"Tyranny comes packaged as “for the people,” or representing “the will of the people.”

Mark Levin disagrees with Trump’s idea to spend huge sums of our money on infrastructure.

Now Donald Trump is proposing $1 trillion in infrastructure spending — twice as much as Hillary Clinton did. They insist this is going to create jobs for the middle class and union workers and so forth.

How many more times are we going to do this? How many more times are we going to take money out of the private sector to fund some mastermind’s idea about how to create jobs?The great power of the American economy was not created by government or tariffs or protectionism or progressivism or populism or nationalism. It was created by Americanism, by Americans.

…Many of the people hawking this are not men and women of the assembly line. They’re not men and women of agriculture. They’re not men and women of the steel mills and the oil fields and so forth. They’re bankers, developers, and businessmen. Like Hoover. Hoover didn’t get dirt under his nails. Woodrow Wilson didn’t get dirt under his nails. Franklin Roosevelt didn’t get dirt under his nails. These are theoreticians who reject or have forgotten what made this country great. That’s the problem. Nationalism and populism have far more in common with status-quo progressivism than they can possibly have with constitutional conservatism.

Virtually every form of tyranny that I’m familiar with is wrapped in populist arguments.

Tyranny comes packaged as “for the people,” or representing “the will of the people.” That’s how Mao Zedong represented his genocidal tyranny, that’s how Vladimir Lenin represented his genocidal tyranny, that’s how Hugo Chavez, the Fidel and Raul Castro brothers, Robert Mugabe, and the like represented their reigns. But populism is not republicanism.

This is not about class warfare; it’s about liberty. You want to live free or don’t you? When you live free, that means at times, things get difficult. But let me tell you something: When you don’t live free, it means things are always difficult.

How many more experiments must humanity go through before it becomes obvious that our system, as set up by the framers, is and was the best? How many more human experiments must we have? How much more spending until it becomes clear that the government doesn’t create jobs? Nobody spent more to “create jobs” than Franklin Roosevelt. Obama spends a hundred billion dollars on infrastructure, what did that do? Now Trump wants to spend a trillion dollars. What will that do?

I don’t care if you’re blue collar or white collar; I don’t even like those terms. Those are terms that some egghead came up with — just like “working people.” Well you’re either working or you’re not. What does that mean? What is a working people? I work very long hours, am I not a working person? Whatever my income is, whatever your income is, this is the vernacular of the progressive leftist. Working people, blue collar, white collar: No, we’re Americans. We are Americans. The goal is to create and defend and improve upon a society that has created the greatest amount of wealth for the most people, the greatest amount of freedom for the most people, despite and in fact due to our diversity. Our diversity of thinking, our diversity of acting, our diversity of producing.

All of these populist movements, whether on the pseudo-right or the Left, always demand egalitarianism. They demand material equality, on different levels and to a different degree. Somebody’s “earning too much,” somebody has “too much wealth.” Why should they have that when you have nothing? These philosophies overlap. And you know what they have something in common? The iron fist.

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