PDA

View Full Version : The decay of a free society doesn’t happen overnight, but we’re getting there.



Tyr-Ziu Saxnot
09-21-2013, 11:07 AM
http://predicthistunpredictpast.blogspot.com/ The decay of a free society doesn’t happen overnight, but we’re getting there.
By Mark Steyn This is the United States of America,” declared President Obama to the burghers of Liberty, Mo., on Friday. “We’re not some banana republic.”

He was talking about the Annual Raising of the Debt Ceiling, which glorious American tradition seems to come round earlier every year. “This is not a deadbeat nation,” President Obama continued. “We don’t run out on our tab.” True. But we don’t pay it off either. We just keep running it up, ever higher. And every time the bartender says, “Mebbe you’ve had enough, pal,” we protest, “Jush another couple trillion for the road. Set ’em up, Joe.” And he gives you that look that kinda says he wishes you’d run out on your tab back when it was $23.68. Where do you go to get a piece of this action? As the old saying goes, bank robbers rob banks because that’s where the money is. But the smart guys rob taxpayers because that’s where the big money is. According to the Census Bureau’s latest “American Community Survey,” between 2000 and 2012 the nation’s median household income dropped 6.6 percent. Yet in the District of Columbia median household income rose 23.3 percent. According to a 2010 survey, seven of the nation’s ten wealthiest counties are in the Washington commuter belt. Many capital cities have prosperous suburbs — London, Paris, Rome — because those cities are also the capitals of enterprise, finance, and showbiz. But Washington does nothing but government, and it gets richer even as Americans get poorer. That’s very banana republic, too: Proximity to state power is now the best way to make money. Once upon a time Americans found fast-running brooks and there built mills to access the water that kept the wheels turning. But today the ambitious man finds a big money-no-object bureaucracy that likes to splash the cash around and there builds his lobbying group or consultancy or social media optimization strategy group.

The CEO of Panera Bread, as some kind of do-gooder awareness-raising shtick, is currently attempting to live on food stamps, and not finding it easy. But being dependent on government handouts isn’t supposed to be easy. Instead of trying life at the bottom, why doesn’t he try life in the middle? In 2012, the top 10 percent were taking home 50.4 percent of the nation’s income. That’s an all-time record, beating out the 49 percent they were taking just before the 1929 market crash. With government redistributing more money than ever before, we’ve mysteriously wound up with greater income inequality than ever before. Across the country, “middle-class” Americans have accumulated a trillion dollars in college debt in order to live a less comfortable life than their high-school-educated parents and grandparents did in the Fifties and Sixties. That’s banana republic, too: no middle class, but only a government elite and its cronies, and a big dysfunctional mass underneath, with very little social mobility between the two. This nation is heading for a great correction, question is will it be 1929 great DEPRESSION TYPE OR A REVOLUTION. Government's big problem is the Revolution looks like the far greater solution because big, dictatorial government is the damn problem whereas in 1929 it wasn't! The lower the public morality is the greater the corruption is in government. Never fails in being true.... --Tyr

Abbey Marie
09-21-2013, 11:11 AM
Love this line:
But being dependent on government handouts isn’t supposed to be easy.

How is it any big deal for a multi-millionaire to temporarily sacrifice like this, anyway? He knows full well that he can go back to his cushy lifestyle anytime he wants. Seems kinda ridiculous to me in the first place. Now, if I heard that he sold his house(s) and his business, and donated it all to charity, I'd be impressed with his sacrifice.