Why Keep Trusting Government?

RUSH: Moscow Mills, Missouri, and this is Rich. Nice to have you on the EIB Network, sir. Hello.

CALLER: Hey, Rush, great to talk to you. Love the show. I want to address the statement that you sometimes make about ‘do not doubt me.’

RUSH: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

CALLER: Well, you had a caller today that wanted to maybe to make a long story short, nationalize Big Oil to pay for Social Security.

RUSH: The new oil that we’re going to drill for, yeah.

CALLER: Yeah, exactly.

RUSH: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

CALLER: Now, I’m sure there’s listeners… I was thinking of my daughter who teaches. You know, she’s out of school right now; and, you know, she’s indoctrinated; and I’m thinking of all the young people out there that listen to you, and they probably doubt you. You know, it takes six weeks, you say, to get up to speed; and so when you say that the Democrats do not want to solve the oil problem, they probably think, ‘You know, who is this guy saying such a ridiculous thing?’ But these people thrive when there’s problems because human nature — unfortunately it seems to me, unless you have some conservative values, human nature says — look to government. Now, this man who called you, that’s exactly what he did. I don’t think he was a liberal, but his answer to the problem is to have government take it over.

RUSH: No, just the opposite. He was a conservative.

CALLER: Well, that’s even worse.

RUSH: That’s why I accused him of being a selfish citizen.

CALLER: Well, I’m 64. I’ve got more than Social Security coming in. But, you know, if people don’t realize that government is not the answer, it’s the problem by now… I was a Marine in ’66 in Vietnam. I saw the Democrats and what they did to that. In the seventies, I saw Governor Reagan, and I almost fell off my couch. I stopped watching news in 1970, national news. I saw Governor Reagan on the Tonight Show, I about fell off the couch because he said, ‘We shoulda went to Vietnam but we should have gone to win.’ Now, that was after everybody in this country assumed it was a mistake, and here was a politician from California saying something that no one would say. Believe me, I almost fell off the couch. But that’s the kind of man Reagan was. If he’d have gone, he’d have won it. Then in ’89, you came along, and I’ve been in advanced conservative studies ever since, but it’s amazing how people will fall for the Democrats. My father, God love him, he was a Democrat ’til he was 91 and passed away, but I couldn’t say Reagan in front of him because he read the Post-Dispatch all his life.

RUSH: Yeah, yeah, I know. Our family read the Globe-Democrat.

CALLER: Well, yeah, until they went out of business.

RUSH: Until they went out of business, that’s right.

CALLER: Yeah, so now we’ve got just one.

RUSH: Yeah. You know, we talked about this. This is an item that puzzles a lot of people: Why, with all the demonstrable failures of government trying to do this or that — all these vast, expensive programs, all the little bureaucracies in cities and counties and states and so forth — why do people continue to turn to government, and a lot of it is psychological. You gotta remember the New Deal formed the basis for a lot of union and Democrat households to pass on the benevolence notion of government to their kids and grandkids and so forth and people just grew up thinking it, and there’s another aspect to it, too. And I haven’t given this a lot of thought, but most people’s laments generally have to do with money and economics.

CALLER: Yes.

RUSH: And there’s one place that’s got an endless supply of money and is always giving it away, and that’s government.

CALLER: Yep.

RUSH: They’re always giving it away to somebody.

CALLER: Yeah.

RUSH: And they’re always giving a lot of it away. They’re spending, what, 800 bucks on toilet seats for military aircraft. They are spending all kinds of money, and when somebody from the government comes along and says, ‘We can make sure that you don’t get screwed by an insurance company, by a doctor, by a car dealer,’ whatever, people who think that they’re powerless, think the government’s everything but powerless. ‘Okay, fine. Give it a shot.’ This is purely psychological because the facts on the ground clearly indicate that if you start depending on government for much of what you want or need in life, you’re going to be perpetually poor and disappointed.

CALLER: Well, maybe it goes to that point that a lot of people think that unfortunately could be true, and that is, it has to be so bad before it gets better.

RUSH: Well, I think that’s another psychological ploy the Democrats use. If you go back to the Clinton campaign in 1992, ‘worst economy in the last 50 years,’ which was a lie.

CALLER: Well, I was thinking more of our oil situation. You know, maybe now we’ll start drilling, now that it’s four dollars. You know, they got people, when they go to fill up their cars, I can’t imagine what they’re thinking. I mean, I’m retired so I’m not driving.

RUSH: I know what they’re thinking. They’re mad as hell.

CALLER: Well, exactly.

RUSH: This is such a golden opportunity for the Republicans. This ought to be the Republicans’ year. The Democrat Party is the one standing in the way of anything being done about the price of gasoline coming down. Now, there’s a tipping point for everything. We’ve learned what it is, when it comes to gasoline: The tipping point is four dollars a gallon, that’s when people say, ‘I’m not going to adapt. I’ve had it.’ All of a sudden, they start getting mad and want action taken. The Democrats, they’re making noises here that they’re going to open up the drilling and so forth, but they’re just saying that to be able to occupy the position. If a piece of legislation ever gets to Congress, House or the Senate, you watch. The Democrats will either insert something in the bill or find —

CALLER: No doubt.

RUSH: — something in the bill —

CALLER: No doubt.

RUSH: — so that they can still have, ‘Hey, I’m for drilling but we can’t do it, ’cause we gotta do it a smarter way,’ or whatever.

CALLER: Exactly. You know, I think of that gas tank again and, you know, we had snipers in Vietnam and I think of the average citizen in this country. They’re after our freedom basically, I mean, if you want to really generalize it in a big way, and they’ve got ’em pinned down. They’ve got ’em pinned down at the gas station. You know, they’re shooting at them. They’re taking away their freedom when they take away their ability to travel, to buy things.

RUSH: It is more hideous than that, because all of that — this gasoline price — is directly related to the manmade global warming hoax, which is the big vehicle for taking away liberty and freedom.

CALLER: Unbelievable.

RUSH: That one actually seeks to punish people. If you walk around town in Moscow Mills, Missouri, and go to the right places, you’ll find enough liberals (you may have to travel to St. Louis to do it) who say, ‘Good! It’s about time gas got this high. We are destroying the planet!’ You’ve got a bunch of just totally sycophant slave nerds, liberals who believe that all this is good, that America deserves to pay this kind of punishing price; which is another problem that we’ve got, and that mind-set finds itself now as prominent in the Democrat Party.