The problem with politics is deeper than Democrats vs. Republicans and deeper than Obama. The problem is that politics, as we know it, consists of career professionals spending other people's money -- billions and billions of dollars of it. The money is nothing more than plunder. We wonder why there's such a lack of grace, class and morality in Washington DC. How could there be? These elected officials are charged with spreading around money seized by force. Think Tony Soprano, or any other organized thief, lifted to respectability and open legality and you have the likes of Harry Reid, Barney Frank, Nancy Pelosi and, yes, most of their Republican colleagues in crime.

The plain truth is, you cannot make the illegitimate legitimate; you cannot make the unrespectable respectable. I don't think most Americans fully understand this. They rail against the party in power without opposing what makes that party possible. Republicans may have spent less than Democrats, but that's simply a reflection of the fact that they didn't have the nerve to plunder trillions rather than billions. Now that Obama liberals have raised (or lowered) the bar on plunder, Republicans will simply follow suit the next time they're in charge. Do you seriously think that the Republicans who ran Congress a few short years ago, once restored to power, are actually going to cut spending?

What's good about America right now is that a healthy majority seem to at least sense that something is terribly wrong. As troubling as the collapse of the real estate market and the growing unemployment rates are, people can sense -- and are acting and voting as if they sense -- something much worse is amiss. The problem is: They don't seem to understand what it is. They're overlooking the obvious. They're missing, evading or simply failing to understand that charging elected officials with redistributing wealth is no different than letting a King, a Czar or a Soviet or Nazi dictator do the same thing. Democratic nuances can't change the nature of the fact that plunder is plunder, plain and simple. Politicians of both parties are simply following the logic of the Big Government welfare-redistributive-regulatory state to its final conclusion: That if it's OK to seize this much private wealth and use it for political purposes, it's OK to seize that much, too. "Hey, if they can do it -- we can do it too." The last 3 or 4 years have been liberal Democrats' way of saying, "Hey, those Republicans mostly ran things for the last 20 or 30 years. They have no business spending the plunder -- that's our territory!" And you can see how they played out their frustrations and pent-up resentment. Your great-great-great grandchildren will be forced to pay for some Congressman’s local pet project. That’s what it has come to, in the land of the once-free and the home of the previously brave.

America must do more than change parties. It has to change -- and by change I mean make a complete U-turn reversal -- with respect to its whole philosophy of government. Entire government agencies and cabinet departments are going to have to be shut down. Entitlements (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid) will have to be curbed and/or phased out. Yes, this will take years, but it's going to happen anyway so we may as well face facts and implement privatization as rationally as possible, keeping in mind that it should have started years ago. It's all going to happen anyway, because we're totally going broke. There should be no more entitlement programs, not a single one, not ever again -- and that includes health care. The United States is now a debtor nation and losing its historically high credit rating, for the first time since America became an industrialized giant in the nineteenth century. We are in serious trouble and Obama is the symptom, the face of the trouble more than the root cause. Fascist China is overtaking us economically, now holding most of American debt, something that could never have happened if America had remained a real and unhampered free-market economy. We can't blame it all on Obama or Bush, although these men did plenty to escalate the final collapse.

It's now up to Americans to save America. The bums in office are not going to save us, but throwing them out won't be enough. Nobody is coming to rescue us. It has to come from within. Whatever the "Tea Party" movement amounts to in practice, it does represent this attitude and it's a good one. It's not new bums or better politicians we need; it's a whole new philosophy of government. Freedom, productivity and greatness have been undermined and hampered by our rulers for too long. It's time to undermine the rulers -- to order them the hell out of our way -- and let freedom, productivity and the greatness that once was America have a chance to rule again.

William Shatner has a great new talk show called "Raw Nerve." Unlike Oprah, Shatner is an interviewer, not a flatterer (although Orpah only flatters those she likes). Recently, Shatner interviewed the talk show host Jerry Springer. Jerry Springer is that rarest of liberals--a conscientious and articulate one. I think he's wrong about essentially everything political, but because he's conceptual and articulate, unlike most liberals nowadays, at least you can see his chain of reasoning and identify his errors. In the interview (and I'm quoting from memory here), Springer said he supports socialism because "life is 99 percent about luck." He cites his own experience as the son of Holocaust survivors and, later, the wealthy beneficiary of "a silly talk show" as evidence that most success is about luck.

Now think about this for a minute. Springer is saying that he has nothing to do with his own success. He's implying that he finds his own television show disgusting (as many of us do). Instead of blaming this on the poor taste of willfully ignorant people, and at least giving himself credit for finding a way to make a profit during a comparatively depraved time in cultural history, he blames his self-loathing on the nature of reality itself. Reality, he insists, is all about luck. "Luck" is the secular liberal's term for "God." I have no more respect for a liberal than I do a religious person screaming platitudes about God's will and other imagined nonsense. Based on Springer's logic, it's not fair that some have more than others since nobody in any way earned what they have, or what they produced. It follows, at least to Springer, that government must redistribute everything equally since nobody owns it anyway. He calls it "progressivism," as all Obamaists do, rather than socialism, but we all know it's socialism. Springer is more candid than most liberal politicians in that he openly admits he does not believe there's such a thing as productive effort and honestly earned success--not for himself, and not for others.

I tend to take the following policy towards anyone who has a lot of money: Assume they made it honestly and through their own efforts unless there’s evidence to the contrary. This is admittedly more complicated and confusing in a mixed economy. In a mixed economy, there are government subsidies and even “invisible” favors that take place that will lead to wealth accumulation in certain cases, involving certain people, that otherwise would never have occurred. HOW often is this the case? I don’t know. Nevertheless, I find it easier on the psyche and the need for benevolence and optimistic-realism to assume that IF someone made a lot of money, good for them, and assume they made it through the voluntary exchange of value for value as opposed to something that came out of socialism or the political deals of the mixed economy.

There are other factors that could generate disgust in the context of wealth. For example, someone may make millions of dollars selling something on the free market that you find disgusting—a movie you can’t stand, a work of art you can’t stand, or music you detest, or whatever it is. When I see a rich rap singer, I’m disgusted because he made all that money through lack of talent and the bad taste of millions; I'm disgusted for these reasons, not because he has money. In a free society, prostitution would be legal (not that it doesn’t exist in a black market now, like drugs), or drugs would be legal—but if someone achieved economic success with those trades you probably wouldn’t want to spend time admiring them. In these cases, of course, it’s not the accumulation of wealth itself that disgusts you, but the fact that people want to pay money for certain things that bothers you. I don’t hate capitalism because of that rich rap singer. My support and love for totally free-market capitalism isn’t one bit reduced or sullied by the success of that rap singer. My respect for millions of Americans, and their lack of taste, IS sullied, but that’s not because of capitalism—it’s the individuals who pay for it that I blame, not the system.