Posted on 03/05/2009 1:29:35 PM PST by AJKauf
The consequences of the financial crisis are all around us: our friends who are unemployed, the “for sale” signs that sprout up like weeds in our neighborhood lawns and unlike weeds never seem to go away.
We think we have some idea of the costs of the financial crisis: the psychological anguish over job security, the declining retirement account, and the neighborhood buzz about falling property values.
There is yet another cost, one less obvious, one equally as threatening to our political system: the loss of civic virtue.
In a time of situational ethics and herd-oriented political opinions, the idea of civic virtue sounds not only irrelevant but anachronistic.
It isn’t. As Benjamin Franklin so insightfully noted, it takes a virtuous people to create a society based on freedom and liberty. Take away virtue, and freedom and liberty are not possible.
Civic virtue is inexorably linked to individual initiative and individual responsibility. Civic virtue means that we are responsible for our actions and their consequences.
No more. There is a new ethos in America. Look out for yourself, enhance your own short-term self interest, take irresponsible risks, and then expect everyone else to bail you out. We can now all be teenagers on a Saturday night with a bottle of whiskey in one hand, daddy’s car keys in the other, and our only concern need be whether we can remain sober long enough to get laid. We have developed the utmost threat to the republic; we have learned how to vote ourselves money and irresponsibility...
(Excerpt) Read more at pajamasmedia.com ...
From Reagan's A Time for Choosing speech (which is what inspired my screen name).
And still the sheeple and Media praise O dummy.
They deserve what they get then.
Trusting Herr Schickelgruber.
It is September 1938 all over again. Only, the dark blot that was the Third Reich has relocated to North America, calling for silencing of all contrary points of view, other than the orthodoxy approved at highest level.
All the forms of representative government are in place, but they represent only a small minority of all the people, and the word is, “Get over it. We won.”
The tyranny of the minority. Have the “re-education camps” been laid out and built yet? We have all this material that was supposed to have been used to erect a border fence. It would be a terrible thing to waste a perfectly good crisis, by not diverting these supplies to some Federally owned property out in a sparsely-populated part of the country, and constructing some very sturdy containment facilities.
Pitchforks and torches.
My 89 y.o. german mother says I should change my party affiliation. She tells stories of what she had to do because she would NOT join the Nazi party.
Here is my letter to Congress.
The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act following TARP combines for over $1.6 trillion of new spending. 647-pages of stealth legislation hugely expands government, while providing few measures CBO can label stimulus.
In addition Obama continues Bush’s government nationalization through bailout promises now exceeding $8.5 trillion. Over $300 billion has already gone to Bear Stearns, CitiCorp, BofA, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, AIG, etal. providing cover for prominent politicians and private executives who gamed the financial system, and continue to metastasize the remnants. Leaving these patricians and private sector allies in place, feeds addictions to power equivalent to chemical and pornography entrapments. These ever more fragile constructs defer final reckonings to devastate future generations.
Since spending cuts are not proposed, the $1.6 trillion plus must becomes money created by Federal Reserve. August M2 money supply was $7.687 trillion. $1.6 trillion multiplied by 10, because we have a fractional reserve banking system, means the dollar looses two thirds of its purchasing power.
That cynical assessment can be mitigated, provided the world continues to subsidize these schemes. Countries such as China and India, and the European Community would underwrite this hubris, because they operate equivalent or more audacious financial mechanisms. They also use U.S. consumerism for their economies like ants farm aphids.
Counterpoint analysis emphasizes China, India and Germany together, or the European Community alone now equals U.S. GDP. Such parity can motivate a country’s parochial fiscal decision, and provoke an international cascade to abandon dollar reserve currency status, much as France unraveled the Bretton Woods Agreement. The outcome would be catastrophic worldwide, because now the largest economy had joined ranks of central planning failures.
Abandoning free market principles to save the free market system highlights credulous economic pursuits. Whatever financial costs people pay now to adhere to principle pales before latter costs incurred, if markets are forced merely to postpone consequences. True solutions reaffirm inexorability for market forces to countermand private and government fiscal sorcery, and to incorporate risk within all economic activities.
Proper government involvement means Federal Reserve, in concert with Treasury and Justice, applies persuasion to private sector firms. Brutal persuasion, approaching torture as condemned by Geneva Conventions, enables private companies to discover programs for market clearing asset prices. They also form new companies absent flagging management and labor attributes.
Constitutional framers possessed the intelligence, pragmatism, and integrity to say this country would promote the general welfare. They rejected impetuous arrogance enabling declaration the Treasury Secretary would ensure protection of home values, college funds, retirement accounts, savings, executive severance packages, homeownership, lifetime employment, corporate wealth, political careers, and union benefits
Despite $8.5 trillion plus bailouts, and $1.6 trillion plus spending the “American Dream” eludes fulfillment by Treasury and Congressional manipulations, 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 requires individual initiative. Government’s job is promoting environments endowing personal initiatives. Otherwise government largesse requires trading personal freedom to bureaucrats and politicians, who grant deceitful security.
Taylor Caldwell synthesized Marcus Tullius Cicero to say, “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 535 elected Congressional patricians, 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 advocating their re-election while concealing the Faustian like bargain, where they duped the electorate into trading personal pursuit of happiness for vacuous socialist prophesies.
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