Socialist Thom Hartmann Lectures Caller: Capitalism a Cancer, Libertarianism Corrupts
On Tuesday, liberal radio host Thom Hartmann engaged a conservative caller who was tired of the anti-capitalist rhetoric from President Obama and the left. “From the president’s own mouth, the anti-capitalist rhetoric is so poisoned,” said the caller.
Hartmann interrupted: “It is rhetoric in opposition to the excesses of unregulated capitalism. Unregulated capitalism can become a cancer just like unregulated growth in a cell is the definition of cancer.” Hartmann went on to say that libertarian notions are corrupting government, and that the Founding Fathers were for “general welfare” exactly like Franklin Roosevelt.
This is the exchange that followed the capitalism-as-cancer analogies:
CALLER: Who regulates the regulators?
HARTMANN: We do. We the people. The first three words of the Constitution. We. The People.
CALLER: Who regulates Fannie Mae? Who regulates Barney Frank and Chris Dodd?
HARTMANN: The people who elect them, and the people who don’t elect them. And that’s the system we’ve got, and if you don’t like it, get involved.
Hartmann asked the caller what he had done to get involved. He said he’d attended Tea Party rallies and made contributions.
CALLER: I do that with the money that I contribute to candidates that apparently you’re, somehow that’s this big evil, trying to make government smaller to reduce the chances of corruption. As the government gets bigger and bigger, there's more room for corruption.
That's why money corrupts.
HARTMANN: It's a nice slogan...but it's meaningless...What is corrupting government is the libertarian notion that if you have a lot of money, you should be able to buy politicians. If you have a lot of money, you should be able to buy public opinion. If you have a lot of money, you should be able to buy up all your competition and put them out of business. That's what's corrupting this government.
When the caller said the Republican field was diverse, Hartmann shot back the the only serious candidate is Romney, “the multi-millionaire who made his fortune using unregulated capitalism to destroy American jobs and send them overseas.” As music swelled, Hartmann concluded by blurring FDR and the Founding Fathers:
HARTMANN: I absolutely agree with Franklin Roosevelt that a necessitous man is not a free man, that if you're unemployed, you're not free. If you're hungry, you're not free. If you're homeless, you're not free, and the Founders did too, which is why the word "welfare" appears twice in the Constitution. “General welfare.”
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Comments
The only thing I know about Hartmann is what I read on...
Submitted by jawebster1 on Wed, 01/04/2012 - 9:03pm.
NewsBusters. If half of what they say about him is true he makes Ron Paul look like Ronald Reagan and I am no fan of Ron Paul!
i listen to this guy - its
Submitted by TruthMonger on Wed, 01/04/2012 - 9:39pm.
i listen to this guy - its painful but i do - he's very good at was he does - what he does is spew extreme liberal bs - he's quick with the bs - it is hard to debate him - he's an unregulated cultural cancer if you ask me
Congratulations Jimmy Carter!
I ask, because I do not know.
Submitted by Mike Bratton on Wed, 01/04/2012 - 10:26pm.
How is it "hard to debate" someone like Hartmann?
I'm very curious. Does he cheat? Cut off callers? What makes him so difficult to engage in debate?
--Mike
he's quick on the draw, has a
Submitted by TruthMonger on Thu, 01/05/2012 - 12:33am.
he's quick on the draw, has a wealth of detailed talking points at his disposal, he's very intelligent and has a memory like an elephant - he does cut callers off as well but i think that's the least of callers challenges...
Congratulations Jimmy Carter!
Quick on the draw? Sounds like "push of speech".
Submitted by drsamherman on Thu, 01/05/2012 - 11:17am.
"Push of speech" and "rush of ideas" are classic hallmarks of a basic Bipolar case. We differentiate from there based on other symptoms, onset and presentation.
So, would you also diagnose
Submitted by ProudAmerican58 on Thu, 01/05/2012 - 1:30pm.
him as being a small 'c' communist?
So, would you also diagnose
Submitted by ProudAmerican58 on Thu, 01/05/2012 - 1:29pm.
him as being a small 'c' communist?
