Decoder: Thomas Sowell’s Recent Column Comparing President Obama To Adolf Hitler

June 28, 2010 in Humor, Politics | Permalink

David Soul. No public-domain images of Thomas Sowell are available.

Thomas Sowell: A democracy needs informed citizens if it is to thrive, or ultimately even survive.

Decoder: Of course, informed people will be able to see through my bullshit, so scratch that idea.

Thomas Sowell: In our times, American democracy is being dismantled, piece by piece, before our very eyes by the current administration in Washington, and few people seem to be concerned about it.

Decoder: Few people seem concerned by things going on in my head and not in reality.

Thomas Sowell: Just where in the Constitution of the United States does it say that a President has the authority to extract vast sums of money from a private enterprise and distribute it as he sees fit to whomever he deems worthy of compensation? Nowhere.

Decoder: Just where in the in the Constitution of the United States does it say that a President doesn’t have the authority to talk sternly to a multinational corporation that behaved irresponsibly? Nowhere. BP could have said “no,” but they figured it would be easier this way.

Thomas Sowell: And yet that is precisely what is happening with a $20 billion fund to be provided by BP to compensate people harmed by their oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Decoder: Um, not precisely. “Precisely” means “exactly.”

Thomas Sowell: Our government is supposed to be “a government of laws and not of men.”

Decoder: And people from my party made sure that there were fewer and fewer laws that regulated the oil industry.

Paul Michael Glaser: I played Starsky, the dark-haired one.

Thomas Sowell: But the Constitution says that private property is not to be confiscated by the government without “due process of law.”

Decoder: The private property wasn’t confiscated. If BP had said “no” and the government had taken the $20 billion without consent, that would have been confiscation. That didn’t happen.

Thomas Sowell: Technically, it has not been confiscated by Barack Obama, but that is a distinction without a difference.

Decoder: It’s actually a big difference, but I’ll try to gloss over that with a cliche.

Thomas Sowell: When Franklin D. Roosevelt arbitrarily took the United States off the gold standard, he cited a law passed during the First World War to prevent trading with the country’s wartime enemies. But there was no war when FDR ended the gold standard’s restrictions on the printing of money.

Decoder: I’m awake at night worrying about the gold standard like a nudnik.

(Image by Stephen Foskett.)

Thomas Sowell: At about the same time, during the worldwide Great Depression, the German Reichstag passed a law “for the relief of the German people.” That law gave Hitler dictatorial powers that were used for things going far beyond the relief of the German people–indeed, powers that ultimately brought a rain of destruction down on the German people and on others.

Decoder: Obama talking tough to an incredibly irresponsible oil company will lead to Nazism in America. Or maybe I just see everything in ridiculous extremes like a child.

Thomas Sowell: Those who cannot see beyond the immediate events to the issues of arbitrary power–vs. the rule of law and the preservation of freedom–are the “useful idiots” of our time.

Decoder: By labeling those who disagree with me as “idiots,” I am attempting to peremptorily avoid any debate of my very dubious opinions.

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