One should always be prepared for the worst. Considering that we have a dumbed-down public who votes emotionally rather than rationally, it is quite possible that Barack Obama can win a second term by simply scaring Americans into believing that they will lose their Social Security, their Medicare, their Medicaid, their food stamps, and all other federal goodies, if a Republican is elected president. Those who remember the 1964 presidential election may recall the scare tactics used by the Lyndon Johnson campaign to frighten Americans into thinking that should Republican candidate Barry Goldwater be elected president, it would be the same as “tearing up” their Social Security card. (See video, below.) Americans are now so addicted to government entitlements, that the idea of limited government probably frightens them. They actually want unlimited government. The more the better, they think, and by November 2012 most Americans may decide that Obamacare is the greatest thing since sliced bread.
Thomas Sowell, in a recent column, noted that liberal Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt won four elections for the presidency (1932, ’36, ’40, and ’44) despite the fact that the economy was in a depression, unemployment was high, and money was tight. The Democrats blamed it all on the Republicans, naming the shanty towns built by the jobless “Hoovervilles.” In 1935, they enacted Social Security, which has become the most sacred entitlement in American history, saving millions of the poor from starvation. What kind of a heartless Republican can be against that.
Yes, we have a debt of over 15 trillion dollars. So what? Every administration, Democrat and Republican, has raised the debt ceiling without much fuss from anyone. As Roosevelt said of his deficit, “We owe it to ourselves.” That was before we began borrowing from the Chinese Communists and everyone else willing to buy our paper. A dumbed-down public couldn’t care less where the government gets the money to pay them. All they want is the money, whether the government has to beg, borrow, or steal it.
And if Obama should win a second term, what should conservatives do? Hopefully, he’ll have a hostile Congress to deal with that will make further socialization difficult. But there’s no guarantee of that either. The smart money is not waiting for the election. Many of them are already making plans to put their wealth in foreign banks, out of the hands of the redistributor-in-chief. Some are even planning to take up residence in countries with more individual freedom.
But most of us will have to stay put and suffer four more years of political corruption and 19th century utopian gobbledegook. If Obamacare is just the start of the process to destroy our free-enterprise system, American students may decide that a planned economy is really a very good idea, one in which each college graduate will be guaranteed a job by the government. Congress may enact laws requiring every corporation to add workers to their payroll, whether they are needed or not, just so that the added worker can collect a pay check.
That’s the way the Soviet Union operated. Everyone had a job and pretended to work. And since the government owned all of the factories, the government could provide everyone with a pay check. But after 75 years of communist dictatorship, slave-labor camps in Siberia, and universal poverty (except for the ruling elite), the Russians finally got rid of the system. They have returned to the kind of authoritarian system they had under the Czars, with some modernized improvements.
But apparently, communism is also not working in Communist Cuba, where the government has had to let go over 30,000 government employees. Even communist governments cannot defy the laws of economics indefinitely. That’s why Communist China got rid of Marxist economic nonsense and decided to adopt a system that worked and produced wealth: capitalism.
But most American college students have absorbed so much Marxian idiocy, dispensed by their professors over the years, that they really believe that socialism can work, notwithstanding the overwhelming evidence that it doesn’t. The Russians learned the hard way that it doesn’t work. And the Chinese were smart enough to figure out that Marxian economics is a recipe for perpetual poverty. But students in the greatest capitalist nation in all of history, want to give it a try.
Freud wrote about the death-wish that he believed afflicted the human species. He certainly saw evidence of it in 20th century Europe. But in America it may be more like self-imposed ignorance that afflicts American students today. But whatever may be the cause of the coming American catastrophe, it’s the surest way that Americans will finally learn that capitalism is better than socialism. It’s a pity that too many Americans are so stupid that they can’t see the obvious.
But there is also the problem of evil, particularly the evil in people like Nancy Pelosi and David Axelrod who are convinced they are acting nobly. In a recent column, David Brooks of
People are really good at self-deception. We attend to the facts we like and suppress the ones we don’t. We inflate our own virtues and predict we will behave more nobly than we actually do….
In centuries past, people built moral systems that acknowledged this weakness. These systems emphasized our sinfulness. They reminded people of the evil within themselves. Life was seen as an inner struggle against the selfish forces inside. . . . These systems gave people categories with which to process savagery and scripts to follow when they confronted it. They helped people make moral judgments and hold people responsible amidst our frailties.
But we’re not Puritans anymore. We live in a society oriented around our inner wonderfulness.
Which may explain why Americans permitted their politicians to lead them to this edge of the abyss. As long as the capitalist goose kept laying the golden eggs, we didn’t say much. We libertarians and right-wing extremists believed that so long as the government was in the hands of Republican George Bush, our drift toward socialism and unlimited government was slow enough so that it could be stopped before it became too dangerous.
So we gritted our teeth when George joined with Ted Kennedy to enact No Child Left Behind, when he should have been working to abolish the Department of Education. We let him increase the debt ceiling because we were in a war in Iraq. We said nothing when he created a new entitlement, a Prescription Drug Plan. All the while, the housing bubble was about to burst, and George was the nation’s least concerned bystander. And then it all hit the fan and required bailouts in the billions of dollars in order to avoid the complete collapse of our economic system.
Did Bush’s behavior have anything to do with his being a member of Yale’s secret Skull and Bones society? His father was also a member, and spoke glowingly of the New World Order we were all dreaming of. Dream on, you fools! Those of us who are awake know that the New World Order means the end of a sovereign United States of America. Thank God that none of the Republican candidates for the presidency are members of Skull and Bones.
The Russians lived through 75 years of communism. The Germans lived through twelve years of National Socialism. The Cubans have lived through 53 years of communism and are not free yet. How many years will Americans live under American-style socialism before they regain their senses and restore the free society the Founding Fathers gave us? Lincoln took us through the Civil War in which the fate of America hung in the balance. He was willing to fight a horrendous war to keep the Union intact. This present ideological civil war may yet end up in widespread civil disobedience, or worse. There is no predicting what a second Obama term with provoke. So, as Bette Davis once said in a famous movie, “Fasten your seat belts. It’s going to be a bumpy ride.”
Indeed, it may be more than just a bumpy ride. It may be a crash landing in which not all of us get out alive.