Thanks for the info.
Submitted by Mike Bratton on Thu, 01/05/2012 - 2:24pm.
I take it people make the mistake of getting caught up in his details rather than the points they're trying to make?
--Mike
Homer SImpson is more rational than this guy!
Submitted by Mrs. Vito on Wed, 01/04/2012 - 9:12pm.
We never heard this poisonous non-sense till Obama. Hartmann needs to relocate to Venezuela. I'm sick & f*cking tired of human excrement like this guy slamming the American Way. He and Wasserman-Schultz oughta hook up.
FDR was not a Founding Father
Submitted by Galvanic on Wed, 01/04/2012 - 9:16pm.
HARTMANN: I absolutely agree with Franklin Roosevelt that a necessitous man is not a free man, that if you're unemployed, you're not free. If you're hungry, you're not free. If you're homeless, you're not free, and the Founders did too, which is why the word "welfare" appears twice in the Constitution. “General welfare.”
If Hartmann is correct, how does he explain why the Founding Fathers didn't include a right to health care, employment, and a home in the Bill of Rights?
The Founding Fathers also permitted slavery -- certainly not in the interest of the 'general welfare.'
But next time Hartmann argues against the Second Amendment, let's remind him about the intent of the Founding Fathers.
Welfare
Submitted by almostacowboy on Thu, 01/05/2012 - 10:05am.
The context of "welfare" meant "the state of doing well especially in respect to good fortune, happiness, well-being, or prosperity " and it was used in reference to "the States", not individuals as Comrade Hartman would have us believe.
Furthermore, in the first instance it say "promote the general Welfare", not "provide" the general welfare. In it's second use, where it does say "provide" "The Congress shall have Power ....... provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States....", it specifically says "for the United States" meaning the 13 separately governed territories.
When the framers wrote the Constitution they said "citizens" or "person" or "people" to signify individuals and "States" meant "States". They were very plain spoken. But, just like convicts trying to escape prison, politicians start trying to weasel around the law as soon as the law is written - one of the reasons Congress "exempts" itself from all the laws it writes to rule over you and me.
why is it-all these anti-capitalists-
Submitted by JIMMY1660 on Wed, 01/04/2012 - 9:18pm.
make super cash in their jobs and then decry the ability to make the cash.
how much does this nitwit make a year.
lets expose the hypocrisy.
Unregulated capitalism
Submitted by PeskyDane on Wed, 01/04/2012 - 9:30pm.
Unregulated capitalism ended with the Whiskey Rebellion. The federal government could not even make it out of the 18th century without a grab for additional power. Yes, even our first president...
Never heard of this guy Hartmann before and I'm not impressed. Typical libtard - if the facts don't match your syphilitic ideology, just make stuff up.
Not only that . . .
Submitted by Galvanic on Wed, 01/04/2012 - 11:20pm.
. . . But capitalism in the US is far more regulated than it was during FDR's New Deal. The regulatory institutions of the New Deal have spawned more regulations, and the Congress has created even more regulatory institutions.
Thom Hartmann is a crackpot.
Submitted by drsamherman on Wed, 01/04/2012 - 9:44pm.
He is a licensed psychotherapist in the State of Vermont, but he also lists alternative medicine degrees in his bio from institutions that I have never heard of, nor do I think are recognized by the accrediting agency for medical schools in the United States. I I think that none of his degrees would qualify him to sit for the USMLE (US medical licensing examination) series, which are prerequisites for practicing allopathic medicine or NBOME (osteopathic equivalent of USMLE) required for practice of osteopathic medicine. He is listed as a herbalist, "alternative medicine" practitioner and "former entrepreneur". The general opinion of this kind of background in the allopathic and osteopathic medical communities is far from positive. Credentials such as his (save for the licensed psychotherapist) are usually greeted by physicians with a groan, roll of the eyes and some disparaging comments which decorum prohibits here.
