Month: November 2012

Since the election results were not what many, maybe most, Americans had hoped for, several commentators have talked about the stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, acceptance, etc. I tend to think more in terms of the Death of a Vision; lamenting what might have been. It’s looking like a gray winter indeed.

Many of us were anticipating a Romney administration where extremely competent and knowledgeable people would make the hard choices that would eventually extricate us from the increasingly gray, socialist stupor America has been sliding toward for decades. Instead we will again be saddled with the same economically clueless administration that we have suffered through for four years; an administration that may be purposefully pushing us toward the precipice by the (Allinsky) book.

With Romney and Ryan at the helm, there was a chance that the insane increase in the size and intrusiveness of government might have been stemmed and even reversed. It was a small chance, because the forces of the mainstream press would have joined the Democrats (as always) to bludgeon the Republicans at every turn, insisting that any reduction in profligate government spending represented an attack on puppies, rainbows and little girls’ hair bows.

With Romney/Ryan and Republican majorities in Congress there could have been hope to turn things around and get us on a path to solvency. With nothing changed, on the other hand, we only have gray winter to look forward to, and the dark night of economic collapse hastening on.

President Obama has made it clear that he doesn’t believe in American Exceptionalism. I might agree to this extent: America, which has been the “last great hope of mankind”, can be made to fail, if we continue down the path on which Obama is taking us. We Americans think of ourselves as “charmed”, with “Manifest Destiny” and all that. But what if we are no different from others? What if it was only the genius of our founders in giving us the gift of Freedom that allowed us to because the “city on the hill”, but if our Freedom is taken from us, either by a despot or by the canker of debt, will we be no more creative or courageous than anyone else?

Sorry for the morose tone, but it is increasingly difficult to see a path to turning things around. The president’s obsession with taxing the rich reveals his total lack of understanding of what needs to be done. Even taking 100% of the earnings of people making more than $250,000 in salary would fund the budget for only a few days. But we are faced with ever increasing spending and debt that no one seems to be willing to name, much less to make the hard choices that would solve the problem. 2025 is the year that the Federal Government’s commitments to social programs ALONE will exceed government revenues. But long before that, there will be increasingly less money available for the military, highways, etc., as no one will be willing to tell social program recipients they will have to do with less.

The end can be seen in miniature tableau in Greece, as riots greet the most modest attempts to moderate government spending. Here in the USA, as more and more people depend on the government for food and shelter, Greece is our destiny, unless the American people can realize that when the takers exceed the makers, there will soon be nothing left to take.

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In my last post, I went “Out On A Limb” and predicted a landslide popular vote victory for Mitt Romney. Obviously I was wrong, in spite of Romney drawing crowds 10 times those of the President. I can only think of two possible explanations.

First, there may have been widespread voter fraud in favor of Barack Obama. Maybe we’ll find out, maybe we won’t. Either way it probably won’t change the outcome.

The other possibility is that we have finally reached the tipping point where the majority of people would rather vote for a living than work for a living. This has been predicted by a variety of people, most notably Alexis de Tocqueville:

“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations has been 200 years.”

So I guess at 236 years we’ve done relatively well. Still I’m mystified.

The president offered pretty much no indication of what he will do in a second term. Unemployment remains above 12 percent (in real numbers) and the national debt continues to rise. There is nothing in his DNA that would enable him to propose policies that will turn things around. There is pretty much nothing that can prevent a Greece-style economic crash.

But Greece’s crash only affected Greece and inconvenienced others in the European Union. When America crashes, the entire world will be shattered.

And note that de Tocqueville says a dictatorship always follows.

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