Beware myths’ hidden venom

Step carefully along the trail, where myths slither and sometimes bite. Among them lingers the one about leftists’ affection for the little guy of political proverb. Better described as an affectation, this explains leftists’ support of unions, nationalized health care, increased minimum wages and wealth redistribution, among other things. Leftists’ actual concern for everyday folk is about as real as the five bites a hiker claimed to have suffered at the fangs of a timber rattler last week off the Blue Ridge Parkway. Hoaxes are not true by virtue of being uttered and believed.

Cases in point abound. We’ll start with the one involving Wal-Mart, the corporate king appropriately referenced in The Wall Street Journal as “that liberal paragon of social irresponsibility.” Somehow, the Walton gang and liberals are embroiled in a sudden love affair, like Paris and Helen before Troy. Wal-Mart has thrown its ample weight behind a piece of the Democrats’ health care proposal that would require employers who do not provide government-approved coverage to pay into a nationalized plan.

Hooray for the little guy, right? Everybody gets health care. Uh, well, what about those little guys still daring to compete with mighty Wal-Mart, the mom-and-pop shops and smaller chains liberals say are chased from Main Street by the discount behemoth? Their profits, which have slowed to a trickle amid recession and were narrow to begin with, would get another snip, enough, likely, to nudge some into the red and out the door. And there sits Wal-Mart, waiting to gobble up the extra business in its ostensible benevolence. The same strategy applied to support of a higher minimum wage.

That’s one example. A story featured last week in The News Virginian offered another. The climate bill passed by the House and now in the hands of the Senate will cap carbon emissions and make those who surpass the limit shell out for permits. That cost will be handed off to electricity users every time they flip a light switch. The affluent will scarcely notice. Those farther down the income ladder will feel it, losing an extra $3,000 a year according to estimates by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. Others put the figure far lower, Obama at $100 annually and the Congressional Budget Office, at $175. We hope not to see who’s right.

It’s not just home consumers who’ll be affected. Farmers, who rely heavily on electricity for everything from keeping the chickens warm to running an array of equipment will be hit especially hard. And what of coal? America has plenty of the stuff and that provides lifeblood for the people who mine it and work other jobs in that industry, especially in neighboring West Virginia and in the southern section of the commonwealth. Coal is a big carbon emitter that Obama hopes one day to drive into oblivion. Many so-called little guys would be driven there with it.

Meanwhile, the federal debt builds while Obama keeps the money printers humming to pay for bailouts of the car and mortgage industries and a stimulus bill that so far has produced a large puff of smoke every bit as toxic as the stuff the president privately inhales while dropping the hammer on Big Tobacco. Someday, the bill will come due, and higher taxes will follow. Who will pay? Yes, the rich, but so, too, the little guy, who by then might be unable to spare a dime.

Swimming through liberalism’s myths is the grandest illusion, the idea that big government can spend as it pleases without siphoning money from the pockets and the futures of the people and without laying waste to the economy and the system that once produced prosperity unrivaled in human history. Big people with big money orchestrated that prosperity but little guys, legions of them, fueled it, and all of them gained, some much and some a little, enough to raise living standards to heights others only fancy.

Leftists, some witting and some not, are getting their way as they never have before, and the legs of an empire greater than the one confronted 233 years ago are wobbled and almost broken. A serpent, this one metaphoric but real, lies in wait coiled along the trail. Its bite is lethal. Before allowing a runaway government to tread further, Americans should take heed and shout stop.