That whole up-is-down, black-is-white thing that the Left’s got going does leave a sane person wondering if they’re all off their meds. How else to explain professional blowhard Michael Moore’s appearance on Colbert this week, where he offered up several big heapin’ helpings of crazy. Bet you didn’t realize Professor Moore was a scholar and expert on all things Founding Father-related? Or that he and Thomas Jefferson had so much in common? Check it out:
Quite a compendium of misleading statements, outright lies, and utter nonsense, no? The coup de grace has got to be that mangling of the legacy of Thomas Jefferson to serve Moore’s own fevered fantasies of collectivism. I don’t know which quote book he’s using, but as far as I can tell Jefferson never said, as Moore claims, “the earth belongs to all of us and we are to share in its resources and labor.”
Best I can tell, this is the quote that Moore was attempting to torture into Marxism: “The earth is given as a common stock for men to labor and to live on… Wherever in any country there are idle lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right. Everyone may have land to labor for himself, if he chooses; or, preferring the exercise of any other industry, may exact for it such compensation as not only to afford a comfortable subsistence, but wherewith to provide for a cessation from labor in old age.”
The somewhat controversial implication that Jefferson did indeed appear to make was that IF there were land/resources that were not being used, and IF there were poor people sitting around doing nothing and not providing for themselves, then perhaps some of that land/resources should be redirected to said poor people. But remember the time and place in which Jefferson made his statements. I think it’s safe to assume that there was significant land sitting around that was not yet considered anyone’s legal private property (after all, the West hadn’t been settled yet).
But note that Jefferson went on to promote that poor people should be exercising some industry of their own, and that they were to earn not only what would make them comfortable now, but MORE than they needed (retirement savings, as it were).
Contrast that with Moore’s utterly unhinged idea that the richest people in this country have “sucked wealth” out of the economy and are “sitting on it.” But Mr. Moore – aren’t they doing exactly what Jefferson was suggesting?
In fact, I have a few more questions for the Left’s favorite filmmaker – because, after all, all quotes are best studied in context. Let’s take a look at a few more of Jefferson’s quotes, and see how they line up with Moore’s “workers of the world unite” rhetoric.
First: On the connection between working and eating…
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