Of course, nobody is proposing dragging out small business owners and shooting them, not yet, at least. Liquidation in the present context means financially ruining, and making dependent those who dare to raise themselves by dint of effort, innovation and enterprise.
Small business owners in the United States constitute one
the strongest bases
of support for the
Republican party and conservative causes. Is it purely coincidental, then, that
Covid-19 restrictions imposed by Democrat governors and local officials are
shuttering millions of small businesses while largely leaving their large
corporate competitors (think: Amazon, Walmart, and McDonald’s) not just open,
but picking up market share? Democrats, unquestionably, have become the party
of big business, in particular the tech oligopolists that censored news
unfavorable to Joe Biden.
Marxists of all stripes despise the petite bourgeoisie,
a disparaging French term for small business and wealthier peasantry. Running a
business and employing people qualifies one as an exploiter in Marxian terms,
but in today’s elitist social circles, it also connotes small-mindedness, lack
of sophistication (“If you’re so smart, why aren’t your rich like Jeff Bezos
or Mark Zuckerberg?) and an alarming tendency toward self-reliance.
For racialists, minority-owned small businesses are even worse,
betraying the left's bigoted view that the natural tendency of minorities
is to vote Democrat and be dependent on government.
Joseph Stalin, when attempting a Great Reset of his own
(collectivization and absolute tyranny), faced a huge obstacle in the existence
of millions of small landowners, those employed the labor of others,
called kulaks. They were his equivalent of small business owners in
the largely rural Soviet Union, as he attempted to industrialize and impose communism
on all aspects of life in his first five-year plan (1928-32), following an
earlier period of relative permissiveness. As historian Robert Conquest wrote
in Reflections
on a Ravaged Century, the land of landlords had already been spontaneously
seized by peasants in 1917-18 and the land of richer peasants, with fifty to
eighty acres, was subsequently seized by the Bolsheviks. But by 1928, peasants
with a couple of cows and five or six acres of land were labeled 'kulaks,' and
targeted for land seizure of their land, imprisonment, and execution. They were
liquidated by the millions.
In twenty-first century America, big business and the educated
professional classes are allied with the left as partners in ruling the masses,
in the name of justice for the underclasses, purportedly afflicted by systemic
racism. Their enemies are the middle classes, especially those who own their
own businesses.
That may be why we see outdoor dining areas of small bars and
restaurants closed while within spitting distance, Hollywood film companies set
up identical facilities with the blessing Democrats Gavin Newsom and Eric
Garcetti:
There is no
science at all behind this restriction, so please tell me what other
explanation there is for such obvious hypocritical and cruel measures.
And consider the “disparate impact” (normally a key concept
employed by the left) of shutdowns on minority-owned
small businesses:
Nearly half of Black small businesses
had been wiped out by the end of April as the pandemic ravaged minority
communities disproportionately, according to a report from the New York Fed.
Black-owned
businesses were more than twice as likely to shutter as their white
counterparts, the report found.
"Nationally
representative data on small businesses indicate that the number of active
business owners fell by 22% from February to April 2020—the largest drop on
record," the report said.
"Black
businesses experienced the most acute decline, with a 41% drop. Latinx business
owners fell by 32% and Asian business owners dropped by 26%."
We know from the behavior of political leaders who flout their own
restrictions on others that they don’t believe that their own health is
imperiled by, for example, dining shoulder-to-shoulder at The French Laundry
with lobbyists (their self-described “friends”). And we know that their
defenders respond that it was a “mistake” and they have “taken responsibility”
by apologizing, and that the solution is double up on propaganda. In other
words, not reconsider pointless destruction of lives and businesses. Watch as
California Congresswoman Karen Bass, who lusts to be appointed as Kamala
Harris’s Senate replacement if the election steal works out as expected,
prescribes more propaganda as the solution to official hypocrisy:
Almost on cue, Gavin Newsom announced yesterday that California
would spend $80 million, not on relief for small business, but on
billboards to spread more propaganda on locking down:
Of course, nobody is proposing dragging out small business owners
and shooting them, not yet, at least. Liquidation in the present context means
financially ruining, and making dependent those who dare to raise themselves by
dint of effort, innovation and enterprise.
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/12/liquidating_americas_kulaks.html
