if you wanted to hold your foreign competitors down, export liberalism! Export feminism, export animal rightism, export all these other -isms and get these societies roiled and torn apart. Export environmental wackoism. But the ChiComs are immune from that. You know, if an environmentalist wacko shows up over in China, they’re going to get thrown in jail along with the Falun Gong. So we allow ourselves to get handcuffed here again under these stupid liberal principles of protecting everything but humanity. So we might be allowing other countries to race past us in some ways. Banking might be one of these ways, I don’t know. This goes back and forth. But if we ever do genuinely slip and cease to be the world’s superpower — and I don’t care what Newsweek writes, there is no other superpower. We do not have a competitor. We’re it, and we’re giving it away, because we have so much damn liberal guilt over it!
If we ever do slip from being THE number one superpower, it is not going to be because anybody’s beaten us, but because we have so hamstrung ourselves with restrictions and obstacles on progress. Other nations are not going to do that and they’re going to race past us. The only way to limit that from happening is to limit the scope and power of liberalism, pure and simple. I’m going to have to start — you know, liberalism is like communism. sometimes the label just turns people off when you say liberalism this. Some people who would otherwise like to persuaded say, ‘Ah, there he goes categorizing people again.’ So in the interests of being persuasive with this argument I’m going to have to do something other than just laying it all at the foot of liberalism. Even though it’s true, even though it’s undeniable and unarguable. Perhaps a subscription of liberals and liberalism rather than just calling them that, engaging in these discussions would be more persuasive. I’m working on this constantly, folks, the art of persuasion. One of the problems with the art of persuasion dealing with this, is that so many people are ignorant — and I don’t mean that as a cut to them. You know my theory that ignorance is the most expensive commodity we have. Without it, liberalism would not have a toehold, would not have a foothold in our society. And, of course, who’s in charge of ignorance? That’s the public school system — and who runs that? Anyway, Steven, I’m glad you called.