RUSH: The fundamentals of the US economy are sound. Snerdley says, ‘You don’t believe that,’ and so I have to ‘splain. See, he thinks that you all are just teetering on the edge of collapse, disaster, bankruptcy, and all of that. And when I say the economy’s fundamentals are sound it makes it sound like I am out of touch. So I’m going to tell you why you feel what you feel. It ain’t the economy. It isn’t. Hang on. But here’s Max Boot in the Los Angeles Times today: ‘Don’t Sell America’s Economy Short.’ He starts out this way. ‘A visiting Israeli Cabinet minister made two interesting points at a conference in Washington over the weekend. The current financial crisis, he said, is undermining the perception of American power when it comes to dealing with problems such as the Iranian nuclear program, Russian adventurism or the growing threat from Hamas and Hezbollah. Various actors around the world look at the US and see a crippled giant. That reduces incentives to make concessions to Washington.
‘That problem is real, but so is the additional sentiment that he expressed after having been here for a few days. The economic woes of the US, he found, are not as readily apparent up close as they are in sensational media coverage abroad. So far, Main Street has shown a surprising amount of resiliency given the problems of Wall Street. Even if the economy eventually succumbs to recession, as now appears more likely, it will bounce back before long. It always has. There have been plenty of crises in the past — the stagflation and oil-price spikes of the 1970s, the savings and loan debacle and soaring trade and budget deficits of the 1980s, the popping of the dot-come bubble and the terrorist attacks in the early 2000s — that led many observers to predict that the United States would soon go the way of Rome,’ and we came back stronger. Didn’t we, Snerdley? Obama sure as hell made out like a bandit in this decade. Obama got rich in the Bush years; Algore got rich in the Bush years; the Clintons got rich in the Bush years.
‘What the pessimists ignore is that the fundamentals of the US economy remain strong.’ You know, folks, the US economy — this is another indictment of the media — the US economy, you can trace it to the confidence of people who make it work, which is you. It’s not these Wall Street people; it’s not people in Washington. Do you really think that Barney Frank and Chris Dodd and all these yokels conducting hearings, that Bernanke and Henry Paulson got a magic bullet to fix this? Do you really believe that? Don’t, ’cause they don’t. If anybody up there had a magic bullet to prevent things like this, they would never happen, but they do happen, because you can’t stop the market. Now, you can socialize it and slow it down and change it and destroy it over time, which is one of the risks here. But these people are no different than anybody else. They just have this aura of expertise based on the jobs that they hold and the jobs that they’ve held, but it’s all happened on their watch, and now they claim they got the magic bullet to fix all this. And it’s only going to be 700 billion, trillion, maybe. That’s why folks, I’ve always said — you laugh at me, think that I’m being a smart aleck — if they’re going to have a recession, don’t participate. You’d be surprised at the power of attitude. What the pessimists ignore is that the fundamentals of our economy are strong.
‘Indeed, the World Economic Forum has ranked the United States as the world’s most competitive economy for the last two years. (The new survey comes out next month.) Its statistics show that per-capita gross domestic product in the US consistently has grown faster than in other developed economies since 1980. Looking deeper at the causes of American competitiveness shows that we score especially strongly not only in domestic market size (No. 1 in the world),’ and we keep hearing about China. We’re number one. We’re the number one domestic market in the world, don’t ever forget it, nobody is close to us, ‘but also in such areas as time required to start a business (No. 3), venture capital availability (No. 1), the cost of firing an employee (No. 1), ownership of personal computers (No. 2), university/industry research collaboration (No. 1) and quality of scientific research institutions (No. 2).’ Now, I’m not going to get into the liberal makeup of these things, we can do that later, just giving you our ranks here.
‘The availability of venture capital might be affected temporarily by the market turmoil, and we should worry if Democrats gain control of both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue in November because they might exacerbate what the survey found to be the two most ‘problematic’ issues for doing business in the US — high tax rates and cumbersome tax regulations.’ I’m telling you, we can’t afford to take out a loan on Barack Obama. We can’t afford the risk. We don’t know what we’re getting, and we don’t need his cosigners on the loan: Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayers, Tony Rezko, Bernardine Dohrn. ‘But whatever happens in the next few months, most of the other advantages that have been powering the US economy forward for decades will remain unchanged. So too will another vital statistic: population growth. According to federal statistics, the fertility rate in the US, where each woman has on average 2.1 children, is now the highest among major industrialized economies,’ because we aren’t having as many abortions as we used to, among other things. So we are producing replacement population worker bees.
