Contributed by: filbert Saturday, January 17 2009 @ 03:35 PM CST
All Hail Obama. Hope, change, a new beginning.
If you buy the rhetoric, we are on the dawn of a new Golden Age, where everyone will have a good job, high-quality medical care, limitless renewable energy, freedom from random wiretaps or roving bands of waterboarding Republicans, a Constitutional right to publicly demonstrate in favor of war criminals and avowed intended mass-murderers to be[*1] , a full, healthy, low-fat vegetarian stew in every pot, and a puppy[*2] . Well, maybe not a puppy, because that would be speciesist slavery. Maybe one of those Japanese dog-robots (a Green one, of course.)
We are told that it’s mandatory to tolerate a religion that is at its core fundamentally intolerant, but forbidden to tolerate in public places a religion that teaches as a core value the act of forgiveness.
We believe that it is just, right, and proper for the government to command that banks lend money to people who do not have the ability to repay those loans, and we also insist that when this scheme collapses, that it’s a “failure of capitalism,”[*3] not a failure of government. Because we believe, a priori, that government does not, can not fail at what it does.
We believe that the way out of an economic crisis brought on by too much debt is to spend more money.
Does any of this really make sense to anyone?
It gets better.
The political party holding the reins of all parts of the Federal Government for the next two years came in promising to be “the most ethical” government in history, but is so ridden by scandal at all levels–even before it takes full power–that newspapers don’t even bother telling which party the crooked politicians belong to.
We have tax crooks writing tax laws[*4] . We have other tax crooks[*5] being appointed to the position which will enforce those laws.
We believe that because agenda-driven, government-financed scientists say that because of carbon dioxide, the Earth is getting warmer, (despite the documented flaws in their computer models, the limitations in modeling such a huge, chaotic, complex system using digital computers, and in contradiction to the plain evidence), we should take our already-teetering economy and completely destroy it, advancing into a Brave New World where Americans and Europeans will live like Indians and Chinese, except more so.
On a note of particular and personal interest to your humble writer: dieticians and nutritionists overwhelmingly believe, contrary to everything that’s known about human biochemistry, that low-fat diets are superior for most humans to low-carbohydrate diets. Once again, the academia-media-government complex has promoted bad science, bad health, and bad policy because of narrow political agendas rather than any true sense of what is right and true.
Our entire society is a long, long, long way from sanity. We have constructed so many intellectual and legal houses of cards that the miracle is not that things are falling apart, it’s that things have stayed together for so long.
What we’re seeing is an entire civilization suffering a massive Tragedy of the Commons[*6] . In fact, that’s a pretty good analogy of what all socialist schemes boil down to–everything is a “common good” that everyone has a “right” to, creating an unsustainable demand for pretty much everything. Then you tie that to the inevitable government interventions in the economy, which are ALWAYS destructive of wealth. Always.
Always.
At its best, government takes wealth from productive persons, takes a cut off the top, and distributes some portion of the remainder according to political requirements–not economic requirements, not humanitarian requirements, not “social-justice” requirements. Political requirements–as in paying off the people who keep you in power. Period.
That is exactly why free market economies perform better, make more people more wealthy, utilize resources better, are cleaner and “greener” than government-controlled economies. Always have been, always will be.
Does anybody study history any more[*7] ?
Socialism. Worked so well everywhere else it’s been tried, eh?
If you want to tear down the achievers in society, then socialism is for you. If you want to improve, in absolute and in relative terms, the lot of the common man, then freedom and economic liberty are the only games in town.