Wednesday, April 1, 2009

United Socialists of America

So here we are April 1st 2009 and I ask the rhetorical question that seems appropriate for today, " does anyone else feel like a fool?" I mean the country that I love seems to be slipping away so fast and I feel completely frustrated to not be able do anything about it. Common sense seems less and less common with every passing day. The government is now firing CEO'S of large American Corporations because of their need to place blame somewhere because of their own mismanagement, and the treasury is in the process of burying my children and grandchildren with enermous piles of debt from which they will likely never be able to crawl out of. I heard it stated the other day, that by 2019, ten years from now, if we continue on the same course we are on and account for the cost of social security and medicare, that we will have a deficit of $59 trillion dollars. That my friends is the definition of bankrupcy. What the hell is going on here anyway? Or as the song from the 60's so eloquently put it " Stop children, what's that sound, evererybody look what's going down." I 'll tell you what's going down and that is the future of our Country as we all knew it. Notice I used the past tense, because it may be too far gone already to save it without furthering raising the taxes on all of us cash strapped citizens who are already paying way too much into the public coffers to pay for our bloated government's excessive appetite to spend and entitle. With every increase in the percentage of income that hard working Americans must turn over to our government to help pay for their addiction to spend, we the populace loose a little bit more of our freedom and liberty that made our country great. I get the feeling though that we are one more tax hike away from a total rebellion in this country of the people against the government. You can feel the pinnings of social unrest everywhere you go, or don't go these days. After all, the internet is quickly turning out to be the fomenting machine of anarchy and unrest and you don't even have to leave your home to start an uprising of hatred of the system ( see the events at the G-20 meetings today in London for proof ) or just plain hatred in general towards whatever it is that you may disagree with. It used to be that we had civilized dialogue in most of the world to discuss our disagreements or various points of view, but now we just put out the word on the internet for hooliganism and other forms of radical protest to get out our viewpoint and thousands or more people show up on command, as if robotically programmed, to execute the called for action. What a great tool that is, ESPECIALLY FOR GROUPS LIKE JIHADISTS AND ANARCHISTS, THAT WANT NOTHING MORE THAN TO SEE THE WORLD BROUGHT TO ITS KNEES WITH SUFFERING AND VIOLENCE. Our Founding Fathers must be rolling over in their graves to see how the 1st Amendment right of freedom of speech is now being used on the internet as a means of destruction, rather than the liberty to be heard they thought they were providing to all people. The proof is everywhere that the end result of the economic tsunamai that the world is facing will be wide spread social unrest and conflict, as the predators prey on the carcass of the world's underbelly and point to this collapse as a global failure of all governments to regulate a system full of corruption and greed. There will be propaganda campaigns and media disception used to further unholy causes that will test the world's collective moral compass to avoid falling into the abyss. We can only pray that we as Americans can rise once again to the challenges that threaten not only a generation, but an orderly world, whereby we once again lead by example and prove to be a beacon of light, a shining star that the rest of the world can count on to bring about the tomorrow of our dreams, for ourselves and our next of kin. To get there is going to require all of the characteristics that we were founded on, but which have been sorely missing of late. Patience, perserverance, sacrifice and hard work must be accompanied by perspective, vision and faith as a starting point from which we can begin to re-emerge as the greatest nation on earth. Do we have the leadership and inestinal fortitide to tackle all of the challenges that we face? Only time will tell. The stakes could not be any greater.

2 comments:

Windy City Cat said...

Joseph Schumpeter wrote in his 1942 book "Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy" about capitalism’s “creative destruction”. In other words, capitalism exists in a state of constant change. New innovations destroying established enterprises and yielding new ones.

Innovators and entrepreneurs “creative destruction” creates great opportunities for many (IE consumers of Wal Mart and Google), enormous wealth for a few (IE The Walton family/Sergei Brin and Larry Page) and destruction to a highly educated group, as well (IE small merchandisers and newspapers).

However, creative destruction is only part of Schumpeter's message when he says “the capitalist process not only destroys its own institutional framework but it also creates the conditions for another”. By displacing many, some intellectual elite, creative destruction creates a group that Schumpeter says “whose interest it is to work up and organize resentment, to nurse it, to voice it and to lead it”.

In the process, government destroys entrepreneurship and innovation and is replaced by a dis(mis)placed educated elite class that leads us to socialism. So unlike Marx, who envisioned the masses rising up, Schumpeter believed that capitalism's success would ultimately undermine the social institutions which protect it.

Seems prophetic but let's hope not…

God Bless America said...

Schumpeter could have been on to something there. It is a historical fact that the average democracy lasts about 250 years and that once it crumbles under it's own weight, it is often followed by a socialst or totalitarian type of government whose aim is to assert more power over the masses which ultimately leads to a bigger cycle beginning again to try and reclaim lost freedoms. Lets hope we still have time...