Now, takes us back to Democrats and taxes. If you think what’s happening now is a shudder, wait ’til all this starts happening with Soc. Security. Now, this degree of crisis may not happen in your lifetime or mine, but it’s certainly going to happen in your kids’, and they may not be willing to pay the tax rates that people like Obama are gonna require. So elections matter. This one is crucially important. Media in the tank, propagandizing for Obama. So if the fundamentals of the economy are strong, and there’s still economic opportunity out there. People are opening new businesses every day. Entrepreneurs are doing what they can, and situations like this, we create new entrepreneurs. We have a history of this. Opportunity is out there. But it’s not gonna come to you. It may knock on your door, the song, (singing) ‘I hear you knocking,’ yeah, might be opportunity, open the door when you hear it knocking, unless it’s after midnight at night. Opportunity does not show up unless you bought it, and that’s when she’s arriving. And I probably wouldn’t even call that opportunity. But it’s out there to be had. So why do you feel so bad? Why do you feel so bad? Well, there are genuine reasons, but they are not economic.
In order to exert control over us feisty Americans, the left, the Democrat Party, the socialists have come at us slowly and deliberately but daily. It never ends. They first tried to trash our religion, until we cower, are quiet and speak in hushed tones. Then it was a war of getting rid of our guns. Can’t have those around, that gives us too much control. Then they infiltrated the public schools, the universities, and the Drive-Bys to have control on our thinking and our moods, and there is where you feel bad because they are telling you, wherever you go, you can turn on the radio, listen to music, you can listen to a television show, watch the news, watch a movie, and they will tell you your country stinks, and so do you. Then they came after our cars. They made the ultimate American definition of freedom a demon, shaming us into these little Matchbox toys, where we can really not escape anywhere. Now they’re working on cell phones, folks. I mean this will not go away. Cell phones cause cancer, the same manner they went after cigarettes. In addition to taking the freedom, they gain cash to operate. Why do cell phones scare ’em? Well, because we can talk to each other.
As soon as they can, they will get rid of me and others who do what I do with the Fairness Doctrine, and then they’ll try to get rid of people on the Internet that they don’t like. And then they will use both of those fora to spread their own propaganda. I mean just this week we saw the first attempt to destroy the free market and private investment to socialize the financial system of the United States of America. We’re getting to the point we’re not going to have control over our money anymore, either. But who needs to invest when we have a secure future with the government? And then we had Chuck Schumer blaming all this on the mortgage. What is the mortgage? The mortgage is the instrument of access to the American dream. It is the symbol of private property ownership, and there’s Chuck Schumer, the mortgage caused this. You owning private property caused this. It’s a long road that we have traveled. This has been going on for years, decades, with this determined group of community organizers. But it’s a very straight road. It is The Road to Serfdom. Friedrich Hayek wrote a book by that name. That’s why you feel bad. You’re losing your freedom, and you don’t understand how it’s happening.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Let me say one thing here just to clarify. When I say the fundamentals in the economy are strong, I’m not trying to talk you out of feeling pessimistic about certain things, because we need to be concerned about something here. I’m not saying just walk around, ‘Hey, everything is cool and dandy, happy-go-lucky,’ you know, flap our hands like we can fly around or fly away from it. Not that at all. The problem that we are in the midst of trying to fix here is not capitalism’s fault. It is the government. We have not just a right, we have a duty to get over being pessimistic. We have a duty to be angry about this and motivated to do something about it. The government is on autopilot in a lot of respects. It’s unresponsive to the public will. And it is the government, these loathsome politicians who use government to undermine the economy. Don’t be so pessimistic about the economic circumstance that it’s going to affect how you behave economically, but you should be mad at what’s happening with this government system that has lurched from its origins to something else that the founders never endorsed. I mean, this is maddening.
When I say the fundamentals of the economy are sound, we’re teetering, we’ve got two choices. We can choose a boom, or we can choose a socialist government and a socialist economy, and you can say good-bye to boom. Here’s a little illusion, a little example of you hear a story like this, throw your hands up and think, ‘My gosh, it isn’t going to be long before it happens here, and what do we do about this?’ This is from the UK Guardian, today: Ecuador is having a vote on giving nature human rights. ‘Ecuador will next week consider what many countries in the world would say is unthinkable. People will be asked to vote on Sunday on a new constitution that would give Ecuador’s tropical forests, islands, rivers and air similar legal rights to those normally granted to humans. If they vote yes — and polls show that 56% are for and only 23% are against — then an already approved bill of rights for nature will be introduced, and new laws will change the legal status of nature from being simply property to being a right-bearing entity.’
You could perhaps be accused of murder if you cut the wrong — no comment from nature on this yet. Nature is not even in the campaign. Nature isn’t even running ads on television in Ecuador. You could be charged with murder, theoretically, if you cut the wrong branch off a tree, or if you’re tooling down the river in Ecuador in your little kayak or your canoe and you gotta relieve yourself, you pee in the river, somebody sees you, who knows what they could do. The left is just out of control for so much power and it’s all about — it’s hard to say it’s all about anything. But one of the things that’s really driving this is the absence of God in the hearts and souls of the left. They have substitutes.