Posted on 12/08/2008 4:54:54 PM PST by decimon
When the $700 billion emergency bailout of the struggling U.S. economy was finally passed by Congress on Oct. 3 after an arduous period of political wrangling, it was against the wishes of an overwhelming majority of the American public.
Now, with more bailouts in the offing and Main Street still skeptical about handing so much cash to Wall Street (and now possibly Detroit), it's worth asking: How the heck did that happen? While economists, politicians and the public remain divided on whether giant bailouts ultimately help or harm the economy, many argue the act was simply an affront to American democracy.
Is a government that ignores the sentiment of its people what the Founding Fathers had in mind?
In a word, yes.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
The “American Dream” eludes fulfillment through homeownership, retiring at 55 or exercising health care rights, but is defined as follows:
“We, the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, ensure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common Defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this CONSTITUTION for the United States of America.”
Justice, tranquility, defense, and blessings of liberty are government mandates. Material prosperity is up to individual initiatives. Government’s job is promoting environments where they can happen. Otherwise government largesse requires trading personal freedom to bureaucrats and politicians, who then grant apparent security.
Marcus Tullius Cicero said, “A bureaucrat is the most despicable of men, though he is needed as vultures are needed, but one hardly admires vultures whom bureaucrats so strangely resemble. I have yet to meet a bureaucrat who was not petty, dull, almost witless, crafty or stupid, an oppressor or a thief, a holder of little authority in which he delights, as a boy delights in possessing a vicious dog. Who can trust such creatures?”
The same applies to most 535 patricians elected to Congress, when nearly all were decayed and wretched. One patrician even became president, though infected by gifts and influence from those precipitating the mortgage crisis.
The same applies to those who advocated their return to office without ever considering the Faustian like bargain they duped the electorate into making.
A throw the bums out storm is a brewin.
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