Politically, he is just a plain crackpot. His theory of the framers of the constitution referring to "welfare" as in cash handouts, gimmes, entitlements, freebies, and freeloaders does match any known history. Their use of the term 'welfare' meant nothing like the modern welfare state. I think reputable historians are of the opinion that 'welfare' connotes the means to be a success but not guaranteeing it. Or perhaps in context, the right to pursue happiness on a level playing field but not the attainment of it.
Personally, I think he is about as left-wing as it gets. The only difference between him and a Leninist is that the Leninist would say Hartmann was a worthless freeloading gasbag.
Milton (NOT THOMAS) Friedman put it best
Submitted by TheHistorian on Wed, 01/04/2012 - 10:31pm.
“Where are these angels who are going to organize society for us?”
Friedman put Phil Donahue in his place. Unfortunately, socialists cannot learn from people like Friedman, because they are too busy listening to Thomas Friedman and Paul Krugman. Neither of these people can come close to speaking as intelligently as Milton Friedman did about why FREE ENTERPRISE (capitalism was Lenin's word for it) is the better system.
We have seen what happens when we over-regulate the economy. If you look, the families in the US have lost roughly 10% earning power (inflation adjusted) in the last 5 years. 0.9% of it in Bush's Presidency, 3+ percent in the Recession that Obama inherited, and 6+percent of it in Obama's recovery. You tell me that the liberals can manage anything except poverty for the US people.
Hartmann is one of Lenin's "useful idiots".
Dennis Prager
Thanks for the clip!
Submitted by drsamherman on Wed, 01/04/2012 - 11:34pm.
I only vaguely remembered that Milton Friedman appeared on Donahue's show so many years ago.
I was still in residency when Milton Friedman was doing the GE summer programs at the University of Chicago. Had I been a financial person, banker or economist, I would have given my eyeteeth to attend his seminar.
Thom Hartmann's favorite form of government killed between 100..
Submitted by Dave. on Wed, 01/04/2012 - 11:15pm.
..and 200 million people in the last century, and caused nothing but pain, poverty, and misery for those it didn't manage to kill but were forced to live under it.
With the possible exception of Islam, that is about as 'cancerous' and 'corrupt' as it gets.
-Dave
Vote for the American in November
That's right. It's "general welfare", not "individual welfare".
Submitted by big.league.slider on Wed, 01/04/2012 - 11:49pm.
Ironically, this socialist dolt actually stumbled onto a very valid point about the Constitution's "general welfare" clause without realizing it. While the words "to promote the general welfare" do indeed appear in the US Constitution, they are blatantly misinterpreted.
General welfare means something that benefits all citizens equally, at all times. Obvious examples are national defense or the judicial system. All citizens benefit from these federal functions equally.
What the framers did not mean by general welfare are federal functions like Medicare, Social Security, or various subsidies. These programs only benefit certain citizens, at certain times. Thus they qualify as "specific welfare", and not "general welfare".
Got it?
great point
Submitted by TruthMonger on Wed, 01/04/2012 - 11:59pm.
great point
Congratulations Jimmy Carter!
Rhetorical scam
Submitted by mustango on Thu, 01/05/2012 - 12:30am.
The implementation of the "welfare" state is one of the biggest rhetorical scams in American political history. Because of that choice of term, anything and everything they choose to place under that banner is thereby claimed to have the blessing of the Founding Fathers, because of the matching word from the Preamble.
Laughable logic, yet argued with a straight face every day.
Still shocked
Submitted by ladeflippinda on Thu, 01/05/2012 - 11:58am.
That anyone who visits this site is shocked about what a liberal radio host/politician says.
How does this idiot explain
Submitted by ohio granny on Thu, 01/05/2012 - 12:00pm.
How does this idiot explain how he has a radio show? Is that not a capitalist enterprise? Imagine demonizing the very thing that makes you wealthy.!!!!! But that is what most liberals do. Obama is especially good at demonizing what he himself takes complete advantage of, but does not want others to have the same opportunity. People are starting to wake up to the hypocrisy of the dems/liberals.None too soon.