The Essay Read Round the World

The clear evidence is that he owned hundreds of slaves, and that he bought and sold human beings as chattel property. It doesn’t get any clearer than that. He also acted to apprehend his runaway slaves and signed the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, which created a nationwide enforcement mechanism for apprehension and return of slaves to their rightful owners and punishes any who would assist fugitive slaves.

It would be a vile calumny to assert that Washington was morally convicted of the evil of slavery but nevertheless engaged in the purchase, sale, possession, and apprehension of slaves.

Washington did became morally conflicted about slavery in his later years. Washington did nothing to advocate abolition publicly, though he did privately mention his desire for a phase out of slavery. Washington willed the emancipation of his slaves after he and Martha died. Big deal: actions speak louder than words, even those contained one’s final testament.

Sorry, but in this case, the failure was violating the 10th Amendment, not economic. The economic issues were a direct result in the feds regulating the economy out of existence.

We regulated ourselves out of existence. It is nearly impossible to invent in the way we did from 1900 to 1950. Tesla and Edison BOTH operated their labs in the heart of New York City. You didn’t have a dozen different departments coming down on them for permits and inspections.

In a 10th Amendment world, SOME state would invite you in to do whatever business some other state would not permit you to do. Where the jobs went, there would go the people.

On top of that, we became the only country in the world to impose punitive damage on companies - some times TRIPLE damages on companies.

Last but not least, we used to draw the cream of the scientific world to the US, where we used to plow serious money into national scientific and engineering objectives.

Every paradigm shift in the living condition of human beings has been ushered in by solving another massive scientific puzzle. Einstein made nuclear power possible when he cracked that bit of the puzzle.

Did we build the next generation of particle collider, based on the ROI we got from the last one?

Well, we spent a billion dollars digging the hole, and then we spent a billion to cover it back up again.

It was THAT MOMENT. The moment we filled in that hole that we decided against being world leaders. We gave up at that moment.

Do you know how much we understand about gravity and magnetism? Why those two things work? Zero. Nothing. Not even a theory. The idea is to keep smashing atoms together at higher energies and looking very intently at the picosecond of impact, hoping for a clue.

It’s been this way throughout history. Now, before long, everyone will have a nuke. What will make one nation ‘great’ and the other ‘lesser’ is the willingness to use it. We’re going to find out who is great here in about a year, once Iran has their nuke, and a rocket to use it.

The world has been waiting for us to see what was next beyond the moon, the transistor, the A-bomb. As a country, we lost our vision, and replaced it with The Legal Industry, where 33% contigency fees and class action lawsuits would create wealth, and that was its own reward.

England had her children to fall back on - us. The US. If we don’t regain our drive to achieve in the face of the Chinese and Russian threat, then we have nobody to fall back on.

That’s the point of this - neither will Australia, the EU, etc. The Norks will keep torpedoing ships. The Iranians will keep funding, fueling, and feeding insurgents. The Pakis and Afghanis will use our own money to kill our troops.

In the past, we used to lay waste to enemies that did such things. At the very least, we starved them, and we let them die in their filth. Not so much anymore.

Close our markets to Chinese goods, and it wouldn’t matter how much of our treasuries they were holding. Become a net exporter of petroleum, and we would get more respect from the Arabs.

Saudi Arabia stands the most to lose from a post Pax Americana world. Wouldn’t be long before the Russians invaded Saudi Arabia. My guess is that they’ll come through Iran, Syria, and Lebanon as invited guests, and then go through Israel, Jordan, and Iraq to take their great spoil.

>>>The first Roman Emperor—Caesar Augustus—was horrible<<<

No, no, no. It was far worse than that. Caesar Augustus put an end to the infighting, the constant civil wars between the elite families, and brought tranquility and order to the society. He recalled the Senate and stated to the people that he would reform the republic. He saw himself in the role of Cincinnatus, the dictator who would rule justly. After his ascension, Augustus ruled for 40 years in a peaceful, properous Rome. That was the horror - the people forgot their republican traditions and came to accept the king as normal. Even after Augustus, the question became, “Who is the best ruler for Rome?” not “Should we have one-man rule?”

If we meekly acquiesce to the current trend of totalitarian rule by bureaucratic fiat - the EU model - we could just see ourselves sliding into the world of Augustus. Of course, Rome remained solvent for another 1,400 years after that in one form or another, so it wouldn’t be the end. Even in Rome, the provinces still continued to practice republican values for a long time into the empire. In fact, if we go this route, I could see empire - a Carthoginian-style war against the Chinese, perhaps, a reinvigoration of American martial values wedded to the state’s needs. Stranger things have happened.

I don’t think that’s the way it’ll go, though.

I think that we’re going to have a rematch of the Glorious Revolution, with the elites supporting the left taking the side of the divine rights of kings (the unlimited state, in modern terms), and the elites supporting the right taking the side of the rights of man (God-given natural rights to each individual). On the left, there is the federal government, the unions, the academics, and the artists, which includes the media. On the right, there are businesses, the states, the military, and the people. The churches are split.

It’s 1688 all over again. Just my opinion.

"It was that exact generation that gave us Franklin Roosevelt’s endless reign and took us much farther down the path to destruction."

You're absolutely right about that.

My father and mother were fanatical Democrats who thought Franklin Roosevelt was wonderful. However, if they were alive today, they would be horrified.

My father died a Democrat. My mother finally saw where the nation was headed and became a Republican back in the 1970's before she died.

That generation was very foolish to empower Franklin Roosevelt and his enablers--but they would never have tolerated the foolishness of the present generation or of the Hippie Revolution.

I can't help wondering how the men--most of them under the age of 21--who walked directly into machine gun fire on the beaches of Normandie would have felt if they had known where the U.S.A. would be in 2010.

I know how my father and mother would have felt. They would have done everything within their power to prevent this Decadence.

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