Posted on 06/13/2013 6:15:14 AM PDT by Rockitz
It is easy to be upset about what is happening all around. The economy is being destroyed, deliberately, by insane economic policies. Incentives to work are being eliminated by punishing work. At the same time rewards are increasing for not working. Not surprisingly we get less of what we penalize (work) and more of what we subsidize (non-work).
As an economist I get sick over what I see happening to what was once a great engine of productivity, capital creation and improvements in standards of living.
After two centuries of progress that amazed the world, the conditions necessary for growth and productivity are steadily being removed. Their presence allowed the miracle of America. Their absence guarantees the decline. Carried to extreme, the US could become a second or third-world nation within a few decades. Virtually all changes in the last five to ten years point in this direction and these changes are accelerating.
As pained as the economic retrogression is, the loss of freedom is even more disturbing. It was free markets and free men that made America the dominant economic power and the beacon of freedom. Without freedom, no economic policy can succeed. Yet, just as economic policies seem designed to destroy rather than create, so too does the role of government as steadily destroys freedom with its expanded oppression and power. The absence of freedom is tyranny. The absence of freedom is also poverty.
Economic decline is difficult to convey, although data are useful. The decline of liberty, however, is not easily quantifiable and even more difficult to communicate. An email from Simon Black (I have no link to the text, the link included is to his website), expresses his concern regarding Leviathan government and its increasing oppression. It provides as good a qualitative measure of what is occurring to freedom in this country:
By now it should be clear to anyone paying attention that most of Western civilization is on a dangerous slide into tyranny.
They’re confiscating funds directly from people’s bank accounts. They’re seizing reporters’ personal records and phone logs. They’re digitally spying on everyone’s emails.
They’ve authorized military detention and drone assassination of their own citizens. They’re using tax offices to harass political opposition groups.
They tell us what we are allowed to eat and drink, what foods we are allowed to put in our own body.
Think about it. These are Soviet tactics, plain and simple.
What’s more, they don’t even care. They think we’re all idiots who are too stupid to even notice what they’re doing.
In fact, just a few days ago, Barack Obama staunchly defended his policies, saying “you can complain about Big Brother. . . but when you actually look at the details, then I think we’ve struck the right balance.” This is textbook sociopathic behavior: destructive, antisocial conduct and a complete lack of conscience.
Unfortunately this is just the beginning.
Imagine what it will look like in a few more years: trillions of dollars of more debt… more printed currency. More police state tactics. More invasions of privacy. More ridiculous regulations.
Unless government oppression is beaten back, there is no hope for the future. For those who focus on the foolish economic policies, they miss the root cause of all of our problems — oversized, overactive, interventionist, overcontrolling and oppressive government. Unless government can be reduced in size and power dramatically and then put back into its Constitutional box, nothing will improve in the economy. Ultimately the economy will collapse and freedom will be lost.
History shows no examples reversing these kinds of trends. Civilizations die as a result and then they rebuild from the ashes. But history never knew the flowering of such a vibrant civilization before our break from King George. It seems as though a similar miracle is required today.
I fear the majority of the American people are too dumbed down to understand what is happening to them and their country. They appear too content collecting whatever benefits the government buys them off with. These benefits will cease when the economy can no longer be pillaged. By then, it will likely be too late.
America will continue to exist and it will eventually be free and prosperous again. But there will be a long period, call it the modern-day Dark Ages, before freedom and prosperity return. A century or so seems a reasonable guess. Evil will eventually be overcome, but not before generations suffer as a result of our allowing and enabling the growth in government power.
It is important to remember the lesson of the Nika riot, and how, at its conclusion alone, their nation was preserved for at least another 200 years.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nika_riots
“The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots *and tyrants*.” — Thomas Jefferson
Often the “and tyrants” is omitted from this quote, and it shouldn’t be. Tyrants cannot be stopped with “crossing the aisle”, committee meetings, bargains or negotiations.
self-ping
Catchy nom de plume.
