Statist Delusions [Mark Steyn]

The president of the United States came to Osawatomie, Kan., last week to deliver a speech of such fascinating awfulness archeologists of the future sifting through the rubble of our civilization will surely doubt whether it could really have been delivered by the chief executive of the global superpower in the year 2011.

“This isn’t about class warfare,” declared President Obama. Really? As his fellow Democrat Dale Bumpers testified at the Clinton impeachment trial, “When you hear somebody say, ‘This is not about sex,’ it’s about sex.” The president understands that “Wall Street,” “banks,” “fat cats,” etc. remain the most inviting target and he figures that he can ride the twin steeds of Resentment and Envy to reelection and four more years of even bigger Big Government. His opponents, he told us, “want to return to the same practices that got us into this mess . . . . And their philosophy is simple: We are better off when everybody is left to fend for themselves and play by their own rules . . . . It doesn’t work. It has never worked.” He blamed our present fix on “this brand of ‘you’re on your own’ economics.”

This is a deliciously perverse analysis of the situation confronting America and a fin de civilisation West. In what area of life are Americans now “on their own”? By 2008, Fannie and Freddie had a piece of over half the mortgages in this country; the “subprime” mortgage was an invention of government. America’s collective trillion dollars of college debt has been ramped up by government distortion of the student-loan market. Likewise, health care, where Americans labor under the misapprehension that they have a “private” system rather than one whose inflationary pressures and byzantine bureaucracy are both driven largely by remorseless incremental government annexation.

Excerpt, read more at National Review

Steyn is wrong about Article 2, Section 1, being a technicality.

Just ask the families who are mourning soldier brought home in caskets due to Obama’s insane rules of engagement. Ask them how they feel about a “technicality” in the Constitution.

One hundred percent loyalty to America, Americans, and our soldiers is what is essential in a Commander in Chief. Then we should ask if his foreign policies are supporting and upholding foreign political factions that are dedicated to killing our soldiers and Americans.

Geeze! Some technicality! ( eye roll). Steyn is wrong and, personally, I believe he knows it. For this reason he is not completely trustworthy. !

One more question:

When did the Constitution become a “technicality”?

Steyn knows that Article 2, Section 1, is not a technicality. It **is** the Constitution! He knows this, too, and is deliberately misleading his listeners.

While he does good work, I will never again fully trust him.

You beat me to it. But here it is, again, so nobody can mistake the meaning:

The political class looted the future to bribe the present

And, for better or worse (I think both) the future is upon us, but not quite arrived. There still exists a surplus, meaning money to be looted, that empowers those who consider it their role to steal it to continue to promise it. There still exists a convenient set of scapegoats, a more or less believable party line, a perverse ability to pretend that things are other than they are. Frightened and resentful people vote their fears and resentments, and demagogues thrive in such a political mess because there's good money in it, if in nothing else. That is, incidentally, why they're the last to starve.

There are a number of reasons why a thing such as 0bama could be voted into office and most of them portend very poorly for the future of freedom in the United States. In most countries the watershed is when the armed forces decide to join the ruling class. In the U.S. it is academia and the media who have elected to do so. We still may have a fighting chance, but that's all it is, a fighting chance.

Some kind of breakup or “virtual secession” will probably be our best case outcome. If we all have to average down all 50 states and 100s of cities to pander to the over-breeding parasite class, we'll be doomed to a USSR-type existence. To redistribute what is left equally among producers and parasites means the producers will go Galt and quit producing. What is left will increasingly resemble North Korea. I see a breakup before that takes place. Let some states become People's Republics, under one caveat: No fences to keep them in. Soon they'll be empty of producers, and the lesson will be inescapable.

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