We just passed the last turn-around exit on the road to Hell. But...
Don't sweat it...
Yeah... ok.
You and I seem to have a acheived the same level of ‘pissed-offness’.
Yep. The Founders knew this. As a collective, we no longer consider violence as justifiable because we’ve been told all our lives that “violence is not the answer”...
Except when violence is the only means left to you to stop an ever encroaching Evil bent on destroying all that is good in life...
Then, violence is pretty much MANDATORY.
Been saying that for years now (see the tag line.) Preach it my brother from another mother! Maybe a few more will wake up.
The Capitol will be a battleground someday in the not too distant future at the rate this country's going. Not that I relish that statement (I do not..) it's just that it's painfully obvious to some of us what it's actually going to take to put this country back on the right course.
The sooner it happens, the better IMO. (Again, I don't say that with any glee, I say that in the most sober and somber of ways.)
Well, that’s two of us. Gonna need a couple more and I think we’ll be set...
-——Western civilization is on a dangerous slide into tyranny.-——
Either the author is a coward or doesn’t get it.
There is no slide to tyranny. The treacherous tyranny is in effect.
Tyrants with no regard for the law and with a fear of disorder are firmly incontrol.
bkmk
A very stark view but not one I can argue with since the evidence is there for anyone who will see. My main hope is that the dark age he predicts can be less than a century.
GOPers denouncing Snowden is more demorsalizing than Obummer getting caught in yet another Noxonian scandal. Repubs had a golden opportunity to capitalize on this scandal and instead they struck the gift horse in the mouth. If GOPers are supposed to be our friends then why do they crumble in the line of fire. They don’t have a clue and don’t comprehend the political strategy meaning of “crisis means opportunity.” It’s like watching the French when the Nazis occuppied their country during WWII.
“Carried to extreme, the US could become a second or third-world nation within a few decades.”
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A few decades? This strikes me about the same way as saying I might need to visit the bathroom sometime in the next six months.
At least you see the heart ofthe problem: media supported by paid advertising will always push the benefits of payng more for less.
It’s what the people who pay them want.
Advertisers decide what goes on the shows and also on the news and they want what draws a stupid, gullible audience.
Time is rapidly running out for a web-streaming media to change that. McLuhan was there for all of us but no one saw.
“If food stamps were good enough for me they’re good enough for my children!”
What justifies this level of optimism?
Isn’t it amazing that some still prattle about the danger of tyranny IN THE FUTURE? How can anyone fail to see that tyranny is firmly established? Actually, in my view, tyranny has been here for decades already. Just one small example, the COUNTY GOVERNMENT where I live says that if a family has two houses on one piece of property and they use the county water system they must have a meter for each house, they cannot run water from one meter to both houses. If they choose to have a private well they must have two private wells, one for each house! Not only that but they must have a permit from the county for each well before a well can be drilled. If that is not tyranny then grits ain’t groceries as we used to say in SC. Those who founded this nation would have been up in arms at the suggestion that someone could tell them that they could not drill a well anytime they felt like it and run the water to as many houses as they pleased.
I would make the case that if you don’t recognize it prior to the twentieth century then it was certainly established with the creation of the IRS and the Federal Reserve system a hundred years ago. If you don’t recognize the EPA as tyranny you simply are living in a fantasy with no connection to reality. Tyranny comes in many varieties and degrees, FREE is a superlative, tyranny is not.
I don’t think they’re cowards - I don’t think they’re on our side.
Actually, it and we may not; we may be looking at the end. A free state can exist only on a proper foundation of culture. The author misses the point, the issue is not freedom, but culture.
Our culture is dying as a result of neglect from within and attack from within and without. The attack from without, fostered through mass immigration, legal or illegal, combined with the idea of multiculturalism, is the most dangerous component because it is almost impossible to reverse.
Accordingly, the immigration bill now before the Congress is, in a most serious way, a very real existential threat to this nation.
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